八八吧 · 88 Bar – Page 106 – A group blog about Chinese tech, media and design

Featured Designer: Studio Pasu

March 26, 2006 by Jason Li

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reading books on the phone

March 25, 2006 by Lyn Jeffery

Another great interview from Pacific Epoch, this one from a company called Byread that’s developed a service for downloading and reading books for handsets, with content from over 200 Chinese publishing houses.

Long awaited 3G licensing should expand what is now available to mobile Internet users in China. In the meantime, a host of companies are developing services in anticipation.…

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Virtual China

Chinese mobile internet on the verge

March 25, 2006 by Lyn Jeffery

With over 400 million mobile phone users and over 100 million
Internet users, the development of China’s mobile Internet is something
to watch in the next few years. Pacific Epoch has two interviews with competing WAP portals 3gnet.cn (7.5 million users) and 3GPP’s Pp.cn (3 million registered users).

excerpts:
…

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Virtual China

TVMAO.COM

March 25, 2006 by Jason Li

Before any of you get excited, the reference to “mao” is a transcription of the word for cat:

TVMAO is a website that has plot summaries for more than 50,000 shows on more than 300 channels in China. Some sociologist could probably mine it for some funny data, but what I’m concerned about is: why Garfield!?…

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Virtual China

big players in Chinese mobile search

March 24, 2006 by Lyn Jeffery

China Net Investor picks up on a recent press release from Nokia announcing that in Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the mainland, high-end N70 and N90 handsets will come preinstalled with applications to access Baidu (China’s leading search engine) wireless search services.

Users will be able to search news, images, and a Baidu online community.

Where’s Google?

…

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Virtual China

A Cultural Mistranslation

March 24, 2006 by Jason Li

PostShow links to a blog entry over at fjliang’s blog entitled “Employee bloggers beware: blog monitoring services are here.”

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After a bit of text, they sarcastically hail the blog monitoring service:

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Sam Flemming’s blog itself speaks of the Shanghai Daily’s (and others) emphasis on his…

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Virtual China

Google’s Sinofication

March 24, 2006 by Jason Li

Chinese holidays presented with the appropriate Chinese calender dates and astrological signs.

Source: PostShow

Virtual China

real estate babes: BBS debate on the morals of marketing

March 23, 2006 by Lyn Jeffery

Today on the Netease BBS: The 8th annual Shanghai Spring Real Estate Market, held last week at the Shanghai Exhibition Center, one-upped the booth babes of other trade shows with a real estate girl. As the BBS poster says (rough translation):

This is something that hasn’t been seen before in real…

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Virtual China

online superstition

March 23, 2006 by Lyn Jeffery

China’s official news agency reports that online “high-tech fortune-telling” sites are poisoning Chinese teenagers, taking them away from their studies. Will try to find some of these in coming weeks!

link
(via Gerry Groot at Chineseinternetresearch)

Virtual China

animated demographic stats

March 23, 2006 by Lyn Jeffery

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The Asian Studies WWW Monitor recently profiled a go-to site for understanding basic demographic data and coming changes in China. Gerard K. Heilig has an impressive body of work that presents data on Chinese demographics, fertility, land use, and food production, through animations, CD-Roms, and maps. Heilig’s homepage links to some of his publications, such as Can…

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