China is launching it its own home-grown 3G mobile phone service which is TD-SCDMA which means it does not have to pay royalties to, mainly, American companies.

Then it becomes important that Agilent Technologies, the world’s largest measurement equipment provider, appears to be an early winner with this standard.

The US company estimates that it now holds more than 60% of China’s TD-SCDMA network testing equipment market.

Key mover will be China Mobile, now the world’s largest mobile carrier, which will build a commercial TD-SCDMA network across the nation.

Once a new technology idea, like China’s TD-SCDMA, is proposed, industry players will need test equipment makers like Agilent to provide the tools to research the concepts.

When China decided to establish its own 3G mobile technology TD-SCDMA in 2000 Agilent was the first company to provide the necessary equipment for the homegrown-standard.

The TD-SCDMA standard is currently in use in eight cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Qingdao.

Source: China Daily

Talks about how to bring the iPhone to China have moved from hard-line negotiations to the logistics phase.

During an interview at the Worldwide Developers Conference, Steve Jobs hinted to CNBC that Apple might soon add China to its list of countries where the iPhone will become available.

Working out the details of exactly how that will happen has not been easy.

Now, talks with Chinese wireless carrier China Mobile have cleared their biggest hurdle which was Apple’s insistence on setting up a revenue-sharing agreement.

Apple has reportedly given up on that idea in favor of a model by which the carrier will subsidize the phone up-front, like the deal Apple now has with U.S. provider AT&T and the vast majority of its carrier partners around the world. That has allowed the two companies to move forward with plans and move on to working out the logistics.

However, a China Mobile spokeswoman said there is still no timetable for when the China iPhone will be released.
Source: CNet News.com

Australian telecom giant Telstra has acquired 55% of Chinese online advertising companies Norstar Media and Autohome/PCPop. No financial details were given.

Norstar operates the popular auto site Che168.com and digital device site IT168.com while Autohome/PCPop, runs auto site Autohome.com.cn (illustrated above) and digital device site PCPop.com.

The controversial head of Telstra, Sol Trujillo, seen here, said the company now owns majority interests in three of the leading Chinese companies in the three key online advertising industry segments: real estate, automobiles and digital devices.

All four of the websites just acquired by Telstra are consumer-focused. They generate revenue primarily through online display advertising and product listing fees.

In 2006, Telstra bought 51% of SouFun.com.
Source: Forbes

China is seeing a rapid development of outsourcing services.

According to the Ministry of Commerce, including ITO (Information Technology Outsourcing) and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing), China undertook outsourcing services valued at $2 billion in 2007. More than 30 million employees work in service outsourcing enterprises, among which over 250,000 are junior college or college graduates.

Minister of Commerce Wang Chao (seen in our illustration), speaking at The Sixth China International Software and Information Service Fair in Dalian said, information technology outsourcing services were the major part of China’s outsourcing industry in 2007, accounting for more than 60% of total outsourcing services.

China’s main contract countries and regions are Japan and the United States; and the outsourcing industry is mainly concentrated in the information transmission, computer services and software industries which together make up 53% of the total while manufacturing services accounted for 30.7%.

Minister Wang Chao said that there imbalanced development between regions.

Fourteen outsourcing service bases are responsible for 80.1% of the entire nation’s outsourcing services.

Outsourcing contracts in Guangdong, Beijing, Fujian, Jiangsu, Shanghai are worth more than $100 million and they account for two-thirds of total outsourcing services.
Source: People’s Daily Online

Visitors to Beijing for the Olympics are not going to get, as promised, 3G service on their cellphones, but it is promised Wi-Fi will be widely available, and it will be free of charge.

China Communications, working with the Beijing city government, has launched the first phase of its Beijing WiCity, providing free wireless Internet access in select districts throughout the city (shaded orange on the illustration).

The plan is to provide free Wifi over a 100 square kilometer area through the Olympics an this will be the biggest Wi-Fi network in China. From there it will expand by next year to 625 square kilometers next year and by 2010 Beijing’s entire city center and the rural areas surrounding the city will be covered.

Tests so far have not been overly encouraging with the Beijing office of the Wall Street Jornal, located within a covered area, only one bar of signal was detected and it wasn’t possible to connect. Media blog Danwei reported access trouble, and a Sina.com report noted that in Beijing’s hi-tech district, Zhongguancun, the signal only worked outdoors.

Sadly, there will be no 3G cellular service except perhaps that based in testing mode on TD-SCDMA, the home standard, despite past pledges from officials. Since China hasn’t issued any 3G licenses for networks using the two international kinds of 3G technology, the networks haven’t been built.

The government has said that 3G services using China’s homegrown TD-SCDMA technology will be available in time for the Games — but overseas visitors phones are not compatible with that standard.
Source: Wall Street Journal Blog

With an Italian-sounding name, a line of computers once made by I.B.M., and a chief executive who hails from Dell and NCR, the Lenovo Group is not a company that most Americans would assume is Chinese.

Lenovo, which happens to be the only Chinese company having a worldwide sponsorship for the 2008 Beijing Olympics does not mind that at all. Indeed, it welcomes it.

