Looking to decorate your apartment but not wanting more Swedish items from Ikea?

Check out Fab.com – it’s a group-buying site like Groupon, but instead of Tibetan curry deals, they bring deals on some of the coolest new designer products to you for a limited time only.

It’s membership driven so you have to sig-up to view the deals, and while the quality of designer items is really in the eye and taste of the buyer, some of the products can be hit or miss – but you will definitely find it a good way to find out new designer products for your home and life – from iPad cases to wall decorations to coffee mugs.

Check them out at Fab.com and tell them Demi Moore sent you.

Google contracted The Boston Consulting Group to reveal the impact the internet has on Hong Kong’s economy – and what might be a surprise to some, surely not to readers of Neonpunch – its massive!

The report estimates that the Internet contributed HK$96 billion in 2009, representing 5.9 percent of Hong Kong’s GDP. A share that is likely to grow by 7 percent annually; contributing 7.2 percent of GDP in 2015 – faster than the forecasted GDP growth of 4 percent, reaching HK$146 billion by 2015.

We love reading these types of reports and luckily Google and BCG have allowed us to share the full report with you as well.

The biggest impact in Hong Kong is to small businesses. The report surveyed over 500 small and medium enterprises. These companies account for 50 percent of Hong Kong’s economy. The survey reveals that three-quarters of SMEs in the trade, transport and logistics, and technology sectors actively use the Internet. About 4 in 5 of these businesses who actively use the Internet report higher sales and three in four report lower costs as a result of the Internet.

Where does this HK$96 billion number come from? It’s estimated using total spending on finished goods and services. It covers four key elements: consumption (both goods sold online and the costs of getting online), investment, government spending, and net exports.

To give you some perspective, roughly a third of Hong Kong’s Internet economy is driven by consumption, which is evenly divided between spending on online shopping and consumer spending on access to the Internet, including telecom services, hardware and software. Another third comes from net exports of e-commerce and Internet-related hardware, reflecting Hong Kong’s role as a global trading hub. The rest consists of government and private investment in Internet-related goods and services, such as hardware, software and network maintenance service.

You can download the full report right here or go to www.connectedharbour.hk to see some videos and more stats in English and Chinese.

Hong Kong: At a Glance

• Population: 7 million
• Households: 2.3 million
• Gross Domestic Product: HK$1748 billion, HK$1632 billion
• Major sectors: Finance, insurance, real estate 27%; Wholesale, retail, imports/exports, restaurants, hotel 27%; Ownership of premise (leasing/ rental services) 12%; Transport, storage, communications 8%
• Internet users: 4.8 million
• Broadband penetration: 82% of households
• Mobile subscriptions: 13.3 million
• 3G customers: 5 million
• 2.5G customers: 1 million
• Hong

We love this 1-page document so we have it embedded below:

One of the more interesting breakout stars on YouTube isn’t a dancing baby or a single day loving 13-year old singer-songwriter – he’s Vancouver-native Carlos Vidal (aka @CarlosDouh) and his series of Cantonese teaching videos have stretched from his home in Canada to Hong Kong and everywhere in between.

Carlos was in Hong Kong recently thanks to a Cathay Pacific video challenge and we had a chance to meet him at a meet-up he held in Mong Kok last Friday night where he was signing postcards for his fans and get the secret to his great Canto.

Carlos plays both sides of the fence with his clever, short and memorable Cantonese slang videos – it appeals to the gweilo’s looking to pick up a few party words to impress (and trust us, it never fails to impress) as well as picking up local fans who like the way he’s spreading slang on YouTube.

Since he started in October 2010, at the behest of a friend to start making YouTube videos, Carlos has gone on to amass 40,000 subscribers on his channel at YouTube, get over 2 million combined views on his videos, 14,000+ fans on Facebook,  and has just recently been made a YouTube content partner. He shoots with a Canon 60D and edits in Adobe Premiere on a Mac.

