Moosh is a local web service that allows users to look up movies and book tickets online before actually going to the theater. You can check for showtimes, watch trailers, theaters that its playing at, seat availability and linking you to the online ticketing websites.

Moosh does a good job with accessibility also, where some local startups tend to overlook. Their mobile version and both Traditional Chinese and English language sites cater to both the local and the large expat community here. This site is appealing and comprehensive and could be the best site to gather movie info in Hong Kong.

Moosh was launched back in March 2009 and comes from the same team that developed aNobii, the social book cataloging website. Although the site is online, Moosh is still early in development and Moosh will slowly make its way to the market, this is likely because the bulk of focus is still on aNobii.

Hong Kong isn’t known as a place for web entrepreneurship, however, my friends at Anobii and Stepcase, two Hong Kong startups have quietly put together a plan which they hope will encourage local university students to get started in the startup world. With the economy at where it is today, hiring freeze, shrinking workforce, students should take advantage of this and get the experience here.

Working together with the Entrepreneur Center at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the goal of the From 0 to 0.1 program is to get students to build a web service in 13 weeks, basically during their summer vacation. If during the program you and your team are on to something great, they may even set you up with some angel investors to pitch to (but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here).

This looks to be a promising program and could give a much needed kick start to tech minded individuals here. Interested students should seriously consider this.

Listening and engaging with the community is more important than ever. Social media tools allows them to freely discuss your brand openly. We have seen reports that social media spending by large brands have increased year over year since 2008 in the US. In Hong Kong, engaging the community is probably the last thing on most brands’ agenda.

Yahoo! Hong Kong, Hong Kong’s leading portal, has long provided a blog service here and can safely say most locals use them more than other blog providers. They have their own product blog (in Chinese) and it’s one of the most, if not the most engaging blogs in Hong Kong. I have never seen people comment like this, locally. The number of comments are anywhere between the teens to the thousands for a single post, the Yahoo! HK blog user community is buzzing.

Continue reading ‘Ignoring the community - a look at Yahoo! Hong Kong’

Thumbdive, currently in private beta, is a microblogging/lifestreaming app that allows you to privately share content, opposite of what other services are offering. Thumbdive was developed by Airgini, a HKSTP incubated company. As I know, Airgini has been around since late 2007 but nothing came about until their Thumbdive product launch in late December as well as being featured on iPhone app store last month.

Similar to other services, Thumbdive lets you write your own updates, but in 150 characters or less (by the way, in Hong Kong, some carriers allow for 160 characters for SMS). Updates created within Thumbdive are shared privately within your SharingPools, or user groups, that you create and manage your audience. You can also choose to aggregate your already public content from popular social mediums, such as Twitter, Flickr, blogs, Facebook status and last.fm.

Continue reading ‘Thumbdive - Privately share your lifestreams’

Yat Siu, the founder and CEO of Outblaze, has noted on his Facebook status that his online messaging and collaboration service has been bought by IBM, details are found here.

I have mentioned in my Twitter before that there has been a handful of acquisitions by large corporations in Asia and US, late last year and into this year. I am now listing them here. With this intent purchase by IBM, the lists now includes Hong Kong.

Here’s the list of startups that I’m aware of (and therefore probably incomplete) that have been acquired since September 2008:

Continue reading ‘Outblaze’s messaging service (to be) acquired by IBM’