china

A cultural sociologist interested in understanding how people use digital tools in their day to day lives, Tricia Wang is involved in various projects related to ethnography and information technologies.

In her talk at Lift 12, she focuses on a story you may have heard of, concerning a student who ended up making international headlines for throwing shoes at the architect of China's internet censorship infrastructure and then become the hero for information freedom worldwide. Tricia tells us what happened to the student and how the outcomes were dependent on a variety of factors that tells us a lot about how we socialize and build trust online.

We have the pleasure to announce that a delegation of Google Business Development from China, Japan and India will accompany Lift12 speaker Nick Heller. To tap into their extraordinary wealth of knowledge we will organize a "Google Dating" during the Lift Fondue, on the evening of February 22nd.

This is a great chance for start-ups and entrepreneurs to exchange with the Google Venture Team during the Lift Fondue! To participate in the call send us an e-mail with a short description about your project and why you'd like to meet the Google Team to google-fondue@liftconference.com until February 14th.

Good luck!

The information has yet to be officially confirmed but it appears that China Telecom may be under anti-monopoly investigation.

Its sin(s)? Abuse of dominance in the broadband market or more specifically charging other broadband service operators discriminatory network access fees. For those not versed in competition law jargon it means that the company is taking advantage of its position in the market to squeeze out competitors (usually by forcing them to resell services to the final customer under the cost of production).

The anti-monopoly law is one of the latest weapon in the arsenal of those trying to instill fair competition in the Chinese telecommunication market. The real question is why China Telecom’s counterpart (China Unicom) does not incur a similar investigation, given that both companies have nicely divided the country in two – the South for China Telecom and the North for China Unicom?

The Chinese government is working hard to improve its e-government services, or so it looks.

After the launch of the Zhongnanhai website, where netizens could chat with their leaders, four cities in Guangdong have created an online system to submit petitions – one of the oldest form of communication between the citizens and the government. According to the Financial Times, the service will even include webcasts.

Some cynics may argue that it is probably those keen on petitioning – the disenfranchised – often don’t have access to the Internet and for those who do, well, there is always the risk of mails being lost in cyberspace.

Artemisia may not mean much to you nor Youyou Tu for that matter.

Dr. Tu – who was recently awarded the Lasker Prize – is the Chinese doctor who developed an artemisia-based drug therapy that helped saved millions of lives threatened by malaria. The plant has been known for more than 2000 years in China and used to cure diseases as different as hemorroids or malaria.

A little bit like the Internet, artemisinin is the result of a secret military research conducted after the 1950s in China which took time to spread across the world. It is now extensively used (together with another molecule) by the World Health Organization to fight malaria in the developing world.

I wouldn’t be surprised that ancient Chinese medical books help cure other diseases.

In China patents come in increasingly surprising forms.

Apple has recently secured Chinese patents on “some of the distinctive elements of its store designs”, including a glass dome. This rather unusual approach to intellectual protection derives in part from the recent discovery of fake Apple stores throughout the country – the one in Kunming looked so real that even the staff thought they were working for Apple.

It is of course quite far away from the more high-tech image that one can have from patenting activity. At the end of the day the technology component of a brand is often quite low.

What is the big difference between China and the West when it comes to electric cars? Most Chinese citizens don’t live in private houses and therefore have to rely on external charging stations for their electric cars.

That’s why having a strong top-down approach to rolling out a new technology comes in handy. The State Grid Corporation - China’s (state-owned) largest electric transmission company – is rumored to thinking of introducing an electric pricing system for electric cars (in addition to those used for private, agricultural and industrial purposes) – not a small feat given the heterogenous technologies on the market and its evolutive nature. Help will be provided by the China Electricity Council’s efforts of standardization and by the arrival in the sector of other state-owned firms seeking to diversify.

Industrial policy does come handy at time – electric cars is one of China’s seven strategic emerging industries - something that must give some hope to firms like BYD whose prospects tended to look rather bleak lately.

Will 2011 mark the emergence of an intellectual property (IP) culture in China?

There are of course the usual suspects, Huawei and ZTE, who happen to rank among the top 5 global patent filers in 2010. But it seems that the two IP champions are building a following at the domestic level. According to Reuters, the number of IP civil litigation cases filed in China in 2010 rose by 37%. Where it used to be MNCs suing Chinese firms, the reverse is now happening – Huawei sued Motorola in a U.S. court – and Chinese firms are also going against each other – Huawei and ZTE are suing each other in a German court (!).

While a sure sign that there is some valuable IP to protect in China, it remains a bit early to rejoice. Having notably improved in the past decade the Chinese court system still requires some capacity-building. In addition, most of the patents filed in China would probably not qualify as inventions in foreign IP offices. But Rome wasn’t built in one day either.

If anyone needs an additional proof that companies and financial markets are tightly integrated across the Pacific, just look at the movement of share prices in the IT industry following the announcement of Steve Jobs resignation as CEO.

On the one hand, shares of Apple’s direct competitors – Samsung, LG and HTC – rose by 1-2% on their respective stock exchanges. On the other hand, the shares of Apple suppliers – Hon hai/Foxcon, Wintek and Catcher Technology – fell by 4-6%.

The surprise came from the Hong Kong stock exchange where the shares of China Unicom – iPhone distributor in China – gained more than 10%, a reminder that second-guessing the reaction of investors is never easy.

When it comes to Internet matters, the US and China are seldom on the same page. For once though they seem to be reading from the same book. At least that’s what appears from the report of the Second Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit recently held in London.

A team of Chinese and American experts have produced two joint recommendations and 46 best practices that, if implemented, would be very effective in reducing spam. Delegates have also agreed to, as part of future work, to come up with a cyber taxonomy as well as multilateral meetings on “rules of the road” for cyber conflict.

It may not yet be cyberpeace between the two countries but at least a cybertruce is a good way to start.