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.

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!

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

Read more from the source. This information is vital to all struggling start-ups everywhere.

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!

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

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:

1. as an early warning when scam artists attempt to set up shop again
2. 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!

Suresh Ramasubramanian

Postmaster and Head of Anti-spam Operations

Outblaze

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):

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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On November 24 I attended the Creative Commons Workshop organized by University of Hong Kong’s Centre for Development and Resources for Students (CEDAR). The workshop provided a wealth of information on the increasingly popular Creative Commons licenses, which allow for sharing of work without the fears and concerns of infringing on copyright. You can see a Creative Commons license on our blog, just glance to the right and look down.

This event was highly informative and I hope Creative Commons becomes the preferred system for the participatory Web community. CC strikes a balance between copyright and public domain, it is a license that helps to preserve copyright on your work while also inviting certain uses of that work - something that is much more difficult to do with a traditional copyright. CC is ideal for the blogosphere and beyond. I am thus very happy to provide the following videos and podcasts for those who were not able to attend the event. (more…)

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.
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It’s time for another Chinese Blogger Conference update. I met Ms Ying Xue in Beijing at the 3rd Chinese Blogger conference. Tangos Chan (see his interview) introduced us and told me that I absolutely must interview her.

Ying Xue is an investment analyst who provides research and analysis to overseas Venture Capital firms. She is one of the volunteers behind CnBloggerCon, and since she speaks fluent English Isaac Mao (see his interview) asked her to provide simultaneous interpretation for the foreign media who didn’t speak Mandarin.

Hong Kong has had more and more IT startups these past few years, but obviously compared with China the scale is completely different. China has a very highly active and diverse community of IT startups (see “China Web2.0 Review” by Tangos Chan), and because of the huge market size (and other factors), they obtain VC funding much more easily than Hong Kong’s IT startups. So I was really interested to know what Ying Xue thinks of the situation.

Ying said she is not representing her company, but just sharing her own personal thoughts with us - thanks Ying!

cnbloggercon, outblaze, cbc2007

It’s a marketing term.

That was the reply of Outblaze founder and CEO Yat Siu when asked what he thought of “Web 2.0″, a term that is over-used, over-hyped, and often associated with obscure companies. The idea behind Web 2.0 - interlinked platforms, social software, and online services that encourage user contribution - is one of the most powerful, promising, and appealing aspects of the evolving Internet, but surely we must retain some perspective. Let us not forget the late ’90s bubble heyday of the prefix “e-”.

Yat was being interviewed at the sixth Web Wednesday, held at Lotus on Pottinger Street in Hong Kong on Wednesday November 7, 2007, for an audience of 130 or so hailing from diverse technology and marketing backgrounds.

The podcast of the interview will be available shortly on the Web Wednesday web site. We’ll update with a direct link as soon as possible.

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:

cnbloggercon, outblaze, cbc2007, denwei

Outblaze is proud to be a major sponsor of the 3rd annual Chinese Blogger Conference, which was held in Beijing on November 3-4 2007.

Fon Hong Kong and Outblaze’s new service Blogarate are major sponsors.

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