The runaway growth of Sina’s microblog service Weibo has been one of the hottest tech stories of the year in China, and we found out the power of the platform firsthand during the promotion and planning of TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing. One curious thing about China’s microblog wars is that an older technology company– not a scrappy startup– became the dominant winner. That’s partially a testament to how entrenched the massive Web brands are with Chinese users and evidence of Sina’s willingness to cooperate with the government, back when other microblogs like Twitter were shut down. → Read More
Facebook, as I’m sure you know, is blocked in China.
And being banned in a country that boasts roughly 500,000,000 Internet users is, of course, not exactly an ideal situation for a company aggressively looking for growth worldwide.
Now Facebook is rumored to have recently inked a partnership deal with a Chinese Internet giant in a move to enter the country (which, as some have pointed out, won’t be a walk in the park any way you look at it). → Read More
Nokia this morning announced two deals with leading Chinese Internet companies SINA and Tencent, who will be integrating with Nokia’s Ovi Maps in China.
Millions of users of SINA’s microbloging service and Tencent’s massively popular online community QQ (636 million users and counting) will be able to share their location through Nokia mobile devices, check-in to locations and upload content tied to location, such as recommendations and reviews of restaurants, shops and movie theatres. → Read More
Microsoft Expo’s project leader, Garry Wiseman, wrote a blog post earlier today criticizing Sina, one of China’s largest search engines, saying “Sina.com steals our design and graphics”. The post highlights the similar look and feel of Sina’s new classifieds site to a previous release of Expo, including the identical color scheme and a pushpin image that appears to have been flat out stolen: Sina.com steals our design and graphics We were recently made aware (thanks to a comment on our blog by Phillipe) of a new classifieds site in China that had not only lifted our previous user interface’s look & feel, but also directly copied some of our graphics (note the cool pushpin graphic that our designer Becky created). The shocking thing is that the website in question is owned by one of China’s largest search engines called Sina.com. Couldn’t they afford to hire a designer? Anyway, take a look for yourself at the images I’ve attached to this blog entry. Alternatively, check out the screenshots of our previous UI and then visit: http://post.sina.com.cn/v3_index.php Let’s just say that I’m looking forward to our China launch.. – Garry Decide for yourself if Sina ripped of Microsoft – the side by side screen shots are below and larger views are available on Garry’s post. There are definitely similarities, although the irony of Microsoft crying foul over a stolen user interface will not be lost on some readers. A quick note: I know Garry well and like what he’s done at Expo over the last year or so on the project. Our previous coverage is here, here and here. → Read More
