New Deadline for Mapping License, or Google Maps Get Lost in 2011

31st March 2011, it is the new deadline (it was by end of 2010) given by the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping (SBSM) to get the mapping license. If the mapping service operator continues its service without the licence, it will be punished after 1st July. And till now, Google has not submitted its application to the officials yet.

The hurdles

Why is it so difficult for Google? According the regulation, for foreign companies which want to apply for mapping license,  the most important requirements are:

• a). the servers which store the map-related data must be located within China;
• b). the license must be applied by a join venture company or a legal Chinese partner.

As Google has moved most of its service to HongKong, the requirement a). could be really the headache. Note that there is one foreign company has got the license, it is Nokia via its Shanghai-based join venture company.

The Consequence

If Google Maps is out of China, it is going to be really bad not only for Google itself, but for many Chinese local internet companies. Most of Android phone and iPhone are bundled with Google Maps applications, popular service like Dianpin (Chinese Yelp) have been using it for years, and many new mobile applications such as Location-based Service all have Google Maps integrated. They might be thinking of the alternatives now.

And another international giant Microsoft needs the license asap too.

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Japanese Virtual World Anime Film Aims At Oscar

Are you interested in the virtual world and Japanese anime film? Then, let’s check the “Summer Wars”. “Summer wars” is a Japanese anime film released in 2009 summer in Japan. The screening has just begun in U.S.A. on December 24.

Story

Kenji is a teenage math prodigy recruited by his secret crush Natsuki for the ultimate summer job – passing himself off as Natsuki’s boyfriend for four days during her grandmother’s 90th birthday celebration. But when Kenji solves a 2,056 digit math riddle sent to his cell phone, he unwittingly breaches the security barricade protecting Oz, a globe-spanning virtual world where millions of people and governments interact through their avatars, handling everything from online shopping and traffic control to national defense and nuclear launch codes. Now a malicious AI program called the Love Machine is hijacking Oz accounts, growing exponentially more powerful and sowing chaos and destruction in its wake…

via GKIDS.tv

See Also:

Summer Wars official North American website
Summer Wars official Japanese website

A lot of elements are packed in this movie. 3D Virtual World(like Second Life), Japanese mobile internet, Avatar communication, Nintendo DS, Artificial intelligence, spoofing, Cyber-bullying, scenery of the Japanese country and big family.

This movie drew more than one million spectators in Japan, won a lot of awards. In addition, Summer Wars earns this year’s Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature.

If you have iPhone or Android mobile, check these game apps based on the movie.

http://swkoikoi.indexweb.co.jp/s-wars.ap/ [J]

You can play the Hanafuda card game, “Koi Koi”, which appeared in the movie.

What’s Hanafuda? See Wikipedia, it is a Japanese playing card and your knowing Nintendo had been a company to make/sell it before game console.

サマーウォーズ スタンダード・エディション [Blu-ray]

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East Ventures Invests In Indonesia Daily Deal Site Disdus

Singapore-based venture fund, East Ventures has invested in Indonesian daily deal site, Disdus.com. Terms of the deal hasn’t been disclosed.

Press release:

Disdus.com today announced that it has raised seed funding from East Ventures, a Singapore-based company focusing on Internet business ventures.

As part of the investment, Batara Eto of East Ventures will join Andrew Darwis as part of Disdus’s Advisory Board. Andrew Darwis is better well known as the Founder of Kaskus.us, the largest online community in Indonesia, while Batara was Co-Founder and CTO of Mixi Inc., Japan’s largest social network.

Disdus.com is a leading social ecommerce website in Indonesia that features a new deal every 2 days. Disdus was launched on 11 August 2010 and has since sold more than 12,000 coupons and reached over 70,000 users through various channels. Some of the deals include movie theaters (Blitz Megaplex), restaurants (Sushi Tei), Beauty and Wellness (Ritz Carlton Spa), Desserts and Café (Coldstone), recreational spot (Jendela Alam), etc. Pursuant to the agreement, both co-founders of Disdus, Jason Lamuda and Ferry Tenka, will continue to lead and maintain full operational responsibility of Disdus.

“We are extremely excited to be able to work alongside the members of East Ventures. This investment will not only allow us to scale our operations, grow our team, but also gain expertise in the mobile platform space.” Batara Eto, a partner in East Venture, added, ”As an investor in early-stage startups, we recognize huge potentials in the Indonesian Internet market. We are confident Disdus has the vision and execution ability to be an industry leader in the online social commerce business in Indonesia.”

