That number comes from a “knowledgable” but anonymous source and, as usual, it should be taken with a grain of salt. But Renren spokespeople did admit to Sina Tech that some personnel adjustment was happening, characterizing it as being part of “an attempt at an internal startup mechanism [within Renren],” whatever that means. They also suggested that some of those laid off might be re-hired internally for work on more promising projects like Nuomi and Renren Games. (On a related note, Renren denied outright reports that there were also layoffs at Nuomi, saying that the team is actually in the process of expanding and that there have been no layoffs there).

We’ve already seen Renren beginning to move away from traditional social networking and toward games and mobile apps, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that a strategic shift of that magnitude would result in a little internal upheaval and personnel turnover. It seems there have been some layoffs, but I don’t think it’s time for Renren fans to panic just yet.

(Sina Tech via TechWeb)

Once hailed as “China’s Facebook”, Renren (NYSE:RENN) has had a rough few years. First overtaken by microblogging (with new rivals Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo) and then by group messaging (like WeChat), Renren hasn’t been able to grow its user-base that much. But it is diversifying. The latest spin-off for Renren is a messaging app to challenge the mighty WeChat, and it’s called TongXueShuo – literally meaning “classmates say”.

But it’s not restricted to campus buddies – and it’s not just confined to messaging. Renren’s TongXueShuo seems to throw in a lot of things in the hope that the mix will attract new users. There are elements of Path, Google+, regular social messaging apps, plus the find-and-flirt capabilities of apps like Momo.

The mobile-only TongXueShuo – with apps for iPhone and Android – came out quietly last month. Perhaps too quietly, as there has been no buzz surrounding it yet.

TongXueShuo is not only up against the 300 million users on WeChat, but also incoming rivals like NHN Japan’s Line, which launched in China in December.

Last month, Renren also had a go at making a Snapchat-like app where the messages and images vanish after 10 seconds.

Renren’s main social network remains China’s seventh largest social network with about 170 million registered users.

(Thanks to reader Ken for pointing this out)

(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.

The company did have some success in mobile gaming in 2012, but its users came primarily via the iOS platform, and since China has way more Android users than iOS users, a harder push into the Android gaming market could yield bigger rewards, although it is also a more crowded and disjointed market. Renren CEO Chen Yizhou said that Renren will be pushing to create a “powerful product line” in Android games.

The move comes at a time when Renren is finding its web-based social network increasingly edged out of users’ online habits by newer and more mobile social products like Sina Weibo and Tencent’s WeChat. The company’s stock has not performed particularly well, and there were even rumors of layoffs at the company late last year. But the company reportedly still has around 700 people in its games department spread out through several offices around the globe, so it should be in a good position to produce and distribute Android games.

Whether or not users will flock to those games is another question entirely, though. China’s Android market is fragmented across dozens of app stores, and competition for users and revenue in the gaming sector is fierce. Plus, as we saw yesterday, China’s young gamers aren’t quite as into mobile gaming as some might expect.

(via Sina Tech)

China’s Facebook-like Renren (NYSE:RENN) looks set to be the first major Chinese web company to launch a Snapchat clone. Called FeiFei, leaked images of the upcoming Renren product shows that it follows the same ‘this message will self-destruct in five seconds’ model for both text and photos.

Renren has 172 million registered users, making it China’s seventh-largest social site. It has suffered in the past couple of years as the nation’s web users have flocked to microblogging sites like Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo. Then, in the past year, mobile messaging apps like WeChat have grown in momentum.

Here’s the purported photo-snapping and grafitti-ing in the FeiFei app:

Perhaps Renren FeiFei can have an impact on Weibo and WeChat usage, especially among younger users. Shortly after Snapchat emerged (quickly rising to 3.4 million users last December), Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) decided that it needed to protect its younger user-base with its own clone, called Facebook Poke.

FeiFei, whenever it’s released, won’t be the first such hyper-messaging app from China. A local startup launched PaoPaoXin last year. But, judging by the mere 16 reviews in the Chinese iOS App Store, it hasn’t been a hit so far.

(UPDATED: It’s real, and the iPhone app is here).

(Source: Leiphone – article in Chinese)

Tomorrow, as 8:30pm rolls around the globe, lots of landmark buildings will turn off their lights to observe Earth Hour and remind the world to not waste our vital resources. Many households will likely join in. And so will six Chinese social media sites, who have vowed to turn off the lights on Saturday evening. As pictured above on Renren, the sites will illuminate their pages only with a single virtual light (1) that follows a user’s cursor.

According to CampaignAsia, the six sites backing this environmental movement, alongside Renren, are Youku, QQ, Ushi, 139, and Kaixin. It’ll probably be seen by most people on Youku, which is the nation’s top YouTube-like site; overall, this support could be seen by as many as 200 million Chinese netizens. Unless everyone’s out eating dinner.

The annual campaign is run by the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), and the theme this year is challenging people to do positive things in return for some karmic reward. For example, these two mischief-making Singaporeans will run down Orchard Road in lingerie if 5,000 people will use reusable shopping bags (2).

Of course, to engage Chinese netizens, the WWF has also taken to Chinese social media rather than YouTube, and there’s a localized Earth Hour page as well.

The seventh annual Earth Hour is 8:30 to 9:30pm and will likely be observed by lots of global sites as well. Of course, in terms of pure technicalities, most gadget displays do not actually use less power to show darker hues than lighter ones – AMOLED with its pure blacks might be an exception – so there won’t be a net saving in global electricity usage from the ‘lights off’ websites. Instead, it’s more about raising awareness of real-world savings that can be made in our communities.

(Source: CampaignAsia)

Along with those numbers, the data also shows that the largest section of China’s social media users – a full 30 percent – are aged 26 to 30. The perfect target for advertisers. As a whole, 91 percent of Chinese netizens have social accounts, which is way above the 67 percent in the US.

So what are those top 10 sites about? I’d categorize some of them like this:

• Twitter-like - In second and third place are the Twitter clones, Tencent Weibo and Sina Weibo. The latter one gets most of the media attention, both in China and around the world.
• Facebook-y - Four of the sites are a lot like Facebook. Tencent’s QZone, Tencent’s Pengyou, Renren, and Kaixin are all focused around a mix of social profiles, albums, buddies, and social gaming. Interestingly, they don’t get so much hype these days, and feel rather like the past generation of sites on China’s web.
• Whatsapp-ish - The much talked about WeChat is like Whatsapp, and is one of a number of Asia-made messaging apps – like Line and KakaoTalk – that are battling to get onto the smartphones of young Chinese and Southeast Asian web users.

Here’s the full infographic:

(Source: Go Globe)

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

The social media posting platform HootSuite ventured into China last October with support for Sina Weibo, which is a crucial avenue for social marketing to Chinese consumers. Today Canada-based HootSuite has added a bunch of new features for Weibo, the biggest of which is advanced scheduling for posts (pictured above).

In addition to scheduling, HootSuite’s Sina Weibo support now allows you – and its enterprise customers – to add multiple accounts and save searches to monitor keywords. That last one will be useful for brands wanting to track what netizens are saying about your company or products, making it easier to respond positively.

HootSuite added China’s Facebook-esque Renren back in November, and that social site gets some loving today as well. The Renren plug-in within HootSuite also adds scheduled posts and multiple accounts, along with new streams for tracking your photos and shares.

HootSuite’s community VP, Dave Olson, explained to us a few months back that much of what HootSuite is doing in China is in reaction to feedback it’s getting from local users. A possible next step for the Vancouver startup is integrating some Tencent-run social networks.

As we saw in a recent report about luxury brands engaged in social marketing to China, Sina Weibo is the go-to platform. Indeed, 88 percent of surveyed high-end overseas brands have an official Sina Weibo page.

Look at all those IE toolbars in this photo from 2009!

Remember FarmVille, the social game that put Zynga on the map? That was pretty much ripped off from a Chinese game named Happy Farm, made by the startup studio Five Minutes. At the height of Happy Farm’s popularity in 2009 (after being released in the summer of ’08), the game had 23 million daily active users in China across three social gaming platforms; the game became a huge fad, talked about by students and young professionals, cited in divorces, and pontificated over by state-run TV as it worried that the addictive game would be distracting kids from their homework.

Coming before mobile gaming really took off in China (remember that 3G only launched in the country in 2009, when smartphones were still a relative novelty), Happy Farm and a few other build-it-with-your-buddies games were the main form of online entertainment, fuelling the growth of social networks such as Renren (NYSE:RENN), Kaixin, and Tencent’s (HKG:0700) QZone [1]. The farming game also made its way to Facebook. But casual games have the lifespan of a goldfish, and Happy Farm is now off the radar of most of China’s casual gamers. Most of them have moved onto mobile titles, having been swamped by the choices on new gaming platforms like the one on Sina Weibo. Happy Farm 2 came out in early 2010 with much better graphics, but the hype – and the hits – were not so great.

The original Happy Farm. Click to enlarge.

Gone to seed

Today there are rumors, as reported by QQ Tech, that Five Minutes, the studio that made the iconic game [2] is closing this week. The news site claims that the startup went into liquidation in August of this year, with some of its assets sold to the Chinese gaming developer and platform Kingnet. But CyberAgent Ventures, a backer of Five Minutes, denies that there’s trouble with the studio and says that it’ll release new products after a period of adjustment.

However, it is known that Five Minutes laid off 90 percent of its staff in June of this year, though the three-man founder team remains intact.

Happy Farm will still keep pumping out vegetables, though. Licensed versions of it are still running on Renren, and its Tencent-bought spin-off QQ Farm is still ploughing the same furrow (see here). Indeed, with that kind of income, it’s not clear how Five Minutes seems to have unravelled as a studio. But now gamers have moved onto zombie bashing, bird flinging, and building entire cities – and we’ll soon take our fingers and finances to the next gaming bandwagon that rolls into town.

[Lead photo: ChinaSmack]

Last year this Digital IQ report ranked three global companies as having “genius”-level marketing chops: Audi, Burberry, and BMW. This time around, four luxury brands get this accolade, led by cosmetics firm Estée Lauder (see the top ten table below).

So how is this calculated? To make the grade, brands need to do a lot of optimization, social outreach, and clever online marketing. For this report, the grading structure is 30 percent each for doing social media and localizing your site, and 20 percent each for digital marketing and mobile compatibility:

With all that factored in, here’s the top ten. Note that Audi once again appears as a “genius” brand when it comes to its online work in China:

As for the winner, the L2 Think Tank team notes that Estée Lauder has a web “presence on six social platforms [which] yields a social universe of more than 1.6 million fans.” Not the biggest number among these global companies, but the report states that its strategy is very social and well integrated.

Being social in China

Aside from things like search engine optimization for Baidu, luxury brands in China need to get themselves on the right social platforms. The report finds that social media adoption is up on every site, with Twitter-esque Sina Weibo still number one. A big winner this year is the video site Youku (NYSE:YOKU) where 60 percent of the analyzed brands in this report now have a social media presence:

That sure has been a long time building up, as we reported on brands like Cartier and Burberry opening brand video channels on Youku way back in the summer of 2011. Once again we see luxury automakers doing especially well, this time exploding their number of channel video views on Youku in 2012:

Of course, there are new platforms emerging, and brands need to be aware of reaching out via the messaging app WeChat (as we’ve seen Starbucks do so well this year), or on the Pinterest-like Meilishuo. Plus, the Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) owned video site iQiyi is aiming to challenge Youku for classy brand video channels, so that outlet needs to be considered as well.

Keeping the conversation flowing on Sina Weibo

Car makers again make a strong showing on China’s most important social service – Sina Weibo. Cadillac is top in terms of fans/followers on Weibo in this luxury segment, and fashion labels Dior and Coach are playing catch-up this year:

For more information about these brands and their strategies, catch the full report here. Plus, L2 has made a nice video overview that runs to three minutes:

(Mobile readers: Digital IQ Index®: China 2012 from L2 Think Tank, on Vimeo).

The folks over at Cooliris have been pretty busy of late, recently pushing a new update for its iOS app with support for new services like Google Drive, Picasa/Google+, and Flickr. And today the California-based company has more news, as Chinese versions of its iPad and iPhone photo viewing app are now available in Apple’s app store.

Cooliris is also announcing that its app will also be integrated with local social network Renren (NYSE:RENN) in China, which had about 45 million monthly active users as of this past summer. The other integrated services are still predominantly foreign, with Instagram, Flickr, and Google Drive and Picasa [1]. So I would hope that Cooliris is planning to bring in more services that locals care about, like Sina Weibo, or even Instagram clone Tuding. A Cooliris representative says that they are working on more sources, but they cannot disclose anything just yet.

Cooliris’s CEO Soujanya Bhumkar noted in the announcement that they’re happy to be launching their first international version of Cooliris in China, as it’s a pretty big smartphone market. As we saw over the weekend, there’s certainly more than a little demand for Apple’s iPhone, with over two million iPhone 5s [2] selling this past weekend after the handset finally launched in China.

