Jean-Francois Amadei

When viruses help old practice to be hip again

I have to say that I was surprised when I first saw this magazine in a 7-11 store (I was searching for the Taiwanese edition of Milk Magazine). It's obviously not edited (nor endorsed IMO) by Facebook Inc. and it seems to be more focused on the casuals games (huge market over here, people are just crazy about Restaurant City or Happy Farmers) available on the platform than the social aspect.

However, this little discovery is quite interesting. When I was working at Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence, I had to conduct numerous research on social medias in Asia and when it came about Taiwan and Social Networks, Wretch.cc always came first in term of number of users and pages view. If Wretch.cc is still (I need to check) the first social network on the island, it shows how in a really short period of time (I recall that in January 2008 none of my Taiwanese friends ever heard of Facebook) Facebook took over the Taiwanese and Hong Kongese users in such extent that some people think that the edition of a magazine would be a valuable opportunity. I think it's Bernard Leong that first talk about that, Facebook really need to open an Asia HQ.

Some people might say that Facebook is still struggling in China (less than 500k users...), Korea and Japan where Renren (Ex Xiaonei), Cyworld and Mixi and practically ubiquitous and that it's useless to dig further in these markets. But nowadays we're living in a world where people travel, study abroad and interact a lot each other, thus when a Chinese has friends in Europe, US and wants to keep in touch with them, which social network do you think they would use?

When I see that some supposed smart and educated people are able to edict such laws, I keep telling myself that I want more of these guys as competitors, one day or another. I've always been a P2P (or more generally illegal download) addict for more than 10 years, I have no shame to say that as beside I keep buying a lot of stuff (music, videos, softs...etc) that worth to be bought. Lately, I've gradually stopped to download music as some services such as Deezer, Jiwa and the excellent Spotify came out, the quality, the choice and the software (for Spotify) were excellent, thus there was no point for me to keep hanging around P2P stuff. But lately I received two mail, one from Jiwa and one from Spotify both roughly saying the same stuff :

We're writing to you in regards to your Spotify account which up

until now you've been using free of charge. While we are really

happy that you are enthusiastically using Spotify, we are

unfortunately going to have to restrict access to your free

account.

Spotify is currently available in six countries: Sweden, Norway,

Finland, Spain, France and the UK. We never intended to allow

use of our service outside of those countries and we do not run

any adverts on your account like we do in the launch countries.

For this reason we have to restrict your account, you will be

able to log in to Spotify and view music and playlists but not

listen to any music.

I'm not sure about that, but I don't think you've ever read me blogging or twittering bad about my life in Asia, haven't you ? Indeed, I may say that (sometime) I prefer Shanghai or Taipei than Hong Kong for some subjective reasons, but so far I don't find anything special to criticize about living in here. But if I think twice, there a thing that can be a pain in the 屁, The time zone.

If I need to talk to my parents I need to wait minimum 2am (the hour when everyone is back from work), 3 to 4am for the weekly OM's football game and finally the worst...between 2 to 3am to follow Apple's keynote !

It's been a long time since the last time I've updated this blog, I'm sorry about that, but a cross-strait moving it's not a quick and easy operation! As I mentioned earlier, the 18/09 I definitely left Hong Kong for Taiwan and moved in a new nice and quite big (25? or 83m2) apartment in Wenshan District, only 15 minutes far (by scooter) from Taipei 101, 東區 or Gongguan. Therefore, I spent the last two weeks by deep cleaning it (it's a new apartment, but it's empty since months) and buy stuff such as a big desk, futon, kitchen stuff and a cat!

Beside that I started to work with Steve Follmer in a new venture called "Chillr" (no website for now, WIP) which is a startup mainly aimed to develop original applications and games for mobile devices such as iPhone and Android. We spent the first days to set up our working tools (computers, to-do lists, tasks management, communication means), some short brainstorms about possible products to develop and of course we looked for an office.

