It’s been in development for 34 months, contains somewhere in the region of 15,000 changes, and it is 100% organic software: these are just a few of the reasons expectations were high for the release of the new version of Firefox. To celebrate the launch of Mozilla’s Firefox 3 the Opensource Application Knowledge Association (OAKA) in Hong Kong threw the new web browser a party on June 28, 2008, at the City University of Hong Kong.
The FON Hong Kong team was in attendance, not just because it’s a cool company full of cool people, but also because FON provided the WiFi access for this event. FON, for those not in the know, is a global community of hundreds of thousands of users (and growing) who share WiFi access among each other using FON’s secure and inexpensive router, called La Fonera. In this image you can see FON Hong Kong manager Terrence Leung enthusiastically explaining La Fonera to some revellers. All reports indicate that the cake was very good. Material for this entry was taken from the FON HK blog.
What if Internet access on your mobile phone for one month cost you HK$ 14,000, or about US$ 1,800? The following story occurred in Hong Kong, but this is a problem common over much of the planet. As recently reported by the South China Morning Post (SCMP):
Mobile-phone users are facing big bills for internet services they thought were free, the consumer watchdog [Hong Kong Consumer Council] warned yesterday. One customer ran up a HK$14,000 bill in a month.
…
The complainant hit with a HK$14,000 bill told the watchdog he thought he was using free Wi-fi services to access the internet.
However, he claims his service provider connected him to the Net through its fee-paying service without warning him first.
“Charges for Web surfing catch out phone users”
South China Morning Post, June 17, 2008
Mobile networks face an important self-imposed obstacle: metered data service charges that are unclear, unrealistic, and often rather opaque to the consumer. While most companies now understand that promoting third generation mobile services requires clear and friendly flat rates, some operators still extract value from their customers the hard way, by selling them voice service plans with Internet access charged extra by the *byte. This is supposed to be the Internet age; regardless of whether the user in question understood he was on Wi-Fi or 3G or 2.5G, a 14,000 dollar bill is exorbitant from any point of view.
This is not a new occurrence. In the April 1, 2003 issue of the SCMP [unfortunately, the SCMP does not support direct linking to articles and requires a subscription] Neil Taylor reported on much the same topic:
… operators know that if their customers were to actually use data services to their fullest capacity, they might suddenly notice what over-priced luxuries these things are.
Last week, I spent three days with Sony Ericsson’s P800 smartphone….
And after three days of happy surfing, I received my phone bill.
If that HK$400 [US$ 51.41] GPRS charge had been for a month’s downloads, I might have been irritated. But I was appalled at what I was charged for three days of sporadic surfing.
By any measure, GPRS charges are extortionate. They are also confusing. Just as we saw with voice and Internet services, the operators appear to have conspired to make their charges as hard to compare as possible.
“Guinea-pig users losers with punishing GPRS charges”
South China Morning Post, April 1, 2003
Neil Taylor was writing about GPRS, the forerunner of 3G, but the business model sounds depressingly similar. Where is the incentive to get a 3G handset and subscription, one may ask? In the July 2005 issue of Receiver Magazine, Outblaze founder and CEO Yat Siu spelled out his view:
The 3G incentive
Serious mass usage of 3G applications will occur when service fees become fixed and subscriptions become attractive and affordable for most users. In Japan, for example, 3G brought about the development of a vibrant and active content download culture that emerged following attractive consumer pricing of 3G bandwidth. Some telecoms may resist the idea, but ultimately they should pay heed to the lesson learned from broadband: charging a service on a usage basis discourages subscription, and will generally limit utilization to early adopters and technophiles.
Many operators who rolled out 3G services erred in setting exorbitant pricing, thus discouraging regular consumers from utilizing expensive 3G bandwidth services. 3G downloads of products such as video streaming, applications, or large emails are fairly substantial and therefore incur a greater cost on a pay-per-use bandwidth model; clearly, this is discouraging to potential customers.