Docomo Capital is an investor in Cooliris, so it will be interesting to see if Japan will be the next country to get a localized app.

No one would deny that China’s once-premier social network Renren (NASDAQ:RENN) has been losing some of its shine of late. Its losses got worse in the third quarter thanks to increased operating expenses, and newer social services like weibo and WeChat have been, to some extent, eating Renren’s lunch. Recently, rumors have been swirling about layoffs at Renren. The company has denied these rumors, but it does seem some changes are afoot.

Sina Tech spoke with Renren insiders and former employees, and it seems clear that the company is doing some “personnel adjustment,” but the extent of that is not clear. One Renren worker told Sina that during this most recent round of adjustment, a lot of the company’s old guard had left, and among one group of ten engineers that had been with the company since its early days, only one now remained at his post. That sounds dramatic, but other insiders told Sina that the changes really were the result of a regular personnel adjustment.

In assessing whether or not these rumors are true, there are a couple factors worth considering. On the one hand, Renren’s problem with increased operating expenses would seem to suggest layoffs as a possible resolution. On the other hand, though, Renren’s games department — one of the departments rumored to be affected by the layoffs — is one of the company’s strongest performers, and it seems highly unlikely that anyone at Renren would look to solve the company’s financial problems by gutting its best source of revenue. Given that, my own personal guess is that the staff changes really are just adjustments. But given the growing losses and the company’s dropping stock price, it’s certainly possible that layoffs are in Renren’s near future.

[via Sina Tech]

All those stats are compiled by the folks at the Singapore branch of the WeAreSocial digital agency, who have just released their 2012 infographic report – see it here, or embedded below – that updates the series that we enjoyed so much last year.

Before you browse the whole set of infographic slides at the bottom of this post, here are a few key points on social media in Asia:

Yes, Facebook is still the region-wide king – not counting the massive weight of Chinese socal networks which tend to be used only in China. But Facebook’s throne is far from safe, we reckon, with more group messaging apps – like Whatsapp, KakaoTalk, Line, WeChat – ready to take away much of the activity that Facebook is used for. After all, the Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps are not as good as many of its rivals in terms of facilitating simple and fun chatting with friends. OK, here’s the full slideshow:

[Source: We Are Social’s blog]

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

Renren Vice President, Huang Jing(Middle)

Perhaps by now, most people realise what is the next wave in the internet industry. It’s mobile.

At Techweb’s IT Conference yesterday, Renren’s (NYSE:RENN) Vice President Huang Jing, and the deputy CEO of JingWei, Lee Youcai, shared some insights on how mobile will affect the landscape of China’s social networks, especially in the field of professional networking, where LinkedIn has been very successful. Huang says that China has the potential to replicate LinkedIn’s success, but he believes that mobile social networking is how China will answer, noting that 60 percent of Renren users are doing so from a mobile.

Almost everyone carries a mobile phone these days, and more and more people are using mobile to access the net. According to Huang, LinkedIn experienced 80 percent growth in China, and 111 percent in Indonesia where it has the biggest number of users in 2011. To date, China has approximately over one million LinkedIn users.

There are already quite a few LinkedIn clones in the market, such as Tianji, Dajie, Ushi, Zhenhedao, etc. And precisely because there are too many of such similar and perhaps mediocre products, users are confused and the market share is diluted. That’s probably why the professional social networking market has not developed in China.

Huang also feels that there is a need for a breakthrough product in the market and he commented that JingWei’s mobile name-card app is a positive indication that developers are still trying to fill this gap in the market and there are many possibilities. Weijing is basically a social media app created for business professionals. It is very similar to Youlu (YCard), another business-oriented app that collates name-card information onto your smartphone.

As the market shifts towards mobile, and there’s also a huge demand for a professional network, it won’t be long before we experience the next social media hit in China. Watch for it.

[Source: Image]

Renren, China’s largest Facebook-ish social network, has a long and complex history which probably not more than a handful of people have heard about in detail. I was lucky enough to have the chance to meet Zany Zeng, the co-founder of NYSE-listed Renren.com and current co-founder of Youlu, to dig deep and document the story behind Renren.

To understand the full journey, the story goes way back to May 1999 when Chinaren.com was founded – arguably the first college-focused online social network in China, way before even Facebook and Friendster started. Chinaren was founded by Joseph Chen (Renren’s current CEO) along with Yunfan Zhou and Nick Yang (who both eventually co-founded NASDAQ-listed KongZhong). Their first task was to hire someone to build the technical backbone of Chinaren; so they went to Tsinghua university and they found Zany, who was still an undergraduate.

Zany ended up hiring more than 60 fellow Tsinghua students to build out the tech team. Just three months away from obtaining his bachelor degree, Zany chose to drop out of college. His stint at Chinaren was short because the startup got acquired for approximately $30 million by Sohu after less than two years of operations. Zany said that Chinaren was fast growing but they didn’t have money to run further, so getting acquired was the only sensible route out. Back then, there were few investors anyway.

His belief that online social networks would one day be a big thing in China saw him join the first Renren as CTO. That’s no typo – and this is the part where it gets confusing. So read on:

Renren 1.0 was founded by Anthony Cheng and Michael Robinson in early 1999. They raised US$37 million in funding, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, reached a market cap exceeding US$1 billion and then, after the dotcom bubble burst just a few weeks later, Renren 1.0 was acquired by a Hong Kong holding company. Renren 1.0 was where Zany met Richard Robinson where they became close friends and allies (they later co-founded and now run Youlu together focusing on creating mobile apps for business professionals.

After his stint at Renren 1.0, Zany, together with Joseph Chen, joined forces again and co-founded Oak Pacific Interactive (OPI) in the spring of 2002. Zany pointed out that the name was chosen because it’s ‘IPO’ spelled backwards. At OPI, Joseph and Zany raised in total US$460 million from big names including Softbank, DCM, and General Atlantic. OPI’s initial business included a number of web sites including one somewhat like Xunlei, a sort of Bit-torrent service. But that didn’t turn out well.

Zany purchased the then defunct Renren.com domain name and used it to create Renren 2.0, a Craigslist-like service, in 2006 but that also did not fare well too. The turning point for Renren happened in 2006 when OPI acquired Xiaonei.com for a song. Xiaonei.com back then was a popular Facebook clone with a large user-base of college students.

In 2009, the Renren of today was born when the company consolidated Xiaonei with Kaixin.com (who bought the domain earlier) under the Renren.com domain to form a unified social network for China. Around the same period, Kaixin001.com (Kaixin means “happy” in Chinese) was also a competing social network. And a lot of people, even local friends, get confused between Kaixin.com (which now redirects to Renren) and Kaixin001, which is the proper name for the rival.

Kaixin001 actually had the chance to buy the Kaixin.com domain but they somehow, maybe for cost saving reasons, decided not to. So, in the end, Renren bought the domain instead. Of course, Kaixin001 wasn’t too happy about it as it got left behind eventually.

After helping grow OPI to over a 1,000 staff and tens of millions of users, COO Zany left the company in 2009 at the stage where the company was China’s largest social network. In 2011, Renren.com went public in the US – NYSE:RENN – and has now 45 million monthly active users users according to its most recent announcement.

On starting a company, Zany has a word of advice for budding entrepreneurs:

Find the right market, don’t give up and iterate your way to product/market fit.

Renren CEO Chen Yizhou

Renren (NYSE:RENN) is the king of China’s traditional social networking hill. But like China’s other social giant, it has found that relying on advertising alone to produce revenue isn’t all that effective. Renren CEO Chen Yizhou said recently that he’s looking for alternative revenue streams, and that he believes games and e-commerce are the keys to social networks retaining their viability.

Of course Renren already has games and e-commerce subsidiaries, including the group buy site Nuomi, which currently enjoys a modest 6.5 percent market share in that sector. It still isn’t making any money, but its losses are shrinking. It seems clear that Chen hopes to lean more on these subsidiaries and less on Renren’s traditional social networking model to strengthen the company through diversifying its revenue streams.

To that end, Chen also says Renren will have to rely on internal R&D, especially in the mobile sector. Currently, mobile income only amounts to about 10 percent of Renren’s overall income, despite the fact that mobile games in general are making all kinds of money. Developing better games and better mobile payment solutions will be important to Renren going forward, Chen suggests, and he wants to do more hiring in that area. Currently about 45 percent of Renren employees are working on the mobile side of things.

Although the company isn’t making a profit and faces a threat in Sina Weibo, Renren is far from dead, and in fact is still seeing strong user growth; with users up 31 percent compared to a year ago. Chen Yizhou also suggested that while weibo certainly hasn’t helped Renren, it has been more damaging to Renren competitor Kaixin001 because (according to Chen) their target demographics are almost exactly the same as Sina’s.

[via Sina Tech, image via TechWeb]

In its Q2 numbers, the Chinese SNS posted a loss of more than $20 million. The company has seen strong user growth over the past year, with monthly log-in users growing 31 percent to a total of 45 million. But, much like Facebook, it seems to be having trouble converting those users into profit. As you might expect, this has not been great news for Renren’s stock, which took a sharp drop following Tuesday’s Q2 results announcement.

Facebook and Renren now find themselves in a similar quandary, but how will they attempt to escape it? It’s clear that there are at least few kinks to work out of the massive social network model both sites use. Given that they both had strong revenue streams, these Q2 results aren’t apocalyptic — don’t expect either company to disappear overnight. But the fact that they’re both losing millions of dollars means that something needs to change.

This is especially interesting given that newer microblogging social networking sites like Twitter and Sina Weibo are also having problems with monetization. Is it possible to build a really big and really profitable social network? Probably. But it seems like no one has actually figured out just how quite yet.

Renren (NYSE:RENN), the Chinese Facebook-ish social network, has released its unaudited second quarter 2012 financial results. In short, both user count/activity and financials are looking okay. They are growing.

Total net revenue was up by 47.5 percent from last year’s Q2 to hit $44.8 million. More than half of the revenue comes from Renren’s growing gaming efforts which increased by 122.1 percent to hit $22.5 million. Online advertising took a drop of 10.5 percent as Renren explains that it faces stiff competition with more users’ eyeballs moving from PC to mobile.

Its user base has been increasing too. Total registered users are now at 162 million, although that number doesn’t really matter to me. What matters is active users and Renren, quite impressively, revealed that monthly active users were up by 31 percent compared to Q2 2011 with a total of 45 million users. Sina Weibo, the Twitter-like service, on the other hand, has 300 million registered users but no one really knows how many are monthly active users today.

The Chinese social network is looking to expand its business in the mobile sector in the near future. Joseph Chen, chairman and chief executive officer said:

Looking ahead, our strategy remains focused on mobile opportunities, with increasing effort to experiment different monetization models, including mobile gaming, mobile advertising and mobile commerce through Nuomi.

Over the last quarter, Renren has partnered with Japan’s DeNA on gaming and also SnapDish for photos on mobile. Nuomi didn’t do that well as it was reported that it lost $9.6 million in Q4 2011.

"Oh, you silly cat. That's not how you spell 'cheeseburger'!"

Asia now has more than one billion internet users – or 1.016 billion, to be precise – who amount to 46 percent of the world’s total number of web users. More than half of those are in China. In addition, 623 million access the web via mobile phones. That’s the overview of the Asia-Pacific web scene depicted in a new report by the Asia Digital Marketing Association (ADMA), a non-profit organisation backed by corporate donors such as Google, Microsoft, and CNN.

For that fast-growing regional audience, ADMA cautions brands to think carefully before engaging in social marketing – “Although 60 percent of social networkers say that social networks are a good place to learn about brands, 50 percent also say they don’t want to be bothered by brands” – and to take care to note the “fragmentation of online activities” between different nations. Here are five eye-watering biz and marketing stats from ADMA’s David Ketchum:

• Online advertising spend in Asia-Pacific reached US$24.8 billion in 2011, making the region second only to the US, with $34.5 billion.
• Every marketing dollar spent online returns $1.78, exceeding the returns of all other marketing media including TV, print, out of home and trade (according to Nielsen).
• By 2015, Asia Pacific is expected to account for a third of all global mobile ad spend, reaching $6.92 billion.
• India, China, Australia and Japan are expected to generate $258 billion in commerce sales in 2012 between them, and mobile commerce is on the rise with 34 percent of mobile internet users in China and Korea transacting via handheld devices.
• Mobile app downloads reached five billion in 2011, generating $871 million.

Here are some of the key demographic tables from desktop internet users in Asia as a whole. It focuses on who’s online, Asia’s most trafficked sites (note Chinese web giants Tencent and Baidu), and where folks go for social media, online gaming, and e-commerce:

And here are three of the demographical highlights of mobile web users in Asia in the ADMA report. It’s interesting to note just how much more likely Asian mobile users are to do serious, practical stuff on their smartphones or feature-phones:

If you’re more into the consumer attitudes and marketing aspect of this and want to see ADMA’s report in full, grab it at the source link below.

