Giant Interactive’s New Long Journey developer soccer team

China’s national men’s soccer team — yes, I called it soccer, get over it — is not having a great month. The team, which has long been the target of Chinese soccer fans’ ire for its poor performances, lost an embarrassing 5-1 game to Thailand this past weekend and things got ugly. Fans across the country have shown their anger in all sorts of ways, but one group of game developers hopes to end the madness once and for all by challenging the men’s national team to a high-stakes, winner-take-all match.

Giant Interactive’s New Long Journey soccer team is a group of 16 guys — programmers, engineers, designers — who like to blow off steam after work by kicking the ball around with other local teams. But after China’s abysmal performance this weekend, the developers — who describe themselves as “average” players — decided to issue a challenge to the men’s national team. If the national team comes to Shanghai to play Giant’s team and wins or draws the match, then the devs will award the national team with 1 million RMB ($163,000). But if the national team loses to the New Long Journey developers, it must promise to “disappear from China.”

Unfortunately for fans of Chinese soccer everywhere, there’s essentially no chance that the men’s national team will actually accept this challenge. That’s probably good news for the dev team, which will likely need to focus over the summer as their game is expected to launch in the late summer or early fall. But the challenge is still quite a cheeky move, and has stirred up quite a bit of discussion online. Some accuse the team of cooking up the challenge as a promotional stunt for the game — which could certainly be the case — but others have saluted them for defending China’s national honor by attempting to rid the country of its embarrassing national team once and for all.

While I can’t imagine the national team would ever agree to disappear, I kind of hope this match gets played anyway. It’d be a great promotion for New Long Journey, true, but it would definitely be entertaining.

Incidentally, if you’re wondering why China’s soccer team is so bad, this Economist article is a great read).

We have actually known about Baidu Antivirus for a while; the company announced the suite back in April but at the time it wasn’t available for public download. And of course, before that there were indications that it was coming with Thailand-targeted Baidu PC Faster launching last year and the English-language Baidu Antivirus launching this past March.

But Chinese web security is Qihoo’s home turf (it dominates the market), and Baidu’s move to offer a competing product can be seen as a sort of counter-attack to put Qihoo on the defensive after Qihoo invaded the Baidu-dominated Chinese search market. The companies’ feud actually runs much deeper, but since the launch of 360 Search it has been glowing white hot, and the launch of Baidu Antivirus certainly isn’t going to cool anything down.

Qihoo also faces pressure in the mobile security space from Tencent (another company it has a rather ugly history with), which looks to be using its ascendant WeChat mobile app to push its way into the mobile security space. And it would not be a surprise to see Baidu make a strong move in the direction of mobile security in the near future, either.

We’ll be taking Baidu’s new antivirus software for a spin in the near future, but for now I’ll leave you to ponder the brutal three-way battle for security and search supremacy that seems increasingly inevitable.

(h/t to Beijing News for the Baidu Antivirus launch news)

Sino-US startup Dolphin Browser has reached 80 million installs around the world for its iOS and Android browser. Today, Dolphin is also being bumped up to version 10 on Android with a revamped interface and a couple of new features.

The MoboTap team behind Dolphin Browser told us a few weeks ago that they’re now targeting new users in Southeast Asia, and that seems to be paying off with with strong growth in Southeast Asia alongside its main user-bases in the US, China, and Japan. It comes pre-installed on KDDI phones in Japan, which is a big boost.

Dolphin Browser reached 50 million installs at the time of its v9.0 update, so it seems to be making solid progress up against a wide range of rival smartphone browsers.

So what are the new features and improvements in Dolphin Browser for Android v10? After playing around with the beta yesterday I can see that the UI is now nicely streamlined to give more viewing space. The previous bottom toolbar is gone, replaced by a semi-opaque dolphin button (pictured below) in the lower-left corner that can spring up to activate one of three things: a summary of all open tabs, a pop-up action bar, or gesture input. Also, you can now drag-and-drop your bookmarks into convenient folders that resemble a phone’s home screen folders.

But perhaps the biggest new feature in v10 is a web app store for HTML5-based site. Really these are just links to mobile-optimised sites, but it’s still useful. Web apps for Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and over 200 more sites are ready for launch. There are still the familiar add-ons which are powerful extensions that help you access functions like Xmarks bookmark syncing.

Personally, I don’t use the mobile browser much, and a year or so ago I found Dolphin to be ugly and overly fiddly when I tried it then, but the browser app looks better now; and despite all the powerful customisation options it also feels lightweight and speedy enough for occasional users like myself.

Dolphin Browser for Android should be updated by now in the Google Play store.

Call us gluttons, but we love food and foodie apps. And there’s certainly no shortage of either those things in China. One such app is AiMeiWei. Literally meaning “love delicious food” in Chinese, AiMeiWei has just revealed that it has secured $2 million in funding to fuel the growth of its Foodspotting-style social app for Android and iPhone.

While this was divulged only today to Chinese tech blog 36Kr, AiMeiWei actually pocketed the money last summer. The series A round was led by ABC Capital, with participation from Gobi Ventures and the Shanghai University Entrepreneurship Fund (EFG).

As with rival apps like Burpple and Ricebook, AiMeiWei lets users upload and prettify their food snaps and review restaurants. With all this user-generated content, the app is also useful for finding places nearby at which to eat.

With well over a million users in 2011 a short while after it launched, AiMeiWei was quickly off to a good start, but it’ll be hard to stand out against strong local competition that even includes the Groupon-meets-Yelp site Dianping.

(Source: 36Kr – article in Chinese)

Digital music revenues are on the rise in China – albeit very slowly, and to a not very impressive level. According to figures from music industry group IFPI, digital music sales in China saw a 49.8 percent annual increase to $75.5 million in 2012. That’s a small number from a massive country.

Indeed, that’s just $0.13 in digital music spending for each one of China’s 564 million web users. In stark contrast, China’s e-commerce market will bring in an estimated $177 billion in sales this year.

Total recorded (and legal) music sales in China hit $92.4 million last year, which is inevitably going down as people move away from CDs [1]. Physical sales vs digital sales of music are now split 18:82 in favour of MP3s or streamed music.

Here’s the key chart, as made by the fortnightly Music Ally Report (thanks to Outdustry for pointing it out to us):

Going VIP

Piracy is clearly still a major issue. Here’s a line from the report:

China is infamous for its rampant levels of piracy, which the IIPA estimates at 95 percent in the case of physical formats and 99 percent for digital ones.

Advertising is clearly the main form of monetization of legal music in China, as seen with the licensed free music on web portals such as Baidu Music and QQ Music. But undeniably those major sites have benefitted – in terms of traffic and ad revenue – from the many previous years in which they deep-linked to pirated music. But let’s not forget that Yahoo’s music portal for China did that until its closure just before Christmas.

Some of China’s top music sites are slowly and carefully testing out VIP packages for their mostly free services, such as Baidu Music’s new VIP section, and there are similar initiatives by Alibaba-owned Xiami, and other popular ones like Duomi and Kugou.

Outdustry’s Ed Peto evaluates this late change in strategy on the Chinese web:

Most services are fairly cautious about the take-up projections for these premium tiers as there is very little precedent for people paying for music in this way.

Whether they will do the bare minimum to satisfy contracts with content providers or really put all their efforts into converting users into paying subscribers remains to be seen.

If you also include things like ringback tones, China’s music industry is worth a healthier $2 billion. But that sector is dominated by China’s three mobile telcos who give very little of that revenue back to music artists.

(Via: Outdustry)

American design-oriented e-commerce site Fab has just raised $150 million in the first part of its series D funding. For us, the most interesting aspect is the two brand-new investors ploughing money into Fab – Chinese web giant Tencent (HKG:0700) and Japanese conglomerate Itochu.

As reported by TechCrunch, Fab founder and CEO Jason Goldberg plans to push the e-store into China with help from Tencent. One Tencent executive will also have a board seat at Fab.

There’s no specific word on a launch in Japan, but Itochu’s retailing experience could help Fab in that nation. But then Fab has previously had one other Japanese investor in the form of the venture capital division of mobile telco Docomo, but Fab has not yet launched outside of the US and Europe.

Fab, which connects consumers with designers of items they can’t find elsewhere, currently operates in in 27 countries, and 40 percent of its sales happen outside of the US.

Worth $1 billion

The next part of Fab’s huge fourth-round funding will come in the following few months. Investors in this newest round also include previous backers Atomico, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, RTP Capital, Pinnacle Ventures, Lars Hinrichs, and Docomo Capital.

Fab is now effectively valued at $1 billion on paper. But its ambitions are greater – for it to become the world’s top design-oriented e-commerce site so that it can become the fifth $10 billion online shopping empire alongside Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, and Rakuten.

China’s top Fab-like designer-to-consumer site is possibly Xipin, which wrapped up $1.5 million in series A funding last October.

As for Tencent, it is one of China’s top B2C e-commerce companies (among its very many interests) and is well-placed to help Fab launch into China. Unless Tencent decides to launch a Fab-like site of its own.

One of the first things that struck me as odd about the alleged Cisco-NSA connection is that while Cisco isn’t one of the nine companies implicated in the original PRISM scandal, Microsoft is. And so are Apple and Google. Collectively, those three American companies are responsible for creating the operating systems that run nearly 100 percent of China’s desktop computers and more than 95 percent of its smartphones.

China can replace Cisco hardware with hardware from a domestic telecom equipment maker like Huawei, but its entire computing environment both in desktop and mobile will still be based on American technology. And replacing American operating systems will be quite a bit harder than replacing American routers. A few months ago I translated a bit of an opinion piece by Chinese tech reporter Ji Yongqing that provides very relevant reading on this topic; Ji argues that China has basic, systemic obstacles that prevent it from being able to produce a viable domestic mobile operating system. Though Ji was talking only about mobile operating systems, many of his arguments are equally applicable to desktop operating systems.

Indeed, most of China’s home-grown operating systems have been forks or skins of Western-developed systems, like the many Chinese Android forks or this impressive Chinese Linux distribution. To create a new operating system without using foreign systems at all, Chinese researchers would basically have to start from scratch as there aren’t any home-grown products they can build off. And even if they did manage to create a functional OS within a year or two, how could it possibly compete with OS X or Windows, which have been in constant development for decades? Chinese businesses aren’t going to switch to a less functional or less stable operating system unless they’re forced to.

Moreover, the continued popularity of Windows XP in China shows that users in the country are especially resistant to any change in operating system, meaning that even if China did create a viable domestic alternative, it would likely struggle to get people to actually use it. And of course, any government-supported project would invite concerns from many users about privacy and surveillance too. From the perspective of the average Chinese user, it may be better to be spied on by a foreign government (which can’t do much to you) than by the domestic one.

In short, while China may spend the next few months ripping Cisco’s hardware out of its internet, the day China can say its tech industry doesn’t rely on international tech companies is still a very long way off. I’d be willing to bet that five years from now, most Chinese people will still be using Windows computers and Android phones. If this NSA scandal sparks a flurry of interest in domestic R&D, then perhaps a true Chinese alternative could be available somewhere further down the line. But China simply isn’t getting away from American technology anytime soon when almost all of its computers and mobile devices run American-made operating systems.

A high-school kid blows off the gaokao to play video games.

Nanjing Official Embezzles 2.5+ Million RMB to Play Web Games

Mr. Zhu was in a pretty perfect position for embezzlement. As an accountant in charge of the finances for one of Nanjing’s economic management stations, he had a fair amount of control over an awful lot of money, and apparently a pronounced lack of oversight. But Zhu was an honest man, or at least he started that way. After several years doing the job the right way, in 2005 a friend convinced him to get into online gaming. He got addicted fast, and started spending large amounts of money buying equipment and upgrades for all his characters. It quickly became a financially draining habit, but luckily, Zhu knew one place he could turn for easy money: the public funds he was supposed to be keeping track of at work.

By his own admission, from 2006 to 2012 Zhu embezzled more than 2.6 million RMB ($426,000) in public funds, and spent most of it on online games. He even took frequent “business trips” (on the government’s dime) that were actually just flights around the country to participate in gaming events and tournaments. And apparently no one ever caught on. But in 2012, when local villages didn’t receive funds from Zhu’s office that they were expecting, village officials showed up to find out where the money had gone. Zhu figured the truth was coming out sooner or later and fessed up, turning himself in to police.

Recently, a Nanjing court finally tried Zhu’s case, and found him guilty (obviously) of embezzling public funds. He won’t be doing much gaming anytime soon; he was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

(Modern Bulletin via QQ Games)

A Promising College Dropout’s Gaming Addiction Nightmare

After getting a 647 — a damn good score — on China’s college entrance exam and earning admission to Jilin University, Jin Aibing seemed destined for success. But then, in his sophomore year, he got into online gaming. Soon he was addicted, and the failed classes started to pile up. When the rest of his classmates graduated at the end of their senior year, Jin had earned high levels in a bunch of online games but had failed to earn a diploma.

After college, Jin basically made gaming his life. He switched his phone number and dropped out of contact with his family. He eked out a subsistence living on around 1500 RMB/month ($238), which he earned by selling in-game equipment. He didn’t even really talk to the people at the internet cafe; his life was strictly online.

That was basically Jin’s life until his family managed to track him down in March of this year. Now, he calls his gaming experience “a nightmare,” and his story is making the rounds on the web as an example of the dangers of internet addiction. A Guangming Daily report on him even includes concerning-but-dubious statistics like “among net users aged 18 to 23, more than 26 percent are addicted.” That’s pretty hard to believe, but it is true that gaming addiction can be a serious problem and that China’s schools, especially, are pretty unequipped to deal with it or combat it. Jin’s story is one part news and one part propaganda, but it’s telling that once Jin got too deep into gaming, it seems no one other than his family was all that interested in helping to pull him out.

(Guangming Daily via QQ Games)

High-Schooler Ditches Gaokao to Play Games Online

Another story making the rounds right now is that of a Shandong high school student who was meant to take the gaokao — China’s college entrance exam — this year but dropped out just ten minutes before the test was to begin. “They haven’t passed out the tests yet; I’m not going to take it,” he reportedly said while walking out of the test site. You can probably guess where he headed next: the internet cafe next door, where he played an afternoon’s worth of games instead of taking the all-important test.

His story has since gotten quite big online, but perhaps not for the reasons you’d expect. While some have condemned the kid for throwing away his future just to play some video games, others have taken his story as an example of the rigid gaokao system’s failures. In an online poll about the student’s decision on QQ Games more than half of the nearly 20,000 voters, when asked what they thought, responded simply that the gaokao wasn’t the only path to success. Another 28 percent pointed out that college grads are having trouble finding jobs anyway. Only 12 percent condemned the student for being stupid and wasting an important opportunity.

(And as a fan of gaming, I tend to agree. Not that everyone should blow off standardized tests to play games, of course. But tests aren’t for everyone, and they aren’t an indicator of lifelong success. A student who’s confident enough to skip out on the test, spend the afternoon playing video games, and then give calm, well-spoken interviews about the whole thing is probably going to land on his feet anyway).

(via QQ Games)

For more stories of gaming madness in China, click here!

This story, for example, suggests that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has told Chinese authorities that Cisco is helping the NSA spy on Chinese networks and computers. That would be a problem given that Cisco’s equipment is a part of the infrastructure of much of China’s internet.

