We should really start a list of what new services and infrastructure are being promised for Beijing in 2008 Olympics. Here’s an interesting one: live TV coverage on the new subway line. The line:
will have a transmitter every 200 meters that can receive
above-ground TV signals, said Ding Shukui, assistant general manager of
Beijing Railway Construction and Management Co. Ltd….The locomotive and the last carriage on the train will be equipped
with receivers that can transmit signals to the eight liquid crystal TV
sets in each carriage,
I simply couldn’t resist and had to return to Molive.cn’s citizen photojournalism site again today. It’s pure China Daily odd news heaven, produced by who knows what kind of people, the kind who like to report on strange things for the rest of us to read. The kind who are photoblogging, because that’s another name for what this is. Aggregated photoblogging. Top photoblog on Molive belongs to Ah Nian, a 40 year old man from Hefei, Anhui. In fact, Ah Nian contributed the first three items below. Since there’s nothing that doesn’t happen in China, perhaps we’ll be seeing some new perspectives on life, news, blogging, and sharing content here. I haven’t found any newer stats on how many people are viewing or uploading yet. But China Daily.com.cn is posting photos with a [MOLIVE.CN] byline.
Today on "Latest Essential Content–Exclusive," we find these stories from October 18. [Editors filter content before it goes online, so perhaps it takes a day for things to appear]:
- [Hefei] "Water Walking Ball" Becomes Latest Entertainment Fashion: Ah Nian saw this in a park in the city of Hefei, Anhui province, and describes it as "an elegant activity" combining "entertainment, health, weight loss, and competition."
- [Xiamen] "Meat Rock": Another unusual rock from the same museum. This one looks exactly like a side of meat, and the author says that you really can’t tell it’s stone until you touch it. It’s said to be naturally occurring.
Molive.cn is a Chinese citizen news site that’s photo-heavy and makes wonderful browsing. According to this Christian Science Monitor article (written already a few weeks ago, so the numbers are surely bigger by now):
Eric Zhang, a former staffer at the China Daily news organization based in Beijing, has launched
www.molive.cn, a
site that lets ordinary people gather news with their camera
cellphones. The site, launched three weeks ago, lets people post photos
they have taken to their own personal websites with small descriptions
of the scenes. Editors comb the postings and put the best ones on
Molive’s home page. The site is young but already has more than 100
people posting on it from all around the country and more than 20,000
readers a day.
It’s searchable by tag, and as of today the most popular tags are motorcycles, quality 素质 , sales promotions 促销, and interesting news such as this 30 cm. diameter clump of bees that gathered underneath an electric motorcycle in Xi’an.
But take a look as well at the tricyle cart photo pool, the ever-popular accidents, and beggars…
Just came across the mobilemonday beijing blog, which I got from the excellent Read/WriteWeb post on best Chinese Web apps. MobileMonday has a set of archived presentations, some pdf, some ppt, which might be of use to some of us. Things like:
YeePay - Payment in China (on e-payment services)
PDX.cn - Mobile Blogging Community
mobilemonday is a worldwide network:
Initiated in Finland in 2000 as an answer to the rising complexity of the telecom business and the necessity to enhance cooperations, Mobile Monday today counts over 20,000 members and 20 chapters worldwide, Mobile Monday is the leading global mobile industry-related event and community.
Our Taiwanese contributor Nydia Chen points out that the famous "Asian Backstreet Boys," aka the "Backdorm Boys" 后舍男生, have a lot going on these days. They’ve become celebrities in China with many videos beyond the original "As Long As I Love You."
They have their own blog, with all of their video works here (I can’t see them here on my Mac. I guess one really needs a PC to navigate Virtual China, when it comes down to it…or a new Mac that can run virtual Windows). You may be better off seeing their various clips on Youtube, including a live performance at the 21CN First Annual Net Popstar Competition in December 2005.
The Backdorm Boys graduated this week from the Guangzhou Arts Academy with degrees in sculpture. Check out their final projects:
If you read Chinese, the Baidu’s Backdorm Boys forum has pretty much everything you ever wanted to know, compiled by meticulous fans. For instance, the BB chronology shows that the "As Long as I Love You" video was released in March 2005; by August they were starring in the delightful Moto phone ad, "Radio in my head." Ogilvy & Mather says the ad has been downloaded 60 million times.