[Source: ADMA’s Digital Marketing Yearbook report for 2012 (requires sign-in)]

General unwillingness among Chinese smartphone owners to pay for apps – even for iPhone and iPad, where online payment in iTunes was recently made easier with the inclusion of bank debit cards – is causing local developers to look overseas. The same report – which was commissioned from App Annie – also notes how China’s top ten development companies generate 90 percent of their app revenue from customers overseas. Those top ten devs only get 1.53 percent of their income from Chinese consumers.

Some of the names on the above list will be familiar to regular readers. RenrenGames is the publishing arm of the local social networking site Renren (NYSE:RENN), makers of iOS social gaming titles like the World War II real-time strategy game Iron Marshal. That game cost 68 RMB (UK£6.99) when we looked at it last year, but is now – tellingly – free in the iTunes App Store, instead relying on a range of in-app purchases that start at just 6 RMB (£0.69).

Another powerhouse Chinese developer is the Beijing-based Hoolai games studio, one of whose titles was innocently caught up in a huge in-app purchase fraud last December. Clearly, other app devs in the nation are already aware of the woeful situation and are developing for a global audience. I see that iFree Studio has versions of its Emross War game (see the developer’s page in iTunes) in German, Japanese, Korean, and traditional Chinese for Taiwan and Hong Kong. Oh, and simplified Chinese for mainland gamers too – though we can guess that that version will bring in the least revenue.

Of course, we’re not too surprised by all of this, as an interesting Distimo report that we looked at last year described many Asian app consumers as “more price-sensitive” than in other nations, with a tendency to go for free apps.

But overseas users – and premium downloads – are not a panacea, and Chinese developers need to think carefully about the freemium model and the most effective kind of advertising platform. For example, the Sina Tech article that carries these images highlights the case of China’s Go Dev Team (see the developer’s page in Google Play), makers of Go Weather, Go Desktop, and lots of other apps that are especially popular on Android. Cao Ming, vice president of the 3G.cn company that owns Go, says that freemium can work well, and is best done by being innovative so that the product is recognised and can scale well globally. Then, Cao says, you can apply more advertising to it.

As for solutions, it’s difficult to see what can be done now that online payments have already been made so easy. I’d wager that jailbreaking is more widespread in China than the global average, with many grey-import (smuggled) iPhones and iPads being jailbroken by the reseller as a service – sometimes with a whole bunch of pirated apps thrown on for a small extra charge. One idea to get Chinese iOS users to pay for apps comes from Innovation Works’ Wang Hua, who tells Sina Tech that Apple’s app pricing in iTunes is enormously awkward in the Chinese currency, with apps starting at 6 RMB and then going up in that increment. That denies local consumers a more psychologically satisfactory kind of price tag, such as 5, 10, 15 RMB. Or 4.9, 9.9, 14.9 RMB etc.

Well, that’s one idea. But something tells me that mere price tags are not the problem.

[Source: Sina Tech news - article in Chinese]

Here’s another milestone for Flipboard in China, with the official launch today of Flipboard for Android ‘China Edition.’ It comes in partnership with the startup Android app stores Wandoujia and AppChina, which have been selected as the official distributors of the Chinese localized version of Flipboard for Android. The new app comes with lots of Chinese news and entertainment content, and supports sharing and syncing to two big social networks here: Sina Weibo and Renren.

This Chinese version of Flipboard can be downloaded right now from Wandoujia.com on this special page; and it’s here on AppChina as well. Like all of Flipboard’s moves in the country, this launch is being overseen by the U.S. company’s product manager for China, Alvin Tse. This new version will be on the Google Play store too.

Plus, to mark this event, the indie app store has bestowed upon Flipboard the “Wandoujia design award” in recognition of the sexy, slidey UI that has made the app a global hit. A Wandoujia representative, speaking to TiA over the weekend, said the startup team is expecting an extra “tens of thousands of app downloads a day” via this special promotion alone – aside from all the regular downloads that it’ll get on Wandoujia. The site’s co-founder, Wang Junyu, added:

Wandoujia and Flipboard both strive for simplicity and elegance. We hope the partnership will promote the value of design among Android apps in China.

Amen to that. As an Android user – on the newest 4.0 – I still have occasion to facepalm when I see a Chinese (or overseas) app that looks like it was coded with v1.5 in mind.

This local launch comes less than a week after Flipboard first hit the Android platform. Before this, its iPhone app came to China in March this year, following in the wake of the iPad ‘China Edition’ that came into life last December.

The deal is a coup for the Wandoujia, which is one of many third-party Android app stores operating in China from web companies both big and small. It capitalises on the fact that a great many Android users here prefer to avoid Google Play and instead use such independent stores, or just download the ‘.apk’ files from around the Chinese web as and when needed. Wandoujia also has an iTunes-like syncing app for Windows and Mac, giving Chinese Android users the missing sync that Google has never provided.

As for AppChina, it’s backed by the Innovation Works incubator, and wrapped up some major series A funding earlier this year.

Here’s a couple of promo shots of the Flipboard for Android ‘China Edition’ in action:
]]> http://www.techinasia.com/flipboard-for-android-china-launch/feed/ 2 http://placehold.it/350x150 http://www.techinasia.com/hubblr-social-media-marketing-to-china/ http://www.techinasia.com/hubblr-social-media-marketing-to-china/#comments Fri, 22 Jun 2012 04:00:59 +0000 Steven Millward http://www.techinasia.com/?p=81559 Read more »]]>

The Hubblr dashboard now support's China's Renren (pictured) as well as Sina Weibo.

Last winter we looked at Hubblr, a dashboard for global social marketing that includes support for China’s Sina Weibo as well as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Back then it was in private beta. But now the startup’s founder, Michael Lam, informs us that it’s launching officially this week with lots of refinements and also brings support for brands to engage consumers on Renren, the Facebook-esque social network. Now that it’s fully open, Michael says that the Australian startup’s “target market is brands or organizations who engage with their customers in both Western and Chinese social networks.”

The main web app at Hubblr.com is where all the posting and analytics (pictured below) action happens, and the slick service is reminiscent of HootSuite – except that Hubblr includes China’s two hottest social media that have the kind of moneyed, blue collar workers that brands chase after. The startup has given us some stats from its beta testing period: over 200 organizations signed-up to make use of it; those beta users were managing over 2,200 social profiles with an average of 11 social profiles per organization that participated; and, users came from 15 countries, including China itself, Hong Kong, the U.S., Canada, Vietnam, and beyond.

The Hubblr team has also made some technical changes, such as fine-tuning its pricing system, which has three tiered packages that offer access to a greater number of profile pages. Also, Michael says:

We added representation in Hong Kong [and] migrated our solution across to Amazon Web Services to make it scalable.

Whether you’re a fellow startup that needs to reach out to Chinese consumers on Weibo or Renren, or a major brand with multiple campaigns to run, check out the Hubblr tour, and share your social marketing thoughts in the comments below.

One element of the social media analytics in Hubblr (Click to enlarge); Below is the new Renren login.

Japanese social gaming giant DeNA (TYO:2432) is announcing today that it is allying with Chinese social networking site Renren (NYSE:RENN) in an effort to bring more mobile games to the service the Mobage social gaming platform. Renren had about 154 million users as of March 2012.

According to the announcement, this will mean that Mobage will get a dedicated section inside the Renren Android application, thus further increasing its visibility in China. It also means that Renren users can sign into Mobage with their Renren ID, accessing its wide range of games. The company previously partnered with China’s other big social networking site Kaixin001 in a similar tie-up.

It should be noted that DeNA China has been pushing hard to make partnerships over the past year, since Mobage launched in China in July of 2011. In addition to Renren and Kaixin, here’s a quick rundown of some of the internet and mobile companies it has made deals with:

• In December, DeNA made a deal with Alibaba Cloud Computing to get Mobage on Aliyun OS.
• In January it partnered with online game developer NetDragon to localize non-Chinese social games for the Chinese market.
• In February it partnered with security software company Qihoo 360 to provide a sort of ‘corner’ in which Mobage China for Android can be downloaded. Also it February, DeNA managed to put Mobage on Huawei smartphones, and brought it to Baidu Yi smartphones too.
• In March it signed deals with China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom to get Mobage China games in each carrier’s app store. It also formed a partnership with Sina to make Mobage more accessible to Weibo users.

So as you can see, DeNA has been quite busy in China. From our point of view this makes an interesting contrast with its Japanese rival GREE (TYO:3632) who appears to be putting its current focus on the North American market. DeNA of course has activities there too (Rage of Bahamut is doing well), but it’s certainly interesting to compare how these two giants approach global expansion.

Here’s a useful infographic showing where the Chinese web is at in mid-2012, with all the updated stats for how many folks are online, and new social media user figures for a dozen of the nation’s most popular services.

Made for us by the folks over at BestFreeOnline, it highlights how Chinese net users are some of the world’s most social, with 91 percent of them in a sample survey saying that they’d visited a social media site in the past six months. By comparison, only 87 percent of Americans have done the same.

Tencent’s QZone remains the country’s most-used social site, featuring the web profiles and photo albums that are complementary to the Tencent (HKG:0700) QQ instant-messaging platform. Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo, as China’s hottest Twitter-like site, is growing at an amazing pace, recently surpassing 300 million registered users and now standing at 324 million.

Further down in the infographic, also look out for some amazing e-commerce revenue projections for 2015, sourced from our reporting on the subject earlier this month:

[Source: BestFreeOnline]

While the biggest news by far in the photo-sharing world was undoubtedly Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, there’s a photo app here in Japan which is starting to take some impressive steps. We wrote about the food photo app SnapDish (www.snapdi.sh) last year, and today we heard some news from them.

The company has just announced a partnership with Chinese social network Renren.com (NYSE:RENN), which will allow Chinese users to share food photos directly to Renren using the SnapDish iOS application. In addition, Renren will be promoting SnapDish to its users in its application section.

So far Snapdish has been downloaded by 120,000 food lovers across Asia. The last time we spoke with the company, a representative told us that an Android version of the application was being considered, and I’m told now that this is coming by June of this year at the latest. Indeed, for Android users who are on the au network in Japan, it’s already available in the au Market.

For mobile shutterbugs who use apps like Instagram primarily for food sharing, you might want to take SnapDish for a test run. What’s different here is that users can add meta data like the type of food, the approximate location, the price, and even a rating. There are also filters that you can use to make your food look better. For example, if it’s undercooked, you can apply the ‘well-done’ option to cook it a little more [1].

But in any case, do give it a try. And if you’re a Renren user, now you have some extra incentive to test out SnapDish.

A report from a Chinese news site suggests that Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has adjusted its ranking rules and algorithm for the iTunes App Store in an apparent bid to punish developers who use third-party services to manipulate their apps’ rankings. Apple first tweaked its system last April [1], making sheer download volume less of a factor in an app’s standing in the store.

Looking only at Chinese-made apps, it can be seen that there have indeed been some major shifts this week. The changes have occurred between March 21st and March 26th, as observed on the Chinese localization of Apple’s app store. A big loser in this ranking re-jig was social network company Renren (NYSE:RENN), whose three social gaming titles for iOS saw significant drops of over 200 places. Other huge fallers included apps by local startups, such as Buding Movie Tickets, Yi Xia, and the e-commerce site Dangdang (NYSE:DANG). Being supposedly quality apps from reputable companies, we don’t think that they have in some way ‘gamed’ the ranking system, but nonetheless Apple seems to have changed something that has seriously demoted these apps.

The Chinese developer KoramGame received the biggest punishment, however. Between the two dates over the last week, its game called Feng Wan Three Kingdoms dropped from fourth place to 335th. Its app page on iTunes – see it here – is filled with 302 five-star reviews and 51 one-star reviews, with little in-between. It sounds suspicious, and apparently Apple has found reason to give it the toughest sanction.

But there were some other good titles that rose up, many of which we’ve also covered before, such as apps from Chinese banks ICBC and CCB, 360Buy’s online shopping app, Huofar, Pulse Business Cards, Youdao Cloud Notes, and Tencent’s QQ Mailbox. Those all saw their standings rise by over 100 places.

The Chinese social network Douban was both a winner and a loser in this reshuffling, with its Dujiao LBS app plummeting while its recently-updated Douban FM social music app soared from 202nd to 126th position in the Chinese iTunes App Store classifications.

In the past, such algorithm changes have been done to beat the cheats, so there’ll be the suspicion that this was the case this week. Possible means of cheating include excessive amounts of paid-for five-star comments – or negative ones aimed at competitors – and bizarre spikes in downloads or in-app purchases. There’s talk in the Chinese app dev industry that as many as ten percent of the top 100 Chinese apps on iOS are cheating the system.

