Volunteers find little food available for on-line ordering in SAR

Take two Hong Kong twenty-somethings. Remove mobile phones, pagers and any devices for contact with the outside world - other than a Web browser. Take away access to television, compact discs, radios or any other form of entertainment. Place into separate hotel rooms for 48 hours, and what do you get? If the hotel is in Hong Kong, you get some pretty hungry people, for one thing. It seems no pizza or any kind of restaurant food can be ordered on-line in Hong Kong. Groceries, on the other hand, take hours to order and days before they can be delivered.

The volunteers, Jonathan Chan and Amy Lam, participating in a publicity event by Web portal Sina.com, resorted to desperate measures.

Jonathan, a 21-year-old computer science student, had friends run to a cafe, grab a menu, scan it in and e-mail it to him. By e-mailing back his preferences and having his friends arrange delivery to the Tsim Sha Tsui YMCA, where Sina put him and Amy up, Jonathan managed to keep up his strength, which he needed to complete a task list that included commenting on news stories, hosting Web chats and reviewing a book.

Amy, a 24-year-old aspiring actress who also hosts a Web chat show, had it tougher. After trying both the Wellcome and ParknShop Web sites - to no avail - Amy was finally able to order some food from the adMart Web site. Then came the hard part. The operator told her that delivery would be made on Wednesday - the day after the two-day exercise was scheduled to end.

According to Sina spokesman Pamela Mak, the only way Amy could get next-day delivery was to threaten adMart by claiming that she was a newspaper reporter doing a rating on the on-line grocery services.

'She said 'if you don't get the food delivered to me right away, I'm going to write a bad report on you',' Ms Mak said.

Ah, yes . . . the power of the press. At least there was a welcome fruit basket in the hotel room.

When adMart delivered, all Amy could eat were the instant noodles and the dry cereal. The canned food was of no use to her, as there was no place on-line where she could order a can opener. No fresh foods were available at the adMart site, only non-perishables, said Ms Mak.

The whole scene was enough to bring Amy to tears, she said. According to Ms Mak, the average Hong Kong resident was about eight minutes from a grocery store, whereas in the United States people were about 20 minutes away. Local retailers had little incentive to put services on-line.

'It's just too immature here,' Ms Mak said.

Lucky thing the event's organisers did not go ahead with their plan to put the pair in a more remote location.

But Sina said it plans to do just that in about six months' time, using the term 'rugged' to describe the site they will be looking for.

Of course Sina would do it again. The Hong Kong site devoted chat rooms, instant voting, and Web-cam to Jonathan and Amy's misadventures, helping raise its overall page views by 20 per cent.

Ordering and taking delivery of food may have been the pair's biggest problem, but it was not the only one. As for ordering a book to read and review, they did not get very far with that, either. Jonathan and Amy were allowed to surf to any site on the Internet as long as they found it through Sina's search engine.

It must have been bad in there because, based on the diaries the two posted on-line, 81 per cent of the Web audience thought Amy would not make it to the 48-hour mark. About 18 per cent thought Jonathan would give up.

Luckily, the two did have e-mail support from their friends - 60 of them in Jonathan's case.

'I think without all of their friends supporting them, they wouldn't have made it,' Ms Mak said.

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