Essays and longer write-ups. For the short stuff, see Notes.
When it comes to hiring web developers, it is so important to hire someone that is English based (location & nationality doesn’t matter, as long as he / she uses English majority of the time!), b’coz the internet changes so fast, and the fact that the US had continued to make progress after the dot com crash whereas the entire Asia had stopped, mean that a lot of Asian web developers are still stuck in technology of early 2000’s.
Read MoreHK TVB news just reported that the Japanese government had watched the entire video of Chinese fishing boat ramming Japanese Coast Guard incident, which clearly showed the Chinese fishing boat rammed into one Japanese Coast Guard ship, ran off, then later on rammed into a second Japanese Coast Guard ship. TVB news went on to say that China’s Premier Wen Jiabao, when meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan told Prime Minister Kan to “carefully consider releasing the whole footage to the public”.
Read MoreFree food, free time, freedom to do what you want while you’re on the company’s paycheck. Most companies and most business owners just can’t grasp these concepts of “autonomy to improve motivation”!
Read MoreHeard about this event at the last minute from Thomas Crampton. I like to travel, or better yet, I love to live in different places. So when I heard about Dopplr a few years ago, I immediately signed up, but as with a lot of the recent web 2.0 social sharing sites, I don’t do much with them after the sign up. The problem with Dopplr for me was that I simply don’t travel enough. Still, I like traveling and so, I couldn’t give up the chance to meet one of Dopplr’s co-founders, Mr. Marko Ahtisaari yesterday. I’m glad I went! Marko is a great guy and after hearing him talk about Dopplr, I can tell Dopplr is different from other mindless social copy cat sites. What Dopplr boils down to is “Declaring travel intention, and shows coincidences”. They find value in user generated data, not content. Since it’s personal information about future plans, they are very careful with privacy and creates a layer of “fuzziness” between your data and the anonymous web. I liked how he’s very clear about Dopplr strategic position and holds a high moral value with the privacy issues so they would rather forgo higher profits for our privacy, this makes them the opposite of the greedy “sell your DNA and copy all the good ideas from other social sites” Facebook. I also like the way he’s handling the eco thing. On Dopplr, one of your navigation tabs is “Your carbon”, and if you allow it, Dopplr will send your travel data (anonymously) to AMEE to calculate your travel’s carbon footprint. Well, I’m all about being eco-friendly and minimalist and shit, so I asked him whether or not he’s trying to push this eco thing as a main selling point on Dopplr, or is it sort of an added value kind of thing. I already knew the answer but it was still nice to hear Marko explains it. Eco friendliness is not a key point, they don’t provide the means to help travelers be green, but they do provide the data to make people be mindful of their impact. I think that’s the right way to do it. I’ve also been trying to create an “eco-friendly restaurant listings” type of site, but I realize that I have to find a bigger draw so that the service itself can become popular… and my “eco-friendly” agenda will be sneaked in there to shape people’s habits. Another topic was the validity of the data, Dopplr is only a small team of 7, it’s impossible to check everybody’s submission onto the system. But there are basic algorithm and moderation to check things, e.g. Places are not listed publicly until a few comments have been made by others. Then, we move on to the future of Dopplr, they had actually just submitted their iPhone app yesterday, it’ll be free and usable by non registered users as a city guide. Their plan is to concentrate on people and create a social atlas. One of the products that they’re trying to roll out is a printed guide. Dopplr online is a highly personalized social experience, but the print guides are compiled using anonymous aggregate of travelers, e.g. Where do Londoners eat in NY? I think Marko realizes that the guide isn’t good enough in this form, so he added a personal touch to it - highlighting one place and one person’s choices. Some people asked Marko what his Dopplr guide has to offer that other traditional guide books don’t, and Marko said “Fresh data”, but I think the problem is deeper than that! Personally, I think a guide about a place based on other travellers’ recommendation, is NOT a good guide. When I travel, I would much rather listen to the local’s recommendations. Who cares if Steve Jobs ate at this restaurant in Paris, WTF does he know? And I was right. Marko said they actually have “hosts” and “travelers” roles, and there is algorithm to weight hosts’ recommendation heavier than travelers. Marko went on to talk about allowing us to create a personalized “My Place” guide, so when our friends come to visit and ask us where should they go, we can just give them our guides! This is the BEST idea!! It encourages users to submit data about their local town / city! AND, based on our local recommendations, Dopplr can create more personalized foreign guides for each of us!!! Some people asked for features to import their personal recommendations from other services like Google Maps or Calendars, but here we have a big “ETL” type of problem (Extract, Transform, Load), ‘coz everybody does it differently. Finally, Marko talked about B2B deals with big travel corporations like the Star Alliance, who can really use Dopplr’s “future travel intent” data. And they are trying to go mobile but not doing it like most other location aware mobile apps ‘coz he thinks most people already have the intention to go to a specific place. All in all, it was a great talk. Marko was very open about everything, the only thing is, I got this feeling that they’re still not very certain on how to evolve Dopplr. Personally, I think that B2B deal is closer to their core ideology than the paper guide thing… unless the guides are personalized like I said above, using our local recommendations. But Marko said they can’t do it right now. ‘Coz once we go down the personalization road, it’s un-ending. Well, I think they WILL do it, may be they’re just lacking in human resources right now. :)
Read MoreColumnist Paul Krugman joined other commentators in calling for a return to “boring banking” - code for when the industry was tightly regulated, US household debt was low, and Ivy League geniuses really did go into rocket science, engineering or tech, rather than inventing arcane financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations.
