We started the e-Committee last year because there were a lot of voices from the SMEs saying that they didn't know what to do, and that they wanted help but there was nowhere to go to. So last year, one of the e-Committee's major priorities was to get them to understand and to get them to try and hook up the theory with their business. This year we think we should be very practical and try to bring something to those people who still have questions. So we are offering free one-hour e-consultation sessions.

So far we've done a handful of sessions and the response has been very good; everyone is going away very happy. The problems they bring are very simple, such as how do I put my products on the Internet? Or, I have a group of sales people running around in China, should we build an Intranet so we can share information and how do we do that?

We were only piloting the programme to e-Committee members over the last two months. We will jointly announce it with the SME Committee to offer it to all members soon. As long as there is a need we will try to help as many SMEs as possible.

We have also asked the Chamber to build a request-for-proposals board so SMEs, whether they come to the one-hour session or not, can still put their requests on the Internet. We will then invite service providers to constantly look at requests and submit their proposals to the guy.

The goals are to do some practical things that can directly benefit members as well as the community. We are spearheading it but we also have 11 other organizations or associations doing it, including the HKSAR Government.

Why are we doing it? Because Hong Kong never gets on any statistics when people talk about e-commerce; it lags far behind other key Asian markets. This is very alarming. This will likely have a long-term debilitating effect on Hong Kong's industries. We hope the campaign -- for the near-term -- will promote the use of the Internet to do transactions, which will ultimately increase Hong Kong's competitiveness.

After a lot of brainstorming we decided to do an Internet Week in December. Citizens are key to this programme and e-commerce in general. We have to get the public involved -- like the ATM services before, once they get used to using them it's hard to go back to the old way of doing things. But Internet Week is not just one event. It is a week when businesses try to entice people to go online and do transactions. The whole purpose is for people to go online, try it, and hopefully like it enough that it will become a part of their daily lives.

Of course there is always that danger, but I envision it is not going to be a big-bang kind of success. I think it will reveal a lot of flaws, so this will be a good chance to flush out a lot of problems. But if something goes wrong we fix it, learn from it and move forward. It will also help identify what is Hong Kong's problem with the Internet; why are we lagging behind? Is it a perception problem? Is it a practical problem? What is the problem?

I think in terms of our unique concept of bricks and clicks, it is a great concept except we got hit really badly with the economy and fall of e-commerce. Although we anticipated the e-commerce fall, we didn't anticipate the market coming down.

It's been a big challenge for us. We had to let go a lot of people. We had to take away a lot of bottom line and basically had to stop most of our business development -- our plan of moving forward has literally stopped. The most important thing for us now is to bring in the front-end revenue and control costs. When we set up this company one and a half years ago we said we would break even in three years. I am still confident that we can achieve that, and that is what we are still aiming at.

Although we knew we wouldn't have natural traffic until 2003 and beyond, because of the economic downturn we had to take decisive measures and we decided to do a major restructuring in February. In May we started to implement another concept at the physical site -- brand-name factory outlets selling off-season goods. We are doing quite well there. We have Dickson ourselves as the anchor -- Polo, Dupont ... -- but we also have Levi's, ABC Golf, Adidas, Megaware ... Its been very successful and it's interesting to see people coming specifically for the outlets.

I would say only when it gets more popular. Last year, when I first started the company, I signed up a WAP service with one of the operators. But it wasn't the right time. It all depends on whether these operators come up with really good applications to help small businesses like myself and populate it among the citizens; then it will be of value to me. As a matter of fact, during one of the outlet openings, one of them leveraged WAP technology to send SMS [simple messaging service] and it generated a lot of traffic. We had lines looping to get to that store. So it can work if it is done right.