Bunnie Huang on China's "Shanzai" Mash-Up Design Shops

saccade.com writes "Bunnie (of XBox hacking and Chumby fame) has written an insightful post about how a new phenomena emerging out of China called 'Shanzai' has impacted the electronics business there. A new class of innovators, they're going beyond merely copying western designs to producing electronic "mash-ups" to create new products. Bootstrapped on small amounts of capital, they range from shops of just a few people to a few hundred. They rapidly create new products, and use an "open source" style design community where design ideas and component lists are shared."

Comments

Re:USA is losing because we think we're winning

[drinkypoo]

Much of our "richness" - our immense buying power - is predicated upon China being fucked. The same is true of Mexico. Mexico is right under our thumb (or if you look at the map, our ass - after all, Hollywood is down there, and they are a major shit-producer) so we can keep them down pretty trivially. China is far away and big. When China comes up they won't need us any more. We've brought Canada on board with our little Axis of evil (been watching your laws up there lately?) and Mexico alone isn't big enough for us both to crap on. If we get to the point where China is buying substantial quantities of goods other than food from the USA, we've already lost (our jerkoff lifestyle, that is.)