Since I posted an article on HaiVL on Tuesday, it has raised eyebrows for two big reasons. First, the 9gag-like HaiVL community caught wind of the post, and then many people didn’t like my statement that “content in Vietnam is a wasteland”. So let’s take a closer look at the state of online content in Vietnam.

A key issue: generating content that lasts

First, let me get something out of the way. The content in Vietnam itself is not “bad” or “good”. The issue is organizing the content. Organizing it into a way that lasts and is easy to find and digest for new users on the web.

The forum model is as outdated as Geocities and Altavista. It was slowly driven out by blogs and then into even newer more sophisticated models. We’re way passed Web 2.0 by now. Certainly, in the US, forums are still used on company websites for questions and answers that are very specific, but the majority of internet users have flocked to new sharing and linking models. People have moved onto Wikipedia, Quora, Reddit, Digg, Stack Overflow, Pinterest, Facebook, Craiglist, Tumblr, 9gag, 4chan, and more. Each site has its own unique niche and user experience idiosyncrasies, but they all excel at one thing: user generated content.

How does this work in Vietnam?

A large amount of content in Vietnam is generated on news sites and forums. Forums like Tinhte and Webtretho publish news and allow users to start their own discussions. On Alexa’s web rankings, you can see that among the top 20 sites in Vietnam, at least 10 of the websites fall into this category.

These old models lack two things:

• The initial content is generated by publishers, not by users. It’s a news-based forum.
• It is not organized in a user-friendly way. Some of the best comments are embedded deep within the discussion.

If you look at these two things, in a way, it looks like Vietnam hasn’t even entered Web 2.0 yet. Has it missed the boat? I mean, Vietnam’s Pinterest clones all haven’t gained traction (including Rocket Internet’s attempt as well). But no, there are obviously enclaves of the twenty-first century web out there, like LinkHay, Zing Me, and obviously Facebook is growing in Vietnam like crazy. But Vietnamese users outside of these spaces are mostly sifting through Web 1.0. Why?

Is it because of Vietnamese users?

It’s always a senseless comparison, but startup scenes across the world are always comparing themselves to Silicon Valley. And one of the key things we envy in the Valley is the early adopter culture. Open up a new, random over-rated social media website like App.net and people flock to it. You may not be successful but at least you got a ton of user feedback in the interim. This doesn’t exist in Vietnam. Not only is the internet population (35 percent) relatively small but it’s so fragmented that most websites don’t get critical mass. For example, Linkhay, an awesome Digg lookalike, has been sitting under 200,000 users for years.

And it’s not an anomaly. Several of my sources working in search engines across Vietnam for the past few years have found that Vietnamese content is lacking (the 13th most populous country in the world and it’s not even on the map). This is why CocCoc and NHN Naver are looking to work with content industry professionals to get more Vietnamese content online. Only in the past year or so has this improved. It’s hard to find the best doctor online, or find out where the best place to buy a specific type of cloth is. Is it because Vietnamese users are unwilling to participate?

What did HaiVL, Foody.vn and others do right?

I think Vietnamese users are still getting accustomed to generating content on their own. This is why I really do think HaiVL is a pioneer. Because they’ve out-executed lots of other Vietnamese companies in the content space. The interesting thing is, as Dave McClure would say ”it turns out all you gotta do is copy great shit 99 percent then innovate one percent every month and you can beat the crap outta most people.” To win in Vietnam, it’s not just about cloning the right model, it’s about cloning very well. It’s about adapting a model we see somewhere else and executing it really well. And what HaiVL has done is get people to freely give content. So the problem isn’t with the users, it’s with what people are building.

One of the key things that HaiVL did was to perform really well on Facebook – not everybody can do that. And Facebook has only recently hit Vietnam, so upvoting and prioritizing best responses isn’t commonplace yet. What HaiVL is basically doing is educating the masses in a new way of interacting with content, in the same way that Nhom Mua and Rocket Internet are educating people on e-commerce.

To me, the country’s users are ready now, it just takes a few startups like HaiVL to take it to the next level. After all, HaiVL has great topics and fun material, and everybody needs comedy in their life. Next, who can take the success behind HaiVL and apply it to different niches of the content market?

Note: We’ve tried our best to cover a lot of the websites in this space and key aspects of the field, but we know we may have missed many, please let us know in the comments.

In the quest to take down Google in Vietnam, CocCoc is stepping up its game once more with the release of a new browser called Corom this week (a name, that pronounced in Vietnamese, sounds a bit like Chrome). I think this is a smart move. When I heard the news that CocCoc wanted to challenge Google in the country, I always thought that they would need to get into the browser battle. After all, most of my searching these days happens either in my Chrome default “omnibox” or search box, and in my default mobile browser. Thus, this move allows CocCoc to get onto Vietnamese users’ desktops.

Victor Lavrenko, CEO at CocCoc, says that the main purpose of building this browser is to “help Vietnamese users. That’s our strategy – do good for users.” and Corom helps to achieve that by providing some key things other more mainstream browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and – cough cough – Internet Explorer don’t have. He points out four main Corom benefits:

1. Typing in Vietnamese. Corom automatically add diacritics, so that when you type something you don’t have to use the Unikey/Vietkey
2. It gives access to Facebook, because it’s not very reliable due to being partially blocked.
3. In Vietnam, Victor says “the problem of speed is usually related to international channels etc. , so we download in several threads, and it’s much faster, up to eight times quicker”.
4. The new browser allows you to download videos from Youtube (you can do this in Firefox with an add-on, but not in Chrome).

Unfortunately for me, the browser is only for Windows. Windows is by far Vietnam’s most popular computer operating system, where Macs are only really seen sometimes used in the big cities. Victor says they do hope to come out with a Mac OS X version soon. When asked if they’d be releasing a mobile browser, an area I think has a lot of potential, Victor said:

Regarding a mobile browser, I think it’s not our target because mostly browsers are pre-installed and people rarely change them. However, probably we’ll integrate points-of-interest search into our browser and maybe this will be an advantage big enough for people to replace their mobile browser.

In Vietnam, one of the most popular models for internet companies and startups to make money in the consumer space is online marketing. It’s only natural, after all, since Vietnamese consumers are still warming up to newer payment methods. That makes selling ads are an easy way to make money. Now, Google is opening up Google Adsense with Vietnamese language support.

Rumor has it that Google makes more money here in Vietnam, a country of about 90 million, than in Indonesia, a country of almost 250 million people. Vietnamese companies are obviously eager for business and growth, and Vietnamese consumers are eager to shop. So Google Adsense coming into the country makes sense, especially as smartphone usage booms in the country. In the announcement, Google also posted Vietnam’s hockey stick growth for internet penetration. Google can no longer ignore Vietnam:

And they especially cannot ignore Vietnam if new search players like Wada and CocCoc are getting really aggressive about attacking Google’s market share in the 13th biggest country in the world.

The announcement, which came on May 10th, has already got major sites like HaiVL signing up, and we’re sure to see bigger sites like Zing Me, and the major Vietnamese newspapers sporting Google Adsense. It’s simply much easier to go through Adsense than to go direct to companies for display banners. With this, we’re sure to see more money pouring into the online space as internet penetration grows and content (hopefully) gets better.

In university, I majored in history of religion and visual culture, so how can I resist writing about a story where a meditating monk took pictures with a naked woman and now she’s asking Google to take her photos down? It’s just too juicy. It combines a host of controversial elements with a seasoning of technology on top.

NSFW Warning: all links have nude photos concerning this issue, so beware before clicking, especially if you are at work.

The photos are part of an exhibit that was released early last year along with a book titled Thoát, which can mean escape, liberate, or exit in Vietnamese. The exhibit, which was shown in the popular beach city of Vung Tau, was meant to be a commentary on feng shui and the relationship between image and story. In the 12 photos, Hue Phong, the feng shui expert and mastermind behind the project, dresses up in monk’s robes and Thai Nha Van, a model and actresses, poses nude behind him in various poses. The story starts out with Van walking up to a temple, meditating in the temple, and eventually learning from a monk there. But it all finishes with pictures of Thue Phong, dressed as a monk, meditating, with Van posing in the background nude.

Thue Phong’s whole idea was to shock the public and art industry to rethink lust, and oddly, to take a closer look at the teachings of Buddhism. Several Buddhist masters in the area have already denounced the exhibit as sacrilegious, and now Van is asking Google to help take down the photos off the internet. She’s also proposing to the photographer to give her licensing power over the photos, but I’d say it’s too late for that. They’re all across the Internet already.

If I know anything about the internet, Van’s attempt to take the photos down is just going to get her more attention, like this article. And the more attention she’s got, the more computers have got her photos. All in all, I think Hue Phong’s been successful in provoking the public into some kind of discourse, even if it wasn’t as he planned.

My favorite irony of this whole affair is that ancient Buddhist art always featured nudity, and no one protests that, it seems time has made Buddhist more conservative?

Chester Roh (pictured) started his journey as an entrepreneur at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), a well-known engineering school in Korea. Chester got interested in the internet and hacking and spent two years honing his hacking skills. (In fact, he was doing so much hacking that he was eventually caught and prosecuted, but thankfully it didn’t do much damage to his career).

Knowing that he was good at hacking and computer science, he joined Inzen (a security solutions company serving the government and large corporations) as a co-founder and CTO at age 21. What Inzen did was to analyze the packet data in real-time to detect and prevent malicious attacks. Chester was at his dream job at 21; a place where he could use his skills to do good. He stayed at the company for five years and eventually saw it go IPO in 2002 in Korea.

Xenters was Chester’s second company, but this time around he was a founder and leader. Xenters also dealt with cyber security and was started by a group of ex-Inzen members that included Chester. The difference between Inzen and Xenters was that the latter could catch smarter hackers who tried to break into the system slowly and randomly, making it hard to track and monitor their packet data. However, the business didn’t succeed as the team couldn’t find the proper customers for their solutions. It was shut down in 2005.

Chester then took a break from being an entrepreneur to work at SK Telecom, the largest telco in Korea. At SK Telecom, Chester got his first chance to build a product for consumers. He was put in charge of building an intelligent customized service, named “Adaptive Personalization System,” that responded to each user’s need and wants, somewhat similar to Google Now. The intelligent customization system that Chester designed wasn’t ready for the market and was eventually discontinued, but Chester got his first taste of building products for consumers, which turned out to be an important point of his journey leading to his success at Tatter & Company. He said:

I really wanted to change my career and that is the reason why I went to SK Telecom. Because [in all my career] I was a security engineer, a security expert. I wanted to change my career to the consumer side. I wanted to do something outside [of my norm.]

After his stint at SK Telecom, around 2005, Chester noticed that there was a blogging trend in Korea and was hoping to import a blogging platform to Korea to ride on the trend. He told me:

My initial thought would be to import a blogging software solution into Korea. So I was writing a letter to the biggest blogging software company in the US (back then), Six Apart, who runs Movable Type.

Six Apart didn’t reply, but one of Chester’s friends, knowing that he was looking for such a solution for the Korean market, sent him a link to Tatter & Company, a blogging platform built by a Korean engineer. Chester elaborated:

It was really beautiful blogging software…so I called him and told him that I was interested in his business and I wanted to work with him.

So in 2006, they co-founded the company with Chester taking the leading role. Tatter & Company builds Tattertools, which is an open source blogging platform similar to WordPress for the Korean market which allows third party developers to collaborate and integrate their ideas into it. Competition was fierce with Daum and Naver, who had 9 million and 13 million users at the time also in the blogging platform arena. But Chester didn’t fight based on numbers. It was quality that he was after:

I have a strong conviction. At the time in Korea, blogging wasn’t new. But the quality of the content wasn’t that good. With search, we need quality content and Tatter & Company is providing all this quality content. So our strategy is clear. We are not taking care of all bloggers but we are taking care of high quality content creators.

Starting in 2006, Tattertools provided services such as allowing bloggers to have their own domain name, their own blog design, and data. While all these sound very common today, remember that they were introduced in 2006. Plus, the rest of the blogging platform in Korea only allowed bloggers to register as a sub-domain and didn’t allow much customization. The strategy worked. From 1,000 users at the start, Tatter & Company is now seeing more than 10 million unique monthly visitors.

In 2008, Google came in to acquire Tatter & Company when it had more than 200,000 bloggers using its platform. Tatter & Company was also believed to be Google’s first acquisition in Korea. Chester reflected back and told me:

All of our engineers were excited when Google contacted us. And in 2007 and 2008, Google was like the king of the web. I felt our engineers were really looking forward to this next challenge in the company so we took that opportunity.

With money and experience under his belt, Chester is now an angel investor investing in local Korean startups. He has invested 15 companies so far with the usual ticket size ranging from $50,000 to $300,000. Some of the successful portfolio companies include Ticket Monster (acquired by LivingSocial) and Dialoid (acquired by Daum). His entrepreneurial spirit hasn’t died down either as he recently founded Ablar, a mobile technology company that aims to build different mobile products to serve the world.

Hey folks, Xin Chào Thành Phó Hồ Chí Minh! In case you’re wondering what that means, it’s actually “Hello Ho Chi Minh city!” And yes, Tech in Asia Meetup will be heading back to Ho Chi Minh, and once again we are all excited to meet and connect with the local startup community there.

This time around, we are excited to have Victor Lavrenko, CEO of Vietnam’s local search engine, Coc Coc, to share with us the challenges he faced in building a search engine up against tough competition from giants like Google. For those of you who have not heard of CocCoc, you can read more about them here.

Or… You are welcome to join us at this latest Tech in Asia Meetup to hear Victor speak on May 23, at 6:30 p.m. Once again, tickets are free but grab them fast while stocks last. See you there!

Agenda:

• Registration: 6.30 – 7.00pm
• [Interview] How CocCoc Plans To Take Down Google in Vietnam 7.00 – 7.40pm
• Q&A from floor: 7.40 – 8.00pm
• Networking & Dinner: 8.00 – 9.00pm

Venue:

Saigon Hub, 27B Nguyen Dinh Chieu Street, Da Kao Ward, District 1

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Speaker: Victor Lavrenko

Victor is a well-known Russian online entrepreneur with over 15 years experience in financial, strategic and technological fields. Graduated from Moscow state University, Faculty of Mathematics and Cybernetics holding MMath degree. Prior to commencing the Cốc Cốc project in 2010, Victor has held top positions from Technical Director to the Vice President of Strategy and Finance at Mail.ru (one of the biggest Internet companies in Russia).

Currently Victor is focused on the development of the Vietnamese Search Engine with the aim to win the local search market and to contribute to the development of the Internet industry in Vietnam.

Not forgetting, a huge thank you to our awesome Sponsors:

Corporate sponsors

VC sponsors

Startup sponsors

(Photo: Associated Press)

Shortly after this weekend’s earthquake near the Chinese city of Ya’an in Sichuan province, which has so far claimed nearly 200 lives with many more still missing, a number of leading web companies rushed to help with the disaster response by setting up online ‘people finder’ message boards.

Here are the five main online resources:

Google’s Person Finder

This is a well-known site in such an emergency, with buttons for “I’m looking for someone” and “I have information about someone”. Google’s dedicated Sichuan quake boards currently have 1,100 records, though it’s not clear how many of those are made up of people looking for missing folks, or actual bits of information about a lost/found individual. The Google site is also nice enough to link to several resources from other web companies, such as the ones listed here.

Baidu Zhidao for Ya’an

Baidu’s Wikipedia-esque Zhidao site now has a dedicated messaging board for the quake-hit area. In contrast to Google’s more closed-off (privacy-oriented?) Person Finder, the Baidu boards are open to anyone to read through.

360 Search for Ya’an

Qihoo’s board emphasizes the names of missing folks in very large type, making it easy to browse through.

Sohu Public Service for Ya’an

Major web portal Sohu has a Google Person Finder-like site (pictured above) split into “want to find” and “want to help” buttons. It also features an open board with Pinterest-style notes for each person being sought. So far, over 7,600 ‘missing’ posts have been made, but many could be duplicate names.

Panguso Post-Quake People Finder

State-run search engine Panguso has had the sense to make this site mobile-friendly, as many people will be turning to their smartphones or feature phones and using 2G or 3G in an area where many buildings and internet lines have been destroyed, or where electricity has not yet been restored.

Earlier today we saw smartphone rivals Apple and Samsung both make sizable donations to post-quake relief efforts. Social sites like Sina Weibo and the messaging app WeChat (known as Weixin in China) are also playing a part as people in the affected area use lots of web and mobile resources to communicate or find information.

Follow the updates on the China Daily live blog.

In Vietnam, the chat app battle is fearsome. Western competitors Whatsapp and Viber face serious opposition from Asian rivals like Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat, and domestic apps like Zalo and soon to be released Wala. Arguably, there’s no real leader right now.

