It was a great night; the eve of Christmas eve. I certainly had a lot of fun. As you can see, most of my staff showed up for the party (except for Thomas, who’s been very busy with multiple weddings to attend these few days).

Even Bill made an appearance, not to mention quite the impression on a few of my lady friends. They think he resembles 林海峰 (a Hong Kong celebrity).

My lovely wife Hannah was also there; and my friend Joe from Convoy, thanks for coming.

Also thank you to Grace for having her friend make the karaoke booking; oh and Bobo too.

A big thanks to Grace’s sweet sister Wing for her wonderful singing; as well as Wing’s husband Ah Wo for the dice games and lively conversations.

I hope that everyone enjoyed the evening as much as I did and I hope they liked their presents.

For my gang, it was an all iPod affair.

All-in-all, it was a merry Christmas party for the m3media gang and company. Here’s to many, many more still to come. And a special shout-out to my friend Truman, the Amazonian in Seattle. Yes, we’re pretty busy here. That’s why some of us can’t keep our eyes open in the pictures. (i.e. Louis – refereed to as 余文樂 by Grace, & myself clearly) Thanks for being the only non-spam commenter so far. We appreciate it. Let’s catch up soon.

Bless me father for I have sinned. It’s been far too long since my last confession. 1 month and 20 days to be exact. During that time, we’ve gone through quite a bit and I’d like give you guys a bit of an update, especially for those of you who can’t read Chinese and didn’t understand our previous post.

As I’ve mentioned, we have Thomas working with us for the past 2 months or so now and he’s been working very hard to get our super secret iPhone App ready for demo. In fact, he’s been working so hard that he didn’t even have time to blog about himself here. We also got my friend Bill to help out on the project and I’d like to thank him for the great work he’s done.

Since the departure of Andrew at the end of October, we’ve been pretty short staffed in the technical side so I’m happy to officially announce the arrival of a new full-time member to our team, Gilbert.

We hope that with the experience Gilbert brings to our Mod-Squad, we’ll, at long last be ready for the development workload that we are anticipating. Along with the design and marketing work that’s brewing in the pipeline, we’ll be working on a web front-end in the coming months to go along with our iPhone App before it’s ready for release. But for now, here are a few more spy shots of our App code name: Avalon.

We’ll be having our Christmas Party in TST tonight and I’ve given everyone tomorrow off to recover for the Christmas weekend. Expect to see pictures from the party sometime soon. I’m done making promises I can’t keep so I’ll be as vague as possible from now on; honest to blog.

By the way, how do you like our new look? It’s not completely done yet but we just can’t hold ourselves back any longer. It’s just going to get better, I’m hoping.

一個月來都沒有 update blog 了。

這個月都忙著新版本的website，快可給大家一個新的面貌！ 我們亦有在推廣網頁設計服務等一些公司的其他業務。

另外 iPhone App 那邊都有新進展，可以放到 iPhone 試玩，不過還有要改善的地方，我們正加緊努力中！遲些會有一些 screenshot 給大家看看。

另外一個好消息是在今個月中會有一位新同事加入 m3media！ 他將會專注負責 programming 及 system admin 的部份。 歡迎 Gilbert！

聖誕節快到了！預祝大家聖誕快樂 Merry Christmas！

I’m aware that this still isn’t the Tokyo write-up I promised over a week ago. I’m not a travel blogger or a food critic, so the process of constructing such an entry has been a much more difficult task then I expected. However, as this is my company blog, I thought I ought to keep everyone posted on what’s been going on with the company in recent weeks.

On a sad note, I was forced to let our beloved Andrew go at the end of last month (October). He’s been with us since the beginning but things just hadn’t worked out the way we’d like them to. It was with a heavy heart that we said our goodbyes. We appreciate everything he’s done for us and wish him the best of luck with all his future endeavors.

Fortunately, we’ve added Sir Thomas to our merry band of brothers (and sister) and although he is with us only on a part-time basis, he’s been a real positive influence since starting in mid-October, and I’ll have him introduce himself here soon.

On the production side, since the arrival of Thomas things have really started to pick up with our iPhone application development. Louis has been working tirelessly on our company’s branding and soon we’ll be pushing out a brand new look to hopefully go with our shiny new iPhone application come December. Yes, I know we look good now, but we will be looking even better in the coming weeks.

Along with the re-branding exercise, Wing, our marketing worker-bee, has been buzzing nonstop in preparation for our ongoing effort to find clients for the web design and development side of our business. After all, a small company like ours can’t afford to be without ongoing income from external sources if we are to stay afloat.

With the recent financial turmoil, companies are far more conservative with their spending. They are looking for a smarter way to spend their limited budget, and we might be able to position ourselves as the best bang for their buck given our status as a virtual unknown, hell bent on being the best at what we do.

