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  • China targets Google and Baidu in crackdown on 'vulgar' websites

    Chinese officials today launched a crackdown on "vulgar" websites including Google and the country's leading search engine, Baidu. Officials named 19 sites they said had failed to censor inappropriate content despite warnings or that had not done so swiftly enough, "harming" young people's physical and mental health. State television, which showed officials seizing equipment from an office, reported that the ministry of public security, along with other government bodies, announced the crackdown at a meeting.

    Matej 1 day ago | Comment this

  • China's internet 'spin doctors'

    China is using an increasing number of paid "internet commentators" in a sophisticated attempt to control public opinion.

    Matej 19 days ago | Comment this

  • China’s impact on the semiconductor industry: 2008 ...

    Andrej 30 days ago | Comment this

  • Can China Adjust to the US Adjustment?

    For the past ten years the global balance of payments has been dominated by the trade and investment relationship between China and the US. This relationship is now undergoing a major shift. Most large economies will be affected, and to the extent that their economic policies do not accommodate this shift, they are likely to fail, in much the same way that economic policy failed in the 1930s. China runs a massive current account surplus with the US and, in recycling this surplus, an equally large capital account deficit. This recycling has been both the main source of the global liquidity that has engulfed the world until recently and a constraining factor in the global economy. Given their magnitude it is impossible for either country to adjust without a major counterbalancing adjustment from the other, but it is far from clear that policy-makers on either side, especially in China, have a clear grasp of how big the necessary adjustments must be. The result is likely to be a steep drop in global growth, much of it borne by China, and possibly even a collapse in global trade.

    Matej 38 days ago | Comment this

  • Workers riot in south China over unemployment

    Hundreds of laid off workers rioted in southern China amid a dispute over severance pay, smashing offices of a toy factory and clashing with police, state press said Wednesday. The unrest in Guangdong province, the heartland of China's export-oriented light industry, is the latest in a series of protests that have flared across the country amid rising unemployment linked to the global economic crisis.

     

    Matej 38 days ago | Comment this

  • Kaixin001: China’s Apple of Social Networks

    Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Alan Rutledge, who formerly worked as a developer for Idealab, the startup incubator behind Google Picasa and Yahoo Overture.

    Kaixin001, the latest newcomer to the Facebook clone wars in China, is China’s fastest growing social network having amassed a staggering 7.5 million users in the first 5 months since it launched in May 2008. The site tripled Twitter’s traffic reach in the month of September alone and is currently the 250th most popular site on Alexa worldwide.

    Compared with rival incumbent Xiaonei, which targets college students, Kaixin001 appeals to white-collar office workers with a simpler UI that is more intuitive to older audiences. This is a significant detail in China, where one in four college students does not own a computer and can only access Xiaonei by walking to an Internet Cafe and paying by the minute. White-collar office workers by comparison, spend an average of nine hours a day in front of the computer.

    Kaixin001 succeeds simply by cloning only the most successful Facebook applications and bringing them to the Chinese market before anyone else. Examples of viral hits that they have cloned are:

    • Friends for Sale: Females have an unfair advantage in this game thanks to China having one of the highest male-to-female ratios in the world.
    • Parking Wars: Ironically most people in China can’t afford a real car, which makes this game all the more compelling.
    • iLike: Up until recent crackdowns, the Chinese equivalent allowed you to upload and share your entire music collection with your friends.
    • Where I’ve Been: This application defaults to a province map of China because most people have never left the country.

    A non-clone worthy of note is Online Storage, a cloud-based file sharing application that harks back to Facebook’s early forays into peer-to-peer file sharing, when Sean Parker of Napster-fame was still president of the fledgling startup.

    Blatant cloning may be shunned in the Valley, but in China and other parts of the world, cloning is the expectation of financial backers who benefit from the lower investment risk profile. Being too slow to clone has in fact hurt Xiaonei, which is now being overshadowed by Kaixin001’s 90% month-to-month growth rate.

    As a fledgling 20-man startup with limited resources, why does Kaixin001 develop all of its apps? At a time when the Western World is embracing open web platforms, this approach strikes us as counter-intuitive and even backwards. Chinese web platforms, however, face several critical issues:

    • Limited access to capital: Venture capital is scarce in China. By comparison, close to a quarter billion dollars has been pumped into Facebook applications to-date.
    • Weak online ad markets: Chinese web companies rely heavily on virtual goods and micro-transactions; neither model works for most of Kaixin001’s applications.
    • Rampant software piracy: There are proportionately fewer developers available to build 3rd party applications in China due to limited job opportunities as a direct result of piracy keeping the market for software stagnant.
    • The Language Barrier: Most open source languages and documentation are available primarily in English. Chinese people who would otherwise make good programmers struggle with this additional hurdle.

    The 700 third-party applications on Xiaonei have a huge variability in quality. Kaixin001 has only 25 applications, yet it retains complete control over quality and and has the speed and focus needed to bring well-tuned viral hits to the Chinese market faster than its competitors—perhaps the better strategy in hindsight.

    Hundreds of thousands of people quite regularly visit kaixin.com instead of the correct kaixin001.com domain name. Recently, Xiaonei’s parent company purchased the kaixin.com domain name with plans to launch a Kaixin001 clone that would steal its rivals users. This effectively makes Kaixin a clone of a clone of a clone. Amazing.

    Kaixin001 was founded by a former executive from Sina.com (the Yahoo! of China) and recently closed a $4-5 million first round from Northern Light Venture Capital.

    Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

    Andrej 40 days ago | Comment this | private

  • China’s Heavy Industry Feels Effects of Global Slowdown

    It is happening faster than most anyone predicted: China’s economy, long the world’s fastest-growing major economy, is slowing down. Economists are forecasting that after growing nearly 12 percent last year, China’s economy could slow to 5.5 percent in the fourth quarter of this year — a stunning retreat for a country accustomed to boom times.

    Matej 41 days ago | Comment this

  • China's richest man disappears

    CHINA'S richest man, the $US6 billion electronics magnate Huang Guangyu, has disappeared from his home into a vortex of speculation about corruption and stock market manipulation.

    Matej 43 days ago | Comment this

  • China issues first definition of Internet addiction

    Chinese doctors released the country's first diagnostic definition of Internet addiction over the weekend, amid efforts to address an increasing number of psychological problems that reportedly result from Internet overuse. Tao Ran, a medical expert at Beijing's Military General Hospital, where the definition was developed, said it was also the first time for China to officially designate hospital psychiatric units to treat such cases. Symptoms of addiction included yearning to get back online, mental or physical distress, irritation and difficulty concentrating or sleeping.

    Matej 56 days ago | Comment this

  • Is This China's 'New Deal'?

    Only 20 percent of foreign-invested firms in the region are seeing a profit, down from 90 percent when the boom was at its peak, according to provincial trade authorities. Tens of thousands of factory workers are now out of work and social unrest is becoming a real threat with which the central government must contend. There have been several reports of workers protesting after their companies shut down. Local governments have stepped in and started paying the workers back wages.

    Matej 56 days ago | Comment this

  • Things Scoble learned in China so far

    If you want to compete with your web service and keep copying from happening, do two things: 1. let users upload streaming, live, video. That drives the censors here nuts. 2. Make your system totally open so your users can leave. The Chinese don’t understand that concept. They love cloning walled garden approaches like Facebook. Even that won’t guarantee success here, they have resources for cloning services that you just wouldn’t believe.

    Matej 56 days ago | Comment this

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