In a surprise move, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has opened its Android-oriented Appstore in China today. That’s despite the fact that China wasn’t listed on Amazon’s Appstore expansion roadmap last month, in which the company took its service into 200 new countries, including over a dozen major Asian markets.

The Amazon Appstore launch in China means that the American e-tailer has leapt the final hurdle in its long pursuit of selling its own hardware in China. Though the Amazon Appstore can be used with any Android device (and is now available in Chinese here), it features as the main store on Amazon’s own Kindle Fire tablets. It’s now likely that these tablets will launch in China soon, perhaps accompanied by the Kindle e-reader.

Amazon is promising Chinese users that there’ll be a host of locally made and overseas gaming titles on the store, including ones from Tencent (HKG:0700) and Sina (NASDAQ:SINA).

This comes just a few weeks after Amazon rolled out its Cloud Drive storage service in China, and over four months after its e-bookstore launched in the nation. In theory, everything’s in place for all of Amazon’s hardware to hit the Chinese market.

While Amazon’s Appstore isn’t the first third-party Android app store to accept payments in China, it should boost revenues for app developers by placing a stronger emphasis on paying for digital content. The Google Play store only supports free apps in China.

(Hat-tip to 36Kr for spotting this)

One of my favorite local Vietnamese tech sites, Pandora.vn, just came out with an interesting report saying that in Vietnam e-books haven’t even hit one percent of the market.

Frankly, I’m not surprised. I had to go to Singapore to get my Kindle Paperwhite. Kindles in Vietnam are either sold out or nobody’s heard of them. For e-readers like Nook, they’re even harder to find. This is despite e-commerce companies like Tiki.vn promoting the sale of Kindles and companies like Alezaa promoting the use of e-books.

From 2010 to 2012, there have been some minor efforts from the Ministry of Education in digitizing textbooks and training materials. But companies like VTC and Go.vn, the government’s social network, have also created initiatives, but maintaining copyrights have been a big hurdle.

This is all in stark contrast to e-books in the US, where last year e-books took 22 percent of the total book spending. I think Vietnam specifically struggles with two things as far as e-books are concerned:

• There are just no e-readers around. In all the local electronics stores, they’re ridiculously hard to find. Merchants don’t think customers don’t want e-readers and customers aren’t buying them. Not to mention, tablets aren’t showing as much aggressive growth as smartphones are.
• Alezaa is one of the only platforms to distribute e-books – but it’s experiencing copyright issues, as are the other platforms. But the real issue is just like iTunes over Napster, this platform needs to be easier for people to buy, because some customers are always willing to pay.

Until these two things are solved, a kind of chicken and egg problem is occuring, e-books will continue to fail to gain traction. The Vietnamese e-book market needs to take a page out of the playbook of Ookbee, the startup e-bookstore from Thailand, and build a model that works for an increasingly mobile-oriented population.

So it turns out that Amazon’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Kindle hardware didn’t launch in China on the 16th as rumors said it would. But there is a concrete development today with the rollout to Chinese consumers of Amazon’s Cloud Drive feature.

Amazon’s personal cloud storage service launched last year in many countries, and was finally imbued with file syncing capabilities earlier this month. The Amazon Cloud Drive apps for Windows and Mac are also now available in Chinese from the Amazon China site.

The business-oriented Amazon Web Services launched in China last December.

The availability of Amazon’s Cloud Drive in China might suggest that Kindle hardware is a step closer. Or not. Amazon’s Kindle e-bookstore opened in China a few months ago, but readers must view the purchased e-books within the company’s smartphone apps. But with China not getting the Amazon Appstore anytime soon – no love for Indonesia or Singapore either – it’s safe to say that the Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD tablets won’t be going on sale here for a long time.

Amazon Cloud Drive is up against a lot of local rivals, such as Baidu’s Netdrive, a Dropbox clone that the search engine giant says has over 30 million users in the country. There are also startup cloud services like Kanbox.

(Kudos to @foxmachia for spotting this)

The full Amazon Appstore new line-up in Asia-Pacific – it has launched already in Japan – is here, with larger nations highlighted in bold:

• American Samoa
• Australia
• Bhutan
• Cambodia
• Christmas Island
• Cocos (Keeling) Islands
• Cook Islands
• French Polynesia
• Hong Kong
• India
• Laos
• Macao
• Mariana Islands
• Marshall Islands
• Micronesia
• Mongolia
• Myanmar
• Nepal
• New Zealand
• Niue
• Norfolk Island
• Palau
• Papua New Guinea
• Philippines
• Samoa
• Solomon Islands
• South Korea
• Sri Lanka
• Taiwan
• Thailand
• Timor-Leste
• Tokelau
• Tuvalu
• Vanuatu
• Vietnam
• Wallis and Futuna

With developers and customers in those countries now having access to Amazon’s catalog of apps, it might soon lead to the company’s hardware, namely the Kindle Fire and Fire HD tablets – going on sale there at a later date. But the Amazon App Store can be used on any Android device.

By the way, there are some seriously odd places on the global list, such as Antarctica, and the Heard Island and McDonald Island (Wikipedia says: “Population: 0”).

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) launched its e-bookstore and e-reading apps in China last December, but there’s still something missing – sales of the actual Kindle hardware. That’s rumored to be changing tomorrow, April 16th, with Amazon thought to be opening pre-orders for the Kindle Paperwhite in China.

Chinese tech blog Huxiu reckons that the date will see the basic Kindle finally rolls out in mainland China – but with no apparent sign of the Android-powered Kindle Fire tablets.

The Kindle e-reader has been on the rumormill in China for years – just as it was in Japan before Amazon’s hardware eventually launched there last October.

Though Amazon is doing fairly well with e-commerce in China – well, it’s surviving anyway – it will, as a foreign company, struggle with regulatory approval for wireless hardware in China. As Bloomberg notes on that previous link, “Wireless devices require at least three layers of regulatory approval in China, including from the state Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.”

Regardless of whether Amazon brings the hardware to Chinese consumers, the US e-tailer has tons of competition in the e-book sector in China, from newer entrants like retail giant Suning and social network Douban, to older adversaries like Shanda and Dangdang. The last two even have their own e-reader products; Dangdang’s is dubbed Doucan, which launched last summer, while Shanda’s Bambook is a long-standing leader in this sector.

242 million Chinese people shop online, and a great many of them do so on e-commerce sites run by China’s Alibaba. So when founder and chairman Jack Ma talks about the industry, a lot of people sit up and listen. Especially as he always speaks his mind.

That’s what we see in this new video in which Jack Ma talks, in English, at an investment conference in Hong Kong yesterday. Emphasising how his company – with sites like Taobao and Tmall – creates open platforms without the need for Alibaba itself to purchase stock and maintain warehouses (what is called B2B2C), he slams “the traditional B2C e-commerce model – which I call the Amazon model” as the wrong way to do business online. He adds:

(The B2C model) is going to face a huge challenge. We believe that putting (…) the traditional business just purely online – that’s not called e-commerce. In the future, business will not make money because of the scale, it’s because of the value – the different value – created. (…)

I checked Amazon. They have $52 billion but they still do not make money, so ‘scale’ does not make any sense.

He contrasts Amazon’s B2C model – and its huge scale – with what he calls Alibaba’s “efficiency” in its “ecosystem” that encourages businesses to get online and sell via its sites – Taobao for amateur shopkeepers, Tmall for small businesses and major brands. (UPDATED: I failed to hear the word “scale” in the video; it’s now corrected in this post).

In another segment, Ma – who’ll be replaced as CEO by Jonathan Lu in May – compared and contrasted the online shopping industry in China and the US. He observed:

The difference between China e-commerce and US e-commerce is that e-commerce in the USA is what I call the dessert – it’s supplementary to their main business, because the USA’s infrastructure of doing business is so good. So it is very difficult for e-commerce in the USA to grow, to develop, to surpass the traditional business.

But in China, because the infrastructure of commerce is too bad, then e-commerce becomes the main course.

You might like to skip the introductory waffle from some banker by going straight to 2:51 in the 45-minute video of Ma’s keynote speech:

(Source: Alibaba’s official blog, Alizila)

Chinese consumers love your gadgets – that’s great news. But the bad news for Apple, Amazon, Google, and many more companies is that Chinese netizens hate your ecosystems. They really don’t want to be trapped in your walled garden. In an age of platforms and extended web services, that’s a huge monetization problem for tech companies entering the world’s biggest market.

Android, without the Google bits

This aversion to tech ecosystems in China is seen most starkly with Google’s mobile OS, Android. An estimated 189 million smartphones were sold in China in 2012, and as many as 86 percent of those were Android devices. But that huge user-base hasn’t translated into popularity for Google’s other apps and services.

Why not? Google has long had a rough ride in China, starting with the Great Firewall blocking YouTube back in 2007 – never to become accessible again. Many more Google services were later turned off by Net Nanny, as some scandal or spread of information made it more convenient for authorities to shut down these channels. Later the GFW blocked Picasa, Blogger, the AppSpot engine. More recently, some apps that are much more central to Android, like G+ and Google Drive, got blocked as well. That certainly hasn’t helped Google’s ecosystem, but I don’t believe it’s the leading cause of Chinese consumers being keen to remove the Google bits from Android.

Love the phones, hate the ecosystem.

Far more crucial to this ecosystem aversion is something indicative of a healthier side of the Chinese web – lots of quality competition. Regardless of the Great Firewall or anything else, Chinese consumers love to pick and choose and mix and match – and get the best deal. We’re talking about consumers who’ll haggle for an hour to save a dollar. And so if there are better apps and services out there, then screw your ecosystem. For cloud storage, Chinese smartphone users could install apps from Baidu, or Shanda, or numerous startups. Over 30 million users have opted for Baidu NetDrive already.

Same for email. Same for web video.

It even applies to sourcing Android apps, with Chinese Android fans choosing to scour a wide range of third-party app stores for games and apps rather than using Google Play.

All that freedom of choice reinforces the general dislike among Chinese netizens of being locked in a walled garden. Using Android generally demands having a Google account and having a Gmail address – but not every user wants to be coralled into this.

Apples are not the only fruit

Apple might have been pushed down to an ignominious sixth place in terms of smartphone sales in China recently – well below Android handset makers like Samsung and Lenovo – but the iPhone and iPad are still examples of an astonishing gadget success in the country. Yet the whole Apple ecosystem hasn’t been so warmly embraced.

iTools is an alternative to iTunes (and helps you jailbreak) if you prefer to opt out of Apple’s ecosystem.

