We’ve thrown together an impromptu event in honour of Marko Ahtisaari, who will be here in Hong Kong Tuesday evening (June 23). Marko is the CEO of the business travel social network Dopplr, which helps users take advantage of collective and current intelligence on travel destinations. Marko is an ex philosophy professor, a blogger, Web 2.0 visionary, author on digital matters, and Grammy award winner, already.

Marko will also be previewing (for the first time) the upcoming Dopplr iPhone app. If you are not yet familiar with the service, sign up to Dopplr and have a look - it is both clever and useful. Make sure to check out the Dopplr Social Atlas project.

Please join us for informal drinks with Marko Ahtisaari at Mozart Stub’n, located at 8 Glenealy road (just up the hill from Lan Kwai Fong), from 6:30 to 8:30 pm, on Tuesday June 23.

http://www.mozartstubn.com/

There will be complimentary beer and finger food (limited supplies).

Thanks to Thomas Crampton for blogging and tweeting this gathering!

More Links:

Really interesting Dopplr blog entry about how the Dopplr community travels

http://ahtisaari.typepad.com/about.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marko_Ahtisaari
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopplr

Outblaze has been named Tech Company of the Year at the 2009 ComputerWorld Hong Kong Awards. Click to read the award article. The award scheme, organized by CWHK, is a yearly event to recognize the best Enterprise-class products and services in the territory’s IT market. The categories are hardware, storage, networking & communications, security, software, and services. Each category has several sub-categories that would require half a page to list; you can view all the winners and categories on the CWHK Awards Winners page. The winners are chosen by popular vote by CWHK readers.

But that’s not all: every year one single Hong Kong-based company is recognized with the coveted “Tech Company of the Year” award for its hard work and distinguished accomplishments. Unlike the other CWHK awards, the company of the year is chosen by a panel of judges based on several criteria. Last year the award went to PCCW. 2009 was the year of Outblaze, which took the award on the basis of over a decade of developing web-based services.

At the awards ceremony, held at Butterfield’s, CWHK  editors Stefan Hammond and Chee Sing Chan cited Outblaze’s innovations, global reach, industry recognition, and of course staying power (11 years!) as the reason the CWHK Awards judges picked Outblaze as THE technology company of the year. We are extremely proud to carry that title and wish to thank the organizers and sponsors for this honour. We would like to congratulate the other winners at the 2009 ComputerWorld Hong Kong Awards, which include IBM, Fuji, HP, Microsoft, Apple, PCCW, Emerson, Cisco, Blackberry, APC, Oracle, Polycom, SAP, Check Point, EMC, Tyco, Symantec, VMware, and CSL among others, in no particular order. Good work!

Interviewed by CWHK for the awards story, Outblaze Founder and CEO Yat Siu offered some insight into how Outblaze got started in the days before the IT boom (and bust) reached these shores:

“Outblaze was founded in Hong Kong in 1998 and was the first company to offer fully hosted multilingual communication services for online communities,” said Outblaze founder and CEO Yat Siu. “We started with four or five people in a run-down office of less than 1,000 square feet with a failing electrical system and single toilet. In our first few months we hired about 20 people, which packed us tight as sardines.”

Fortunately in 2002 we moved to the CyberPort, where we are still headquartered and no longer packed in the highly unpleasant way described by Yat. Read the rest of “Blazing a Trail for Hong Kong Tech” for more background on Outblaze. And to the Outblazers reading this: well done!