racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on cars, gadgets, technology and social media

Mobile is changing the face of gaming and even gambling. With the rise of apps and games on smartphones and tablets, the technology industry is taking heed. In a recent Time Magazine article, the tech industry is setting its sights on gambling. It’s not necessarily hardcore gambling, though, but mostly casual gaming and entertainment that is grabbing developers’ and users’ attentions.

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Crowdsourcing is the in thing in just about any industry today. Popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia is crowd-sourced. Open source projects are likewise crowd-sourced, to some extent. Meanwhile, even start-up projects can get funding from the public through crowdsourcing. These include portals like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and the like.

What’s great with crowdsourcing is that you get the synergy from the crowd, especially if contributions add up to quite a significant collection. In the design industry, the concept of crowdsourcing has been extended to contests and design submissions, including competitions for themes, logo design, web design and the like. The benefit here is that designers get an incentive to work on their chosen projects, while a client can choose from among the best submissions.

Australia-based startup DesignCrowd has launched in he Asia Pacific, and is starting with the Philippine, Singapore and India. The company says it already has 90,000 designers registered on its service, and estimates a million potential designers from the region.

The setup benefits both designers and owners of web properties. For one, designers get the chance to win prizes and bounty from potential clients if their designs are chosen. Clients, meanwhile, will not be stuck with only a single designer for their design needs, but can choose from hundreds.

Are you a designer or website owner looking for design work? Do check out DesignCrowd.

We got this message from a reader via email. Apparently, blurred images are not the only problem with Globe Tattoo. I can personally stand blurry images while mobile, if it meant conserving bandwidth (given I also use PowerSurf). But this seems a bit more serious. Read on.

Image credit: Alan Levine

I stumbled upon this post of yours.

I just want to share this odd Globe Tattoo glitch related to their image cache.

It took me a while to figure out that it was my broadband that was causing the problem. In fact, my boyfriend (who’s an engineer) had to help me, and I probably wouldn’t have discovered this without him.

Several days ago, I was testing some HTML mockups I developed for the website I was managing at work. I uploaded them on the website, so I can test them live. The page took a while to load because I was using a lot of hi-re PNG files on it. (And as I’ve discovered some months earlier, Tattoo’s image compression doesn’t work on PNGs.)

When the page loaded, I was horrified. It was displaying images which I have never seen before in my life. I have never visited websites that have those photos, so they certainly can’t be in my cache. I know I have never seen them because these are photos of people, and they look like personal photos people often post on their Facebook. In any case, I reset my cache and even fired my CCleaner, just to be sure. I visited the link of my templates again, and I discovered that some of the images were restored and some weren’t.

It was kind of a frustrating and time-consuming experience, so I won’t describe the troubleshooting I was doing on my own. I had the most paranoid hypotheses for a while, like either (A) my Mac was infected (which is next to impossible, because, well, it’s a Mac, and I also don’t visit suspicious websites), or (B) our website was hacked / targeted for SEO poisoning.

Anyway, after eliminating some variables and hypotheses (particularly, the two cited above), I thought I had fixed the problem when I replaced the PNG files with JPG ones. After a few days, I had that problem again, but it wasn’t as shocking anymore, because only one tiny image was displayed incorrectly.

I didn’t know how to Google what was happening to the mockups I was uploading to the website. I asked my boyfriend to help me, and he had no idea either. Eventually, he found this: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=533721

And if you scroll far down, there was a random user who commented this:

I’ve seen this before, but that was ISP related, not Firefox.

Some ISPs cache some of the regular used data in order to save some bandwidth and then something goes wrong with their caching system (or it is not working properly to start with) and you get that kind of problems.

Seen it with quite a few wireless ISPs here in SA

So when I switched off my Globe, connected to a fixed broadband network, and cleared my cache, true enough, the pages were displaying properly again.

I already know about that no-cache fix. In any case, I was interested to learn whether other people had encountered such problem with Globe Tattoo. Either my Googling skills suck or that problem is just not well documented on the internet yet. While I was browsing though, I came across your blog.

I don’t really know what I want you to do in response to this. Maybe you’ve heard of this issue before? If so, maybe you can show me some references online where I can learn more about this myself?

I also have some security/privacy issues regarding this. What if someone with a Globe Tattoo somewhere is incorrectly loading images on a page and is displaying MY pictures?

If you’ve reached this far, thank you for reading my long email. If not, I suggest you do.

I’ve read a lot of supposed tricks or hacks in forums that purport to allow “unlimited” surfing while on Globe prepaid. I’ve tried this, and it works in some cases. But I think it’s cheating, given that you can pay P50 per day for unlimited data, anyway! (If you want to share your prepaid data connection, check out my earlier post.)

For legitimate uses, I think that Globe’s data promos are cheap enough. For smartphone users, I especially think that the “powersurf” bucket pricing is reasonable:

• PhP 15 for 20MB good for 24 hours
• PhP 30 for 50MB good for 24 hours
• PhP 50 for 100MB good for 3 days
• PhP 99 for 50MB good for 30 days
• PHP 299 for 300MB good for 30 days
• PhP 499 for 1GB good for 30 days

However, the daily and three-day charging might be too limiting. Also, the PhP 99 plan per 30 days might seem lame. Just 50 megs?

