You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June, 2007.
By The marketing war between Digicel PNG and Telikom has begun and Masalai is not too far from this action. Digicel PNG has engaged Masalai’s services starting with their pre-launch website.
A post-launch website will also follow later this year.
See the screenshot below or visit the site at http://www.digicelpng.com
Update: 31/07/07
Should have posted this earlier but the post launch Digicel website has been up now since last week after the launch. See it at http://www.digicelpng.com
Bank South Pacific (BSP) recently contracted Masalai to produce a Signature Register (SR) software on CD-ROM. The SR enables managers to quickly search and find management specimen signatures to confirm transactions and documents for approval. The SR can search by name, number and country (for branches in Niue, Fiji and Solomon Islands also). Because of security issues these CD-ROM’s are to be kept by managers alone and can only be accessed when inserted into a PC. We produced 200 copies of the CD-ROM’s
Ideally this would be better developed as a web application running on their website or an intranet within the bank. However time constraints on BSP’s end did not allow for the solution to take that direction. In any case we are quite honoured that ‘Our Bank‘ has given us this opportunity to assist them and we hope that we can be of further service to them in the future.
You can see screen shots of the SR below:
Okay to all those music loving bloggers out there, today’s interview is with Cameron Kennedy aka Clarence Q from Cairns. Some of you in Pom will no doubt have already seen the flyers going out for the big party with 2 other DJ’s at Lamana on the 7th of July. You can also check out their MySpace page here.
So I thought I’d have a chat with Clarence Q to find out a little more about this Disc Jockey. So mate tell us a little about yourself.
I’m 25 years old and I was born in Adelaide and within 2 weeks was living it up in Port Moresby. I’m half Tolai and half Aussie.
And how did you get into your music, where did that come from?
Living half of my life in PNG and the other in Australia, I was exposed to lots of different music. Growing up with people from all over the world exposed me to drum n bass and Jungle from Ireland, Disco and House music from USA and Dub and Reggae from Jamaica, UK and PNG.
I first started DJing with cassettes and vinyl when I was 9 years old at my mum and dads house parties on Airvos Avenue. My mum and dad where disco people, they were around at this night club in New Orleans when Amy Stewart’s “Knock on Wood’ first performed in the early 70’s’.
These days I play pretty much everything from House to Hip Hop and Funk to Dub.
So did you go to school here in PNG?
I went to school at Ela Beach Primary School and then to POMHI for 2 years. I then went to Ipswich Grammar School as a border for 4 years. After that I moved to Townsville to do a Bachelor in Photography. I then moved to Cairns and did a Multimedia diploma and started HiFly Production House soon after.
Tell us about your company HiFly Production House?
With HiFly I have photographed concerts, made television commercials, documentaries, designed magazines ETC. I have recently formed another company HiFly Entertainment Group which has just bought a nightclub here in Cairns. I plan to bring down as many PNG recording artists as possible to both my club as well as clubs in Brisbane.
I am also one of 6 young people in QLD to be chosen for the Q Music’s A-Venue Program in 2006. That same year I coordinated my first major festival ‘Backdrop Festival”. I had to organize 120 performers on 3 stages over 12hrs. That was a mission!
Since 2003 I’ve been in the promotion side of things in Cairns putting on bands and DJs from all over Australia and the world. I’ve put on over 200 shows since I began in this business.
Cool, is your nigh club ready yet? What’s it called?
Im in the process of license transfers right which takes 4 to 6 weeks. So im hoping to launch the HiFly Bar at the End of July.
So obviously besides your other work at HiFly you are a DJ in your own right, whereabouts have you played?
We’ve performed at the Barrier Reef Hotel, Victory Café, PCT, Backdrop Festival, the Upholstery, IMA, the Tanks, and Metropolis. I play Funk, Hip Hop, Dub and House and I’ve been performing for 16 years now.
So any funny stories when you’ve been on the job?
Wendell Sailor almost belted me at Hotel LA in Brisbane. But I guess it wasn’t funny at the time.
One last question do you know Akay-47 of the Massive Sound System?
No but I went to school with Tarosi at Ela Beach and Glen is my cousin.
Awesome! Well it’s encouraging to see young people such as yourselves developing the music scene internationally as well as in PNG so thank you for your time and I’ll definitely see you at the LGC!
TEN mobile phone “super stations” are on their way to Papua New Guinea to relieve temporary congestion caused by constantly growing demand on the Telikom Mobile network.
