Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

Baidu beats Google in delivering detailed online map of Chinese cities. You can now browse through a quite detailed online map database through map.baidu.com. It does not yet have the "Satellite" version but the city maps are quite accurate and impressive. For some reason, Google has not yet attached Chinese maps with their map engine although you can see some detailed satellite images of some major cities in China.

Baidu is one of the leading Chinese search engines. It uses similar spider (bot) driven data collection structure as Google in archiving and indexing online contents. There had been rumors on how baidu “Copied” ideas from Google. From a user’s perspective, there are definitely many similarities between the two search engines. One thing Baidu does and Google doesn’t do is MP3 indexing. It is quite insane how many mp3 songs you can search and download through Baidu MP3 search engine. This has raised some serious concerns over intellectual property and copy rights related issues. Over the last few years, Google has purchased some significant stakes of Baidu. However MP3 searches help Baidu to generate their loyal client communities. So, it’s less likely for Baidu to completely abandon this service in the near future. I am anxious to find out how is Google China going to work with Baidu in the super heated search engine industry.

VS.

Yesterday was Google's 7th birthday. They claim that Google's total archive is 3 times as much as Yahoo according to the search results. Way to go!

pachyderm.org is now the official site for the Pachyderm project. For more information, goto the site and check it out.

Me and a couple of my colleagues were talking about the best display devices out there. I was just describing my dream set, 5 LCDs all around me, spread out from one base, all connected, can be used for both PC and Mac... Then I found this one on the web:

This is a real display set, created by Liebermann, highest resolution reaches 19200 X 2400. Only 2.5 inch thick. 16.7 million color.

video.google is using Flash for the video previews. Very slick and fast. Great quality. Macromedia uses Sorenson Compression to handle all the video compressions in Flash. All you need is an up-to-date Flash Player to view Flash video. It is a more popular standard compare to Real Media, Quick Time or Microsoft ASF. Flash does have a limitation on maximum number of frames in one SWF file - 16000 frames. This is some what limiting video presentations when the file is exceeding the limit. However, Macromedia has introduced a new file time - *.flv which is fully supported by standard Flash players and dedicated for video delivery. Flash 8 has built-in FLV player component makes the authoring experience as easy as drag and drop.

100 years ago, Fudan was established in Shanghai. It is now one of the top universities in China.

A new statistics from Xinhua.net indicates in the past 8 months, there have been over 190.6 billion text messages being transferred over the Chinese mobile SMS! Chinese mobile communication companies charge 0.1 yuan (1.5 cents in CAD) per message, this means there has been over 19 billion yuan (2.8 billion dollars in CAD) in profit being made on short messages alone! According to this number, the total amount of messages using Mobile SMS will easily proceed last year's record (220 billion messages). There are currently 3700 million mobile phone users, approximately 28 phones every 100 Chinese.

Well, let’s put it this way, the leader of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer wants to personally “bury” Eric Schmidt and the company Google. According to Mark Lucovsky’s sworn statement in the court days ago. Mark was a senior engineer and currently working in Google. He also worked for Sun Microsystems and was the CEO of Novell.

Here is Mark’s statement:

"At some point in the conversation, Mr. Ballmer said: 'Just tell me it's not Google,'"Lucovosky said in his statement. Mark replied that he was joining Google. "At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office," Lucovosky recounted, adding that Ballmer then launched into a tirade about Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again.
I'm going to f***ing kill Google."

Carefully thought through, just how innovative has Microsoft been in the last 5-8 years? How many "killer applications" have been produced by Microsoft? Other than Microsoft Office, I can’t think of any. I have to admit that they are still doing everything right to sell the Windows product which is a product they tried to bandit for the last ten years. They spend most of their effort on acquiring companies that are threatening them and shut them down. Anyway, good luck to the search engine war against Google. This one is coming to stay I think…

Annunced today, the Norwegian company finally switched off the ads from one of the best browsers in the market - Opera is now a freeware. After ten years of existance, Opera has been developed into a solid web browser with high performance and unique features. We use Opera (the ad-version) to diagnose the network requests when we test the Flash templates in Pachyderm developments. Opera shows all of the internal and external requests and list the URLs according to the loading sequency. This makes it to be an ideal browser to test dynamic flash applications.

Be aware of the ipods, they kills your hearings. The new generation grown up with head sets and walkman/CD Player/MP3 Player are losing their high frequency hearings thanks to the new technologies... I personally have the feeling that after a few days of intensive listening to the MP3 player using ear phones, my hearing really decays...

Today is August 15th in the Chinese Calenda, which is the second most important folks' festival for the Chinese communities around the globe - the Moon's festival. It is a date for all family members to get together and enjoy the peace and harmony. So, Enjoy the full moon and happy Moon's Festival!

IT Giants from all over the globe came to Hangzhou today to hear how China's dotcom leaders plan to turn the country's fast-growing internet population into corporate profits. Found some very interesting quotes from the BBC's coverage article:

While China already has more than 100 million internet users - a figure that is growing by 100,000 new users daily - only four million of them currently make purchases online.

While debit cards have been around for a decade in China, it is still uncommon to have a credit card. There are just 30 million in circulation today - about 2% of China's total population.

Another figure I had a few days ago shows not just the mainland Chinese have low internet spendings, but also the Chinese communities around the globe in general are not picking up the online purchasing wave. This has to do with the culture influences.

"Internet users in China, comparatively speaking, are very young," said Mr Ma. "They are university students or recent graduates, so after 3-5 years they will become white collar workers and they will spend.

Just found this out today, Horizon Wimba acquired the assets of Silicon Chalk at the beginning of this month. Silicon Chalk is a Vancouver-based company that creates software which, from within a class, broadcasts an instructor’s prepared notes and lecture materials to local and remote students. It's founder - Murray Goldberg is also the founder of WebCT. Kudos to Murray's team. Once again, he created an innovative yet fully marketable software.

Microsoft announced the "new weapon" in dot net based application creation - Sparkle. It is a Microsoft product for building Avalon user interfaces. It is aimed towards non-programmers using this tool to design media rich web or OS (Microsoft Windows series of course) based applications. Or looking at it from another angle, it can be used by "geeky" programmers to easily create applications with "cool" interfaces. Although this philosophy was first introduced by Macromedia products - Director and Flash, Sparkle still has many unique strength to compete (if they will compete) with the existing products. After watching the hourly long video on Sparkle, my first impression is it is still too early to compare Sparkle to Flash. However, what's worth to mention about Sparkle is it's easy data-binding and round trip XAML makes the final product more "searchable" by standard search engine. Flash contents not being indexable is the long known "fatal" problem and Sparkle may have a solution to this. However, in the short run (2-3) years, good luck to the Sparkle team to market this product. I simple can't see those hard core Flash developers will easily convert to this new application and not to mention, many of them are hard core Mac users too!

Using the hotel's business center or a public computer without the IM application and you have no right to install it? Sign in the a web interface and keep chatting with your buddies! Check out MEEBO.com and e-messenger.net, quite interesting web applications.

for 2.6 billion dollars!!! I can smell the blood from the telecommunication market. (Google talk, Ebay Skype, MSN, Yahoo, AOL...) What happens when IM and VOIP market collapse?

You can download the 30 days trial version at Macromedia's Flash product site. It is stated as: "Macromedia's biggest Flash release to date." Once again, the flash designers need to push the even more powerful tool into it's new edge!

A huge bus JAM. I couldn't get onto 2 buses this morning and had to wait for the third one. For some reasons, there were a few empty buses running around. I wonder if BC Transit needs a new computer system...