{"id":3341,"date":"2005-05-26T15:54:26","date_gmt":"2005-05-26T15:54:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/e-commerce\/taiwan-and-the-virtual-girlfriend.html"},"modified":"2005-05-26T15:54:26","modified_gmt":"2005-05-26T15:54:26","slug":"taiwan-and-the-virtual-girlfriend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/consumer-electronics\/taiwan-and-the-virtual-girlfriend.html","title":{"rendered":"Taiwan and the Virtual Girlfriend"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\"><span style=\"FONT-SIZE: 10pt\"><span style=\"FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: \"><span style=\"FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: \"Times New Roman\"; mso-fareast-font-family: \"Times New Roman\"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA\">What to do when your mistress is busy? Get out your <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tmcnet.com\/tmcnet\/articles\/2005\/taiwan-mobile-3g-nokia-virtual-girlfriends.htm\">mobile virtual girlfriend<\/a>. I often write about how Asia is so far ahead of the <country-region w:st=\"on\">US<\/country-region> in telecom and broadband technology &#8212; I have finally found something I am glad <country-region w:st=\"on\"><place w:st=\"on\">Taiwan<\/place><\/country-region> has before us. We can thank 3G technology &#8212; which the <country-region w:st=\"on\"><place w:st=\"on\">US<\/place><\/country-region> doesn&#8217;t have, for making this service available. I am sure we will have something similar in the states soon. How sexist though. There is no need for a virtual boyfriend?<\/p>\n<p>Still the story reminds me of an editor we had at TMC years ago. He was quite intellectual and a great colleague. One day in a meeting he took out a plastic gadget. Now this is seven years ago before PDAs were really popular and before iPods. Curious, we asked what it was. Turns out it was a virtual pet he was taking care of for his daughter. He had to feed it from time to time or it would die and his daughter would be upset.<\/p>\n<p>One wonders if a virtual girlfriend (or boyfriend &#8212; don&#8217;t want to be politically incorrect) would need to be bought purses (or wallets, tickets to the game, etc). Well you get the point.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What to do when your mistress is busy? Get out your mobile virtual girlfriend. I often write about how Asia is so far ahead of the US in telecom and broadband technology &#8212; I have finally found something I am glad Taiwan has before us. We can thank 3G technology &#8212; which the US doesn&#8217;t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[172],"tags":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3341"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3341\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}