IFTF

About Virtual China

  • ABOUT THE BLOG:
    Virtual China is an exploration of virtual experiences and environments in and about China. The topic is also the primary research area for the Institute for the Future's Asia Focus Program in 2006. IFTF is an independent, nonprofit strategic research group with more than 35 years of forecasting experience based in Palo Alto, CA.
  • ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
    Lyn Jeffery is a cultural anthropologist and Research Director at the Insitute for the Future, where she leads its Asia Focus Program.
    Jason Li is currently a design research intern at Adaptive Path. He previously worked at IFTF & Microsoft Research Asia, and recently graduated from Brown University.
    Nan Yang is a freelancer in Shanghai whose many projects include part-time Mandarin teacher at MandarinShanghai.com, assistant for Eric Eldred from Creative Commons, translating manager for gOFFICE, translator for MeMedia, member of Social Brain Foundation, and author of 1idea1day.com. She is also passionate to take part in small and innovative seminars in Shanghai.
  • EMAIL THE AUTHORS:

About Asia Focus

  • In response to the great need for foresight about Asia, IFTF has launched the Asia Focus Program. Asia Focus research topics are large-scale, under-explored areas from which unexpected futures will emerge. It is part of IFTF's flagship program, the Ten-Year Forecast Program, which provides a broad scan of the environment and is a leading source of foresight for a vangard of business, government, and nonprofit organizations.

About the Institute for the Future

IFTF del.icio.us links on China

Blog powered by Typepad

« political sustainability of Chinese inequality | Main | BBS: a new forum for folklore »

February 27, 2007

Comments

Lyn

This is going to be really interesting to watch once it's available. What will it tell us about Chinese design of virtual spaces, for instance? How will user-generated objects and interactions differ or be the same as the primarily non-mainland interactions in SL?

Mauri G Gronroos

A Form of a Second Life, too!

The students of Southern China Jimei University have intiated and launched a quite interesting new entertainment genre.

There is a weekly small story about a private detective who solves criminal cases in China. The Chinese readers can influence the adventure by voting.

Besides entertainment, the aim is to give a voice to the Chinese youth. For this purpose the story, background information and everything is published in real-time in English, too.

A pretty interesting Web 2.0 venture at: http://www.kremtrekker.com

David Scott Lewis

And other SL clones in China are on their way. Unfortunately, I suspect that all the same mistakes made with SL will be repeated once again.

Copying may be the sincerest form of flattery, but not necessarily the best business model. SL needs a lot of work (not in PR, though); I suspect that the same will be true for the SL clones in China.

I wonder if they'll also have negative white space on their pages? ;-)

Jason

Copying seems inevitable, but it'll be interesting to see they do with it once they use a SL-clone as a starting point.

What kinds of SL mistakes are you referring to?

Wayfinder Wishbringer

HiPiHi has a real chance both in the Chinese (and if thoroughly supported) the English market. Second Life has well-known serious problems, both in performance and host-company attitude. Millions of their "residents" no longer use the board and far less than 2% of their residents are paying customers. At this time, many are of the opinion that Second Life is a great idea, badly managed and with terrible performance (serious lag, continual database losses, etc).

This leaves the market wide-open for some serious competition, especially if they have the good sense to examine where Linden Lab went wrong and avoid making the same errors (over and over and over again).

Wayfinder Wishbringer

HiPiHi has a real chance both in the Chinese (and if thoroughly supported) the English market. Second Life has well-known serious problems, both in performance and host-company attitude. Millions of their "residents" no longer use the board and far less than 2% of their residents are paying customers. At this time, many are of the opinion that Second Life is a great idea, badly managed and with terrible performance (serious lag, continual database losses, etc).

This leaves the market wide-open for some serious competition, especially if they have the good sense to examine where Linden Lab went wrong and avoid making the same errors (over and over and over again).

SuezanneC Baskerville

Hi,

I'm trying to run Hipihi under English language Windows XP.

I installed the Asian language pack, and have the Windows XP language bar showing Chinese PRC on the left and on the right. Hipihi makes it as far as the login screen, where I can enter my Hipihi name, but when I move into the password field, nothing happens when I press keys, no characters appear, no markers for hidden characters, no action at all occurs when I press keys while the cursor is in the password field.

Jason

Hey Sue, I'm not sure how to resolve your problem -- but from your blog, it looks likes you figured it out :)

frankc

Copying seems inevitable, but lets see what it has to add.

With support to other languages besides Chinese it could have a big market.

The comments to this entry are closed.

Search Virtual China

July 2009

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
      1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31