… is supposed to stand for “organizing.” But, as we reported earlier in the week, the sale of the second batch of Olympics tickets “organized” by the Beijing games’ planning committee quickly turned into a debacle, with only a handful of tickets getting sold and the throngs lining up around the block at Bank of China branches around the country being told to try again another day. The reason was that people buying tickets online can request them far more quickly than their counterparts who actually go and queue up. They also happened to have the added advantage, which apparently went unnoticed by BOCOG, of being able to submit multiple requests for tickets by simply clicking a bunch of times. Our pal Imagethief has a good post on the episode here (more after the jump): (more…)

China tech-watcher Paul Denlinger’s post about the country’s decrepit internet cafes (which he calls “shitholes and firetraps“) has been making the rounds among the China blogging elite lately. Beijing-based Wikipedia expert Andrew Lih agreed with Denlinger’s view in rather milder language, calling them “digital opium dens.” Kaiser Kuo, a CER alumnus who’s gone on to bigger and better things - like being Ogilvy’s China new media boss, also riffed on Denlinger’s views.

In short, Denlinger said that the majority of China’s internet cafes were terribly unpleasant places to spend your time: smoke-filled, poorly lit and generally dingy. In a follow-up post, he asked, why hasn’t some smart entrepreneur started franchising internet cafes on the scale of a McDonald’s or Starbucks (he even mentions Apple, but that seems a little implausible to us)? The opportunities are there for the taking.

It seems someone has been thinking just that for awhile now. We read a news item in the Asian Venture Capital Journal in September reporting on Intel Capital’s second-round investment in BigCafe (China) Holding Corp. The amount invested was undisclosed. But what is known is that BigCafe (please, guys, lose the heavy Flash intro) was started in 2006 and has 1,000 net cafes around the country operating under its own brand. It plans to double that number by year’s end (perhaps underscoring the futility of the government’s supposed freeze on new internet cafes through the rest of the year), and it owns another 10,000 outlets that operate under different brand names, which it bought recently.

BigCafe doesn’t just run its own chain. It’s also apparently targeting some of those firetraps Denlinger fingered. It provides management services like staff training, marketing consulting and advising on property insurance (important for any fire hazard) and financial services.

The cafe chain looks like it’s in good hands. Prominent Chinese blogger Isaac Mao’s United Capital Investment was a first-found investor in BigCafe. Intel certainly thinks so. An Intel Capital spokesman told the AVCJ that “BigCafe is poised to play a major role in the internet cafe industry and Chinese users will benefit.”

Highlights from the last week of China business news: Hu Jintao has a few aces up his sleeve in the run-up to the party congress; the world’s largest standing army, the PLA, gets in on this whole ‘internet’ thing.

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Highlights from the last week of China business news: A minister calls a mining accident a “natural disaster”; the Shanghai Composite Index crosses the 5,000 mark while new securities regulations are introduced

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Another Wall Street Journal-related post. There’s been a lot of talk lately about Murdoch lifting the Online Journal’s paywall. In an August 8 conference call with analysts and investors, he was asked whether he had been thinking about it. His reply: “Yes, we are currently debating that, both within Dow Jones and in News Corporation and we’ve certainly come to no decision yet. It would be a very, I think be an expensive thing to do in the short-term. In the long-term, it may be a wonderful thing to do. But we’re looking at it closely.”

A free Journal would certainly be a boon to those of us interested in China, because the Journal, and Dow Jones newswires, has some of the best English-language coverage of the business and political scene here. If you read our daily briefs, you might have clicked on a few links to Journal stories, only to be stopped in your tracks by their paywall. Let’s hope Murdoch wins the argument and lets the Journal go free. Along with increased traffic, and the argument goes, increased ad revenue, a free-to-read Journal also means increased influence, which is something Murdoch has never been quick to turn down.

Here are some related links exploring the argument of a paid versus free Journal. Murdoch’s decision on this could well affect the way all media think about paywalls, since the Times’ walled-off section, Times Select, is reportedly faltering now as well.

Businessweek: The Case for Freeing the WSJ Online - According to this article, the Journal could make more than the Times in online ad revenues because it’s more targeted.

Silicon Alley Insider: Running the Numbers: Why Newspapers Are Screwed - Henry Blodget, a man who knows a little about fiddling with numbers, runs a thought experiment using the New York Times.

Seeking Alpha: Murdoch, Free The Wall Street Journal Online - Blogvangelist Jeff Jarvis highlights the attractiveness of the influence argument on Murdoch’s decision.

I accidentally typed in a Livejournal URL without feeding it through a web proxy just now, and, miraculously, the page loaded! Livejournal, an easy-to-use blog system popular with non-geeks, was blocked in China in March. It’s still unclear why it was targeted, after all, no known political activists or dissidents had Livejournal pages (maybe it lowered their street cred? It wouldn’t do to have cutesy mood icons on a post demanding democracy, after all) and the service was mainly popular with foreigners.  In any case,  now that it appears to be unblocked, LJ users can log on and read those ‘friends-only’ posts they couldn’t access through a proxy. Get going!