The super stations will more than double the capacity of mobile traffic hotspots, in Port Moresby, Lae and other centres.
“The Telikom mobile service has almost been the victim of its own success.
“We now have 185,000 mobile phone users, making more than one million calls a day, and, yes, there has been some congestion in the Port Moresby area,” Telikom sales and marketing executive Wency Noruka said.
“The super stations will go into Port Moresby, Lae and other centres of high traffic demand, and will be installed as a matter of absolute priority as soon as they arrive.
We have engineers rolling out mobile stations from Alotau to Vanimo, and our mobile net will have 350 stations nationwide when the present roll out is completed.
But the problem is keeping up with the popularity of the service. “We just have to keep doubling and re-doubling capacity,” Mr Noruka said. The reach of the mobile net will be further extended when the next phase of Telikom’s exclusive deal on Bougainville rolls out within the next week, with mobility extending from Buka to Arawa.
Further treats may be in store for Telikom customers, including a universal re-charge card that will provide credits on mobile, Telikad, pre-paid and other Telikom services with a single purchase.
Mobile roaming for international travellers into and out of Papua New Guinea was already available, along with international text messaging.
Industry observers said there was never a better time to become a Telikom mobile customer, as a season of price reductions and specials could be just around the corner.
Rex, a regular visitor here, has started his own blog called the Yu Tok blog. His catch cry is, ‘Amplifying unheard voices of youth‘. I’ve added it to the blog roll on the left.
I’m particularly interested in the ‘So we Begin‘ post, something to do with broadcasting your opinions on radio. I wonder if this is a University Radio Station, and if so how do I tune in?
I can’t believe this is happening to me, it’s something that I hear from other people. But tragedy has struck me, my 120 GB external hard disk is gone. It happened so suddenly without any warning. I was listening to some Dimitri from Paris tracks and then suddenly the song started skipping and chopping, then the music died and along with the external hard disk as an error message came up saying there was a write/read failure with an external device.
I immediately hopped onto Google to check out data recovery services in our region and I found a company called Data Recovery Services - Sydney, Australia. So I guess I’ll need to fly my Hard Disk down there for them to recover all my work files. I’ve emailed them and so waiting for a reply now.
My work files I can rebuild if I really need to, but my biggest concern is my music. I have 17,253 tracks, which is 90.85 GB of music and it took me 8 years to build that collection. If I can’t get that back then I think I’ll die too…
Update: 11/06/07
Well…while I was waiting for Data Recovery Services to get back to me, (which they haven’t yet), Ernie from Data Detect has popped in to offer his company’s services. I’ve filled out the booking form for his company so waiting for them also.
Update: 13/06/07
External HD left today for Sydney. I decided to go with Ernie at Data Detect since they responded so quickly to my plight. Now I gotta wait to see if they can recover my beloved music files (oh and work files too)?
Update: 18/06/07
Really not sure how to feel now…got an email from Ernie saying that there was media damage and my files will not be able to be recovered. 8 years of my life have just gone down the drain, I can’t f@#kin believe it. I’m feeling really depressed now!
Since I’m showing my arty type Flickr pics thought I’d upload a new one for my header image, you can see it above. The original pics are below which I took at Boroko on my way to my parents house.
Feeling too skin-dai to write about technology today. Delays with contractors, delays with quotes from suppliers, delays with payment of Invoices, delays delays delays….just too frustrated today.
Anyway though I’d share with you some pics I took this morning at around 6.30 am. The sky was really alive. Took it from my office window which is out at Gordons. I cleaned them up a little with photoshop but I really didn’t have to do much but take the shots.
Okay that’s it, leaving the office now, gonna pop into Foodworld to grab a coffee and an apple pie with cream (I know, but it helps me relax!)…bye!
Click on them to see them bigger in my flickr account.
Heard a rumour today that Digicel is discussing the possibility of RapidFones becoming the sole distributor of Digicel products and services. Would make sense though seeing that RapidFones has already set up a good distribution network among the retail shops and also by being known now as probably the biggest retailer of mobile phones in PNG.
Guess it will be up to RapidFones owners to decide if they are ready to take the gamble and to stop selling Telikom products to focus only on Digicel.
I was reading a magazine on the weekend about Glenn Murcutt, an Australian Architect who spent a part of his childhood in PNG. His main tenet of design is to create buildings and structures that fit into the environment that it is being built. He’s going through a little trouble right now with a job at Moonlight Head, which is how I got to reading about him, but he’s still apparently an icon in architecture around the world. He won the Alvar Aalto Medal in 1992, and the Pritzker Prize in 2002.