Read MoreCreated the first HK meetup for CUUSOO fans on facebook. I didn’t do much advertising this time around coz I came down with the flu and it killed me! Seriously! I was sick for a whole week! Anyway, I’m all good now… didn’t gain no super powers, but I have been turned into a zombie. :) 0524 03 cuusoo hk 1st meet (by cloneofsnake) It was raining cats and dogs on Sunday, I sent out a message to the CUUSOO HK group in the morning to tell everyone that I’ll still be there. It was nice to see Ca-Phun, his friend William, Charlotte, her friend Alan braved the rain to come learn about what we’re doing to bring CUUSOO to Hong Kong. Charlotte in particular gave it some thoughts and invited her friend Alan, who’s a local Product Designer! Alan was very interested in CUUSOO’s idea. I showed them my presentation (I’ll post it up later), basically, after the Design and Innovation Forum event, Kohei and I had a few long discussions about lots of things, in the end, Kohei suggested that we start from small - get ONE design - the Kayla Tote Bag - up on CUUSOO.com and go through the complete life-cycle, once proven that CUUSOO system works in Hong Kong, we can start to duplicate - work with users on CUUSOO, creating multiple designs. If we look ahead into the future, our entire line of designs can be sold as a complete business! (sold to MUJI for example) The whole thing will go down in history and become a case study. In this case, CUUSOO will become a platform for designers to launch their “micro business”. Right now, what we can do from Hong Kong is to participate in the Kayla Tote Bag’s design process (by commenting), and to help promote it on blogs and facebook and other social media venues. We had a good, long discussions about lots of things. A few of the major questions were:
Read MoreAfter getting the confirmation from Kohei Nishiyama, founder of Japanese user innovation company cuusoo.com, I had little more than a month’s time to prepare and organize this “HK International Design & Innovation Forum” event. You can read about the reason why I wanted to create this event in my previous post. I wanted to do something meaningful for the local design and technology communities, yet during the preparation stages, I encountered quite a few disappointments. For example, Youth.gov.hk, I sent them an info email like the one I wrote in my previous blog post, and all I got in response was this:
Read More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
Read More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/
Read MoreJust 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.
Read MoreI 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
Read MoreBeen 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)
Read Morehttp://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
Read MoreJust 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.
Read MoreI 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!
Read MoreIMG_2655 (by johndbritton) 2 days after the Open Everything Hong Kong event, I’ve finally recovered the usage of my brain! :D Last week, besides working with my pals from Hong Kong Drupal User Group on rebuilding our venue provider, SOHOlife’s website, I also had to prepare a presentation about it (and just Drupal in general), and another presentation on Flickr, I want to help spread Flickr in the HK Chinese community. (Also caught a bad cold too, but took antibiotics immediate to fix it before Saturday hits.) The venue was a big headache for us too! Originally, I hooked up SOHOlife with HKDUG so we can have a place to hold physical monthly meetings and a free online space to put up a Drupal “sandbox”, in return, we’ll rebuild their website with Drupal for free. John volunteered to help if SOHOlife can also host his Open Everything event, so I talked to my friend at SOHOlife again, brought John to check out the place on the next Monday and got the whole deal rolling. There was only 3 weeks left to the event so it was a huge win! Unfortunately, the next week when a few of us went to work on the website at SOHOlife’s office, we realized that their rooms were kinda small and the internet connection was kinda slow! HKDUG working at SOHOlife’s Office (by cloneofsnake) That raised an alarm for John and he started looking for alternatives. We were still checking out other possibilities on the Thursday - 2 days before the event. We went to the University of Hong Kong, where Creative Common HK’s Haggen So helped provided 3 separated classrooms in 2 buildings. With more than 50 people signed up for the event, John thought it was necessary to move the event to HKU. In the end however, it proved too hard to change a venue in the last minute! We were pretty worried in the morning of the event! As 20 more people signed up in the last minute! But here’re some tips for you if you’re planning an event.
