Will China be the next Silicon Valley? Being an occasional traveler to China, I have always been awed by the speed of economic development in such a vast country. The online channel has develop at such a pace that China is currently home to around 253 million Internet users and in terms of unique visitors, [...]
According to various online news sites… it looks like Yahoo is to shed the investment it made in Alibaba.com. Four years ago Yahoo invested in 1.14% of AliBaba, a deal which gave AliBaba management control over Yahoo China. It appears that AliBaba’s plans for global expansion followed by Yahoo and Microsofts search deal have complicated [...]
We recently blogged about the rivalry between Baidu and Google in their quest to take over the massive Chinese online search market. It appears this rivalry has taken another quite interesting turn. Largely down to the Chinese government putting some pressure on homegrown music services, to clean up their act… and link to licensed MP3 [...]
The Indian PM – Dr. Manmohan Singh is on facebook, which is a small step in the same direction as the giant leap taken by Barack Obama. Obama’s mastery of facebook and the internet is folklore but even Dr. Singh’s unprompted interest is an interesting development. This marks a small but important step. India politicians [...]
Last Friday, Google announced the departure of Kai-Fu Lee, President of Google China. Considering Kai-Fu’s popularity and talent, it is largely seen as bad news for Google in it’s quest to gain market share or claw some market share away from Baidu. So what next for Google? Kai-Fu has left the reigns in the hands [...]
Being a user of Apple iPhone since it was first released in Jun 2007, I was amazed at how the iPhone has transformed and shape mobile commerce industry within a short span of 3 years. The iPhone has transformed the smartphone market and also changed the way consumer access the internet via the Mobile platform. [...]
As most of you will be aware, Yahoo and Microsoft signed a much hyped partnership agreement at the end of July. The details of the deal, can be scrutinized here, but the most important component by far is the fact that Microsoft’s new engine, Bing, will be powering Yahoo Search. In the US this creates [...]
McDonalds have built different websites for different ethnicities. On the surface this idea seems somewhat logical; most brands have different sites for different regions/countries to varying degrees of success, so what makes this different? For one, the sites can be considered somewhat racially insensitive, featuring sections such as “Kimchee Mouse” for Korean sayings on http://www.myinspirasian.com [...]
The Wall Street Journal has a story about AliBaba.com (undeniably, China’s biggest B2B online retailer…) shifting their classified listings site Koubei.com away from Yahoo China. According to the article AliBaba is going to be moving Koubei onto it’s Retail website TaoBao.com. What does this say about Yahoo China’s ability to attracting relevant converting visitors?… is [...]
It is interesting when Hichame in his post talks about Baidu vs Google in mobile search and the Chinese Search engine viewing mobile search a ‘strategic focus’ for the future. Google has been fighting hard to wrestle market share from Baidu in the Chinese market for the past 2 years without much success and Baidu [...]