Cisco announces a three-year $45 million (RMB300 million) commitment to helping rebuild in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake that left nearly 5 million people homeless. The memorandum of understanding signed by both Sichuan Governor Jiang Jufeng and Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers was the result of several weeks of meetings between the Cisco team and officials from all levels of the Chinese government to gain a better understanding of the current situation. Corporate......

The famed Shaolin Temple has started its own online store on Taobao, and everything we've seen there looks like a bargain — from this Kinnara engraving (RMB1,800) to this god-knows-what-it-is (RMB9,999). The store, which opened a month ago, has sold a whopping 24 items. Reuters details all the praise Chinese netizens have for the temple's latest commercial venture here. Shanghai-based Ebay subsidiary Kijiji.cn has just announced its rebranding to Baixing.com. The company headed by Shanghai......

From Danwei: "But conspicuously missing from the list are the Big Three of the Chinese Youtube clones: Youku.com, Tudou.com and 56.com. Although 56.com has been off line for nearly two weeks after an apparent porblem with the authorities, these three websites have the largest amount of funding of any video websites in China, most of it foreign. By most accounts they are also the most popular video sites in China."......

Last week Shanghai saw the introduction of ">handy tri-colored boxes in communication stores throughout the city to be used to recycle or properly dispose of cell phones. The initiative could make a huge impact in helping the city's environment: Shanghai Mobile reports 3.2 million phones are trashed in the city each year. The local trend may be indicative of a nation-wide movement. During his recent visit to China, Samsung CEO Lee Yoon-Woo announced the company’s......

Search for Carrefour's Chinese name 家乐福 on Google.cn right now and you get a blank screen with a one-liner (screenshot on the right) telling you that you can't access the results for your search term, and please go back to Google.cn to search for something else. Funnily enough, the same search term on Google.com is not blocked within China and returns 6.2 million results. In related news, ISP's across China received orders last week to......

Graham Webster of CNet blog Sinobyte reports that William Chang, chief scientist for Baidu, told the WWW2008 conference in Beijing yesterday, "'There's in fact no reason for China to use Wikipedia, a service based 'out there'... It's very natural for China to make it's own products," and hence all of us should be good boys and girls and use Baidupedia instead. He of course conveniently forgot to mention Chinese Wikipedia remains blocked.HiPiHi, the Chinese clone......

From Ananova: A Chinese man is hoping to get in the record books after creating what he claims is the world's largest working mobile phone. Mr Tan, of Songyuan city, says his 3ft high phone, which weighs 48lbs, is an exact copy of his own phone - but 620 times bigger. A local journalist tested the phone by making calls and sending text messages and pronounced it completely functional, reports City News. Tan says it......

As the Financial Times reported, April 1 was the day that China Mobile started trials of its homegrown 3G wireless technology in eight major cities, with about 60,000 customers. A more recent Chinese reports suggests that the trials may only involve ">20,000 people. Another Chinese media report says that China Mobile offers three very attractive discount packages to people testing out 3G. For one, the regular voice telephone charges are less than what we 2G......

A few weeks ago it came to our attention that what appeared to be a large price tag-shaped sign was affixed to the front of a building under construction across the street from Zhongshan Park. The sign was under wraps, but the shape alone was enough to conjure up images of Best Buy and many high school hours spent searching in vain for movies and music that they don't keep in stock. Now despite......

By Kenneth Tan and David Feng Not good news: Tudou may be in for a squashing by the Chinese mainland authorities, specifically, the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television. A Sohu IT report claims that the presence of porn -- a big no-no on the Chinese Internet -- was all that it took for the potato (which is the Chinese translation of "tudou") to be squashed. The squashing is long-term and has no set......

Photo by Mike Chen The Steven Spielberg pullout... AFP: Spielberg mocked in China over Olympic pullout Business Week: Why Spielberg doesn't care about annoying Beijing Xinhua: Spielberg slashed by Chinese, but his movies still admired ... and the fallout Reuters: Dutch party seeks boycott of Olympics opening The Canadian Press: An athlete's voice of protest could become a roar at Beijing Games AFP: Ex-China basketball star says Olympics are platform for change The spy......

About.com has entered the Chinese market as Abang.com (阿邦网), and the website, like so many other Chinese portals, is looking very 热闹 ("busy"). The range of topics on Abang.com doesn't look like its very extensive yet but that's because they've only just started. Thomas Crampton catches up with Matt Roberts of About.com and finds out why they have chosen the name 阿邦 for their China presence. We thought the name was a great idea —......

Odd story coming out of Tianjin, about 100 miles southeast of Beijing; some girl's mobile phone kept on switching off by itself. Immediately after switching the phone back on, the mobile started sending messages like there was no tomorrow. An attempt at ringing someone resulted in a warning:You've run out of cash and owe us CNY 300 in unpaid bills!That oddity happened with a Nokia 7370 in a Tianjin university. (At the last Mobile Monday......

(h/t to Zhongnanhai) It's just about time, isn't it, that Anonymouse came up with its own toolbar, so we don't have to go to its website each time we want to purvey the tonnes of dissident and pornographic material on Blogspot, Wikipedia and Wordpress? The toolbar for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox on Windows, Mac OS and Linux can be downloaded for FREE here. Other options that have worked wonders for us include the......

Here, Shanghai, were your favourite stories for the year 2007: Most Voted: 1. Man with world's largest hand in Shanghai for surgery 2. Giant man-eating catfish found in Guangdong reservoir? 3. China home to the world's largest Christian population? 4. Is Shanghai the sex capital of the world? 5. Chongqing's doggie-style public sinks 6. Don't date men who regularly peruse personal ads 7. We'd kill to eat at Southern Barbarian 8. Public pocket pinball......

