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

Chinese personal computer manufacturer Lenovo wants to concentrate on growing its desktop business in India.

Towards this end, it is expanding its desktop line with its consumer-focused IdeaCentre series. These systems have unusual features such as an anti-bacterial keyboard and face-recognition security. And analysts say the desktops mark a significant departure from the bland aesthetics of Lenovo’s well-known business systems.

Its market share in India is around 6% which is just half that of the leader, HP. But over the last couple of years, the growth of laptops has outpaced that of desktops.

Moreover, growth in the desktop shipment for the April-June quarter of CY08, according to research firm IDC, dropped by 2.4% year-on-year, while the laptop shipments grew 51% over the same period.

Lenovo’s strategy seems to work well with laptops which provides about 60% of its total revenues in the Indian market.

Amar Babu, managing director, Lenovo India, seen above, explains that the growth in desktops will not be at the cost of laptops, ‘in which we are already strong players.  . . .

‘India was the first country where Lenovo’s consumer brand was launched outside China. The laptop business, as the numbers show, is growing effortlessly. We can surely do better on the desktop front too. So we will also look at the desktop growth in smaller cities, where the penetration is low.’
Source: India Business Standard

TD-SCDMA models

China Mobile has cut the cost for its trial 3G services to near fixed-line phone rates to try and attract business, families and students.

China Mobile will gradually launch new packages, with the top rate cut of more than 50%, in the coming year. This is pretty official because China Mobile published a statement to this effect on the Website of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

The new packages will be available in ten cities with TD-SCDMA (time division-synchronous code division multiple access) networks including Beijing and Shanghai. The carrier has chosen Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Tianjin as the first cities with the new packages.

In the new business package, China Mobile will offer users 500 minutes of calls for RMB30, compared with the previous RMB88 600 minutes.

The TD-SCDMA rate is RMB 0.22 for first three minutes call and RMB 0.11 for following minute, lower than China Mobile’s 2G rate and similar to China Telecom’s fixed-phone rate.

Sandy Shen, a Shanghai-based analyst at Gartner Inc, a US-based IT research firm said, ‘It’s nice to have the cut rate but the key problem is the handset.’

Fewer than 10 TD-SCDMA models are available in the market though China Mobile said more handset makers are developing new models.
Source: Shanghai Daily

Apple iPhone for China

According to state media consumer electronics and computer firm Apple and mobile network operator China Mobile are in the final stages of talks that would pave the way for the official launch of Apple’s iPhone in China. (Unofficially it is already there in large quantities.)

Unnamed sources told the state-run 21st Century Business Herald that the two companies will complete talks soon.

China Mobile, which has over 415 million subscribers, had previous stated that the main obstacle to bringing the iPhone to China had been swept away when Apple dropped its revenue sharing demands.

Separately, China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou told reporters at a telecom conference that he and Apple chief Steve Jobs ‘are discussing the issue, but we do not have an agreement yet.’

An article at it.hexun.com which cites a member of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) as its source says:

China Mobile will procure the handsets for their full price, and then on-sell subsidized handsets to consumers. The source explained that China Mobile could buy a 3G iPhone from Apple for $299 — an example price — and then sell the handset to users for $199, treating the additional $100 as compensation to Apple.

No mention is made of the half a million or more iPhones currently being used in China. They did not come through official channels and therefore do not appear to count.
Source: Yahoo News

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

Fixed line wiring

China’s largest fixed-line telephone operator, China Telecom, wants the government to promote competition in the telecommunications sector. This is understandable from China Telecom’s point of view. Fixed line is slowly dying. Mobile is soaring.

Wang Xiaochu, chairman and chief executive of China Telecom, said more regulations are needed on resource sharing.

More than US$164 billion was spent on the construction of telecom infrastructure between 2002 and 2006, but only a third of telecom cables are used.

China Telecom acquired the CDMA business of China Unicom as part of an industry restructuring. Wang said

China Telecom hopes to see the sharing of resources, such as networks and transmission towers, to improve efficiency and increase fairness in price competition.