Yat Siu, in Receiver Magazine, July 2005
There is the argument that 3G network operators were fleeced by their governments, but regardless of who bears responsibility for high 3G prices, several operators used confusing metered pricing to transfer the high 3G entry costs to their customers. And that’s not the only way in which the consumer loses: the high and often confusing costs of 3G services keep adoption rates low and indirectly hamper 3G technology. Until the majority of operators offer attractive flat rate data usage plans as well as “common sense” plans that prevent gigantic Internet access charges, consumers in most of the world will continue to be confused and outraged at the end of the month. That is, if they make use of data services in the first place, which is something many people avoid.
This brings us to Wi-Fi: it’s cheap, available across a growing multitude of devices, supported by just about all operating systems, and growing fast. Consider FON, a network of hundreds of thousands of members around the world who share their bandwidth with other FON members. In Hong Kong FON coverage is getting quite good, and you’ll find a free FON signal at Starbucks, McDonald’s, and major shopping malls just to name a few. FON has even been reviewed by the government of Hong Kong.
Outblaze operates FON in Hong Kong and we might have a slight bias, but there are local alternatives in most cities. Although FON is a global service, in Hong Kong Y5Zone is fairly prevalent and well organized, with over 800 hotspots. PCCW also offers Wi-Fi around the city.
Service plans with hidden or secret rates simply cannot compete with affordable flat rates. We’ve seen the shift from metered to flat charges in traditional telephony, television, and fixed line Internet access; isn’t it time the latest generation mobile network operators modernized all their fee structures to match their handset line-ups? You too can help discourage those network operators who maintain confusing charges: just have your mobile device connect via Wi-Fi when you need the Internet, and avoid data service charges entirely. In a city like Hong Kong Wi-Fi is available at most locations, so you’ll avoid astronomical bills while sending an important message to your provider.
Hong Kong domains are the most dangerous in the world; this little factoid from a recent McAfee report generated quite a bit of media coverage, and even made TIME magazine’s top stories list (here is McAfee’s press release on the subject). But all is not as it seems, and aspects of the report may have been out of date before the report was even published.
McAfee’s study seems to be based on a year’s worth of data, and last year was a particularly bad year for the Hong Kong domain, thanks to a gang of botnet spammers registering thousands of domains under the .hk country code top level domain (ccTLD; a generic top level domain is a gTLD).
These domains were most likely registered using stolen credit cards, and contained bogus information in the “whois” records (which show domain ownership). The contact email address for each domain was usually an email address at a random free webmail site like Yahoo, Hotmail, or some of the Outblaze clients.
This certainly turned out to be a gigantic reputation problem for the .hk ccTLD - far more scam domains were being registered under .hk than legitimate domains. Even worse, these scam domains were being hosted on botnets (large networks of infectedPCs, remotely controlled by criminal gangs).
The .hk domains started turning up in spam for porn, fake prescription medication, phishing (identity theft) and many other illegal schemes such as “money mule recruitment”, where people are conned into running an “export agency” and unwittingly become conduits for money laundering and receivers of goods bought with stolen credit cards.
A botnet is a very large, highly failure-tolerant and distributed network. It is also international in nature, so that a child pornography website hosted on an infected PC in Hong Kong could turn up the very next minute on an infected laptop in Brazil. With distributed peer-to-peer botnets the domain name used by a botnet is sometimes its single point of failure.
Registrars (which provide domain registration services) and Registries (which administer gTLDs and ccTLDs) are therefore crucial to any attempt to mitigate botnets.
HKDNR, the registry for the .hk ccTLD, was initially slow to react to this problem, prompting antivirus and antiphishing researchers like Gary Warner (now Director of Research in Computer Forensics & Cybercrime at the University of Alabama at Birmingham) to declare a “crisis situation” in a March 2007 email to a mailing list that discusses phishing. In the email he accused HKDNR of inaction and insufficient response to the concerns of the antispam community.
HKDNR and the Hong Kong CERT (HKCERT) were accused of responding to complaints with canned letters that promised to investigate, but appeared to take no action at all. The response letters encouraged complainants from outside Hong Kong to “report the matter to their local law enforcement agencies”.
By late 2007, the number of .hk domains registered by scam artists numbered in the tens of thousands. Action by various groups (independent technologists, antispam block list providers, CERT teams, law enforcement and regulatory agencies) then seemed to convince HKDNR of the need to take immediate drastic action against scam domains registered in the .hk ccTLD.
