Jean-Francois’ posterous

Jean-Francois’ posterous

Jean-Francois Amadei  //  大家好！

My name is Jean-François Amadei, I'm a 24 years old guy living between Hong Kong and Taipei. I'm a former Technology Evangelist at Toro-Asia.com and Digital Media Strategist at Ogilvy Digital Influence HK. I'm currently working on a new Taipei based venture in the mobile application business.

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Nov 15 / 5:16am

Free Chinese lessons at ChineseTeachers.com

By browsing the different teachers available on Chineseteachers.com I found out that one their teacher (named "Annie") is giving away free one to one chinese lesson for the whole month of november.  For that You only need $1 in your account to have lessons with her, and of course that $1 will not be deducted! She is the only teacher with the special promotion 'S'  red icon .

As you remember, I've already written a long post about Chineseteacher.com, I mentioned that even thought the service is really great (one to one Chinese lesson anywhere in the world at any hour of the day...or the night) it's still can be quite intimidating to have a lesson with someone we don't really know, that's psychological and we cannot do much things about this (at least for now, that's mainly why Loic Le Meur switched its product, Seesmic, from video conversation to a tool that would instead aggregate content from other social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook). 

If you are not totally sure about the fact that a one to one lesson through internet is an easy thing for you, you should try this offer and see.

Note : This is not a sponsored post (but they are indeed friends of mine :) )
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Filed under  //  China   Chinese   Chineseteachers.com   lesson   Mandarin  

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Nov 2 / 8:57pm

Mao - A Chinese Histoire

You always find strange stuff in Taiwan (the best and the worst) and I saw one last night in NCCU. Before showing you the picture, I must mention that NCCU (國立政治大學) is a university (where I was a student once) located in Taipei and mainly ruled by "blue" (KMT) people following the "blue" guideline, thus seeing stuff related to mainland china (such as mainland newspapers, teachers and even students) is quite common. But this was quite awkward :

Not because there is a DVD about Mao edited in Taiwan (that could have been awkward a few years ago, now...) but because the title is written in French ("Mao Une Histoire Chinoise") as well as the whole movie (with chinese subtitles of course), now you have to tell me what is the relationship between Mainland China, Taiwan, Mao and the French languages :)

I haven't see the DVD yet (still reading Mao - The Unknown Story for the second time, not that I love the guys but the book is quite complicated with a lot of names and situations) but it'll be interesting to see it as France and some French people (my dad's family for instance, who were fierce communists in that time) has always been a great support to Mao's regime (The General De Gaulle was among the first western leader to recognize the new Beijing government) and ideology (a lot of current (but old) french politicians claimed to be "Maoist" during their youth) and I guess it'll certainly be felt during the film.

Update : This movie is actually a french/german production for the french/german TV channel ARTE. Amazon says that it contains archives that has never been shown before.
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Filed under  //  arte   China   communist   france   germany   mao   movie   nccu   taiwan  

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Sep 30 / 11:13pm

Facebook "Magazine" available in Taiwan

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?

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Filed under  //  asia   casual games   China   cyworld   facebook   japan   korea   milk   mixi   renren   social networks   taiwan   wretch.cc  

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Aug 1 / 6:58am

The 幹簡體字 Button

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(-_-; )


The system is simple, when you are on a web page in simplified, you just need to click on the "幹簡體字" button and the whole page (it's not perfect, things in flash will remain in simplified but important are converted). One example with a random 天涯 Forum page :

Before:

After:


 

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.

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Filed under  //  China   Chinese   Firefox   Mainland   plugin   Safari   Simplified   Traditional  

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