This is where the funny part comes, in Taiwan, the housing surface is not measured in square meters like in Europe or square feet like in Hong Kong, but in "Ping" ("坪"), equal to 3.3m2 and this is standard (not likeJapanese's Tatami). But what should be included in the surface measurement depends on everyone appreciation! As a result we visited a 22坪 office in Gongguan andanother nearby Shida measuring 21坪 and it turned out that the 21坪 was almost twice as big as the 22坪 in Gongguan.

Why that? It's simple, as I said any landlord is free to include what he wants into the measurement that is the lobbies, the hallways, the elevators, the balcony (even though it's outside the apartment and occupied by aircons...) or a too high ceiling. If you plan to rent/buy a house in Taiwan, you won't get so much differencesas we had, but I strongly suggest you to not trust too much what the classified says and always remove two to five 坪 for an apartment and five to ten for a house (with garden...etc).

I'm very sorry for not having updated my blog recently but I'm currently busy as hell. I have to manage : Ogilvy (ok it's almost finished, all the big projects are now done), class and exams (almost one per day, I have two exams this weekend), paperworks (new passport, Taiwan visa...etc) and a friend who came to visit Hong Kong and of course, I had to show him all the finest place in the area.

This tuesday I'm moving to Taiwan, a new venture is waiting for me over there :) But I won't have internet for at least a week so don't expect any update then. 

                                                     

Click here to download:

Coming_Back_Soon.zip (15488 KB)

I think it's Albert Einstein who said: "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction" (basically Make everything as simple as possible). I'm still surprise that I've been fooled because usually I'm a very "straight to the point" and "less is more" guy.

You all know the hatred I can have for the simplified form of Chinese characters (I'm sorry, but the aforementioned quote doesn't apply here...or maybe yes, you can see what is the result of simplification performed by some people who were, obviously, very far to be geniuses) and even though I can recognize them without much problem (if you learn traditional set first, the simplified one can be guessed quite easily, you just need to see it once) it always slowed me and gives me a headache (yes I'm also very stubborn and not diplomatic at all).

The thing is that according to the CNNIC last report (2009/3/23), no less than 96% of websites in the Mainland are filled with simplified characters (note all the work that remains to be done to reverse this trend; also note that officials websites are proposed in traditional as well) and whether we like it or not, we cannot escape this insanity, can't we?

Hu! You have a short memory, I told you I'm stubborn!

A few month ago I decided to code (I don't know how to write a single line, but to learn new thing never scared me) a Safari/Firefox plu-gin that would allow me to instantaneously and invisibly convert any simplified Chinese page into a traditional one with the help of Google Trans lation (We're talking here about a "conversion", not a "translation" thus the result is almost perfect). So I passed days and nights to read books, tutorials, testing some easy then more complicated code until (few weeks of labor later...) a friend of mine mentioned to me that that kind of thing already existed...made by Google 凸(-_-; )

To do that it's very simple, you simply drag and drop the "Chinese (Traditional)" link, that you will find in that webpage, onto your Bookmarks Bar. Note that this little trick can also works with other language.

Before starting this blog, I had another one that I started in 2005 and to tell you the truth I'm not very proud of it. It was quite lame, filled with spelling mistakes and not that much interesting that is why I started to think that I should erase it.

But I guess it would be a shame to do that, there is about 550 posts retracing stuff I did, or happened to me and even though it can be really lousy to read, it's still something I spent time working on and it really shows the evolution of my blogging style. Therefore, when I saw that Posetous allows the merging of different blogs into a single one, I decided that it would be interesting to bring back all my old post (all in French sorry). It worked well excepted two (regrettable) things:

- The original layout is not always respected (I mostly have a single text block)
- Pictures are not imported :( (which is a real shame as I'll have, one day or another, shut down the old blog as it's hosted on a friend's private server)

I'll try to contact the Posterous team to see if they can do something about it

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