Ever wanted to work at a hip, dynamic, innovative, award-winning and internationally recognized technology company? Outblaze, which BusinessWeek called “Hong Kong’s marquee Internet startup”, is now hiring for various positions in game development, project management, and quality assurance.
If you would like a chance to work with major established brands such as Hello Kitty, BEN10, Cartoon Network and Tom & Jerry, as well as up-and-coming brands we are developing right now, check out our job openings on our new web site!
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.
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.
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!
So you have a start-up company. You have slaved over the business plan. You have assembled the core team, who have all agreed to defer pay in order to get the business off the ground. You have prepared a prototype of your product/service. You have developed your web site, reseller network, and you are doing all the customer support yourself, because you know THAT is the kind of dedication it takes to start a business.
Poppycock. If you are truly dedicated to making your start-up a success, you know what you need to do. You need to grab your CFO and scrape together as much money as possible - liquidate company assets and fire a couple founders if you need to!
Once you have gathered the money, you give it all to ridiculously rich angel investors.
Here at Outblaze we’ve certainly experienced our share of the bizarre in over a decade of operations, but we have now been introduced to something new: angel investors who charge start-ups significant sums of money before they will even consider investing in them.
You read that correctly. If your start-up needs money, you can now pay rich investors to think about the possibility of a distant chance to maybe invest in your business idea.
More information on this truly revolutionary business concept at the blog of Jason Calacanis, the CEO of Mahalo.com:
Last week, a number of the TechCrunch50 companies informed me about firms calling them to present at their “Angel forums” — only to discover that they would face fees ranging from $1,000 to $6,000 for a 10-15 minute pitch slot. After additionally investigation by the Jason Nation (the top 10% of the maniacs who follow me on Twitter), I was sent details of one epic bastard that wanted $10-$25,000, plus a couple of percentage points of the value of the deal
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.
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.
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.
Hong Kong domains are the most dangerous in the world; this little factoid from a recent McAfee report generated quite a bit of media coverage, and even made TIME magazine’s top stories list (here is McAfee’s press release on the subject). But all is not as it seems, and aspects of the report may have been out of date before the report was even published.
McAfee’s study seems to be based on a year’s worth of data, and last year was a particularly bad year for the Hong Kong domain, thanks to a gang of botnet spammers registering thousands of domains under the .hk country code top level domain (ccTLD; a generic top level domain is a gTLD).
These domains were most likely registered using stolen credit cards, and contained bogus information in the “whois” records (which show domain ownership). The contact email address for each domain was usually an email address at a random free webmail site like Yahoo, Hotmail, or some of the Outblaze clients.
This certainly turned out to be a gigantic reputation problem for the .hk ccTLD - far more scam domains were being registered under .hk than legitimate domains. Even worse, these scam domains were being hosted on botnets (large networks of infectedPCs, remotely controlled by criminal gangs).
The .hk domains started turning up in spam for porn, fake prescription medication, phishing (identity theft) and many other illegal schemes such as “money mule recruitment”, where people are conned into running an “export agency” and unwittingly become conduits for money laundering and receivers of goods bought with stolen credit cards.
A botnet is a very large, highly failure-tolerant and distributed network. It is also international in nature, so that a child pornography website hosted on an infected PC in Hong Kong could turn up the very next minute on an infected laptop in Brazil. With distributed peer-to-peer botnets the domain name used by a botnet is sometimes its single point of failure.
Registrars (which provide domain registration services) and Registries (which administer gTLDs and ccTLDs) are therefore crucial to any attempt to mitigate botnets.
HKDNR, the registry for the .hk ccTLD, was initially slow to react to this problem, prompting antivirus and antiphishing researchers like Gary Warner (now Director of Research in Computer Forensics & Cybercrime at the University of Alabama at Birmingham) to declare a “crisis situation” in a March 2007 email to a mailing list that discusses phishing. In the email he accused HKDNR of inaction and insufficient response to the concerns of the antispam community.
HKDNR and the Hong Kong CERT (HKCERT) were accused of responding to complaints with canned letters that promised to investigate, but appeared to take no action at all. The response letters encouraged complainants from outside Hong Kong to “report the matter to their local law enforcement agencies”.
By late 2007, the number of .hk domains registered by scam artists numbered in the tens of thousands. Action by various groups (independent technologists, antispam block list providers, CERT teams, law enforcement and regulatory agencies) then seemed to convince HKDNR of the need to take immediate drastic action against scam domains registered in the .hk ccTLD.
As the Postmaster and Head of Anti-spam Operations for Outblaze, I contributed to the effort by providing a feed of several thousand .hk domains from spam reported on our network of 40 million hosted email users.
The results were astounding. Over 10,000 scam domains were terminated in a matter of days. Long term measures were also put in place, such as
Credit card fraud prevention, including Verified by Visa (most of these scam domains were registered using stolen credit cards)
Due diligence measures to detect fake domain registration
Closer cooperation of HKDNR with relevant authorities and agencies.
International cooperation is vital for two reasons:
as an early warning when scam artists attempt to set up shop again
as a way to share best practices with groups, associations, government regulators, and law enforcement agencies working on the prevention of spam and cybercrime.
In a matter of days, the huge concentration of scammer domains in the .hk ccTLD scattered, shifting to other countries and ccTLDs. Some moved to China (as the McAfee report indicates, a large number of scammer domains still exist in .cn space) and others went onto .biz, .info, and even ccTLDs like .ma (Morocco).
