Yahoo! Malaysia's Ramadan Mubarak

In conjunction with the holy month of Ramadan, Yahoo! Malaysia had launched a dedicated microsite, Ramadan Mubarak, offering religious and lifestyle contents which includes waktu solat (prayer times) for the various states in Malaysia; articles by Dr Mohd Asri Zainul Abidin, recipes from Chef Wan, greetings from local celebrities, bazaar reviews and so forth.



Ramadan Mubarak will be presented in the Malay language to connect with the local community. We did ask if it will have an English equivalent but was told not at the moment. We thought that having them in English would enable foreigners and tourists to learn more about the religion and what fasting is all about. Hopefully by next year, this will materialise.

According to Marc Lourdes, Country Editor of Yahoo! Malaysia, the content for this special site was developed to satisfy the community's interest on Islamic values and at the same time satisfying the need of lifestyle contents. Hence, Ramadan Mubarak touches on varied contents around spirituality, entertainment, lifestyle and food.


Left to Right: Marc Lourdes, Uttam Chopra & Jon-Tjin Kee

Further to that, Uttam Chopra, Lead Product Manager, Custom Brand Experiences, Yahoo! SEA; showed us how to connect with family and friends by sharing the articles found in Ramadan Mubarak. If one has log on to their Facebook, the Share buttons are enabled to share the beautiful photos, interesting articles and recipes, so convenient eh? Yahoo! Malaysia has also made things easier by offering the contents on mobile devices and tablets on all platforms.

The Sales Director and Country Ambassador of Yahoo! Malaysia, Jon-Tjin Kee, mentioned that such Custom Branded Experiences offers a unique value proposition to various brands who wants to be publishers and generate social reactions online. So what Yahoo! Malaysia did was to partner with various establishments by providing them the environment to engage with consumers. Say for example with Dumex, a children milk products, they have a Parenting World page where Dumex supplied the relevant contents with regards to parenting with no direct mention to Dumex, well as in hard sales of the product. Then there's Vaseline on beauty and for now Listerine with Ramadan Mubarak.

For photo buffs, Yahoo! is running a special group on Flickr for you to share your Ramadan Memories in photos. Looks like I'll go round photo hunting and share my experience with the world as you know Ramadan here is uniquely Malaysian!

Just a note, all my photos on this blog is hosted on Flickr, you can check them out here.

To all our Muslim readers, Ramadan Al-Mubarak!