The Swedish furniture retailer IKEA is linking up with the Chinese electronics manufacturer TCL to offer a furniture-TV named UPPLEVA. One of the central value proposition will be the disappearance of cables (or at least hiding them better) and a better integration of the TV in the furniture.
So after getting their feet wet with Electrolux and Whirlpool, IKEA now moves out of the kitchen. The challenges for UPPLEVA? Keeping up with the fast evolution of consumer electronics will most likely require a very modular approach as well as managing the partnership with TCL
Given the rising level of social discontent in China it may be hard to believe that the country made it to the top of the Gross National Happiness (GNH) index.
The explanation? The GNH ranking was established by North Korea. For sure the Hermit Kingdom knows how to chose its (rare) friends since all of them are at the top of the list, right behing China and North Korea (modestly ranked #2); Cuba comes third, Iran comes fourth and Venezuela comes fifth. Unsurprisingly, South Korea is ranked #152 and the USA ranks last at #203.
Who said that North Korea’s propaganda department didn’t have a sens of humour?
P.S.: No wonder some North Koreans are fleeing to China: they all want to go and live in the happiest country on earth.
Anybody with an interest in technology looks forward to the annual CES meeting in Las Vegas - the world’s largest consumer technology tradeshow.
Among the usual suspects present at the fair, booth #13632 was occupied by Haier. One may be wondering what the Chinese company – one of the world’s leader in appliances such as minibars and washing machines – was doing there among the Samsung and Microsoft of this world. Well, Haier was unveiling a new range of internet-connected appliances – yes the domotic dream is still alive and the firm even partnered with Yahoo! Connected TV.
On one hand, it is not bad for a company founded in 1984 – the year the first Macintosh was released. On the other side, one is still waiting for Chinese firms to establish recognized brands in the consumer electronics market and come up with innovative products.
Not so long ago, one would look at NASA’s satellite to see what the earth looks like. Those stunning pictures are now rivaled by other visualization of the blue planet.
If you look closer to the visualization of Facebook friendships you won’t fail to notice that one big chunk of humanity (no, not North Korea) is missing from the picture. How come No that the country that coined relationship (guanxi) is nowhere to be seen? Of course, the fact that Facebook is currently banned in China goes a long way in explaining the conspicuous absence – the recent trip of Facebook’s founder to China may not be unrelated to an attempt to unblock the service. But even then, some home-grown social network alternatives (like Kaixin and Renren) occupy that space and may give Facebook a run for its money.P.S.: For those wondering why Japan is also missing from the map, Japanese Netizens have a very different Internet culture in which users hide behind pseudonyms and nicknames
Just before New Year’s eve the Shanghai Daily ran the list of the top IT developments in China. They are in order of appearance (and with my comments):
- Foxconn’s vague of suicides (the days of cheap and silent labour may be counted)
- Google’s redirection of traffic to Hong Kong (censorship mixed with cyber-espionnage)
- Mobile applications and online stores (the Apple business model conquers China)
- Micro-blogging (65 millions would-be commentators of China’s socio-political evolution)
- Government-supported technology projects (bad habits die hard)
- No. 1 seat in the supercomputer race (more of a symbolic than actual technological feat)
- Debut of the iPad (Apple conquers China redux)
- Overseas IPO wave (in China too technology means serious business)
- The battle between Tencent and 360 (privacy matters)
- Tang Jun’s academic scandal (fraud from a posterchild of China’s IT industry).
What is one to do with the phone booth? Probably a question that quite a number of incumbent telecommunication operators have asked themselves since the turn of the century.
Mobile phones and laptops connected to the Internet via GPRS or some other fancy technology have slowly but surely put a dent in the utility and usage of the phone booth. In certain places, the actual service they render has dramatically evolved. In the UK they serve as shelters and advertisement. In Switzerland, some of them are equiped with defibrillators.
In China one municipality has plans to turn them into Wi-Fi hotspots. Provided the fixed-line functionality is kept – not everybody has a mobile phone yet – this makes sense: first, not everybody is connected non-stop and hence spots to reconnect to the Internet are welcome, at least until the price of a non-stop connection becomes financially reasonable; second the location of existing phone booths has usually been carefully thought of and match the distribution of population. Now add a quick-charging mechanism (for both mobile phones and laptops) and there might be a second life for the phone booth.
No, it is not a Second Life hoax, you can actually get a “direct” channel (with a slight time lag…) to Zhongnanhai, the center of power in China. Netizens can write to their leaders – a bold step for an organization that usually seems to operate in a parrallel world and is not known for transparent communication skills.
Initial posts from netizens were geared towards property price issues and public housing. Whether even more sensitive questions (e.g. corruption) will be allowed in the forum is to be seen. For memory, when the National Bureau of Corruption Prevention launched its website in 2007, the site crashed due to the overwhelming response from Chinese netizens.
Let’s see if the gates of Zhongnanhai are flooded too!
They did it! Well, not quite the [sci-fi] physical teleportation you may be thinking of but still a quantum leap.
According to China Brief a team of 15 researchers from Tsinghua and a Physcial Science Lab managed to extent quantum teleportation from the range of 100 meters to a distance of 16 kilometers by using a blue laser.
So what? While you may not go for a quick roundtrip to Beijing in a split second, quantum technologies have a promising future in the areas of cryptography and secure satellite communications – a distance of 16 kilometeres displays a similar degree of light distortion as from the earth to a satellite abd thus have interesting military applications.
It so happens that the Chinese scientists were not really the first to manage quantum teleportation over such a long distance – a team of US scientist reached 23 kilometers using infrared. The difference is that with a blue-laser one can also reach submarines. The [war]game is far from over.
For an etymologic take on super – from latin “supra” meaning above – there is no need to go further than…Shenzhen, home of Hashi Future Parking Equipment.
What looks like a whale swallowing cars is in fact a project to maximize mobility on a given stretch. For now buses are “in competition” for space with cars. The super bus project aims to improve mobility (up to 30%) on a given stretch by superimposing a moving structure on top of the road.
On the one hand this may sound like a good idea given the level of road congestion in Chinese cities. On the other hand one can just imagine the chaos caused by an accident “under the bus”. We will soon be fixed as whether there is any future for the project as the superstructure will soon be tested on the outskirts of Beijing. P.S.: Link to the YouTube super bus video
Here comes another by-product of the Shanzhai culture. Yosion Technology – a small startup company in the South of China with less than 10 employees - has come up with a case that turns an iPod Touch into an iPhone. The devise is said to be ready for mass production just as soon as it clears the “small” obstacle of intellectual property rights.
There are dim chances that the Apple Peel 520 will ever make it to the mass market. Beside IP issues the device faces a tougher battle: it requires users to jailbreak their iTouch and, for the time being, appears to suffer from quirks.Two segments of users may really be interested in the hybrid though: cost-conscious users and experimenters. Not exactly the usual Apple customer segments but maybe ones that other Shanzhai manufacturers will keep serving with their creativity.
Marc is a lecturer at the University of Lausanne and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and senior advisor to the Evian Group, a think tank based at IMD (Lausanne, Switzerland).
From 2007 to 2011 he was a senior research associate at the EPFL on the coherence between institutional and technological governance in infrastructures. In a previous life, he worked as a research analyst at SwissRe and McKinsey’s Business Technology Office. [More about me...]
P.S.: Link to the YouTube 
