StartUp Saturday HK 2010!
July 22nd, 2010Hey Everyone,
If you haven’t heard yet but we [Hong Kong] will be having our very own StartUp Saturday Hong Kong. The event will be held at CyberPort on August 7, with a wide range of speakers, from AliveNotDead’s Patrick Lee to Microsoft’s Architect Evangelist Andy Cheung. There will also be Demos from Hong Kong’s upcoming start ups, including our very own PandaForm!
This FREE 1-day event is aiming to bring together, start-ups, entrepreneurs, investors, students, media, and tech enthusiasts.
Need more convincing? Check out the StartUp Saturday HK website! Created and designed by us and powered by PandaForm.
(BTW, this blog post was done by our summer internship Katherine Hao.)
PandaForm (Beta) Is Officially Launched!
June 9th, 2010
We have just launched our first product – PandaForm at 1 Jun 2010 in the Echelon 2010 event. (And we got a small link from Techcrunch too).
PandaForm is a simple application form builder which you can use it to create online form easily. It setup the database and script for you so that you can create a form up and running in 5 minutes. Besides creating a form you can use it to keep track of form approval status, invite user to edit a previously submitted form, send forms to list of applicants, etc. We hope PandaForm can be a simple but useful tool that empowers business users.
Please sign up today and let us know what you think about PandaForm. You can contact us directly by Twitter, Emails, or Forum.
New Office for Oursky Team!
January 20th, 2010
We’re thrilled to announce that Oursky will move into our new home in Hong Kong Science & Technology Park. Over the past year, our team has enjoyed a growing number of new members. The extra space in Science Park will definitely give our developers more room to explore their creativity, exchange new ideas and stretch their arms and legs after a day’s hard work!
“With great office comes great responsibility!” We will continue our commitment to high quality web and mobile application development. If you need help with your e-business strategies, how to grow your business with internet, or simply want to have some fascinating Web 2.0 or iPhone App ideas developed, track us down in Science Park and tell us about it.
Also, you’re very welcome to drop by anytime in our new office to try out PandaForm (or just chat with us), the web-based workflow solution we are building. Take a sneak peak before PandaForm’s official launch in March 2010 and find out yourselves how this newcomer in cloud computing can help you automate and grow your businesses! Of course, the fresh air, see breeze and our geeky hospitality are not to be missed!
Address of our new office: Unit 308B, 3/F, Enterprise Place (Bldg. 9), No. 5 Science Park West Avenue, Hong Kong Science Park, Shatin, N.T.
We are all very excited about the new environment and ability to provide better services (with bigger tables and proper conference room!). Looking forward to meeting you in Science Park.
Web Developers Carmen and Rocky on board!
December 23rd, 2009We’ve been pretty busy at Q4 2009, developing our new Workflow SaaS solution (which we will be talking about it later). With the support of SERAP funding, we are having two new web developers on board — Carmen and Rocky.
Both of them are graduated with an Electronic Engineering degree in top local universities and are learning quickly to adopt new web technologies and agile development model. While our solid technical team going full speed with the new team members, please stay tuned for more news and the release of our new workflow SaaS solution coming in early 2010.
New website launched for Project Learning, the Chinese University of Hong Kong
November 9th, 2009
Oursky is glad to announce that a new website has been launched for the Research and Development Work on “Project Learning”, a project undertaken by the Chinese University of Hong Kong to collect and study the experience of schools and organizations who had participated in various “Project Learning” projects subsidized by the Quality Education Fund in the past ten years. Through this website, schools and educators can gain insights into the lessons learned in previous projects and use the research findings and other resources provided on the website to develop better approach for both learning and teaching.
The website serves a repository of “Project Learning” resources with a very clean categorization that allows users to find the materials relevant to them easily. Presentation of each “Project Learning” case also aims to help users absorb vast amount of information in the shortest period of time.
Oursky picked up the project after the Chinese University of Hong Kong decided to create web database for schools and educators to have easy access to their research findings and other “Project Learning” resources. Thus, we helped them built the site with nanoc, a Ruby compiler which generates static HTML.
Oursky Team on Google Wave
October 19th, 2009
Almost everyone in Oursky got the Google Wave invitation last week so we’re ready to do some real test on how well it works within team collaboration.
Instead of using a combination of emails, IRC, Trac (Wiki) and DropBox for collaboration, we tried to use Google Wave for a few days last week for:
- A chat room for general collaboration
- Team cooperation on the iPhone Application Development
- Brainstorm room for use cases of our new WorkFlow project
Here are a initial summary of thought:
- The major problem now is the performance and stability of the software, it is known as Wave is still in preview, not even in beta!