This is despite Apple having built up the most rigid ecosystem (probably an oxymoron, as ecosystems are fluid and adaptive in nature) that mandates having an Apple ID, syncing via iTunes, and not customizing your phone’s UI in any meaningful way. Almost inevitably, a lot of Chinese iOS owners have flipped the bird at all these restrictions and – as is the case on Android – have been greeted with plenty of locally-made resources that can be used as alternatives.

For example, those who dislike iTunes as a domineering music player and App Store combo can instead try out iTools, which is made by a Shenzhen-based startup.

Admitedly, piracy is also an issue, and for some people it’s a motivation in opting out of Apple’s restrictive environment. As we explored recently, there are lots of piracy and jailbreaking resources in China for iPhone and iPad owners.

But ultimately, as with Android, the Apple ecosystem aversion is mostly down to Chinese consumers being keen on using things from local competitors, even if – in avoiding iTunes, iCloud, etc – it makes their experience more fragmented and involves signing up for a bunch of different apps.

Who cares about the Kindle?

All of this bodes very badly for Amazon. Just because Amazon is a huge name and runs China’s fifth-largest e-commerce site, it doesn’t mean that Chinese netizens want to jump aboard its broader hardware and web platform. In fact, all available evidence suggests a strategic nightmare ahead.

Amazon has launched its Kindle e-bookstore and apps in China but it has not yet launched other cloud services or any hardware here. Since Amazon makes some of the most locked-down hardware, and its Kindle Fire tablet is a parallel-universe version of Android, it sounds like a potential disaster as a raw example of a product that’s totally unsuited to the Chinese market. Yes, China loves Android, but only in its own image. The Amazon AppStore sounds like a no-go here as well.

The hardware, too, will be coming into a market dominated by well-established local rivals who already have e-bookstores linked to their e-readers, such as with Shanda’s Bambook or Dangdang’s Doucon.

Be water, my friend

Be formless, shapeless, like water. (And be flexible towards your ecosystem users).

Yes, it’s a tough market. But openness seems to be massively important – both to Chinese consumers, and to a company’s chance of success in this market. While the Android situation might sound bad, it’s still great for Google. The search giant can still say to developers: “Hey, come develop for Android, because Chinese smartphone buyers love it. Yes, there’s piracy and they refuse to use Google Play, but you can still monetize from ads – yes, our own ad platform – and you still get access to the world’s biggest smartphone market.” I believe it’s only a flexible and adaptive ecosystem – like Android – that can perform such a feat. Plus, Android is responsive on hardware price-points, and adaptable and customizable at a software level.

It’s rougher for Apple in China, where the company’s you’re either with us or against us approach to their users often forces many to jailbreak, where they’re then more likely to become app pirates. From that point onward, Apple has no more means of monetizing those users on its platform.

It’s also a cautionary tale for Microsoft in China as it starts afresh with Windows Phone. As established as Microsoft is in China, it’s still in no position to enforce Hotmail/Outlook as a starting point for WP users, and its Marketplace for apps risks being as restrictive as Apple’s.

Of course, local web companies are not immune to all this. China’s biggest e-commerce company, Alibaba, has been met with a frosty reception with its attempt at a mobile OS of its own – and that’s despite having hundreds of millions of local users on its online stores. The nation’s top search engine, Baidu, is also finding it tough to persuade its search users to try out its apps ecosystem – like Baidu Maps, which lags behind local mapping experts Autonavi in terms of users – in the face of strong competition in every single sector. That leaves China’s numerous web giants scrapping over users for every single app and service – it’s unrelentingly rough, but it’s the only way.

So my advice on pushing your tech ecosystem in China is, essentially, to listen to Bruce Lee: Be water, my friend.

(Lead image credit: Our photoshop contains this sketch from DeviantArt)

The figures suggest that China’s e-commerce scene will not grow exponentially in 2013, and growth will slow every year as the realistic saturation point is finally reached. While the growth in online shopping in the country was over 100 percent from 2011 to 2012, it’ll be down to just 22.8 percent expansion from 2015 to 2016. By 2015, Chinese e-tailers will be taking in 7.4 percent of China’s total retail value.

Aside from all the growth, the infographic gives a good summary of the current players [2] in the B2C e-commerce sector, which is dominated by Alibaba’s Tmall and the perhaps-soon-to-IPO 360Buy. There’s also market share info for e-payments providers in China, again dominated by an Alibaba company (Alipay), along with Tencent’s Tenpay. Here’s the full thing:

(Infographic source: Go-Globe)

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has just launched its e-bookstore and Kindle smartphone apps into China’s crowded e-book market. It has been a long time coming – and there’s still even longer to wait for Chinese consumers who’d actually like to buy a fully-supported Kindle e-reader, as that device is not part of today’s launch.

As spotted by TheNextWeb, the Chinese “Kindle Store” – meaning its e-bookstore – is now online here; plus the Android version of the Kindle reading app is on this special homepage, along with the iPhone and iPad versions now in the Chinese iTunes App Store. All the apps are the global ones that everyone else uses, not some fenced-off made-for-China creations.

What’s next for Amazon’s Kindle in China? It’s high likely that the next launch will be the Amazon Android AppStore along with Amazon’s cloud services – both being prerequisites for the Kindle and Kindle Fire tablet.

There’s an array of free and paid-for e-books in this new Kindle Store, though for now they can only be read in the Amazon-made smartphone apps. Here’s an e-book product page:

Quite a few e-book fans in China have purchased imported Kindle e-readers, but they’re still not being supported by Amazon. In fact, a whole cottage industry has grown up around these Kindle owners and enthusiasts in the country, such as iKindle for news subscriptions, and Duokan for flashing custom firmware onto Kindles.

The Kindle Store enters a very crowded market in China, with everyone from the funky social network Douban to huge e-commerce stores offering e-books. One such online store, Dangdang (NYSE:DANG), even sells its own e-reader device. Others, such as Shanda Cloudary, have been in the biz for years already. So the Amazon and Kindle names are guaranteed success in China about as much as the Mayans are going to be proved correct later this month.

[Source: TheNextWeb]

Rakuten’s (JSD:4755) subsidiary Kobo has announced that its Kobo Mini e-reader is now available for pre-order, with shipments starting on December 18. This one is a 5-inch e-ink device, available in both black and white, and able to hold up to 1,000 e-books. It will be priced at 6,980 yen, or about $85.

The timing of this release means that consumers have lots of tablet/e-reader options to choose from this holiday season in Japan. Amazon recently announced that its lineup of Kindles are hitting Japan, with the Kindle Fire models coming a day after the Kobo Mini ships, on December 19. Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite went on sale in November.

And of course if we’re talking about ‘Mini’ form factors, we should also note that Apple’s iPad Mini went on sale in Japan last month as well, and the cellular model became available a few days ago.

Rakuten’s Kobo Touch was launched in Japan earlier this summer, apparently selling well in the early stages, although there was a subsequent speed-bump with a controversy surrounding user reviews. Kobo also offers the Kobo Glo e-reader in Japan as well.

Now that Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has finally brought its Kindle Line to Japan, it is following up with Amazon Cloud Drive as a digital storage solution for customers in the region. The service provides five gigabytes of storage for free, with paid plans starting at 800 yen per year for 20 gigabytes.

So for now, this means that consumers can store videos, photos, and documents on Amazon Cloud Storage. The announcement interestingly makes no official mention of music, although my guess is they are intentionally avoiding that subject as their Cloud Player (which is bundled with Cloud Drive in the US) attracted some controversy in the US when it launched.

I’m certain Amazon don’t want any part of the Japanese music industry, especially after Japan’s revised copyright law went into effect back on October 1st, effectively making downloading copyrighted material a crime.

In any case, for the time being Japan-based users can use Cloud Drive from PCs, Macs, and Android devices. And once Kindles hit the Japanese market on December 19, they’ll be able to use Cloud Drive on the Kindle Fire as well.

In addition to the US, Amazon’s Cloud Drive is also available in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

This comes after a very, very long delay and perpetual reports that Amazon and its Kindle would be coming soon. That was likely due to reservations on the part of publishers, as Amazon has the potential to disrupt what was a reportedly a $789 million industry for fiscal 2011. Amazon adds in its announcement:

The 50,000 Japanese-language titles come from a wide range of publishers small and large, including Bungeishunju, Gentosha, Kadokawa, Kodansha, Shinchosha, Shogakukan and Shueisha, all of whom have worked with Amazon to make their titles available in the Kindle Store.

It has been almost five years since Amazon’s Kindle was originally released, so this has certainly been a long time coming. We’ll have to wait and see how it stacks up against Rakuten’s Kobo, which got an early jump on the local market, despite a few minor troubles along the way.

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is announcing today that developers can submit their Android apps to the Amazon Mobile App Distribution Portal for distribution in Japan later in the year. App developers can head over to the distribution portal website to sign up.

Jim Adkins, the vice president of the Amazon Appstore, commented on Amazon’s expansion of this service to Japan:

Opening our portal to app and game developers looking to reach Japanese customers is an important milestone as we strive to serve consumers and developers globally. Many of our existing developers are anxious to localize their apps and games for Japanese consumers, and we look forward to working with new developers that have been waiting for a chance to bring their Japanese content to the Amazon platform.

Amazon hopes to continue international expansion of its Appstore, and it will be interesting to see if the company looks to any other Asian markets in the near future. The company tends to be very patient (read ‘slow’) in moving into overseas markets, so while China or Korea might appear to be a logical next step, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

But from a developer’s point of view, being able to reach mobile customers in Japan now. This is in addition to the other countries where Amazon has also recently expanded, including the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Spain, and Germany.

Amazon’s Kindle is a huge hit overseas, but it still hasn’t even been officially released in China. Of course, there are plenty of gray-market Kindles available in China’s electronics malls, but since there is no official Chinese Kindle Store, it can be difficult for users to subscribe to Chinese-language content for their devices. What’s a Chinese Kindle user to do?

One option is to turn to a startup like iKindle, a subscription service that lets users set up automatically-syncing (via wifi or 3G) subscriptions to a number of publications. The options range from traditional publications like The Financial Times (Chinese) and Southern Weekend to online news sources like TechWeb and TechCrunch to specially-curated reading lists, like Douban’s weekly classic literature snippets or Yeeyan’s collection of translated articles from the foreign press. The current selection is definitely heavy on tech reporting and news (rather than literature, short stories, humor, or whatever else) but presumably the selection will grow with time. The same team does also offer a separate ebook-selling service, too.

