IE will seed the discussion by sharing on possible business opportunities from the international marketplace and channels of assistance available for industry collaboration, covering specific go-to-market costs. Key agencies involved in the virtual world industry development in Singapore will also be present at this industry networking session.

Date: Thursday, 5th November 2009
Time: 14:30 – 17:35
Venue: 230, Victoria Street, Level 10, Bugis Junction Office Tower, Singapore 188024

Please RSVP to events@virtuallythursday.com with your name and contact info. Light refreshments will be provided throughout the event.

For more information, please contact:
Mr. Cheong Zhaoyong
CHEONG_Zhaoyong @iesingapore.gov.sg
Tel: + 65 6433 4733

*Based on available seats on a first come first served basis for the first 50 registrants.

1) Virtual World Roundup: Hipihi, Novoking and UOneNet

• Distinguish the virtual worlds: (i) worlds with no purposes – 2nd Life vs (ii) gaming worlds like World of Warcraft which coveted 80% of the market.
• Useful facts and statistics for the news: HiPiHi: 48,000 registered users, NovoKing: 10,000 registered users while UOneNet: <1,000. By comparison, Second Life has 13.5 million “residents.” One thing to note is that all three are still in their private beta.
• Talk about the differences in thinking between US and China virtual world creators: for example, Xu Hui sees the virtual worlds as a 3D version of web browser for the future.
• Virtual world for kids – Penguin Club (http://www.penguinclub.com).
• Commerce on virtual worlds – featuring First Meta (http://firstmeta.com).

2) Interview with Daniel Cerventus Lim.

• Co-founder of Ideapreneur (http://ideapreneur.net).
• Supporting orgasnisation of NetBash – a fringe event at the WCIT.

3) Letters

• Are we too China focused in our content?
• Email you comments / feedback to geekgoddessshow@gmail.com

For more info, do visit our website: http://thegeekgoddess.tv

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‘)

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.

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.

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.

Contributed by Bjorn Lee

HiPiHi: The World Exists Because Of You. (Literal translation from Chinese) The name is derived from 3 base words: I, Hi, Hapi (or the phonetically similar “Happy”).

Currently in closed beta testing, HiPiHi has generated some interest on Second Life Insider and debates on whether this will take off in China.

Some key observations (the entire site is written in Chinese, so I play translator here):

• - Hipihi was founded way back in October 2005 in Zhongkuanchun, Beijing. Second Life took a long time to be developed too before its launch.
• - The founders are mainly Xu Hui and Rao XueWei.
• - The founders are guys but everything else in their marketing, including their promo video here, appears to target the female crowd.
• - The whole site and virtual world uses Chinese as the main language.
• - There are two main products: Hipihi World and Hipihi Home
  • Hipihi World is exactly like Second Life: avatars can fly and modify their own appearances, build houses, explore the land with planes, choppers and hot air balloons, which HipiHi calls public transportation systems. You can also have steering controls over your flight, offering a chance to fly your own plane. Options for parachuting also exists. The World seems to be organized around malls and town squares with socializing at its very core. Of course, avatars can also buy land and build their own houses. I see a lucrative industry coming up.
  • Hipihi Home appears to be modelled after CyWorld. It is positioned as a personal space and private communication platform between friends. Users will own their “living rooms”, procure furniture and be able to invite their friends to their “homes” and attend parties at others too. Whats most interesting is the mention of a convergence between internet and mobile. Could Hipihi be a dual-screen innovation? We will have to wait for the launch
• - Like Second Life, Hipihi users will own the property rights to their in-world creations.
• - There will also be a in-world currency, implying a virtual economy to facilitate user-to-user transactions. Perhaps the first and Chinese-originated millionaire in Second Life, Anshe Chung, has made virtual world creators think Chinese are the best market for such a product?

Kaiser Kuo, who is accredited for this post, has the following thoughts:

My gut tells me that done right, this could be quite substantial in China, and might have more legs than its U.S. counterpart. For one thing, MMORPG culture is pretty deeply embedded among Chinese netizens, and many players are very used to “repatriating” currency earned in the in-game economy to real life. HiPiHi seems to have made dumbed-down object creation tools available while keeping more advanced options available to the more proficient–don’t quote me on that, I’ve not really played around with it yet.

There’s a definite feminine sensibility to the pitch video, which you can download (.wmv) here: a female narrator and avatar, emphasis on the outfits, the landscaping, the houses. Going after women is probably the right move: there are plenty of online gamers in China, but few of the hack-and-slash MMORPGs really work for women.

The promotional video done by Hipihi is available below. Again, its all narrated in Chinese but it being visual-based video, is self-explanatory enough.

Editor’s Note: The article is reproduced from Bjorn’s website.