China’s Shanda has made e-readers for years, and launched an Android-based smartphone last year. Its next hardware venture will be much smaller and actually wearable – a smart watch. According to Chinese media reports this week, it’ll be called the Bambook Smart Watch and will run the open source Firefox OS.

The leaked picture above, spotted via Technode, is said to be the actual Bambook Smart Watch, and it’ll launch in June. Running Mozilla’s Firefox OS – which will also be adopted by a number of Chinese smartphone makers, like Huawei and ZTE – the wearable device will run HTML5 web apps, negating any dependence on things like Android native apps. Though reports suggest the device will also support Android will be available as a separate version for Android (and thanks to Engadget’s Richard Lai for pointing out that detail).

As well as using the Bambook name that’s so familiar to Chinese gadget buyers, Shanda’s smart watch will use the kind of color e-ink display (1) that has been put into service on its e-readers, but there are no hardware specs available yet.

The Bambook Smart Watch looks to be arriving at an opportune time when no other major Chinese hardware makers have entered the space. Shanda, as one of China’s largest software, hardware, and gaming companies, already has the distribution channels to promote and sell this well. Plus, it’ll benefit from the perpetual and very dubious hype surrounding “rumors” (2) of an Apple iWatch. There are other such watches from Sony and Pebble, but they’ll likely never properly support Chinese web services and so will not catch on in China.

Speaking of web services, Shanda has plenty of its own that could make the Bambook Smart Watch a compelling buy – imagine if the watch could read aloud your Bambook-purchased e-books, sync your Shanda MKnote reminders, whilst giving you updates on how your gaming buddies are performing on your favorite Shanda MMO game. We’ll have to wait until June to see just how smart the watch will be.

(Source: Techweb – article in Chinese; hat-tip to Technode for spotting this)

Alan Tan, co-founder at Shanda

If you head over to China and ask any gamers on the street, it’s likely that they’ve heard of Shanda (盛大) or perhaps even played some of their games online. Shanda is one of the largest internet companies in China and was ranked as one of China’s top ten companies by revenue. Shanda started as a gaming company but eventually branched out to other businesses including e-books, smartphones, and cloud computing.

Alan Tan co-founded Shanda with Mr. Chen Tianqiao in 1999. When we recently met for coffee in Singapore he briefly told me the Shanda story. It was fascinating, and I knew that I wasn’t the only person who wanted to hear it, so I invited him to speak at our upcoming Startup Asia Singapore conference in April.

Through his experience as Shanda co-founder, Alan said that gaming has had a big impact in Chinese internet industry since 1999. He believes that gaming habits like purchasing items online and consuming internet content for long hours (not that that’s always a good thing) helped shape user behavior and eventually the internet industry in China. It makes sense and it is an insight that the younger generation might not be aware of.

Alan feels the same is true for Southeast Asia and believes that the maturity of the internet ecosystem is connected to how prosperous the gaming industry is. After all, he is in Singapore for a reason, which I believe is to spot and invest in potential Southeast Asian companies.

In our coffee chat with Alan, we will talk about the founding story of Shanda and how he and his partners worked hard to make it one of China’s most successful internet companies, and how they played a role in building China’s internet industry.

This year’s speakers at Startup Asia Singapore 2013 (held April 4 and 5) also include Darius Cheung (co-founder at BillPin), Ole Ruch (managing director APAC at Airbnb), Steve Melhuish (co-founder at PropertyGuru), Stefan Jung (Co-Founder and Managing Director SEA,
Rocket Internet), Daphne Lee (international business director at Taobao), and more.

We also have Startup Arena, our pitching competition, where startups battle for the $10,000 grand prize. So far, we have accepted some very exciting startups from China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Early-bird tickets are selling fast and are available until March 8. Grab your tickets now.

Shanda is one of the pioneers of China’s gaming and internet industries, and the split-off Shanda Games (NASDAQ:GAME) has long been a dominant figure in the games industry. But could those days be coming to an end? In Shanda Games’s Q4 2012 earnings report, the company reveals that net revenue dipped more than 20 percent year-on-year (to $172 million), and gross profit was down more than 15 percent year-on-year (to $115.9 million).

Those are still absurdly high numbers, of course, but for the first time in a long time they weren’t absurdly high enough to beat out rivals Changyou (NASDAQ:CYOU), who just barely eked out Shanda Games with $173 million in Q4 net revenue. Of course, both companies were still dwarfed by Netease, which dominated the online game industry with more than $300 million in net revenue.

So how does Shanda plan to respond? In the company’s quarterly earnings call, CEO Zhang Xiangdong revealed that Shanda is working on a 3D game engine, and it hopes to use that engine to develop 3D games based on its most popular 2D games. It’s an ambitious (if also long overdue) plan, as the shift to 3D development often raises the stakes — making a 3D game costs more, so flops and missteps are more painful.

But in addition to the decent-but-not-great financial numbers listed above, Shanda also reported a bit of a mixed bag with regards to the changes its player base underwent in Q4. In the Q4 report, the company said that average monthly paying users had dropped quite a bit (4.9 percent quarter-on-quarter) due to the introduction of more free-to-play games, but average monthly active users and average monthly revenue per paying user were both up (1.2 percent and 1.1 percent, respectively). Will 3D games bring in more gamers or generate more revenue for Shanda? We’ll have to wait and see.

(via Sina Tech and Shanda Games’s Q4 2012 report)

Into the deadpool: the Shanda Everbox file syncing service.

A notice on the Everbox site suggests that users migrate their data this month before the closure deadline. New registrations, as well as new uploads for current users, have been ceased. The announcement says that the cloud storage capabilities will be “incorporated into the company’s other products.” So Shanda remains in the cloud business, but seems to have decided that a dedicated online file storage hub is not a good idea. That’s bad news for users of Everbox, who now have just a month to download and save their material.

Everbox has apps for Windows and Mac, plus iOS and Android (pictured right). But its iPhone app lacked development, and was not updated after November 2011.

The past year saw a surge in competing consumer cloud services, with a major new service from top search engine Baidu joining the fray last March, and that now has 30 million users. Plus there are rival file backup and sync services from Tencent, Kingsoft, Huawei, as well as startup offerings from Kanbox and Yun.io.

Shanda also runs an Evernote-esque service called Mknote, which is China’s largest notes syncing app in terms of users. Shanda is looking to spin off its e-book and cloud service division with a separate US IPO, called Shanda Cloudary, which is thought to be on track for an investor roadshow this Spring.

