Asia on the Edge (AOTE) is a regional platform aggregating creative entrepreneurs and arts practitioners with the aim of incubating new ideas and trends from and of Asia and Asian origins.
Between 24 August to 9 September, AOTE 2012 comprising of two tracks: Generating Ideas and ReGenerating Communities will continue to serve culture and society while stimulating and engendering creativity. This year’s festival has been expanded to feature an in-conjunction programme: Causeway Exchange (CEX), a joint arts and culture initiative between Malaysia and Singapore that serves as the premier exchange platform between arts and creative industries of both countries.
Generating Ideas serves as a catalyst for the development of new content from the Asian creative communities. It features keynote lectures by leading Asian creative entrepreneurs, thought leaders and change agents, and an open pitch platform – Pitch It! – for upcoming creative entrepreneurs, providing an opportunity for new ideas to be identified for incubated. Themed Creative Mapping of Asia, Generating Ideas @ AOTE 2012 will highlight the development of creative hotspot sectors and identify industry trends in Asia, specially markets such as Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.
In March 2012, Generating Ideas was held in Cebu as a lead up to AOTE 2012. It aimed to catalyze business collaborations and seeks to encourage and actualize the development of new content from creative industries beyond exchange of ideas between Singapore and the Philippines. Subsequent lead up programmes, Generating Ideas @ Jakarta and Generating Ideas @ Kuala Lumpur, have been scheduled to be held on 3rd and 7th July 2012 respectively.
ReGenerating Communities fulfils its aim of serving community and culture through creating regional and international awareness of the rich and diverse heritage of Asia. It focuses on providing a platform to showcase Asian cultural practice and practitioners whose works are in danger of oblivion or whose works have revitalized and regenerated a community. ReGenerating Communities @ AOTE 2012 will feature such artists and groups from Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore.
AOTE 2012 & CEX 2012 hopes to facilitate greater opportunities for placement and exchange programmes for the arts and culture industries for Singapore and Malaysia in Asia. The annual festival, held bi-annually in Singapore, will showcase multiple genres including music theatre, comedy, theatrical play, 3-Dimentional art, photography, film, poetry and literary arts in its third edition.
Programme Selection
(1)Pitch It!: USD$ 110 per pax (2) Conference: USD$260 per pax (3) Pitch It! and Conference: USD$320 per pax
Add On Programme
(1) Sundown Cruise: USD$80 per pax (2) Night Crawl- 1 Clun & 1 Pub: USD$60 per pax (3) Sundown and Night Crawl: USD$120 per pax
Additional Information
Accomdation are charged $170 per night Enjoy an early bird discount of 10% if you sign up 31st July 2012 Also enjoy a group discount of 15% if you sign up 3 or more people in total!
Posted: May 31st, 2012 | Author:Gang Lu | Filed under:apple, Baidu, CHINA | Comments Off
One big reason for me to have my iOS device jailbroken is that its pre-intalled input method for Chinese is not convenient to use. Using QWERTY keyboard to input Chinese is slow; you can not really input a long sentence with it, and it is a headache if you need input English & Chinese mixed message as you have to switch between English and Chinese input method.
Good news is that Apple seems to realize this issue and wants to introduce a solution. Instead of developing a new input method for Chinese, Apple might be working with Baidu to have Baidu’s mobile input method pre-installed into iOS. We heard this rumor yesterday from an experienced entrepreneur, but he refused to tell us who’s his news source.
We contacted Michale Wong, the founder of Touchpal, a Shanghai-based startup which claims the No.2 popular input method in the world. He told us, in Chinese local market, Sogou is clearly the No.1 in input method market, and Baidu now has taken the 2nd in terms of number of downloads. The newly released Baidu input method supports iOS5.1.1, and comes with cool features such as voice input, cloud library, pinyin input, stroke input etc.
What I am quite curious about is that, if the rumor is confirmed, does that mean Chinese version of iOS will also have Baidu search as the default search engine, and Baidu map the replacement of Google Map? That would be another sad story for Google in China.
Looking at Chinese social media space, we see the fast growing of Weibo (led by Sina and Tencent), going-down of social networks Kaixin001 and RenRen, the missing of Facebook and rising of social ecommerce. The following infographic produced by Chee Seng of bestfreeonline.net gives a good overview of the social media in China.
The high-resolution version can be downloaded here.
Posted: May 31st, 2012 | Author:Ben Chiang | Filed under:CHINA, mobile | Comments Off
Guess what, couple days after the New York Times reported that Facebook might be working on a smartphone for a second try, Renren was rumored to dig its head into a proprietary mobile OS which built atop Android.
