Jared Kim’s Weblog

Hmm, so China’s largest MMOG gaming company Shanda plans to launch a Second Life clone. They definitely know the market and demographic, which most foreign companies lack. With this knowledge + distribution network + their huge user base == i think will be successful chinese Second Life clone.

One thing I wish I did when I ran my first startup in China was take more pictures of the whole journey. I took exactly 0 pictures the whole time.

Fortunately one of my kickass lead developers Andrew Bright snapped a bunch. Click here to see the whole album!

This time around I’m definitely going to document the whole thing in pictures. I recommend you do to, whether you’re starting a company or just chilling in college. It’s really nice to look at pictures 2-3 years later!

Just had my interview with TheCulturalConnect go live yesterday. Check it out!

The easiest way to find MP3s in China is by searching on mp3.baidu.com. You’ll find tons of music, including copyright material.

However, I just recently noticed searching for most MP3s from outside of China returns 0 results. For instance, when I was in mainland China I could search for “Linkin Park” and I would get pages and pages of results.

Now I’m in Hong Kong and I just bought a new iPod. I wanted to get a few MP3s on it to test it out, however running the same search from my hotel returns 0 results… Different popular bands/artists yield the same results.

Anyone sensing something shady going on? I remember Baidu getting some heat after their NASDAQ IPO for allowing people to find illegal downloads of copyrighted material. Baidu in response agreed to remove copyrighted material from the results…  I guess they did remove those results — from the view of their American investors. I wouldn’t be surpised to see something like this in their code:

if ( get_user_country() == ‘CN’ )
{
// return results
}
else
{
// return no results
}