Carlos is able to tap into the zeitgeist that is the YouTube phenomenon – no more TV executives and gatekeepers allowing what they deem good for public viewing consumption – just like iJustene and FreddieW and hundreds of others that just picked up a video camera, uploaded to YouTube and started to entertain millions of people in a way that no scripted or reality show could ever do.

Enjoy a few of the videos Carlos has made below and you can follow him on Twitter, on Facebook or subscribe to his YouTube channel here – hell, he even has his own online T-shirt shop here.

And amongst all the hustle and bustle of his meet-up in Mong Kong, we did learn the secret to his great Cantonese – which is one that has been passed on from generation to generation: a Chinese girlfriend.

Hear it. Speak it. Memorize it.

CHOK YEUNG:

COOKING WITH CARLOS:

SING LE:

Neonpunch.com is going to SXSW 2011 in 10 days.

The South by Southwest (SXSW) music, film and interactive conference in Austin, Texas is one of the biggest events for technology in the world and Neonpunch.com will be there live, covering the going-ons to give Hong Kong some insight into what happens when the creators of Foursquare, Twitter, Mashable, Techcrunch and all your favorite iPhone apps and blogs get together under one roof.

SXSW combines music with film and interactive – we’ll be there just for the 5 days that the interactive portion of the show runs. So expect a lot of coverage coming your way as we head down to Texas next week not only on Neonpunch.com, but on our Twitter account too.

For those that don’t know what SXSW is have a look at these videos:

The Zuck was last year’s keynote:

Watch more at the SXSW YouTube channel here.

We’ve plenty of requests for more information on how to get/stream/view video from the US here in Hong Kong and we’ve decided to throw together this light overview of 3 virtual private network (VPN) services that may help you.

If you’ve travelled or work in China you know that VPN’s are a way of life if you want to access even basic sites like Facebook and Twitter through the Great Firewall. The Chinese government knows people use these to get around their restrictions, yet these VPN services still operate. Sso we’re guessing that if you know how to access a VPN you’re probably not the kind of internet user they want to stop from accessing country sensitive information.

So, while we enjoy open surfing here in HK, our IP addresses give away the fact that we are in Hong Kong when we want to watch things like Hulu or enjoy Netflix Watch Instantly – so here are 3 picks if you want to go down this route.

StrongVPN.com has service to 14 different countries, though they break up their package into regions. You can get the North American “region” and access to USA and Canada or you can get the European region, etc.

Overplay.net is a personal favorite of ours. For one small fee of $9.95 US a month you get access to VPN servers from 22 countries (the exact number seems to change on the fly quite frequently). We’ve found the speeds more than sufficient for live streaming, but like everything in Hong Kong, it is dependent on how many other users are currently running bittorrent in your neighborhood sucking up all the available bandwidth.

There are also a number of new services that are free, such as ExpatShield and AnchorFree.

Expat Shield runs a few ads when connecting but will give you an IP address in the UK. Anchor Free is also know as Hotspot Shield and provides you an IP address in the USA. While some have had great success using these, others have reported bandwidth issues that affect the playback. These programs require a download that is currently Windows-only at this point.

So with one of these services you can go to SETTINGS on your iPad, plug in the necessary info and you can start watching Hulu right away. Your local video store not offer anything outside of Avatar and other recent hits, want to see more Indie films and even older films, then you might want to try and sign up for a Netflix account and access their amazing databases.

Setting up a VPN is not only limited to your iPad of course, the same settings can be applied to your iPhone, Android phone, laptop and desktop. So there are a few hurdles to jump since we’re sure its not companies like NetFlix that don’t want you to access their site but the license holders.

With your VPN set up on your iPad you can lean back, grab your cat and watch whatever the BBC or IFC can throw at you.

If you have other suggestions we’d love to hear them.

Someone’s been watching too much Minority Report while having Steve Jobs’ keynotes playing in the background .

We’re all for easy to access content but is this taking it too far? Or not far enough?

