simonb.com: a 35mm comedic short about a man

China has published pictures from its first moon orbiter.

A researcher has embedded electrodes in a pigeons brain that can be used to remotely influence the bird’s flight. Pictures here.

Atkins has won an international competition to design a five-star resort hotel set within a beautiful water filled quarry in Songjiang. Wow!

A match between China’s under-23 squad and Queen’s Park Rangers was stopped early for a massive fight. More here and here.

According to this article, Sichuan Sinomanic Technology LLC in Chengdu have developed a MIPS based PC that will sell for RMB1000. This is admirable and I wish them lots of luck. The ComputerWorld article says the PC is based on a chip from Raza but another article from Pacific Epoch (translating from qq.com) says it is based on the Dragon (also MIPS). Time and a screwdriver will tell. I would guess it is based on the Raza Alchemy family. If so, it could also be a DVD player and IP STB - which would be pretty cool.

There are some reviews of Eric Clapton’s Shanghai concert up on his web site. The set lists of the concerts in other countries make interesting reading. There’s only two place in which Cocaine was not performed: China and Singapore. Think about it.

Shanghai To Issue Spit Bags To Taxi Drivers. Nice. Would you rather ride around with a bag of spit all day or wind down your window and expectorate?

Eric Clapton played Shanghai last night. Lots of old tunes from the Derek and the Dominoes era. More details here. Talking of Dereks one of his two support guitarists on this tour is Derek Trucks.

Shanghai Metro has a new website. There’s no metro map on the site though. Why would there be?

In response to my comments on the CER EVD article there’s a new post on the CER IT blog and a corresponding one on Gareth’s personal site in which he defends the original post. Good for him. He also misinterprets what I wrote. In the spirit of a blogging conversation I respond below.

First, let me define what I mean when I say success in relation to disc formats: a disc format is a success if content providers are making lots of content and consumers are buying lots of discs. For example, CD, DVD, PS2, XBox etc. By lots I mean millions not dozens.

The news reports claim that China manufacturers will stop making DVD players in favor of EVD players in 2008. And because most DVD players are made in China the implication is that EVD will take off. Well, hang on. An EVD player is also a DVD player. So they’re not really stopping to make DVD players - just wrapping the DVD player functionality in an EVD box. EVD player sales may increase but it may not be because the consumer wants to play EVD discs. For example, if the Chinese consumer needs to buy a new DVD player and the only choice is an EVD player or an EVD player priced the same a DVD player, of course they’ll buy the EVD player. Note, lots of EVD player sales does not translate as a success for the EVD disc format (see above). If you’ve got an EVD player but are only playing DVD discs then it’s just another piece of consumer electronics with features that are not used.

Another definition of success is profitability. How profitable will it be to make EVD players? Well, look at current DVD player manufacturers - not much. In the world of consumer electronics and particularly in China there is very little markup over production cost on sales prices. The real money is in the content and licensing. Well, to get income from licensing you need someone who wants to use the intellectual property and is willing pay for it. Which, with a new standard, is an uphill battle as potential licensees need to be convinced of the standard’s viability. Maybe companies will be lining up to pay EVD royalties but I doubt it.

Another way to cut costs to the manufacturer is to reduce license fees. So, for example, remove the DVD functionality. I find this highly unlikely. The consumer will not buy a player that can not play their existing discs. Also the idea that taking out the DVD functionality removes all of the patents used in DVD is wrong. There are patents on the physical optical disc technology that are valid no matter what logical format is present and some patents that hold true even if the physical format changes.

It has been known for CE products to be sold below cost price to push out competitors. This is one reason DVD players are now so cheap and the number of manufacturers is decreasing. Another reason to sell below cost price is to build an installed base. This is the reason XBox-360 and PS-3 machines are priced as low as they currently are. In the games industry the strategy is to make a loss on the player in return for greater profits on the content sales. But the games console market differs from the video disc market in the following ways. There are many video disc player manufacturers but only one manufacturer of a particular game console. So any kick-back the hardware manufacturers get from software sales is spread out rather than going to one place. (Assuming such a kick-back exists and can be successfully claimed.)

Movie content does have an advantage over games when it comes to new formats. Once you have a movie it does not take much to re-author for a new platform. (Disney does this all the time.) Compare this to games in which software needs to be re-written for a new platform. Of course, the studio has to agree to put out the movie in the new format in the first place. I doubt movie studios will be lining up to author EVD discs and pay EVD royalties given the amount they loose on pirate DVD movies in China. Of course, another way to increase the number of EVD discs would be for the local pirate to start producing EVD as opposed to DVD. Anything is possible I guess.

