Baidu

Chinese Internet-search giant Baidu.com— probably totally unfairly — has become embroiled in a public backlash over tainted milk.

The Beijing-based company has repeatedly denied speculation online that it censored information about tainted milk powder, which has killed four infants and sickened more than 6,200 in recent weeks, and accepted payments from dairy companies to keep negative items from appearing in its search results.

Baidu this week said it had been approached by several dairy producers but said it has ‘flat out refused’ to screen out unfavorable news and accused rivals of fanning the flames.

Baidu allows advertisers to pay their way up to higher positions within search results.

It integrates paid advertisements into its regular search listings to a greater extent than most search engines. For a popular search term such as ‘mobile phone,’ paid results take up almost the entire first page.

In the second quarter of this year, Baidu held 64.4% of China’s search-engine market by revenue, up from 60.7% in the first quarter.
Much more on this HERE.
Source: Wall Street Journal

National Library of China

The Chinese national library’s new building has opened to the public, and it the world’s third largest in terms of floor space.

With the addition of the new building, the library’s total area reached 250,000 square meters, behind only the national libraries in France and the United States.

The new building in western Beijing, which is considered the second phase construction of the library, covers an area of 80,538 square meters, combining storage rooms, reading rooms, a display area for ancient books and a digital library.

It has 2,900 seats and a capacity to cater to 8,000 readers daily with about 600,000 books.

Readers can also use wireless access to Internet on their own laptops or use any of the 460 computers in the new building. Palmtop digital book readers are also available to access the 200-terabytes of digital resources.

It also planned to open a library channel with a cable TV company to put on programs of its lectures and exhibitions, as well as a short message service on library information.

Deputy head Chen Li said, ‘In the age of Internet, we are introducing new technologies into the “old” library work.’

Yes, but can you access the whole of the library through the Internet? Apparently not. When that happens it will truly be in the age of the Internet. Not before.
Source: China View

Taobao.com

Chinese online auction and e-commerce website Taobao.com has recently announced its latest consumer protection plan, which (at first appearances quite strangely) includes blocking the search engines of Baidu, Google and Yahoo.

Apparently Taobao.com completely blocked the search engine of Baidu and it also partly blocks that of Google and Yahoo.

Taobao.com says that the blocks of search engines aim to eliminate fraud caused by ill-intentioned merchants. Through different blocking degrees over different search engines, it can prevent consumers from being cheated by illegal merchants who gain consumers trust by pay per click and search optimization techniques.

Statistics offered by Taobao.com show that over 80% of consumers complaints are caused by a small number of unscrupulous businesses. Comments on blogs query the reasons for this blocking of search sites.

Taobao.com is owned by Alibaba Group in China.
Source: Yahoo

Marketing pitch not welcome

There is a surging wave of the transfer of commerce to mobile Internet. Whether this is to be viewed as an advance depends on, first, whether it is voluntary and, second, whether it works from an existing database.

Data from CCW Research shows that mobile commercial business is developing rapidly in China at a compound annual growth rate of more than 30%. In 2008, the market scale will amount to over RMB30 billion. The advent of 3G mobile phone technology will advance it considerably.

Zhang Yong, an expert on mobile business from China Academy of Telecommunication Research, sees mobile e-commerce becoming a major core area of marketing. His view is that mobile marketing, by such features as being accurate, efficient, prompt, and interactive, is becoming a new marketing mode.

Certainly, what attracts enterprises and merchants is the amount of mobile-phone users in China, which nearly amounts to 600 million, far more than the over 200 million netizens.

If, however, the result is going to be a massive increase in spam on mobile telephones the question has to be: who is going to pay for it? The user or the merchant.

Nie Hailin, a Deputy Director of Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Commerce, expressed that with mobile e-commerce, an innovation had been realized in the field of e-commerce application.
Much more on this complex question HERE.
Source: China Economic Net

Ctrip publicity brochures

Revenues and profits from China’s major online travel business rose strongly in the second quarter of the year.

Ctrip.com saw quarterly revenue rise by 30% to $55 million, compared to the same period one year earlier.

Net profits were up 34% over the same period, reaching $17 million.

The company’s positive results were driven by a surge in online sales of air tickets.

Ticketing revenues rose 44% to $25m.

China’s increasingly affluent population is using air travel more for business trips, vacations and family visits. In addition, China has recently phased out paper tickets in favour of e-tickets, allowing ticket sales to be transacted completely online.

Apart from air ticket sales, Ctrip’s other main revenue generator is its hotel bookings business, which increased 14% over the year to $29 million.
Source: VNU Net

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

You have to be a bit careful here. The headline is literally true. Boosted by strong economic growth and government support for rural network construction, the online population in rural areas of China grew by an impressive 127.7%  last year, three times more than the expansion rate in urban areas.

And that means that China has edged out the US to have the world’s largest internet population of 221 million.

China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) said about 29.17 million out of China’s 73 million new internet users, or 40%, were from the countryside, raising the internet population in rural areas to 52.62 million,

All absolutely true. But note carefully that most internet surfers were still from cities and online games are still a major, major force. Yes, the rural  population is getting connected but it will be a few years before it is using the Internet in the sense that it is generally meant.

The official Xinhua news agency reported 53.3% among rural residents who have yet to go online do not know how to use computers or the Internet, while 23.1% lacked Internet facilities.
Most of the rural Internet users — 61.4% — go online for news. Think of it as a selective television set.

And the country still lags well behind the U.S. in the percentage of their respective populations that use the Internet.

China currently has only a 16% Internet penetration among its residents — lower than the worldwide average of 19.1%, and well below the 72% usage rate in the U.S.