But whether Snowden has actually said anything like that is a bit difficult to determine. The Cisco-NSA connections have been reported in a number of Chinese media outlets, but no Western outlets that I can find. Moreover, many of the Chinese media reports — like this one in English — suggest that Cisco was one of the nine companies reported to be working with the NSA in the PRISM scandal, but in fact it was not. (The nine companies are Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, Youtube, Skype, AOL, and Apple, though many have since denied having any open access arrangements with the NSA).

Earlier in the week Snowden did tell the South China Morning Post that the NSA “hack[s] network backbones,” presumably including China’s, but he did not apparently mention Cisco by name or suggest that the NSA had any kind of agreement with the company; in fact the use of the term “hack” certainly implies that the NSA was gaining access to network backbones without the knowledge or permission of the people who produced and owned the network infrastructure.

So did Snowden actually say anything about Cisco, or is the Chinese press simply using the NSA leaks as an excuse to relaunch last year’s anti-Cisco PR campaign? I have no idea, and honestly, it probably doesn’t matter at all. The PRISM scandal seems to have done for American tech companies what Huawei and ZTE’s military connections have done for Chinese ones, and it’s likely that regardless of what Snowden actually said, Cisco and other American companies are going to have a much harder time winning Chinese contracts than they used to.

It’s hard to see exactly where this buildup of mutual distrust ends. Just a decade or so after internet and communications technology brought the whole world closer together, it increasingly looks like hacking and surveillance scandals and suspicions are likely to tear it back apart.

Chinese telecoms firm and phone-maker Huawei is going to spend Rs 175 crore ($30 million) to build its brand in India. This push into the consumer segment in India comes at the same time as the launch of its 6.1-inch screened Huawei Ascend Mate in the country, which hits stores today for $430.

As noted by The Hindu, Huawei is aiming to sell one million smartphones and tablets in India in the next six months.

Huawei’s president of India device business development, Victor Shan, explains:

We will invest around eight to ten percent of our mobile devices revenue in India. In 2012, our India revenue was $300 million. The spending would be mainly in strengthening our retail presence and brand building exercise.

He added that Huawei “will be expanding our portfolio with the launch of more devices before Diwali.”

For greater reach across India, Huawei has teamed up with some local e-commerce giants such as Flipkart and Snapdeal to get its flagship Ascend Mate and other models into the highly trafficked online stores.

Huawei has just unveiled its new Ascend P6 at an event in London, a sleek 6.18mm-thick Android-based phone with a 4.7-inch screen.

The push into consumer gadgets could also help Huawei compensate for potential lost revenue from political pushback against its enterprise telecoms business, which is under great scrutiny in America, the European Union, and in India as well.

(Source: The Hindu)

Jiepang’s first sponsored photo filter (pictured below) is made in conjunction with skincare company Neutrogena. Rather than just slapping on a logo, the clever “sunshine” filter will pull in information for the user’s vicinity to show up the location, current temperature, and the angle of the sun. All that ties into the skincare brand’s line of sunscreen products. In addition, users of that special filter will unlock a redeemable virtual badge for special discounts on Neutrogena products at one store chain (Watsons) and on the online shop Tmall.

After running this promo for three weeks, Jiepang tells us today that it has seen 70,000 pictures uploaded with that filter, and those have been shared over 250,000 times on various social networks like Sina Weibo.

Last summer we looked at how Tuding, an Instagram-like photo app and social network in China, was also rolling out branded photo filters for some of its partner brands like Adidas.

We also saw an amusing smart filter on the Chinese photo app Vida that tells you how bad the air quality is in the place where you took the photo. So if you’re shrouded in smog, you might want to try out Vida, but if you can actually see the sun (a rarity in Beijing), give the Foursquare-like Jiepang a try.

Another question, of course, is whether or not they should. India’s concerns about the security threats posed by ZTE and Huawei are concerns that have been echoed by other governments, and both companies do seem to have ties to the Chinese military (both have also had dealings with some fairly questionable regimes). But the case against WeChat is definitely thinner, at least in terms of the information that’s publicly available. Is the fact that the app is Chinese enough to make it a de facto security threat? It seems harsh; but with all the revelations of hacking and web surveillance that have come out over the past year, it might be arguable that no government should allow any international tech companies to operate within its borders.

Of course, India and China do have a fairly antagonistic history, and even today the countries disagree on where the Sino-Indian border lies, so there’s not a lot of love lost between the two of them. India’s increasing suspicion towards Chinese tech companies will likely be seen as an unfair, protectionist move in China (try not to giggle at the irony of China accusing other countries of protectionism in the tech industry), but the truth is we really don’t know enough to judge whether any of these companies is a real security threat. If there’s a smoking gun out there, no one has yet revealed it, and we’re left to wonder what the hell is actually happening behind the scenes. Are Chinese tech companies posing a real threat, or is this, like China’s accusations about Cisco, just a propaganda tool in a much broader battle over international trade?

I genuinely have no idea, although I suspect the truth may lie somewhere in the middle. But since none of these accusations has come with much evidence and we’re all just speculating, I put the question to you, dear readers: is this unfair anti-China bias, trade protectionism, or reasonable reactions to tangible security threats?

(image source)

Talking at the Reuters Global Technology Summit on Monday, Donahoe said he sees “encouraging signs” that Chinese authorities will finally give Paypal the green light to compete against the likes of Alibaba’s Alipay or Tencent’s Tenpay. So, what’s the time-frame?

I am confident that PayPal will be the first non-domestic company to get a payments license in China. That could be in three months or five years.

So, pretty much anytime this decade. Or next decade. Or never. Good luck with that.

Already transacting $6 billion in China

Despite no solid time-frame or assurances, Donahoe believes that “over time you’ll see the Chinese domestic economy try to connect with the global one,” according to the account of The Economic Times. China joined the World Trade Organization over a decade ago.

Paypal is currently handling about $6 billion in transactions in China, though it’s not clear how much of that stems from Chinese e-commerce, or if that’s mainly from offline Chinese businesses using it for overseas trade.

It’s also unclear whether Paypal could operate as a wholly-owned foreign enterprise in China, or if it’d have to form a joint-venture (in which, as is custom, it’d have a 49 percent stake) with a local company.

(Source: The Economic Times; Image source: HuffPo)

The device hasn’t been officially announced yet (we’ve contacted Qihoo to see if they’ll confirm or deny it), but Sina Tech’s sources have provided a lot of details in addition to the images you can see above and below. The device is very small, plugs into any computer’s USB port, will cost 20 RMB ($3.27), and comes in the black and white colors you see above.

An illustration of how the device will work, and its diminutive size.

The device apparently came out of Qihoo’s observations of its customers’ behavior; Sina’s source says the company noticed that users were transferring files from phone to PC and vice-versa using actual cables instead of doing it wirelessly, presumably because establishing the wireless connection was too complicated. Qihoo’s new router aims to make it simple.

Of course, Qihoo’s controversial reputation ensures that like almost any product it launches, the wireless router is likely to be met with both enthusiasm and skepticism. In the comments thread on Sina Tech, plenty of users have said they’re excited about the new product, but several have also wryly asked if it will automatically upload users’ browsing histories to the cloud, a reference to concerns about user data security in Qihoo apps. We also have asked Qihoo about this too, so hopefully we’ll be able to update this article soon with details of how the device handles security.

(via Sina Tech)

We try to avoid reporting rumors that rely solely on the testimony of completely anonymous sources, but this one is just to weird not to pass along: Sina Tech is reporting, citing a “knowledgable source”, that Amazon is considering a strategic shift in its e-commerce business in China that would see the company partnering with competitor Alibaba and joining Tmall. Details on how that would work are scant, obviously, but Amazon International supposedly met with people from Tmall a couple of weeks ago to discuss the possibility of a partnership. When contacted by Sina Tech for comment, Amazon China told the website that it wasn’t aware of this situation.

That raises a number of intriguing possibilities. Has Amazon’s international leadership decided it’s time to cut bait in China? Its site is by no means a failure, but it certainly doesn’t have the kind of commanding e-commerce market share that Amazon enjoys elsewhere in the world. Is Amazon China opposed to this change, or unaware that it’s something that’s being explored? We’ve contacted both Amazon for comment, and will update this post if we hear something tangible back. Alibaba doesn’t comment on rumors.

Amazon China has around a 3 percent share of the B2C e-commerce market in China — compare that with Tmall’s 54 percent — so it’s possible that someone at Amazon has done the math and determined that the company would make more money if it shifts from an Alibaba competitor to a partner. But if I had to guess, I’d say the recent meeting (assuming it really happened) was more likely a discussion about offering Amazon’s recently-launched Kindle line on Tmall through an Amazon branded store, rather than a discussion about a broader partnership that would reshape Amazon’s whole approach to e-commerce in the country.

Still, you never know. This is one to take with quite a few grains of salt, but it’s also one to keep a close eye on.

(Sina Tech via TechWeb, image source)

In fact, the first account to offer in-app purchases seems to be McDonald’s official China account, which is offering WeChat users a special discount they can only get by purchasing tea from within the WeChat app. Similar features are likely to pop up in other major vendor accounts over the next few weeks as Tencent gets ready for a more wide-scale rollout, probably when it officially launches WeChat’s 5.0 update.

The in-app purchases are just the latest in a long line of features likely to be rolled out nationwide in WeChat’s upcoming 5.0 version; another rumored feature is a security “bodyguard” to protect the app’s new e-commerce features that may well spark another PR war between Qihoo and Tencent. It’s not clear when any of these features will come to the app’s 50 million international users.

It’s also not clear how receptive Chinese users will be to the new in-app purchase feature, especially given that it only supports purchases through TenPay, Tencent’s less-popular answer to competitor Alibaba’s online payment platform Alipay. “TenPay doesn’t support enough banks,” complained one user in the comments section of a TechWeb article on the new WeChat feature. “WeChat will become an ad marketplace,” wrote another user who accompanied his post with a crying emoticon. Whether WeChat users will embrace the convenience or condemn the increased marketing they’ll have to put up with as a result of this feature seems to still be very much up in the air.

But whether users like it or not, it seems e-commerce is coming to WeChat. Below is an image showing almost the full process of a user making a purchase via the McDonald’s WeChat account (via this weibo user):

(Netease Tech via TechWeb)

This company just exploded onto the scene today. Along with the watch and ring, these are the new Geak Eye and Geak Mars phones.

We’ve seen a lot of Chinese companies leaping on Android to make their debut as phone hardware makers in the past year. Apparently there’s still room for yet more new smartphone brands to emerge – and today China-based Geak is debuting with two brand-new smartphones and two other surprising new products. It’s as if someone at Geak said, “Hey, let’s take all those Apple rumors and just make all that shit ourselves.”

The two bits of wearable tech are the Geak Watch and the Geak Ring (pictured below). The latter is a finger ring, rather bulky, that has no external indication that it’s a smart device. Basically, the Geak Ring works with the company’s two new smartphones that were also launched today, the Geak Mars and Geak Eye.

The Geak Ring – which has a claimed stand-by battery life of 99 years – seems to have three main functions: it can optionally be used to securely unlock your Geak phone, to bump your contact details to someone with the same device, and to keep your device awake when you’re holding your Geak phone in proximity to the ring. The product page doesn’t explain which system it uses to do so (e.g.: Bluetooth?).

The Geak Watch, meanwhile, is an Android-based device with Bluetooth and wi-fi support that serves as an accessory to your phone to show details like current weather and notifications, and also serves as a fitness tracking gadget similar to the Jawbone Up or the Fitbit. Geak’s new watch comes a few months after images surfaced of an Android or Firefox OS-based smart watch from major Chinese web company Shanda.

• Geak Watch – Available July 3 for RMB 1,999 ($325)
• Geak Ring – Goes on sale August 8 for RMB 199 ($33)
• Geak Mars – Flagship phone with a large 5.8-inch screen 1080p HD screen (at 377 PPI) and powered along by a 1.7 GHz Snapdragon 600 quad-core processor. It sells on June 25 for RMB 2,999 ($487)
• Geak Eye – The more affordable of the pair of new phones still has quad-core and a 5-inch screen. Available June 25 for RMB 1,999 ($325)

Those are very lean prices, several hundred dollars less that flagship phones from Apple, Samsung, or HTC.

China’s most successful startup phone brand so far – aside from already established conglomerates like Lenovo, Huawei, ZTE – is Xiaomi, which sold over seven million smartphones in 2012 and is looking to double that number in 2013. It will likely do so despite ever stronger competition from budget-conscious new-comers like Geak.

As my colleague Charlie noted back in March, the initial unveiling of China-made Smartisan OS was accompanied by some ridiculous hype that this was China’s software saviour and it would somehow “kill off Apple eventually.” All bullshit of course, since Smartisan “OS” is just an Android skin – like Samsung’s Touchwiz, HTC’s Sense UI, or Xiaomi’s MIUI – and so it’s not some great homegrown innovation. Now Smartisan has been released over the weekend and is available to be downloaded for free to be installed onto Samsung Galaxy SIII phones in place of Samsung’s own Android overlay.

While the Smartisan ROM is available for worldwide users of the Galaxy SIII international model, all the instructions are in Chinese for now. A hands-on video of the Android skin in action has already emerged (embedded below courtesy of the Engadget China crew), showing that it does look good, but is just at an early pre-beta alpha stage. I must say it does look a bit odd with just 12 app icons per screen and no apparent support for wallpaper backgrounds – but that’s just a matter of taste.

So what now for Smartisan? Either the startup crew will have to live up to their own hype and create some quality hardware on which to ship their Android skin – as Xiaomi has done with great success – or it’s just doomed to be one of thousands of Android ROMs out there that a tiny minority of tweakers will bother to ‘flash’ (a difficult process) to their phones.

Presumably, as with other Android ROMs, Smartisan will later be adapted for other phones.

The pair created a company that caters to the needs of those customers. Imagineers makes its own 3D-printer, which retails for $1,000 and is similar to the Makerbot‘s popular Replicator model line. But that’s just the product side of their business. The other half lies in the two main services Imagineers provides.

Low-cost prototyping

The first is low-cost rapid prototyping. Chen and Gu say this market is saturated in the US, but it still has a lot of room to grow in China. On average, if you want less than 20 of something made, they say 3D printing is more cost effective and efficient compared to casting. That’s a good solution for a design firm or R&D department on a tight budget.

(See also: 3D Printer Maker Pirate3D Now Aims for $1 Million on Kickstarter)

Their second service is system integration. For example, a company can pay Imagineers to install three of their own 3D printers, one $300,000 high-precision full-color printer, and a suite of software for scanning and 3D design. They’ll even teach you how to use all of it. Chen and Gu say it only takes about five minutes to learn how to scan an object with 123D Catch and about a day to nail down the basics of Caxa, a Chinese design program. Right now, they say software is a bottleneck for the 3D printing industry because it’s not easy to use.

Eye on Chinese schools

The market for system integration includes engineers and designers, but Imagineers also found a less obvious niche: students. They’ve already worked with two high schools in China to install the above package for kids taking design courses. They even write the curriculum. While they hope to get the technology in the hands of more students, Chen admits it would be easier if individual schools in China had more control over their own funds.

Imagineers is only one year old, but they have big plans for the long term. They say today’s leading 3D printer manufacturers, Stratasys and 3D Systems, aren’t innovating anymore. Chen and Gu say the future market will shift from rapid prototyping to manufacturing final parts. They foresee big centralized 3D printing factories, where designers can remotely design and use more advanced and precise 3D printers in the cloud, what they call “intelligent processing and control.”

