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Hong Kong International IT fest 2015 Hubba Hubba in Hong Kong

B2B Editor19 May 2015

B2B magazine recently attended the International IT Fest 2015 in Hong Kong.

Editor and publisher of B2B, Tim Benson, attended IT Fest as a sponsored guest of the Hong Kong Economic & Trade Office in Sydney, representative office of the Hong Kong Government in Australia and New Zealand.

The International IT Fest featured a series of events to provide a platform for the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry to share insights with the Chinese Mainland and overseas experts.

The inaugural IT Fest was held in April 2013 with 25 ICT events. The second edition in 2014 featured a total of 38 events covering a wide range of ICT domains in which HK is developing fast, such as cloud computing, startups, information security, mobile technology, the Internet of Things, digital entertainment and digital inclusion.

Now, The International IT Fest 2015 brings together over 50 ICT events, including the annual signature event, the Hong Kong ICT Awards 2015 Awards Presentation Ceremony, which recognises outstanding local IT applications and solutions; the International ICT Expo, which is the largest of its kind in Asia; and a series of seminars, symposiums, conferences, competitions, award presentations, recognition schemes, exhibitions and fun fairs.

For more details on International IT Fest 2015, please visit http://www.itfest.hk/

Hubba hubba in Hong Kong

Miss Joey Lam, Deputy Government Chief Information Officer, Office of the Government Chief Information Officer, Hong Kong Government, wants Hong Kong to be the hub of all hubs – a tourism hub, an IT hub, an intellectual property hub, in fact ‘a hub economy’.

And why not, isn’t Hong Kong the gateway to the largest economy in the world China?

Since 2013 Hong Kong has consolidated its ICT awards and festivals into the International IT Fest. In 2015 it is bigger and better with 51 events, almost doubling since its inception.

Joey says that the main objective for the Hong Kong Government is to ensure that ICT is more widely used and contributes to social and economic growth.

“The three main objectives are to encourage the exchange insight, competition and networking,’ Joey explained.

One of the ways they are achieving this is to publish ICT advertorials, in Chinese, so it is not possible to provide an English link unfortunately.

“We are in a digital age and a shared economy, through businesses such as Uber, crowd funding, crowd sourcing. ICT has blurred international boundaries,” Joey stated.

According to Joey, Hong Kong is a great place to do ICT business because of the sound legal system, the free economy, the low regulatory threshold, low tax regime and most importantly, close proximity to the Chinese mainland.

“We want to be a smarter city,” Joey said.

And Hong Kong is well on its way with mobile phone usage sitting at 240 per cent.

In addition to this, Hong Kong is steaming ahead with a number of major ICT projects including:

* Public Wi-Fi access

* e – health records

* Smart ID cards; and

* E cheques.

Hong Kong is also creating a new industry where intellectual property rights can be traded.

Hong Kong is an amazing place, full of wonderfully creative people, it will become the hub of all hubs.

1000 plus Hong Kong students set world record for collective coding

At the opening ceremony of the 2015 Hong Kong International IT Fest, over 1000 students set a world record for collective coding – and they did it by recreating Hong Kong in Minecraft.

The International IT Fest 2015 commenced at the Hong Kong Central Harbourfront with a five-day Hong Kong Digital Life Carnival where members of the public experienced the latest digital products, wines and food.

The Inter-School IT Elite Challenge has over 130 schools participating, and 36 IT exploration tours for secondary students to visit IT facilities and renowned technology companies in Hong Kong to learn more about the local ICT industry and stimulate their interest in IT.

“This year’s International IT Fest will focus on public participation, with an aim to enhance public understanding of the convenience and benefits that can be brought by technology developments and the joy of ‘digital life’,” Hong Kong Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development, Mr Gregory So, said.

These events cover a wide range of ICT domains in which Hong Kong is developing quickly, such as cloud computing, startups, cyber security, mobile technology, the Internet of Things, digital entertainment, e-learning, digital inclusion and more, together presenting a showcase of interactive Hong Kong.

