China Digest – 8 Aug

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) Sina Weibo experienced its second large scale attack. Unlike the first attack, a link phishing operation, this attack came through a Weibo app that has since been closed. It claimed a host of high-profile users, including Yao Chen, a superstar actress and Sina Weibo’s most popular user with over 10 million followers.

(2) Yang Qin, CEO of OurGame, said that the company is back on track after addressing the turmoil as a result of dispersed ownership. The company has set the goal of focusing on casual games, as well as chess and card games. They will also be stripping off less-relevant businesses. On top of client-based games, OurGame has also been working on browser-based and mobile games lately with the set-up of specialized team and studios and the imminent launch of a bunch of mobile and browser-based titles.

(3) Last week in Shanda’s Got Talent party, Tan Qundao, CEO of Shanda gave a keynote and disclosed some information about a new game which he described could be the best in the world. It is named World Zero, which actually looks like more than a game. It’s a gamified Second Life.

(4) QFPay (the Chinese name means Money Square), a Beijing-based company is rumored to provide a similar solution as Square. QFPay has been working in a stealth mode for a couple of months, just today it published several messages on Sina Weibo to introduce itself for the first time and also look for more engineers.

(5) TechNode is officially launching a new free database service called Nodeble.com (alpha version). The database, available in English and Chinese, is packed with very useful information organized by China/Asia technology companies, key individuals and investors as well as information about fundraisings and acquisitions.

(6) According to an anonymous staff of Kingsoft, the long-established office and security software vendor has been in talks with Xiaomi Tech to release the Chinese counterpart of Apple’s iCloud.

(7) Tencent has scheduled to launch a “super B2C” platform, and the first batch of businesses which will be featured on the platform include OKbuy (online vertical for shoes), elong (flight tickets and hotels booking), Kela (online vertical for diamonds) and so on, all were rumored or confirmed to has been invested by the Shenzhen-based company.

(8) Aggregating offline communities seems the way to go in developing Linkedin-like professional social networking service (SNS) in China. Beijing-based professional SNS Hengzhi said its registered users has reached 1 million.

We thank nordicfactory for the flag image.