The pair are based at Tsinghua University in Beijing, from which they got a one-time funding of about RMB 200,000 (about $33,000) and have access to the school’s other resources. It seems they’re getting into the market at the right time. The Chinese government is throwing money at 3D printing, possibly fearing the technology could up-end its manufacturing industry. Chen says:

The Chinese government wants to promote 3D printing, but they don’t know how to do it. All they have is money.

Not the Xiaomi TV – yet. This is the Android-based Xiaomi Box interface on a generic TV.

After selling over seven million Android-based smartphones in 2012, it seems that China’s Xiaomi is now looking at the big screen. Leaked images circulating on Sina Weibo show the backside and packaging for what looks to be a 47-inch 1080p HD Xiaomi TV.

The purported Xiaomi TV packaging was revealed by one Weibo user over the weekend who then also posted two images of the rear of the TV, bearing Xiaomi’s simple logo:

We reached out to Xiaomi in Beijing, but the company declined to comment.

Xiaomi also has an Android-based stream-to-TV box, which launched in March after months of regulatory delays. Presumably the TV has the same software and main features as that Xiaomi Box, so the Box would not be needed with the Xiaomi TV. A launch by Xiaomi could be imminent with mass production seeming to be under way.

Smart TVs are proving popular in China and Japan, and other young Chinese companies have jumped on the trend to launch their first ever TV hardware, such as video-streaming site LeTV with its new SuperTV models.

(Photos: Weibo user @Only_搞机)

1. Pick a market you want to serve, and plan for 20 years. SoHelpful.me‘s Kevin Dewalt explains what separates happy from unhappy entrepreneurs. A “deep intrinsic empathy” for your customers and long-term thinking are the most common factors in the happy segment.
2. Know your priorities. Angel investor Steven Price advises startups to prioritize features that are simple and differentiate them from competitors, and leave complex, standard features for later.
3. Investors’ default answer is “no.” Angel investor Benjamin Joffe explained how to deal with rejection and the “show high interest then stall” (SHITS) tactic used by investors.
4. Ask for advice, get money. Joffe also says, rather than asking investors for money outright, seek their advice, first. Once they have spent time advising you, they feel more psychologically invested, which could lead to actual investment.
5. Data, not software or media, is king. Red Pagoda Resources‘ Andy Mok posits that the “content is king” mantra is no longer true.
6. No school and no incubation program can guarantee you success. Filmmaker-turned-entrepreneur Tan Siok Siok, the least conventional of all the speakers, dispels the myth that a good startup incubator is a sure-fire path to prosperity–in a room full of incubator mentors and participants.
7. Hire people who are smarter than you. This one from angel investor Philip Beck is pretty self-explanatory, but the humility required can be difficult for some entrepreneurs.
8. Ask your mentors if they have mentors. The often echoed motto, “advice is free, and you get what you pay for,” means entrepreneurs should be wary of who they solicit for wisdom. One of the best ways to vet a mentor or coach, according to Beck, is to ask them who their mentors are or were.
9. Be afraid when you get funding. Angel investor Richard Robinson says this is no time to relax. On the contrary, that’s when you should be most eager to impress.
10. Take care of yourself. It’s easy to overwork, and it’s likely not worth it. Robinson says anything beyond 50 hours per week moves into the negative side of costs versus benefits. Use that time to get ample sleep, exercise, and eat a proper diet.

And there you have it. Now that you’ve heard all their advice, here’s mine. If you’re an entrepreneur, take all advice with a grain of salt, especially investors. They want something from you, too, and they will tell you what is in their best interests. What do you think? Can all the advice here be taken at face value? I’m asking that both hypothetically and literally, so leave us a comment if you want to pitch in.

This time, they were involved in an online gambling service — gambling is illegal in China outside a few special spots like Macau — that reportedly raked in millions of RMB (hundreds of thousands of dollars) before police discovered it and made 19 arrests, including Li and Jun.

It seems that originally, the men had simply decided to launch their own web games company after their release from prison, but unfortunately, the company was unsuccessful and gamers showed little interest in their games. It was then that Zhang Shun suggested the company make a strategic pivot and become a gambling platform. Li and the other partners agreed, and soon their company was making money. Of course, it was also breaking the law. Li and Zhang, acutely aware of the potential repercussions, shut the site down and tried to destroy the evidence when police launched a nationwide gambling crackdown in 2012. But it was too late; the police were already onto them and in early 2013, the last of the suspects was rounded up.

Currently the men are awaiting trial again. In a way, you can sympathize with them — doing a gaming startup is hard! — but at the same time, I have some advice for Zhang and Li the next time they get out of prison (which isn’t likely to be anytime soon): maybe stick to offline ventures for now on. And, uh, perhaps brush up on your local laws, guys.

(Tencent Tech via TechWeb)

China was on public holiday for three of the working days this week, but we still managed to dig up plenty of new tech developments and put forth some opinions of our own. Here are the most popular ones:

1. The New York Times Gets Xiaomi Way, Way Wrong

It seems that the ‘old gray lady’ of the media world needs a new pair of spectacles, because this tedious New York Times article seems to be only able to see startup phone maker Xiaomi through the prism of Apple. (No, not that Prism).

2. Why Don’t More Chinese Internet Companies Expand Overseas?

Check out my colleague’s five reasons for this tech industry insularity.

3. Apple’s iOS 7 is Copying Other Operating Systems, Say Chinese Net Users

On one of China’s top tech blogs, 60 percent of respondents to a poll reckon that Apple’s iOS 7 has “plagiarized” Android and Windows Phone in some way. Personally I think that’s nonsense; iOS 7 looks really good and will hopefully – I’m talking as an Android user here – shake up some of the more eye-stabbingly awful Android skins out there [1].

4. China Leads Asia in VC Investments in E-Commerce; Sadly Acquisitions Are a Rare Sight [STATS]

From 2010 to the present day there has been more than $6.9 billion in investments made in Asian e-commerce sites. While China attracts far and away the majority of that investment, check out how few acquisitions there are – that really can’t be healthy.

5. WeChat Under Suspicion from Indian Intelligence Bureau

The Hindu reports that Indian intelligence officials have told the National Security Advisor that apps like China-made WeChat pose “new cyber threats.”

6. WeChat Competitor Feixin: 100 Million Users, But Low Activity Levels

It’s not often that a mobile telco – those beastly behemoths – is ahead of the curve on innovation, but China Mobile was doing group messaging before WeChat made it cool in the country. But its app is now looking like a bit of a wasteland.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you might like to subscribe to our China RSS feed.

Exactly what those threats are isn’t clear, but the service will be investigated by India’s Ministry of Home Affairs and the Department of Telecom before a final call is made on whether or not WeChat will be allowed to operate permanently in India, according to a source in The Hindu article.

Although WeChat’s Chinese origins — the service is operated by Tencent — are probably part of the Indian government’s reason for concern, in fairness the country also recently initiated an investigation of Canadian company Blackberry, citing similar concerns. India, it seems, is planning to be quite cautious about what foreign service providers are allowed to operate within its borders.

(via The Hindu Business Line)

Right now, Beijing China Mobile customers who’d like to can visit any of six designated China Mobile shops to switch their SIM cards out for new ones that will allow them to connect their phones to their bank accounts. Soon, Beijing’s public transportation system will let them swipe those phones to pay for bus fares around the city. No transit cards required.

But of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg; China Mobile and the banks have big plans for the virtual wallets (which use NFC technology) and are already working with NFC-enabled handsets like Samsung’s Galaxy S4, the HTC One, and some Huawei and ZTE models to integrate the system. By September, China Mobile says there will be twenty handset models that fully support the virtual wallet system.

In Beijing, a few upscale spots like Starbucks and Häagen-Dazs already support mobile payment, but as China Mobile’s system proliferates — assuming it catches on with users, which it might not — expect that number to jump up quite a bit. Has the era of waving your phone at everything dawned in China? We’ll have to wait and see.

(Incidentally, between this and its next-gen 4G network potentially coming online, this is looking to be an impressive second half of the year for China Mobile!)

(Beijing News via TechWeb)

Last week we wrote about some of the new features rumored to be coming to version 5.0 of WeChat, but the National Business Daily is now reporting on one feature we hadn’t previously heard of: WeChat Bodyguard. Bodyguard, which was confirmed in an interview with Tencent vice-director Ding He on Wednesday, will protect WeChat and its mobile payment feature from hacking and malware.

Needless to say, this is being interpreted by many as a first jab at mobile security incumbent Qihoo 360, which currently dominates China’s web and mobile security markets. Tencent CEO Pony Ma has reportedly said internally that Tencent must put all its effort into winning the mobile browser and mobile security market, and that puts Qihoo directly in its path.

Of course, the two companies also have a fairly adversarial history. Recently, Qihoo lost a couple of major lawsuits to Tencent, and lost another one a couple years ago. But all that animosity originally dates back to the so-called 3Q war, a dispute that erupted into a major PR flame war after Tencent bundled a bit of security software with its messaging service QQ back in 2010.

So are we on the verge of another 3Q war in the mobile space? There’s no way to be sure, but with Tencent once again bundling security software with a popular chat product, and Qihoo likely still smarting from its recent spankings in court, there are plenty of reasons to believe we could see some sparks fly here, so stay tuned!

(China Business News via TechWeb)

Earlier today we looked at a report that has counted up $6.9 billion in investments among Asian e-commerce sites from 2010 to the present day. A mesmerising $4.8 billion of all that venture capital went to e-stores in China.

Despite that amazing marquee number of $4.8 billion, China’s e-commerce landscape is marred by a woeful lack of acquisitions. Basically, Chinese e-stores either exit via an IPO (where China excels), or struggle on as an independent company. Or die off.

The aforementioned report by venture capital database CB Insights points out this huge disparity. Amidst all that investment in Chinese e-commerce (way ahead of the $978 million poured into such businesses by VCs in India), China is actually dwarfed by India when it comes to deals such as acquisitions:

No deal?

So the problem is that no-one is acquiring fellow Chinese e-stores for their own advancement. It’s an issue seen throughout the entire national web and tech industries. It’s cheaper to throw people at a problem in China. Despite it being a market where an estimated $177 billion will be spent by shoppers in 2013, the nation’s e-commerce giants – like Alibaba, Jingdong (formerly 360Buy), Suning, Tencent, Dangdang – don’t like spending on acquisitions. Here’s the investment and deal volume in the country in the past three years or so:

Inevitably, that VC and buy-out money is going to the core growth areas in online shopping in China, such as clothing stores and daily deals:

Exit = IPO

Looking on the bright side, China’s e-commerce IPO exits are plentiful, with the most recent being B2B marketplace LightInTheBox hitting the New York Stock Exchange just last week. The upcoming IPO that everyone is waiting for will be the biggest tech IPO that China has ever seen – that will happen once Alibaba (which runs market-leading sites like Taobao and Tmall) sets a date. That could value Alibaba at anywhere from $40 billion (the reported valuation based on its recent Yahoo partial stake buy-back) to the fevered heights (in some rather overblown headlines) of closer to $100 billion.

Other possible IPOs include Jingdong, Vancl, and travel booking site Qunar.

But this is the more grim scene in China in terms of buy-out style exits:

Sinophile VCs

China’s top overseas VC in terms of making the most deals in e-commerce in the country is IDG, where they’ve made 11 injections of capital. IDG’s most recent was back in January when it ploughed series A funding into discount shopping aggregator Mizhe.

Click to enlarge a bit.

See the full report on the CB Insights blog.

When I took Zank for a spin, the app hit all the right notes. Registration for the service was very friendly and remarkably quick. The app itself is clear and well-designed, so much so that even though it’s in Chinese, a non-Chinese speaker could probably figure out how to do almost everything the app lets you do (for example, adding an event, viewing someone else’s, liking an event, etc.). It even has a chat function so that you can talk to other people involved if you’re interested in an event. Honestly, aside from the fact that it isn’t a very original concept, I really having nothing bad to say about the app.

I’m not sure how many users the service has now, and have gotten in touch with the Zank team to see if they’ll tell me; I’ll update this post if I hear back. Based on my own experience, I’d say there have to be at least a few hundred users and probably more just in the Beijing area, and the service has more than 20,000 followers on Weibo. But other areas have far fewer; in Harbin, for example, there are currently only four events posted, and two of them are global events that appear for every city. It’s clear the team still has quite a bit of promotional work to do.

Update: This article was updated significantly to reflect the fact that the app seems to be being subtly marketed to gays, something we hadn’t noticed at first.

But it’s not all good news for Asia’s e-commerce businesses. India and China take much of the money, and both deals and funding rounds are way down from a peak in mid-2011. Furthermore, Asian startups – even in this vital e-shopping space – see tiny exits. Indeed, CB Insights calls the exit environment “flaccid”. Most of these web buy-outs in Asia are really small – usually under $50 million. Forget the blockbuster hundreds of millions or billions of dollars being thrown around in Silicon Valley. Here’s the overview graph:

India rings in the deals

In terms of buy-out deals (which includes IPO exits as well), Indian e-commerce ventures lead the way in this region. India has seen 154 e-store deals since 2010, with 25 deals coming in 2013 already. These 154 business transactions are worth $978 million from 2010 to this point in 2013.

Just two weeks ago, India’s second largest homegrown online store, Snapdeal, acquired a smaller rival. Snapdeal is also well funded with $50 million from eBay in its pockets. The larger Flipkart site also helps make India a red hot web shopping market – and one that’s ripe for lots of consolidation this year.

China leads in terms of investments – but we’ll look into China in more depth in a separate post later today (Update: China’s here!).

Here’s how this sector in India leads in terms of deal value:

And this is the remarkable uptick in this category in India so far this year:

MakeMyTrip (NASDAQ:MMYT) was India’s biggest ever tech IPO exit so far, worth $447 million in 2010.

E-shopping in fashion

So, what kind of web store is proving the hottest for business deals? Inevitably it’s clothing sites. Just look at the huge amount of money being thrown at Rocket Internet’s fashion store Zalora, which netted $100 million last month. But thankfully the nature of these e-commerce acquisitions is changing, as shown by the growth of multitudinous web stores that fit into the ‘other’ category in this graph:

Interestingly, clothing leads in India’s e-commerce sector (accounting for involvement in 44 percent of business deals), while the travel sector is second (15 percent).

Exit, pursued by a bear

Most of Asia’s e-commerce exits have been small – 60 percent of them valued at less than $50 million. Only major ones like China’s VIPshop (NYSE:VIPS) and India’s MakeMyTrip have bucked the trend as they IPO’d.

2012 saw an upturn in such exits, with a peak of 29. But there have been 14 so far this year, so 2013 might be even better. Here are charts for exit valuations and their share by geographic location:

Tiger economy

You could say that Asia’s online shopping sector is a tiger economy because the leading venture capital firm in the past three years is Tiger Global Management. It has been involved in 25 deals in 18 companies in the past three years – most of them in India. Accel Partners is second and Intel Capital is third:

Click to enlarge a bit.

See the full report on the CB Insights blog.

Ms. Wu says she bought some Kiehl’s eye cream from the site during a promotional event earlier this month, but noticed that the product was slightly different when compared to the ones she usually buys at the Kiehl’s retail shop. When she took her online purchase in to ask about it, “the worker there said it was obviously a fake.”