(Source: 36kr – article in Chinese)

Here’s a sentence we’ve uttered before but which came to nothing: the Shanda Cloudary US IPO is supposedly back on track. Yes, the Shanda Interactive (NASDAQ:SNDA) e-book platform subsidiary, Cloudary, has reportedly pencilled in April 2013 for its public listing – that’s after filing with the US SEC back in May of last year only to cancel its IPO procedure in July of 2011.

Shanda Cloudary has not confirmed the April 2013 date officially, but the digital publisher and e-books portal – which also makes the Kindle-like Bambook e-reader (pictured right) – is known to be very keen to get the IPO lined up. It hopes to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the NYSE:READ ticker.

The most recent amendment to the original F1 SEC filing (here) is from this summer, and it outlines how Shanghai-based Cloudary generates revenue from a mix of licensed titles and original, user-generated e-books. Its largest user-facing site is Qidian. The prospectus explains:

We own and operate the largest online Chinese literature community in terms of user base. Our six original literature websites attracted in the aggregate an average of approximately 66.9 million monthly unique visitors in the first quarter of 2012, according to the iResearch report. We nurture a large and growing community where aspiring authors can find a ready and engaged audience and readers can discover and support their favorite authors.

Shanda Cloudary – formerly dubbed Shanda Literature – recently appointed a new chairman in ‘Robert’ Qiu Wenyou, a former investment banker at Merril Lynch. He’s also the new president of Shanda Interactive. As such, he’s responsible for Cloudary, video site Ku6, e-payments platform Shengpay, Shanda’s advertising platform. The gaming division, Shanda Games (NASDAQ:GAME), is separate. The installation of the Merril Lynch man is seen as a sign of how much Cloudary wants to get in shape for its IPO.

In 2012 Q1, Shanda Cloudary pulled in RMB 191.4 million (US$30.52 million) in net revenues, and managed to escape from its loss-making ways to convert RMB 3.07 million ($490,000) into a profit.

[Source: Techweb - article in Chinese]

This is Starbucks…. er, I mean, ShaBaKe fortress in the game ‘Legends of Mir’. (Updated: This is just our silly photoshop, btw).

US coffee store chain Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX) has lost a trademark infringement claim in Beijing’s top court over an online gaming world that sounds very similar to the retailer’s Chinese name. Starbucks is known locally as XingBaKe, and the MMORPG land is dubbed ShaBaKe; it not only sounds close, but also uses two out of three identical Chinese characters.

The court’s ruling went in favor of Shanda Interactive (NASDAQ:SNDA; FRA:RZP), the Chinese gaming giant that created the game Legend of Mir in which ShaBaKe appears. In the 2D online game, ShaBaKe is a virtual castle fortress (pictured above). The game – and that castle’s name – dates back to 2003, but Starbucks’ Chinese name was registered in 2005, says Sina Games today. But, looking at a previous copyright win for Starbucks in China in 2006 (see the story on Forbes), it’s stated that Starbucks registered its Chinese moniker way back in 1996.

The case has actually rumbled on for many years, with Starbucks previously asserting that it had a stronger claim (in 2009 and then 2011) to the name. But last year another court ruled that the “sha” and the “xing” sounds were not so close that the name actually sounded exactly the same as its coffee shops.

The Beijing First Intermediate Court took this newest case brought by Starbucks in March of this year, then held a public hearing in June, before handing down its verdict this afternoon.

The Chinese term ShaBaKe can actually be traced to its usage long ago as a transliteration of Shabak, which refers to a minority ethnoreligious group that lives in northern Iraq, so it’s not like Shanda even invented the Chinese name itself.

Starbucks’ mellifluous Chinese name is often imitated by other retailers in China, especially the two sounds “Ba Ke” (which is a phonetic rendition of “bucks”) at the end of its name. Aside from all that, the chain is performing well in the country, and has been using Chinese social media very cleverly to do social marketing.

[Source: Sina Games; via TechinAsia Chinese]

I wish all tech companies had animals for logos - like Tencent's QQ penguin - as it makes it easier to do silly photoshops like this one.

A Chinese research institute, in cooperation with authorities in Beijing, has compiled a list of China’s top 100 tech and web companies by revenue. Looking only at the top 10, it’s full of familiar names from the world of social media, e-commerce, and gaming.

Before seeing the top 10 list, the institute’s white paper points out this eye-watering figure: China’s hundred hottest tech companies pulled in a total profit of 11.6 billion RMB – that’s US$1.868 billion – in 2011. That’s 26 percent higher than the industry average in the country.

1. Tencent (HKG:0700) makes China’s biggest social network and is also top in social gaming. Plus, it makes WeChat, the world’s biggest messaging app. Oh, and it does e-commerce. And lots more.
2. Netease (NASDAQ:NTES) must’ve had a good year to make it so high up the list – but then this list is about revenues, not a company’s market cap. Netease is primarily a web portal, but it also does online gaming (it runs World of Warcraft in the country), and also the Evernote-esque, Youdao Yunbiji service.
3. Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) is the nation’s top search engine by a big margin, and also has a major ad platform and some social services too.
4. Sohu (NASDAQ:SOHU) is another web portal, and is pushing its streaming video site pretty hard these days. It also runs the Sogou search engine which is sneaking up on Google’s market share.
5. Shanda (NASDAQ:SNDA; FRA:RZP) here means Shanda Interactive, which makes the Kindle-like Bambook e-reader, and has lots of web services like an e-bookstore, cloud storage, and more. Its gaming subsidiary is separate.
6. Alibaba is China’s biggest e-commerce company in every sector, running Tmall, Taobao, and Alibaba.com.
7. Perfect World (NASDAQ:PWRD) is China’s fourth-biggest social gaming platform.
8. Giant Interactive (NYSE:GA) is a tad smaller than perfect World in terms of gaming revenue, coming in sixth in that respect in the country. It runs games like Allods Online in the country.
9. Besttone (SHA:600640) is a telecoms firm, and the only one in the top 10 that we’ve never looked at before.
10. Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) is talked about a lot these days – and on this site – as it runs Sina Weibo, China’s hippest Twitter-like service. But Weibo is proving costly to run and hard to monetize – hence having China’s hottest social media site doesn’t equate to stellar revenue.

There are plenty more big names lower down on the list, such as Qihoo 360 (NYSE:QIHU) in eleventh, media outlet People’s Daily Online (SHA:603000) in 24th, and the kids social network Taomee (NYSE:TAOM) in 41st.