The Chinese Facebook has been working on the system for several months, currently it’s still beta testing the OS while a release could come as early as next week, local report citing people familiar with the matter. But we didn’t know the phone would be OEMed by which mobile vendor. Renren once teamed up with HTC to launch a device targeting social networking addicts.
A screenshot of the OS captured online shows that, Renren has integrated a bunch of its own offerings into Android, like Renren Album, Renren Passport, and Renren Radio.
I guess Renren is facing the same problem that Facebook now concerns, namely users’ quick shift from PC to mobile will make them even harder to make money off their offerings as limitations like small screen size and less ad space persist.
Out of the 40.1 million users who logged into the service in April, 39% of which were from some sort of mobile devices. A situation similar to what Facebook is facing as the U.S. SNS empire though has been witnessing a big surge in non-American markets like India or South Asia a lot of these new traffic was routed through mobile phones.
A place to find out today’s most popular social entertainment, Starcount counts activities from 11 of the biggest social networking sites in the world and aggregates data into dynamic charts.
The Singapore-based startup is also a place to discover and even connect with the world’s greatest entertainers.
Charts on Starcount gives users insights into who and what is the all time most popular, who or what is today’s most popular, and who and what are the ones to watch. Charts cover broad topics ranging from celebrities, politicians to travel destinations, and can even be further segmitized according to geographical location.
Levels of popularity on Starcount are based on two basic principles – Engagement and quantity. These data are then pulled from social networks, microblogs and video sharing. To prevent inaccuracy in the data, social activities that denote any sentiments are not factored in.
Starcount Logo
Within the next quarter of this year, Starcount is also expected to launch the fan charts; charts based on social gamifications, which will give users their own autonomy to create their own charts, and personalized their own contents. These fan charts will also chart the users themselves based on their popularity on social media. This is in hopes of creating a “social media democracy” whereby fans can be active and become stars themselves. For example, Lady Gagita, a Filipino artist who is an extremely passionate double of Lady Gaga would probably be one of the contenders to top the Lady Gaga fan charts.
Lady's Gagita profile on Starcount
The idea will culminate into an ambitious event in 2013 whereby the “oscars of social media” will be held to celebrate the people at the top of the charts. This includes celebrities themselves, together with fans that are at the top of the fan charts meeting together in one event.
Other than merely providing charts, CEO of Starcount, Drew Thomson, also mentioned that Starcount is able to give “a tangential view to how people look at things” by being able to view all of the star’s recent social activities on one page.
Today marks the official launch of Starcount and a symbolic celebration of the journeys of many more discoveries to come.
Phyzios [J] has released an iOS game application “Battleship Craft,” which uses its own particular physics engine. Download is free.
“Battleship Craft” is a naval battle game which fuses the fun of manufacturing with real action. Users use various weapons and block parts in the 3D space to build an original battleship and can engage in battle with other users. The battleship’s actions use Phyzios’ particular physics engine, and real physical phenomenon such as buoyancy, water resistance, gravity, and so on, are replicated. Depending on things like the method of fixing screws and the rudder, and the combination and arrangement of parts, the ship’s movements at sea, ebbing and flowing, speed, rotation, stamina, and the like, will change. In “Battle Mode,” matching takes place via Ad Hoc or Game Center, and you can challenge users from all over the world in real time depending on what’s going on that morning or evening or whenever. Furthermore, the background music in the game offered by the Marine Self Defense Force (Performance: Marine Self Defence Force Band) uses the marching songs “Battleship” and “ShikiShima Warship”
In addition to the Malabar team, Indonesia will also be represented by Org.com in Imagine Cup 2012. While Malabar competes in the software design category, Org.com will compete in the final of Imagine Cup 2012 for the game design: phone category. Org.com will present its mobile game, Cronus.
For this competition, Org.Com sends Muhammad Hilman Beyri, Prisyafandiafif Charifa, Alfian Ramadhan, and Mahardiansyah Kartika. All of them are students of Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) class of 2009. Org.Com is actually a community of students similar to Creacle. Both of them are communities of students who like to create games and participate in game competitions and together have a dream to build a professional game studio once they graduate from the university.
Org.Com with its game, Jonk! was also a finalist of Mobile Games Developer War 3 held last week. Prior to that, it also released a game titled The Garbager and has created Gundu Tubruk and Pasar The Game.
Different from the software design category which has regional “preliminary phase”, participants of game design: phone in Imagine Cup 2012 will directly compete globally. To reach the final stage of Imagine Cup 2012, they have to pass 3 phases.
