Results tagged “tencent”

If you follow us on our twitter, you've probably noticed that, every now and then, we'll ask you to chat with us on the new QQ International. What's QQ? It's the chat platform that's taken China by storm - basically any local with an internet has a QQ ID. QQI is the International English version of the platform, which now gives you a window into the China chatting world (download it here). And we're on it. If you want to join our group, talk to some of our writers and generally shoot the breeze about China and everything else with other Shanghaiist readers, here's our QQ ID: 35321512.

On-line dating is already one of the most successful business ventures to spring out of dot com mania, but it looks like one Shanghai based company is going to take the dating service idea one step further.

Most social networks and web businesses generate their revenues from online advertising - but it looks like some do it much better than others.

• Arrests made over audio porn [Shanghai Daily] "City police approved the arrest of a Shanghai native surnamed Gong, 30, the general manager of ilisten.cn, for allegedly making a profit by spreading pornography. Other suspects in custody include two of Gong's employees - a local in charge of the company's technical department, and an Anhui Province native who worked in the department. A 23-year-old Shandong Province woman surnamed Ma was caught in Beijing. She was allegedly hired to record some of the audio books, police said."
• The world’s most lucrative social network? China’s Tencent beats $1 billion revenue mark [VentureBeat] "A billion dollars in revenue in a single year? Not even MySpace, currently the most profitable social network outside China, has managed to accomplish that. But publicly traded Tencent, a leading Chinese web portal, instant message client, social network, game developer and more has done it, and largely through the use of virtual goods and other 'Internet valued-added services,' like avatars, dating services, online memberships, music and community sites."
• Dissident warns Taiwan on China [Taipei Times] Yuan Hongbing (袁紅冰), a Chinese democracy activist living in exile in Australia, yesterday warned Taiwanese to beware of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “two-faced” approach to diplomacy. Yuan made the remarks at a press conference in Taipei after 15 Chinese academics were blocked from leaving the country to take part in a conference on the development of liberalism in China, despite calls for more cross-strait cultural and intellectual exchange by the Chinese leadership.

QQ, China's wildly popular instant messaging service with over 690 million registered users, 360 million monthly active users and 130 million daily users, is now available in English, under the new portal IMQQ.com. As far as we understand, QQ has had an English version of QQ since 2005 but those earlier versions met with little success. With the launch of its new English portal, is Tencent Inc (the company behind QQ) finally setting its sights on the world? Well don't start scoffing at the idea because Tencent did make its millions way before MSN figured out how to monetise its Messenger service. Anyhow, for those of you that are interested, start downloading the QQ2009 Beta for Windows and the Mac version 1.0 beta to begin chatting with your Chinese friends.

Hot on the heels of the Asus eeePC and the meteoric rise of the netbook, Tencent has leaked that it is planning to launch a "lightweight, long-life notebook computer" next year. JLM Pacific Epoch says that it will be themed on the instant messaging tool. Our guess is that it will just be another ultra-light netbook with a penguin sticker on it.