Setting up iKindle is fairly simple; it just involves tweaking a couple items in your Amazon settings and on the machine itself. After that it works like any other Kindle subscription: it shows up automatically and it looks very nice and you can read it. On a free plan, you can subscribe to two news sources; after that the company offers tiered subscription plans. For 3 RMB a month ($0.47), users can subscribe to 4 news sources. For 4 RMB ($0.63) per month they can subscribe to 6 sources. Or users can select an unlimited subscriptions plan for 6 RMB ($0.95) per month.

As far as I can tell, all of the content iKindle offers is content that is provided for free online. But I can’t imagine all of these providers are OK with their content being sold this way, especially since they can’t make any money from advertisements if users stop visiting their websites because they now have a Kindle subscription. We have reached out to a few of iKindle’s content providers to check and see if they’re aware the service is using their content, and while we have yet to hear back, I can’t imagine iKindle has partnerships with any of these companies because the numbers don’t make sense. The New York Times, for example, is another subscription offered by iKindle, but its regular online subscription service costs per week more than three times as much as iKindle’s most expensive option. There’s simply no way that these companies all consented to sell their content, advertisement free, for such low rates. Even if iKindle was passing 100% of its revenue onto content providers, it just wouldn’t be enough.

So what can we conclude about iKindle? On the one hand, it is providing a useful service and solving a real problem: Chinese-speaking Kindle owners don’t have a good official way to subscribe to news content for their devices. On the other hand, it is almost certainly stealing its content to do so. While we can’t condone stealing, it’s worth pointing out that many of China’s biggest internet services started out this way. Tudou and most other web video sites, for example, used to be rife with pirated content. As the sites grew and the investments came in, though, most of them eventually went legit; now, it’s very difficult to find pirated stuff on Tudou.

Could iKindle follow a similar model? Perhaps if Amazon continues to not officially support the Kindle in China. There have been rumors the Kindle is coming to China floating around for a long time now, but the real thing has yet to appear. And even if Amazon does begin offering Kindle content on a Chinese site, iKindle could remain competitive as long as it could stay out of the courtroom because its prices are inevitably far lower than Amazon could afford. With China’s tech sector as developed as it is, and IP rights becoming an increasingly high-profile issue here, I’m skeptical that iKindle can achieve much growth before its apparently-unwitting content providers take it to court. But I could be wrong. The startup is walking a path that many Chinese startups have walked before, and sometimes, it works out pretty well.

[Image via Reuters]

For western companies, China is probably the hardest country to localize for. But Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is trying hard in China and has come a long way. It acquired Lei Jun’s e-commerce startup Joyo six years ago, before changing its China branding to Amazon.cn last October (Chinese name: 亚马逊 – ya ma xun).

At the China Internet Conference earlier today, Amazon.cn CEO Wang Hanhua shared some interesting localization strategies that the American e-commerce giant has adopted.

Wang says that China is the only country in the world in which Amazon delivers goods on its own. And this year the company is expected to deliver more than 20 million items, and Amazon users can receive their purchases on average within 2.5 days. This was largely made possible thanks to a 160,000 square-meter warehouse located in Tianjin, north-eastern China. Wang said:

Amazon’s service in China has surpassed its service in the US. Our founder, Jeff Bezos, has also tried delivering goods in China himself.

Amazon subway ad in China

Wang also noted that unlike Americans, Chinese don’t really care when the goods are delivered. They only care when the items they purchased will arrive and if they will ever arrive. So on Amazon.cn, it will state what time of day the items will arrive at your doorstep.

Even in product search, Amazon.cn underwent some minor localization. Wang explains that non-Chinese usually click and hit the back button whenever they are looking back and comparing products. But for Chinese, they prefer to open different windows in their browsers/tabs to search and compare products, and Amazon China adjusted to suit this behavior.

Also, 70 percent of buyers prefer to pay when goods are delivered. To make it easy for Chinese to pay, Wang claims that Amazon China is the first to introduce portable POS so users can pay the delivery guy via credit card at their doorstep.

Last year, we mentioned that users can actually key in the super short URL Z.cn to access Amazon.cn. The change was made because Amazon is an English word (unlike, say, Baidu) which makes it hard for Chinese consumers to remember. Wang closed on an insightful note that any e-commerce company can benefit from:

Localizing your service isn’t about what you and I think, it’s about how the market thinks.

That mobile spending spree will amount to RMB 11.64 billion (US$1.84 billion) in bought items in Q2 – that’s 487.9 percent higher compared to the same period in 2011. The very strong growth in Android and iOS in China will help push that forward even more, especially as nearly all of the country’s e-commerce players have very nice apps for those two mobile OSes.

So who are the main players in mobile commerce in China? Perhaps it’s no surprise that the two large online malls from e-commerce behemoth Alibaba – Taobao and Tmall – lead the way with a monstrous 75.6 percent share of mobile shopping [1]. Second is 360Buy, the B2C rival to Tmall with 6.2 percent. Those stats suggest that 360Buy is seriously underachieving in its mobile strategy, as Analysis International market share data for China’s B2C market shows that 360Buy’s share is more in the order of 15.5 percent.

The specialist e-tailers Vancl (for clothing) and Maobaobao (for handbags) stand out strongly in these m-commerce stakes:

[Source: iResearch]

Me the cheapestz Credit: LA Times

In the taxi here in Beijing, radio hosts are discussing the publicity and price war between 360Buy, Suning, and Gome, three of China’s top electronics e-tailers. In the subway and in cafes, I hear people talking about it. And of course, the topic has gone wild on Weibo and among the media and blogosphere. On the radio, 360Buy CEO Liu Qiangdong claims that 360buy has nothing but money to spare to support this e-commerce price war. He also commented that as an e-commerce company, he could refresh the prices every 30 minutes, but brick-and-mortar shops like Suning and Gome probably can’t match that speed. (Note that Suning and Gome have e-commerce ventures too).

But have the prices really changed? Yes, but not greatly. If you check around the weibosphere, some folks are dubious of 360buy prices. This Weibo user, for example, questioned 360buy’s iPad prices (translated):

Didn’t you [360buy] say that your products would be 10 percent cheaper than Suning’s? Why is Suning’s iPad 140 yuan cheaper than yours!?

One place to compare local prices is eTao.com, Alibaba’s price comparison search engine. As if this is some kind of Olympics, eTao is amusingly tracking each product’s prices and “awarding” each B2C e-commerce site gold, silver, or bronze for the top three lowest price points. So who is winning this battle? According to eTao’s leaderboard, Gome’s overall offers are cheaper then 360buy’s and Suning’s. But the cheapest of all (according to the number of gold medals) is Amazon.cn at the time of this writing. So yup, none of the folks who started this price war is winning it, for now, in eTao’s eyes.

Now, back to reality. Seeing this from a outsider’s point of view, the price war feels a little awkward, though a little fun at the same time. It doesn’t take an extreme skeptic to doubt if all this is just a publicity stunt by 360buy or even one performed together with Gome and Suning. This Sina Weibo poll suggests that a large group of netizens are indeed suspecting that this is a joint act. The price war could have some detrimental effect on all the companies’ bottom-lines. But if that’s in the name of publicity, then it could still be a worthwhile investment. But this Weibo poll seems to suggest that the price war has the potential to generate negative publicity for all three companies, too. And perhaps the winners could be Amazon, eTao, and other product search engines, who are smartly riding on this frenzied wave to show their price comparison capabilities.

Red = They are ganging up for a show, Blue = They are fighting to the death

And while getting all muddy on this price war. I do hope that all these price cuts don’t translate to sub-par customer service or product quality. Because that would be dumb. It’s encouraging to see Chinese consumers and netizens paying attention to this price war, and doing so with scrutiny. But beside the price tag, I’m pretty sure that consumers are also concerned about the quality of the service and products. One Weibo user has had a bad experience, as suggested by his comment at Liu’s message (translated):

While you’re an entrepreneur, please kindly deliver the orders on time. If your orders are late, then that’s not at all a competitive advantage.

That Weibo message sums things up pretty well. It would be nice to have a battle of who provides the best customer service too. That, in my opinion, would be something really worth watching.

And so a lot of names now familiar to Chinese online consumers have expanded their market share. Tmall went up from 39.9 percent to 41.5 percent share in the time between 2011 Q4 and 2012 Q2. Huge gains, too, for Chinese web giant Tencent (HKG:0700), which is finally succeeding in its e-commerce efforts, coming from almost nowhere to grab (an albeit distant) third place with its fairly new QQ Buy site.

Lots of other specialist e-tailers have grown healthily, with Suning, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Dangdang (NYSE:DANG), Vancl, Coo8, and Yihaodian all having expanded their market share slightly. Here are the most recent stats, which we’ve taken the liberty of putting into English-language charts:

And now compare those new figures with the situation (data also from Analysis International) from six months ago:

As for the entire B2C online retailing sector in China, it grew to take in 98.84 billion RMB (US$15.65 billion) in transactions in 2012 Q2 alone, which represented growth of 21 percent from the previous quarter, and up 82 percent year-on-year.

[Sources: Analysis International @ Eguan (1) and (2) (articles in Chinese)]

Obviously, the draw here isn’t really that people want their items shipped more slowly; actually Amazon is trying to cater to customers who are interested in online shopping but put off by the shipping prices, especially for small items.

It’s a bit of a risky move, as slower shipping times means more time for online shoppers to change their minds, cancel their orders, or otherwise abandon the purchase, which could potentially increase the number of returns and customer service issues Amazon’s support staff has to deal with (and pay for). That, Amazon reps say, is why most other Chinese e-commerce sites prefer to offer only fast shipping options. Amazon hopes the competitiveness of the 4-7 shipping option’s price will give the company enough of an advantage to offset any damage done by the increase in pre-delivery buyer’s remorse.

But if you’re looking for that 3 RMB savings yourself, you could be out of luck, as presently the slower option is available only in Shanghai and Harbin. It is also available only for items that are sold directly by Amazon, so it won’t work with any of the items Amazon sells via third parties. If it works out, expect to see the service rolled out to other Chinese cities; if not, expect it to be canned even more quietly than its decidedly-low-profile rollout.

[Morning Post via Sina Tech]

According to the Daily Yomiuri, Japanese authorities have arrested four employees publishing company Sansai Books for selling a book (pictured right) on how to copy DVDs which came bundled with DRM circumvention software.

