Moosh does a good job with accessibility also, where some local startups tend to overlook. Their mobile version and both Traditional Chinese and English language sites cater to both the local and the large expat community here. This site is appealing and comprehensive and could be the best site to gather movie info in Hong Kong.

Moosh was launched back in March 2009 and comes from the same team that developed aNobii, the social book cataloging website. Although the site is online, Moosh is still early in development and Moosh will slowly make its way to the market, this is likely because the bulk of focus is still on aNobii.

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Working together with the Entrepreneur Center at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the goal of the From 0 to 0.1 program is to get students to build a web service in 13 weeks, basically during their summer vacation. If during the program you and your team are on to something great, they may even set you up with some angel investors to pitch to (but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here).

This looks to be a promising program and could give a much needed kick start to tech minded individuals here. Interested students should seriously consider this.

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Yahoo! Hong Kong, Hong Kong’s leading portal, has long provided a blog service here and can safely say most locals use them more than other blog providers. They have their own product blog (in Chinese) and it’s one of the most, if not the most engaging blogs in Hong Kong. I have never seen people comment like this, locally. The number of comments are anywhere between the teens to the thousands for a single post, the Yahoo! HK blog user community is buzzing.

However, the blog itself doesn’t get updated frequently and it doesn’t offer much content other than being a channel to communicate notify users of mostly updates or system outages, upgrades, etc.

So, why are users so active and leaving so many comments? Well, all the comments are of users venting their frustration with the releases or upgrades and the service and commitment in general, one after another, the negative comments pile up to the hundreds and even thousands.

But can you blame the community? Yes and no. Yahoo! HK has seemingly ignored these conversations that’s going on under their nose now and in the past and it doesn’t appear to affect their brand at all.

In comparison, Yahoo!’s other property, Flickr, having launched a Traditional Chinese version since 2007, has had a local community manager (but based in US) for a year now watching over the (Traditional) Chinese language community, mainly Taiwan and Hong Kong. She’s been active in their forums and communicates openly with them. It makes us wonder why there’s no such person dealing with the growing frustration locally.

I’m not sure how much longer they can ignore this, but I’ll admit, they’ve had “success” sweeping it under the rug for years, it’s bound to catch up with them one way or another.

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Similar to other services, Thumbdive lets you write your own updates, but in 150 characters or less (by the way, in Hong Kong, some carriers allow for 160 characters for SMS). Updates created within Thumbdive are shared privately within your SharingPools, or user groups, that you create and manage your audience. You can also choose to aggregate your already public content from popular social mediums, such as Twitter, Flickr, blogs, Facebook status and last.fm.

The service is currently available for PC and the iPhone but said to have plans to roll out to other mobile platforms in the future. I just like how they visually laid out their content (below is from the PC version, which is very similar to iPhone designs).

And if you’re wondering about their business model… According to their website, Thumbdive is a system that allows for advertisements. They claim I did not notice any ads while trying out the private beta version.

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I have mentioned in my Twitter before that there has been a handful of acquisitions by large corporations in Asia and US, late last year and into this year. I am now listing them here. With this intent purchase by IBM, the lists now includes Hong Kong.

Here’s the list of startups that I’m aware of (and therefore probably incomplete) that have been acquired since September 2008:

• TNC, blogging platform (Korea), acquired by Google Korea
• Me2day, microblogging platform (Korea), acquired by Naver
• J2M, online gaming (Korea), acquired by EA Sports
• Roiworld, casual gaming/avatar startup (Korea), acquired by Lifetime Networks
• Outblaze, email and messaging service (Hong Kong), acquired by IBM
• Update: OpenSourceFood, cooking social network (Japan), acquired by Tsavo Media
• Other acquisition include Focus Media (China) by Sina

It has been a busy shopping season at the end of the year for companies in Asia and US and it has been good for Korean startups. And although the economy is bleak and despite recent news that Google is shutting down a number of services they acquired earlier, I do expect more acquisitions down the road for startups in Asia.

