八八吧 · 88 Bar

Apparently no-one in business is immune from the innovation imperative these days, and one must be seen to be creating the conditions for innovation, if not actually being innovative — yet it’s one of those words that have been bleached of practically all meaning through overuse. Still, there’s an important cultural battle going on regarding what innovation is and who…

Continue readingQQ Labs QQ实验室: the battle of the innovators

The latest McDonalds ad campaign, in China, launched on the Web, in Flash. It gives us a good look at the anatomy of Chinese web advertising, with much more pop star/idol and cell phone emphasis than we’re used to in the US.

The guy grimacing at us center stage is a popular, young Taiwanese pop star. The site…

Continue readingMcDonalds in China, on the Web

Several recent events in the megacorporational front, in no particular order:

Google launches Google Camp, an outreach program to Chinese university students, which includes a overall googlecamp.org social space as well as local university pages, presentations and activities.

Lenovo launches a design blog, Design Matters. It’s in English. It’s licensed…

Continue readingMegacorporations on the March

China Web2.0 Review points us to the top Taiwan blog, Wan’s Comic Blog (彎彎～用漫畫寫日誌). At least, according to Blog Look (部落格观察).

Below is a sample post. Translations in maroon, as always:

Nokia Mooncakes (for the Mid-Autumn Festival last Friday).

Design by Nokia. Culinary skills provided by Starbucks.

Via Postshow, via Engadget(CN), via alexwutw’s post on PalmIsLife.

Have you ever been forced by a client to copy an English language website?
Have you ever been blamed by a leader for producing something “unsophisticated”?
Have you ever felt unsure when the “English” website you copied keeps on looking wrong?

For those of us who are interested in how people from different cultural contexts “see” things online differently–a…

Continue readingChinese and English language website design

After having used Babelfish for all this time, I finally checked out online dictionary Dict.cn, which Jay Dautcher told me about a year or two ago. It’s really good, especially if you read Chinese, because it provides you with the word you’re looking for in various sentences.  You can get a sense of how the word works.  Another nice touch…

Continue readingnew favorite online Chinese dictionaries

“City 2046” 《都市2046》Chinese MMORPG officially launched on Sept. 26, after several months of beta testing.  The game takes place in a futuristic urban environment, obviously. It’s billed as “the first massively multi-player 3D online game set against an entirely realistic urban background,” but was alleged in the Chinese gaming media in July to be a copy of a Korean game also…

Continue readingmarriage in the virtual city: City 2046 《都市2046》

On Sept. 23 China announced the launch of the world’s largest pure next-generation Internet. Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) will replace the current Internet, which is Internet Protocol Version 4. The Chinese network, called CNGI-CERNET2/6IX, or CERNET2 for short, and broadly referred to by the name China Next-Generation Internet (CNGI) project, currently links 167 institutes at 25 universities, in 20 different cities (…

Continue readingIPv6: China’s next generation Internet

From a strip entitled 奔向2008·漫画奥运 (Towards 2008: Olympics Comic).

As always translations in maroon.

Link to original comic on Sina.
Link to Sina’s comics front page.