Line, probably one of the sleekest apps in the space is headed and designed by NHN. I sat down with JB Park, the CEO of NHN Vietnam, to talk about where NHN is headed next in Vietnam and was surprised to learn some interesting moves for the coming year and facts about NHN in Vietnam.

Currently in Vietnam, NHN has 70 staff, mainly engineers, and over 250 servers in the country dedicated to Vietnam. The Line chat app has had over 1.5 million downloads so far, although Park did not reveal monthly active users. But what is really interesting is that the 70 staff that NHN has up in Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital, are not working on features for the chat app (that innovation happens back in Japan and Korea where Park says there are teams of Korean, Japanese, Russian, and American engineers working together), but they’re actually working on bringing a new search engine into the Vietnamese market, one of NHN’s other fortes.

That means in Vietnam, NHN is going to be competing in two very significant spaces: chat apps and search.

A quick look at the history of search in Vietnam

If you’ll remember, I recently reported that Coc Coc, a Russian-backed search engine, is looking to pump $100 million into defeating Google in Vietnam, and there’s also another Russian-backed search engine called Wada, who hasn’t gotten as much traction in the market yet. Historically, Vietnam has seen its fair share of search engines that want to be Google:

• In 2006, DFJ VinaCapital invested $2 million on timnhanh.com, which has now shifted into newspaper content crawling.
• In 2007, the Nguyen Hoang Group invested $500,000 in monava.vn, but has since closed down.
• In 2008, Tinh Van company invested $2 million into Xalo.vn, but hasn’t made much headway.
• In 2008, Socbay.com also debuted to great fanfare but also hasn’t gained much traction.

It’s been difficult. Since 2008, no significant players except perhaps Coc Coc have really stepped up to face Google, and Google remains the dominant search engine with over 80 to 90 percent of the search engine market share – and it’s by far the top website in Vietnam. So it’s interesting that NHN is jumping into the Vietnam search war as well. According to Park:

In South Korea, Naver has long been the king of search, soundly dominating Google, which has only had around five percent of market share. So in the next few months, we’ll be releasing our own search engine on the market.

In order for NHN to succeed on the search front, it will have to be proactive in building up its own content. That means coordinating with local companies and organizations that produce information.

The only way that we could be better than Google in South Korea was in working with content distributors and publishers locally, so that’s what we’ll be doing here. The problem in Vietnam is that content is very weak. So we have to look at helping to produce it and get it online.

It’s going to be an interesting journey for NHN’s search in Vietnam. Park didn’t say if the name of the engine would be Naver like in South Korea, but he did say they’re look at building a search app in addition to a website. The challenge moving forward will be if the team of Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese engineers can crack Vietnamese search better than the Russian-Vietnamese teams at Coc Coc.

We’re inundated with social media these days. I consider my friends who aren’t on Facebook lucky, they don’t have to deal with the onslaught of senseless status updates and the latent narcissism that it entails. Facebook has slowly but surely blurred the lines between friends and acquaintances and strangers, but hasn’t put much emphasis on close friends and family. This is where PassedOn comes in.

The startup, based here in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam, focuses on creating an online diary of experiences with your loved ones for the English-speaking global market. And as the name implies, creating an album of videos, photos, soundbytes, and thoughts with them before you or they pass on.

The project has been online since November 2012 and already has over 100,000 users with “some more active than others”. Marco Oparq, CEO of PassedOn, has his sights set on working with companies like Dropbox to add value by personalizing their services instead of working with big companies like Facebook and Google. All of the data on PassedOn is encrypted so not even Marco knows how users are using the service.

I chatted with Marco for some insight into what he terms intimedia and the story behing PassedOn:

Intimedia is a new generation of websites that are more private and intimate than the jungle of social media that is currently offered. The WWW has an overload of information sharing and too few places that you can consider for yourself and your direct loved ones.

Marco goes on to say that Facebook is for friends, Twitter for business and friends, LinkedIn for business, dating sites for new lovers, but for your mother, daughter, and best friend, there isn’t a website that takes care of people you currently care about.

How did you come up with the idea?

Marco: I was on a holiday to Cuba with my wife, and the airplane had turbulence. At that moment, I realized that if the airplane would have crashed, basically we had nothing arranged. My kids were with my parents in law in Colombia, and they don’t know my parents, they don’t even have the contact number. Nobody in Vietnam knew where I was, and actually my parents in Holland, didn’t even know I was on a holiday.

Then I thought, I’m surely not the only one who hasn’t taken care of the basics (bank details, crucial information, etc.). Then a couple of months, I started to talk with people and see if it would be a nice idea to have an online portal to arrange these necessities in case something unexpected happens. Throughout these months, I realized that in fact it is more important to leave behind your thoughts and emotions than the actual administrative parts.

What happens when a user dies?

Marco: When a user dies, the “eWills” will be released to their loved ones and added to their profile. Later, we will add functions like being able to receive a printed version of the eWill in a nice book and allowing the people to “Leave a message to the World”.

But Marco emphasizes that PassedOn is not about death:

Marco: In general, I think it is good to mention that PassedOn is not about Death it is about realizing who and what is important for you and get a certain peace of mind that you have collected these thoughts and moments in a special place so you can share it with those you care most about.

What about older generations who are not accustomed to services like this?

Marco: First: the UI will be more visual. Second: we use the first wave of members (young mothers) to teach them. They are surely a target group.

I asked what Marco thinks of other competitors in this space like Deadsocial, LivesOn and Legacy Locker, but he says that these services don’t focus on the emotional ties between loved ones. PassedOn is decidedly about preparing “for only the few people before you are not here anymore, and only they can see it at that time.” Google has also entered this space with its Death Manager today.

The project plans to do a UI refresh this month, release a new app in the beginning of May, and start a new service that allows people to email their pictures and data directly into the service.

Check out the video for more on the service:

On the Alexa traffic rank, Zing Video is the fifth highest ranked site in Vietnam. But that number piggybacks on the strength of Zing Me, VNG’s flagship Facebook-like site. They’ll be allowing users to download individual videos they want to keep starting on April 9th; and from April 19th to June 1st, users can download their own videos en masse. It’ll all be over officially on the June 2nd when the service goes completely offline.

Taking down the service falls in line with two main factors for VNG, a general shift in strategy and a disinclination to compete head on with Youtube. In terms of strategy, VNG has been going heavy into mobile with new products like mobile chat app Zalo and mobile social games like Giai Dieu Vui while maintaining its strong strategic advantage with web real estate like Zing MP3, Zing News, Laban (a web and mobile browser), Zing TV (which allows users to broadcast Vietnamese television onto their web browser or mobile), Zini (a new Weibo or Twitter-like service released earlier this month), and Baomoi (the leading news portal that VNG acquired). In terms of foreign competition, Youtube currently holds the number four Alexa traffic ranking in Vietnam just behind Google and Facebook.

On one side, VNG is obviously shifting its resources into new projects like Zalo and Zini, but it also brings up a scary thought: can Vietnamese companies handle competition from mega companies like Google and Facebook? Certainly, VNG’s Zing Me has maintained a strong domestic growth rate of 12 million users compared to Facebook’s 12 million – though Facebook’s aggressive one million new users per month growth rate in Vietnam makes it look like it’ll win in the end. But can this growth be maintained for long as Facebook gets more aggressive about how users can access its platform with apps like Facebook Home?

In China, Youtube has been blocked since 2007 effectively allowing local competitors to dominate the space without resistance. In Japan, Youtube has faced an innovative competitor in Niconico-douga which in addition to streaming videos, allows users to comment on top of the video. Up until now, VNG’s Zing Video was the only one that could take on Youtube in Vietnam.

This underlines a current of unease in the Vietnamese consumer domestic market. Effectively, VNG is competing with Google and Facebook on multiple fronts, and it’s having to pick its battles more wisely in order to stake out a secure market advantage. Zalo makes a lot of sense because both Google and Facebook are weak in chat apps. But with Google rumored to acquire Whatsapp soon (and Google Talk rebranding as Google Babel to be more like a new-style group messaging app), how will Vietnam’s Zalo fare if Google puts all of its engineering weight behind one chat app competitor that is already incumbent in the space? And how will Zing Me do up against a Facebook that is even more aggressive about innovating its interface. On the other hand, Zing MP3 is bound to remain untouchable with the American music industry holding back services like Spotify and Pandora from going global.

All of this, although fascinating and telling of VNG’s prowess in the consumer space, does not bear much weight on VNG’s central business: gaming.

(Source: Zing’s Blog)

When Google left China’s search market back in 2010, it seemed like an end to the company’s attempts to seriously engage with the China market. Yet somehow, just a few years later, Chinese people are buying phones in droves that run on Google’s Android platform. 86 percent of the new smartphones sold in China run Android. Most of China’s so-called “home grown” mobile operating systems are just Android ROMs. Even China’s MIIT feels that Android’s dominance poses a potential threat. Heck, even Google’s biggest domestic competitor Baidu has launched a mobile OS that runs on Google’s Android platform. Yet for some reason, China’s state-run media organs seem to be fixated on Apple.

The anti-Apple parade began a few weeks ago with CCTV’s annual World Consumer Rights Day show, in which it accused Apple of treating Chinese customers unfairly because of allegedly discriminatory return policies. Since then, the echoes of anti-Apple sentiment have only grown, in part because some people have hitched their wagons to that train in hopes of getting some free hype.

Yet for all the talk about “China’s war on Apple,” I think Google is the real concern. As my colleague Steven pointed out on Friday, Android’s market dominance in China means that Google essentially controls a huge chunk of China’s mobile industry; thousands of app developers and indeed entire app marketplaces revolve around the Android platform, so much so that even the Chinese developers who want to create unique mobile OSes are essentially forced to make them Android forks to ensure that users will even give them the time of day. Think about it this way: how many Xiaomi users would still be using MIUI if Android apps didn’t run on the platform?

I should state that personally, I don’t think Google really poses a threat to China, although its dominance of the mobile market certainly does take some opportunities away from Chinese companies. But if Chinese authorities are worried about the influence foreign tech companies have over the domestic market — and I imagine they are — it is surprising that there hasn’t been a stronger push towards a real home-grown mobile OS that can compete both domestically and abroad. That’s doubly true given that China’s government already knows Google is opposed to the country’s censorship polices. Google could, for example, release a new version of Android that made it easy for users to circumvent the Great Firewall. It hasn’t, of course, but if it did, the vast majority of China’s smartphone owners already own phones that could run it easily.

Personally, I think it would be great if that happened, but my guess is that China’s government doesn’t. So where is the push-back against Google, and the calls for a real home-grown mobile OS? I’m not sure.

Last week Steven argued that Firefox OS is China’s best hope at a homegrown mobile platform, so perhaps the government is waiting to see how that pans out. But I can’t help but wonder if Ji Yongqing wasn’t right when he argued that the problem lies much deeper and that China will not be able to create its own mobile OS under the current conditions. If that’s true, then China and its mobile marketplace are a little bit at the mercy of Google. It’s strange that we keep seeing headlines about how evil Apple is when in theory, Google could pose far bigger problems.

Disclaimer: I’m not trying to defend Apple here; it probably deserves the stick its getting and even if it doesn’t, I’m mad at the company anyway because yet another of its crap-quality power cords has broken on me. And, as I said earlier, I think if anything Google is likely to use its influence over China’s market for good, not evil, so I don’t think China actually has much to worry about. But since Chinese government authorities (like government authorities everywhere) seem inclined to worry about this sort of thing anyway, I thought it was worth pointing out that for all the bluster about Apple in the press, Google is the real 800 pound gorilla in the room (figuratively speaking).

A little more than two years after the colossal Japan earthquake and tsunami disaster of March 2011, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has let its Street View cars venture into the Fukushima exclusion zone town of Namie­-machi (pictured) for the first time. Its residents, however, are still not allowed to return due to the meltdown at the nearby Fukushima nuclear power plant caused by the freak wave that swept ashore.

The Google Street View cars capture eerie scenes of collapsed buildings still in a heap in the badly damaged main streets of Namie­-machi. There’s not a person in sight:

Click this or images below to enlarge

Located one kilometre inland is the fishing boat pictured below. In a blog post written by local mayor Mr. Tamotsu Baba that will soon go up on the official Google Japan blog, he points out that “nearby Ukedo harbor once proudly boasted 140 fishing boats and 500 buildings.” Few of either remain.

Near Ukedo harbor

In the vicinity is Ukedo elementary school, where Street View cameras have ventured on foot to capture the abandoned and wrecked classrooms:

Inside an abandoned classroom

It’s a painful yet poignant reminder that Namie­-machi and Fukushima are trapped in a time-warp, frozen in convulsed horror in the day of the massive natural disaster that assaulted the land and seas.

This is part of Google’s Build the Memories project that we looked at back in December 2011. At that time, the Street View cars had captured the devastation caused by the tsunami in badly-hit Miyagi prefecture. But until now, the hauntingly desolate streets around Fukushima had been off-limits. We notice that the street snaps of the whole area haven’t been refreshed for this project, so you’re limited to viewing certain areas, such as the two places we’ve linked above.

In the days and weeks after the disaster, a great many initiatives used technology to try help victims of the great Tohoku quake in some way, such as with ‘person finder’ videos on YouTube, through digital photography, and a site that connected Japanese who’d lost their homes with a host family.

Google Art Project took off in 2011 with the aim to make the world’s great cultural artifacts viewable online. But mainland China has always been a sizable omission from its digital archives. That has finally changed with the first-ever Chinese museum now cataloged by Google.

50 priceless pieces from the Hunan Provincial Museum in central China can now be seen here. The museum specializes in items excavated from local Han-era tombs, plus bronzeware from the Shang and Zhou dynasties dating back to 1600BC. One of the oldest – and most adorable – of the ancient relics is this boar-shaped bronze wine vessel which is at least 3,000 years old:

Click to enlarge

Hopefully this is the first of many Chinese museums to put their finest pieces on Google Art Project. But with many museums in China charging stiff admission fees (due to a lack of general tax-funded support), it’s far from guaranteed to happen. Also, Google is far from being the favorite web company of authorities in Beijing.

This time last year, Indonesia’s Museum Nasional made over 100 relics available for global virtual visitors.

Let’s start Monday morning with some big numbers. Now that smartphones account for 73.2 percent of all mobiles sold in China, and with many locals opting for Android devices across a variety of price-points, it’s not too big a surprise that China is an Android nation. As neatly outlined in this brand-new infographic, China had 224 million Android users at the end of last year (already three times larger than the number of US fandroids), and is on course for 300 million by the end of this year.

Thanks to the flexibility of Google’s Android OS, various research groups reckon that 86 percent of smartphones sold in China run Android, leaving Apple’s iOS to take much of what remains (12 percent).

Chinese devs dominate apps; Foreign studios make the top games

The Chinese startup behind this infographic is Wandoujia, the third-party Android app store that went global last summer with its SnapPea app for Android-to-desktop syncing. Using the analytical data from its hundreds of millions of individual Android app downloads, Wandoujia reveals an interesting dichotomy when it comes to the top apps and games that Chinese Android users enjoy. This is largely true on iOS as well (1). Essentially, it’s mostly Chinese developers that make the nation’s favorite apps, but foreign gaming studios create China’s most-tapped games.

Indeed, only 10 percent of Wandoujia’s top app downloads are from overseas developers, while 70 percent of the leading games are from outside China’s borders – led by the ever-frantic Temple Run. Chinese giant Tencent makes four of the 10 smash-hit apps, with its WeChat messaging app rising fast to the top alongside Tencent’s old-skool QQ instant messenger app.

Good news for developers is that monetization on Android is finally getting better, especially on games. Here’s the full graphic:

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

(File image: Google’s Eric Schmidt)

Google’s search engine launched in Myanmar yesterday on the Google.com.mm domain. It’s nothing special to look at, and it’s just in English at the moment, but it’s another big step as the 21st century greets the citizens of the newly opened up and quasi-democratic Myanmar. Today, Google chairman Eric Schmidt is in the capital Yangon where, according to TheNextWeb, he gave a speech warning of the dangers for the nation’s fledgling internet:

He added:

Indeed, Myanmar is likely to skip the PC era and jump straight to mobile, as has been seen in some other late-emerging Southeast Asian nations. To that end, Google has also partially opened up its Android app store, Google Play, to people with Myanmar SIM cards in their phones.

Google is one of many tech companies keen to jump into Myanmar, which has a population of 48 million. Right now, according to Radio Free Asia, only 6.7 percent of Myanmar’s population has landline and wireless internet capable subscriptions, and the mobile ownership/penetration rate is at just nine percent.

