The Global Venture

I read a very comprehensive article from Agnus Lau's blog 852signal about Web 2.0 s in Hong Kong.

In Hong Kong, there are several options to finance a Web 2.0 start-up and most of them happen to be the Government of the HKSAR (Hong kong Special Administrative Region). At this moment Venture Capitalists are not very present in the web 2.0 panorama of Hong Kong. However here there is a very complete list of Venture Capital firms in Hong Kong.

These are three of the possibilities offered by the Government:

• Small Entrepreneur Research Assistance Programme (SERAP): it offers a grant of up to HK$2 million (around 200.000 €) on a dollar-for-dollar matching basis, in the form of cold cash or manpower
• Incubation Programme @ HKSTP:  offers some sort of funding and office space for the startups
• Cyberport IncuTrain Centre: offers some sort of funding and office space for the startups

Appart from these Government schemes, there is:

• Youth Business Hong Kong program that provides HK$100,000 (around 10.000 €) interest free loan for small startups.

Requirements: 

• Being permanent Hong Kong citizens.
• Have a registered business

As I already expected, financing a start-up in Asia is not easy, above all if you are not a permamente Hong kong citizen (which is my case). Furthermore the capital offered, about all by the Youth Business Hong Kong program, is not very high.

According to a press release published in February 2005, Siemens is working on a post-it system like the one I have just explained in my previous post.

My friend and co-author of this blog already started talking about Siemens Mobile Post-it in a previous post.

Siemens calls it Digital Graffiti Service.

The press release can be found on Siemens corporate site and articles about it can be found on specialized sites like Infoworld or PCWorld.

The press release estates: "At present the developers anticipate that the graffiti system will be rolled out in about two years time, most likely starting with applications for tourism and in the exhibition sector."

I would like to make two remarks:

• Effectively, tourism sector would welcome an application like this, my idea is more oriented to user generated content and the general public.
• We are already in July 2007. More than two years have passed after the press  release and Siemens Graffiti has made little effect in the market.
  

Building blocks is a concept that has been around for a while, but I did hear it out loud for the first time in the Google Developer Day 2007.

They were talking about the idea of building web applications based on certain blocks. An example: mashups based on google maps like frappr.

Building complex applications is easier than ever before due to the use of there building blocks and their APIs. Facebook has seen this model, and now they are opening their API so everyone can create applications that run in their environment.

I see two trends here:

One trend is to build stuff out of the blocks, like say, mix twitter with google maps and you get twittervision.

The other trend is to spread your services out of your main website. Instead of having everything centralised so users have to come in to get the good stuff, you allow bits of it to live out there in widgets/gadgets in neighbourhoods like netvibes or in igoogle, Facebook, myspace and even in blogs.

The good thing about this is that people do not have to go to your website in order to get to know you. They may hate you and your website, and your website, but if in a friend"s community page they see some block they like (oh that lovely pink mini-calendar for special candy moments!!), they will click on it and get it instantly, thus spreading the word, and so the viral marketing begins.

Wow, that easy?
The key of course is to have a good product. I strongly believe as a user that if the thing looks bad, I won"t click on it, and if I click and I am disappointed, another click later it will be history and I'll never look back. No matter how big your marketing budget is, it won"t save you there. You can trick people into clicking once, but you have to win their hearts and minds to stay.

The idea we are discussing here is similar to this one from Siemens.

As a small company, if we start doing something similar we should be able to get some smaller working prototype much, much faster (months). Big companies tend to develop big products with longer development time, our chance being small is to act fast and outmanoeuvre them.