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Close-up on Guangdong winners of the 19th Chinese Outstanding Industrial Design Awards

Two Guangdong enterprises, Tencent and Midea, received gold awards at the 19th Chinese Outstanding Patented Inventions and Industrial Design awards.

Considered by some the ‘Nobel Prize in the Field of Intellectual Property Rights’.It is the highest award jointly issued by State Intellectual Property Office in the field of intellectual property in China and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) for original invention and design.

Stories of these two award winning Guangdong-based companies’ innovation follow below:

Tencent’s Graphical User Interface (GUI) for mobile apps

It is the first time Tencent has won gold at the Chinese Outstanding Industrial Design Awards, and is also the first gold award to be won by Internet company with its Graphical User Interface (GUI) design.

Traditionally, Chinese people give red envelopes filled with money, known as "Hongbao," to friends and relatives during Chinese New Year.

Tapping into this tradition, Tencent enabled users to send and receive these red envelopes on their smartphones. It has since become somewhat of a cultural phenomenon.

Statistics show that 18.3 billion people (person-time) have exchanged red envelopes on mobile QQ since the patent was applied to the platform, with especially high volumes during Chinese festivals.

WeChat showed some 230 billion messages sent via the app from Feb 15th to 20th, this year, with a whopping 768 million people using the red packet service.

The digital red envelope has become a useful way for people to both send their wishes to friends and relatives or even just day to day payment.

The GUI receiving the award was designed for this digital red envelope feature of Tencent’s social media platforms like QQ and WeChat. Every detail of the design is centered around providing a better user experience, through a simple interface.

The GUI captures the feeling of sending or receiving a real red envelope.

There is a subtle shadow effect on the cover and the bottom of the red envelope lending a three-dimensional feel, and showing that the red envelope is unopened. Lively, eye-catching yellow is used as secondary color to highlight transaction value in the red envelope.

Furthermore new forms of red envelopes such as "short video envelopes”, “voice password envelopes” were introduced to cater to more users and more occasions.

By the end of May, 2018, the number of patent applications for Tencent had reached 16,000, with over 6,000 authorized patents in China. It has 7,000 items filed for Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) international patents and over 1,000 items are patented in America.


Midea’s rice cooker (MB-FZ4094)

Chinese consumers have an ever increasing demand for high quality, great tasting rice, and some of them chose to spend a lot of money aboard, purchasing Japanese or Korean rice cookers.

Therefore, Midea has striven to make a premium rice cooker to serve users a perfect bowl of rice..

Midea has 25 years of research in the field and researchers have started to trace the cooking methods, and have traveled over China to study various kinds of rice, different eating habits,food culture, etc.

Finally, they found that the most authentic taste of rice is that rice cooked on a traditional stove with firewood. Therein lies the problem of using modern technology (rice cooker) to restore that good taste appreciated by consumers.

That product winning the award was designed to capture the look of an ancient firewood stove, a combination of traditional appearance with modern high-quality standards and a luxurious feel.

Analysis of rice cooked by both stove and common IH (induction heat) rice cooker, highlighted the key links for cooking great rice: heating with strong thermal power, boiling and stirring, stewing and supplementary cooking.

A range of technology is used to simulate the heating system of firewood stoves. For instance, it applies multistage IH heating technology to increase the heating surface; and offers continuous heating at low power.

As of the end of May, 2018, the number of patent applications for Midea Small Domestic Appliances had reached 16,000, with 8,000 patents already granted.

Author: Will

Editor: Simon

 

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