Schmidt’s tone is more strident in Myanmar than it was in North Korea, where only a select group of government officials have access to a limited national intranet. However, tourists and businesspeople heading to North Korea can now purchase mobile internet hotspots from which they can freely access the full internet.

Schmidt, who seems to have transformed into a Hillary Clinton-esque ‘Google Secretary of State’, will meet with Thein Sein, Myanmar’s president, this afternoon.

(Source: TheNextWeb)

And yes, for privacy reasons, these Yak’s faces will probably be blurred.

Forget the Google Reader announcement and come with me on a trip to Shangri-La, brought to you by your friendly neighborhood Google.

As a Buddhist myself and big fan of Tibetan and Bhutanese Buddhism, I was overjoyed to find out that Google is bringing street view to Bhutan. The country, which only allows in less than 20,000 tourists per year, and asks each tourist to invest at least $200 per day, is pretty isolated, to say the least. It’s a country of 738,000 people with less than ten percent of the population online.

But now, with Google Street view coming in, we’ll get to see more images like the ones my uncle took in 2010. It’s a beautiful place.

As the press release out of Thimphu announced:

Starting today, Google cars specially fitted with cameras will begin driving and taking street-level photographs of public locations across the country starting with Thimphu.

For the next few years, Bhutanese citizens will start to see Google cars driving across the countryside mapping out the entire country. I’m excited, it means we’ll get to see more of this untouched country.

For Bhutan, this will give them even greater visibility in the world and give tourists a closer view on the country they’re about to visit.

This isn’t the only isolated country that has recently seen Google Maps open things up, North Korea also got a maps upgrade in January.

(Photo Source: my uncle’s site Khiem’s Photography)

Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, market leader Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) dropped by nearly the same amount in that period of time. Elsewhere in the new traffic pageviews numbers from CNZZ, Google continues its slide down while most of the other rivals are fairly stagnant.

To get a sense of the big impact of Qihoo’s search engine since it launched last August, let’s compare the new February numbers with ones from October last year:

Over that whole time, Baidu has gone down by almost the same as Qihoo has gone up. And don’t forgot that a chunk of Qihoo’s initial share upon arrival on the scene also came from Baidu.

Though Qihoo is currently facing serious charges over abuses of user privacy on its software apps – including the web browser that feeds so much traffic to its fledgling search service – the company posted a strong Q4 financial report earlier this week that caused its share price to hit an all-time high.

(Source: CNZZ data, via Marbridge Daily)

In terms of tech, Myanmar is heating up. It’s uncharted territory. It’s a digital wasteland. And everybody wants to get in on the action before their business rivals can do so.

Singaporean, Norwegian, Malaysian and Vietnamese telcos are already rushing in – and the latest is Cisco, the networking and telecoms giant.

Cisco revealed today that it’s planning to open up two network training centers in Myanmar by an unspecified date. It’s very possible that these training centers will be targeted at getting SME’s and large businesses set up with networks.

Foreseeably, by the end of next year, the technosphere of Myanmar will explode – in a good way.

Today, SIM cards cost anywhere from $300 to $500, leaving only one in every ten people in the country with mobile access. Internet penetration sits far below ten percent, and most people in Myanmar still only have a laptop if someone brings one in from abroad. And yet, at the same time, BarcampYangon is the biggest technology conference in the world. That means Myanmar is ripe for the pickings and the big tech companies know it.

With over 90 companies bidding for telco licenses to operate in the country, and companies like Google, Microsoft, HP, Intel, and Cisco visiting and possibly planning to open offices, by the end of 2014 we’ll be looking at a completely different Myanmar. It’s hard to imagine how a country will fare with extremely rapid technological development. If, for example, SIMs come down to a regular Southeast Asian level of pricing, about $5 each, we’ll see Myanmar’s citizens joining the mobile web. By 2014, I’m guessing eight out of ten people in Myanmar will have a mobile, and they’ll be keen to jump on social networks and try out mobile commerce.

(Source: Associated Press)

Japan already has a sophisticated and trigger-quick public alerts system for disasters like earthquakes and tsunami – and now Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is helping out to ensure that these life-saving notices are seen by people as they browse the web. The Google Public Alerts system has just launched in Japan, marking the first time it has been rolled out beyond the United States.

With this new implementation by Google, whenever a disaster alert goes out, it will become visible instantly on Google Search, Google Maps, and Google Now (pictured above). So if a person misses the alerts on, say, TV or SMS, then they might catch the important notice prominently displayed across those Google services. These alerts appear across mobile or desktop sites. Here’s how it would look for a tsunami warning when using Google Maps:

Google’s blog notes that this is being run in conjunction with the Japan Meteorological Agency.

Perhaps the cleverest part of the whole scheme appears in Google Now. So if I’m on a trip to Tokyo, my phone’s location will have already been detected by Google Now – and then if a disaster alert is issued, I’ll see it as well despite not even living there.

As we noted recently, Japan’s government has set up a sort of online portal for post-disaster co-ordination to ensure that latest information is available to people even if black-outs have taken down TV and radio.

Get more info on the Google Public Alerts homepage.

Oftentimes, people like to compare Vietnam with China. In some ways, the similarities are pretty obvious. The Chinese dynasties ruled Vietnam for one thousand years. Vietnamese people celebrate Lunar New Year, and our names have Chinese roots. But online and in the tech industry, things look really different.

In Asia, there are four communist countries: China, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. Laos and North Korea are so small they’re not really on the tech map (even if North Korea is finally using mobile internet). That leaves China and Vietnam. In China, Baidu, Tencent, and Sina Weibo are the search and social media giants. In Vietnam, Google and Facebook are tops and Twitter isn’t blocked. What happened?

Search

China began interfering with Google’s search service in 2010, and it frequently fails to load but is not fully blocked. It’s due to China’s effort to manage the content that the majority of its population has access to; it’s also, some have argued, a big part of the protectionist success of Baidu and Sina Weibo who fill the shoes of Google and Facebook/Twitter. Today, Baidu gets an average of five billion search queries per day, and Google gets over 100 billion searches per month. But with Google partially locked out of China (it’s still the fifth most used search engine there), Baidu basically has near-exclusive access to the biggest market in the world.

In Vietnam, Google.com.vn is the number one search site and Google.com is number three. Vietnam has some new locally-made players like Wada.vn and CocCoc, but they’ll have a hard time up against Google’s dominance. In the mid 2000’s, Google was already slowly creeping into Vietnam. Youtube was and still is one of the most used and viewed websites in Vietnam and so Google was allowed to slowly creep in.

The interesting thing about Vietnam is that Google never officially opened up an office here. It still hasn’t. Google slowly entered, its value was assessed by users, and then it slowly rose to dominance. Now, if Google were blocked in Vietnam, it would leave a huge black hole in the Vietnamese cyberspace.

This is the trend in Vietnam. Let them in, assess how politically harmful they could be, and then realize it’s too late to cut them. For social media, it’s a little more complex. But the same principles apply.

from Doubleaf via Flickr

Social Media

China began blocking Facebook in 2008 and Twitter in 2009. In China, the Great Firewall has been very hard to get through, so China’s users have flocked to local social services like Sina Weibo ¹. Although many would argue that Chinese sites would still have more users even if others were not blocked. I don’t buy it. If Facebook wasn’t blocked in China, Zuckerberg would open up an office there and/or be collecting the same wealth of data that Weibo now collects on its users. Today, Sina Weibo supposedly has 500 million users. That’s more than Twitter’s 200 million and less than Facebook’s billion.

Vietnam started blocking Facebook in 2009. But the block was relatively casual. Most users still get on via DNS tweaks or using HotSpotShield with no problems. This is exactly why we’ve seen such explosive growth in Vietnam – doubling its numbers in a year. It’s currently the fastest growing Facebook country in the world, and Facebook has surpassed Zing as the nation’s top social destination.

Vietnam let Facebook in and let it grow until it was too late. Recently, I learned from an undisclosed source that Facebook supposedly has 15 to 20 million users in Vietnam already, so if authorities pull the plug it would be disastrous for users in the country. Hundreds and thousands of businesses have set up shop in Vietnam with Facebook Pages and advertisements.

And although the block has strengthened along with the political tides, that has more served to educate the population to self-censor more than deterred use of Facebook. Today, the block is as light as ever. And because of this, Vietnam has effectively avoided the need to build its own Weibo.

Oh, and as far as Twitter is concerned, in Vietnam, microblogging still hasn’t caught on. That’s probably why it’s not blocked.

from Vietnamese comic artist Thanh Phong

What this all means

Although Vietnam and China are neighboring socialist republics and Communist comrades, they’ve taken very different political stances towards the internet. China sees the internet variously as a battle field, a business goldmine, and a threat to social stability. China’s allegory is one of a large empire controlling the biggest population in the world and eventually leading the world. Information is essential to that and it must be tightly controlled and it must be Chinese. That was underlined this week by China’s tech ministry taking a dim view of Android.

Vietnam, with about 92 million people, is smaller in population than China’s most populous province, Guangdong, with its 104 million. The allegory in Vietnam is catch up and adapt. There isn’t a global agenda. That has allowed Vietnamese users to reap the rewards of the two tech giants – both Silicon Valley and China’s web companies – but that’s at the cost of not building giants of its own. Vietnamese social media and search startups struggle to compete with Facebook and Google with no government protection, financing, or encouragement.

There are two sides to this coin. In China, the result is a lot of space for startups and mega-tech companies like Baidu to build for the local population. But they sacrifice a connection to the world. In Vietnam, startups have to compete with outsiders while also getting a little more globally connected – although many would argue people here are still very isolated. The end result may be that some Chinese tech successes are inflated because they have no “real” competitors beyond their borders; and Vietnamese startups are stunted because they can’t out-execute the big guys or regional startups who expand into the country.

But the truth is, it’s a very hard comparison. Although they’re run under relatively similar governments, the scale alone puts everything out of proportion. Chinese companies immediately have access to a huge population while also competing with a host of other fellow Chinese companies. How they triumph over these odds is what really fascinates me.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, comment below at your leisure.

(Pre-photoshopped image from balanceofculture.com)

In a recent white paper from China’s tech ministry, MIIT, it warns of China’s huge dependence on Android, Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) mobile OS. It represents, the officials warn, a risk to the development of China’s smartphone industry, and cites how Google can exert pressure on handset makers. With a reported 140 million Android users in China, it’s far away the leading smartphone platform.

The report states:

While the Android system is open source, the core technology and technology roadmap is strictly controlled by Google.

As noted by Reuters, the report (PDF) encourages Chinese companies to create their own mobile platforms – and says that Google is discriminating against Chinese companies in the way it controls Android.

That’s likely a reference to the kerfuffle between Alibaba and Google last year, when the launch of an Acer-made flagship phone for Alibaba’s mobile OS, Aliyun, was cancelled. Essentially, Google claimed that Aliyun had adapted elements of Android, thus its Android hardware partners could not carry such offshoot mobile platforms.

The MIIT report is, without specifically saying so, backing its web companies, like Baidu, Alibaba, and Huawei in making its own OSes. But, ironically, Baidu’s own platform is essentially just a skin of Android, and Alibaba’s Aliyun can run Android apps and needs that allure of the Android ecosystem in order to sell. As for Huawei and ZTE, it’s buddying up with Mozilla – yes, another foreign company – to adapt Firefox OS for its phones as a possible alternative to Android.

So, as much as MIIT might dislike it, its companies are in need of working with foreign companies – including Google. But Google is possibly the least favorite tech company among authorities in China after the stand-off that saw Google’s China search engine switch off rather than censor its content. A great number of Google products – including ones integral to Android, such as G+ – are blocked by the Great Firewall in the country.

(Source: Reuters)

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)

Prices for Google Play e-books in India.

Android fans in India now have a new source for e-books. Today, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) announced that it has opened up Play Store Books to Indian consumers, and the change is already visible on both the desktop site and within the Google Play app.

It’s a challenge to India’s homegrown e-commerce store Flipkart, which sells e-books (as well as music) within its Flyte store. Flipkart recently upped the ante by launching a Flyte E-Books app for Android.

This move also allows Google to get the jump on Apple, who has not yet started selling e-books in India. In December, Apple’s iTunes expanded its music and movies section to India (and Indonesia), but the e-books were left on the shelf.

It’s not clear if every single e-book title within Play Store Books is available for Indian buyers, but the range seems healthily large, ranging from Fifty Shades of Grey (also on Flyte store) to The Hobbit.

Indian readers can buy e-books from the Google Play web store and app, and read them in a desktop browser, on Android, or with the iOS version of the Google Play Books app.

The new Asia Pop channel has only four videos so far, but that will soon expand once it adds livestreams of special events. The first Hangout will kick off on March 8th with Korean pop star SHINee.

Also useful are the playlists within the new Asia Pop area – there are five so far – that give you a rundown of the most popular music of the past week.

Google tells us that the new channel will focus on Korean, Japanese, and Chinese pop music. Hopefully that might also expand to cover other nations with vibrant pop music scenes that have cross-border appeal – and perhaps some alternative music too. But that’s just our wishful thinking.

There are seven Hangouts planned for early March. This is the line-up so far:

March 8 – Shinee (K-Pop)

March 9 – Wang Lee Hom (C-Pop)

March 10 – Super Junior (K-Pop)

March 11 – Kyary Pamyu Pamyu (J-Pop)

March 12 – Flumpool (J-Pop)

March 13 – 2PM (K-Pop)

March 14 – Mayday (C-Pop)

Only five lucky fans, Google explains, will be allowed into each Hangout, so you better start thinking of a good question if you want to get in.

As you’ll likely know already, PSY’s Gangnam Style is the most-viewed YouTube video of all time, so it seems like a fitting time for the region’s pop music to get more attention from YouTube itself.

Just last week, YouTube announced the opening of Asia’s first YouTube Space in Tokyo to give content creators a professional space to craft their videos.

Singapore’s shopping centers can be big and confusing. If you’re as lost as me when it comes to navigating when shopping, then Indoor Google Maps feature will be something you need. Google announced today that its Indoor Google Maps feature is available in 22 shopping spots in Singapore (see below for full list) with most of them in the Orchard shopping area.

The floor plans will appear when you zoom into a building where indoor map data is available. For some locations, you will also be able to navigate your way within the shopping malls — for example, to get you from your current location to a nearby store within the mall. Singapore becomes only the second country in Asia to get these indoor maps, after an earlier roll-out in Japan.

In Singapore, we also have YFind for indoor mapping, focusing on helping users find shops, ATMs, and those all-important toilets.

Singaporean business owners who want their location to be mapped can find out more information here.

I’ve also embedded two videos about Google’s indoor mapping below. One explaining how indoor mapping works and another is an indoor map promo video from Japan (in Japanese).

Map your business, inside and out

Japanese promo video

You might like to know that Indoor Google Maps feature is available in — deep breath — 313@somerset, Century Square, Hougang Mall, ION Orchard, Liang Court, Mandarin Gallery, Marina Bay Sands, Metro (Department store in Paragon), Ngee Ann City, Orchard Central, Paragon, Parkway Parade, Scotts Square, Suntec City, Takashimaya (department store in Ngee Ann), Tampines 1, The Centrepoint, Tiong Bahru Plaza, Triple one, Wheelock Place, White Sands, and Wisma Atria. If you’re on Android, give it a try.

YouTube announced today the opening of Asia’s first YouTube Space in Tokyo. The Space can be used free of charge as a collaboration and production facility for all members of YouTube partner program, particularly those living in Japan and Asia-Pacific region.

Located inside the Roppongi Hills complex, the Tokyo Space seems to have everything a creator needs to build an awesome video. The place has three production studios, an equipment room (with cameras, lights, mics, and other equipments available to be used), a training/screening room, and resources for post-productions like editing systems and voice-over recording booths. Vice president, global head of content operations Tom Pickett comments:

We built the YouTube Space Tokyo as a way to support the incredible wave of Japanese creativity we have seen develop among our YouTube Partners over the last few years. The Space is an investment in these creators to support their quest to make even better videos and build even bigger global audiences.

Interested creators can start to file their applications to use the Space starting April 1st. TechCrunch mentioned that accepted applicants can use the production facilities for up to three months. You can check more information about the Tokyo Space here. And you can also find more resources for creators here.

Besides acting as a place to build videos, the YouTube Space Tokyo will also host live-streamed music sessions and Google+ Hangouts from time to time, with R&B artist JUJU holding the first live concert tomorrow night. While the Tokyo Space is the first of its kind in Asia, YouTube has built two other in London and Los Angeles last year.