Lenovo, which bought I.B.M.’s personal computer business in 2005, plans to use its Olympics campaign as a launching pad for its brand.

Although Lenovo’s largest shareholder is the Chinese government and its biggest operations are in Beijing, Americans who watch advertisements during the Olympics this August will see only a company that wants to show off its technology.

Glen Gilbert, Lenovo’s vice president for brand management, said, ‘In China, the advertising will be very much leveraging the heritage of a Chinese company. In the U.S., we won’t be making direct mention of that.’

He said Lenovo is not trying to hide its Chinese roots. Rather, it wants to position Lenovo as a global brand and highlight the quality of its computers.
A lot more on this by clicking HERE.
Source: New York Times

China’s State Intellectual Property Office refuted a news report that ‘Chinese IP officials, together with research institutes, were engaged in an investigation in an international software magnate who was suspected of market monopoly.’

In a statement, the office said the report was seriously irrespective of facts.

It said it had commissioned relevant institutions to conduct studies on domestic piracy rates, and the results had already been released to the media.

‘But we have never conducted investigations in enterprises suspected of monopoly, and have no plan recently to carry out work in such respect.’

The earlier reprorts suggsgt that Microsoft was the target but that was specifically denied.

Yin Xintian, a spokesman and legal director at the State Intellectual Property Office in Beijing, said, ‘We are not conducting an anti-monopoly investigation against Microsoft and have no plans to do so.’

It has taken China 13 years to formulate an anti-monopoly law and many had suspected that Microsoft would be an early target, since a copy of its Office and Windows software costs nearly as much as a new computer in local currency. But Microsoft, too, has said it is not aware of any investigation.

It added: ‘Microsoft fully supports China’s efforts to establishing an environment conducive to promoting fair competition.’ There is also no suggestion that the Microsoft staff in the illustration are under investigation. That was taken in 1978.
Source: VNU and Sydney Morning Herald

The central government has set a target of more than 100 million TD-SCDMA subscribers in three years for China Mobile according to the South China Morning Post. China Mobile was asked to submit a detailed business plan and budget for the next round of tender, worth US$4.36 billion, for extending the TD-SCDMA network.

TD-SCDMA is China’s homegrown standard for third-generation mobile communications and all reports suggest it does not, as yet, work very well.

The news was delivered by Li Yizhong, the new information industry minister, when he met China Mobile and industry executives.

Li said that the number of TD-SCDMA users should surpass Xiaolingtong users at their peak in 2006, which was more than 93 million, according to an anonymous source. Xiaolingtong is a fixed-line technology that provides limited mobile service.

China Mobile currently has 3,000 paying TD-SCDMA subscribers and 20,000 users who were invited to use the service for free.

The firm is operating trial networks in eight cities, including Beijing and Shanghai.

Informally, this writer thinks the targets will not be easy to attain and will require some amazing pricing discounts to get it moving and a great improvement in its technical ability for it to become popular.

Luckly, China Mobile has the marketing power, and the money, and the technical expertise to possibly acheive this target. But it will not be easy.

And certainly it will not be widely available by the start of the Olympics.

The date 2011 has been mentioned and that seem more likely.
Source: Forbes

Nicer Canada is buying into Jmars Information Technology, a fully private foreign investment high technology enterprise in China. It will purchase 66.67% of JMIT’s shares.

JMIT develops, markets and sells RFID and Business Intelligence computer software, services and products in China. RFID is where you put a tag — which are getting smaller and smaller — on goods which makes their shipment faster and more secure.

A partnership in technology research with Fudan University of Shanghai has helped JMIT’s reputation as top software developers in it fields.

JMIT has forecast net earnings of RMB$4,025,000 for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2008.

The Company’s technical foundations were laid by a RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology company in China.

Nicer expanded from RFID into integration information systems based on global positioning and patented RFID technologies. In other words, more accurate and sophisticated RFID.

As this is the way all shipping is going in China the market potential is very large.

Our illustration of a cow with an RFID tags is important. Cattle ear tags are always being torn off or becoming illegible. RFID gets around that. And the other illustration is RFID being used in a truck doing deliveries. It is going to be very, very important.
Source: iStock Analyst

Three containers with suspected toxic electronic waste from the United States were detained by Hong Kong inspectors after environmental activists boarded a cargo ship.

The activists from Greenpeace placed a giant banner across three containers that said ‘Toxic Waste Not Welcomed Here’ aboard a ship that was due to unload the containers in Hong Kong.

The e-waste would then have been trucked to nearby Guangdong province in southern China, where it would have been dismantled.

Edward Chan, a Greenpeace campaigner, said, ‘The Environmental Protection Department and customs have detained the suspect containers and we hope that they send them back the United States.’ The shipment was from a company in Oakland, California.

He said, ‘Hong Kong has always been the transit point for illegal toxic waste into China because there are legal loopholes.’

Greenpeace had tracked the loading of the waste in California.

Southern China has become a world center for the processing of illegal e-waste, with much of the world’s unwanted computers broken down for constituent parts. Without strong safety precautions, workers are exposed to dangerous fumes from parts such as cadmium, lead and mercury.
Source: AFP