Ich Bin Ein Beijinger

Cool Web 2.0 app of the day - Anothr.com

I just met with Jim Sang, CEO of a Shanghai/Hangzhou based startup called Anothr.com. Anothr is an RSS tool that sends feeds you subscribe to directly to your IM. Right now it supports GTalk, Skype, and MSN/Windows Live Messenger.

The greatest thing about is its utter simplicity: you go on the Anothr.com website, click on your IM of choice, accept the add request from the Anothr bot, and a couple of seconds later you get your first message. Subscribing to RSS feeds has never been simpler: all you need to do, say, to subscribe to CNN is type in the word "CNN." It gives you back three choices, as in the screen shot from my Skype client below:

To select CNN.com -World (which you can see is subscribed to by 129 others) you simply enter the number 2. I subscribed at 5:31:10 pm, and received the first batch of news items--the three most recent--only 47 seconds later.

Each feed gets assigned a number (in this case, it's 5) and if I wanted to cancel, all I'd have to do is open a chat dialogue with the Anothr bot and enter "-5" to have it removed.

To subscribe to an RSS-enabled site (a blog--my blog, for instance) that no one else has yet subscribed to, you need only enter the site's URL. Add a popular blog--say, Danwei--and it knows of course what you want.

Jim has a team of 10 people working on this startup, which was introduced to me by Isaac Mao, who's on their advisory board. Good guy to have on an advisory board.

The question, of course, is how is it going to make money. I believe there's real potential. You know what feeds the user subscribes to, you know what's in the text of each feed, you know (based on his IP address) where he is, and you know what his status is (busy, away, what have you). I think targeted and highly relevant advertising could be introduced unobtrusively. Perhaps context-sensitive ads in between feed messages? Perhaps some primitive behaviorally-based ads? Or in-text ads? Anyway, I'm confident they'll find the right approach.

They've got the interface now in six languages (Simplified and traditional Chinese, English, French, Japanese, German, and Russian). There are English and Chinese versions of the website already up. Click on "Tools" on the website and, if your blog service provider supports it (mine doesn't, alas!), you can put an Anothr widget button on your blog so that people can subscribe with ease.

Most significantly for me--as someone who often grouses about the lack of real innovation coming out of China--is that this isn't a model copied from the Valley. (You hear all the time now how "C2C" means "Copy 2 China"). Jim Sang and his team oughta pat themselves on the back: They came up with the Anothr idea by themselves. Perhaps it's not for people who already use RSS readers and have gotten comfortable with them, but it's an elegantly simple little app, and it's really great for entry-level people who already have Skype or MSN on their desktops and don't know their RSS from a hole in the ground.

China's Instant Cities

More beautiful, insightful writing on China from Pete Hessler, author of Rivertown and Oracle Bones, in this month's issue of National Geographic. In this article, with excellent photography by Mark Leong. I joke with Mark that he's got the best eye for squalor of any photographer I've ever met: On a Time assignment in Inner Mongolia during the SARS epidemic, I swear he had the driver stop when he saw particularly squalid roadside scene so he could snap a few shots. Check out his book China Obscura if you can. Mark lives in Beijing with his wife Sharon and twin toddlers Boris and Oscar in a decidedly non-squalid part of Beijing--a development called, get this, "Upper East Side." But I digress.

Pete's NatGeo piece deals heavily with Wenzhou. I've always been fascinated by Wenzhou and how its entrepreneurial culture has just taken off. My wife has a Wenzhou friend Qingqing whose siblings are in the shoe business, and in the last few years she's watched her business grow from a humble retail stall in the Alien Street market in Beijing's Russian zone to a massive footware empire spanning several provinces. I remember how a few years ago we discovered that they were early adopters of camera phones and MMS: they'd snap pictures of shoes that were moving quickly in Beijing and order inventory from down South. They divided up foreign languages commonly spoken by their customers and suppliers among them--Cantonese, English, Russian, Mongolian--and each learned business rudiments of at least one of them.

From Pete's piece:

The Wenzhou airport bookstore stocks a volume titled, Actually, You Don't Understand the Wenzhou People. It shares a shelf with The Feared Wenzhou People, The Collected Secrets of How Wenzhou People Make Money, and The Jews of the East: The Commercial Stories of Fifty Wenzhou Businessmen. For the Chinese, this part of Zhejiang Province has become a source of fascination, and the local press contributes to the legend. Recently, Wenzhou's Fortune Weekly conducted a survey of local millionaires. One question was: If forced to choose between your business and your family, which would it be? Of the respondents, 60 percent chose business, and 20 percent chose family. The other 20 percent couldn't make up their minds.

At least in Qingqing's case, the business is the family.

Midi Music Festival 2007

The Midi Music Festival has become a real cultural phenomenon, drawing young people from all over the country and giving me increasing hope that the still-marginal rock culture has reached critical mass and momentum. This year, I hear there were 80,000 people on the first day, and the line for tickets was nearly a kilometer long, wrapping from the east gate of Haidian Park all the way around the north side. Organizers did a terrific job of crowd control and security, but I still worry whether the auhorities will squash the thing next year--especially if there's as much dope-themed stuff for sale as I saw this year:

   

With our Ayi on break, I've been on baby duty and couldn't get out to Midi for any of the other days--just Friday, the day we played. I hear Hate Space from Denmark played an amazing set on the first night--pure Thrash, delivered good 'n tight. Friday didn't see nearly the crowds as the first day, but still quite a good turnout. I got there just after noon and was greeted by a busload of fans from Tianjin, all decked out in their Metal gear. They even had an authentic, slutty-looking Metal chick in tow. One can never have enough of those, you see. I met people who'd come from as far as Chongqing for the show.

I managed to catch Robert Gonnella's new band, Raging Mob, on the Gibson Guitar stage just before we went on. Robert lives in Beijing and organizes a soccer league here, but he's still the lead singer of the vintage 80s German Speed/Thrash Metal band Assassin, which he tells me played some shows in Russia just last week. Raging Mob's quite good, and Robert's an excellent performer.

The guy with me in the picture below is called Chen Chao, and he says he came all the way from Huangshan in Anhui just to see Chunqiu. You can see him front and center in the crowd shot I snapped as we were setting up, second pic below. I could see him singing along with every song. After doing several interviews and a whole lot of mugging for pics with fans, I spoke with Chen, who paid the band a very high compliment: saying that when he listens to us he feels like he's not just listening to music, but partaking of a distinct form of culture. Very kind indeed!

The amazing thing was that all the bands were actually ahead of schedule: Usually, you get rushed on and off stage, but on Friday at Midi in Haidian Park, there was ample time, and organizers actually had us add two songs to our originally planned set.

It felt really good. I was enjoying watching the audience so much--they successfully crowd-surfed a guy who must have weighed 140 kg, and moshed in a manner most joyous--that I found myself forgetting to move around on stage at various points.

Chunqiu will be playing a zhuanchang (a nice long headlining show with only one other support act) in Beijing some time in June. Watch this space for details.