As the Postmaster and Head of Anti-spam Operations for Outblaze, I contributed to the effort by providing a feed of several thousand .hk domains from spam reported on our network of 40 million hosted email users.
The results were astounding. Over 10,000 scam domains were terminated in a matter of days. Long term measures were also put in place, such as
Credit card fraud prevention, including Verified by Visa (most of these scam domains were registered using stolen credit cards)
Due diligence measures to detect fake domain registration
Closer cooperation of HKDNR with relevant authorities and agencies.
International cooperation is vital for two reasons:
as an early warning when scam artists attempt to set up shop again
as a way to share best practices with groups, associations, government regulators, and law enforcement agencies working on the prevention of spam and cybercrime.
In a matter of days, the huge concentration of scammer domains in the .hk ccTLD scattered, shifting to other countries and ccTLDs. Some moved to China (as the McAfee report indicates, a large number of scammer domains still exist in .cn space) and others went onto .biz, .info, and even ccTLDs like .ma (Morocco).
The botnet problem is clearly international, and registrars and registries around the world are vulnerable to what HKDNR suffered last year. While it might be stale news in that HKDNR has already dealt with this problem, it serves as a reminder that botnet criminals are still out there and still causing trouble. Spam and cybercrime are hitting record levels and that there is a need for constant awareness and joint efforts to mitigate the menace that botnets have evolved into over the last few years.
I have written a long and detailed paper on botnet mitigation for the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) as part of the ITU’s Botnet Mitigation Toolkit. It discusses the threat that botnets pose to the worldwide community of Internet users, and describes an interlinked set of policy, technology, and civil society approaches to the problem of botnets. Most of what I have written in this blog entry is already present in the ITU paper, so I will stop here and encourage people reading this to glance at the paper as well. It is 100 pages long so probably not bedtime reading, but I’d still appreciate your comments!
On 12 May 2008, Wenchuan County in the Chinese province of Sichuan experienced one of the most violent earthquakes in history. With an epicentre located 90 Km from Chengdu and registering a 7.9 on the moment magnitude scale (roughly equal to the old Richter scale), buildings swayed in Shanghai and Beijing and the tremors were felt as far away as Thailand and Pakistan, thousands of kilometres distant. Imagine what happened at the epicentre.
At the time of writing the official death toll reported by Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, is well over 15,000 and rising. Thousands of people remain trapped in rubble - nearly 20,000 of them in Mianyang alone. Entire communities have been obliterated. As with other natural disasters, the initial cataclysmic event is only the beginning, and rescue workers must now fight against time and the elements in order to search for the missing, provide care and shelter for the injured, and stave off disease among the survivors.
Roads in Wenchuan County have been damaged, blocked, or destroyed, slowing relief efforts and in some cases preventing them entirely. Heavy rain and landslides also hamper the progress of rescuers. Thankfully, the danger from aftershocks is minimal, but it’s worth remembering that a previous earthquake of comparable energy in China, the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, caused the death of nearly a quarter of a million people (much more than that, depending on the statistics you use). Many of those victims were not killed during the earthquake, but instead died in the following days.
We can all help by donating to relief efforts, both as individuals and as companies. Remember, every little bit helps, especially when many tens of thousands of lives are at stake in the next few days. Outblaze donates to the Red Cross but all accredited relief agencies need your help now. Please donate and help to mitigate the effects of this natural disaster.
China Digital Times provides information on donating directly to the Red Cross Society of China (the Red Cross China web site appears to be unavailable but you can donate using the information in the article)
Information on how to donate was provided by Rebecca McKinnon, who has also set up a ‘chinaquake’ Pledge Fund - please join it.
The photograph in this post was found on the EastSouthWestNorth blog. These images provide an idea of the horror and suffering caused by this earthquake and are extremely disturbing.
Regulars readers of this blog already know that Outblaze assists FON in Hong Kong specifically, and in Asia generally. FON offers a great deal: buy a FON router and set it up on your Internet connection, and it will create a secure WiFi hotspot, sharing a portion of your bandwidth with registered FON members passing through the area. In return, you get free access to FON hotspots all over the world - over 300,000 of them!
