OGE & Internship Complete!

It is finally the last day of my internship and in less than 3 days I will be back in Toronto.  It was a stellar experience working abroad and a learned a lot about:

• starting a business in Hong Kong
• running a small business / startup company
• wi-fi and gadgets
• hotel management and the hospitality industry
• dealing with clients
• building and designing a website
• and much more…

Unfortunately my boss had to leave to Shenzhen, China yesterday so he was not here for my last day.  However, yesterday he sat down with me for what seemed like an hour where we talked about his business.

My boss is a veteran of the IT industry working in it since the first computer came out.  He has worked in places like IBM, AT&T and Juniper and he said because of those places he had learned a lot about the IT and Networking industry.  He has several business’ but DNET solution is a company that he is looking to make it with.  He only recently started the business, however he is moving in the right direction and he has a solid business plan.

He spoke a lot about his time at IBM where they trained him and gave him a lot of essential skills that he uses in developing DNET that he would have never gained in school.  This interests me since I have been curious about starting a business sometime in the near future.  He advised me in making sure to work in the industry first if possible to gain a better understanding about how it works and most importantly I can build a network of friends in that industry.  He said his network that he built during his time working was extremely valuable when he was starting his own business.

A great piece of advice he offered me was a few tips for starting a business.  Before you want to start your business you first need to figure out where this business will be in 2-5 years and what you want to do with it.  For example: do you want to create a product and try to get a bigger company to acquire your entire company and sell your IP and move onto the next idea or build your company for several years and aim for an IPO.  He also gave me a lot of advice on how to initially finance and build a proper budget for your business using some tips he learned at IBM.

Overall, I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here and I have made several contacts here in Hong Kong that I intend to keep in touch with.

Web Dev Update

So the website was completed and it is now live and available at : http://www.dnetsolution.com/

Earlier this week I said I would post at post mortem of sorts about my progress with developing this website since it was one of my main and largest tasks to do over this summer in comparison to the other things I have done.

I shall go into detail of each page individually:

Home Page

Home Page

The old home page had a lot of unneeded info on it and it made it a bit difficult to look at to understand exactly what DNET Solution is.  For my homepage I decided to strip it away and follow a really minimal approach to everything.

Home Page 2

For the rest of the homepage I highlighted the main product which was the Supermedia where DNet makes its main profit from.  For the footer, I also kept it simple by having a simple and sweet ‘about us’ statement and a few outgoing links to other DNet portals.

About Page

About Page

The about page defaulted to the Contact us subpage because I felt that it had the most important information to help a client reach DNET and a form to send us any email really quickly so the person would not have to load up their email.

Our Story is a small subpage with a bit of  a company blurb, nothing too fancy.  Gallery has a few pictures of DNet products and a nice lightbox display that fades the entire screen when you click each image as it opens up in full screen.

Also note that the subpages do not need to be loaded separately.  They were preloaded to make browsing faster since they all technically exist on the same page.

Product Page

Product Page

This page was really hard to do since the old version was super clunky.  I decided to stick with my minimal approach and remove a lot of hindrances and highlight all the products at the top with a collage, then have each product section at the bottom in an accordion that the user can click and interact with.  Rather then loading another page for each, I just placed each product neatly hidden in each button.

Product page, Accordion

The accordion works really nicely to hide each product neatly into the buttons and it allows for a very fast way to view each product. When you click on the other “Specification” button you are able to download the a data sheet for each product.

Download Page

Download Page

I didn’t want to keep this page, But I ended up having to since my boss was adamant about having a page to send his clients to, so they may download important documents about our products.

News Page

NEWS Page

I made this page entirely out of embedding a tumblr blog that I set up so that my boss did not have to keep updating the website when he wanted to make a change to the news section.  It feeds info from a DNET tumblr page and it auto updates with every new post.  It is a lot easier to use tumblr then to update a website, which is why I chose to do it this way.

Quote Page

Quote Page

Another really simple page that just allows a user to enter data into a form so that an email will be sent to the sales team to approach them.

 

Aside from that that is pretty much the website I built in about a week and a half.

Last Week at Science Park

At long last the internship is almost over.  This last week is going to be jam packed with last minute work and things to do.  For one I need to get the website live and uploaded onto the current DNet Solutions website.  It should not be very difficult to do that, the only thing I haven’t had time to test is the speed at which each web page loads.

