Tech on Nick Wang

香港國際設計創意研討會 Hong Kong International Design and Innovation Forum

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 02:44:45 +0000

香港國際設計創意研討會 Hong Kong International Design and Innovation Forum - Please visit the official site and RSVP here.

Picture of Kohei Nishiyama, founder of cuusoo.com and creator of the Design-to-Order process. (Taken by Joi Ito shared on Flickr) (This is actually an email I sent out to my comrades, posting it on this blog to help spread the word.) Dear all, A friend of mine, Mr. Kohei Nishiyama, is coming to HK in the last week of April and I’m trying to create a “Design and Innovation” event on Saturday, May 2nd, so that he can make a speech and share his experience with the people of HK. Kohei is the founder of cuusoo.com, where consumers, designers and manufacturers are pulled together to make “wishes come true”! Users submit their “wishes”, designers transform these “wishes” into concrete designs and manufactures turn the designs into real products! They have partnerships with internationally well known brands like MUJI and LEGO. Thomas Crampton is a former NY Times reporter and he had recently interviewed Kohei while in Switzerland. I met with Tom on Sunday and he told me he has been trying to get Kohei to come to HK too, so he’s happy about the news and has offered to help me with the event. Check out his interview: http://www.thomascrampton.com/internet/kohei-nishiyama-co-creation-at-muji-and-lego/

▶ YouTube video

For more info on Mr. Nishiyama, check out:

US - Japan Innovators network - Kohei Nishiyama (西山浩平) - CEO & Founder, elephant design co., ltd.
cuusoo.com Personally, I am disappointed to see that while Hong Kong does not lack design talents, the society itself and the business communities don’t seem to value these people very much. The same goes for technology and innovation. In creating an international Design and Innovation event, I hope to help change the mindset of HK people and businesses, to put more emphasis back in “Creativity and Innovation”, and open their eyes to see the long term benefits of having a healthy creative industry in HK. So, if you’re also passionate about design and innovation, please don’t hesitate to contact me at nicholas.wangyahoo{period or dot or full stop}com or simply leave a comment here. Be it sponsors or venue choices, speakers or promoters, I need all the help I need in order to successfully pull this off in such a short period of time! Thank you, -Nicholas Wang

Comments

HK Design Innovation Forum Photo Report « Before I Die — 2009-05-06 11:13:05

[…] Preparation and Result of my Monbukagakusho ApplicationTravel Blog - 2006/03/28 - Hakone, Japan香港國際設計創意研討會 Hong Kong International Design and Innovation ForumManagement Problems in Hong Kong (and generally in Asian Companies)Monbukagakusho - the reason why I […]

Economic Crisis and How it is Killing Microsoft

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:40:08 +0000

Just read Dries Buytaert’s write up on the OSBC - Open Source Business Conference. Here’s an excerpt:

The general consensus was that, for a variety of reasons, the down turn in the economy will have a positive impact on Open Source. The consensus was also that, as the “Open Source disruption” continues to move up the stack, the traditional web content management space will get shaken up in the next couple of years. I think that the Drupal project, with its larger ecosystem, will be there at the right time, at the right place. It is clear that Drupal will have an important role to play in this.

As I read this, I was thinking… although Microsoft is being beaten on all fronts and is super uncool these days, probably nobody thinks they will go away. However, if you really think about it, though MS is still pretty safe with all the big dinosaur businesses forced to continue supporting it, with the current economic downturn, we see a whole bunch of dinosaurs dying. New companies are not gonna use Microsoft products anymore, a lot of them are perfectly happy with Mac / Linux + Google + open source softwares. Now imagine a few of these cycles… more and more of the dinosaurs will die, and eventually, so will Microsoft. Hope I’ll live to see that day.

iPhone Google offline maps - Hong Kong 香港 and Tokyo 東京

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 09:10:14 +0000

I used GMDL (Google Maps Download) and created a Hong Kong map and a Tokyo City map (around the Yamanote-line 山手線), you can download them on rapidshare: Hong Kong - 香港 http://rapidshare.com/files/209543569/iPhone_GDML_Google_Offline_Hong_Kong_maps.rar Tokyo City - 東京都 http://rapidshare.com/files/211314833/iPhone_GMDL_Japan_Tokyo_offline_map.rar