The law in question is Japan’s Unfair Competition Prevention Act, and apparently the magazine was sold on the Sansai Books website between February 9 and April 21 even after the Japan Video Software Association warned them to stop.

Blogger Francesco Fondi astutely points out that such books are being sold over on Amazon Japan as well. While the offending book is not currently listed on Amazon, it appears to have been available on Amazon as recently as July 14 as you can see from this cached link. We’ve reached out to both Amazon and Amazon Japan this evening to find out more (perhaps they were asked to politely remove it?), and we’ll post an update if we hear anything.

Looking outside Japan in comparison, there have been exceptions made in the prohibition of breaking copy protection for non-infringing purposes.

[h/t @noruweijin]

Amazon's Kindle will soon be seen in back pockets in Japan too

According to The Asahi Shimbun citing unnamed sources, Japan’s Finance Ministry is planning to impose a consumption tax on e-books from non-Japanese companies. This comes in the wake of Tuesday’s news that Japan’s Diet approved a legislation to double the current 5 percent consumption tax to 10 percent by October of 2015. And if that tax were applied only to Japanese internet vendors, they would be put at a clear disadvantage from overseas competitors.

This discussion comes at a time when Japan’s e-book space is beginning to heat up, with Amazon’s Kindle coming soon and Rakuten’s Kobo just around the corner. Finance Minister Jun Azumi was quoted today saying:

We must seek to ensure fairness over taxation on online content sales so that companies at home will not be put at a disadvantage. […] I hear it has become a reason for domestic industries to move their bases overseas.

Like Japan’s anti-copyright law revision we told you about earlier in the week, this is another example of lawmakers struggling to keep regulations current with changing technology. This, of course, is not a problem unique to Japan. But the nations content owners have been extremely protective when it comes to intellectual property and the profits to be had from digital distribution, so it will be interesting to see how lawmakers will react on this front, and how quickly (or slowly) they will do so.

From B-Mobile's promo page for the new SIM card

A Nikkei report on Monday claimed that Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) was about to sell prepaid 500 MB SIM cards in Japan. And today those cards are now available on Amazon Japan for 1980 yen per month (or about $25).

According to my understanding, users must make an initial ‘sim package’ purchase of 3,150 yen, and then once they use up their 500 MB, they can purchase an additional 500 MB for another 1,980 yen via credit card, which would be a total of 3,960 yen (or $50) for that month.

The data that you don’t use each month is not carried over to the following month. Frankly, that seems really crappy to me. It would be nice to pay for what you use, not more than what you actually use. But mobile companies in Japan have always been good at milking cash from consumers (with the highest mobile ARPU in the world), so this is par for the course in my opinion. Thankfully the service will notify you via email when you are down to your last 100 MB.

It’s officially a B-Mobile 4G/LTE card (available as a standard SIM and as a micro SIM). It’s LTE enabled and will use Docomo’s network. According to B-Mobile, the card will be used for data only, and will not support voice calls, SMS, or MMS. Nikkei reported previously that these cards will be able to function in Docomo’s mobile devices, in addition to compatible foreign handsets such as the iPhone.

Chinese search engine Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) slowly started rolling out its cloud services – along the lines of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Google App Engine – last year. And now the company’s VP of engineering, Wang Jing, says that its Baidu Cloud applications engine can save startups a lot of money, and the revenue sharing from its developer platform gave “more than 100 million in shared-revenue” to app devs in 2011 – and he expects “this figure to at least triple” to 300 million RMB (US$47.51 million) by the end of 2012.

That stat was posted today on the official Baidu Beat blog in English. The post goes on to claim that developers who use its app engine can lower their app “development costs by 30 percent, and shorten the development period by 40 percent.” It gives the example of the locally-made photo-editing app Meitu XiuXiu, which made the switch to paying for Baidu’s enterprise cloud program to power its app. As a part of the deal, the app now gives its users free cloud storage on the new Baidu Wangpan, the Dropbox-esque consumer-grade file backup offering from the Beijing-based company.

All in all, Baidu says its cloud engine and developer platform now has 80,000 mobile apps on board from 60,000 devs. Citing the same 91Mobile report on China’s app-etite for mobile downloads that we looked at yesterday, Baidu points out that the top 100 ranking apps already make up for 48 percent of total user downloads – which leaves hundreds of thousands of app devs scrapping for the remaining space on the nation’s smartphones. And so, the PR spin implies, Baidu Cloud can give a startup the kind of boost – in terms of support, lower costs, and greater potential exposure – that can help it compete. One final alarming stat is that:

The cost of acquiring one non-paying app user has gone up to 1.4 RMB [$0.22], leading many developers in the China market to see the mobile app’s industry as a game for the wealthy.

That bodes ill for indie app makers in the face of China’s many web giants who like to have their fingers in as many pies as possible, such as Netease, Sina, Tencent, Alibaba, and… er… Baidu too.

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), for its part, is fighting back in Asia against such new competition from Baidu, making the case for its AWS being the engine that should be powering startup’s apps, allowing them to scale up – or down – their server needs in a flexible and affordable way. We even recently saw the startup MadeiraCloud, which allows users to map out their AWS architecture in a visual manner. Amazon’s AWS is available and accessible in China, in contrast to the situation with many other foreign web services.

But Baidu won’t have things its own way among Chinese services, with strong competition from Shanda (NASDAQ:SNDA; FRA:RZP), makers of the Bambook e-reader, with its Cloudary platform.

Baidu itself has been pushing its consumer-level cloud services a lot in the past six months, when its own Android-based mobile OS was launched and came with all its social apps and utilities bundled together. This was followed just last week with its budget smartphone that added cloud-powered voice controls.

If you read Chinese, the Baidu Developer platform homepage can be found here.

As you can see, Amazon has erected fake shipping boxes with Amazon’s familiar logo around a few of the pillars in the Guomao station, and probably elsewhere as well. It’s pretty eye-catching for people who ride the subway a fair amount; it jumped out at me immediately that something was different. And I’m impressed that they spent some time thinking about a creative way to advertise that interacts with the advertisement’s surroundings, instead of just slapping up a bunch of posters. Although admittedly they have also slapped up a bunch of posters elsewhere in the station. Still, though, it’s pretty cool.

I wasn’t the only person to respond to it, either. During the short time I was waiting for the train, I noticed it was getting quite a bit of attention, and one young man even walked over and hugged it. Sadly, it was just as my train was coming and I wasn’t able to get a photo. But if people are hugging your advertisements, you know you’re probably doing something right.

(Yes, I suppose the guy could have been a plant, but I don’t think so. He only hugged it for a second, and then he jumped on the train too. If it was a viral stunt, it was pretty poorly orchestrated; I think it was just a guy who really likes Amazon China.)

Any of our readers in Japan who are waiting for Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) to start selling e-books and its Kindle e-reader the country are very likely running out of patience. We’ve been following Japanese news reports over the past six months or so, and more than once we’ve heard that its coming soon only to be later disappointed [1].

Taking a look back at previous news reports, we can see that the delays are getting more than a little tired:

• October 2011: Nikkei Business Daily says Amazon is in late stage negotiations, and could enter e-book market sometime in 2011, bringing the Kindle as well.
• December 2011: Kyodo News reports Amazon does not have enough publishers on board, and the new target date could be spring 2012.
• February 2012: Nikkei Business Daily (again) says that the Kindle e-book reader will sell in Japan as early as April, with free data via Docomo’s 3G network.

And today Asahi (and in less detail, the Daily Yomiuri yesterday) says that Amazon has finally struck with key Japanese publishers, and names Gakken Holdings Co., Shufunotomo Co., and PHP Inc. as notable ones. As for the Kindle’s release, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos is cited as saying that a date will be announced by the end of this year.

That date is more than a long way off, and perhaps Bezos has learned that Amazon will need more than a little breathing room to negotiate with Japanese publishers, given the headaches that the company appears to have experienced thus far.

As for the companies other e-commerce business, Amazon aspires to grow 30 percent every year going forward in Japan. And to that end it began airing a TV commercial for “Amazon Fashion.”

B2C in China is big business, and it’s a big business that Alibaba’s Tmall is currently kind of dominating. Taking a gander at the chart below might be intimidating for anyone running a B2C site in China that isn’t Tmall, but it doesn’t phase Amazon China’s CEO Wang Hanhua. In an interview with Southern Metropolis, he said that B2C is a marathon, not a sprint:

I’m most concerned with whether or not you’ve prepared for the marathon, whether or not you will be the final victor. When there are three to five companies left in the market at the end, will you be one of them?

Wang’s lack of fear isn’t entirely misplaced. True, Amazon China currently commands a paltry 2.2 percent of the market (by total revenue share, according to these numbers). But that giant block of “others” — hundreds of tiny sites that command only fractions of a percentage point of the market — indicates that the market is likely to consolidate and fluctuate in the coming years.

Wang says that Amazon China hasn’t yet “reached its peak” — which of course is what any good CEO would say — but personally, I’m hoping he’s right. Amazon China doesn’t offer the selection of some other online B2C malls, but it’s easy-to-navigate customer service and the fact that it allows payment by COD for all items (yes, some other sites do this too) has made it my personal favorite B2C site, so I’m hoping it sticks around.

Rocket Internet recently launched fashion e-commerce site Zalora, and now it has brought out another e-commerce venture that’s focused on selling electronics. It’s called Lazada. The word ‘lazada’ itself is the Spanish word for loop, and it is another clone made by the notorious Samwer brothers, ostensibly following Amazon’s model this time. Which is a polite way of saying it looks almost identical to the old Amazon.com before its recent refresh – or to the current UK version of the site (pictured above). Based in the Middle East – Dubai to be exact – Lazada has so far launched in Egypt, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand.

Lazada.com will focus on electronic products such as cellphones, TVs, software, computers, and cameras. In Indonesia, there are several brands that have partnered with the new site so far, including Acer, Apple, Blackberry, Canon, Lenovo, Nokia, Samsung, and Sony. It offers free delivery to anywhere in Jakarta thanks to Go-jek Indonesia, just as we saw with Zalora Indonesia. Again, this is not a surprise since the CEO of Rocket Internet Indonesia is Nadiem Makarim, who’s also the co-founder of Go-jek.

For Lazada to win the market in Indonesia, it will face the likes of local e-commerce mall BliBli, as well as Japan-based Rakuten’s Belanja Online, the latter of which has been going all out recently to build brand recognition and gain market share.