While you can obviously set up a Yahoo! mail account with Mail on your iPad and avoid opening Safari altogether (and push too) Yahoo! is still stepping it up with a HTML5 enhanced version of Yahoo! Mail and it looks pretty.

From the Yahoo Mail blog:

• Faster and more reliable: If you’re offline, Yahoo! Mail uses local caching capabilities to help you access and search your messages even without an Internet connection.

• Smart: You can find and organize your messages using Full Search, personal folders and Smart Folders with messages from your most important contacts and optimized views for photos and file attachments.

• Feature Rich: View rich photo attachments in their full form, or as previews directly in the inbox view. Also includes a dual-pane view to make reading and organizing a breeze.

The new Yahoo! Mail experience will be available globally to anyone who has an iPad. So if you do have one, simply open up Safari and head on over to http://mail.yahoo.com to try it for yourself.

Hong Kong (and Asia) is a fragmented place for the big US internet brands. Yahoo Hong Kong is a monster here, but everyone uses MSN Messenger for instant messaging. eBay also falls second to Yahoo Auctions.

In terms of search engines, we here at the ‘Punch love to Google left-right-and-center, the Bing search does look quite sharp, but we can’t remember the last time we used Yahoo to search for something other than our own rankings.

So the new ComScore report that showcases the breakdown of the search engine market is quite interesting: Google has a mod-60% share (we thought it would be higher) Yahoo has a 17% share (we thought it would be lower) and Microsoft who was going to buy Yahoo not too long ago and launched their own search engine is already at 11%. This is just the US since we’re sure Baidu has a pretty big user base themselves.

Click on to read more and also answer our poll: Which search engine do you use?

BusinessInsider.com continues:

• Google domestic explicit core search market share was 65.8% in July, down slightly from 66.2% in June. Google domestic explicit core search volume growth of 16.9% Y/Y in July was an acceleration from June’s 12.7% growth and 2Q’s 9.1% growth.
• Yahoo! domestic explicit core search market share increased to 17.1% in July from 16.7% in June
• Microsoft sites’ domestic explicit core search market share stayed flat at 11.0% in July.
• Baidu’s share in China is 70.8% with Google at 27.3%.

Including this guy, Ben Huh, the CEO of the Cheezburger Network, who apparently is allergic to cats! And you can count even more Asians, if you include people from Japanese and Korean heritage.

On the list singer/actor and Green Hornet sidekick Jay Chou, senior software engineer at Facebook Haiping Zhao and Perry Chen who started Kickstarter, a crowd-sourcing investment site. Say what you will about the list, but these creative Asians are all mentioned in the same breath as Lady Gaga, James Cameron and Jamie Oliver.

See the full list here.

Yahoo! Hong Kong honored local companies for their innovate web presences at the annual “Yahoo! Emotive Brand Awards 2009-2010.” This is the 8th year that Yahoo! Hong Kong has organised the event with the first awards held in 2002.

Held at a packed Four Seasons ballroom awards where given out in 24 catagories to one major brand after another (check out the list of winners at the bottom of this article to see who won what).

Yahoo! Emotive Brand Awards encourages Internet users to vote for and give recognition to their favorite brands through the Yahoo! Hong Kong portal. Based on online polling results, the Yahoo! Emotive Brand Awards aims to pay tribute to local brands that demonstrate excellent brand value and are also able to establish close ties with their customers. The Awards also hopes to arouse public awareness and understanding about quality brands and services in an attempt to further strengthen Hong Kong’s position as International hub for business.

Yahoo! Inc Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Elisa Steele

Kicking of the event with a short speech was Jeremy Godfrey the Government Chief Information Officer, who was then followed up by Yahoo! Inc Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Elisa Steele  and Yahoo! Hong Kong Vice President and Managing Director Alfred Tsoi.

