Now here's a funky, flash widget recently added to the Web Wednesday blog, where you can listen to guest interviews from previous social mixers in Hong Kong. We've also thrown in a few comments and mutterings for your enlightenment!
You'll notice that the more recent recordings are of a higher quality; I'd like to thank the multi-talented Henry Oh for spending his valuable time to add a badly-needed element of professionalism! Henry was a previous guest speaker at Web Wednesday Hong Kong and is the co-founder of Socialutions and the Hong Kong Start-Up Association. Enjoy!
If you missed out on Web Wednesday Hong Kong's two year anniversary celebrations at our 24th Social Mixer in May, or were just too busy chatting at the bar, here's your second chance to catch Rex Ng, Co-Founder and MD of 6Waves, as he tells us how he tapped into the non-English speaking community on Facebook and found a creative way to make fistful's of dollars through advertising and the sale of virtual items.
Alternatively, you can download the full version from MotionBox here. YouTube doesn't allow me to upload more than 10 minutes or even link to the file, and I just don't have the time to break the video down into 10 minute portions. Still, we do have a rather empty Web Wednesday Wideo channel onYoutube, crying out for your contributions.
This time, we relied on the steady hand of an old friend and independent designer, James Chow, to record this on my Flip MinoHD. You can reach him on his website, JamesChow.hk. Thanks for the creative input, Jim!
Wow! Twenty four Web Wednesdays, two years old and so much more to learn...
Thank you to all of you for being part of this rapidly growing community of Internet and digital media executives,and all those other curious people who somehow turn up at each networking event.
DediPower brought their own photographer, whose photos we added to the Web Wednesday collection on Flickr and post here for you to enjoy.
A video and audio podcast of the interview are on the way.
For our next social mixer on Wednesday 3rd June, we've invited Gary Chen, CEO & Founder of Top100.cn, a leading music website which recently became Google's exclusive music partner in China (Google中国音乐服务独家运营商).
[A big "thank you" to the folks at MusicMatters for helping us organise this great speaker!]
The topic is "Top100.cn: Making Music Legal with Google in China". (Here's screenshot of the Google Music site in China. Unfortunately, we can't listen to any music from here in Hong Kong):
I'll be asking Gary how to run a successful MP3 download service for licensed music in a country dominated by online piracy, and how he sees the partnership with Google eating into Baidu's dominance of the Chinese search market.
Since starting in August 2008, the joint service now offers over 1 million licensed songs owned by four major record companies, 140 independent record companies and four overseas music publishers.
"We were missing one piece ... we didn't have music," Lee Kai-Fu, the president of Google in Greater China.
The night kicks off at 6:30pm and ends around 9:30pm, so you'll have plenty of opportunity to mix with the movers and shakers of our local Internet and music industry.
There will be an entrance fee of HK$100, unless you're a bona-fide student, in which case it's HK$50. This includes one complimentary drink. All other drinks are at Happy Hour prices. (We will issue a receipt, if you require one). As per our last event, we will donate 10% to charity.
Do invite fellow music lovers and MP3 pirates (or IP lawyers!) to join the Asian Digerati on Wednesday 3rd June at Volar Bar & Club, Basement, 38-44 D'Aguilar Street, Lan Kwai Fong, Central.
You can sign up for the June social mixer on this blog, Facebook or LinkedIn. (We want to catch you wherever you hang out online!)
Looking forward to seeing old faces and meeting many more new ones,
Whilst wandering around the hills of Hong Kong last weekend (on Buddha's birthday), it suddenly dawned upon me that Web Wednesday is about to turn two years old! Our next social mixer on 6th May will be Version 24.0, which translates to 24 months of Web Wednesdays!
I'm not sure if it was the sudden intake of fresh air (not a common occurrence in Hong Kong)...or just being distracted by other pressing concerns, like swineflu. Nevertheless, I felt the urge to step back and assess where we've come.
In celebration of reaching this milestone, I have the pleasure of announcing that we will be offering an extra round of drinks to the first 100 guests who attend tomorrow's social mixer, courtesy of our new sponsor, DediPower - the UK's leading provider of managed hosting services.
Unless you've been working in a big bank, where the local telcos dote on your expensive use of their air-conditioned data centres, I guarantee that you've had to suffer shoddy and often unstable local web hosting services. Nearly every web developer that I know has had to turn to North American suppliers for his/her hosting needs.
I'm hoping that DediPower's self-proclaimed "support with passion", humanly-managed hosting and on-call technical advice will shake up the industry here and finally provide us with good quality, reliable and affordable hosting services.
In the UK, DediPower supports established corporations like iTV, First Great Western and Sony, as well as rapidly growing social media start-ups, such as TweetMeme and SlicethePie.
Last weekend, Twitter was abuzz with the news of swine flu hitting Hong Kong. You could feel a palpable surge of panic but, thankfully, it rapidly calmed down. Compared to the awful days of SARS, where over 250 new infections were being announced each day, there is still only one infected case here in Hong Kong. (Read the latest updates on the WHO's official pandemic outbreak website).
What interests me about the way this "outbreak" is being handled is the prolific use of social media. In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has even set up it's own social media guide at www.cdc.gov/socialmedia. On Twitter, savvy users are using the hashtags, "#swineflu" or for Hong Kong news specifically "#swinefluhk". There's a local blog on the topic in English (swinefluhk.blogspot.com), Technow has a good web 2.0 guide in Chinese and a doctor i snot managing to keep his domain H1N1.hk up to date.
But by far the best visual tool is the crowd-sourced "2009 H1N1 Flu Outbreak Map" on Google Maps. It was created by "Laurel" on April 25th, has 25 collaborators, has been viewed 1,844,629 times and has 2664 comments!
They've even come up with a catchy URL, "swinemap.org"! The map is embeded below so that you can play around with it yourself.
Networking is just a click away! You're warmly welcomed to join Asia's premier networking community for internet entrepreneurs and digital media executives.
