News on Nick Wang

HK International Design and Innovation Forum

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:41:09 +0000

香港國際設計創意研討會 HK International Design and Innovation Forum 你都可以設計俾住好D，無印良品，LEGO You can design for GOD, MUJI and LEGO too!

Thank you for coming and making this a great event!

Please share your photos on Flickr tagged with “hkdesigninnovationforum” before Sunday night. Wacom is giving away 3 Bamboo Fun S drawing tablets and we will announce the winners here on Monday. And the winner is…..

So what was the process I used and what was I looking for? I looked through the photos with Flickr Slideshow on all photos tagged with “hkdesigninnovationforum”. What I was looking for was not just beautiful portraits of the speakers, but a sense of “users participation”. After all, this was a “User Generated” event - so it is about “the people”, and that’s what I looked for in the winning photo. So, congratulations to se_ea, you’ll be contacted through Flickr mail about the prize. Thanks to everyone who share photos on Flickr. It is the best platform to share information from a photo to the world. (Facebook is only good for sharing photos with your “friends”, so it is not ideal to pool together photos for public events.) Finally, I’ve just created a cuusoo.com 空想生活 Hong Kong Group for those of you interested in design, user innovation and user generated products to stay connected with Kohei and cuusoo.com in Japan! Any other suggestions?? Let me know! Date: May 2nd, 2009 Time: 2:00pm - 5:00pm (Discussions begin at 2:30pm) **Address:**Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre 30 pak tin street, shek kip mei kowloon, hong kong

HKDUG’s Nicholas Wang is proud to have the opportunity to gather two leading luminaries of Asian design to share their experiences with you. Kohei Nishiyama, founder of the Tokyo-based online design company cuusoo.com and Douglas Young, founder of Hong Kong design-based retailer G.O.D. Both Mr. Nishiyama and Mr. Young have been hard at work pushing the design and innovation envelope for over 10 years, you will be able to hear about their experiences and what drives them to success. HKDUG的Nicholas Wang有幸邀請到亞洲設計界兩位傑出權威者將其經歷與大家分享。第一位是日本東京網上設計公司cuusoo.com的創辦人, 西山浩平先生。第二位是香港本土生活品味店「住好D」的創辦人, 楊志超先生。兩位大師致力推動並革新創意設計的界限已有逾十年經驗, 大家將可諦聽兩位的歷程及成功心得。 RSVP here! Kohei Nishiyama

Since 1997, long before the Web 2.0 trend toward co-creation, Kohei Nishiyama has been running an innovative online product development community. The system, used by the design-centric Japanese retailer MUJI and soon to be rolled out globally by LEGO, has manufacturers working with consumers to design products - from inception to manufacturing. Started off as an ideal to make “people’s wishes come true”, cuusoo.com is now synonymous with crowdsourcing. Mr. Nishiyama will be sharing with us how massive online collaboration can create sophisticated design products. 西山浩平 遠於Web 2.0成為”共同創造”概念大趨勢前的1997年起, 西山浩平早已引入一個極具創意的網上產品發展社群平台。以設計為核心的日本零售店「無印良品」以及即將全球性推行採用此方式的LEGO集團, 讓製造商從始到末與消費者共同設計產品。由最初「想令每一個人也能實現所想」的理念, 至現今的cuusoo.com已成了「群眾外包」設計的俵俵者。西山先生將與大家分享如何透過網上協作創出精緻產品。 Douglas Young

Douglas Young launched the Hong Kong-based homeware and accessories company Goods of Desire (GOD) in 1996 with a mission to bring better homegrown design into people’s lives. G.O.D., the acronym which sounds like “to live better” in Cantonese, started out by capturing Hong Kong’s icons and turning them into art forms and retail objects to be appreciated as affordable art. Mr. Young’s designs are inspired by Hong Kong’s unique cultural identity, they’re often iconic but with a twist, so people of Hong Kong can immediately identify with them, while putting a smile on their faces. Mr. Young has the foresight to begin collecting items of cultural significance more than 20 years ago, their G.O.D. Street Culture Museum is now a database for current and future designers to draw inspirations on. When Mr. Young learned of this meaningful event, he graciously accepted the invite and lend us a venue to make this happen. 楊志超 楊志超先生於1996年創辦本土生活品味店「G..O.D」的宗旨是要將優質本土設計引進港人的生活。G..O.D, 廣東話俚語即「住好啲」, 意思就是要提升生活質素, 最初將一些香港代表物融入產品, 變為讓大眾可欣賞的廉價藝術品。楊先生的設計靈感源於香港獨特的文化身份, 往往以一些大家熟悉, 而加進了鬼馬元素的設計為材, 讓港人能即時發出會心微笑。早有遠見的楊先生在20多年前已開始蒐集具文化價值的物品, 住好啲石硤HEA街頭文化館現已成為各設計師攝取靈感的資料庫。身為本地設計界權威, 楊先生得悉此活動後, 慷慨地接受邀請並騰出場地以舉行是次項目。 Thomas Crampton

