Thursday, April 28, 2005

Internet speed The connetction speed of the internet to sites outside China has increased a lot during the past days. Two weeks ago sending a 10 MB file to Europe took me almost an hour, today it was maybe 2 minutes. And not only in the office, also at home things have speeded up. The speed inside China was always already much higher (about 250 KB/sec) but has not changed. Did China upgrade its internet firewall? 5:19:01 PM    comment []

Various Next week China will have it[base ']s May holiday, and all companies will shut down for a week. Problem with that is that there is always a huge amount of work to finish before the week starts. For that reason I have been working almost day and night for the past couple of days, no time for sports, leisure or my weblog. Too bad, because the weather has been fantastic lately (yesterday[base ']s high 32.8 degrees, today even higher), but I was not able to really enjoy it. I had a whole list of things I wanted to write about, but I don[base ']t think I will have time in the next 2 days, therefore just a short overview with a few sentences for each topic. First, the decision of the European Union to investigate the large increase in textile imports from China in order to determine whether measures are necessarry to curb the growth. Seriously, what did they expect after the global textile quota were abolished? Europe has been trying to protect its markets from Chinese textiles for a long time, and it seems that this is the first step in the direction of new quota. Then, the arrests made in Shanghai of some of the more violent participants in the anti-Japanese demonstrations, days after they took place. It seems that it took the government a few days to determine its strategy, but this is clearly a sign that new demonstrations won[base ']t be tolerated. Furthermore, Houston Rockets basketball star player Yao Ming has indeed been chosen as the National Model Worker of the Year (thanks to What's Ming's blog). Maybe it[base ']s a good time now to stop the model worker institution, as it seems to have lost all of its original values. Then something more tech-related, Mark Andreesen (Netscape) has a new start-up. Very similar to our start-up Toodou.com, but more focused on existing TV and film programming, instead of self-made content. Also in the same field is the first radio station that only broadcast podcasts @ www.kyouradio.com. And to finish it off, Toodou.com is running very well with over 100,000 hits in the first week after its launch. Many people set up their own channels and there is lots of new content every day. I also came across a radio interview I gave about Toodou on China Radio International, you can read/listen to it here. 11:15:14 AM    comment []