NERD NEWS

STARFALL IN QINGDAO

China’s richest man, Wang Jianlin, went on a bit of a shopping spree in Hollywood in October, picking up a number of useful titles for his dream of a Chinese movie mega-industry. For sci-fi fans, one of the biggest pieces of news involved a planned sci-fi blockbuster from Joe Johnston, the director behind Captain America: the First Avenger and Jumanji, who cut his teeth on Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark as a VFX director and designer. The movie is to be called Starfall and will be written by David Coggeshall. Johnston isn’t immune to flops (namely Jurassic Park III), but the man who brought Honey, I Shrunk the Kids to life knows his strong suit: the green screen. Considering Wang’s Qingdao movie complex boasts a 5,200-square-meter green screen, it’s a pretty good guess that this next movie isn’t going to be a claustrophobic think piece like October Sky. Oh, and one more thing: it’s got a 100 million USD budget—about twice the budget of the soon-to-be winter blockbuster Arrival. Even if the story itself ends up being complete rubbish, 100 million USD is sure to produce enough action to get bums in Chinese theater seats. If nothing else, Warcraft taught us that much. – TYLER RONEY

SPACE TOURISM ON THE HORIZON

The China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALVT), a state-backed firm, revealed that they have plans to enter the growing space tourism sector with the creation of a simple one-piece space plane. The biggest name in space tourism for the past few years has been Virgin Galactic, whose SpaceShipTwo—for the low, low price of 250,000 USD—can fly passengers to space and back, and Blue Origin’s New Shepard will do the same. An important facet of the proposed Chinese model is that it’s a one-piece. It’s not possible to just “fly” to space on traditional engines, but whereas ships like the SpaceShipTwo intend to take off from another plane, the Chinese version would take off vertically from the ground. Both the SpaceShipTwo and the New Shepard will carry six passengers, and the 10-ton Chinese version will carry five. But, things get really exciting with the 100-ton model, which will be able to carry 20 passengers. This frontier in new space tourism might not be ready to take off for a long time yet, but, hey, Richard Branson has been selling tickets to SpaceShipTwo for years. – T.R.

WEIBO WORTH MORE

China’s Sina Weibo social media platform is now officially worth more than Twitter—the platform it copied. Weibo lands at around 11.35 billion USD while Twitter flits in at the slightly lower 11.34 billion USD. The fact that the Chinese internet authorities blocked Twitter access in 2009 has certainly been a boon to Weibo, but Twitter has been experiencing problems for quite awhile, including inability to add new users. The short story is that Weibo is on the up and Twitter is on the out; at its height, Twitter was worth 40 billion USD. While Weibo is safe from almost all international competitors due to the blocking of pretty much every international social media platform in China (except LinkedIn, obviously), it’s got its work cut out when it comes to WeChat—and its 800 million users, online shopping, and the ever-popular WeChat Wallet. Weibo could be coming to a peak, but its predecessor is definitely falling behind. – T.R.

DRONES FOR YOUR WECHAT

Continuing its bid to occupy every inch of Chinese internet life with its messaging app, WeChat, Tencent released a consumer quadcopter drone, called “Ying”, at the end of October. Made in partnership with Qualcomm and Chinese drone manufacturer ZeroTech, Ying allows its users to capture videos at 4K resolution and can be synchronized to your phone to be broadcast live to your social network through WeChat. It also works with WeChat’s video calling function. The drone industry in China is a lively one; Chinese company DJI’s Mavic Pro, released in September, currently has 70 percent of the market share in consumer drones worldwide. Ying, however, is priced at 299 USD, one-third of the cost of a Mavic Pro, and weighs just 425 grams. According to the product’s official website, Ying is meant to expand the drone market beyond “the domain of professional photographers” and into the hands of “ordinary players”—if they’re in China, that is, as Tencent has made no announcements about the item’s availability for the rest of the world. – HATTY LIU