YouMeiTI 有媒体

From BBC - China feels the quake online: "One man walked to Chengdu from an area very close to the epicentre of the earthquake.

On the way to the city he took photographs of deep fissures in the ground, collapsed buildings and abandoned vehicles with his mobile phone.

His photographs were uploaded onto a local bulletin board in Sichuan province.

Another Sichuan forum reports on volunteers getting to the earthquake zone. People on this community comment on rumours circulating about the water quality in Sichuan and reassure one another that drinking water is in fact safe.

Sites previously used for light-hearted social networking such as this food, drink and friendship site for Sichuan now carry banners lamenting "Tragedy in Sichuan".....

Global voices has a posted selection of microbloggers by region, including a comprehensive list of posters from Sichuan. The phenomenon of sharing information and support via sites such as Twitter and Fanfou has been well-documented in the media recently, with the BBC writing a blog post about it and the Ogilvy China Digital Watch blog observing that: "Twitter's public nature was of some real value both for ordinary folk and for professional journalists." "
-photo from BBC

Technorati Tags: application, bbs, cellphone, china, earthquake, forum, photograph, bbc, sichuan, twitter, water

Posted by Tricia Wang at 4:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Textually:
"Nurse" bleeds lonely hearts with flirty SMS: A Chinese company has duped about 400,000 people by creating the character of a young female nurse to solicit text messages and collect revenue from lonely men, reports Reuters.

"The Beijing-based company employed a team of 12 or 13 people -- mostly men -- to act as "Wang Jing", a 22-year-old nurse who would invite mobile phone users to become her online boyfriend and to seek her out "whenever they felt lonely", the Beijing News said.

"Yang", who would receive up to 2,000 text messages from people all over China in a single shift, said the nurse scam had reaped hundreds of thousands of yuan a month, a Chinese newspaper reported.

... Text message scams and unsolicited spam flogging everything from real estate to weapons are common in China, where telecommunication service providers allow companies to bombard mobile phones for a cut of the profits."

Insight on "SMS Sex Chat" services in a Wired article posted yesterday: Backstage With a Text Actress

Technorati Tags: cell phone, china, mobile, nurse, phone, scam, SMS

Posted by Tricia Wang at 4:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Chinamemes:

China Mobile Content 2.0 - Research Report:
WR Hambrech + Co. Research Report on China's Mobile Content Providers. Companies mentioned: Tom.com, Kongzhong, Hurray!, Sina, Linktone. Download the report here. original news

Technorati Tags: cell phone, china, mobile, report, resaerch

Posted by Tricia Wang at 7:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Terra Nova:
Games & Culture CFP: Submission call for a special issue of the Games and Culture journal, focused on Gaming in the Asia-Pacific region.

"As a region, the Asia-Pacific is marked by diverse penetration rates of gaming, mobile and broadband technologies, subject to local cultural and socio-economic nuances. Two defining locations – Seoul (South Korea) and Tokyo (Japan) – are seen as both “mobile centres” and “gaming centres” to which the world looks towards as examples of the future-in-the-present. Unlike Japan, which pioneered the keitai (mobile) IT revolution and mobile consoles such as playstation2, South Korea – the most broadbanded country in the world – has become a centre for MMOs (online massively multiplayer) games and convergent mobile DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadband i.e. TU mobile).

Adorned with over 20,000 PC bangs (PC rooms) in Seoul alone and with professional players (Pro-leagues) making over a million US per year, locations such as South Korea have been lauded as an example of gaming as a mainstream social activity. In a period marked by convergent technologies, South Korea and Japan represent two opposing directions for gaming – Korea emphasizes online MMOs games played on stationary PCs in public spaces (PC bangs) whilst Japan pioneers the mobile (privatized) convergent devices. These two distinct examples, with histories embroiled in conflict and imperialism, clearly demonstrate the importance of locality in the uptake of specific games and game play.

This issue seeks to explore the politics of game play and cultural context by focusing on the burgeoning Asia-Pacific region. Housing sites for global gaming production and consumption such as China, Japan and South Korea, the region provides a wealth of divergent examples of the role of gaming as a socio-cultural phenomenon. Drawing from micro ethnographic studies to macro political economy analysis of techno-nationalisms and trans-cultural flows of cultural capital, this issue will provide an interdisciplinary model for thinking through the politics of gaming production, representation and consumption in the region.

Topics of papers will discuss the region in terms of one of the following areas:

- Case study analysis of specific games and game play
- Is there such thing as a culturally specific aesthetic to the production and consumption of certain games?
- What is the “future” of gaming?
- Emerging and re-occurring productions of techno-nationalism in the region
- New media and experimental gaming in the region
- Convergent technologies and the impact on established modes of game play
- Gendered consumption and production of games
- Government regulations and types of game play
- Pervasive gaming and the role of co-presence 

Deadline for this special issue of Games and Culture: 15th March 2007. Authors should submit all inquiries, expressions of interest and papers to Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University) larissa.hjorth [AT] rmit.edu.au

Technorati Tags: asian, computer, culture, digital, gaming, japan, journal, mobile, pacific, pc, puppy, south korea, submission

Posted by Tricia Wang at 1:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From mocoNews:
Chinese Will Buy Cheap 3G Handsets: A survey released in China last week claimed that 77 percent of Chinese mobile phone users are keen to buy 3G handsets when they become available. However, it also notes that around 76 percent of users currently spend less than 2,500 yuan (US$320) on their handsets, so the success of selling 3G and the extra content that goes with it will be linked to the price of the phones. [By James Pearce]

Technorati Tags: cell phone, china, mobile, chinese

Posted by Tricia Wang at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Forbes:

Google, China Mobile: The report quoted an official from China Mobile as saying that the company and Google have begun developing their joint mobile search product for launch in 2007. Last week Google announced a mobile search tieup Chunghwa Telecom, the biggest telecom operator in Taiwan

Technorati Tags: asia, cell phone, china, google, internet, mobile, china mobile, search

Posted by Tricia Wang at 6:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Baku Today:
China has 830 million phone users, 132 million online: The number of Chinese fixed and mobile telephone subscribers has hit 830 million..

