Revelance

Yet again, China is China. Recently Beijing announced that companies will no longer be able to register their businesses at locations other than a proper office. This sounds reasonable, and in most modern countries is the rule, except that in Beijing there is a large number of companies which use ‘apartments’ for office. In many cases these apartments are designated Office/residential dual use. It offers a low cost small area alternative to offices. TongTong is currently based in one.
Trouble is, our lease is up. The newly passed law says that if you have already registered, then its fine to keep your business registration where you are, even if you are in a residential place. However no new registrations will be passed, and ‘yearly inspections’ will not pass if you are in a apartment. The latter trouble won’t creep up on us for at least a year because we did our ‘annual inspection’ just before the law was announced.
However, our office lease is up soon and we have to move. This means, theoretically, that we have to move the registered address of our company. But, because of the new rule we are theoretically excluded from moving into any cheap office/apartment dual use spaces if we want our company registration to stay kosher. Not a big issue except that small offices are not falling in our laps and any suitable ones in terms of size / location are way too expensive.
Thousands of companys will be affect within the next few years as their annual inspection creeps up. Will all the companies currently operating in huge apartment complexes like 建外SOHO be forced to move out to more expensive offices? What will happen to these developments which were targeted at providing small office spaces. The whole complex, and many others like it are literally brimming with companies.
We will keep you updated on what finally happens to us. Fingers crossed.

- that’s the current uptime on our server.

OK, it’s not brilliant (Unix servers have known to be up for years) - but it’s pretty good. Unfortunately once we upgrade the hardware the machine will have to go down. But, until then, I hope to manage 365.

Firebug is probably the best web development tool I have come across. To bad it was just found last night, after the bulk development for tongtong.com was done. I can not praise it more, it is simply awesome.
Firebug is a firefox extension that lets you “explore the for corners of DOM by keyboard or mouse. All of the tools you need to poke, prod, and monitor your Javascript, CSS, HTML and Ajax are brought together”. It even has a XMLHttprequests inspector!
If you are a web developer and are sick of ‘alert debugging’ with
javascript, this is for you. If you are a designer and you are fed up
with CSS debugging, this is for you.
Once in a while, something comes along that just blows you away in terms of functionality, ease of use and just plain goodness, firebug is one of them.

Do you use Google? This book, 55 Ways to have fun with Google, (you can download the PDF for free), tells you all about some of the fun side of Google. Pretty good, worth checking out.

用Google吗。《55种用Google找乐子的方法》里面有很多Google好玩的小秘密。值得一看。中文版在此。

Google just officially announced the rumored ‘GBuy’ or google checkout a google online shopping cart system (on June 28th I think). Once again, google. has managed to find a brilliant way of reaching into the deep depth of the long tail to reap in the revenue. Charlene Li from Forrester has a great article on google checkout.

Sitting here in SIT, I can’t help but notice the ridiculus number of laptops here. 11 in my narrow field of view. The amount of information being produced / processed is amazing.
Person next to me is working on CAD / architecture of some sort, there people learning from dancing videos, listening to music, web surfing, and on and on.
Three questions or issue come to mind immediately:
Will the desktop be obsolete?
With miniaturization and laptops becoming more and more powerful, is there a place for the desktop anymore? It will only be a matter of time before someone produces a modular laptop, where you can swap out the components as you like. Already, several manufacturers are offering custom-built laptops. Why would I want a desk top anymore if I can have the same amount of power and flexibility in a portable package.
How will the social-information fabric changed?
This question is a bit more complex. The pervasive-network mentality, where you are connected to the internet where ever you are is becoming more and more of a reality. There are cities which have and are setting up free city-wide wi-fi. Books such as ‘Smart Mobs’ are already delving into the possibilities of the ‘always-on’ and ‘always-connected’. How will information be organized, how will agents be connect?
Sustainability.
It takes 4000 times its own weight in materials and energy to produce a single laptop. Imagine that sitting on your lap. We must be aware and take steps to limit / reduce the enviornmental impact of the wired/wireless society, and take note that the majority of the world is not so fortunate. Will the One Laptop Per Child initiative really make lives better? Education does not equal technology. Education does not equal providing children with fancy machines and an internet connect.