Of course, the list is open to debate because revenue is not always the best way to rate a company. Perhaps a more representative list could be formed by calculating every firm’s true valuation. If we did that, then Tencent would still be first, but Alibaba Group would be second as the recent Yahoo share buyback and fundraising effectively valued Alibaba at $40 billion.

[Source: Techweb; via Techinasia Chinese]

Shanda’s Daguan news app aims to give readers a new meaning to, and experience of, reading. It is basically a mobile newsreader, where it provides a wide range of news and stories on topics such as lifestyle, fashion, technology, food, travel, etc. The Flipboard clone mainly provides the same services as Flipboard itself – except for one, which is connecting fellow readers in the community.

The Daguan app has a bookmarking feature that collates the user’s “liked” articles in a reading corner, where the user can keep a collection of it and also making it easier for the user to re-visit the articles. Users can also follow other users to check out what they read. In this way users are able to connect with other users, and build and strengthen the entire reading community.

I feel that this particular feature of the app does make it more convenient for the readers to communicate and connect, something that I have not seen on Flipboard yet. If you are a frequent reader and if you are interested to connect with other reading fanatics, you might want to download this app, which is available on iOS.

This year and last has seen a wave of smartphones and mobiles OSes being launched by Chinese web companies such as Alibaba (Aliyun), Qihoo, Shanda, Baidu, and Xiaomi. All those are very familiar names to web users in China, and the phones – some of which I recently looked into in detail – are pretty sweet. In fact, these represent a huge threat to hardware makers who’re currently doing well in China – namely Apple, HTC, Samsung, and Motorola. Hey, they might even threaten other Chinese phone-makers such as ZTE and Huawei.

Here are six reasons why I think these (mostly) Android-based phones from Chinese web companies could soon by depriving Samsung et al of tens of millions – and, later, hundreds of millions – of Android smartphone sales:

1. Cheaper - Starting with the dramatic Xiaomi phone launch that emphasised its 1,999 RMB (then $313) price tag with giant numerals, getting your hands on one of these is generally a lot cheaper than mid-range new products from the likes of HTC, Samsung, or Motorola. For example, HTC unveiled the Daren phone for China after the Xiaomi release, but it was a low-end, smallish-screen handset that cost a few bucks more than the dual-core Xiaomi with the four-inch screen. Motorola has been trying a bit harder to make models that are adapted to local consumers, but they’re not able to compete on price either. To make it even tougher, the new Shanda Bambook phone has taken dual-core, hi-res screen prices down to as little as 1,299 RMB.

2. Better pre-installed software - Being web and/or software companies, the makers of these new Chinese smartphones make some superb apps – light years ahead of what the hardware makers tend to pre-install. It’s all useful stuff from popular services – like Baidu’s Ting for music streaming, or Shanda’s Mknote for cloud note syncing – and none of the undeletable crapware that users have suffered in the past.

3. Brands are more recognizable and accessible - Allied to that last point, web companies like Alibaba and Baidu are well known, and feel a lot more familiar – and perhaps trustworthy – to consumers than the more abstract moniker behind a hardware maker like ZTE or Motorola.

4. Not pre-flashed - On a more obscure point, it’s worth noting that a lot of people in China buy grey-import phones that have been smuggled into China. They tend to be cheaper, having avoided import taxes. But then these “grey” phones almost always – especially for the easily tweaked Android platform – get “flashed” with a different ROM by some shady middleman who gets a cut for preinstalling some apps or third-party app stores on it. Needless to say, having random people who work outside of the law tweaking your phone is a very bad idea in terms of digital security.

5. More likely to get updates - As a corollary to that previous point, those pre-flashed phones will never get software updates from the manufacturer as they have been too heavily modified. But these new breed of smartphones will get updates. Xiaomi pushes monthly minor updates, and will eventually update its M1 phones to Android 4.0, and Alibaba has pushed Aliyun 2.0 to its customers.

6. Chinese consumers prefer unlocked phones - And it’s unlocked phones that the web companies are dishing out, avoiding the telco contracts (and telco crapware; see #2) that are not a popular choice.

What’s your take on these new competitors? Hit the comments, and add your own points in favor – or against!

Yes, it's a crowded market: all four main cloud notes rivals in China squished together.

New user number stats for the main cloud notes services in China reveal that Evernote has made a great impact in the mere two months since it launched a separate version for the country. With a reported 1.1 million users, Evernote’s Chinese cousin – called Yinxiang Biji – has shot into third place among four main contenders.

But that still leaves Evernote trailing behind two major Chinese web companies and their more established notes syncing offerings. The oldest of the bunch has the greater number of users: that’s Shanda’s (NASDAQ:SNDA; FRA:RZP) Mknote with five million users (see the table below).

In second place is Netease’s (NASDAQ:NTES) Youdao YunBiji, which has grown to three million keen note-takers from the two million figure we reported back in February [1]. That leaves one startup, FIT, trailing in fourth place with its stylish YunBiji (yes, it has the same quite generic name as the Netease product, meaning “cloud notebook”) picking up 400,000 users so far. The stats were compiled by Techweb.com.cn, and come from self-reported figures:

Evernote’s main battle is clearly against Netease and Shanda. For free users, Evernote’s meagre 60MB of storage allowance per month seems to be sufficient and is not hampering the early traction of its Yinxiang Biji in the country. Since these services are mainly about taking notes, not storing files, the generous 1GB storage of the major web companies might not be a factor. I’d hazard a guess and say that the slickness of the Windows app – and then the accompanying mobile apps – will prove to be the winning factor.

Check out all four competitors on their homepages: Evernote’s Yinxiang Biji, Netease’s Youdao Yunbiji, Shanda’s Mknote, and FIT’s Yunbiji.

[Stats from: Techweb - article in Chinese]

China’s web companies want to go mobile. And to that end, many are creating their own phones that carry their own mobile platforms, serving as a vehicle and a showcase for their own apps and services. The likes of Xiaomi, Baidu, Alibaba (with its Aliyun OS), and Shanda are pioneering this, and many more will follow.

So let’s take a look – see our colorful graphic below – at five homegrown mobile platforms from China that are packaged in their own hardware. The afore-mentioned four web companies are on the list, and I’ve thrown in Meizu as well, since it has transformed itself so well in the past couple of years, and is building an ecosystem of its own too. Scroll down below the table for a summary of why they’re significant, and why both local and global handset makers – from ZTE to HTC, Huawei to Motorola – should be very, very worried about the consumer familiarity and brand pulling power of these affordable smartphones.