Simply extract and copy them onto your iPhone’s /var/mobile/Media/Maps/ folder. (Of course, you’ll need a jail broken iPhone and installed OfflineMaps from Cydia. Once the folders are in place, open OfflineMaps and you should see this:

So here, the path of these 2 folders are: /var/mobile/Media/Maps/HK_HongKong and /var/mobile/Media/Maps/JP_TokyoCity Touch on HK_HongKong and you’ll see this:

Touch Link and you’ll see this:

Your’re basically done! Now hit the Home button and open the iPhone Maps program!

The Hong Kong map will come up, even though you’re not on Wifi (See? No Wifi signal on top.)

If you zoom out, you’ll see the limit :) Only Hong Kong available in the HK_HongKong map.

Zoom all the way in… this is Lv 1 - building names and MTR exits are shown!

Also! You will be able to see your current location if you are within the range of at least 3 cell phone signal receiver! (Normally, if you don’t have a data plan, you can’t see the map and so you can’t see your location. But now, with Offline maps, we can see that cell tower triangulate positioning is actually available to us all! :) One time after I changed the folder names, Maps couldn’t display the offline maps anymore! I looked into it and found out why - the symlink was still pointing to the old folder. See, this is how offline maps work, when you use iPhone Maps normally with Wifi, it stores caches of map tiles inside: /private/var/mobile/Library/Caches/MapTiles/ What Offline Maps does is it stores the “permanent cache” files created with GMDL in a separate folder: /private/var/mobile/Media/Maps/ When you touch on “Link”, it creates a symlink from the /private/var/mobile/Library/Caches/MapTiles/ folder to the offline permanent cache, so in JP_TokyoCity’s case - /private/var/mobile/Media/Maps/JP_TokyoCity/ , so if you go to /private/var/mobile/Library/Caches/MapTiles/ and type ls -l , you should see something like this: MapTiles.sqlitedb -> /var/mobile/Media/Maps/JP_TokyoCity/MapTiles.sqlitedb . Basically, if your maps doesn’t work, try deleting that link with rm * and then redo the process from the beginning. A detailed tutorial in which I learned from is here. Only sightly outdated for iPhone firmware 2.2 - if you’re downloading your own maps, the new GMDL can convert the maps directly to v2.2, so you don’t need to do the last step of “Mapv4v5Converter”. A screenshot of the tutorial below:

Host unlimited photos at slide.com for FREE!

Comments

cloneofsnake — 2009-05-24 11:28:11

huh? Where did u hear that? My friend’s report from Tokyo - No good, couldn’t use GPS to locate himself. :( I was a little surprised… I thought that since iPhone 3G has GPS built-in, even if you’re not using any cell signal, you can still get GPS location. Not true?

Ignacio — 2010-02-13 16:27:28

Hi guys, maybe an easier way to have true offline maps: this is a new app in the appstore that lets you see, search for places and streets, and calculate routes WHILE you are offline, and for any part in the world… http://sites.google.com/site/truemaps

Alvin — 2010-02-05 18:25:58

I cant seem to fine the copy instead of link map tiles, please help

Alvin — 2010-02-05 04:55:33

hi thanks for your efforts, but after i have uploaded everything and clicked on the HK file, offline maps crashes, any remedies for that?

cloneofsnake — 2010-02-05 10:10:13

This guide is pretty outdated, if you’re on OS 3.0 or above, you need to find new instructions. Basically though, use the latest Offline Maps version, Copy instead of Link the map tiles, also, install Enhanced Maps (another Cydia app) which will enable you to store the map tiles in cache… so if you browse while you’re online, the maps you"ve download will stay on your iPhone and not get erased!

