Chinese New Year snatched the limelight last week. To celebrate the New Year, Baidu launched a creative “Red Packet” campaign, whereby users stand a chance to win prizes like travel tickets, iPad and iPhones by simply searching “红包”on the Chinese search engine. Google and Baidu had also switched to a rabbit-style doodle logo to suit the occasion.
On Twitter, ‘Kung Hei Fat Choi’, a Cantonese phrase equivalent to ‘prosperity and wealth’ was a trending topic. Even non-Chinese Twitterers were seen tweeting the phrase. Facebook on the other hand, was used to stop people from having shark’s fins during Chinese New Year. Supporters were asked to change their Facebook display picture to show support. The impact was viral enough to attract media attention.
Beside Chinese New Year, last week was a week of government 2.0. The Government of India promoted Census 2011 through Facebook. Drawing inspiration from that, the Planning Commission of India also employed Facebook to reach citizens. On the same week, Taiwan President Ma, also launched his Facebook page to connect with Taiwanese on Facebook. The page was wildly popular with over 300,000 likes at the point of reporting. Currently, it has over 430,000 likes.
On start-up Asia, Smaato, a mobile ad platform company secured $7 million funding from Singapore’s EDBI (Congrats!). More on mobile, we learned that RockeTalk was ahead of Facebook and Twitter to be India’s top mobile social network. Check out the comments section as we have some interesting discussion going on. We also featured Freesia City, a Singapore and Indonesia based social game which hit over 115,000 monthly active gamers on Facebook. Fressia City is one of the successful start-up examples which made Indonesia a rising technology start-up nation. Likewise for China, as we shared Kaiser Kuo’s thoughts on Beijing as China’s Silicon Valley in the future.
Last week, 4th Feb, was Facebook 7th birthday and its best birthday gift would probably be an increasing number of Chinese users on Facebook. Facebook users in China had doubled to 700,000 within 4 weeks. Mark Zuckerberg’s trip to China two months ago had somehow paid off. In fact, Facebook was gaining users in almost all parts of Asia. To date, Asia has 143 million Facebook users in total.
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