Benson wins grand award at Hong Kong ICT Awards 2015

The Hong Kong ICT Awards 2015 celebrates the achievements of the Hong Kong Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector.

Benson (no relation) Chiu, Founder & CEO of nBition Development, received the Award of the Year, the highest accolade at the Hong Kong ICT Awards 2015. Chiu is a self proclaimed ‘open-minded geek’, a technical co-founder, has eight years of experience in software and hardware engineering and is a previous employee of Microsoft, IBM, CIBC, and founding start-up in Silicon Valley.

‘Arist’, an innovative coffee machine that can make the perfect espresso coffee from your smartphone, is one of the latest ICT inventions. The Arist coffee machine brews coffees from the world’s top baristas with the click of a button.

Before you judge this decision, be aware that Benson has raised $845,139 US on crowd finding site Kickstarter, and has 26,000 pre sales at $699 US each.

There were 972 entries for this year’s Awards – one Grand Award was awarded in each category and an Award of the Year selected from the 10 Grand Award winners.

The winners in the 10 categories are as follows:

1. Best Business Solution Grand Award: TFI Digital Media Ltd HERMES OTT Platform

This platform is a solution for TV broadcasting to deliver content through the Internet and via an Over-the-top (OTT) device connected to a TV set. It is also commonly referred to as Internet TV. Compared to traditional terrestrial broadcasting (Over-the-air), OTT broadcasting offers low geographical limitation. To offer the service, it does not need a license from the government. Two-way interaction between user and the content source is supported.

2. Best Digital Entertainment Grand Award: Centurysoft International Ltd. 3 Fruity Kingdoms

“3 Fruity Kingdoms” is an Action-Role Play-Game (ARPG) which is developed on the prototype of the cute version of the popular animation character of “Fruity Robo” in Mainland. Riding on the background of “Three Kingdoms”, the actor, Pineapplello, is a terminator determined to wipe out his enemies and accomplish his missions.

3. Best Digital Inclusion Grand Award: Buddhist To Chi Fat She Yeung Yat Lam Memorial School and collaborating schools. SAME E-enhanced Learning, Teaching and Assessment System

A Joint-school project for developing an e-learning platform, SELTAS aims to help students with special education needs to learn effectively within the framework of the general curriculum. The targets are students studying in special schools and students with special education needs in mainstream schools.

4. Best ICT Startup Grand Award: Nbition Development

Formed from the middle letters of ‘barista’, the Arist name brings barista style coffee into every home. Arist sets itself apart from all other coffeemakers, with its smartphone interface, precise customisable functions, elegant simplicity as well as a cloud platform where baristas can share their “coffee recipes” with users to establish a coffee community. It is the first coffeemaker that provides complete control over every single step in the brewing process, from adjusting the grind size to fine-tuning the pressure.

5. Best Innovation Grand Award: Dragon Creative Enterprise Solution Limited MAD Glass

MAD Glass is a smart glass which includes the functions of a smartphone. It can make phone calls, text messages, send multimedia to contacts, access personal digital assistant, play media, use GPS navigation, run thirdparty applications, take photos or record videos, web browsing, use Wi-Fi and pay online, etc.

6. Best Lifestyle Grand Award: Penana Ltd. Penana – The Social Publication Platform for Story Showcasing and Collaborative Creation

Penana is a social network designed for showcasing and sharing creative stories and fiction. It makes writing and creating a fun, collaborative, and social experience, in contrast to the traditional perception of ‘boring’ and ‘lonely’. Utilising many popular concepts in social networking, it makes use of the latest UI/UX and backend framework technologies to incorporate a modern, story centric, user-friendly user experience design platform.

7. Best Mobile Apps Grand Award: TeamNote Ltd. TeamNote

TeamNote is a cloud based mobile collaboration tool which helps corporations unleash the productivity of their mobile workforce and maximise work efficiency via the easy-to-use features that mobile technology brings about. With TeamNote, users are able to make better decisions; coordinate more efficiently with colleagues; react more quickly to changing conditions; and manage complex tasks more effectively.

