5 Questions with Taxizu.com Co-Founder Nagib Tharani

Taxi sharing iPhone app helps you plan rides with others.

Continuing on with our coverage of some of the Hong Kong start-ups that received funding from Cyberport, we sit down with Taxizu.com co-founder Nagib Tharani for a quick interview to see what Taxizu.com is all about.

Nagib and his co-founder Ben Liong developed the idea at a startup weekend event hosted by Boot.HK and StartupsHK last year and have taken that initial 2-days of work and expanded it into a full business that is set to shake-up the transportation industry from your smartphone.

How did you come up with the idea for Taxizu?

Oddly enough while going to Cyberport for their Web 3.0 Asia event.

Actually it had been in my mind for a while, but having to wait in a line at Admiralty with a stream of taxis, where you could pretty much guess where a good percentage of folks were heading solidified the idea that this could work. It’s obviously most suited to long-haul taxi routes. And a city like Hong Kong’s population density works in your favour. There is a better than even chance you’ll find folks heading to a similar district as you.

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5 Questions with Timable.com Co-Founder Mike Ko

Hong Kong’s Timable helps you organize your entertainment schedule.

Following up on Cyberport’s Creative Micro Fund winners post here, we sit down with Mike Ko of Timable and ask him more about his start-up and what he’s going to do with the 100 large that the HK government gave him for his tech company.

How did you come up with the idea for Timable?

The idea came with the real problem that I faced with Sam, another co-founder of Timable. Some time ago we hang out on weekends and found that it’s difficult to find something interesting and meaningful.

Movies and dining seemed our only choice, and when we tried to find something else from different sources like magazine, web and friends, the information are just too discrete, not consolidated enough. When we found something interesting, it’s too late since the events may have expired already. So we think it would be a good idea to have such a single platform aggregating all sorts of events.

Just like when we want to search for information, we will go to Google; and when we want to search for activities, we hope people will go to Timable.

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Cyberport Funds Hong Kong Start-Ups with HK$500k From Creative Micro Fund

Is Hong Kong becoming the new Silicon Valley?

Five promising Hong Kong start-up companies got a special break last month when they were granted HK$100,000 each as the winners of the Cyberport Creative Micro Fund (CCMF).

Established to promote digital entrepreneurial talent in Hong Kong by Cyberport, this year’s fund focused on start-ups that showed potential for capturing the opportunities of the next-generation Internet.

Hey, it’s not a lot in this day and age but at least the HK government is starting somewhere – although they are seriously behind cities like Singapore that match $1-to-$1 investments up to $1-to-$4 up in similar platform as well as helping their start-ups to tour around the world like we saw at last month’s South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas.

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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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