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Startup Saturday 2010: Asian Start-up Entrepreneurs Meet Together In HK (1/2)

On August 7, at Cyberport in Hong Kong, there was a one-day conference giving Hong Kong and Asian entrepreneurs the opportunities to present their services and discussing the future of tech start-up communities in the region.

There are two hubs for incubating tech start-ups in Hong Kong.   One is Cyberport, which is located on the ocean side of Hong Kong Island and near a floating restaurant which are often introduced as one of the area's must-visit spots on Globetrotter and Lonely Planet.   The other one is Hong Kong Science Park, which is located 30-minute away from the region's highest populated area by train bound for Guangdong Province[C], Mainland China.   Startup Saturday 2010 took place at Cyberport.

It started with a keynote address made by Douglas Young, the co-founder/CEO of G.O.D.(Goods of Desire, 住好啲), a Hong Kong-based design-oriented casual furniture/clothing chain retailer.

(The event's opening starts around 00:06:45.   Please put the video above on forth.)

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Startup Panel:

  • Arthur Chow, COO of 6 Waves (A Hong Kong-based social game app provider who has developed a lot of popular Facebook apps.)
  • Andy Ann, CEO and Founder of Darizi.com[C] (大日子, a Hong Kong-based start-up operating wedding and marriage portal sites.)
  • Kevin Huan, CEO of Pixel Media (a Hong Kong-headquartered Asian online ad sales network having offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.)
  • Terry Tsang, Co-founder of Pencake (a Hong Kong-based Facebook game developer specializing in helping brands and agencies create and launch interactive promotions.)

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Start-up Showcase Round 1:

Crispy Entertainment

Crispy Entertainment develops the original comic book series for the iPhone and other iOS devices.  They recently introduced Super Kaiju Hero Force #1 of 5.  Created by Casey Lau and Jeff Kwan and 70+ pages of FREE comic book action served up with Apple's iADs.   The app is available on iTunes AppStore.

Photogoodness (in private beta)

Photogoodness is a new digital photography management and manipulation application, built from the ground up for photography enthusiasts with DSLR cameras.

Stylenearby (in public beta)

StyleNearBy is an iPhone app that will help you keep track of your favorite boutiques and designers so that you will not miss another sale event or new product launch again.   The app is available on iTunes AppStore.

Pandaform

Pandaform is a simple business form builder. Use PandaForm to create and process forms, then manage or update the data.   Keep track of contacts and know who submitted forms to you.

FindLegs.com (搵腳網)

FindLegs.com is a multi-lingual social network platform that promotes action and activities amongst users by integrating multiple user-friendly online communication technologies and channels in efforts to promote thinking, cycling of information, interaction, and finally action.

Boot HK

Boot HK aims at igniting Hong Kong's entrepreneurial community by giving people a social place they can work and meet up.   The long term vision is to create a network of spaces throughout the country that provide different environments such as hackerspaces, workshops, and social meetups for artists, entrepreneurs, and technologists.   Their first space in Sheung Wan will be a place to bring everyone together and to provide space for co-working.

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Funding Panel:

  • Tony Chan, Founder, Asia Pacific Deal Flow (亞洲企業融資平台, a platform for distributing private equity fund raising deals.)
  • Douglas Glen, Ex-CEO, Imagi Studios (意馬動畫工作室, an animation production of CG-animated feature films.)
  • James Giancotti, CFO, Excitin (incubation, helping in brand building of tech start-ups and dealing with M&A issues.)
  • Kin Ko, Founder, Lakoo China (拉闊遊戲, an iPhone/Android game developer known for their popular MMORPG 帝國Online(Empire Online) which has engaged three million users worldwide.)


(to be continued to 2/2)

See Also:

The startup ecosystem in Hong Kong

Report Of Asiajin Shanghai Meetup

This is a report of Asiajin Shanghai Meetup which was held on July 24th. The meetup was held at Sunstyle showroom in Shanghai Sculpture Space. Thank you so much to Gang Lu and George Godula for securing a venue.

More than 20 people have gathered to the event on this very hot day in Shanghai.

Five people have talked about country situation and their startup experiences.

  • Situation of Japanese startups by Shunichi Arai (me)
  • Online collaborative drawing tool 'Cacoo' by Shinsuke Tabata.
  • What's happening in China by Gang Lu.
  • Social game 'Happy Tower' for Mixi platform by Yong Zhao.
  • His entrepreneur experiences and his new startup by Mike Cai.
Situation and recent trends of web startups in Japan @ Asiajin Shanghai meetup

I talked about the Japanese situations and trends, but I've quite surprised by that many attendees already know about Japanese Web industry quite well. So, we could do a very detailed discussion.

We have a few Chinese speakers to compare and discuss the industry between Japan and China. Gang Lu, the founder of OpenWebAsia workgroup, gave a great talk about Chinese Web industry. Unfortunately I was not good at time management, so we had not many time to discuss about that.

Yong Zhao is a long-time reader of Asiajin, and he has kindly invited me to his company called 'Kingnet'.

Kingnet is a company providing social games to many platforms including Mixi platform. Their game called 'Happy Tower' is very successful in many platforms.

Yahoo Japan Buys Location-Based Mobile Advertising Company Cirius

Something pretty rare happened today in Japan's web industry: a big Internet company acquired a smaller one. In this case, Yahoo Japan (the nation's biggest website) snatched up all shares of location-based mobile advertising company Cirius Technologies.

Cirius is headquartered in Tokyo and also operates Cirius Technologies, Inc. in San Francisco (more info on the US side of the business can be found in my earlier TechCrunch article on the company).