Read MoreOpen Everything Hong Kong 2008 (by 黛) Next Saturday, Dec. 6th, my friend John Britton has organized the first “Open Everything” event in Hong Kong - http://openeverything.hk/2008/. Main event starts at 10am, (registration starts at 9) at SOHOLife Office - Guangdong Investment Tower 1/F - 148 Connaught Road Central, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong (MTR exit C, turn left and walk one block West). Follow us on Twitter and facebook I’m not going to repeat the official event info, you can read that at the OpenEverythingHK site. I’m hoping to do a presentation on a good photo management process - from your camera to Picasa to Flickr online. I’ll do this in Chinese and put it on youtube, so hopefully more locals will know how easy it is to share photos on Flickr instead of Facebook. :P See you there! Remember to register!!
Read MoreJoi Ito and me (by cloneofsnake) Went to last Saturday’s Creative Commons launch event in Hong Kong, my knowledge of CC stemmed from my fanboy-ism toward Flickr. I think I had probably heard some Yahoo internal talks about Flickr that included a briefing of this “CC” license thing. So, the presentation from CC founder Prof. Lawr ence Lessig and CEO Joichi Ito were both eye openers for me! OK, so my knowledge of CC is basically what’s listed in Flickr’s Creative Commons page, and Prof. Lessig presented a much more detailed & updated version of it. The parts that I picked up (and remembered) are: CC0 - no law, waive, assert, public domain, social norm - honor - keep it free CC+ - beyond CC, license to buy, for profit CC Networks - SENSE / RESPECT For more info on Prof. Lessig, check out this TutSearch result of “Lawrence Lessig”. (Will watch those videos later when I have time.) While Lawrence Lessig came from a law background and talked about law and licensing. Joi Ito talked about tech & science. Most of it relates to the scientific communities, how researchers could use CC to ease their processes of trading information w/o worrying about the lawyers. My take-away: Science Commons Provider (Designer / Creator) –> Bank (keeps track of use of your creation) –> Users (Re-design, Consume) For a better summary, check out Ryanne’s blog on the event. It was too bad that the Q&A session was too short, ‘coz as soon as I heard about CC0 and public domain, a weird question came up in my mind. If CC0 would’ve existed 20+ years ago, would it have killed the Mario Brothers? :D Let me explain. Mario is the plumber in Donkey Kong! Donkey Kong was a massively successful video game! Nintendo made a shit load of money off of it. Then, Universal Studios sued Nintendo for infringing their King Kong character. Nintendo of America’s CEO back in the days was Howard Lincoln - a lawyer by trade. He looked it up. Went to court. Had the whole case threw out b’coz Universal Studios had registered King Kong under the public domain. So… if CC0 had existed back then… no Donkey Kong –> no Mario Bros. ??! Possible??? Actually, a more serious question would be how they view Chinese and Asians in general, ‘coz to me (as with a lot of others), Chinese are viewed as selfish and likes to “take” but doesn’t “share”. (And in the worst cases, stealing and profiting from counterfeits / pirated goods.) I think it would’ve been beneficial if Lessig & Ito could give a few examples of other countries with similar issues and how CC had helped. I really wanted to talk to them afterwards but they both escaped quite fast, I was only able to hunt down Joi Ito! I told him about my projects and also my move to Tokyo in January to work for Cuusoo.com. It’s pretty obvious how CC could help small time designers and artists, but what about an established corporation - like Muji or Lego? Turns out Joi knows about cuusoo too, he remembers it as Elephant-Design, he said he needs to get back to their lawyers as they are not using CC yet, but he thinks that’s only because their lawyers don’t fully comprehend the CC license. He said may be I should explain to Nishiyama-san about the CC license as well! :P … and may be he’ll see me in Japan. All in all, it was a good day! Learned a lot, pumped me up and gave me new ideas, met up w/ my Flickr and Drupal and Microsoft pals, organized a follow up meeting w/ the Drupal dudes to discuss the usage of CC. I have a feeling that those of us who are working with open source and CC will lead and become “paradigm shifters” in HK (and perhaps even Asia). Links given during the presentation: TED Talks - Ideas Worth Spreading. - “Inspired talks by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers” fotonauts - Images for Humanity. - “fotonauts’ mission is to enable the creation of the definitive pool of images for everyone to contribute to, discover, use and enjoy, covering all areas of human interest.”