Last week, China Telecom reported a 2008 first-half net profit fall of 8.2% year-on-year, to US$1.84 billion, because of a significant decline in its core fixed-line business. Meanwhile, China Mobile, the country’s leading wireless operator, saw a 44.7% rise year-on-year to US$8.02 billion in its first-half net profit as its subscriber base grew rapidly.
Source: China Daily

Loongson computer chip

Chinese researchers are preparing the first multicore versions of Godson, China’s first homegrown microprocessor, with four- and eight-core designs to be released in the coming months.

Zhiwei Xu, deputy directory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Computing Technology said the four-core version of the Godson-3 should be available this year with the eight-core version planned for 2009.

Chinese PC manufacturer ZhongKe Menglan Electronics Technology began offering a low cost computer based on Godson to schools and governments in 2007. As yet they have not made it in a major way in mass-market products.

MIT, which is about prestigious as you can get, sees the new Godson-3, developed with government funding by more than 200 researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), as a distinct challenge to Intel.

Godson chips are manufactured in China by a Swiss company called ST Microelectronics and are available commercially under the brand name Loongson, meaning ‘dragon chip.’

Loongson chips already power some personal computers and servers on the Chinese market, which come with the Linux operating system and other open-source software.
Sourcea: EE Times and MIT Technology Review

China SMS

The number of telephone users in China is edging increasingly closer to 1 billion and it should happen within the next few months. This even though the number of landline subscribers is falling.

Official figures from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology show 960 million telephone users in China at the end of July, 608 million of which are mobile phone subscribers.

45.6% of the Chinese population now owns a mobile phone.

This is an average growth rate of 8.7 million per month. So five months should see the one billion mark reached.

Over 290 million mobile phone users are in the more developed Eastern region of China.

In July, 57.76 billion text messages were sent in China, an average of 3.08 messages per phone number per day. (This pales into insignificance compared to, say,the Phillipines where the average cellular phone user sends 15 text messages a day.)

Text messaging was reported to have addictive tendencies by the Global Messaging Survey by Nokia in 2001 and was confirmed to be addictive by the study at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium in 2004.

Since then the study at the Queensland University of Australia has found that text messaging is the most addictive digital service on mobile or internet, and is equivalent in addictiveness to cigarette smoking.

Fixed-line subscribers fell 10.6 million in the first seven months of this year, with a total of 355 million at the end of July. There appears to be no addiction there.
Sources: The Telecom and Latest News

Dell Vostro

Dell has announced four new computers. Two notebooks will be available in more than 20 countries, starting at about $475. The cheaper of the two desktop computers — part of the company’s Vostro line — will start at about $440, including a screen.

The new models are aimed at helping Dell deepen its hold on developing markets as sales have slowed in mature markets including the United States.

Stephen Felice, Dell’s president for operations in the Asia Pacific region, speaking in Beijing, said, ‘Within the world’s emerging economies, millions of new businesses are demanding just the technology they need, at the prices the can afford, from a vendor they can trust.’

One only has to search blogs for Dell complaints to realize that the last part of that — a vendor they can trust —  does not apply to all users.

Dell is one of many companies offering low-price, no-frills computers in China and other developing countries.

Last year, Asustek, a Taiwanese computer-maker, released the Asus Eee PC, a line of small laptops that retail for between $300 and $500. Acer released a small notebook in July that retails in Taiwan for about $350 while Hewlett-Packard unveiled a similar product in April.
Source: Austin American Statesman

Faye Wang

China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile phone service provider, which boasted 421.7 million subscribers as of the end of July, said membership to a number of its services has grown sharply.

Membership to its mobile music business reached 80.83 million. This is probably through users logging in to listen to Faye Wang and Li Yuchun (both shown here) and other popular music stars.

Li Yuchun

Fetion instant messaging service hit 111.81 million subscribers.

Along with communicating online, Fetion users can send instant messages from desktop computers to others’ mobile phones, and vice-versa.

The company has also worked on custom services for enterprises and said its corporate customer base for such services had reached 2.39 million companies as of the end of June.

Is this as high as we will go? Probably not. Although the figures are staggering in percentage of population they are not world leaders.

There is still immense room for expansion. Silly though it sounds, 80 million music users is but a start.
Source: PC World