Tornado spotting and partying: how WeChat is being used by US colleges (Yahoo News/Tech in Asia: 12/5/2013 - Ken Chester)

On November 17, the WeChat account MSU伴侣 (literally “MSU Companion”) warned overseas Chinese students about the possibility of tornadoes and severe winds near Michigan State University’s campus in East Lansing. Earlier this year, the school also used WeChat to calm students’ nerves about a reported shooter on university grounds (pictured below).

While there were fortunately neither tornadoes nor gunmen, WeChat was able to facilitate timely Chinese-language emergency communications in a Midwestern American college town.

Besides urgent notifications, students who subscribe to this particular account (i.e. a brand page, just like Facebook has) can hear about cultural events, group outings, parties, and the occasional post about local car insurance rates.

For an insider’s perspective on using WeChat in this way, I talked to Chinese students and recent graduates at my alma mater, where Chinese students make up roughly 12 percent of this year’s freshman class. More...

Is this the end of AcceleratorHK, Hong Kong’s pioneering startup incubator? (Yahoo News/Tech in Asia: 11/14/2013 - Ken Chester)

AcceleratorHK, the first privately-run startup accelerator in Hong Kong, is in standby mode at the moment. It’s in limbo as its parent company, Telerik, moves on to its next accelerator project across the Pacific in Silicon Valley.

However, if co-founder Stephen Forte has anything to do with it, AcceleratorHK will continue on to welcome its third cohort of startup founders from Hong Kong and around the world. When I first met up with Forte last week, he had just arrived in Silicon Valley to jumpstart Telerik’s new Mach5 mobile startup accelerator, but the “Pearl of the Orient” was still fresh on his mind.

Forte discussed several alternatives that he foresaw for AcceleratorHK’s future, yet he was most enthusiastic about his efforts to entice well-known international investors, such as 500 Startups, to take over the reins in managing the accelerator. More...

Korean startups finally get all the limelight at beGLOBAL event in Silicon Valley (Yahoo News/Tech in Asia: 9/16/2013 - Ken Chester)

This past Friday, Korean startup blog beSUCCESS inaugurated its first beGLOBAL conference in Silicon Valley, bringing Korean startups together with globally-minded investors, incubators, and seasoned entrepreneurs.

For an overview of the event, I talked with John Nahm, a co-host of beGLOBAL and a founding partner at Strong Ventures. Nahm’s firm initially funded beSUCCESS and its series of startup conferences, starting with beLAUNCH in Seoul’s Gangnam district and Friday’s beGLOBAL conference in the US.

“Korean startups don’t have clout in Silicon Valley, so we wanted to create a high quality event with a top-notch group of startups and speakers,” Nahm said. “We’ve not yet arrived like the Israeli startups have in the Valley, since we don’t have a proven track record.” More...

A Bhutan tech primer: early signs of startups and e-commerce (Yahoo News/Tech in Asia: 9/2/2013 - Ken Chester)

In our initial Bhutan tech overview, I provided a brief summary of the country, its unique circumstances, and its increasing openness to technology and startups. In this second article, I’ve reached out to the COO of Thimphu TechPark (pictured above), Tshering Dorji, and several others for an on-the-ground analysis of the Bhutanese tech scene.

Dorji has been with Thimphu TechPark since it opened in May 2012, and prior to that, worked at Bhutan Telecom, where he witnessed the country’s explosive internet and mobile growth firsthand.

In the 14 years since the Bhutanese government first allowed internet access, “people took to the internet almost like a fish to water,” he said. More...

The pain and the passion behind building Asian language keyboard apps (Yahoo News/Tech in Asia: 8/29/2013 - Ken Chester)

This past weekend, I briefly mentioned the Perfect Tibetan Keyboard app, which allows Tibetan text input across a variety of platforms. Also, in December 2011, TechinAsia covered the launch of Phetasarth, a standardized Lao font developed by XY Mobile and adopted by the government of Laos.

Keyboard implementation varies widely across the many languages used in Asia, and even across different orthographies (writing systems) of the same language. So, for some unique insights into the development-side of these keyboard apps, I talked with Todd Kramer of Kramer Apps. Todd is the developer behind iOS keyboards for 16 Asian languages and three more globally. More...

Bhutan opens up to tech and startups, with an inclination towards Chinese social media (Yahoo News/Tech in Asia: 8/23/2013 - Ken Chester)

Bhutan, famous for its concept of Gross National Happiness and guardianship of Tibetan Buddhism, is a land of many contrasts. It welcomed Tibetan refugees fearing the destruction of their culture in neighboring China, yet several decades later, deported approximately 108,000 Nepali-speaking Bhutanese who refused forced assimilation under Bhutan’s ‘One Nation One People’ doctrine.

This small Himalayan kingdom, sandwiched between China and India, transitioned to a constitutional monarchy in 2008, but it remains deeply restrictive, even toward Tibetan kin. Most foreigners must pay the Bhutanese government $200 to $250 per day to visit. More...

To find the best Korean food in LA, forget Yelp or Foursquare (Yahoo News/Tech in Asia: 8/21/2013 - Ken Chester)

In keeping with my theme of diaspora studies using Asia-made messaging apps, today I’m venturing into Korean territory with KakaoPlace (pictured above), a complementary service to the popular KakaoTalk messaging app.

Per chance, imagine that you have a serious craving for Korean cuisine – but don’t know which local eatery would best appease your desire. Perhaps you’d employ Yelp, Foursquare, or even Singapore-made Burpple. Although each of these would be a suitable choice, only KakaoPlace can provide culinary recommendations and reviews directly from a current user-base of nearby Korean nationals. And it works wherever its Korean users are – even here in the US. More...

