A very happy Christmas to everybody from the Coobico-team, and a happy new year. While development of Coobico will still go on during the holidays, there will probably no blog-post before new year.

I nearly missed this piece: Facebook lost its lawsuit against German competitor StudiVZ. FB claims that StudiVZ infringes on FBs design and features, and that StudiVZ illegally stole source-code from Facebook. Well, at least the first claim seems to be pretty obvious; the only even more blatant FB-clone I can think of is its Chinese copycat Xiaonei (they did not even change the colors, like StudiVZ).

IMO German jurisdiction concerning Internet cases is inconsistent and weird at best, maybe a reason for this verdict. The court seems to have argued that “StudiVZ isn’t trying to trick users into thinking they are actually on Facebook. Another factor in favor of the German site: When StudiVZ went live in Germany in November 2005, Facebook was virtually unknown in that country.”
Hmm, so it’s okay to clone a web-service in Germany as long as the original is not really that well-known here, and as long as you do not pretend to be them; this seems to contradict normal German trademark-law — I need to keep this in mind…

At least that’s what John Riccitiello, CEO of Electronic Arts, claimed at DICE summit, according to Game/Life: “Riccitiello said that while big players like EA will be able to ride out the recession, others will not—which will help to keep ‘junk’ off shelves, he said. ‘A lot of the riff-raff is going to go bankrupt,‘ he said.“

Riccitiello’s statement about the “big players like EA” and the rest, the “riff-raff”, seems to imply that small indie-producers are the omnium-gatherum of crap. I give it to Mr. Riccitiello, that there is a lot mediocrity in the market and that the current financial meltdown is a time of survival of the fittest, more than ever. But I beg to differ on his somewhat high nosed implication: during the past few years most of the innovation in games notably came from small-scale production houses (Braid, Okami, Portal, you name it).

A lot of original ideas might be put on the back-burner until the recovery of the global markets, while big players will be sticking to the tried and true. It’s sad to see a company loosing touch with its very own roots. Riccitiello would be well suited to remember the early eighties, when EA was still a small start-up going by the name of Amazin’ Software.

Soure: Wired’s Game/Life

恭喜發財, Gung Hei Fat Choi, we wish everybody a prosperous lunar new year of the ox.

We had quite a long blog-out in the past weeks–partially due to my notebook being in repair for around a week, partially due to heavy workload. Stefan and me have hauled Linking People to its new home in the recent weeks, a linux-server in Canada, powered mainly by green energy (no kidding).
While I’m looking after the German part of our business at the moment, I missed the Web 2.0 Startup Meetup in Hong Kong in August–thanks P.K. from Team and Concept for pointing me to the event. I would have loved to show up, according to Angus Lau’s posting at 852signal, it was seemingly a nice event.
On Sept 16-21, 2007, the Hong Kong web community will meet up at web gathering 3 for some chitchat with Jeremiah Owyang from PodTech of Silicon Valley. Sorry, guys, I’m still going to be stuck in Germany at that moment. Read more here, if you want to attend. I’m going back to my work in the meantime…

My colleague Stefan and me are back to Germany in the meantime, to pamper some of our local clients there and generally work on our german-related projects.
Our webspace will be on the move soon, too; we’re hauling it to a server in the US (very probably, after comparing a lot of hosting-services in UK, Switzerland, USA, Canada and so on in the last weeks), so hopefully there will be no hickups with our blogs and sites. As for myself, I’m super-busy right now with some of our products–more about that after moving to the new webspace.

I’m going to be back to Hong Kong in August or September then.

Hello Hong Kong. Now also i’m back in town. It’s amazing to see how much this city is changing within a few months. Where is the cat café now? Why there is a parking lot instead of the ferry terminal? Many questions for a jet lagged designer.

Hello and welcome to Linking Corner, a blog run by the folks of Linking People Ltd. We are a bunch of creative media experts with a mission to introduce new innovative Web 2.0 products to Hong Kong.
Here at Linking Corner, we will write about our experiences, ideas and developments every now and then, as well as about our products and services, business, webdesign, careers and stuff we like in Hong Kong and Mainland China. Disclaimer: of course, everything we are going to post here is will be strongly biased and completely unfiltered, so take care.

Feedback, discussions and ideas are always welcome – we are looking forward to your comments (in english, please, if possible)!