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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It’s been in development for 34 months, contains somewhere in the region of 15,000 changes, and it is 100% organic software: these are just a few of the reasons expectations were high for the release of the new version of Firefox. To celebrate the launch of Mozilla’s Firefox 3 the Opensource Application Knowledge Association (OAKA) in Hong Kong threw the new web browser a party on June 28, 2008, at the City University of Hong Kong.

The FON Hong Kong team was in attendance, not just because it’s a cool company full of cool people, but also because FON provided the WiFi access for this event. FON, for those not in the know, is a global community of hundreds of thousands of users (and growing) who share WiFi access among each other using FON’s secure and inexpensive router, called La Fonera. In this image you can see FON Hong Kong manager Terrence Leung enthusiastically explaining La Fonera to some revellers. All reports indicate that the cake was very good. Material for this entry was taken from the FON HK blog.

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Mobile-phone users are facing big bills for internet services they thought were free, the consumer watchdog [Hong Kong Consumer Council] warned yesterday. One customer ran up a HK$14,000 bill in a month.

…

The complainant hit with a HK$14,000 bill told the watchdog he thought he was using free Wi-fi services to access the internet.

However, he claims his service provider connected him to the Net through its fee-paying service without warning him first.

“Charges for Web surfing catch out phone users”

South China Morning Post, June 17, 2008

Mobile networks face an important self-imposed obstacle: metered data service charges that are unclear, unrealistic, and often rather opaque to the consumer. While most companies now understand that promoting third generation mobile services requires clear and friendly flat rates, some operators still extract value from their customers the hard way, by selling them voice service plans with Internet access charged extra by the *byte. This is supposed to be the Internet age; regardless of whether the user in question understood he was on Wi-Fi or 3G or 2.5G, a 14,000 dollar bill is exorbitant from any point of view.

This is not a new occurrence. In the April 1, 2003 issue of the SCMP [unfortunately, the SCMP does not support direct linking to articles and requires a subscription] Neil Taylor reported on much the same topic:

… operators know that if their customers were to actually use data services to their fullest capacity, they might suddenly notice what over-priced luxuries these things are.

Last week, I spent three days with Sony Ericsson’s P800 smartphone….

And after three days of happy surfing, I received my phone bill.

If that HK$400 [US$ 51.41] GPRS charge had been for a month’s downloads, I might have been irritated. But I was appalled at what I was charged for three days of sporadic surfing.

By any measure, GPRS charges are extortionate. They are also confusing. Just as we saw with voice and Internet services, the operators appear to have conspired to make their charges as hard to compare as possible.

“Guinea-pig users losers with punishing GPRS charges”

South China Morning Post, April 1, 2003

Neil Taylor was writing about GPRS, the forerunner of 3G, but the business model sounds depressingly similar. Where is the incentive to get a 3G handset and subscription, one may ask? In the July 2005 issue of Receiver Magazine, Outblaze founder and CEO Yat Siu spelled out his view:

The 3G incentive
Serious mass usage of 3G applications will occur when service fees become fixed and subscriptions become attractive and affordable for most users. In Japan, for example, 3G brought about the development of a vibrant and active content download culture that emerged following attractive consumer pricing of 3G bandwidth. Some telecoms may resist the idea, but ultimately they should pay heed to the lesson learned from broadband: charging a service on a usage basis discourages subscription, and will generally limit utilization to early adopters and technophiles.

Many operators who rolled out 3G services erred in setting exorbitant pricing, thus discouraging regular consumers from utilizing expensive 3G bandwidth services. 3G downloads of products such as video streaming, applications, or large emails are fairly substantial and therefore incur a greater cost on a pay-per-use bandwidth model; clearly, this is discouraging to potential customers.

Yat Siu, in Receiver Magazine, July 2005

There is the argument that 3G network operators were fleeced by their governments, but regardless of who bears responsibility for high 3G prices, several operators used confusing metered pricing to transfer the high 3G entry costs to their customers. And that’s not the only way in which the consumer loses: the high and often confusing costs of 3G services keep adoption rates low and indirectly hamper 3G technology. Until the majority of operators offer attractive flat rate data usage plans as well as “common sense” plans that prevent gigantic Internet access charges, consumers in most of the world will continue to be confused and outraged at the end of the month. That is, if they make use of data services in the first place, which is something many people avoid.

This brings us to Wi-Fi: it’s cheap, available across a growing multitude of devices, supported by just about all operating systems, and growing fast. Consider FON, a network of hundreds of thousands of members around the world who share their bandwidth with other FON members. In Hong Kong FON coverage is getting quite good, and you’ll find a free FON signal at Starbucks, McDonald’s, and major shopping malls just to name a few. FON has even been reviewed by the government of Hong Kong.

Outblaze operates FON in Hong Kong and we might have a slight bias, but there are local alternatives in most cities. Although FON is a global service, in Hong Kong Y5Zone is fairly prevalent and well organized, with over 800 hotspots. PCCW also offers Wi-Fi around the city.