(Update: Full press release below)

YouTube Space Tokyo to open for video creators

Special production facilities will let YouTube Partners from Japan and across Asia-Pacific learn skills, collaborate on projects and create more ambitious videos

February 14, 2013 (Tokyo, Japan) — Today YouTube™ announced the opening of YouTube Space Tokyo — a state-of-the-art collaboration and production facility for YouTube video creators in Japan and across the Asia-Pacific region. Members of the YouTube Partner program (youtube.com/partners) will be able to use the Space, free-of-charge, to launch even more ambitious projects, learn about video production and collaborate with other creators.

Located in the heart of Tokyo inside the Roppongi Hills complex, YouTube Space Tokyo is the third YouTube Space opened worldwide (YouTube Space London opened in July 2012 and YouTube Space Los Angeles in November 2012) and the first YouTube Space in Asia. The three global facilities are designed so that creators can produce original digital video content, all the way from the start of an idea to through to filming, editing and uploading to YouTube.

The Space consists of three production studios (including one with green screen cyclorama), an equipment room with cameras, lights, mics and grip equipment available for checkout, a training/screening room, and post-production resources ranging from editing systems to voice-over recording booths. Access to the Space is on an application basis, open to YouTube creators who qualify. The Space will also hold training and learning sessions for YouTube Partners both emerging and established.

Tom Pickett, Vice-President, Global Head of Content Operations, said, “We built the YouTube Space Tokyo as a way to support the incredible wave of Japanese creativity we have seen develop among our YouTube Partners over the last few years. The Space is an investment in these creators to support their quest to make even better videos and build even bigger global audiences.”

YouTube Space Tokyo will also host live-streamed music sessions and Google+ Hangouts. The first of these will be a live concert from Japanese R&B singer-songwriter JUJU on the night of February 15.

The Space will begin taking applications from creators from April 1. Find more creator resources at youtube.com/creators and learn more about the YouTube Spaces in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and London at youtube.com/space.

For images of YouTube Space Tokyo, please visit http://goo.gl/LmQsJ.

About the YouTube Partner Program
YouTube Partners are avid users who upload content on a consistent basis, have amassed a large, loyal audience on the platform, and have become part of the YouTube Partner Program. The partner program allows them to place ads against their content on YouTube and move what was once a hobby of uploading videos on the platform to a full time career.

About YouTube
YouTube™ is the world’s most popular online video community allowing millions of people to discover, watch and share original videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small. YouTube, LLC is based in San Bruno, Calif., and is a subsidiary of Google Inc.

On January 30th, CocCoc, a new Vietnamese search engine, arrived on the scene. It’s the second big homegrown Vietnamese search engine to appear in the past three months. And by big, I mean:

Well, including search raters and other staff, we have about 400 people. Five in marketing, four in accounting. You can safely assume that the rest is a technical team.

That’s Victor Lavrenko, CEO at CocCoc. The project, which started two years ago, has been in closed development until very recently. Since inception, the project has burned over US$15 million, with most of the 400 person staff working full time. The new search engine looks to take on the incumbent Google.com.vn and the competitor that came out last November.

Russian roubles

Victor is from Russia. So are another 40 engineers in the team. These engineers have had experience battling Google back home in Russia, getting up to even 20 to 25 percent of the search queries in Russia through native search engine, Nigma. So they felt confident enough to fully enter the Vietnamese market. The company is mainly funded by Russian venture capitalists like Digital Sky Technologies, who also invested in Facebook early on.

Edit: Nigma did not secure 20 to 25 percent of the market but decided to move its energies to Vietnam.

CocCoc is actually a spin-off from projects back home, Victor explains to TechinAsia:

It comes from an experimental search engine in Russia, nigma.ru. It gave us good experience and a good team. Second, we’re not just a startup with an idea or a weak prototype. We already have the engine and many experts, including current and former Google employees, and are quite enthusiastic about our search quality.

For example, the top Vietnamese guy at Google, Christopher Nguyen, thinks that in 92 percent of the navigational queries – when you search for a particular website – we’re the same or better than Google. Also, we have lots of very experienced individuals. About 10 people are from the leading Russian search engine Yandex that beat Google 3:1 by market share in Russia. The head of our web search team is the guy who created the first Russian search engine. It was later killed by an ISP that bought it out, so he did it for a second time with Mail.ru, and now it has about 10 percent market share – it’s not much, but quite comparable to Google’s 20 percent. And he had only $700,000, so the project was underfinanced, but he still got quite good results. I myself was a co-founder of Mail.ru, as a CTO, which is now a $7 billion company traded on the London Stock Exchange.

Other Russian roots can also be seen in the afore-mentioned other newcomer, Wada, which launched in November last year, and which is built on search technology from Ashmanov and Partners.

Search me for a reason why Russians are getting involved in Vietnamese search engines.

The Mechanics of CocCoc

CocCoc means “Knock Knock” in Vietnamese and signifies the team’s sensitivity to the Vietnamese language. Victor stresses that his new search engine “better understand Vietnamese linguistics, and rarely produce irrelevant results …. At least that’s our goal.”

For the nerdy folks out there, I had to ask Victor what specifically makes CocCoc better than Google’s search mechanics. According to Victor, since Google crawlers are outside Vietnam, its links are weak. CocCoc has two billion pages indexed so far in-country, he claims, so its numbers are more up to date. But the Vietnamese language is the trickiest area, and it has proven to be a hard nut for Google to crack. Victor explains the linguistic minefield:

Well, it’s easy to explain the specifics using our name as an example. You may notice that it has a space within the word Ed: Though not when we type it! because Vietnamese words are written by syllables. They used Chinese characters before, and the principle is one Chinese character for one syllable. So usually words consist of two or more syllables. Even if a word is a one-syllable term, there is a so called “pairness tendency” in Vietnamese language – they will add a stop word or the syllable with the same meaning just to avoid telling the single syllable.

Another specific is diacritics. There are two dimensions of diacritics in Vietnamese. The first dimension – is a pronunciation type – e.g. “o” can be just “o” or ”ô” or ”ơ”. The second dimension is tones. It can be “o” or ”ó” or ”ỏ” or ”ò” or ”õ” or ”ọ”. So altogether we have 18 combinations for all the Vietnamese vowels.

Apparently, CocCoc is ready to tackle these linguistic issues much better than Google. Users don’t have to type out the diacritics but the search engine accounts for them. It’s also at the heart of Wada’s mission. Wada can also deal with diacritics better than Google. I wouldn’t be surprised if CocCoc could manage this, with such a high percentage of Vietnamese engineers on the task.

Either way, CocCoc is going to have to work very hard, even with its linguistic advantages, to defeat Google, since Google is already the most used website in Vietnam, according to Alexa. One thing it is working on is something called the “Pho Xa 360 feature”, which will be like a Google StreetView in Vietnam. A service that Google currently has not implemented in Vietnam.

Today is Chinese New Year’s eve. So kids, including myself, are “forced” to do spring cleaning. It’s part of the entire Chinese New Year celebration process of shopping, cleaning, eating, gambling (just for fun), and visiting relatives. And fireworks. Of course, younger people will also be busy collecting red envelopers (stuffed with cash) from senior family members.

My friends from Taiwan texted me to try Google’s snake game doodle. It’s snake themed because this is the year of the snake in the Chinese calendar, replacing the outgoing year of the dragon. The Google doodle snake game plays a bit like the old Nokia snake game: you control the snake’s direction while grabbing items. Avoid grabbing the festive fire crackers though. You have 60 seconds to play but I don’t think you will get any rewards regardless of how many points you score. The game also comes with a traditional Chinese New Year tune, adding to the festive mood. You can try the game on Google’s Hong Kong and Taiwan homepages right now.

We’d also like to take this chance to wish all readers a very happy and prosperous Chinese New Year.

Like any fan of things that are totally awesome, I have been following the process of Google’s self-driving car pretty closely. Yesterday, I came across this article in Forbes about the potential future adoption of the car on a large scale, and in it author Chunka Mui makes a brilliant point: though adopting the car on a wide scale might be legally and logistically tough in the US, the driverless car would be perfect for China.

Why? Mui makes several salient points:

• China has a higher rate of accidents and traffic fatalities than the US, and Google’s cars would reduce this significantly.
• The government could save money building smaller roads, and expenses like traffic lights and some signs would no longer be necessary.
• China sees this kind of technology as being of strategic economic value and is interested in investing in it.

Those are great points, and I think there are even more reasons why the Google self-driving car would be perfect for China, and maybe some other Asian countries, too:

It could cut down on traffic congestion. Traffic congestion is a huge problem in many Chinese cities, and it’s just as much of an issue in parts of Southeast Asia, too. (We saw some gnarly traffic jams in Jakarta last year). Having self-driving cars wouldn’t eliminate traffic jams totally, but it could cut down on them significantly if computers were in control of every car, as they would be able to route themselves efficiently to avoid congestion whenever possible. Driverless cars could also cut down on some of the road rage that comes along with traffic jams, as drivers would be free to tune out and do some work on their laptops or even maybe watch TV while the cars sorted the traffic issues out themselves.

Driver education would no longer be a problem. Part of the reason China has so many traffic fatalities is that many drivers are relatively inexperienced, and drivers education in China can be quite poor. In part because there are so many people who want to learn to drive, many drivers’ ed courses are short, and the practical parts of the course often only include driving at slow speeds on closed courses; nothing like the driving people encounter when they take their cars onto city streets. Having self-driving cars would fix this problem by eliminating the need for drivers’ ed in the first place.

Self-driving cabs? This is admittedly taking things beyond what Google has yet accomplished, but it seems like it would even be possible to deploy self-driving cabs. Potential passengers could hail cabs using a smartphone app that would signal to the closest available cab to come pick them up, and then use NFC or some other location technology to confirm that the smartphone user is the person who gets into the cab. This would eliminate any issues of driver bias or picking and choosing their fares, and it would also eliminate passenger squabbles during rush hour about who hailed the cab first. To increase efficiency, perhaps cabs could even scan passenger destinations and (for a reduced fee) pick up multiple passegers who are all headed to the same general area.

There are, of course, some reasons why this wouldn’t work. The biggest one is that it would be massively expensive, and while China’s government has been quite willing to spend huge amounts of money on high-tech infrastructure projects like its high speed rail system, the massive corruption and deadly accident that have come out of that project so far indicate that at the very least, China would have to be very careful to ensure no corners were cut in the implementation of a driverless car system nationwide.

Even so, though, I think it’s an excellent idea, and the Chinese government should be looking very carefully at Google’s project. Perhaps in a few years’ time when the technology is a little cheaper and a little bit more mature, the government could pick a very small city as a test area and implement driverless cars to see if the project could ever work on a larger scale.

Manila has a lot more brightly-colored sofas and foosball tables today with the opening of Google’s Philippines office. Narciso Reyes has been appointed country manager. He commented this morning that Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) newest office will help the company provide “better services to our Filipino users” as well as help local “businesses, large and small, grow locally and globally.”

The Manila Google base should also be good news for startups in the country, allowing them to get easier access to advice from the search company. Google is still hiring for this new office.

Julian Persaud, managing director of Google in Southeast Asia, said in today’s announcement:

The Philippines is a key country in Southeast Asia in terms of its digital economy and tech-savvy population. This new office will allow us better engage with our local users, partners and advertisers. Over 33 million Filipinos access the internet regularly to study, shop, search for ideas, opportunities, create news businesses, and connect to each other. And internet use in the Philippines is set to grow exponentially. Research indicates that the number of Filipinos online will have nearly doubled by 2016.

Narciso Reyes, Google Philippines’ new country manager.

Google is already well established in the country. The Philippines was the first large country where Chrome became the most popular web browser, and it was also the first nation where the search giant teamed up with a telco to launch free access to Google products for mobile users. Filipino netizens also made good use of lots of Google stuff to help coordinate after devastation from the recent typhoon Pablo.

Google has some social catching up to do in the nation, where most of its web users are signed up for Facebook – a whopping 27 million of them.

Google had to get used to being in fourth place in China in 2012.

2012 was a year of disruption, frustration, and lost users for search engines operating in China – the emotion depends upon which of the five main players you’re talking about. Much of the frustration belonged to Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), whose services are so unfairly slowed and deliberately borked by China’s Great Firewall. There were quite a lot of lost users for Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), not to mention a declining share price [1]; and Qihoo (NYSE:QIHU) was the disrupter.

New pageview and unique visitor stats for all the search engines in China reveal how the landscape looks at the end of the year. From Chinese traffic stats company CNZZ, the data for December 2012 shows Baidu slipping yet again in terms of traffic share to 71.76 percent – down from 72.97 percent of pageviews at the end of October. It’s perhaps no coincidence that Qihoo’s controversial new So.com, which only launched last summer, rose by about the same amount that Baidu lost. Google is long since resigned to fourth place, below Sohu’s (NASDAQ:SOHU) Sogou.com search engine.

Here’s the table, with green figures for December 2012 indicating a recently rising share of pageviews:

Those sceptical of Qihoo’s So.com speculate that it will be hard for it to build upon its initial tranche of web traffic, something that’s thanks to its long-standing AOL-like web portal and its IE-esque web browser. But Qihoo is defying the critics by edging up slightly in these latest stats from CNZZ. Its search offerings are a bit limited for now, but we can expect it to add new aspects in 2013. It has already recently added things like online maps (but not in a mobile app) in conjunction with Autonavi.

Lower down the order, things seem pretty static. Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) went up a fraction; perhaps the company can hunt down its one new user and give them a prize. Bing, too, is not seeing any apparent boost from its Windows Phone ecosystem.

Hopefully the new year will be about innovation, which will help win over China’s increasingly more discerning web users. Just last month, both Baidu and Sogou launched their own mobile voice assistant apps for Android, which look quite a bit like Google Now.

[Source: CNZZ data; via Marbridge Daily]

Over on the Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) blog today, the company is highlighting entrepreneurship in South Korea, as well as its involvement and support via its Google for Entrepreneurs initiative.

Google has partnered with Korean accelerator and incubator Kstartup to support Korean startups beginning in 2013, with help from AppCenter, and the Korean Communication Commission as well. It will be a three-month acceleration program in Gangnam (yes, that Gangnam), which Kstartup explains further on its website:

Through this partnership with Google and others, Kstartup will provide free workspace, technical, operational and business mentoring, as well as seed funding to startups we choose through a selective screening process. Whether an entrepreneur launches a startup in Korea or globally, we are confident that Google can provide the necessary resources needed to help scale the business locally or overseas.

Techcrunch cites Kstartup’s David Lee as saying that Google will provide "an undisclosed amount of funding as well.

In its blog post, the search giant also elaborated on its partnership with the Global K-Startup competition this past year, and listed the winning startups which it describes as follows:

• BrainGarden – vocabulary learning mobile application with social game feature
• Whatugot – social networking mobile application for collection and sharing favorites
• WATCHA – movie recommendation application with personal collection gallery features
• KnowRe – innovative adaptive learning solution focused on math education
• Alarmmon – mobile gaming alarm application with various character branding
• Classting – web/mobile application for classroom management and inter-class connection and collaboration

As we have noted before, Korea is a stronghold for Android in terms of smartphone OS market share, so it would make sense for Google to throw support of this kind behind the ecosystem. When we spoke with the folks at Tapjoy earlier this year, we saw that the company’s users on Android were more than quadruple those on iOS. That’s a strong indication of the platform’s popularity in the country.

Korean pop star PSY’s smash-hit Gangnam Style video (sorry if I just got it stuck in your head) has more than 943 million views on Youtube, and that number is only climbing. PSY doesn’t represent the entirety of Korean culture, of course — not even close — but the success of PSY and artists like him in Youtube is part of why the Korean Ministry of Culture gave Google a special achievement award yesterday for helping to spread Korean culture.

Of course, K-Pop is just one aspect of Korean culture available on Youtube; the service also hosts Korean films and TV shows, too. But K-pop has been increasingly popular outside of Korea and its success on Youtube is probably a big part of why Google was given this award. According to Google, the number of Youtube users viewing K-pop music videos has risen rapidly over the past three years.

In a post on its Korea blog, Google responded to the award:

We are greatly honored to receive this meaningful award. But this award is not really about YouTube — we’re just the platform. This is a reflection of the incredible creativity and ingenuity of Korean content creators who have captured the imagination of the world.

That’s very modest of the company, but we shouldn’t underestimate the value of a platform like Youtube when it comes to spreading culture globally. After all, millions of people around the world are already on Youtube; what better way is there to quickly export your culture?

[via Google Korea Blog]

Google Zeitgeist map

It’s that time of year again, when we see all sorts of media publishing a barrage of year-in-review pieces. Obviously some are better than others, and one of my favorites so far is Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) extensive presentation of hot topics from the past year. Its Zeitgeist 2012 page is a fun overview of what the world was searching for over in 2012, as is its video summary which is included below.

