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:

1. Marcus, A. “The Sun Rises in the East,” Interactions, ACM Publisher, Vol. 14, Issue 6, November/December 2007, pp.52-53.
2. 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. (more…)

With pfingo, leading Sinagporian info-communication company StarHub has launched the world’s first fully converged VoIP, email, messaging, and mobile Internet service that is device-independent. This is a development to keep an eye on.

pfingo offers users email (mobile, desktop, and webmail), instant messaging, mobile VoIP service, contacts synchronization, news feeds, and a respectable 400 MB of storage space in addition to several premium options. The email, synchronization, and webmail components used by pfingo are powered by Outblaze.

pfingoACTIVE, the application that enables pfingo functions on your mobile device, is a compact piece of software with built-in pushmail, push news and stock quotes, instant messaging, remote webcam feed, and remote file management. It’s already compatible with hundreds of models of mobile phones.

pfingoMAIL, provided by Outblaze, is the central messaging component of the pfingo concept and the launchpad of the pfingo experience. pfingoMAIL allows you to collect email from your other email accounts in order to deal with all your email in one single convenient and mobile-friendly location. With it you can unify your various contact lists, manage your tasks and schedule, and instantly synchronize your Outlook calendar and contacts.

Check out the press release to learn more about this launch.

Social media presents a rather attractive business proposition: provide your users with social services and let them generate content, traffic, and exposure for you. Last week (November 26-30) in Singapore I was restating this case in Outblaze’s bid for the Asia Pacific Information & Communication Technology Alliance Awards, one of the best and most comprehensive technology award schemes in the region and known more briefly as the APICTA Awards (see this site for more information). Our entry in the competition was OutblazeVideo, a white label hosted social video platform for portals and media companies.

To make a long story short - this event lasted most of the week - Outblaze won the APICTA Award in the category Tools & Infrastructure Application. I was there solo, and between all the cocktail receptions, networking events, exhibits, presentations, judging sessions and the excitement of victory I completely forgot to take photographs. I do have a picture of me with the award kindly sent in by Janice AuYeung and Karman Li of the Hong Kong Computer society (Janice and Karman, also in the picture, did a great job coordinating the Hong Kong delegation activities):

APICTA is a network of 16 Asian and Australasian countries and economies whose common goal is to increase awareness of information & communication technologies, stimulate ICT innovation and creativity, promote economic and trade relations, facilitate technology transfer, etc. Their yearly awards are among the most coveted by all manner of IT firms in the Eastern hemisphere.

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On November 24 I attended the Creative Commons Workshop organized by University of Hong Kong’s Centre for Development and Resources for Students (CEDAR). The workshop provided a wealth of information on the increasingly popular Creative Commons licenses, which allow for sharing of work without the fears and concerns of infringing on copyright. You can see a Creative Commons license on our blog, just glance to the right and look down.

This event was highly informative and I hope Creative Commons becomes the preferred system for the participatory Web community. CC strikes a balance between copyright and public domain, it is a license that helps to preserve copyright on your work while also inviting certain uses of that work - something that is much more difficult to do with a traditional copyright. CC is ideal for the blogosphere and beyond. I am thus very happy to provide the following videos and podcasts for those who were not able to attend the event. (more…)