Facebook China Rumor and 40+ Asian Tech Stories You May Have Missed

Update 2: Reuters reported that someone familiar with the subject said that Facebook has not signed any agreement with any company in China so far.

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

Last week’s biggest story had to be the Facebook-Baidu rumor that is going around the Web. We did a story on Facebook’s chances to succeed in China if it were to enter China with Baidu.

More on China, Shanda, a giant gaming company also invested in Codoon, a fitness social network which sells fitness-related tracking device as well. Kaixin, a Facebook clone was also reported to be gearing up for U.S IPO.

India was also buzzing loud on the social web as it achieved a great starting victory over corruption last week. The Internet and social media played a major role. It was an amazing experience to witness and cover the entire movement via the Web.

Just before the movement errupted, Nike’s ad, which first appeared on YouTube celebrated India’s Cricket World Cup victory. India, the largest ad market in Asia Pacific, was also reported to have grown by 27 percent from October 2010 to January 2011

Indonesia had some fun as Norman Kamaru, a “Bollywood dancing cop” became a YouTube sensation. Penn Olson’s Julian also attended iMulai 3.0 at Jakarta where he witnessed 15 winning Indonesia-based start-ups pitched and walked away with Microsoft’s software licenses valued at $250,000. Groupon also officially entered Indonesia as it acquired Disdus. We managed to speak to Jason, co-founder of Disdus just before the press release reached us.

Last week’s featured start-ups include  Twitvoice and Giftee from Japan, Nightspade and BursaIde.com from Indonesia and INeedgift.com from Singapore.

Below are 5 must-read stories and another 26 below to get ready for the week ahead.

(1) Young Indians Fight Corruption on the Internet: Fighting corruption in India has a new medium: indiaagainstcorruption.org. Fed up with news of malpractices, some young, net-saavy individuals in Mumbai joined an online protest raising concerns about the ever-increasing cases of corruption.

(2) Facebook In China: Turned out, my analysis tends to favor for a Facebook win. The social network might have enough muscles to succeed in China one day, and here’s why…

(3) How Infographics Can Help Your Business: Anol Bhattacharya, CEO at GetIT to share with us the ‘whys and hows’ on infographics for businesses.

(4) Softbank CEO pledges 10 billion yen to quake victims: Softbank’s president, Masayoshi Son, will be personally contributing the enormous sum of  10 billion yen (about $118 million) to the Japan earthquake and tsunami relief effort.

(5) The Rise of China’s Mobile Industry [INTERVIEW]: Arndt Focke, the Research and Consulting Manager at GWC (Great Wall Club), the organizers of the upcoming Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing shared with us some insights about China’s mobile industry.