China began allowing individuals to access the Internet via dial-up services in 1995. China has promised full and unrestricted Internet access during August’s 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing despite concerns among security officials about possible cyberattacks.
Source: ComputerWorld and  The Economic Times

MediaG3, a developer for broadband wireless product, has entered a partnership with the Academy of Broadcasting Science (ABS), a division of China central government State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT).

The idea is perhaps to offer interactive TV coverage and high speed Internet in areas of China.

Peiyu Guo, Director of Information Technology Institute, of ABS said, ‘Broadband wireless technology has tremendous market potential in China, especially in vast regions where cable coverage is not feasible. Proven and cost effective broadband wireless technology and applications are two key solutions to satisfy the huge demand in China. We are very pleased to work with MediaG3 to explore and develop broadband wireless applications for connectivity and delivery.’

There have been two years of testing and now a pilot program is being planned.

In the interior regions and rural areas, there are about 900 million Chinese who are under- served or have no connections to the Internet or interactive TV programs.
MediaG3 may be able to fill that gap.
Source: Earth Times

Some facts on which to ponder:

China’s software sector generated RMB580 billion ($80.8 billion) in revenue in 2007, an annual increase of 20.8%.
Sales of software products surged 22.5% to RMB201.7 billion.
China’s phone subscribers, mobile and fixed line combined, are expected to grow by more than 60 million in 2008 to hit a total of 976 million, according to the Ministry of Information Industry.
China’s fixed-line and mobile phone subscribers will account for 27.1 percent and 46.4% of the population, respectively. The continuous falling of mobile communication charges has directly led to a sharp increase in mobile phone subscribers and some people even replaced their fixed-lines with mobile phones.
In 2007, China’s mobile phone subscribers increased by 86.22 million, while fixed-line subscribers fell by 2.33 million.
By the end of 2007, China had 370 million fixed-line subscribers and 530 million mobile subscribers. The two figures combined accounted for a fifth of the world’s total phone subscribers.
Some 99.5 percent of the country’s villages have access to telephone links, and the broadband connection reached 92% of the villages nationwide.
The number of Internet users in China passed 200 million in 2007, the China Internet Network Information Centre said in its semi-annual report on Internet use.
China’s Internet population stood at 210 million at the end of last year, up 53% from the same time in 2006 when there were 137 million. That figure puts China just 5 million users away from becoming the world’s largest wired nation — and with only about 16% of the population online. At its current growth rate, China will become the world’s top Internet market sometime in the next few months.
China’s most popular Internet application is online music, used by 86.6% of those surveyed, followed by instant messaging with 81%. E-mail placed only fifth, with 56.5%.
China’s information industry authority plans to expand broadband service to more than 95% of the nation’s villages in 2008.

David Wolf, CEO of Wolf Group Asia, a Beijing-based technology consultancy, said, ‘China’s admittedly impressive user statistics hide an important fact: only a fraction of those users have regular access to a PC.’ Most of them are using Internet cafes.
Source: PC World and Beijing 2008 and China.com

Streaming videos from Chinese YouTube may, just may, see a severe decline in popularity.

The Chinese government has announced new rules that could block all but a few video sites from reaching Chinese viewers.

The regulations, posted to Web sites of China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and the Ministry of Information Industry, require that effective January 31, all online video outlets must avoid politically or morally objectionable content (not an impossible request) and obtain a government-issued permit.

The thought it that while the statute could limit online video to state-controlled media sites and ban foreign-owned video-hosting sites like YouTube and MySpace, it may also go unenforced, serving more as a threat to coerce video-hosting sites to police themselves.

Ben Edelman, a professor at Harvard Business School and an Internet filtering researcher, said rather than banning sites like YouTube altogether, says, Beijing’s new rules may be ‘a shot across the bow.’

Ben Edelman is probably perfectly correct in saying the government lacks the technology to filter video as selectively as it filters text. That being so it may hope to scare sites into censoring the content that the government wants banned.

He asked, ‘Would the government actually block all video sites, save for registered sites, in one fell swoop? Maybe not. Their goals are just as well served by the threat.’

MySpace China, a Chinese-language version of the News Corp. social networking site, already practices some degree of self-censorship. The site has been criticized by bloggers for demanding that users report one another when they spot posts with objectionable political content.

Its terms of service prohibit members from discussions that would ‘leak state secrets or undermine the government,’ or ’spread rumors and disturb the social order.’

MySpace China, however, hosts no video. Neither MySpace China nor its U.S.-based counterpart could be reached for comment.

It remains to be seen whether the original MySpace, one of the most popular U.S. video sites, would follow MySpace China’s self-censorship model to obey the Chinese government’s new rule.

Would YouTube, which is owned by Google, be willing to censor content to comply with tightened Chinese regulations? Probably.

YouTube spokesperson Ricardo Reyes, said, ‘We obey local laws wherever we have local sites.’ YouTube hosts a Hong Kong site, which would fall under Chinese law. But its terms of service do not contain the political prohibitions included in MySpace China’s terms of service.

John Palfrey, a Harvard Law professor and researcher at the Open Net Initiative, worries that video sites without government ties could be wiped out altogether in preparation for the public relations battles surrounding the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

He said, ‘This could be bad news for free speech and bad news for economic development. And it could make it very hard for Web 2.0 businesses to compete in China.’

In fact, no one outside of the Chinese government — least of all the affected sites themselves — knows to what degree the tightened regulations will be enforced or how complicated it will be for video sites to get government permits.

A statement from YouTube expresses, above all, bewilderment. ‘China’s new regulations for online video could be a cause for concern, depending on the interpretation. Like other companies, we are studying the new rules.’
Source: Forbes