Due-East.org

Yep, that’s right…rollercoasters in supermarkets. In China’s city of Shenyang, a grocery store has actually installed tracks in the aisles so that people can relax while they slowly move down the aisles and pick up what they want.

The good: It moves very slowly, so you don’t have to worry about puking on aisle 4.

The bad: It moves very slowly, so if you miss an item on the aisle the first time, you’ll have to go through the whole ride again to get back to pick it up.

Link to YouTube video here.

In a move that pretty much everybody predicted, China re-banned its citizens from accessing Wikipedia only about a week after opening up access to the site.  The reason for the ban is apparently due to certain sensitive content on the site (Taiwan, the Falun Gong, Tibet, etc.).  And since the Chinese government can’t totally control the site and what’s printed on it, they decided it would be best to just not allow access to it all. 

Article Here.

This is a pretty interesting article on Gizmodo that speculates about that and which country will move in to take its place once it happens. 

Here’s a selected quote from the article:

“After all, the natural cycle in gadget production has been for a country to start out as a purveyor of discount knock-offs, then gradually reinvent itself as a premium supplier. We’re all probably too young to remember this, but “Made in Tokyo” was a sign of inferior quality circa 1950. And weren’t LG and Samsung considered cheaper alternatives to Japanese goods just a generation (or less) ago?

You can already see what might be the first stirrings of China’s maturation—the transformation of Lenovo into an IBM-buying global brand, for example, or the efforts of Japanese companies like Matsushita Electric to move high-end manufacturing operations to Shanghai. I’m not saying that the flood of cheap MP3 players from Shenzhen is gonna stop in the next twelve months, but maybe it’s time to start asking: when it comes to low-end gadgets, what’s the next China?”

It’ll be interesting to see how it all shakes out.

Article here.