One of Asia’s most influential bloggers and a career correspondent at New York Times and International Herald Tribune. Now Asia-Pacific director of Digital Influence at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, Thomas draws deep experience from both the old and new media world. You can read his blog at http://www.thomascrampton.com. Thomas will lead Mr. Nishiyama and Mr. Young in panel discussion in the first half of the event. All attendees will be invited to join in on discussions in the second half. 亞洲其中一位最具影響力的網誌人兼國際先驅導報及紐約時報記者, 現任奧美公共關係國際集團360 Digital Influence的亞太總監。Thomas Crampton先生是新舊傳媒界的資深人士。大家可到www.thomascrampton.com細閱其網路日誌。Thomas Crampton先生將會於活動時間的首半節主持有西山先生及楊先生發表意見的專題討論, 然後於後半節邀請在場參加者一起投入討論。 Nicholas Wang

The organizer behind this event, Nick is an Internet and Social Media expert with experience at some of the largest Internet companies like Yahoo! and Microsoft MSN.com. Having spent half of his life living and working in the US, he envisions the loss of Hong Kong’s competitive edge if the people of Hong Kong continue to abandon long term investments in creative designs and I.T. expertise. Nick is now actively involved in the HKDUG - Hong Kong Drupal User Group, social media communities, and founded Sharingan Consulting as a mean to pursue his vision of a digital future of Hong Kong. 負責是次活動的節目統籌。Nicholas Wang是曾任職雅虎及微軟MSN.com等網絡鉅子的網絡科技與社會媒體專家。主要於美國生活的他預料香港人若繼續漠視創意設計和資訊科技這些長線投資便會失掉競爭優勢。Nicholas Wang現致力實現其對香港數碼未來的願景, 並活躍於香港Drupal User Group及其他社群媒體。 Facebook Event Page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=160525385437 Thomas Crampton’s Blog Entry: http://www.thomascrampton.com/hong-kong/meet-2-great-asian-designers-in-hong-kong/ Nick’s Blog Entry: http://cloneofsnake.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/hong-kong-international-design-and-innovation-forum

Twitter tag hkdesigninnovationforum

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遺失了的記事：2009年5月 | Daisy’s Digital Anthology — 2009-09-06 12:50:58

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Inauguration of Barack Obama - never been so proud as an American

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:48:05 +0000

Been watching it on TV this morning, everybody is in such joyous mood for this historic moment. I have to admit, when I first moved to Seattle 18 years ago, I was taken aback by how behind the times the USA was in comparison to Hong Kong. Also, I didn’t have any interactions with the African Americans here because there simply weren’t too many of them where I lived. (Issaquah Washington was predominantly White.) Basically, everything I know about the Black population was from the news and media, so it was natural that I didn’t hold a very high opinion about them. This continued all the way through college and even to the time I worked at Microsoft, where all my colleagues were either White or Asians. It really wasn’t until I moved to New York and started working at Yahoo! that I finally got to interact closely with Blacks and Hispanics. Now, 2 of my best friends whom I would always visit when I go back to NYC are Black and Hispanic. Recently, I can still hear from my relatives living in the US, racist comments toward our new President due to the color of his skin. This surprises me now, but I guess it really shouldn’t be too surprising… I suppose if I had stayed in Seattle forever, I may still have a low opinion of Black people. (When I say my relatives though, I’m talking about the older generation who have been living here for a while but haven’t really mixed in with the general public due to language barrier.) I’ve also met a guy who moved from HK to NY for a year of work, he had only just moved to NY when we went out for dinner and he said it straight out that he didn’t like Black people. LOL… I don’t blame him as he had just moved there from HK, but I wonder how he feels about our new President… In a lot of ways, the USA is really very conservative and “behind the times”, I think the world had a false sense of “the land of the free” before, but finally gotten a real taste of it through the last 8 years of hell thanks to George W. Bush. I think many of us feel the same as I, that we haven’t felt proud to be American for a long looong time. Personally, I’ve never been so proud as an American! I’ve been proud to be Chinese American, a proud Yahoo employee, proud to be a local New Yorker… but never just a plain ol’ American. 18 years, first time! A new era! Let’s hope this will teach everyone in America to be more open and tolerant of other people… … Now, if we can just get rid of all the conservatives in the country! (LOL! Joke)

