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

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

This blog just misses out on the list of the most popular blogs in China. Damn and blast.

The most popular blog entries — the ones that have the most visits — so far this year on Sina blog are about celebrities.

The champion, with over 980,000 hits, is a short entry written by 25-year-old model and singer, Wei Jiaqing, who gained her national recognition after participating in the 2006 Super Girl singing competition. Not that the writer is an expert but I do not think she won.
In the entry, she told her fans that she already ended a contract with the company that managed the Super Girl. Her knowledge of matters technical means that she will not, as matters stand, be writing for China Economic Review.

Among the eight blog articles that have been viewed for more than 500,000 times, six fall into the paparazzi and celebrity journal categories, written by celebrities themselves or by bloggers specializing in star tales.

Sina hosts perhaps the largest number of celebrity blogs in China,

In one of the popular articles, which is from a paparazzi site, the blogger recounted the love story between famous Taiwanese actress Lin Qingxia (Brigitte Lin) and her three lovers. The entry is full of detailed anecdotes and old pictures, demonstrating the blogger’s rich knowledge. Which sorts of leaves us out of the picture although looking at the pictures of Brigitte Lin, seen here, we wish it could be otherwise.

The two non-paparazzi entries that reached the 500,000-hit mark concern nothing serious, either.

One of them is about China National Geography magazine’s project of searching for people with peculiar family names in China.
The other, on Bulldog, a blog site carrying more serious discussions about politics, culture and economy, only generated five-digit hit.s

From which was can assume that as much as the Internet has become an important political forum for Chinese public, it is an even more powerful entertainment medium.

A large number of Internet users in their teens and twenties, who are dedicated followers of the celebrity culture. Perhaps we should create our own celebritaries. Perhaps not.
Source: China in Transition

Ministry of Information Vice-Minister Lou Qinjian has announced that, as of September 2007, China had 172 million Internet users.

This figure represents a 10 million increase over the last count. That was in July by China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) which said China had 162 million Internet users.

This rate of increase is consistent with the rate of growth of China’s Internet population since January 2007, when CNNIC counted 137 million Internet users.

Work on the basis that about four million Chinese people go online for the first time every month.

The story of the great Internet Wall of China gets a big press — outside China. Most users do not, in fact, even notice that it is there. Those that do are mainly Westerners living in the country and using the Internet to search for news and information.

In China, the typical activity on the Internet is not to search for news and information. It is to search for entertainment in whatever form that might be; sometimes multi-user games, sometimes contact sites.

Yes, thousands of websites may have been shut down but that plainly does not deter Chinese people from going online. And, indeed, a substantial percentage of Chinese net users are unaware that they are restricted in access.

In the West it can be different but just as difficult. To illustrate this article a portrait of Lou Qinjian would be appropriate. Indeed, we have used one before. Go into Google and do a search under the minister’s name under Images and the picture we have here comes up first. Charming but most certainly not the minister.

Shares of the e-commerce company partly owned by Yahoo! will begin trading on November 6 in an offering to be co-managed by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley

Founder and chief executive officer Jack Ma, seen here, spoke to reporters to reveal details of the deal. The company expects to raise about $1.5 billion in an IPO to be co-managed by Goldman Sachs (GS) and Morgan Stanley (MS). Trading.

The Alibaba listing is not just a key event for the company; It also promises to be watershed moment for the Chinese online world.

With more than 160 million people using the Internet now, China has the world’s second-largest Net population after the U.S.

But while a few Nasdaq-listed Chinese dot-coms such as search engine Baidu and portal Sina have done well by selling keywords or banner advertising, until now there hasn’t been a Chinese e-commerce company that’s generated much interest among investors.

There’s also a renewed interest in some of the first-generation portals that were among the first Chinese Internet companies to go public on Nasdaq during the days of the U.S. internet bubble. The share prices of top Chinese portals Sohu and Sina are up sharply this year amid confidence that online advertising will increase ahead of Beijing’s hosting of the Summer Olympics next year.

Morgan Stanley (MS) predicts that China’s online advertising market will total $2.4 billion in 2008, an increase of about 45% year over year.
Source: Business Week

Baidu, the Chinese search engine, had its stock plunge $51 in one day. If it had happened in some American companies in 1929 there would have been a lot of jumping from windows. Robin Li, the head of Baidu, remained calm. After all Baidu’s shares on Nasdaq are still up an incredible 174% up for the year.

The drop came because JPMorgan analyst Dick Wei predicting that the company would report quarterly earnings on October 25 slightly below earlier predictions because of the temporary closures of some Internet data centers for technical reasons.

Even so he expects the price to rise to $400 by the end of next year. The price drop reflects the fickleness of the stock market which, once again, has become a gambling casino.

A more important question is whether Google is catching up with Baidu? Dick Wei, making sure he has an each way bet, said, ‘From a 12-month perspective, we expect Baidu to further consolidate its leading position and increase its monetization rate from growing traffic.’

(An article in the New York Times last year that Google would swamp Baidu by being more relevant. Do not hold your breath waiting for this to happen.)

Baidu has also launched it first operation outside China, a service in Japan. It has also launched BaiduTV, which enables the company to sell video ads

According to a new report from Comscore, Baidu is now ahead of Microsoft in search-engine popularity. Not just in China, but globally. There were 3.3 billion searches done via Baidu in August, compared to just 2.2 billion for Microsoft’s sites.

Nokia has built software into a phone as seen in our illustration. Four of Baidu’s most popular services, including Web Search, News Search, Image Search and Baidu Post Bar, a popular Baidu online community discovered by Baidu, are provided in the application.

The suggestion has been made that if Beijing insists on the companies censoring the Net, the Americans could just threaten to leave. So what? China may not care about Googling something as long as they can Baidu it.
Source: BusinessWeek

It is very good that writers such as this one should be put smartly in their place.

The most popular blog entries — the ones that have the most visits — so far this year on Sina blog are about celebrities.

One of Wei Jiaqing’s blog articles has been viewed for nearly one million times. She is a 25-year-old model and singer who was in the 2006 Super Girl singing competition. She was among the eight blog articles that have been viewed for more than 500,000 times. Of these, six fall into the paparazzi and celebrity journal categories, written by celebrities themselves or by bloggers specializing in star tales.

In one of the popular articles, which is from a paparazzi site, the blogger recounted the love story between famous Taiwanese actress Lin Qingxia (Brigitte Lin) and her three lovers. The entry is full of detailed anecdotes and old pictures, demonstrating the blogger’s rich knowledge about the super star.

The two non-paparazzi entries that reached the 500,000-hit mark concern nothing serious, either. One of them is about China National Geography magazine’s project of searching for people with peculiar family names in China.

Thus as much as the Internet has become an important political forum for Chinese public, as well as for other nations, it is an even more powerful entertainment medium.

It is a depressing thought to find Paris Hilton, is richer, younger, better looking than you and gets 22,732 times more hits. Hits being meant in a positive way.
Source: China in Transition