In the first phase, the participants are asked to send documents of the game design or storyboard. All participants who send the game design pass to the second phase. Then in the second phase, participants resend the game design or storyboard with additional description on the game play, gameplay video and playable game. Participants who made it to third phase are required to resend the game design or storyboard with the gameplay, gameplay video, playable game, 3 screenshots of the game and one game trailer video.
From the three phases, 10 finalists were chosen and will present their work at the final of Imagine Cup in Sidney, Australia in July. Org.com with its Cronus game will compete with Monkey Pepper (Brazil) with Little Changes, Wicked Games (Czech Republic, Yggdrasil: The Tree Of Life), Ecosia (France, Ecosia), Swifteam (France, Swifty Ball), Turtle Games (Hungary, Rum Rum), Gaon Nuri (Korea, Knocking Hope), LevelUp (Lithuania, Never Future), AVe (Romania, City Quest), and Drexel Dragons (United States, MathDash).
Even though they are competing in the game design: phone category, all participants will still carry the main theme of Imagine Cup 2012; which is “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems”. More information on how Org.com team wraps the theme in a cool game called Cronus will be explained in the next article. May Org.com team and Cronus be able to bring good name to Indonesia in the Imagine Cup 2012 final.
Six months ago, Evernote introduced a mobile app that would enhance the way people connect and stay connected. The free app called ‘Evernote Hello‘ that aims to make remembering contact information easy by associating faces with location, time, notes and and personal encounters. First released on the app store, the app is now available for download from the Google Play store.
Evernote Hello has three parts to it. It remembers the:
1. The people you meet. To add someone new to the the Evernote Hello’s contact, you can : (1)Add the information yourself (2) Pull their information from the address book or (3) Have your new contact input their details
Image: Evernote
2. The mosaic of encounters. This is the home screen of Evernote Hello that strikingly resembles the home screen of the Windows phone. The mosaic layout features the faces of people you have met in a chronological order. Since the images of people you have encountered are placed chronologically, multiple encounters with the same person will appear multiple times on the home screen.
This also means that the home screen will only be meaningful if images of encounters are captured consistently. Else, it will just appear as a collage of still images.
3. Your profile, now with LinkedIn. After syncing your LinkedIn account with Evernote Hello, the app quickly build a rich profile of the people you have met by referencing to information on their LinkedIn profiles.
With a lot more additional intelligent features like predicting the people that you might be meeting according to your upcoming events (based on your calendar) and recent call and text history, there is no reason why you should be missing out on this amazing app!
I have quite a bit of trouble remembering faces and names. Working with e27 allows me too meet many new faces and I have since collected quite a big stack of name cards, of which some I have difficulties of putting a face to the name. I have just downloaded the mine and can’t wait to explore it. Leave a comment below to let me know of your thoughts on the app.
This post is a popular rebuttal challenging 张小龙 (Allen Zhang’s) idea on user centered design (UCD). The critic here is 尹广磊 (Guanglei Yin), founder and community manager of the rapid prototyping tool, Axure.
This is part of the translated series aimed to elucidate the Chinese internet industry to foreigners what topics are trending, what people are discussing, what thought leaders are saying in China.
The original post (Chinese language) was written on May 11th, the English translation and all errors therein are my own.
About the respondent:
Guanglei Yin is the founder of WebPPD.com and Axure.org focused on rapid prototyping and training. He is also a web application developer, interaction designer, consultant, trainer, online community organizer and promoter Axure.
About the original author:
Allen Zhang is the product director for the highly successful Chinese unified communicator app “Weixin” or “Wechat” from Tencent. By end of March, Weixin surpassed 100 million active users in 433 days and still growing strong today. Allen is also the chief designer and architect for 2 other products that exceeded 100 million users namely Foxmail and QQmail.
Guanglei’s response to the 3 points that Allen made in his translated post:
1. It is hardly conclusive to deem iPhone’s unlock mechanism “natural” just because 3 year olds can unlock it. All we can draw from this observation is that it is extremely easy to learn. Remember the first generation iPhone commercial? The first 5 seconds showed the audience how to unlock, and then it showed how to navigate to other screens and apps by swipe and touch. In subsequent commercials, Apple showed that we could zoom in and out of map by pinch and expand with two fingers. We were amazed with this design and we learned quickly. But these commercials really served as user education; a user who is shown once to achieve mastery still needs to be shown. Also, I seriously doubt 3 year olds find it natural to switch between single and multiple fingers in navigating touch screens.
