My big question/looking for suggestions is how to address this issue? People would definitely pay for this kind of service, and (I would imagine) authors would love to earn some revenue.
Is it because of language barriers?
Outdated "legacy" practices?
What are practical solutions? I can't even imagine what a good way to monetize this would be (grooveshark style?)
if link is tl;dr: read below
Manga Artist Park Jin-Hwan Speaking:
[...] But I saw 'the breaker' uploaded on a foreign website. It's being uploaded with only a few days delay. What's more surprising is that everything has been translated (even these notes from myself). So, I'm now speaking to that group. Please stop... Why are you selling and profit off our work? If you have any conscience, shouldn't you have emailed... Or written an apology, or shown some show of support for us? All our works that are on your site are up there without our permission. So please stop. Take them down before it becomes a bigger problem!!
#From the scanlation group
We'd like to respond to this as follows:
To Park Jin-Hwan,
We greatly appreciate the work and effort required by you to bring this great manwha to us, and we apologize if our actions have caused you offence. We would like to clarify that we actually make no profit from your work. We do this in our free time for fun, and we have always bought your books. We, like countless thousands of other people from around the world, love your work, and always look forward with anticipation to the next chapter. We would love to continue doing work on this series, and hope that we can work out an arrangement with yourself towards this purpose. If you would like to contact us, [...]
While I certainly understand the merits of having a prototype, the competition is structured to focus on concepts (we don't have a lot of time to prepare).
If we were to build a prototype we would want it to be really awesome, which isn't too realistic right now.
Look at what they've done. A portfolio, a (completed) project, a (completed) website can say a lot about their attitude and approach to things.
I'd say for someone to really fit your bill (talented/ambitious), they would have to have some tangible deliverable accomplishments somewhere. Not just talk, grades, etc.
Look for what they've done in their community. If they're young (i.e. from college) those that excel at communication are usually pretty engaged in the community and have held some leadership positions. Resident Life? Coaching? TA?
As a student studying abroad in Shanghai right now, I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised by the speed at which the sites I host at slicehost.com load. Granted, when I ssh in to manage the stack it lags quite a bit, but it seems you'll probably be developing from the US side.
In summary, I think that any good US hosting service probably has reliable speeds in China too.
On a different tangent, I'm currently writing a research paper on differences between US and Chinese business practices. If you could answer some questions, or me to someone that'd be great! [email protected]