Read MoreJust read something about the victims in Earthquake stricken Szechuan in Western China - a man lost both of his sons and now dedicates his life to exposing the corrupt local government which allowed poor constructions of schools in the area, but got arrested in the middle of the night and was told not to continue bothering the government! A woman who lost her friends due to leaked poison from the local heavy industry factories, but is forced to go back to work there now to get by! Apparently there were a couple of scientists that kept sending letters to the government to warm them about building a big fucking dam right in the middle of not one, but two continental fault lines! One of them also warned beforehand that the added weight of water may actually induce an earthquake! Two thousand years ago, the area was already constantly being flooded and the ancient Chinese went with the flow of nature and simply directed the river into multiple branches! Human and nature hence lived peacefully together for 2000 freaking years. Nowadays, we have become fools who think we can control and alter nature!! orz The earthquake killed millions of poor, ordinary people… and we got a comment from Sharon Stone asking “Is that Karma?” I think it kinda shows how unpopular the Chinese government is in the eyes of the West… but we’ve got to separate the little people - the poor men & women & kids who work at the local heavy industries that are poisoning their lands, just to put bread on the table!, from the corrupt government and corporations!! These people still haven’t gotten back to normal lives, everything is still in shambles, but guess what? Those poisonous factories are already back up and running! If you wanna talk Karma, then please let’s talk about the cheap handbags, clothes, shoes, LCD tvs, computers, digital cameras - Walmart, K-mart, Target… etc etc… Remember what prices used to be 10 years ago for a large TV? Lower prices means more sales and more profit for the corporations, but at what expense? How about factories in China that heavily pollute our Earth?! Part of the money you spent on you LCD TV goes to the pockets of corrupted Chinese government officials and the factories owners. So, economically, we the consumers is where it all started. The bad Karma begins with you and me!!! Let’s really thinking about where we should give our money to!
Read MoreToys 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.
Read MoreStartup 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?
Read MoreThe development of my site has hit a slight delay due to the developer I had hired is taking a 2 weeks vacation. I’m taking this chance to start entering some contents and check out the inner workings of Drupal. But it is putting some extra stress on me due to the progress of the project being stagnant. Recently, I’ve also started talking to my acquaintances whom I want to recruit to become my business partners. This basically means I have to “sell” my business idea / model to them. I’m definitely not a good sales person, so this is kind of tough for me. One of the people I talked to is my college friend who has been working at Microsoft since he graduated, switching from technical I.T. roles to marketing roles. So, he can help cover some business skills that I don’t possess. It was really hard selling to him, and I know he still isn’t completely sold yet, but I know if I get him to believe in my business and get him on board, he will be able to sell it 15 times better than I do! :) Besides, I totally understand his position as I had also been a satisfied employee at a major US technology company. I liked my job and although both he and I wanted to work on our own business, we were reluctant to give up our good jobs. Anyway, one interesting thing that he told me to beware of is to “not under-estimate the stress of having no full-time job”. It turns out his sister had tried her hands on starting her own business with her boyfriend, and during that time, they had received a lot of stress from the people around them. Unfortunately, I didn’t need him to tell me about that, as I am already suffering from a lot of stress from my family. This reminds me of a recent interview of a web entrepreneur in the US, he had had success with his previous web business and is now starting a new one, yet even with his experience, he said on some days, when it seems like there are absolutely no progress at all, he would still question himself… “What am I doing? Why isn’t it going anywhere?!”… That’s pretty close to what I’m feeling now too. At a time like these, when everyone around you is pressuring you to give up and “just find a job”… all you can do is to re-evaluate your vision… believe in the path you’ve chosen and continue to execute your plan!! It’s not easy, in fact, I can tell you I feel like SHIT right now! It’s definitely a lot easier to “just find a job” and become a “gear” within a machine again and do your 9 to 6. It really pains me to have the people close to me not believe in me and would rather have me submit to a 9 to 6 because of the pressure they feel from other people… Other people who doesn’t even know shit about me and my plans!!! But there’s nothing we can do about this. We all look at the world with our own set of values and we also judge other people based on that. You can’t win over everybody, and you don’t need to explain yourself to everybody. All you can do is stay focus on your vision, believe in yourself, work hard, network with the right people… and just NEVER GIVE UP! This is how all successful empires are built throughout history! As I get closer to launch, I can feel that things are within my grasp… yet at the same time, there are so many more things that can be expanded on… I can see the possibilities that will open up eventually as the business grow and expand. But for now, from my experience in Project Management, I know better than to lose control of the existing plan. I’m staying focused on launching with the foundation and features as planned on my functional requirements.
