Google to save world, official

Seems like Bob Cringely was absolutely right – Google have now officially announced their plans to pump their megabucks into renewable energy technologies. This is tremendous news… this has to be one of the most positive things I’ve heard for the hope of clean, renewable, and cheap energy.  I just hope that they will partner with developing countries, and China and India in particular, to ensure that whatever comes out of this project can get into operation on a massive scale ASAP. As I mentioned before, it would be great to see Makani’s kites in operation across the Gobi desert, for example.

Meizu MiniOne news

Slashphone brings the news that when the Meizu M8 is released in February next year, it will hit the market not just in China, but also in the US. Apparently it will be previewed at a trade show in the States in January.

Hm. So much for my hopes of making a fortune by selling them from China on eBay….

I’ll be in Beijing in February, so it’s likely I’ll be getting one. The question is, do I buy a CECT T100 in the meantime? I’ll have to make that decision in the next couple of days…

The Chinese onion effect, revisited

Lots of internal references in this post, as it brings together a few themes I’ve been following for a few years now.

I wrote this back in August 2005; the earlier post was lost when I moved this blog to WordPress.

I blogged over a year ago about the ‘onion layer’ theory of the Chinese economy, and here it is in practice. As the article mentions, even the second-rank cities are facing stiff competition from India, Indonesia and other developing nations, so there will be pressure to move ever-further inland. I say this is good because it will bring greater prosperity to the poorer areas of China, and hopefully stem some of the human tide moving from these areas to the coast. Both will help to shore up social stability in rural China, which is vital for China in the long run if it is to be a peaceful member of the international community…

I don’t remember what had inspired the first one, but in the 2005 post I linked to an ATOL article about a report from Jones Lang Lasalle China.

The topic of the need for China’s manufacturers to move inland in search of lower costs comes up again today in this post from Richard Florida, who talks about Rob Gifford’s article in The Prospect.

One thing Gifford mentions is the rising labour costs in the coastal regions – which I saw mentioned in 2004, back when this blog was still on Blogger. The IHT article I mention there doesn’t appear to be online any more, but you get the gist of it from the quotes.

If labour is too expensive on the coast, then manufacturing must move inland. Consequences:

• Money and jobs arrive in inland regions. More people can find good work near their homes, which may reduce migration and income disparity across China. This will work boost social stability. Good.
• Local officials get a bigger pot of money to loot, which will decrease stability: “the mountains are high, and the emperor is far away“. Bad.
• Currently undeveloped and clean regions develop and become polluted, damaging health and quality of life, possibly leading to the kind of unrest we’ve already seen elsewhere. Bad.
• The overall rise in wages – though less than it would be if the manufacturing had stayed at the coast – is joined by the coast of getting goods overland to the ports from where they head to the West. This raises costs to the point where India and other countries become competitive, as Gifford points out. The way around this? Put a deep-sea port in easy reach of the Chinese interior. Two plans to do this are underway. The first: the Three Gorges project, which will open up Chongqing and Wuhan to deep-water ships. The second: heeelllooo Myanmar!

Computer lessons from the Russian front

Sorry, I need to rant a bit here…

I got an email the other day from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation. I’d been checking out their website a couple of months ago, and noticed their “Buy one, donate one” scheme, which at that time had yet to commence. It sounded interesting, the offer was affordable, and I was quite interested in getting hold of one of these famous little critters. So I signed up. Of course, I’m in Singapore – and it seems this offer was only available to residents of the USA and Canada. This fact wasn’t at all apparent from the page I read, and the reminder email I received didn’t mention it either. So, no new laptop for me. I’m not sure why this would be – I managed to buy my retro clamshell iBook from Australia without difficulty, so it’s not a logistical problem Could it be… that the Foundation just hadn’t thought about the world outside North America? It wasn’t a good sign.

Another bad sign reminded me of an episode from my childhood. I’m from a small country town, and when I was in my pre- and early teens, lots of residents didn’t really travel much. Once, a travelling theatre group came to perform a play in our community youth centre. I still remember one scene in which the cast stood packed close together, each with one hand raised, swaying rhythmically. I had at that point been to London a couple of times, and knew that they were portraying strap-hanging commuters on the Underground. The whispered questions around me revealed that many in the audience had no idea what was meant to be happening: they’d never seen the real thing. I thought of that episode when I read that Electronic Arts have donated The Sims to be pre-loaded on OLPC computers. Is this really sensible when – correct me if I’ve got this wrong – the laptop is intended for poor rural children in developing countries? Who may perhaps have seen small towns? Are the concepts of the Sims really appropriate, or even comprehensible, for this market?

