All Posts by ‘George Chen’

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Hutch 3 Hong Kong + I-mode. WTF >.>

July 2, 2007

The current issue of Hong Kong youth culture consumer magazine East Touch did a huge cover infommercial on the Hutchsion launch of I-mode in Hong Kong.

Hong Kongnese’ worship of Japanese culture is understandable, but why border with I-mode (something that’s last gen.) when we are in the age of XHTML (aka WAP 2.0 – the non-gateway mobile internet), iPhone, and turly content-rich open Mobile Web?

At the same time, Hutch is also pushing “open-garden” in Europe so I am not sure what’s going on there.

Take a quick look of the the Hutch Hong Kong I-mode Web Site you will see boring handsets. If you thought I-mode means bringing bleeding edge Japanese handset to the Hong Kong market, then prepared to be disappoint. Sorry, no super cool handsets for you Hong Kong Hipsters. 🙂

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Two Good Ad Campaigns

May 4, 2007

Two really well executed Ad campaign everyone should take note.

First one
is the current 2007 Toyota Prius “Yes!” campaign. In the TV commercial, you’ll
see Prius owners answering the question “Would you buy another Prius again?” by
holding up a big “Yes!” sign. The commercial itself is merely ok, but the brilliant
part is Toyota also sent the Prius owners (like myself) the same “Yes!” sticker
– hoping the Prius owner would put the stick on their cars and be a part of the integrated
marketing effort. Good stuff.

Second campaign
I like a lot is the viral campaign by Joost. Try to build demand for the P2P TV
app, instead of freely available free download; you have no easy way to sign up
for Beta. The only way one can get your hands on the app is by getting an
invite through a friend (similar to how the original gmail invite works). Since
Joost allows one to invite many friends (100?) into the Beta trial, you start
to see bloggers announcing on their blogs that they have invites for you to
join. All you have to do is to leave a comment on the blog. I saw many blog
sites that did that, and MANY people leave comments on those sites. Again,
being viral and let the users do the work for you…. It’s all good.

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Microsoft Deepfish

March 28, 2007

Want to experience "full" internet browsing (that promised by iPhone) on your cel phone today? On a non-iPhone? On a Windows Mobile phone?! 😛

I suggest you check out Microsoft’s Deepfish. (Note: at the time of writing, the limited public beta registration is closed)

If you have seen Steve Jobs’ iPhone demo, you should have a pretty good idea on what does "enhanced browsing" means. To put it simply, these type browser rendering technology take a snapshot of an existing Web page and resize it down (like a photoshop scaling effect) for the mobile screen.

During the dinner time, I played with Deepfish for about 15 mins (my wife was pretty unhappy about it) on my  O2 Atom, and it looks to be a pretty promising technology.

Some quick thoughts:

– the user experience is optimized for Windows Mobile Smart Phones vs. the stylus friendly Pocket PC
– it took me a while to realize the Center Selection Key (CSK) pretty much does everything since I am a Pocket PC user that’s used to stylus input
– I hope in the future version we will find the stylus input to be usable for Pocket PC version
– some zooming animation is needed to indicate if one is zooming-in or zooming-out
– the rendering speed on Wi-Fi is very good
– the rendering speed over EDGE is not acceptable
– my test device is an O2 Atom (which has a pretty speedy process) so my positive feedback might not apply to older or slower Windows Mobile devices
– partial / progressive rendering of a page should be nice to have in the future

So far so good. I hope the folks at MS will keep this up.

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The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness

February 16, 2007

Steven Levy is not stranger in chronicle all things Apple. Over the years, he wrote a book about the launch of the original Macintosh (Insanely Great) and countless stories Apple and Apple products in general interest magazines like Newsweek. The new (relative) book by him gave a pretty good insight into the development of the past and current generations of iPod – similar to the what he did with the book Insanely Great.

In The Perfect Thing, you’ll find out what’s the first song ever played on the iPod . You’ll also find out more about the click wheel, the design & engineering process of the iPod. If you are in any form of product development you’ll gain interesting insight on how things get done and can be insansely great at the same time.

There are other parts of the the book I don’t enjoy as much (mainly the cultural part – it’s just ok), but the NYC subway iPod Music Smack Down is certainly pretty funny. The short side track story about the history of the Sony Walkman is also pretty nice.

With all the talks about DRM Music right now, this is also a reference book on the subject matter – and how that relates to Jobs and the iPod.

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Yahoo! Go 2.0 Gamma

February 16, 2007

Gamma version of Yahoo! Go was the very last thing I did for Yahoo! It’s officially now. There are still rough edges here and there, but it’s very close to a final shipping form – as least very close to how we design and spec. it. 😉

People kept telling me they can’t get their hands on Yahoo! Go 2.0 when it first came out. Now I have no problem getting the latest update OTA (over the air) as I have no insider information about the product developement anymore.

Congratulations to the folks and Hamburg and Berlin. You guys did some amazing work in J2ME! 🙂

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LAI Again

February 12, 2007

The boys Los Amigos are back at the Bay Area *again*. With the all political unrest at Venezuela I think they should just stay… 😛

Anyhoo, they are playing at the The Independent aka the old Justice League at Divisadero.  This is also the place where LAI played  MANY MANY years again – (5+).  So they are really back to where it all started.  Two night. Tomorrow and Wed. It should be great.

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Washington Mutual Branding

February 3, 2007

02032007133

Alison is a Washington Mutual customer (not me). Picking up the mail today, I saw "WaMu" branded mailer from Washington Mutual.

I have mixed feeling about this.

It’s one thing "Apple Computer Inc." changing their name to "Apple Inc.", or Nike being associate with the "swosh". I guess other financial institution simply has a easier time with their name such as "Schwab", "Fidelity", or "BA" (Band of America). "Washington Mutual" does seems long and serious.

Even before WaMu officially started calling themselves WaMu, customer (such as Alison) has been calling their bank "WaMu". 

Interesting side note, "WaMu" direct Chinese translation is "華美" – which is the Chinese name used by the East West Bank in the US. Branding crisis, anyone?