Last week Baidu announced after two years of searching the appointment of Li Yinan as the new Chief Technology Officer for China's leading search engine. Just when everything began to fall into place and we were getting ready for a season Googlesque innovation, rumours began to fly that William I. Chang, Baidu's Chief Scientific Officer was planning to resign because he didn't like his new job scope. Not sure though how much of a rumour......

Chris Horton of GoKunming informs us of another abnormal incident involving a bus in Kunming Monday evening. No reports of any bomb or explosive device were made, but eyewitnesses say they heard a "loud explosion-like sound", as rumours of another explosion spread like wildfire via text message. Meanwhile, in a separate incident at the Kunming airport, several irate passengers "clashed with airport police, smashing computers, desks and other items".......

Too much spam on your mobile phone? You're not the only one being hit or getting angry. 30 NPC delegates are thinking of enacting a PRC Information Security Protection Law, which would provide a heavy deterrent to spammers. No details have been released regarding the law under discussion. However, Chinese law now officially forbids people from sending pornographic or "otherwise disturbing or irritating" messages via SMS text message. There have been cases where sexual harassment......

The 10 Australian survivors of the Xi'an hostage incident have left China from the Pudong International Airport yesterday. Unconfirmed reports say one member of the group has already employed the services of a celebrity agent to sell her story.The controversial extension of the maglev line will not happen this year, Mayor Han Zheng tells reporters on the sidelines of the National People's Congress.After the long-standing ding-donging of the Disneyland project, it has also been confirmed......

BBC's Shanghai correspondent Quentin Sommerville goes to the Pingyang neighbourhood south of Shanghai and finds that the anti-Maglev protests have not quite abated. In his report [VPN required], he makes the following observation:Rarely have protests in China been so well organised, or the protesters so well-dressed. The Maglev protests are really a case study in acts of civil disobedience with Chinese characteristics. Knowing that their protests would never be approved by the authorities, demonstrators decided......

Odd story coming out of Tianjin, about 100 miles southeast of Beijing; some girl's mobile phone kept on switching off by itself. Immediately after switching the phone back on, the mobile started sending messages like there was no tomorrow. An attempt at ringing someone resulted in a warning:You've run out of cash and owe us CNY 300 in unpaid bills!That oddity happened with a Nokia 7370 in a Tianjin university. (At the last Mobile Monday......

Quick note from the Editor: We are pleased to introduce to you a new member of our family: David Feng, who has come to join us at Shanghaiist to head up our tech column. David is the founder of the Beijing Macintosh User Group and a one-man super blogger on the China tech and startup scene. He was most recently the China editor for tech uberblog BlogNation, before its infamous implosion, that is (which we......

You can pluck a Chinese patient away from the hospital, but you will never snatch his cell phone away from him! Photo from Tim Johnson of China Rises. Share with us how you see Shanghai, or China! Simply post your photos on Flickr, tag them with "shanghaiist", and we'll select one favorite image per day. Or you can simply email your photos to photos[at]shanghaiist.com.......

No, we're not talking about "personalized networks of influence" — everyone needs those. We're talking about Guanxi, the paid SMS service that allows you to send the name of a venue and it replies with the venue's address. Yesterday, for about the 27th time[1] in the past several months, we got a message supposedly from Guanxi telling us their number had changed ... again: Due to Mii rule chng,new# of Guanxi Search is 106695882929.Pls save!......

Chinese video-sharing site Youku.com has raised another US$25 million in funding while our favourite airline ticketing company Qunar.com has received US$10 million in a fresh round of funding.Chinese social networking service Xiaonei.com has followed in the footsteps of Facebook and opened up its services to non-college students. The only thing standing in its way, we think, is its name as Xiaonei ("校内") literally means "at school“.Google has launched an SMS search function that now makes......

Li Yuchun (李宇春) — the "androgynous wonder from Sichuan" who was the first winner of Super Voice Girls (an American Idol-style talent show) — recently gave a concert in Nanjing, and she performed in *gasp* a skirt! Now if you have no clue what an earth-shattering revolution Super Voice Girls represented (for the very first time, viewers were allowed to vote for their favourite singer via SMS, causing some powers-that-be to quake with fear) and......

Two bits of transportation news from random sources: The Xinmin Evening Post reports that the Shanghai Pudong Airport Authority and the Shanghai Mapping Institute will be making free maps of the city available in special racks at the Pudong Airport starting this week, with plans to expand to Hongqiao Airport and the Shanghai Railway Station. The map is the standard Chinese map of Shanghai that you can buy for RMB 6 at bookstores throughout the......

We received the following tip in the form of an SMS from Dan who saw the following story on TV in Singapore while vacationing with his wife (Oh the wonders of modern technology!): Last Saturday morning, a fire broke out at a Tongchuan Lu apartment. Footage from CCTV4 showed the man perched on top of a ledge on the fourth floor as firefighters attached a safety harness to his waist. Shortly afterwards he slipped and......

The first rule that many foreigners hear about doing anything in China is that you will need guanxi - relationships that help you clear the jungly bureaucracy, receive preferential tax treatment, or "free" land. Of course, the follow-up rule that is never stated in polite company is that guanxi means money, a greased palm, a sop, and a board seat. However, as useful as some relationships can be, they frequently outlive their usefulness and......

If you are a text message addict like us — 10 fens do add up fast, we have some good news for you. For a limited time, China Mobile (all you 134-139, 158, 159 people) is offering free SMS service with just one string attached: download its new instant messenger client, 飞信/Feixin/Fetion (Chinese for “flymail”). The IM, at least in its current incarnation is nothing to crow about, but it does have one ass kicking......

