racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

I’m sometimes lazy with charging my mobile phone. These days, with weeks-long battery life for phones you tend to forget to plug in at night. So sometimes we use a car charger when on the road. I didn’t realize car chargers weren’t so good in terms of battery care.

Chris Pirillo quotes:

Any charger that goes into the car is bad for the device battery. Why? Because the power is not regulated like in your home. In my line of work, I have seen many batteries die because people use their car chargers WAY too much. A car charger should be a LAST resort. I try to explain to customers that when they get home they obviously (well I guess 99.9% of the world) take out their wallet, keys, coins, or whatever is in their pocket before going to sleep. Make it a habit to charge your phone with your home charger.

The same goes for purchasing cheap home chargers just to save a buck.

Last I wrote about mobile phones it was about my Nokia 1112 (which I reviewed here), the basic but decent mobile phone I’ve been using for almost a year now. Looks like I’m not alone in opting for basic, no-frills phones. Jeremy Wagstaff writes of a recent experience one Loose Wire.

The Nokia 1100, according to Wikipedia, is the world’s best selling handset, having shifted 200 million units. It seems to cost about $20, often less, and has a battery life of about 400 hours. And, crucially for my friend, sports two important features: It makes and receives calls and SMS. Beyond that, in the words of Bryan Ferry, there’s nothing. (Well, actually there’s WAP, but who uses that?)

The point about the Nokia 1100 is that it’s a phone. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else (except a flashlight, if you press and hold the “c” key down (presumably “c” stands for torCh or flasChlight or “come into the light where I can see you, Mildred”.) It’s designed for conditions in developing countries—dustproof keyboard, non-slip sides—but for many of us that could describe an ordinary day in the office (dusty, slippery, in need of illumination).

For my PIM and mobile Internet needs, I use my laptop!

Last Saturday, my wife and I had lunch at Makati Shangri-La’s Circles restaurant on the invitation of Ms. Karla Maquiling of Pinoycentric.com. Apparently, the people behind Aryty.com (said to be pronounced like “alrighty”), CEO Nils Johnson and Creative Director Daniel Neumann, were in town and they wanted to introduce their company and services to Filipino bloggers.

The concept behind Aryty.com is strikingly simple, but with lots and lots of potential, in my opinion. Aryty basically lets users send prepaid credits to Philippine mobile phones—be it Globe, Smart or Sun Cellular. They don’t even charge any fees in excess of the actual credit amount. Users just have to go to Aryty.com, sign up, and send load to any prepaid number in the Philippines using their credit cards to pay.

And why does it have lots of potential? Get this. While internet penetration rate in the Philippines is at a dismal 10% or less (most of which access at public access points like internet cafés), mobile penetration rate is around 50% of the population, or around 50 million people. And what’s even better for Aryty’s business is that a good majority of Filipinos have friends or family members living abroad either as immigrants, expats or migrant workers.

So that means Aryty saw great demand, and they’re now filling in that gap. The competition is not actually other companies doing the same thing, but the behavior of the consumers themselves. Here in the Philippines, a good majority of mobile users are on prepaid, and credits can be bought just about anywhere—including stalls or shops in the malls, small corner stores, convenience stores, gasoline stations, and even your next door neighbor. You can even ask someone to pass or share load from his cellphone to yours, if you run low.

The prevailing preference is for micro purchases (say PhP 50 or about $1 a pop), but larger amounts are available (like PhP 300 or 500—about $6 to $10). These are still cheap by US standards, mind you.

But Aryty says it’s tapping the remittance-sending market, meaning those Filipinos who usually send bulk of their earnings back to their families here. So instead of them having to worry about their relatives back here who might need a few bucks to buy credits, they can just send them load at the comfort of their own Internet-connected computers. Remittances aren’t instantly sent and received, after all, but load can be sent in a matter of a few seconds.

What’s even more convenient is that once a user is registered, he/she can send load to mobile phones in the philippines not only from their computers, but even from their cellphones thru SMS.

And taking into account that not all Filipinos abroad are professionals with bank accounts and credit cards, Aryty will be opening stalls (or affiliating with shops?) where Pinoys can pay cash for credits to be sent here.

