Xu: QR codes gained Chinese adoption because Roman URLs are counterintuitive
Christina Xu · a16z Podcast | Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · Jan 2, 2019 · at 39:43
Christina Xu, researcher on Chinese digital culture, explains why QR codes achieved ubiquity in China while failing to take off initially in Western markets.
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“Yeah, so one of my hypotheses was that the internet's infrastructure is in English. URLs are in using Roman characters that don't really correspond to Chinese, and so a lot of even like large Chinese companies will have URLs that basically look like fxyjjj.com or .cn slash, you know, some other string of pinyin, which is the way that you transliterate Chinese characters into Roman characters, and That's just so counterintuitive for a lot of people that scanning a QR code is way easier.”
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