As reported on the local FON blog, Continental Diamond Plaza in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, is now the world’s first fully FON-enabled high-rise building. Continental Diamond Plaza has 29 floors, and is home to many restaurants and bars in the heart of the city. You will find FON_FreeWiFi signals at every floor, bringing FON yet one another step closer to covering the entire planet with WiFi Everywhere! Congratulations to the FON team for making this little piece of history!
We would also like to extend our congratulations to FON Hong Kong for earning the Caring Company Logo 2007-2008 for efforts to give back to the community. FON Hong Kong’s operation and charitable activities, donations, and initiatives qualified the company for six out of six Caring Company criteria.
Within hours of the announcement the blogosphere was abuzz with the news that Hello Kitty will have her own MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game). So why are we talking about Hello Kitty here at Outblaze? For one, Outblaze is the provider of all services on SanrioTown, which as any kawaii connoisseur knows is the official home of Hello Kitty and friends. Outblaze also handles the backend for the game Hello Kitty Online - something we also did for adidas in The Impossible Team Online Game, a free title adidas offered during the 2006 FIFA World Cup (the game was taken down after the end of the tournament).
But back to Hello Kitty Online. We were pleasantly surprised by the remarkable display of Kitty Power: within a few hours of the announcement the game site received 30,000 requests for beta accounts and the news was plastered on countless blogs. And we were delighted by the flood of humorous reactions. Here is a small selection.
Kotaku
Kotaku (one of the first to report this news) informs readers that “Only one MMO could possibly release World of Warcraft’s death-grip on the massively multiplayer gaming market - Hello Kitty Online.” They also posted a selection of game screenshots under the heading “Too cute to live”.
Kotaku readers were not to be outdone and produced some lively banter:
User JAML said, in reference to the bright and cheerful palette, “To all Developers out there: More colors that are not some sort of brown please.” I know Yahtzee Croshaw agrees.
TECHKNOW commented, “With all the Player Killing in the Open Beta, lord knows what this will be like when it gets released on the market. I just hope I get to carry over my +9 Lollipop of Destruction”
Probably referring to the super cute screenshots, ICEPICK314 commented, “didn’t know you can code diabetes…”
MELODYKITN said, “Is it bad that this MMO sounds a whole lot like there’s more to do than other free MMOs?”
InventorSpot
The InventorSpot boldly states, “Today Hello Kitty Online, tomorrow the World (of Warcraft)”.
ValleyWag
Like Polonius, this Silicon Valley gossip rag knows that brevity is the soul of wit; in a post titled Why Second Life will fail, they provide an irrefutable argument in just four words: “Hello Kitty Virtual World”.
Plime
Plime.com calls Hello Kitty Online “THE deprogramming tool for WOW addicts” [that's World of Warcraft, for those unfamiliar with the abbreviation].
Japanator
Recovering from the attack of extreme excitement caused by the announcement, Japanator decreed Hello Kitty Online “the most mind blowing MMO ever conceived”. Japanator readers are encouraged to sign up for beta, although they are warned to prepare themselves for “a face-melting cute explosion. The music actually left sugar crust in my ears”.
little. yellow. different.
This blog stated, in a manner incomprehensible to non-gamers, that “today, a new MMORPG has entered a private invitation-only phase that could possibly bring Blizzard to it’s murloc-killing, PVP-flagged, epic-wearing knees” [Blizzard is, of course, the maker of World of Warcraft].
Rock, Paper, Shotgun
The site that’s been covering PC gaming since 1873 did not manage to retain its cool in the face of the Hello Kitty Online announcement, and began dribbling about “The End Of Cute, where Cute will reach critical mass and implode to create some kind of super-dense Hello Kitty merchandising, sucking us all into the candy-coloured abyss”.
New York - Tokyo
Nothing ambiguous in a post titled Hello Kitty takes on World of Warcraft: “World of Warcraft’s days as king of the MMORPG hill are numbered…. it’s only a matter of time until the battlefields of Azeroth are barren and lifeless” [Azeroth, for the uninitiated, is the fantasy world setting of WoW].