Service plans with hidden or secret rates simply cannot compete with affordable flat rates. We’ve seen the shift from metered to flat charges in traditional telephony, television, and fixed line Internet access; isn’t it time the latest generation mobile network operators modernized all their fee structures to match their handset line-ups? You too can help discourage those network operators who maintain confusing charges: just have your mobile device connect via Wi-Fi when you need the Internet, and avoid data service charges entirely. In a city like Hong Kong Wi-Fi is available at most locations, so you’ll avoid astronomical bills while sending an important message to your provider.

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McAfee’s study seems to be based on a year’s worth of data, and last year was a particularly bad year for the Hong Kong domain, thanks to a gang of botnet spammers registering thousands of domains under the .hk country code top level domain (ccTLD; a generic top level domain is a gTLD).

These domains were most likely registered using stolen credit cards, and contained bogus information in the “whois” records (which show domain ownership). The contact email address for each domain was usually an email address at a random free webmail site like Yahoo, Hotmail, or some of the Outblaze clients.

This certainly turned out to be a gigantic reputation problem for the .hk ccTLD - far more scam domains were being registered under .hk than legitimate domains. Even worse, these scam domains were being hosted on botnets (large networks of infectedPCs, remotely controlled by criminal gangs).

The .hk domains started turning up in spam for porn, fake prescription medication, phishing (identity theft) and many other illegal schemes such as “money mule recruitment”, where people are conned into running an “export agency” and unwittingly become conduits for money laundering and receivers of goods bought with stolen credit cards.

A botnet is a very large, highly failure-tolerant and distributed network. It is also international in nature, so that a child pornography website hosted on an infected PC in Hong Kong could turn up the very next minute on an infected laptop in Brazil. With distributed peer-to-peer botnets the domain name used by a botnet is sometimes its single point of failure.

Registrars (which provide domain registration services) and Registries (which administer gTLDs and ccTLDs) are therefore crucial to any attempt to mitigate botnets.

HKDNR, the registry for the .hk ccTLD, was initially slow to react to this problem, prompting antivirus and antiphishing researchers like Gary Warner (now Director of Research in Computer Forensics & Cybercrime at the University of Alabama at Birmingham) to declare a “crisis situation” in a March 2007 email to a mailing list that discusses phishing. In the email he accused HKDNR of inaction and insufficient response to the concerns of the antispam community.

HKDNR and the Hong Kong CERT (HKCERT) were accused of responding to complaints with canned letters that promised to investigate, but appeared to take no action at all. The response letters encouraged complainants from outside Hong Kong to “report the matter to their local law enforcement agencies”.

By late 2007, the number of .hk domains registered by scam artists numbered in the tens of thousands. Action by various groups (independent technologists, antispam block list providers, CERT teams, law enforcement and regulatory agencies) then seemed to convince HKDNR of the need to take immediate drastic action against scam domains registered in the .hk ccTLD.

As the Postmaster and Head of Anti-spam Operations for Outblaze, I contributed to the effort by providing a feed of several thousand .hk domains from spam reported on our network of 40 million hosted email users.

The results were astounding. Over 10,000 scam domains were terminated in a matter of days. Long term measures were also put in place, such as

• Credit card fraud prevention, including Verified by Visa (most of these scam domains were registered using stolen credit cards)
• Due diligence measures to detect fake domain registration
• Closer cooperation of HKDNR with relevant authorities and agencies.

International cooperation is vital for two reasons:

1. as an early warning when scam artists attempt to set up shop again
2. as a way to share best practices with groups, associations, government regulators, and law enforcement agencies working on the prevention of spam and cybercrime.

In a matter of days, the huge concentration of scammer domains in the .hk ccTLD scattered, shifting to other countries and ccTLDs. Some moved to China (as the McAfee report indicates, a large number of scammer domains still exist in .cn space) and others went onto .biz, .info, and even ccTLDs like .ma (Morocco).

The botnet problem is clearly international, and registrars and registries around the world are vulnerable to what HKDNR suffered last year. While it might be stale news in that HKDNR has already dealt with this problem, it serves as a reminder that botnet criminals are still out there and still causing trouble. Spam and cybercrime are hitting record levels and that there is a need for constant awareness and joint efforts to mitigate the menace that botnets have evolved into over the last few years.

I have written a long and detailed paper on botnet mitigation for the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) as part of the ITU’s Botnet Mitigation Toolkit. It discusses the threat that botnets pose to the worldwide community of Internet users, and describes an interlinked set of policy, technology, and civil society approaches to the problem of botnets. Most of what I have written in this blog entry is already present in the ITU paper, so I will stop here and encourage people reading this to glance at the paper as well. It is 100 pages long so probably not bedtime reading, but I’d still appreciate your comments!

Suresh Ramasubramanian

Postmaster and Head of Anti-spam Operations

Outblaze

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