8 Asians

HTC’s latest Android smartphone, the HTC One, has been getting a lot of fantastic reviews and is about to launch in the United States. So it’s nice to see that one of their latest commercials features hip hop band Far East Movement, to highlight the HTC One’s superior sound quality with “Turn Up the Love” playing.

This story and report came out last December, but I’ve only had time to get to this now. Asian Americans and Asian non-citizens 50.1% (versus 40.7 White, 4.2% Hispanic, 2.3% African American,  and 2.7% other) of the San Francisco Bay Area technology-related workforce (“Silicon Valley” for the sake of simplicity). According to the San Jose Mercury News’ analysis of the latest Census Bureau data:  ”An analysis of the Census data shows that among tech jobs [...] Continue »

Motorola’s latest commercial for its Droid RAZR M stars an Asian American Little Red Riding Hood, using her smartphone at the latest version of Android (“Jelly Bean”) to find a safer way to grandma’s house. I thought the commercial was cute, but wonder why Motorola chose this particular actress (besides the fact that she was cute). Not sure this fairy tale story is necessarily the best way ton convince consumers to consider a Motorola smartphone, [...] Continue »

This past Sunday, Aug 5th, the Mar’s Rover successfully landed after a 36-week flight from Earth to the red planet. Sending HD images back almost immediately after landing, it has begun its two-year mission to study whether Mars has and/or can sustain life. But 3 years before its take off, about 9,000 students entered a Wall-E sponsored NASA contest to name this latest ambassador to the martians, and out of the thousands it was Kansas [...] Continue »

Bamboo Ceiling? Not anymore. At least, not for Greystripe cofounders Michael Chang and Andy Choi. Although there have been several stories about the Bamboo Ceiling and how it plagues immigrant Asians because a lack of self-promotion, now there’s a happy ending: Andy Choi and Michael Chang, founders of the mobile ad network Greystripe, have taken the helm of the digitization company YesVideo. The pair’s new company focuses on the digitization of old videos and photos, [...] Continue »

by Chris Corning Via JapanProbe, there’s a bit of a kerfuffle about an iOS game meant to raise awareness of dolphin hunting in Japan. In particular, JapanProbe is concerned about the “propaganda” – the fact that the game referred to the practice of hunting dolphins as illegal, which it is not, and referring to the sales of the meat as being black market. Apparently the post drew the attention of the app developer, who in [...] Continue »

From TechCrunch: “Zynga is drumming up stereotypes that simply don’t apply in this day and age. As Asian Americans who grew up in or near white suburbia, this is the exact type of mass media that made us feel like we didn’t belong,” write Anthony and Peter Ha. What on earth are they talking about? A new Farmville (remember that?) add-on called Jade Falls that takes place in exaggerated “Asian” locales. And of course, there [...] Continue »

Back in April, Asian American celebrity host Yul Kwon hosted a four part series on for PBS called America Revealed with the following episodes: Episode 1 – Food Machine Episode 2 – Nation on the Move Episode 3 – Electric Nation Episode 4 – Made in the U.S.A. If you missed them, they’re online. Though I don’t know for how long. I watched the entire series and thought the cinematography and aerial photography was fantastic. [...] Continue »

We iPhone users are spoiled. I use my iPhone to its fullest, including using the Starbucks app to buy drinks at Starbucks, another app to read magazines… sometimes I even use the magic 8 ball app when I can’t decide an answer to a yes or no question. Now, there is even a more interactive app for people who want to find out more about the hosts of a show they are watching, what the [...] Continue »

I caught this tidbit of news the other day from Nielsen: 67.3 percent of Asian Americans have a smartphone, higher than any other ethnicity within the United States. This should come as any big surprise – Pew Internet & American Life Project did a study on Asians Americans and Technology last year and found similar trends for Internet and mobile usage. What surprised me more was that a higher percentage of women own a smartphone [...] Continue »

I just saw the 30-second version of this commercial by Intel, promoting the Ultrabook line of laptops “inspired” by Intel. I personally just bought a Toshiba Ultrabook back in February and love it (for its long battery life as well as how thin it is – like a MacBook Air, except has 3 USB ports, HDMI & VGA out, SD card, Ethernet jack, etc.)

What do normal college freshmen do? Probably try to drink and sleep around as much as possible. What does Berkeley freshman Derek Low do? Build what is probably the most awesomest dorm room ever. Check out BRAD (Berkeley Ridiculously Automated Room) where features like lights, music and curtains are automated to work  through motion sensors, voice commands and even an iPad app. There’s even an Emergency Party Mode in case studying for finals becomes too [...] Continue »