Hu Jintao, in his speech at the 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party stresses the importance of Culture, both for national cohesion and as a development tool.He emphasies committment to spreading internet access, promoting Chinese Creative Industries and realizing a Chinese Experience Economy!
some quotes
“Culture has become a more and more important source of national
cohesion and creativity and a factor of growing significance in the
competition in overall national strength,”
“…to vigorously develop the cultural industry, launch major
projects to lead the industry as a whole, speed up the development of
cultural industry bases and clusters of cultural industries with
regional features, nurture key enterprises and strategic investors,
create a thriving cultural market and enhance the industry’s
international competitiveness”
“…to establish a national system of honors for outstanding cultural
workers”
It’s now official that google will purchase the finnish microblogging service Jaiku. This is great news for our firend Henriette Weber, or Toothless Tiger who’s been part of the small development team. Congratulations !
The ultra-cool XO laptop from the ‘One Laptop per Child’ project will be commercially available from Nobvember 12th. It works like this, you buy two laptops, one is donated to a child and the other is shipped to you. Price about $ 380 for both of them. Given the ridiculously cheap dollar this is a really good deal (apart form being ethically sound). The thing is a design marvel, with ultrasensitive wifi antenna (detecting a network where you ordinary pc is blind) and a screen that’s perfect for reading e-books in the sun.
get it here
I’ve been away from this blog for quite some time, first in Italy getting married, then in Shanghai for a month researching Chinese creative industries and teaching students about Web 2.0. Quite another planet. The chinese government are very keen to build creative industry parks and zone old abandoned factories as new latte havens. (And where there aren’t enough old abandoned factories, they build new old abandoned factories…)
