Poppycock. If you are truly dedicated to making your start-up a success, you know what you need to do. You need to grab your CFO and scrape together as much money as possible - liquidate company assets and fire a couple founders if you need to!

Once you have gathered the money, you give it all to ridiculously rich angel investors.

Here at Outblaze we’ve certainly experienced our share of the bizarre in over a decade of operations, but we have now been introduced to something new: angel investors who charge start-ups significant sums of money before they will even consider investing in them.

You read that correctly. If your start-up needs money, you can now pay rich investors to think about the possibility of a distant chance to maybe invest in your business idea.

More information on this truly revolutionary business concept at the blog of Jason Calacanis, the CEO of Mahalo.com:

Last week, a number of the TechCrunch50 companies informed me about firms calling them to present at their “Angel forums” — only to discover that they would face fees ranging from $1,000 to $6,000 for a 10-15 minute pitch slot. After additionally investigation by the Jason Nation (the top 10% of the maniacs who follow me on Twitter), I was sent details of one epic bastard that wanted $10-$25,000, plus a couple of percentage points of the value of the deal

Read more from the source. This information is vital to all struggling start-ups everywhere.

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President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo declared a state of calamity for almost the entire region. Several areas were affected by heavy flooding, with surges as high as 6 metres sweeping up everything in their path. 240 deaths were reported as of September 28, 2009, and countless people are still missing. News reports for the past days have shown people clambering to the roofs of their homes in a desperate attempt to escape the floods, the clothes on their backs the only things they were able to salvage. To say that this has caused major damage to person and property would be an understatement, given the major losses the country has suffered.

While there have been rescue missions and outreach programs to help the victims, most victims of this storm are still in need of aid. Here is where you can help. Listed below is web link to World Vision that delivers badly needed aid to the victims of typhoon Ketsana. Even the smallest contribution will help to provide relief to the needy, so please consider giving.

Thank you.

World Vision – Emergency Relief
http://www.worldvision.org.hk/eng/form/donation.html

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Treat yourself to the extremely interesting blog post on this subject by FON founder Martin Varsavsky. Martin also provides a personal account of the huge potential and harrowing times at FON; last year he began financing the company’s monthly losses using his own money.

Serial entrepreneurship doesn’t get any better than this.

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Marko will also be previewing (for the first time) the upcoming Dopplr iPhone app. If you are not yet familiar with the service, sign up to Dopplr and have a look - it is both clever and useful. Make sure to check out the Dopplr Social Atlas project.

Please join us for informal drinks with Marko Ahtisaari at Mozart Stub’n, located at 8 Glenealy road (just up the hill from Lan Kwai Fong), from 6:30 to 8:30 pm, on Tuesday June 23.

http://www.mozartstubn.com/

There will be complimentary beer and finger food (limited supplies).

Thanks to Thomas Crampton for blogging and tweeting this gathering!

More Links:

Really interesting Dopplr blog entry about how the Dopplr community travels

http://ahtisaari.typepad.com/about.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marko_Ahtisaari
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopplr

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But that’s not all: every year one single Hong Kong-based company is recognized with the coveted “Tech Company of the Year” award for its hard work and distinguished accomplishments. Unlike the other CWHK awards, the company of the year is chosen by a panel of judges based on several criteria. Last year the award went to PCCW. 2009 was the year of Outblaze, which took the award on the basis of over a decade of developing web-based services.

At the awards ceremony, held at Butterfield’s, CWHK  editors Stefan Hammond and Chee Sing Chan cited Outblaze’s innovations, global reach, industry recognition, and of course staying power (11 years!) as the reason the CWHK Awards judges picked Outblaze as THE technology company of the year. We are extremely proud to carry that title and wish to thank the organizers and sponsors for this honour. We would like to congratulate the other winners at the 2009 ComputerWorld Hong Kong Awards, which include IBM, Fuji, HP, Microsoft, Apple, PCCW, Emerson, Cisco, Blackberry, APC, Oracle, Polycom, SAP, Check Point, EMC, Tyco, Symantec, VMware, and CSL among others, in no particular order. Good work!

Interviewed by CWHK for the awards story, Outblaze Founder and CEO Yat Siu offered some insight into how Outblaze got started in the days before the IT boom (and bust) reached these shores:

“Outblaze was founded in Hong Kong in 1998 and was the first company to offer fully hosted multilingual communication services for online communities,” said Outblaze founder and CEO Yat Siu. “We started with four or five people in a run-down office of less than 1,000 square feet with a failing electrical system and single toilet. In our first few months we hired about 20 people, which packed us tight as sardines.”

Fortunately in 2002 we moved to the CyberPort, where we are still headquartered and no longer packed in the highly unpleasant way described by Yat. Read the rest of “Blazing a Trail for Hong Kong Tech” for more background on Outblaze. And to the Outblazers reading this: well done!

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Hello Kitty Online, the upcoming massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), received recognition for Best Graphics. Hello Kitty Online (HKO) will open this February 14th for a special Valentine’s Day celebration. The game is still in beta but it looks great and it is easy to see why the graphics by design studio Dream Cortex impressed the judges.

The second season of the hit TV show “The Adventures of Hello Kitty & Friends” swept in four award categories, including Best 3D Animation, Best TV Series, Best Modeling & Texturing, and Best Lighting & Rendering. “The Adventures of Hello Kitty & Friends” is a 3D CGI animated series whose first season has aired all over the world. It is also the first time Hello Kitty has been seen in a TV series in CGI.

Read more about this at the Sanrio Digital Blog.