Fernando — 2009-05-24 00:15:01

Your telling me that this is working for you in software 2.2.1????

mimizone — 2010-02-16 16:28:13

is the Tokyo map available elsewhere? RapidShare has been overloaded for the past hours and doesn’t let me download it for free. Thanks. I’ll try true map as well, but I find the OpenMap tokyo map not very detailed. It’s missing a lot of info and streets at the street level.

cloneofsnake — 2009-05-03 11:28:37

you’re welcome, my friend just went to Tokyo, I’ll get his report on actual usage when he comes back. :)

profinite — 2009-05-03 10:42:14

cloneofsnake Thank you so much for the JP_TokyoCity map. Installation was a breeze. It is going to help me a lot when I am in Tokyo from May 11, 2009. I appreciate the great work you have done for all of us! – profinite

Fernando — 2009-04-27 12:16:21

Any update?

Ben — 2009-03-17 07:15:12

And here is a tutorial for Google Maps made in paper :) (just for fun) Pretty sure you’ll like it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9TtDecveCE

Patrick — 2009-04-06 00:04:43

hi i am having a problem with offline maps and i was wondering if you could help me. i used iphonebrowser to move the extracted files into the location you specified, but i realised there wasnt a MAPS folder, so i had to manually create a new folder. then when i moved the files over, and i started up OfflineMaps, it just kept crashing and reboots the Iphone. Any ideas or suggestions? thanks!

cloneofsnake — 2009-04-08 00:14:34

hmm… not sure why it would keep crashing, but 2 things: It’s Maps, not MAPS. Perhaps it’s the new folder not having the right permission? Try running this in Terminal - sudo chmod -R 755 /private/var/mobile/Media/Maps

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/

Making Toys Vs. Developing Software - Agile Hong Kong

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 11:54:02 +0000

Toys vs. Software - Agile Hong Kong (by cloneofsnake)

I almost missed Tuesday night’s Agile Hong Kong event - Toys vs. Software, Fight! Had to check the address and the map at a public terminal in MTR at the last minute! Jonathan Buford, Managing and Technical Director at Advanced Design Labs, was there to talk about his experience in the toys development process… and how it’s similar / different from software development. He showed us a few of his past designs, one of which I’ve seen on TV commercials in the US. He also has a product that has just finished development and is being manufactured for the coming Chirstmas season. It was pretty interesting to learn about the specifics in creating new toys. In fact, it was so interesting that we kept asking questions about making toys and Jonathan had to ditched the entire 2nd half of his speech on software development! :) This shouldn’t be surprising, as most of the people attending Agile’s events should have IT backgrounds and understand software development processes and project management. So we all had a good grasp on Jonathan’s explanation on the “critical path” in product development. What really interested me was about the risks - R&D can completely go down the tube if no one is buying the idea. So, to minimize risk, they develop lots and create prototypes quickly. He mentioned Rapid Prototyping machines, saying that eventually users will be able to design and make the prototypes themselves. This is related to crowdsourcing and Cuusoo.com, so I asked him what was his take on “crowdsourcing toys design”. Jonathan thinks that we are heading toward the direction of “user generated products”, there are just 2 factors holding us back - 1) the design tools that Jonathan uses is quite advanced and the general public just don’t have the kind of access to these tools. He mentioned that Google SketchUp is pretty good, and may be some day soon, people can use that to design & make models. 2) is the manufacturing part - how do normal people connect to manufacturers? Obviously, he doesn’t know about Cuusoo.com, it has the entire 2nd part covered! I have heard about SketchUp when it was first bought by Google, I guess it is time for me to pay a visit and see if we can integrate its tools for crowdsourcing design.

