Event Coverage

HardwareZone's 10th Anniversary: The 2001 Refresh

Birth of HWM and the Hardware Zone Awards

The Birth of HWM

Not only did we increase our services and community efforts in 2001, but it was also a year where major milestones were achieved in the editorial department and the company. As we gradually increased our staff strength and garnered new talent/experience, as well as the unexpected dot-com gloom with regards to advertising and investment, the company made a strategic decision to make inroads into the print publishing business as well.

Based on our forte in computer technology, HardwareMAG was conceived as a quarterly title after numerous new process changes to accommodate the print publishing business model. With the very first issue rolling out in July, it was also the first and only homegrown IT magazine and it still is today. HardwareMAG's second issue would next be the September 2001 edition. Following that in the next year, HardwareMAG became a regular monthly title and was renamed to HWM. The rest as we know is history as the title expanded its reach within South East Asia, concentrated more on consumer technology/electronics/communications and is now one of the most influential tech magazine publications around in this region.

 Here are two magazine covers of HWM from the more recent years.

The Hardware Zone Awards

As the editorial team geared up for the magazine publication, another effort was underway that occupied much of the earlier part of the year as we prepared for our inaugural Hardware Zone Awards event to round up the best in technology for the year 2000. To sum it up, here's the excerpt from our Editor-in-Chief, Dr.Jimmy Tang:-

This inaugural event marks a significant milestone for Hardware Zone as it strives to bring recognition to I.T. product manufacturers and at the same time, promote excellence in product quality, design and performance. The ceremony was held at The Mandarin Singapore attended by product manufacturers, distributors and some SLS vendors too.

The awards started with a month long campaign at the end of last year with Hardware Zone members nominating products which they think should deserve an award. The nominations were consolidated and five of the most popular products nominated in each category were picked as the final nominees. With the finalists in hand, we invited manufacturers to send these products to our Reviews Lab for a final round of testing. Over a period of less than two months, the editorial team at Hardware Zone have worked hard, day and night (sometimes skipping lunch and dinner), running extensive tests on more than 120 unique products.

As you can tell, it's no small feat and we've got the winners listing in the Hardware Zone Awards 2000 article .

For the actual event coverage and awards presentation ceremony, we've got that covered in a separate follow-up article since digital cameras those days were woefully inadequate for professional needs and we used a conventional SLR camera for photography and relied on scanners to convert the photos digitally for web usage. Even then, the limited internet connectivity in those days meant we had to compromise quality and picture size, but you'll still get a good feel of how the event proceeded nearly eight years ago. So read about the pomp and fanfare that took place over here .

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