Harbork is a new social network from Hong Kong. It is currently in private beta and they demo-ed it to the crowd at the Startup Hong Kong event couple weeks ago.

The idea behind this is allowing their users to monetize for the traffic that is generated from the content uploads, including videos, classifieds, polls, audio, files, photos and other media onto their personal page or in groups they’ve created. So, the more pageviews you generate, the more money you get, simple enough.

Users and organizations can also create premium groups and charge members to join and in this case, Group owners can earn 70%-100% of the revenue it generates and Harbork will take what’s left.

I do like the idea of allowing members to make a few dollars and it encourages them to create original content. However, there will be the concern of copyrighted materials floating around and they’ll need a filter them somehow before things pick up.

Aside from taking a cut from the premium groups, their other source of revenue is with Google ads and believe they have plans to roll out other forms of advertising as they move along.

Update: made a change to the title, my brain went dead for a second.

While Hong Kong has started to take on the idea of Barcamp unconferences, Singapore is initiating these events all year round. On top of Barcamps there, Entrepreneur 27 Singapore has been hosting their own unconferences for five yearstimes in two years now. This year’s event will be on July 12, 2008. There will be startups pitching their ideas to the audience and breakout sessions throughout the rest of the day.

Read more about the startups that’s going to be there pitching. This is another good opportunity for Hong Kong entrepreneurs to understand what’s happening in Singapore. The scene there is more vibrant and paces ahead of Hong Kong.

It’s still not too late to register. Hurry and Sign up for the event at Eventbrite.

This is news, two local startups rebranding themselves with new names this month. First it was Bullpoo, with changing to Duedee. Now, Lifesterblog, the local blog host that makes a good alternative to Yahoo! Hong Kong’s basic blog platform, renaming themselves to Youblog.cc.

You won’t notice much differences between the old site and this new site. They have only rebranded to shift their focus to the Chinese blogging community, hence the name Youblog.cc. They even came up with an acronym for the .cc domain, Chinese Community.

More rebranding news than startup news in Hong Kong for month of June. That’s the reality here in HK.

We all know the 3G iPhone will be a hit, I’ve waited knowing they had plans to release a 3G version after the launch of the 2G version. In Hong Kong, the sole provider, 3 Hong Kong, is taking advantage of this and have jacked up the prices. As a clueless consumer (not reading fine print), I only care about price tag and when I see the price tag of $2938 HKD (~$380 USD) for an 8GB iPhone and $3738 HKD (~$480 USD) for the 16GB, there is something fishy with how 3 HK is operating. On top of that, who knows what the Prepayment Price mean, it’s not clearly stated and doesn’t have any notes, so will that be charged too? Who knows, but wouldn’t be surprised if they did. Yes, there are other plans, but they are still considerable expensive to the Apple price.

Prices in Hong Kong Dollars

From what I can gather with the little attention I’ve given the iPhone, Cingular offers them at the Apple price, I don’t see why 3 HK has jacked up the price. Does Apple allow carriers to adjust pricing as they like? I have no clue and would like to know.

Yea, I do plan on getting the iPhone, but not at that price and definitely not through 3 HK. I don’t think consumers should either, but we are in Hong Kong, where most of the youths are willing to pay any premium to have the latest and greatest gadgets.

Update: What I forgot to mention is that all the other 3G plans here from 3 and other carriers are priced $40-50 HKD less than the iPhones. Now if it’s coming from a US consumer perspective, $188 HKD is cheap.

Zendesk is a Copenhagen-based startup focused on helping companies put focus on their customer service. It’s not all based in Europe as they have presence in Hong Kong where business development is stationed, developers and designers are from different parts of the world, including US, Sweden, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Argentina. Talk about a global development!

The online support service appears to show some promise as they have recently raised a bit of seed funding from Pageflakes co-founder, as reported by GigaOm and an official release from Zendesk.

For companies looking to improve their customer service logistics with an on demand SAAS, Zendesk offers a great solution. Large and small companies can try out various plans for suit your their requirements, from a free plan with one agent to a paid plan with 25 agents (users). If you’d like to see how it works, they have a slideshow highlighting its features or you can try out their service by signing up to their free trials.

I see a great need for this for Hong Kong companies, large and small. Hong Kong seriously lacks in customer service in all sectors and often times, my online inquiries to local companies/stores always go unanswered, leaving me to wonder why they even bother with establishing themselves online.

Zendesk has also been very active and supportive in the Hong Kong web community, by supporting the first Barcamp Hong Kong and the recent Startup Hong Kong event.