Shanghai Apple Store
The weekend before last I paid a short pilgrimage to the new Apple Store in Pudong, Shanghai. It’s Apples second store on the mainland (the other is in Beijing) and as with many of its other stores the facade sports a cylindrical glass entrance with glass stairs which lead down to the brightly lit subterranean shop floor below. Read more
The Future of Mac OS X, iOS and iDevices
It seems fairly obvious that Apple is betting the future of computing on multi-touch interfaces built around a two-tiered architecture of browser-based HTML5 web apps and local apps more closely tied to the operating system – iOS. Google are also taking a similar path, albeit with a more web-centric approach. I’ve been thinking about this recently and want to talk a little about where I see it all going. Read more
Replacing Embedded Flickr Photos
Flickr has long been the platform of choice for many amateur photographers and bloggers to host and share their photos. It’s simple interface and large active community make it an all round great choice and by using the service to host their photos bloggers can also save a considerable amount of money on bandwidth costs. Read more
How To Optimize Your VPN Connection
For folks living and travelling in China having a VPN (Virtual Private Network) has become a necessity if you want to leap over the great firewall and access sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to name but a few. While personal VPN providers like Witopia and 12vpn provide easy to set up packages which you can install on your computer many people will still intermittently experience slow or unstable connections (through no fault of the provider) which can dampen the experience. Read more
Social Media in Asia Presentations
While Facebook and Twitter might rule in the US and Europe it’s a whole different game in Asia. If you follow Thomas Crampton (Asia-Pacific director of 360 Digital Influence for Ogilvy) then you’ll know he’s often posting insightful presentations about Social Media in Asia. I’ve been bookmarking them for a while and thought I’d share a few of the better ones here with the key takeaways (and other miscellanea). Read more
How The Great Firewall of China Works
The “Great Firewall of China” (GFW), officially know as the Golden Shield Project (金盾工程), is the system which filters, blocks and censors the flow of information online within the People’s Republic of China as sanctioned by the government to “protect” its citizens from content it deems harmful to societal stability (or “harmony” as they call it here). Read more
Asian Music Videos Made With iPhones
With its many sensors (touch, proximity, direction, sound, camera) the iPhone has become a versatile platform for both developers and artists alike. Apps like Drum Meister, Bassist, iDrum, NLog Synthesizer, I Am T-Pain, Ocarina, and BeatMaker (to name but a few) turn the iPhone into a veritable collection of musical instruments in a single device which you may or may not look stupid using! Read more
Break Free This Spring Festival
While in the west it may be Valentines day, February 14th over here marks the end of the Year of the Ox and begins the Year of the Tiger. Once again Chinese New Year is upon us and the great masses are shifting around the country on their way homeward for a well earned break. Trains will be packed and prices inflated. Firecrackers will be burnt and many multitudes of dumplings will be eaten. Some will drink so much baiju that they will forget the week altogether. Read more
Inside P1.cn – China’s Exclusive SNS
For almost as long as records have existed being a member of an exclusive club or organisation has been the preserve of the rich elite around the world. As well as giving them access to people and resources, it makes them feel privileged and provides an ideal way to flaunt their wealth among their super-rich peers. In other words somewhere to show off. Read more
Hong Kong Cell Carriers Complicit in Chinese Censorship
A friend of mine noticed something odd while visiting Hong Kong last weekend. Despite Hong Kong not being subject to the heavy internet blocks and censorship on the mainland he still couldn’t get Facebook or Twitter to work on his iPhone (which had international roaming turned on). Hong Kong residents using one of the local providers don’t face any such restrictions and after testing out a few different apps as well as making sure the sites worked fine on a normal laptop we began to become suspicious. Read more