Companies like Amazon or Zappos haven’t been focusing on the Middle East or Southeast Asia region, which gives Rocket Internet a window to execute quickly in the hopes of being eventually acquired. It might set an example and a precedent for cloning big names and localizing similar services on an almost indistinguishable webpage.

What do you think about Rocket Internet’s operations in Indonesia and other emerging markets? Let us know in the comments!

A writing collaboration service from Indonesia recently caught my attention. It’s called Volpen, and it aims to unite casual writers all over the globe to create the next epic literary work, one book at a time.

It strikes me as a little odd, but also cool and interesting at the same time. Since elementary school we have been taught to have a structure before putting our ideas in ink. But it’s interesting because you would not expect the same style of writing, tone, voice, and storyline since the eventual product will be a collaboration among a many authors. Daniel Liejardi, the co-founder and development head of Volpen elaborates:

Our vision is that the books written at Volpen are not going to be the typical book. It is meant to be more fun, less uniform, and an exposée of the different styles of ideas and writings of the contributing authors. It will be the agglomeration of the ideas of a big group of individuals — where all these different ideas can be organized and take the form of a Volpen book.

There are four steps to publishing a Volpen book: writing, voting, royalty sharing, and then publishing.

Volpen has a writing platform that adopts a minimalist design where data is stored and backed up automatically every 30 seconds to prevent the risk of data loss. It looks pretty straightforward but personally I would prefer if the writing pad were in full screen mode or be placed on the left rather than on the right where it is currently.

How do they choose which direction is best for the story then? Volpen has a voting system which ensures that only the best submissions to the continuation of the story will be chosen, since the eventual chapters are submitted by different writers.

Upon completion of the book, revenue and royalties are calculated and displayed to each contributing writer. Percentages are shared based on the number of words contributed to the story. It will then be automatically formatted and then submitted to e-book publishing platforms such as Amazon and Kobo.

Volpen currently has four co-founders and four developers on their team, and since their beta launch last December, they already have 435 registered writers on board with them, averaging out to over 100 writers signing up with them per month. They have also raised US$100,000 from an undisclosed angel investor.

Upcoming plans? The Jakarta startup is adopting a global outlook, which I like. They are planning to translate their interface into multiple languages, to ease their entry into different countries. Daniel adds:

We are also developing a private group feature that will allow educational systems to utilize the platform to make writing more fun and competitive. Traditionally, students in creative writing classes are only writing to please one person — their teacher. The Volpen platform will allow them to write competitively and expose their writing for public scrutiny. The completed work will also be sold commercially, further adding to the incentive for them to write. In short — we aim to make the creative writing a fun class activity and less of a chore.

Two Chinese B2C e-commerce sites, Amazon China and Suning.com (SHE:002024), have removed the iPad from sale in an apparent move to avoid implication in the Apple versus Proview legal battle over the use of the iPad name in mainland China. Today, a search for ‘iPad’ or ‘iPad 2’ or any relevant permutation yields results only for accessories for (or rivals of) Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iconic tablet on both those sites (pictured above).

Just two days ago, an Apple reseller in a city in central China was raided by authorities and had 45 iPad 2 units seized as a part of the ongoing investigation into Proview’s (HKG:0334) claim.

The Chinese site QQ Tech has two screenshots of an iPad 2 listed on both Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) China and Suning, but with consumers unable to buy the item. Note that Amazon has removed the price and ‘buy’ button, while on Suning the checkout icon is greyed-out and the price was also missing:

Screenshots from QQ Tech News showing listings of an iPad 2 on both Amazon China and Suning, but with the checkout buttons disabled.

After a number of searches, we cannot find those same listings (and thereby truly verify the authenticity of the screenshots), and indeed cannot find any iPad models for sale on either of those two sites.

Suning and Amazon China are relatively minor players in the B2C e-commerce space in China. The market leaders, Alibaba’s Tmall.com, and 360buy, still have iPads for sale (see here and here), as does Dangdang (NYSE:DANG), one of China’s earliest consumer electronics online retailers.

Though the Apple-Proview litigation isn’t near a blanket ban on iPad sales in the country, it remains a possibility as that is one move that could be made by the federal Administration of Industry and Commerce (AIC). Proview – which is from Taiwan but has a mainland HQ in Shenzhen – might even make a filing to prevent iPads that are assembled in China from being exported. It’s now up to Apple to foresee what move Proview might make and get itself some time to respond from the AIC.

We’ll keep you updated if any further e-commerce sites also quit selling the iPad.

[Source: QQ Tech news - article in Chinese]

The Nikkei Business Daily is reporting that Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) will start selling its Kindle ebook reader in Japan as early as April, with pricing falling somewhere in the 10,000 to 20,000 yen range ($130 to $260). The Kindle Touch will likely be the company’s flagship device, and will reportedly have free data access via Docomo’s (NYSE:DCM) 3G network.

Sale of the device would of course require that Amazon first nail down a deal with Japanese publishers for its e-book service in the country, something which has proven elusive for the company thus far.

As for the Kindle Fire tablet, that device still remains exclusively on sale only in the US.

The Japanese ebook market was worth 65 billion yen (or about $846.9 million) back in 2010, but the print market was worth about 30 times that at two trillion yen (nearly $26 billion).

Could this sign be appearing in the windows, er, on the homepages of e-commerce sites in China this year?

2012 is still young, especially in China, where the new year doesn’t really start until Spring Festival has wound to a close. And while the last few years have seen massive expansion in the e-commerce market and new companies springing up right and left, could 2012 be the year that sees that trend reverse? The China Business Journal thinks so.

The paper ran a lengthy article today with predictions for 2012′s e-commerce market. While e-commerce as a market is likely to continue to grow, that may not be enough to rescue smaller e-commerce sites, which the paper predicts will close in droves this year.

In part, that’s because many of these sites are nearing the average life expectancy for a small or mid-size company in China: three years. It’s also because as the biggest e-commerce companies — Alibaba, 360buy, Amazon — continue to grow and strengthen their own positions this year, smaller sites are likely to get left out in the cold. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for Chinese consumers, though; the paper frames it as part of the natural process of the maturing of the e-commerce market in China.

In fact, B2C sites are likely to speed their growth in 2012 — the big ones, anyway — because the massive investments that have been made in these companies over the last year. Investors, it turns out, put twice as much money into Chinese e-commerce (mostly B2C) last year as they did over the previous five years combined, and all that money should manifest itself in the market in the form of better services and faster growth. Of course, for the many smaller companies that didn’t get big investments in 2011, this is only going to leave them further behind than they already are.

The paper also suggests that the battle for the C2C market is already over, and Taobao has won.

We still don’t know for sure what 2012 will bring, but further e-commerce growth seems almost inevitable. Will this benefit the big guns but leave smaller companies out to dry? Only time will tell.

[China Business Journal via Sina Tech, Image via Shutterstock]

Last summer there were reports that Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) would be entering the Indian market in early 2012. This has turned out to indeed be the case, as this past week the company finally launched its online shopping website junglee.com to serve Indian consumers.

Amazon says that the new web service will offer over 12 million products from 14,000 brands, and will allow customers to buy from retailers including “Homeshop18, UniverCell, Hidesign, Gitanjali, The Bombay Store, Fabindia, Bata India Limited, Dabur Uveda, Microsoft India Store, Reebok, and Amazon.com.”

The Junglee website offers a very simple design, featuring product categories ranging from books to cameras to jewellery. The Junglee logo has simple typeface, with an orange swoosh that mirrors the arrow in Amazon’s original logo.

And Junglee is hiring too, so if you’d like to join the Amazon family, click on over to the Junglee website for more details.

GREE girl at 2011 Tokyo Game Show

Japanese mobile social gaming company GREE (TYO:3632) has announced a number of global partnerships that will bring support tools as its prepares to launch its global gaming platform.

There are 20 new international partners coming on board with GREE to assist with development, most notably Amazon and Microsoft. Other companies highlighted in GREE’s announcement are as follows:

Back in December the company also partnered with Paypal to help facilitate payments as it expands globally.

On a related note, the legal battle between GREE and rival DeNA escalated yesterday as the latter filed a countersuit to an anti-competitive lawsuit which GREE (and others) had filed a couple of months back.

There are some key differences we see about the newborn Grow, one being its website design. User can see the archive of all contents that they ‘Growed’ (Grew?) in a timeline format. By following other users on Grow, you’ll see what kinds of content people feel is worth paying for. So it  can be used as a highly curated information website too.

I have Grow button placed on my personal blog TechDoll, and I have received 7 Grow points so far. Until now these points were just applause for my content because I couldn’t do anything with it. But now, Grow points can be exchanged to Amazon gift certificates. For now, for every 10 points, publisher receives 600 yen worth of Amazon gift certificate. At present this feature is limited to publishers in Japan.

To see how Grow works, please see the image below. Publishers can place the Grow button on their website, and users who want to thank those publishers can create an account on Grow and use it to reward them. If you run into an inspiring article with a Grow button, let the author know by pushing it to leave a tip.

The team is planning to officially release the platform in English this March. They are working on preparing more options for exchanging Grow points. Outside Japan, it may be transferred to your Paypal account or may even be withdrawn as money. If you have any suggestions, please let us know!

Here’s a quick round of of some of the more notable China tech stories we covered for the first week of 2012!

1. China Implements Real-Name Registration, Online Ticket Sales for Trains, Buses

China’s online real name requirements look to be spreading to many corners of the internet, and early in the week we saw that this included China’s online train system, and before long there will be real name requirements to online payment systems (like Alipay, for example) as well. As for microblogs, we also found out this week that the transition to a real name system will be anything but cheap.

2. Migrant Laborer Says China’s Online Ticket System Unfair

It wasn’t a big surprise that China’s online train ticket purchasing system buckled under the pressure of the Spring Festival rush. But another issue that might not have been considered was the fact that less computer savvy folks (namely migrant workers) found themselves at a disadvantage with this new online system in place. Beijing net cafes say they will help anyone who has trouble using computers, but the whole system still remains a troublesome issue.

3. Top 3 Startup Provinces in China: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong [CHART]

January 3, 2012 – Hats off to 17Startup.com for their examination of China’s startup scene broken down by province and type.

4. The Chinese Internet Takes an Arrow in the Knee

The well-known meme from Skyrim gets the China treatment as netizens put their own spin on the “but then I took an arrow in the knee” phrase. This. Is. Awesome.

