Amidst all the swimming, judo, badminton, archery, table tennis, and more that’s on offer on day two of the Olympics, we thought you’d still like to have our Sunday round-up of the hottest China tech news of the week. This time, here are the seven stand-outs:
1. Sina Weibo to launch “promoted tweets” ads
Yes, we’ve seen all this before from Twitter, which gives brands the chance to reach out to all who use its website. And now China’s hottest Twitter-esque site, Sina Weibo, looks set to do the same.
2. Sina Weibo opens discussion forums, no longer any 140-character limit
In contrast to the story above, there are many ways in which Sina Weibo is well ahead of Twitter is terms of new features. It’s a much broader social platform too. And that was proved this week with a vast array of discussion forums, called Weiba, which were added to Weibo.
3. In wake of disastrous rainstorm, Beijing says text message warning system impossible
Last weekend, a great many Beijing residents were affected by flash floods, with over 75 thought to have died (by the latest official death toll). As soon as the waters ebbed away, local authorities rolled out a bunch of excuses about the lack of warnings about the deluge. It got awkward a few days later when a different province found no obstacles to giving its citizens SMS warnings about an approaching tropical storm.
4. Netizens map Beijing floods on Google Maps
Still on the subject of those terrible floods, this week also saw a number of Beijingers taking the post-disaster coverage into their own, crowd-sourced hands.
5. See who rules China’s B2C e-commerce market as it nears $100 billion in value [CHART]
As a part of our market share coverage, we looked into China’s business-to-consumer online shopping sector, where the top five sites all consolidated their leads. Quarterly sales revenues among all these sites is now close to $100 billion!
6. China’s e-commerce king gets social, wants users to “get together”
The nation’s top e-tailing company decided to get a lot more social this week, launching a social network that looks like a cross between Weibo and G+.
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