You can see some of the differences in the image below; the tin she bought from Jingdong is on the left and the legit tin is on the right. As you can see, the labels aren’t just different; the creams apparently use wholly different ingredients.

Wu wasn’t the only one with this problem, either. Following the sale, many customers had complaints about the cream they recieved, and a QQ group Wu created to help organize the dissatisfied consumers grew to more than 250 people within just a few days. But Wu says Jingdong won’t accept returns unless the customers have a test report that proves there’s a problem with the product, and chemical composition tests aren’t the easiest thing for everyday consumers to get their hands on.

(Update: The following quote is from the company):

As part of Jingdong’s commitment to offering China’s best online shopping experience, we stringently select and monitor our suppliers to ensure that all products offered on our B2C platform are genuine. We have investigated this matter and based on certification documents provided by our supplier we are confident that the Kiehl’s eye cream products in question received by our customers were genuine. Jingdong will continue to strive for complete customer satisfaction.

Jingdong told the Beijing News that their products are all legitimate and provided by suppliers, but declined to comment on its supplier’s relationship with Kiehl’s or to say who its supplier is. The company also said the differences Ms. Wu experienced could be just be because of the minor changes that can occur in different batches of cream. (We’ve contacted Jingdong to see if it has any additional comment on the matter).

Kiehl’s told the paper that Jingdong is not an authorized online seller of Kiehl’s products, so it’s not clear who the supplier actually is here.

Recently, we wrote about the difficulties Taobao has had in getting rid of fake Adidas products, but Taobao is a C2C platform, and its many users/vendors can be tough to control despite the company’s best efforts. Jingdong has a lot more control over its B2C platform, so if it turns out the company really was selling fakes — intentionally or not — that could really hurt its reputation and possibly push it even further behind e-commerce frontrunner Alibaba.

(Beijing News via Sina Tech)

• Lack of interest. Frankly, many Chinese internet companies simply don’t care about overseas markets because China’s market is so huge and is likely to continue growing rapidly over the next decade. With a giant market at home that promises lots of opportunity, why even bother taking a risk overseas?
• Lack of expertise. In the same way that many Western internet companies failed to properly adapt to the Chinese internet and thus were beaten by domestic competitors, Chinese internet companies face similar challenges when expanding abroad. Adapting Chinese services to the needs and wants of overseas users is difficult and expensive, and often finding the personnel necessary to do it properly isn’t easy.
• Political problems. Chinese law can sometimes pose problems for companies hoping to expand overseas. As Tencent learned in February, for example, China’s requirement that all Chinese companies use maps that claim all disputed territory as Chinese isn’t something that goes over well in Vietnam (which also claims some of that same territory). But to remove the offending bits of the map would violate Chinese law. Some companies prefer to avoid these kinds of issues entirely by staying within China, where there’s only one political position you need to worry about.
• “Brand China” is poison. I wrote about this a while ago, but in part because of stereotypes and in part because of very real issues like government censorship and China’s political scuffles with its neighbors, a lot of non-Chinese web users simply don’t want to use Chinese services, and in fact will go to some lengths to avoid them. Simply being a Chinese tech company in and of itself puts you at a disadvantage in the international marketplace, so many companies choose not to bother trying to row against the tide.
• Entrenched competition. While many Chinese internet services have evolved into pretty unique platforms, most of the big ones started more or less as copies of successful Western services. But those Western services are still around, and outside China they have way higher user counts, way better brand recognition, and way more momentum. Chinese tech companies generally have enough competition to worry about domestically; trying to take on someone like Google internationally is hugely time-consuming and expensive.So, again, many companies choose to focus on the more-than-big-enough domestic market and just not bother trying to fight entrenched overseas competitors.

Of course, even given these issues, many Chinese companies are taking at least early steps towards expanding overseas. Baidu, for example, has been pretty active in Southeast Asia, with a research lab in Singapore, a portal site in Indonesia, and a security suite for Thailand, among other things. Tencent, of course, has the aforementioned WeChat that’s doing quite well overseas, and it likely won’t be long until other companies decide the risks are worth the potential rewards and follow suit.

And if the early response is any indication, Chinese gamers feel, if anything, more strongly about the PS4. Game consoles may be technically illegal in China, but there’s a vast gray market for the machines, and anyone who wants a console can buy one quite easily at electronics shops in any major city. They may be gray market imports, but most of them were legitimately purchased in other territories like Hong Kong, so they do represent actual sales for the gaming companies. And despite the comparative popularity of the Xbox 360 in China, Microsoft, it seems, has shot itself in quite squarely in the foot when it comes to the XBox One.

First off, the $100 price difference is a big deal to Chinese gamers, most of whom are young and aren’t making boatloads of money. Neither console is cheap, but $100 can go a long way in China, so gamers will have to ask themselves why they should spend an extra $100 on the Xbox One. And unfortunately for Microsoft, there doesn’t seem to be any reason. The console’s always-online restriction for all games is likely to make it virtually impossible to play even single-player games on the machine in China (where Microsoft won’t have official servers; connections to overseas servers can be quite spotty in China sometimes). And it’s probably also going to make it more difficult for Chinese vendors to jailbreak Xboxes to play pirated games, which is something many Chinese gamers want. The consoles being hacked are still machines that were originally purchased from Microsoft, some the company does profit a bit even from the sale of pirate Xboxes; if the new machines can’t be hacked, they’re likely to sell less well in China.

Although there are still months before the consoles are actually released, the early response in China’s gaming press seems to indicate that Sony has won the war quite completely. Take, for example, major gaming portal Netease Games: its top two stories are about the Xbox One and the PS4, but the PS4 story has attracted three times as many comments. And, tellingly, the Netease chose to print the PS4′s price in the local currency — RMB — for that headline, whereas the Xbox One’s price is in USD.

That might seem thin, but if you look at the actual comments on the stories, they bear out the theory that Microsoft’s advantage is dead. The most popular comment on the Xbox article is: “There’s nothing to say here, Sony has won.” The second most popular comment begins “Garbage!” before launching into a profane rant about Microsoft’s policy of limiting secondhand game sales.

On the Playstation article, the top comment is a rebuke towards another commenter who tried to rally people against Sony on nationalistic grounds (in general, Chinese net users don’t tend to be enthusiastic about Japan or Japanese companies). The other top comments are mostly praise of the PS4, and it’s telling that even the appeal to nationalism apparently isn’t stopping China’s internet hive mind from going with Sony on this one.

No one knows for sure how much this will actually affect either company, since the gray market nature of console sales in China makes them extremely difficult to track accurately. But it’s hard to overstate how easy it is to find game consoles in China despite the fact that they’re “banned”, and I suspect that over the long term, the country amounts for — at the very least — hundreds of thousands of unit sales, and probably more. (I’ve read estimates of a 2-3 million unit install base for the Xbox 360 alone, for example, though I’m not sure how reliable those numbers are). I imagine that folks in Redmond right now are a bit upset with how their E3 keynote was received in the US and Europe, but the company seems to stand to lose a fair share of ground in China, too.

At yesterday’s WWDC conference, Apple unveiled its brand new mobile operating system: iOS 7. It’s a slick-looking beast, no doubt, but in China, the OS reveal raised more than a few questions about Apple’s innovative abilities and whether aspects of the OS had been, ahem, inspired by other software.

Some net users are suggesting that the Cupertino-based company has taken more than a few pages out of Meizu’s design book. The Chinese mobile phone company’s OS Flyme features a very simple, “flat” look that Apple’s new iOS version does resemble a bit. Others have said it’s copying Android more generally, and I must admit that during WWDC several TiA team members also noted the similarities between Apple’s new iOS aesthetics and Google’s white-space-and-thin-fonts design style. And still others, including this Apple fan, think it bears more than a passing resemblance to Windows Phone, too:

Apple, I’m disappointed in you! What have you done to iOS 7? Android + Windows Phone? I don’t know whether I should say it’s copying or just borrowing, but taking calls, unlocking, the photo albums, and even the back end stuff are all like Windows Phone! Unbearable. Until you come out with something better, I think I won’t be using iOS anymore.

In fact, the cries of copying were widespread enough that major tech portal TechWeb put the question to its readers in a front page poll. As I write this, the poll has already collected more than 2,600 responses and it’s sure to be more by the time this post is published. The poll question doesn’t specify a particular source Apple has copied from, and instead asks generally if readers feel the OS has copied from others. Clearly, most do as nearly 60 percent said ‘Yes’:

Of course, being a copycat isn’t necessarily a death sentence or anything. As one clever weibo user pointed out, Steve Jobs once called Android a copy of iOS, but that hasn’t stopped the platform from going on to dominate the global smartphone market.

So what do you think? Is iOS 7 just bits and pieces of other mobile operating systems, or is this an original Apple creation?

Over the past year, Tencent’s WeChat has exploded. So much so, in fact, that you might forget that other mobile messaging services were actually on the scene first. One of them, China’s Mobile’s (NYSE:CHL) Feixin (its official English name is Fetion but I’m not going to call it that because that’s a terrible name), has been around since 2011, but a recent report in the 21st Century Business Herald shows that sadly, the company doesn’t have much to show for that.

Following the theory about college students demonstrated by Facebook’s rapid expansion in the US, China Mobile has been pushing Feixin hard on college campuses, with the theory being that if students adopt it, sooner or later, other users follow. And the push hasn’t been for naught; the 21st Century Business Herald cites data claiming the service has nearly 100 million monthly active users, many of them college students.

Unfortunately, the paper also says that its own investigation has shown that the students who do have the app installed still don’t use it very often. Chief complaints among students are that the service doesn’t have enough other people on it, that the user experience isn’t smooth enough, and that it charges money to respond to text messages. Tencent’s WeChat, on the other hand, is free, has double Feixin’s active user count, and offers a pretty slick user experience.

So if Feixin is the inferior product, why do students even have it installed? Apparently, at many campuses it’s one of the primary modes of communication between students and instructors in the event that a whole class needs to be notified of something at the last minute. For example, in a 21st Century Business Herald investigation at Renmin University among grad students, the paper found that nearly all the grad students it spoke to saw Feixin as a kind of notification center rather than a tool for chatting with friends.

Although that’s not China Mobile’s goal, it might not be bad as a consolation prize. Given that the company has had longer than Tencent to create and promote a compelling chat product and still hasn’t been able to capture that market, I doubt the company has much hope of overtaking WeChat now that it’s extremely widespread and popular. But as long as people are using the service for some reason — even if it’s just to get notifications from work or school — then that’s a start, and something China Mobile can work to build on in the future.

(21st Century Business Herald via Sina Tech)

Adidas is one of the most famous foreign athletic brands in China, but that status is both a gift and a curse when it comes to Taobao, China’s biggest C2C e-commerce platform. The German company has been battling sellers of fake Adidas shoes and clothes on the site for years, and while the US removed Taobao from its list of notorious IP rights violators last year, a recent China Business report reveals that Adidas is still fighting fakers and in fact has largely given up on trying to eliminate them.

The problems are twofold. First, although taking down the large sellers is often effective — the report quotes a big shop owner who has decided to stop selling fake Adidas shoes after getting a takedown notification and the threat of having his shop closed permanently by Taobao. But smaller vendors can be difficult to find, and when they are found and banned, they pop back up again immediately. The same shop owner told the paper that some people simply register multiple shop IDs at the same time so that if one gets noticed and banned, they can simply move their counterfeit items on to the next shop.

For that reason, Adidas has taken to mostly going after the major shops — the ones that would lose too much in reputation and customer feedback to be able to make the switch. But as for eliminating fake Adidas shoes completely from the site, the China Business article employs a Chinese idiom that seems particularly apt: “Even a prairie fire cannot destroy the grass.” And indeed, no matter how much companies like Adidas do to keep counterfeit versions of their products from popping up on Taobao, there always seem to be more available (as you can see for yourself if you scroll through the search results for “Adidas”). Unless Taobao itself takes a more hardline stance (and maybe creates some way to detect counterfeit vendors automatically) it seems unlikely that Adidas is going to be liberated from its perpetual battle with Taobao fakes anytime soon.

UPDATE: Here’s a statement from Alibaba:

Alibaba Group has continuously demonstrated its commitment to intellectual property protection, including the establishment of formal cooperation with law enforcement agencies in China to jointly tackle the issue both online and also offline; in 2012, Alibaba Group provided information involving 72 brands to law enforcement that resulted in the arrests of 324 suspects from a total of 43 counterfeiting rings. The amount of merchandise involved in the takedowns totaled RMB170 million. Going forward, we will continue to execute a comprehensive multi-pronged approach to protecting intellectual property in collaboration with IP owners and government agencies in an effort to get at the heart of the problem and create a healthy and sustainable online environment.

(China Business via Sina Tech)

China is preparing its fifth and largest ever manned spacecraft launch tomorrow. Coming a full year after the 13-day Shenzhou 9 mission, tomorrow’s take-off of Shenzhou-10 is scheduled for 5:38 p.m Beijing time (June 11), according to Xinhua state news agency. The space trip will last 15 days and will transport three taikonauts – two men and one woman – into the country’s record books.

As with most of China’s major launches, the newest Shenzhou craft will blast off from the Jiuquan Launch Center in the Gobi desert in Inner Mongolia province.

CNN correspondent Nic Robertson is the only western journalist at the launch center ahead of Tuesday’s launch. He says on Twitter that propellant fueling begins this afternoon.

The mission’s core aim is to head back to the Tiangong 1 space laboratory to perform medical testing. It’s likely this will be the last launch until 2015 when China begins to build its next-generation Tiangong 2 space lab.

Last year’s crew was made up of China’s first female astronaut, but Liu Yang will not be the one going into orbit again this year. This time, China’s leading female taikonaut is Wang Yaping, whom Xinhua says is the daughter of a farming family in eastern China.

China’s first ever manned space mission was in 2003 aboard the Shenzhou-5.

(Unmodified version of photo is by Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

Created earlier this year, the Beijing-based startup aims to ease your ordering process by churning out a list of recommended dishes for you, along with the average price per pax within 10 seconds. All that is required of you is to indicate if the app has accurately detected your location and how many people you are dining with. Don’t like the combination given? Just shake your phone and a new list will be generated until you’re satisfied.

And if you prefer to have some control over what is on the list and would like to remove a particular dish from the list, all you need to do is to swipe to the right and that is done (pictured right). Still prefer to have full control over what goes into your stomach? Fanqie Kuaidian also boasts full menus for most restaurants in the four cities listed above, and also indicates which dishes are most popular, so now you will know which dishes are “must-order” according to patrons who have visited the restaurant.

You can also take tantalizing photographs of the dishes and upload according to what you have ordered. It also works as a food journal (pictured right) where you can reminisce on how that piece of peking duck was roasted to perfection and melts in your mouth without having to chew. You can also contribute to the dish’s ranking by giving it a thumbs up or down.

Aside from recommending what dishes you should order, the app also includes little pockets of information to educate the diner. For instance, if you are dining at a Korean restaurant, it explains why Korean chopsticks are flat and made of metal; it also tells you what would be good to consume for the current season, as well as its nutritional value. And the app is designed in such a way that the more you use it, the more it understands your eating habits. So it will be able to recommend better dishes every single time you whip out the app to aid in your order.

The startup also claims that its creation has become one of the top recommended apps by Apple within just one month of launch, and it has been featured on third-party Android app store WanDouJia as one of the best designed apps.