After all, telcos and old-skool handset makers have a tendency to fill their smartphones with bloatware and other crap. But these new devices from the more savvy web companies come brimful of apps that look great and which you’d actually want to use for, say, music-streaming, group messaging, or cloud notes syncing.

Here’s our table, comparing the five hot phones spec-by-spec:

Meizu MX (dual-core)

Looking at the cheaper dual-core model, not the newer 4-core version, the Meizu MX was launched with Android 2.3 and Meizu’s attractive Android UI skin, which will soon by updated to the more evolved Flyme OS that Meizu is building as its ecosystem. As such, it has the Flyme cloud backup service and its own app store. Here’s a review of the MX dual-core from Engadget.

Shanda Bambook phone

Launched on June 6, the Bambook smartphone is the first ever phone from Shanda (NASDAQ:SNDA; FRA:RZP), makers of the Bambook e-reader. It’s also based on Android – though the older 2.3 – and comes with neat cloud apps and supports Shanda’s Yuncheng e-book market.

Aliyun OS – represented by the Haier Zing

Aliyun OS is the big play for mobile and mobile commerce from Alibaba, the country’s e-commerce giant. Launched last summer, it is not based on Android, places an emphasis on web apps, and is also loaded with useful – and mostly cloud-oriented – apps. It’s a tough sell, though, up against so much competition. Earlier this month, Haier (SHA:600690; HKG:1169) stepped in as a new hardware partner with the cheap Haier Zing.

Xiaomi M1

Xiaomi has had the biggest sales – and social media – success with its first-ever phone, the M1, generating huge buzz and really selling people on the idea of a good-looking, well-localized way of enjoying Android. Now looking the oldest of the bunch, Xiaomi is surely due to unveil a new version later this summer. It is also due Android 4.0 – replete with MIUI overlays – soon, and I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten an official update from MIUI (also a Xiaomi venture) yet. See our video review of the Xiaomi M1.

Baidu Yi – represented by the Changhong H5018

Baidu’s (NASDAQ:BIDU) Android-based OS is a showcase for its many social and practical apps, and it now has two very different phones to carry it. At the higher end is the Dell Streak Pro D43, while a cheaper option comes in the form of the newer Changhong model which costs a mere 850 RMB ($135). Admitedly, its lower specs – it’s the only one in the line-up to have a sub four-inch screen – make it look a little odd in this company, but I reckon it has more of a chance of gaining traction than the Dell model.

Note that the brand-new Qihoo AK-47 (such a dumb name) is excluded for now, but will be featured when we update this table later in the year. Netease might have its own contender by then too. Stay tuned!

Qihoo 360′s oddly-named AK47 handset went on sale for the first time ever via Tmall and 360Buy and sold out within two hours. Tmall reported it sold 1,000 of the handsets within the first ten minutes of the sale, but beyond that, it’s not immediately clear how many of the handsets were sold.

Shanda’s dual-core Bambook also launched yesterday, but apparently the official Bambook website had some problems, and as a result, Shanda hasn’t been able to gloat about share any of its sales figures.

Finally, e-commerce site Beidou launched a preorder for its dual-core Little Pepper handset (pictured above). The preorder appears to be ongoing, so if you’re looking for a dual-core smartphone running Android 4.0 that costs $110, you might want to check it out.

Not to be outdone, reigning cheap domestic smartphone king Xiaomi also held a prize giveaway yesterday to attract more users to its site.

In short, the cheap domestic smartphone market here is getting pretty full, pretty fast.

[Beijing Times via Sina Tech]

At present, the service is host to just three mobile games (all for Android) but Sina Tech reports there will likely be at least ten by the end of this year. Like most Chinese gaming platforms, it will also operate multiplayer games, and allow players to recharge their game accounts with real money via a variety of third-party payment options. The eventual plan is that Shanda’s most important products will be playable on mobile phones, PC clients, and within the browser.

As it has so few offerings at the moment, we’ll have to wait and see how well the platform works out. But it’s clear that Shanda is taking mobile gaming very seriously. Or at least kind of seriously. The name works a bit better in Chinese, to be fair, but it’s still a pretty questionable choice. When reached for comment, Google issued the following official statement (not really):

[via Sina Tech]

Tencent's iconic penguin mascot surfs its way to social gaming success.

A seasonal survey of China’s online gaming market by Analysys International reveals some stellar growth up to the end of 2012 Q1 – and that Tencent (HKG:0700) has extended its lead as the country’s mavens of social gaming. Back in 2011 Q2, the Shenzhen-based web giant dominated with 29.5 percent of market share by revenue, but that’s now up to 33.7 percent.

The whole gaming sector has grown to be worth US$1.78 billion in terms of revenue in China. That’s 9.5 percent growth from the previous quarter.

There was a bit of a shuffle below Tencent, as Netease (NASDAQ:NTES) moved up from third to second spot, now claiming 17.3 percent of domestic online gaming revenue. Shanda Games (NASDAQ:GAME) saw no growth – despite its new World Zero title – and consequently got demoted to third.

Tencent runs China’s biggest social network with its QQ empire of IM, social networks, and social gaming. Earlier this week, we looked at the QQ Games exclusive tie-up with PopCap to launch Plants vs Zombies Great Wall Edition. It also operates some more hardcore MMO titles such as Crossfire. Indeed, social gaming is a large part of the reason behind the company having far-and-away China’s richest web portal.

Here’s the interactive chart for market share by revenue among China’s gaming services (2012 Q1):

(View the pie chart as a static image).

The online gaming market as a whole saw 33 percent year-on-year growth. When we last looked, last summer, it was at 8.7 billion RMB ($1.36 billion at that time), but the new figures show the industry has expanded to the point where it reels in 11.26 billion RMB ($1.78 billion) up to the end of 2012 Q1:

[Sources: Analysys International 1 and 2]

So the new big thing for tech giants in China is to make smartphones, it seems. Shanda (NASDAQ:SNDA), also the creator of the famous Bambook e-reader, is set to launch its long awaited Android-based smartphone on June 6 this summer, according to a TechWeb report.

While reports of the specifications vary, the price looks to be fixed at 999 and 1,199 RMB, which is about US$190 on the high end. No specific name for the phone was announced yet. But given Shanda’s experience and success with the Bambook e-reader, the phone should be an interesting one to watch.