Also, we’ve decided to go with HSBC for our staff’s MPF scheme as well as our business banking. It is to be hoped that this will simplify things.

My Tokyo story is till forthcoming, but don’t hold your breath, it could be a little while still.

I know I promised a write-up on my Tokyo trip, but, in light of all the wonderful articles written by my friends, and this monumental event which I unfortunately happened to have missed, I decided to make a brief comment in regards to my personal stance on the subject of free culture, the spirit of CC, and open source.

Indeed, this is what business analysts and pundits commonly referred to as a PR nightmare, when company officials publicly divulge their opinions impulsively, with complete disregard for the impact such maverick behavior can have on the company’s image.

However, I’m a firm believer in straight talk when it comes to my own philosophies. It is important for people to know who they are dealing with when they choose to work with our company.

This is what I think:

I wish I had read more on the subject; I wish I had been at the launch event; but above all, I wish I had been able to help spread the word about free culture more aggressively. I think this may very well be the one thing we have going that could pull the world out of it’s current financial tailspin.

What people sometimes fail to understand is that free culture doesn’t limit your potential for commercial success, but rather it promotes growth and collaboration while protecting your content and your brand so that you can monetize when the right opportunity comes-a-knocking.

When we can see past our own selfishness, greed, and insufficiencies; only then can we truly embrace free culture and understand the joy of being a part of an open community.

I don’t think that complete deregulation is a good idea, but I do believe that the sharing of good ideas is the way towards a better future. I hope that by instilling a sense of honor and fair-play to the next generation, they’ll be able to create a better world for themselves and generations to come. This is why my company focuses most of our energy on education. That is the least we can do.

Lately, it seems as though I’ve been attending quite a few conferences. They are all different in their own way and yet, somehow, they are beginning to blend into one jumbled mess of fractured memories consisting of fly-by-night chats with interesting characters, potential business contacts and the same desperate feeling of trying to sell or be sold.

This ADMA event was no different. But since it was clearly an event focused on marketing, they did manage to pull it off quite smoothly without appearing to be pandering or agenda driven. Kay Bayliss, the ADMA director and event organizer, was very helpful and made us all feel welcomed and at ease, even amidst the chaos of registration, lunch, and drinks at the end.

The topics throughout the day were interesting for the most part, even though most of the people in the audience seemed to be quite aware of the current state of digital marketing. Probably because most people at the event were involved in the industry in one way or another.

In the end, for me this event was, once again, not about the talks or the topics. Like BarCamp, this event was about immersing myself into a circle of like-minded people keen on making a difference in this rapidly changing world. Sure, we’re all trying to find more business, more clients, and more partners; we have to in order to survive. It is perhaps the idealist in me that still truly believes that we can do far better than just making a boatload of money together.

With behavioral targeting, social media, and better spam regulation, surely we can make the digital world a safer, simpler, and more vibrant place for ourselves and others alike. Evangelism aside, I think that Jay from Charged Media brought up a good point about our need to manage our increasing number of connections and be everywhere at once.

Taking his advice to the old school “physical” world, I traveled to Tokyo for TIFFCOM last week and met some cool people and a few interesting Japanese companies. I’ll be sharing my experience in my next entry so stay tuned.

是次 Event (Your Digital Day), 重點介紹 Digital Marketing。

相比 Traditional Marketing, Digital Marketing 無論方法與途徑都較多和複雜。不過是次活動最能吸引我的還是背後引申的問題，而非推廣方法如何花巧。

OMD 的 Jason 所提出的 Behavioral targeting 本來就不是什麼新鮮事, Google 多年前早已在其 Search Engine 中實行 User-habit Tracking。當中涉及到的 Privacy 是最為人所爭論, 不過那是完全是另一個問題, 暫且不在此詳談。

有了Behavioral targeting, 基於 demographic 的數據, 再進行相對的跟進, 理論上 marketing 的成效應該會更加好。不過一個家庭共同使用同一部電腦, 再加上共公場所所提供的上網服務, 資料的準確性進一步下降; 即使使用cookies也無補於事。而且 Microsoft Beta 2 測試中的 IE 8 提供了 Privacy Mode (IE 的市場佔有率一直高於 70% 以上 ), 都在挑戰傳統方法。

對於這方面, 未來 Behavioral targeting 如何提升成效, 以及何時出現新方法取以代之, 我們儘管拭目以代。

至於另一講題 – Rich Media, 同樣都是引起了我的關注。

對於 Rich Media, 我一直都有點保留; 問題在於應用範疇以及對象。

無可否認, 互動與及動畫元素確實比較容易引人注目, 然而注目之後顧客感受及反應又是另一回事。這正是大部份所謂 Creatvice Marketing 最常見的錯誤!