- It is not easy to track the unread conversation now, some UI things should be improved on this one.
- When you reply the last message, the reply doesn’t indent, it is kind of very wried and consider as a “bug” by most people as I know.
- Why real time typing? It might be useful for real-time collaboration on documents but it is a very serious distraction and affect productivity since it tends to attract your eye-balls
Despite the many un-statisfication on the stabilities and performance, Google Wave, frankly looks most promising to us on it’s extensibility compare with other communication tools (like email). For example what if we integrate our version control system and ticketing system in Google Wave so that we can discuss the features and do code review on it? My guess is the success of Google Wave largely depends on how easy for developers to extend so that people can start doing more and more useful communication on Wave.
Rackspace Cloud Files or Amazon Simple Storage Service?
October 9th, 2009We were comparing Rackspace Cloud Computing (Cloud Servers and Cloud Files) with Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, SQS) which we have been using it for over a year, both for our clients and internal projects.
We started by comparing Cloud Files with S3, mainly because:
- The pricing are similar when you consider we’re serving visitors from Hong Kong through CDN, and
- Amazon CDN – CloudFront seems not working really well in Hong Kong, having latency issues since it’s launch and that hurt websites that serving a lot of small files.
So we did a little experiment to compare is Cloud Files’s CDN better? We find the result might be interesting for someone else so we posted here but it’s by no mean scientific or authoritative, bear in mind that we’re testing it in Hong Kong and all we want to compare is how well it serve static small files for website. Feel free to contact us if you want to know about other factors we’ve been thinking about.
Environment
- Firefox with FireBug
- PCCW 4MB Business Internet Connection
- To load FONCEPT frontpage with 21 images, 3 CSS, 11 Javascript.(yea we know we shouldn’t have so many Javascript files…
Flash Loading (sec)
Trial | S3 Performance (with CDN) | Cloud Files (with CDN) 1 | 6.58 | 2.56 2 | 7.08 | 3.19 3 | 7.34 | 5.48 4 | 6.59 | 3.15 5 | 8.36 | 3.76 6 | 7.40 | 3.28 7 | 7.03 | 4.19 8 | 9.28 | 3.93 9 | 9.00 | 3.57 10 | 8.80 | 3.98 Average | 7.75 | 3.71 S.D. | 1.02 | 0.79
Observation
- Cloud Files take longer time just to give 404 sometimes (> 1sec), a wild guess is the CDN is not caching for non-existed files.
- [anything else?]
Welcome! Daniel — Our web solutions evangelist.
October 9th, 2009Always thinking about start-up, Daniel Cheng joins the team at Oursky after completing a master degree in Management Science from Stanford University. He will be responsible for our Sales and Marketing work and assist our clients in addressing their needs.
With an additional staff, our team is going to be increasingly capable in fulfilling your needs. Lets us know whenever we can help!
Feel free to contact Daniel at ydcheng@oursky.com or call us if you need any help.
Barcamp 2009 Presentation: Pylons and Tokyo Cabinet Database
September 14th, 2009Another inspirational Weekend !
Finally the long-waited Barcamp conference was held last Saturday! Barcamp is an international event that gathers professionals and know-how about I.T. industry from all around the world to make in-depth and delightful sharing about the industry’s development and academic exploration. Ben from Oursky Ltd was able to be in the inspirational atmosphere that day to make highly absorbing sharings about his understanding towards the web framework Pylons and the key-value pair database, Tokyo Cabinet.
Wanna know more? Or if you’re interested in Pylons and Tokyo Cabinet too? Feel free to contact us by email or twitter!
Craig Badings launched “Thought Leadership” website with Oursky
September 11th, 2009
Another website launched! Oursky has launched a blog for Craig Badings, an experienced Public Relations consultant whose expertise has brought him to the current position of a director at an leading communications services group in Australia.
A bit unlike our colourful and fun website designed for RTHK Radio 3, this is a neat and informative web for a professional. Through the website, surfers can learn more about Craig and his expertise–thought leadership. It also serves as a communication platform facilitating direct communication.
Oursky picked up the project when Craig reached us explaining his wish to set up a personal blog. After we have learnt more about his needs, Oursky team started this project in early July and completed it in 2 weeks, and we’ve communicate with Craig remotely using Basecamp as the project site.
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