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!

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.

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.

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…)

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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