So what was big in Asia over the past year? Google points out that all things mobile proved to be very hot this year. Asia’s fascination with mobile, if it wasn’t apparent already, was hard to miss in 2012, as Apple’s iPad 3 was a trending search in China, but so were ‘Android games.’ The iPad Mini and iOS 6 were popular in Japan, as were searches about popular chat app Line, and how to use it. Samsung had a successful year in 2012, and in Vietnam the Samsung’s Galaxy was one of the most popular searches. Even in India, the perpetual vaporware Aakash tablet was a trending search.

As for the most discussed topics, it’s pretty fascinating to note that while PSY’s infectious Gangnam Style was the second most popular search worldwide (behind the late Whitney Houston), that certain Asian regions proved practically immune from this viral video, notably India, Japan, and Taiwan.

If you’d like to drill down to see more insights about your own country, do head over to Google’s Zeitgeist page and give it a try. It’s pretty fascinating.

Google isn’t alone in its efforts to summarize the past year for us. Twitter has an insightful overview of what the world was talking about in the past year, as well as a function that lets you view your own personal year of Tweeting via a Vizify page. In much the same way, Facebook has a clever personalized Year-in-Review page where you can see a summary of all your 2012 activity.

What will you remember most about 2012? Let us know in the comments.

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has just confirmed the closure of its Google Shopping China service, just as we speculated last night. The product search engine is thus meeting the same fate as Google’s China-only music service, which closed in September.

A Google representative tells us this morning:

We’ve decided to shut down our Google Shopping service in China. We remain committed to helping Chinese businesses export their goods around the world, and Chinese merchants will still be able to use Google Shopping to reach consumers in other markets. But Shopping in China was not providing businesses with the level of impact we had hoped, so we will be sunsetting it in order to focus on the products that do. These include in-app mobile advertising with AdMob, mobile and desktop display, and export-oriented search advertising.

Though the local version of the product search engine is still online for the time being (at Google.cn/shopping), a blog post has just gone up, in Chinese, on the official Google China blog (see here), but here’s the translation of that, courtesy of Google:

The Google.cn/shopping page yesterday. Click to enlarge.

We aspire to build great products that help businesses take advantage of the Internet to grow and succeed online. To do that, we need to prioritize high-impact products that really change how businesses use the web––which means carefully evaluating our projects to ensure that we’re working on technologies that make a real difference to the lives and businesses of our Chinese customers.

As part of our ongoing effort to prioritize our offerings, we’ve decided to shut down our Google Shopping service in China. Google Shopping helped to connect Chinese shoppers looking for goods with retailers and merchants who could provide them. We remain committed to helping Chinese businesses export their goods around the world, and Chinese merchants will be able to use Google Shopping to reach consumers in other markets. But Shopping in China was not providing businesses with the level of impact we had hoped, and so we will be sunsetting the product in order to focus on the products that do: in-app mobile advertising with AdMob, mobile and desktop display, and export-oriented search advertising. The change will take effect tomorrow, December 12, 2012.

We’ve never been afraid to try big, bold things, and that won’t change. But by targeting our resources more effectively on our core mobile, display, and export ads products, we can better help Chinese businesses grow and thrive on the web.

Other product search engines in China include Alibaba’s eTao, and Netease’s newly-launched Huihui.

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is believed to be shutting down its Google Shopping search engine for China tomorrow (December 12th). According to QQ Tech, Google has notified some merchant partners of the closure of google.cn/shopping (pictured above), but the company has not yet issued a public notice on its official China blog. We’ve reached out to Google Shanghai and will update if we get a response. [UPDATED 13 hours later: Google has confirmed it].

If this comes to pass, then the closure will come nearly three months after Google shut down its China-only music service. It’ll also even further shrink the few online services that Google still has on Chinese servers (and ‘.cn’ web domains) after the company abruptly moved its search engine to uncensored Hong Kong servers and domains. There remain a few things, such as Google Maps for China at ditu.google.cn, though the app version of that is struggling with slumping market share.

Google Shopping is the web giant’s dedicated product search engine. In China, it has stiff competition from the nation’s e-commerce behemoth, Alibaba, which runs eTao. Plus there are a few other contenders. Last year, Alibaba ploughed 1 billion RMB (over US$150 million) to drive traffic to eTao, which indexes lots of – but not all – e-commerce sites in China. In comparison to its rivals in the country, Google Shopping for China looks a bit too simplistic.

The Chinese version of Google Shopping was undoubtedly hampered by the controversial move to Google.com.hk in 2010 to avoid mandatory media censorship in China, as any product that is searched for on the site ultimately goes to a standard Google search – at google.com.hk/products – which is very slow. That slowness is mainly attributable to Google’s overseas sites – yes, including the HK ones – being throttled by China’s web filtering system. That’s also part of the reason for Google’s search services as a whole dropping to fourth place in terms of market share in China.

[Source: QQ Tech - article in Chinese]

Yesterday Indonesian telco Telkomsel and Google launched a free mobile internet feature called Free Zone. This new feature allows Telkomsel users to use three of Google’s products – Google search, Gmail, and Google Plus – for free for the next six months. Interestingly, users will also be allowed free access to the first page of third-party websites from their Google searches. But they would incur normal data charges for further browsing on that or any other website.

Telkomsel users who already have a Google account can start using Free Zone by opening telkomsel.com/freezone on their phones. This feature isn’t available for PCs and tablets though.

Indonesia is only the third country to see the rollout of Google’s Free Zone feature. The other two are the Philippines and South Africa.

Google Free Zone is part of Google Indonesia’s effort to grow the country’s internet ecosystem, a goal which Google’s country head of Indonesia mentioned during our Startup Asia Jakarta event. To help achieve that goal, Google Indonesia is also working to achieve its target of bringing 100,000 small businesses online.

[Via Trenologi]

Google’s Crisis Response map for Typhoon Pablo

Folks in the Philippines have been hit by another typhoon over the past few days, as Typhoon Pablo hit on Monday. More than 40,000 people were reportedly evacuated and dozens killed [1], and just as with the floods that occurred earlier this summer, efforts were being made online to circulate critical information about where to find shelter, which areas were at most at risk, as well as other storm-related alerts.

Amid the crisis, the government stepped up its game this time by providing a mobile-friendly, text-based disaster information page that could be easily read on most mobile devices. It includes important announcements like the location of the storm and which areas were in danger of or experiencing flooding [2].

I can’t help but wonder if there might be a need for a dedicated open source CMS for crisis response, to help countries in getting disaster information out in a hurry. Recovers.org is a promising initiative in the US (see Staten Island Recovers for an example of how it works), but it may take some time before Asia jumps on board with this, or something like it.

Typhoon Pablo alert, Free Zone

As usual, the folks at Google were quite active as well with a crisis map in place displaying shelter locations, predicted storm surge levels, flood hazard areas, and other information. As usual, the public has chipped in to help with information sharing as well, with another Google Map created to show shelter locations too [3]. And as we saw last summer, conversation on Twitter is extremely active as well around the #PabloPH hashtag.

Google also took advantage of its recent partnership with Globe Telecom to link to the afore-mentioned government site from its Free Zone sign in page. You can see how that looks on mobile in the screenshot to the right. Since the Philippines still has just 30 percent of the population using smartphones, this effort to get information to feature phone users who may not have active data plans is certainly worthwhile. For more information on Google’s role, you can check out the video interview below with Philippines’ ANC News.

Given that Asian regions are generally more prone to natural disasters, hopefully we can see governments, organizations, and citizens come together to create better ways to prepare for them. Sharing critical information is only one aspect of this, but it’s something everyone should keep in mind, especially civic/social entrepreneurs who want to contribute to their communities.

Image by Nobuyuki Hayashi; At Google Singapore. Click to enlarge.

With developed nations close to the saturation point in terms of web users, Google is looking to Asia for “the next billion” netizens. These will be, said Google representatives today at an event in Singapore, in emerging markets (especially Asia) where 500 million new users will come online between now and 2015.

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) points out that, of its 16 Asia offices, almost half are in emerging markets. There’s one each in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and four in India. Asia already has one billion netizens – many getting online solely on budget phones – but there are many more to come.

This will mean, says Google Singapore in a factsheet issued today:

The global marketplace for ideas will grow from two to three billion people — that means a billion more people contributing and benefiting from the world’s best ideas, talents and more. […] This will also mean incredible new business opportunities as a billion new potential entrepreneurs, small business and consumers expand their markets and the global market.

And so the search engine giant is looking closely at Asia to offer up much of that next billion – as is Nokia with its similar mantra. To prove that Asia is at the center of all this potential web growth, Google’s Asia team cites this snippet from the World Bank:

Explaining how to take the web mainstream to the next billion in Asia. (Image: Nobuyuki Hayashi). Click to enlarge.

In 2011, around 2.2 billion people had the Internet while 4.6 billion did not — half of those who don’t have the Internet now live in just five countries, all in Asia: India, Indonesia, China, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Here’s the state of internet penetration among the main markets in South and Southeast Asia:

• India: 125 million Internet users – 10% of population
• Indonesia: 43.6 million Internet users – 18% of population
• Vietnam: 31.1 million internet users – 35.4% of population
• Philippines: 27.5 million Internet users – 29% of population
• Malaysia: 17.6 million Internet users – 61% of population
• Thailand: 16.4 million internet users – 23.7% of population

Google is facing challenges in some of those countries – such as Vietnam, where Google doesn’t have a country office. A Vietnamese-Russian joint venture search engine, called Wada, launched last month. And it’s likely that China’s Baidu will push into the search engine market in Thailand and Vietnam in the future.

Of course, Google is already doing plenty to get new web users onto its services – such as its recent telco tie-up in the Philippines to allow feature phone owners there access to Gmail, Google search, and Google+ without the need to pay for a data plan.

[Images courtesy of journalist Nobuyuki Hayashi (@nobi) on Twitter]

Google’s Eric Schmidt and PSY at Google Korea

A new post over on the Youtube Trends blog points out that over the weekend PSY’s ‘Gangnam Style’ video became the new most-viewed video of all time. Currently the catchy Korean video has over 820 million views in total.

So who did PSY take down from the top spot? None other than my countryman Justin Bieber, and to be honest, I’m ok with that [1]. Bieber’s song ‘Baby’ now falls to second place on YouTube’s all-time charts with 805 million views.

Perhaps what’s most amazing about PSY’s accomplishment is that rate at which it was accomplished. As you can see in the chart provided by Youtube below, Bieber’s rise up the charts was more gradual, spread out over a couple of years.

But PSY’s hit has literally been rocket-like in trajectory, and after it first gained traction in South Korea it later spiked thanks to popularity in the US and around the world.

It will be interesting to see if this pace is sustained, and how long it will take for ‘Gangnam Style’ to reach one billion views. PSY’s channel overall has already broken the one billion views mark, although it still trails behind Bieber’s channel which has over 3 billion.

YouTube and the folks at Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) are clearly delighted that PSY has ridden their platform to fame. Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt even asked PSY to teach him the famous ‘horse dance’ from the video during a visit to Google Korea.

China has, at present, 390 million mobile internet users among its billion-strong phone subscribers. And now new data for 2012 Q3 from Beijing-based mobile analytics startup Umeng claims that, among all those mobile users, Chinese consumers have snapped up just over 200 million iPhones and Android smartphones. Of those, 60 million are iPhones, and 140 million of them are Android-powered devices.

The researchers reckon that 200 million figure has rocketed up from a mere 87 million iOS and Android phones in China in 2012 Q1. Though these stats are not based on sales figures, it’s good to have a reasonable sounding figure for only Apple’s and Google’s mobile OSes as they ascend to replace the outdated Symbian and JAVA-based touchscreens. Here’s the key graph for the Q2-to-Q3 explosion in just iPhones and Androids:

That stellar growth is sort of backed up by Canalys’ recent finding that smartphone sales were up 199 percent in China this year, with 42 million shipped in the country in Q2 alone. Of course, that stat doesn’t fully satisfy the larger leap that the Umeng stats claim, and it’s worth noting that the data is based on observed usage of certain apps on Umeng’s network, not of shipped/sold phones.

Of all those shipping smartphones in China, the top four were all predominantly makers of Android phones, and the fifth in the line-up was Apple itself, so it’s clear iOS and Android are seeing insane growth. This is proving to be the dawn of a heyday for Chinese-brand smartphone makers like Lenovo and Huawei.

China’s smartphone market is far from sated, with still hundreds of millions of people ripe for upgrading to smartphones as wages rise and the prices of (some) devices drop. That’s a major force behind Android’s growth as it now dominates in China.

[Source: Umeng’s 2012 Q3 report - article in Chinese; Background photo in main image from creativityinspiresme.wordpress.com]

Today, Indonesia’s ministry of tourism announced its partnership with Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) StreetView program for Google Maps. As of today, Indonesians might come across a fleet of Google cars (pictured above) fitted with the famed cameras and ministry’s ‘Wonderful Indonesia’ logo driving and taking street-level photographs. This is happening, says Google, in “Jakarta and other major regional cities around the country” – so there’s no official list of StreetView destinations just yet.

Dr. Mari E. Pangestu, the minister of tourism, explains the partnership strategy:

We believe this mapping technology will have many different uses – allowing tourists to check out hotels before arriving, make travel plans, and arrange meeting points. And with these available digital tools, hotels, tourism sites and businesses can be more creative in making it easier for visitors to find their stores, location and websites.

Andrew McGlinchey, the product manager of Google, said that the pictures will be made available for users in the coming months. He also said that the company will ask Indonesian citizens to help choose where to drive in the near future.

Google notes that the company goes to great lengths in safeguarding users’ privacy with StreetView. This is done by blurring human faces and number plates of vehicles using Google’s technology. The company is also responsive to users’ request to blur any images that feature them.

This announcement was made during the Indonesian Creative Products Week which runs from November 21st to 25th. The event’s exhibition also features works from 15 sub-sectors of creative industries, which include digital games in the country. Japanese game publisher DeNA is present at the event to further help facilitate the knowledge transfer and possible cooperations with the local game developers and publishers.

media.mapping.jp

There’s an interesting piece over on the Emergency Journalism website about Project 311, which was a sort of ‘Big Data Workshop’ organized by Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Twitter Japan back in September and October. The initiative brought together data sets about both traditional and new media from around the time of the March 11, 2011 earthquake, and made it available for people to experiment with and analyze.

One person who got involved in the workshop was Hidenori Watanabe, who we have mentioned before on this site for his impressive visualization work on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki archives projects, as well as his East Japan Earthquake archive which presented photos and victims testimonials in a Google Earth view. What he created this time, using data from companies like NHK and The Asahi Shimbun, as well as data from Twitter, is an East Japan Earthquake Media coverage map, which you can now find at media.mapping.jp.

The map provides controls to display certain data, and it’s really interesting to compare how broadcast television compares to, say, the geo-coded Tweets marked in green around the country. There’s a time element as well which spans from March 11 to the 19, which scrubs through the eight days and animates the reports as they occurred on the map. Hidonori notes that in some places there was no news coverage, but there were some important tweets found (see below).

According to the report, NHK is said to be making use of the data as well to try to understand how to improve their disaster coverage. That’s definitely encouraging, but I think that this project could be taken even further if the companies involved continued to make their data available beyond the workshop (if I understand correctly, it is no longer public), so that others could build upon the work that has already been done.

There was no news broadcasted about Kamisu, but there were some tweets that shared important information, like this one about the state of a local factory.

This morning the winners of the competition were announced. The team from Raffles Institution came in first, followed by teams from Crescent Girls’ School and Victoria Junior College. As students, you can imagine how excited the Raffles Institution team was when they were told they will be visiting Google HQ in Mountain View, California, for a total of four days.

Speaking to the winning team at Google Singapore’s office this morning, Christabella Irwanto, one of the members of the team, told us that the idea came about when they were on a bus. The resulting animation which they subsequently created (see below), shows a man showering in public, subjected to public scrutiny. It highlights that the man is exposed to the world, a metaphor for sharing everything about himself publicly.

I thought the video was really brilliant, given that it took the seventeen-year-olds a mere two weeks to complete. With the win, the computer science team hopes to convey a message to peers to be careful of what they post online.

As for the Victoria Junior College team, team members Jerome Wong and Shawn Hoo felt the competition was a fantastic attempt by MDA and Google to reach out to fellow peers on cyber-wellness. When such messages come from the government or schools, they do not hold as much appeal. In fact, they usually find it pretty boring.

This is part of what Google set out to achieve with this competition. Deborah Nga, the youth literary lead for Google APAC tells us that this competition aims to get youths into thinking about good online practices. Often young adults hold a certain level of skepticism hearing messages from older folks, and videos are best way to convey messages.

