China Digest – 8 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) According to a local report, Baidu is stealthily developing its own Mobile OS(codenamed Qiushi which means fruits in autumn) which is based around Android and will be released by year-end. Baidu dismissed the rumor by referring Qiushi as an under-developing mobile ad product.

(2) Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like service, experienced its first mass virus attack last week. A large number of users posted the exact same new stories with links to their Weibo.

(3) Nut Shell Electronics, the e-reading subsidiary of Shanda, announced a lowering its Bambook e-reader’s price to RMB 499 (US$ 77), nearly 50% percent off the current RMB 999 (US$ 154) price tag.

(4) Douguo.com, a pioneer in China for its food recipe sharing service, announced that it won first round funding of up to RMB 10 million (US$ 1.54 million) from Chinese online game vendor Shanda Interactive, which is a record high in the food social networking service field and the first investment made by Shanda in such an area.

(5) After 54 hours of non-stop sweat, blood, and caffeine, 5 teams and 39 entrepreneurs presented to a packed house of investors and tech enthusiasts at StartupWeekend Beijing. Here’s a round-up of the five startup teams that came out of StartupWeekend Beijing. E-commerce was a theme among this batch.

(6) Baidu officially launched its Mobile Box Computing effort last week in Beijing, which is aiming to offer search engine users with instant and intuitive access to all kinds of features which are “outside of the box”.

(7) Find Japan announced that it would partner with Sina Corp to market its Twitter-like Weibo service in Japan.

(8) Tencent, China’s most used Internet service portal, is shopping again. Lin Nin, CEO of FTuan, a daily deal site in China, confirmed that Tencent invested in the company for an undisclosed sum.

(9) Baidu’s overseas expansion brought about a total loss of over RMB 680 million (US$ 105 million), or RMB 196 million (US$ 30 million) in 2008, RMB 224 million (US$ 34 million) in 2009 and RMB 260 million (US$ 40 million) in 2010.

(10) Jason Zeng, the billionaire co-founder and former COO of Tencent, who is the largest shareholder of newly public Taomee, has been taken away by authorities to “assist in an investigation”.

(11) Statistics released by NYSE show that, by June 30, there are already seven Chinese firms that went public on NYSE in the first half of the year.

(12) Baidu, the largest search engine which claims over 83.6% of Chinese search market share, announced that the company had struck a deal to team up with Microsoft’s search offering Bing in an effort to speed up Baidu’s pace of overseas expansion.