asides

Korean Sausages Work Well as iPhone Stylus [Video]

Posted under Korea, asides on Tuesday, 16 February 2010 by Joop Dorresteijn
Phones with Multitouch displays, like iPhone and Nexus one, require gestures with fingers. Most strongly remaked by Steve Jobs, as the 'iPhone would be the end of the stylus'. He did not realize that Chinese characters are actually writen at much faster phase with a pen-like stylus. Steve, unlike...

Beer in China

Posted under asides on Saturday, 13 February 2010 by Joop Dorresteijn
China has been brewing beer-like drinks for over 9000 years, usually made with rice, honey and grapejuice, but the alcoholic beverage lost popularity during the Han dynasty. It were the Russians that made beer popular again, when they setup a brewery in the country during the 19th century. Today...

Shopgirl Shanghai

Posted under asides on Friday, 5 February 2010 by Joop Dorresteijn
Suna and I ran into Shopgirl Shanghai, Siyan (middle) yesterday. She has an interesting blog, too bad we missed her Barbie birthday party, perhaps next...

Shanghai metro getting overcrowded

Posted under asides on Thursday, 4 February 2010 by Joop Dorresteijn
Traveling by metro today and I notice that its really crowded. I was waiting at the station and saw the train coming, but got dissapointed when I noticed that there was no space to stand. First I wanted to wait a train, but the train that had arrived just wouldn't move. I decided to try a few...

Holding the new South Korean 50.000 KRW bank-note

Posted under asides on Thursday, 4 February 2010 by Joop Dorresteijn
The first 50,000-won notes (Today worth about 30 Euros) were released in 2009. Its yellow color may be confusing with the light brownish 5,000 won note, especially since the face figures don't feature any comma nor dot : Westerners would write 50,000 (fifty thousand) where Koreans read 5,0000...

Google ad in the metro

Posted under asides on Wednesday, 3 February 2010 by admin
Google decided on new 'no cencorship' approach on China a few weeks ago. While this created a lot o buzz around the brand abroad, Google has, or commenced advertising in the Shanghai city metro. In China, google represents 30% of the search engine market. The ad features their short g.cn domain, a...

Sushi

Posted under asides on Tuesday, 2 February 2010 by admin
I like sushi, especially good sushi from Japan. But I also have a craving for cheap sushi, in korea I lived next to a sushi bar where every sushi was a dollar, and here in china its even less then a dollar per dish. Japanese spit on these cheap things, but I love cheap...

Photo’s from China – Hot in Shanghai, Cold in Beijing and Chinesepod

Posted under asides on Wednesday, 20 January 2010 by Joop Dorresteijn
What is this? I have settled on a simple experiment: I will capture various events with my mobile, but digest these photo’s to a weekly update. The frequency is important to me because I don’t want to broadcast a constant flow of single pictures. In sets however, I think they might be more...

Pictures of 2009 Shanghai marathon

Posted under asides on Sunday, 29 November 2009 by admin
In early August, Marc van der Chijs threw up a ball whether we wanted to run a half marathon in November. Shortly, a big deligation from Spilgames signed up and started exercising. Today was the day - now the Shanghai marathon is over, I'm looking back to a great event. Besides my father Johan...

Special visitor from Netherlands

Posted under asides on Monday, 26 October 2009 by Joop Dorresteijn
I've got a special vistior from the Netherlands over this week. Giel Talsma is a former neighbor of mine and we've known each other for over ten years. I ran into him when I was in Holland during the summer and I invited him to China, he was excited immediately. After picking him up at the...

S. Korea web companies prepping for iPhone, nation going wireless

Posted under asides on Friday, 9 October 2009 by Joop Dorresteijn
I bet that we can expect heaps of great Korean developed games and apps from Korea from 2010. The iPhone is will be introduced in South Korea in November. While South Korea is arguably miles ahead in tech, the iPhone has been absent from store shelves ever since its first launch in 2007. Web...

[Movie] Would you freak out when your name is announced at the Airport? (Dutch)

Posted under Netherlands, asides, travel on Tuesday, 4 August 2009 by Joop Dorresteijn
Imagine sitting at the gate, waiting for your plane from Amsterdam to Shanghai to arrive and you hear your name announced over the speakers. This happened to me yesterday. Yesterday I took the train to the airport of Amsterdam, and checked in like normal, passed security check and ordered some...

Web ventures on sale; RTL Interactive completes takeover of German social network

Posted under asides on Monday, 9 February 2009 by Joop Dorresteijn
RTL Interactive, the Internet brance of the RTL Group (German) announced their 100% takeover of Wer Kennt Wen. Marc Schröder, the CEO of RTL Interactive responded to the takeover in a interview with a German newspaper that RTL wants to become less dependent of tv advertisements, instead they...

LG: Let’s combine a 3G phone and a watch

Posted under asides on Wednesday, 14 January 2009 by Joop Dorresteijn
During the last few years, technology has merged many devices. Some combinations are insanely genius, like the nifty packed smartphone on your desk for example, and the fellow who invented the microwave-oven combination should get an award too! But other product mergers are just ridiculous, some...