2. Claiming directory and document concept is not natural in PC is bogus. Having documents and directories on desktop is the most natural thing on any device. In the case for iOS, if you overlap two apps, it forms a directory. While it is true that iOS is more protective of its system files making root and other system directories/files inaccessible. iOS made that as a conscious choice because Apple thinks regular users would only cause detriment if they had access. The more accurate differentiation here is PC is more open while iOS is more closed. It does not mean iOS abandons the directory and document structure.
For the argument made in “natural scrolling”, it is important to note this “natural” feature was not available in prior to OSX Lion. Scrolling with two fingers to move in the direction of the content is the same natural movement as a mouse. Sure, it is opposite direction from the PC’s touchpad, but all it added is another option for the user… claiming natural does not makes the case. Also, it is worth arguing that the real reason Apple added natural scrolling option is to compensate for the new full screen feature navigated by swiping in the direction opposite of the multi-finger movement. The designers at Apple realized if natural scrolling weren’t added, it would be awkward for users to switch between horizon vs. vertical scrolling logic. So this move, I believe, is using logic to compensate for design, not because it is really natural.
3. Claiming Weixin Shake is a primal to get to know people around the user is bull. If this logic were true, we’d see more physical gestures than complex language development in our modern society. The truth is, designers at Tencent knew the built-in accelerometer and gyroscope sensors in smartphones are fun and interactive so they leveraged it to increase the entertainment value of the app. Also, this isn’t their first time leveraging physics in software; QQ music adapted shake to skip to the next song but I would still argue this action is hardly common place. I feel Bump’s shake to exchange information is more of an exception than a rule. Can you imagine someone on the street shaking his phone to get to know the people around him? I think if I see someone shaking his phone on the street, the natural tendency is to think he’s lost signal during a call or that he’s crazy.
There are two other examples where Tencent stumbles in being natural (not mentioned in Allen’s post):
Tencent saw that Path lets users swipe right and swipe left to access menus and navigation and it tries to copy this capability to its QQ mobile messenger. But while Path swipe to switch between menus, QQ’s swipe closed the chat window rather than temporarily switching to something else.
QQ’s installation on MacOS on its official website asks the user to drag from left to right to enable download (like software installation in the MacOS environment). To me, this is hugely unnatural to be employed on web downloads. What is natural is the default flying animation to the downward arrow on the top right corner in Safari. It’s completely unnecessary to reinvent the wheel in the wrong place.
The book “Don’t make me think” is only an ideology not a methodology. There are multiple methods to execute to an idea but the most important thing is to encompass user behavioral permutation and thought complexity into the design and prototyping process. Then, exceed user expectation and deliver something that surprises them. This is are a lot more useful than debating what is natural and what is easy to learn.
Mindtalk, an Indonesian based startup, an online social channel which allows you to discuss your interested topic with similar users, recently announced that they have launched their Nokia app, on top of their Android, BlackBerry, and Google Chrome app.
While the announcement of its deployment onto the Nokia platform as opposed to the iOS platform may come as surprising to some, the decision was made entirely based on the overall marketshare of Nokia in the Indonesian smartphone market. Danny Oei Wirianto, founder of Mindtalk, commented that the Nokia platform is still one of the top choices for developers and has a strong brand presence in indonesia. Nokia Lumia is also one of the fastest growing smartphone among the Nokia line up compare its previous smartphone series.
Photo: Mindtalk comes to Nokia Lumia
“In case of Nokia App, we are focusing to build on Nokia Lumia Windows phone platform because our their current marketshare that still strong in overall Indonesia handphone market, even though other players such as Samsung has gaining their market share significantly in Indonesia. Hence the situation, since we saw the Windows Phone 7 ability, we believe that Nokia Lumia series will have a great chance to make a come back for smartphone category and the Nokia Lumia give a fresh air to smartphone landscape by giving customers an alternative solution for the smartphone users in Indonesia side-by-side with Android and iOS Market,” says Danny.
On top of that, Mindtalk has also established an agreement with Nokia and Microsoft to have Mindtalk pre-installed in the latest Lumia 610 series for the Indonesia region, and is hoping to do the same for the rest of the Southeast Asia region.
While it may take time to develop an iOS version for the app, using native language iOS, Objective-C/Xcode, Danny told us that they have big plans with its upcoming iPhone app. The Mindtalk team is currently working on several mobile apps and is certainly on track with their development. “In terms of features right now we are developing a feature that we already plan from beginning. I can say that the Mindtalk that you see right now is only 70 percent of what we are aiming. Hope by the end of September we will be able to roll out with our final version and get out from Beta mode.”