Zergwatch
In Zergwatch’s entry titled MMORPG Showdown: Hello Kitty vs Toontown Online we witness how the little kitty soothed the beast’s savage heart: “I quickly realized that this is going to be the cutest goddamn MMORPG we have ever seen. I suddenly lost my angry gaming edge and wanted to cuddle with fluffy pillows and ride unicorns around rainbow filled sky.”
Hello Kitty Hell
We made it a special point to send this fellow a copy of the press release, but we needn’t have bothered - apparently he received over 40 emails about Hello Kitty Online from excited readers. Hello Kitty Hell thoroughly blasts the game, but we can’t help feel that these are just the desperate words of one who has almost succumbed to Kitty Power: “Hello Kitty sticks with her true colors by making money (’The Item Mall allows players to use real money to purchase special items and upgrades for characters’) and creating violence (’Hello Kitty Online has an extensive crafting system with output such as tools & weapons…it has a sophisticated combat system’)”.
He concludes: “Sanrio Digital … where all people working deserve to lose their jobs for thinking for one second that 1. creating this game was a good idea and 2. sending me a press release about it so my wife could know about it was in any way, shape or form a smart thing to do”. OK, Hello Kitty Hell!, we’ll keep you posted on our progress.
I hope you enjoyed this selection. There were many more amusing write-ups and feedback but I can’t possibly capture them all, so if you have any please post them as comments here (please note: comments are moderated and there may be a delay in publishing).
He came to our offices, he fired several volleys of questions, he filmed it all. We are talking, of course, about Thomas Crampton’s whirlwind video tour of Outblaze and the ensuing YouTube videos (embedded below for your convenience).
The interview is split into two video clips, under 20 minutes in total but covering a lot of ground. The first video is Thomas Crampton barging in the Outblaze offices and being shown around, with a bit of company history thrown in. Outblaze started life as a technical services solutions provider, then morphed and expanded its way to the point where we are now a media services and solutions company, as explained by Outblaze CEO and Founder Yat Siu in the interview.
The second video clip focuses primarily on the partnership between Outblaze and Turner, and the reasoning behind the alliance. An alternate recording of that video was posted on our own blog last week in order to answer frequently-asked questions about Outblaze and Turner, however Thomas’s video contains some additional footage - the Director’s Cut, as it were.
Over the last week announcements of the Turner Entertainment and Outblaze project called TurnOut have generated quite a few questions. We’ve taken a video of Thomas Crampton video-interviewing Outblaze CEO and Founder Yat Siu a few days ago on the subject of this cooperation. Thomas Crampton is a former correspondent for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, currently working for Next Media Hong Kong and of course on his own blog.
Thomas came for a tour of our offices and to catch up on all the exciting work Outblaze and Outblaze sister companies are doing. We recorded the conversation about the Turner / Cartoon Network project in order to illuminate those who may have questions not addressed by the announcements of the last week.
The video is about 8 minutes long. In it, Yat Siu explains how TurnOut is bringing together Turner’s impressive library of brands and characters with Outblaze’s digital services to create compelling Web 2.0 offerings.
With no good standard ways of plugging input methods into Linux desktops, trying to develop an input method used to be difficult. But now there is an actual standard to address this small but important part of Linux, especially for East Asian users.
Last week, I was at the Chinese Electronics Standardization Institute (CESI) in Beijing to chair the Input Method Sub-Working Group meeting for the 13th time over the past three years. The IMSWG is part of the larger Northeast Asia OSS Promotion Forum (NEAOSS), formed by the Chinese, Japanese and Korean governments for pushing open source software.
Over the past few years, literally every detail of how input methods should work were discussed and debated among participants from the three countries. All had strong opinions on the architecture of the system, and at times it seemed impossible for them to agree on the specification.
We solved that by getting them to write software code instead - being programmers, they understood each other better in computer languages than in English.
Now, not only do we have an agreed specification, but we are also developing a reference implementation called IMBus, thanks to the hard work of all involved. We have both James Su of SCIM fame, and Hideki Hiura, the designer of XIM and IIIMF on board, so IMBus will no doubt be widely adopted. James gave a nice talk about IMBus at last year’s LF Desktop Architects Meeting.
