Ho, ho, ho! It's so rare I blog these days right? Ya, I hate to admit it that life is busy and thoughts have mostly parked themselves nicely in my brain and never came out again. :(
Anyway, I'm here to talk about the newly launched MyDistress application. It's a mobile application that was launched on Wednesday, 24 August 2011 by the Selangor Police. It was a co-developed application with a mobile phone software developer called Cconvep Mobilogy Sdn. Bhd.
Well, I got to know about the app via my sister, as she was happily pointing out her friend being the model holding an iPhone 4 for his brother which was the team in inventing the app. She encouraged me to download it as the sister was telling the friends (including my sister) over a BBQ party to help support the brother's good cause and help create some news over the radar.
So I decided to give it a try. Googled it through my phone, found the site mydistress.net and my mobile phone directly prompted me to download it. OK, so I downloaded the app, and checked that out. I was really impressed with the app. It can actually track down your location using GPS! Of course, your phone will need to have GPS to do so, but the point it, SO COOL! No more worries of miscommunication! I quickly registered myself, not knowing much hidden clause. Oh, they also had all the contact numbers of the police stations in Selangor, including emails! That's really helpful right?
However, just today, when I was about to tell my other girl friends about this 'great' news, one of my tech-geek guy friend mentioned that they will charge a monthly subscription of RM2 starting from January 2012! What? Charging you monthly for what? Apparently it's for the upkeep of the system and no profit is gained by the developer.
Well, it does make sense that you need $MONEY$ to upkeep a system, but why are you charging the rakyat? I understand that it is pretty much a self-help system, which maybe its quite a premium 'service' so to say if we use it. There might be well argued that no all rakyat has a mobile phone, what more that this app only work on smartphones? It's clearly not fair for those rakyat that don't own a phone and not getting the service to be contributing to the service via paying taxes? True! That point is valid! But, on the flip side, is it reasonable to charge RM2 EVERY SINGLE MONTH? What is really such a big expense that you need to charge people every single month? I don't quite understand that part. They could well charge by per usage! RM2 per usage to safe my life.... reasonable? Hell ya!
So my verdict: Good initiative but same old, same old.... pushing the cost to rakyat. With so much initiative to make Malaysia a better and more developed nation, can't Selangor government absorb the cost? I really hope this app will actually continue to create more discussion and leads to a Federal government's decision of providing it as free service nation wide. They are promoting e-government right? I suppose this is in line with that?
ps: currently, only on iPhone this app looks the 'coolest' as on blackberrys and symbian/nokia phones, it looks a bit cacat/ not as user-friendly as iPhone's version. :(
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