The ranks of Tuscany could scarce forbear to cheer. A group of leading international record companies have lost their lawsuit against Baidu.com, for the alleged illegal downloading and sharing of their music.

The seven companies, including EMI, SONY BMG, Warner Music and Universal Music, in 2005, accused Baidu.com of engaging in illegal downloading and playing 137 pieces of music owned by the record companies online without their permission.

They demanded a public apology from Baidu, the suspension of Baidu’s download service and compensation of RMB1.67 million ($226,000).

The People’s High Court of Beijing said in its final ruling Baidu’s service does not constitute an infringement.

Last November, Beijing’s First Intermediate Court also ruled that Baidu’s service, which provides web links to the music, does not constitute an infringement as all the music is downloaded from web servers of third parties.

The record companies appealed to the higher court.

Baidu argued that the MP3 search engine it provided was the same as other search engines providing links to web pages, news and pictures.

Some web servers have put a huge amount of copyrighted music onto the Internet and offered them to millions of netizens without permission from copyright owners.

Baidu said it searched all music file formats through the Internet, such as “.mp3″ or “.wav”, making no distinction between copyrighted and pirated songs.

If the other side was anything but the music companies then one might wonder about the ramifications. But this cartel has controlled, and been very successful in controlling, music for many years. And not for the benefit of the artist.

Read the biography of Louis Armstrong (pictured here) and weep at how much money the mercenary music industry robbed from the greatest trumpet player of them all. He was still working for much needed money when he died.

Now Baidu has won.

In our illustration Jennifer Lopez is complaining she has been pirated by a lot of Chinese netizens. At least, that is what the writer thinks she is saying.
Source: China View

The Microsoft Yahoo nonsense which is currently proceeding brings Baidu under the spotlight.

If you can think back a bit we may be in the same over-heated area we were in 2000. Then analyst Henry Blodget of Merrill Lynch said Yahoo price potential was around $425 even though at the time they were near the $300 mark.

He was more than somewhat off the mark.

Yahoo dropped like a stone in a muddy pond by more than 95% and ended in the $10 area. Recovered since then, of course. But it was an awful warning as to how far enthusiasm can go.

Citi thinks Baidu is a good buy and has increased its one year price target from $350 to $415.

This logic is, in a sense, helped by the fact the shares have almost doubled in the last month from the low $200s.

Past experience would tell us that last year they went up too far, too fast and are due for a correction. And that will not be in the direction suggested by Citi.

Now let us try pure reason.

The way matters stand at the moment the market is saying Baidua is worth nearly $13 billion. To put this into perspective add together most of the American airlines and their total worth is less.

Yet these airlines are estimated to generate revenues in 2009 of $86 billion.
A billion here, a billion there and suddenly your are talking real money.
This equates to more than 118 times Baidu’s expected revenues of $731 million.

Even though mathematics are not my strong point and in shares I am a conservative Welsh Calvinist Methodist there seems to me to be some sort of lack of logic herein that.

Baidu’s shares are selling at 91 times estimates of the 2008 profits and 57 times 2009 estimates of $6.54.
Google is selling at only 23 times 2009 earnings estimates.

OK, forget the airlines. Think of Google. And remember that Google is chip, chip, chipping away at Baidu’s share of the market in China.

Anything could happen because this is China and sometimes irrational decisions can be made. But, at the moment, I am not thinking of putting any of my meager earnings into Baidu. The lottery looks a lot more attractive.
Source: Seeking Alpha

Baidu.com is going to make a serious move on the online game sector in China.

The country’s No. 1 Internet search engine provider has already announced expansion into the instant messaging and online auction business.

Now, through cooperation with five game operators, including Shanda Entertainment, Baidu has launched its game site.

It is initially offering six browser games: Zongheng Tianxia, Tiankong Zuo’an, Fangbianmian Sanguo, Luanwu Chunqiu, Empire, and XBA Manager. You can see the basic idea at http://youxi.baidu.com.

At the moment these are free altough it is unlikely that will long continue.

Baidu, in a statement, said, ‘The games are Web-based, therefore they don’t require high-standard computers. The games on Baidu’s platform are green and healthy, without too much blood.’

Whether that is a sure and certain way to success is open to debate.

China’s online game market revenue was RMB12.8 billion ($1.83 billion) in 2007, and the figure will hit RMB40.1 billion in 2011, according to Analysys International, a Beijing-based IT consulting firm.

Robin Li, Baidu chief executive and chairman said Baidu’s new services aim to improve user loyalty and profitability of the company’s core search business.

Robin Lin said Baidu Hi, its new instant message tool, has been in public testing, and Baidu’s auction Website will debut this year.
Source: China View

IM instant messenger penetration rate is in China is much higher than email (81% vs. 57%), and Tencent has built a cash machine around its popular IM client QQ. Baidu would like some, please. If you want to crash a market the key is you should do it better. IM from Baidu, which is called Baidu Hi, is out for public beta.