Read MoreWhen it comes to hiring web developers, it is so important to hire someone that is English based (location & nationality doesn’t matter, as long as he / she uses English majority of the time!), b’coz the internet changes so fast, and the fact that the US had continued to make progress after the dot com crash whereas the entire Asia had stopped, mean that a lot of Asian web developers are still stuck in technology of early 2000’s.
HK TVB news just reported that the Japanese government had watched the entire video of Chinese fishing boat ramming Japanese Coast Guard incident, which clearly showed the Chinese fishing boat rammed into one Japanese Coast Guard ship, ran off, then later on rammed into a second Japanese Coast Guard ship. TVB news went on to say that China’s Premier Wen Jiabao, when meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan told Prime Minister Kan to “carefully consider releasing the whole footage to the public”.
Free food, free time, freedom to do what you want while you’re on the company’s paycheck. Most companies and most business owners just can’t grasp these concepts of “autonomy to improve motivation”!
A couple of days ago a friend of mine asked me why a certain someone had quit, and I said it was b’coz she just couldn’t take it anymore. I made a pretty good analogy at the time.
Heard about this event at the last minute from Thomas Crampton. I like to travel, or better yet, I love to live in different places. So when I heard about Dopplr a few years ago, I immediately signed up, but as with a lot of the recent web 2.0 social sharing sites, I don’t do much with them after the sign up. The problem with Dopplr for me was that I simply don’t travel enough. Still, I like traveling and so, I couldn’t give up the chance to meet one of Dopplr’s co-founders, Mr. Marko Ahtisaari yesterday. I’m glad I went! Marko is a great guy and after hearing him talk about Dopplr, I can tell Dopplr is different from other mindless social copy cat sites. What Dopplr boils down to is “Declaring travel intention, and shows coincidences”. They find value in user generated data, not content. Since it’s personal information about future plans, they are very careful with privacy and creates a layer of “fuzziness” between your data and the anonymous web. I liked how he’s very clear about Dopplr strategic position and holds a high moral value with the privacy issues so they would rather forgo higher profits for our privacy, this makes them the opposite of the greedy “sell your DNA and copy all the good ideas from other social sites” Facebook. I also like the way he’s handling the eco thing. On Dopplr, one of your navigation tabs is “Your carbon”, and if you allow it, Dopplr will send your travel data (anonymously) to AMEE to calculate your travel’s carbon footprint. Well, I’m all about being eco-friendly and minimalist and shit, so I asked him whether or not he’s trying to push this eco thing as a main selling point on Dopplr, or is it sort of an added value kind of thing. I already knew the answer but it was still nice to hear Marko explains it. Eco friendliness is not a key point, they don’t provide the means to help travelers be green, but they do provide the data to make people be mindful of their impact. I think that’s the right way to do it. I’ve also been trying to create an “eco-friendly restaurant listings” type of site, but I realize that I have to find a bigger draw so that the service itself can become popular… and my “eco-friendly” agenda will be sneaked in there to shape people’s habits. Another topic was the validity of the data, Dopplr is only a small team of 7, it’s impossible to check everybody’s submission onto the system. But there are basic algorithm and moderation to check things, e.g. Places are not listed publicly until a few comments have been made by others. Then, we move on to the future of Dopplr, they had actually just submitted their iPhone app yesterday, it’ll be free and usable by non registered users as a city guide. Their plan is to concentrate on people and create a social atlas. One of the products that they’re trying to roll out is a printed guide. Dopplr online is a highly personalized social experience, but the print guides are compiled using anonymous aggregate of travelers, e.g. Where do Londoners eat in NY? I think Marko realizes that the guide isn’t good enough in this form, so he added a personal touch to it - highlighting one place and one person’s choices. Some people asked Marko what his Dopplr guide has to offer that other traditional guide books don’t, and Marko said “Fresh data”, but I think the problem is deeper than that! Personally, I think a guide about a place based on other travellers’ recommendation, is NOT a good guide. When I travel, I would much rather listen to the local’s recommendations. Who cares if Steve Jobs ate at this restaurant in Paris, WTF does he know? And I was right. Marko said they actually have “hosts” and “travelers” roles, and there is algorithm to weight hosts’ recommendation heavier than travelers. Marko went on to talk about allowing us to create a personalized “My Place” guide, so when our friends come to visit and ask us where should they go, we can just give them our guides! This is the BEST idea!! It encourages users to submit data about their local town / city! AND, based on our local recommendations, Dopplr can create more personalized foreign guides for each of us!!! Some people asked for features to import their personal recommendations from other services like Google Maps or Calendars, but here we have a big “ETL” type of problem (Extract, Transform, Load), ‘coz everybody does it differently. Finally, Marko talked about B2B deals with big travel corporations like the Star Alliance, who can really use Dopplr’s “future travel intent” data. And they are trying to go mobile but not doing it like most other location aware mobile apps ‘coz he thinks most people already have the intention to go to a specific place. All in all, it was a great talk. Marko was very open about everything, the only thing is, I got this feeling that they’re still not very certain on how to evolve Dopplr. Personally, I think that B2B deal is closer to their core ideology than the paper guide thing… unless the guides are personalized like I said above, using our local recommendations. But Marko said they can’t do it right now. ‘Coz once we go down the personalization road, it’s un-ending. Well, I think they WILL do it, may be they’re just lacking in human resources right now. :)
Columnist Paul Krugman joined other commentators in calling for a return to “boring banking” - code for when the industry was tightly regulated, US household debt was low, and Ivy League geniuses really did go into rocket science, engineering or tech, rather than inventing arcane financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations.
