Message from the Managing Director

The 2007 year is into the last two months and we are still busy, Singapore is still trying to figure out if the run up in the property market is finished, whether it is just taking a pause or if more onblock sales will continue the momentum. The reasons for the run up started with integrated resorts, to onblock sales and the latest is the government desire to bring in people to achieve a population of 6.5 million and there is just not enough property. The only rule that I understood with property is that as soon as you could afford it, you should be in.

But back to something I know about.

Recently we have launched two new web sites. Total Golf Services web site is the business store front for Singapore based PGA pro Allen Kelly. Allen has played in Asia Pacific and North and South America and been the club pro at several clubs. He became Singapore based quiet recently for the benefit of his family. Allen is still a playing pro and was in the line up for the Singapore Open. In building his web site we used the DNN framework and that provides more functionality from standard modules. On Allen site you will notice that we have an active and picture driven Home Page with the top portion from his last two Blog entries.

The site is extensive on Allen's Services and one of the features under the Products and Services button is the Beginners Tour. In Singapore it is so tough to get on a course unless you have a club membership card, handicap card or you have a Proficiency Card, known colloquially as a PC. Allen Blog's two to three times a week either on his tournaments or some aspect of the game in Asia or in the US.

The site also feature a Pre-owned gear page where Allen puts up equipment that people want to sell. The site provides a range of information on Golf for amateurs and pros alike. In line with the internet business, if Allen provides you with equipment or a service you just go to his web site and pay the bill via pay pal. We have also used Google Adsense and Amazon Affiliate program on the site.

However Allen is a keen photographer and he has included a Gallery with some of his favorite Photo's, make sure that yours is not one of them. Allen is also out on the other golfing blogs on the web and since July 13th has driven unique visitors to his site from zero to thirty per day and has successfully attracted the following Robots/Spiders; Googlebot, Alexa (IA Archiver), Yahoo Slurp, SurveyBot, MSNBot, Netcraft.

The other site that we put on the web is Acacia-Tree.BIZ. Yes that's right .biz, but it just seem right to Sandra Chia the proprietor of this Antique Ethnic Jewellery business, or should I have spelt that Jewelry – well while checking out the keywords in some of the internet tools that I use it didn't seem to make a different as the answers that came back were the same.

Sandra's Site is in response to requests from her customers who have purchased her jewellery and would like to come back for more but live in the US, Europe etc. Sandra started her business in KL but for family reasons moved to Singapore and opened her second shop. Sandra travels to many part of the world like Morocco, Uzbekistan, Tibetan, China, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Malaysia, Lebanon, India, Nepal, Thailand, Jordan, Turkey, Syria and Indonesia to gathered lapidary supplies to fashion her items, hence they are unique. No two pieces can be the same.

In building the site we again used the DNN framework. We needed to provide a catalogue with the ability to take a piece off line when it is purchased as there are no two items the same. As Sandra manufactures new jewellery and puts them on line she will send out a newsletter to her contact list to advise the new items that are available. So visit her site and sign up for the Acacia-Tree.BIZ newsletter.

MS SBS – Small Business Server

PASR has been a strong support of the MS Small Business Server. This has many reasons and most of them are about value, manageability and low cost with a high level of functionality.
On the PASR site at;
http://www.pasr.com.sg/default.aspx?page=Publications&Section=MSSBS
You can download our publication on the benefits of SBS.
However in the market there has been many comments that at 75 Users it really is running out of legs in the small business market and while in theory you can install many different application on one server, at three of four you need a highly skilled techie to manage the environment. However the rumor mill has it that next year Microsoft is going to reconfigure the product to double the number of users and to allow up to 3 hardware servers in the configuration and licensing scenario. We at PASR are looking forward to the formal announcement.

Internet Marketing Boot Camp – Singapore, Derek Gehl

On the last weekend in October I attended the two day bootcamp on Internet Marketing by Derek Gehl. Derek Gehl has been a leader in the Internet Marketing area for many years and focus on working with small business with one product or service.

While he is selling in the main to people who are looking to start a business he does have some very good advise in three area's – Building focused web sites, Generating traffic and Email marketing. He also has many good ideas in other areas but not as cohesive. To support those people with the small number of products or services he has also started to focus on eBay.

Over five hundred people turned up to the two day boot camp and apart from one session Derek spoke for the whole time despite several technical glitches with the systems at the Furama Riverfront Hotel.

The one discussion point that I always pay attention is Keywords. Derek's proposition is almost that you find a niche keyword and build your business around that keyword. The criteria for the keyword is that it has a high demand and a low supply. However I suspect that the ability for us users to use keywords to drive business, especially new businesses is diminishing. My reasons for this are;
  1. Many large sites that attract large number of visitor never have keywords in the keywords meta tag, even our own PASR Technologies site did not have keywords until just recently
  2. Google's "sandbox" that is rumored to limit new web sites exposure under organic searches by their algorithm and it is restricted until the site has a little more age- search the internet for the extensive discussions on this topic
  3. In the Adsense section of the Google site there is a tool that allows you to nominate a URL and they will go away and search the site and come back with their suggestions of what are the keywords for the site. At the moment I think that it is not working well, however time and effort would improve the performance and so Google will makes its own decision of what are your keywords.
  4. Pay Per Click is becoming so sophisticated that you can target a niche market in a local area at rates less than newspaper advertising rates
  5. Content is still King. I keep having this discussion with clients that a 300 to 500 word addition to the web site each week in a blog or information page will add more value to the majority of sites and keep those search engine spiders/robots come back for more.

Peter Rigbye
Managing Director
PASR Technologies Pte Ltd

Mission Statement

To be the preferred Managed Services and IT Services Partner in Asia

IT Services

PASR has four core competencies;
  • Systems Integration
    Primarily in support of our outsourcing clients, the IT Services we provide include design, specify, plan and then supply, install and project manage infrastructure and application projects.
  • Managed Services
    Managing IT Services for organizations, both Infrastructure and Applications, for up to 500 seats regionally (we now have clients in London, Hong Kong and Shanghai). Our clients range from local professional offices through to regional offices of larger MNCs, and include clients in the following industries: Airlines, Logistics, Manufacturing, Construction, Internet Content providers, Legal, Shipping and more.
  • Development
    Focused on web based application development and concentrating on thin-client (web) front-ends. We also cater to websites and eCommerce projects. The largest application undertaken is greater than eighty man months of IT Services development.
  • Consultancy
    In meeting client's needs PASR undertakes Consultancy IT Services to assist in analyzing, scoping and defining appropriate IT Solutions to assist clients to build a performance based company. We focus on analysis and solution options so that a business decision regarding IT can be confidently taken. Recently we have taken on work supporting Tandem systems.

PASR Technologies Pte Ltd Key Milestones

  • Started business in 1996 as a solution shop for problems that were not solved by other vendors
  • First outsourcing customer on board, Sulzer Pumps 1997
  • First Application development project, Travel Agency Manager (TAIMS) 1998
  • Took larger offices in Mohamed Sultan Rd, 2002
  • Staff expanded to 10 people, 2003
  • Completed $500k application development with customer acceptance 9/2004
  • Appointed IBM Partner for Intel Systems 2005
  • Appointed HP DSPP Member July 2006
  • PASR delivers websites on DNN framework with e-commerce capabilities, October 2007

PASR is active within Singapore industry groups supporting the following organizations