This competition attracted over 200 student participants, and more than 60 group project submissions from 30 schools. Google is also looking to have another collaboration launching similar competitions with MDA early next year.

You can view the other two videos by the Crescent Girls’ School and Victoria Junior College team below:

Wada CEO Pham Tien Thinh speaking on stage

When it comes to search in Vietnam, Google is number one, at least according to Alexa. But Vietnamese netizens aren’t exactly happy with Google’s search service because it wasn’t built with Vietnamese characters in mind. And that’s where Wada, a new search engine launching publicly today that’s run from Vietnam, is seeing an opportunity.

Wada is developed by local company New Horizon Internet. It is, however, based on search technology invented by Russia’s Ashmanov & Partners.

On Wada, users can find web directories based on genres across entertainment, business, and sports. There’s also a one-page news aggregator from over 250 news sources. The news aggregator is able to identify the primary news source and filter duplicated news for users’ reading convenience. Alexander Smirnov, business development director of Ashmanov and Partners, says:

We consider these services very important for the Vietnam market, especially mobile users. In Russia, at least 20 percent of mobile users are new to the internet. And they do not like to search by putting in queries but by clicking on directories. […] We believe these are features users want in Vietnam.

One example of the search engine’s localization is being able to detect Vietnamese names quickly and accurately. Wada also allows searching without the need to insert accent signs while you are keying Vietnamese on mobile. The search engine (pictured below) will suggest the correct accent signs to your search queries. Google.vn, on the other hand, doesn’t do this useful thing:

Challenging Google

As I see it, Wada wants to challenge Google in Vietnam, to create a search engine for Vietnam that’s much more localized and specialized. It isn’t just about language, but also some cultural and behavioral aspects of Google’s search engine that aren’t quite suited to Vietnamese users.

In Wada, the potential is certainly there. Thinh Pham, the CEO of Wada, says that Vietnam has more than 30 million internet users (out of 91.5 million in total population) and 75 percent of them use search engines actively. Vietnam also has many mobile subscribers – 127 million – and many are still on feature phones.

So it’s not surprising that Opera Mini (which is well-known for saving users’ mobile data and loading pages faster) is the number one mobile browser in Vietnam. And today’s announcement here in Hanoi also highlighted a partnership between Wada and Opera. For Vietnamese users on Opera Mini browser, Opera will feature Wada.vn on its start page. Opera insists that this partnership isn’t to challenge any other search engines. The mobile browser remains neutral and open to work with any content provider. Opera Asia’s senior VP, Fabrizio Caruso, says:

We’re an open platform only to give our users the best mobile browsing experience. […] We give relevant content to users. And we believe that Wada will give relevant content to Vietnamese users.

Since being featured on Opera Mini, Caruso says that Wada has attracted 180,000 unique users and 700,000 page views within two weeks in Vietnam.

Anyway, it should be fun to see how Google will react to this punch from a local competitor. It isn’t just Google who will be pulling its hair out, though. Chinese search engine Baidu recently set up a language R&D center to research the Vietnamese language (and also Thai) in Singapore, and the Chinese giant may also be taken aback by this news.

When asked by the media about how Wada will be able to change users’ habits now, when they’re already used to Google, CEO Thinh Pham didn’t really answer the question directly but insisted that the purpose of Wada isn’t to compete directly with the current search engines. Rather, Wada is focused on building a better search experience for people who use the Vietnamese language. Pham did concede that he’s aiming to bring Wada to other markets in the future. Smirnov added:

In the short term, we would like to have one million users. In two to three years, we would like to have 30 percent share of the search market [in Vietnam]. Search is just our technology, we would like to build other services around it.

The reason not to, of course, is that unlike in China, Google isn’t blocked in Indonesia, and the company already has a big foothold in the market there. But let’s not forget that Baidu was winning Chinese search by market share even before Google left town. Chinese companies can beat Google at its own game by being more local, and I’m not just talking about the language (although that is obviously key). Baidu services often won out over Google’s for Chinese users even when both sites were accessible not only because Baidu’s search results were better in Chinese (in my opinion), but also because it offered other services catered specifically to the market at that time. A good example of this is its MP3 search feature which, while full of pirated music, was definitely something that users wanted, and something that Google just didn’t offer.

Chinese companies could do the same thing to Google in Indonesia if they’re willing to adapt their services to local tastes and partner with local companies to better access the market. And while Chinese internet companies have a pretty terrible track record when it comes to overseas expansions, the successful ones are the ones that adapt to local tastes while still maintaining their original flavor. (See, for example, WeChat).

Indonesia’s internet is growing fast, and with nearly 250 million citizens, that means there is a huge internet market that is still in the process of opening up. Foreign companies will be there regardless; but Chinese companies should be taking advantage of their geographical proximity to mobilize teams in Indonesia and gain a foothold for their services in that market. If, when the dust settles, Google remains at the reins of search in Indonesia, it will be in part because Baidu, Tencent, and other Chinese companies failed to commit themselves until it was too late.

The platform is everything in a new internet market, so ruling search is more or less ruling the internet. But there are other kinds of platforms that Chinese companies might be even wiser to establish. I’m pretty sure Tencent hopes to pump up users on WeChat and the QQ Mobile browser in Indonesia, and Baidu wants the same for its Baidu Mobile Browser. Once users are on these platforms, promoting other relevant internet products becomes relatively easy. Some people believe that Indonesia is the next China and if that’s the case, there’s no reason why Baidu, Tencent, or any other Chinese companies shouldn’t be keeping Indonesia on their expansion shortlists.

Kompas cites Hary Tanoesoedibjo, the CEO of Indonesian media company MNC Group, as saying yesterday that the company is going to start building a search engine in 2013. Hary did not explain anything further other than that they will be cooperating with a foreign company for the search engine development, and that nothing has been finalized yet.

MNC Media Group is huge in Indonesia. CEO Hary Tanoesoedibjo is also acting as the president director of parent company Global Mediacom, which owns gigantic media presences including newspapers, TV channels, online media, and entertainment companies in the country. This is the same Global Mediacom that recently partnered up with China’s internet giant Tencent two weeks ago. And that makes Tencent, which also operates Chinese engine Soso, a worthy candidate to be this foreign company that Hary mentioned.

Soso.com has had some success in China and South Korea according to Alexa. It’s currently China’s fifth-largest search site. Of course, China’s leading search company is Baidu, which could be a possible contender for the spot as well.

Hary said, as reported by Kompas, that the reason he wants to build a search engine is because Indonesians are still using American search engines – especially Google [1]. This remark by him could be a hint to rule out other US engines, such as Yahoo or Bing, as MNC’s potential partner. Another reason is that both Tencent and Baidu are targeting Southeast Asia for expansion these days.

To date there hasn’t been any Indonesian search engine strong or bold enough to try to compete with the American giants. It’ll be very interesting to see if Hary and any potential partner will be able to make an impact.

[Original picture source: Kompas]

[UPDATE 13 hours after posting: Chinese web users are waking up to find Google search, Gmail, and some other services (any many VPN hosts) restored. Obviously, long-blocked sites like YouTube are still a goner].

With something as finicky as the Great Firewall, it’s hard to ever be totally sure what’s going on, let alone why whatever’s happening is happening, but reports from net users across China are indicating that the country has blocked access to all Google services. We first came across this via the folks from Greatfire.org, who tweeted this:

google blocked and VPNs being targeted – one step closer to fully separating the Chinanet from the Internet

— GreatFire.org (@GreatFireChina) November 9, 2012

Complaints from China based users on Twitter, Sina Weibo and even the commenters on our own site all seem to confirm the outage, although as it has rolled out over a Friday evening, many users likely won’t discover it until Saturday or even Monday.

Of course, everything could be back to normal by then. China’s government never officially announces that it has blocked something, and sometimes blocked sites return after a day or two. No one can be sure whether the blockage of Google services is a temporary bug, a temporary measure that will be undone when the 18th Party Congress ends, or the new status quo in China. But many China web users will be hoping it is not the latter, as the permanent blocking of Google services would leave Gmail users stranded and probably disrupt the operations of numerous businesses that have integrated Google products into their workflows. Moreover, switching on the VPN may not help, as many VPN users are reporting their VPNs are now offline, too.

On Sina Weibo, complaints about Gmail are rolling in quite quickly for such a late hour. “After the web gmail was blocked, now even Pop3/SMTP access isn’t working,” wrote one weibo user, “what can I do?” And indeed it looks like Chinese email clients are even blocking those forms of indirect access to Gmail accounts. “Fuck,” wrote another user, “did they just shut down the ports to the outside world? If I can’t get on Gmail, so be it, but why can’t QQ Mail get the mail from my Gmail account?”

Some users have suggested Google’s disappearance in China may be a DNS pollution issue, but Google has yet to announce anything on its blog, and access to Google services outside China has not been interrupted. The timing of this problem is also a bit suspicious, coming as it does at the beginning of the 18th Party Congress and occurring on a Friday evening (releasing bad news or making unpopular changes late on a Friday is a classic PR tactic, because no one reads the news on Friday evening and most people don’t read it on Saturday, either). But it is certainly possible that all of this is just a technical glitch that will be righted in the morning when China wakes up.

We recently reported that even before this latest blockage, many China based users had been experiencing unusual slowness or other problems with both VPNs and Google services, so it seems unlikely to me that the current reports that many VPNs and all Google services have been blocked are just coincidental. If you’re based in China, please let us know in the comments what you’re seeing, and whether VPNs and Google services are working for you.

While the smartphone revolution is well established in most mature mobile markets, there’s still a long way to go in some countries, particularly in some Asian regions where the transition from feature phones is not moving as quickly.

But a new partnership between Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Globe Telecom in the Philippines promises to bring a number of Google’s internet services – namely Gmail, Google search, and Google Plus – to feature phone users in that country. ‘Free Zone powered by Google’ is a mobile internet bundle now offered by Globe that does not come with any data charges.

Users can access the service by visiting libre.ph on internet-enabled phones, or by texting ‘LIBRE’ to 8888. The offer will be available until March 31 of 2012 2013.

The Philippines still just has about 30 percent of the population using smartphones, so there’s still a big opportunity here for anyone who wants to tap into that market. If this initiative is well received, you can probably expect to see Google offer this product in other markets as well. My guess for likely candidates would be India and Indonesia.

As we heard from Alvin Yap (of TMG and Kotagames) recently, there is indeed money to be made by going after the feature phone market. He appears to be doing just that in the gaming space in Indonesia.

Similarly, earlier in the year we also featured Fonetwish, a service that allows users to access Facebook without a data plan. Its users are primarily based in India and Indonesia.

Here are the new CNZZ stats in full:

Qihoo’s gains came from both Baidu and Google, which both dropped slightly since Qihoo’s 360 Search hit the scene in August. It’s no surprise that Qihoo has vaulted into second place, as several sources said it had done so in just its first week, but it’s good to have this data from CNZZ to paint a broad picture of how the landscape has changed.

But Qihoo will likely find it hard to grow more. Though it’s very clever in terms of making use of its web portal’s great volume of traffic, it’ll need to seriously innovate in search technology in order to dazzle new users. Qihoo’s CEO Zhou Hongyi has said that he’s aiming for 15 to 20 percent market share in this space in China. Baidu’s (NASDAQ:BIDU) shares have dropped in recent months as analysts worry about the threat from Qihoo.

As for Google, it’s a double-dose of gloomy China news for the search giant after we reported earlier today on how usage of its Google Maps app is in huge decline in the country.

[Source: CNZZ; via Marbridge Daily]

It seems clear in which direction Google Maps is heading in China. Down. New stats for Q3 2012 for mobile maps app market share in the country show Google Maps getting even more lost amidst strengthening local competition, losing nearly half its market share and slipping to sixth position – that’s down from second place in Q2.

The fall of the Google Maps app sees it leapfrogged this quarter by Baidu Maps, Mapbar, Tiger Maps, and Sogou Maps. Google now has, in this data from Analysys International, 9 percent share of the mobile mapping market in China, down from 17.5 percent in the previous quarter. This data covers all smartphone platforms, but not feature phone OSes such as Symbian S40. We put all that into a new pie chart for Q3 2012:

After earlier gradual drops, it’s not clear why the Google Maps app suddenly lost half of its share in just a few months. There might be no single reason. While Android is booming in China, various localized flavors of Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) mobile OS don’t come pre-installed with Google Maps, so Google’s mapping product doesn’t necessarily get to ride that wave of smartphone popularity here. Plus, the website version of Google Maps is partially blocked by the Great Firewall, which might give some consumers the idea that Google’s product is faulty or slow.

The other foreign competitior in this sector, Nokia’s (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) Ovi Maps, had a bad quarter too, dropping from 7.3 to 5.1 percent share.

Autonavi is stagnant at the top, and Baidu’s oft-updated maps app is growing slowly but surely.

If you’re looking for Apple Maps that appeared recently in iOS6, it’s too early to figure in the chart for Q3 which runs from July to October. But clearly it has some very strong local competition to deal with, though Apple’s China maps might be boosted by being sourced from market leader Autonavi.

[Source: Eguan/Analysys International - article in Chinese]

In just three short months, Indonesian creative network and marketplace Kreavi.com has gone through several milestones, one of which is by earning a spot as one of Google’s Community Ambassadors Partners for its digital street art Open Spaces program. During that time, Kreavi has also rebranded its logo. We talked to Benny Fajarai, the co-founder of Kreavi, during the startup’s first member get-together session called Kumpul Kreavi last weekend.

Google Open Spaces is a competition that is looking to promote creativity and art through digital street art. The nine best artworks will be painted on nine big walls strategically placed all over the Indonesian capital city. Benny explained that Kreavi has a similar objective with Google. And as 34 percent of Kreavi’s members are digital artists and illustrators, Kreavi is looking to give huge support to the program. To help encourage user participation, Kreavi promises additional prizes for the top 30 artworks in the Open Spaces final vote, and will offer things like a chance to tour renowned illustration studios in Jakarta.

Recently, Kreavi has also seen co-founder Caroline F. Sunarko take up a position at another startup, as the general manager of Damn! I Love Indonesia online. Benny confirmed that this is true, and explained that Caroline’s role has always been an advisor for Kreavi to connect with senior creative practitioners, universities, and also emerging designers. This doesn’t change Caroline’s advising role at Kreavi.

Benny shared some of Kreavi’s latest statistics since we last wrote about the startup:

• User-base: 3,100
• Number of artworks: 14,000
• Total companies posted on the marketplace: 287

Regarding user growth, Kreavi is a semi-professional design network which targets mid- to high-quality creative talents. The startup filters the artworks submitted every day, and has put around 10 percent of them into the ‘scrap’ category, which is a digital dustbin for artwork which hasn’t met the basic quality standard set by the startup.

During the afore-mentioned get-together session, Kreavi also unveiled its new and simpler logo. Benny said that Kreavi has now set its eyes on a more ambitious mission to inspire, improve, and connect the Indonesian creative talents – compared to its previous mission which was to showcase Indonesian creative talent. He believes that quality, opportunity, and economic value will become the keys to the creative success online, and the logo must represent that change as well.

Besides connecting with brands and creative communities, Kreavi now seems to have set its eyes on linking up with government departments. Kreavi will fill in a couple of sessions on the upcoming Indonesian Creative Products Week later this November, which is backed by 14 Indonesian ministries. The startup will also link up with the ministry of tourism and creative economy on a project in the near future.

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has announced today that Android developers in India can now sell paid applications, in-app items, and subscriptions on the Google Play platform. Developers can collect payments on a monthly basis via their bank accounts.

This follows news yesterday that Android smartphone users in India would be able to buy apps in Indian Rupees after October 25.

Google also revealed some incredible figures about Android adoption in the Indian market, most notably that India is now the fourth largest market in the world in terms of downloads, with device activations up 400 percent in the last year. We understand that Japan and Korea are second and third respectively in terms of downloads, and (while it hasn’t been announced) presumably the US is number one.

Analyst Chetan Sharma noted back in May that while India has the world’s second largest total of mobile subscribers (behind China), it isn’t even in the top ten in data revenue or data usage. So its encouraging to hear this news from Google that things finally look to be picking up on the smartphone side.

The 2012 data we received from Tapjoy a few weeks back indicated that India is one of the Asian countries which leans far more in favor of Android than iOS.

Looking at Google’s ‘Our Mobile Planet’ survey, we can also see that Indian smartphone users look to be more passionate about their handsets than some other countries, with 49 percent of those surveyed saying they would prefer to give up their TV than their smartphone.

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival and Sunday guys! By now many of you, especially in China and Taiwan, should have seen some customized doodle on the front page of search engines like Google, Baidu, and Qihoo’s 360’s new search engine So.com. (Hey Bing, where’s yours? UPDATED: Bing’s was late, but now it has arrived, and looks great fullscreen, as pictured below).

