Made in Hong Kong, Happenings in Hong Kong

Kanchoo, a Simple and Elegant iPhone app for premium news publishing

Today, I met with Kanchoo, a Hong Kong base startup, and got a life demo of their content management system and the Kanchoo native iPhone application. The web based Content Management System is very easy to use. A news media person will take no time to learn how to enter news categories and articles into the CMS. Within minutes of "Publishing" the newly added articles, the content shows up beautifully on the iPhone. The Kanchoo application has all the nice reader features one expects from reading news on the iPhone. Their web site has a good summary and video demo. The product is scheduled to launch in May. Please wish them the best of success! It is made in Hong Kong!!

Who can use Kanchoo? If you are a news media, government agencies, academic institutions who have a steady volume of news publication and wish to delivered on the iPhone without worrying about the technical know how, Kanchoo can be your answer!


Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, on Charlie Rose Mar 06, 2009 tip #1

The interview has so much good information that I had taken 4 hours to watch the video in many pauses and written almost a full transcript of the interview. Over the next few weeks, I will take apart Schmidt's insight and views on various topics from this interview and apply to the topics discussed in this blog.

#1 How to decide the approach to monetize user generated content?

Since I just met with Kanchoo today, I thought I'll mention a few related comments from Schmidt on the topic of content publishing. Schmidt echoed many content publishers struggle in the challenge in monetizing user generated content. Schmidt categorize user generated content into three groups. If content has a massive audience, well he uses a really massive number: 20 Billion, then advertising is the way to go. If audience is "smaller", say 20 millions, he suggests using micro payment. The micro payment can be in the form of 1 cent, 3 cents, 5 cents for a viewing. If the content is of high premium value, such as research report contents. They have a very small audience but content is of high value to them, and those businesses or individuals likely can afford to pay for the specialized content. This third category is best to use subscription charge.

Well, the beauty of democracy and freedom of speech is it allows varying views to be expressed and heard. Wired Magazine 16.03 has an interesting and yet somewhat extreme view of the future of business, not constrained to content publishing. FREE! Why $0.00 is the future of business.



Web Wednesday, a social mixer for digerati of Hong Kong

Also learned today that Web Wednesday Hong Kong's next social is next Tuesday, April 7! Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress will be speaking about "The Bare, Naked Realities of Blogging". Click here for more information on Web Wednesday.