Being a MS employee, I buy my Windows XP from the Redmond company store for a mere (Price to low to mention) dollars. Why, thats less than the cost of a brand new Xbox 360 game. I have never had to buy Windows in retail since its usually provided with...

Although, I am not a Seahawks fan myself (i'm from NYC), you can't spit in a MS office without hitting a SeaHawks fan. I went to school in Boston so I would have to claim Patriot favoritism. The first ever NFL game to be held in China will be held in...

Users want video downloads on the TV . We addressed this problem with our DynaLine paper . However, we approached it from an interaction design perspective: how does one navigate such a huge corpus on a remote control? And given the unique nature of...

What kind of RSS reader are you? MSR Asia is currently doing research on how people use their RSS readers (aggregators). We've been up to our necks in interviews, contextual inquiries, and now this survey! The results will be made public to the...

I sat on a panel with some of the good folks involved with China Access 2008 today. China Access 2008 is a strategic international business marketing and partnering initiative that has been consciously structured to help China better realise the...

China undercuts MIT/Negroponte at $125, nobody surprised. Negroponte has said that what he wants is a software ecosystem to emerge from the platform of laptops in developing areas. But he's getting hardware too. Why don't price wars work this well...

China's current crackdown on video piracy is humming along and there has been impact on the availability of pirated DVDs to some degree in Beijing. "BEIJING -- Chinese law enforcement agencies destroyed nearly 13 million pirated compact discs, DVDs...

You may need to open a free account at www.gamasutra.com but these papers provide some pretty good academic analysis of key topics in the gaming field. Understanding addiction in multiplayer games Game Spaces and Worlds Spatial Principles...

Some interesting concepts from Germany on what Neo-China will be like : The new opportunities arising for Western designers from the developments in China were the focus of this year's CHINA DESIGN project. This interdisciplinary student project...

Every year, ATC goes and flies every FTE (full time employee) to an offsite meeting somewhere in China. This year we went to Hainan Island which is a province very close to Vietnam. Think of Hainan as similar to Thailand (both the good and bad aspects...

Just as I was praising how cool Macs were in a previous post , my girlfriend's Nano died today and she had a run in with Apple's service center here in Beijing. As I mentioned previously, Apple seems to be having issues with service and support in other...

Former MSRA CID visiting artist and researcher Rania Ho , reporting for NPR: The immigrant story is a familiar one: a family leaves behind poverty or war to make a new life in America. They work hard, save money, make friends, buy a house and a...

Two 16-year old Beijing girls from the Zhonguancun area in Beijing (the "Silicon Hutong") mirrored me for several hours at work a couple of weeks ago. These were girls not specifically interested in pursuing careers in technology, but they certainly knew...

On a recent user research trip to a village in Huarou County, outside of Beijing (home of the beautiful Huairou geological formation), several of us piled into a minibus (complete with in-car navigation system that probably needs to be updated more than...

This is a picture of the side of the building where the sign hangs. Its about 50 feet tall and in the Zhonguancun Silicon Hutong of Beijing. -frank yu

This was an interesting post from an MS employee in the Macintosh Business Unit and her experience with being a Mac user in Microsoft. In some ways, I can understand her situation since I am a former mac Zealot myself having owned the following in the...