By Hilary Faxon and Adrienne Wong Youku.com, one of China's two largest video sharing sites, announced at midnight last night that it has closed a funding round of $30 million. Youku said in a statement that it netted $30 million from existing investors Farallon, Sutter Hill, Chengwei, and Brookside, and an additional $10 million in venture debt from Western Technology Investment. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, Youku has more than 100 million video views a day. Ku6.com......

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......

China Digital Times reports that a new virus is being distributed through e-mails with anti-China headings that ask readers to click on what looks like an embedded video player, but instead release a brutal virus onto the machine. Messages with subjects like “China is paralyzed by new earthquake,” “2008 Olympic Games are under the threat,” and “A new deadly catastrophe in China,” should be treated as potentially harmful.......

He may be the President of 1.3 billion people, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t surf the internet like you and me. President Hu had his first interactive webcast through the People’s Daily Online this morning, answering tough questions like what he reads on the internet, and where he goes to feel for the pulse of netizens. For the full transcript of the webcast, click here.......

On the internet grapevine, a story surfaced yesterday that had China Unicom launching Apple’s new 3G iPhone here on the mainland come August. The wildly popular iPhone 1.0 never made it to the PRC (well not officially, the local grey market was pretty well supplied). The rift between folks over at Cupertino and Chinese wireless carriers was over Apple’s subscription revenue sharing business model, one that would have had the carrier partner giving Apple a......

How does — 160 million pairs of eyeballs — sound to you? 160 million Chinese Internauts do audio and video on the Internet. (That's the latest report in from CNNIC, China's Network Info Center.) The writing on the wall: The AV web's active and competitive, but is also pretty optimistic; diversification and integration are what's to be expected. Of note:The high number of AV netizens can be accredited to the mass availability of broadband......

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......

A survey conducted online by Sohu shows that to the Internet netizenry (at least those who took part in the survey) thinks, in regards to the telco reshuffle: • the reshuffle will happen post-Olympics; • the reshuffle will boost competition, ultimately benefitting the customer; • China Mobile will appear as the most favorable telco after the remix. In terms of specifics: Q: Will there be any concrete moves before the Olympics? • No: 44.06% •......

Following a hot tip from the New York Times we were able to find Facebook's newest member, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao (温家宝). Initially Shanghaiist was excited about the prospect of being friends with 'Grandpa,' but then we realized he had more friends (13,280 supporters as of now) than all of the contributors combined and more supporters than the Shanghaiist fan page. Just leave it to the older generations to make it uncool for everyone else.......

Two recent cases have shown that the Chinese Internet is probably more alive than you ever thought it to be... Case 1: "The Liaoning Girl": Gao Qianhui (高千惠), a 20-year old girl from Shenyang, Liaoning (in northeastern China), took aim at the recent earthquake in Sichuan. The 3-day period of mourning took away Internet games from the girl, which made her more than unhappy. Unfortunately, the nearly 5 minute-long clip, which was also posted on......

With over 30,000 dead, another tens of thousands missing, and 200,000 injured, coupled with a broken down mobile/land line and transportation system, many people are on a frantic search for each other, and Google mobilised 100 of its employees to help create a custom search engine entirely dedicated to helping people find their friends and loved ones. Other nifty tools found on this feature-rich page include Google Maps integrated with the latest earthquake and relief......

In honor of Science and Environment Day today (Saturday), Sagevision and the Ruijin Community Cultural Center, are erecting a ‘Community Trash Art Mural’ in Fuxing Park. They aim to “create public awareness and interest regarding the impact of trash on the environment in China and the world.” Shanghaiist has diligently been washing our plastic and metal trash and storing it for this big day. Participants will watch a short video on a product’s life cycle......

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......

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......

The free admission that began this week was such a great success at the Shanghai Museum that officials have now limited the maximum number of visitors to 5,000 at any time. The other three museums included in the trial also reported a spike in visitor numbers.Xunlei, the Chinese P2P service that is currently being sued by the Hollywood-based Motion Picture Association for US$1 million has said that the Shanghai court was not the appropriate place......

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......

TechCrunch called it "the only legitimate iPhone knockoff" but it looks like the day of reckoning has come for the Chinese copycat manufacturer! German police have shut down the Meizu booth at CeBIT, the technology uber-fair. From Engadget.com:Remember how the folks at the Meizu booth swore up and down that the M8 Mini One wasn't that similar to the iPhone? Well apparently the Hanover police think otherwise. According to a report, the booth (shown above......

