A new home

Since wordpress.com is not accessible from inside China, I won’t be able to post to it once I move to Beijing at the end of this month. So… this blog is moving to this new home. Thanks for coming along! If you have been reading via RSS, don’t forget to update your feeds…

iDunno

My MBA classmate from Tsinghua, Muskie, sent me an email to tell me that I must blog about the MacBook Air. Well, OK, but… meh. I’m left pretty cold, to be honest. OK, it’s thin… very thin… but too many places where I work have either no wifi or an unreliable connection – I need an ethernet socket! I also still use my optical drive a lot to watch my movies, and I’m not going to start downloading them all again; neither am I going to start carrying around an external drive. Plus – only one USB port???

So: it’s not for me. Some of the tech it uses is cool, though, especially the multitouch. It’s worth reading Bob Cringely’s take on what the Macbook Air is all about, really.

I was more interested in the updates for the iPod Touch, which is now taking its first steps towards being what I would like it to be. This also turned out to be a letdown, though. Like many others, I am rather resistant to paying for what I can’t help thinking ought to be either a free upgrade, or cheaper. As for the new features:

1.  Customisable screen. Bleh. So what?
2. Mail. Bleh. I use webmail pretty much exclusively. Maybe this is useful as a way to get PDF files, etc, onto the iPod – but I would much rather have the iPod visible as an external filestore.
3. Maps. Aah, now you’re talking! This is useful – or would be, if I wasn’t about to leave for Beijing, which isn’t covered by Google Maps…
4. Weather. Useful… but not really a must-have. I can very easily check online before I go out.
5. Notes. Useful. But… I almost always have a pen and notebook with me, and frankly that’s easier than trying to use the iPod’s keyboard.
6. Stocks. Meh. Maybe this will be useful next year, but I don’t need it right now.

So, overall…. nope, not excited. Sorry, Muskie!

More on augmented reality

A couple of new developments to keep an eye on (pun intended):

•  Contact lenses with virtual displays embedded;
• Monkey controls robot’s movement with its thoughts

See also this slightly tongue-in-cheek, but absolutely true all the same, article on 10 ways online gaming will change the future.

How do we communicate in our various realities?

I used to be be an avid reader of Dave Pollard’s blog at How to Save the World; somehow, over the past year I kind of dropped out of the habit. Right now, there are 128 articles queued up for me to read in my RSS reader!

Anyone who’s read this blog lately will know that I’ve become increasingly interested in the various virtual worlds out there, as well as in augmented reality, and in the effects it will have on business and society. One element of all this is how we construct our identity in each virtual world, how we manage any differences in what we put into each identity, and how we communicate using one identity with someone who got to know us in another.

Of course this isn’t new: the simple fact that we change anyway over time means that most of us have had the experience of meeting someone we used to know, and realised that perhaps they haven’t changed much but we have. It’s uncomfortable, having someone trying to interact with you as the person you used to be rather than who you are now.

This is likely to become more common as we inhabit more and more ‘worlds’ – and let’s be clear that many of us will live in several different realities at one time! This is what brought me back to Dave Pollard. I forget now which blog it was, but someone wrote a short piece linking to this excellent blog post: Conversation in virtual communities: what happens when you change from one medium of communication to another?

He takes the following channels of communication as his starting point for a very interesting discussion:

1. e-Mail
2. chat/IM
3. chat/IM plus virtual presence (using an avatar)
4. v2v (voice to voice)
5. v2v plus virtual presence (using an avatar)
6. v2v plus virtual presence (using a webcam)
7. f2f (face to face)

Check it out.

Subsidise, and everybody wins

The Chinese government has decided to fund subsidies for the purchase of air-conditioning units, cell phones, televisions, and other such technological goodies. These are all items that represent the ‘good life’, are fairly cheap and basic, and yet have been  beyond the purchasing power of vast numbers of China’s rural poor.

This seems to be a pretty smart move:

•  The peasants’ quality of life improves significantly;
• The peasants’ access to, and knowledge of, the markets for their produce improves significantly;
• The peasants are happier; therefore, a contributing factor to domestic political dissatisfaction is eased, the gap between rural and urban lifestyles is narrowed a little,  and the Communist Party has slightly less reason to worry about internal unrest;
• Chinese domestic consumption is boosted; in the face of an economic downturn in the USA and Europe, and consequent decreases in consumer spending, China’s factories now have a bigger home market to absorb their output.
• As a result, fewer factories will shut down, and fewer workers will lose their jobs, when the US economy slows down. The CPC has another reason to sleep a little more soundly at night.
• A little more time is won for China to worry less about internal strains, and invest more in alternative energy – which will be even more needed as the demand for electricity to power all these new purchases skyrockets…

Relics of a more civilized age…

It may be due to watching David Lynch’s Dune at an impressionable age, or perhaps reading Michael Moorcock’s Oswald Bastable series at around the same time, but I have strong steampunk affinities. In particular, I’ve always regretted the fact that the great airships were phased out after the the Hindenberg disaster.

Although there seems to be a suggestion every 10 years or so that an airship revival is imminent, it never seems to happen. Still, I am inspired nonetheless by a couple of articles (via Slashdot) that seem to give hope that it may yet happen, enabled by the rising cost of oil.

It seems to me that these could be very useful for short-haul passenger trips around south-east Asia – perhaps they would be safer than the chronically over-loaded Indonesian passenger ferries, and less prone to disasters. They would also be very useful for moving cargo around China, or India….

