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.
Congratulations to FON!! The three year old internet connection sharing company is on track to show profitability in the last quarter of 2009!
Treat yourself to the extremely interesting blog post on this subject by FON founder Martin Varsavsky. Martin also provides a personal account of the huge potential and harrowing times at FON; last year he began financing the company’s monthly losses using his own money.
Serial entrepreneurship doesn’t get any better than this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yet one more interview from my visit to the 3rd Chinese Blogger Conference in Beijing November 3-4, 2007. BlogBus launched in late 2002 and was one of the first blog service providers (BSP) in China. BlogBus offers free blog hosting and charges premium service fees of less than $15 a year. According to the Baidu Blog Development Report China has 52,300,000 blogs and 1460 BSPs. BlogBus is one of the top 20 BSPs in China. The interesting thing is that the company is only a couple dozen people, but competes against organizations with hundreds of employees. (more…)
More material from the 3rd Chinese Blogger Conference that I attended last week-end! Today we have Tangos Chan, I know him from his Chinese blog 未完成 - Incomplete, and first met him at the 1st Chinese Blogger Conference, in Shanghai.
Tangos also has an English blog called China Web 2.0 Review, which tracks web 2.0 development, and reviews and profiles web2.0 applications, businesses and services in China. He wants foreigners to pay more attention to new IT start ups, and not just at the famous portal sites.
Besides English (as you see in the interview) and Mandarin, Tangos also speak Cantonese which made me feel more at home. He took good care of me at the Blogger Conference, helping me to find more people to interview. Tangos, thank you very much!
Next up we have Jeremy Goldkorn, founder and editor of Danwei.org, a hugely popular site that covers Chinese media, marketing, advertising and urban life. Jeremy has been in Beijing for 12 years, and speaks fluent Mandarin. He just wrote a blog post called ” Chinese Blogger Conference 2007 - some thoughts. Here is the video interview with Jeremy Goldkorn:
You may remember Forrester Research senior analyst Jeremiah Owyang’s visit to Hong Kong last month and particularly his photographs and commentaries on the ultra spicy Szechuan dinner he enjoyed his first night here. At the time Jeremiah interviewed Outblaze CEO Yat Siu on the state of the Web industry in Hong Kong and the video is now available - go to Jeremiah’s video post to watch it (or click the screenshot below).
Jeremiah is clearly a fan of the Cyberport, the high-tech facility where Outblaze has its headquarters. Take a look at his write-up and photographs.
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.
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