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We update you on the most essential news from Asia in tech, media, and business—the things you need to know that you probably haven’t heard in Western media.
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Shenzhen Becomes World’s First 5G City 🗼
The Chinese city of Shenzhen claims it has become the world’s first city to achieve stand-alone 5G coverage. This means that you can receive 5G cell phone service and high speed wireless internet across the entire city. Chen Rugui, Shenzhen’s mayor, made this announcement in a press conference earlier this week. There are apparently 46,000 5G stations in the city, more than any other city in the world, and 5G tech providers Huawei and ZTE are both headquartered in Shenzhen.
Shenzhen’s history symbolises the ascent of modern China. From becoming a special economic zone in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping to now being called Silicon Valley of China, Shenzhen may be home to the new forefront of 5G technology. China has prioritised developing 5G infrastructure and applications as a national policy, with most other major Chinese cities already aiming to achieve similar levels of 5G coverage as Shenzhen very soon. Apart from making everything faster, there are many ways (some hard to predict) that the power of 5G technology could change the way many parts of society operate. However it changes things, we might see it first start to happen in Shenzhen.
Bytedance’s Other Ventures in Education 🎓
While Bytedance might be best known as the Chinese company that owns TikTok, many people don’t realise that Bytedance is a multi-faceted tech holding company that operates several diversified business ventures. And with all the scrutiny TikTok faces, Bytedance may need to double down on their other companies. One major area of focus for Bytedance right now is education. The company has launched two new online learning apps in China—Xuelang and Qingbei Xiaoban.
Xuelang offers one to three hour long livestream classes for K-12 students and also courses for professionals. Qingbei Xiaoban focuses on small online classes run by a teacher with a limited number of concurrent students. These are just the latest in dozens of apps launched by Bytedance over the last few years, including other education apps. As I have written about before and has been profiled in publications like the FT, edtech (education technology) startups have really benefitted from the coronavirus, especially in Asia. It makes sense for Bytedance to treat education as a strategic priority. People have described Bytedance as an App Factory, so launching several edtech experiments at once is a typical strategy for them.
Live Chinese E-Sports, Back in Business 🎩
Many people across China have been attending large social gatherings in the relative aftermath of the coronavirus, including places like Wuhan, which hosted a packed music festival in a water park just a few days ago. This week, Honour of Kings, one of China’s and the world’s biggest competitive e-sports games, hosted the Honour of Kings World Champion Cup 2020. This was the first live, physically attended e-sports event of the year since the coronavirus outbreak. Things have changed, however.
While the event took place in a stadium in Beijing with a capacity of 19,000, only 2,000 tickets were available for fans. As has become the norm, attendees had their temperature checked and mobile health codes scanned before entering the event. In fact, you could only purchase tickets to the event if you had a level 30 Honour of Kings account, which means you are a high ranked player in the top percentile of gamers and most likely a superfan. Whether you like these ideas or not, they present some pretty interesting options for stadium attendance and ticketing that could also be utilised in other countries around the world.
Update #53 - Shenzhen 5G, Bytedance Education, and Live E-Sports