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The Makers Road to Shenzhen

My friend Karl von Moller came along with me and a few others on a recent trip to Shenzhen, China. Karl is a film-maker so he documented the trip extensively, and the first episode about the trip is up now:

He’ll be following up with more videos about what we saw on the trip, and my own video about our tour of ITEAD and visit to the Sonoff factory will be up soon too.

4 thoughts on “The Makers Road to Shenzhen

  1. Very interesting video.
    Has the Sonoff range been certified for use in Australia and New Zealand?

  2. I found the video quite interesting, especially the part about how the city grew from 25,000 people to 25,000,000 in 25 years. The city’s infrastructure must have been overwhelmed.

    As to the awful video in the factory, I wish you had simply narrated that section later rather than try to force the viewer to understand what you were saying. You might want to invest in a wireless microphone rather than depend on the camera’s microphone.

    1. What I find interesting about the rapid growth from almost nothing is that it has allowed them to upgrade infrastructure to match, without any historical baggage that prevents major public works. Most cities have at least a few historic buildings and a very slow planning process that sees things like new roads built to a schedule that can be set decades in advance. In Shenzhen, there’s no sense of working around the past so they just bulldoze and upgrade anything that gets in the way. Their public transport infrastructure is world class: immaculately clean subways with trains that run every 2 minutes during peak times with the longest delay being 6 minutes between trains in the quietest times, and able to take you across the city for small change. The main road down the middle of Shenzhen is a pedestrian-only walkway with elevated public gardens over the subway entrances. A few years ago when I visited, I was told that they opened more underground metro track *per* *week* than the entire metro system in Melbourne, Australia (which is admittedly small) and from what I’ve seen, I believe it. So any infrastructure growth problems are handled in typical Chinese fashion of massive and immediate overkill.

  3. Very timely – I’ll be there on Thursday 😀

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