Hong Kong Web & Blogger Community Gathering

On the evening of September 18, 2007, bloggers and members of the Web community in Hong Kong gathered for drinks at one of Hong Kong’s most exclusive establishments, the Prive’ lounge on Wyndham street, in the city’s hottest entertainment district. The event was kickstarted by Angus Lau and Jeremiah Owyang, and sponsored and hosted (and ultimately organized) by Outblaze. The turnout was good: over 80 people signed up at the wiki event page and around 70 showed up. For nearly three hours industry people and enthusiasts mingled, drank, ate, and made merry.

Jeremiah, whom I met at the event for the first time, turned out to be a pleasant and insightful fellow who genuinely cares about social media communities everywhere – traits that will no doubt serve him well in his new role at Forrester Research as social computing senior analyst. He blogged the event and took numerous photos, so have a look at his post.

As the evening progressed I was asked a few times why Outblaze would sponsor such an event, so I’d like to repeat the answer here. As a company, Outblaze straddles the old and the new, in that we offer companies a range of white label hosted services for their Web, communication, and collaboration needs. Our traditional infrastructure services, such as webmail and anti-spam perimeter protection, are very much part of the established “old school” Web. Yet from day one (1998) we’ve also been working on products, services, and features for social information & communication – back then it was message boards and friend-matching, today our offerings have grown in number and sophistication and include a video/multimedia editor and sharing platform (OutblazeVideo), social network applications, etc. We even operate FON in Hong Kong, offering user-provided WiFi access – an interesting spin on the Web 2.0 concept.

We see bloggers and social media users driving technology adoption while the business world lags two or three steps behind, sometimes stubbornly so. We want to foster the cutting edge of the Web community in Hong Kong because it will be its members who usher in the best technology, who come up with ground-breaking ideas, contribute to the local industry’s growth, and so forth. They are the future. By nurturing the small but vibrant blogger and Web community in this city we’re investing in that future.

It was great to see everyone at the gathering. We Outblazers had a chance to mingle with Sidekick, who we love seeing. Our friends from SanrioTown, Typhoon Games, and Activ8 were there and lively as always. Rebecca McKinnon, one of the finest journalism bloggers in the city, made an appearance and even joined us for dinner afterwards. Usual suspect Napoleon Biggs was not to be missed and even did a brief interview of Jeremiah (Napoleon runs WebWednesday, an event for Web professionals held on the first Wednesday of every month). I met a lot of new people, Edmund Wong (founder of local blog provider LifesterBlog), P K Chan (of EditGrid, a fascinating web based spreadsheet system), the Vcasmo boys (web based video and presentation service), Ed Chok (of Dookaz, the T-Shirt printers with a Web spin), and many more that I just realized I won’t be able to list.

After the event a half dozen of us went for a late and ridiculously spicy Szechuan dinner in Causeway Bay. Jeremiah, who whips out his camera with a speed worthy of Billy the Kid, posted some pictures on his blog both of the event as well as the lip-numbing dinner.

All in all it was a great and stimulating evening – keep an eye out for other events sponsored and/or hosted by Outblaze.

Technorati tags: HKBloggerSept07 outblaze blogger web+industry web hong+kong