Among all of those, we thought Baidu’s was best, with a simple game for users to to catch all the mooncakes within 30 seconds. We thought we would give them our unofficial Mid Autumn Festival “Search Engine Doodle Competition” award. (*Hands over invisible trophy to Robin Li*.)

In this Baidu doodle game, it doesn’t really matter whether you succeed or fail in grabbing all the mooncakes. I collected all of them but found myself winning nothing, no free mooncakes delivered to my house or anything! Nonetheless it is still a neat effort that put a smile on my face. And kudos to the other search engines for their designs too.

We’d like to take this chance to wish all of you a happy Mid Autumn Festival, and hopefully a restful one for all our friends in China.

Better late than never, someone at Bing turns on its Mid-Autumn doodle for Chinese users.

Today Indonesian developers gathered at the Google Dev Fest in Jakarta. This is the place where they can share knowledge on how to work with the application engine and monetize their apps. The developers could also benefit from having face-to-face technical discussions with Google engineers and local speakers. But Dev Fest is not only for current developers – lots of students went to the event too.

Today’s Dev Fest coincides with Google Day – and therefore Google’s birthday, this time its 14th – whose theme is “University Day”. In Google Day, Indonesian students and lecturers focused on university programs sponsored by Google and also a number of internships. So, this event is more about introducing Google services for educational purposes.

One of the speakers at the Dev Fest was the head of technology and program management at Qualcomm Indonesia, Salim Ezer. He talked about the Qualcomm Vuforia SDK that supports Android and iOS. This is a mobile development platform to build Augmented Reality (AR) applications. Even though it’s a Qualcomm SDK, it’s compatible with processors from other brands. But Salim said that he can’t guarantee it will be as optimized as in Qualcomm devices.

Salim showed off some Vuforia featured apps, which looked very promising. The most amazing part which wowed the audiences was an app that can make it look like you’re being beamed in a Star Trek-style teleportation. The AR app could make you disappear and then show up again in your device screen. Another app has a naughty part that can undress people in a picture. Vuforia can also bring book’s characters to move in a certain tablet app. It has the ability to deliver a lot of information from image tracking. Salim stated:

The numbers of animations which can appear in the apps depends on handset support. But with Vuforia, all of the animations are stored in the cloud. So, you can provide millions of bit of information.

Computer vision

Another exciting topic related to AR was shared by a lecturer at the School of Electrical Engineering and Informatics of Institute of Technology Bandung, Peb Aryan. Discussing ‘computer vision’ applications, Peb shows how an app can erase a person easily from a picture like that person never existed. That happens with the power of accessing and manipulating pixels in the picture.

Peb’s topic, computer vision, plays an important role in an AR app. Basically, it’s a computer’s ability to recognize visual targets just like face-recognition features in Facebook’s photo tagging or determining the state of traffic jams from the police camera images. Computers can be programed to detect and separate objects from the background based on colors, borders, corners, regions, and motion.

The use of computer vision gives a lot of benefit to the kind of apps that we can see nowadays. Computer vision can be “trained” to recognize faces from a moving picture. Peb gives the example (while joking) on how to recognize people when there is a homemade porn video that leaks online. Together with recognition algorithms, computers can match faces in the picture with its database.

Computer vision can also reconstruct objects from assorted pictures. He shows an image of a building complex that has been reconstructed using pictures taken from the people who visited the place.

At the end of the session, attendees shares their crazy ideas on building computer vision/AR apps, throwing out concepts like one for recognizing criminals from e-KTP (Indonesian electronic identification card) photo data, to an app for handwriting recognition for psychological analyses. We hope that some of those crazy ideas from these developers find their way into your cellphone pretty soon.

Here are some fun photos from Google Korea showing PSY’s visit to the company’s Seoul office, where Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) executive chairman Eric Schmidt apparently requested to be taught the popular ‘horse dance,’ made famous from PSY’s Gangnam Style video. To reciprocate, Eric Schmidt presented PSY with a framed Google doodle.

As you know (unless you have been living under a rock this summer) PSY’s Gangnam Style is now the king of all viral videos, having become the most ‘liked’ video ever on YouTube. Currently there are almost 2.9 million likes, and about 289 million views.

On a related note, yesterday a Google Day event in Jakarta closed with a Gangnam style flash mob.

Apparently no city is safe anymore…

After the launch of YouTube Indonesia, country marketing manager for Indonesia, Krishna Zulkarnain, says that an opportunity is now available for new video content partners on the local YouTube Indonesia. And so Google will open the content partners position for Indonesia.

Anyone can apply as this will be the latest roadmap for YouTube Indonesia. But Google hasn’t set any date now. He stated that the Google Indonesia team will have to prepare the technical side of that.

To apply as an new content partners and producer, Krishna said that there is one main requirement: all of the videos’ rights must be in the partner’s hands. Therefore the proposed content partners should be the original owner even of the master recordings.

The content partners will get the benefit of a national and global audience and will of course also earn more money. You will also get exclusive development programs, video equipment, and other tools to improve your skills in video making.

Building brands on YouTube

Aside from that good news, Krishna was busy inspiring the attendees at today’s Google Day event in Jakarta. He opened the seminar by talking about building brands using YouTube, giving the example of the successful campaign by Lady Gaga in building her personal brand.

Krishna said that business leaders should be able to maximize the function of all screens. From laptops to cellphones, all of the screens can be used as an extension for TV commercials. Google data stated that there is a 24 percent increase in brand recall on YouTube compared to conventional TV ads. YouTube’s ad products, dubbed Masthead and TruView, are said to drive a million hits in a single day.

YouTube Masthead gives an interactive experience to click on products, play games, and even play TV commercials. Krishna said that it can help your business to engage with your consumers in a richer way.

As for TruView, it lets the audience choose to watch your ad. If they don’t want it, they can just skip ad. This first five seconds will be the time for consumers to make that decision. Krishna explained why YouTube allows its viewers to skip the add:

You only pay when users choose to watch your video ad. You can measure the engagement.

With the ability to choose to watch, TrueView could tell that 85 percent of the people who choose to are highly engaged with the content. Brands don’t need to pay if the viewers just opt to skip your ad. This feature makes your investment more measureable, he says. If you don’t like this kind of feature, Instream will make sure the viewers can’t escape from your ad. Krishna adds:

We enable the technology. The limit is your creativity and imagination in driving your business in the digital age.

Today, Indonesia celebrates Google Day in Jakarta. This is the first Google Day event in the country. The same event also took place in the neighboring countries like Malaysia and the Philippines. The event goes for two days, starting today with the agenda of ‘Business and Government Day.’ The head of communications for Google Indonesia, Vishnu K. Mahmud said that this event is just for a basics introduction of Google products. He said:

These seminars gather all of the Google users in Indonesia to be introduced to Google’s products and services. It’s just an introduction which gives basic knowledge about using these products.

Search, AdSense, Google Analytics, Map Maker, Google Places, Google+, and YouTube were all on today’s menu. Vishnu said that today’s agenda received interest among a wide range of people, from businessmen to students. Tomorrow will be University Day which introduces Google services for use in education.

Google Dev Fest Jakarta 2012 is also tomorrow. This will focus on Google developers as a community event that connects developers with developer advocates and Google engineers in Indonesia. The event included several introductory and intermediate level sessions on best practices using technologies ranging from Android to App Engine.

The country’s marketing manager for Indonesia, Krishna Zulkarnain, announced today that Google’s next big space will be the Google Glass Project. But the release date has not been declared yet. He can not give more details about the shape, target market, and the price. But new innovations are on the way.

Vishnu stated that this event is a great way to meet Google users, especially people from Google Business Group Indonesia and Google Developer Group Indonesia. After the seminars ended, there was a Gangnam Style flash mob held in the main exit. That video marks a YouTube success story which recently broke the Guiness Record for most liked YouTube video.

It’s official, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is now the highest trafficked website on planet Earth, at least according to web ranking site Alexa.com According to Alexa’s data, Facebook overtook Google last Friday, September 21st. That may or may not be accurate, depending on whether you believe in Alexa’s measurement methodology. But without both Facebook and Google revealing their own data, no third-party measurement can claim to be perfect. So as always, take Alexa’s data with a grain of salt.

Nonetheless, one thing is for sure. Facebook has gained a lot of users in Asia lately, particularly in Indonesia and India. Facebook is also the number one website in terms of web traffic for several Asian countries, including Malaysia, Philippines, Pakistan, Thailand, and Indonesia. And it is fair to assume that Asia has been Facebook’s growth engine to help the social networking site snatch Alexa’s top spot away from Google.

TNW previously reported that Asia has recently overtaken Europe as the largest continent with the most Facebook users – at a whopping 250 million users. Out of which, Indonesia and India have both contributed a huge amount: 54 million and 44 million, respectively. Elsewhere in Asia, SocialBakers also recorded huge growth from countries such as Japan and Vietnam at over 90 percent monthly user growth rate. But to really reach world domination, Mark Zuckerberg and his crew would have to crack the China market.

Photo: Gizmodo Japan, Eric Schmidt on stage

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) held an event in Tokyo this afternoon to announce some new goodies for the Japanese market. We already told you this morning that the Nexus 7 tablet can now be ordered by consumers in Japan.

Further to what we noted this morning, we’re told that the device will soon be available from the nations biggest electronics retailers, like Bic Camera, Yodobashi Camera, and K’s Denki to name a few.

But the big G had more in store as well, with Eric Schmidt in attendance for the event too, as we understand it. The company will be launching books on Google Play, and there are also now movies available from Paramount and Sony on Google Play as well.

Google shared some key metrics about the Japan Android market as well, perhaps most notably that the number of Android devices has nearly tripled in the past year. Naturally, that’s going to boost its apps ecosystem, and the company notes that Japan is the number three country for Google Play app installs.

In addition to the announcements at this event, Google also recently added bus routes for Google Maps in Japan. This comes at the same time when Apple is hearing a chorus of complaints about its new maps service in iOS 6.

It appears that sometime between yesterday and today, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has quietly made its Nexus 7 tablet available for Japan-based consumers.

The 16 gigabyte version of the tablet is now selling on Google Play for 19,800 yen (or $254), but buyers will also get 2,000 yen in Google Play credit upon activation [1].

That’s a pretty competitive price considering the current tablet competition here in Japan. If you’re in the market for tablet, and the 7-inch form factor looks good for you, this would certainly be a decent choice. My colleague Steven has one, and likes it a lot.

Although an iPad Mini is still expected to be just around the corner, if you don’t mind waiting to see what the future holds.

For Japan, 7-inch tablets could strike a sweet spot given that they are a little easier to hold with one hand, which certainly comes in handy when you’re on a moving train and clinging to a strap with your other hand.

[Via Komugi.net]

This was a pretty eventful week in the technology world in China, as we saw some interesting developments surrounding big players Baidu and Alibaba, as well as some fresh funds for Innovation Works. Oh, and Apple’s disastrous maps. This week also included the day the music died for Google. So in case you missed any of it, here are the notable tech headlines from this week in China:

1. Alibaba Hands Over $7.6 Billion to Yahoo For Share Buyback, Financing Values It at $40 Billion

You know how painful it is to make a huge payment that seems to empty your pockets and your bank balance? Perhaps that’s how the folks at Alibaba felt this week.

2. Baidu’s Digital Patriotism Looks Like Corporate Suicide for Overseas Expansion Plans

Amid widespread anti-Japan protests in China that occasionally turned violent, Baidu thought it was wise to publicly choose sides, and planted a virtual flag on the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku homepage on its homepage doodle. While Baidu has beaten Google in search market share, in my view it can’t come close in moral capital.

3. Panasonic: Violent Anti-Japan Protests Saw 3 China Plants Damaged, 2 Still Shut

Need further elaboration on story number 2? Here you go.

4. The Story Behind Renren, China’s Facebook-ish Social Network

Here’s an interesting overview of how one of China’s biggest social networks, Renren, got started. We spoke to co-founder Zany Zeng about how it all began.

5. Han Han vs. Baidu Legal Battle Settled: Baidu to Pay Peanuts, Wenku Stays Open

China’s most famous blogger, Han Han, has come away with a small victory in a copyright dispute with Baidu.

6. Innovation Works Adds $224 Million To Its Second Fund

Following Innovation Works’ recent $148 million second fund (aka ‘Fund II’), Kai-Fu Lee’s incubator has added another $224 million to its investment war chest.

7. China’s Alibaba Spins Off Aliyun Mobile OS Business, Supports it With $200M Investment

This was a surprise. Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba is spinning off its Aliyun mobile OS division and giving it $200 million worth of investment.

8. Apple Botches China and Japan Maps in iOS 6

Have you upgraded your iPhone to iOS 6 yet? If you depend heavily on maps, you may want to wait a while. Many users the world over a complaining about the new maps feature, and China is no exception. Apple says it hopes to improve.

9. Google Shuts Its China-Only Music Service

Google has shut down its China-only music service, according to an official blog post from the company. It was originally launched in March 2009. And then, ending what was an opportunistic week for Baidu, it jumped on the ‘music’ moniker, changing its streaming and downloads service’s name from ‘Baidu Ting’ to ‘Baidu Music’.

10. Apple’s iOS 6 Comes With Sina Weibo Integration, In and Outside of China

We were surprised to find that Sina Weibo isn’t just integrated for users who opt for Chinese language. But it is also integrated for international users, or iOS 6 users who opt for the English language setting.

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

With news of protests all over the world recently, I confess that technology news has been a relief lately for me. Even tech headlines saw some ugly politics leaking in this week, and we also heard about a fishy scam in the startup world as well.

But before you throw in the towel on humanity and jump the next escape pod to Mars, there were a few space-age gadgets that point to a promising future here on earth. Read on to find out more in our staff picks from this week’s Asia tech news.

Charle’s pick: Upgraded Railway Ministry Site Already Broken

This week we reported about the Railway Ministry’s new site upgrades, then immediately saw them fail. That shouldn’t be much of a shock, but it is when you factor in the site’s price tag: $52 million. WTF, China.

Rick’s pick: Baidu’s Digital Patriotism Looks Like Corporate Suicide for Overseas Expansion Plans

While I disagree with my colleague’s label of ‘corporate suicide’ here, I do think that Baidu creating a Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands doodle on its homepage was irresponsible, leveraging a socially volatile and occasionally violent situation for its own benefit. The subsequent PR spin was impressive, but if Baidu’s purpose was really to encourage a rational response to the island dispute, then planting a big red flag in front of half a billion Chinese net users on your homepage (a bold political/emotive stance) is an odd way to go about it.

Enricko’s pick: Australian Entreprenurs Aim to Reinvent the Light Bulb With LIFX

Improving traditional light bulbs with smartphones? I love this idea! Why didn’t anyone think of this before? The idea does look awesome, the challenge definitely lies in the execution. But if it works? Wow! It could revolutionize to the light bulb industry for the next decade.

Steven’s pick: Google Shuts Its China-Only Music Service

Despite surving the shutdown of the Google.cn search engine during Google’s spectacular stand-off with censorship-lovin’ authorities, its China-only music service got killed off on Friday. An official Google blog post confirmed that the Google China music streaming and downloading service wasn’t proving popular enough – good news for rival Baidu and its own musical offerings.

Andrew’s pick: Dear Whatsapp, Aren’t You Threatened By WeChat?

I’ve been complaining about Whatsapp ever since I started using WeChat. And I couldn’t agree more with this piece. Whatsapp just failed to innovate. Aren’t you sick and tired of downloading updates, going from version 1.1 to version 9.9, only to realize that there are hardly any changes at all? For god’s sake Whatsapp, just innovate already!

Willis’s pick: The Red Herring Awards Scam

I think the Red Herring Awards have pissed off many entrepreneurs and I’m happy to make this scam known publicly, just so entrepreneurs can avoid it in the future.

Minghao’s pick: Docomo Gives a Sneak Peek at Futuristic video-Phone Glasses

This report about a concept video-phone glasses device reminds me of the Google glasses launched a while back in Google IO conference. With new smartphones with almost identical features being launched every week, have smartphones has already reached it’s peak of innovation. After Apple, who will be next to innovate?

I was amusing myself last night by looking back at old blog posts from my days in China, and I stumbled across a fun site that I discovered back in 2007. It’s called BaiGoogledu, and if you dare to use it for search, it will give you a side-by-side Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) comparison of search results.

From there you can use the direction arrows in the middle of the page to close out whichever search results are not up to par.

This site is likely not much more than a passing fancy for whoever made it, but I’m still pretty surprised and impressed that it is still online. A rare gem in a distant corner of the interwebs for sure!