[via]

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XinShanZhai: Seeed Studio and Facilitate Open Innovation

[This post is written by our guest writer David Li, and co-published on his very interesting project XinCheJian]

Today we at Xinchejian kicked off the first of the “Xinshanzhai” series of talks and discussion on how “Shanzhai” micro manufacture efficiency combined with open innovation process and open source hardware will change how China innovate. We had the honor to have Eric Pan, CEO and Founder of Seeed Studio to give the talk “Facilitate Open Innovation – The Seeed Studio Approach” [Speech Slides].

Seeed Studio was founded 3 years ago in Shenzhen to explore combining open source hardware and the electronics supply chain in Shenzhen. Today, Seeed Studio employes over 30 engineers and support staffs with over USD$1 million in annual revenue mainly from US, Europe and Japanese customers which are 98% of its business. Seeed does not yet focus on Chinese market as Eric points out that the tinkers/makers community in China has not yet matured enough for Seeed and there is not enough community.

Seeed Studio has so far depends on words of mouth of open hardware community for its marketing and will launch its first marketing campaign in 2011. The following is one of the first ads to be run in Make Magazine.

Seeed’s current focus is to grow its WISH platform described by Eric as a ecosystem to support open source hardware designers to better manage the product life cycle. WISH platform let designers and users propose requests and new design and through the community voting and pre-ordering process to help to bring products to the market. The process is best illustrated by this slide from the speech. Seeed also works with partners sites such as Dangerous Prototypes to promote the platform.

Eric’s 30 minutes talk was followed by over 2 hours of heated discussion on the topics of open source hardware, innovation and manufacture. The talk and discussions were livecast on Sina Weibo by Steven Cheng under #新山寨#.

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Softbank Mobile To Transform iPhone4 IC-Card Enabled… With Stickers

Softbank Mobile, exclusive iPhone seller in Japan, today announced their new IC-Card(FeliCa) products for iPhone 4, IC-Card stickers.

iPhone not having FeliCa, RFID smart card, is one of lamentations for users who can not give up their e-wallets function on their Japanese cellphone. One of the reasons that half of Japanese iPhone users still keeps their feature phones.

Android is planning to support NFC on version 2.3, which has the same basement with FeliCa but can not cover all FeliCa doing now. Japanese cellphone vendors have been adding FeliCa on their Android smartphone recently. There are few Japanese Androids which are capable by hardware, but waiting software adaptation to support major FeliCa e-money providers.

Three major e-money WAON/Edy/nanaco issued by supermarket and convenience store chain will be provided as a different stickers in coming February 2011.

Each sticker costs 2,980 yen (US$36). The regular WAON and nanaco cards issuing needs 300 yen, Edy card requires 500 yen so it is pretty expensive but the stickers nicely fit with your iPhone 4. They are also tested well with Apple’s genuine iPhone 4 Bumper.

It seems for me that you can put those stickers not only on iPhone 4 but also on anything. The release does not tell if those IC-Card can be checked and charged via iPhone, or it is just a small sized version of the card-size IC card.

Softbank Mobile made another weird peripheral gadget, TV for iPhone 2 years ago.

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Want To Buy/Sell/Rent Without Going Online -Try KuchBhiBikega

While a lot of online classifieds exist and serve our purpose of selling/renting/buying all sorts of stuff, our choices are limited by the penetration of internet. Even today a lot of people who want to sell or buy real estate/vehicles/electronics etc. are not online.

KuchBhiBikega is a classifieds service over web and phone that kills the need of going online. Ahmedabad based startup KBB claims to be India’s first Tele-Classified Platform that lets people post & access advertisements to buy/sell products from any place, at any time through phone (in addition to the Internet).

This is how KBB works:

1. Call KBB on (079) 4032 3400 and ask for your nearest agent.
2. Give the details of product to sell along with a small fee to the agent.
3. Agents uploads the product details for you.
4. When a buyer shows interest in your offering, over phone or web, you will be provided his details.

Depending on the product the fee is between Rs.0 to Rs.200. Eg. properties – Rs200. Vehicles & Electronics – Rs100. Books – free. Depending on the volumes an agent could make a cut of anything between 15%-45%.

This is a very interesting mix of online and offline world. While all the pain of online world are addressed, given the cost of operating the offline model would obstruct the scalability of this model. Though from a user point of view the fees are not steep but the model would be seen fighting between the “free(dom)” of online classifieds and reach of print media classifieds.