Comments

cloneofsnake — 2009-02-01 15:34:48

hmm… I can imagine this happening in Hong Kong, tiny shops open up in every shopping arcade, a Rapid-Prototype machine makes individualized casings for standardized hardware - like netbooks or may be cell phones… The problem here is economy of scale… how well can this model work for the mass market… or even just the local market. I think this will give rise to many profitable small businesses in city like Hong Kong, Tokyo or New York… but it can’t become a behemoth of a business like Nokia or Toyota. Not that it need to though… that’s the whole point of individualized items. :)

Jonathan Buford — 2009-01-31 22:52:24

Hi, thanks for coming to the talk, I’m glad that you found it interesting. Looking over cuusooo.com, I think this is still just a step in the direction that I was talking about. Of course there are outlets like this that allow for something that mimics the mass production that is currently popular, but where I think things will go is something much more personal. One-off items that are made just for that user. I think that it will be a merging of making the design tools more simple with rapid prototyping costs coming down. Currently, a rapid prototype model cost is still too high and the machines are still not accessible enough that they would fit this, but it is heading in that direction with projects like http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome Just like the current generation of netbooks having a fairly common hardware spec, I think the electronics will become more integrated and modularized, so that it is just a matter of picking the modules and designing a case around it.

BarCamp Hong Kong 2008

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 23:51:45 +0000

Startup Lighting Talks (by 黛)

Comrades at Hong Kong’s Drupal group reminded me about BarCamp Hong Kong 2008, it was my first time and I got a really good impression of it. It’s probably fair to say I won’t be the only one who wishes we can have BarCamps more often. I loved it! Check out all the photos at flickr and a general write up about it on LaiHiu’s blog and another insightful one at Ca Phun Ung’s yelotofu. Personally, it felt great to be able to immerse once again in an open, knowledge-sharing environment. We have lots of these events in the US, and they are great for networking. I was able to meet with a few great people and also organized more regular offline meetings after BarCamp. I listened to iPhone apps development (& finding it more and more amazing how Apple can become so popular and “cool” while maintaining their unfriendly, “closed door” stance.) An Open Education open-mic with John Britton (half of it), then jumped over to Microsoft’s OSS session. The lead developer of one of the best online Rich Text Editor - FCKeditor. A Drupal theming session where John Britton informed us about the Knight Drupal Initiative, and we organized what will hopefully become regular offline meetings for HK Drupalers. Finally, there’s the Start-up Lightning talks where I presented my “Environmentally Conscious Restaurant / Food directory” idea. Hopefully, I can connect with a few kindred souls in the 200+ attendants to help spread the site. (Probably gonna use this “currystar” domain.) Finally, met a young entrepreneur, Alvin, who’s still in studying at Stanford… he was working hard networking and spoke with me about having connections to VC in the US. It’s good to know someone who’s so young and passionate! Saw a couple of Yahoo HK developers, I asked one of them how he felt about Yahoo in HK, and he said it’s too “revenue oriented”. I think this is a typical problem with companies that have grown big and also for small HK companies. As a general observation, I think companies (and people) who are “revenue oriented” are often too short-sighted. Because of that, nothing truly revolutionary will come out of them. At the other end of the spectrum, we have visionaries who dream of producing something that will change the way everybody do things, they might create that revolutionary product, everybody loves them, but then they don’t know how to make money out of it. (The classic Slashdot joke: “Create genius product -> Everybody loves it -> ??? -> PROFIT!!) LOL. Rarely do we see phenomenon like Google ~ where a revolutionary idea also crosses over well into a revenue generating model. Generally speaking though, I am supportive of the latter crowd. Take Google for example, they have tons of talented developers but very little managers (they found that managers were killing innovations, so they fired a majority of them in 2001!), everyone is encouraged to spent some of their work hours to work on their own projects! I think most of their products are not making them any money ~ Gmail, Apps, Docs, Reader… etc, but with so many people converging on their platform, something good must come out of it. (Sort of reminds me of how Yahoo was before the bust.) Now, as an ex-Yahoo, (and more importantly, a shareholder!) I really hope Yahoo can produce something “good for the people” rather than “something that helps the bottom line.” I think in the long run, this will help Yahoo gets back on track. For example, Yahoo Hong Kong is the most visited website in Hong Kong, there are so much more they can do to help the locals, so why aren’t they standing at the forefront of it, but rather they are copying local success like OpenRice.com? At BarCamp, one of the guys is creating a mass transit info site - passionately named it whereismybusrightnowdude.com.hk :P As a returning expat, I am like a foreigner who doesn’t know how to get around HK except for the MTR! Other major cities like Tokyo and London already have something like that, people CANNOT live without these services! Why haven’t Yahoo! HK done something similar?

