January 2007 Archives

Ah, the year end Ogilvy BeiJing WeiYa Party. I impersonated Nils Andersson, our account executive Jeff Wei says we have matching outfits. :-/

Read on for more pictures.

I will be in NYC next week for a photoshoot. Pictures will be posted soon.

It was a lot of fun. Made new friends and had a blast. Thanks for the invite San Mao

Come on Chinese parents, please stop herding your kids to study what you think makes the most money. Please stop telling them best thing to do is MBA or real estate, we have enough of that already.

With recent CES just finished, Wired Magazine did a top 10 products round up. Only one Chinese manufacturer's product stood out, and here is the review:

Ugliest Product: Konka's Magic Mirror LDC TV
Konka, a Chinese TV manufacturer, concentrated its depraved creative instincts in a single exemplar of horrid industrial design: the Magic Mirror LDC TV. That the 42-inch set was equipped with a camera to allow it to "reflect" the scene before it is tacky but ingenious. That the set comes in a vomitous leopard-spot print, polished to a shine and embossed with what appeared to be an alligator skin texture, is truly inspired by the devil. The set's edges, cut into gentle, swooping waves, added a final touch of compositional flatulence.

This product is so ugly, that I think the editor actually took special attention towards it. The words are pretty scathing, in fact this is the meanest review I've read since I started reading Wired. I think the review is necessary though, just to expose Chinese manufacturer's failure of not taking design seriously. Konka, this is what you get for letting someone that doesn't know design, to design.

sorry people i guess the internet is still unstable in this part of the world i live in, will up load those pictures again when they decide to fix the damn thing.

here it is, sorry for the measly 19 pictures, I was only there for 3 days after all. Anyways.

This is the first post I'm able to upload to my US. server since that Taiwan earthquake which knocked off the cables. During this time, not only I found my self having a worse internet withdraw compared to couple years back, I also noticed that much of the content I'm interested in are provided by websites from outside of China. Things such as news about new gadgets, blogs on new designs, discoveries, general news, etc. Pretty much 90 percent of what I read comes from content providers from overseas. This is because most of the websites I encounter in China are portal sites, if you don't know what they are, try to remember what yahoo.com was like back in the 90s, or yellowpages. Basically a site that tries to own everything, the first thing you see is a massive table with every imaginable category there is. From news to chat, apartment buying to toy trading, things everyone's interested in and plus a ton of things you just heard about. This is pretty much all there is in China, no woostercollective.com , no theonion.com , and very few cool designer's portfolio sites (i know only 2). Thats quite sad for a country that has 1/5 the population of the world don't you think? Creative spirit is much needed in this country, not media control. Some one would argue I'm biased and not everyone in china will surf the net like I do. I agree, I also know there are tons and thousands of blogs and Youtube copy sites here, but... portal sites still are pretty dominant here in China, which annoys me.