Category: Uncategorized

Mascots: the Cutest Social Police?

Posted on by Christina Xu
Image via Wikipedia.
Image via Wikipedia.

In the years leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Fuwa (福娃, “dolls of good fortune”), the official Olympic mascots, were everywhere: on billboards, in TV ads, made into stuffed toys, and erected as mini-statues in malls and airports all across the country. Since then, hyper-cute anthropomorphic mascots designed through public contests have…

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A Look Back: Our Writing on Internet Culture & Graphic Novels in China

Posted on by Jason Li

Editor’s note: This post was commissioned by The London Book Fair, who wished to offer attendees in its upcoming conference an introduction to internet culture, graphic novels and book culture in Greater China.

 

Internet memes are alive and kicking in China, though they might not be the ones we’re used to seeing. If you…

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The Translation Detail Everyone Missed in the China Internet’s Incredibly Surreal Anthem

Posted on by Jason Li

In case you missed it, the New York Times, ProPublica, the Guardian and the Atlantic all wrote about this incredibly surreal but voted best of event anthem celebrating China’s glorious internet. Thanks to ProPublica we have a subtitled, Youtube video above.

As James Fallows at the Atlantic pointed out,…

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Fact checking the hype around mesh networks and FireChat

Posted on by Jason Li

Being based in Hong Kong, my tech friends and I still occasionally get asked, “So what’s the deal with FireChat?” In case you missed it, FireChat, a smartphone chat app with basic mesh support, made headlines during the recent Occupy Hong Kong protests. Protesters on the ground here turned to it in late September when rumors began to circulate that the government would shut down…

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Xiaomi’s vaguely familiar design and a Chinese bitcoin mine

Posted on by Jason Li

In case you’re not following consultant-turned-VC Benedict Evans‘ newsletter on mobile technology (which is excellent and highly recommended), here are the China-related gems from this week:

Xiaomi unveiled the latest version of its custom flavor of Android. Lot of interesting and innovative features in there. The design language, though, looks… vaguely familiar. Link

Apple is…

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IBM teams up with the Beijing government to tackle its pollution problem

Posted on by Jason Li

ibm-evolving-temperature-and-wind-directions

From a Quartz article by Gwynn Guilford:

IBM plans to improve the quality of data by installing its latest generation of optical sensors, incorporating meteorological satellite data and running that through its artificial-intelligence computing system (a.k.a. Watson, that computer that trounced humans on Jeopardy). The visual maps it generates will identify the source and dispersal pattern…

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