When thinking about chinese brands many western people do actually think about the brands they get to know from advertising campains for the western market. Interestingly some companies do have different names – with even different meaning – for the chinese market.

For example Lenovo is not a chinese name as you may think – it is a brand specially adapted to the western marked meaning "Le" from legend and "Novo" for new. As it was former known as the "Legend Group" (src: Wikipedia).

But as chinese friends pointed out the chinese word is Lián Xiǎng (联想) meaning "associate", or "joined thinking". It’s meaning is also not so far away from the actual chinese word for computer which is diàn nǎo (电脑) meaning "electronic brain". It is also worth mentioning how well the brand "Think Pad" fits into that idea… .

(picture from chinese Wikipedia) 

So it is most interesting how all chinese words can have a meaning to be used even for commercial names. And although the modern chinese see a big value in lerning and speaking english they still love they’re language to create new meaningful words for english vocabulary as you would not see it in Germany where we just take english word into every day language and even create english words for new inventions.

Some of you may have realized a downtime of mput.de in the last days. This is due to a relocation of the server powering this side for the last years.

After a long and great time im Paris (exactly Aubervieller) I want to thank eliott-ness and Daniel for making that possible. Starting today mput.de will be located in Germany like you would suspect it from the TLD. The folks at Speedbone.de have a great service and it was quiet easy and uncomplicated to bring my server to the Alboinkontor in Berlin-Schöneberg. I also want to thank Manu for his superb hospitality and a nice evening with his friends in Paris. Thank you that I could join hours of dîner and enjoy french specialties and relaxed chats.

addition:
2005/05/14 – speedbone.de was down for 2 hours and after 2 h 25 min downtime mput.de was online again, and rebooted. – Reason: broken UPS + broken bypass. Speedbone assures that they have now replaced that UPS what should ensure that this is not going to happen again.