Life after fame: Renren, once “China’s Facebook”, tries and tries again to remain relevant (Yahoo News/Tech in Asia: 8/19/2013 - Ken Chester)

Every so often I open up Gmail’s spam folder to see if anything important has been misdirected there. Typically, I find at least one notification email from Renren (RENN), the faded-out ‘Facebook of China’, coming from another unknown URL among its apparent suite of domains.

Last year, there were Renren notifications coming from xiaonei-inc.com (a defunct URL from its first name when it was a campus-oriented social network; but xiaonei.com still redirects to renren.com). Then, this April, I began receiving Renren notification emails from its Tongxueshuo domain, which hosts an under-publicized student-focused mobile messaging app. More...

Social media lessons from China’s Great Firewall: censorship, external authentication (Yahoo News/Tech in Asia: 8/12/2013 - Ken Chester)

Late last month, Sina Weibo announced that it would be allowing international users to register via Facebook. However, as Weibo largely failed to expand, its market remains China-centric. This means that the target market for Facebook registration likely consists of the Chinese diaspora, Sinophiles, future expats, and other people likely to visit the Middle Kingdom at one time or another. For these populations, not only is Facebook registration too little, too late, but it also appears counterintuitive to Weibo’s usefulness in its home market.

After all, Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009, so this begs the question: if I use Facebook to register for Sina Weibo in San Francisco, and then hop on the next flight to Beijing, would my Facebook login exclude me from Weibo in the very country where it’s most relevant? More...

China’s Weibo Could Transform Into An Awesome Hyperlocal Network (Yahoo News/Tech in Asia: 8/8/2013 - Ken Chester)

In my previous article, I briefly touched upon Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo’s mobile ‘look around’ feature while examining Asian diaspora populations near Silicon Valley. That time I was using the messaging apps WeChat and Zalo. This time I’ll focus on the Twitter-like Weibos.

Sina Weibo and its oft-forgotten microblogging rival Tencent Weibo have an even larger array of “hyperlocal” tools than those chat apps. Sina Weibo’s official mobile app has the largest amount of nearby options, including categories of local recommendations for nearby discounts, group buying, food, movies, bars, hotels, and other places of interest. There is also a gallery of all user photos posted nearby.

Scroll further down the screen, and there is a stream of location-tagged posts, where I found 53 postings located within 500 meters of my current location an area of northern California. More...

How WeChat And Zalo Shine a Light On The Asian American Diaspora (Yahoo News/Tech in Asia: 8/7/2013 - Ken Chester)

China’s WeChat and Vietnam’s Zalo are both increasingly popular chat apps and mobile social networks. WeChat is experiencing explosive growth both at home and abroad, while Zalo has a laser focus on Vietnam with its Vietnamese-only interface.

Interestingly, both apps have a mobile ‘look around’ function that allows users to interact with people nearby. With this location-based feature alone, I’ve been able to do an ad hoc analysis of Chinese and Vietnamese diasporas in the San Francisco Bay area. More...

WeChat Group Chats Find a Place Among China's Expat Alumni (Yahoo News/Tech in Asia: 8/1/2013 - Ken Chester)

In the world outside China’s ‘Great Firewall’, college alumni associations oftentimes facilitate conversation and event planning via Facebook groups. Chinese colleges, on the other hand, might be keen to gather regional alumni chapters via student-focused Renren, or in QQ groups.

Renren and similar products, however, are only available in Chinese – a major deal-breaker for the mixed-nationality foreign college alumni chapters in China’s largest cities. But along came WeChat, with its global ambitions and English-language interface. In fact, if my alma mater of Michigan State University is any indication, WeChat groups could become the go-to communication tool for foreign university alumni in China.

On a recent morning, I awoke to 84 unread WeChat messages from an unknown sender whom I nearly deleted as spam until I found that it was a group chat. I was added to the conversation by Dan Redford, president of the MSU Beijing Alumni Club. We had met a few times due to our shared passion for China, and the thousands of Chinese students attending MSU. More...

Seeking refuge (The State News: 9/30/2011 - Kyle Campbell)

With between 400-700 refugees coming to Lansing each year, there are many services and agencies that cater to their needs, but the focus for most of those groups is centered on children and families, MSU alumnus Ken Chester said.

But there are few resources for college-age refugees, Chester said.

Because of this shortcoming, Chester founded Refugee/Immigrant Young-Adult Neighbor, or RYAN, in 2008 based on the work he did as a student at MSU and a member of IVAC. More...

Developing and validating the Communication Function Classification System for individuals with cerebral palsy (Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology: 6/27/2011 - Ken Chester & others)

The purpose of this study was to create and validate the Communication Function Classification System (CFCS) for children with cerebral palsy (CP), for use by a wide variety of individuals who are interested in CP. This paper reports the content validity, interrater reliability, and test–retest reliability of the CFCS for children with CP.

The CFCS demonstrates content validity and shows very good test–retest reliability, good professional interrater reliability, and moderate parent–professional interrater reliability. Combining the CFCS with the Gross Motor Function Classification System and the Manual Ability Classification System contributes to a functional performance view of daily life for individuals with CP, in accordance with the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health. More...

Accepting differences (The State News: 4/9/2007 - Ken Chester)

While snow swirled outside East Lansing High School on Saturday evening, a warm atmosphere of diversity, tolerance and brotherhood filled the cafeteria inside.

"There are five words: Accept people as they are," said Tammam Alwan, president of MSU's Muslim Students' Association, introducing the evening's speaker.

It was MSA's second annual Diversity Dinner, where mostly members of MSU's Muslim community shared traditional food, prayed and discussed race, diversity and religion. More...