The group (composed mostly of bloggers) fielded a lot of questions and suggestions to the Nils and Daniel, and these were mostly about how secure the system is, and whether there’s room to improve or expand to other fields, like remittance, and even micropayments using prepaid load. Nils said they invested a lot of money and over a year’s effort of working on the back-end, so the system is solid and secure.

And as to their business model? We wondered if they will be sustainable, given that they won’t be charging fees on top of the actual prepaid load. The answer: they’ve purchased the credits in bulk, so they must have bought these at a huge discount. Note that local retailers also rely on the bulk discounts to earn. So for instance small retailers probably get about 10% discount on the prepaid load they sell, so they earn about PhP 10 for every PhP 100 they sell. The more credit or cards they buy for resale, the bigger the discount (I hear the larger retailers get about 30% discount or larger).

A summary

Let me summarize the good points and the bad points I see with Aryty so far.

The good points

• You can send load via the Internet.
• First time users get a free PhP 150 or about US$ 3 to send to Philippine mobile owners.
• Users need verification using a US- or Canada-issued mobile number, so the potential for abuse (i.e., multiple sending of PhP 150 load) is lesseneed.
• Local users can send text to foreign mobile numbers to request for load. Foreign users (US and Canada for now) will then receive the request on their mobile. If the number is registered already, they can just respond to send the load (and debit their debit/credit card). If not, they can login to Aryty.com to send the requested load.
• As mentioned, both sender and requester can use their mobile phones to ask for or send load, so there is no need to have access to a computer (as long as the sender is already registered).

Things to improve on

• For now, the service is only open to the US and Canada, hence a limited reach. Pinoys live and work all over the world, and this would be a good market to tap (which Nils says they are planning to do soon).
• The service is yet to open here in the Philippines. However, whether there is a demand here is still debated, since there is a low percentage of Filipinos with credit cards, and most who do are not very comfortable with using credit cards to transact online.

Suggestions

• Prepaid credit as currency? Can be a legal/technical hassle, but it’s probably doable. Vmobile tried this before. I wonder if they got any success.
• Of course, more countries.
• More payment options (like PayPal and even cash).
• Aryty as a remittance service?
• Have a button for bloggers/web publishers who might want to be “tipped” by prepaid load. Micropayments via PayPal aren’t here yet, but perhaps you can get rich by receiving thousands in prepaid load!

So if you Are in the Philippines and you have friends and relatives in the US or Canada, or vice versa, go try out Aryty.com !

One of the built-in games on my Nokia 1112 (a very very basic phone) is Yahtzee. You might be familiar with this game as the Yacht dice game. I usually play this game to pass the time during those lull moments. I used to play this game on the computer, too, way back in the late 1990’s, when we were addicted to Hoyle Board games (we especially liked Parcheesi, too).

I’ve more or less mastered Yahtzee through the many times I’ve played it, but recently I’ve developed a surefire technique to increase points—and I think this might have good parallels with work flow and work habits.

The system

First, the basics of the game. Yahtzee is a dice game, where you roll 5 dice to arrive at a combination. You get a total of three rolls per round, in which you can save certain dice so they won’t be rolled in the next roll (in the hopes that the next roll + the saved dice will give you a good combination). Here’s a visual reference for the rules (although rules have varied through time and through different game releases).

Here are the combinations and the points.

Upper section

• 1 to 6: The sum of the die faces corresponding to the number.

Lower section (combinations)

• 2 Pairs: The sum of all die values
• 3 of a kind, 4 of a kind: The sum of all die values
• Full House: A pair and a trio: 25 points
• Small straight: dice 1 to 4, 2 to 5 or 3 to 6: 30 points
• Large straight: dice 1 to 5 or 2 to 6: 40 points
• Chance: any combination of dice, the sum of all dice
• Yahtzee: 5 of a kind, 50 points

The technique

For the longest time, I had been focusing on filling in the combinations, especially with the upper-end values. For the fixed points, it’s okay to get low die values, since you get fixed points anyway. For instance, three 1’s and two 2’s give you a full house.

