In the e-book era, local students will soon be reading digital textbooks: the Shanghai Education Commission has set an ambitious plan to make all primary school grade one pupils use e-textbooks within five years [...]

The Straits Times (Singapore) has an interesting article the contrast between the popular global Social Networks and the local websites in China [...]

Shanghai is set to be among the first to implement a pilot program to settle overseas trade using the Chinese RMB yuan to consolidate its international financial hub position, the Shanghai Financial Services Office said recently. Using the yuan as a settlement currency for international trade is a step forward to internationalizing the currency and will also boost Shanghai as an international financial hub. The city is a magnet for overseas financial players, home to the China headquarters of giants such as HSBC and Citigroup. The city also holds the mainland’s bigger stock market, biggest futures market, gold, currency and interbank markets…

Lucasfilm Ltd. and Lucasfilm Animation are using Autodesk® Maya® software to create the upcoming television series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, just as they did to create the feature-length animated film that is now in theaters. Lucasfilm Chief Technology Officer Richard Kerris said, ‘Star Wars: The Clone Wars brings an entirely new look and feel to Star Wars by moving it into animation. We wanted to use technology that would live up to the high standards of Lucasfilm, and selected Autodesk Maya as our animation platform for both the film and TV series…’

India, China, and Brazil saw bigger growth in the millionaire population last year than anywhere else, and wealth in the Asia-Pacific is expected to grow nearly 8 percent a year to 2012 despite a slowdown in the world at large, a survey showed. The number of millionaires in the Asia-Pacific grew 8.7 percent from a year ago to 2.8 million people and their combined wealth soared 12.5 percent to $9.5 trillion US dollars, excluding the value of their homes and consumables, Merrill Lynch and Capgemini said at a news conference in Singapore recently…

South Korea’s Internet searchers conducted an average of 104 searches in April/2008, nearly twice as many as Malaysians, who clocked in at 54 searches per searcher; according to Comscore’s latest findings; Asia ’s largest number of searches, not surprisingly, came from the 82 million Chinese Internet users doing 6.2 billion searches in April/2008. That is an average of 75 searches per Chinese searcher [...]

Shanghai maintains the highest quality of life on Chinese mainland for Asian expats, but environmental pollution problem is still a concern, according to the latest survey. The Location Ranking Survey, conducted by one of the world’s largest human resources organizations, ECA International, ranked Shanghai in 11th place in Asia and 78th in the world in terms of expat living conditions. The city retained its top spot among the 13 cities in Chinese mainland that included Beijing, Nanjing, Tianjin, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Xiamen [...]

The cost of living in Shanghai is catching up with more expensive locations in the region such as Hong Kong and Taipei, according to the latest global cost of living survey. The ECA cost of living survey listed Shanghai in 100th place among the top 300-plus most expensive cities in the world, up 23 spots from last year. Shanghai was also one position higher than Singapore among Asian cities, which ranked at 122nd place globally, according to the report.