Results tagged “baidu”

If you've got a Nokia S60 series and happen to speak Chinese, you can now use Google voice search on your mobile in China. The new service, the first non-English voice search Google has released, is one of many recent attempts to wrestle some more of the market away from current leader Baidu. According to the company, it works best with sharper Mandarin accents (Beijingers might have a little more trouble being understood) and will be rolled out to other phones sometime soon.

• A crowd-sourced translation of The Lost Symbol: is this copyright infringement? [Danwei] "His last book, The Da Vinci Code, was wildly popular in China and propelled translations of his earlier novels onto bestseller lists as well. The latest thriller, which follows the further adventures of intrepid symbologist Robert Langdon, should sell well over here too. Once it's translated, that is. People's Literature Publishing House expects a Chinese edition to be on shelves sometime in 2010. Chinese Internet users can't wait that long, so Yeeyan, a collaborative translation website, has launched a project to crowd-source the translation of The Lost Symbol into Chinese. They've already posted the prologue and the first two chapters."
• Baidu CEO touts growth of China's search engine [Cnet News] "Baidu CEO Robin Li, on a rare visit to Silicon Valley Wednesday, explained the rise of his company's search engine in China before a group of students more interested in entrepreneurial tips than censorship. Li ended a trip to the U.S. Wednesday at Stanford University, speaking to a crowd of several hundred students about the lessons he learned shepherding Baidu through the first dot-com bust and growing it into the Google of China. Baidu has 76 percent of the Chinese search market, he said, which consists of 338 million Internet users: larger than the entire population of the U.S."
• 11 indicted over factory brawl in S China [Xinhua] "Eleven people involved in a toy factory brawl on June 26 that left two employees dead in south China's Guangdong Province have been indicted for intentional injury and group affray, procurators said Wednesday. Xiao Jianhua and four other suspects were indicted for intentionally assaulting people during the Xuri Toy Factory brawl, the Shaoguan Municipal People's Procuratorate said."

• China party scholar hints at Xi Jinping promotion [Washington Post] "A Chinese Communist official on Tuesday held out the possibility that Vice President Xi Jinping could still be promoted to a military position, in a step toward ultimately taking over the nation's top leadership post. Some media had speculated that Xi, who is expected to succeed President Hu Jintao in 2013, would be anointed vice chairman of the Central Military Commission at a party plenum last week, reinforcing his succession claim. However, the plenum closed last Friday with no word of any personnel changes."
• China opens media center for coverage of 60th National Day celebrations [Xinhua] "A media center was opened Tuesday for journalists covering celebrations commemorating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China on Oct. 1. The center, in the Media Center Hotel, will operate until Oct. 2 and will be responsible for providing reception and services for media personnel, such as issuing press passes and organizing interviews. Zhu Shouchen, deputy director of the center, said they had so far received applications from more than 4,500 journalists in and outside the Chinese mainland."
• What China's Hu Would Really Like to Tell Obama [Time] "Summit meetings, in particular those with 20 heads of state in attendance, are usually scripted, staid affairs. That's especially true when these get-togethers involve Chinese President Hu Jintao, whose private persona varies little from his public style. As befits someone who is running the world's most populous country, he is intensely disciplined and extremely cautious. On Tuesday, he will meet one on one with U.S. President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York City before heading off to Pittsburgh, Pa., for the G-20 summit on Sept. 24-25. This is what a more relaxed Hu might say to Obama, whose first major decision on trade was to slap a 35% tariff on tires produced in China — an action that generated a flurry of stories in the media about the possibility of a U.S.-China trade war..."

• Readings on 1999's "May 8th Tragedy" [The China Beat] The China Beat compiles readings on 1999's "May 8th Tragedy," when NATO missiles were fired into the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three PRC nationals and sparking protests all around the world from angry Chinese citizens. Included are two news accounts from the time - one by the BBC and one by CNN, a Salon.com piece by a Beida foreign student and two later analysis of the situation.
• China eyes regular Olympic show [Financial Times] "Less than a year after China hosted the Olympics, Beijing is planning to put its stunningly choreographed opening ceremony back on as a regular evening show at the “Bird’s Nest”, the main stadium built for the games... Zhang Hengli, vice-president of the National Stadium Company that now runs the Bird’s Nest, said: “We want to put on a regular evening show like the opening ceremony. But that will take longer to realise [than other performances in the works for the stadium] because it requires a huge amount of money. We need to find an investor and deal with potential issues of intellectual property of the International Olympic Committee.”"
• Communists Can’t Outspend Capitalists as China Jobless Increase [Bloomberg] "Demand for work is so high that 5,000 students jostled at a Shanghai employment fair in March for 400 jobs available in the funeral industry. One woman with a management degree applied for a position as a mortician’s assistant to “make up the faces of the dead,” state media reported. The attraction: It paid 4,000 yuan ($585) a month, equal to what she might have earned in an office job two years ago."