The company's flagship product (in both markets) is called AdLocal, which makes it possible to reach consumers with ads that take into account the physical location of users via GPS, Cell-IDs, map coordinates and other data. And that's exactly the technology that Yahoo Japan was after - apart from the over 30 brains in the company, obviously.

Following the acquisition, Cirius will close the office in the US and move its HQ to that of Yahoo Japan's. The price for the acquisition was not disclosed. Cirius CEO Gen Miyazawa, who founded the company in 2004, is just 28 years old.

Via TechCrunch Japan

Twitter Bug Allows You Long Long Tweet (on browser)

[Update] The bug seems to be fixed and now Mashable and TechCrunch reported it (though they could not find the @zakuro563's first tweet but someone's long tweet at 3 hours later).

Some Japanese Twitter users found a Twitter bug around 140-letters limitation Saturday night (local time. JST). My test reproduced it like this.

By the way, the long tweet is from our recent big news of the Japan No.1 social network service position takeover.

A Japanese Twitter user @zakuro563 seemed to be the first one. He posted 900 letters Japanese tweet around 7:30 p.m. 14th August.

The tweet, one of popular copied text circulating 2-channel and other forums for years, was quickly retweeted over 100 times, and some others tracked down and explain how @zakuro563 broke out the 140 letters limit.

It uses Twitter's official URL shortening service t.co. t.co accepts not only URL but also any text. As Tweet Button introduced days ago, you can use its tweet box. Copy the following line to your browser address box, give over 140 letters text after 'url='. (If you include any symbols, you should urlencode them)

http://twitter.com/share?url=whatever long text you like

Then, enter gives you a shortened URL with the tweet box. You may add some base text on it when tweet.

Since twitter.com extracts all t.co's URL to the original on browser interface, your tweet with the t.co URL will be expand and so you can convey near one thousand letters tweet.

Thanks for explanation, @0mg and @travelllist

What does the original @zakuro563 's tweet say?

His tweet is a well known copied text which is part of Japanese internet meme. It is a monologue by fictional hard-core fan of a Japanese juvenile novel series, who is totally nerdy and into a girl on the story. In Japanese it is "creepingly impressive".

I don't think I have such a good English command to translate those very colloquial, domain specific phrases. Luckily a certain anonymous bilingual 2-channel user translated it already so I paste it.

Louise! Louise! Louiseaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!
yarghh...uh...aaahah-! AaAAAAA!!! LOUISELOUISELOUISEaaaaAAAAaaa!!!
Ae...*sniff*sniff*! *sniff*sniff*! sssssaaahsssssaaah.. smells good.... *sniff*
*gasp*! I can haz sniffsniff pink blonde hair de Louise Francoise?! *sniff*sniff*! Aah!
No! I want fluffing! fluff! fluff! Hair hair fluff fluff! Scratch scratch fluff fluff... Kyunkyunnkyui!!
Louise-tan was so kawaii in vol.12 of the novels!! AaaAA...AAA...AhAaAAA!! FaaAAAnng!
Congrats on the 2nd season of the anime Louise-tan! AaAAAAA! So cute! Louise-tan! Kawaii!AaaAAA!
2nd volume of the comics were grea...nnNrAGGggghHH!! Nyaaaaaargh!! UGyaaaAAAAA!!!
Nnnnnnyyyyuuuurrrrgggghhhh!!! Comics...................... AREN'T reality!!! ?...what about the novels and the anime....
LOUISE I S N' T R E A L????? AAAAArgggghhHH!!! Uwaaaaaaannn!!
NononononoNONONONONO! EEeeeeaAAAA!!!! HGGGGrrrrruuyynnnnnNN!!! Halkeginiaaaaaa!!
You! BASTARDS! I'm quitting! I'm QUITTING REALIT...Y....huh!? She's...looking? Louise-chan on the cover is looking at me?
Louise on the cover IS looking at me! Louise... at me! Louise-chan in the pictures in the book are looking at me!!
Louise-chan in the anime is talking to me!!! Phew... reality ain't so bad after all!
Yessssss! Wheeeee!! YEAH!!! I have Louise!! I've done it Ketty, I can do it alone!!!
C..comic... Louise LOUISE-CHAAAaaaaaAAaaAAAN!!!!!!!! HyaaAAAaaaAaaaAAaA!!!!!
Ahahaah...ahahaaahhhhahaAnn! Si, Siesta!! HenriettaaaAAAAAAaAA!!! TabithaaAAAAA!!
u....uuuu..*sniff*sniff*uuuUUU!!! May my love reach Louise!! May my love reach Louise of Halkeginia!

This may be the next generation Japanese Lorem Ipsum... (headache)

See Also:

Twitter Clone Nano Blog Chuitter Limits 14 Letters Instead Of 140 - how Japanese can convey more information on the same 140 letters limit

Twitter Mobile Version Now Limits 140 “Bytes” Not “letters”

KDDI Promotes Brand New Products And Collects User-Generated Parody Songs

Japan's second largest mobile operator KDDI's au introduced several new lineups for their design-oriented feature phone series last month, and they have been running a promotion campaign collecting user-generated parody songs via Twitter.

When you post a set of lyrics consisting of five-seven-five syllables (which has a similar rhythm to Haiku or Senryu) via Twitter with hashtag #iidacalling[J], using a vocaloid synthesizing technology, it will be remixed with a melody of a new song by the faces of the campaign and popular female technopop trio Perfume[J].   Your song will be published on the campaign website[J].

Try it and enjoy listening.   You're required to enter lyrics in Hiragana or Katakana.