Now the misinterpretation. Below is a quote from Gareth’s blog:

“...that this is a new attempt by China to have its own standard and it is a most serious attempt. Simonb disagrees. He may well be right. But he is totally wrong to suggest that the manufacturers are not doing it.”

Gareth makes two claim:

1. That I disagree this is a serious attempt at a new standard. I don’t.

2. That I suggested that the manufacturers are not doing it. I didn’t.

My only criticism of Gareth’s entry was the lack of discussion and analysis that I expect from CER. My suggestion is that EVD will not be a success in terms of number of discs using the EVD standard and in terms of profitability.

At the end of my previous entry I had the following paragraph:

“While we’re on the subject, lets explode the myth that China can do nothing about piracy: try buying fake Beijing Olympics branded goods.”

This was in no way meant to imply anything in relation to Gareth’s writings. It was put in there because piracy is relevant to the discussion of new content standards.

One last thing. I wish Gareth would link back to my original entry so that those that are interested can read what I actually wrote in its entirety. To me that’s only fair.

The IT News blog from the China Economic Review has an entry about EVD. The entry is (at best) poorly researched. I’d expect a little more quality control from CER.

First, the entry is more or a less a carbon copy of the article on Xinhua. The only added analysis being the rather wide eyed “What will be amazing is if this takes off...”

Second, if the author had spent a few minutes with Google he could have found out that this is old news. Here, for example, is a link to an article from 2002 describing the (then) new EVD system EVD players were already introduced into the market years ago and sunk without a trace - no content. (BTW Google also shows that this entry on CER is re-produced verbatim on Bloggeroff by the same author)

Had there been a little research, a discussion on why EVD failed the first time would have been interesting. EVD failed because of a lack of content and lack of HD screens. I don’t see this changing any time soon. Hollywood is certainly not going to jump on the format second time around - all their movies are already available in China on (pirate) DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray are in the market now and direct download is taking off. It would be amazing if Hollywood were to do a content deal for EVD.

Let’s look at the patent issue. If you consider the royalties as part of the cost of manufacturing then the manufacturers are selling below cost price. The price competition is totally self-inflicted. The Xinhua article claims that there are now fewer than 150 DVD player manufacturers in China because of the royalty cost. Or, put another way, there are 140 too many DVD player manufacturers in China. And there’s strong competition because of a history of price cutting going back to the VCD days.

The above argument about manufacturers going out of business because of royalties assumes the manufacturers are actually starting to pay royalties. If the current situation is the same as the past, no royalties have been paid. So the whole argument is academic.

While we’re talking about patents lets examine the claim that EVD will have lower royalties than DVD. This is totally bogus. EVD will have higher (or the same) royalties because it is a DVD player AND an EVD player. So there is the DVD royalties and the EVD royalties. Even assuming EVD is free for China manufacturers the royalties have not gone down, they’ve stayed the same.

While we’re on the subject, lets explode the myth that China can do nothing about piracy: try buying fake Beijing Olympics branded goods.

You’re given the task of designing a logo for City TV - the annonying TV channel played in Shanghai taxis. (There shall be no quiet places.)

Do you:

a) Flex your creative muscle and design a new logo. (How hard can it be right?)
b) Bastardise a cultural icon.

Before you answer remember you’re in China.

Mmmm. Text shadow effect.

So Xiang Yang Market has closed. As a memorial, here’s a picture of their piracy sign declaring no fake goods sold. A sign that was universally ignored by sellers, buyers and government officials. The market and all shops surrounding it have disappeared - all in one weekend. Even the Starbucks across the street has closed. 

Two stories of World Cup fever in Beijing.

A Beijing man ignored his house on fire to watch the World Cup.

Beijing “entrepreneur” sells bags of World Cup air.

Number of Asian teams remaining in the competition: zero

Google has a new function that lets you compare search and news results for keywords. Above is an image for the trends for Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong. It is interesting to note the following:

• Search Volume: Beijing has the lowest search volume, Shanghai is double Beijing’s and Hong Kong is more than double Shanghai’s
• News volume: Shanghai has the lowest news volume, Beijing and Hong Kong are approximately equal at double Shanghai’s volume

It’s interesting the Beijing and Hong Kong generate about the same amount of news. One would expect Beijing, as the capital, to generate more than Shanghai. But I am surprised how close Hong Kong and Beijing are. Maybe this is the language effect - I am searching in English. Search volume tells another story there is clearly a huge amount of interest in Hong Kong (at least for English searchers) - much more so than for Beijing and Shanghai. If one adds Taipei and Singapore to the results (left as an excercise for the reader) we see Singapore at double Hong Kong for searches while Taipei is the lowest of all five. So in terms of where the action is (at least as far as Google is concerned) we get the following (high to low): Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei. Which is interesting because I’ve visited Singapore many times and I can safely say it is the most boring place on Earth.