For the current website, everything loads really slowly, but for this website, I took out a lot of unneeded photos and clunky boxes in favour for a more minimalist approach.  I’ll post another blog in the middle of the week talking more about the website, kind of like a post mortem.  For now here is a picture of the home page:

DNet Homepage Alpha

 

This is what the old Homepage used to look like:

Old DNet HomePage

I am still in the process of changing the header image because I would like to replace that with a slideshow. However I am still waiting on some pictures.

Overall this internship has been very rewarding.  I got to wear a lot of different hats during my time working here and it was my first time both working abroad and in a very small company.  I like how relaxed and homey it feels to work in a small company and most of the people here have known each other for many years.  I used to work in a much larger company where it was a lot more professional but it also felt very fake and it was not the right fit for me.  Working at DNet, I sit 3 seats away from one of the CEO’s and I can approach him whenever I want and we can strike up a conversation about many different things.  Working at SNCL I needed to walk half a floor away, knock on a door and choose my words carefully when I spoke to my boss who was always busy and the air in the room always felt very tense.

At DNet I feel like I can work at my own pace and I have a lot more control and freedom to do my work.  I am very glad that I had the opportunity to take part in an 8 week internship abroad and I would like to come back to Hong Kong in the future to do business.

Off to Boracay!

Everything Hurts!

Last week was a pretty short week where I spent most of my time working on the website.  I’ll post some screenshots this week so you can see exactly what I have been up to.  I have been using Adobe Muse to create the website through a recommendation of one of the Global edge students which was a breath of relief since it allowed me to make the website a lot faster then what I was doing before.  Adobe Muse allows you to simply and efficiently create a website without having to worry about creating the CSS sheets and doing any coding.  The real power comes from the ability to visually see your website and test in under 30 seconds.  Its a really great piece of software and I highly recommend it to anyone trying to build a website that wants to get it running in under a week.

Muse also has a great bunch of modules for creating a parallax scrolling version of your website and they have support for creating mobile and tablet versions of the website as well.  I wanted to created a parallax version of the website I was doing for DNET Solution, but I don’t think that is what my boss wants.  He spoke of creating a very simple and sleek version that someone can navigate through very easily.  It is proving to be a bit of a design problem more then anything.  Minimalism is a great design practice but its also very hard to do.  Often times I will stare at the same screen for about an hour while moving something 4 times to see what works better for a user to enter and where I want the focus points to be.

It helps that we do a bit of graphic design in our program otherwise I would have no idea as to what I am doing.

Week of Web Development and Directing

This week felt relatively slow since  my time was split between finding time to work on working on the website and working with my boss, David, to film video demonstrations.  The video demos are ways to instruct our future clients and overseas partners in exactly how our hardware works so if they are asked questions during sales meetings they are able to answer them.  They also serve as a good tool on learning how to demo the device in those sales meetings.

I was in charge of filming and editing the video.  David wanted to film the video in one smooth take so I could edit it as fast as possible and have a video ready as soon as possible.  He was surprised that I was able to edit it and have the video ready by Thursday since he was heading to China this weekend and I guess it made his meeting with his partners a bit smoother.  This coming week will be a lot shorter while I will be doing the same mix of web development and video editing tasks again.

It will be shorter since myself and most of the Global Edge crew will be going to Boracay, Philippines!  I am pretty excited because its supposed to have one of the best beaches in the world.  I really hope the weather doesn’t ruin it, since I saw that it might be raining for a bit.  But what I am really excited about is the cliff we will be jumping off into the sea.  Its called Ariel’s Point and its about 50 feet high and compared to the 20 feet waterfall in Luk Wu stream here in Hong Kong that we jumped off, its should be really fun!

Aside from that I have sat down for a Skype meeting with one of David’s daughters who is studying marketing in America and she gave me a few tips on what she didn’t like about the old website that I plan on incorporating into the new one sometime this week.

Here is the Video Demo I worked on this week:

Singapore Was Awesome!

Guten Tag!

This past weekend a few of us were able to get Friday off from work and we went to both Malaysia and Singapore!  We visited Kuala Lumpur and went up to the Twin Towers and got an awesome view of the city from a variety of angles.  Singapore was amazing, definitely my new favourite city.  We only had a day and an half in Singapore, but we packed it with a lot of activities.  From riding a Segway on the beach, going on a duck boat tour, a nighttime safari and so much more.

Aside from that I have been put in charge of revamping our current website and making it look alot better than it currently does.  My other job is to make it easy enough to update if you have no experience in web programming.  I have a couple ideas of what I want to do with the website, but I have no clue on how I will implement it for now.  I personally have little to no experience in web programming so this should be an exciting and challenging task.  It works out well since I have to make my own portfolio website later on this year before I enter the job market.

