July 22, 2010 | Filed Under Uncategorized | No Comments
Let’s just say that @DavidFeng took the first half of this month to further studies in the mediasphere, so to speak. One’s never too old to learn, and we’re hoping the readership’s learning new and interesting things about the Chinese web every day through techblog86.
techblog86 is now back, and the site’s going to get an infrastructure update soon, which will allow much more in the way of tweeted updates and “on-the-spot” posts.
We hope we didn’t leave you all in the cold!
June 22, 2010 | Filed Under Uncategorized | No Comments
And all this in the name of the People. @no_Z_turn churned out a brilliant tweet which made us laugh pretty hard:
After People.com.cn came out with People’s Search…
1. Xinhua Web [Ed: Official news agency] will soon debut Person Search [Ed: ie, a search on your person, much like security check, but on the Web, supposedly...]
2. Chinese Police Web will soon debut Hostage Search
3. Kaixin (001) will soon debut Renzha Search [Ed: Renzha, 人渣 in characters, is a pretty nasty term — to be used only on your enemies, dead and/or alive]
4. Tencent [Ed: China's biggest IM network] will soon debut Shemale Search [Ed: Dis-s-gusting]
5. Qiu Zhi (Job Search) Web will soon debut HR Search
6. Renren Web will soon debut Human-Flesh Search [Ed: that's an Internet manhunt, by the way
7. Sina will soon debut: Life Search [Ed: the Chinese for this, 人名搜索, has sinister connotations]
8. Baihe Web [Ed: big online dating service] will debut: Man-and-Wife Search
9. Mop will soon debut: Ren Liu Search [Ed: painstaking operations!]
Talk about China. And “Copy To China”. Only that the copycat-ing has just gone all-local with this one…
June 6, 2010 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Let a thousand startups bloom!
In China, you’ve lots of young people who refuse to be “unified” by force, so to speak. As in be mixed, matched and merged into that “Great Big ‘Society’ Out There”. Full of darkness or at least excess copycat stuff. Young folks have a lot of dreams, but if it doesn’t make capitalist pocketbooks fat, it’s not going to happen.
Or at least there’s an angel for Chinese startups. We leave it to Gang Lu of Mobinode, who himself has a startup (Kuukie.com), and has a post out on ChinAccelerator. This is fabulous. Check it out…
On the one hand, it’s about money. Startups do not need big amount of money to get started, but unfortunately here in China, it’s so hard to find angel investors who believe what the founders believe and are willing to give them money to share the risk together; on the other hand, money does not mean everything. There are loads of cash in China I would say, and there are many people out there waiting for projects. However, the issue is that many startups do not know how to reach them. More importantly most of the local investors are great in traditional business but know little about web industry. They only believe Guanxi will work and how-to-make-money is the only metric they trust, which basically shut down the door to many young men with dreams. Young entrepreneurs need angel money and also need mentors and help.
If you’re not too familiar what the “guanxi” thing is: China’s a very LinkedIn kind of nation where connections matter like — H.E. double hockey sticks, let’s just put it this way. Without the right ties, your startup idea will forever be stranded on the runway, only to be flattened by an Airbus A380-ish “fellow startup” who has the right government-and-capital ties and is out there to make you irrelevant.
Mobinode’s article on its partnership with ChinAccelerator is one uplifting read. Check it out here.
May 4, 2010 | Filed Under Uncategorized | No Comments
If you’re reading into this from an iPhone or iPod touch, congratulations. You should be seeing this after having clicked an article from the first screen (an “article menu” as we’d like to call it). That way, it’s just about impossible for us to totally clog your screen with irrelevant banter, quite unlike the web version of the website.
When this website first went live, the readership was asking for mobile device support, so we’re pleased today to (re-)support it. Out of the 400 million Internauts in China, about 233 million surf from mobile devices, so it was high time they got techblog86 the way they wanted it.
We hope you enjoy it… we’ve got some more “magic” in the making (think more along the lines of “Web 2.0 convenience + integration”…!
April 22, 2010 | Filed Under Uncategorized | No Comments
Not good news for those doing 3G: Two independent tweets coming out from @PhilipsShiu and @nielscn today reporting that 3G performance today, especially in Beijing, is poor. @PhilipsShiu reports that it’s impossible to log onto Google Talk via 3G, while @nielscn reports bad connections from the popular college hangout area, Wudaokou.
