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After 2 years of living in her six-story, 38,000-square-foot Shanghai mansion, Mattel’s iconic American doll Barbie is moving out.

The Shanghai flagship store, which featured a spa, a cosmetics counter, and a cocktail bar, was launched in March 2009 (Barbie’s 50th birthday) in an attempt to expand the market into China. However sales failed to meet expectations and the firm was forced to cut its targets within the first eight months of the store’s existence.

Mattel is taking a positive spin on the situation, claiming that the store “served its purpose and was meant only to establish Barbie’s brand in China”. Barbie will soon be jumping in her “Barbie Pink Bus” to head on tour in the near future, a spokeswoman said, declining to disclose further details.

In the meantime, Barbie is still being sold in other shopping outlets across China.

A notice announcing Barbie’s new “mobile” lifestyle in China after her Shanghai mansion went into foreclosure can be found here.

I personally think a lot of these Western companies enter China’s market with an overly optimistic outlook and ambitious goals. To see what I’m talking about, Just take a look at the photo gallery after the jump.
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Just when I was getting excited about China’s first capsule hotel, the fire authorities in Shanghai have refused to issue an operating license.

The refusal was mainly due to fire and personal safety concerns. Apparently, the capsules were found to be made of highly flammable materials. In addition, inspectors said that the average space for each guest, which is measured at 2.4 square meters, did not meet the city’s basic requirement for renting houses and may pose difficulties for emergency evacuation.

The “Xitai Capsule Hotel” was set to be China’s first capsule hotel. The hotel features 68 cabinet-sized rooms imported from Japan – where capsule hotels originated – each equipped with a power point, clock, light, television and wireless Internet. The hotel is only opened to men with shared lavatory and shower facilities. It also has a designated area for snoring guests.

The hotel planned on charging 68 yuan ($10) for 10 hours or 88 yuan for 24 hours which is very cheap – even compared to budget hotels in China.

Ta Zan, the owner of the hotel who used to work for capsule hotels in Japan, said that without a license, he had never booked a guest since construction was completed last October. Ta regretted the denial of a license, but said that he would not give up the idea of opening capsule hotels in China.

via China.org.cn.

Here’s another reason to be excited about using Android devices.

Students at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University are currently developing and testing a new Chinese input system on Android devices. This new input, named Aeviou, is similar to Swype, with the difference being that Aeviou is only for Chinese input.

There are already quite a lot of different Chinese input methods on the market which is natural, considering the keyboard was primarily designed for English language input. However, this is only when traditional keyboard input is used. For the increasing number of mobile devices released, the main method of input for Chinese is still the PinYin method. PinYin input entails having to phonetically spell out each character and then selecting the correct character among the choices. The entire Chinese language is represented by 412 phonetic combinations so it is a long and tedious list. There is also the choice of handwriting Chinese on touchscreen devices but, although it is the most natural Chinese input method, it is also the slowest. There are so many strokes in Chinese characters that it takes a long time to input a character and thereby also increasing the chance for errors.

Aeviou intends to replace traditional PinYin input methods to become the fastest and most convenient input method for mobile devices. It removes all the vowels and the letter “v” (that’s where the name Aeviou comes from), reducing the combinations for Chinese PinYin input. This lets you literally swipe through the letters with ease, just like you would with Swype. Researchers claims that their speed tests show an increase of more than 3x against other input methods.

Now that is real fast. Check out the video below for Aeviou in action and comparison with other input methods:
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via reddit

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