Today in China is the Lantern Festival, the traditional end of the 15-day long Chinese New Year celebrations, although most people actually went back to work at the start of last week. And so many search engines have festive doodles depicting lanterns, or perhaps even the ‘tang yuan’ sticky rice dessert that many will eat tonight. Here are eight cute Lantern Festival doodles from both Chinese and overseas search engines. They’re in no particular order, though I’ve saved my personal favourite for last: The whole Google.com (NASDAQ:GOOG) domain is now showing this ...
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Feb 3 2012
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Mocku.ps, a Slick Tool for Designers
This post is a part of our coverage of Startups in Asia (Singapore), Penn Olson’s first tech conference. Our full coverage of the event can be found here, for our RSS feed, click here. Mocku.ps is a Singapore-based startup that aims to make the lives of designers and their clients easier by streamlining the process of sharing designs. Aen Tan (Mocku.ps founder and a career designer) took the stage this afternoon to pitch his startup to the panel of judges. Traditionally, a designer would simply email a design image to a client; however, Aen ...
Feb 2 2012
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Piktochart Wants to Ignite the Web With Interactive Infographics
This post is a part of our coverage of Startups in Asia (Singapore), Penn Olson’s first tech conference. Our full coverage of the event can be found here, or for our RSS feed, click here. You might’ve noticed that we on PO love infographics, so Piktochart is something that makes sense to us. It’s essentially an easy way to make good-looking and interactive infographics out of tedious data, helping people to present info in a way that’s visually appealing and more engaging. Up on stage at our Arena this afternoon, Piktochart co-founder ...
Feb 1 2012
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Sribu Receives Funding From East Ventures
Sribu.com, an Indonesia-oriented service for connecting web/graphic designers with clients, has just announced that it has received seed funding from East Ventures. We got this tip straight from the founder himself, Ryan Gondokusumo. It doesn’t really surprise me as Sribu has gained quite a lot of traction and has a clear business model. Sribu helps designers who are doing freelance jobs to earn money by creating things like logos and layouts. It also helps companies, whether they’re startups or larger enterprises, to solve their design outsourcing needs. Plus, it boosts the ...
Feb 1 2012
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Wantedly: Japan’s Trust-based Social Recruiting Site Officially Debuts
On Monday, a Tokyo-based tech startup called Wanted officially released its social recruiting platform Wantedly. The service was developed by ex-FBer Akiko Naka and her buddy Gaku Hagiwara, and it allows employers to find potential employees by showing them how they would work in the company with possible future colleagues. We had a chance to interview the startup's co-founder and CEO Naka and asked her a little bit more about the service, as well as some of the details behind it. Wantedly originally launched as a platform to find like-minded co-workers for projects. Did ...
Jan 27 2012
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Photohoku: Helping Japan’s Tohoku Rebuild Through Photos
It’s almost been a year now since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and while we don’t hear as much about the recovery efforts in the news anymore, there are still many people working to help out people in the Tohoku area. A few days ago I stumbled across a great project called Photohoku.org (the name is a portmanteau of Photo and Tohuku), which is an initiative to help families restart photo albums, after the tsunami washed away family photo collections that they had before . From what ...
Jan 26 2012
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Air China’s Facebook Marketing Campaign Takes Off
We’re always on the lookout for creative online marketing campaigns from companies here in Asia. But we were somewhat surprised to hear that Air China (HKG:0753) was using Facebook as a promotional tool since the popular social network is blocked in China. But upon taking a closer look, this particular campaign was for Air China in Sweden, where of course Facebook is not blocked at all. The campaign was orchestrated by Swedish ad agency Rodolfo, who decided to take advantage of local Asian restaurants in Stockholm. Customers were encouraged to check-in ...
Jan 28 2012
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Pleco: Chinese Character Recognition App Finally Comes to Android [REVIEW]
After months of rigorous testing, feedback from hundreds of voluntary testers, and seven beta versions, the Android iteration of Pleco dictionary has today gone gold, and now finds a home in the Android Market. It comes with OCR abilities so that it can scan and ‘read’ Chinese characters using your smartphone’s camera, handwriting support, voice recognition, and numerous dictionary options. Its range of features means that it can be used by the most casual of tourists who might want to scan a menu whilst visiting China, to the most studious of ...
Jan 23 2012
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Dancing Robot Army Rings in Chinese New Year
Happy Chinese New Year everyone! While I don’t get a chance to watch the annual CCTV gala (aka craptacular) since coming to Japan from China a few years back, it’s always fun to watch the often unusual highlights online. Thanks go out to gizchina for pointing out perhaps the most remarkable performance I’ve comes across so far, these miniature dancing robots, all moving harmoniously in sync to the music. Check out the YouTube video of the performance below. I’m not sure of the maker of these robots, but maybe some of ...
Jan 22 2012
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AllSet Learning Launches Chinese Grammar Wiki
AllSet Learning is an educational consultancy startup based in Shanghai, China. Today, AllSet has entered the tech realm by launching a Chinese grammar wiki. The wiki, which contains explanations and examples of Chinese grammar points organized by level of difficulty, is licensed with a Creative Commons license, which means that although it was created by AllSet, it can be used and shared by anyone interested in learning Chinese. AllSet Founder John Pasden told us: I'm really hoping that learners all over the world will find it useful, and that some of ...
Jan 20 2012
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Alipay Enables ‘Red Envelope’ Gifting Via Social QR Codes For Chinese New Year
‘Red envelopes’ - or ‘red packets’ - are a long-standing fixture of Chinese New Year celebrations whereby money is gifted, usually from adults to young relatives. And now Alipay, China’s biggest online payment platform, is dragging the tradition into the 21st century by allowing people to create QR codes (as seen above) that can be scanned by the smartphone of another Alipay user which then wires the cash through the ether. Yes, it’s a virtual red envelope. First, the hopeful recipient can go to Alipay’s special New Year promo page - ...
Jan 20 2012
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China Has No Innovation? Look Closer
I gave a sharing session at the National University of Singapore last Wednesday about my experience living in China for a year. I am currently in my last semester at NUS majoring in Communications and New Media, with a very fun minor in ‘Technopreneurship.’ In order to obtain my Technopreneurship minor, I opted for a global immersion project called the NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) program. In my case, I was attached to an Innovation Works’ invested startup called XingCloud, and took courses at Tsinghua University. Before I could even share ...
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