So if you happen to be in those four cities in China and are spoiled for choice (provided if you read Chinese, of course) when it comes to ordering food, do give the app a go on your iPhone or your Android device.

Xiaomi founder Lei Jun wearing a black shirt and jeans and thus totally copying Steve jobs.

It’s pleasing to see that the overseas media is finally paying some attention to Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. But unfortunately, the New York Times’s latest piece on the company was, I think, extremely misleading. So while I have nothing but respect for author David Barboza, I feel I can’t help but rip this one apart.

The whole article is based on the premise that Xiaomi is aping Apple and Steve Jobs, and on a surface level, this is pretty true. Both companies sell smartphones. Both founders favor black shirts with jeans. But beyond that, it all starts to break down. So let’s go through this article bit by bit and see what we can say about it. It begins:

China is notorious for its knockoffs. But now comes a knockoff of one of the gods of American ingenuity: Steven P. Jobs.

In a country where products like iPhones are made but rarely invented, Lei Jun — entrepreneur, billionaire and professed Jobs acolyte — is positioning himself and his company as figurative heirs of Mr. Jobs. The Chinese media have nicknamed his company, Xiaomi, the “Apple of the East.”

The article certainly begins provocatively, with an assertion that Lei Jun is just “a knockoff” of Steve Jobs. Yes, there are some aesthetic similarities in their press conference styles (both in terms of clothing and in terms of presentation), and I highly doubt that’s a coincidence. But beyond that, are they so similar that Lei Jun, a longtime China tech industry veteran, can really be called a knockoff of Jobs? Since the late 90s, Lei Jun has been working and investing almost exclusively in software and web platforms while Jobs was pushing Apple hardware; Lei’s career cetainly hasn’t mimicked Jobs’s. Even the aesthetic argument is questionable; the black-shirt-and-jeans look Jobs preferred almost exclusively is something Lei Jun employs only on occasion (here’s a launch event, for example, where he wore a suit). And Lei typically prefers short-sleeve polo shirts to Jobs’ long-sleeve turtlenecks.

Moreover, the term “the Apple of China” is not something that I have ever read in the Chinese press in my two years of covering the company for Tech in Asia. I don’t doubt that some Chinese media outlet has, at some point, called Xiaomi this. But it’s certainly not a common nickname, and when I did a search for the term in Chinese, every result I could find was just quoting the New York Times article. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a single instance of this term’s use in the Chinese press before June 5 (the day after the NYT article was published) on Google News.

But those are really just minor gripes. Let’s move on to the big stuff.

The title is a stretch, by almost any measure. But Mr. Lei nonetheless is carefully cultivating a Jobsian image here, right down to his jeans and dark shirts. He is also selling millions of mobile phones that look a lot like iPhones. Chinese consumers — and deep-pocketed investors overseas — seem to be believers.

The opening line about Lei Jun is something that I would actually sort of agree with, at least on an aesthetic level. But Xiaomi phones look like iPhones? That’s nonsense. Yes, they’re black rectangles with screens, but that’s true of virtually every smartphone on the market. Beyond that, where are the similarities? iPhones are all glass and metal; Xiaomi phones are pure plastic. As someone who owned an iPhone, then switched to a Xiaomi, and recently moved back to an iPhone, I feel quite confident saying that the phones have a very different overall look and feel. If Xiaomi is trying to make smartphones by copying the iPhone’s design, as Barboza is suggesting here, it is truly awful at copying.

Skipping down a bit, past the part where the NYT suggests Xiaomi is pronounced “SHAO-mee” — it isn’t; “SHIAO-mee” would be closer — we come to the real meat of the piece:

Mr. Lei, for his part, hardly discourages comparisons to Apple and Mr. Jobs. And why would he? Founded by a group of Chinese engineers three years ago, his company sold seven million mobile phones last year by using designs that mimic the look and feel of the iPhone and using marketing that seems right out of Apple’s playbook.

As I previously mentioned, the devices don’t look particularly alike (if we take as a given that all smartphones are small rectangles with screens). And they feel absolutely nothing alike. Seriously, try picking up an iPhone in one hand and a Xiaomi in the other. The materials are very different. The weight is very different. And if you actually start using the devices, the user experience is very different, too. Apple is all about simplicity; a clear and streamlined user experience that’s the same across the board. Xiaomi is all about customizability; users can tweak almost everything about their phones, or even abandon the preinstalled MIUI operating system (a slick Android skin) altogether if they so choose. That is, if anything, the polar opposite of Apple’s approach.

And Xiaomi’s marketing isn’t particularly similar to Apple’s, either. As I mentioned previously, there are certainly aesthetic similarities in terms of their presentation styles, but Xiaomi’s buzz marketing through its continued use of very limited sales windows is a far cry from Apple’s global, buy-it-everywhere blowouts. When was the last time Apple announced a new iPhone, and then said there would be a few hundred thousand available for a limited preorder? Oh right, it was never.

But here’s the real difference between Apple and Xiaomi: price. Apple markets its products as luxuries, especially in China. They’re expensive, and if you don’t like it or you can’t afford it, then they’re not for you, period. Xiaomi, in total contrast, claims it is selling its phones at no profit to keep the price as low as possible. Whether that’s actually true is debatable, but that’s certainly a gigantic difference in the way the two companies market their products, and it has been a huge part of the reason Xiaomi has been so successful so fast and spawned a whole group of copycats selling cheap-but-powerful smartphones.

This does come up a bit later in the NYT piece:

Skeptics say the company produces low-price iPhone imitations with no significant software or hardware advantages. They also say the company faces stiff challenges from Apple and Samsung, which are in a position to offer low-price smartphones.

Indeed, Apple and Samsung could offer low-price, high-performance smartphones in China, but they haven’t (Samsung does offer low cost phones but none I’m aware of that perform as well as Xiaomi for the price). Why are they now potentially considering doing so? Because of Xiaomi’s success in that market.

And while it’s tough to argue specifics with the anonymous “skeptics” cited in the piece, I can say that personally, I was introduced to the Xiaomi as a die-hard iPhone user and, to be quite frank, someone who really disliked Xiaomi founder Lei Jun. Before using it, I called the Xiaomi an iPhone clone, and I wrote in the article I just linked that I was hoping the company would fail. But after actually seeing the Xiaomi in action, I had to admit I was wrong, and indeed was so convinced that I bought one. After recently switching back to iPhone 5, I’ve been unimpressed enough that I’m probably headed back to Xiaomi for whatever my next smartphone will be.

But since the anonymous “skeptics” in the NYT article apparently couldn’t find any hardware or software advantages for the Xiaomi, allow me to list just a few:

• Easily replaceable/swappable battery: if your battery dies, you can just buy another one for cheap, rather than having to pay for Apple’s costly repairs or buy a new phone altogether.
• Easily replaceable/swappable SIM card: unlike the iPhone, removing the Xiaomi’s SIM card doesn’t require any special equipment other than your hands.
• Easily replaceable/swappable memory card: so you can choose your own card for data storage, switch out different cards if you need to carry a lot of data with you, etc. (At least in the Xiaomi M1; newer models have sadly dropped this feature).
• Multicolor, swappable case backs on the latest Xiaomi phones.
• Total customizability: in terms of what you can change and control, the difference between MIUI and iOS is really like night and day.
• Everything’s swappable: Don’t like the MIUI keyboard? Download a new one! Don’t like the iOS keyboard? Deal with it, that’s the keyboard you get.

Now, it’s not my intent to say that Xiaomi’s phones are better than iPhones. That’s purely a matter of opinion, and there are obviously advantages to taking Apple’s tightly-controlled approach to hardware and OS design. It really comes down to personal taste. My point is simply that there are major differences between these two phones, and if the New York Times‘s “skeptics” didn’t find any then frankly they’re idiots.

And bizarrely, later in the article Barboza himself points out more differences between the Apple and Xiaomi’s design and marketing approaches:

Xiaomi also outsources designs and features online from its so-called Mi-Fans, and releases a new version of the operating system every Friday, to add new features and keep the Mi-Fans excited.

Can somebody please remind me of the last time that Apple did something like that?

It is perhaps telling that throughout the entire piece, which repeatedly suggests Xiaomi is just copying Apple, Barboza doesn’t get a single quote from any named source who’s willing to say as much. Everyone quoted in the article seems to have only nice things to say about Xiaomi, and Lei Jun himself is the only person who makes any kind of Apple comparison.

This has been a difficult piece for me to write, because I greatly admire most of Barboza’s work at the New York Times. But I have to admit that if the byline were someone else’s, I’d probably have written something even harsher. At best, the NYT article seems like an attempt to shoehorn a very interesting company into the pre-conceived narrative that any Chinese company doing something well must be copying it from someone (probably Apple). At worst, it’s a total hack job that seems ready to condemn an entire company as copycats because one of its founders admires Steve Jobs and occasionally wears similar pants.

Either way, it’s very disappointing that this is the part of the Xiaomi story that’s being presented to American audiences who, frankly, might be interested to learn that there’s a company making more customizable phones with iPhone-level hardware performance at less than half the iPhone’s price.

(Interestingly, I’m not the only one who thinks so. This Forbes article by Rebecca Fannin makes a similar point, although her claim that WeChat has 800 million users is pretty baffling.)

Some big moves were both made and rumored in China this week. We hope you didn’t miss any of them, but in case you did, the biggest of the big are listed below. And also a story about sheep, because I simply could not resist.

1. After Alibaba Investment, Sina Weibo Puts Daily Deals in the Social Stream

As expected, Weibo and Alibaba are getting closer and closer following the big Alibaba investment. But can they continue this pattern without making Weibo users feel constantly marketed to?

2. Alibaba Among 3 Suitors Vying to Make China’s Next Big Video Site Acquisition?

Speaking of Alibaba and investments, the company is rumored to be in the running for a PPTV buyout, too. That would certainly make China’s video market a bit more interesting.

3. You Can Pay for Laptops and Smartphones Using Sheep in West China

This isn’t really important news, but it’s the first tech story I’ve ever written that sheep play a prominent role in. Plus, it’s been really popular on our site this week.

4. Beijing Government Makes a Taxi Finding App With One Ludicrous Flaw

This is exactly why the facepalm was invented.

5. Finally, the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite and Fire HD Launch Today in China

After lots of speculation and rumors, the wait is finally over. You can buy the Kindle e-reader and Android-based tablet in China!

6. China’s First Tech IPO of 2013 Has Just Hit the New York Stock Exchange

Tech stock geeks have a new Chinese ticker to geek out over: NYSE:LITB. And so far, it’s doing really well.

7. YouTube Founders Have Made a Chinese Clone of Vine – And It’s Really Good

Vine gets a China clone. But it comes from some of the guys who made Youtube, and it turns out it’s really good!

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

Last week we wrote about online grocery store BenLai.com, and how it aims to be the top provider of quality groceries delivered right to your doorstep. So what’s next after you’ve bought all the grocery from there? Here’s what we’ve found: XiaChuFang (下厨房).

XiaChuFang, which means “to cook”, is available on both mobile and web platforms. It carries a wide selection of recipes, from what you can cook for both breakfast and supper to dishes for vegetarians and weight watchers. When you have decided on what you would like to make, it shows a picture of the end product, along with the ratings and the number of people that have made the dish before. Like any other typical recipe platform, it also tells you the ingredients required as well as the step-by-step instructions (pictured above).

But here’s a little detail that I really like about the iPhone app: When you tilt it horizontally, each individual step goes full screen (pictured right), and a swipe across brings you to the next step. I find it really helpful especially when your hands are all greasy and you don’t have to squint your eyes just to make out what the exact instructions are. I’m sure many who do cook would appreciate this.

There are also little tips that guide you to achieving better results. You can also leave comments, suggestions, complaints, and upload pictures of your completed product too. And it also recommends what other dishes you can cook to go with the ones you’ve picked, along with other related recipes they think you might like. And if you like a particular user’s dishes, there’s an option to follow them too.

You can also choose to “collect recipes”, making them into a collection so you can look back and give it a try while standing in front of the fridge racking your brains over what to cook. Another feature that I find really useful is that you can add the ingredients to the “shopping list”. Once you’re done shopping for that particular ingredient, you can cancel it off with just one tap (pictured below).

However it is still a little buggy and at present does not allow you to upload your own step-by-step instructions via the app itself yet. You can do it on the website, but I would think it would actually be more convenient if it supports mobile upload. There is definitely still room for improvement, but I think the app is pretty clean and easy to navigate, and is especially useful for when it gets really messy in the kitchen.

And yes, the best way to know what’s really going through that digestive system of yours is to take control of what is being added during the cooking process. If you do cook often and would like to give the app a try, you can visit its website here, or download on your mobile device, which is available on both iOS and Android platforms.

They found some cool new features, but it’s worth pointing out that these features are probably coming only to the Chinese version of the app in the short term, and then to the international version sometime later down the line. And of course, this is just a beta version, the real upgrade hasn’t been released yet, so any and all of this could change before it does. With that said, here’s what they found:

New options for “Companies” and “Subscriptions” in the WeChat address book. The “Subscriptions” option takes you to a page with all the WeChat Public Platform accounts you’re subscribed to follow (see below). It’s not yet clear what the “Companies” option does, but it seems a likely guess that it will take you to a full list of all the companies (as opposed to NGOs, celebrities, fan groups, etc.) that you follow.

No more unread message numbers in WeChat groups. Now, if you have unread messages you’ll just see a little notification flag but no specific number; the idea being that this might help you feel less stressed or behind if you haven’t checked up on the group in a while.

Scanning now includes bar codes, covers, translations, and even your surroundings. You can now scan product bar codes to see a readout of the product and links to ecommerce sites (see below). But that’s not all. You can scan the covers of things like books and CDs to get more information about them. You can scan text in other languages to get an auto-translation of what it says (maybe). And you can even scan your surroundings to get data and feedback about anything interesting in your area. How this all works will be interesting to see in action, but it sure sounds cool.

Shake for video. You can already use WeChat’s “shake” feature to find people in your area or to listen to music, but now you can use it while you’re viewing videos in other apps; WeChat will use the sound to identify the video and then take you to a page that displays more data on it and allows you to easily bookmark it within the app.

User info page now includes “My bookmarks”. Users can now save information, clips, and more from chats to their bookmarks and thus have easy access to them whenever they’d like in the future.

So, that’s what we’ve got for now. It will be interesting to see if all this is there when the new version is officially released, but if so, it looks to be a pretty massive update.

(via QQ Tech, upgrade image source)

The Kindle Fire HD is hidden inside Amazon China store ahead of today’s launch. Click to enlarge.

Though it’s likely that not many Chinese users care all that much, the tech world has nonetheless been awaiting the arrival of Amazon’s Kindle hardware in China most keenly. And now, at long last, it has happened. We’ve found hidden pages on Amazon’s China site that confirm the launch of the Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle Fire HD. The official announcement is set to happen shortly at 4pm local time. (UPDATED at 16:15: Amazon China now confirms it on its frontpage, so we’ve updated headline from ‘Here’s the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite and Fire HD Ready to Launch in China’).

The China Kindle marketplace is working already. Click to enlarge.

Furthermore, one Sina Weibo user with an imported Kindle device has managed to login to the Chinese Kindle marketplace (see here) this afternoon, as pictured below.