Baidu Hi has almost all the basic features which an IM in China should have, such as voice/video chat, file transfer, IM group and interface personalization. Baidu Hi is bundled with Baidu Space which has over 920k concurrent users already, which will definitely be helpful to Baidu Hi’s promotion.

The integration of Baidu Space is just the first step, all other Baidu community products, such as Baidu Zhidao and Baidu Tieba, will also be integrated with Baidu Hi eventually.

Baidu Hi is quite smart with viral marketing, only users who has invited at least 30 friends successfully are qualified to have right to create IM groups.

It was hoped Baidu Hi would adopt open standard XMPP protocol instead of building its own proprietary protocol. By exploiting the power of an open source community, Baidu can build an open platform to compete with the QQ.

Now it has decided to go it alone. And it is up against QQ, AliWangWang, MSN Live Messenger, GTalk, Skype and others.

Yes, it is very, very good. That is not, perhaps, enough. It should be startlingly better. Baidu has an extensive user base and strong community products, Baidu has a good base to promote its IM software. But whether it can get to a dominant position is another thing. It will be very, very difficult.
Source: China Web2.0

Baidu.com is the leading Chinese language internet search engine. It has 72% share of the Chinese language web search market and seems to be in an unattackable position.

Its fourth quarter revenues of $78.3 million exceeded market expectations of $77.2 million. Sequentially the revenue was 18% higher and 110% higher if mesured year on year.

For the year, its revenue of $239 million, represented a gain of 123% over the previous year’s revenues of $107 million, and beat market expectations of $232 million.

The company’s online marketing revenue grew to $78.1 million, and was 111.2% higher than the previous year.

Which is not bad.

To gain a wider market share, Baidu has recently launched a Japanese search engine. In addition, it is currently building its own C2C online auction platform which will begin to generate revenues for the company in the upcoming fiscal year 2008.

But. despite all this, its share price did not show significant upward movement. Having closed at $261.90 the day before the results, the stock price reached a high of $280.44 in the following trading session, but closed at $264.50. Since then, the share price has been constantly slipping — be it marginally — and is currently trading at $250.32.

How successful does founder Robin Li, seen in our illustration, have to be to make the figures soar?
Source: Seeking Alpha

Chinese search engine Baidu.com is preparing to launch its own instant messaging service to gain a footing in the Web application that is the second most used in China.

The country’s most used search engine is recruiting engineers for development of its own IM product, with preference to those ‘with experience in reputable IM companies.’

Company officials said they did not have a timetable for the IM product yet, or how much they will spend on the development.

In a sense it is approaching this in exactly the opposite way to the market leader. Tencent was founded by Pony Ma in Shenzhen, China, in November 1998 with it messaging service being officially launched in Feb 1999.
In the 2006 Q3 report it had 221.4 million active users and it has climbed massively since then.
In 2005 Tencent opened QQ Lab which acts as QQ’s Web2.0 service incubator. So far it has launched Tencent’s web2.0 service QQVideo and a social bookmarking service called QQ Bookmark is in public beta testing.
Richard Chang, the founder and director of QQ Labs said that after the message service QQ has built up several more excellent services — QQ.com, QQ Game, QQ Zone, QQ Show, Paipai.com, and more. All of these services have been seamlessly integrated with QQ IM and can be accessed with a user’s QQ account.

Thus Baidu.com is starting late in the day and is against solidly entrenched opposition with QQ,.com now listed as one of the top ten sites in the world.

On the other hand Baidu has rarely put a foot wrong. Possibly because it is inspired by beautiful woman.

The name ‘Baidu’ was inspired by a poem written during the Song Dynasty. The poem compares the search for a retreating beauty — ‘. . . hundreds and thousands of times, for her I searched in chaos, suddenly, I turned by chance, to where the lights were waning, and there she stood.’

If Baidu is that persistent no doubt it will make a serious impact on the IM market.
Source: Shanghai Daily and research.

And even the ranks of Tuscany could scarce forbear to cheer. A group of leading international record companies have lost their lawsuit against Baidu.com for the alleged illegal downloading and sharing of their music.

Baidu is one of China’s largest Internet search engines. Arrayed against were seven companies, including EMI, SONY BMG, Warner Music and Universal Music.

In 2005 they accused Baidu.com of engaging in illegal downloading and playing 137 pieces of music owned by the record companies online without their permission.

(Note, with some amusement, that Happy Birthday to You, while not included in this suit, is seen by the music companies to be owned by them. It was written by American sisters Patty Hill and Mildred J. Hill in 1893 but the music companies claim that one note was later split and three words changed and that makes it copyright. They sued the Girl Guides for singing it.)

