Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

Intel just announced opening a new 300mm wafer fab plant in Dalian, Liaoning Province, China. The overall investment is 2.5 billion US dollars. This puts Intel on to the top "foreign investors' list".

"China is our fastest-growing major market and we believe it's critical that we invest in markets that will provide for future growth to better serve our customers," said Intel's president and chief executive Paul Otellini.

Dalian is one of the fastest growing coast cities in China. It's about 8 hours drive from Beijing and geographically close to both Korea and Japan. It is a well developed ice-free seaport. Many of my Chinese friends have good impression of the city Dalian, saying it's clean, safe and beautiful city. It seems Intel has picked a right place to land their new base. It is Intel's first new wafer fab at a new site in 15 years. The last one was in Ireland back in 1992.

Intel Fab 68 in Dalian China

Just how cheap can a desktop PC be? Around $300 US, with a Intel Processor. Intel's chairman of the board - Craig Barrett is in China today and announced the plan of launching the wave of cheap desktop PCs that are just made for the rural geographic locations in China. In the next four years, Intel will invest over 1 billion US dollars into 4 world regional manufactures to produce low cost desktop PCs for the locals.

On June 2nd, 2006, Dell released their flag-ship product: Dell XPS series to China. This indicates Dell is aware of the Chinese gaming industry. The models Dell is releasing to China include Inspiron XPS M1710 and M1210. The M1710 is the fastest laptop from Dell at the moment:

* System: Dell XPS M1710 (Red color lid)
* Processor: Intel Core Duo T2600 (2.16 GHz)
* Memory: 2GB @ 667MHz - 2 DIMM Slots (2 x 1GB) (Max Ram 4GB)
* Hard Drive: 100GB capacity at a speed of 7200 RPM
* Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GTX with 512MB DDR memory
* Screen: WUXGA Truelife (1920 x 1200)
* Optical Drive: 8x CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW/+R) with Dual-Layer
* OS: Microsoft MCE 2005
* Wireless Card: Intel 3945 (802.11b/g)
* Battery: 9-cell lithium ion rechargeable battery
* Ports / Slots: 5-in-1 Memory Card Reader, DVI-D, VGA video output, S-Video, IEEE 1394 (Firewire), 6 USB 2.0, Express Card slot, Modem, Ethernet/LAN, Microphone in, Headphone out
* Integrated Subwoofer
* Price of this configuration: $4,215 (base price of black metallic M1710 starts at $2,600)

It is an ideal laptop for the serious gamers and one of the fastest laptop computer out there in the market today. The current Chinese gaming industry has 26.34 million players, over half of them are paid customers. The Chinese gaming industry generated 3.77 billion yuan (500 million CAD $) in the year 2005. I foresee the Dell XPS series will have a good market in China.

Click here for a detailed review on current laptops!

Steve Ballmer has signed a memorandum with China’s Ministry of Information Industry (MII) to help the Chinese government with the economic development in China’s rural areas.

"Microsoft will work closely with MII to reduce the digital divide and increase informatization in China’s rural communities." - Steve Ballmer

In this memorandum, Steve has promised that Microsoft will use technology to provide career training to thousands of educators in non-developed areas and will help the Chinese government to deliver distance education to hundreds thousands of students in the country sides. This echoes the recent polices on making rural development a priority.

Microsoft has also promised to train more than 70,000 software engineers through a combination of classroom instruction and distance learning. This deal seems to be a formal response to the high-profile April visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond. The Chinese government has promised to further enforce all government organizations use copy-righted software and strengthening the regulations on software piracy. Not to mention, Lenovo (the Chinese company who acquired IBM personal computer division) just signed a $1.2 billion deal with Microsoft.

Google just announced it's Chinese name - 谷歌 in Beijing on April 12. (谷 - gǔ - grain / corn / valley 歌 - gē - song) Together, Google's new Chinese name can be translated as "harvest song" and the Chinese pronounciation is very similiar to "google" in English. This is Google's first name in foreign languages which is purposed for the non-English speaking Chinese surfers. 谷歌.cn had been registered by Google.

This action has sparked a wave of registration of Guge-related domain names. Domain names that has the "guge" combination are all gone as of today.

There is a video clip released on YouTube describing a new profession in China, the online game workshops. They gave the workers an interesting name: Chinese Gold Farmers.

The business idea is simple, you have hundreds of teenagers playing popular international online games (e.g. World Of Warcraft)days and nights (I mean 12+ hours a day), eating boxed food, sleeping on the floor (for a very short time), open up the curtains a couple of hours every week! From the intensive team plays, these players get high level characters, rare weapons and virtual gold. Then the company put these virtual merchandises onto eBay, get bought by the American and Japanese players.

This idea may sounds tedious, but the truth is there are hundreds of this types of "Game Workshops" opened in China and there are well organized "outsourcing" infrastructure behind these commercial "services". The profits are real and the business are expanding.

What I like about this is that soon people may find thousands of best WOW players in China. What I find sad about is the gamers are taking these
"virtual products" way too serious! The hours of online playing are destroying their life and health. But hey, like the kids in the video say, I am earning money while playing my favorite game, what else can one ask?!

China Mobile published their 2005 financial report today. They pocketed 53.55 billion RMB (CAD $7.9 billion) in the year 2005, an 28% increase compare to the previous year. SMS (Short Message Service) alone gained 24.67 billion RMB (CAD $3.63 billion) in the Chinese mobile communication market. Ringing Tone download service and WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) are the other two major profitable services offered by China Mobile.

According to my experience, SMS is way more popular in China than here in Canada. Maybe this is due to the "cheaper" telephone rate and "fancy" mobile service plans we have here.