Apple will likely never reveal what’s the true ‘weight’ or make-up of its App Store rankings. To developers, a high rank is critical for increased exposure. The Cupertino company acquired the app search startup Chomp last month, and perhaps some of its know-how is now being put into an attempt at a fairer assessment of which are the apps that people truly use and cherish.

It should be noted that Netease (NASDAQ:NTES), which produced this article today on its news portal, is itself a major Chinese web company that also makes a number of apps. Indeed, the aforementioned Youdao Cloud Notes app is made by the company.

[Source: Netease Tech - article in Chinese]

Flipboard pushed out the iPhone version of its localized app for China last week – and now the startup is saying that it aims to have five million Chinese users on iOS very soon.

The iPad version of Flipboard’s Chinese edition launched last December, integrating with local social networks Sina Weibo and Renren. That approach was mirrored in its new release for the iPhone.

With that solid base on iOS and a great-looking, well-localized app, Flipboard’s Alvin Tse (pictured right) has told Chinese media that the company’s plan is “five million downloads in mainland China on iOS this year.” Of course, downloads don’t equate directly to users – or even active users – but it’s still a size-able goal that the startup is working towards.

Working With Sina

Flipboard remains a small company with offices, apart from its Silicon Valley base, in New York and London, employing 55 staffers in total. There’s no plan for a China office, Alvin reveals, but says that the team understand the importance of making a localized version of an app for this “completely different market.” Alvin himself has Hong Kong roots, speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese, and is tasked with crafting business development on Flipboard’s Chinese edition apps – picking out content partners and overseeing the right kind of social media integration, such as the way you can tweet to Sina Weibo from right in the app so as to share an article with friends.

The interview revealed that Flipboard has long been working closely with Sina (NASDAQ:SINA), and that Sina CEO Charles Chao once flew to the startup’s main office to talk turkey, and showed himself to be an avid user of Flipboard’s original version (before that Chinese edition came out last December).

Alvin says that Flipboard is still seeking new Chinese content for its app but will not add a source unless they have full permission to do so.

And so the US company might be on the verge of an all too rare social media success in China. We’ll keep you posted if/when that five million milestone is reached. We get the feeling it will indeed happen this year – despite a wealth of clones from major web companies like Netease (NASDAQ:NTES) as well as newcomers such as Zaker.

[Source: Donews - article in Chinese]

Back in December everyone’s favorite reader application, Flipboard for iPad, made its way into China by partnering with Chinese internet giants Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) and Renren. And today Flipboard is announcing that its app is expanding to both the iPhone and iPod touch in China.

In addition, the Flipboard team is also making content from Chinese social networks, namely the afore-mentioned Sina Weibo and Renren, available to readers all over the world, not just those in China. Users just need to navigate to ‘Accounts,’ and select Sina or Renren from the many social sources listed (see here).

There is even more recommended Chinese language content available if you look down to the ‘Choose your content guide’ option near the bottom (see here), where users can now select a Chinese content guide. This area includes articles from famous publishers like GQ, Vogue, and Cosmopolitan China. For those who prefer video, there’s even a Youku section added.

I find it pleasantly surprising that Flipboard is doing so much for its Chinese-speaking users. If you’d like to try out these new features you can download the Chinese version of Flipboard for iPhone or iPad over on the App Store, or you can simply add Chinese content sources from other language versions as well.

Chinese content guide

Youku on Flipboard

China’s biggest Facebook-like social network, Renren (NYSE:RENN), has launched a good-looking social travel app and site for its users. Called Fengche – meaning ‘windmill’ – it allows users to make a sort of photographic diary of their travels, which friends can then check out and comment upon.

Fengche comes with apps for Android and iPhone, where you can create your travel journal whilst still on the move – as indicated by the prominence of the central, green ‘camera’ button (pictured below). A look at the Fengche.com website reveals that individual trips created by users are then presented as sets – appearing like a cross between Flickr and Pinterest – and that its main purpose is for browsing. It seems that most of the creation happens in the apps.

Renren’s COO, Liu Jian, told Chinese media that Fengche was a natural expansion of its social media ecosystem, and that the content created by its users would have a far-reaching influence in the travel and tourism market.

The new social travel platform resembles the travel diary app AoYouJi which launched only very recently, after we previewed it at the end of last year – though AoYouJi focuses more on geo-tagging. Nonetheless, this might be bad news for the startup. Renren’s Fengche also treads on the toes of smaller sites like Weyup, which made a localized version of the Gogobot travel community.

Having been in private beta for a while, Fengche is launching with over 2,500 trips being documented and posted to the site. Interestingly, the Renren ownership is being played down, perhaps to give this new venture a chance to bring in new users to the Facebook-like site at a time when Chinese web users have been more keen on engaging on microblogs like Sina Weibo.

Grab the Fengche app for iOS or Android from the homepage.

Group buy sites, group buy sites everywhere, yet not a drop of profit! Yesterday, we were talking about Tuanbao, but today, it’s Renren’s (NASDAQ:RENN) group buy company Nuomi, which lost over $9.6 million in Q4 2011 according to Renren’s quarterly filings. That brings Nuomi’s total yearly losses to more than $24 million. Yikes.

During the quarter, Nuomi took in over $2 million in revenue, but that wasn’t enough to match more than $11 million in operating costs. Renren itself came out of 2011 with a net profit of more than $40 million on the year, but of course, that number would have been much higher without that dead albatross Nuomi.

The especially bad news is that Nuomi seems to be losing money with increasing speed. In the first quarter, it lost $3.7 million but in Q2 that rose to $4.5 million and Q3 saw it rise again to $6.5 million. One has to wonder whether Renren will decide to cut bait here rather than continuing to let its financials get banged up by massive Nuomi losses. Or perhaps, like the Mariner who shot the albatross, Renren will be doomed to wander the earth for eternity, sharing its grim quarterly financials with passers-by as a cautionary tale about why one should never invest in a group buy website.

[via Sina Tech]

Renren (NYSE:RENN), China’s biggest Facebook-like social network, has today launched a social pinboard and sharing website called Renren Plaza. As with the US service Pinterest, it allows users to post up items that they like – typically clothes, gadgets, and random cute things – and then discuss or ‘like’ them.

And so Renren Plaza consists mainly of theme-based image boards created by users, such as the ones shown below. There’s also a microblog/weibo element to the site, as it has a system of followers and direct messages that’s separate from one’s main Renren profile. This allows Plaza users to share images and thoughts without total access to more personal information that might be inside their regular accounts.

One user on Renren Plaza - most items link to her store on Taobao.com

Importantly, most items have a ‘go buy in the store’ link which leads to the item on an e-commerce site – usually the consumer-to-consumer Taobao.com, which is owned by Alibaba. This could help turn Renren Plaza into a nicely curated storefront for especially cute things that people are selling online. Or it could just lead to spammy sellers using it as free advertising. In contrast, Pinterest tends not to have online store links, and so is more focused just on sharing images.

In addition, there’s an ‘avenue’ section where you can browse trending boards or a certain category of images, such as Korean-style clothing, or home decorations.

This is the first major new development from Renren for quite some time. The site listed in the US last May where it went from a brief high of $20 per share down to its current $3.85. We’ve contacted Renren HQ to hear their aims with this new Plaza feature, and will update when we get a response.

Net rumors today continue to suggest that the massive hacks we reported on yesterday may also have affected social networking sites like Renren (NYSE:RENN). Renren hasn’t confirmed that it was hacked, but in speaking to the Dongfang Daily, Renren reps did suggest it was possible that hackers had fished Renren user data out of the CDSN database that was hacked.

Some users are reporting they’ve received official messages suggesting they change their passwords. As of 1 P.M. Beijing time on Friday, I have received no such notification on my own personal Renren account, but it seems prudent to suggest that any Renren users change their passwords anyway, as well as changing the passwords for any other site that used Renren login credentials or used the same password as on Renren.

We know it’s a pain to use different passwords for every site, but hacks like this pose a serious threat to the safety of your personal information. They’re also big business — the CDSN hack reportedly could net the hackers millions in data sales — so they’re not going anywhere. Get a password manager if you don’t have one, and use a safe password. Try this site to see how well you’re doing (but keep in mind it doesn’t matter how safe your password is if someone hacks the database it’s stored in). It’s also best to change passwords frequently on any accounts you can’t afford to lose information from or control of. It’s a pain, sure, but the alternative is worse.

[Dongfang Daily via Sina Tech]

Information from hacked Duowan accounts, via TechWeb

Yesterday, the Chinese internet was shaken by the news that IT portal and community CSDN has been hacked and data for its more than six million users had been stolen, including usernames and passwords. Today, reports have it that CSDN wasn’t the only site affected.

Duowan, a games site, was hacked and hackers stole the data of its over eight million users. 7K7K, also a gaming site, reportedly lost data for 20 million users, and hackers also got info from 10 million accounts by hacking 178.com, another game site. Rumors are spreading that the hacks and leaked data may also have affected major social networking sites like Renren (NYSE:RENN) and Kaixin, but those claims appear to be unsubstantiated (at least for now).

Actually, aside from the CSDN hack, none of the other hacks have been officially confirmed yet; however, much of the stolen account information has been published online (see, for example, the image of Duowan usernames and passwords above), so the reports appear to be fairly accurate. This certainly appears to be very bad news for Chinese net users — and gamers in particular — but we’ll keep an eye on this and update once more has come to light.

[Techweb via Sina Tech]

The Chinese social network Renren (NYSE:RENN) has released its World War II real-time strategy game Iron Marshal onto iOS – taking it out of the web browser and into iTunes for the first time.

It’s actually the company’s second game that has made the switch to mobile, coming one week after the iOS debut of Troubled World.

Social games are crucial to Renren in terms of both revenue and keeping a hold of users – which perhaps explains its move into self-developed titles. Right now, it is fending off a fast-growing move into gaming by Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) with its Weibo platform on one side, and a resurgent Tencent (HKG:0700) on the other which seems intent on covering the gamut from cutesy QQ games to perhaps running Blizzard’s World of Warcraft.

The brand-new Iron Marshal game for iOS runs on iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, and costs 68 RMB (UK£6.99). But it seems to be only in the Chinese language despite being available internationally. Take a look at the game in the iTunes App Store, or check out a couple more of the promo screenshots:

Photo via Flipboard blog

Earlier this year you may recall that everyone’s favorite iPad reading app Flipboard was blocked in China. But apparently the GFW ain’t no thang, as the company has made its way into China via big-name partnerships with none other than Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) and Renren (NYSE:RENN).

As Flipboard points out in a blog post:

[Y]ou can already search for and add content in any language to Flipboard. What’s different about the Chinese edition is the fact that the entire Flipboard experience is in the local language, including a curated Content Guide with regionally-relevant content and the inclusion of popular local social networks Sina Weibo and Renren.

I’m not certain what the most recent status of the regular Flipboard app is (is it still blocked?) but this is certainly good news for Chinese fans of the app. In a Wall Street Journal report this morning, Flipboard’s Robin Chan notes that “[b]y working with government-approved content from partners, we think we addressed the issue with the government.”

This Chinese version is Flipboard’s first international edition, and it’s certainly a bold step considering the app’s previous troubles. As co-founder and Chief Exec Mike McCue noted at the time, it opened the door for Flipboard clones to step in in their place (see Zaker for example):

But McCue told the WSJ that part of the reason for entering China first was because these clones created a ‘sense of urgency’ for Flipboard to develop a Chinese edition.

As for Sina, CEO Charles Chao noted that “having Sina content and publication partners available on Flipboard [provides] a new way for publications to reach readers and a new way for our Sina Weibo users to enjoy and share content.” Likewise Renren’s CEO Joseph Chen said “[our] cooperation with Flipboard will further enrich our social network experience and satisfy user demands.”

If you’d like to try the Chinese edition of Flipboard, you can get it for free via iTunes. We’ve included a few of their screenshots below, showing the same great design that made the original edition so popular.

Microblogging has taken off in China to the extent that we now see nearly half of all Chinese urbanites in larger cities on Weibo. That’s thanks to the major microblog platforms from Tencent, Sina, and NetEase (in descending order of user numbers). Many users might be thankful to discover that you’re not forced to use the dowdy official apps when tweeting on their smartphones.

Here are three neat third-party apps for Weibo:

Weico

Weico (pictured avove) is available for iPhone and Android, which is superb, but it only supports Sina Weibo and not the other platforms, which might be a downer for some. Sadly, no English support either.

Made by a start-up called Eico Design (which counts BMW (FRA:BMW), HTC (TPE:2498), and Firefox among its clients), the Weico app looks fantastic with a crisp blue and white colour-scheme that’s highly customizable. On iOS, many ‘skins’ for the app are available as in-app purchases; on Android, they’re free. Weico incorporates some swish features as well, such as an Instagram-like photo-filter that can spare you the hassle of using a separate photo app for all that Lomo and vintage posing action.

