Swipe typing, China edition

March 19, 2013 by Jason Li

Above: TouchPal (触宝)’s promo video for their smartphone swipe-typing technology. Note the (probably unauthorized) Lady Gaga soundtrack.

Francis Pisani over at Winch5 has a feature on TouchPal Cootek, a China born-and-bred smartphone swipe-typing technology. Pisani claims that their keyboard works much better than the Swype that’s offered on Samsung phones. Amongst Cootek’s many features are predictive text…

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Typography Design

Featured design: Cover

March 6, 2013 by Jason Li

Update: It seems that magCulture is no longer selling this from its online store, and the originally linked-to review has gone missing.

Presenting Cover, a new magazine coming out of China by Mazzybox. (Anyone have more information about him/her? magCulture says that Mazzybox works at a studio called Deadline.)

The magazine’s second edition, pictured…

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Starting Up in Shenzhen

The Hardware Fairyland of Huaqiangbei Road, Shenzhen

February 25, 2013 by Jason Li

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Photos by Windell H. Oksay, from an Evil Mad Scientist post in 2009. From the hours I spent there last year, it hasn’t changed since then. Note the heavy advertising expenditure from Samsung, who were out there back in 2009 already.

The electronics markets around Huaqiangbei Road (华强北路) in Shenzhen…

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Trying to cash in on Chinese New Year – Chinese sneakers from Western companies

February 5, 2013 by Jason Li

From Adidas:

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From Nike, and apparently not for sale:

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Not very subtle, are they?

(Image sources here, here and here.)

2 rooftops, 2 farms, 2 cities

February 1, 2013 by Jason Li

A Tale of Two Rooftops from The Perennial Plate on Vimeo.

A beautiful tale of two rooftop farms, one in Beijing and one in Hong Kong, and the people behind them.

Via This Big City.

Ethnography of Tech

The Free Lunch case for inefficient, redundant design

January 24, 2013 by Jason Li

In her talk for The Conference 2012, Designing for Trust: How China’s Free Lunch avoided The Curse of Kelvin (embedded above), Tricia Wang makes the case that the inefficient data entry and publishing sequence pictured below is the culturally appropriate and only effective solution available.

The case study she gives is of journalist Deng Fei’s Free Lunch project, which…

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Ethnography of Tech

Trust, social networks, and how the guy who threw his shoe at the Father of the Great Firewall got away

January 9, 2013 by Jason Li

Tricia Wang’s delightful talk at LIFT 12 touches upon a variety of subjects:

The full back story and epilogue of the person who threw his shoe at the Father of the Great Firewall. Fun fact she mentions: Because the scandal was censored within China and not a big deal, the shoe thrower was only chastised lightly by local…

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Stats: The kinds of tech startups in HK

December 18, 2012 by Jason Li

Last month, my friend Paul Orlando and I launched Startup Hug*, an experiment in cultivating an early adopter community here in Hong Kong. As part of the process, we evaluated over 130 local startup websites (the list came from Paul’s We Are HK Tech). One side product is that we categorized and annotated this list of 130.

…

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China Meme Report

Milk powder ad mashes up Angry Birds with kung fu

November 27, 2012 by Jason Li

What’s interesting is that the ad uses a smartphone swipe metaphor for “next,” borrows Angry Birds imagery to set up a friend versus foe battle, and, of course, lays in some kung fu at the end.

You don’t have to understand it to see what’s going on.

Via the Adkungfu.

Troll defaces luxury handbags on subway

November 20, 2012 by Jason Li

According to this report from Apple Daily HK, there’s a real-life troll that’s been going around on the subway in Hong Kong defacing various strangers’ luxury handbags with a ball point pen.

八八吧 · 88 Bar

Author: Jason Li