It is also interesting to observe all the other tech giants venturing to make Android smartphones in China. Baidu has one coming with its Android-reworked Yi OS, and Xiaomi hit it biggest so far claiming $156 million in monthly revenue. Alibaba also has smartphones to offer with its Aliyun mobile OS. We also reported earlier this morning on Samsung’s low-cost Android based phone with a starting price from 1,158 RMB (US$183).

There will be a lot of cheap smartphones available in China, and overall that’s a good thing for the Chinese consumers. But each phone will be packed with it’s own lineup of services. For example, Xiaomi is pre-installed with Miliao (rather than the more popular WeChat) while Baidu has its Ting and Maps apps installed. Aliyun phones are integrated with Alipay and Aliyun Mart to spur mobile commerce, I believe. While iPhones are still luxury phones in China, Android OS is more likely to get the love of the masses in China.

Folks have always said that mobile is going to be a big huge in China. So I guess there’s no harm for the tech giants to splash a little budget to get a slice of the smartphone pie. The main business isn’t about selling phones, it’s more about promoting the services inside the them.

China’s Shanda Games (NASDAQ:GAME) has just launched its first-ever mobile gaming title called My Country. It’s a city building game, so far only on Android in Shanda’s Chinese release, which allows users to build up their city’s landscape, transport infrastructure, and economic business.

Like many such casual games, My Country is free-to-play but with a number of tasks and goodies that can be expedited if you pay real cash for some in-game virtual currency. But if you’ve got the patience to build up your initial factories (pictured below) quite slowly so that they eventually start making your municipality a bit of revenue, then you could always play it for free.

The game was developed by San Francisco-based Game Insight and has already been released on numerous platforms. But this week’s launch by Shanda as a publisher sees it arriving in China fully localized into Chinese and with local payment options. The game already has 11.2 million players around the globe, and that number could be about to get a huge bump from new Chinese mobile gamers.

Shanda Games is best known for developing and licensing/operating major MMO titles like Trion Worlds’ Rift, or its own World Zero. This marks its first foray into mobile gaming. At the end of 2011, China’s mobile gaming market was a fairly small part of the nation’s wider $7.1 billion gaming sector, but it’s one that’s fast-growing.

If these kinds of community building games are your thing, you might also like EA’s The Sims Social, which recently arrived in China on Tencent’s Qzone platform.

My Country is not on the Google Play store, so Android gamers will need to download it from Chinese app store GGG.cn instead, or from the title’s new Shanda homepage.

[Source: Game Insight blog]

The upcoming Android phone from Chinese web company Shanda (NASDAQ:SNDA; FRA:RZP) looks like it might be the world’s cheapest legitimate dual-core smartphone. That’s according to a purported leak of its spec and price, which shows that the customized Android phone could well sell for as little as 1,199 RMB (US$190) unlocked. That’d beat the current budget dual-core device title holder, the Chinese-made Xiaomi M1.

The leaked specs point to a huge battery to back up a large 4.3-inch screen which, at 960×540 pixels, would be higher resolution that most economical Android handsets. Here’s what it might look like in terms of specifications:

• 1.0 GHZ dual-core ARM processor made by Texas Instruments, and badged ‘STE U8500.’

• 1GB RAM

• 8GB San Disk Micro-SD for external storage for free, with presumed support for adding in larger cards if you need.

• 4.3-inch qHD screen at 960×540 pixels resolution.

• 5MP camera on the back with an LED flash and support for 720p video shooting. Plus, a 3MP front-facing camera for video-calling and such.

• Android 2.3.6 beneath its customized UI (pictured below). Not the current Android 4.0, which is a pity.

• WCDMA 3G which would suit China Unicom, plus the usual connectivity across wifi, Bluetooth, etc.

• 1930mAh Li-ion battery such as previously seen in the Motorola Atrix 4G.

All that would be quite a lot of bang for laying out only 12 of the biggest Mao-notes. Shanda makes the country’s most popular e-reader, the Bambook, so it has the hardware experience and leverage to get this kind of thing done.

Shanda’s phone is due this summer, and will come pre-installed with a number of its cloud-oriented apps, such as those for online file backups and e-books. It seems intended to steal sales and attention away from rival Chinese mobile platforms, such as Baidu’s Android-based Yi OS, or Alibaba’s Aliyun phone.

[Source: Techweb - article in Chinese]

If last year was all about social photo-sharing, 2012 looks set to see a boom in video-sharing. And there’s yet another Chinese startup entering this sector with the launch of Weiku. It comes with an app for iPhone – with an Android version in the works – on which users can record videos, apply filters, and share the end result socially.

Weiku follows the lead set by Movie360 and iSheHui in China. The main difference is that Weiku restricts the length of videos – to a mere 30 seconds. Although all smartphones can record for longer, the startup apparently feels that brevity is the soul of celluloid wit.

The startup’s founder is Lu Jian who told Techweb that a 30-second video will weign in at 3- to 5-megabytes on an iPhone 4 or a high-end Android phone which will save your limited data plan from the not very generous Chinese 3G networks.

The little vids you’ve made with Weiku can be shared to Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, or Renren. Plus, there’s a micro social network within the app where you can follow certain people, and ‘like’ and view their videos. The main social area of the app has a nice UI that uses horizontally-sliding blocks – much like the Vida photo-sharing app – to let you browse your buddies’ content.

As with an increasing number of Chinese startups, Weiku has signed up to Shanda’s (NASDAQ:SNDA; FRA:RZP) cloud hosting service – which is much like the Amazon Web Service – to power its entire back-end.

Grab the Weiku app from its website.

Chinese web giant Shanda (NASDAQ:SNDA) wanted its subsidiary, Shanda Cloudary, to list in the US last year, but plans were cancelled in July when one of its lead underwriters withdrew. But the US IPO for the digital publisher and ebooks portal (pictured above) is back on the books, according to Chinese media.

Parent company Shanda has issued a prospectus, but has not yet filed with the US SEC for Cloudary (sometimes referred to as Shanda Literature). It includes standard 2011 financial data that shows the subsidiary made a loss of 27.1 million RMB (US$4.3 million) on revenue of 701 million RMB ($111.2 million). Once again, it aims to be listed under the NYSE:READ ticker.

On a more hopeful note, the prospectus points out that the Cloudary division, since its inception in 2008, has grown to have a Chinese ebook market share of 72.1 percent (by revenue). Plus, its operating loss narrowed last year compared to 2010, and its revenue rose by nearly double in that same time-frame.