Here are the Market and iTunes download links.

YiBo

This app (pictured avove) is for Android only, with no indication from the developers, MinSheng Studio, if an iPhone version will ever roll out. On the plus side, it has a good English localization.

For me, this YiBo app hits the sweet spot of good design, requisite features, and minimal layout. Plus, it supports a lot of other Chinese microblog services, plus also Renren (NYSE:RENN), Fanfou, and Twitter.

Here’s the Market download link.

Di Long

Lastly, the Di Long app (pictured avove) is made by an unnamed bunch of local geeks, and is the most ‘home-made’ of these three alternative Weibo apps. Nonetheless, it has a pretty good English version and supports both Sina and Tencent Weibo along with Digu and Fanfou. The iOS-like design, however, is a bit fatuous on Android.

Here’s the Market download link.

It’s good to see some funkier alternatives to the joli laide official offerings from Sina and Tencent. Plus, if you use both – or more – Weibo services, two of the three above apps provide a very useful syncing service.

Expedia (NASDAQ:EXPE), the US online travel giant, has further increased its stake in the comparable Chinese site eLong (NASDAQ:LONG). It has done this by buying up the entire stake in eLong that formerly belonged to Renren (NYSE:RENN), the social media site. It was sold for approximately US$72.4 million, or $23 per ADS.

This increased investment strengthens Expedia’s place as the largest shareholder in eLong (owning over half of it), with China’s Tencent (HKG:0700) holding the second-largest stake at 16 percent.

In a joint announcement of the buy-out from Expedia and Renren, the latter emphasised how it’ll still continue to work with eLong to provide travel deals for its group-buy site Nuomi.

Expedia’s president and CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, said that the company was delighted to be able to plough more into eLong, and added:

We have been very happy with the strategic and operational progress made by eLong […] Our early investment in eLong helped us build mutually beneficial commercial ties as well as generate strong returns for our shareholders.

Indeed, when we last looked at the Chinese travel site after its most recent quarterly earnings, we saw that eLong’s revenue increased 19 percent in Q3 2011 compared to the same point last year.

Chinese search giant Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) invested $306 million in Qunar in June of this year, signaling that the online travel segment of China’s thriving e-commerce industry was ready to expand in line with consumers’ growing hunger for domestic and global sightseeing.

CheWen.com is the Renren Inc. (NYSE:RENN) owned, car-oriented social network that’s a mix of Quora, microblogging, and automotive news. And it’s doing pretty well – the GM of CheWen, Xiu Yu, has told the media that the site has now revved up to four million users, a mere six months after its launch.

The social network for car fanatics is separate from Renren.com, but makes use of the latter’s third-party login. It doesn’t integrate with its rivals, Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) or Tencent (HKG:0700) Weibo, but it does allow sharing of pages with other social media. CheWen, though, is a clever spin-off from the parent company – one that looks ahead to keep hold of some of the wealthiest netizens who would be valuable to advertisers. But, at the moment, CheWen is refreshingly free from ads (or, rather, they’re minimal and unobtrusive). The website has been active in promoting itself, attending the biggest car shows in China this year.

CheWen has microblog elements, such as its allowing users to follow each other and automotive brands as well, and to retweet what others have said; it incorporates the ask-an-exert aspect of Quora too, with all that crowd-sourced knowledge and banter searchable; plus, it picks up some car news from around the web.

At the moment, Audi (ETR:NSU) is the top brand (pictured above) in terms of followers, with nearly half a million fans out of CheWen’s four million user-base. With that German automaker being the biggest-selling luxury car brand in China right now, that’s not too much of a surprise.

Renren has other sites as part of its empire. It also owns Nuomi, the group-buy site that’s doing well in Taiwan – although the last time we looked at it, Nuomi was actually losing money overall, along with pretty much every other daily deals site.

[Source: DoNews - article in Chinese]

HTC (TPE:2498) has today unveiled a so-called ‘Renren phone’ – an Android-powered smartphone with baked-in widgets and features crafted especially for Renren.com (NYSE:RENN), China’s largest Facebook-like social network. The phone is dubbed the HTC Daren (pictured above). It’ll be priced at 2099RMB (US$330) unlocked, available only from official HTC or mobile telco outlets, and will launch a bit later this month.

It was unveiled by the Taiwanese handset maker at its HTC Week event which is taking place in Beijing (in the same place where we were at for TC Disrupt and the 2011 CMDC last week).

In actual fact, the HTC Daren is just the budget HTC Explorer handset with a slight tweak in its Sense UI that ditches Facebook and Twitter integration in HTC’s Friendfeed feature, and replaces it with Renren instead. So it’s nowhere near as special as it’s made out to be. The phone has fairly low-end features, such as a low-res (480px by 300) 3.2-inch screen, and a 3-megapixel camera. It’s totally out-run by the new dual-core Xiaomi phone, which is a few dollars cheaper.

Back in July of this year, HTC did a similar thing with its ‘Weibo phone’ called the HTC Weike. On that occasion, it was a disappointing reworking of an aging HTC Salsa handset. At least this new device for China is based on a brand-new model.

Boosting Android in China

At the HTC event (pictured above), CEO Zhou Yong-ming also outlined the company’s revamped China line-up of five new Android smartphones, which includes the Sensation XE coming to the mainland for the first time.

HTC Android phones are so popular in China that they’ve been given nicknames whereby each new one is a higher number suffixed to a ‘G’ – thus the fairly new HTC Sensation has become commonly known as the G14. The Taiwanese firm will be hoping to continue this success – which is taking away a good deal of sales from Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) – with this new line-up.

[Source, inc. images: HTC’s official Renren Page - in Chinese]

There are a lot of social media dashboards out there that try to bring together your social missives, but only one includes integration with China’s hippest social network – that’s Hubblr.

It’s a brand-new, enterprise-oriented web app from an Australian start-up that’s aimed at making PR and online marketing across the globe – including China – a safer and slicker experience.

Hubblr’s CEO and co-founder, Michael Lam (pictured right), gave me a guided tour over Skype, and then we coincidentally ran into each other again at TC Disrupt Beijing last week, giving me ample time to get a feel for the service.

Right now, Michael says, it’s in private beta and free – but it will launch soon and come ready with a number of packages for brands to do their global marketing and PR. Apart from multi-posting to Twitter, Facebook, Sina Weibo, and LinkedIn, it also features analytics, a profanity filter, one-click translation, embedded image viewing, scheduling, and some advanced gizmos for marketing professionals to follow-up on individual tweets. They’re also “working on Renren and Tencent Weibo” integration.

Hubblr is, he tells me, a spin-off from Cornerstone Tech, and is “now boot-strapping, looking for funding.”

Weibo Marketing to China

The main Hubblr dashboard, showing a mix of tweets from Twitter and Sina Weibo.

Asked what Hubblr offers, he says, “It’s aimed at global brands who operate in China. It gives them visibility. Plus, it’s real-time and instantaneous, and gives brands immediate feedback.” Michael adds:

It can prevent a PR disaster by blocking swearing, and you can add any words to monitor, such as your brand name – or even a misspelling of your brand name.

The stats and analytics begin from a user’s first day on Hubblr, and include monitoring of posting levels and follower counts.

The last time we looked at corporate use of social media across Asia, we found that microblogs – i.e. Twitter and Weibo – were now second only to broader social networks such as Facebook in terms of them being used for engaging with consumers. But, in China, a brand’s presence on Sina or Tencent Weibo is now arguably more essential than being on, say, Renren.

Simul-Posting Dashboard

Hubblr analytics allow you to visualize followers, engagement, activity, etc.

The Hubblr post box allows single or multi-posting to numerous social networks.

Aware that his start-up risks getting blocked in China, Michael has “implemented an IP filter” so that it cannot post to Twitter and Facebook for users in China. And so the emphasis is firmly on enterprise users overseas reaching out to Chinese consumers, and not for individuals looking to tweet behind the GFW (as HootSuite and Seesmic used to be able to do, before Net Nanny blocked them).

Personally, I don’t think it’s a good idea to multi-post the exact same thing to different social networks – especially not if there’s a language barrier between the two. But that’s not an issue on Hubblr, as it can be used as a launchpad for posts to any social network either separately or simultaneously, and you still get the benefits of the other features. That means an overseas company can easily manage its Sina Weibo account, despite the original site not having an English localisation.

If you’re with a company and would like to take Hubblr for a blast, click the link to reveal the Hubblr email address and fire them an email with “Penn-Olson invite” in the subject – you’ll be given priority access to the private beta.

One reason is that when Tudou announced their intention to IPO (and then successfully pulled it off this summer), Zhou saw the window of opportunity closing for 56. Since Youku had already pulled off a successful IPO, Tudou’s IPO would mean that 56.com, if it ever wanted to IPO, would be stuck being the third wheel. That was not a prospect that Zhou relished. “At most, one region can only have two listed companies [in the video market],” she said.

At around that same time, social networking giant Renren had already IPOed and was looking to acquire original video content. After consulting its finances — we assume this is code for “realizing Youku and Tudou would be too expensive” — the company turned to Zhou Juan and 56.com.

So, at more or less the same time, the two companies turned to each other. “By the middle of this year, I had begun to think that our hopes of pulling off an IPO were not likely, and that it would be more prudent to sell,” said Zhou Juan:

Youku had already successfully listed, and at that time we knew that Tudou was also definitely going to list. As far as the same model [of site] is concerned, I felt that for [the market] to tolerate even two listed companies is good, and the opportunity for a third company [with the same model] was very small. When Tudou listed, their valuation was way less than Youku’s, but is there really such a difference between Tudou and Youku? As I understand it, their traffic numbers aren’t as different as their valuations.

Additionally, Baidu, Sohu, Tencent and other major players from other sectors were starting to get seriously into video, which meant an even tighter squeeze for independent video players and especially for the unlisted 56.com.

Zhou was also concerned about the strength of their user-generated content (UGC) model, which hasn’t been embraced in China with quite the same fervor as it has elsewhere. Other video sites like Youku temper their UGC offerings with licensed shows, films, and original productions, and Zhou feared that in comparison, a more “pure” UGC site might be tough to sell to American investors without more clear demand from the Chinese market. “We’re confident the UGC model will succeed,” she said, “but it will take time to prove that.”

If Renren had come earlier, Zhou said, the results might have been different: “We might not have considered selling the company.” And it didn’t hurt that Renren’s CEO Chen Yizhou promised not to interfere much with the company, allowing them to maintain their management team and focus on their product but giving them the freedom to stop worrying about IPOs and how to exit. “It’s like we just changed the chairmain of our board of directors,” said Zhou. “If you look at it that way, it’s easy to understand why [I] sold the company.”

Throughout Zhou’s comments there’s a strong reflection of the real taboo that exists in China towards selling off a start-up. “Of course an IPO is best,” she and others say repeatedly, and one gets the impression that she’s feeling a bit like a failure, and that some others may consider her one. It’s hard to imagine that the IPO-worship can continue for too long, though, as the IPO market continues to look sour for Chinese companies and the cash-rich bigger companies increasingly expanding into markets that, like video, were once the domain of independent players who only had to compete with each other.

[cyzone.cn via Sina Tech]

A screenshot from Renmo's darkly sexy promo vid.

“Are you a human or a devil? Let people know your other side.” That’s the suggestive tagline of a brand-new, somewhat twisted, Chinese social network called Renmo (which means human-devil in direct translation). It will launch on October 20. Renmo wants users to be deliberately two-faced, and possibly evil, by providing them with two different IDs and social zones at the same time. In this way, Renmo wants to overturn the traditional pattern of SNS such as Renren (NYSE:RENN) and Weibo, which enforce real-name IDs and non-disruptive conduct.

Although the web site is not online for another week, the start-up’s marketing campaign is in full swing, with adverts across cities luring users into ditching Renren so as to give voice to their darker side. There’s a darkly shot promo video (see below) named “the most beautiful devil ever” featuring a sexy model stripping off.

But despite all this hype, it’s not clear what the new social media site aims to be: is it just a hook-up site, a dating site, or a sort of anti-Renren in which you’re not obliged to upload photos of your food or chit-chat with co-workers. Also, how will it monetize if advertisers don’t even know what kind of demographics are on the site?

Renmo's outdoor ad campaign is in full swing.

This week, Renmo’s outdoor advertising kicked off, with mostly bus-stop box-light ads (pictured right) in major cities saying things like, “When Renmo’s on show, Renren trembles.” The “renren” name in this context is a pun referring to “everyone,” as well as China’s Facebook-esque SNS.

If this is supposed to be a flirtatious site for potential hook-ups, then it has been beaten to launch by a more cutting-edge, LBS-based mobile social network called Mix, which allows you to connect with people nearby.