在進行 Rich Media 之前, 不應該只要認為遊戲娛樂性高, 畫面完美無暇就一定成功, 反而要先考慮對象是誰, 是次推廣的是那類服務那類產品? Right person, right thing, to the right target。

今天到了 Cyberport 參加一個由 Asia Digital Marketing Association (ADMA) 舉辦的 Event，名為 Your Digital Day，重點談論 Digital Marketing。

我同意 Start Creative (UK) 的 Jonathan 指出要創造持續商標，一定要創新！例如 Virgin，除了 Airlines，想不到還有 Galactic！有沒有看過廣告？ Check it out! 不知道我有沒有機會坐上那只太空船呢？還有 Virgin Mobile BITES! 另一個例子 Adidas，除了一系列的運動用品，波鞋，Adidas 也不斷創新一些新產品，如運動時配戴的電子裝置，在你跑步時用來不斷量度 BMI 和建議你應該用多少時間去跑多少公里，這個對我這些熱愛運動的人很有用。看見這些大品牌都是依靠創新來生存，所以我們都必須適應迅速轉變的科技和世界，以創新來發掘更多新事物，令人類的生活更方便，更多姿多采！

另一位演講者 OMD 的 Jason 談論有關 Behavioural Targeting。每個人有不同的習慣與生活模式，包括你和我。哪些人會對你的產品，服務有興趣？如何知道他們有沒有興趣？ Behavioural Targeting 根據用户的網上行為去分類顧客，收集 cookies。在顧客的角度，57% 是不願意被 track。那當然每個人都想有私隱，tracking 始終有點像被監視的感覺。我個人認為用户應該有選擇的權利。

專題討論包括 Ross，Andrew 和 William，話題是 Rich Media。Rich media 是一個非常重要的網上市場的途徑。我相信只有少量瀏覽者會自動 click 入廣告 banner，除非那個廣告很吸引。 Rich Media 可以與瀏覽者互動，包括互動廣告，錄影，音樂等，去達到使瀏覽者停留在網站的目的。因為互動可以大大增加廣告的趣味性，例如有些廣告加入 mini-games，我都會自然地 click 進去玩一玩。又例如 PCCW Wifi 的廣告，要用户以滑鼠進行拖拉動作，不但增加趣味性，而且令用户更深刻。

What is this BarCamp thing all about, I wondered? I looked through the brief description on the Facebook event page, checked out their event website, and even did a bit of wikiing, but frankly, I went to this event not really knowing what to expect. In the end, however, I came away with many new friends and learned quite a lot. Though I mostly sat back and watched the presentations and festivities, I felt for the first time like I was part of the community of “tech” people.

I thoroughly recommend that everyone interested in new technology and digital media development attend any or all upcoming events of this nature. Not only are they a lot of fun, but they are also very enlightening, allowing you to meet people who are smart, forward-thinkers.

Unlike other conferences and networking events I’d been to previously, BarCamp was much more relaxed and the topics were far less “engineered” and “sales pitch-like”. I think it’s great that we have events that are motivated by the desire to promote innovation, collaboration, and the sharing of knowledge, rather then by unadulterated greed, greed, and more greed.

I hope that at next year’s BarCamp I’ll have something to share.

My friend Vincent from my primary school days wrote this rousing note on Facebook reviewing the iPhone after using it for a little more than a week. It’s one of the most thorough personal reviews of our beloved “Jesus Phone” to date (in my biased opinion). I’m reposting it here with his permission so that those of you who visit our blog can get an honest, outside take on the iPhone from a user’s perspective. Please check out Vincent’s website and his blog for other articles on various subjects including travel and food.

Vincent’s Article:

I was using the iPhone for a week, and I guess I can give some comments on this Invention of the Year 2007 (by Times Magazine) now. I have been using this system for a year since I got an iPod Touch, and I am pretty familiar with how this system works.

Mac OS on iPhone is definitely one of the best systems I have used so far on mobile devices. I won’t go into the details of the features and functions this Apple phone has, and you can visit Apple.com/iPhone for more information. Here, I will tell you more about the good and bad things about it, so that you know more other than what Apple and other magazines say in the usability aspects.

Smoothest System, to use and to jailbreak

Seriously some people said that the system was pretty hard to control, and I have no idea why. With that few buttons and gestures to control the phone, I don’t know what the difficult part is. Some other people said that it was easy to use, but Mac computers were not. That further baffled me. They are the same system and take the same approach in interface design, how come people feel different on the two systems? I just don’t understand.

