Startup Lets You Save and Share Parts of Web Pages

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No need to copy and paste—Clipboard employs advanced Web technology to let users save the part of a page they want.

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The Web may make it easy to communicate with people thousands of miles away and put libraries full of knowledge at our fingertips, but plenty of simple things are still surprisingly hard to do online. Take saving a piece of a Web page. That specific task is trickier than it sounds. A startup called Clipboard is building a simple solution using some rather sophisticated Web technologies.

Clipboard allows users to select and store pieces of Web pages in a cloud-based account. Users can comment on items, tag them, and search them. The site allows people to keep clippings private, share them with specific people, or offer them to the public. The new site has been in stealth mode until today, but it's now opening up for a private beta test (readers of Technology Review are invited to participate and can sign up here).

The site's founder is Gary Flake, who previously founded Microsoft's Live Labs, Yahoo Research, and Overture Research. Flake says that Clipboard grew out of his own needs. He couldn't find a satisfying way to save and share information he found while searching the Web. In fact, he describes a laborious process that will sound familiar to many Internet users: After finding something interesting online, he says, he would highlight it, hit control-C, open a word processor or e-mail program, paste the content in, and save or send it. "That's the state of the art for saving things on the Web," Flake says. "For me, there was a huge void waiting to be filled."



Of course, plenty of existing services let people save and share things they find online. People often post links to social networks such as Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, or to dedicated bookmark sites such as the newly revived Delicious. Services such as Evernote allow people to build up a digital memory cache loaded with notes, photos, and saved information from websites.

But when he went through what's already out there, Flake says, he couldn't find anything that met all of his requirements. He wanted to save items from the Web in a form that preserves the way they look, so that he can benefit from his visual memory of the page. He wanted the clips to continue to work—links should function and video should play. Finally, he wanted the things he saved to be portable, stored in the cloud, and easy to put there from a browser on any computer.

Flake describes Clipboard as a Web service that sits on top of the Web pages open in the browser. To use it, a person installs a bookmarklet in the browser. However, clicking the button doesn't take the user to a new Web page—it launches Clipboard's lightweight JavaScript application. When running, the application lets a user select portions of an open Web page. It then runs an extraction algorithm that analyzes the page and figures out how to write HTML and CSS that will re-create what the user selected.

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A 10-step plan to improve inefficient civil service in Malaysia!

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A 10-step plan to excellence

Question Time By P. GUNASEGARAM

Cutting the numbers, raising salaries of good employees and emphasis on efficiency are some of the keys to improve the civil service.

COMPARISONS with other countries indicate that we have too many civil servants for the population (about 25 million). Some 1.3 million civil servants, together with retirees, accounted for nearly two-fifths of the Federal Government’s operating expenditure last year of over RM150bil.

A bloated civil service not only sends the wrong message by keeping too many people unoccupied, it also leads to a considerable waste of government revenues and needlessly high expenditures which could have been better utilised elsewhere.

There are two sides to a large, inefficient civil service. As the numbers come down, you need to increase the rewards to retain the better people and improve the quality of entrants.

For illustration, if you cut the number of people in service by 50% and increase salaries by 50%, you actually save 25% in costs.

That may be too drastic a cut even for the civil service but a target to reduce it by a third over five years by natural attrition, getting rid of incompetent, lazy staff and very selective and prudent hiring is possible.

To encourage people to stay in the service and to recruit new, more able people, the salaries can potentially be raised by a third over five years.

Despite the salary increase, there will still be savings in costs of about 11% – if you don’t believe me, you can work it out yourself.

Remember too that the one-third salary increase need not be – indeed should not be – across the board.

It should be tweaked to give good ones better increases and bad ones smaller or no salary increases at all.
But this needs to be done under a clearly specified framework to prevent abuse.

As with many other institutions, the civil service has become highly politicised and some top civil servants have taken after the image of their political masters, demanding special treatment, special privileges and keeping their noses in the air.

They have come to consider themselves a law unto themselves and not only neglect the rakyat who they are supposed to serve but treat them with contempt, disdain and disrespect, leading to an outpouring of complaints against them, which they coolly ignore.

