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According to 新浪科技 (Sina News), the number of users accessing the Internet via mobile devices in China has hit more than 300 million.
As of February this year, Internet penetration in China reached 35%, or ~470 million users, making China the largest Internet population in the world.
新浪邮件(Sina Mail) has started rolling out upgrades to its free webmail accounts that, along other new things, will also feature unlimited email storage space. However, these accounts will not immediately receive unlimited storage; instead, users will have to “earn” it – new and current accounts will start off with 5GB of storage, thereafter, every three months, the users will get to increase their storage by another 5GB for free. This move is probably designed to thwart abuse of their services.
Credits: Sina News
According to NetworkWorld, China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile carrier by userbase, has hit 600 million users, putting it far ahead of its other rivals – China Telecom at 335.6 million users and China Unicom at 323 million.
Newflash: Sina Microblog (新浪微薄) has moved to weibo.com. Users can still access Sina Microblog (新浪微薄) at its old address at t.sina.com.cn, but both sites will eventually merge into a single site at weibo.com.
According to NetEase News (网易科技), 新浪 (Sina) has announced that as its contract with Google to use its search engine technology had expired, 新浪 (Sina) had started to use its in-house developed search engine to power its search function on its websites.
According to NetEase News (网易科技), a Baidu (百度) spokesperson have confirmed that Baidu has developed their own (PC) web browser that is based on their “Box computing” concept, and have started internal tests.
According to NetEase News (网易科技), Hongkong expects to start accepting .香港 domain name registrations from general public in May; Some Hongkong Government agencies have already registered for “.政府.香港” (.gov.hk) domain names.
Internationalised Domain Name， aka IDN, refers to any domain names that contains non ASCII characters.
ICANN’s IDN ccTLD Fast track process aims to introduce country code top-level domains such as .中国 into the Internet, in recognition of the diverse languages of the world’s Internet users.
Seems like Opera has been pretty aggressive in growing their market recently. Soon after announcing the launch of their new cross-platform mobile app store – Opera Mobile Store, Opera has announced that it has entered into a joint venture with China’s Telling Telecom (天音通信) to develop and market a customized mobile browser for the Chinese market. While Opera brings with it the mobile browser technology and knowhow, Telling Telecom (天音通信) brings local content and its distribution network – ~18% market share of Chinese mobile-phone distribution industry – to the table.
According to TheNextWeb Asia, 新浪 (Sina) have recently launched a new Foursquare-like Geolocation service – 微领地 (vld.sina.cn) – that allows its users to check-in to a location. This service, currently still in beta, encourages its users to use it by rewarding them with badges, as well as discount e-vouchers – just like Foursquare.
Main page - http://vld.sina.cn/
Badges
Discount e-vouchers
The Chinese government had probably grown uneasy with 百度 (baidu)‘s growing clout, which had meant that the state have very little leverage against Baidu if the need arises; the state cannot simply block access to Baidu, as a recent study by iResearch had revealed that Baidu had 83.6% of China’s search engine market.
Credits: iResearch
As such, it is likely that their strategy is to introduce a sizable competitor in order to gain leverage against Baidu in the future. To that end, they have lent their support to 盘古搜 (panguso.com) – a newly unveiled China search engine that was built by the 新华 (Xinhua) – 中国移动 (China Mobile) partnership.
That said, 盘古搜 (panguso.com) is no lame duck; it tries to differentiate itself with its focus on news, unlike other search engines which usually focus on web pages. This is evident from its search results defaulting to the “News” category instead of “Webpages”. Furthermore, 盘古搜 (panguso.com) also introduced a way where users could share a search result via SMS, though currently it’s only available to China mobile subscribers.