We’ll check out Renmo in full once it launches next week. In the meantime, you could follow Renmo on Weibo, check out its promo page, or – I get the feeling you’ll prefer this – watch the darkly erotic video promo:

It’s a rough year. An awful economic situation across much of the western world has restricted sources of investment; in China, tech companies and start-ups have come to be viewed with some suspicion after the post-IPO scandals at Longtop and Sino-Forest; plus, tightening regulations in the Chinese tech and media industry will make it much harder to access foreign investment going forward. All mashed together, it has made for a year of extreme winners and losers amongst this year’s Chinese tech IPOs.

Indeed, as a new infographic from IPO Dashboards reveals, this year’s hardest-hit industry is the tech sector, whose global IPOs fell an average of nearly 20 percent as some observers squabbled over whether a new tech bubble was about to pop.

Looking at the infographic, the only real tech IPO winner from China is Qihoo (NYSE:QIHU), the anti-virus vendor, with 15.31 percent growth this year from its debut on the tickers. It’s fully interactive, so click on any bar to see further stats and percentages:

Which means there are a lot of IPO losers who have gotten a bit nauseous on their roller-coaster ride. The Chinese ones are: the dating site, Jiayuan (NASDAQ:DATE); data centre operator 21Vianet (NASDAQ:VNET); the children’s digital entertainment network, Taomee (NYSE:TAOM); chip maker BCD (NASDAQ:BCDS), video-sharing site Tudou (NASDAQ:TUDO), social network, Renren (NYSE:RENN), and anti-virus provider Netqin (NYSE:NQ), whose value plummetted 62 percent.

As for American social media, we’re getting very mixed messages, with SNS IPOs both gaining the most (LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD)) and failing the hardest (that’s you, FriendFinder (NYSE:FFN)). Clearly that’s due to judgements on their ability to monetize, or the value to advertisers of their users.

It’s such a poor economic climate right now, it’s possible that only one further Chinese company will float in New York this year – the e-commerce platform Vancl, which aims to raise as much as US$1 billion.

But with some fearing that “a winter is coming” for tech companies in China, it might be too early to gauge who truly won or lost in 2011.

[Source: IPO Dashboards]

Photo-sharing apps and smartphones go together like the proverbial horse and carriage. So in China it’s no surprise that dozens of start-ups have gone the route of forming a light community based on a neat photo app.

Before dismissing them as Instagram clones, remember the limitations of Instagram: it’s for iPhone only; has no browsable photos on the desktop, meaning its website is functionally useless; and it supports only four American social networks. Plus, Instagram moves so slowly that it might take years before it deigns to support other mobile platforms or social media. So, rather than just twiddling their thumbs, a whole host of Chinese start-ups have made photo-sharing apps and light communities that are arguably better and richer than Instagram. As we like to say on PO: screw the idea – it’s the execution that really matters.

So, here are five of the best Chinese-made photo-apps, almost all of which support at least two mobile OSes and numerous local social networking sites, as well as some global ones too…

Vida

For: iPhone, (Android under development)
Connects to: Sina Weibo, Douban

Vida is the newest and perhaps the most gorgeous of the group, setting a new standard for design and attention to detail among Chinese-made – or, indeed, worldwide – photo-sharing apps. Not much is known about the start-up behind it other than that it’s run out of Shanghai. A unique aspect to Vida is that the app itself can be themed, so that its glaring pink colour-scheme is easily changed.

In terms of actual features, it pushes ahead of most other photo apps with built-in group sharing of images that you and your friends have snapped, in the manner of the much-hyped (but failed) Color app. Plus Vida’s calendar-like timeline gives you a fresher and more contextualized way to browse people’s photos. Right now, it comes with ten filters, which is a fairly good start for a v1.0 app, and the Android version is en route.

PhotoSola

For: Android, iPhone
Connects to: Tencent, Sina, Renren, kaixin, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Myspace, Wretch

PhotoSola – or YouTu as it’s called in Chinese – is an Innovation Works incubated start-up, which means it’s getting some of the best mentoring in Asia. It’s also pushing for some global – or at least Asia-wide – user-ship, with a fully English localization and the ability to connect to SNS such as Facebook and Twitter.

The photo app itself has grown a lot recently, adding popular features such as easy-to-make collages and animated GIFs, the likes of which are now all over Weibo. Like any light community, it limits itself to some simple ‘like’ and friending options. At the moment, PhotoSola has 15 filters, but they’re only slight colour variations, with no particularly amazing effects.

TuDing

For: Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, and Symbian
Connects to: Facebook, Twitter, Renren, Kaixin, and the Weibo services of Sina, Tencent, Sohu, and Netease

TuDing is the only one of today’s group of apps with overseas roots, as it is made by GeoSentric (HEL:GEO1V), a Finnish company with a long track-record in location-based technology. They’re better known as the makers of GyPSii, the LBS-oriented mobile social network. The company is claiming three million users for the TuDing app.

The app features a calendar that encourages users to upload at least a photo a day, and a pushpin motif that pushes the idea of also geotagging your photos more so than in other apps. At present it has 20 filters, and a good range of other effects and collage styles. Adding all things together, TuDing feels like the most developed – though not the most gorgeous and visually appealing – of the five we’re testing.

LomoKR

For: iPhone only
Connects to: Kaixin, and the Weibo services of Sina, Tencent, and Sohu

LomoKR is made by a start-up called MobSharp, who seem to be not very discoverable. Regrettably, this app is the only one of the five to not have an Android version either released or in the works. Another annoying thing is that you need to register a separate username before then hooking the account up to your preferred social media. All the other apps here let you do a direct third-party login, which is personally what I like to do.

Despite all that, LomoKR has a pretty hip and lively crowd of users, who seem to be mostly smartphone-toting youngsters aged from about 15 to 25. It has only 15 filters so far, but they include some unique effects that seem to be popular.

Lemeleme

For: Android, iPhone
Connects to: Tencent Weibo, Sina Weibo, Kaixin, Renren

Lemeleme is quite a new entrant in this segment, though little can be divined of the start-up team behind it. People who want to see their photos/account on the website are out of luck, however, as this service is the only one here without that feature.

For the moment, I’d say that Lemeleme has the most distinctive and funky set of filters and effects, with the most flexibility in matching different frames with certain styles. Plus, it’s the only one of today’s selection that does HDR photos. This company is the only one of the bunch to also have a paid app – Leme Camera Pro – for sale in the iTunes App Store. In total, there are 16 filters in the free version so far.

Social networking service Renren has just announced that it has acquired 100 percent of 56.com, one of China’s video streaming services. The deal is worth $80 million dollars and is expected to be finalized in the fourth quarter of 2011.

56.com is one of China’s leading video sites, though it ranks well below competitors Youku, Tudou, Ku6, and Qiyi in terms of visitors. You can view a breakdown of the China’s video space in the chart below, according to numbers from iResearch.

Juan Zhou, the co-founder and CEO of 56 said in a statement:

We are excited to become part of the Renren family… Given its user base and broad offerings in SNS, mobile, and social commerce, Renren’s platform will provide deeper resources and support to enhance 56.com’s attractiveness to users.

As for Renren, the so-called ‘Facebook of China’ is the nation’s leading social network, but is faced with competition from an increasingly popular Sina Weibo. Renren chairman Joseph Chen notes that by picking up 56.com, it will help “meet user needs of recording and sharing their lives through video format on our social network.”

[Via Techcrunch]

Here’s another handy infographic from the folks over at Burson Marsteller. This time it focuses on China’s digital landscape, summarizing the many types of activities that netizens are engaged in, as well as the websites and services they frequent.

Among some of the more noteworthy observations:

• Chinese users spend 32 hours per month online
• 41 percent of netizens’ time is spend on Weibo and SNS
• 23 percent of time online is spent watching video

We should note that some of the data comes from a Group M report, which we mentioned a few weeks back. For more details, please check that out as well.

[View full size graphic in new window]

The long drawn-out battle between Renren (NYSE:RENN) and Kaixin over the “Kaixin” brand-name looks like it might have moved to the highly-competitive world of Chinese group buy sites.

Kaixin’s daily deals site – news of which we covered yesterday, as it opened the platform to partners – has a clone called KaixinTuan. Compare the official Kaixin deals site here, with the counterfeit one here.

For the background history, we need to think of “Kaixin” the social network as Kaixin001, which is the URL it owns. Renren – backed by Oak Pacific Interactive – actually owns the Kaixin.com URL, even though it lost the acrimonious lawsuit between the two firms when the former was adjudged to have copied the essence of Kaixin001’s name. Renren’s Kaixin.com site later merged with the main social network, and the URL was decommissioned, but its ownership was retained.

Although that battle is over, the war seems to be ongoing – but now in the deals industry. What’s significant with this development is that the group buy clone’s logo looks a lot like Renren’s visualization of the “Kaixin” brand, as it appears when you type kaixin.com in your browser and you get redirected to renren.com, with an explanatory banner saying the two sites have merged and that your login now works on Renren. See how the two dots form eyes, and a smile suspends beneath the two “i”s:

This could suggest that Renren is actually behind the clone deals site. Of course, it could also mean that the cloner – the shape-shifters that they are – nabbed the design from Renren’s banner because they thought it’d be too risky to steal it from the actual Kaixin site. It’s not clear who owns the kaixintuan.com URL, or whose name is on its mandatory Chinese website license. There are no other clues on the clone site that link it directly to Renren.

In terms of daily deals, Renren has its own challenger in the form of Nuomi, in which it has invested millions of dollars, and holds a major stake. By all recent measures, Nuomi is doing better than Kaixin’s official offering in the fragmented deals market in China.

Penn-Olson reached out to Kaixin for comment, who couldn’t be drawn for a direct quote. But the firm’s response is a phlegmatic one, saying that if the clone provides a good experience, then it reinforces the Kaixin[001] brand, and that users will figure it all out in the end. We’ll update if we hear back from Renren. UPDATE: A Renren representative suggests only that “I think they were inspired by our logo.”

On the wider clone issue, there are – like after some idiot sneezes all over everyone in an elevator – viral outbursts all over the place, such as kxtuan.com, or renrenzhe.com. But only the one identified above has the whiff and suspicion of Renren backing.

In the meantime, hit the comments to tell us if you think this smacks of skullduggery, sabotage, or mere serendipity.

Renren

Of course, it’s got some catching up to do. Sina has had its light blogging service Qing for some time now, and early last month Sina announced Qing already had over a million users and an iPhone app.

But of course, the devil is in the details. What’s Xiaozhan like? We’ve only given it a quick once-over, but it looks pretty slick. Registering an account is quick and easy — it requires a real name, or at least something that looks like a real name in Chinese, but then you can name your blog whatever you want. From there, the interface is pretty simple. You can post “statuses” (short, tweet-like updates), longer blog entries, and also upload photos and share links. You can also follow and be followed by others, and there are easy links for other users to share and comment on your posts. I set up a test page and made a couple posts here, so feel free to check it out for yourselves, I’ve made one of each kind of post and labeled them so you see the difference.

My test page for Xiaozhan....die, werewolf zombie!

As far as user experience goes, it’s pretty good, and there are also customization options I haven’t yet had time to dive into. However, as with all social networking endeavors, a good user experience is meaningless if your users friends are all already on a competing service. Renren got into the light blogging game a little late, but with only a million plus users, Sina’s head start isn’t insurmountable, and Renren does have a giant user base it can bring to bear.

We’ll keep an eye on Xiaozhan and see if it takes off. If you’re interested in the PRified version of this story, click here for the original release.

Today, Renren and MSN China announced plans to cooperate. The strategic cooperation will integrate the two companies social networking platforms. From the release:

According to the strategic agreement, Renren and MSN China will share a wide range of applications and services across the two platforms, including unified account log-in, content synchronization, finding and communicating with friends, among others.

Renren, of course, is China’s largest social networking platform, with over 120 million users. MSN is perhaps best known here for their instant messaging service, MSN Messenger. Given that, this partnership could be grim news for Tencent QQ, which enjoys a lead in the Chinese instant messaging market but has recently seen a downturn in user activity and is already facing some new and powerful-looking competitors in the IM market. Integrating MSN seamlessly into Renren’s giant user base might give users yet another reason not to bother opening a separate program like QQ.

In the last couple of months, we have seen Renren partnering with different corporations to make its social networking service even more exciting for Chinese users. These partnerships include:

• Weddings – a social wedding platform with Recruit of Japan
• Gaming – Integrating Popcap’s Plants vs. Zombies for Renren’s social gamers
• Credit – A “social” credit card, in partnership with China Merchants Bank

From a bird’s eye view, it seems that Renren is pretty scattered and has no clear product direction at the moment. But the company is doing well financially, as its latest financial report shows that net losses were down 78.5 percent from last year, before its IPO, whilst net revenues were up 46.6 percent to US$20.6 million, and online advertising revenues were up 100.5 percent to US$8.1 million. Despite this positive growth, the market doesn’t seem to be convinced with the Chinese social network’s performance though; its stock price has plummeted like a falling rock.