This time these downright, forthright, upright, stalwart upholders of the cultural rights of the United States demanded a public apology from Baidu, the suspension of its download service and compensation of RMB1.67 million ($226,000).

The People’s High Court of Beijing said in its final ruling that Baidu’s service does not constitute an infringement.

Last November, Beijing’s First Intermediate Court also ruled that Baidu’s service, which provides web links to the music, does not constitute an infringement. All the music is downloaded from web servers of third parties.

The record companies, of course, appealed to the higher court and lost again.

Baidu argued that the MP3 search engine it provided was the same as other search engines providing links to web pages, news and pictures.

Some web servers have put a huge amount of copyrighted music onto the Internet and offered them to millions of netizens without permission from copyright owners.

Baidu said it searched all music file formats through the Internet, such as “.mp3″ or “.wav”, making no distinction between copyrighted and pirated songs. It had nothing to do with our illustration which shows music written in 1893. And, as far as one can tell, you can play it without being sued.
Source: China Views

Netease has a new homepage to allow for the fact that the search engine Yodao has become the official search engine of the site.

Yodao, run by 163.com, is now out of beta — the test phase which can last many months, or in the case of Google, years — and now integrates many services from Netease, the biggest online game company in China, while, at the same time, still continuing to search like Google.

The company’s CEO Ding Lei says he expect the new website would become the No. 1 search engine within three years.

It took two and a half years for over 100 technicians to create the search engine. Ding Lei is positive that quality will tell. ‘If we provide better services, we will have many customers. They never refuse better products.’

China’s search engine market has not fully developed. Only 10% of Chinese enterprises have their own websites.

Already Wang Zhansheng, CFO of Baidu.com, has commented that the future market is able to support more new search engine companies. The reviews suggest that the Yodao Reader, while not better than the Google Reader, is fast, stable and Ajax-powered.

Yodao News Search is also new. Like Google News and Baidu News, it generates headlines on the subject searched for automatically.

All of which may bring some changes to the Chinese search market where Baidu is in a massive lead with Google - this is an unusual experience of that continuously booming company — trailing along in the rear. If Google is now beaten by Yodao then Google will be sending messages to its subsidiary in China that it is not happy, not happy at all.
Source: China Web 2.0

China Tech News reports that China’s largest search engine Baidu.com has closed a deal with music giant EMI to start a free music service.

‘Baidu will set up a special “EMI Music Zone” in its music search channel which will legally stream all of EMI Music’s Chinese repertoire, including recordings from artists such as Jolin Tsai, Stephanie Sun, David Tao, Sandy Lam and Richie Ren. While consumers listen to the music for free they will be exposed to Internet advertising, and EMI and Baidu will share the revenue generated by the advertising.’

It is a deal between unlikely partners.

A traditional music provider fighting piracy with what could be thought heavy-handed methods and a Chinese service one of whose assets was access to pirated digital goodies.

The young model in the spotlight is wearing what I think, think, is a new logo. The deal was signed in the Peninsula Hong Kong and was brought by helicopter which landed on the roof. I think. Try NetEase for the somewhat incomprehensible story. It may well be written in rap or hiphop or some damn thing.

How lucrative the deal is going to be is still unclear. It is part of a growing trend in China — offering free goods or services in exchange for advertising. Video sharing service Tudou.com, three times the size of YouTube.com in China, has recently started to introduce advertisements.
Source: China Herald

What are the top ten ‘What is’ questions searched by Chinese Internet users — according to Baidu?

1. What is a mutual fund? 2. What are warrants? . What are stock-index futures?4. What are stocks? 5. What is e-commerce? 6. What is love? 7. What is 3G? (Third generation wireless technology) 8. What is corporate culture? 9. What is ’scientific view of development?’10. What is OEM? (Original Equipment Manufacture)

The Google top ten “What is” questions by English users around the world:

1. What is love? 2. What is autism? 3. What is RSS? 4. What is lupus? 5. What is SAP? 6. What is Bluetooth? 7. What is Emo? (For those of us who do not keep up with modern trends it is a style of rock music) 8. What is Java? 9. What is HPV (human papillomavirus)? 10. What is gout?

Now the top ten ‘How to’ questions searched by Chinese Internet users — according to Baidu:

1. How to reduce weight? 2. How to speculate in stocks? 3. How to open up the registration form? 4. How to lighten your skin [a beauty treatment popular in China]? 5. How to apply make up? 6. How to buy mutual funds? 7. How to make money? 8. How to start a business? 9. How to kiss? 10. How to manage wealth?

Compare it to Google’s top ten:

1. How to kiss? 2. How to draw? 3. How to knit? 4. How to hack? 5. How to dance? 6. How to crochet? 7. How to meditate? 8. How to flirt? 9. How to levitate? 10. How to skateboard?

Source: China Digital Times