The botnet problem is clearly international, and registrars and registries around the world are vulnerable to what HKDNR suffered last year. While it might be stale news in that HKDNR has already dealt with this problem, it serves as a reminder that botnet criminals are still out there and still causing trouble. Spam and cybercrime are hitting record levels and that there is a need for constant awareness and joint efforts to mitigate the menace that botnets have evolved into over the last few years.
I have written a long and detailed paper on botnet mitigation for the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) as part of the ITU’s Botnet Mitigation Toolkit. It discusses the threat that botnets pose to the worldwide community of Internet users, and describes an interlinked set of policy, technology, and civil society approaches to the problem of botnets. Most of what I have written in this blog entry is already present in the ITU paper, so I will stop here and encourage people reading this to glance at the paper as well. It is 100 pages long so probably not bedtime reading, but I’d still appreciate your comments!
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.
On Monday, I got a few hours’ notice that Joi Ito, Chairman of Creative Commons and board member of the Mozilla Foundation, was arriving to our offices en-route to a visit to Macao. This initiated a flurry of activity in the office since Joi is also a board member of Outblaze affiliate SanrioDigital, and it was thus a great opportunity to give Joi some insight into what the team at SanrioDigital has been up to, and to pick his brain and see what else we could be doing.
Joi is a fascinating person and has tremendous insight into popular culture. His ability to absorb information at a rapid pace and provide succint yet insightful comments was extremely valuable to the team. In spite of his pressing schedule, he was also able to meet up with Pindar Wong, Chairman of the Asia & Pacific Internet Association and co-founder of the first licensed ISP in Hong Kong. Pindar and Joi have been associated due to their involvment in ICANN.
Pindar is a big proponent of bringing Creative Commons to Hong Kong along with others such as Rebecca MacKinnon, Charles Mok, and Oiwan Lam . My apologies if I have failed to mention other prominent Hong Kong fans of Creative Commons.
I had the privilege of spending some time with Pindar and Joi and gaining insight into why they think Creative Commons is valuable to Hong Kong and what challenges are faced in localizing CC for this territory. I hope others can help promote the advantages of Creative Commons and provide assistance to the Hong Kong Fans of Creative Commons who at this point are looking for a lawyer specializing in intellectual property to review their draft.
Enjoy the video content and don’t forget to spread the word!
Post interview whilst we were discussing random things, discussion again veered towards Creative Commons and its relevance to Hong Kong and thanks to our intrepid cameraman Jacky Yuk who kept the camera rolling I have another snippet for you to enjoy
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…)
Aaron Marcus is the founder, President and Principal Designer/Analyst of Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc. (AM+A). He is well-respected in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field and has been working in this field for more than 30 years. In the Nov/Dec 2007 issue of ACM/SIGCHI’s Interactions magazine, in his “Fast Forward” column titled “The Sun Rises in the East”, he stated that professional development in user-centered software practices in Asia is expanding rapidly, and the level and quality are rising quickly [1].
This year, the User Friendly conference was held in Beijing from Nov 23 to 25. The number of participants of User Friendly conferences increased from 50 to more than 700 participants in just four years! This is an evident sign of the field’s rapid expansion and confirms Aaron’s observation in his column.
I met Aaron Marcus at the User Friendly conference in Beijing, where we posed for a photo. He was curious about the “flower pin” on his suit and asked me the meaning of the Chinese word “嘉賓” (Guest) printed on the red ribbon.
Aaron gave a keynote at the conference. His workshop titled “Cross-Cultural User Experience Design for Mobile User Interfaces” covered one of his favourite research topics: the impact of cultural differences on user interface design. He introduced the five dimensions of culture identified by the cultural anthropologist Geert Hofstede (more details can be found in his book “Cultures and Organization: Software of the Mind” and website). Based on Hofstede’s framework, Aaron and his colleagues studied corporate websites in different countries and identified patterns of how the cultural dimensions affect the uses of metaphors, mental models, navigation, interaction, and appearance in the Web user interfaces. He mentioned that the common approach to software localization is limited to accommodating local language and data display formats such as date, time, and currency formats. However, localization is far beyond translation and needs to consider deeper cultural issues. Aaron also showed some innovative mobile user-interface design and explained how they addressed the cultural needs.
Cross-cultural user experience design is gaining more attention as many western software companies are swarming into potential markets like China and India. In the beginning of the workshop, Aaron showed us a 2005 article in Fortune magazine titled “Bill Gates as Anthropologist”. The article cited Microsoft’s Bill Gates as promoting anthropological study of its products. I think this may be an indicator global software companies have realized that recognizing the cultural differences is important to their businesses. Lada Gorlenko of IBM predicts we will see a significant part of UX design being offshored and carrying out by local professionals [2]. Maybe this is happening now. Many global companies such as Microsoft, Google, IBM, Autodesk have already set up local design teams in China.
References:
Marcus, A. “The Sun Rises in the East,” Interactions, ACM Publisher, Vol. 14, Issue 6, November/December 2007, pp.52-53.
Gorlenko, L. “Offshoring usability: The moment of truth: how much does culture matter to you?” Interactions, ACM Publisher, Vol 13, Issue 2, March/April 2006, pp. 29-31.
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…)
Entries (RSS)