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Stepcase appeared to have put their productivity web service aside to focus on building iPhone apps and have already launched four free and paid apps. Enroute, Lifehack, Meeting Time, SteadyCam, a mix of productivity and fun apps.

Another is the Walkamap team, who previously worked on Ruby on Rails projects and has been active in the local RoR gatherings. Their move to iPhone has been with their Walkamap Hong Kong app, a location based app that allows users to find nearby restaurants, pubs, and other establishments. And according to their website, they have also partnered with FON HK so FON users can use their service to easily locate FON access points.

All these seem to be handy services (I wouldn’t know because I don’t own an iPhone yet) but the money is made with games on the iPhone or is it? Maybe in the US and from my observation, iPhone is more a mobile data/camera/music device than a gaming device in Hong Kong. Nintendo’s NDS Lite and Sony’s PSP are still the leaders in mobile gaming here, but this makes for another entry.

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For those who couldn’t make it, you missed some great insights and chances to network with the speakers, entrepreneurs and other attendees. We hope to provide slides on Open Web Asia conference through support partner Slideshare. There are also interviews in English (site in Chinese) from our media sponsor at Netease.

Unfortunately, we did not have a video stream at this event, but it was recorded and will see when we can have this out to you guys. Head over to the conference blog to get those videos.

In the meantime, you can track back on Twitter and Flickr for what went on at the conference and visuals of the speakers and event. Here are some photos I took of the event.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

We are working on getting all the feedback possible and start planning for next year’s event. If you were at the event, we ask you complete this 10 question survey.

We were very excited to have the speaker lineup that we did and like to thank all the speakers for making it to Seoul. The sponsors, supporters and World Knowledge Forum were also very supportive and could not have done it without them. I’d like to thank the local Korean team who made everything go smoothly for both conference goers and the organizers.

Stay tuned to the conference website.

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It’s an interesting move for Apple, I mean of all markets, they chose Hong Kong. It’s a matter of time before people in Hong Kong start buying all these iPhones and begin selling them on eBay for the people in the US. This is how Hong Kong people/businesses make money. And despite the almost $800USD price tag for the 16GB and the screwed up economy, I’m sure people there will be willing to pay. I don’t think Apple has implemented anything that would limit the purchases made online. I still think they should limit one iPhone purchase per Hong Kong ID.

I guess it’s not that great being an early adopter for Apple products.

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The service has got a lot of the same features, payment gateway integrations, Captcha form and other spam protection, summary reports, SSL, RSS, storage, form templates and others. It’s more or less the same features found in Wufoo.

Unlike the other services mentioned, ecForm doesn’t appear to offer a free service, a big downside to their service. I can see why they would charge them right from the start, if Hong Kong businesses are the target market. I mean people/businesses will exploit it anyway they could to get the most out of a free version, in other words, being cheap. Another downside is the minimum 1-year contract that make you sign. Did I mention the current sign up process requires you to download a form and printing/faxing it back to them.

Addressing those simple issues first would be helpful. I cannot imagine anyone or company who will be willing to put down a year’s payment without first trying it. Online signup, it’s probably not their fault, that’s how businesses operate here in Hong Kong, with fax machines, you get the picture.

Despite all that, Hong Kong needs a service like ecForm. I really hate how companies conduct in-person and phone surveys here. They swarm you on the street and and speak extremely fast on the phone. If and when they put it online, that’s when I’ll start participating.

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Frenzoo gave us a peek at their new release, they have since moved on from a client installed software to a web service (although, there’s still a small install). The new web version is so much better than the client install, even co-founder Simon told me that their old version was junk and I think anyone who have been with Frenzoo would agree.

Frenzoo also raised additional funding on top of their previous round from ASI, this time with SERAP, the local government fund to help local startup businesses.

In addition, the Hong Kong Startup Association also discussed their plans to begin its first talk. As this is a new organization, they are continuously seeking input from the local web entrepreneur, startups and community. If you have any thoughts, feel free to share them at their site. Sign up for the email updates or Facebook updates.

Big thanks for Simon and Frenzoo team for hosting and drinks and HKSUA for sponsoring the food.

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