JISHOU, HUNAN — I am now doing product endorsements. I hope someone at Kellogg’s is reading this post.
Here’s how it came about. I use QQ a lot to chat with Chinese students and people who are not even students. One of my QQ pals is Elektra, who is a senior at Jishou Normal University. She has a part-time job working in town for a start-up company selling educational software to parents and schools. [The words "start-up company" and China are no longer mutually exclusive, you know.]
A few days ago, Elektra invited me to visit her workplace, a medium-sized office in the local government complex on Zhouzhengfu. With four-day weekends now, I have plenty of time, so we agreed I would come by yesterday around 5:30 pm to meet with her and her boss, Mr. Hu.
Elektra’s English skills are actually very good, but she was initially nervous that she would not be an effective interpreter for me and Mr. Hu. We sat in the waiting room, while Elektra explained the goals of the company and its primary product, a 2600 RMB software/hardware package that restricts schoolchildren’s access to a computer and the Internet, while providing a secure chat, blog, and instructional platform.
Normally, I oppose net-nanny measures, but in China children are often left alone at home (or with non-technological grandparents) until their parents return from work. Elektra and Mr. Hu said that probably 10-20% of China’s hundreds of millions of school-age children are addicted to surfing the Internet and to playing computer games, including the violent kind. So, the company’s founders, with support from the national government, developed the e package. 
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