CityIN’s press release arrived in my box this morning, and it looks pretty interesting. It’s a Hong Kong-developed social networking service that can work on your mobile, and it uses QR codes, which always seem so smart to me but which have not taken off much of anywhere outside of Japan. The Wikipedia entry says: QR Codes storing addresses and URLs
may appear in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards or just about
any object that a user might need information about. A user having a
camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the
image of the QR Code causing the phone’s browser to launch and redirect
to the programmed URL.
It would be a very interesting development to have them start to actually be used in China–a form of meaning that could be left in public places but not immediately visible to the ordinary passerby. CityIn’s press release cites a different use for QR codes, however, as kind of an easy way to get information from one screen (say in an Internet cafe) to your phone screen.
CityIN generates a QR code image for each user-created social events, visitors just need to scan the QR image with their mobile phone camera, and at maximum 4296 English characters (which is more than 1000 Chinese characters) will be read and input into their phone.
Why is this QR code feature important? Think about where many Chinese youngsters go online - Internet café. Do they have pen/paper/mobile-PC usb? So what if they need to note down the address of the party they are going tonight?
If you’re looking for a place to find people to do translation jobs for you, either from English to Chinese, or Chinese to English (or possibly any other languages), one place to check out is 1×1y.com, or 翻心翻译. On the jobs board you can find people and companies who post their prices, number of words per day, and email addresses. To get to some of the data you have to register. And of course, the site is in Chinese, so if you’re not a Chinese speaker you will have to use Google or something else to help you translate. But even so, it should lead you to people who can help you.
I put this together for a talk today and thought I’d share it for those who haven’t read the latest CNNIC report (#21) or who don’t feel like combing through it for some of the basics. The data comes mostly from that report, but also a bit from ESWN and ars technica.
Number of Internet users, 12/2007: 210 million (compare with U.S. at 215 million…getting close) Penetration: 5% rural/20% urban/45% Beijing, Shanghai
60% of population is rural; vast majority not online, mainly because of “not understanding how to use computer” but also because of lack of infrastructure
3 of every 100 rural households has computer; 47 of every 100 urban households has computer
About 1/3 using commercial Internet cafés
Rural migrant workers are paying highest monthly rates for Internet use: they value it highly and they will drive diffusion
Cost: 900 yuan a year for home broadband, compared with about 600 in Internet café;
Average price of 100Kbps of broadband in China costs $10.85 per month, about 20x US costs
Chinese users pay average 10% of monthly income
Mobile: About one-quarter have ever used mobile to go online in last 6 months, of those about half are between ages of 18-24, and two-thirds of total are men.
Netease’s "news" forum has this item today, on a group of rather shabby streetwide fortune tellers: On those who know the fate of others. With great difficulty I managed to sneak up on these people and secretly take a few photos. Could it be that they can see their own fates?
Selected responses:
Yes, their fates are to remain this way for the rest of their lives!
They’re all fakes!
Maybe they told their own fortunes and found out that this was the best thing for them to do?
Hey, they’re making a living.
Fate can be told, but it all depends on who’s doing the telling. Really good fortune-tellers don’t sit on the street.
When someone dies his or her relatives can’t stand the feeling of being separated. Even if one knows it’s fake, still sometimes they do make pretty accurate predictions. There’s a willingness to spend the money. Whose fault is it, anyway, that China’s psychology profession is so backwards?
Apologies for those of you who’ve been bumped off the RSS feed or accessing strange 404 errors, but we’re in the middle of transitioning off of the Typepad platform (not very accessible in China) onto our own servers.
I’m currently hosting the blog myself (it currently forwards to virtualchina.hongkonggong.com), but I’m hoping to throw it on an IFTF server as soon as they’ll set it up for me.
"We are very pleased to announce that 13th FIRA Roboworld Cup China 2008 will take place in Qingdao from 22-25 July, 2008. We would like to invite you to take part in the FIRA Cup and Congress.
13th FIRA RoboWorld Cup China 2008
Date: 22-25 July 2008
Venue: Shinan Software Park, Qingdao China"
It’s been a while since the song, the MTV and its spoofs were circulated around the internet, but I found a witty animated version today on Tudou that transliterated the Romanian words into Chinese:
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