Pacific Epoch has an interview with Jason Tian, founder and CEO of Heiyou.com, a Chinese social networking site that has recently launched a site for romance — Match100.cn, now called Baihe.com. Good basic info on growth of these kinds of services.
…users upload photos and basic personal information and then contact each other. 96333.com is the oldest among them; that site has been around for five or six years. Pengpeng.com’s Marry5.com is the most similar website to Match100. In the future there will be more competition, but we are not worried. 96333 has registered only three million users since its founding; it took us only six months to reach that number. We also have a six month head start on Marry5.
note: free registration required to read the interview on Pacific Epoch’s site
Financial Times reports that the BBC, whose Chinese language news services have long been blocked by Chinese web filters, has launched a new site with articles in English and Chinese. Aimed at the younger Chinese Internet reader who wants to learn English, it’s also a good site for those who want to learn Chinese. It’s also another example of creating special mainland content that will shape a different view of what’s going on in the world. [via China Digital Times]
Check out this hilarious ad from Chinese search engine, pointed out on Sam Flemming’s excellent blog. It features a depiction of a tall, white foreigner in a tophat [representing Google?] speaking a somewhat stupidly accented Chinese, holding the arm of a Chinese girl in a wig and a white wedding dress. Reminds me of some of the anti-foreign Chinese cartoons I’ve seen from the 1950s. Sam translates it as:
Background: There is a poster challenging anyone to try to make sense of a Chinese text. The text is short, but has no “stops” such as periods, so it is a bit tricky to understand. A foreigner enters into the town claiming “he knows” how to interpret the text.
Foreigner : I know! Heh heh.
Tangbohu (a famous Chinese clever guy) : Hahahaha~~ You may not know!
Tangbohu : I know you don’t know. I know you don’t know I know. YOU DON ’T KNOW.
Foreigner : I know!
All : Ei? [audience is surprised at Foreigner's seeming agreement with Tangbohu that the foreigner does NOT know (as in does not "get it"]
Foreigner : Ei!I know!
Tangbohu : Not necessarily. I know you don’t know me, I know you don’t know me, haha~ I know you don’t know!
Foreigner : I know!
Tangbohu : I know that you don’t know I know. You don’t know that I know you don’t know!
Here is a translation of the final part of the commercial:
If you have any question, just “Baidu it”!
- Baidu understands Chinese the best, with custom developed stop word technology, understanding more precisely.
- Baidu understands Chinese best. Machine learning understands just as human along with phonetic key words customized for Chinese language.
- Baidu respects Chinese language most. Customized Chinese language processing and web page indexing technology.
- Baidu focuses on Chinese language most. Worlds best Chinese language technology team. Unbeatable.
- Baidu hosts the largest online community in the world with Tieba.
Dynamic Internet Technology released a report on results of Google.com vs. Google.cn searches, but done via a proxy inside China. Not surprisingly, things look different from there:
Besides removing results, Google also adds more results from websites in China to www.google.cn and www.google.com when accessed from China. Those websites in China usually follow government propaganda closely. Because of the ranking algorithm, such larger pool of well inter-connected web pages will "dilute" other web pages and lower the ranking of oversea web pages sooner or later.
So the known Internet world on the mainland will include more domestically produced content than content produced overseas. Is that dilution?
Tom Foremski’s intriguing scenario: boycott users who find themselves within heavily censored systems.
The Chinese government’s attempts to censor internet access makes it vulnerable to a reverse censorship–web sites could cut themselves off from Chinese internet users as a form of protest.
It could happen as a form of economic sanction at the national level.
But at some point, access to the Chinese web user will become critical for foreign businesses to continue doing business there.
CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) recently released (in pdf and ppt) its 17th Survey on the current development of the Chinese Internet. These twice-yearly surveys are Chinese governmental basic data on the Chinese ‘net. It’s not translated into English yet. In the meantime, some of the topline results:
- 111 million internet users
- ~ 65 million are broadband users
- Large gap between urban and rural Internet use, with ~91 million urban users and 17% penetration, vs. ~19 million rural users and less than 3% penetration
- large gap between internet use in eastern China vs. western China
- 18% of users accessing the web via laptop computers
- Internet users average 16 hours/week online, a 20% increase [since the last survey in mid-05? unclear]
At least according to Tangos at China Web2.0 Review. He did a search for what should be a pretty easy thing to find–Google China’s new official blog (Google 黑板报). Results?
The winner goes to GBS and Technorati with 85 and 70 results, icerocket
followed with 50 results. But all the China’s blog search engines
sucks, the best one only returns 11 results.
China Tech News has an informative interview with Kiam Choo, CEO and founder of Bbmao, a start-up Chinese metasearch engine. Bbmao gathers search results from China’s top 5 search engines: Baidu, Google, Yahoo, Sogou (Sohu), and iAsk (Sina). Choo touts the new service’s features as social bookmarking, clustered search results, and a job search site–a big deal in China’s chaotic labor market.
When a searcher uses Bbmao’s
clustered search and clicks on categories, he is effectively having a
conversation with the computer in which he is saying something like,
"OK, find me information on cats…ok, now zoom in on Persian
cats…now narrow down to the history of Persian cats."
He also notes the high rate of dissatisfied Chinese searchers–30-50% according to surveys. Wonder how that rate compares to other national search markets?
The Chinese web’s take on the very American idea: try before you buy. By signing up, you get to try out free deals from other websites - there are limits though, on the number of free deals per period and a mandate for leaving your opinion afterwards.
http://www.itry.cn
Source: http://www.postshow.net
niyouqian (transliteration: “you have money”) is social software that involves your monetary transactions. E.g. Your boss gave you 100$ for Chinese New Year, and then people comment on it.
Note from PostShow: here’s the logo they copied:
Source: http://www.postshow.net
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