Culturecom and IBM Announce Joint Collaboration to Launch Ucan.com to Greater China Consumers

A smarter gaming and music platform to provide hyper personalized services

HONG KONG, May 8, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Culturecom Holdings Limited (Stock Code: 00343.HK) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced their joint collaboration in creating a smarter gaming and music platform, Ucan.com, with IBM's integrated, high value solution. Operated by Culturecom, Ucan.com will be an online smarter city that provides hyper personalized services to Greater China consumers.

Culturecom and IBM announce joint collaboration to launch Ucan.com, a smarter gaming and music platform to provide hyper personalized services.

Today, the forces of social media explosion, mobile proliferation, and hyper digitization have changed the ways people live, communicate and interact with each other, and put the empowered customers in control. In order to make Ucan.com a premier multi-functional platform for culture, lifestyle and entertainment, Culturecom is collaborating with IBM to equip Ucan.com with big data/analytics, social and cloud technologies to provide tailor made and customized services to customers.

Donald Kwan, Managing Director of Culturecom, commented on the collaboration, "We share the same vision with IBM to create differentiated experience for customers in this smarter, social era. The collaboration between Culturecom, Asia's top comics and multimedia company, and IBM, a world leading business and information technology solutions provider, is a significant and win-win–win partnership to both Culturecom, IBM and the consumers in Greater China."

Ucan.com is developed following the trend and characteristics of "Hong Kong Style" Comic. It is a virtual-reality lifestyle, entertainment and culture platform where users can interact and share in this smarter online city. With the full support from our founding shareholder Jay Chou and the abundant Hong Kong comic resources from Culturecom, Ucan.com is set to attract millions of fans to co-develop a virtual world with infinite possibilities.

Ucan.com is entering a new era of rapid development with the launch of Ucan.Sing by the end of June, and the provision of exclusive online game establishment and operation to "The Voice of China", the current rank No.1 singing performance entertainment program in the PRC. Also, Ucan eCommerce, a service platform with diversified revenue business models, is expected to commence operation by the end of December this year.

"We are delighted to working together with Culturecom to build a highly scalable, secure and smarter platform to support the growth and ongoing operation of Ucan.com, as well as to infuse intelligence into the platform to build a solid foundation for an online smarter city. Becoming smarter is increasingly a winning factor for organizations in the smarter, big data era," said Jinn Sin Lin, Director, Institute of Electronic Government, IBM Greater China Group and Technology Council member of IBM Academy of Technology.

Under the collaboration agreement, IBM helps Culturecom design, build and operate the Ucan.com platform from end to end. The solution includes:

• A cloud computing infrastructure built on IBM PureFlex, a new breed of "expert integrated systems" that radically simplifies computing and transforms the economics of IT. It provides a highly scalable platform that can meet the surge of demands from millions of users, while offering the highest level of security and availability from a tier 4 data center.
• Ongoing management and operation of the platform from IBM's tier 4 data center in Suzhou for thirty months by IBM Global Technology Services.
• Big Data/Smarter Analytics that encompasses advanced social analytics and customer analytics to understand social sentiment and customer wants and desires, to enable Ucan.com to provide hyper personalized services and deliver differentiated experiences to customers.
• Smarter Commerce to enable secure integration of complex B2B processes with diverse partner communities in support of eCommerce on the platform.

"Our integrated solution enables Culturecom to focus on core business and drive innovation, while our highly available, secure and scalable cloud infrastructure will ensure a consistent and great customer experience. In addition, Big Data/Smarter Analytics will enable the creation of truly personalized services," said Ernest Lee, Director, Smarter Planet Solutions, Software Group, IBM Greater China Group.

"We will continue to provide our best-of-class technology and ensure services delivery excellence to enable Culturecom to fulfill their customer promise and business objectives."

Also under the collaboration agreement, Culturecom and IBM will create a joint technology innovation center to bring in international expertise and state-of-the-art technology to provide full-scale support to Ucan.com.

About Culturecom Holdings Limited (343.HK)

Founded in 1979, Culturecom is one of the largest comic publishers and animation developers in Asia. Over the past three decades, Culturecom owns over 200 comic titles. Our comics have been distributed in 14 countries across the globe and translated to 10 different languages. For more information about our comics business, please visit: www.culturecom.com.hk.

About IBM

For more information about IBM Hong Kong, please visit www.ibm.com/hk and the Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/IBMHongKong

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