5. It’s Official: iPhone 4S Finally Coming to China on January 13

After months of speculation about when China might get the iPhone 4S, it was finally officially announced this past week, along with the pricing. In addition to that, Chinese fans saw the Apple’s New Year Sales start on Friday as well, though discounts aren’t as much as we’d hoped.

6. Dangdang’s Upcoming E-Reader Shown in Leaked Photo, Coming to China in April

We got a sneak peek of Dangdang’s upcoming e-reader this week, as some leaked pictures show a device that is very Kindle-ish. But Dangdang’s e-book platform is still less-than-stellar, with 50,000 titles that are mostly outdated and boring.

7. Rumor: Amazon’s Kindle Coming to China

Speaking of e-books, Dangdang might to look back over its shoulder, because rumor has it that Amazon is gearing up to bring it’s Kindle line to China.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS.

The Kindle Fire, via Amazon

Perhaps those government talks we reported on back in October went well, because it looks like Amazon’s Kindle product line may finally be coming to China.

The rumor, which is being passed around in tech circles on Chinese microblogs, suggests that Amazon’s Kindle product line should be hitting China soonish. Amazon China spokesmen told reporters that while the company certainly wants to officially introduce the Kindle to China (there are plenty of sketchy Kindles available on the gray market), there is no official timetable as yet.

The rumor has been supported in part by job postings that show Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is looking to hire Kindle engineers in China. However, that in and of itself doesn’t necessarily mean anything as there’s no guarantee whatever they work on isn’t meant to be sold abroad.

Still, if Amazon can get the government to go along with it, it’s hard to imagine a better time for a China Kindle launch than soon. E-reader hardware competitor Hanvon has been losing ground and as we reported earlier today, Dangdang’s entry into the digital book market is looking weak. There’s a gap here for Amazon to exploit, but it won’t last forever.

[QQTech via TechWeb]

Dangdang's ebook store

Last month, we reported on the launch of Dangdang’s Ebook platform and apps. According to Dangdang (NYSE:DANG), the thing has over 50,000 titles, the company has made deals with half the nation’s publishers, and it’s full of bestsellers. Sounds great, right?

Apparently it’s not quite as great as it sounds, though. First Caijing Weekly points out that on the front page, for example, one of the first books you see is a bestseller, but it’s a bestseller from ten years ago. The same author’s most recent hit, which is burning up bookshelves right now, isn’t available via the platform.

In fact, looking at Chinese social network Douban’s list of the hottest books right now, only one of them appears on Dangdang’s platform. That’s Steve Jobs’s biography — definitely an essential for any Chinese bookstore — but users will be disappointed to see that the ebook isn’t really any cheaper than the print edition.

The ebooks also have some compatibility issues for Dangdang. Its books aren’t bound to their platform as tightly as Amazon’s ebooks are — you can read them on Hanwang ereaders, for example — which means it will be harder for Dangdang to push its own ereader device. At the same time, its iPad reading app, for the moment at least, isn’t in the official Apple store and thus can only be installed on jailbroken iPads.

Dangdang’s actual ereader device isn’t out yet, of course, and whether or not that’s appealing could have a big effect on the overall desirability of the platform. But Dangdang may want to step on the gas pedal, as Amazon is clearly beefing up their branding in China and reportedly in talks to launch the Kindle here, too.

[Sina Tech]

Back in October we told you about how Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) was supposedly winding down late-stage negotiations with Japanese publishers to launch its e-book service in Japan. We had expected to see the online retailer enter the local market sometime in 2011, but according to a Kyodo report today the negotiations have proven difficult.

Amazon does not yet have a sufficient number of publishers on board yet to launch its service, and its new target date could be next spring.

The Japanese e-book market was worth 65 billion yen ($846.9 million) in 2010, while the market for printed books and magazines which is worth about 30 times more at two trillion yen (almost $26 billion). So naturally, Japanese publishers are going to soil their respective pants at any medium that threatens to disrupt their business. According to one source, lower priced e-books from Amazon could cause “paper book prices [to] crash, triggering the collapse of the publishing industry.”

Nonetheless, it’s a bit of a bummer for Japanese geeks who prefer their books in a digitized, often more portable and convenient, format. But hopefully Amazon can find some way into the market soon.

We know already that Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is entering the Indian market pretty soon. But the approach the online retail giant is taking to enter this market is both different and intriguing.

According to Medianama, Amazon is joining hands with various homegrown e-commerce portals to launch an open platform-style marketplace in India. This marketplace will reportedly showcase products from its e-commerce partners with Amazon taking care of the payment system. The online retail giant is expected to take 2 to 7 percent commission on sales, with the exception of clothing where it is expected be much higher.

One of the e-commerce portals which is tying up with Amazon told Medianama on condition of anonymity that the retailers on the platform will have to provide Amazon with an XML-based product list, customized to the latter’s categorization – and they (retailers) will be responsible for delivery.

Further, each of these retailers will be reviewed and rated by consumers based on their experience. Added to that, Amazon will also be managing the website front-end and is reportedly in talks with a logistics company to buy them out.

While there is no information on which e-commerce companies are partnering with the Seattle-based retail giant, the Times Of India had previously reported that the company is in talks with Flipkart, LetsBuy, and Exclusively.in among others.

Why this approach?

If you are wondering why other e-commerce companies are flocking to join Amazon’s Indian marketplace rather than staying independent and fighting the competition? It’s quite simple. Amazon’s consumer traffic from India is already higher than these homegrown e-commerce ventures, despite zero sales presence in the country, as noted by Medianama.

Also, note that Alibaba’s Tmall has a similar approach in China, where smaller rivals are flocking to its open B2C platform.

According to R. Sriram, ex-CEO of Crossword Bookstores and co-founder of consulting firm Next Practice Retail, Amazon’s customer traffic from India is already four times that of the top online Indian retailer. Hence, e-commerce ventures are jumping on board to gain an additional revenue channel.

Any guesses on who Amazon India’s launch partners will be? Let us know in comments below!

via Gizmodo

Amazon’s Kindle, which has been available in China for years but only on the gray market, already supports Chinese characters and texts. But the gray-market e-readers don’t work with Amazon’s bookstore, and Hanvon’s e-readers — directly targeted at the Chinese reading population — have been more popular here.

Hanvon’s losses this quarter were attributed mostly to the company’s lowering of e-reader prices by a significant margin. The company also spent money “optimizing” its R&D projects and invested heavily in important projects. Both are signs that the company sees Amazon coming for their market share. It’s even possible the “important project” is an inexpensive tablet similar to Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

Amazon, which yesterday announced that it was removing the “Joyo” from its name in China (Amazon bought a domestic startup called Joyo to enter the Chinese e-commerce market in 2004), is clearly making moves to establish itself more firmly in the Chinese market. But it faces competitors in all directions. China’s e-commerce sector has numerous powerful players like Alibaba and 360buy, and in the e-reader market it will have to deal with Hanvon, assuming the losses haven’t done it in by then.

With a Kindle launch, Amazon also faces a challenge from the Chinese government, who is unlikely to accept a free and uncensored book marketplace. Even if they’re given the green light to launch at all, Amazon may be forced to choose between offering a censored, China-specific market or offering an uncensored market and seeing it blocked or otherwise disrupted.

An official Kindle launch in China might also spell the end of another, unintentional perk of the device. Currently, Kindles can surf the internet completely uncensored, thanks to one of the vagaries of China’s Great Firewall. That capability has made the device popular among fans of blocked websites. So far, the government has done nothing to close the loophole because the Kindle is not officially sold here and users are few. But an official Kindle launch here would almost certainly mean the end of that particular (and probably unintentional) feature.

[Via TheNextWeb (English) and TechWeb (Chinese)]

Etao is the product search engine that was created by Alibaba Group, China’s biggest e-commerce company. But its origins are cause for reticence among some e-commerce sites. On Tuesday, we reported that 360buy has blocked Etao from crawling and indexing its site. And now the High Street retailer turned e-commerce newcomer Suning (SHE:002024) has followed suit. Suning’s online store now also blocks Etao’s spiders from cataloging the site (pictured above).

In contrast, both Amazon China (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Gome (HKG:0493), which is a High Street electronics rival to Suning, are backing Etao.com. Earlier today, at an event for Amazon’s rebranding in China, the regional president, Wang Han-hua, reaffirmed his belief in the usefulness of Alibaba’s product, and said he will not join in with blocking Etao’s web spiders.

Gome has gone further and signed up to Etao’s third-party login platform which will allow people to login to Gome’s site using their Taobao accounts and then purchase the products using Alipay. The Gome agreement for online payments also covers the retailers sister site Coo8.com.

At the moment, the number of e-commerce sites that allow Etao to index their products – or have also signed up for Taobao-Alipay payments, such as Nike China, Vancl, and YihaoDian – far outweigh the two who have so far blocked the search engine.

But it’s interesting to see some strategic maneuvering in this sector. Although there are theoretically only benefits that come from being included in Etao.com – which Alibaba says is agnostic, and has no favourites – some dissenting voices are emerging. Suning and 360Buy apparently take such a differing view, and perhaps would like to weaken Alibaba’s product search engine in its infancy before it gets too powerful.

[Hat-tip: iFeng tech news]

Old vs new, as Joyo Amazon changes to just 'Amazon' in China.

The American e-commerce site Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has made some big changes to its China site today – there’s now a new name and a new short URL, in a sign that the company is ready to stand alone on its global brand. Formerly called “Joyo Amazon” – after buying out Joyo.com seven years ago in order to enter China – the name is, starting this morning, simplified to just “Amazon.” The new Z.cn URL serves as an easy-to-remember shortcut to the ongoing Amazon.cn homepage.

Although it sounds like a small change when said in English, it’s actually more significant in the Chinese language, as there has been a 100 percent switcheroo in the Chinese characters used in the branding of the site.

Joyo was created in 1999 by Chinese entrepreneur Lei Jun – now known to us for his Xiaomi smartphone – who then sold it to Amazon for US$75 million. In 2007, it moved to the Amazon.cn domain – which it retains today, despite the new short URL – and then became “Joyo Amazon.”

The old branding that today vanishes. Pic from TechWeb's Weibo, via Lei Jun's.

Reminiscing on his Weibo this morning, Lei Jun said:

Joyo: in January 1999, I established a small department within [anti-virus vendor] JinShan and began to experiment with the internet. My first idea was for Joyo to be a downloads site. The next idea was for e-commerce. In May 2000, I set up the independent company Joyo, firstly to sell movies, but that soon extended to books. It then became China’s leading [B2C] e-commerce site. In September 2004, it was sold to Amazon. Joyo shall forever remain in my heart. Best of luck to Amazon in China.