Created the first HK meetup for CUUSOO fans on facebook. I didn’t do much advertising this time around coz I came down with the flu and it killed me! Seriously! I was sick for a whole week! Anyway, I’m all good now… didn’t gain no super powers, but I have been turned into a zombie. :) 0524 03 cuusoo hk 1st meet (by cloneofsnake) It was raining cats and dogs on Sunday, I sent out a message to the CUUSOO HK group in the morning to tell everyone that I’ll still be there. It was nice to see Ca-Phun, his friend William, Charlotte, her friend Alan braved the rain to come learn about what we’re doing to bring CUUSOO to Hong Kong. Charlotte in particular gave it some thoughts and invited her friend Alan, who’s a local Product Designer! Alan was very interested in CUUSOO’s idea. I showed them my presentation (I’ll post it up later), basically, after the Design and Innovation Forum event, Kohei and I had a few long discussions about lots of things, in the end, Kohei suggested that we start from small - get ONE design - the Kayla Tote Bag - up on CUUSOO.com and go through the complete life-cycle, once proven that CUUSOO system works in Hong Kong, we can start to duplicate - work with users on CUUSOO, creating multiple designs. If we look ahead into the future, our entire line of designs can be sold as a complete business! (sold to MUJI for example) The whole thing will go down in history and become a case study. In this case, CUUSOO will become a platform for designers to launch their “micro business”. Right now, what we can do from Hong Kong is to participate in the Kayla Tote Bag’s design process (by commenting), and to help promote it on blogs and facebook and other social media venues. We had a good, long discussions about lots of things. A few of the major questions were:
After getting the confirmation from Kohei Nishiyama, founder of Japanese user innovation company cuusoo.com, I had little more than a month’s time to prepare and organize this “HK International Design & Innovation Forum” event. You can read about the reason why I wanted to create this event in my previous post. I wanted to do something meaningful for the local design and technology communities, yet during the preparation stages, I encountered quite a few disappointments. For example, Youth.gov.hk, I sent them an info email like the one I wrote in my previous blog post, and all I got in response was this:
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
Thanks Matt for introducing me to this g2 theme
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/
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.
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
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)
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
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 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!
IMG_2655 (by johndbritton) 2 days after the Open Everything Hong Kong event, I’ve finally recovered the usage of my brain! :D Last week, besides working with my pals from Hong Kong Drupal User Group on rebuilding our venue provider, SOHOlife’s website, I also had to prepare a presentation about it (and just Drupal in general), and another presentation on Flickr, I want to help spread Flickr in the HK Chinese community. (Also caught a bad cold too, but took antibiotics immediate to fix it before Saturday hits.) The venue was a big headache for us too! Originally, I hooked up SOHOlife with HKDUG so we can have a place to hold physical monthly meetings and a free online space to put up a Drupal “sandbox”, in return, we’ll rebuild their website with Drupal for free. John volunteered to help if SOHOlife can also host his Open Everything event, so I talked to my friend at SOHOlife again, brought John to check out the place on the next Monday and got the whole deal rolling. There was only 3 weeks left to the event so it was a huge win! Unfortunately, the next week when a few of us went to work on the website at SOHOlife’s office, we realized that their rooms were kinda small and the internet connection was kinda slow! HKDUG working at SOHOlife’s Office (by cloneofsnake) That raised an alarm for John and he started looking for alternatives. We were still checking out other possibilities on the Thursday - 2 days before the event. We went to the University of Hong Kong, where Creative Common HK’s Haggen So helped provided 3 separated classrooms in 2 buildings. With more than 50 people signed up for the event, John thought it was necessary to move the event to HKU. In the end however, it proved too hard to change a venue in the last minute! We were pretty worried in the morning of the event! As 20 more people signed up in the last minute! But here’re some tips for you if you’re planning an event.