With all the shameless copying going on in China, it was only a matter of time before people began stealing content from atthewu.com. We know of at least one site which has copied some of the shop descriptions we have, word for word.

Copying may help you in the short term, but ultimately, it is creativity, innovation and leading the change which will enable one to succeed. You will never be able to copy the thought process and the creative talent behind successful businesses.

So, atthewu.com made it to the 5th result on baidu search when you put in ‘五道口’. Sweetness.

好消息！ atthewu.com 是百度查询‘五道口‘结果的第一页的第五位！我们慢慢的再往上爬！

In other news, we are on the second page of google.com search when you type ‘五道口’, but in quite a different incarnation. Oops, I guess they caught us with our pants down (showing an error we had a while back).

Web20Zen.com is a site about web2.0(whatever that is) design. It has a daily listing of banners of web2.0 design. Usual deal: pastel colors, big fonts, round corners and voila, you have Web2.0

Web20Zen.com 是一个关于Web2.0设计的博客，每天有一批Web2.0网站设计banner. 现在看起来带一点粉色，有大字体，打个远角就算Web2.0.

With all the buzz that going around about Web 2.0 (just what the heck is that anyway), its hard to keep track of all the sites popping up. Here at www.categoriz.com is a categorized list, one oft he best I’ve encountered.

Watch the new apple ads over at apple.com, they don’t try too hard to hide who they are trying to make fun of. Now that you can run windows on a Mac, there really isn’t too much reason to get a PC, right? (oops, I could have fanned some flames with this one). Thanks to mac addicts in and out of the office for the link.

A great and useful website, edushi.com for hangzhou
The map works like google maps, but is much better. Buildings are faux 3D, when you mouse-over a building, its name shows up, click and a photo shows up on the left.

Icons indicate bus stops, points of interest, and panoramic photo spots.

You have to check out all the glory here at hz.edushi.com

Update: not just hangzhou, but several other cities, including Shanghai and ShenZhen, all at http://www.edushi.com

The company behind the technology: http://www.weinuor.cn/

China, the land of no imagination and photocopiers. They blatantly rip off US websites, every detail, down to the color scheme and layout. Can’t you even be bothered to change the color scheme??? An especially bad perpetrator is upcoming.org/boubo.com. If you find any more, feel free to list them in the comments to the blog entry.
www.43places.com > www.aimi.cn, www.mipang.com

www.thefacebook.com > www.xiaonei.com

www.flickr.com > www.bababian.com, www.fotolog.com.cn, yupoo.com

www.upcoming.org > www.boubo.com

www.feedburner.com > www.feedsky.com

www.web2list.com > www.web2list.cn

www.douban.com > http://look.itv.mop.com/

www.digg.com > www.livedigg.com, www.17dig.com

www.linkedin.com > www.wealink.com

www.youtube.com > www.pomoho.com

www.kayak.com > www.qunar.com

Update (12/Nov/2006): Goofymob.com has change its interface, so has boubo.com.
list of ‘Chinas’ Web2.0
http://tech.sina.com.cn/i/2006-04-08/2203896065.shtml
and
http://logolinks.sitesled.com/

After a long, relaxing weekend in Shanghai (a bunch of us from tongtong), we are back in the office and hard at work.
Long awaited comments on photos will be out soon. We are still going to test internally for a day or two, but its basically ready. Some improvements on blogs also coming soon in the next day or two.
Enjoy the nice, cool weather in BJ while it lasts.

An adjustment to our PHP configuration has been made, namely with magic_quotes. This option, provided by Zend to allow newbie programmers to code without worrying about escaping slashes, has instead caused grief and confusion to many PHP users with inconsistent software packages. Since we believe in clean programming, we also believe it is the responsibility of the programmer to escape and add slashes as necessary. We have therefore turned this option off.

Whilst there have been no major adverse affects on the site due to this change, a bug or two may be lurking amidst the depths of the system. Please bear with us as we check all our code thoroughly and make the adjustments necessary - this is for the better, really!