Virtual(ly) Thursday – 5 Nov

Hosted by IE Singapore, Virtual(ly) Thursday is a roundtable session on the Virtual Worlds industry. This November’s event would be an informal roundtable discussion for key industry players to discuss about the challenges of commercialisation, as well as explore opportunities for collaboration collectively, through enabling companies to identify potential synergies among themselves. Read more

The Geek Goddess Show Episode 3: Virtual Worlds & NetBash

The 3rd episode of the Geek Goddess show is out. Do take a look and send us your feedback on the Geek Goddess Show website. This episode centers on virtual worlds in China, with a little mention of the Singapore company, First Meta, and our friend, Bjorn Lee, co-founder of E27. We also have our friend, Daniel Cerventus, across the causeway to share with us what he thinks of the web 2.0 scene in Malaysia and the difference with Singapore. You can also check out my own production notes here. Of course, as usual, my thanks to Podfire for the support, and the hard work put in by the hosts: Estee and Peter and co-producer, Michael. Read more

News Flash: HiPiHi and Intel enters into a new technology partnership

Something interesting popped up in China today – 22 Nov 2007. Remember HiPiHi (as pronounced High-P-High), the China-based company which is currently involved in the virtual worlds market. Since our last encounter with Xu Hui, CEO of HiPiHi sometime back, we have heard that Intel China and HiPiHi have announced today that they are entering into a technology partnership. The interesting part is that Intel is not entering as just a usual corporate resident but committed towards supporting technical needs of a virtual world platform. They will be setting up a brand experience centre in the Intel island that seeks to enhance the interaction with the consumers (or users), and the details will be announced later. The HiPiHi CEO has remarked that, “As China’s first company to enter into the virtual worlds market, HiPiHi has already attracted Intel and P&G which are well-established multi-national companies. We believe that there are other companies of such stature who will join us in the future and take HiPiHi to the next level such that it will add value and attract more enterprises and consumers to join us.” (Translated from eNet.com.cn). Here’s an interesting perspective to think about. This strategic collaboration between HiPiHi and Intel is reminiscent of the Second Life and IBM one sometime back. (Also check out Wagner James Au’s ‘First Looks at a ‘Chinese 2nd Life‘)

 

An informal meeting with Xu Hui, CEO of HiPiHi

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. Read more

The Chinese clone of Second Life: HiPiHi

 

Have you heard about Second Life? It is a virtual world where you can enter as an avatar, explore, meet up and create communities with other people. It is generating an interesting virtual economy that is translating into dollars and cents here in the real world. Now, we have a chinese clone for Second Life, a company named HiPiHi. Our resident contributor, Bjorn Lee, co-founder of Entrepreneur27 gives us a review about HiPiHi and offers his perspective on the competition with 2nd Life in the near future. Read more