PhP 299 for 300MB might be reasonable, but if you consume more data when mobile, then the PhP 499 plan might be best.

But what’s great with prepaid powersurf is that it’s cumulative, which means that if you don’t consume your megabytes within the expiry period, you can extend this by subscribing to another bucket. For example, you subscribe to the PhP 15 plan, but you only use 5 megabytes, you have 15 megabytes left. If you subscribe to a PhP 50 plan before this expires, you get 100 MB plus 15 MB, good for three days.

Now, if you’re too stingy to pay P299 for the 30-day 300Mb plan, you can actually subscribe to a lower three-day plan first, and then subscribe to the PhP 99 50MB plan to extend that particular plan to a month! You can effectively subscribe to multiple P50 plans and extend it to a month.

For instance, 50+99 gets you 150Mb good for a month for PhP 149. It’s the same price per megabyte as the P299 plan.

With this trick, you can effectively get more megabytes than the 299 registration for the same price if you know how! I’m not telling explicitly, but you do the math!

What’s great is that if you don’t consume your megabytes, just register to another P99 plan again to extend it.

Get it? It’s entirely legitimate, but you save more than with the usual registration fee. It takes a bit of effort, though, and you will need to set reminders so you don’t forget to renew.

I got a Wi-Tribe connection last September as my backup mobile broadband solution, and I can say I have mixed feelings over the service. It’s convenient for connecting while on the go. It’s fast during off-peak hours, but the connection seems to be laggy when there is congestion and when signal is weak (such as during very bad weather).

One of my bigger gripes is that Wi-Tribe started offering contract-free accounts just a few weeks after I signed up for one with a two-year contract. This meant that new subscribers have the freedom of disconnecting their service anytime without hefty fees.

When I moved houses, I relied on my Wi-Tribe as my primary connection since the place didn’t have wired connections, and again I have had mixed feelings. The speed would usually reach or even exceed the marketed 2 Mbps. However, latency — or connection quality — would often be poor.

I switched to using Globe 3G/HSDPA as my backup connection. It’s the same case — fast rated speed, but high latency. Globe’s mobile broadband also somewhat cheated in terms of speed, since the service compressed images to reduce consumption, resulting in ugly websites.

I got a pleasant surprise a few weeks back, though, when Wi-Tribe called me offering to convert my plan to prepaid. I must admit I wasn’t very prompt in my payments because I had issues with the quality of service, and so I guess it’s their way of making sure they get to keep me as a customer. At the same time, their converting me to prepaid ensured that I paid on time (which is before I use the service).

Good deal, at any rate.

I was able to re-activate my device as a prepaid account today. This comes with free 2 Mbps service for three days.

Wi-Tribe’s prepaid rates are quite competitive, and will cost as low as PhP 440 per month for the 512 Kbps plan. PhP 1,100 per month gets you 2 Mbps. PhP 3,200 gets you 6 Mbps.

Users can pay for the speed they want, which is typical with Wi-Tribe’s “tri-speed” USB stick. Rates are actually paid on a per-day, per-week or per 15-day basis. The lowest is PhP 25 per day for the 512 Kbps connection. In comparison, mobile providers usually charge PhP 50 for 24 hours of data over 3G. True enough, these can reach up to 7.2 Mbps, but that’s location- and device-dependent.

PhP 440 per month is good enough for a backup mobile solution. I actually have unlimited data with my smartphone (which I usually share via mobile WiFi hotspot). But mobile data performance can be iffy.

What’s great with my account is that I have the mobile “MyPass” router, which can share the WiMax connection with Wi-Fi-enabled devices like notebooks, tablets and smartphones. I believe this particular device is not available for purchase with the prepaid service, which only comes with the USB stick.

The only disadvantage is the limitation in terms of prepaid loading stations. You can buy load at Wi-Tribe shops, 7-Eleven, Western Union branches and Cebuana Lhuillier. It’s not as convenient as buying prepaid cellphone load, which is practically any convenience store, sari-sari store or even your friendly neighborhood load entrepreneur.

Converting your device

If you have an old Wi-Tribe device, I suggest you try firing it up, connecting (even if you don’t have service) and accessing the prepaid account page at http://www.wi-tribe.ph/my-prepaid-account.

Then click the link for retrieving your account number and key in your MAC address.

Then use the new account number to login. Password should be wi-tribe. You get three free days of surfing until you have to reload again. Wi-Tribe tells me you need to reload within the next 7 days or the account will expire. Subsequently, accounts expire if not reloaded for 90 days.

I’m not sure if your account needs to be pre-converted or pre-approved for this, but it’s worth a try. You can at least call 31-TRIBE to check if you’re qualified. I was given a new account, which means the old one is disconnected altogether.

I’m going to be using this as my backup connection since I recently got a new DSL subscription.