No, we're not talking about "personalized networks of influence" — everyone needs those. We're talking about Guanxi, the paid SMS service that allows you to send the name of a venue and it replies with the venue's address. Yesterday, for about the 27th time[1] in the past several months, we got a message supposedly from Guanxi telling us their number had changed ... again: Due to Mii rule chng,new# of Guanxi Search is 106695882929.Pls save!......

If you think only Chinese people use Baidu, you're dead wrong. Recently, a friend of ours in the US complained that he was unable to find any more music through Baidu's MP3 search service. Not a surprise really, since that treasure trove of pirated music that is now getting sued for big bucks in a Beijing court by some of the biggest names in music including Universal, EMI, Warner, Sony BMG and their local subsidiaries,......

Those sounding the death knell for an Apple, China Mobile iPhone partnership maybe a bit premature. On Friday, a China Mobile spokesperson in Hong Kong confirmed(in Chinese) that discussion between the two sides is still ongoing, but didn’t elaborate on any details. China Mobile has bluntly stated that it has no intention of sharing subscription revenue with handset manufacturers, the core of Apple’s business model. And as the overwhelmingly dominant carrier in China, it is......

Heres' a public service announcement to (illegal) satellite TV users from Shanghaiist: Don't put stuff on top of your satellite receiver box. We had gotten in the habit of placing the occasional DVD or DVD sleeve on top of our satellite box, which is covered by a bunch of small vents. Not long ago, while working at our computer (surprise, surprise) at around 1 am, we heard a popping noise coming from near the TV......

Chinese video-sharing site Youku.com has raised another US$25 million in funding while our favourite airline ticketing company Qunar.com has received US$10 million in a fresh round of funding.Chinese social networking service Xiaonei.com has followed in the footsteps of Facebook and opened up its services to non-college students. The only thing standing in its way, we think, is its name as Xiaonei ("校内") literally means "at school“.Google has launched an SMS search function that now makes......

Baidu has released its video search report, and Kaiser Kuo of the Ogilvy China Digital Watch translates and summarises some of the key findings. Interestingly, “adult-related” search terms account for 34.14% of daily search volume, followed by celebrity-related (14.74%), TV serial related (12.48%), and animation-related (12.21%) searches. Google is reportedly under investigation in China for tax evasion, says Paul Midler of The China Game.Chinese Skype users now exceed 25% of the global total.While venture capital......

Maybe. China Mobile’s CEO Wang Jianzhou confirmed that his company has been in discussion with Apple to bring the wildly popular handset to China, “because our customers like this kind of fashionable product,” said Wang. But, negotiations have stalled over Apple’s subscription revenue sharing business model. In Europe and the US, Apple receives a portion of iPhone users’ data/voice revenue from their wireless carriers. China Mobile, with its 350 million user base and de facto......

Last weekend, we told you that Yahoo! is now apologizing for not telling the full truth to Congress at the February 2006 hearing where Yahoo! was taken to task for its role in the conviction of Chinese journalist Shi Tao. Now both Republicans and Democrats have launched scathing attacks on Yahoo. San Mateo Democrat Tom Lantos has called Yahoo "moral pygmies", and New Jersey Republican Chris Smith compared Yahoo’s cooperation with the Chinese government to......

As you know, Feedburner is being blocked in China, thus many people are having difficulties using the Shanghaiist RSS feed, which uses Feedburner. Per reader request, here's an alternate Shanghaiist RSS feed you can use until Feedburner becomes accessible again: feed://shanghaiist.com/temp_rss.xml Sorry for the delay in making this accessible.......

Baidu rolled a new feature as of yesterday—a person of the month, which you can see in their logo. They say that they pick the person based on searches done in their engine, so it's a bit like Google Trends meets Time Person of the Year on a monthly basis. This month it's Xu Sanduo (许三多), a character from a popular TV series called Soldier Sortie(士兵突击), which has become one of the more popular shows......

Yahoo China has taken a jibe at its arch-nemesis in the search arena, Baidu, with new banner ads featuring a bald big-bellied man peering out into the distance with a telescope and a tagline that says "If you can search only 100 degrees, you might as well search 360 degrees with Yahoo" (搜索只能搜100度，不如雅虎全能搜搜360度). Baidu's Chinese name 百度 means, literally, "100 degrees". According to this report at least, several webmasters have complained that their websites......

As we speak (type?), RnB diva and superstar, Beyoncé is probably relaxing in her luxury suite somewhere in this city. We, on the other hand, are not relaxing. We are anxiously awaiting tomorrow night., when she will take the Shanghai Grand Stage to belt our some songs and shake that tailfeather of hers. In case you forgot (and how could you really?), we told you about the concert ages ago, so most of you probably......

Yes, that was our reaction when we saw these pictures, but sorry to disappoint all you Facebook whores (that includes ourselves!) out there, the image on the right is just a Facebook clone, Xiaonei.com (校内网). It looks like the portal was started around 2005 (less than two years after Facebook was born), and since then, it has grown exponentially to cover around 2,000 university campuses in Greater China. They have just recently started to......

So, as some of our commenters in a previous post brought up, Youtube is indeed back! So what was behind the temporary block — was it the 17th Party Congress or was it Youtube's Hong Kong/Taiwan versions? I guess we will never know. But enjoy it while it lasts people. You never know when the block will come back up, but when it does, you know you have VPN to fall back on ;-) There's......

So both Myspace and Friendster have their own China versions. Now Kaiser Kuo of Ogilvy Digital China Watch points us to a report on China Business News (第一财经日报) which cites an “industry insider” who says that Facebook plans to release additional language interfaces and intends to enter the China market as early as December this year. The paper also claims that "Facebook has given up its initial plan to set up its own China-based site......