Distractions

Welcome to hell...

http://www.happyhub.com/network/reflex/

Digital Talanoa : Potholes, Fish, Service

There’s a pothole in Namadi Heights which, late last year, had a fish living in it. I’m not joking. It was a living, breathing fish about two inches long and gray-brown. It survived at least two days. I know this because the first day I saw it, I was stuck in traffic and, like the other drivers on the road, needed to slowly maneuver my car around the particular pothole. I then happened to glance down into this asphalt canyon and I saw it swimming around. It appeared quite happy given the size of its new home, too. The pothole was a combination of at least two other potholes that apparently decided to join forces and create a massive fissure which stretched across the road. It existed in this state for at least three weeks before it was filled with gravel and sealed over (I’m assuming with the fish forever entombed within). It’s a tragic story and I’ve never been able to figure out how a fish could have ended up there. You would think that someone would have seen it walking up the road and checking in.

Kidanet ad campaign

We're finally starting to get going our Kidanet advertising. Here's the first TV spot. Some billboards are slowly sprouting up around town now and a good mix of print and radio will also be used to introduce the Internet service offering.

We're also now using Kidanet service in our offices and have had excellent results (although we did identify a problem with our internal router that cut out more than 1/2 of our bandwidth but that will be rectified). Kidanet are obviously our client so you could call us bias but reliable super-speed service is worth mentioning. I'll post again and write a bit about the overall approach that is being taken and how the country's newest ISP is differentiating their service from the others. The fact that they're offering an unlimited, no-usage-cap service will be very welcome locally.

The full website will launch soon at http://www.kidanet.com.fj. By the way, Oceanic worked with ProMotion [Fiji] to shoot this TV spot and manage its production.

Digital Talanoa : Customers, Email and Roach-acinno

It is a great example of the way the digital rumour mill tends to work here in Fiji and elsewhere around the world. An email has been making the rounds this week (and this means pretty much every Internet-connected computer in the country) telling the less-than-appetizing tale of someone’s roach-acinno beverage at a local coffee house. I received the email from three different people and each time, the message included hundreds of forwarded email addresses. The topic clearly touched a nerve.

It appears to have started innocently enough. A woman shared a negative experience with three of her family members. She was drinking a cup of coffee and felt something in her mouth. She spat it out and there it was…a cockroach. The story spread like a water outage in Suva. Everyone just had to experience it.

The Machine

Just perfect.
What a fantastic glimpse into our digital world and its evolution.

Commenting, flaming, blogging.

A relatively brief commentary about a local website redesign ends up causing people such angst. It's an opinion, people. It wasn't written as an attack on either the company that developed it or the client. Was it perceived by them as such? Apparently so judging from the amount of traffic that came to that posting from the developers own network as well as the baseless comments and attack postings made. Perhaps it was inevitable that Oceanic would be accused of negatively commenting about a project they didn't win.

This really seems to demonstrate the fact that in Fiji, complaining (or commentary) is rarely well received.