The company will be hoping that the markets will be kinder to Chinese tech stocks in 2012, and that its Amazon-like digital publishing subsidiary finally has a clearer business model – and a chance to turn a profit – now that it has more products in full flow. These include a Shanda-badged Android smartphone en route for later this year which will be another vehicle – along with its Bambook e-reader – for its paid ebook platform.

This all comes at a time when the parent company is looking to do quite the reverse: delist from NASDAQ and go private, thanks to a management-led buyout.

[Source: People’s Daily Online - article in Chinese]

Shanda Games (NASDAQ:GAME), China’s second-largest online gaming company, has lost its president, ‘Tony’ Ling Hai (pictured right), who has resigned from the company. Mr. Ling has done so in order to go back to the entrepreneurial life to work on his own gaming and social media startup.

He had been president of Shanda’s gaming division since 2008, and had joined the parent company Shanda Interactive (NASDAQ:SNDA) way back in 2003, and was at one time the VP there.

It’s a big boost to the entrepreneurial scene in China, bringing a very experienced hand into a new startup. The new venture of Ling’s is called Butterfly Interactive – at hoodinn.com – and it is based in Shanghai. Currently it is developing its product, and the website contains no further clues as to what it might be.

Shanda Games is second only to Tencent in terms of revenue from online gaming in China. It is best known for running multiplayer titles such as World Zero and the Final Fantasy series.

On his Sina Weibo page Ling mused that, “We have come too far and have forgotten why we started.” That’s probably the best clue as to why he’s getting back to his roots.

[Source: Netease Gaming news - article in Chinese]

After a management buyout, some believe $SNDA will head back to its native Shanghai and list there instead.

Shareholders of Shanda Interactive (NASDAQ:SNDA), one of China’s biggest web and gaming companies, have voted overwhelmingly to back Shanda’s plan for a management buyout, with the intention to go private and delist from NASDAQ. The management buyout is led by founder and current chairman Chen Tian-qiao along with his wife and brother.

87.3 percent of voters at yesterday’s extraordinary general meeting agreed to the move, according to a company press release, which proposes buying up all the outstanding shares at a 25 percent premium from their level last October when this was first put forward. It will thereby cost the management team an estimated US$750 million.

Some analysts believe that this act of delisting and then going private is actually a necessary prelude to Shanda Interactive listing on the Shanghai stock exchange, which could blaze a trail for future Chinese IPOs.

Shanda’s gaming division, Shanda Games (NASDAQ:GAME) is entirely separate and not a part of this move. Shanda Interactive, aside from its online gaming subsidiary, is a major Chinese web company, with music, video, social, and e-book platforms. Earlier this week we previewed the company’s plans to launch its own brand of smartphone running a customized version of the Android OS. $SNDA closed yesterday at $41.28 per share.

The new Lezhong ROM, based on Android, by Shanda.

Shanda (NASDAQ:SNDA), a leading web and gaming company in China, has released the open beta of its new Android ROM, dubbed Lezhong. It’s the first step towards launching its own budget Android smartphone later this year, on which we reported recently.

The Shanda Lezhong OS is based on the open-source parts of Android, and incorporates all of Shanda’s standalone apps. These include Yuncheng, its cloud-based e-book platform, and the Evernote-style note-syncing app Mknote.

This effort is an attempt by Shanda to make use of Android to push more into mobile. It’s also a challenge to China’s other web giants who already have a mobile platform of their own – and ones which are also very oriented around cloud computing – such as Baidu’s Yi, and Alibaba’s Aliyun phone.

As QQ Tech News points out, Shanda’s upcoming OS looks a lot like MIUI, the ROM that eventually got a life of its own in the popular Xiaomi phone. Unintentionally proving that there’s some copying going on, the Lezhong ROM will be auto-updated over-the-air every Friday, just as the MIUI team does with its own software.

Other than the built-in Shanda apps (which exist already), I don’t see anything new, surprising, or enticing about the Lezhong version of Android. Seems that ordinary folks might as well just buy any existing Android phone and then, if they so wish, install a bunch of Shanda apps on it.

The Lezhong ROM is available only in Chinese, so if you’re an expert tweaker and tinkerer, go here to download it.

Shanda Games (NASDAQ:GAME) will distribute the game for developers Trion Worlds, although from the press release it’s not clear yet when the game will actually be available in China. Speaking of the presser, here’s the propaganda line:

“We are delighted to bring RIFT, Trion Worlds’ much-acclaimed award-winning title, to China,” said Mr. Alan Tan, Chairman and CEO of Shanda Games. “RIFT offers an adventurous online world with fantastic dynamic content and stunning graphics and has attracted many devoted fans worldwide. Based on our experience and expertise in the China market, we are excited about the upcoming launch of RIFT to our broad gamer audience and are confident in the success of RIFT in the China market.”

Yes, yes, dynamic content, stunning graphics, blah, blah, whatever; when do we get to play Rift?

This is not the actual Shanda smartphone. The real thing is set to launch this summer.

The Chinese web company Shanda (NASDAQ:SNDA; FRA:RZP) is set to launch its first ever smartphone this summer, according to reports, which will run a highly customized version of Android. With a rumored price tag of just 999 RMB (US$158), Shanda could well be trying to create an ebook platform that supports both its e-reader, the successful BamBook, and its new smartphone – in the manner that Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is doing with its Kindle and Kindle Fire tablet.

Local tech media reports that Shanda’s smartphone exists as an internal prototype that’s undergoing testing. Its specifications are not known, but at such a budget price it’s unlikely to be a cutting-edge device.

Shanda already has a great deal of apps for iOS and Android that support its ebook store, as well as other cloud-based services that it provides. But this report indicates that it feels the need to come out with a phone of its own.

All About the E-Books

Shanda’s BamBook is the second most popular e-reader hardware in China, and ties in with Shanda’s ‘Literature’ ebook store. But it faces stiff opposition in that sector from e-commerce giant Dangdang, which has an e-reader of its own coming to market soon.

Last year saw other major Chinese web companies making a big push into mobile with their own ecosystems – first there was Alibaba’s Aliyun phone, and then Baidu’s (NASDAQ:BIDU) Android-based Yi OS.

[Source: Techweb - article in Chinese]

There has been a bit of a fad on the internet in recent days for posts about amazing things that happen online in just one minute, and so the Chinese site 17Startup made one about the web scene in China. The numbers were so awesome that we felt it was worth whacking the infographic into an image editor in order to translate it into English.

