Outblaze subsidiary Dream Cortex has several interesting apps on offer on iTunes, many of them in the highly popular Baby Cortex product line. One in particular, Baby Piano HD for the iPad, has become a favourite in the paid education software section. It reached the position of fifth most popular in its category and was featured on the “What’s Hot” iTunes list. Congratulations Dream Cortex!

Outblaze founder and CEO Yat Siu lays out several convincing arguments on his personal blog to explain how Google is likely to benefit should it withdraw from China.

Google shocked the world when it announced that it was going to exit China as a result of government censorship and sophisticated hacking attacks that targeted Chinese dissidents using the Gmail service. Here’s an excerpt:

Google’s exit is not necessarily a face saving move or  a public stab at Baidu, but a tactic calculated to gain market share in more lucrative western markets, which represent the vast majority of Google’s currently reported financials (Q1-3 USD 16.974 billion with Q4 results also expected to be strong). Google is getting excellent publicity globally about this issue  (outside of China, that is). Even more interestingly, Google has recently become proactive on similar sensitive topics and I would not be surprised if this situation ends up creating a significant rise in activity and demand for Google products and services.

Enjoy this logical, evidence-based argument and don’t forget to click on the hyperlinks, because Yat’s post links to a truly impressive amount of information. Read on at Yat Siu’s blog.

In the latest news from IBM, Panasonic will move 100,000 to 380,000 employees to IBM’s LotusLive hosted, Web-based collaboration suite of services. This deal is noteworthy in the cloud arena for its size: it is larger than any enterprise deal inked so far by Google Apps, a highly popular platform boasting 2 million clients.

Few companies can ever hope to match IBM’s reputation and track record among enterprises. Now Big Blue is proving to be quite the cloud warrior, boldly striding into the Software as a Service fray after having accelerated its product offering with the purchase of Outblaze technology last year (Outblaze messaging assets were incorporated in the LotusLive Web-based collaboration suite).

Congratulations to IBM and Lotus from Outblaze!

Outblaze wishes everyone a delightful holiday season and a happy new year. May your 2010 be joyful and prosperous!

Today I attended IBM’s ceremony announcing the opening of the first IBM Cloud Computing Laboratory in Hong Kong. The event was well attended by industry leaders, media, analysts, IBM’s major partners, and senior government including Mr John Tsang, Financial Secretary of the HKSAR Government. As Mr Tsang put it in his speech, the lab is a significant development:

IBM has Cloud Labs in cities across five continents and we are delighted that Hong Kong has been added to this distinguished list. This marks a new milestone for the development of R&D and information and communications technology (ICT) in our city. It is also testimony to our strength as a centre for ICT innovation and our strong fundamentals, including a sound legal system, vigorous regime for protecting intellectual property rights and world-class ICT infrastructure.

The IBM Lab is a strategic investment built on the technology and expertise of the Outblaze messaging business, which IBM acquired in April 2009 (note that IBM acquired some Outblaze assets, and not Outblaze itself). All of us at Outblaze are honoured to have demonstrated Hong Kong’s advantages as a centre for R&D, innovation, and talent in information technology.

Outblaze CEO Yat Siu had a few words for the occasion, though unfortunately he was overseas at the time of the launch and was unable to attend. In his blog he writes:

I congratulate IBM for officially opening this Cloud Computing Lab, this is a strategic investment to IBM and is only one of a few such centers world wide. I am happy to hear that IBM will continue to invest and grow this Lab and lead the way of large multinational technology companies to grow and build some real R&D effort in Hong Kong. This is a subject that I have been talking about before and I hope more multinational companies will emulate.

I congratulate Hong Kong because it demonstrates that Hong Kong has the stuff to develop leading and cutting edge technology with a global reach. Lotuslive iNotes is made in Hong Kong!

and last but certainly not least I wish to congratulate everyone at Outblaze who have made this possible through their effort, dedication and passion. You have demonstrated what is possible in Hong Kong and that will continue to foster and grow the spirit of research and development  in the field of technology here in Hong Kong.

Which sums it up nicely. Congratulations to IBM, Outblaze, and Hong Kong!

