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Local firm ties up with Facebook

0 Comments | New Straits Times, Jul 19, 2010

FACEBOOK is partnering with a Malaysian company to sell credits at retail outlets across Asia for the first time, aiming to make it easier for millions of people to purchase virtual goods and play games on the social networking site while boosting revenue for developers.

Electronic payments company MOL will offer the online currency from Aug 1 at more than 500,000 outlets including 7-Eleven stores, Internet cafes and online banks in five Southeast Asian countries, India, Australia and New Zealand.

The move targets people who don’t have a credit card, particularly younger Facebook users, and those who don’t want to take the risk of making electronic payments online.

MOL already sells prepaid credits for other online games at its established network of stores, but it will be the first time that consumers can buy credits for Facebook’s applications, including such popular games as Mob Wars and FarmVille, without credit cards.

MOL had last year bought social networking site Friendster.

In Southeast Asia, the credits will be sold in Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines.

More than 70 per cent of Facebook members use applications, and payment transactions and volume have seen a double-digit increase over the last few quarters, according to MOL.

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Spectator, The, Jul 24, 2010 by Adair, Gilbert

DUCHESS OF DEATH: THE UNAUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY OF AGATHA CHRISTIE

by Richard Hack

J.R. Books, 18.99, pp. 320,

ISBN 9781906779832

The opening paragraph of Duchess of Death ‘s fourth chapter, in which its subject is about to have her first whodunit published, begins thus:

September 25, 1919. John Lane was very pleased with himself as he leaned into the mirror over the sink in his bathroom and examined his beard. Using a small pair of manicure scissors, which he was barely able to handle with his too-chubby fingers, he snipped at a few stray hairs.

And, four lines later in the same fauxfinicky vein, the paragraph ends: ‘Yes, he was very pleased.’

Now, if Hercule Poirot’s name were to be substituted for John Lane’s, that passage would read as an amusing parody of Christie’s style. The problem is that Lane was of course a historical figure, co-founder of the Bodley Head as well as the gamy publisher, in his preChristie days, of The Yellow Book , and one would rather like to discover how Hack was privy to the niceties of his morning toilette.

Or how, when Christie embarked on her great vanishing act, he knew that her breath ‘left a vapour trail for her passion to follow’ and that the gravel under her feet ‘sounded like a knife scraping burnt toast’. Since neither of these images, nor numberless others, are checklisted as quotes from the 5,000 ‘previously unpublished correspondences’ claimed by the book’s blurb, one scarcely needs much in the way of little grey cells to arrive at the conclusion that they’re all Hack’s own gratuitous maunderings.

No doubt there are readers who won’t be too fussed by such fabrications. I confess I have an almost intestinal resistance to them in a biographer, especially one willing to spend pages and pages on Christie’s pets, frocks and grand houses, yet displaying a quite insane indifference to what rendered her of interest in the first place – her books. Take The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, whose central conceit – or, rather, deceit – remains a benchmark for superlative narrative craftiness even in an era when unreliable narrators are beginning to outnumber reliable ones. He accords it two senISBN 9781906779832 tences.

And Then There Were None , the most perfect whodunit ever written? Five brief, uncommonly unenlightening paragraphs.

Plot synopses? None. Analyses? None.

Speculations as to why her work became so universally popular? None. Comments on the snobbery, racism and anti-Semitism by which it is pervasively marred? None. I couldn’t help thinking of a comparable biography of Benjamin Britten, let’s say, in which one reads, ‘In 1945 his opera Peter Grimes was premiered to wide acclaim. Alas, it was only two weeks later that Chouchou, his favourite tabby, passed away. . . . ‘ I’m making no comparisons, understand, but surely the principle is the same.

This, then, is a book which is not just unauthorised but unauthored. And as for that ‘unauthorised’ tag, conspicuously blazoned on the cover yet difficult to reconcile with its author’s boasted access to all those unpublished letters, unless the fact that Christie’s second husband, the eminent archaeologist Max Malloran, had unconsummated homosexual leanings at Oxford is calculated to set your heart racing, there’s no revelation here worthy of the word as used in this context.

I personally am grateful, nevertheless, for having read Duchess of Death , for it effectively squelches a notion I floated in one of the several essays I’ve written about Christie.

I ventured to suggest that the pivotal murders, if by no means the least important element of her whodunits, were equally by no means the most. I even went so far as to propose that, since what their fans appreciate above all are the vividly evoked textures and trappings – the bridge parties at St Mary Mead, Poirot’s Mayfair service flat with its gleaming oil-fired radiators, etc – it ought to be possible to eliminate the ingredient of crime altogether.

Well, I was wrong
bathroom mirrors