This was a big week for tech in China, with two pretty important conferences in Beijing and some interesting stuff happening elsewhere, too! Here are my top five picks for this week.
1. Techcrunch’s Disrupt Beijing Conference
One of the big boys of tech blogging in the West finally came to Beijing and put on a pretty impressive show, despite a few disappointments. We spent all of Monday and Tuesday there covering the sessions with kickass liveblogs and interviewing start-ups and CEOs, so instead of picking just one story, here’s the run-down of all of them, from the big keynote talks to every start-up in the start-up battlefield.
2. Alipay is Going Global…
We got some exclusive information about Alibaba’s forthcoming Alipay Express, a global payment solution thats hoping to take PayPal’s lunch money, and maybe kick it around the playground a couple of times. When’s it coming? Soon! Check it out.
3. …and Ai Weiwei is Using it to Crowdsource His Taxes
Speaking of AliPay, dissident artist Ai Weiwei, who was recently slapped with a $2.4 million bill in unpaid taxes, has been using Alibaba’s payment service to accept donations (or maybe they’re loans) from net users all over China. He managed to raise nearly 400,000 RMB in just a few hours, so maybe there’s something to this.
4. The 2011 China Mobile Developers Conference
We also covered the 2011 CMDC during the second half of these week, where we got to hear from more Chinese companies and see a bunch of the same faces we saw a few days earlier at Disrupt Beijing (what’s up, Lei Jun?). So again, instead of linking just one story from our conference coverage, we invite you to browse them all!
5. Beijing Set to Launch Free Wifi, or Maybe Free Trap
The Beijing government is set to launch a free wifi pilot program that will eventually extend to over 400,000 nodes across the city, and only ask of citizens that they submit their mobile phone number before logging in. This sounds like good news, but we were a bit suspicious about the real reasons behind the plan. Plus, we rarely pass up an opportunity to make Admiral Ackbar references.
It’s a wrap! Er, I mean, that’s it for this week’s top stories. Stay tuned next week, as I have a sneaking suspicion that more things will probably happen during it. Ciao!
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