We are coming up to the end of 2009, and ’tis the season to win awards! Once again, Outblaze has worked diligently not to disappoint its fans. Earlier in the year, we nabbed the Company of the Year Award at the ComputerWorld Hong Kong Awards, as described in my previous blog post. Last night, Outblaze founder and CEO Yat Siu was presented with the Young Entrepreneur Award at the prestigious and highly competitive Hong Kong Business Awards 2009, organized by DHL and the SCMP.

The Young Entrepreneur Award honours persons under 40 years of age who have made proven contributions to a Hong Kong business through the application of outstanding talent, originality, innovation, and managerial skills.

Competition was fierce to say the least. Other winners announced during the evening included Richard Elman (CEO and founder of Noble Group), Vincent Cheng (Chairman of The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited), and Marces Lee (Chairman of Le Saunda Holdings). Jetta Company Limited took home the Enterprise Award, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China won the China Company Award, and Gingko House (a fantastically interesting concept) won the SME Award. Noble Group also grabbed the International Award.

It’s been a great year for Outblaze, a company about to turn 12 years old. If I may quote from the press release:

Yat Siu’s steady leadership and vision steered Outblaze through the Dotcom Bubble and several subsequent crises. Outblaze became a world leader in white label hosted web services, winning numerous awards and accolades. With over 75 million end-users under management, Outblaze secured clients and partners from all over the world and business sectors, including service providers, telecommunications operators, corporations, academia, media and publishing companies.

In April 2009, Outblaze messaging assets were sold to IBM and incorporated in IBM’s LotusLive suite of services. IBM also used the Outblaze assets to open its first cloud computing laboratory in Hong Kong. The transaction established beyond doubt that -like banking and finance services- Hong Kong’s local information technology can compete on a global scale.

Upon accepting the award, Yat wasted no time in reminding the audience in the sumptuous Grand Hyatt ball room that this award is recognition for the efforts of all the good, hard-working people at Outblaze. And, almost as importantly, it is recognition for the efforts of I.T. entrepreneurs everywhere. Congratulations to Yat Siu and congratulations to Outblaze!

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!

Big congratulations are in order to our sister companies Sanrio digital and Dream Cortex, who took a total of five prizes in the Best Digital Entertainment Award at the Hong Kong ICT Awards 2008, held on February 9th at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. But the real winner was Hello Kitty: the charming feline was the subject of all five awards.

Hello Kitty Online, the upcoming massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), received recognition for Best Graphics. Hello Kitty Online (HKO) will open this February 14th for a special Valentine’s Day celebration. The game is still in beta but it looks great and it is easy to see why the graphics by design studio Dream Cortex impressed the judges.

The second season of the hit TV show “The Adventures of Hello Kitty & Friends” swept in four award categories, including Best 3D Animation, Best TV Series, Best Modeling & Texturing, and Best Lighting & Rendering. “The Adventures of Hello Kitty & Friends” is a 3D CGI animated series whose first season has aired all over the world. It is also the first time Hello Kitty has been seen in a TV series in CGI.

Read more about this at the Sanrio Digital Blog.

Some very exciting news today: IBM will buy Outblaze’s email assets and incorporate them in “Bluehouse”. “Bluehouse”, a project by IBM Lotus, is an online social networking and collaboration service for businesses.

The news was released overnight, local time, so postings of the news and requests for information are starting to appear. More details on this deal will be released next week at the Lotusphere conference, and you can check back here for more news then. For now here is the text of the press release issued by IBM:

IBM Announces Intent to Acquire Outblaze’s E-Mail Service Assets

ARMONK, NY and HONG KONG - 15 Jan 2009: IBM (NYSE: IBM) has announced its intent to acquire the strategic messaging service assets of Outblaze, Ltd., a privately held provider of online messaging and collaboration services, based in Hong Kong. Building on IBM Lotus’ market leadership in messaging software, the asset acquisition will accelerate the delivery of affordable, Web-based e-mail services in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

With more than 10 years of experience, Outblaze was one of the first companies to offer a fully hosted multilingual e-mail service and now supports over 40 million users. Outblaze’s proven online Web-based messaging service offers unique capabilities for branding and administration. Today, Outblaze operates one of the largest online service platforms for the provision of private label e-mail, collaboration and social media services for other service providers, telecommunications operators, corporations, academia, media and publishing companies.