I said “nearly” in the title of this blog post because the specification is not yet actually “published”. NEAOSS being a semi-governmental organisation, they are very keen on adhering to set procedures and there is still some paperwork to be done before the specification gets to the “approval” stage later this year. However, all technical issues have already been addressed. Hopefully this specification will work its way up to ISO and be published as an ISO standard in the future. ISO being ISO, this won’t happen anytime soon - I’ll talk more about that next time.
On Monday, I got a few hours’ notice that Joi Ito, Chairman of Creative Commons and board member of the Mozilla Foundation, was arriving to our offices en-route to a visit to Macao. This initiated a flurry of activity in the office since Joi is also a board member of Outblaze affiliate SanrioDigital, and it was thus a great opportunity to give Joi some insight into what the team at SanrioDigital has been up to, and to pick his brain and see what else we could be doing.
Joi is a fascinating person and has tremendous insight into popular culture. His ability to absorb information at a rapid pace and provide succint yet insightful comments was extremely valuable to the team. In spite of his pressing schedule, he was also able to meet up with Pindar Wong, Chairman of the Asia & Pacific Internet Association and co-founder of the first licensed ISP in Hong Kong. Pindar and Joi have been associated due to their involvment in ICANN.
Pindar is a big proponent of bringing Creative Commons to Hong Kong along with others such as Rebecca MacKinnon, Charles Mok, and Oiwan Lam . My apologies if I have failed to mention other prominent Hong Kong fans of Creative Commons.
I had the privilege of spending some time with Pindar and Joi and gaining insight into why they think Creative Commons is valuable to Hong Kong and what challenges are faced in localizing CC for this territory. I hope others can help promote the advantages of Creative Commons and provide assistance to the Hong Kong Fans of Creative Commons who at this point are looking for a lawyer specializing in intellectual property to review their draft.
Enjoy the video content and don’t forget to spread the word!
Post interview whilst we were discussing random things, discussion again veered towards Creative Commons and its relevance to Hong Kong and thanks to our intrepid cameraman Jacky Yuk who kept the camera rolling I have another snippet for you to enjoy
The 2007 Hong Kong ICT Awards ceremony and gala was a lavish affair held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre last night, January 21st, 2008. Outblaze competed in the Best Business (Product) stream, and took home the Gold Award with our white label social video service, OutblazeVideo. It was a pretty positive start to the new year. As you may remember, just last November OutblazeVideo won the APICTA award for the Tools and Infrastructure category, so it’s almost time for us to buy a new display cabinet.
The Hong Kong ICT Awards were established in 2006 as a collaborative effort among industry support organizations, ICT professional bodies, academia and the Government to establish a large scale and internationally recognized brand of ICT awards for Hong Kong. By the way, congratulations to our affiliates Dream Cortex and Sanrio Digital, who took home a Merit Award in the Digital Entertainment award category (read the press release on their web site).
You can peruse the Outblaze entry to learn more about OutblazeVideo, or browse through the other winners of Best Business awards. The winners for Best Business not only show the tremendous breadth of Hong Kong expertise and potential, but also indicate a few of the things Hong Kongers are passionate about. OutblazeVideo needs no explanation since Hong Kong has always been crazy about movies - especially free ones.
Not to be missed is Team and Concepts Limited, who won a Gold for EditGrid, their fantastic online spreadsheet. This clearly suggests that Hong Kong people put great value on efficiency and organization, and we all know that is the case. Read the rest of this entry »
Hong Kong’s first ever BarCamp, held at Yahoo! Hong Kong offices on December 16, 2007, attracted about 100 participants and was hailed as a success. BarCamp is an informal, very loosely structured ‘user-generated’ conference event that began in Silicon Valley, spread around the world, and was recently imported to Hong Kong. The rules are simple if unconventional.
No previously organized panels or keynotes, and no invited guests - you’d think this would be a recipe for chaos, but quite the contrary (see links to feedback below). The first Hong Kong BarCamp was a team effort involving a dozen companies (including Outblaze), which you can view at the BarCamp Hong Kong wiki page.