Behind the scenes, it’s business as usual at Amazon. Joyo’s former president, Wang Han-hua, remains as Amazon’s country manager. In China, Amazon has ten operations centers across the nation, and boasts 400,000 square meters of logistics-oriented floor-space. Not quite as big as the 1.47 million square meters throughout the US, though. But Amazon reports that only 57 percent of its revenue comes from its American operations.

Sales in China, however, are not so impressive as its floorspace. The phenomenal growth of books- and 3C-seller 360Buy in China in the past few years – to be number two in the B2C sector – shows that Amazon missed its prime opportunity in the country.

[Source: TechWeb - article in Chinese]

Last month we saw Amazon’s Japanese branch announce a call center in Sendai, which is not only good news for the earthquake-affected region, but also an important step to help support customer inquiries in the country.

According to this latest Nikkei report, the Japanese e-book market was worth about 65 billion yen ($846.9 million) in 2010. That pales in comparison to the market for printed books and magazines which is worth about two trillion yen.

Bringing affordable Kindle readers could certainly help shake up an industry that has been slow to take off thus far. But in an space where publishers hold a tighter grip on content than in the US, it remains to be seen if Amazon can offer the same kind of ebook discount pricing that it can give in other markets.

Homegrown online retailer Rakuten (JSD:4755) also recently jumped into the e-book space with its new Raboo online book store.

[Via Reuters]

Amazon Japan

Thursday morning, Xinhua (China’s official state wire service) reported:

Online shopping giant Amazon.com opened an online Chinese-language bookstore on Thursday in cooperation with a Chinese state-owned publishing group, according to a news release from Amazon.

That’s interesting, because there doesn’t seem to be a release about that on Amazon.com or Amazon.cn. Given that, we have no idea when it actually launched, but Xinhua is at least right that there is now a small section of Amazon.com dedicated specifically to books about China, especially books by Chinese authors.

Xinhua’s report makes it all sound like a bit of a bigger story than it is — it’s a small selection of a couple dozen books, some in English and some in Chinese — but it is good to see Amazon spotlighting Chinese authors and some of the few Chinese works of literature that have appeared in translation.

China apparently sees it as another small step in its soft-power push. From the Xinhua report:

The store is intended to allow readers from all over the world to have the opportunity to enjoy Chinese books, as well as improve cultural exchanges between China and other countries, according to Jon P. Fine, a senior manager at Amazon.

[...]

“China has many excellent publications suitable for the international market, but sales are restricted by limited marketing channels,” Liu Binjie, head of the GAPP, was quoted as saying in the news release.

We’re not sure whether this bookstore is really going to improve many cultural exchanges (whatever that means), but if nothing else, perhaps it will help a few more foreign readers stumble into good reads like Wolf Totem or The Complete Works of Lu Xun (assuming those foreign readers can read Chinese and have an extra $600 lying around).

Personally, I’d like to see a special section of Joyo, Amazon’s China partner, dedicated to China books in English too, but I think I’ll have to keep waiting for the time being.

Jasper Cheung, president of Amazon Japan, with mayor Emiko Okuyama

While the tech world is waiting eagerly to see Amazon’s new Kindle Fire, we’d like to point out that Amazon brought some good news to quake-stricken Sendai yesterday as well. The Japanese branch of the company said on Tuesday that it will be opening a call center in the city’s Aoda ward in March of next year.

Of course, that will be about one year after the tragic March 11th earthquake and subsequent tsunami hit the city.

According to a report, Sendai mayor Emiko Okuyama describes the announcement as encouraging news amid the servere employement situation the area currently faces. The call center will address the company’s need to support customer inquiries, drawing on local human resources by hiring about 1000 people in order to do so.

However, Amazon also said in the press conference that its previously planned distribution center in Iwanuma, Miyagi would be cancelled.

Just a few days ago Sendai reopened its airport which had been decimated by the tsunami. This is a huge boost for the area as flights finally resumed operations.

[Via analytica1st, Photo: Mainichi]

Credit: Shehjar.com

With Amazon poised to enter the Indian market early next year, home grown e-commerce portals like Infibeam and uRead are reportedly preparing to raise capital to the tune of Rs 245 crores ($51.3 million) by the end of this year, according to a report from Business Standard.

Quoting officials privy to the development, the report stated that while Infibeam plans to raise Rs 180-225 crore ($37-47 million) to enhance its operating capabilities, uRead is hoping to raise Rs 20 crore ($4 million) to expand into other segments.

Explaining the need for funding, Infibeam’s vice-president (planning and strategy), Manu Midha said:

We have not raised any money to date, and now, we are looking to raise money from venture capital. The funds would be used to build operational capabilities. We want to raise at least Rs 100 crore ($21 million). We are open for more funding, but at the right valuation. We have already signed up with a partner to help us raise the money.

As we had noted earlier, investments in the Indian e-commerce space are definitely heating up, with companies like Flipkart, Infibeam, and Snapdeal vying to lead the e-commerce space in the country, before the online retail giant Amazon lands here.

NYTimes had in fact noted, in one of its recent articles, that venture capitalists had poured in Rs 8.7 billion ($183 million) into 20 e-commerce firms in the last year, compared to Rs 2.91 billion ($61 million) for 13 firms in 2009.

A similar report from ASSOCHAM suggests that the online retail industry is expected to be worth Rs 7,000 crore ($1.5 billion) by 2015. This growth will be driven by increasing Internet penetration across the country and easy availability of broadband services.

Keeping this in mind, I think it’s fairly safe to assume that e-commerce in India is still in its nascent stages.

Photo: Venture Beat

According to a report from Digitimes, Amazon will ship its new 7-inch tablet in October, supplied by hardware maker Quanta Computer out of Taiwan. The report also stated that a 10-inch model will to go into mass production at Foxconn in Q1 2012, the Taiwanese manufacturer best known for producing Apple’s iPad.

While so many other manufacturers fight it out for the number two tablet position behind the dominant iPad, Amazon’s entry will certainly be intriguing given that it has digital distribution of content nailed already.

As prices of the Amazon’s Kindle lean closer and closer to zero, one has to wonder what its new tablet offering will cost. Will there be ads served on the home screen so that consumers can buy at a lower price? Could there be a discount for Amazon Prime members?

The tablet wars get more and more interesting by the day. Stay tuned! Who knows what tomorrow brings.

[Photo: Venture Beat, KK]

Credit: Shehjar.com

E-commerce has proven to be a lucrative business when executed properly. Success stories range from eBay and Amazon in the U.S to Alibaba Group’s dominance in China with Taobao.com. And in India, there are a couple of fast-growing e-commerce giants emerging too, namely Flipkart (books), SnapDeal (group-buy), and HomeShop18 (everything). As a fast growing Internet nation, it’s important to grab market share early. Everyone knows that. And these e-commerce companies are fighting to the death to grab whatever they can. HomeShop18.com has been particularly aggressive, especially this month.

How aggressive? First it acquired CoinJoos.com, an online book e-commerce site (but which is nowhere near Flipkart’s size); then it rolled out a new and refreshing logo; and third it initiated a TV advertising campaign (ka-ching for the ad industry). Anyone in big business knows that TV commercials are one of the biggest costs that one has to commit to make it successful. A newly-created thirty-second TVC could easily cost hundreds of thousand of dollars. Here’s HomeShop18’s new spot:

But why is HomeShop18 spending so much in August? Here’s what I think:

(1) Timing: The rest of the e-commerce boys in India aren’t spending on gaining reach – not yet, at least. So spending now seems logical because there isn’t a need to fight against the clutter. The ad’s tagline says it all: “Homeshop18, India’s largest e-commerce company.” And the quietness of the rest amplifies that message. What of its rivals? With a new $20 million injection, Flipkart is probably going to spend some on advertising. Would it be a TVC? As it’s under a little more pressure now, perhaps yes.

(2) Expansion: Flipkart started selling other stuff back in March, like CDs and electronics, which was a punch to HomeShop18’s face. In return, HomeShop18 flexed its muscles and acquired CoinJoos to improve its online bookstore firepower. This way, HomeShop18 acquired some customers and a team of folks who can quickly help it enter the online book shopping market.

(3) Amazon: Uh oh, here’s comes big daddy, Amazon.com. Yes, the US giant is coming to town. I mean they are already here, but this time round they mean real business as they look to sell things online in India. Amazon has the cash and knowledge to make this a success, provided they are able to localize their service well in India.

Some HomeShop18’s sudden spending spree does make sense if you connect all the events together. The timing of the logo redesign was right after the acquisition of Coinjoos. And the TVC follows up to hit hard on its new image and authority in the Indian e-commerce market. I wonder what else HomeShop18 has in the pipeline – and how its competitors will react.

Let the e-commerce war in India begin.

According to a report today on retail and auction sites from research firm comScore, Amazon is reaching over 20 percent of the internet’s entire population, with 282 million visits in June. That’s more than any other site, including second ranked eBay which reaches 16 percent. How do Asian companies fare in the rankings? I’m glad you asked.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba comes in at number three reaching 11.3 percent, although as you can see in the chart below, a whopping 86 percent of that comes from the Asia Pacific region.

Similarly Japan’s online retail service Rakuten ranks fifth just behind Apple, reaching about four percent, although 73 percent of that is from the Asia Pacific region.

How do other major retail sites breakdown by region? Here are a few selected examples. As you can see, Amazon and Apple are managing to bring in a more ‘globally distributed’ audience from across all regions.

These numbers illustrate a couple of things. Alibaba and Rakuten still have much room to grow in overseas markets. This is particularly true for Alibaba, which could have much better reach in North America and Europe.

As for Rakuten, while it has made moves to improve reach in Europe with the acquisitions of PriceMinister and Tradoria, it still has room to expand in North America.

As online retailing continues its globalization trend, the biggest Western companies will continue to look for more Asia-based audiences too, just as Asian companies will want to look West for buyers they have yet to reach.

[Source: comScore]

Sad box robot: "Downloads? But then you won't need me anymore!"

Thanks to the always informative Serkan Toto for the tip earlier today that Amazon Japan has expanded its offerings to include software downloads among its online retail offerings.

Most of the software categories are more or less in line with what you see on other Amazon regional sites, with PC games, security software, or applications for office or design use. Although I admit that the Adult PC Game category is a little ‘different,’ the section does ask if you’re over 18 before proceeding.

