Marcus Gomez, Freelance Writers

Marcus Gomez has been recruited to help write and edit the official Cisco newsletter for Small and Medium Businesses aptly called SMB Now.

Click to go to Cisco Singapore's SMB XChange Portal.

Published out of Cisco’s regional headquarters in Singapore, SMB Now provides entrepreneurs and senior managers in the SME/SMB arena with sound business advice and and technical tips that aim to boost your ability to keep up with the rapidly accelerating changes in the technology world.

Unlike the newsletters of many other companies, SMB Now does not just focus on what Cisco can do for you. Instead, it takes a more pragmatic approach to communication that puts the reader’s interests first rather than Cisco’s interests per se. The most recent issue includes a network security checklist, for example, as well as four strategies for SMB’s to find a route to recovery:

1. Increase revenues by getting bigger and better
2. Control labor costs by increasing productivity
3. Improve cash flow and profits by cutting overheads
4. Reevaluate your technology suppliers

Cisco’s SMB XChange Portal is also chock-a-block full of case studies, executive insights and technology spotlights, not to mention a wealth of information about the latest applications of IT in the networking world.

The assignment was an interesting one, and Marcus Gomez looks forward to working on the next issue of Cisco’s SMB Now. You can sign up for Cisco’s newsletter here.

Download SIRIMLink, Issue #2, 2009. "Getting to the Heart of Matter". (PDF, 2.3MB)

SIRIMLink Issue #2, 2009 is now available for download from our website on our portfolio page. (Or, you could just click on the cover image right here).

Published by the Standards and Industrial Research Institute of Malaysia (SIRIM), SIRIMLink is a quarterly journal on the latest R&D news from the eminent research and quality organisation. The theme for Issue #2, 2009 “Getting to the Heart of Matter” is nanotechnology — that all-exciting science of small stuff.

This time around, Marcus Gomez was given a tour of SIRIM’s Advanced Materials Research Centre (AMREC) in Kulim High-Tech Industrial Park and was allowed to witness some of the experiments first-hand. Once again, he was bowled over by the sheer brilliance of some of the discoveries being made, specifically in the fields of nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes.

Here is an excerpt from the lead story in the magazine, “The Tiny Revolution”:

“Nuclear fission taught both scientists and governments to think twice before playing with powerful technologies they know nothing about, and thankfully, the world has since come to regard the atomic world with a healthy mixture of awe and respect. Scientists are no longer obsessed with smashing up atoms. Instead, researchers around the world are using atomically precise technologies to put atoms together.”

Marcus Gomez has already started work on the next issue of SIRIMLink, which will take a decidedly different tack from the usual format. In it, President and Chief Executive of SIRIM Ir. Hj. Yahaya Ahmad will discuss the restructuring of SIRIM Berhad and talk about the organisation’s future in Creativity and Innovation. We also speak to Dr. Mohamad Jamil, Vice-President of the Design & Engineering Division, and find out what the restructuring will mean to his team.

Watch this space for more!

Microsoft Malaysia Business Advantage Newsletter

Microsoft Malaysia has contracted Marcus Gomez to write the lead articles for its monthly Business Advantage Newsletter: Management and Technology News for SMEs.

The monthly enewsletter contains helpful insights and tips for small to medium businesses. The business strategies covered include brand building, the creativity of selling and customer relationship management. It also includes some useful technology tips as well as the current events and promotions of Microsoft Malaysia.

The enewsletter is delivered by email every month. You can sign up for the newsletter at Microsoft Malaysia’s SMB microsite for free, although you’ll need a Windows Live ID to do so.

"Transit TV: All Eyes Are Now On It" (PDF; 2.4MB)

Marcus Gomez recently concluded a white paper project for Asia Media titled “Transit TV: All Eyes Are Now On It”. Asia Media is Malaysia’s leading narrowcasting network.

The white paper takes a close look at Transit-TV as an information medium. Research by AC Nielsen reveals some startling insights into an audience traditionally overlooked by media account managers. For example:

• 87% of passengers are able to recall one or more commercials viewed on transit-TV.
• 80% of the transit-TV audience are 15-to-39 year-olds and possess tertiary educations.
• 31% of bus riders have purchased a product advertised on transit-TV.

Here is an excerpt from the white paper:

“Transit-TV is quickly asserting itself as an alternative advertising medium that offers an exceptionally captive market with high frequency and high brand awareness recall rates, all at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising mediums. The audience are tertiary-educated city-dwellers with a demonstrable propensity to spend money on fast food and entertainment, personal hygiene and mobile services.”

The white paper can be downloaded for free from our portfolio page.

Marcus Gomez & Partners today announced that it has successfully developed an on-board electronic help solution for devices based on the Qtopia platform.

Qtopia is a graphical environment for Embedded Linux devices. It is used with PDAs, mobile phones, web pads and other multimedia mobile computing gadgets. However, there is no common delivery standard for help documentation on this platform. Manufacturers typically provide user manuals in PDF or plain text format, requiring users to scroll through hundreds of pages to search for the help they need.

“The challenge was to develop an electronic help solution that could fit the small viewable areas inherent to Qtopia devices and yet be minimalist enough for embedded applications to support it,” says Marcus Gomez, founder and Principal Partner of Marcus Gomez & Partners. “The result of our work is Konq/eHelp: a new service that converts a static help document into an interactive help system that runs on the Konqueror Embedded web browser.”

Part of the writing consultancy’s business philosophy is to stay close to its customers and the market, and to create value wherever it can. When Anacise Testnology (www.anacise.com) wanted to develop a help system for their Qtopia-based device, the company turned to Marcus Gomez & Partners.

“We decided to give them something that would not only further enhance the product’s usability and greatly benefit their customers, but also be easy to maintain and update,” says Mr Gomez.

In collaboration with the customer’s engineers in Taiwan, the Konq/eHelp system was successfully installed onto the product and proved to be an instant hit among users.

“Users like the idea of knowing that if they need instructions, all they have to do is tap, tap, tap,” explains Mr Gomez, refering to the touch-screen interfaces used by some Qtopia-based devices.

Improving user experiences

“The key to improving the usability of any device is to make it easy to use,” explains Mr Gomez. “One of the best ways to do this is to build highly-accessible instructions for the product’s features and functionality into the device itself. That way, users don’t have to spend hours figuring out how to execute a certain function or be forced to carry print manuals around with them.”

By leveraging Qtopia’s open source platform and in collaboration with engineers in Taiwan, Marcus Gomez & Partners developed an electronic help solution that met all the technical design requirements. The Konq/eHelp system uses drop-down menus and navigation keys, an intuitive user interface and an easily visualised hierarchical structure. Marcus Gomez & Partners also plans to develop a search functionality that will make the system even more user-friendly.

“We are also looking at how we can incorporate some of our other products and services into the system,” says Mr Gomez. “VisualHelp, for example, provides Flash-based animated help documentation. This would be particularly useful for compound help instructions with complex inter-application relationships. Enterprise-wide knowledge management initiatives may also be augmented with the Konq/eHelp working as a foundation for feedback systems.”

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About Marcus Gomez & Partners

Marcus Gomez & Partners is a business and technical writing specialist serving customers all over the world, specifically Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Indonesia, Vietnam and other territories in ASEAN. For more information on the company’s technical and business documentation solutions, call the firm’s BusinessMobile hotline at +6012 238 0508 or log on to www.marcusgomez.com. Alternatively, inquiries may also be addressed to writeus@marcusgomez.com.