Comments

BarCamp Hong Kong 2008, A Great Event Experience! « Digital Anthology — 2008-09-13 00:30:13

[…] This one time, at BarCamp… An Expat Educator in Asia - Barcamp HK 2008: Well worth the time. My Journey to Japan - BarCamp Hong Kong 2008 belleliu.com - Reflections on BarCamp Hong Kong 2008 Tags: “BarCamp Hong Kong 2008”, BarCamp, […]

caphun — 2008-09-08 02:57:53

Great write-up. You started off slow but ended with a passionate speech. Visionaries and Geniuses very rarely make money because, as great as their ideas are, it is usually ahead of their time. By the time their visions take shape they are either dead, too old or someone else has taken it and marketed better. Though I totally feel your sentiments :)

太子英文會話，電腦，保習～香港，九龍，油尖旺

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:21:16 +0000

My first post in Chinese!! (Well… the title anyways…) This is basically a test of how good my site is optimized for search engines (SEO), or rather, how poorly are Chinese sites out there optimized. :P It’s not just a test for SEO though, I do want to tutor (English and Computer / Technology) and get a little income on the side… Education is part of my interest too… besides working on my “environmentally conscious restaurant menus” site, I am also looking into working something out with online learning. One of my favorite online learning site is JapanesePod101.com, I discovered it when I got my first iPod (5.5G Video… Yes, I didn’t think iPod was “ready” until it hit this generation!), and I had listened to it everyday for over a year when I was commuting to and from the Yahoo! office in New York. I absolutely loved (still do) their podcasts and it had definitely improved my Japanese skills by multiple folds! Because of it, I was able to engage in interviews in Japanese over the phone with one of the managers from Yahoo! Japan!! Even after I stopped listening to it (due to lifestyle changes), I still retained so much of what I had learned that I was able to score very close to a passing score on a mock JLPT Level 2 exam. (which from what I was told, is harder than the actual exam!) Once I’ve launched my current project, I will try to see if I can work something out with Jpod101 and may be create an EnglishPod101 for Hong Kong. Phew… long story… anyways… if you are interested in hiring me for tutoring, then please contact me at 6603-6127, or email clone {dot} of {dot} snake {at} gmail {dot} com, or simply leave a comment below. My name is Nick. A brief summary of myself if you haven’t read any of my other posts on this blog, I was born in Hong Kong, spent my high school / college years in the US, worked for internet giants like Microsoft MSN.com and Yahoo.com after I graduated. I just moved back to Hong Kong in beginning of this year after 16 years of absence, currently working on my own web project, hoping to create something meaningful with my life / time, (because life isn’t just about work and making money)… I hope to create something that Hong Kong people can be proud of to called their own.

Comments

suishoo — 2008-06-17 04:24:53

that’s interesting, i thought that podcast only has basics with lots of english. hm, i’ll try it.

Environmentally Friendly, Sustainable food supplies - Crowdsourcing meets Food meets Travel

Thu, 29 May 2008 00:36:47 +0000

As mentioned before, I am creating a product that Hong Kong people can be proud of - a community to help people make environmentally friendly choices on food. I have spoken with some business partners and friends and we are all very excited about the idea. I’ve had this idea for more than a year now, and after leaving Yahoo, I’ve spent time researching into web technologies that would help me achieve this goal. I’ve networked with businesses and industry experts that will help me on different stages of the project… Crowdsourcing, Web marketing, development, Environmental and Social Responsibility professionals, WWF HK, CSR Asia… etc. Finally, it has come down to one of the last, but very important issue - the domain name. I’m thinking about using this one - currystar.com. I registered this name with the intention of opening this food / menu site. I only put my own personal blog on it because the site wasn’t ready yet and I was learning different web blog / CMS systems. So, should I use currystar.com? And move my blog back onto the free cloneofsnake.wordpress.com site? Or perhaps one of my other domains - iswack.com or streetwalker2.com I like currystar.com because I think the name sticks easily, but if I can find a better name that stands out just as good, and is related to food + environment + travel… then I may choose that instead.

