Singapore Entrepreneurs

Last Tuesday, before the State of Play V party “Flash Forward”, thanks to Andrew Peters and the Digital Movement, I was invited to meet up with Xu Hui, CEO of HiPiHi and we spent one hour together with him, hearing his thoughts and aspirations about HiPiHi, China’s virtual world platform creator with an interesting tagline, “The World Exists because of You”. We will also hear his thoughts about how HiPiHi differentiates herself from Second Life. Here is a summary of the main points during that one hour conversation.

The whole conversation was divided into four parts. Mr Xu Hui started from the big picture on why he started HiPiHi. He talks about the current world of internet moving from a 2-dimensional into a 3-dimensional world. In his view, there are two different types of 3D worlds. The first type is the mirror of the real and living world, for example, Google Earth, which projects the real world into the computer screen and allows anyone to look for any location on Earth from anywhere. The second type is the Virtual world, that brings the real world into the virtual world. However, the aim is not just to bring people from the real world into virtual world, but rather allow the person from the real world to exercise the imagination of the creative minds. Hence, the mission of HiPiHi, according to him, is to break the boundaries among nations and people from all walks of life to socialize and create as their purpose. One interesting feature that he aspires for his company is to focus towards no communication barrier between netizens in HiPiHi. To him, experience is the most important feature in the virtual world, and it must appeal naturally to the user.

Moving on, he comes to his next point is about how HiPiHi differentiates from the rest of the Chinese internet companies and also companies who are contesting the virtual world landscape. In his view, currently, in the virtual world market, there is only Second Life and a few other small virtual worlds. He starts with the focus of his company is on Asia, and he believes that at least 20-30% of the users will come from the west. Second Life has dominated mainly in US, but not in some Asian countries such as Japan and Korea. His vision for HiPiHi is that he wants to develop a universal user interface for the virtual world that will be available in every platform (for example, Apple, Linux and Microsoft). Note that currently HiPiHi is only working in Windows. For their long-term plans, they hope to enable the platform to be open source and also the possibility of merging with Second Life, allowing users to bring their identity and inventory across both worlds. The key is to build an ecosystem, and his strategy is to get HiPiHi to be pre-installed with existing technologies, for example, handphones and other electronic gadgets. Interestingly, he views HiPiHi as a browser to allow users to surf the internet in a 3D perspective.

Interestingly, some of us in that meeting asked about censorship in China. Xu Hui pointed out that there is actually very few things (mostly political issues) that the government would censor. He mentioned something interesting that I believe that Singaporean entrepreneurs should take note. The goal is to build HiPiHi so big until the government looks into it, instead of waiting for them to come in. He used past examples like Sina and Sohu, where the government only entered much later with encouragement and support. It is at this juncture where we found out that Xu Hui has been working in the internet industry for some time before entering into the HiPiHi project.

Then we come to the part about technology. This is the part which got Xu Hui animated. Unlike Second Life, where they fix their computer resources on pieces of land, HiPiHi adopts an dynamic allocation approach where the computer resources from some lazy servers can be transferred into the more active ones. The key reason, according to him, is that the simulations of the virtual world takes up the most resources on the server. Hence, HiPiHi adopts the solution of splitting the simulations for both server and client.

Lastly, we come to the part on how HiPiHi goes global. One fundamental difference that we note is that unlike Second Life which adopts one universal governing body in the whole virtual world, HiPiHi has decided to lease the virtual space and the autonomy to the partners or supporting regional corporations in each country. For example, he cited the Japan market, where they allow the Japanese partner to decide on the policies on how the virtual world runs. He also hope that they can work with 3rd party developers in different countries. One thing that we note is that HiPiHi has not implemented a virtual world currency like the Linden dollar in Second Life. On that note, he prefers to consider that possibility in the future. Of course, he hopes that the development of HiPiHi would go in the direction of integrating with mobile phones such that the phones act as a communication tool for the user in the HiPiHi world.

In that hour, we ran through pretty much many interesting issues about HiPiHi. Of course, Xu Hui has kindly invited me to Beijing to visit HiPiHi end of this year, and I would love to take a look behind the scenes. We also look forward to seeing him in Singapore in the future to come.

Photograph: Mr Xu Hui (CEO of HiPiHi) - 2nd from the left.

Acknowledgements: BL thanks Andrew Peters for the invitation and Peter Du for being the translator for Xu Hui during this formal gathering. He also thanks the other participants for the interesting one hour discussion. The HiPiHi screenshot is taken from Kevin Lim’s blog “Theory.IstheReason.com”

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