As seen on the hidden product pages, the price tags are RMB 849 ($137) for the Kindle Paperwhite, and RMB 1,499 ($243) for the Kindle Fire HD, and a bit extra for the 32GB model.

E-books at the ready

This Kindle Paperwhite launch comes a month after Amazon opened its Android app store in China, which itself came a few weeks after the roll-out of Amazon’s Cloud Drive to Chinese consumers. Both are important platforms that complement Amazon’s hardware. The e-bookstore already launched in the country last December, with viewing of those e-books restricted to Amazon’s smartphone or Mac/Windows apps.

Click to enlarge also.

With an eye to the many Sina Weibo users who access the Twitter-like service via mobile, two of China’s web giants have formed an interesting partnership today. The buddying up deal sees Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) agreeing to promote videos on Sina Weibo from Youku Tudou (NYSE:YOKU), the merged company that runs two of China’s top video sites.

Youku’s announcement points out that 76 percent of Sina Weibo’s daily active users access Weibo through mobile devices; meanwhile, Youku Tudou have around 170 million daily mobile video viewers right now.

The video content promotion will start throughout Weibo in July. The promos will take “multiple forms including through personalized recommendation section embedded between micro-blogging posts.” Less annoyingly – and actually pretty usefully – “search results for movies and TV dramas will provide direct thumbnail links to watch the title instantly”. There’s something that would never happen on Twitter.

Creating and sharing content is at the core of the Internet, and Youku Tudou’s cooperation with social networking sites such as Weibo is a powerful move towards deepening consumers’ online video viewing and sharing experience.

Youku is, by most measurements, China’s top video site, with a mix of user-generated content and Hulu-like streaming of licensed TV and movie content from around the world.

Sina Weibo has over 500 million registered users, but only about 46.3 million of them are daily active users. Plus, many people use third-party Weibo apps, so not all of them will necessarily see the new promoted video content once it comes online.

YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are no stranger to the Chinese market having launched a localized version of social bookmarking site Delicious after their company, AVOS, bought Delicious from Yahoo. But the newest app from Hurley and Chen is on shakier moral ground as it’s basically a clone of six-second video app Vine for the China market. But that’s fine. Vine’s Chinese doppelgänger is called Wanpai, and it brings the video-sharing fun to Chinese social networks Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, and Renren.

Twitter-made Vine app doesn’t support those Chinese services, and probably never will. So Wanpai is nicely adapted to the local market. And adaptation is survival, as anyone with a basic grasp of anthropology – or logic – must realise.

Not only is Wanpai app (which was spotted by TechCrunch) pretty good, it actually works better for me than Vine. Whereas Vine is buggy on Android and its video recording feature is totally broken on my phone – which is not very good in a, you know, video app – Wanpai works fine on my device. Wanpai is available for both iOS and Android. Here’s my first Wanpai video:

In fact, I wish Wanpai would support Twitter so that I can delete the buggy Vine app.

Video-sharing apps have mostly failed in China due to a combination of limited 3G data plans in he country, and a universal lack of incentive to sit through an entire video that will, 99 percent of the time, be disappointingly lame. I’ll admit that I thought they’d be a huge hit in China in 2012, but it didn’t happen. But Vine – I mean Wanpai – might actually make it happen.

China’s Jingdong — the e-commerce site formerly known as 360Buy before a recent rebranding — is moving further into cloud-based services, according to a release yesterday that says the company has launched three new cloud services:

• JD Hosting, which is a web hosting service for Jingdong vendors
• JD Engine, an app development platform
• JZone, a social community for developers (basically just a collection of documents and a BBS forum)

The new services all seem to be a fairly obvious move towards “platformizing” the e-commerce site and allowing developers better access to develop new apps and better ways to integrate third-party products and vendors into the Jingdong ecosystem. Jingdong’s no Taobao, but it’s big enough that I’m sure some developers will be interested in the new tools.

You can rule international developers out, though, as for the moment these Jingdong platforms come in one language only: simplified Chinese. But given that the company’s recent rebranding seems to have come along with a new push to appeal to the international media, I wouldn’t be surprised if over the next few months other languages are added to the new platforms to make them more functional for non-Chinese developers who might want to get in on the Chinese e-commerce action.

In the meantime, if you can read Chinese or just want to try and click things at random and see if it builds an app for you, the services can be located on their own site, Jcloud. And if you’re looking for a more entertaining J-Zone that’s in English, I recommend this one (NSFW language).

Apricot Forest

The medical field is a haven for red tape, especially in China. Between patients, pharmacies, insurance companies, and doctors stands a mountain of paperwork that costs all parties an immense amount of time and money. As you can imagine, any means to cut through some of that bureaucracy could turn out to be very lucrative, so long as it isn’t shut down by the government.

It seems Zhang Yusheng, founder of Apricot Forest (杏树林), might have struck gold. The Beijing-based company publicly launched its iPhone app last month, what he calls an “Evernote for physicians”. Zhang says more than ten thousand users upload hundreds of medical cases into the cloud every day. Now he and his team of 20 developers and physicians are working on Android and iPad versions to be released this month, and looking to go beyond China’s borders, as well. Zhang says, “Our goal is to provide the best mobile apps for physicians to make their work easier and more efficient.”

MedChart (病历夹) is specialized for examination purposes. Replacing a burdensome physical notebook and separate camera, doctors can use their device to take notes and pictures of a patient. That information is then uploaded to the cloud, so the doctors can access it anywhere, including desktop browsers. Once a doctor verifies his professional status and agrees to never share the identity of any patient, he or she can share the data with other physicians using the app, creating a crowd-sourced community of experts.

“Some physicians even have over 100 cases recorded in their phone,” Zhang says. That statement is both encouraging and disconcerting. Even though doctor’s have access to all their patients’ info anyway, they don’t typically walk around with it in their pocket. Zhang trained as a physician in China, but he got his MBA in the US, where he also worked for a big health insurance company. As a result, he understands the security and privacy issues involved with such an endeavor. That’s why he plans to first target Asian countries, where laws about patient confidentiality aren’t quite so strict. He described the United States’ HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) as an obstacle, for example: “To use patient information, there’s very strict rules and regulations, which is not true in other countries.”

Still, there’s still a huge market in Asia for Apricot Forest to thrive in. And even though the laws might be more lax, that doesn’t mean it’s a free-for-all. Zhang says his team takes special care to help doctors protect patient confidentiality, including a built-in editing tool used to redact a patient’s identity should it appear in a photo, such as a name on an X-ray.

He says the response from physicians has been very positive so far. However, they aren’t the folks Apricot Forest makes money off of. The app monetizes via targeted marketing, mainly pharmaceutical companies. “The users are doctors,” Zhang says, “but the clients are pharmacists.”

The company is a year and a half old, and is now in round A funding. Their other two apps are also healthcare-related: one for personalized medical literature and the other a reference for medical work that’s often difficult for doctors to memorize.

“There are so many problems in the Chinese healthcare system that need to be solved,” says Zhang. “So I might keep doing that for another 20 years, then retire, maybe find a college, and start teaching.”

Possible privacy and security issues aside, Zhang seems to have his heart in the right place. In any case, I’ll be happy to sacrifice whatever shred of privacy I haven’t already handed over to Google and Facebook if it means I get quicker, better quality healthcare. As Zhang says, “I think we need more serious apps which can really change the lives of people, or save people’s lives.”

You can download the MedChart iOS app here.

Microsoft’s Bing China denied responsibility yesterday for a data leak in Sogou’s mobile input method that Sogou says is ultimately the fault of Bing and other search engines. “Bing search has not violated the robots.txt agreement,” the company said in a statement.

The madness started earlier this week, when security firm Wu Yun pointed out on Weibo that a new feature of Sogou’s input method software on mobile devices was, ahem, exposing Sogou users publicly. The feature allows users to upload photos and other multimedia to Sogou servers for sharing, but these uploads aren’t necessarily meant to be public. Unfortunately, Wu Yun discovered that they are all searchable via some search engines, including Bing, and users have since dug up some pretty embarrassing photos (including the ones pictured above, edited for nudity/privacy).

Sogou has responded that the problem is search engines violating the robots.txt agreement. Robots.txt is a file that allows websites to disable search engines and other bots from crawling and indexing their sites. For example, in pinyin.cn’s robots.txt file — that’s the server the images from Sogou mobile input are uploaded to — all bots except for a single Google bot are blocked from using the site.

It’s not clear how Bing or other search engines could be indexing the images if they’re not ignoring Sogou’s robots.txt file, but it’s worth noting that the robots.txt convention is just a general agreement, not an actual law. And it isn’t unprecedented for companies to ignore the blocks listed in a robots.txt file; for example, Qihoo 360‘s spiders were set to ignore Baidu’s robots.txt file in a dispute that led to a major lawsuit earlier this year (a Qihoo rep told us that the company respects robots.txt so long as it isn’t being “abused” by competitors).

But whether or not Bing is adhering to Sogou’s robots.txt file is probably of little concern to the people whose, um, data has already been found and shared by the public. Especially that guy on the left, who’s been getting a little stick from China’s netizens for having, ahem, a little stick. And while any search engine ignoring robots.txt is being obnoxious, it’s hard to argue that the ultimate blame doesn’t lie with Sogou here. Users put their trust and their nudie pics in the company’s hands, and it failed to protect them sufficiently.

(via Sina Tech)

Pissed-Off Gamer Breaks Computer, Slaps Manager, Pees on the Net Cafe Floor

This one happened back in February but is just now making the rounds: In Hubei, a gamer named Chang at an internet cafe discovered, mid-game, that the computer time he had paid for was about to run out. He called over Ding, the net cafe’s manager, and demanded money be added so that his computer wouldn’t shut down when the time he had purchased ran out. The manager explained that he’d actually have to pay money because the net cafe’s perfectly reasonable policy was that they don’t activate or prolong a computer session until the customer has paid.

Chang told Ding the money was in his bank account and asked Ding to go take it out of the bank for him, but as the two were arguing, the computer shut off automatically — Chang’s time limit had run out — and he lost all his game progress. That’s when Chang flipped, punching the computer screen (which broke), then jumping up and grabbing Ding, slapping him in the face repeatedly. After that he left, but not before taking a moment to urinate on the floor of the cafe.

He was subsequently found by police and detained for 16 days for assault and willful destruction of property.

Viral Net Cafe Brawl Caused by a Coat

Be careful who you ask to move their coat. That’s the lesson one new net cafe manager learned the hard way last month when he asked a customer in a Kaiyang internet cafe to move his coat and got a beating for it. The customer, Wang, was a longtime visitor and former employee at the establishment, and considered it sort of a second home. But the manager, Guan, was new and didn’t know Wang, so when he saw Wang’s coat behind the counter he asked him to move it. Wang refused, and an argument started that culminated like this:

That’s Wang you can see in the video, jumping over the counter and smashing Guan repeatedly. By the time police showed up, Guan was a bloody mess, but since everyone knew Wang, it didn’t take long for police to track him down and arrest him.

More Beatings in Internet Cafes

And those aren’t the only recently-reported incidences of violence in net cafes, either. There’s this video of a recent throwdown somewhere in China, and QQ Games also lists reports of recent brawls in Harbin, Nanchang, Zhengzhou, and one other undisclosed location. Perhaps unsurprisingly, booze played a role in several of these fights, but all of this only further supports my opinion that internet cafes are not a place for children.

(via QQ Games)

Here’s a new tech ticker for you: $LITB. That’s the stock market moniker for Chinese B2B e-commerce site LightInTheBox (NYSE:LITB), which has just gone public on the New York Stock Exchange. The global sourcing platform for business and retailers to buy goods direct from Chinese suppliers was aiming to raise up to $100 million and had set its opening price at $9.50 per share.

Shortly after the NYSE opened, LightInTheBox’s share price started trading at just over $11.20, and in the first 30 minutes of trading, as I write this, it’s up to $12.10.

LightInTheBox has been invested in by Zhenfund during its growth stages; its primary rival is Alibaba’s global B2B site. The newly-IPO’d site claims to have 2.5 million users and pulled in $200 million in net revenues in 2012.

With a claimed 10 million registered users right now, Chinese online education company Alo7 has wrapped up a third major round of funding. The sum is the usually vague eight-digit figure, so it could be anywhere north of $10 million. The lead investor is American chipmaker Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM), with participation from UMC Capital and Vickers Venture.

Aside from having lots of Chinese parents paying up for Alo7’s online courses, the well-established Shanghai-based startup also has partnerships with hundreds of English language training academies, public elementary schools, and kindergartens across China. Clients include the troubled New Oriental (NYSE:EDU) chain of language schools.

Alo7 was started up in 2010, but the parent company Saybot, which makes learning-oriented voice recognition software, has been around since 2004. It was founded in Boston, US, in 2004 by MIT graduate Dr. Pengkai Pan. After some initial support and seed funding from architect and MIT luminary Nicholas Negroponte (founder of the One Laptop per Child Association), the educational startup moved back to mainland China to target the huge demand for English language learning there. The entire ‘English as a foreign language’ (EFL) market in China is said to be worth over $2 billion – and inevitably more of that is going to move online.

The first funding round for Alo7’s parent company was worth $8.2 million back in 2007, led by CID Group.

(Hat-tip to Sina Tech (article in Chinese) and Marbridge Daily for spotting this)

Taxi finding apps are a hot topic right now in the Chinese startup ecosystem – both for their success, and for their being under increasing scrutiny from authorities. Beijing’s government will soon challenge the startups with a taxi booking service – both via phone and an upcoming app – of its own for the capital. Trouble is, the municipality’s own effort has one truly ludicrous flaw.

Whereas startup taxi finding apps pin-point your location and can connect you immediately, down on the street, to the nearest cab driver that has partnered with the service, Beijing’s state-approved ‘96106’ will require people to book several hours in advance – to a maximum of 15 hours. Yes, even when 96106’s smartphone app launches, it will still require you to book way ahead of time. Clearly that’s utterly useless when you’ve just emerged from a supermarket with armfuls of shopping, in the rain, and all the taxis are flying by with someone already sat smugly in the passenger seat. In contrast, private-sector apps can help someone locate a vacant taxi on their smartphone screen and get that driver to immediately come find you.

Worse yet, the pilot program for 96106, which started on June 1 across Beijing, has hit only a 68 percent success rate on its 4-hour reservations. So basically this thing is a lottery. However, the aim is for this municipal taxi booking service – it’s clearly not a taxi finding one – to hit a successful delivery rate of 99 percent.

So why are the startup-created taxi apps proving so controversial when they’re clearly far more advanced? Basically it comes down to monetization and the varying and unregulated extra fees for cabs that are picked up using Chinese taxi apps such as Kuaidi Dache, Yaoyao Zhaoche, Didi Dache, and DaChe Xiaomi. Indeed, authorities in the cities of Shanghai and Beijing have banned such apps if they charge fees in addition to the taxi’s metered fare; free services are still permitted.

So startups in this sector can still compete with 96106 in this space, but will have to forego monetization from their smartphone app users. But their real-time usefulness makes them a better option than the state-approved service.

Kuaidi Dache received funding in April, with one of the backers rumored to be Alibaba. A few weeks later, Yongche-owned DaChe Xiaomi also attracted investment.

(Source: Techweb – article in Chinese)

Chinese consumers have been embracing new technology at breakneck pace over the last decade, and with this new technology has come new forms of payment like online payment service Alipay. But one electronics dealer in Kashgar, Xinjiang has recently started accepting a rather old form of payment in return for his gadgets: sheep.

