111–120 of 161 posts
I lived in Shanghai and worked in the startup community there from 2012-2013. Im happy to answer any questions people might have. Very interesting space. The government is taking a very active role at developing startup "infrastructure", but it looks incredibly different from anything in the West.
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They have a Google in terms of making money, they don't have a Google in terms of usefulness. The search engines in China are unusable; my Chinese colleagues are far less efficient than we are because of it. When i'm sitting next to them with my SSH lynx to Google, I find answers fast which they cannot. Baidu is just only bought links (inherently bad quality) and Bing is, well, just a really bad search engine. That's…
Thanks for the interesting observations. No surprises. In my experience, wechat is a spam monster - too many useless notifications and missing useful features like easy OTT voice calls and read receipts. I find iMessage and whatsapp (I use both hourly) vastly superior. How old is your uber/didi experience? I find both now to be mostly useless to non-chinese. I tried to get an uber to the airport in Beijing last week…
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They have a Google in terms of making money, they don't have a Google in terms of usefulness. The search engines in China are unusable; my Chinese colleagues are far less efficient than we are because of it. When i'm sitting next to them with my SSH lynx to Google, I find answers fast which they cannot. Baidu is just only bought links (inherently bad quality) and Bing is, well, just a really bad search engine. That's…
Thanks for the interesting observations. No surprises. In my experience, wechat is a spam monster - too many useless notifications and missing useful features like easy OTT voice calls and read receipts. I find iMessage and whatsapp (I use both hourly) vastly superior. How old is your uber/didi experience? I find both now to be mostly useless to non-chinese. I tried to get an uber to the airport in Beijing last week…
The taxi queue at BJS is quite reasonable most of the time, so I don't bother with didi.
But this is why doing biz can be hard in China, so many business models operate in grey zones while the government lets them go on while swinging a huge axe over their head. As another example, did you know electric tricycles are illegal throughout the entire country? And China's whole new goods delivery businesses are built around these....
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Europe has done pretty much everything the US wants, from spying on our citizens to foreign companies paying little to no tax. All you hear these days is how lame Europe is because we don't have a Facebook and how we should all move to the overpriced small town of SV. China doesn't only have a Facebook, it has a Google, an Amazon and an Uber. Which are in many ways surpassing their US counterparts. Since when was tra…
They have a Google in terms of making money, they don't have a Google in terms of usefulness. The search engines in China are unusable; my Chinese colleagues are far less efficient than we are because of it. When i'm sitting next to them with my SSH lynx to Google, I find answers fast which they cannot. Baidu is just only bought links (inherently bad quality) and Bing is, well, just a really bad search engine. That's…
Didi is great if you can speak a bit of Chinese. I've had a decade of perfecting my taxi driver Chinese though (since I seem to only use Chinese to talk to taxi drivers these days). YouTube is still way better than youku/tudou for content discovery...they have no "popular now" for non Chinese content.
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I've been told that the great firewall is actually more about protectionism than censorship. They know they can't really contain information, but they can block or degrade foreign services to favor their own. Of course this does serve a state censorship and surveillance agenda indirectly since home grown services can be more easily controlled. As much as I can't stand Trump and could never vote for him, I do think he…
I think most economists will tell you the USA-China economic trade benefits both countries. Few will tell you it is "unfair". China get American money, and the USA get swath of cheap goods.
It must help Chinese startups that many SV companies are blocked from competing in China. For example no competition from Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Youtube, Gmail, Dropbox, Vimeo, SoundCloud... more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_C...
I've been told that the great firewall is actually more about protectionism than censorship. They know they can't really contain information, but they can block or degrade foreign services to favor their own. Of course this does serve a state censorship and surveillance agenda indirectly since home grown services can be more easily controlled. As much as I can't stand Trump and could never vote for him, I do think he…
You're misrepresenting the real situation - China is the US's 3rd largest export partner, and we export over $200B of goods, and much more in services to China per year, which is greater than the GDP of silicon valley. Trump is proposing that we stop all of that, which will lead to a depression.
It must help Chinese startups that many SV companies are blocked from competing in China. For example no competition from Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Youtube, Gmail, Dropbox, Vimeo, SoundCloud... more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_C...
Absolutely. Corollary: When running a country, protectionism of tech businesses can really pay off if your population is large enough. Should every country follow Beijing's example? I'm not sure it leads to a good outcome globally, but on a per-country basis it seems like countries with large populations do have something to gain by acting selfishly.
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I've been told that the great firewall is actually more about protectionism than censorship. They know they can't really contain information, but they can block or degrade foreign services to favor their own. Of course this does serve a state censorship and surveillance agenda indirectly since home grown services can be more easily controlled. As much as I can't stand Trump and could never vote for him, I do think he…
> As much as I can't stand Trump and could never vote for him, I do think he's one of the few candidates raising the issue of how unfair our trade relations are with China. The WTO limits tariffs but the Chinese have found tons of indirect ways to implement protectionism: the great firewall, manipulating their currency, making it hard for US firms to take payments in China, etc. That's rich coming from the US.
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That's true but even more so when applied to the computer network. Nowadays, in case of a war, closing emails or zombying all Windows pcs could do more harm than food supplies.
And that's why for countries who aren't US closest allies it makes total sense to base military infrastructure on open-source operating systems and software (because let's be honest, Russian or Chinese military most likely won't be able to produce their own modern OS of comparable quality from scratch). However, software and hardware on one hard, and internet on another, aren't the same thing: I don't see how one can…
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Europe has done pretty much everything the US wants, from spying on our citizens to foreign companies paying little to no tax. All you hear these days is how lame Europe is because we don't have a Facebook and how we should all move to the overpriced small town of SV. China doesn't only have a Facebook, it has a Google, an Amazon and an Uber. Which are in many ways surpassing their US counterparts. Since when was tra…
They have a Google in terms of making money, they don't have a Google in terms of usefulness. The search engines in China are unusable; my Chinese colleagues are far less efficient than we are because of it. When i'm sitting next to them with my SSH lynx to Google, I find answers fast which they cannot. Baidu is just only bought links (inherently bad quality) and Bing is, well, just a really bad search engine. That's…