The Outblaze messaging service will be part of IBM Lotus’ Project “Bluehouse.” “Bluehouse” is IBM’s online social networking and collaboration service designed for business and currently in open beta (http://bluehouse.lotus.com). “Bluehouse” helps people work together more quickly and easily beyond the boundaries of their organizations. Within the service people can share files, chat, participate in online meetings and network over the Web.

“The acquisition of these Outblaze assets further demonstrates Lotus’ commitment to delivering secure, scalable online solutions and will help accelerate delivery of collaborative services, with little to no IT involvement,” said Bob Picciano, General Manager, IBM Lotus Software and WebSphere Portal. “Lotus has always led the way in helping people get more connected, and we recognize that getting the right information and expertise particularly outside of your own organization, can pose quite a challenge. IBM will help companies overcome the barriers of time, distance and affiliation to easily work together and deliver better business outcomes,” added Picciano.

The combination of the Outblaze assets and “Bluehouse” will provide customers with more choices in messaging solutions. Enterprise clients will be able to use IBM as a single provider for all their messaging needs, whether on-premise or online, serving a range of user needs from occasional to full-time. Small business customers will get a simple-to-acquire, integrated set of collaboration services that allow them to easily work with their network of customers and partners. Partners such as telecommunications operators and Internet service providers will be able to package and sell collaborative services to their clients under their own brands.

Further detail on how these new assets will become part of IBM’s online portfolio will be disclosed at the Lotusphere conference in Orlando next week.

Dopplr is an online service that lets you plan for smarter travel - not in the sense of easier ticket bookings or seat upgrades, but in a social and Web 2.0 sense. In Dopplr’s own words:

Dopplr helps you make the most of your trips by sharing your travel plans with the people and brands you trust. The service then highlights coincidences, for example, telling you that three people you know will be in Tokyo when you will be there too. You can use Dopplr on your personal computer or mobile phone. It links with many popular online calendars and social networks.

Simple and elegant. Here at Outblaze we like this service so much that we’ve been supporting it since 2007, and are pleased to be counted among the Dopplr 100, a list of early adopters of this ingenious social network (here is the raw list: the Dopplr 100).

We’d also like to congratulate Marko Ahtisaari on his recent appointment as CEO of Dopplr. Keep up the good work!

Leading media company Axel Springer AG today launched autobild.com.cn, the Chinese online edition of AUTO BILD. Axel Springer is one of the largest publishers in Europe, and AUTO BILD is one of the world’s most popular automobile publications by market and circulation. Outblaze is the technology partner for AUTO BILD China, and we are developing some nice web toys for this project, some of which are already available on the newly launched portal.

autobild.com.cn is a Chinese Web 2.0 driven platform with rich media, social networking and social media services all powered by Outblaze. The primary design goal for this portal was to provide a rich online media experience for automobile enthusiasts in China. Chinese Internet users are increasingly tech-savvy, and static images simply don’t let enthusiasts really explore a car. This meant that Outblaze had to provide solutions not just for standard video content, but also for interactive 3D animations that support user customization.

After all, if you’re looking through a database of cars, wouldn’t you want to be able to view them from multiple angles and in any shade conceivable? Consider how stylish the Lamborghini LP 560-4 looks in pink.

As well as car exteriors, the site also allows you to look around inside 3D interiors - especially useful if you are concerned about leg and head room.

Web sites providing 3D viewing and manipulation of products offer better insight to consumers looking to decide on a purchase, because they let the user get a better feel for the product. And the advertising potential for any web site skyrockets when you give users customization options.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a car portal without plenty of video content, powered by the award-winning OutblazeVideo engine.

In addition to rich media features, autobild.com.cn also allows users to interact and exchange knowledge and ideas among themselves and with the editors of AUTO BILD China. There are user blogs, personal profiles, friends lists, discussion boards, and of course all the regular content you would expect from a seasoned publication like AUTO BILD: a car database, reviews, hints & tips, articles, and much more.

Here’s a few more images. See the action yourself at autobild.com.cn.

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.

BarCamp Hong Kong web site

BarCamp Hong Kong Wiki

BarCamp Hong Kong FaceBook page

Location of current event: Turner International Asia Pacific Ltd.

Address: 30/F, Oxford House, Taikoo Place, Quarry Bay, Hong Kong

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.