Technorati Tags: cell, china, mobile

Posted by Tricia Wang at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Textually.org:

Singaporean is world's fastest text messager: Sixteen-year-old Ang Chuang Yang, a student from Singapore, broke the Guinness World Record for the shortest time needed to type a 160-character SMS message on Sunday after whizzing through the task in 41.52 seconds in a competition, reports Reuters.

Just for comparison'ssake, in 2004, James Trusler typed the message in 67 seconds, beating his previous record by one second. Trusler was the confirmed world text champion by the Guinness Book of Records since September 2002.
The phrase to qualify is: "The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human."

Technorati Tags: guiness world record, singapore, SMS, text messaging

Posted by Tricia Wang at 8:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Asia Pundit: Cell Phones and Teen Depression, "a report noting a correlation between cell phone use and depression among Korean teens.: The teen obsession with yakking, text messaging and ring-tone swapping on cellphones might mean more than a whopping phone bill. For the most crazed, is a sign of unhappiness and anxiety, according to a new medical study.
A survey of 575 South Korean high school students found that the top third of users; students who used their phones more than 90 times a day; frequently did so because they were unhappy or bored. They scored significantly higher on tests measuring depression and anxiety than students who used their phones a more sedate 70 times daily.
The study, presented Tuesday at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Assn. in Toronto, was among the first to explore the emotional significance of teens; cellphone habits as the device becomes more entrenched in today's youth culture.
Lower in the article it notes that high cell phone use is not likely a cause of depression but rather a means of dealing with anxiety.:
Dr. Jee Hyan Ha, lead author of the latest report, said heavy cellphone users involved in his study weren't clinically depressed. Rather, he said, the students probably had some serious cases of teen angst.
The youths may have been unhappy because of a problem in their lives or anxious about their social status. They are trying to make themselves feel better by reaching out to others, he said."

Technorati Tags: asia, cell, korea, mobile, depression

Posted by Tricia Wang at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From BillsDue: According to an article in 第一财经日报, China Mobile is planning to launch a "central music platform" and work directly with record companies to sell music, ringtones etc to mobile subscribers. This can't be good news for the existing WVAS SPs, all of whom seem to be getting into the music business. Those SPs that are focused on original content creation may be OK, but music is a hit-driven and very unpredictable business.

Technorati Tags: china, China Mobile, chinese, music

Posted by Tricia Wang at 8:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Shanghai based Metroer, just ended their national cell-phone enabled short-film competition. Filmmakers who created 2 minutes of original works were eligible to submit their films via their cell to Metroer's website. Films could have been produced on any format, just as long as they were submitted via cell. "It is a good way for the public to have fun," said Liu Haibo, a teacher at Shanghai University's School of Film and Television Technology.
There has a flurry of experimentation combining cell-phones and traditional media.

• Ithica College in New York hosted the CellFlix Festival for "Cellular Short Films." It was a nationwide 30-sec cell phone movie submission competition. The winner won $5,000.
• Forum des Images in Paris held its first Pocket Film Festival for cellphones.
• US based Zoie Films says they hosted the first cell-phone film festival, where movies could be viewed on Nokia, Sprint and AT&Tmulti-media phones.
• MTV and Motorola just teamed for 3 years to play with $75 million to produce wireless device programming. One recent result is Head and Body, an international mini-doc series created just for cell phones. They have a series blog and also country specific webpages - here's the link for China.

I am excited by all these projects - especially Metroer because it signals more collaborative, digital and device-crossover work to come out of China. Building out cell-phones to be our all-in-one portable computer seems to be the R&D direction.
FYI: A recent American media project that I've been keeping an eye on is Sanctuary. The director put all her footage online as the world's first exploration of new production and distribution methods, where anyone can edit her footage. On the editing end, Diva, scalable open-source editing software, only runs on Linux Gnome desktops as it is in their exploration phase. I just spoke with Jin Ge about open-distributive editing with his Gold Famers project in Shanghai. Hopefully him and Kenyatta Cheese collaborate on exploring how to make this happen with his work - maybe trying Diva out?

Technorati Tags: cell, competition, distribution, film, liu haibo, metroer, mobile, movie, movies, opensource, production, puppy, sanctuary

Posted by Tricia Wang at 11:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Vodafone Offers Japanese to Chinese Translation:
"Vodafone Japan has added a new function to its MMS service for 3G handsets which displays mails written in foreign languages, reports Cellular News.

"Starting April 3, customers will be able to send mails in Japanese to China Mobile and China Unicom customers, and also receive mails written in Chinese from customers using these same operators."

Posted by Tricia Wang at 5:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)