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December 2006 - Posts

Why some foreigners decide to stay in China - Linkedin vs. MySpace

Happy Messy New Year Ken Carroll from Chinesepod , one of Time Magazine's Top 10 podcast sites in the world, turned me on to a site called BubbleGeneration that discusses issues in the Internet Economy. While reading the analysis of why MySpace works Read More...
Posted Sunday, December 31, 2006 1:33 PM by msracid | 5 Comments

For my homies without internet access in Asia

from xkcd Internet access in China is improving but still blocks many from doing their work. I just chatted with one of my ex-interns who now works for a large multinational game company in Shanghai. All work on Xbox Live platforms has stopped since they Read More...
Posted Saturday, December 30, 2006 2:33 PM by msracid | 0 Comments

The creator of Firefox rants about Google - He should browse the Chinese Internet

Having been part of the IE team here in Beijing, I have a healthy respect for both Firefox 1.0 and Maxthon. Knowing how much work goes into making browsers work will rock your world. Personally, I use Firefox, IE, Maxthon and Opera depending on the platform Read More...
Posted Friday, December 29, 2006 4:12 PM by msracid | 0 Comments

Internet as public utility

The Chinese Internet outage, Day 2: 'The Great FireWall' was just the beginning. "China" in Mandarin translates to "Middle Earth" or, "The Center of the World". But how often do Chinese businesses rely on external websites for their daily business? The Read More...
Posted Friday, December 29, 2006 10:12 AM by msracid | 1 Comments

The Taiwan quake brings Asia back to the 90's Internet

Beijing demolition. Run Run Run Its all said in CNN's Earthquake story . "Taiwan lost almost all of its telephone capacity to Japan and mainland China. Service to the United States also was hard hit, with 60 percent of capacity lost. Later, Chunghwa said Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 28, 2006 10:41 AM by msracid | 0 Comments

The Dōngzhì goes on and on

Dōngzhì ( pīnyīn ) or Tōji ( rōmaji ) ( Chinese and Japanese : 冬至; Korean : 동지 ; Vietnamese : Đông chí ; literally: "winter solstice") is the 22 nd solar term. It begins when the Sun reaches the celestial longitude of 270° and ends when it reaches the Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 27, 2006 2:47 PM by msracid | 1 Comments

Christmas comes and goes in China

A MySpace like blog entry for Xmas Christmas dinner was spent eating Indian food. For the first time, I saw someone selling live tortoises door to door on the highway to cars stopped at the traffic light. Christmas is not complete in Beijing without forcing Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 26, 2006 5:44 PM by msracid | 1 Comments

Happy Festivus (Dec 23rd). Grinchy Ph.D students want to ban Christmas

China always has a clutch of weird news coming out each day so I 'm always wondering when Festivus will be the official holiday in China. Mu - the blood saint of Festivus Since the holidays approach including kwaanza and Saturnalia, it only fitting to Read More...
Posted Friday, December 22, 2006 10:48 AM by msracid | 0 Comments

Chengdu's Xbox Live Arcade Incubation Center

Microsoft offices are coming up all over China like earthworms after a rain. Chengdu public art and some out of town tourists. My team went to the new Xbox Live Arcade incubation center in Chengdu a few weeks ago. It is not really an MS office in the Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 21, 2006 11:08 AM by msracid | 0 Comments

Mad rush for discounts

A friend sent me this thread on a Chinese BBS. I love the anguish. -neema Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 21, 2006 9:03 AM by msracid | 0 Comments

Food rules in MS Sigma Office

A new e-mail was distributed to us today concerning the placing and eating of smelly food in the office. Cafeteria food for those who cannot eat at their desk anymore. Subject: Minimize Food Smell in Sigma Office In order to create one comfortable Sigma Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 20, 2006 11:14 AM by msracid | 2 Comments

MultiPoint builds on work from MSRI, MSRA

Microsoft just announced the MultiPoint SDK , which will be released soon. It will be included in the 2007 ImagineCup contest , which has lots of quality entries in China. There's even a Channel 9 video for it already. While the idea of multiple mice Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 20, 2006 10:46 AM by msracid | 0 Comments

Audio conversation threads

This is basically a nifty implmentation of the paper I published last year (PDF), except Chinswing has left out a core affordance: easy quoting. Without quoting, context and quick browsing decrease in quality. Still, it's neat to see this tech in beta, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 19, 2006 9:50 AM by msracid | 0 Comments

What a week.

Think week is almost over and I just finished writing 4 papers . One of them is with my esteemed MSRA colleague Neema. Not only do we collaborate on high level thought projects, we also perform together with our dueling Tablet PCs (mine is dual core though) Read More...
Posted Monday, December 18, 2006 3:41 PM by msracid | 0 Comments

Creating personas for Chinese children

ACID under Neema has conducted interviews with several families and young children in Beijing to better understand the structure of the youth education market in China. I have seen very little corporate ethnographic study of this new emerging group from Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 13, 2006 9:50 AM by msracid | 0 Comments

China HipHop

Local media site Danwei created a great video piece on a Chinese HipHop artist in the city of Qingdao. It is very interesting to see how the impact of western media and technology morphs and adapts to the Chinese economic reality. Seeing the interview Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 12, 2006 6:28 PM by msracid | 1 Comments
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Code Karaoke and Laptop DJs

In one of our more obscure diversionary projects at MSRA, we tried to see if we could create music by KTVing to popular tunes using programming code for the "Hello World" script.. We tried C++, BASIC, Pascal, and some really obscure legacy computer languages, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 06, 2006 5:17 PM by msracid | 0 Comments
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Results of RSS Survey Available

The results of our public survey on RSS usage are now available in Chinese and English . -neema Read More...
Posted Monday, December 04, 2006 1:09 PM by msracid | 3 Comments
 
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