On hand to present awards were a number industry experts and luminaries that include; Eric Lam Lung, Assistant Director of Office of the Telecommunications Authority (OFTA) Assistant Director, Steven Lo Kit-shing, Chairman of South China Althetic Association Football Management Committee, together with his wife Canny Leung Chi-shan, who is the Executive Director of bma Entertainment Holdings Ltd and a famous writer; Mary Pandora Cheung, professional training and marketing expert; famous models Bianca Bai Xin-hui and Larisa Angela, top photographer Sunny Lau, and Crystal Choi Ka-yee, daughter of “King of Toy Manufacturing” Dr. Choi Chee Ming, J.P., and more.

On hand to pick up their award for “Top Celebrity Spokesperson Awards 2009-2010” were Charlene Choi, Cheuk-yin (one half of Canto-Pop group Twins) for Adidas and Joey Yung, Jo-yee for Broadway. Gillian Chung, Yan-tung (the other half of Twins) for Dr Reborn was unable to attend so the award was accepted by Charlene in her place.

The nomination list of brands and celebrity spokespersons for Yahoo! Emotive Brand Awards 2009-2010 was derived as a result of the interviews with a number of experienced marketing professionals, advertising experts, senior executives and other professionals from different sectors. These interviews were conducted by international market research firm Synovate commissioned by Yahoo! Hong Kong. After a series of screening exercises, a total of 359 outstanding brands and celebrity spokespersons were selected for public polling.

The Top 3 Yahoo! Emotive Brand Awards 2009-2010 (Winning Brands – Categories)

• Canon (Digital and Audio Visual)
• Cathay Pacific (Airline)
• Ocean Park (Entertainment)

The Top 3 Yahoo! Asia Emotive Brand Awards 2009-2010

• 7-Eleven (Retail Chain)
• Sony (Digital and Audio Visual)
• Sony Ericsson (Mobile Phone)

Top Celebrity Spokesperson Awards 2009-2010

• Charlene Choi, Cheuk-yin (Adidas)
• Joey Yung, Jo-yee (Broadway)
• Gillian Chung, Yan-tung (Dr Reborn)
• “Mannings sister” Winky Wong, Wan-ki (Mannings)

Yahoo! Emotive Brand Awards 2009-2010

Banking / Credit Card

• HSBC
• Hang Seng Bank
• VISA

Insurance

• AIA
• Manulife
• Prudential

Property Developer & Agent

• Centaline
• MTR Corporation
• Sun Hung Kai

Mobile/Internet Service

• 3 Hong Kong
• Netvigator
• SmarTone-Vodafone

Mobile Phone

• Apple iPhone
• Nokia
• Sony Ericsson

Digital & Audio Visual

• Apple
• Canon
• SONY

Automobile

• BMW
• Mercedes-Benz
• Toyota

Travel Agent

• EGL Tours
• Hong Thai Travel
• Wing On Travel

Airline

• Cathay Pacific
• Dragonair
• Japan Airlines

Entertainment

• AMC/ Broadway Cinema
• Hong Kong Disneyland
• Ocean Park

Restaurant

• Café de Coral
• McDonald’s
• Starbucks

Food/Beverage

• Calbee
• Nissin
• Vitasoy

Beauty Salon/Fitness Centre

• Angel Face
• Marie France Bodyline
• Sau San Tong

Cosmetics/Skin Care

• Shiseido
• SK-II
• The Body Shop

Personal Care

• Acuvue
• Johnson’s Baby
• Tempo

Health Care

• BRAND’S
• Nin Jiom
• OSIM

Watch & Jewelry

• Cartier
• Chow Tai Fook
• Chow Sang Sang

International Luxury Fashion Brand

• Gucci
• Louis Vuitton
• Prada

Retail Chain

• 7-Eleven
• JUSCO
• Mannings

Everyday/Sports Fashion

• Adidas
• H&M
• Nike

Brand with Corporate Conscience & Social Responsibility

• HSBC
• Hong Thai Travel
• MTR Corporation

Government Sector

• Fire Services Department
• Hong Kong Post
• ICAC

Logistics/Transportation

• KMB
• MTR Corporation
• New World First Bus/ City Bus