According to the China Daily, 29-year-old Huang Jie decided to start accepting sheep as a way of encouraging rural people in the region to buy gadgets, and making them seem affordable by putting their prices in terms that were more relatable. He also apparently felt some were selling their sheep for too little in rural areas, and that he would be able to get a better return for them in the big city. So, long story short, now you can buy a bunch of gadgets in Kashgar with sheep. Here’s the price chart:

As of June 2, apparently no one has yet actually paid for an electronic device using sheep, but Huang must be hoping it’s a matter of time.

Having no idea what sheep generally cost in rural Xinjiang, I can’t be sure whether Huang is charging too much or too little for his gadgets. But if your sheep are burning a hole in your pocket, well, now you know where you can trade them in for something shinier (and less likely to poop on your floor).

(via China Daily)

Gome (which has over 1,600 conventional stores across China) does have its own standalone e-commerce site as well as a stake in struggling Coo8. But Gome’s launch on Tmall seems to suggest that the retailer fancied having the greater traffic that comes from being on Alibaba’s platform. Gome’s new store is here.

It’s a contrast to the strategy of Gome’s gadget retailing nemesis, Suning (SHE:002024). Suning (with over 1,300 stores across China) has been more successful with its own shift to selling on the web, and Suning’s standalone store ranks as China’s fourth largest in the B2C sector (in Q1 2013 figures from iResearch) with 4.5 percent market share. That’s ahead even of the over-hyped “China’s Amazon” that is Dangdang (NYSE:DANG). Gome is in sixth position:

According to Alibaba’s official Alizila blog, the Gome virtual storefront on Tmall “creates the opportunity to play off of each other’s complementary strengths and could serve to further solidify Tmall’s leading position in the consumer electronics sector as well as allow Gome to gain a competitive edge in the online retail arena,” says Tmall general manager Tan Biao.

Gome has a lot of catching up to do to its arch rival Suning, so we’ll have to wait and see how much this new e-store helps.

Tmall now has 88 Chinese B2C sites on its open platform, including Dangdang, Walmart-owned Yihaodian, and own-brand fashion store Vancl.

Interestingly, new figures from McKinsey show that Chinese e-commerce has shifted to platform-based marketplaces – like Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao; or Tencent’s Paipai – much more so than in the US. Indeed, 90 percent of the industry in China is currently marketplace‑based, compared to just just 23 to 24 percent in the US. Amazon Marketplace is the largest in the US.

After last year’s billion dollar merger between Youku and Tudou, and last month’s acquisition of PPS by Baidu, the time’s now ripe for the next major act of consolidation among China’s red-hot video sites. According to rumors circulating in Chinese tech media, the next site to be snapped up will likely be PPTV, a Hulu-style service full of (mostly) licensed TV series and movies.

The three suitors said to be vying to acquire PPTV are Sohu (NASDAQ:SOHU), which already has the prominent Sohu TV streaming site; Suning (SHE:002024) the brick-and-mortar electronics retailer turned e-commerce star; and Alibaba, China’s e-commerce titan. For the latter two, a video site would be an entirely new proposition and a major expansion of their online scope.

Alibaba’s rumored bid could be tied to whispers of China’s top e-shopping platform working on a TV set-top box. Presumably if Alibaba wants to take e-commerce onto the big screen in everyone’s living rooms, it’ll need to be bundled in with some fun content. Alibaba has been diversifying into social media in the past year, most recently paying over half a billion dollars for a sizable stake in Sina Weibo.

2013 is shaping up to be a blockbuster year for China tech deals.

(Source: Netease Tech – article in Chinese)

The event isn’t just new for participants. Matthieu says this past weekend’s event was the first of many to come in Beijing in four-month intervals. JCEF (the acronym is different in French) invited several keynote speakers who also doubled as mentors for the teams, including angel investor and entrepreneur Benjamin Joffe and App Annie CEO Bertrand Schmitt. Some of the teams already had a project in the works, while others started from scratch.

App Annie CEO Bertrand Schmitt (right) mentors a 48Hour Start-Up team.

“It’s useful at any stage to get feedback from some other people,” Schmitt said, talking about very young companies. “You want to find and divert any expense you can.”

Even with so much fresh blood, Schmitt said he issued much of the same advice he gave at similar events in the past. The most common question he poses to teams is how they plan to monetize their product.

David said, for first-timers, “The difference in advice they have is more about whether or not they are familiar with the industry.”

He said he was a little concerned about taking up too much working time with speaker presentations, but in the end, “I think that was good because even those who haven’t won have learned a lot.”

Let’s be honest, no reasonable amount of time will seem enough for a group of people who have never met before to create a product and pitch it to investors. As one newbie put it, “They could have a startup week, or a startup month.”

The top prize was taken home by the ALGEN team, a hardware-focused group that uses sensors to detect intruders, medical emergencies, or safety risks like a house fire.

JCEF organizers encouraged everyone involved not to hit and quit it after a weekend fling by creating a WeChat group to stay in touch.

It’s only been about five weeks since e-commerce titan Alibaba invested nearly $300 million to take a significant stake in Sina Weibo, China’s hottest Twitter-esque site. But already there’s been a major social commerce melding going on with the launch of daily deals on Sina Weibo. The brand-new deals portal on Weibo is centered around tuan.weibo.com, but users (of which there are over 500 million registered) will likely find these group deals popping up in their social stream.

If it’s a paid deal (as most are) anyone who clicks the deal is lead from Weibo to the respective vendor’s e-commerce site. Yes, there are no actual transactions going on on Weibo. But if it’s a free or promotional deal and a Weibo user fancies a chance at claiming and winning it, he or she will first have to follow the vendor and retweet the deal – as seen in this screenshot of a free travel package offered by travel booking site eLong directly on its official Weibo page:

Nearly 10,000 people have retweeted that particular travel deal pictured above with three days remaining on the offer.

The new Weibo deals (spotted by the TechNode crew) are not tied to Alibaba, and they appear to be an open platform for Sina Weibo’s corporate users to sell things directly to their followers. It should help greatly with the monetization of Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) leading social service, which has been proving costly to run.

But of course, with so many smaller vendors in China using Alibaba sites like Taobao and Tmall, the new Weibo deals will prove to be a great traffic driver for those C2C and B2B2C stores.

Sina Weibo added Taobao ads shortly after Alibaba’s investment was announced. Those ads are not yet targeted. Between the possible targeting of those ads and a conceivable evolution of social commerce on Sina Weibo so that things can be purchased directly on the social site, there’s still a lot of interesting things left to be implemented.

Despite all the hype that Bitcoin is some magical new non-governmental global currency of the future, not many people are really, actively using it – and there are even fewer places where they can be spent. But if you’ve got Bitcoins burning a hole in your pocket, you could shop for new threads at Bitfash. It’s a new fashion e-commerce site created by a startup team of three people spread across Australia and China.

For the moment, Bitfash stocks men’s and women’s clothing from three affordable to mid-range fashion brands: Zara, Forever 21, and Net-a-Porter’s ‘Mr. Porter’. More will be added in due course [1]. Most of the site’s customers are from the US and various Asian nations.

Bitfash co-founder Chris Woods tells us that the team first contemplated Bitcoin and then considered a niche to fill with this currency:

We started following the Bitcoin news late last year and in doing so, tried to get across as much detail as we could to understand firstly what the currency was all about, but also the outlook and potential to undertake an entrepreneurial venture in this space. Our idea to link fashion with Bitcoin came from the observation that numerous users were sitting on considerable wealth in Bitcoins but had no specialist place to purchase fashion using their Bitcoins – we sought to fill this niche and meet the demand in the market in this respect.

Chris says that he and his startup are all believers in the digital currency, and they both hold Bitcoin and use it for goods and services.

Bitfash will add a fourth fashion brand very soon. Since starting up in April this year, the startup e-store has been evaluating which retailers fit their niche whilst also receiving lots of offers from online boutique retailers who want to come onboard the site.

Expats in China who want to buy some home gadgets with their Bitcoins could check out Iwannabuy, a Beijing based e-commerce site that we featured a while ago.

I don’t want to go into too much detail about the reason behind that day being chosen lest we find Tech in Asia gets “maintenanced” on a more permanent basis, so if you’re not sure why this massive censorship bonanza happens on that particular day, well, I’ll just leave this link here.

So what should you expect on this year’s June 4? More of the same. Expect snarky comments, expect a lot of references to “May 35″ (because the phrase “June 4″ itself is often censored). Expect heavy and fast censorship and expect some websites just to not be available for a day or two surrounding the anniversary. If you look at the list from 2009 you can see that all sorts of sites were taken down (or perhaps took themselves down to avoid controversy).

This year it likely won’t be as extreme as it was in 2009, as that was the 20th anniversary of the aforementioned event, and China’s government tends to see those big anniversaries as particularly dangerous. Moreover, China’s web censorship measures have matured quite a bit since 2009.

Many sites — especially the big ones — are likely to be up, but with special restrictions in place and probably certain features disabled. In 2009, for example, Renren, Douban, and other social networks all had features temporarily disabled. And since 2009 and the rise of services like Sina Weibo, the government and tech companies have gotten quite a bit better at censoring with subtlety. Instead of blocking posts about the anniversary outright, for example, we may see services like Weibo allowing users to post whatever they want but then automatically hiding any posts containing blocked keywords from all other users, effectively censoring users without them knowing it. Blocked searches are another tactic that’s become common these days; many services will let you say whatever you like but blocked searches makes it difficult to see what others are saying about the same topic.

It’s hard to be sure exactly what will happen on this year’s ‘internet maintenance day’, but whatever goes down, it’s not likely to be a lot of fun. And we should warn you to be careful if you’re planning to mess around to test the censorship measures on services like Weibo. China’s laws give police an awful lot of leeway, and they don’t tend to mess around when it comes to this particular anniversary, so tread with caution.

If you’ve got friends all over the globe, those buddies are probably scattered across not just lots of nations but also several social media services. It’s even more fragmented if you’re an overseas Chinese, working or studying far from home, as your new workmates or classmates are using stuff that’s blocked in China – like Twitter and Facebook. To bring all these sites, conversations, messages, and buddies together is a new app that launches today called MelonFriends.

Launched initially just on Android, MelonFriends brings Sina Weibo and Renren into the mix with Twitter and Facebook. You can choose to view those streams separately, or aggregate them into one.

It’s a nice idea, though it comes at a time when lots of people are using apps like Whatsapp or WeChat for more and more communication. MelonFriends designer Duan Tingliang – based with the three-man ‘Melon Sail’ startup team in Singapore – tells us that the idea of the app is to keep the group dynamic alive:

The core feature for MelonFriends is to help overseas Chinese to manage their social network connections across China (Renren, Weibo) and overseas (Facebook and Twitter). So the usage of MelonFriends is very different from WeChat and such messaging focused apps. In a nutshell, WeChat is focusing on one-to-one communication with friends (which can be in China or overseas) while MelonFriends is focusing on the sharing, interacting, and managing of one’s entire network of friends. But there are opportunities in the one-to-one messaging business that are worth exploring in future.

To keep the conversations flowing, MelonFriends will add in interest-based ‘channels’ at a later date that work across different social networks. A social shopping/gifting service is also in the works. Duan explains:

For instance one of the channels which I will definitely build and use personally would be “Food back home”. Through this channel, we can introduce users with service providers who give bulk discounts on buying food from China (maybe via Taobao) and overseas shipping solutions for group buying, etc. As such, a channel services not just information but also a viral shopping/gifting solution for overseas Chinese. Eventually, this could extend its reach to overseas Chinese’s connections in China and overseas also.

That social shopping aspect would also be a form of monetization for the app, along with upcoming in-app-purchases for customizations like themes and emoji.

MelonFriends for Android has a two-day exclusive on Chinese app store Wandoujia before launching on Google Play on Wednesday (June 5th).

Dolphin Browser took the Android world by storm and achieved 50 million downloads in two years. “It’s much more than 50 million now,” reveals Edith Yeung, Dolphin Browser’s head of corporate strategy. Hailed by Lifehacker as the best browser for Android, MoboTap has since launched Dolphin Browser for iPhone, iPad and a HD version for Android tablets. (Fun fact: it’s also my 60-year old dad’s favourite browser). After this initial success, the next step is to tap into the hundreds of millions of new smartphone owners across Southeast Asia.

How it started

Yongzhi Yang, CEO of MoboTap (the company behind Dolphin), shares with us that he was previously a software architect at Microsoft and… well, he got bored. He was sorely disappointed at the stock browsers available on mobile phones and saw this as an opportunity to develop something smart, elegant, and innovative. This saw the birth of MoboTap in 2009 and the start of the development of Dolphin browser. What’s behind the name? Dolphins are smart – they learn fast and are easily trainable; and that’s Yang’s goal for the browser, that at the end of the day, it will be smart enough to learn each user’s needs and adapt to them to give users the best browsing experience they could have on their own mobile phones.

Though both hail from China, Edith and Yongzhi have spent a good portion of their time in the USA as well. Edith mentions that MoboTap has never considered themselves as a “Chinese company” – instead, their plan was always for international expansion, and indeed, it has taken off.

Different approaches to different markets

With Dolphin Sonar, you can use your voice to search, share and navigate your mobile web browser.

Besides packing a punch in features – lots of extra gestures for things like closing tabs, bookmark sorting, and voice command options – Dolphin is also working on social features coming in the near future. Furthermore, Dolphin is easily customizable with a number of add-ons, including Dolphin Webzine, which displays web content in a magazine-like format, and a web-to-pdf plugin that allows you to save entire web pages as PDF files.

MoboTap tailors its browser to suit the demands of different markets – this sets them apart from some rivals and has contributed to Dolphin’s success. Dolphin’s user interface in each of the countries it has a very strong foothold – China, USA and Japan – is vastly different, catering to the different internet consumption habits of people in each market.

For example, the interface targeted to the Chinese market resembles a phone homescreen and looks a little more cluttered. According to Yang, the Chinese are used to browsing and absorbing a lot more information at one time, and for extended periods of time. The interface targeted at the American market is much cleaner and simplified, in line with the flat UI trend right now. On a related note, it’s interesting that gestures are used much more in America, and Sonar, Dolphin’s aptly named voice control feature, is used more in China – it usually takes longer to write a word in Chinese.

Bonding with users

Edith tells me that within six months of launching, the browser hit one million downloads without any marketing effort – everything was based on word-of-mouth endorsements, attesting to how well the product worked and resonated with users. The team rolls out releases and fixes weekly. Yang attributes the startup’s winning culture to making the right hires:

We’re constantly on the lookout for people with the right DNA that fits in with our company culture. It’s fundamental that every employee is smart and responsible. Most importantly, we look for people who are passionate about the product, and take ownership of their projects.

Another factor would actually be Dolphin’s own users. Yang says:

We receive up to 20,000 emails a day from users that consist of regular feedback or crazy ideas. Some of them actually help us a lot, in terms of building themes and localizing our product.

Dolphin’s next step: conquering Southeast Asia

Yongzhi Yang (left), Edith Yeung (Right)

Yang explains that their focus will be on Southeast Asia for the next three to five years.

