asiabanks coverage by Shanghaiist

Google Earth Used By Netizens To Discuss Urban Planning [chinaSMACK] "For those of you who lived in or been to any major city in China, you must have at one point gotten stuck for hours during the morning commute or being lost within the maze of side streets and intersections. Things apparently don’t look that much better from the bird’s eye view, as curious Chinese netizens shockingly discovered (thanks to Google Earth) that even cities in Africa have seemingly better city planning and layouts than Chinese ones. The crux of the arguments boils down to whether it was truly poor city planning or because that most Chinese cities, like Rome, were not built in one day."
The Akamai Of The East [Forbes] "In the first seven months of this year, 40 million users plugged into China's Internet for the first time, about 7 million more than the entire population of Canada. For China's Web sites and telecoms, that's a server-straining, broadband-bending rate of growth. For a privately held Beijing company known as ChinaCache and its investors, it's the kind of statistic that opens champagne corks. As the top content delivery network (CDN) in mainland China, ChinaCache holds a near monopoly on the lucrative business of selling Internet-based companies a fast track through the country's congested cyberspace."
Taiwan film festival pressured to drop film about Chinese dissident [Monsters and Critics] "After Chinese protests, the organizer of the Kaohsiung Film Festival came under pressure Thursday to cancel a showing of a film about the life of a Chinese dissident. The Kaohsiung Film Archive announced earlier this month that it planned to show the Ten Conditions of Love, a documentary about exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer, during its October 16-29 film festival in Taiwan's second-largest city."

Continue reading "Today's Links: Planning Shanghai with Google Earth, Asia banks flourish, and Chinese students finally free to look at porn"