What do you think of this model? Will it really be able to connect the unconnected?

Similar: Chaupaati Bazaar, a Mumbai based startup (acquired by Future Group) is also in the space of bridging the digital divide via phone.

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10 Kickass Opera Extensions for Web Developers [Recommended List]

Opera desktop browser’s latest version, i.1. Opera 11 has added extensions (addon) to its feature set and interestingly, Opera 11 was downloaded 6.7 million times on the first day itself. As Opera continues to gain share in the desktop browser market, web developers cannot afford to ignore it anymore.

Here is presenting a set of most useful plugins for web developers and designers:

URL Encoder/Decoder

Use this extension to encode/decode URI. It is useful to encode strings the same way that the posted data from WWW forms are encoded. Non-alphanumeric characters (depending on the chosen Javascript method) are replaced with a percent sign (%) followed by two hex digits.
The following encoding/decoding methods are available on the extension preferences page:
- encodeURI / decodeURI
- encodeURIComponent / decodeURIComponent (default)
- escape / unescape

OMeasure!

Opera’s version of MeasureIt, OMeasure! is a simple measuring tool for web developers.

Validator

Validates a page with W3C’s Validator. Pretty much a standard feature.

JSON Viewer

Formats and highlights JSON data loaded from file or server. String and Boolean values are highlighted with blue, numbers – with green, null values – with red color.

Edit the Page

Edit the page like a WYSIWYG editor. This extension toggles the ‘Design Mode’ so that you can edit the contents of the page. A great way to play/experiment with the layout, without changing any piece of code.

HTML5 Outliner

Outlines a web page’s HTML5 elements

Displays an outline of the current page using the HTML5 outlining algorithm. This extension is a port of the bookmarklet at http://code.google.com/p/h5o/.

HTML Ruby

Render ruby(*) annotation (furigana and stuff)

HTML Ruby adds support for basic rendering of ruby annotation in Opera. After installation, ruby annotations in pages will be automatically processed and rendered as closely as possible to the ruby annotation spec.

*: “ruby” are small texts that are usually displayed above base texts to show the pronunciation of characters used in East Asian languages.

Scripter

The extension allows to execute custom JavaScript code on any site and to store the comments for pages. JavaScript code is executed when the page loads, and can contain jQuery selectors.

Custom JavaScript code can be executed for different groups of pages:
1. For all sites
2. For all subdomains
3. For a specific domain
4. For a specific page

Snap Links

A productivity booster, this extension helps when you are researching on a topic. This extension enables you to select an area containing links and have them open all at once.

Auto-Ipsum

Transforms special HTML comments found in webpages you’re developing into blocks of Lorem Ipsum text.

When this extension is enabled, every webpage you view will be checked for special HTML comments that specify numbers or ranges of words, sentences, or paragraphs.

Other useful Opera extensions: WhatisMyIP, NoAds, NotScripts (to block scripts), Wayback Machine and Translate.

Also, one cannot afford to not mention the Firebug clone, i.e. DragonFly which has improved significantly since the launch and provides the much needed debugging help to web developers.

To summarize, Opera (in the current form) doesn’t boasts of the same quality (of plugins/extension) as its rival, especially Chrome and Firefox. But as the day progresses, expect this Norway based company to get more aggressive in building a developer community.

What’s your favorite Opera extension?

Also see: 30 Kickass Firefox Plugins for Web Developers

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Baidu Launched Online Music Radio Channel

It’s been a long while we have not covered anything about Chinese online music service. We’ve wrote about 8Box, the Last.fm-like service and Yobo the Pandora-like service, but it’s almost 3 years ago. Both sites are still available, but the traffic is miserable. Online music service is not that hot, but we have seen some relatively new service launched in past year, among which Xiami and Douban.fm are my favorites. Today, we saw a new online music radio channel launched and it is operated by a tough competitor, Baidu. It’s basically a music-streaming service, but powered by Baidu’s search technology.

Looks like Douban.fm, on Baidu music radio service, you can listen to a public channel on which you can choose the genre of the music. Then the service will stream the music to you one after one; or you can listen to a private channel if you are Baidu’s registered users. In private channel, you can personalize the music it plays according to your interests. Powered by Baidu’s search engine, the pretty cool thing about Baidu’s private music radio channel is that, it is able to (at least trying to) push the right music for you in the light of the music you have searched for, downloaded and listened to.

At last, you maybe curious about whether the music Baidu’s streaming is copyrighted or not, it seems for me they are all from somewhere in the internet.

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