Learn to read and pronounce Korean Hangul in 2 days

Posted under Internet, Korea, Review, asides on Friday, 12 September 2008 by Joop Dorresteijn
You don't need a black belt in Taekwondo to master the Korean language, actually... reading Hangul (Korean writing) is surprisingly easy! That's the main point I am trying to make in this post. While the Korean characters seem complex at first, they are easy to read within one week. Skip the...

City trip? 3 cool web meetups in Amsterdam

Posted under Internet, asides on Tuesday, 12 August 2008 by Joop Dorresteijn
In a few moments, I am flying to Asia again. While the whole world is looking at the Olympics in China, my plane is headed to South Korea. I found a book to occupy my mind for the time at the airport, but I couldn't help letting my thoughts run away with me for a moment, as I think back of my time...

Ipoki.com, GPS-based social networking

Posted under asides on Tuesday, 5 August 2008 by Joop Dorresteijn
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. This time we're interviewing Diego Fernández Domínguez, the co-founder of ipoki.com. Ipoki lets you get the most of your GPS by connecting you with others to...

Google to start investing in startups

Posted under asides on Thursday, 31 July 2008 by Joop Dorresteijn
David Drummondby darthdowney (CC)Google is ready to launch a venture capital arm, opening up the possibility to invest in startups, rather then just buy them. Senior vice president and chief legal officer David Drummond will lead the new investment part of Google. "The move would make Google the...

Ex-Google engineers launch ‘Cuil’, the first results

Posted under asides on Monday, 28 July 2008 by Joop Dorresteijn
Search engine Cuil launched this Monday. Cuil is the brainchild of Anna Patterson, who sold her last internet search technology to Google in 2004. This time, she believes that the technology is more valuable and she is not planning to sell it. We wonder, is this a Google competing internet...

Microsoft: Headed to be online hub, income from ads

Posted under asides on Monday, 28 July 2008 by Joop Dorresteijn
Steve Ballmer at the Max 08 conference, Picture by Gorriti (CC) Steve Ballmer held the keynote at the Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting in Redmond last night and underlined the importance of succeeding in search and advertising. I have seen slides explaining that Microsoft wants to sell...

Ebuddy mobile IM client downloaded 5 million times

Posted under asides on Friday, 25 July 2008 by Joop Dorresteijn
The popular independent IM messenger eBuddy seems to be popular on mobile devices, the mobile J2ME version has been downloaded 5 million times! These numbers are unreal to me, since I used the initial version of the IM service primarily for some quick-and-simple IM access at the office back in...

Google in negotiations to acquire Digg, good!

Posted under asides on Wednesday, 23 July 2008 by Joop Dorresteijn
Google's negotiations with Digg have become serious, and Techcrunch heard whispers at Google that the companies have signed a letter of intent and are expected to close the deal within a couple of weeks. With the acquirement, Digg will be brought under the Google News property. The acquisition...

Automate your blog promotion with BlogUpp!

Posted under asides on Tuesday, 22 July 2008 by Joop Dorresteijn
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. This time we're interviewing Valer Batcu, the co-founder of BlogUpp!. The service works as follows: BlogUpp! asks only for the link to the blog, automatically...

Qik opens public beta and announces new features

Posted under asides on Monday, 21 July 2008 by Joop Dorresteijn
Qik enables users to go live by streaming anytime, anywhere, right from your phone. The service has opened its public beta program. The streaming service has also announced a couple of new features on their site today, including groups, events and an embeddable player. New features: Facebook...

Torrent-like live streaming invented in the EU

Posted under asides on Sunday, 20 July 2008 by Joop Dorresteijn
Do you have an event that you want to cover live, but you lack the budget to cover bandwidth costs? Researchers from 21 different European countries have developed software that can stream video over a peer-to-peer bittorrent network, an open source initiative that might change the way we stream...

If you like the web, I bet you love South Korea too

Posted under Entrepreneurship, Korea, asides on Thursday, 17 July 2008 by Joop Dorresteijn
This is the conclusion of my web series about the internet in South Korea, published on ReadWriteWeb and TheNextWeb.org two weeks ago; I put it on my blog for completeness of the serie. That is, if you like to be connected to the Internet all day, while enjoying the fastest connections in the...

China is paying commenters to say the ‘right’ thing

Posted under asides on Thursday, 17 July 2008 by Joop Dorresteijn
The Chinese government has a long tradition of keeping an eye to the media in order to prevent critical messages towards the communist party, a task that has become difficult since the rise of the open and worldwide Internet. The government started attempts to control the content on their domestic...

Wordpress 2.6 adds revisions, Gears and Tumblr style blogging

Posted under asides on Tuesday, 1 July 2008 by Joop Dorresteijn
Matthew Mullenweg has just announced Wordpress 2.6, the latest update of this popular blogging platform. The release is almost a month ahead of schedule, and it seems that Wordpress is maturing into a full functioned content management system. These are our top three favorite new functions: 1....