Come, speak and learn at BarCamp Hong Kong! The user-generated conference is back in the city that really never sleeps. This event will be bigger and better than the first one, held last December, so don’t miss it. As was the case with the first BarCamp Hong Kong, Outblaze is a proud sponsor and supporter. This time, the venue is provided by Turner.
This is not your average technology conference. Do you get bored out of existence attending run-of-the-mill events? Are you tired of being herded in and out of auditoriums like an over-dressed schoolchild? Have you had it up to here with sales pitches when all you are looking for is genuine information? Has a speaker at a traditional conference ever said something that made you want to ask a crucial question right away, and not 45 minutes later? Are you ever so slightly annoyed at the jumping through hoops required three months in advance just to speak at an event?
If the answers to the above are yes, BarCamp is just what you need. BarCamp is an unstructured, inexpensive, down-to-earth gathering of technologists who get together to share and learn. I said “inexpensive”, but in fact it’s completely free of charge. And if you consider that you get free food and drink, and a chance to win prizes, it’s almost as if BarCamp were paying you to attend.
Without further ado, here are the BarCamp rules and relevant details.
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.
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.
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. (more…)
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):
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.
A team of 14 intrepid Outblaze members took part in the ORBIS-BUPA Moonwalkers (Chinese version here) charity event on the night of November 17, 2007, braving chilly temperatures to aid the preventably blind. Starting at the Wanchai Sports Ground and ending at Repulse Bay Beach, participants walked 20 kilometres from dusk to dawn, finishing at approximately 6 AM the next day.
Are we well served by our general news media? It sometimes doesn’t seem that way when the subject is one of a scientific (including medical) nature. I came across an article on CNN that tells the story of Shannon Malloy of Nebraska, a woman who survived a horrendous car accident. My sincere wishes for a strong and rapid recovery go to Ms Malloy, but this piece is not about her. It’s about the way her story was reported.
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