If only Baidu and Google could have gotten along so well in real life. Fact is though that the last decade has seen Baidu run rampage over the rest of the search market in China. Check out the charts below to China’s search engine market share in 2004 as compared to 2012. Oh how times have changed!

Download image version of chart

The Google China music service – at google.cn/music – is giving users until October 19th to export their music playlists as a downloadable file. But all its streaming and legal MP3 downloads have been terminated from today.

Why is this happening? The official Google China blog (which is blocked in China, along with the whole of the company’s Blogger service) indicates in its post today that it’s just about prioritizing products. The post concedes (translation is mine): “The impact of this product is not as great as we expected, so we decided to shift resources to other products.” Google then notes that the China-based music staff will go to work on other projects, so no job losses will result.

Fans of the Google China music web app have plenty of alternatives, such as the licensed music service from search rival Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), called Baidu Ting. There are also plenty of startups in the country, like Xiami or Jing.fm, that’ll be happy to pick up new users in search of good tunes.

Photo: Businessinsider.com

The California-made video The Innocence of Muslims, the anti-Islam film behind violent and deadly protests in several countries, is all over YouTube. This has led to the Indonesian government asking Google-owned YouTube to restrict access to the video which portrays the Prophet Mohammed as immoral.

The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology spokesman, Gatot S. Dewa Broto, said that Google as the parent company of YouTube had emailed them on Thursday evening to say it had blocked Indonesia’s access to 16 URLs related to the “Innocence of Muslims” videos on the site. But the video remained online until Friday noon until access was restricted.

The minister of Communications and Information Technology, Tifatul Sembiring, stated on Friday afternoon that ministry has coordinated with YouTube to take down the videos in question. Extracts of the film were still available with the help of video-sharing websites up until Sunday. Even though Google was making special efforts, it still takes time to block everything due to file sharing. When Indonesians try to access the video now, they will see “This content is not available in your country due to a legal complaint.”

Widespread Protests

Around 250 people from Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia protested in Apsari Park, Surabaya, regarding the film. This was followed by around 50 Indonesian students who trampled the US flag and threw eggs at a US diplomatic mission American Presence Post, which is part of the US Embassy in Jakarta, in Medan today. This afternoon, thousands of people from Muslim organizations like Gerakan Reformis Islam (Islamic Reformist Movement), Gerakan Pembela Islam (the Islamic Defenders Movement), dan Front Pembela Islam (the Islamic Defenders Front) held a march from Hotel Indonesia to the US Embassy Jakarta to condemn the film. They all demand the same thing: hard punishment for the filmmaker, Sam Bacile. Some even demanded the death penalty.

Muslim protests also occurred in other parts of the world since the film originally appeared on Youtube. Today, Sam Bacile been arrested and questioned by the United States police, but due to illegal drugs possession, not the film.

Broto also said that the government wrote a notification to mobile phone maker RIM to ask for a content filter on its smartphone services. Broto said:

We could access the videos on Blackberry too so we wrote to RIM to ask that it filter them, and RIM has been very co-operative [and filtered it].

The video is also blocked in Libya, Egypt, and India. Minister of Information in Malaysia, Rais Yatim on Sunday also asked Google to remove the video from YouTube from the country as it may trigger violence. Google has begun blocking the video access in Malaysia as a respond to the official complaint. But Google refused a White House request Friday to take it down.

US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said that the video is disgusting and reprehensible. She emphasized religious freedom and tolerance. Clinton added:

The United States government has no connection to the film and absolutely rejects its content and message.

This film was hardly noticed before anti-Muslim activists in Virginia, America, reposted it and sent the links to activists and journalists in Egypt. It doesn’t take a genius with a high budget (or any directing skills) to spread religious hatred online and get instant attention.

With apologies to Matt Groenig.

So, you’ve heard the Google smackdown on Acer’s planned partnership with China’s Alibaba to make its latest flagship Aliyun OS phone. Where does that leave the cloud-oriented, Linux-based Aliyun mobile OS now?

In further comments on this saga, the SVP of mobile at Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), posted on his G+ yesterday (via AllThingsD):

Hey John Spelich [Alibaba VP on global communications] – We agree that the Aliyun OS is not part of the Android ecosystem and you’re under no requirement to be compatible.

However, the fact is, Aliyun uses the Android runtime, framework and tools. And your app store contains Android apps (including pirated Google apps). So there’s really no disputing that Aliyun is based on the Android platform and takes advantage of all the hard work that’s gone into that platform by the OHA [Open Handset Alliance].

So if you want to benefit from the Android ecosystem, then make the choice to be compatible. Its easy, free, and we’ll even help you out. But if you don’t want to be compatible, then don’t expect help from OHA members that are all working to support and build a unified Android ecosystem.

Trouble is, it can be disputed that, in Rubin’s words, “Aliyun is based on the Android platform.” For starters, it’s not clear if the Android head honcho is referring to source code (which would be a legal issue, a bit like the Oracle vs Google trial that concluded in July), or merely to the convenience of Aliyun non-natively running some Android apps, and having a whole app store full of them [1]. But that’s a very grey area. To what extent is Aliyun truly and technically infringing on Android, or is Google merely taking offense?

It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to

The cancelled Acer A800. Is this Google's actual beef: That Aliyun can run and benefit from Android apps? (Image: Techinasia.com staff). Click to enlarge!

If it’s the latter case of Google taking umbrage, then it’s a grim turn of events for anyone working on Android-based or Android-associated platforms. This is where the afore-mentioned Open Handset Alliance (OHA) comes in. This Android-focused agreement covers dozens of telcos, phone makers, chip makers, and more. But if the OHA is being used as a carrot-and-stick by Google – in the absence of a legal framework for preventing many forms of building on top of Android, even if it’s in a way that Google dislikes – then it’s effectively assembling an ad-hoc monopoly of hardware partners. That can serve has a way to beat down OHA partners from other projects which are not close enough to Google’s vision of Android. We’d argue that that’s what we’ve just seen develop this weekend, with Acer (a OHA member) forced to postpone/cancel its launch of the Aliyun-powered Acer CloudMobile A800 phone.

I don’t think Google is in any way scared of Aliyun as a mobile platform – one million in sales in the space of nearly a year suggest that various other forms of Android (yes, there are many – I wonder which others Google disapproves of?) are massively outselling the two Aliyun OS phones launched so far.

In response to Rubin’s latest missive (above), Alibaba’s John Spelich says:

Aliyun OS incorporates its own virtual machine, which is different from Android’s Dalvik virtual machine. Aliyun OS’s runtime environment, which is the core of the OS, consists of both its own Java virtual machine, which is different from Android’s Dalvik virtual machine, and its own cloud app engine, which supports HTML5 web applications. Aliyun OS uses some of the Android application framework and tools (open source) merely as a patch to allow Aliyun OS users to enjoy third-party apps in addition to the cloud-based Aliyun apps in our ecosystem.

It’s not clear if Google has made attempts to analyze Aliyun to determine if those Alibaba claims are true.

Why does the OHA exist? Rubin’s longer post over the weekend on the “benefits and importance of compatibility” points out that, “We thought hard about what types of external factors could intervene to weaken the [Android] ecosystem as a whole. One important external factor we knew could do this was incompatibilities between implementations of Android.”

But Aliyun is not a fork of Android as such, and so it poses less of a fragmentation issue than the many other divergences in Android, such as apps or games that only appear on certain handsets, or with certain ROMs like HTC Sense, or run only on certain processors. Indeed, from the view of a user weighing up, say, an HTC Wildfire S in one hand, and a Haier Zing (Aliyun) phone in another, they’re totally different beasts. Indeed, with OHA members being so lousy at pushing out Android updates in a timely manner, one might even say that Aliyun represents a better ecosystem purchase, with a more direct update process straight from Alibaba. But I digress. The core issue is that unless Google can show us some Darwin-esque drawings of an evolutionary line between Android and Aliyun – not including permissible virtualization of Android apps, the likes of which is also exercised by RIM in its BlackBerry Playbook – then this still looks more like a gripe than a legally justifiable move.

So, to completely clear the air, Google should either take Alibaba to court over Android source code, or just put up its hands and say: Aliyun annoys us and we’d rather no-one in the OHA ever build stuff for them. That would at least be honest. Because the US search giant has not yet put any evidence on the table that suggests weighty technical reasons for apparently pressuring Acer (TPE:2353) to pull out of this China launch.

No cool phones = Aliyun’s death?

But, the biggest loser in all of this might well be Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce company. It has lost – perhaps cancelled permanently – its flagship Aliyun phone, leaving it sporting two less convincing Aliyun-powered smartphones. And, looking at the OHA list of members, it seems all of them are now out of bounds after Google’s recent judgement. So that means no Acer. No Asus. No HTC. No Lenovo; no NEC; no Sharp; no Sony; no Toshiba. Local phone-maker ZTE? Nope; an OHA member. Same goes for Huawei and Lenovo. Even the tiny Chinese brand Oppo, which has proved it can make some sexy devices this year, is off-limits. Is this an “alliance” or a mafia? You dishonored by family’s name, and now you’re gonna pay.

As we saw with the success of the startup phone-maker Xiaomi, well-known brands are not the main thing – an aggressively low price is one strategy that can win over consumers so long as the hardware looks strong and convincing enough, giving customers the sense of getting an awesome bargain. Superb design might help a lot too. But then how about a processor for a new Aliyun phone? The OHA monopolizes all the world’s maker chipmakers, even smaller regional firms like MediaTek. Will Google prevent them from powering Aliyun devices too?

So the Aliyun team is facing a tough task to put any new phone on the shelf, and to keep Aliyun itself alive as a mobile platform. I’d be surprised if it exists in a few years’ time – but that’s due to normal market forces (Android as a whole; iOS; Windows Phone – they’re all way more fun), not this Google move. Nonetheless, it’s being squeezed of life now, denied a proper fighting chance. Hit the comments with your thoughts on this issue going forward.

Hands-on with the Acer A800 - But Google seems to have torpedoed its launch forever.

After a couple of days of silence from Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), which looked to have been implicated in the cancelled launch of an Acer phone in China, the search engine has finally released a statement. The phone was to be the Acer CloudMobileA800 running the Aliyun OS, a year-old mobile platform created by Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce company.

[UPDATE: Scroll to bottom for remarks direct from Android man Andy Rubin].

Referencing its phone-maker partner, Google told the WSJ (paywall) earlier:

[Acer has] committed to building one Android platform and to not ship non-compatible Android devices. […] Compatibility is at the heart of the Android ecosystem and ensures a consistent experience for developers, manufacturers and consumers. Non-compatible versions of Android, like Aliyun, weaken the ecosystem.

So the assertion here is that Aliyun is a “non-compatible” version of Android; but Alibaba insists that it’s built from the ground up, based on Linux, and can run Android apps only by running them virtually and non-natively (a bit like in BlackBerry’s Playbook). Aliyun’s focus is on web apps. In reaction to Google’s words, Alibaba’s VP of international corporate affairs, John Spelich, said:

Aliyun OS is not part of the Android ecosystem so of course Aliyun OS is not and does not have to be compatible with Android. It is ironic that a company that talks freely about openness is espousing a closed ecosystem.

Talking to TiA, John expanded on the ecosystem theme:

This is like saying that because they own the Googleplex in Mountain View, therefore anyone who builds in Mountain View is part of the Googleplex. Will someone please ask Google to define Android.

Previously, Google had told us that it couldn’t comment, while Acer emitted only a very vague apology a day after the last-minute cancellation of the dual Acer-Aliyun launch event in Shanghai. The Acer A800 was to have been the flagship phone for the Aliyun OS, and the first from a big-name hardware brand. Its two other phones are built by local partners K-Touch and Haier.

Anti-competitive?

So, what’s going on here? Google’s words sound even more odd when you think of phone-makers who do actually make what seem to be “non-compatible” Android devices and also regular Android phones – such as we’ve seen with Lenovo’s OPhone, which was a closed-source fork of Android made for China Mobile (but which never really took off as a separate platform). But Lenovo still gets free reign to do that. Perhaps Acer has a different kind of agreement/relationship with Google.

From Google’s words, which seem to have been buried late night Friday in the US (and behind the WSJ’s paywall), we might extrapolate that Google did put pressure on Acer [1] to pull out of the launch. Also, the US giant’s compatibility assertion doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, since Aliyun OS being Linux-based does not make it part of the Android ecosystem. Or perhaps the fact that Aliyun can run some Android apps is the actual – but unstated – core of the objection. But software virtualization isn’t illegal. Either way, Google’s argument looks weak.

[UPDATE: Adding Andy Rubin quote]: Android head honcho Andy Rubin has weighed in directly on his G+ page (via The Verge) and apparently takes a dim view (as I suggested above) of the way Aliyun runs Android apps:

We were surprised to read Alibaba Group’s chief strategy officer Zeng Ming’s quote “We want to be the Android of China” when in fact the Aliyun OS incorporates the Android runtime and was apparently derived from Android.

Based on our analysis of the apps available at http://apps.aliyun.com, the platform tries to, but does not succeed in being compatible.

It’s easy to be Android compatible, the OHA supplies all the tools and details on how to do it.

This Acer A800 running the Aliyun OS should've launched today... But it didn't.

Well, this is awkward. China’s biggest e-commerce firm, Alibaba, was due to launch a new flagship phone for its Aliyun OS, made by Acer (TPE:2353), at a Shanghai event this afternoon. But it was cancelled at the very last moment under mysterious circumstances – and now Alibaba claims that Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) in some way intervened to stop its Android partner, Acer, from taking part in the launch.

Acer is a partner of Google in building Android phones, and that seems to be at the core of Google’s objection. But a number of smartphone-makers build for two or more platforms, as seen with Samsung and HTC, so today’s developments are quite odd. Perhaps Acer has a contract with Google that would limits such outside partnerships. We talked to Google this evening, but a representative couldn’t comment, and we’ve to reached out to Acer as well, which has yet to explain anything. [UPDATE the next day: Acer says it can't comment as well].

Click to enlarge

This is an embarrassing incident for Alibaba. The e-commerce company distributed a notice via social media making it clear that Google caused this launch to be halted on account of its partnership with Acer. A spokesman for Alibaba’s cloud computing division (aka: Aliyun) slammed Google’s actions as “clearly unfair to consumers and we are concerned about the impact on customer access to competitive products.”

A separate Alibaba rep said:

We believe that by introducing the Aliyun OS we are giving consumers and hardware makers more options which is the foundation of a healthy and strong market. We think that it should be left to the market to decide.

The cancellation happened just after I’d already posted my hands-on review of the Aliyun-powered Acer CloudMobile A800 (pictured above), which I got time with at a separate event over the weekend. So, apart from a bunch of review photos from me and some other Chinese tech blogs, consumers will have to wait for the proper launch of what’s billed as the flagship phone for the Alibaba-made Aliyun OS. The mobile OS is Linux-based but is not a fork of Android, though it can run Android apps via virtualization. That’s not thought to be part of Google’s beef, though.

Aliyun OS launched last summer and – with the scuppering of the Acer A800 launch – is found on just two handsets so far, made by local manufacturer K-Touch and Haier. The Acer A800 was to be its first big-name device.

Yes, it’s Zhou Hongyi again. But there isn’t any war of words this time round. Earlier today at the China Internet Conference, the Qihoo (NYSE:QIHU) CEO was talking about the future – and a possible collaboration – of its 360 Search engine. As Sina Tech reported, 360 Search will launch an open platform and they will also pick up Google’s advertising system on its search engine.

Zhou mentioned that 360 Search has plenty to learn from Google, especially in the aspect of advertising on a search engine platform. He also shared that 360 will adopt the categorization of paid and unpaid search results, which is mainly adopted by Google. At the same time, 360 will launch an open platform to allow more quality vertical searches on its search engine.

Zhou commented (translations are mine):

Search engines should be an open platform, where distributions are spread across to many other sites. […] Search engines should not just contain data and fail to put it to better use.

Zhou also reflected that there are plenty of high quality vertical searches out in the market that no one gives a damn about. He is open to the idea of working with smaller web companies, so as to give its users a more professional set of search results. Earlier this week, 360 Search focused on its users’ experience with the launch of the “like Project” allowing social search recommendations – like with Google and G+ – in its own 360 Browser for Windows.

Oh well, it’s tough to exactly figure out what’s on Zhou Hongyi’s mind. We never seem to be able to predict his next move. However, be it a gimmick or a strategy, Zhou is clearly trying to make more friends now rather than creating yet more enemies. The Qihoo CEO also hinted at possible collaborations with Google, Microsoft and local rival Sogou; the plans will be revealed in the near future, he added.

[Source: Sina Tech, Image]