Hong Kong only cares about money, lacks innovation

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:38:14 +0000

(Rant!) Generally speaking, that is. I’m sure there are some innovators in Hong Kong too, but from what I can see, Hong Kong people and businesses can be summarized in the following few points:

Most people either work in (or want to work in) banks, insurance, or sales
Most people only care finding a job that makes more money
People would spend that money in foreign brand name goods
Local goods are seen as “cheap” and therefore can only command a low price
Businesses are either small retail shops, textile manufacturing in Chna, or cell phone / mobile phone, laptop covers (they have covers for everything!) (Sarcasm)

It’s really quite sad. Today, I went to meet with a company’s owner whom I thought may be a good local partner for future web development and retail supply logistic. However, I was disappointed to learn that he really doesn’t have a direction for this company. His main concern seems to be to just hang on to their biggest client, and continue to support their intranet, which they developed.

I don’t know if it’s a Chinese thing, but I get the feeling that as a race, we really need to learn some basic economics - “Supply & Demand”… It seems like all Chinese people know to do is to “be cheap”! Sell shit as cheap as possible!! Anyway, here in Hong Kong, designers really have it tough! My wife was a talented accessories designer in New York. She commanded a salary of US$ 70+K / year and could singlehandedly design an entire line of handbags for each season, from start to finish, including flying to Hong Kong to work with the manufacturers. Now however, even though the company she worked for wants her to continue to work for them after she moved to Hong Kong permanently, they don’t want to pay her a US salary anymore! The fact is, American companies are used to hiring people in Hong Kong for less than HKD 15000 a month (roughly US$1900 a month, or $23K a year!!) That’s the typical salary for an experienced designer in Hong Kong! So, even though my wife will be doing the same thing as she did in New York, those companies will not pay her the same salary, simply because the market rate is low like dirt! Why does it have to be this way? Why are untalented designers in New York getting paid as much as $90K a year, while designers in Hong Kong, which often have to come up with designs themselves, plus fix the sketches from New York designers to make them work, then travel to factories in China to do some of the tougher designs hands on, work late and work on Saturdays… only to get paid 1/4 or 1/5 of their New York counterpart?! Before I leave Hong Kong, I hope to do something good for the locals. Hong Kong doesn’t have any big internet destination like the Amazon.com for shopping, or tripadvisor.com for travels… currently, I’m thinking of creating a good, Chinese / English bi-lingual travel & food community based on Drupal. (Drupal 6 possess that localization options, but the problem is most of the modules are not ready for D6 yet.) Chinese people are notorious for eating all sorts of shit, and personally, I am against people drinking Shark-fin soup. I hope to create a registry to take advantage of the current “environmentally conscious” market, to hopefully drive business to restaurants that complies to international conservation laws of efforts. Hopefully, I can create something meaningful and benefits our planet. That, to me, means so much more than just creating wealth for myself.

Comments

Angus Lau — 2008-05-09 23:08:32

Hi nice to meet you. Couldn’t agree more with your post, but there is a small group of web entrepreneurs here, so send me an email when you get a chance and lets hook up.

Environmentally Friendly, Sustainable food supplies - Crowdsourcing meets Food meets Travel | My Journey to Japan — 2008-05-29 00:36:52

[…] 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 […]

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!!!!

Drupal on Nick Wang

Hong Kong only cares about money, lacks innovation

Comments

Developing Crowdsourcing Community with Drupal