I will likely try to do something using HTML 5 as I have seen some really cool web pages set up using that. I have also been looking into WebGL and JQUERY for special effects and to do things like parallax scrolling and what not.  The more time I spend researching on web development the more I get excited at all the possibilities.  Normally in game programming, when you start its difficult to show people your work easily.  Especially if you are still very new to programming due to all the technicalities involved in making an .exe run on several machines.  However with web pages you can have a website up and running in an hour, a day if you are new to web development.

Week 2!

SALUT!

This was a shorter work week than normal because we had the Monday July 1st as a statutory holiday.  Not only is it Canada day, but it is also the Hong Kong SAR day.  The global edge crew including myself spent the weekend volunteering at the Canada Day celebration by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.  I was pretty busy and I regret not taking enough photos, if I manage to find some that others took I shall post them here.

Aside from that this week has been a bit slower than last week.  On Wednesday I had a chance to visit ASAP Creative & Communication.  They are interested in partnering with DNET Solution to hopefully sell our hardware in Taiwan.  I was glad my boss took me to the meeting so I could see first hand how business was done in Hong Kong.  It turns out that my boss knew the Director for over 20 years.  He was telling me that in Hong Kong relationships are very important, it’s mostly how business is run.  My Boss’s goal was to get the Director to showcase the product to her husband who has a company in Taiwan who would eventually tell his colleagues and through that their business would spread and they would be able to sell the hardware.  Most of the meeting was in Cantonese so I couldn’t gauge anything but their facial expressions and reactions.

The other main task this week is trying to integrate another companies tech with our multimedia panel.  Essentially that tech is an Android based media server that would be the perfect harmony to our companies hardware.  Our main job is to figure out if the tech can either fit in and be integrated into our hardware to offer the full hardware and software experience to the customer.  Otherwise if we can’t integrate it we have to add it on as a package deal when we try and sell our hardware to our clients.  I personally hope that we can integrate it because our current software is pretty primitive and from the demonstration I saw last week, I like their version a lot more.

Mainly because it is developed using the Android 4.2 OS, as a software (game) developer I can see myself trying to convince my boss that games can be developed specifically for that system.

On July 8th, I had the privilege of visiting a press and industry launch of “Tomorrow’s Guestroom” at the Icon Hotel and the Polytech Uni. DNET won the award so myself along with almost everyone in our office went to the press conference to showcase our hardware to both the press and industry.  It was really exciting to meet several people from the hospitality industry and it was a bit awkward since almost everyone there was 2-3 times my age.  It was great to see how fast paced things in Asia are.  I never knew how slow business was in Canada until I came here.  I guess it really helps that China is so close that we don’t have to wait long to hear from manufacturers.  In Canada since the distribution channels are mostly further apart from one another, I guess it slows down business.  It is really amazing that a small company can manufacture hardware and prototype so fast!

 

Thats all for now!

End of Week 1

Aloha!

I finished my first week of work here at DNET and it was a really interesting week.  I can safely say that I have not had two days at work where I did the same thing.

I had some downtime at work and I didn’t exactly want to sit around and browse the internet and I was a bit lazy to work on my personal programming projects. Since I am more then familiar with the Adobe creative suite I offered my Photoshop skills to them and within the hour I was working with Illustrator editing some of their technical documentation.  Granted  had little to no Illustrator experience before, but I lot of what I knew from Photoshop helped me out.  My colleagues seemed to be pleased and I felt less useless :D.

Aside from the office work, on Thursday I had the opportunity to head to the Polytech University’s School of Hotel Tourism and Management to set up some tech.  DNET entered a competition based upon building tech for “tomorrow’s guest room”.   Several other companies also applied but DNET managed to win with their DN-7000 model that I talked about in my last post.  So I spent some time during the week making sure I could install and debug it so that it worked when we had to install them in 3 model guestrooms.

Panorama from the hotel room

There were several categories in the competition however I didn’t get time to see them all since we managed to install and demonstrate all our devices before everyone else came in.  I saw some other people installing a VOIP operated system that worked with the display in the room to help the user use the hotel’s services while also being able to reserve tables and order online.  The menu of the restaurant’s would show up on the TV while a map of the seating arrangements would also show up on screen.

Oh yeah the hotel even had self cleaning toilets! They had a button that would… clean your behind for you also. Haha.  I was more amazed by this then a grown man should have been.  There were a couple other buttons on it as well, but they all made to many sounds when I pressed them and I didn’t want the people outside to wonder what I was doing in there.