• Beijing professor's remarks spark angry protests [AFP] "About 30 protesters tried to force their way into China's elite Peking University on Friday to confront a law professor who said 99 percent of the people petitioning the government with grievances are mentally ill and could be institutionalized."
• Chinese Online Games Market Grew 63% In 2008 [Gamasutra] "New data from analyst group Pearl Research shows that China's online games market grew 63 percent in 2008 to a total $2.8 billion. In its new Games Market in China report, Pearl Research forecasts that the Chinese online market will be worth more than $5.5 billion by 2012."
• The Pavilion Wars [The Atlantic] "The upcoming World's Fair should offer the chance to build a showpiece U.S. pavilion. But thanks to behind-the-scenes maneuverings and State Department incompetence, we may end up with a Chinese-funded pavilion—or no pavilion at all."

After the launch of Google China's free music service we couldn't resist taking it for a test drive - especially since all the pundits have been saying this was too little too late for Google as Baidu has been offering free (albeit illegal) MP3 downloads for ages.

Of no surprise to most people, the Baidu scandal has caused the search engine to lose some of its massive lead over Google in the Chinese market. While the company says its taken steps to correct the problems underscored by a CCTV expose, and U.S. investors are confident that Google won't ever win the race in this country, the numbers are still enough to make Baidu sweat a little. Google's share of the local online ad market rose 4.4% to 27.8% from the prior year. Baidu's rise was smaller, at 2.9% during the same period. Meanwhile, 4Q Internet traffic levels shrunk at Baidu, but gained at Google. Source: Bloomberg

"The Rixin neighbourhood committee in the city's north-east has begun a campaign to discourage residents' longstanding habit of wearing pyjamas out of their bedrooms and on the streets...'We're telling people not to wear pyjamas in the street because it looks very uncivilised,' community official Guo Xilin was quoted as saying."

While other singers, bands and musicians continue to add China as a stop on their world tours, it looks like Guns N' Roses won't get to do that anytime soon. The Associated Press reports that Chinese state media have blasted their song Chinese Democracy:

In an article Monday headlined "American band releases album venomously attacking China," the Global Times said unidentified Chinese Internet users had described the album as part of a plot by some in the West to "grasp and control the world using democracy as a pawn."

Continue reading "Chinese Democracy: Has it been banned?"

Recent actions by the Alibaba Group and Taobao to protect their market share may not be enough given the multi-front strategy taken by search engine juggernaut Baidu. With their profits up by 91% in the last quarter, Baidu seems to be using their financial success to attack other Chinese online markets.

• Last week Baidu announced after two years of searching the appointment of Li Yinan as the new Chief Technology Officer for China's leading search engine. Just when everything began to fall into place and we were getting ready for a season Googlesque innovation, rumours began to fly that William I. Chang, Baidu's Chief Scientific Officer was planning to resign because he didn't like his new job scope. Not sure though how much of a rumour it is when they have already named his successor.
• To make CEO Robin Li's life even more stressful, Baidu's next big push will be into the e-commerce arena with the launch of youa.com may be thwarted by Alibaba Group's announcement that it will invest another RMB5 billion into its own online Taobao.com to strengthen its 57% market share. Of course Alibaba claims that this had nothing to do with fending off Baidu and we of course believe them.
• In its own corporate reshuffle, Alibaba has for the first time in its five year history appointed a COO. Zhang Yong, former CFO was promoted to fill the void left by Huang Ruo, the former VP and B2C business director who resigned at the end of September.

After two long years, the void left by the departure of Jerry Liu has been filled by telecommunications technologist Li Yinan. Li was the former Chief Technology Scientist at Huawei Technologies and oversaw the development of 3G mobile chipsets.

• 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.

Following their somewhat bizarre picture last month of Obama and a "dapper" donkey, the latest person to grace Baidu's homepage gives a slightly clearer message. The picture is of "Wheelchair Angel" (as she's been dubbed in some sections of the press) Jin Jing clutching the Olympic Torch to her chest, a position she adopted when pro-Tibetan protestors tried to snatch the flame from her in Paris last month. Clicking on the picture takes you through to a page headlined with the words "Protect the scared flame, make China faster, higher, stronger!"

Video from HiPiHi.