With that said, it remains to be seen exactly how this partnership will pan out. The press release certainly makes it sound like it’s all roses, gumdrops, and fairy tales ahead for Renren and MSN China, but then, that’s what press releases do. Reality sometimes has other ideas.

Either way, we’ll keep you posted.

According to Renren’s report, Nuomi took in just over $1 million US during Q2, but its operating expenses for that same time period well exceeded $5 million, resulting in a substantial net loss.

Since Renren itself only managed to eke out a $0.8 million profit this quarter, and expectations of below average performance in Q3 have sent its stock tumbling, one wonders how long it can continue to support highly unprofitable Nuomi.

Nuomi was launched on June 23, 2010 but has been struggling in China’s crowded group buying market, where a huge number of sites are still vying for prominence.

Even Groupon, the American company that popularized the group buying format internationally, has faced significant setbacks in their Chinese group buy joint-venture with Tencent, Gaopeng.com; last month they made staff cutbacks and there are rumors flowing that the site is short on cashflow.

The web traffic stats site Alexa reveals that China’s former top social networking site Kaixin001.com has lost 65 percent of its traffic in the past 12 months (see the graph above).

In another blow to Kaixin, a gauge of Chinese netizens interest in the site measured by Baidu Index, has hit the rocks. Today’s ‘user interest level’ for the Kaixin site is rated at 1,500 (see the graph below), which is its lowest ebb since March 2009, before the social network really took off.

The Alexa and Baidu Index measures point to a trend towards Twitter-like microblogging platforms, pulling people away from the ‘one stop shop’ approach of China’s early Facebook clones.

A measure of 'user interest level' by Baidu Index (index.baidu.com) shows Kaixin001.com at the same level it was at back in March 2009.

A greater plurality of ways to share news and keep in touch with friends is also hurting Kaixin’s traffic. Note that traffic figures are not an indication of user numbers, and might not be taking into account sessions on mobile apps.

While Renren’s (NYSE: RENN) traffic is holding up for now, it’s interesting to ponder how China’s first web 2.0 sites now seem to have been superseded.

Back in 2009, smartphones were not so common, so a lot of Chinese casual game fans then had fewer channels for a bit of light gaming. Now, millions more people have iPhones and Android smartphones – and social games can now be found on nearly every Chinese web platform…

A little less conversation, a little more gaming please

Although Kaixin has plenty of games on it, such as the social game Happy Farm – and more involved multiplayer ones too, such as Shanda’s soon-to-launch Legend of Immortals – the casual gaming market has changed a lot in the past few years. It was back in 2008 that Kaixin’s great rivalry with Renren began, when Kaixin was full of advertiser-friendly white collar workers, and Renren.com was just packed with ramen-slurping college students.

In terms of games, Tencent is growing stronger across both its QQ and Pengyou.com platforms. Just last week China’s SNS giant scored a coup, getting an exclusive on Zynga’s CityVille. Sina, meanwhile, last month added a games portal and a virtual currency to its popular Weibo platform.

So it seems blogging has metamorphosed into microblogging, and along the way a number of China’s major portals – such as Sina and NetEase – got their groove back as they jumped on the 140-character bandwagon, while the indie social networks didn’t innovate so much. It is believed that Sina Weibo now has some of China’s most engaged and wealthy social media users.

End of the American IPO dream?

Renren got its US IPO in May this year, but it has proven to be a rough year to be a new Chinese tech IPO amid dubious user stats and the Longtop accounting scandal.

Kaixin had been moving towards its own US IPO earlier this year, but that looks nigh on impossible now, after fellow Chinese tech firms Xunlei and Shanda Cloudary suspended their share offering plans on the same day last month, citing concerns about their fragility on jittery global markets.

In fact, it’s gotten so bad that some tech CEOs believe the window to overseas IPOs has, at least temporarily, closed for Chinese companies. Zhang Fumao, the CEO of Beijing-based web game developer Youxigu, says that his company was originally planning to debut on the market this year, but has now pushed back to 2012.

“The current environment for overseas IPOs is truly awful,” Zhang told reporters. “Many American investors have doubts about Chinese companies entering the market, and funds are looking down on Chinese companies when they make their estimates.”

The main issue seems to be concerns with the veracity — or lack thereof — in the reports offered by some Chinese companies. “Especially for game companies,” Zhang said, “when we apply for IPOs, the user numbers, active user ratio, and the value of each individual user will all be called into question by American and European investors.”

Zhang insists that for any gaming company, the cashflow is sufficient, and there would be no reason for them to cook the books, but foreign investors remain skeptical. And so Zhang, his company, and many other China tech companies, will choose to sit on the sidelines for a while, building their profiles while — hopefully — some of the suspicion directed their way cools down.

[Image Source]

GREE CEO Tanaka eyeing US listing

We reported last week about Japanese gaming company GREE’s lofty aspirations, aiming for a user base that would rival Facebook’s in size. The company’s CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka has not been shy about sharing his overseas ambitions, pointing to American and Chinese markets as keys for potential growth.

And now this morning Bloomberg is reporting (see video below) that Tanaka is eyeing an overseas listing in the U.S. as well:

Numerous Japanese companies have listed overseas after doing so on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. We would like to consider such an option as well… If the Japanese markets shrink, we would need to be a global company or our business would shrink.

If Japan-based GREE were to IPO, it would follow a number of Chinese internet companies that have done so over the past year, as Renren, Jiayuan, and Qihoo are already listed and there are more on the way.

Gree already has partnerships in place with Tencent and mig33, which should help it expand in China and South East Asia respectively.

Even the online dating site Jiayuan.com (NASDAQ:DATE), which is seen as a more solid long-term bet – a seemingly well-run matchmaking site in a nation of too many bachelors, with 44% of the market share in online dating in China – took a bit of a dive in June (see the graph, below), though it now remains 8% up on its initial IPO price.

Focusing on Renren, then: reports of accounting irregularities just before its IPO started everything off on the wrong footing, and being caught exaggerating its monthly unique visitors – which are up 19% in Q1, not the adventurous figure of 29% – left some wondering if they’d backed China’s MySpace rather than the media’s beloved label of “China’s Facebook”. Also, had western investors fully considered the weight of the competition, from Sina Weibo to Tencent Pengyou? The June jitters suggest that some of these realities dawned.

Renren Inc.’s 2011 Q1 unaudited results, their first since their IPO of course, dropped on June 21st , showed net revenues and online advertising revenues up, whilst losses narrowed. The RENN stock picked up slightly, to end a rough month of June on a small uptick.

It’s possible that Renren.com will hold water – and that its investment in group-buy site Nuomi will prove to be visionary – and was just unlucky to suffer the most in a month when the Longtop fraud hit China’s tech IPOs, and exposed incompetence at Deloitte, and saw two Chinese firms delisted from NASDAQ.

It’s also conceivable that $RENN remains over-priced for its consistent financial under-performance, relative to some more mature Chinese tech firms. Let’s see if July is another month of Chinese IPO rollercoaster rides.

What are those rays of sunshine? Well, those net losses were down 78.5% from last year, before their IPO, whilst net revenues were up 46.6% to US$20.6 million, and online advertising revenues were up 100.5% to US$8.1 million.

Renren’s CEO, Joseph Chen, was upbeat, describing the company’s Q1 as a “robust first quarter, in particular the doubling of our advertising revenues.” In further statements accompanying the unaudited results, Hui Huang, Renren’s CFO, commented, “Our company is still in the early stages of monetization. We … [are] investing significantly in research and development, sales and marketing, and strategic acquisitions and business partnerships.”

What that means is that Renren.com is trying to remain nimble, and not lose users to short-but-sweet microblogs, such as Sina Weibo or Tencent Weibo. Fortunately for Renren, user growth continued, with monthly unique logins up from 23 million to 33 mil by the end of May 2011.

Renren is not alone is being a major Chinese IPO’d firm which can’t break into profit – top video-sharing site Youku, which has much higher operating costs, has been posting bigger losses since its inception.

Stats source: Renren’s official statement; Image source: Reuters/Adam Au

The organizations claim that this is a “globally innovative pilot” that combines social, location, and mobile services. Besides offering a range of incentives to card holders, China Merchants Bank will offer useful location based information to users as well, such as useful services offered by more than 10000 of its merchant partners via Renren’s location based services. There will also be check-in features that offer promotions from those partners who are nearby.

The CEO of Renren, Joseph Chen explained that this partnership is an important step for the social network:

Through this co-branded credit card program, we see a business model we previously envisioned start to materialize, combining social, location and mobile services to make people’s lives more convenient, more informed, and more fun.

As for China Merchants Bank, it will greatly benefit from Renren’s young user base, enabling it to bring inmany new customers as a result of incorporating Renren’s social services.

In addition to this partnership with China Merchants Bank, we also recently saw Renren engage in a joint venture with Recruit to offer a social wedding service. These are somewhat unconventional partnerships for a social network, but from a business point of view they appear to make sense.

In a somewhat more natural partnership, Renren also recently announced that it would bring PopCap’s Plants vs Zombies to China through its social network platform.

[Original press release]

Surprisingly the numbers say that Chinese users spent only 5.5 percent of total minutes on social networking sites, which comScore says is “less that one-third of the category’s percentage on a worldwide basis.”

A couple of caveats

It should be noted that here ‘Greater China’ includes Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. And perhaps an even bigger asterisk is that the data does not account for visits from internet cafes. This pretty key in my opinion, because I think that those who go online from net bars in China would throw a lot of weight into the ‘entertainment’ category.

Nor does comScore track mobile visits, so a report like this would favor services like Renren, in contrast to microblog Sina Weibo which has a substantial amount of mobile users. Nonetheless the report should still prove useful for the many marketers who are targeting PC users in the region.

comScore also pointed out that Tencent has the nation’s leading portal, reaching 64 percent of all net users. If you’re looking for a more complete picture of Tencent’s online properties, see the study from Credit Suisse which we recently reported on.

Judging solely on statistics, advertising on portals seems like the best way to go about capturing Chinese eyeballs. Social media certainly has potential though, as cosmetic company Maybelline previously employed only Sina Weibo and Renren to engage with Chinese internet users, and did so with some success. Conversations rate where high on both sites, especially on Sina Weibo where there was an unusually high volume of conversation revolving around the product.

Meanwhile in neighboring Japan…

We told you yesterday about comScore’s research into media use in Japan after the March 11 earthquake. That report proved to be an interesting study in how age relates to new media adoption. (Note: I have inquired via email about the sample size of that report, but I have still not heard back from comScore)

Photo: wirespot

With contributions from Willis Wee

After Renren’s recent IPO, we saw Plants and Zombies move onto the popular social network. And now today there’s news that it has partnered with Recruit, Japan’s largest HR and classified media group to launch a social wedding service.

Interestingly the joint venture between two media giants is expected to give birth to a multimedia platform that fully integrates online wedding related social content and offline media, such as magazine and wedding exhibitions. It is interesting to see that Renren is involved in offline business, something that is out of the norm for Internet businesses.

The new website is scheduled to be officially launched this winter with the aim to become one of the leading wedding online media in China.

Patrick Tham, Chairman of Recruit’s China subsidiaries in the deal commented:

[We] believe our partnership will combine Renren’s strength in social networking with Recruit’s strength in the wedding business to enable more Chinese couples to plan and enjoy happy weddings.

A Renren spokesperson tells us tonight that the website will provide “information needed for wedding planning, online booking of wedding services” and some other offerings. Furthermore, the website will be separate from the social network’s main site, but it will feature “some integration with Renren.com to leverage [the network’s] user base.

We contacted a representative with PopCap China this evening who told us that the game is not just localized, but it’s “adapted to Chinese user behavior.” This version of the game was developed by PopCap’s Shanghai studio, and there will be new zombies, power-ups, and challenges each week to keep gamers on their toes.

James Gwertzman, the head of PopCap in the Asia/Pacific region sent out the news earlier today on Twitter (see above). He was in attendance at the recent Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing, sitting on the Western Innovations Panel. At that time he commented on why many western companies have difficulty operating in the Chinese market:

As long as distribution is locked up and prohibited from foreign ownership, you’re going to have difficulties here… You have to find a domestic partner. I don’t have a grudge that we have to share the revenue, but you’re just one step away from the market.

It looks like PopCap was indeed willing to take on a domestic partner in the end, and quite a big one at that. Renren recently IPO’d making them the first social networking firm to be listed on the NYSE.

Lead photo: donews

Youku says the Tencent Qzone was seeing shares/re-posts in excess of 700,000 in early April, while over on RenRen each video posted is re-posted an average of 85 times. And Youku is the most widely used video service to share on both Sina and Tencent microblogs.

