This is not for the squeamish. You have been warned…

Dan Chung (The Guardian and DSLR News Shooter) has shot a video of the Zhongguancun gadget city in Beijing. He shot the video to test his new Canon 550D cameras. But it is of interest to a geek audience because it shows what China’s gadget/electronic markets are like. They’re huge multi-floored malls in which you can get everything you need to satisfy your inner geek.

According to the China Daily an average of 2.1 billion SMS messages are sent per day in China. Imagine the infrastructure required to support such volume. The monitoring systems must be huge! Gotta go and delete some junk Chinese SMSs from my phone…

Last night, at my local DVD store, I purchased a Blu-ray disc for RMB 80 (USD 12). The same disc on Amazon costs USD 17.50 (down from USD 35). It is safe to assume, just like every other title in the shop, it is a fake. When Blu-ray was introduced there was doubt as to its viability due to the rise of Internet delivery and competition from HD-DVD. But the appearance of fake discs means Blu-ray has arrived as a standard. It must be viable because there is a big enough market for pirates to be shipping discs. Therefore, I…

CNNIC recently updated its rules about who can register a .cn domain name. Basically only registered companies in China. OK. This was on 11 December 2009. GoDaddy wait until 5 February 2010 until they send an email to registrants with details of a list of paper work that must be submitted by 12 February 2010. That is, they give us one weeks notice. Here’s the thing. They don’t say in the email where the paperwork is to be submitted. Or if it has to be paper. Or if scans are OK. Only it is to be submitted. Duh!…

China has been in the news a lot lately. Not all of it good. But here is some good news. The New York Times is reporting on China’s rise in renewable energy industries - already World leader in wind turbines and solar panels. And The Guardian is reporting that, in the wake of the US plans to scrap moon missions, China could be the only country remaining with the goal to place men on the moon. Good luck to ‘em it will be a marvellous achievement.

For someone who spent 14 years in a corporate research lab (seven of those in China) I don’t write much about research. Perhaps I should. One of the things that was obvious to me went I came East was that, given the scale of investment and the determinism and hard work going on, China would soon be catching up with the West in research. The numbers seem to be suggesting this will soon be true.