Plurk animals say: Where are you going? Going to Plurk's first birthday party!

Translation (English):

Hello everyone!

My Chinese is bad, but I don't care. I came to Taiwan this Februrary, to stay for just 2 weeks, but now it's already 3 or 4 months. (audience: do you feel like leaving?) When to leave? I really don't know. At that time, when we first started, we were scared that no one would play with Plurk. Plurk is not from Taiwan, many people don't know that. Plurk is a Canadian company. We first targeted the North American market, and then staring from last year, there were a lot of people on Plurk from Southeast Asia. So this year I thought I'd come to Southeast Asia, and the first stop is Taiwan, and now I haven't left yet. So next year I'll come again to Southeast Asia.

I've prepared some slides. I wanted to share with you guys some scenes from when Plurk first started, some photos, and lots of features. There are many versions of our features, and when we launched, we had left out a lot of them, a lot of designs, etc.

So can you guys see? This is at my Toronto house. Plurk started here. At that time, my partner and I spent a lot of time here, designing, writing. At first we were deciding colours, at first we were orange and blue, and we were discussing, would it make money? will there be people on it? If there were no one on it would I need to find another job? Everything is here. My house is really messy. It started here.

This is the first ever plurk. The first one. This is from the other co-founder. We started November 2007, founded the company, and spent half a year designing and coding. On June 1st, we launched. After launching, the plurks on June 1st were not the first plurks, because half a year before, we were inviting friends, family to try it out. Now this one is the first Plurk from November 2007.

Now we can show you some screens. You haven't seen this, and in the end, it wasn't released. You're looking at another version of the "my friends" screen.

This one is from June 1, the plurk.com home page. (How do you say home page in Chinese? audience responds, and Alvin sighs and goes ok!)

Next, this is when you log in, a different version. On my computer, I have hundreds of photoshop files and mocks, cause I'm responsible for the design. A lot of stuff I couldn't show anyone, and some of them I really liked personally. In the end, we used the more practical designs, the ones more people were going to use. I'd like this opportunity, now, to share some of this with everyone here.

I'd like to introduce the Plurk team. Plurk is a small company, there are 8 of us now, I'm one of the co-founders [literal: "principle persons"]. So that's why I came to Taiwan, because the rest of the staff doesn't know Chinese, and mine is OK (audience chuckles)

Now this is Gleb, he's in charge of IM. So if you guys use yahoo, MSN, or gchat to plurk, he's responsible for that.

Next is Ryan. Ryan just joined us recently. He's the server admin, just does some some strange [complicated] stuff.

Petrious does translation. I think Plurk does so well in Taiwan because of the translation. It was really well done. Two weeks after launching, someone helped us translate into traditional and simplified Chinese. And lots of Taiwanese friends, they come in, and right away they feel at home. It's in Chinese, for the Taiwanese, so they feel that it's a Taiwanese company. Most importantly, though, I feel it's not important which country we're from, so I feel really happy to see so many friends here today.

Next, Dennis, Next, Alexi, Next, ME,
Next is the other co-founder, Amir.

Today, I told them to record some video to say happy birthday, and whatnot, so let's see...

No sound?? .. can we repeat?

(offstage: No problem, I've seen this video: it's only 4 seconds, it says "happy birthday Plurk" [audience laughs] - very simple, I can dub for them no problem)

- Video plays -

At first when I came to Taiwan, they were jealous of me, because I can speak some Chinese, and there were a lot of users from Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore. So when I came here, I got some attention, some media interviews, etc. In Canada and the US, even though we're pretty well known, but compared to twitter, we don't really compare. Over there (in NA), we didn't have the reaction as I had here. So when I told them about the reaction over here when I host these events, they (the rest of the plurk team) all wanted to come to Taiwan. At lots of events, you guys would bring up Karma, [I didn't catch what he said here], things that weren't available overseas, so here I really enjoyed a lot from you. So I didn't really want to go back... maybe I can stay in Taiwan. (audience laughs).

So next, ... oh ... no more ....

Do I still have time?

(offstage: You already spent 3000 bucks, please hurry) [idiom for saying you're in debt in terms of time]

Ok, I see so many people are worried that Plurk is trying to make money, and these issues. Now we're buring cash, and I think we'll continue to burn it. I don't know how to say this, but I've never been worried about this. I mean, we still have a lot of money to burn (audience cheers), so there's no question. I don't know what to say to let you guys know not to worry. I can only say really, don't worry, and we'll continue to strive forward, try harder. At first when we started we really didn't know we would be so popular in Southeast Asia, and if I didn't have Plurk, I wouldn't be in Taiwan. This is my first time in Taiwan, and I really had a great time. And I feel a bit like a celebrity here (audience laughs), so my head is now bigger, and you can imagine, when I go back to Canada, then there's no one on the street who knows me. That feeling is pretty good. So we'll keep on trying, working, and hopefully we will have a second year, and a third. Thanks.