5 Questions with Makible.com Founder Jonathan Buford

Crowdsource product startup launches in Hong Kong.

This is the first in a new series of posts we’re doing on Hong Kong’s tech start-up scene. We’ve done some in the past with Steply and RockGinger but we wanted to shine a spotlight on some of the recent innovations in the local market.

First up, we have Makible.com – a site where you can upload your ideas and find others to help you work on it, when its ready you can then get customers to pre-order it online before even entering a Mainland factory – this is disrupting the entire manufacturing business that Hong Kong is so famous for.

Makible.com’s first project is an Android headset and so we grabbed founder Jonathan Buford for 5 questions:

What made you come up with Makible?

After my experience with creating and manufacturing retail products for the last decade, I knew there had to be a better way. If you look at how most products are created, someone comes up with a concept that they think is going to be successful based on experience or from feedback from a small test group and then move it onto a retail shelf. This creates a huge amount of exposure to risk for everyone within that chain.

Makible is turning that process around, validate an idea by directly connecting to the customers and then make it based on demand.

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Review: Limitless

What would you do if you had a pill that made you smarter?

The basic premise of Limitless is what would you do if you had potential but was somehow blocked from realizing it, and then finding a drug that can unlock the 80% of your brain that isn’t used and access information you’ve been storing there all your life. What would you do?

Limitless is the new film starring Bradley Cooper (The Hangover, The A-Team) based on the book The Dark Fields. Its a fun no-spandex superhero movie that is more intellectual than physical, and while the first half (the origin) is fun, the sub-plots and general nastiness of the main character leads it in to a downward spiral that leaves it quite “limited.”

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Archos Reveals Their Color Android eBook Reader: The Archos 7ob

Is this the local competitor for the Kindle or the Nook?

Just before the end of last year Archos launched a series of Android tablets hoping to take on the Big Apple with quite successful results in Hong Kong.

The few times we’ve been to the Golden Shopping Arcade we’ve witnessed a few people purchasing the 7-inch version and a couple even buy the 10 inch model. Now the French electronics maker hopes to give Amazon’s Kindle and even Barnes And Noble’s Nook, a run for their money with their new 7 inch colour TFT screen Android 2.1 powered eReader the Archos 7ob.

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Review: Sucker Punch

This movie made The Matrix look like it was made in the ’70′s.

In a nutshell: F– the critics! Sucker Punch was awesome!

Well to be fair, this is what happens when expectations run at high altitudes for director Zack Snyder’s follow-up film to Dawn of the Dead, 300 and Watchmen – as any card-carrying geek will tell you Zack Snyder knows movies and Sucker Punch is his raison d’etre to filmmaking and dare we say an “art film” wrapped in an action movie blanket?

We’ll caveat this review with this: If you don’t know what Naruto, Killzone, Panzer Cops, Bleach, Dragonslayer, Appleseed, Gears of War or Lady Snowblood is – you probably aren’t going to appreciate a lot of what is going on in Sucker Punch.

Zack Snyder has basically combined his knowledge of video games, comics, manga, anime into a blender, added liberal helpings of sexy girls, garnished with an amazing soundtrack and out came the movie that must be seen on an IMAX screen.

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Sucker Punch Girls Hit the Streets of Hong Kong

WB take guns and swords to the streets to promote the new film.

Zack Snyder’s latest film Sucker Punch opens in Hong Kong this Thursday and Warner Bros. Hong Kong has sent a troop of their own Sucker Punch girls out into the streets of Mong Kok and Causeway Bay to make sure everyone knows it and get free limited edition collectible cards!

10 Neonpunch.com readers of course will be joining us tonight for the special advance IMAX preview tonight and will be giving us their thoughts on what looks to be an amazingly visual cocaine trip even if the US critics don’t like it. We’ll let you know tomorrow.

In the meantime have a look at these photos of the Hong Kong Sucker Punch girls and mark your calendars for this Thursday and check out all our past coverage here.

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