When people say that learning Chinese is hard they mean it. Even my Japanese friend Oki Matsumoto says that learning Chinese is harder for him than learning English. There seems to be something impenetrable about Chinese that goes beyond the writing itself which is already incredibly complicated from people coming from English, Spanish, Arabic, French, German, and other major languages of the planet. This is one of the reasons that when the Chinese get to be the number one economic power in the world, something that they will probably achieve in purchasing power terms within 10 years and in nominal terms within 20 years they will have a very hard time being the number one cultural power in the world. As opposed to what happened when England “ruled the world” or now that USA “rules the world”, when the Chinese “rule the world” we will all be ruled by people whose language most cannot understand. Cultural moments as the Chinese version of Happy Birthday will have a very difficult time to spread around the world as nobody will be able to say the words.

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In this video I give some of my impressions on Dalian and China.

You can also watch this video in Youtube or Sevenload

I live in Spain. In Spain it´s legal to use P2P. But while people can use P2P programs in their Macs it seems that they will not be able to use them in the iPod Touch taking advantage of the new WiFi functionality. This functionality seems to work only to buy songs (videos not allowed) from iTunes and not to get nor send songs to your friends over WiFi. Even in the States where P2P is illegal, most people download their music using software like Limewire, Bittorrent, and my guess is that at least 90% of the music in all iPods in America has been downloaded from P2P and music streaming sites. Apple knows this well and they know that if they checked if people had paid for all the music they have in their iPods, something they could easily do, their iPod sales would plummet. My guess is that Apple launched the iTunes shop in order to avoid the wrath of the record labels. But iTunes is not for me as it does not even have a decent all you can eat offer like Yahoo Music or Rhapsody. A music unlimited deal would be cool especially when combined with WiFi. This is what what Zing´s gadget offer. I have been using the Sansa/Yahoo all you can eat music offer for a while. I also like Sonos for my home but was dissapointed with Music Gremlin. But at least what Apple could do so I can walk around with the most beautifully designed music gadget that I can connect to Fon is to have Last.fm in the iPod Touch. I want my, I want my, I want my Last.fm!

This is the first time in my life that I visit a huge city whose name I did not know. I am in Dalian now. 7 million people. Until WEF invited me to their meeting here (yes I made up with them and accepted their invitation) I did not know Dalian existed. Now if you like me, have had trouble learning all the new countries that arose after the atomization of the Soviet Union and you like me, care about geography, then you´d better start learning your Chinese cities. Dalian is a good start (don´t ask me I still don´t know the others…). In any case getting here was a haul only made more endurable by the company of Tariq Krim founder of Netvibes who flew with me. We flew via Hong Kong so I could have a meeting with YK Lin who runs Fon in Taiwan and it was there that YK and I took a break to compare WiFi gadgets. Here´s the result.

You can also watch this video in Youtube or Sevenload