Anyway, I took less than 90 minutes to set up the phone and also jailbreak it. I installed many useful programs and turned it back to a phone that I can accept. I mean, iPhone actually missed quite some functions, and some people were complaining about all these important programs including MMS and video capturing. I got all of them working for me now. While I would call them stupid, I also want to say that if you use iPhone, you need to spend some time on it and explore, and learn how to take advantage of the system. If you don’t bother to spend time, or you expect it to be like other phones with everything installed so that you don’t need to worry, then you shouldn’t have bought this iPhone.

Missing Pieces

One of the major things missing form iPhone is definitely the copy-and-paste function, but reports found that Firmware 2.2 Beta sent by Apple to developers already embedded with some kind of copy-and-paste framework, together with Finder and Spotlight things. If that is true, the coming final v2.2 will turn iPhone into the real mobile computer platform.

Another thing that most people complain about is Safari. It just crashes suddenly when you are surfing the web. Apple addressed this in a report once, saying that it was caused by overloading of scripts in a web page. No matter what they tried to defend, it is a serious bug. I can’t bear the fact that this iPhone system has a Windows-like piece of software.

Also, after installing like 15 apps on my iPhone, the system starts to lag a little bit. Maybe it happens when you have themes loaded into it through Winterboard, but it sounds like it can be easily dragged down in speed by the apps. I guess Apple has to look into this seriously. If you use iPhone, you also need to bear the speed. Don’t expect your contact list springs up like instantly, nor should you expect that the SMS can come up in 2 seconds. You just have to slow down your biological clock.

Stupid Plans with Stupid Apps

Carrier plans definitely give people headaches before owning this little gadget. Without the Internet, iPhone is nothing but an iPod only. However, many service providers has already set up different traps for you to go into, so that while you enjoy your surfing, they get the most out of your wallet.

I don’t know why some apps need to connect to the Internet when you open them, but still you have to be very careful. Some free apps have ads and so unknowingly you connect to the Internet and start the counter. Of course you can also turn on the airplane mode but that would be lame to do so when you are on the train or on the street.

Best Part of the Apple

So what is the advantages of using the iPhone? For me, it is to complete my Apple series on the desk. Okay, I am just joking, but seriously, if you are using iCal, Address Book and other Apple software or computers, iPhone will go seamlessly with your daily routine. You may be thinking that other PDA or smart phones already do the same job but what is best is that, like Mac OS X on Macintosh, it is the environment and interface that make your life easily and prettier. With finger gestures controlling all the apps like slideshows and music, you feel like manipulating data and digital information. The Interface is so easy to understand, and that means a lot.

Of course, the animations and translucent panels are very attractive. I am a graphic and interface designer, and when I see the name, titles, information panels and buttons slide up on my iPhone when someone is calling, I feel good. It is just cool shit. It feels like being in some high-tech and futuristic movies. That’s something no phones and gadgets so far can do. Even PSP only has a pretty interface, but not a wow one.

Another thing is the keyboard. While people complain about this kind of touchpad keyboard to be too sensitive or hard to hit the keys, they don’t realize that this keyboard is one of the best inventions. Just because your fingers are bigger than any peanuts, this keyboard is designed so that it guesses what you want to input. It suggests corrections which can be taken with just spacebar, so that you can just type and apply without selecting yes or no. I type so fast that I usually type the messages 40% wrong, but it corrects everything for me and leaves no mistake in the end. Isn’t that so great? That’s why I don’t have a problem now to actually write blogs on the iPhone.

Learn to Appreciate, not just at the iPhone

I have to say, if you want to use iPhone, you must appreciate all the design and details it possesses. But then you may say, it becomes an attitude, a lifestyle and passion to design. Yes it does. I believe that this world seriously needs us to appreciate life more. We tend to miss so much detail and we take many things for granted. You can buy the iPhone because you are rich or because many others have it already, but then you are actually wasting your money. You may not care, but you ARE wasting money. You buy the iPhone because you appreciate its design including its accelerator and proximity sensor. You like the interface because you love all the animations and panel designs. Now that really means it when you say I like it.

Too many people around have it just because they want to, and that’s it. They don’t know that you can double-click the home button to get shortcuts, and they don’t know that you can slide right to delete something. They don’t even know the term jailbreaking. If you are this ignorant to own a phone, to me it is just a pure laughing stock. Or should I say, I feel sad that so many people become slaves of vanity, and even more sad for the designers who spent so much time to create these beautiful things.

So if you have iPhone and you realize now that you know so little, don’t worry. Try to explore more about your gadget by testing it and reading articles about it. Learn how to appreciate, and learn how to look into details. Remember, it is really about an attitude to life, not just mere ownership of a phone.