Picasa finally out on Mac

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:37:17 +0000

http://picasa.google.com/mac/ After the initial news leak / rumor a year ago, I’ve been eagerly waiting for Picasa Mac’s release! Every time I fire up Aperture, painfully work on my photos just to add tags and headlines and comments and upload to Flickr… I would Google “Picasa for Mac” and see if there are any news about when it will freaking come out! A WHOLE YEAR!!! Well, it’s finally out now! Time to export all my photos from Aperture & iPhoto’s mess of a database, and reorganize them like I used to for Picasa. Also check out my presentation about Picasa & Flickr at OpenEverythng Hong Kong

Reverse the pecking order and Rectify the unjust banking structure

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:16:31 +0000

Just came back to Seattle and saw this on the news:

Merrill Lynch exec, Peter Kraus, got paid a $25 million bonus for what amount to a few weeks of work. This is after Bank of America had bought out Merrill Lynch and received a $25 billion cash infusion from the US government’s bailout plan. Peter Kraus just bought a $37 million, 5 bedrooms co-op apartment in NYC’s Upper East Side, at 720 Park Avenue.

I have a big problem with things like this and those greedy CEOs getting multi-million dollar salary / bonus while the average Joe can barely survive from paycheck to paycheck! I guess it’s due to my background, my father is an engineer and I also worked as an engineer at Microsoft and Yahoo! People like us are “creators”, we develop, implement & maintain things so that businesses can run, produce and earn money. To engineers and scientists, there’s more to a job than just monetary compensation, we also look for that sense of accomplishment when we create meaningful things for the world!!! We take pride in our work based on our achievements and meaning, more than how much money we make!!

I’ve always had a hard time understanding finance and the stock market. Why are these people simply trading papers and can make a shitload of money while producing no quantifiable products for the world? Why are we letting these people control our money??! Anybody else think that this is seriously fucked up?!! I wish someone would enlighten me and may be we can find solutions to fix this social unjust, reverse the pecking order, and take back the control of our hard earned money from the evil banks. Speaking of evil, I’m reading “The Google Story” and one chapter is about Google’s process to IPO. What these guys had done really impressed me! Excerpts from the book:

Larry and Sergey knew about the scandals - some criminal, some unethical, all evil - where Wall Street underpriced IPOs and then let favored clients profit by dumping the stock on day one, after the price skyrocketed. The guys wanted no part of what seemed to be a corrupt and rotten system. Google used an egalitarian method for distributing stock to the public, this means anyone can participate, and would overcome the Wall Street bias toward underpricing. Brin and Page resented what they viewed as a Wall Street monopoly when it came to fees. All the firms charged the same exorbitant fees for handling IPOs - 7%; in a $2 billion public offering, they would earn $140 million. … They decided they would compensate Wall Street at less than half of the usual and prevailing fees, and if the brokerage houses didn’t like it, they didn’t have to participate in the deal. Furthermore, they developed detailed plans to wrest control over the unfair pricing and allocation of shares, and reserved the right to cancel the deal at the last moment if they changed their minds. To put it mildly, the Google Guys were sending a “drop-dead” message to Wall Street. Larry and Sergey were advised by their outside lawyers that once they filed IPO documents with the SEC, they would enter something know as the “quiet period”, when they would have to make sure they said nothing to tout the value of Google stock. As populists, it made no sense to Brin and Page that the quiet period permitted something called a road show, where they would meet behind closed doors with big money people, the institutinal investros and heavyweights of Wall Street, to give presentations and answer questions. Why did it make sense to give those big insiders an advantage at road shows gatherings, leaving outsiders and small investors to fend for themselves? This seemed like a typical self-serving Wall Street tradition, and they aimed to break it, or at least bend it, in the process of going public. They would say little or nothing new at the road shows, and give everyone access to the same additional data about Google by posting it on the Internet.

Finally, another excerpt from the same chapter that talks about engineers and good and evil:

Many of the best engineers had a strong sense of the deeper philosophical issues of right and wrong, and of good and evil. Technology, in and of itself, could be a force of light or darkness. By instinct, talented technologists were attracted to a company that had appealing values and virtues that went beyond maximizing profits and market share.

A little too exaggerating, may be. But all the same, a lot of my colleagues at Yahoo! felt the same way back then. (though we certainly didn’t mind when our stock options kept shooting up either.) :P

Comments

Jason Khanlar — 2009-02-09 01:06:47

I agree wholeheartedly. :3 Interesting blog!