Jiang Su, one of the best developed coast provinces in China has launched a qualification process over all distance education service providers across the province in the new year. 282 high education DE&T sites were examined and 18 got terminated. The disqualified service providers and the ones are pending for the qualification are not allowed to enroll students and advertise about the service within the province.

It's good to see there is some type of qualification acts being initialized for the over-whelmed and crowded distance education market in China. There are hundreds of high education institutions across the country and almost every single one of them have an independent, self-funded DE&T unit. However, on the other hand, most of the university and colleges don't have any technology aided learning platform for the face to face learnings. Online studies has been driven by pure profit in China for years. But here are the un-answered questions: who should be the agency to provide the qualifications? What evaluation procedures are taken in the process? How to prevent GuanXi (relationship) corruption being factored into the process?

Six universities in Guo Zhou, (Guang Dong Province, China) just launched the first city wide wireless campus network this month. This project is a part of the bigger initiative - 100 university campuses over entire China launch wireless networks by the end of the year 2005. This project is initiated by China Education and Research Network and partially financed by Bank of Beijing, Shanghai PuDong Development Bank and several other financial organizations. This project also involves providing 50,000 specially designed (efficient and highly mobile) laptop computers to all universities across China at fairly low price. The banks will provide mortgage plans to help the institutions and students to finance the purchases.

The initiative is targeting for establishing 500 wireless post-secondary campuses across China by the end of the year 2007.

The well recognized online language training provider in China - "New Oriental Online" recently decided to permanently lower their online course tuition. They have lowered their business writing and conversational courses from 500 Yuan (80 CAD$) to 75 Yuan(12 CAD$), Adult Standard English Training courses from 200 Yuan (30 CAD$) to 50 Yuan (8 CAD$). They also bundle their courses such as take 1 for 50, 2 for 80 and 3 for only 100 Yuan. Beside the standard online courseware, New Oriental also rolls out subject based training packages such as vocabulary building training, culture English training etc. Each smaller package listed a 10-20 Yuan (<3 CAD$). Other online training courses such as Financial training programs have also lowered their prices by 60%-70%.

According to the New Oriental officials, the reason behind this dramatic cost reduction is the new technology that being used to produce online course materials have lowered the overall cost dramatically. My previous experience tells me that New Oriental always have a way to reduce the production cost and creating easy-to-upgrade online content. This allows them to stand out and succeed in the high competition market in online language training. However, my personal opinions that the courseware are still self-study focused and the production cycles are still at low quality but high quantity stage. New Oriental still has some road ahead of them to keep up with the continuously growing global e-Learning market.

I started seeing these so called commonweal banners from Google on multiple Chinese web sites. This is one way for Google to establish its dominating image in the search engine industry in China. The banner is simply a white background with a question in the middle such as, “How deep is the ocean?”; “Where is the nearest planet?”; “What is largest numerical value?”; “What’s the temperature in sun?”; “How deep is the ocean?” etc. Following the question is a line “Google will help you to find the answer.” By clicking on the banner, you will reach the Google search page with results to the question which was on the banner. What I find these banners quite interesting is that it really catches kids’ attention. What’s the chance of having them read pages of encyclopedia? Imagine let them play some online games and toss them a banner like this, have them browse through the result sites and develop their own interests in learning. I have not yet encounter a banner like this in English, maybe Google feels no need to further establish it leading role in the Western world.

A sample banner, screen captured from a Chinese website, 1/2 of it's original size:

US based education group McGraw-Hill announced that it will invest in Chinese online education service provider PRCedu last week. The company and an unnamed US fund will invest 150 million Yuan (25 million CAD$) in total in PRCedu. PRCedu was founded in 1998 and its current investors include Citibank and IDG. Most of the 68 online universities licensed by the Ministry of Education are PRCedu partners. (pacificepoch)

I think it's the time for all the big identities (Publishers, Media Companies, Entertainment Corporations) to finally realize online learning is the future and it will change the way people seeking for information and solution in daily life. So, instead of waiting till e-Learning get taken over by new, independent companies, these giants will simply invest and "buy" the future today. I believe we shall see more publishers invest into e-Learning industry in 2005.

China National Publications Import & Export Corporation presented their joint project with eyouCT (WebCT) on CNPC ECourse (ePack) packages at the China Bilingual High Education Conference. The project is to introduce ePack to the Chinese post secondary insitutes. The presentation used two successful studies: ePack being used in University of Yale and Hong Kong City University. It definitely brought attention to many institutional participants at the conference. Although the demand of bilingual instructions being used at the post secondary level is still limited in China, but the first impression on ePacks were still overwhelming. Many institutional representatives favored the package due to the simplicity and well published learning contents. I personally think ePack did not impact the American e-Learning industry well enough in the past 5 years. However, due to the increasing demand of bilingual instructions in China and the lack of foreign online learning resources, ePack make be the right product to the Chinese bilingual education market.

According to Blackboard’s marketing unit, they will increase their investment in the Chinese e-Learning market in the year 2005. There are currently over 40 institutes (universities, colleges and K12) using Blackboard in China to enhance their e-Learning environment. Blackboard had a joint adventure with kejiao.net.cn, together, they fired up a new company – CeBibo which will be their pioneer into the Chinese market.

CeBibo is a service provider that provides e-Learning solutions to the Chinese institutes using Blackboard technologies. Some big names that are using CerBibo’s elearning solution packages: Renmin University, Beijing University, Ocean University of China, Nankai University, and Harbin Institute of Technology. According to my “Chinese sources”, CeBibo is currently seeking for K12 clients in Shanghai.