Are You Scanning Me, or Am I Scanning You?

January 25, 2016 by Christina Xu

Photo of QR code tattoo — Sol, a film producer, shows me her QR scanner tattoo in Beijing.

During a ten week trip through China, I added over 150 contacts on WeChat, China’s overwhelmingly dominant messaging app. If we weren’t being introduced by mutual friends online, we usually used the most common way for people to add each other in…

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China Meme Report

Anti-shanzhai memes, copycat gamemakers and Korean popstars

July 28, 2014 by Jason Li

Left: Puzzle & Dragons. Right: Tower of Saviors. Image sources: AppAdvice, USGamer. — **Left:** *Puzzle & Dragons*, made in Japan in 2012. **Right:** *Tower of Saviors*, made in Hong Kong in 2013. (Image sources: AppAdvice, USGamer .)

This month, South Korean boy band sensation Big Bang arrives in Hong Kong as the newly-minted spokesperson…

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Ethnography of Tech

Some initial thoughts about the popularity of QQ’s WeChat (aka Weixin)

April 18, 2013 by Tricia Wang

Excerpted from Bytes of China:

A few weeks ago, a conversation about the popularity of WeChat emerged on a tech mailing lists. Someone posted several reasons why they thought WeChat was more usable than Skype. They listed several technical reasons, such as ease of use, great mobile interface, and more efficient…

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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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Shanzai Nokia N9 has 7 OS interfaces, but most importantly it has Talking Tom & Stripping Games

November 7, 2011 by Tricia Wang

Excerpted from Bytes of China:

In the wonderful world of shanzai, we have a new competitor made with a Mediatek chip- a Nokia N9 knockoff, the Noka (诺卡) N9. The Noka N9 has 7 operating systems interfaces: Meego, iOS 5.0, HTC Sense, Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry, Smasung’s TouchWiz and Symbian Anna.…

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八八吧 · 88 Bar

Tag: smartphone

Anti-shanzhai memes, copycat gamemakers and Korean popstars

Swipe typing, China edition

Shanzai Nokia N9 has 7 OS interfaces, but most importantly it has Talking Tom & Stripping Games