IE 5 to 8 major security flaw gives your passwords away

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 07:31:35 +0000

I don’t remember how many years it has been since I ditched IE, and since last year I’ve migrated to Mac 100%. Wouldn’t it be nice if no one uses IE anymore? We definitely need to spread the news on this one!

Major flaw revealed in Internet Explorer; users urged to switch

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/111811 The major press outlets are abuzz this morning with news of a major new security flaw that affects all versions of Internet Explorer from IE5 to the latest beta of IE8. The attack has serious and far-reaching ramifications – and they’re not just theoretical attacks. In fact, the flaw is already in wide use as a tool to steal online game passwords, with some 10,000 websites infected with the code needed to take advantage of the hole in IE. Virtually all security experts (as well as myself) are counseling users to switch to any other web browser – none of the others are affected, including Firefox, Chrome, and Opera – at least for the time being, though Microsoft has stubbornly said it “cannot recommend people switch due to this one flaw.” Microsoft adds that it is working on a fix but has offered no ETA on when that might happen. Meanwhile it offers some suggestions for a temporary patch, including setting your Internet security zone settings to “high” and offering some complicated workarounds. (Some reports state, however, that the fixes do not actually work.) Expedient patching or switching are essential. Security pros fear that the attack will soon spread beyond the theft of gaming passwords and into more criminal arenas, as the malicious code can be placed on any website and can be adapted to steal any password stored or entered using the browser. It’s now down to the issue of time: Will Microsoft repair the problem and distribute a patch quickly enough to head off the tsunami of fraud that’s about to hit or will it come too late to do any good? Meanwhile, I’ll reiterate my recommendation: Switch from Internet Explorer as soon as you can. You can always switch back once the threat is eliminated. (To clarify: You don’t need to uninstall IE, just don’t use it for the time being.) Links for other browsers to try: Firefox Chrome Safari Opera

Comments

adamsmith1922 — 2008-12-17 17:10:46

Suggest people switch to Firefox http://adamsmith.wordpress.com/2008/12/17/security-flaw/

Back in the US, watching Bear Grylls eats Goat Testicle Raw!

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 03:28:04 +0000

After spending more than 2 months in Hong Kong (and way too much money) for my wedding, I’m now back in the US. Just arrived in Seattle yesterday, I gotta say, I had left Seattle 6 years ago and I’ve forgotten what Seattle winters feel like! Boy am I glad I moved away! All this gray clouds and drizzle… I’m feeling suicidal already! Anyway, just wanted to write a quick post because I am watching my favorite show ~ Man vs. Wild on Discovery channel. Part of the reason why I really enjoy this show is that this guy, Bear Grylls, eats a lot of animals / insects / plants RAW! I find it very manly and wasn’t disgusted by it… until just now… This episode, he is in the Sahara desert, and he ate a freaking goat testicle, RAW!!! It took me a split second to connect raw testicle and the stuff it holds inside… and immediate I want to puke! XD LOL

Limiting Internet Usage before Harry Potter release in fear of Spoilers

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 23:48:40 +0000

I’ve just saw a news from Slashdot that someone had taken pictures of every single page of the US version of Harry Potter book 7 and released it on torrents. In fear of what happened to me when book 6 was released, I think I’m going to stop using the internet from now until I this Saturday.

Virginia Tech shooting - suddenly Asians ain't so funny anymore

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 09:30:15 +0000

Shooter Identified: Cho Seung-Hui That was what I saw on TV just now, my first reaction was… I laughed. It totally reminded me of skits from Mad TV or Saturday Night Live. :P But this isn’t comedy, this is reality, suddenly these jokes on Asians ain’t so funny anymore. People go nuts, even us stereotypically “nice” Asians do. The difference is, when these kind of things happen in other places, they don’t have access to guns. Here, a stereotypically “smart and hard working” Asian can walk into Walmart, buy a gun and some ammo, come to school, lock all the exits, and start shooting until he gets an “A”. Here are e-mails sent to Virginia Tech students with timestamps!

News on Nick Wang

HK International Design and Innovation Forum

Thank you for coming and making this a great event!

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Inauguration of Barack Obama - never been so proud as an American

Picasa finally out on Mac

Reverse the pecking order and Rectify the unjust banking structure

Comments

IE 5 to 8 major security flaw gives your passwords away

Comments

Back in the US, watching Bear Grylls eats Goat Testicle Raw!

Limiting Internet Usage before Harry Potter release in fear of Spoilers

Virginia Tech shooting - suddenly Asians ain't so funny anymore