Continuing our long line of creative and unique giveaway ideas, allow me to introduce the Mixr Reward Center. In short, it’s yet another way to earn free stuff on Ningin and the other sites in the Mixr network. However, it’s much more than that. It’s a new system of giveaway that is points-based which offers us numerous flexibilities in coming up with new and exciting contests as well as allowing you guys to pick and choose the exact prize that you want. What this means for you is two things: More »

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The last thing on my EXP upgrade list was charts. And now it’s done. If you’re logged in, check it out by clicking here. You can see your scoring stats for the past 7 or 30 days by total EXP points, by sites in the Mixr network, and by what applications (Newsstream, Games, Blogs, etc) that you used. Spiffy, huh? This is pretty much self-explanatory, but ask questions in the comments if you have any. More »

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This is a cool looking themed shelf and table designed after Nintendo’s Mario’s world. More »

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Japan is known for their unique love hotels. What’s a love hotel you ask? Well, it’s a hotel especially made for couples to have some alone time to do things lovers do (I’ll leave that to your imaginations). More »

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Scandinavian furniture store Ikea is releasing a new line called CHARLOTTA. It will contain designs by Åsa Ekström, whose influences come from manga. More »

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From Ziggytek: It seems that everything cool, sometimes crazy, always arrives outside of the United States first. This time, its a Levi Branded LG X120 Mini Netbook. It’s your average netbook with 1GB of RAM, 160 GB of HDD, Atom CPU, and a 10.1″ WSVGA LED backlit screen. The features are all the same except the design is what stands out here with its Levi Jean’s layout and even a Levi’s Jeans pouch to hold you computer. More »

Juice boxes are adorable and cute but like all things Japanese, they’ve been reinvented in a whole new way.

Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa has revamped juice boxes to look like the fruits they contain. So far there are banana, kiwi, strawberry and soybean which feels like “silken tofu skin”. I know I want my hands on those bad boys. More »

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There’s a lot of chitchat about Utada’s new American album “This Is The One”. And not just about the music, but the album art too. Few people thought the album art for the “Come Back To Me” single would also remain the album art for “This Is The One”.

Ningin asked a few graphic designers what they thought about “This Is The One” from a design standpoint. Their musical tastes were not a factor. More »

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Most likely you need to refresh your browser cache by pressing F5 or use a forceful refresh by pressing CTRL+F5.

It’s been almost three months since my last upgrade post. Yea…things keep coming up. The Megaman Movie Trailer, the BoA interview, the End of the Year Special, America’s Best Dance Crew, drunken holiday parties + hangover recovery time, launching ZiggyTek — our gadget site, I was sick (no really I was), etc. In a way, it was kinda a perfect storm of events for Ningin as our growth has been skyrocketing from all those different things combined. Well, not the being sick and drunk part. More »

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Phase One of the Ningin redesign. Please enjoy the new Community Page!

Ningin doesn’t have a home page per se like most websites. Rather an equivalent that we call the Community Page which takes a snapshot of all the different things happening within Ningin at a given time. It was natural for us to start with this section first. The goal of this redesign was to introduce a cleaner layout and more intuitive navigation. I hope you can agree that we made a big step towards accomplishing that goal.

You might have to refresh your browser by pressing F5 for everything to work properly.

As mentioned before, a new design was only part of the new Ningin. There are many more features and functionally in the pipeline. This phase of the upgrades not only changes the Community Page, but adds the foundations for those new features which will be added in later as they are developed and tested. Every one of our current applications, Forums, Blogs, Social News, and Profiles, will receive major upgrades in features and functionality. When this upgrade is all said and done, we will be at Ningin 2.0 =) More »

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Pat Kelly is our 4th placing winner of our New York Anime Festival cosplay contest. What is so interesting about Pat is his costume production. The making of his mask was a real family affair. His daughter Susie, who is only 15 years old, concepted and created it from beginning to end. Susie also introduced the manga Death Note to her father when she thought he would be wonderful at cosplaying, the apple eating Shinigami of the series, Ryuk. When we interviewed Pat it was only common sense that Susie also be apart of it. Here is great proof that cosplay is not only for younglings, but can be enjoyed on a family level with parents and children for a awesome creative bonding experience.

Q: What are some of your favorite anime/manga characters? A: Ryuk and L from Death Note

Q: Do you consider yourself a hardcore cosplayer? A: No, but if I’m not careful, I will be More »

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As some of you already know (many of you actually don’t), we’re in the processing of a complete make-over for Ningin. Perhaps it’s more fitting to say Ningin will experience a major upgrade in both design and features. Every single area of Ningin will look different. Every single application (social news, blog, forums, profiles) will have new features. Plus, we’re adding one new application! The tentative date for all of this is in about 2-3 weeks. Some site downtime will happen (it’s also an infrastructure upgrade). Most likely this will happen in phases, so the whole upgrade might last as long as a month.

While this upgrade will have many different focuses, the main one is something I’ve stressed about a lot on Ningin, Community. There will be a lot more things you can do to interact with the users on Ningin. There will be a lot more interactions with other Asian media websites. Probably most importantly, there will a lot more interactions in the offline world as well with event happenings and charity organizations. The latter isn’t going to happen right away, but it is a major goal of ours.

Looking back, it’s hard to believe that Ningin has only been on this path since March of this year. The amount of growth in users and content has definitely been great! Who knows where we’ll be if we continue at this pace.

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We’ve been quietly testing our newest community, GirlyBubble.com for about a week and we’re ready now to show the world! GirlyBubble is for young females with an appreciation of all things related to being a girl. GirlyBubble.com focuses on fashion, beauty, design, entertainment, food, culture, gadgets, gossip, and other girly curiosities.

Three bloggers form the core of GirlyBubble’s unique voice: Ming, Lan and Tiffany. Each brings her own interpretation of “girliness,” offering users a wide variety of subjects to read and discuss. Rather than catering to any unique point of interest such as fashion or celebrity gossip, GirlyBubble highlights “girliness” in its many forms and personal tastes to generate an open forum for the online female community. Participants can contribute their own discussions of what “girliness” means to them.

All sites within the Mixr Media network, such as Ningin and GirlyBubble, are tied together via a common login system which allows users to travel from one Mixr Media site to another and keep the same profiles, friends lists, and other personal information. Give GirlyBubble a look around, give us some feedback on it, and win a chance for a $100 gift certificate to buy anything on Amazon.com!

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For the 3rd time this year, we’ve changed the Ningin layout based on numerous feedback and critiques. So thanks to everyone who contributed their thoughts and opinions! We hope you find this incarnation a little easier to use and a little easier on the eyes. (You might press F5 to refresh your browser if things look weird.) Though keep in mind that Ningin is constantly a work in progress. There are many more features and applications we have on our roadmap. Not only that, but we’re in the process of adding many, many more bloggers in the next few weeks. Expect more events, more content partnerships, and more great things in general.

One minor change that we’ve made somewhat unceremoniously a couple of weeks ago is our tagline – from Asian Media Exchange to Asian Media Community. (How many people actually noticed that?) We feel that the word “community” fits us better because that’s in a nutshell who and what we are. With the help of you, our users, Ningin is a community of people interested in all things related to Asian media. Wonderful things tend to happen when you put people together with similar interests and that’s been a big driver of growth and ideas for us.

More »

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