Meeting Dopplr’s co-founder Marko Ahtisaari

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.

CUUSOO Hong Kong 1st meeting 空想香港

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.

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:

1. What does CUUSOO provide if we already do everything from design to market to produce the products? (My answer: That’s just the beginning stage in HK, where we’ll have to take on the roles of designer + marketer + manufacturer! Eventually, each role only does its own thing and manufacturers will come to CUUSOO to pick up businesses.)
2. If most investors are only willing to pay $50 for the product, but a few are willing to pay as much as $1000… does that pull up the curve? In other words, does the product still get made – and some people pay more than others? (My answer: Probably not… but that’s a good question, I’ll ask Kohei. )
3. How is CUUSOO gonna secure its designers’ Intellectual Properties? It works in Japan because they all respect IP… but here in HK and in China… you post a design online… they can just take your design and make it themselves! (My answer: True ~ I can think of 2 things – 1 – CUUSOO as the platform has to take on the legal responsibility… so it may have to sue the people who infringe our IP. 2 – but personally, I like to be more ideal, think when the eco-system is more mature on CUUSOO, I hope the businesses will want to come on CUUSOO and establish a reputation. Basically, customers will want to give their money to reputable, ethical and moral businesses – and that in turn will make the manufactures want to be good.)
4. The language problem – the website is all Japanese, are they going to make a English site? (My answer: Yes, it’s a big problem, and Yes, we’re working on it.)

Another interesting thing we talked about was “Trust”… Charlotte actually works for a local web development company, and she had to be careful to not let the company owner knows about CUUSOO, because “the biz owner is a typical Hong Kong businessman who only looks at the $dollar sign. If we tell him about this system, he’ll simply take it and build it as his own business!

I said this is definitely very typical “Hong Kong”! But also, it is where Hong Kong fails!! I’ve said it before, people who only look at money and profits are too short-sighted… they don’t see the big picture. This is a perfect example! Since typical Hong Kong people and business think only about short-term profits, they rarely produce IPs and brands that are long-term, or become world renowned. This becomes a downward death spiral! Say if Charlotte’s boss really decided to steal CUUSOO’s system and build the exact same platform for Hong Kong. Do you think designers will trust that website with their designs? The site itself disrespects IP and stole the business model from CUUSOO, why would anyone give it their trust? When a worldwide company like LEGO or MUJI choose to partner with a company, do you think they will choose such a company?

HK Design Innovation Forum Photo Report

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:

From: “enquiry@youth.gov.hk”
To: Nick Wang@
Sent: Thursday, April 9, 2009 9:44:14 AM
Subject: Re: Design and Innovation Event

Dear Mr Wang,

We are sorry that the forwarded message has been send to us by mistake.

Youth.gov.hk

orz

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

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!

OFFICIAL EVENT PAGE IS UP – http://www.currystar.com/event/hk-international-design-innovation-forum

PLEASE RSVP HERE – http://www.currystar.com/form/rsvp-hk-international-design-innovation-forum

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。

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

Previous Entry:
http://cloneofsnake.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/hong-kong-international-design-and-innovation-forum

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/

For more info on Mr. Nishiyama, check out:
– US – Japan Innovators network – Kohei Nishiyama (西山浩平) – CEO & Founder, elephant design co., ltd.
– cuusoo.com

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

Thank you,

-Nicholas Wang

Economic Crisis and How it is Killing Microsoft

Just read Dries Buytaert’s write up on the OSBC – Open Source Business Conference.

Here’s an excerpt:

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

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

Hope I’ll live to see that day.

iPhone Google offline maps – Hong Kong 香港 and Tokyo 東京

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
[The old file had some missing tiles (file name had "Yamanote" in it, I've since fixed the problem by repairing existing map directory, please download this new version.]

Simply extract and copy them onto your iPhone’s /var/mobile/Media/Maps/ folder. (Of course, you’ll need a jail broken iPhone and installed OfflineMaps from Cydia.

Once the folders are in place, open OfflineMaps and you should see this:

So here, the path of these 2 folders are: /var/mobile/Media/Maps/HK_HongKong and /var/mobile/Media/Maps/JP_TokyoCity

Touch on HK_HongKong and you’ll see this:

Touch Link and you’ll see this:

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

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

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

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

Also! You will be able to see your current location if you are within the range of at least 3 cell phone signal receiver! (Normally, if you don’t have a data plan, you can’t see the map and so you can’t see your location. But now, with Offline maps, we can see that cell tower triangulate positioning is actually available to us all!

One time after I changed the folder names, Maps couldn’t display the offline maps anymore! I looked into it and found out why – the symlink was still pointing to the old folder. See, this is how offline maps work, when you use iPhone Maps normally with Wifi, it stores caches of map tiles inside:

/private/var/mobile/Library/Caches/MapTiles/

What Offline Maps does is it stores the “permanent cache” files created with GMDL in a separate folder:

/private/var/mobile/Media/Maps/

When you touch on “Link”, it creates a symlink from the

/private/var/mobile/Library/Caches/MapTiles/

folder to the offline permanent cache, so in JP_TokyoCity’s case –
/private/var/mobile/Media/Maps/JP_TokyoCity/

, so if you go to

/private/var/mobile/Library/Caches/MapTiles/

and type

ls -l

, you should see something like this:

MapTiles.sqlitedb -> /var/mobile/Media/Maps/JP_TokyoCity/MapTiles.sqlitedb

. Basically, if your maps doesn’t work, try deleting that link with

rm *

and then redo the process from the beginning.

A detailed tutorial in which I learned from is here. Only sightly outdated for iPhone firmware 2.2 – if you’re downloading your own maps, the new GMDL can convert the maps directly to v2.2, so you don’t need to do the last step of “Mapv4v5Converter”.

A screenshot of the tutorial below:

Inauguration of Barack Obama – never been so proud as an American

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)