That attitude needs an about-turn.

It is therefore very timely that the Budget is now addressing some issues surrounding the civil service, including a mechanism to remove non-performers in the civil service. Hopefully, something will come out of that.



Meantime, here’s a list of 10 things which are imperative for change in the civil service and a move towards excellence.

1. Eliminate corruption and patronage. As has been pointed out, delays are in themselves a cause for corruption because people will seek to use nefarious means to avoid them, such as pay to put a file on top of the pile. While efficiency builds up, it is necessary to take a strong stand against any kind of corruption and patronage at all levels. The best way to do this is to issue a stern warning and take action against anyone found to be flouting the rules.

2. Recruit, reward and retain the best. You can’t have an excellent civil service without excellent people. You must recruit the best people, give them the right rewards and incentives and do your best to retain them by giving them more responsibilities, promoting them and giving them incentives.

3. Make service the aim. Considering the shabby treatment that many Malaysians receive at government departments, including the police, it is clear that the concept of service is alien to many civil servants. They exist for the public, not the other way around, and their assessment must include how well they satisfy the public in the performance of their service. This leads us naturally to our next point.

4. Encourage and act on public feedback. All counters which deal with the public must have ready feedback for public complaints. If a member of the public feels he has been badly treated, he must be given the immediate right to speak to a superior and make a complaint on the spot. Video cameras can be installed to help obtain the actual sequence of events. Superiors must act on public feedback and if a civil servant treats badly a member of the public, he must be punished.

5. Make it Malaysian. The statistics indicate that before 1970, the civil service was more Malaysian in that it better reflected the racial composition of the country compared to now when an estimated 80% or more of civil servants are bumiputras. This often leads to allegations of bias and a civil service that is not always sensitive to the needs of different races and cultures. Efforts should be made to recruit more non-bumiputras into all areas of the civil service. With an accompanying improvement in salary and benefits, it should not be a problem.

6. Use measurable standards. For performance appraisal, it is always good to use a measurable goal such as number of people seen in a day for a counter service, or number of projects approved. The goals will be different for different departments and for different levels within the same department but an effort should be made to quantify effort, even if work also has to be assessed qualitatively. The important thing is to keep any kind of bias out.

7. Reward good work. For any organisation to be vibrant and vital, it is important that good people are rewarded by offering them better increments, promotions and being put on the fast track for movement up the organisational ladder. That helps to ensure that as they progress, there will be increasingly better people at the top.

8. Punish poor work. The first part in dealing with poor work is to try and remedy the situation by pulling up the person, helping him, and giving him the means, the time and help necessary to do the job properly. If this does not get improvement, then it is necessary to reflect this in his benefits, clearly explaining what he will have to do to get back on the growth path. Sometimes even this fails, which leads us to the next point.

9. Get rid of deadwood and incompetence. If sufficient effort has been made to rehabilitate a worker and if that still fails, then the Government has no choice but to sack the worker. Clear procedures must be put in place so that there is no discrimination and that all inquiries are properly conducted before dismissal.

10. Keep political interference out. Sometimes, it is the politician who keeps the civil servant from performing his job. Politicians should set policy with input from the civil service and in the process they must have respect for the expertise developed within the service. Once policy is set, they must allow the civil service to implement it without hindrance, only interfering if the civil service baulks at implementing policy.

Few countries have become world class without an excellent and efficient civil service to support the transformation. If we don’t elevate our civil service significantly to much higher standards, we are all going to be losers.

> Managing editor P. Gunasegaram loves how he can renew his passport in just one hour, a clear indication that the civil service can perform.

Learning from Steve Jobs: from Garage to World Power!

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Learning from Steve Jobs

Ceritalah by KARIM RASLAN

Before we can start talking about the need for innovation or speak of the need to create geniuses, we have to learn that creativity and innovation are first and foremost cultural phenomena.

STEVE Jobs is dead. Apple’s co-founder did more than anyone – and this includes his arch-rival Microsoft’s Bill Gates – to make computing manageable for everyone. Indeed, even my seventy-something mother owns a well-used iPad2.

