When Asus announced its Padphone last year, it turned more than a few heads with its phone-inside-a-tablet design. Say what you will about the appearance, but the idea of shared hardware is a clever notion. India-based industrial designer Prashant Chandra appears to have one-upped Asus designers with his concept Lifebook laptop, which has three sub-devices – a camera, a phone, and a tablet – all built in. What’s clever here is the placement of those gadgets. The tablet, which would have a virtual keyboard, would take the position of where ...
Archive | Creative
RSS feed for this section
![Every 60 Seconds On the Chinese Internet… [INFOGRAPHIC]](http://www.penn-olson.com/wp-content/themes/penn2/thumb.php?src=wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Every-60-seconds-in-China-thumbnail.jpg&w=250&h=250&zc=1&q=90)
Jan 19 2012
0
1848
A Traveler’s Around-the-World Journey into E-commerce
About a week ago I received an unusual message from a friend of a friend, some guy named Thibaud Clément who was apparently coming to Japan in order to find out more about e-commerce here. It certainly seemed like a long way to travel for a research project, so I was curious to meet up and hear more about what I thought sounded like a pretty strange plan. When I met Thibaud in here in Tokyo yesterday, I found that his travel plan was acually far greater in scope that ...
Jan 19 2012
0
2347
Karaoke Gets Even More Social, Competitive, With This Cute Web App
Karaoke is already a pretty social activity, but one Chinese startup wants to make it even more so. iHou allows users to sing pop songs online, get a score for their performances, challenge other people to a sing-off, and then share your score and recorded performances online. It’s all so neat and so perfectly fitting for China, where karaoke (or ‘KTV’ as it’s called here) is a really popular pastime, that I’m surprised one of the Chinese web giants hasn’t done this already. The site is not new - having been started ...
Jan 18 2012
1
2675
Tokyo’s Voyage Group Helps You Make Your Face a Mosaic
Tokyo's web service juggernauts Voyage Group (previously known as EC Navi) has announced it has set up a new division exclusively for developing Facebook apps - and today released a new Facebook app called Mosaic Face Me. The app uses your profile image on Facebook, breaks it down into many tiny parts, and re-organizes a new image of you made up of small pieces of your Facebook friends' profile images, as pictured below. It takes around one to three minutes to complete the own mosaic, which can be placed on your ...
Jan 18 2012
1
2434
Virtual Diva Hatsune Miku Out-polls Lady Gaga in Olympic Singer Survey
Hatsune Miku, the popular vocaloid character from Japan, is leading an online vote titled Singers You’d Like to Perform at the 2012 London Olympics Opening Ceremonies over on TheTopTens.com. The poll is also getting the attention of many here in Japan, including the very popular Jcast website. Second in the ranking is Korean male idol group Super Junior. Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber are ranked seventh and eighth respectively. Hatsune Miku’s most devoted fans are most likely to be heavy online users though, which would help to explain the current poll results. ...
Jan 18 2012
1
1832
WayangForce Spreads Word of its Magazine Reader App – With a Café
The startup team behind WayangForce, the digital magazine reader for iPad and Android tablets, made a surprising move late last year when it opened an offline venture - a café (pictured above). This coffee shop has iPads so that customers can read using the WayangForce app while taking a sip of freshly-brewed coffee or munching on your homemade sandwich. Wanting to know more about this, as well as what the startup plans for this year, I asked Jeffry Anthony (pictured below), the co-founder and CTO of WayangForce (as well as the ...
Jan 12 2012
1
1962
Startup Grepsr Wants to Make Data Collection Easy
Grepsr is one of the more intriguing startups I’ve come across in a while. It is a data extraction and web crawling service which you can use if you need to automate data collection from places on the web. Initially I thought this was simply a data scraping tool, but upon closer inspection ‘service’ does seem to be a more apt description as there is some human involvement from the Grepsr team as well. I spoke to Amit Chowdhury, who explained that Grepsr is a just a two-man operation so ...
Jan 10 2012
1
1713
Openbar App Wants to Go Drinking with You in Hong Kong
I have a bit of a weakness for ‘hyperlocal’ websites and apps that map important information about cities that others can benefit from. In the few years that I lived in Dalian, China, me and some friends put worked on a website that provided mapped restaurant and bar listings as well as other important points of interest. These days, of course, such services very often come in the form of apps. Take for example, Openbar, an iPhone application that provides users with information about bars and clubs all over the ...
Jan 5 2012
8
3203
10 Sites to Help You Learn Python for FREE
Elisha Tan is the Founder of Learnemy, a web application that finds you instructors for anything you want to learn. Always wanted to build a web application but didn’t know where to start learning? I had the same problem too. I didn’t know what resource was good for newbies because I had no way to tell if I could understand the material or if the material gave me enough information to build an app. So I’ve put together 10 good sites where you can pick up Python as a newbie without ...
Jan 4 2012
0
1543
If He Was Still Here, Kim Jong Il Would Look at Glorious Pyongyang Subreddit
ever: reddit.com/r/Pyongyang. I can’t tell if this is real or fake, and since it seems to have sprung up just recently, it’s hard to tell if this is a troll (or trolls) with too much time to spare, or real-live North Koreans on Reddit. I can’t imagine it’s the latter… The page is decorated in a patriotic red with portraits of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung prominently featured. All posts to the subreddit thus far have been from the latter, reddit user Kim Il Sung, who has been ...
Dec 30 2011
8
6396
Every 60 Seconds On the Chinese Internet… [INFOGRAPHIC]
The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology. There has been a bit of a fad on the internet in recent days for posts about amazing things that happen online in just one minute, and so the Chinese site 17Startup made one about the web scene in China. The numbers were so awesome that we felt it was worth whacking the infographic into an image editor in order to translate it into English. It shows that insane amounts of money - and a ...
Dec 30 2011
1
2662
Japanese iPhone App Kamiwaza Multiplies Your Money
We’ve looked at number of different augmented reality apps over the past year, ranging from fun to practical to downright scary. And it seems fitting to end the year with this one from Asahi Broadcasting (iTunes link) which promises good fortune as you break in the new year. Or at least, a virtual fortune anyway… The application is named Kamiwaza, and it uses your iPhone camera to detect 1000, 5000, and 10000 yen notes. Once they are found the app displays a much bigger pile of money on your screen. It ...
Qihoo Says Apple is Re-approving Its iOS Apps, Drama Over
Feb 7, 2012
Beepmo: A New LBS Social Network for Professionals in Asia
Feb 7, 2012
Shanghai Boy Imitates Mobile Game, Jumps Off Five-Story Building
Feb 7, 2012
James Tong: How IDA and Gobi Ventures Help Startups Expand Into China
Feb 7, 2012
Beijing School Begins Using iPads in the Classroom
Feb 7, 2012