I thought I would share some of the pics that we snapped while here in Beijing.

China is quite beautiful this time of year which forms the perfect backdrop for a perfect birthday. Kevin has just turned 3. Hard to believe. It just seems like yesterday when I saw him open his eyes for the first time. Happy Birthday Kevin!

Tingting’s relatives came by to help celebrate Kevin’s big number 3. Tingting’s younger aunt brought us some traditional hats with scarves from China’s Xinjiang provence which she picked up while visiting. Kevin, Tingting, and I are posing with them in a couple of the pics.

Some of the other pics are from different days. One set is from an amusement park that we took Kevin to, and others from the Beijing Olympic park area where the 2008 Summer Olympics were held.

We will all be back in the U.S. next week. Visiting China never gets old. It seems like that there’s something new to see everytime, making the 13 hour flight well worth it.

Traveling is a great way to build memories that you can carry with you into your old age. Having an automated internet business system makes it that much easier to create those experiences which enhance what’s really important in life. Have you started yours yet? If not, what’s keeping you? As my uncle Joe Nike always says… “just do it”.

I thought this was pretty cool.

This is Miku Hatsune, one of the most popular Vocaloid characters out of Japan.

Hatsune Miku translates as ‘first sound from the future’, which is appropriate since she is the first of Crypton’s “Character Vocal Series”. �Miko’s voice is based on Yamaha’s Vocaloid technology.

Back around 2007, Crypton decided to use a different marketing strategy from ZeroG’s. Instead of focusing on high end studios, they changed their focus to the public in general, especially targeting teenagers.

In addition to an extremely appealing voice, they also needed to develop an image. Enter manga artist KEI. Kei had come up with Miko, and gave her the physical characteristics, but left it up to the public to collectively give her personality.

You could say that the collective energies of contributors and fans from all over the world have given Miko a soul of her own, somehow traversing the boundaries between the perpetual near future, and the present. The physical and the virtual.

Miko’s immense popularity has resulted in some pretty astounding sales figures as well. Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

The initial sales of Hatsune Miku were so high that Crypton could not keep up with the demand. In the first 12 days of sale, nearly 3,000 sales reservations were made. This was around one sale in 250 in the music software industry, quoted as “an impossible number” by Wataru Sasaki�the person in charge of the planning and production company ‘surprise’. �Amazon.co.jp stated on September 12, 2007 that they had sales of Hatsune Miku totaling 57,500,001 yen, making her the number one selling software of that time.

The decision to combine Vocaloids with a manga character was an instant magic formula that brought Vocaloids from an obscure niche into a new genre of music. This strategy has opened the floodgates of collaborative content creation which has sparked a whole new dimension in artistic creativity.