Developing Crowdsourcing Community with Drupal

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:34:34 +0000

In the recent months after I’ve moved to Hong Kong, I’ve been working with my former school mates from College to revamp their existing e-commerce pet apparel store and to launch a new business. For that purpose and in preparation for my new role in Tokyo, I’ve been devoting my time to 3 things, 1) learning to develop web sites with Drupal, 2) catching up with the latest SEO (Search Engine Optimization) topics and 3) brushing up on project management skills I learned and used at Yahoo. This post will be about part 1 - Drupal. I had learned of Drupal a few years ago, I was looking for an open source CMS to be used at work internally as an information sharing portal, and Drupal caught my attention because it received support from Google! I didn’t pick it at that time because it didn’t fulfill our functional requirements. However, I did tested it out and honestly, I found it “not very user-friendly”. It was obviously aimed more toward web developers than the regular Joe. What I realized was this: if you just want an easy to use web site to put up contents for yourself and your friends and family, then Drupal is not for you! (Use wordpress instead.) If you’re a business however, and you’re looking for quickly building a highly customizable, highly scalable web site, then use Drupal!

It’s obvious to me that being skilled in Drupal is actually a valuable asset on a personal level, and choosing to use Drupal is a major advantage for probably 80% of the businesses out there! However, I don’t know if it’s because of its weird name or something… it’s quite hard to convince people to pay attention to Drupal! When I try to garner interests in my friends, most of them would ask “What does Drupal do? Why is it good?” Hopefully, this “Implementing Drupal” video from Google Tech Talk can save me from repeating myself again! orz So, how am I going about learning Drupal? I’m not a web developer, although I am knowledgeable in PHP, Perl, Apache and Linux/Unix… I’m mainly a database guy. So, the whole web design AND development thing is quite a challenge for me. One of my bad habit is that I always like to do thing perfectly! I can see far into a “goal”, how a web site should look like and function… so, I want to do everything perfectly! The problem with this is of course, it’s not easy (if not close to impossible)! For example, with this wordpress blog, I learned to theme it with CSS until I feel that all the colors and layout is perfect! Luckily, that wasn’t too hard. With Drupal however, it’s a different story! I started with reading the Pro Drupal Development book by John VanDyk & Matt Westgate. After the first few chapters of learning how Drupal works internally, writing a few simple modules (or add-ons) to it, I realized this book isn’t what I need at that point in time! The best way to learn any web technologies is to get it up and running! I need to set something ASAP, start migrating some content to it from one of my existing web sites, and just run with it. However, this first step was still a necessity, as I needed to know, on a high level, how Drupal works. I always like to get a grasp on the nuance or “bigger picture” of whatever needs to be done. This way, I can make meaning out of it and delegate work to my team accordingly. So, next, I looked for theming tutorials. (I like my sites to look pretty!) I found excellent resources at Drupal’s theme guide, the Zen theme, and The Art Lab’s Drupal School podcasts. At this time, Drupal 6 was released, it has improved a little bit in terms of User Experience. I switched to it and looked up The Smashing Magazine for web design tips with Photoshop. I was able to create a pretty cool theme in a couple of days. And then… I realized… I can’t even post some contents in formats that I want! After doing some research, I realized that there are a few modules that are almost CRITICAL to any Drupal installs, (in fact, the power of Drupal lies with its vast library of modules!) Sadly, these moduels are not available for Drupal 6 yet!! So, I went back to my Drupal 5.7 sandbox. Installed CCK, Views and Imagefield… etc, and that’s where I am at right now… learning to create custom content types and views within Drupal. (This is part of the reason why just a vanilla Drupal install looks so boring… its basic content types - blog post, page, forum… they are all too basic and look exactly the same! BORING!!) It’s also at this time that I found this article about New York Observer (the newspaper) had migrated their web site to Drupal. The hired professionals to do this, and it is a prime example of how hard Drupal can ROCK if you know how!!!!