We got in to the office today, logged on to check our Yahoo! Mail and then … nothing! The page wouldn’t load. Imagine our dismay when we quickly attempted to load Yahoo! Chess, only for it to end in failure as well.

Our worst fears were confirmed by a visit to greatfirewallofchina.org which summarily flashed ‘BLOCKED’ on the screen.

A crawl through Google Blogsearch (since Technorati’s been blocked too) revealed this post, published 12 hours ago, also saying that Yahoo.com access had been stopped. A comment on the post says that there’s no access in Shenzhen either.

Let’s keep in mind that a Yahoo service, Flickr, has recently been blocked here.

Has Yahoo.com been deliberately “harmonized” (or purified, as Hu Jintao might say)? Or was it some technical malfunction or human error? We’ll find out in the next few days, I’m sure.

Rebecca Mackinnon and other GFW watchers, where are you? GFW police: Fine, take Yahoo, but leave Google!

Update: Pacific Epoch is feeling similarly frustrated, Shanghaiist weighs in: Upcoming.org, also Yahoo owned, is not accessible.

Update 2: All is well. Yahoo seems to be working fine now.

The Chinese-English language barrier has allowed innovative companies to carve out niches in the language learning market. The arbitrage of English and Chinese, in particular, can be a lucrative practise.

One company that’s been doing this for awhile is Praxis, which runs Chinesepod out of Shanghai. Chinesepod is a podcast and website that teaches users Chinese. The podcast is free, but users pay a subscription fee for extra services. Fees start at US$9 a month for the basic package, which includes access to PDFs of dialogues, to US$200 for a year with all the bells and whistles, which includes daily practice phone calls from a Chinesepod staff member.

I’ve spoken to the Chinesepod team at their cool warehouse office near Xintiandi, and they say they’re profitable (but won’t disclose figures). They’re certainly enthusiastic about the possibilities of ‘language-casting’ (my shorthand for language learning podcasting… which is a mouthful) and have been chatting up partners and investors to expand their operations. (more…)

Bill Gates may be the world’s most generous philanthropist, but that tag is usually overshadowed by the brickbats hurled his way for dominating our computing life with Microsoft Windows.

Now he’s combining his do-gooding with business with the $3 Microsoft Windows package for developing countries (terms and conditions apply).

At the heart of this is his stated desire to bridge the technology and innovation gap between rich and poor nations.

But, as PC World’s Harry McCracken pointed out, it’s also a delayed reaction to the Linux-ification of the developing world.

China, for example, favors the open-source Linux operating system. Projects like the $100 laptop, aimed at developing countries, run on Linux too.

Microsoft’s ultra-cheap Windows bundle will get students in poor countries hooked on Windows while they’re young and encourage them to continue their habits into adulthood, hopefully before they discover a better operating system.

It will also boost their piracy drive. Microsoft’s popularity in the developing world is aided in large part by enterprising software bootleggers who have made the operating system available to developing countries’ citizens for much less than $3 over the years. Now, Microsoft will at least be able to make some money from markets where they previously earned nothing.

Danwei.org’s Joel Martinsen has a good roundup here of online chatter in the Chinese internet about the tragic massacre at Virginia Tech Monday, where over 30 died. Many comments, he says, are shocked and sympathetic, with some ugly venting here and there. He also includes an interesting excerpt from a CCTV reporter’s blog:

A journalist with a CCTV news program wrote on her blog that this possibility ultimately caused their report to be scrapped. She comments:

Instinct at the time was: not doing it would be unacceptable and a dereliction of duty. However, to do it might run into temporary restrictions, and it might even be killed before being born. Regardless, the first thing is to get going on it. This was the opinion of the editor in chief, and also that of us workers….Originally, the thought was to come up with a plan as quickly as possible and let the leaders pass a verdict on it, but something unexpected came up: the leaders quickly “became aware of the serious nature of the issue” and “stopped up a hole that could be problematic for propaganda.”

Meanwhile, Beijing Newspeak, a blog written by a foreign copy editor working at Xinhua, has a post here on the mood in his state newsroom as it was revealed that the gunman was a Korean permanent resident of the US, not a Chinese citizen, as had been reported earlier:

In the end, we will never know how they planned to approach it but suffice to say the senior editors were delighted when “South Korea” was read out at the press conference. Back-slapping and congratulations ensued - one editor said that it would have been a inconceivable loss of face if the gunman had been Chinese. Xinhua can now go forth and write about the incident all they want but there is no doubt that if the gunman had been Chinese the reporting would have been understated to say the least. Galling really. To think a potential loss of face dwarfed a sense of responsibility to report such a tragic world news event.