Samsung Motorola has recently put forth a patent for the Feng Shui Phone, which, according to Unwired View, does the following (and I quote):
- Three-dimensional Hall-effect sensor
for measuring the strength of electromagnetic fields and to form a
compass to determine the geographic direction in which the main wall of
the house faces.
- Digital camera to determine color saturation, order and balance of the surroundings.
- GPS receiver to determine geographic location of the phone.
- The coordinates are then sent to the GIS databse
through wireless network to to get the information about the
surroundings of the location, e.g. the distance from the undesirable
sites such as major airports, landfills, and factories.
- Cellphone microphone is used to measure noise level of the location.
- AM/FM radio to measure the AM and FM transmission strength and the distance form nearest AM/FM towers.
- The table with the chi values of each parameter is stored in phones memory and is used for calculation of chi values of different parameters.
Via PostShow; info from Unwired View
Another excellent Pacific Epoch interview, this one with Buddy Ye, the co-founder and CEO of Wangyou Media, a company that provides a platform for users to share audio, video, and photo content, with mobile services as well. They call themselves a cross between Myspace and Youtube, and you can see elements of both in the interface. The kicker is that the company also turns that content into mainstream media content by creating a weekly radio show, monthly CDs, and possibly a TV show in the future. So users get to hear themselves on the radio and buy their own CDs. Reminds me of blurb.com, which takes personal digital content and turns it into old-fashioned hard-cover books.
And check this out: you get "points" for including ads in your content (3-5 second spots), with which you can claim prizes. You can also get points for reporting "inappropriate content," if it manages to get past management.
Wangyou claims over 3 million users.
What’s missing? At first glance, at least a good system for rating and sorting the content, beyond "new" and "hot".
link to interview
link to Wangyou site
link to Wangyou videocasts–you may have to register to view them. I’ll be exploring.
Maoxianjia at China Tech Stories reviews some of the forecasts coming out of the 2006 Boao Forum for Asia, held in Hainan, China, April 21-23. Baidu’s CEO, Robin Li, noted that 3G will be available before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, potentially revolutionizing mobile Internet in China.
He estimated that in the next 2-3 years, wireless internet will add 100 perhaps even 200 million internet users…Asad Jamal, CEO of Draper Fisher Jurveston Ventures…predicts that the number will grow about 16%
annually and could reach 230 million by year 2010.
link
Youmeiti blog reports the opening of the First Cellphone Film Festival, put on by the daily Shanghai webzine Metroer. The short films (20 sec. to 2 min.) had to be submitted by cellphone to the Metroer website. They were produced using digital cameras, video cameras, and phone cameras –anything really, so long as it could be submitted by cellphone.
Chinastic reported the contest as it was being kicked off in February:
Filmmakers said using cell phones is a great way to make a short movie
with little skill, money, and no access to professional equipment.
You can download some of the roughly 50 short films–some crashed my system, some said they needed more upgrades–but Shanghai Freak loaded nicely. Hip French music in the background. Kind of interesting to consider what you can do under the limited conditions of something transmissable by cell in China in 2006.
link to Youmeiti post
download Shanghai Freak by going here and pressing the blue download button which looks like this:
download additional films here, clicking on the titles in a row on the far left, or on the purple link at the lower R hand side of the screen to scroll through additional choices, and then looking for the blue download button.
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.
excerpt:
Byread’s mobile reading solution has different versions that can
support a range of low-end to high-end handset models. Fifity to 60
high-end smart handset models and almost all basic Java handset models
can use our platform. Different handset models require different
solutions and will include different services. For example, for
high-end handset models our mobile reading solutions can offer audio
and video effects when users are reading our books while versions for
low-end handsets will not include the special effects.
Some Southeast Asian companies have contacted us about possible
partnerships, which we are considering. I do not think expansion will
be a short term goal because if we go outside of China, the lack of
content will be a big challenge because Chinese content is quite
different from content in other languages. This is the same reason that
large companies such as Adobe, which has a similar mobile reading
solution, have not yet been successful in China’s mobile literature
market.
link
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