This reminded me of another childhood lesson. As a boy during the British 1970s, a backward-looking period obsessed with the Second World War, I was saturated with comics, stories, and biographies of that period. I learned the lesson of the tank battles on the Russian front. The Germans built intensively designed, high-precision, finely constructed panzers, which were the match or superior of any other tank in the world – on a one-to-one basis in ideal conditions, when manned by a highly-trained crew. They were extremely expensive to build, maintain, and repair – so there weren’t very many of them, and they often didn’t work very well in the conditions of the Russian winter. The Soviets, in contrast, built crude, but extremely functional T34s, which were ideal for the environment, cheap to build and run, easy to repair, and which could be deployed in large numbers with peasants fresh from the farms at the wheel. We all know who won.

Something similar seems to be happening in the computer market for the developing world. The OLPC computer is being highly- (even over-) designed for a very narrow market, in very specific conditions. It’s not like anything else on the market (read: which everybody else is using). It seems to be aimed at an ideal user, rather than the real people of the poorer regions of the world.

I can’t really talk about the conditions in contemporary Africa, for example. I can see how something of this design might work in the rural African villages I knew in Lesotho twenty years ago. But is this the market we need to worry most about? That could sound callous, I don’t mean it to, but aren’t there vastly more children or others in need of accessible computing in less remote areas, small towns, urban shanty zones, etc – where there is access to electricity, etc?

The OLPC means well, is driving important innovations, and is publicizing an important need – but it’s still the equivalent of those German Panzers. In the campaign to bring affordable computing to rural areas, I suspect they will be swamped by the T34 equivalents, such as the Chinese Longmen computer, or the Sinomanic. I’ve seen these while I was in China: cheap, cheerful, using commodity parts, and cut-down versions of the same software everyone else is using. Specifically aimed at poor students or rural farmers, they will swamp the OLPC – and I wouldn’t be surprised if its these models, or ones like them, that win the day for the developing markets in Africa and elsewhere…

Just-good-enough in large numbers and low price will win out over expensively over-designed, no?

Keeping an eye on Chinese phones

Interesting to see a lot of traffic recently coming from a post on Yahoo’s finance boards; this is to my post discussing the CECT T100 – the phone with biometric security. It seems I’m not the only one interested in what’s going on with Chinese phone design.

From that Yahoo! thread, I see that the T100 is available for CNY1380, or SGD270 – which is a pretty good price. Some Beijing-based friends are coming to Singapore soon; perhaps I should ask them to bring me one…

Apparently the T100 is being very well-received within China; at least, so say China Economic Review.

The development of biometric security for phones very much seems to be  driven by Asian demand. A quick review finds that:

• LG are introducing fingerprint-access phones for the Korean market.
• Hitachi bringing out a model in Japan.

Singapore, of course, is home to the most notorious example of the dangers of losing your phone. My own phone didn’t have anything controversial on it in the least, but as  our phones increasingly become our gateway to our online selves, our address-book of first resort, our digital recorders of our everyday curiosity…. the need for better security is clear. This is a trend to watch.

Chinese on the iPhone

I’ve been under the impression that when the iPhone is launched next year in Asia, it will have Korean and Japanese input, but not Chinese. Unfortunately, I can’t locate the source that originally mentioned it. Anyway, it seems there’s already a hack that allows the ‘Sinification’ of the iPhone.

However… this only appears to change the menus. You know what I really want Apple – or someone else – to provide? I mean, come on: this is a touch-screen device. I want to be able to write characters on the screen with my fingers, and to have hanyu pinyin options. No small demand, I know, but with Chinese characters being used all over Asia, even the world, surely there’s a big enough market for someone to develop this…?

Underground dreams

Three years ago, I wrote about how delighted I was to read about the discovery of a mysterious cinema, built by persons unknown in the catacombs of Paris.

In the same spirit, let me just pay a hat-tip to the visionaries who – completely illegally – constructed a vast complex of underground temples in the Italian Alps…

The Beijing tech scene

I’ve just found Tim O’Reilly’s report from the Beijing Foo Camp, posted a week ago. It chimes with everything I feel about Beijing after my time there, and in particular, this:

There are (reportedly) very large differences between the tech cultures in Shanghai and Beijing. Shanghai is very entrepreneurial, with money as a common language. Beijing is more complex, richer by most opinions, but more difficult. We might have felt more at home in Shanghai, but because of the complex interactions between government, academic institutions (which are centered in Beijing), the artistic revival here, and business, many felt that the future is here in Beijing. Of course, they also said that the rivalry between the two cities is like the rivalry between LA and New York.

I totally agree – and it’s one of the reasons why I keep touting Beijing as one of the most interesting places in the world to be right now – and why I’m going back next year

The whole of Tim’s post is worth reading for his thoughts on Beijing, China, and the tech/arts scene.