Jobs’ brilliance lay in his ability to look at technology from the viewpoint of the user, stripping down the complexity and jargon until a machine became a tool in the hand of the user.

He asked straight forward but critical questions: what do consumers want and need? How can I meet these demands?

Instead of producing computers that flaunt their sophistication, Jobs made his devices ever more accessible and simple.

Apple products were the perfect marriage of form and function. They were sleek, intuitive and useful – objects that we enjoy touching and holding so much so that we develop a strange emotional link with them.

In order to achieve this aim, Jobs also upended the way we’ve traditionally thought of music, books and films – freeing them from their analogue formats. He discarded the old-fashioned ways of receiving entertainment and placed his products – the iPod, the iPhone and iPad at the heart of future solutions.

His success was prodigious and extraordinary. At one stage last year, Apple briefly eclipsed ExxonMobil in terms of market capitalisation.



Indeed, it’s estimated that well over 100 million iPhones and 25 million iPads have been sold to date. That the Indian government, on the day he died, rolled out its own tablet computer, called the Aakash (or “Sky”) is a greater tribute than the legions of obituaries.

The global outpouring of grief on Jobs’ death is hence a measure of the man’s reach even in death. It’s also a testament to his iconoclastic style as well as his breath-taking ability to think unconventionally.

Furthermore, Jobs executed his ideas with flamboyance and flair, disregarding the consequences as his various inspirational ideas wrought havoc with long established industries.

Standing back from the man’s achievements, it’s hard to deny that all entrepreneurs have a little bit of Steve Jobs in them.

They all possess a modicum of his verve, dynamism and, yes, madness. Wouldn’t they have become bank managers or civil servants otherwise?

However, we can’t deny the element of luck either: had Jobs died in the 90s, he would probably have been consigned to history’s footnotes, yet another businessman ousted from a company he had founded.

Also, as the son of a Syrian emigrant, Jobs was lucky he was born in America, where the opportunities to succeed were more pronounced than anywhere else.

Indeed, it’s hard to see where else a college dropout could turn a company that he started in his parent’s garage into a multinational with a market capitalisation of US$222.12bil (RM694.78bil).



This is not to say he was some kind of secular saint. His paranoia and abuse of friends and subordinates alike were well-documented. Neither was he a flag-waving patriot either.

Unlike Henry Ford, most of Apple’s products were contracted out to East Asian manufacturers, particularly China, where allegations of sweatshop labour and poor working conditions continue to haunt the tech-giant even today.

Nevertheless, no one can deny that Jobs displayed the individualism and entrepreneurial spirit that are the hallmarks of the American character.

Indeed, if we shift the discussion from Jobs to the idea of entrepreneurialism, we have to acknowledge that we are all shaped by the environment we are born into.

We can separate ourselves from the world that surrounds us on our birth.

So as we start talking about the need for “innovation” in Malaysia’s economy or speak piously of the need to “create” geniuses we have to address the national condition.

Let me ask a question then: what if Steve Jobs were born in Malaysia? Could he have reached the same dizzying heights or would he have been consigned, like so many others, to dead-end jobs.

Alternatively, would he have directed his prodigious talents to chasing after government contracts? I’m not joking.

If Malaysia is to compete in the future, we have got to learn that creativity and innovation are first and foremost cultural phenomena. These are things that you cannot pay for or legislate into existence.

Creativity cannot thrive in an environment where the balance between risk and reward is skewered. Can we truly say we’re allowing people to reach their fullest potential when our obsessions with race and religion are so dominant?

Innovation in Malaysia is hampered by our Government’s constant interventions: protecting and bailing-out businesses and individuals that ought to have gone bust ages ago.

There’s absolutely no incentive for people to think unconventionally if the most important criteria for creating wealth is your “know who” rather than “know how”.

How many Malaysian Jobs’ or Gates’ or Zuckerberg’s have we smothered because they lacked connections or were born in the “wrong” community?

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak has declared 2012 to be the “National Innovation Move­ment” year, but it won’t count for much unless we start really rewarding hard work and genius rather than mediocrity or mindless conformity.

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