Now the thing that really caught my interest in him was that he uses allot of corrugated iron in his designs, which comes from seeing allot of it being used when he was a child in PNG. Here is an excerpt from an article on him:
“Glenn remembers their home in New Guinea, built by his father, with a roof of light weight corrugated iron, and perched on stilts a full story above ground to keep water and reptiles out, as well as affording some protection from quite dangerous local people…At one point, Glenn says he was concerned that he was becoming known as the “corrugated Gal Iron King.” He points out that he hasn’t used galvanized iron just to be using it as a gimmick. He says, “I use it because it’s an important material for the things I want to do. It’s capable of giving me that thinness, that lightweight quality, an edge, a fineness, economy and strength and profile. I’m able to bend it and curve it in two dimensions. I love it because it reflects the quality of the light of the day and surrounding colors. On a dull day, the building dulls down; on a bright day, the building is bright. When laid with the ribs horizontal, the upper surface of the corrugation picks up the sky light and the lower surface, the ground light — accentuating the horizontal. That’s a material which responds to its environment.”
Makes me think of all those new age bush houses in Australia that use corrugated iron and well we still use heaps of it here in PNG.
In terms of Architecture, I wonder if architects in PNG think like that and would energy saving buildings be cheaper to build or just cheaper to operate in the long term? I’m no architect but just wondering??
‘Touch the Earth Lightly‘ is the name of his autobiography.
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Oh, and his father Arthur Murcutt in the early 1930’s once teamed up with a mate to build a yacht in which the two of them would sail across the Pacific. The mate was a fellow Australian, Errol Flynn, before he achieved his movie stardom in the United States. Their cruise was canceled when the boat sank shortly after being launched. As his father related the story, it sank due to sabotage to prevent Flynn from leaving the country owing money.
Well things in the telco sector are really heating up! See below an ad in todays Post Courier for our 3rd Player in this sector.
Don’t know much about them though, tried to check their website but all I got was this red one page image, which you can see below.
My personal thoughts are that I am not sure if we have space for a third player and Green Communications comes across to me as a bit of a cheap operation. Maybe it’s my marketing side that’s making me biased, but I would think that if you were serious about playing in this sector than allot more thought would go into educating the public about who you are and why you would want us to go with you instead of Digicel and Telikom. Then again maybe all their money is being spent on technical equipment to give us good service. Well we’ll just have to wait and see.
International texting now on
TELIKOM’S B-Mobile customers can now be able to send text messages to Telstra and Optus customers.
The service will be available free of charge during a launch period which started yesterday (Thursday). Telikom B Mobile customers can send unlimited international text messages to any Telstra or Optus customer in Australia, at no cost, Telikom acting chief executive Peter Loko announced.
“We want all our 173,000 B Mobile customers to enjoy the fun and convenience of sending text messages to Telstra and Optus customers in Australia, and we offer it to them free of charge for a launch period, so that they can enjoy the experience even more,” Mr Loko said.
At the same time, inbound mobile roaming is available to Telstra and Optus SIM card holders, to operate within PNG. This service also started yesterday.
Outbound roaming, which will allow PNG post-paid mobile customers to use their PNG SIM card while travelling in Australia, is technically available, but on hold pending co-operative discussions with ICCC, Telikom said.
“International roaming is a complex subject, involving bilateral arrangements with the service providers in various overseas countries,” Mr Loko said.
“It takes time to establish agreements, charges and financial arrangements, and at this time, there is no global SMS or roaming available. In a short time, we will provide these services and, meanwhile, we are happy to introduce the SMS text service for our customers, to get a taste for the convenience, and the business advantage, that it brings.
“We will have a series of new services unfolding for the benefit of our customers.
“We hope our valued customers enjoy free-of-charge SMS to Telstra and Optus with our compliments.”
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Digicel makes new appointments
PACIFIC Telecommunications company, Digicel, has appointed three Papua New Guineans to form its senior management team in a move to heat up the company’s establishment.
The trio will comprise senior nationals, including a woman, who have a lot of experience in the business world.
Digicel has appointed Moni Cross as sales and distribution head for Digicel PNG. The company also announced the appointment of Peter Watinga as head of marketing. Mr Watinga has over 15 years experience in marketing and communications. The third appointment is former senior editorial staff of The National newspaper, Christine Paka-kota who is the new public relations and sponsorship senior executive.
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