This unconference was certainly well received in the Hong Kongblogosphere. You can read up on the event at the Web Wednesday entry, and see thoughts and reactions from organizers and attendees at Hong Kong Phooey, 852Signal, Digital Anthology (also this primer), RConversation, d.otted rhythm, and others. Victor of Hong Kong Phooey also runs a CNet blog in which he goes over the participation rules in more detail. I particularly recommend the RConversation entry for its write-up of the stimulating discussion on user rights and government interference - many interesting and thorny issues there. Presence among Chinese language blogs was also good, have a look at SideKick’s post and Drinkazine and Ben Lau.
Pictures available on Flickr. Outblaze was proud to be a sponsor, and was particularly happy with the event T-shirts (sponsored by Dookaz):
Aaron Marcus is the founder, President and Principal Designer/Analyst of Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc. (AM+A). He is well-respected in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field and has been working in this field for more than 30 years. In the Nov/Dec 2007 issue of ACM/SIGCHI’s Interactions magazine, in his “Fast Forward” column titled “The Sun Rises in the East”, he stated that professional development in user-centered software practices in Asia is expanding rapidly, and the level and quality are rising quickly [1].
This year, the User Friendly conference was held in Beijing from Nov 23 to 25. The number of participants of User Friendly conferences increased from 50 to more than 700 participants in just four years! This is an evident sign of the field’s rapid expansion and confirms Aaron’s observation in his column.
I met Aaron Marcus at the User Friendly conference in Beijing, where we posed for a photo. He was curious about the “flower pin” on his suit and asked me the meaning of the Chinese word “嘉賓” (Guest) printed on the red ribbon.
Aaron gave a keynote at the conference. His workshop titled “Cross-Cultural User Experience Design for Mobile User Interfaces” covered one of his favourite research topics: the impact of cultural differences on user interface design. He introduced the five dimensions of culture identified by the cultural anthropologist Geert Hofstede (more details can be found in his book “Cultures and Organization: Software of the Mind” and website). Based on Hofstede’s framework, Aaron and his colleagues studied corporate websites in different countries and identified patterns of how the cultural dimensions affect the uses of metaphors, mental models, navigation, interaction, and appearance in the Web user interfaces. He mentioned that the common approach to software localization is limited to accommodating local language and data display formats such as date, time, and currency formats. However, localization is far beyond translation and needs to consider deeper cultural issues. Aaron also showed some innovative mobile user-interface design and explained how they addressed the cultural needs.
Cross-cultural user experience design is gaining more attention as many western software companies are swarming into potential markets like China and India. In the beginning of the workshop, Aaron showed us a 2005 article in Fortune magazine titled “Bill Gates as Anthropologist”. The article cited Microsoft’s Bill Gates as promoting anthropological study of its products. I think this may be an indicator global software companies have realized that recognizing the cultural differences is important to their businesses. Lada Gorlenko of IBM predicts we will see a significant part of UX design being offshored and carrying out by local professionals [2]. Maybe this is happening now. Many global companies such as Microsoft, Google, IBM, Autodesk have already set up local design teams in China.
References:
Marcus, A. “The Sun Rises in the East,” Interactions, ACM Publisher, Vol. 14, Issue 6, November/December 2007, pp.52-53.
Gorlenko, L. “Offshoring usability: The moment of truth: how much does culture matter to you?” Interactions, ACM Publisher, Vol 13, Issue 2, March/April 2006, pp. 29-31.
Do you know about FON? You should - FON is the largest WiFi network in the world and it’s growing at a healthy rate. Get yourself one of FON’s La Fonera routers, set it up so that it begins sharing part of your Internet connection with other FON members (Foneros), and enjoy free WiFi access at hundreds of thousand of hotspots around the world.
Outblaze operates FON in Hong Kong, and we are extremely pleased to announce that FON is now enabled at a number of malls (such as IFC and Times Square) as well as McDonald’s and Starbucks outlets throughout Hong Kong, Kowloon, New territories, and even the Outlying Islands! Roughly 400 retail shops, restaurants, bars, malls and other public spaces and businesses are now serving Foneros, and that’s just the public hotspots - there are thousands of private hotspots all over the city. Read the rest of this entry »
Entries (RSS)