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The news was released overnight, local time, so postings of the news and requests for information are starting to appear. More details on this deal will be released next week at the Lotusphere conference, and you can check back here for more news then. For now here is the text of the press release issued by IBM:

IBM Announces Intent to Acquire Outblaze’s E-Mail Service Assets

ARMONK, NY and HONG KONG - 15 Jan 2009: IBM (NYSE: IBM) has announced its intent to acquire the strategic messaging service assets of Outblaze, Ltd., a privately held provider of online messaging and collaboration services, based in Hong Kong. Building on IBM Lotus’ market leadership in messaging software, the asset acquisition will accelerate the delivery of affordable, Web-based e-mail services in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

With more than 10 years of experience, Outblaze was one of the first companies to offer a fully hosted multilingual e-mail service and now supports over 40 million users. Outblaze’s proven online Web-based messaging service offers unique capabilities for branding and administration. Today, Outblaze operates one of the largest online service platforms for the provision of private label e-mail, collaboration and social media services for other service providers, telecommunications operators, corporations, academia, media and publishing companies.

The Outblaze messaging service will be part of IBM Lotus’ Project “Bluehouse.” “Bluehouse” is IBM’s online social networking and collaboration service designed for business and currently in open beta (http://bluehouse.lotus.com). “Bluehouse” helps people work together more quickly and easily beyond the boundaries of their organizations. Within the service people can share files, chat, participate in online meetings and network over the Web.

“The acquisition of these Outblaze assets further demonstrates Lotus’ commitment to delivering secure, scalable online solutions and will help accelerate delivery of collaborative services, with little to no IT involvement,” said Bob Picciano, General Manager, IBM Lotus Software and WebSphere Portal. “Lotus has always led the way in helping people get more connected, and we recognize that getting the right information and expertise particularly outside of your own organization, can pose quite a challenge. IBM will help companies overcome the barriers of time, distance and affiliation to easily work together and deliver better business outcomes,” added Picciano.

The combination of the Outblaze assets and “Bluehouse” will provide customers with more choices in messaging solutions. Enterprise clients will be able to use IBM as a single provider for all their messaging needs, whether on-premise or online, serving a range of user needs from occasional to full-time. Small business customers will get a simple-to-acquire, integrated set of collaboration services that allow them to easily work with their network of customers and partners. Partners such as telecommunications operators and Internet service providers will be able to package and sell collaborative services to their clients under their own brands.

Further detail on how these new assets will become part of IBM’s online portfolio will be disclosed at the Lotusphere conference in Orlando next week.

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Dopplr helps you make the most of your trips by sharing your travel plans with the people and brands you trust. The service then highlights coincidences, for example, telling you that three people you know will be in Tokyo when you will be there too. You can use Dopplr on your personal computer or mobile phone. It links with many popular online calendars and social networks.

Simple and elegant. Here at Outblaze we like this service so much that we’ve been supporting it since 2007, and are pleased to be counted among the Dopplr 100, a list of early adopters of this ingenious social network (here is the raw list: the Dopplr 100).

We’d also like to congratulate Marko Ahtisaari on his recent appointment as CEO of Dopplr. Keep up the good work!

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Leading media company Axel Springer AG today launched autobild.com.cn, the Chinese online edition of AUTO BILD. Axel Springer is one of the largest publishers in Europe, and AUTO BILD is one of the world’s most popular automobile publications by market and circulation. Outblaze is the technology partner for AUTO BILD China, and we are developing some nice web toys for this project, some of which are already available on the newly launched portal.

autobild.com.cn is a Chinese Web 2.0 driven platform with rich media, social networking and social media services all powered by Outblaze. The primary design goal for this portal was to provide a rich online media experience for automobile enthusiasts in China. Chinese Internet users are increasingly tech-savvy, and static images simply don’t let enthusiasts really explore a car. This meant that Outblaze had to provide solutions not just for standard video content, but also for interactive 3D animations that support user customization.

After all, if you’re looking through a database of cars, wouldn’t you want to be able to view them from multiple angles and in any shade conceivable? Consider how stylish the Lamborghini LP 560-4 looks in pink.

As well as car exteriors, the site also allows you to look around inside 3D interiors - especially useful if you are concerned about leg and head room.

Web sites providing 3D viewing and manipulation of products offer better insight to consumers looking to decide on a purchase, because they let the user get a better feel for the product. And the advertising potential for any web site skyrockets when you give users customization options.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a car portal without plenty of video content, powered by the award-winning OutblazeVideo engine.

In addition to rich media features, autobild.com.cn also allows users to interact and exchange knowledge and ideas among themselves and with the editors of AUTO BILD China. There are user blogs, personal profiles, friends lists, discussion boards, and of course all the regular content you would expect from a seasoned publication like AUTO BILD: a car database, reviews, hints & tips, articles, and much more.

Here’s a few more images. See the action yourself at autobild.com.cn.

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This is not your average technology conference. Do you get bored out of existence attending run-of-the-mill events? Are you tired of being herded in and out of auditoriums like an over-dressed schoolchild? Have you had it up to here with sales pitches when all you are looking for is genuine information? Has a speaker at a traditional conference ever said something that made you want to ask a crucial question right away, and not 45 minutes later? Are you ever so slightly annoyed at the jumping through hoops required three months in advance just to speak at an event?

If the answers to the above are yes, BarCamp is just what you need. BarCamp is an unstructured, inexpensive, down-to-earth gathering of technologists who get together to share and learn. I said “inexpensive”, but in fact it’s completely free of charge. And if you consider that you get free food and drink, and a chance to win prizes, it’s almost as if BarCamp were paying you to attend.

Without further ado, here are the BarCamp rules and relevant details.

BarCamp Hong Kong web site

BarCamp Hong Kong Wiki

BarCamp Hong Kong FaceBook page

Location of current event: Turner International Asia Pacific Ltd.

Address: 30/F, Oxford House, Taikoo Place, Quarry Bay, Hong Kong

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