Open Everything Hong Kong 2008 (by 黛) Next Saturday, Dec. 6th, my friend John Britton has organized the first “Open Everything” event in Hong Kong - http://openeverything.hk/2008/. Main event starts at 10am, (registration starts at 9) at SOHOLife Office - Guangdong Investment Tower 1/F - 148 Connaught Road Central, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong (MTR exit C, turn left and walk one block West). Follow us on Twitter and facebook I’m not going to repeat the official event info, you can read that at the OpenEverythingHK site. I’m hoping to do a presentation on a good photo management process - from your camera to Picasa to Flickr online. I’ll do this in Chinese and put it on youtube, so hopefully more locals will know how easy it is to share photos on Flickr instead of Facebook. :P See you there! Remember to register!!
Joi Ito and me (by cloneofsnake) Went to last Saturday’s Creative Commons launch event in Hong Kong, my knowledge of CC stemmed from my fanboy-ism toward Flickr. I think I had probably heard some Yahoo internal talks about Flickr that included a briefing of this “CC” license thing. So, the presentation from CC founder Prof. Lawr ence Lessig and CEO Joichi Ito were both eye openers for me! OK, so my knowledge of CC is basically what’s listed in Flickr’s Creative Commons page, and Prof. Lessig presented a much more detailed & updated version of it. The parts that I picked up (and remembered) are: CC0 - no law, waive, assert, public domain, social norm - honor - keep it free CC+ - beyond CC, license to buy, for profit CC Networks - SENSE / RESPECT For more info on Prof. Lessig, check out this TutSearch result of “Lawrence Lessig”. (Will watch those videos later when I have time.) While Lawrence Lessig came from a law background and talked about law and licensing. Joi Ito talked about tech & science. Most of it relates to the scientific communities, how researchers could use CC to ease their processes of trading information w/o worrying about the lawyers. My take-away: Science Commons Provider (Designer / Creator) –> Bank (keeps track of use of your creation) –> Users (Re-design, Consume) For a better summary, check out Ryanne’s blog on the event. It was too bad that the Q&A session was too short, ‘coz as soon as I heard about CC0 and public domain, a weird question came up in my mind. If CC0 would’ve existed 20+ years ago, would it have killed the Mario Brothers? :D Let me explain. Mario is the plumber in Donkey Kong! Donkey Kong was a massively successful video game! Nintendo made a shit load of money off of it. Then, Universal Studios sued Nintendo for infringing their King Kong character. Nintendo of America’s CEO back in the days was Howard Lincoln - a lawyer by trade. He looked it up. Went to court. Had the whole case threw out b’coz Universal Studios had registered King Kong under the public domain. So… if CC0 had existed back then… no Donkey Kong –> no Mario Bros. ??! Possible??? Actually, a more serious question would be how they view Chinese and Asians in general, ‘coz to me (as with a lot of others), Chinese are viewed as selfish and likes to “take” but doesn’t “share”. (And in the worst cases, stealing and profiting from counterfeits / pirated goods.) I think it would’ve been beneficial if Lessig & Ito could give a few examples of other countries with similar issues and how CC had helped. I really wanted to talk to them afterwards but they both escaped quite fast, I was only able to hunt down Joi Ito! I told him about my projects and also my move to Tokyo in January to work for Cuusoo.com. It’s pretty obvious how CC could help small time designers and artists, but what about an established corporation - like Muji or Lego? Turns out Joi knows about cuusoo too, he remembers it as Elephant-Design, he said he needs to get back to their lawyers as they are not using CC yet, but he thinks that’s only because their lawyers don’t fully comprehend the CC license. He said may be I should explain to Nishiyama-san about the CC license as well! :P … and may be he’ll see me in Japan. All in all, it was a good day! Learned a lot, pumped me up and gave me new ideas, met up w/ my Flickr and Drupal and Microsoft pals, organized a follow up meeting w/ the Drupal dudes to discuss the usage of CC. I have a feeling that those of us who are working with open source and CC will lead and become “paradigm shifters” in HK (and perhaps even Asia). Links given during the presentation: TED Talks - Ideas Worth Spreading. - “Inspired talks by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers” fotonauts - Images for Humanity. - “fotonauts’ mission is to enable the creation of the definitive pool of images for everyone to contribute to, discover, use and enjoy, covering all areas of human interest.”