Designing the Future: Japan’s Tech Revolution - Panel Discussions on Technology & Design

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 02:50:33 +0000

0609 03 Kohei Nishiyama - Future of Lifestyle with Design, originally uploaded by cloneofsnake.

First of all, who thought it was a good idea to host an event at 10am on a Saturday morning? Seriously! Who wakes up earlier than 10 on the weekends? I had to set my alarm to wake up early on June 9th. Managed to leave the house way early, but when you need to go somewhere on time, leave it to MTA to fuck it up for you!! There were constructions near Queensboro Plaza on my N,W line, I had to ride the train backwards to Astoria Blvd, and then the outbound train was stuck right before we got to Queensboro Plaza because they were using one platform for both directions! So I ended up being late! Mr. Nishiyama was the first one to present, so I missed some of his speech.

Kohei Nishiyama, inventor of Design to Order (DTO) system and founder of elephant-design and cuusoo.com. The DTO system reduces the risk of new products development by allowing manufacturers to wait until the number of orders for a product reaches the break-even point. One interesting tidbit, Nishiyama-san grew up in South America. He lived there until age 19. He’s a graduate of the University of Tokyo. So… naturally, I wondered if he had applied to UT as a foreigner. I think he should have some good advice for me in that department.

Unlike the companies that presented yesterday, Kohei Nishiyama’s company is truely “Customer Driven”. What elephant-design and cuusoo.com do is they invite users to submit their ideas (or dreams), other users who shares the same ideas can join in and provide inputs. Then, the “designers” within the cummunity can put the ideas into reality. Mr. Nishiyama summarized the business into 3 basic steps:

share a problem to make a community \
Invite designers to brush up innovation \
gather reserveration until break even point \

One of the key points that Mr. Nishiyama brought up was that “Users’ wishes to collarborate with designers can be viewed as assets”. This idea is similar to what Professor Karim Lakhani had said in his speech the day before, which was “companies need to adjust to the changing market where users are now active producers”. elephant-design is at the forefront of this so called “crowd sourcing”. People are just beginning to realize this potential as Web 2.0 rolls along. The amazing thing is, Mr. Nishiyama started elephant-design in 1997! That’s before the Web 1.0 bubble had burst! It has taken 10 years for the web to mature to the point where communities can finally be leveraged as an asset.

After the speech was a Q&A session, the moderator, Nick Thompson started it off by asking some tough questions like:\

How do you motivate or reward the wish makers?\
Who owns the IP of a design?

I was pretty interested in elephant-design’s concept, so I had a few questions of my own, like one that’s IP related (which is very important for a designer) - has any designer or manufacturer stole ideas from cuusoo?

The question that I asked was this. First, I revisited someone else’s comment the day before, which was “a user cannot be a designer”. In my personal experience as a developer, I realize that users don’t really know what they want! It takes a special talent of a designer to understand the needs of a user, and a designer has to possess the “eye” to see into the future, to create the “next thing”. That being said, I understand the user’s urge to share their wishes with the designers, so I applaud the creation of a system like elephant-design and cuusoo.com, to bring the users and designers together. I think it was ingenious. Now, regarding the “break even point”, Mr. Nishiyama said that currently, they have 20 thousand members, and when a design is made, they gather “reservations” until the number of people that are going to purchase the product reaches the manufacturer’s break even point. I questioned whether or not the company had thought about corporate sponsors. (It isn’t uncommon that when companies first introduce a new product, they have to incurr some losses before the market catches on and they start to make a profit.) I guess because my question was too long, Mr. Nishiyama didn’t get to the corporate sponsor part. He pointed out that he agrees with the statement that “users cannot be designers”, but that doesn’t mean users cannot participate in the designing process.

