About
Bill Bishop is a bilingual American with experience working in both the US and China. Most recently he was CEO of a Beijing-based developer and operator of online games. He co-founded CBS MarketWatch in 1997 and stayed until the sale in 2004 to Dow Jones. Mr. Bishop lives in Beijing and is currently an investor in/advisor to several startups. With over 6 academic years of formal Chinese language studies, he has an MA in China Studies from Johns Hopkins SAIS, a BA from Middlebury College, and a hard-won appreciation of the difficulties of trying to understand China and Chinese. He has lived and worked in China on and off for over 6 years since 1989, and continuously in Beijing since mid-2005.
In addition to writing Digicha, Mr. Bishop blogs on more general China topics at Sinocism and is an active user of Twitter @niubi.
Johns Hopkins? Explains all: if it is “viscerally satisfying” to poke China in the eye WHY live & work (& presumably profit from China? Wouldn't it be more satisfying to remain in the land-of-the-free?
I am still getting used to writing full sentences; Twitter is doing much damage to the English language, or at least my English language.
I did not mean that it would be viscerally satisfying for me. I meant that for the people involved in this issue at Google it might be quite satisfying.
I appreciate your twitter notes.
I was wondering if you know how fast Google.cn would be shut down if they stopped filtering.
Ten minutes? An hour?
Also, I don't know how many Chinese people will have their search terms ready in case it happens. Do you think they will get overloaded if it happens?
Thank you for your updates.
Thanks. I assume very fast. We may find out soon
ha, Bill….just started following you on Twitter. Can't thinking of a more “Beijing” flavored name like “NiuBi”. You surely learned Chinese (especially Beijing style) very well.
[...] About [...]
[...] installment discusses Google in China and features Kaiser,Jeremy Goldkorn from Danwei.org, and yours truly. You can listen to the [...]
Hi Bill,
My name is George Saines and I'm the ceo of a unique spaced repetition software called Skritter. We're a closely held start-up, in fact the core of the company consists of myself and my two best friends from Oberlin College. We're growing quickly though- we've doubled our user based in the past 5 months and the trends are only looking upwards.Given that you're both a startup guru and a student of Chinese, I thought you might be interested in taking a look at Skritter.
Perhaps I should explain Skritter in a little more detail. In short, Skritter is unlike any other Chinese or Japanese spaced repetition client in that it integrates the actual writing of characters.This confers, most obviously, the benfit of learning both to write and read a chracter but also allows a student to study more efficiently. Why? Well, when a student is prompted with a word's meaning and correctly writes a character they must be able to actively recall how the character looks and how it is written- a process they are 'graded' on. It’s one thing to be able to flip over a flashcard and say you know a character, as in other spaced repetition clients, but it is entirely another to produce proof that you know that character. This process of active recall allows a student to study more efficiently and successfully as they have an objective reflection of their knowledge. Skritter corrects a student when they write a character incorrectly and recognizes when they get it right; it isolates the various components of the word being studied so it can recognize when a student has learned the character and meaning but still needs to learn the pronunciation. And the numbers speak too: The average user on Skritter has a retention rate of just below 91%! Compare that with the average retention rate in traditional classroom studies: a mere 39%! Finally, Skritter is downright fast too: the average student can learn a character in just over 3 minutes! You don't even want to know what that number looks like in a classroom setting.
We'd like to invite you to take a look at Skritter yourself. Send me an email at george [at] skritter [dot] com and we'll set you up with a coupon code.
Hope to hear from you soon,
George Saines
Hello,
We released a small adapter for the iPad, which I want to make you aware of. Our iXP1-500 iPad adapter solves the problems iPad users have charging from their desktop and laptop computers.
The iPad Charging with a USB port is mostly not a solution. Plugging an iPad into a computer’s USB port, instead of an AC jack, often results in syncing only. The iPad requires 10W of energy to charge which is much more than a typical USB port provides. However, even a USB port will work extremely slowly compared to an AC outlet. That means most desktops and laptop USB ports won’t charge the iPad. Therefore, to charge the iPad you have to be a slave to a wall outlet.
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The iXP1-500 Adapter and the XP1Power XP-2500 are inexpensive solutions and they make charging convenient. Pick the solution, which is best for you. The XP1Power XP-2500 will charge the iPad while you are on the go. Anywhere. No need for an USB port or a wall outlet.
http://www.ixp1.com
Drew Stoiberg
drew@xmultiple.com