Shanghai will always be a step ahead of the capital, Beijing, when it comes to some things. Like freeways — Shanghai got the Huning Freeway first (back in 1988!). And now, wifi freeways. Jiading Wireless City will be reality no later than May 2008. Mesh Wi-Fi and WiMAX technology will make this part of Shanghai just that bit more wireless. And the good thing is — this is free. Want to get online now in......

We've been here before so don't get too excited, but it seems that blogspot sites are once again accessible in Shanghai. Photo from China Daily Good news for Olympic athletes who have recently been (sort of) granted permission to blog (but not podcast) at the Olympic games by the IOC. Any media-savvy athletes however, will be registering their own domain names in order to avoid a blanket ban. We notice that www.LiuXiang.com has already been......

In tribute to our city's place at the cutting edge of technology, AMD have decided to name their latest processor "Shanghai". Photo by Stelzer Recent reports suggest that the tiny 45-nanometer quad-core microprocessor "Shanghai" will use less power than its competitors whilst achieving similar speeds, and could be out as soon as the third quarter of 2008. "Shanghai" is, of course, developed in India.......

More and more folks in China are getting in on the mobile phone rage: December 2007 saw an increase of 6.6 million new mobile phone users. The newest January 2008 stats are even more impressive, with 7 new mobile people. China Mobile is now the choice of 376.4 million people in a nation of 1.3 billion and counting. China Unicom, too, has added 1.42 million new users in January 2008, up from the December 2007......

Ready for the great big leap over the 200M marker? If the China News Agency (中国新闻网) have done their maths right, China would see a growth of 34.1% -- and by the end of the Olympic Year, 2008, we'd see 244 million online. In a nation of 1.3 billion -- maybe even 1.4 billion some years later... Growth has been increasing, especially for the period between 2006 to 2007. A 23.6% increase some years ago......

From Boxun.com (you need a proxy) we discovered that there was a maglev-related protest on January 6th. It first started around 11am, around the Xinzhuang/Minhang area, and was dispersed, only to form again sometime around 3pm, this time in the busy Xujiahui CBD. It managed to, in some form, last until 11pm. Protesters carried signs saying "out for a walk" (散步), while other chanted slogans about protecting their homes. The proposed maglev was to link......

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......

No, she hasn't been reincarnated, but yes, she's back, and this time as a virus! Reports are out that hackers have pounced on the news of Benazir Bhutto's assassination and within twelve hours of her death, viruses and malicious scripts appeared on the internet preying on surfers interested in additional information surrounding Bhutto's death. Well, guess who's responsible for the attack! CNet China has the details:据专家分析，由病毒的编写手法、来源网站、木马植入方式、病毒的危害对象等来看，此带毒网站可能与中国黑客有关。但是，由于在搜索引擎上搜索布托夫人英文名字的主要是国外人士，并且该网站在百度等国内搜索引擎的排名并不高，因此对中国用户的危害相应较弱。 Analysts have looked into the way the viruses are......

Quick note from the Editor: We are pleased to introduce to you a new member of our family: David Feng, who has come to join us at Shanghaiist to head up our tech column. David is the founder of the Beijing Macintosh User Group and a one-man super blogger on the China tech and startup scene. He was most recently the China editor for tech uberblog BlogNation, before its infamous implosion, that is (which we......

Just as the rest of the world is getting swept away in a social networking frenzy, googling for keywords such as "Badoo", "Facebook", "Ebuddy", "Hi5" and even "Second Life", Chinese googlers it seems are a completely different species. In 2007, four out of the top ten keywords among Chinese googlers were wealth-related, searching for keywords such as "stock", "China Merchants Bank", "Industrial and Commercial Bank of China" and "China Construction Bank". Bank of China is......

Leading Chinese search engine Baidu is mourning the loss of its CFO, Shawn Wang (王湛生) who died in an accident during his Christmas vacation in China on Thursday (no more details were given). The man was credited with leading the company through a successful initial public offering on NASDAQ. Meanwhile, a group of seven leading global record companies, including EMI, SONY BMG, Warner Music and Universal Music have lost their lawsuit against Baidu for aiding......

Nature News cites an EU report that finds that the real value of a Chinese scientist's wages is the lowest among the 38 countries surveyed. Yes, Chinese scientists make even less than Indian scientists. (h/t to Global Voices )CNNIC announces that China now has 72.82 million blogs and 47 million bloggers. That's one quarter of all Chinese netizens.The Little Red Blog bets against Baidu and roots for Google in the year 2008.Washington Post asks......