It was unfortunate that Mr. Nishiyama had to run off and head to Boston right after his speech, I would’ve liked to have a chance to speak with him more in depth about his company. I touched base with Ray before he and Mr. Nishiyama left Japan Society, then I went back inside the auditorium to listen to the next speech.

Afterwards, I chatted with a few industrial designers who came to listen to Mr. Nishiyama’s company, all of them came in later than me so they missed out a lot. From what I gathered, their main concerns were 1) I.P. and 2) finding a trust worthy manufacturer. They all seemed to be very interested in Mr. Nishiyama’s company and wanted to know more. I offered to get their contact info and get back to them when I find out more info. So Mr. Nishiyama please! Let me talk to you! :)

Comments

Melina — 2007-12-20 12:34:57

very interesting. i’m adding in RSS Reader

Designing the Future: Japan’s Tech Revolution - A Customer-Driven Corporate Perspective

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 11:12:59 +0000

0608 02 Karim Lakhani at Japan Society Tech Epoch, originally uploaded by cloneofsnake.

“It’s not about what you know, but who you know.” Networking is important in almost all aspects of life, not just when you’re job hunting.

A couple of weeks ago, my sister told me about a U.S.-Japan Innovators Project Symposium event at the Japan Society in New York. You can read about my thoughts on the event from the link above, but on this blog, I want to concentrate on “going to grad school in Japan”, and one of the most important factor is networking. The event turned out to be very enjoyable, and most importantly, I got to meet the lovely Fumiko-san at Japan Society. The next week, I sent an email to her telling her that I’m looking for info on going to grad school in Japan, and she helped me by forwarding my email to one of her contacts who went to the University of Tokyo from France. She also invited me to come back to their “2-DAY SYMPOSIUM Designing the Future: Japan’s Tech Revolution” event.

I decided to go to Friday’s Corporate Luncheon - Designing the Future: A Customer-Driven Corporate Perspective, unfortunately, it would seem that big companies such as Toyota and Panasonic are just not as “customer-driven” as I would like to see. Their speeches were all about their design ideology. I would say they are more “traditionally customer focused” than “customer driven”.

The event started with moderator Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School giving a short intro. Karim is an assistant professor in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at the Harvard Business School. He specializes in the management of technological innovation and product development. He spoke of the blurring of the line between consumer and producers and gave youtube.com as an example in which a company shifted the production of “products” to the hands of the consumers. As a result, companies need to re-think how to adjust to the changing market where users are now active producers.

The rest of the speeches from Naoaki Nunogaki of Toyota, Naomi Hirose of Tokyo Electric Company and Toyoyuki Uematsu of Panasonic were, like I said, heavily self-centered on their company’s design ideology and had very little to do with being “customer-driven”. The meat came at the end during the Q&A session. Some of the key points that were raised during the Q&A were:

A major part of customer driven design is “understanding you customer”, gathering “customer feedback”.
“Extreme Users” now appear online to share user information that are not released by the corporations. These users collaborate to share knowledge in order to achieve their goals. e.g. to save money by sharing spending details.
From Mr. Uematsu: “It’s important for designers to protect their intellectual property”. (This is a major concern for any designers.)
From Mr. Nunogaki: “Customers cannot foresee the future needs for themselves.”
Users cannot be Designers. A designer must be a participant of the society, and be inspired and possess that special talent to design “what’s next”.

Afterwards, we were treated to a free lunch. I chatted with an industrial designer and then I met Ray Hatoyama, fellow student of Karim Lakhani at Harvard Business School and Vice President of elephant-design, US Operations. elephant-design and 空想生活 cuusoo.com are truly inspirational companies with a revolutionary idea made into a business. I learned that the founder - Mr. Kohei Nishiyama, was having a speech at the Panel Discussions the next day, so I decided to come back again to learn more about his companies. I’ll write about that in the next post.

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Designing the Future: Japan’s Tech Revolution - A Customer-Driven Corporate Perspective

太子英文會話，電腦，保習～香港，九龍，油尖旺