The last few weeks since my last post about HK investment culture have been quite busy. I’ve been meeting up with many more local investors and startup founders, I’m finding that there is a lot of good potential here that could be fostered to be quite a unique ecosystem.

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Last week was the second year that I attended the Cyberport Venture Capital Forum (CVCF). This year was focused towards angel investment and the last year was more about venture capital. So, is there an angel culture in HK? The short answer is yes, but the short answer is not very helpful in this case. continue…

Being based in Hong Kong, being multilingual is just a way of life. (Well, to some extent or another, my in-laws still complain about my lack of progress with Cantonese.) So, it is just natural for Sampi Plan to be available in both English and Chinese from the get-go. When researching competitive products, it was quite surprising that none of the top competition offered more than a single language for the interface. continue…

The last few weeks have been notable for us. First, we have confirmed our place in the IncuTrain program, which will help us to defer some of our costs as we move into taking Sampi Plan into a paid app. Second, we’ve been getting some good feedback, catching bugs, and improving the code base.

Over the last week, we’ve fixed and improved our login handling, the file linking, and inviting other users to a space.  continue…

Is there a startup culture in Hong Kong? Are there any resources for those that want to give a try at making that idea into something more? For the last few years, I’ve been both trying to start a new company here as well as becoming involved with groups that support startup companies. continue…

We have just sent out the Beta confirmations to everyone that was left over with an inactive Beta account. We’ve been cranking through the bug list and making some final changes to get things working well for now and for future expansion.

It has been a bit of a good long day today, I’ll have to post more later to explain more about Incutrain, which we just confirmed joining the program this morning as well.

Burn-down Work-up Chart for Sampi Plan Development Sep 2009

This chart shows the general progress on Sampi Plan that we’ve logged over the last four months using the system. The chart itself is what we are calling a Burn-down Work-up, which is one of our key tools for people to understand how they are working so they can continually improve and find the bottlenecks within their processes.

So, that looks pretty, but what is it? continue…

When I started doing the frontend engineering work for Sampi Plan I didn’t know anything about JavaScript. That was almost a year and a half ago, since then I’ve learned both the core language as well as the YUI and jQuery frameworks.

Not knowing anything, after comparing all of the major frameworks at the time, I chose to go with YUI 2.x for our development. The main points in favor of YUI at the time were documentation and consistency. The GUI widgets looked very appealing, and it wasn’t the slowest horse in the race. continue…

I went to a knowledge management conference the other day at Cyberport here in Hong Kong. It was my first time to hear about it in depth, and about 3/4 the way through the presentations and discussion I had this gnawing question: “OK, so this sounds good, but how does it tie back into your business process?” continue…

Whew, the last few months have been quite an adventure! It has been a while since since my last post, so I thought I should at least do a quick one to catch up with the current status of Sampi Plan and the beta program. continue…