We will be taking a day off tomorrow for Christmas, but we promise to be back to soon with more updates on launching Asia’s first bilingual industrial property marketplace.

Hope your holidays are filled with joy and I look forward to seeing you again here on Mingtiandi.com.

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Baby Mike, “I’m tired — are we there yet?”

Baby Mike’s long-suffering pop, “We are almost there!  Stop complaining – it’s only another 9/10ths of a mile.” (Knowing full well that my five year old brain had no comprehension of a mile or of 9/10ths of anything).

Now it must be only another 9/10ths of a module before the site is finished.

To make things slightly less opaque, our developers had neglected to consider what order the values on the site’s menus should appear in for the Chinese version of the site, and I was not pleased with their assumption that the Chinese menus should just use the same sequence as the English menus.  There was also a considerable SNAFU regarding the translation of the listings on the site that obliged me to make the team go back and do a number of things over again.

The project schedule now looks a bit like this:

• Week of 27 October: Fix the listing translation issues
• Week of 3 November: Fix the menu sequence issues
• Week of 10 November: Remove any remaining bugs and get the site onto a proper hosting server (it’s on a development server at the moment)
• Week of 17 November: Perform UAT (User Acceptance Testing) on the site on its new host
• Week of 23 November:Make any post-UAT fixes
• Week of 1 December: Go live and shake the world!

While we are now confident that this should be the final schedule for the site, we also realise that many schedules have died a slow, miserable death because of this project.

In the meantime, we are getting ready to have a small event on 19 November for a few friends who will help us test out the site. The party concept revolves around getting a group of property professionals in a room with a bunch of computers, introducing them to the site, giving them copious amounts of beer, and then asking them for constructive feedback.

On the plus side, we had a great marketing meeting with Edward Zhong and Gary Yan from Changshu Economic Development Zone. Changshu is second-tier city near Suzhou, and they opened their development zone in 1992. Edward and Gary gave an impressive presentation on the appeal of Changshu for foreign investors and were excited to see the opportunities for promoting their properties on RightSite.Asia.

Wish us luck!

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1. Lost in Translation

As a B2B site in China, we believe that one of the key elements of Rightsite’s effectiveness for its users will be its ability to connect international users from around the world with Chinese property owners.  And since most of our users will not be bilingual in English and Chinese (I wish I was) then our site will need to offer its information in both Chinese and English.  All of the information. Completely the same. Whether the user is viewing in Chinese or English.

Having formerly been a manager at Global Sources, which then was the leading online B2B in Asia, I believe that one of the biggest reasons that Alibaba was able to grow so much more effectively in the same space as Global Sources is that they offered Chinese language service and a complete Chinese site.  This allowed them to gain much greater traction with Chinese Internet users, and since in China the Chinese Internet users are the revenue base, then this is where the money is.  So RightSite will be biingual, just like Alibaba.

Actually, RightSite will be bilingual in a way that is much better than Alibaba. Instead of offering two separate sites (with separate content), one in English and the other in Chinese, RightSite will have only one site with one set of content, but allow the user to choose whether they view the content in Chinese or English.  If we grow a bit, we will also offer versions of the site in traditional Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Thai. It sounds complicated, but its fairly easy for us to accomplish once the site is done.

RightSite can be easily displayed in various languages because we’ve built the site’s core content, its property listings, consultant listings and industrial zone listings all around structured data.  So if you wanted to create a listing for a warehouse that you would like to sell in Waigaoqiao, rather than just entering a text description of the warehouse into the site in English and/or Chinese, you would be asked to select values in a number of fields for such variables as the area of the warehouse site, the construction area of the warehouse, the province, city and district that the warehouse are in, and many more.

Filling in these values takes about five minutes for a listing, and the user can choose to enter the values from an English or a Chinese interface.  Once the values are entered, however, other users can view the listing (and the values that it contains) in either English or Chinese, regardless of the language that you used to create the listing.

That’s the secret sauce.

Of course, this system applies only to the site’s dynamic content, such as the property listings, and doesn’t work for static content such as field labels, About Us pages and other fun stuff.  For these areas, our team needs to create bilingual versions of all content, and all the static content needs to be entered into the system twice — once in Chinese and once in English.

So that’s where we are right now.  The English static content is 99% complete, but now we will have to add all of the Chinese static content.  This is bit complicated because I can’t read Chinese and neither can any of our developers, so there will be some busy times ahead for the bilingual staff at RightSite. But the hard work of our team should help our site reach users across China and the world.  So let’s get to work.

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In the spirit of community cooperation, I have come up with another name and number that folks can contact, since Mr Andrew Phillips, who is supposed to be in charge of membership refunds here in Shanghai, has fled to Malaysia and stopped answering emails.

As Mr Phillips is still employed by Fitness First, he is now reporting to Fitness First’s Managing Director for Asia, Mr Simon Flint. Mr Flint may be reached at the following contacts:

Simon Flint, Managing Director – Asia

Fitness First

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

email: sflint@fitnessfirst.com.my

Tel: 60-3-7722-1177

Oh, and if you do get in touch, please let them know that Michael Cole sent you. It’s the least I can do for such nice people

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But I always have time to write when I’m seriously chapped, and nothing sounds the call to action like scam artists, this time yet another gym which fails to keep its promises.

I was among the many members of Fitness First that signed up for a refund of our unfulfilled memberships when the gym was forced to close down due to losing its lease. According to the agreement that I signed with Fitness First on the 29th of April, I was to receive my refund within 3 weeks time. The membership representative, Shirley Zhu, assured me that I would receive my refund in the form of a check before the gym was to close on May 31st.

However, on May 30th, when I still had not received the promised refund check from Fitness First, I was told that there had been some unforeseen delays, and my check would not be available until June 10th, and I would then need to go to the Fitness First temporary office in Plaza 66 to pick it up.

Well, when I went today to pick up the refund check, the Fitness First staff told me the following:

• There were too many people who signed up for refunds before me, so I couldn’t expect to receive my check promptly
• That their bank limited them to issuing 30 checks a day, so they could not processall of their members by this date
• That the manager in charge of the Shanghai office, Mr Andrew Philip, had fled to Malaysia, where he no longer answered email or phone inquiries, but still maintained responsibility for resolving unpaid refund checks from the Shanghai office.

From the multitude of answers that the Fitness First staff gave me, I’m guessing that none of them are actually true. Not to mention that their original three week timeline has now stretched to ten weeks.

In the meantime, in case any of the rest of you are owed money by Fitness First, here are some contact numbers and emails.

• Mr Andrew Philip, Fitness First, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. email: ap@fitnessfirst.com.hk, Tel: 60-3-7722-1177
• Colin Waggett, CEO, Fitness First Limited, 58 Fleets Lane, Poole, Dorset, BH15 3BT, United Kingdom,Tel: 01202 845000

I was not comforted by the fact that while waiting in line, I heard the staff tell the person in front of me that his membership had already expired, and he was not due a refund, only to correct themselves upon being shown a copy of the contract that proved the membership was not due to expire until October.

If any of you are owed money by Fitness First, I would suggest pushing them hard. Or if any of you have received refunds, I would be interested in hearing whether the piledriver or the full-nelson was more effective in expediting the processing of your records.

In the meantime, enjoy the rest of your Friday, and have a happy weekend.

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