THE FUTURE!

I was really impressed by Hong Kong’s use of technology.  Especially in the science park! Every place I went to was working with the latest software updates (Android 4.2, Windows 8 and whatever version of iOS and OS).  I am used to working for larger North American corporations who find it more cost effective to deploy older software that they still have licenses for while not updating to the latest version.  I can understand why they do that: they have other systems that have been tested and depend on those pieces of software and the workforce is already trained with that version. IE: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  I really don’t like that mentality though.  In the Science park there is a lot of innovation and collaboration going on that is possible with never software versions that allow them to do some really futuristic stuff.

More on that part later!

Next time I’ll likely talk about the “google glass” augmented reality talk I went to on Friday.  Oh and since July 1st is also Hong Kong SAR day, we get the day of work! But the global edge crew will be volunteering at LKF street in this Canada Day festival.  There is so much going on and I am loving it!

LATER!

Week 1 at work

Hello!

I never did an initial post to commemorate my first two weeks here in the Orient because of all the craziness that happened.  A quick recap of the past two weeks are:

• Flew to Hong Kong
• Went to the Canadian Chamber of Commerce
• Went to the University of Hong Kong School of Business
• Went to the Honk Kong University of IT
• Visited the Hong Kong Stock exchange
• Trip to Macau to activate our Hong Kong Visa’s
• Took a 2 day course at the Chinese University of Hong Kong
• Flew to Thailand (Bangkok and Pattaya) for 5 days

Now that that was all done I start work!

Dnet Solution

http://www.dnetsolution.com/

So I work for a relatively small company in the Science Park in Hong Kong.  At the park I am 25% of the company.  There are only three other people that work in the office, we have Camey who handles many of the office tasks, Alfred the technical director and David the main boss and one of the founders.

DNET builds customised multimedia panels for hotels.  What does that mean? Essentially when you go into a hotel room and you would like to connect your PC, iDevice or even use the TV as a projector you would normally have to bring your own tech to do that.  This past April when I was apart of a team that went to Montreal to do a presentation for Ubisoft we needed to use the TV in the hotel room to practise the presentation.  I had brought my own VGA cable and they had a nice Samsung TV that had a proper VGA port to connect to.  When I did so, I could not connect to the TV because the hotel had put in some blocks on the remote and TV and the only thing I could do was flip the channel and control the volume.

This was obviously frustrating and annoying considering we were staying at a relatively expensive hotel (Hyatt).

Multimedia Panel

DNET builds multimedia panels like the one you see above that solves problems like this.  They make it drop dead easy for anyone to plug in and connect their devices to display them or charge them on the hotel display.  This is great because if you are on vacation and you would like to show off your pictures on the screen in the hotel because your mobile device’s screen is too tiny the DNET Superdock is there to make your life easier.

First Day

It is only the second day of my work as I am writing this and my main job is to get familiar with their tech and learn how to use it.  This Thursday I am heading to the Polytech University to showcase DNET’s award winning tech for hotels.  It is essentially an alarm clock with an NFC speaker on the top that allows the user to simply drop their phone on the top of the device to play music transmitted through NFC.

DN-7000
http://www.dnetsolution.com/product/SuperDock

My job for the first few days was to get familiar with it enough to show people how it worked and repeat these facts to whoever asked:

• Day time Clock
• Alarm Clock x 2
• FM Radio 76.0 to 108.0 Mhz
• Magically amplifies the sound from any mobile phone devices
• Power Supply AC 110-240
• No configuration and pairing is needed
• 4 Speakers with Sound Output power 7 Watts
• AUX In and AUX Out for external Audio System
• USB 2.0 Charger port
• Remote Control
• Dimension 150 x 112 x 55 mm

It was pretty easy to do and I completed the task in under 30 minutes.  The rest of the time I spent with Alfred playing around with the SuperDock because he wanted to test some new functionality with my Samsung Galaxy S4.  I’ll talk more about that on a later blog post because it is related to one of my main tasks this summer.

Aside from that this Friday there is a Google Glass seminar in the Science Park and I am super excited to go check it out!

If you don’t know what Google glass is you might have to get out of that rock you are living under.  It is essentially a new form of technology that you wear similar to prescription eyeglasses.  However it comes with speakers, microphone and its goal is to provide the user with an augmented reality experience that is totally futuristic.

More info – http://www.google.com/glass/start/

Later!

– Naeem