Serkan noted that limited offerings on the site (about 1300 titles presently) will likely expand over time, saying that “[t]he selection (or prices) aren’t terribly exciting, but this is actually a quite big move for the site.”

As a consumer, I tend to use Amazon quite a bit here in Japan, as its prices tend to be as low as any other online retailers here. Incidentally, we’re beginning to see some Amazon-ish moves from homegrown retailer Rakuten, whose Raboo service (Rakuten Books) and Android e-book reader have been announced this summer.

[Nikkei via Serkan Toto, Image Nikkei Trendy]

Reports say that Baidu has bought up 40 percent of digital books and e-reader maker Fan Shu in a deal believed to be worth 47.6 million RMB (US$ 7.4 million).

The buy-up, when it’s confirmed, raises the intriguing prospect of Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, branding Fan Shu’s Yambook e-reader (pictured above) as its own, and tying it to Baidu’s Wenku books portal. It’d be a move reminiscent of Amazon with its Kindle.

Wenku is one of Baidu’s newest sections; it sells digital books for download or reading online. Back in March of this year, Wenku was the centre of a controversy – now resolved – when some prominent Chinese writers accused Baidu of pirating and profiting from their literature.

Fan Shu is a joint-venture subsidiary of the Beijing Founder Technology company, which makes budget laptops and other hardware. The Baidu deal would value Fan Shu at 120 million RMB. Its Yambooks sell for 1800 RMB for the cheapest wifi-only model.

The last time we saw Baidu splashing the cash, it was investing a much bigger sum of money ($306 million) in Qunar.com, China’s biggest travel-booking and search website.

[Source: Sina tech news - article in Chinese]

Pluggd.in reported last month that a call for applications had gone out from Amazon HR representative @guptak via Twitter. They also pointed to the fact that someone named Madhu M was hired as the SVM at Amazon India in Chennai.

We reported back in March that the e-commerce industry in India is set to hit the $10 billion mark in 2011. And while recent report by the IAMAI noted that many Indians are currently very wary of buying products online, it sets the table for a trusted and established organization like Amazon to jump in and fill the gap.

It is also worthy to note that Amazon’s existing offices in India are basically development centers that dig deep into the technology aspect of the business. With that in mind, it is rather surprising to learn that the company has taken such a long time before setting its e-commerce reach (sales unit) there.

[Update: July 21st, 6pm Beijing time - And now we hear that Xunlei (the video, games, and P2P download site) has cancelled its IPO for the time being, also citing concerns about global markets and fragile Chinese IPOs. Just two weeks ago we profiled Xunlei and its range of content.]

Shanda has reportedly suspended the planned IPO of its Shanda Literature and Cloudary division, which is a digital publisher and books portal, in a sign of growing fears of volatile market conditions. One of its lead underwriters, Merrill Lynch, is thought to have withdrawn.

The planned spin-off from Shanda Interactive Entertainment (NASDAQ: SNDA) was filed at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) back in May, and was due to hit stock tickers as READ. But today the Chinese press is reporting that it has been cancelled, with no set date for a fresh attempt at an IPO. Shanda was aiming to raise US$200 million in financing.

Shanda Literature is China’s largest online literature and literary community, established in 2004. Under the Cloudary name – which stands for Cloud Library – it now comprises seven distinct websites, variously aimed at publishers or readers. Its public face is QiDian.com (pictured above), which sells digital books for downloading to your computer, mobile, or e-reader devices.

Speaking of which, Shanda makes the Bambook (pictured right) as a complement to its Shanda Literature business, in a manner similar to Amazon with its Kindle.

Earlier this week, we reported on how Shanda has made another move aping Amazon with the launch of its Grand Cloud web services, aimed at small- and medium-sized enterprises in China.

[Source: Sina Tech news - article in Chinese]

“With consumers increasingly shifting their purchases online, it is imperative for us to expand our presence and take it to the next level. These funds will enable us to build capacity in our supply chain so that we can shrink customer delivery time lines while expanding our product base.” Sachin Bansal, said CEO of Flipkart.

The company started its operation in 2007 selling books similar to Amazon.  In 2010, the company expanded into other categories like CDs and DVDs, games and software, mobile phones, and electronics to extend its product offerings to customers with an aim to hit $1billion in sales by 2015.

Flipkart is one of the most promising e-commerce start-ups in India. It also has one of the most aggressive growth strategies that saw an increase in traffic in recent months, according to a recent comScore report.

Source: India Infoline, Chart via Pluggd

In fact, by the time iPad 2 launches in India, the third generation of iPads might have already been launched in US.

If you’re looking for a nice and light device for reading purposes, you might want to consider the Amazon Kindle 3. Indiaplaza.com has launched the Amazon Kindle 3 in Indian Rupees for easy purchasing in India.

The Kindle is primarily used for reading and comes with e-ink technology, Wi-Fi and 3G support. The Kindle offers more than 115,000 e-books for selection. Users can also read newspapers, subscribe to magazines and blogs, and even play audio files such as MP3′s or audio books.

“The Kindle 3 comes at an all inclusive price, duty-paid for & with free home delivery across India and customers can choose from two models – Wi-fi and Wi-fi with 3G. While the Wi-fi model is available at Rs. 8950, the higher model with Wi-fi and 3G is priced at Rs. 11,850,” said the statement.

With increasing demand and Apple failing to give India its attention, it seems like a lot of people will find the Kindle 3 very tempting.

Mr Sriram Ravi from Indiaplaza said, “Since 1999, Indiaplaza has pioneered the concept of online shopping in India by constantly expanding selection and availability of products at low prices on the website. The availability of the Kindle in Indian Rupees is another step in this direction.” To a certain extent, it is, especially by offering free delivery across India. Purchasing the

Below is a Kindle 3 review video by TechMobileReview:

Does the Kindle 3 attract you? Or would you be willing to wait for Apple’s iPad 2? Let us know.

Connect on Facebook:

While Twitter might suggest otherwise, the aggregated online buzz (blogs, message boards and online communities) doesn’t lie.

Apple, on the other hand, made it to 4th position.

Due to the recession, discount oriented stores like Walmart, Target and Amazon, all made it to the list.

The buzz rating is calculated by a formula that weighs a variety of different factors on a given subject, including overall volume of online posts, and the positivity tone of those posts.

Zeta Interactive CEO Al DiGuido commented:

“Google displaced Microsoft as the lead last year, but this year, the tech giant took the No. 1 spot due to aggressive advertising. These marketing efforts include the “Laptop Hunters” ad from agency Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, and a major push ahead of its Bing search engine debut. Bloggers often used terms such as “easy,” “efficient” and “better” in their online discussions about Microsoft.”

#10. Walmart

Despite being last on the list, consumers are probably more satisfied with Walmart than with Target or Amazon.

#9. Nike

Nike’s Facebook page might be less successful than Adidas’ but overall, it still emerges as the winner in terms of online popularity. The sport apparel brand uses blogs, Facebook and Twitter intensively; showing other brands what thought leadership and solid content can do in today’s online age.

#8. BlackBerry

BlackBerry has the highest positive tone rating. Despite facing intense pressure from Apple’s iPhone, it is still considered the best business phone (at least in my opinion).

#7. Sony

Sony has the lowest positive tone rating amongst the top 10 brands listed. Even if its intensive marketing campaign managed to push it rather high up on the list, it should certainly start taking note of what people are saying about it.

#6. Honda

Being the only automobile company on the list tells us something about Honda – it has used the web pretty well to get consumers’ attention, especially in times of recession. The commercial that cost them $6.2 million 2 years back rocked the world. I wouldn’t say the same for its product manager, who was caught astroturfing.

#5. Target

Its numerous Twitter pages are all about discounts and new offers. That could explain how it attracted over 650,000 fans on Facebook as well. But it seems like its holiday commercials aren’t that well-liked this season.

#4. Apple

Apple is undoubtedly tweeps’ favorite. It has become a routine for ‘iPhone’ and ‘Apple’ to make it on Twitter’s trending topics. New product launches, speculations, holiday discounts, lawsuits and Steve Jobs keep the buzz alive.

iTunes has also been featured as one of the top 25 Facebook pages, with more than a million fans.

#3 Amazon.com

Amazon’s $850 million acquisition of Zappos was big news in the online world this year. Besides that, the online retail giant has also created multiple Twitter accounts for different deals and services. Another most talked about topic revolving Amazon would be its e-book reader, Kindle.

#2 Google

Google’s ever changing logo is bloggers’ favorite topic. Its UFO doodle, for example, has caused a stir as all that was given were hints to why there was a logo redesign. Google has also created great presence on Twitter, with multiple Twitter pages that cater to different consumer needs.

#1 Microsoft

Aggressive online and offline marketing is the core reason why Microsoft is on the number 1 spot this year. Its Windows 7′s launch was huge business despite Apple’s mockery. It has a Twitter page of over 35,000 followers and a Facebook page of over 70,000 fans. Not very impressive numbers for a big brand like Microsoft, but I guess its the buzz that matters. Congrats!

On SlideShare

Stock photo powered by Pixmac

Charlene Li, Analyst from Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group has the answer. A study on brands’ social media engagement was conducted on the top 100 brands featured on BusinessWeek’s “Interbrand Best Global Brands 2008″ publication. This study spans across more than 10 social media sites such as Facebook, Wikis, Forum, Flickr and content distribution sites such as Facebook Connect and ShareThis.

Before we show you the top 10 brands, you might want to briefly understand how companies go about gaining engagement credits. Companies only receive credits if they are actively creating and promoting presence and consistent participation within the channel. On the other hand, partial credit is given if corporate presence is created by external parties (e.g. consumers, third party affiliates).

Engagement Profile

Each brand is classified under an Engagement Profile, according to the brand’s magnitude of presence and engagement. Those with high engagement and many channels (on the top right quadrant) are called mavens while those with one channel and low engagement (lower left quadrant) are named wallflowers. Interesting names!

Top 10 Engagement Score

And here it is! The top 10 most engaging brands; led by Starbucks® with a score of 127.

Bonus: Engagement Scores by Industry

These 100 companies are grouped into their respective industries to calculate the industry average engagement scores and channels. With that, the Media and Technology industries stood out with a score of 76.7 and 70.0 respectively.

Media Companies: Google, Yahoo, Thomson Reuters, MTV, Disney, GE
Technology Companies: Dell, Microsoft, SAP, Intel, Blackberry, Oracle, Cisco, HP, Samsung, IBM, Xerox, Motorola

Via Techcrunch