Group tours and packaged activities are a way of life here in China. Why hike on your own in the mountains when you can sign up for a tour with a hundred other hikers and get a guide to give you commentary of the local scenery right? Why not a group photo...

The growing news stories and revenue size of the online world seems to be in the public zeitgeist on a daily basis recently. Not only are we conducting more transactions and getting our news from online platforms and sources more and more, we ourselves...

A few days ago I linked to how your Outlook habit reflects your personality. Today's link can be classified as "for amusement only". It seems that your choice of browser is a lifestyle choice according to the article. I mean, all else being equal since...

What's the big deal about Mongolian Milk? Read this . Netease recently took pictures of the Google office in Beijing's Wudouko area, (across the street from my very local high rise Hutong). Looks a little like ourMSRA floors but definitely not our...

Great article on the psychological profile of Outlook user habits. Deep in the vaults of Micrsoft User Experience is probably a study that logs every action while slicing down in seconds exactly what users are doing in outlook. However, looking into...

As part of my ongoing diatribe of how entertainment is slightly "different" in Asia (ie. Japan, China, and the Philippines), MS needs to look into studying the enthnography and social profile of Asian consumers more. I mean check this out. Although...

ChinaJoy is by far the largest and most attended videogame exposition that no one has ever heard of. The rise of China means that everything around is also rising: largest internet audience, largest wireless market, largest online gaming population.....

Sure, you can buy any item and have it shipped anywhere, but you'll pay a handsome fee for shipping. And there are still barriers to many with regard to international payment options. Living in Beijing, there's a number of items that are tough to come...

I want an online language translation service that uses genetic search result queries to improve performance I have used several online translation sites from Google language tools to Babelfish. For western languages the results seem to be very...

In an age of rising development costs and the need for ever more detailed artwork in next generation games, flash and java games on the net represent an almost zen like return to simplicity. In countries like China and Indonesia, web games are very popular...

Hot exhibit halls, garbage strewn about everywhere, maddening crowds, loud blaring music, terrible stench, mushy cold food, terrible stench (yes, it deserves a second mention), mediocre schwags and generic looking video games. Behold ChinaJoy2006 ! ...

YouTube , Google Video , and Grouper brought video-sharing to the 'masses'. They initially dealt with uploading videos and sending video URLs to friends. The next step was associating one video with another (usually via a 'similar videos' list). But now...

Who're you calling Web 2.0? Zhejiang Nong Min Xin Xiang ("Zhejiang Province Farmer's Mailbox") is a new service promoted by the ever-progressive Zhejiang provincial government. Agriculture workers are all encouraged to register, creating a typically...

One of our common tasks here in Beijing when we get visitors from Redmond is to bring them to all the places that pirated software can be found. We show them Windows, Office and now Xbox 360 pirated games in order to bring back and study. A colleague...

Beijing ACID Blog #49 is dead...Long live One Billion Users ! Lets face it. The old name gave us that not so fresh feeling. I wanted to call it ACID Factory #49 based on the fact that all factories here in China have that type of name...e.g. Shanghai...