Our very own job board for tech/media/design in Asia

Posted on by Jason Li

88 Gong screenshot

We’ve been pretty quiet about it, but a while back, Tricia and I got together with our friend Adrianna to launch 88 Gong – the world’s first job board for tech/media/design gigs in Asia. Since its inception, we’ve had over 400 postings featuring jobs from not only China but also India, Singapore, Malaysia and countless other places. Plus, we’ve been…

Continue readingOur very own job board for tech/media/design in Asia

Upcoming event: memes, puns and selfies, a look at Chinese digital culture

Posted on by The Editor
Illustration draft
Illustration by Jason Li.

Our very own An Xiao Mina will be hosting an evening at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco next week (July 2). From their website:

Writer, critic, artist and technologist An Xiao Mina has designed an interactive program that will explore the visual culture of the Chinese Internet. First,…

Continue readingUpcoming event: memes, puns and selfies, a look at Chinese digital culture

Starting Up in Shenzhen

Robots, Diaper Monitors and Putin: What We Saw at Maker Faire Shenzhen 2015

Posted on by Jason Li

Photo of Maker Faire mascot

Now in its fourth year, the Maker Faire Shenzhen was bigger than ever. Aside from ever-larger booths and robot sculptures (see above), there was also a much larger corporate presence from sponsors, and, given Premier Li Keiqiang’s recent interest in “maker culture,” probably a great leap in government support. In short, Maker Faire Shenzhen has grown up.

As…

Continue readingRobots, Diaper Monitors and Putin: What We Saw at Maker Faire Shenzhen 2015

Starting Up in Shenzhen

Hardware Makers Thrive in the Grey Area of Chinese IP Rights

Posted on by Jason Li

From bunnie’s blog:

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about a $12 “Gongkai” cell phone… that I stumbled across in the markets of Shenzhen, China. My most striking impression was that Chinese entrepreneurs had relatively unfettered access to cutting-edge technology, enabling start-ups to innovate while bootstrapping. Meanwhile, Western entrepreneurs often find themselves trapped in a spiderweb…

Continue readingHardware Makers Thrive in the Grey Area of Chinese IP Rights

Ethnography of Tech

Ethnographic dispatches: Spring 2015

Posted on by Tricia Wang

Editor’s note: As some of you might know, 88 Bar members Tricia Wang and Christina Xu spent the spring of this year doing research and fieldwork around people and technology in China. Here we’ve excerpted some of the highlights from Tricia’s Instagram account.

 

First stop – a Tencent conference in Beijing headlined by a talk on “user research…

Continue readingEthnographic dispatches: Spring 2015

What the internet users in China thought about the China-themed Met Gala

Posted on by Christina Xu

Weibo users applauded Rihanna’s choice of a Chinese designer (Guo Pei) for her dress, but there were also a lot of joking comparisons of her dress to an omelet or egg crepe...

This year’s Met Gala had the unfortunate theme “China: Through the Looking Glass”, which was, according to their curators, “not about China per se, but about a China that exists as a collective fantasy.”

Um. Oookay.

But what did the 600 million or so internet users in “China per se” think about the…

Continue readingWhat the internet users in China thought about the China-themed Met Gala