Pitchfork ran a post recently that touched on some Shanghai live music news, mostly the role they felt was played by the "slightly-more-repressive-than-ours" Chinese government. (Pitchfork is based in Chicago.) We've already offered you some reasons why Pretty Girls Make Graves canceled their April 28 gig at 4live. Pitchfork talked to their label, Matador, which said "following some miscommunications with promoters, Pretty Girls were unable to secure work visas in time for the shows." Hmmm.......

One of the nice features on Google Calendar is the ability to add the lunar calendar on top of the western one, which helped us verify that today, Thursday, is indeed the third day of the third month of the lunar calendar. For several years now, Shanghai Normal University has been holding a ceremony/celebration of this day, which is known as "Daughter's Day" (女儿节). We know this because we saw a TV report yesterday about......

The sign on the gate that leads to Tang Hui on Huating Lu reads "停止营业" (ting zhi ying ye or "No longer open for business"). Yep, it's true — the new Tang Hui failed to last a year. The bar and supposed music venue closed last week, Tang Hui general manager Morry Morgan confirmed via SMS: Yes, unfortunately Tang Hui is closed. The music revolution is going to have to wait a bit longer. .........

Imagine Superman, Monkey King, time travel, martial arts and state-of-the-art technology all rolled into one. Sorry for that mental image, but this is what Mohuan Shouji (魔幻手机 or "Magic Cellphone") promises when it hits the small screen in November. This "modern" fantasy television drama series brings up a concept that human beings can actually be transported through SMS (we have heard rumors that Shanghai officials and mobile phone service providers are actually planning on launching......

A while ago we stopped getting those helpful reminders from China Mobile when our cellphone started approaching zero in the funds department. After a couple months of sheepish thank you's to the wife for helping us recharge, we thought it was about time to get them back. It turns out to be a simple matter of sending an SMS of "10086" to 10086, China Mobile's customer service number and navigating the Chinese-only menus. We discovered......

The folks at Shanghaiist hope that the first two days of the new year have treated you well. We were busy, constantly deleting SMS's—Shanghai sent an average of 32 messages per person, and our puny memory capacity got filled up right quick. Also, we are glad to report that we didn't die from fireworks related injuries. Like many others, these days center around family meals and gatherings. As fun* as that is, we think it......

Despite the Rumors, iPhone is Not for China "This, ladies and gentlemen, is the perfect example of how an otherwise intelligent person can make a huge, expensive mistake in China." Shout Out! Winopete, Now Available in Shangers "Its author, the often wily and sometimes wobbly Winopete, has now relocated to Shanghai and turned his pen and liver loose." Not your grandma's Antiques Roadshow "What distinguishes Collection' from those other shows is that Wang destroys......

From Shanghai Daily: From March 1, users can send junk mail to 1008-6999, the carrier said yesterday. Shanghai Mobile will ban numbers found to be the source of the messages. Hmmm. We'll see how this works. Hopefully Shanghai Mobile has employees checking the validity of these spam claims. We don't want our arch enemy to be able to get our number banned simply by attaching it to a bad SMS.......

The Straits Times today tells us about 27 year old Liu Qian who "has been feted as a modern-day heroine, held up as a role model for women, and won the hearts of thousands across China". For the past eight years, Liu was the mistress of Yao Chuanrui, a former manager of a Shenzhen-based state-owned company, who had been detained by police for questioning over the alleged embezzlement of RMB70 million. On receiving an SMS......

After almost half a year, Shanghai’s iconic “alternative lifestyle nightclub”, Home Bar, officially reopened last week under its new brand, Pinkhome. It has been transformed from its previous existence into what is China’s first gay multiplex including a dance club, restaurant/lounge, and hotel. As some readers may remember, there was a pre-soft (is that a word?) opening last October for the bar, after which the establishment was closed again until renovations were completed. For those......

Tonight, we were all set to show our out-of-town visitors that hip-hop is alive and well in Shanghai. The tide, we reasoned, was beginning to shift, and if the previously moribund live music scene could find its second wind, why not a bona fide community of true hip-hop heads? Of course, much of this speculation hinged on the continued growth of So Much Soul, the weekly hip-hop event sprung into action by the Lab, and......

We know we've had our fair share of gripes with the hip-hop scene in Shanghai, but fear not, gentle reader, this won’t be one of those occasions. For tonight there’s a change in the air, and no, we're not just talking about the sudden chill that's setting in. Positivity is contagious, and there’s nothing quite like an old-fashioned block party to get those juices flowing, those feet shuffling, and the contented murmur of music aficionados,......

No, Shanghaiist isn't talking about xanadu or China's “rediscovered” Shangri-La. And, we are definitely not referring to the Tongren Lu establishment that just opened (no offense, but Tongren sucks!). Anyone who reads Danwei (or China Daily) knows that "lala" is a synonym for lesbians. So, welcome to the long-awaited post on Shanghai’s lala land. Some gay men reading this might be scratching their heads right now and saying to themselves, "What lesbian scene?" Despite all......

Now that we are on a monthly SMS plan, Shanghaiist is pretty happy with our cell phone situation: Our bill is down, spirit is up, and our social calendar is packed as ever — maybe the last two items don’t have that much to do with China Mobile, now the world’s largest wireless company. But, apparently not everyone is enamored with the mobile communication behemoth as we are. One person in particular has gone out......

Someone sent us a link today: 邻客网. It's called Belinker in English, although we have no clue what it means. We did have a little fun with the English help page of the site, which explains the function of the service in this way: The idea is simple, you tell us where you are, and we will let your friend know. You can imagine the city map in your mind, each moving point represents your......