3G has had a pretty — beaten-up track record in China and around the world. Initial 3G-ish ads surfaced in 2000, right after the massive Nasdaq crash. Meanwhile, China’s adamant decision to come up with a PRC standard that would have went global — we’re talking about TD-SCDMA here — meant that it ended up as a flop. The telco mandarins eventually fed the flopped standard (if this makes any sense at all) to China Mobile, the nation’s biggest mobile telco.
China Unicom, in the meantime, was never known to be a network renowned for its quality when it comes to signals. Despite ads that would have brainwashed you that it was an affordable (even El Cheapo?) network that had good signals (信号好), most user experiences tell otherwise.
Oh and by the way — it’s good to be back on techblog86… we’ve switched back to the old, early 2008 “all blue” layout because we just plain love it. Good excuse?
今天，中國聯通的 3G 服務令人擔憂，有兩名推友 (Twitter 用戶) 發現，在北京一些地方，3G 難用，或者上不去一些站點，或者在某些區域用起來很費勁。
April 20, 2010 | Filed Under Uncategorized | No Comments
This blog will resume publication effective April 22, 2010. Thank you for your understanding.
August 1, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized | No Comments
In a year where China’s getting increasingly on edge about anything that might create a political or social stability manhole just before the Big Sixty, when the PRC turns 60 on October 1, 2009, the Beijing Evening News has done a multi-page special in its Saturday LOHAS edition about — MSN, or now known more “accurately” as Windows Live Messenger.
During the past ten years, a fair number — pardon the pun — of MSN numbers have stacked up. Here’s how MSN has impacted us:
• The average age worldwide for MSN users is 26.5 years.
• An average MSN chat takes 5 minutes; in China, which is somewhat a chattier nation, chats go up to 8 minutes on average.
• On average, people go on MSN as often as they eat — that’s three times a day.
• 28 million trees are saved through MSN chats — if they were printed out, the planet would be a hotter place.
• 30.5 million users are on MSN — and that’s in Brazil alone. That’s 82.4% of the netizenry there — and 11.4% of the whole Internet population. (Figures given in the paper are good through July 2007 — we realize that this thing’s a little “tardy”…)
June 23, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized | No Comments
Ideal — note that word. Note what happens when two very strong fronts come head to head. We had this about a week ago, when Beijing’s skies turned pitch black right around noon. Bad things happen when two — let’s call “extreme things” — go head to head.
In a China that’s just 100 days shy of its Big Sixty (as in the People’s Republic — the whole nation itself claims about five millennia of uninterrupted history), things are already getting pretty sensitive and there’s a fair amount of über-idealism. The latest ideologically charged move — a proposal to abandon the Web on July 1 by Ai Weiwei — is a kneejerk reaction against a new Internet bill requiring PCs to come with “cleansing”, ie censorship software, pre-installed — but apparently not pre-enabled, according to official outlets.
Meanwhile, the ideological camp on the other side has never been any tougher. The official press has spawned as of late a 48-page People’s Daily — probably a record for the party newspaper. Twitter has been blocked for six days in early June, apparently on “very sensitive days”, and Ai Weiwei himself seems to have quite a bit of his communications not only monitored, but also shut down, including an account on a local microblog service. Beijing is fully aware that Olympics-level — maybe even tougher security — is needed on October 1, which local media has repeated said will feature a military parade. “Harmonization” so-called of sensitive topics has never been more felt — and has never gotten this buck-naked.
There’s an ideological storm brewing. Only one thing here: not a great deal of folks actually seem to care. You can “blame” it on the “lack of education” of certain “sensitive events”, or you can actually go the Mashable way and realize that people have work to do:
Furthermore, it’s hard to imagine the entire China boycotting all online activities for even one small part of the work day, especially those who have to be online to be able to work.
Also something of note: “All of China” as in the online population does not equal 1.3 billion. There are 316 million of us in China online — that number, though, is sure to keep on growing more and more. Already by headcount, the People’s Republic has surpassed the United States and looks set to grow more and more. Frankly speaking, it’s just a mix of “God knows” and “a matter of time” regarding when we’ll see the one billionth Chinese Netizens surf online.
As an actual expat in China, yours truly sees China increasingly opening up. Verboten topics are less and less these days, and the media has become significantly more open — although open attacks on, say, the central leadership still end up being harmonized. China’s going through growing pains but we’re seeing the light of day. Probably what’s least needed right now is a mass campaign to nix all those changes the past 30 years has given us. Yes, it’s not smooth sailing all along, but at least in the history of the People’s Republic, it’s not a downhill ride as of late.
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