This frictionless sharing of content on the web is great to in any country, but particularly China. With so much talk of censorship these days, it’s important to remember that China’s view of the web can be far different that what we might presume it to be.

On a somewhat related note, this little tidbit of good news from Youku is a very timely one, as it might distract from the fact that its stock price dropped yesterday by 9.5%. Fellow Chinese net properties RenRen and Sina were also down, 6.6% and 5% respectively.

While the IPO is a success, it remains to be seen if Renren could match up to Facebook’s revenue per user ratio. The Financial Times reported that Facebook earns about $4 per user while Renren makes only $0.80. That’s a huge difference in monetization efficiency, but as many have pointed out over the past few days, Renren is no Facebook.

In its latest SEC filing, Renren reported a lost of $1.1 million despite stating that its online advertising revenue increased by 100.5 percent and online gaming revenue by 11.3 percent on a Q1 year-on-year basis. Nonetheless, the loss is explained:

“There is a large financial charge related to the exercise of warrant by one of our largest investors Softbank… because we sold our shares too cheaply three years ago… so therefore we have a large charge.. going forward all that costs are gone,” said Joseph Chen, CEO of Renren in an interview.

Renren’s user count stands at about 117 million but only 31 million are active monthly users. That isn’t especially impressive when compared to Facebook’s 500 million active users with 50 percent logging on to the social network in any given day. I’m not too excited about Renren’s IPO as the user statistics don’t really seem to suggest a bright future. At least in my opinion, Renren lacks the stickiness and sleek user interface that I’d like to see in a social network. I gave up using the site long ago.

A social network thrives on a strong community and Renren doesn’t seem to be able to do that as well as Facebook or even China’s microblog, Sina Weibo. But then again, who can? I believe Renren’s impressive IPO is at best a speculative surge since it is the first social network to be listed on the NYSE. Let us know your thoughts.

Sina Weibo appears to be the social media platform of choice for most brands to stage their engagement with consumers in China, whilst fewer brands have exploited the potential of Renren, a Facebook-esque social network. Maybelline, however, has used a two-pronged marketing approach using Sina Weibo as their brand’s main platform and Renren as a complementary hub for product-specific campaigns such as B.B. cream.

WaveMetrix analysis shows that Maybelline’s approach is effective in approaching different types of users. Sina Weibo proves most successful in engaging owners, whilst the B.B. cream page on Renren attracts users who are interested in the product (potential owners). However, WaveMetrix analysis shows that whilst Maybelline’s Renren page generates higher product engagement than Sina Weibo, the majority of discussion focuses on the celebrities which Maybelline post pictures of.

Sina Weibo proves most effective at engaging owners:

Maybelline’s Sina Weibo page attracts more owners than its Renren page: 75% of discussion on Maybelline’s Sina Weibo page is from owners, reflecting the brand’s success in engaging its existing consumers. They are prompted to share their Maybelline experience and also to provide tips for others on how to use the products. Through sharing its range of products and campaign roll out, Maybelline successfully uses Sina Weibo as a hub to engage its users.

Only a quarter of discussion on Renren has driven current or potential owners: Maybelline uses Renren in a time-specific manner and focuses on new product launch. The brand manages to create engagement with potential owners who say “looks good” and “want to try it” about its newly launched B.B.. However, discussion from potential and current owners only makes up around 25% of buzz, indicating that most engagement comes from general consumers

Maybelline’s Renren page attracts more general discussion than brand or product-specific buzz:

Consumers on Renren engage with the brand in a general manner: Reflecting the low proportion of potential and current owners, Maybelline’s Renren page attracts a very low proportion of product and brand buzz. Almost 90% of discussion is general in nature as consumers talk about the pictures of the celebrities and entertainment events which Maybelline posts about. This highlights that Maybelline isn’t as successful as it could have been in engaging users around a specific product

That suggests that DST perceives the value of the Chinese online retailer as being $10 billion, as Chinese media websites have been reporting.

DST has invested in well known internet companies like Facebook and Zynga, and its investment in 360buy is just a part of a much larger trend of money pouring towards Chinese online properties.

But Usmanov asserts that conditions have charged, saying “Investments in internet companies start to bring less profits compared with two or three years ago when we began to invest in them almost at a startup level.”

Meanwhile Chinese internet companies continue to make headlines, with RenRen filing for an IPO a few days back and Kaixin001 expected to follow soon.

A few weeks back we reported that the Baidu would allow users to microblog from its search box, which is indeed a useful feature. And now Baidu is now testing the ability to add custom links to its homepage among a selected number of users.

During the adding process Baidu suggests some links you might like, such as popular Chinese services RenRen and Sina Weibo. Some might think that giving users a way to jump off your site is not wise, but this is indeed a valid way of adding some value for the user, perhaps making the Baidu homepage just a little more homely.

Now that we’ve seen this new custom link feature, we can’t help but wonder how long it will be until we see Facebook among those suggested links!

[Via China Internet Watch]

Update: Sohu.com reported that an agreement between Facebook and China was signed

Most of you would have heard the rumors that Facebook might be coming to China. Marbridge Consulting reported that Baidu and Facebook are rumored to have  joined forces to bring the social network to China.

It was also rumored that Facebook China will not be functioned under Facebook.com. Facebook.cn, a Facebook owned domain could be used instead.

Take all this information with a grain of salt as no source could verify that the rumor was accurate. We tried but failed too.  ”There’s nothing to say: mere rumor. We won’t comment on rumor,” Kaiser Kuo, Baidu Spokesperson told us in an email.

Still (assuming all these speculations are true) it somehow made me wonder if Facebook can succeed in China. Turned out, my analysis tends to favor for a Facebook win. The social network might have enough muscles to succeed in China one day, and here’s why:

1. Due diligence paid: It’s a known fact that Facebook has always wanted to enter China. However, Mark Zuckerberg understands that China is probably one of the greatest barriers toward Facebook’s march to connect the world. He was, indeed, very patient with his approach. Facebook has studied China for quite some time. Mark Zuckerberg has even poured in time to study the Chinese language and culture. He even took time off to visit China last year. Note that all the above are probably just a small part of Zuckerberg’s effort to understand China. I’m sure he would have done much more than these before bringing Facebook to China.

2. First step right, Facebook.cn works better: Facebook.com is banned in China simply because there is a clash of philosophy between the two. In my opinion, it is a clever move to enter China through Facebook.cn. The China domain will follow Chinese’s law religiously (and probably unconditionally) while Facebook.com remains status quo. Facebook.com will continue to celebrate freedom of speech. Who knows, 5 or 10 years down the road, when China starts to embrace democracy, both sites could merge which immediately connects China with the world.

3. Chinese love Mark Zuckerberg: When Mark Zuckerberg visited China last December, we saw a spike in the number of Facebook users in China. With all factors constant, the only reason that could trigger the growth was Mark Zuckerberg’s presence in China. “I think more of us signed up for Facebook because of Mark Zuckerberg’s visit in China. His presence has somehow promoted Facebook in our country,” Aileen Meng, a professional working in the Internet industry in Beijing China told us in our previous article.

Not an easy task

However, we shouldn’t discount the fact that there are strong competitors in China. With 160 million users, Renren is a competitor that Facebook should be caution of. Without compelling reasons most users wouldn’t jump ship to Facebook. The network of friends built on Renren ties users down to the Facebook clone. Even for Chinese students abroad, Facebook is merely used to help them connect with the locals. Renren, is undoubtedly still the first choice online social network.

That’s a major problem. As most Chinese use Facebook as a medium to connect with the world, putting Facebook.cn as a separate entity from Facebook.com would simply kill off the reason for Chinese to join Facebook. However, that’s only on theory. I believe the Chinese would still sign up for Facebook.cn to quench their curiosity. After all, Mark Zuckerberg‘s creation is somewhat influential, at least within the Chinese tech community. If you haven’t already known, it is also good to note that Renren has planned for a $500 million IPO in U.S. If succeeded, the IPO will give Renren more funds for growth.

Conclusion

With Renren dominating, it will be a tough battle for Facebook to be the market leader in China. But does Facebook has much choice? Probably not. The thing is, Facebook has to enter China quickly before it is too late. The bigger Renren grows, the harder it is for Facebook to establish presence in China. Facebook understands that it has to move swiftly before Renren becomes the de facto social network in the country. Joining up with Baidu (assuming this is true) seems like a good choice for Facebook. Nothing beats a local tech giant to help you scale your product. Let us know what you think.

Launched back in 2008, Kaixin is very much like a Chinese version of Facebook, with ‘friending,’ status updates, games, and photo posting features. For a quick walk-though of the interface, jump to the bottom for a screencast I made of Kaixin a few months after it began. Note that the interface has changed a little since then, but it’s still pretty much the same product.

Renren, China’s other Facebook-ish network, is thought to be also getting ready for a US IPO as we reported here earlier this year. In contrast with Kaixin, Renren caters mostly to college students. It was formerly called Xiaonei and borrowed heavily from Facebook’s design early on.

News of Kaixin’s plans comes hot on the heels of Qihoo’s IPO, a Chinese security software maker which went public at the end of March. Qihoo’s shares shot up high on the first day of trading, so it will be interesting to see if Kaixin will be as fortuitious.

In China, Renren and Sina Weibo are dominant players in the social network market. They can be seen as the “Facebook” and “Twitter” of China as each network currently has 160 million and 50 million registered users, respectively.

More to comes as eMarketer forecast that China will have 265 million social network users by the end of this year. The total number social network users is also estimated to hit 488 million by 2015. A user is counted as one who uses social network service at least once a month.

“As penetration approaches saturation, users are adopting activities that mirror the West but remain distinctly Chinese,” said Mike Froggatt, eMarketer research analyst and author of the new report “China Social Media Marketing.” “They have innovated in categories as diverse as online entertainment, group buying and social media.”

“Although social networks in China will increase reach, sites often have very specific audiences,” said Froggatt. “Choosing how and where to target these audiences can determine whether social media campaigns are successful or flop.”

With the ongoing fight for dominance, China’s social network market look fragmented now. But it could be worst by 2015, at least in my opinion. Four years from now, it remains to be seen if Renren and Sina Weibo are still the dominant players. Chinese users are adopting English-based social networks like Facebook and Twitter as they feel the need to stay connected with the world.

That means U.S based sites could still stand a chance to gain pieces of the Chinese market. If both companies successfully entered China, it would cause further fragmentation as users are spread among different social networks. Marketers would then have to understand and manage dozens of social networks to better target consumers. Of course, there is also a possibility that that more social network services would spring up in the near future. It’s a huge but complicated market, isn’t it?

Also catch: The Twitter War in China

Image credit

As Facebook is not yet listed, Renren could become virtually the only choice for investors seeking to buy into the sector’s growth, the Financial Times said.

Renren is China’s largest social networking site with over 160 million users. Despite that, a significant number of Chinese users is also starting to own a Facebook account. In the last couple of weeks, we noticed that the number of Facebook users in China ballooned to 700,000 within a month. The sudden boom in users was probably triggered by Mark Zuckerberg’s visit to China last year. It could also be due to growing global influence as more Chinese feel the need to stay connected with friends abroad.

It is easier for Facebook to enter China compared to Renren trying to conquer the world. Could $500 million make a difference? Let us know your thoughts.

In other words, 7 out of every 10,000 Chinese online users are on the world’s largest social network. Thanks to the great firewall of China, Chinese users who are on Facebook have to use a proxy server to gain access.

Beside a proxy server, there are several alternatives that have sprung up in recent months. Amazon Kindle and social web browser, RockMelt are among those. However, these aren’t long-term solutions as they are easily blocked if spotted by the Chinese government.

The real need to stay connected on Facebook comes from global influence, especially Chinese who are or have been abroad. In Singapore, many students from China are using both Renren (China’s social network) and Facebook. Facebook helps them stay connected with Singaporeans while Renren with their friends back in China. Even though both social networks have almost identical design and features, most Chinese students prefer Renren. The difference is in the quality of network built.

“Facebook helps us connect with Singaporeans. It makes sure we are part of the Singapore community. But I prefer Renren because my elementary, high school and best friends are all on it,” a Chinese national student from Singapore Management University commented. Singapore has almost half of its population on Facebook.

So, if Facebook were to operate in China, it would have to help Chinese users build up their network rapidly. Technology and user interface aren’t enough to attract Chinese users. Renren has the same features and perhaps better since it is tailor-made for the Chinese. For example, Renren has a better interface for reading and sharing.

Laoli, another Chinese national student in Singapore feels that Renren has a better “atmosphere” for online reading.

“We generally love to read about trending news. It could range from gossips to important matters and we’re very likely to share them. It’s much easier to read and share on Renren than on Facebook.”