It shows that insane amounts of money – and a great deal of content – flows from the fingers of Chinese internet users every sixty seconds. The hugest number is the amount of ads that Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) serves every minute, and just how much is spent on e-commerce site Taobao:

(Click to enlarge a bit)

If that’s compared with the recent – and more glossy – pair of infographics from web design company Go-Globe.com (via this blog), which looks at the worldwide scene, we see China’s numbers stack up favorably in many instances.

For example, as you see below, Xiaomi’s Android-powered M1 phones seem to be outselling all of RIM’s (NASDAQ:RIMM) Blackberry handsets, and Twitter’s 98,000 tweets per minute pale in comparison to the firing of missives from Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo.com:

(Click to enlarge a bit)

(Click to enlarge a bit)

[Chinese infographic source: 17startup, via Toumingti - articles in Chinese]

It has never been a smooth ride for Ku6.com (NASDAQ:KUTV), which is currently China’s fifth-largest video-streaming and sharing site. And now, as its stock sinks to below US$1 per share, some staff are facing job losses, which are being portrayed in some sections of the Chinese media as “violent cuts” to its staff and operations.

Ku6 – which was acquired by Shanda Interactive (NASDAQ:SNDA) in 2009, but has proven problematic and unprofitable for Shanda – insists it’s just restructuring. The company says that its games and music video channels, which were based in Shanghai, will be moved to Beijing HQ along with staff who wish to relocate. The Shanghai office will close. Some staff are, however, being let go – with Ku6 stating that they’re voluntary redundancies – but no figures have been given. Ku6’s investor relations website says that it has 610 employees in total.

Despite being one of China’s first video sites at the turn of the last decade, Ku6 was soon superseded by Youku (NYSE:YOKU), Tudou (NASDAQ:TUDO), and Baidu’s (NASDAQ:BIDU) Qiyi.com, in terms of market share in this sector.

As a result, it has also struggled to keep pace with the maturing video market in China in which Chinese consumers have been demanding increasingly costly licensed TV shows – the rights to which can now cost as much as US$100,000 per episode.

Ku6 listed on NASDAQ in 2005. Its net loss in Q3 2011 was $13 million, about on a level with its losses at the same period in 2010. Its stock is currently at its lowest ebb, closing before the weekend at 98 cents per share.

[Source: DoNews - article in Chinese]

This week’s news that Shanda Interactive (NASDAQ:SNDA), the major Chinese media and entertainment company, is looking to go private and delist from NASDAQ was a bombshell. It raises the spectre of other Chinese web/tech companies also abandoning the New York tickers in favour of, say, SHA, SHE, or HKG – China’s own stock exchanges in, respectively, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong. Under current regulations, Chinese companies incorporated in a foreign country are not allowed to sell shares on the mainland.

It’s conceivable that the company’s online gaming division, Shanda Games (NASDAQ:GAME), which runs hugely popular MMO titles such as World Zero, might do the same – though that was not stated this week. But there have been rumblings for a long time to that effect. In March of this year, Shanda Interactive Chairman Chen Tianqiao spoke to Reuters and said:

It would be great if we can return [to the mainland stock markets]. Every company wants to share the fruits of its country’s economic growth.

Note that he was talking about $GAME there. Mr Chen then used the phrase “orphan stocks” to describe the predicament whereby his company lists in a country where it pretty much does no business. By extension, the orphan stock phenomenon applies to many other companies who might prefer to abandon or ignore NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in favour of local listings.

Shanda Interactive would not be the first of the so-called “sea turtles” – a phrase more commonly tagged to Chinese students who return to the mainland to apply their knowledge. TOM Online, which operates Skype in China, and is the internet/media division of the TOM Group (HKG:2383), went private in 2007. But TOM Online did not then list locally, despite the parent group being listed in Hong Kong.

Some industry insiders feel that Shanda will blaze a new trail in a quick move from New York to Shanghai. It raises the prospect of huge IPOs in the future – such as, say, the Alibaba Group, or its Taobao or Tmall divisions – avoiding the US altogether, rather than being orphan stocks. (Note that only Alibaba.com is listed, in Hong Kong: HKG:1688)

Peter Schloss, an experienced internet executive in China who was the CFO of TOM Online when it got its US IPO, said recently on Twitter:

Is Shanda the first of many US-listed Chinese internet companies that will go private and then re-list later on the Chinese stock markets? I say yes.

[For the full background to the $SNDA move, check out the New York Times’ Dealbook blog]

A scene from Tencent's 'Crossfire' first-person shooter game. (Image credit: cf.131.com)

New figures for Q2 2011 show which Chinese tech companies get the biggest slice of the online gaming market in China, in terms of revenue. Total revenue in the industry is 8.7 billion RMB (US$1.36 bil), which is up 3.1 percent on the previous quarter.

Tencent is still the online and social gaming king in China, with its broad spread of titles – from numerous QQ games, to its Zynga CityVille tie-up, to the 3D first-person shooter Crossfire (pictured above). It took 29.5 percent of all online gaming revenue in the country in the most recent quarter.

Shanda and Netease are joined for second place with a matching 17.1 percent of revenues in the market. Shanda has titles such as the newly-released World Zero, while Netease is known for MMORPGs like Westward Journey.

Beijing’s Perfect World (NASDAQ: PWRD) is in fourth place in Q2 2011; and slightly trailing them is ChangYou, which is a subsidiary of Sohu. We recently looked at how ChangYou had spent $80 million in developing its newest game The Deer and the Cauldron.

Here’s our interactive graph of all the online gaming market shares; data comes from Analysis International and was then compiled by Digitimes:

[Source: Analysis International, via Digitimes]

It's a metaphor.

Ku6, a streaming video site that’s been struggling to gain a foothold in China’s extremely competitive online video market, posted losses of over $21 million, nearly 40 percent worse than the $15.5 million in losses they sustained in Q2 2010.

To be fair to Ku6, content costs in China have risen exponentially over the past few years, to the point that some smaller sites are considering tacitly endorsing piracy because the legal costs may be cheaper than buying the online broadcast rights to copyrighted shows. Prices have risen because of the sharp competition in the internet video sector, with video sites occasionally engaging in bidding wars that drive up the prices of the most desirable video content.

However, despite rising content costs, Youku and other leading sites have been able to reduce their losses recently, though no online video company in China is yet making a profit. Ku6′s losses are perhaps partially the result of its minimal market share (see the chart below) and partially the result of Shanda’s mistakes in advertising, according to corporate leadership. Either way, it’s difficult to imagine Shanda holding on to Ku6 if it continues to make such a large dent in their bottom line without being able to increase its market share significantly.