But for the combinations where the points are summed up, it’s best to get the higher values. For instance, a four-of-a-kind with four 6’s and one 5 will give you 29 points, while a four-of-a-kind with four 1’s and one 2 will give you only 6 points, since it’s summed up.

Of course, it’s the Yahtzee puzzle that’s the jewel of the game. This gives you 50 points, whether you get five 1’s or five 6’s. But it’s also the most difficult to achieve, in terms of chances.

At first, I tended to disregard the upper section, and just selected these when I couldn’t find a better combination. After all, combinations either get you fixed high points, or the sum of all dice. The upper section just gives you the sum of all corresponding die faces. So for instance I get two 5’s and a mix of other die faces, and I select the “5” box, I only get 10 points.

A new strategy

However, I realized later on that the game—at least according to the rules that my mobile phone uses—that the game will award you a bonus of 50 points if your upper section totals to 63 points or more. This means if you fill in the single number boxes with high values through the game, you get the chance to win an extra 50 points.

For instance, if I get four 6’s, that’s 24. Another four 5’s, that’s 20. Another four 4’s, that’s 16. Another single 3, and that’s 3. In total, that’s 63 points already. I get an additional bonus of 50 points!

It’s just like getting a Yahtzee! But it’s way better, since apart from getting 50 points, you also get the combined points of your upper section boxes.

What have I learned from this game?

In real life, getting the Yahtzee is like winning the lottery. Or it’s like going through a short cut at work, with business, or with other important things. You get the big bucks, or you get some result, but you didn’t really work hard (or smart?) for it. However, your chances of winning the lotto are very low. You either have to be very lucky, or have a very very good strategy to win. And when you do shortcuts (like cheat in exams, bribe your way through bureaucracy, etc.) you’re not really helping solve problems, but instead it’s like helping a sickness get worse.

Building up the upper section, on the other hand, is like working hard (or smart) on something, and then earning a big bonus once you’ve reached a certain goal. It’s like breaking even with your new startup business sooner than expected because you know how to optimize operations for best profit and least cost. It’s like putting out the best output at work (not necessarily by working hard, but perhaps by working smart) and impressing the boss, warranting you a bonus.

What do you get from this? At work, you build up experience (and brownie points with the boss) while getting a hefty bonus paycheck in the process. In business, you better optimize for profit, and hence you are likely to earn even more than you planned.

Focusing on or prioritizing the upper section is like building a structure on top of a solid foundation, instead of just focusing on how the structure looks from the outside. Focusing on winning the Yahtzee and neglecting the upper section is just like building a skyscraper without digging deep into the ground for some good foundation. Soon enough, you have a good looking building in no time, but it’s likely that this will topple soon enough, too.

Focusing on the Yahtzee and the higher combinations made me neglect building up this upper section in the past. But since I discovered that I can get better points by building up the smaller non-combination amounts, I learned to focus on this instead. So now, when I get four 6’s and a 5, I prioritize the 6 box instead of the four-of-a-kind box. I know I’ll only get 24 points (6×4) instead of 29 (6×4 + 5) but I know I will potentially gain a bonus of 50 points if I grow my upper section total to the appropriate level.

So when I started focusing on the upper section (and with a bit of luck in die rolls) I can now beat the opponent (which is the phone) more often. And while my highest scores below were in the range of 250+, these days my average is 300+, and my highest would be about 380+.

Now if you get to both build up a solid foundation, and get the Yahtzee, then you’re really lucky and smart!

The rules may vary across games and systems, as I earlier mentioned. But it’s the concept of building up a good, solid foundation that’s important in winning the game.

I’m not very fond of Nokias, but I’ve been posting about them like there was no tomorrow. My primary motivation: usability.

My most recent posts on ForeverGeek involve mobile phones and mobile technology (and how they also apply to design concepts outside of mobile telephony). I basically rave about how, no matter how high-tech my mobile goes, I would always go back to using it just as that—a mobile telephone—for calling, texting, and the occasional alarm clock needs.

First, on ForeverGeek, I find it funny how mobile phone junkies (like myself) always have this urge to buy the latest gadget, but end up using the phone’s basic features after the novelty wears off.