China Digest – 31 Jul

Here you can find some interesting startup news from China, not only in its capital, Beijing, but also other startup hubs such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Hangzhou, and many more.

(1) The first-ever Startup Weekend Shanghai was surprisingly packed for 54 hours. Over 200 participants were divided in two main groups of startups: ‘individuals’: new ideas formed at the event, and ‘innovations’: existing startups hoping to expand and further develop their projects. At the end of weekend, two were declared ‘winners’ with two more as ‘runner-ups’.

(2) A recently circulated job vacancy indicates Flipboard, a personalized digital magazine, which pulls content from users’ social networks and other websites, is on its way back to China.

(3) Sina Weibo started off copying Twitter as a microblog, but has since charted its own course. Sina’s intention is clearly to develop Weibo into a social network.

(4) In July, CNNIC released its 28th edition of China’s Internet Development Report, recording growth in the general internet population and across each sector, from group-buying to social networking. Overall, China’s netizens reached 485 million users by the end of June, almost twice America’s 245 million netizens.

(5) Chinese professional SNS sites have waken up after LinkedIn’s successful IPO. Dajie, one of the business SNS sites in China, has pulled in tens of millions of US dollars in funding from Fidelity, New Oriental and Hotung Investment.

(6) Baidu, the largest search engine in China, has just released its own third party login service Baidu Connect.

(7) Airbnb, the leading online community marketplace that lets anyone discover and book unique spaces from people around the world, announced that it has received $112 million in Series B financing from Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, and General Catalyst, bringing the company’s total funding to $119.8 million. The capital will be used to fuel growth, accelerate the hiring of a world-class team and strengthen the Airbnb community at the local level.”

(8) The leading social game vendor Zynga has teamed up with Tencent to bring its popular title CityVille into Chinese game market. The Chinese version of CityVille will be rebranded as Zynga City.

(9) Just last month, Lashou was the leading group-buying site in China accounting for 14.4% of market share in terms of revenue. Just one month later, the fierce group-buying battlefield shows that QQ now dominates the market with 10% market share (up from 6th place) and Lashou has dropped to the 10th position with only 5.1% market share for the month of May.

(10) Two months ago it was reported UMeng, the Innovation Works portfolio company was to close securing series A funding. Now, the news has been confirmed by UMeng team: around $10 millions has been raised for this round and Matrix Partners is the lead.

(11) Gaopeng, the Chinese subsidiary of Groupon has been drastically cutting staff in tier3 cities with people from operating and administration divisions affected. The layoff plan will be expanded into tier2 cities as well, according to people familiar with the situation.

(12) iResearch values the Chinese consumer online game market to be 9.48bn yuan in Q2 2011, representing a 23.9% increase year on year.