(PS: Bonus points to the intrepid commenter who can spot which anchor we used in the image above. It’s from a famous ship. No googling.)

Shanda, one of China’s biggest developers, is bringing this idea to China in a major way with their upcoming World Zero. According to the game’s website, World Zero will be a free-to-play MMO development platform that allows users to easily create and share MMO-style worlds. Sound exciting? Check out this video and you’ll be even more excited:

Supposedly, the game offers incredibly robust creation tools that allow users to create playable characters, NPCs, levels, and maps. It includes “easy-to-use” script and mission editors and will allow players to fully design, develop, and ultimately release their own MMOs through the World Zero platform.

Of course, as any gamer will tell you, the extent to which a game like this catches on very much depends on how “easy-to-use” it actually is. Modders have been using design tools to make their own games for years on a number of platforms (most popularly, the Half Life 2 engine and various Blizzard games). But these tools require a technical knowledge that forms a high barrier for entry, and most users don’t take advantage of them. What will make or break World Zero is whether or not they’re able to hit the tiny target that makes creation games like this one explode: easy and intuitive for beginning users, but robust enough to hold the attention of more advanced gamers too.

World Zero promises “standardized” tools that will make development easy, but at present their official site doesn’t offer much more than platitudes and that cool video. There are no screenshots, no demo, and no release date, although the video suggests it will come out sometime in 2011 and the company said at ChinaJoy that they would have “a big announcement” sometime this October. Until then, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. It’s a fascinating, very unique concept for a game, but in the web 2.0 era, it’s all about the execution.

[Image: Technode]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Source: Sina Tech news - article in Chinese]

Shanda (NASDAQ:SNDA) has flipped the switch on its Grand Cloud services, aimed at China’s small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME), and which is modeled on the successful Amazon Web Services.

Its Grand Cloud platform – at grandcloud.cn – will provide remote computing and cloud-based services, for a fee, in a manner that Shanda says is more reliable, secure, and faster than a more old-fashioned business hosting set-up.

At the moment, Shanda is offering its SME clients five distinct services on its cloud platform: cloud-based hosting, storage, cloud-based hard-drive back-ups, database, and monitoring. A sixth service, MongoIC, will roll out later, and thus offer a sophisticated documents database as well.

Shanda, like Amazon, is aiming its cloud platform at companies who want to implement client-side applications, as well as firms needing more conventional web services.

It’s not clear how much extra server horsepower Shanda is employing for its new Grand Cloud, but as the distributor of some of China’s biggest-name online role-playing games (MMORPGs), Shanda is no stranger to massive bandwidth needs.

Shanda recently began pushing more into the realms of pure social media – aside from its online games – when it tested and unveiled a Twitter-clone microblogging service named Tuita.

[Source: TechWeb]

Is Shanda creating a new Twitter-like service? Named Tuita (推他, loosely translated as ‘push him’), the service is currently in closed-beta phase, according to iChinastock.

The website doesn’t state when the product is going to be launched. It doesn’t even have a email registration for eager users to receive a beta invite. One thing for sure, this site belongs to Shanda as stated on the site’s fine print. Whois.net also confirmed that this new domain is registered under Nanjing Shengda Networking Co.Ltd

Shanda, known for its gaming business has recently moved into many new business portfolio including QiKe, a mobile Location-based service and Youni, a mobile IM application. Shanda has also recently invested in Codoon.com a fitness social network that sells fitness tracking hardware. With the new funding, Paul Shen, Co-founder of Codoon told us that the company will be focusing on the tracking hardware, mobile and marketing.

The research firm outlines in its 150-page paper that Tencent led the market with $1.4 billion in revenue, followed by Netease with $749 million, Shanda Games with $680 million, Perfect World with $374 million, and then Changyou with $327 million.

This rapid growth spurt puts China ahead of the U.S game industry which fell to 22% according to The People’s Daily citing Digi-Capital. That dramatic headline read “Game over for US: China to take lead in video games.”

With an increased number of mergers and acquisitions over the course of 2011, Pearl Research expects China to expand out beyond domestic markets.

We recently reported that China’s Sina Weibo has also witnessed astronomical growth hitting 100 million users in February 2011. Given the astounding statistics regarding China’s overall digital rise, we expect that the nation will continue to make its mark on global industries as it strives to become a world leader.

Photo: China.org.cn

China‘s online gaming company,  Shanda has invested in Codoon.com, an online fitness social network. The investment, as reported by our friends at Marbridge Consulting, was of 8-figure sum in yuan (at least US$1.5 million).

Codoon.com has a unique business model. While most social networks rely on ads, Codoon sells fitness device. This fitness device tracks users’ calorie consumption, motion (walking and jumping), distance travelled and even quality of sleep. Users can also synchronize and share these data to their network. The device has so far tracked over 300 million meters in distance and 20 million kcal in calories.

The fitness social network start-up is also looking for alternative revenue sources as its online community continues to grow in numbers. Codoon was founded in October 2009 and had previously received RMB 600,000 in funding from the National SME Technology Innovation Fund in China.

Paul Shen, co-founder of Codoon, explained to us via email that the investment would be used for the following three key activities:

1. Develop more network fitness gadgets
2. Develop iPhone, Android and mobile client and fitness application
3. Marketing

Unfortunately, the exact investment amount cannot be revealed. Shen also said that he is feeling indifferent after the investment. I guess working hard and producing result are his main focus now. Stay tuned as we follow up with Codoon.com.

Codoon isn’t the first social network site for fitness enthusiasts. SixReps, an Indonesia-based fitness social networking site is also gaining attention from both users and investors (I heard). SixReps, for now, is fully focused on building its online community.

The service is fairly easy to navigate, allowing users to drill down to group buying deals according to city, price, and category of goods. Tuanyouhui also features a handy deals map, although this feature is still a little sparsely populated particularly in second and third tier cities.

Tuanyouhui is still using the domain tuan.sdo.com, which remains prominently featured it the website’s logo. But visiting tuanyouhui.com will work, as that domain is registered to Shanda.

Given the amount of services springing up around China and the rest of Asia, it makes sense to package them all up like this as Shanda has. The website reminds us of Japan’s AllCoupon.jp, an effort from Cybridge which conveniently aggregates online coupon deals from the country’s major coupon sites.

Via Marbridge