“Southeast Asia is huge – hundreds of millions strong. The uptake of smartphones is growing, and it’s not as saturated as it is in the US, so there is definitely room for growth,” says Edith. They hope to replicate their success in other countries with the same strategy – capturing a nascent market and working with strategic partners to achieve success; but they know this is not going to come easy.

Just as MoboTap has experienced in China, the Southeast Asia market has plenty of strong rivals, such as China-made UC Browser, Google’s Chrome, Opera and Opera Mini, Firefox for Android, Tencent’s One (the global version of its QQ browser), and interesting startup apps like Japan-made Sleipnir.

“It’s scary, but exciting. Each market in Southeast Asia has different nuances, so it’s definitely going to be a challenge,” Edith explains. MoboTap hopes to use Singapore as a springboard to the rest of Southeast Asia, and is looking to hire marketing hands and are on the lookout for potential partners. If you’re interested, feel free to connect with Edith on LinkedIn or Twitter

Let’s check out China’s tech news this week. As always, the huge country has got tons of interesting growth news like UCWeb and Samsung. As well as some interesting commentary from Charlie on what setbacks China’s needs to face in order to conquer the future.

1. 400 Million Users Strong: UCWeb CEO Shares Turning Points of the Company

UCWeb is by far one of the biggest mobile browsers in the world, and they’re been slowly making the move to go global out of China. With now 400 million users, that’s quite a bit over Opera’s numbers, which clock in at a little over 200 million users.

2. Samsung Sold 12.5 Million Smartphones in China in Q1, Heading for Blockbuster 2013

With Samsung winning patents across the world and

3. A Quarter of Chinese Startups Are Founded by Overseas Returnees; Is That a Problem?

This article from Charlie reminds me of this article in Vietnam, overseas influence, folks educated abroad with a Western mentality. Do they have the mettle to take on China’s market?

4. Beating the Censorship of China’s Great Firewall with Raspberry Pi

The tiny single-board computer originally designed for education, is going far these days. Some folks have even been hacking it to revamp their Nintendos, and now it’s headed into helping some diehard hackers into escaping censorship in China. We’re looking beyond “long tail” these days, we need a new term for this, where the original use grows into areas that it was never expected to: “Long Value”?

5. No Chrome, No Firefox: Why Chinese Online Banking Still Requires Internet Explorer

It turns out Chinese bankers are lazy, and that’s holding them back from using new technologies.

6. China’s Government is Stifling Tech Innovation and Prolonging Social Problems

As long as China continues to hold back its people from growing, it’ll be hurting its innovation. And one key problem is that local governments aren’t letting local businesses tackle social issues.

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

Established just last year, the Beijing-based online grocery store saves locals a trip to the supermarket. BenLai provides goods that range from locally-grown organic vegetables to imported baby milk powder from America and salmon from Norway. They even offer monthly plans for your standard grocery needs, saving the hassle of you picking what to buy each time. For the latter deal it delivers twice a week for a total of four weeks.

To ensure that the quality of food is high, the service is only offered in Beijing and promises to deliver in 24 hours for areas within the sixth ring road. The startup also assures that the time from stuff being packed to the point of delivery takes a mere eight hours; and during that eight hours the food is being kept at optimum temperatures according to the individual needs of each item so that it stays fresh.

So as long as you place your orders right before midnight, your grocery shopping will be delivered the next morning. It supports both online and offline payments; for orders above RMB60 ($9.80) delivery is free and orders below that will require a RMB10 ($1.60) delivery fee.

So why is BenLai doing this?

I mean, having access to safe food is a basic human need isn’t it? The team at BenLai has a couple of reasons for its existence: One, to be able to enjoy safe food, to the company, is a basic right. Two, the name Ben Lai (本来) when translated means, “originally”. The team feels that the food consumers should be consuming must be in its original condition instead of fearing that it contains harmful chemicals.

Food scares are undermining the trust of China’s new leaders and there’s a national crisis of confidence in food standards. Just 12 percent of people were worried about food safety in 2008 in China, but that’s now up to 41 percent in 2012, according to Pew Research.

There are other choices for food deliveries in China, such as Walmart-owned Yihaodian, or Alibaba’s Taobao grocery deliveries in Hangzhou and Beijing.

But if you want organic foodstuff, the main rivals to BenLai are the imported goods from the US made available on Alibaba’s Tmall earlier this year, or the organic farmer offerings that are also on Taobao.

But skepticism still remains; should we give this startup a chance to prove to the world that better food standards in China can be achieved?

China Mobile (NYSE:CHL; HKG:0941), the world’s biggest mobile telco by user-base, has perhaps been inspired by the worldwide success of WeChat and Skype in launching its own app messaging app for a global audience. Called Jego, it has apps for iPhone and Android but no desktop application.

While you can sign up with your phone number apparently anywhere in the world, the new Jego service is actually more like Skype than newer social messaging apps because it has global calling plans. For example, a Jego user could sign up for unlimited calls to Hong Kong for $12 per month after buying credit. There are mobile and landline calling rates (see here) for 20 countries so far, such as $0.02 per minute for landline or mobile calls in Singapore. That makes Jego a lot cheaper than the gouging you’d get from most telcos on global calls – including on China Mobile itself – and makes Jego app comparable in affordability to Skype’s paid features.

For those who don’t need calling, China Mobile’s new Jego app supports online messaging for free, and will scan your contacts to find friends who also use the service.

Skype, which is now owned by Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has over half a billion users (when it last revealed numbers under its previous ownership), though it’s not clear how many of those are paying for premium calling.

Mobile telcos around the world have been threatened by social messaging apps like Whatsapp, WeChat, Line, Viber, and Nimbuzz for many years, with the threat mounting as new features like video calls get added to some of those apps. WeChat has 195 million active users (and close to 400 million in total) while Line has 160 million registered users this week. While China Mobile’s stealthy launch of Jego won’t really solve any of that, it at least puts the company in contention to wrest back some of those global chatters and perhaps turn them into paying customers.

(Hat-tip to TheNextWeb for spotting this)

Image via Reuters

From a purely mercenary point of view, one of the wonderful things about solving a problem is that there’s often a way to make money from it. Solving problems in a way that can help people and bring in profits is the goal of most technology companies at the most basic level, and it’s something that the past 15 years have proven they do quite well.

China is not a country that is lacking for problems. Although its economic growth speed has set records, that growth has come along with some major growing pains. And time and time again, when Chinese startups step up and try to address these problems, they are delayed, stymied, or outright banned by the Chinese government. When tech companies tried to make buying train tickets online less of a pain, the government banned their apps. When Taobao tried to make visiting the hospital more convenient, the government told it to stop. As taxi finding apps try to make finding transportation easier for everyone, Chinese local governments have been banning them outright or just banning the ones that try to turn a profit.

Yes, there’s a rationale behind each of these bans, but ultimately I think it really just comes down to an odd sort of territorialism/protectionism. The government keeps pretty tight control over things like transportation and healthcare because they’re important services, but it is unwilling to let go of that control — and the money that comes along with it — even when China’s private companies have come up with ways to solve the very real and very major problems that plague these industries.

I do understand the impulse to protect the public from the sharpest edges of capitalism, but as people have suggested, unless the apps are outright scams — and they’re not in any of these cases — consumers should be given the ultimate choice. If they want to pay a few extra RMB for the convenience of a well-designed user interface and a smooth user experience, why shouldn’t they be allowed to, especially if those new services also have the potential to solve real-life problems?

China has a vibrant, strong tech industry, but local governments are letting some of its talent and value go to waste by not allowing it to take a crack at these social issues. And since the government itself has thus far failed to solve them — finding cabs at rush hour is only getting harder; hospitals have been a nightmare of waiting for years — the fact that it won’t let anyone else even try seems awfully selfish. If it’s really about the consumers, don’t Chinese consumers deserve a service that actually solves the problem?

I am hoping that these bans are just bumps along the road and that over time, China will adopt a more open and productive policy when it comes to allowing tech companies and startups to build products that help solve problems in public-interest industries like transportation and healthcare. But China’s governments would be well-advised to allow tech companies more leeway in tackling these problems. If the citizens are well-served, the tech company is making more money, and the government gets fewer complaints about the problem, isn’t that a win-win-win?

China-made social messaging app WeChat is once again making a push for new users in emerging markets by launching a new version of the app for Nokia Asha phones. WeChat previously made an app for older Symbian phones, but this new Asha app is totally remade for Nokia’s budget devices.

WeChat already has 50 million users outside of China, and this new Asha app should help that in areas where sales of these sub-$100 “smartphones” (as Nokia insists they totally are) still prevail over proper smartphones like those running Google’s Android OS. It’ll also work for users of older Symbian S40 phones. In a similar move, Tencent’s WeChat launched on the legacy BlackBerry OS at the end of last year.

Being made for budget devices, the WeChat app for Asha doesn’t have the same features as the iOS or Android versions, and is missing voice and video calls. But the Asha iteration still has fun stuff like touch-to-talk messaging, group chats for up to 40 people, and image sharing.

Rival messaging app Line already has an Asha version of its own.

Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) launched its Asha series of phones in October 2011 with an eye on its “next billion” customers in developing nations like India and across the African continent.

Now that everyone has posted their first quarter financials for this year we can see how much China’s web giants are making out of gaming. The top six gaming companies in China pulled in just over $2 billion in revenues in Q1 to set, as expected, yet another record for this lucrative market. The six market leaders are, in descending order: Tencent (HKG:0700), Netease (NASDAQ:NTES), Changyou (NASDAQ:CYOU), Shanda Games (NASDAQ:GAME), Perfect World (NASDAQ:PWRD), and Giant (NYSE:GA).

Covering everything from MMORPGs to cutesy casual games, their gaming transactions total for Q1 was RMB 12.8 billion, which is $2.07 billion. In contrast, statistics (from a different source) for the same point last year show that the entire industry in China was worth $1.78 billion. So that’s some stellar growth. Here are the Q1 2013 standings:

Not a ‘perfect world’

Of course, not everyone fared equally well in the online gaming sector recently. Looking at game revenue growth or declines (see graph below), we see that Perfect World and Shanda Games fared badly and were the only ones in the top six to see income drop.

Why the drop in revenues? After all, Q1 should be the time that all gaming companies see a huge boost from students having as much as three weeks off school for the Chinese New Year holidays. Aside from boardroom upheavals at Giant that might be causing it to run inefficiently, both Shanda and Perfect World aren’t in the best cycle of gaming releases right now, and the companies claim to be spending more on R&D to push out new games in China and overseas markets. Perfect World operates DOTA 2 in China and is prepping the distribution of Cryptic Studios’ Neverwinter. As for Shanda Games, it’s seeing its MMOs tanking once again (MMOs in particular are down 28 percent year-on-year) and is trying to diversify with more mobile games for both the Chinese and Korean markets Shanda is also awaiting some payback from new launches such as Dragon Nest and Dungeon Striker. Interestingly, both of the losers also have the lowest profit margins among these half dozen gaming titans. These are the risers and dippers in the past year in terms of gaming income:

Tencent does a lot more than just online gaming, so it’s total revenues across social media, e-commerce, gaming, online ads, etc., for Q1 2013 were an astronomical $2.161 billion.

(Source: QQ Tech – article in Chinese)

A country where the question Have you eaten? is a common greeting, China is definitely a nation of superb cultural diversity that’s obsessed with food. That also makes it a good place for a foodie app to grow. Ricebook is a homegrown social food app that helps you take great photos of your food and then share them with buddies over social networks like Sina Weibo.

The Ricebook iOS app has just been updated to v2.0 to give it a fresh new look. CEO Meng Chencang told 36Kr today that the refreshed app is now much more social and allows you to find online friends who match the kind of dynamic displayed by your own foodie posts.

But the main aim of Ricebook is the same – to give a very visual way to find good places to eat based on the food photos and reviews of previous diners and Ricebook users.

Of course, we’ve seen this done before by Singapore-based Burpple, which expanded into China last summer and is already proving to be a global success. There’s also Foodspotting, but that’s useless in China.

Perhaps more dauntingly, Ricebook is also up against Dianping, sort of like China’s Yelp, which has over 40 million users on its mobile apps alone and also encourages photos of food in tandem with its user-generated restaurant reviews.

Ricebook is available for iPhone only at this point.

(Source: 36Kr – article in Chinese)

Californian-based TubeMogul is a platform for the real-time buying of video ads on mobile devices. Aside from how annoying it must be to be hit with a video ad on your phone, it’s an interesting business. The investment arm of telco giant SingTel seems to agree that it has lots of potential, as today SingTel Innov8 has led a $10 million funding round in TubeMogul.

At the same time, TubeMogul is expanding into China and has just opened an office in Beijing to be headed by Sven Rossbach. His task, says today’s announcement, is to “introduce Chinese brand marketers and publishers to the programmatic buying of video ads, and grow TubeMogul’s presence.”

TubeMogul’s main product is PlayTime media buying, which also enables brands to get assurances that their video ad was watched, and gives analytics on where it was viewed and who saw it. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is on the board of TubeMogul (Updated: No longer on board).

This is TubeMogul’s third major funding round and it already has offices across the US, plus one in London, and more recently opened bases in Singapore, Japan, and Sydney to begin its Asia-Pacific expansion.

SingTel Innov8 director Punit Chiniwalla said today:

TubeMogul fits perfectly into our strategy of investing in top advertising companies that are poised for rapid growth in Asia. We are impressed by the product and team on the ground and look forward to working more closely with the company.

The last time we saw SingTel Innov8 splashing some cash was just last month when it put $5 million into a Chinese startup that helps overseas gaming developers publish in and monetize from Chinese gamers.

Cross Creek Capital, a venture fund linked to Wasatch Advisors, also participated in this series C round along with existing investors Digital Advertising Consortium, Foundation Capital, and Trinity Ventures.

Most agreed with Singtel Innov8‘s William Bao Bean that the number of venture capitalists will fall while the number of angel investors will rise dramatically. “In the US you have about 18 to 20 billion [USD] invested by angels. In China, the figures are a little rough, but it’s about a billion,” says Bean. “Early stage investment is really small here. There are angels, but it’s mostly friends and family.”

500 Startups‘ Dave McClure says even though more angel investors and incubators are definitely in China’s future, “I think they’re all going to lose a fuckload of money.”

“Globally, people are worshiping entrepreneurship like it is the next coming of Jesus Christ,” says McClure. “This is fueling a lot of bad behavior. It’s fueling a lot of entrepreneurs who have no business being entrepreneurs deciding that this is a good thing to do. It’s fueling a lot of angel investors putting money into a market when they know absolutely nothing about investing or entrepreneurship.”

But Qiming Venture Partners‘ Hans Tung argues all that “dumb money” isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It still contributes to encouraging and training China’s up-and-coming entrepreneur class. Tung says someone in their 20s getting investment is rare. “If you’re a young, 25- or 26-year-old, then you don’t have many friends in this world to help you. So it’s a very different world than it is in the US.”

For the incoming angels looking for a place to put that cash, Tung defined a “special group” that drives a lot of internet activities: “people between the age of 25 and 40, mostly male, lots of money, bosses of SMEs or government officials,” he says. “If you wanna figure what is the next big trend in China, then look at and track what these people do on the internet.”

Bean adds the big firms — Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, et cetera — are more likely to open up to startups, rather than try to crush them as they have in the past.

“Some of these big platforms are going to war with each other,” Bean says. “They’re trying to find some friends to help them fight each other.”