Just read something about the victims in Earthquake stricken Szechuan in Western China - a man lost both of his sons and now dedicates his life to exposing the corrupt local government which allowed poor constructions of schools in the area, but got arrested in the middle of the night and was told not to continue bothering the government! A woman who lost her friends due to leaked poison from the local heavy industry factories, but is forced to go back to work there now to get by! Apparently there were a couple of scientists that kept sending letters to the government to warm them about building a big fucking dam right in the middle of not one, but two continental fault lines! One of them also warned beforehand that the added weight of water may actually induce an earthquake! Two thousand years ago, the area was already constantly being flooded and the ancient Chinese went with the flow of nature and simply directed the river into multiple branches! Human and nature hence lived peacefully together for 2000 freaking years. Nowadays, we have become fools who think we can control and alter nature!! orz The earthquake killed millions of poor, ordinary people… and we got a comment from Sharon Stone asking “Is that Karma?” I think it kinda shows how unpopular the Chinese government is in the eyes of the West… but we’ve got to separate the little people - the poor men & women & kids who work at the local heavy industries that are poisoning their lands, just to put bread on the table!, from the corrupt government and corporations!! These people still haven’t gotten back to normal lives, everything is still in shambles, but guess what? Those poisonous factories are already back up and running! If you wanna talk Karma, then please let’s talk about the cheap handbags, clothes, shoes, LCD tvs, computers, digital cameras - Walmart, K-mart, Target… etc etc… Remember what prices used to be 10 years ago for a large TV? Lower prices means more sales and more profit for the corporations, but at what expense? How about factories in China that heavily pollute our Earth?! Part of the money you spent on you LCD TV goes to the pockets of corrupted Chinese government officials and the factories owners. So, economically, we the consumers is where it all started. The bad Karma begins with you and me!!! Let’s really thinking about where we should give our money to!
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.
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?
The development of my site has hit a slight delay due to the developer I had hired is taking a 2 weeks vacation. I’m taking this chance to start entering some contents and check out the inner workings of Drupal. But it is putting some extra stress on me due to the progress of the project being stagnant. Recently, I’ve also started talking to my acquaintances whom I want to recruit to become my business partners. This basically means I have to “sell” my business idea / model to them. I’m definitely not a good sales person, so this is kind of tough for me. One of the people I talked to is my college friend who has been working at Microsoft since he graduated, switching from technical I.T. roles to marketing roles. So, he can help cover some business skills that I don’t possess. It was really hard selling to him, and I know he still isn’t completely sold yet, but I know if I get him to believe in my business and get him on board, he will be able to sell it 15 times better than I do! :) Besides, I totally understand his position as I had also been a satisfied employee at a major US technology company. I liked my job and although both he and I wanted to work on our own business, we were reluctant to give up our good jobs. Anyway, one interesting thing that he told me to beware of is to “not under-estimate the stress of having no full-time job”. It turns out his sister had tried her hands on starting her own business with her boyfriend, and during that time, they had received a lot of stress from the people around them. Unfortunately, I didn’t need him to tell me about that, as I am already suffering from a lot of stress from my family. This reminds me of a recent interview of a web entrepreneur in the US, he had had success with his previous web business and is now starting a new one, yet even with his experience, he said on some days, when it seems like there are absolutely no progress at all, he would still question himself… “What am I doing? Why isn’t it going anywhere?!”… That’s pretty close to what I’m feeling now too. At a time like these, when everyone around you is pressuring you to give up and “just find a job”… all you can do is to re-evaluate your vision… believe in the path you’ve chosen and continue to execute your plan!! It’s not easy, in fact, I can tell you I feel like SHIT right now! It’s definitely a lot easier to “just find a job” and become a “gear” within a machine again and do your 9 to 6. It really pains me to have the people close to me not believe in me and would rather have me submit to a 9 to 6 because of the pressure they feel from other people… Other people who doesn’t even know shit about me and my plans!!! But there’s nothing we can do about this. We all look at the world with our own set of values and we also judge other people based on that. You can’t win over everybody, and you don’t need to explain yourself to everybody. All you can do is stay focus on your vision, believe in yourself, work hard, network with the right people… and just NEVER GIVE UP! This is how all successful empires are built throughout history! As I get closer to launch, I can feel that things are within my grasp… yet at the same time, there are so many more things that can be expanded on… I can see the possibilities that will open up eventually as the business grow and expand. But for now, from my experience in Project Management, I know better than to lose control of the existing plan. I’m staying focused on launching with the foundation and features as planned on my functional requirements.