China Tech Roundup: Alibaba, Baidu, iTunes and China Mobile

• Chinese online trading site, Alibaba, plans to expand to Europe. The company behind the site will open a London office, as part of a project called "Road to London", which aims to encourage Chinese companies to invest in the next Olympic host city.
• As we told you earlier, an album called Songs For Tibet, was released on iTunes just three days before the Olympics, causing its online store to be blocked in China. Now however, iTunes Music Store has been reopened, in a new and Songs For Tibet-free version, somehow the censors have managed to block access to this album, without blocking the entire site.
• Baidu's new e-commerce platform will offer 10.000 beta testers free online stores and domain names.
• China's third most viewed blogger Liu Yijun, a.k.a. Acosta, has sued digital screen advertiser Touchmedia (the company behind the little screens in Shanghai's taxis) and the Wuhan subsidiary of smart phone maker Dopod for RMB 1 million. He claims Dopod used photos from his blog to edit him into a phone advertisement for Touchmedia's network.
• According to China Tech News China Mobile plans to include 28 cities in its new TD-SCDM-network: 26 provincial capitals and coastal cities Ningbo and Dalian. They've got competition however, this week Ericsson became the first foreign company to launch a base station with the Chinese-made TD-SCDMA technology.

Photo by maury.mccown