internet - Has the Skype protocol been cracked?

And what does it mean? Several stories, like this one in the CIO-site, suggest that a small Chinese company has cracked the proprietary Skype code by reversed engineering. That would be an interesting development and might be scary for those companies who do use proprietary programming for their business model.
The next question is, when it is true, what is going to happen with that knowledge. It might force Skype to open up to third party developers. Another possibility, suggested in the articles, is that it could help the Chinese government to actually block Skype more easy. The last suggestion would not really be that realistic: if it gets blocked, we could simply shift to another system. All that blocking is already possible and has not seriously been pursued as far as I have noticed.

Shanghai - Nostalgia: a way of life is dying

Shanghai film-maker Shu Haolun links to the Reuters' article on his documentary about Shanghai that has been picked up by some of the larger media.

For many Chinese, replacing old and dirty houses with well-equipped apartment blocks seems entirely appropriate.
But for Shu, a way of life is slowly dying. He mourns the loss of the intimate warren of streets that cars can barely squeeze through, to the way people wander in and out of each other's homes because no one locks their front door.

economy - Nanjing Auto will build MG in US

No, it is not April 1 and the Reuters article seems rather genuine. In a longstanding Chinese tradition the company is not giving more information or helping to answer the many questions that might exist.

media - Wu Hao released, says sister

According to a short message on his sister's website Wu Hao been released, notes Frank Dai at the Global Voices mailing list. Wu Hao was working on a documentary about underground churches when he was detained, kidnapped since there has never been a legal basis for his arrest.
Details on his release are still lacking.
A little bit more on Global Voices.

Blogs market share

internet - More than 120 million blogs expected in 2006

The question how many weblogs China actually has kept many people very busy over the years. Only last weekend Sam Flemming asked me what my latest assesment would be. If would have referred people perhaps to Sam if they were looking for an answer. But that is perhaps the way you become an expert: you have a small group of people you refer the others to.
Seeking Alpha comes with a new set of figures, predicting 120 million weblogs by the end of this year. Most interesting I found is their assesment of the market shares that shows that QQ is with 21 percent the market leader, something I discovered earlier this year. Now, assuming these figures a right, remarkable is how far the once-market leader Bokee has fallen, even Sina and Sohu are doing better now.

labor - What does an engineer cost?

I have been explaining to people once again a bit about one of my pet-projects, the wage indicator. It is an online tool that makes is possible to collect wage information in 17 different countries, and later this year including China and Japan. In some countries, like in the Netherlands were the system is being developed, but also Spain and Germany the system is already producing a wealth of information.
When we have the system in place we can - for example - compare the wages of IT-engineers in the major economies in the world. For each occupation you need about 50 questionnaires before you can make valid assumptions. In China we probably need a few more, since there are so many internal differences in China that have to be covered too.
Perhaps I'm too enthusiastic, since you need a decent infrastructure in place. First, we need to have our online questionnaire up and running. Then, we need to convince employees to fill them in. In most countries that is not really a problem, but that needs a rather good publicity campaign. In the Netherlands the wage indicator is a household name that is used by one third of the labor force! It might take a while before we get to that level in China.

life - Shanghaiist dives into gay parties

The other day I had to put somebody straight who thought that being gay was reason enough in China to get into jail. That is over since, let's say 1993, but the image of a anti-gay country is hard to get rid off.
So, I think it is a good idea Shanghaiist focuses on the fun part of being gay in Shanghai for a while.

Although, incomparable to San Francisco, Sydney or Amsterdam, at least Shanghai has its big gay parties hosted by the likes of R&G (think 3,000 of the hottest men in town, sweaty, shirtless, and grinding with each other) and G.O.D (open-air events at the Summit's 35th floor bar) and we can boast of a "bear bar", aka a place that caters to guys with a big-hairy-man fetish. However, is it right to call ourselves one of the world’s most compelling/exciting/trendy/insert adjective destinations, when we're still waiting for a nightclub with a dark room? (No, we're not talking about a photo lab. Since the internet lacks a decent gay vocab dictionary, use your imagination.)

Images of 'countries' might too often be wrong. Take that image of the Netherlands being liberal. Just last night a good friend of me got arrested by the police, not for being gay but for not having his dog on a line. He got jailed for six hours. Just image that would have happened in Shanghai.

telecom - TD-SCDMA "mature enough"

Chinese companies are pushing for a fast release of the pending 3G-licences, writes The People's Daily today, after the industry gather over the weekend in Hangzhou. No longer they want to wait till all possible flaws have been eliminated, and that is a new tone in the discussion.

"A new technology can not grow mature if not put into the market," said Zhao Yan, vice president with Koretide Corp. in Shanghai engaged in mobile operation system research based on TD-SCDMA.
"It would grow up quickly through self adjustment and international capital would flow in soon once the license is issued," said Zhao.

Ongoing tests with TD-SCDMA seem to have revealed problems, but they do not seem large enough to stop the roll out of the network. Other networks based on European or American standards would only get a chance after the Chinese standard has been put into practise. Because of the approaching Beijing Olympics in 2008 the time frame for rolling out TD-SCDMA is already becoming rather short.

labor - Experts slash Mercer wage figures

How much do Chinese production workers earn. While asking the question is easy in a country that derives part of its competitive edge from low wages, giving an answer is a bit tougher. In a recent Mercer HR Consulting report the average monthly salary is put at just under 1,500 Renminbi (€ 150) and CSR-Asia slashes the figure.

1) it doesn’t put it into context (i.e., how does it compare to average wages in comparable job categories? what is the spending power of that wage? etc); 2) it doesn’t indicate how many hours employees need to work to earn that (i.e., do they need to put in 100 or more hours a week in workplaces where temperatures constantly hover around 40℃ and more - as is the reported case in this story (in Chinese) about a woman dying of heat stroke in a textile factory last week in Fujian [more on this later]); and 3) it’s just plain wrong.

In the factories CSR-Asia advises nobody earns that much, they say. Most of these reports, also those by Hewitt CS. get their figures from foreign invested companies in China and they tend to overpay, well, compared to other categories of companies that is.
The wage-figures we use at the wage-indicator is not going to relying on surveys of (often foreign) companies, but on online surveys by the employees. Those figures in itself will never give a representative overview of the whole labor force, but according to the scientists who analyse the figures for other countries when we have 50 questionnaires for a certain occupation, those data will be scientifically valid.
Encouraging people to fill in not only online but also offline questionnaires can expand the reach beyond those who are online.
Main challenge in China will be to cover the diversity inside the country. A production worker in the Pearl River Delta has always been perceived to earn less than those in the Yangze Delta, but that would be based on anecdotical evidence. For the rest of the country it would even be harder to get those data, at least you will need for each region those 50 surveys to make valid assumptions.