I’ve written previously that my apartment overlooks the port of Singapore, and that I’m fascinated by the constant flow of ships and their cargo, as well as by the streams of commerce that they represent; perhaps one day it will be my good fortune to live with a view of a Singapore Airship Port, with gleaming zeppelins depositing passengers and goods from all over the world…

China Recreation District

I’m finding this intriguing – China Recreation District. A project sponsored by the Beijing government (I’m taking this to read the municipal government, rather than the Beijing-based national government) to connect Chinese businesses to the world. Projects like this are nothing new, of course! After all, my first-ever internet job, way back in the early 90s, was at a company working on something similar, funded by the Welsh Development Agency. The scope and ambition of this Chinese effort is something new, though, since they’re buying in an existing and very popular European-developed virtual game world; this is going to be one avenue for us Western consumers to go talk directly to Chinese manufacturers! Very cool; I’m definitely going to have to try to visit these people once I’m in Beijing!

• Introduction
• Press release on creating an e-commerce network to directly connect individual consumers to Chinese manufacturers.
• The CRD as a virtual world
• The basis of the virtual world – Entropia Universe, created by Swedish company Mindark.

China will change us

The more I read, the more I realize that those of us in the “Western” world really don’t understand what’s happening in China, and how it’s going to rewrite the rules whether we like it or not. This is partly to do with technological development, but even more so with the culture around tech and communications.

For example, I’m going to Beijing next year to teach e-commerce. I already have the textbook, which is based – as you would probably expect – on the Western (largely US) history of e-commerce. Yet, reading blogs, tech news sites, and so on, I’m beginning to see that the way the Chinese are approaching e-commerce is going to be rather different.

I’ve been mulling this over for a while, but Niti’s post on Chinese aid to Africa has spurred to finally blog it! As she suggests, this is all about design insight drawn from market experience. China has a vast market with no pre-existing infrastructure, a hunger for Western-style affluence, and third-world budgets. Since Chinese factories already make pretty much everything for everyone in every cost range, the manufacturing capacity is present to make vast numbers of anything that can be designed to target this market.

This is leading to design innovation through rapid evolution: make lots of different designs, get them onto the market, and see what works. It produces products that are cheap, effective, and demand-driven – rather than overdesigned and over-marketed “solutions”. Result: Chinese-designed tech products that are only intended for the domestic markets, and yet find a world-wide demand – because they’re affordable and meet real needs.

As Niti’s post shows, this means that it’s Chinese-designed technology that’s being sought out in other developing countries. This is important as we go into 2008, I think, because all the indications are that the US, and perhaps Europe, will experience an economic slowdown or recession. However… the indications also seem to show that the rest of the world will not. The BRIC economies, for example, will carry on doing just fine and, since China in particular will continue to need raw materials, other developing countries will also continue to do well.

So what does this all mean? China will become the technological focus of attention for much of the world… I’m curious as to whether Chinese tech culture will also be exported, because it seems that this is where there are significant differences from the West. Some examples:

• Massively distributed collaborative tasks: Rick Martin on C|Net discusses guerrilla translation projects for pirated films. How else could this culture be harnessed or adapted? It would seem to be an open-source dream… Could it be used for coding? Design?
• A crowd philosophy. Chinese internet culture is developing along the lines of constant presence. As Professor Guo Liang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences outlines in a very interesting interview:
  

  The interesting thing is that in China about more than 30% Internet users don’t have an email account. Less than 30% of those who have an email account check their emails every day. It does not necessarily mean that they don’t communicate with others. They prefer instant contact by QQ, which is a Chinese version of ICQ. People used to only have address on their business cards. Then, they have phone numbers or even fax numbers. And then, they have email address. Now, many people put their QQ account number on their business cards.

• Let’s not kid ourselves: the future of internet access in China is phone-based. As Professor Guo also says:
  

  Firstly, I would say Internet use is growing very fast in China. Currently, there are about 123 million users in China, ranking the second largest Internet country in the world after the US. Secondly, there is the issue of the digital divide, which many Western scholars are interested in. In theory, rich people and better educated people are more likely to need a computer and they can afford it. So they may access more information and may have more opportunities to get even richer. But I think the digital divide is not mainly because of digital but economy. According to my research in small towns, a lot of people don’t have to buy a computer. They just go to the Internet café for RMB 1 (US$0.12) per hour. In large cities, it’s something like RMB3 per hour

  So: most Chinese internet users don’t have their own computer, they use a cybercafe. When they get to the stage where they want to go online outside a cybercafe, I suspect they are most likely to want to do this via a mobile phone – because they already have one, they regularly upgrade it, and in most of China it’s the only available communications technology. This extremely interesting CNN article shows how competitive and ambitious the mobile market is in China.

Now this is where I get speculative. As we can see, the trends are that:

• Chinese internet users are most likely to be online through their phone, which they have with them at all times;
• Chinese internet culture is such that users like to be constantly connected to their friends, and are open to approaches from strangers;
• Chinese tech culture is increasingly collaborative and distributed.
• Chinese tech manufacturers are predisposed to developing lots of different technologies and throwing them into the market to see what works.

Now I want to throw into the mix something I wrote about before: augmented reality and extended consciousness. The technology exists, and is about to hit market at a fairly low price, to turn the internet into something we are immersed in, 24/7. It’s western-developed, and – I think – still searching for a niche outside uber-geeks. Very largely, it seems that it’s being directed at gamers. In mainstream western cyberculture, we’re still thinking of the social web in terms of Facebook etc, sites you go to visit; the immersive internet is not likely to catch on.

Once gaming brings this technology to China, I suspect we might see very different results. The Chinese internet experience is already immersive; this will just take it to a new level. Can this technology be adapted for phone-based internet access? I suspect we’ll see Chinese manufacturers and service providers willing to give it a try. Will it take off? Who knows. It seems to have a good chance of success.

If it does take off… it will be something unlike we’ve seen before. And let’s not forget where this article began: other developing countries are adopting Chinese technologies and trends, because it’s affordable and meets their needs.