8. Best Smart Hong Kong Award: Axon Labs Ltd. HKBus+

HKBus+ is an information platform offering comprehensive public transportation information in Hong Kong, covering buses, mini-buses, MTR, ferries and trams. It combines the open data released by the HKSAR government as well as data collected from the Internet to offer the most comprehensive and up to date information to the users.

9. Best SME ICT Grand Award: Play More Ltd. Team More Enterprise Communication Platform

The solution provides a common platform for daily communication among over thousand users in the enterprise. It consists of nine ready-to-use modules for different communication needs, such as news dispatch, product catalogue, document cloud storage, on-the-go training, event calendar sharing, social platform, e-form communication, e-newsletter publications and enterprise messenger.

10. Best Student Invention Grand Award: Wong Yiu-nam/Wong Chungpak of Shun Tak Fraternal Association Yung Yau College. MindFootPrint

For people encountered accidents and chronically ill patients, their situation can hardly be discovered, so that they cannot receive the immediate relieves or rescues. Most likely, their consequences are suffering from a serious sequel and even causing to death. An effective health monitoring (with location tracking) will be a key to help us to secure our lives.

The Hong Kong ICT Awards were established in 2006 with the collaborative efforts of the industry, academia and the Government. The aim is to build a locally recognised and internationally acclaimed brand of ICT awards in Hong Kong. Over the years, the Awards have effectively served as a springboard for local ICT innovations to make inroads into the international arena.

This year’s Hong Kong ICT Awards created a new award category, Best Smart Hong Kong Award, to encourage the development of “smart” applications and
solutions for “Smarter Hong Kong, Smarter Living” in line with the vision set out in the new Digital 21 Strategy.

Detailed information about the winners and the 10 award categories are available on the website of the Hong Kong ICT Awards (www.hkictawards.hk).

Cyberport is Hong Kong’s hub for ICT startups

They don’t do things by halves in Hong Kong. For example when it comes to incubating and encouraging information and communications technology (ICT) startups there is Cyberport.

Cyberport is home to four grade-A intelligent office buildings, a five-star design hotel, and a retail entertainment complex and is a creative digital community with a cluster of over 300 technology and digital tenants.

It is managed by Hong Kong Cyberport Management Company Limited, which is wholly owned by the Hong Kong SAR Government.

“We have a vision to be the leading ICT hub in the Asia-Pacific region,” Karen Wu, Cyberport Senior Manager Corporate Communications, said.

Cyberport aims to nurture ICT industry start-ups and entrepreneurs, drive collaboration to pool resources and create business opportunities, and accelerate ICT adoption through strategic initiatives and partnerships.

The Entrepreneurship Centre at Cyberport also offers two very generous, non-repayable grants to local and international entrepreneurs yes, Australian entrepreneurs, can be, have already been and currently are, recipients.

1. Cyberport Creative Micro Fund

The Cyberport Creative Micro Fund Scheme is a seed fund set up to encourage innovation and creativity by sponsoring high potential creative and innovative start-up projects or business concepts in ICT-related areas. A grant of HK$100,000 in cash will be awarded to the successful applicants in a 6 month project period for proof of concepts and for developing prototype products.

There are 2 types of CCMF, with the same vetting requirements, catered for aspiring entrepreneurs at different lifestages and target markets. They are 1) the Hong Kong Programme and 2) the Cross-Border Programme(s).

2. Cyberport Incubation Programme

The Cyberport Incubation Programme supports the development of the Hong Kong ICT industry by providing incubated companies with access to advanced facilities and resources, support in business development, financing & hiring of graduate interns, as well as entrepreneurship and technology training.

Financial assistance or reimbursement of up to HK$530,000 will be made to incubated companies in a 24-month incubation period for jump starting their business.

Cyberport is an ultra-hip and modern facility for those wanting to start and nurture an ICT idea into a business.

“We are designed to work with our ICT businesses – they work 24 hours around the clock on an idea – so do we. We understand the drive, commitment and passion entrepreneurs have for their businesses,” Karen said.

To find out more about Cyberport visit: http://www.cyberport.hk

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