Extrabuzz

Dear Extra Buzzers, Happy Belated New Year! I have a very big announcement to make! You might have noticed that it’s been a whole month since I last posted on here, so what have I been working on? Well … we are remaking Extra Buzz! It will be a community […]

Dear Tech Buzzers, Thanks so much for sticking with me through this year of experiments. I’d be curious as to your thoughts on the newsletter and what you think of it, as I decide how to optimize my time. As you can probably tell though, I am most interested in telling long-term […]

Dear Tech Buzzers, I’ve spent one entire week on the Ant Group IPO halt (partly also to avoid giving myself a heart attack following the US election) so that’s what this issue is about! I also wrote about the company for another publication (check out UK’s Tortoise Media, they’re cool!) […]

Dear Extra Buzzers, Thanks for bearing with us as we continue to experiment here at Tech Buzz. Our YouTube channel now has all of our existing content organized into playlists by theme (to make them easy to share with friends who might have a topic they’re interested in and don’t know […]

Dear Extra Buzzers, I took the last week off and enjoyed some peace and quiet on Southern California beaches and in the desert as part of my first vacation since covid19 began. It coincided with the mid-autumn festival and also the weeklong national holiday in China to celebrate the founding of […]

Dear Extra Buzzers, Hope you’ve had a chance to listen to our most recent podcast episode on Ant Group (fka Ant Financial), Alibaba’s fintech affiliate and poised to be possibly the largest IPO in history. We’d done a previous episode back in 2018 on Ant that was fairly critical — its […]

Dear Tech Buzzers, This newsletter is a bit different from prior ones. I’ve collected some of my notes for the ByteDance e-book I’m working on and tried to make a coherent piece out of one section where I’ve been spending the last few weeks: down a rabbit hole of how […]

Dear Tech Buzzers, Most of this was written pre- Trump’s Executive Orders banning “transactions with” WeChat and ByteDance on Thursday. I was going to write on the bans but given their vagueness, it’s basically all speculation at this point how they will land (and also, if they will land). I […]

The Indian government banned 59 Chinese apps. Who was affected? What was the response from the tech sector in China?

The annual 618 Shopping Festival was highly anticipated as it was China’s first major shopping event after covid19. How did the country do?

Kuaishou launches a get-paid-for-using short video app Zynn that rockets to first on the app charts in attempt to out-compete TikTok.

Bytedance hires Disney veteran as company COO & CEO of TikTok. Hands up if you did not see that coming. But you should have, if you were paying attention!

China’s “largest youth community” Bilibili caused a stir on the interwebs when they released a 4-minute video for May 4th Youth Day in China titled “The Waves Behind.”  

Once the youngest self-made billionaire in China tech, Leo Chen is a pale imitation of his former self.