We last caught up with HD Trade Services in August, when the company, part of Y Combinator’s summer class, released a tablet app to help smaller enterprises manage the process of buying and shipping goods from one country to another, by offering visual inspections (by way of photos and HD video) of goods to minimize fraud.
Now HD Trade Services is taking that concept one step further: it’s… → Read More
Aggressive demonstrations in and near Panasonic’s and Canon’s Chinese factories have forced the companies to temporarily suspend operations. According to the French news agency AFP, demonstrators are motivated by nationalistic reasons and events that occurred over the past few days.
The Japanese Government bought a private yet critical archipelago in the East China Sea: the Japanese call it the… → Read More
Chinese companies don’t view Siri in a favorable light, hence the creation of the Speech Industry Alliance of China (SIAC). They are willing to offer an alternative that is supposed to work better with Mandarin and Cantonese. In fact, iOS 6 will include a new version of Siri that understands and speaks Mandarin and Cantonese. It is a threat for Chinese mobile phone manufacturers, carriers and… → Read More
Guitar-making is a noble and beautiful art and it’s high time luthiers started thinking about the web. MacKenzie & Marr is a tiny company in Quebec that designs and hand makes relatively inexpensive but amazingly handsome guitars. While they do outsource much of the manufacturing to China, there is not a single robot involved in the building of their cedar-top git-fiddles and guitarists can… → Read More
One more analyst house, Canalys, has released its numbers on global smartphone sales in Q2, and unlike Strategy Analytics and IDC, it has focused on sales by platforms rather than OEMs. In that light, Google’s Android was the clear, all-out winner: in a market that saw 158 million smartphone shipments worldwide, Android accounted for 68% of them, with its 108 million units an increase of 110% over… → Read More
Apple today noted in its earnings call for Q3 that two-thirds of its Asia Pacific revenue is coming from Greater China at the moment. CEO Tim Cook noted that revenues in the country were $5.7 billion for the quarter, 48 percent increase on last year, and still growing at an “incredible rate.” To date Apple’s revenues in China for the year now total $12.4 billion. In 2011 the company made $13.3… → Read More
Search is going very strong in China, and leading player Baidu continues to reap the benefits. In its Q2 results, the company reported sales of 5.456 billion yuan ($858.8 million), up 59.8 percent compared to the same quarter in 2011. The company’s chairman and chief exec, Robin Li, said in a statement that Baidu will “maintain momentum” going forward by investing in new technology, new talent… → Read More
Apple product launches in China traditionally draw big crowds. Thousands of prospective buyers (and scammers) usually amass outside Apple Stores, all hoping for a chance to buy the latest iDevice. This time around Apple turned to reservation lottery system to curb some of the chaos. It seemed to work. The new iPad launched in mainland China earlier today and there was nary an uproar. → Read More
The new iPad launches in China this Friday, July 20th. Big crowds are expected. But Apple is using a reservation lottery service to allow buyers to essentially reserve their place in line now. Interested buyers simply need to go to this page, select a version of the iPad and provide their government ID. After that, a lottery-like system will notify the lucky few.
But this isn’t just about… → Read More
Nokia’s Q2 earnings out today reflect the big challenges for the handset maker amid what CEO Stephen Elop calls the “ferocity” of competition from Android and Apple, but here’s a clue to one interesting development: he closed off today’s analyst call with a hint that Nokia might be the first handset maker to produce a smartphone on the much-anticipated Windows Phone 8 platform from… → Read More
It’s been a long time coming — plans for a mobile content partnership between NTT Docomo and China’s search giant Baidu were announced a year ago — but today it’s finally happened: the Japanese telco has announced the completion of their $22.5 million (¥1.78 billion) investment in a joint venture in China, Baidu Yi Xin. Docomo becomes a 20 percent shareholder in the new mobile content… → Read More
Online video site Viki has made a big business out of aggregating content from around the world, covering 150+ languages in all, and making it accessible to all by crowdsourcing translations from its community of users. Now that pool of viewers is set to get a little deeper with a new distribution deal with Renren, known as the Facebook of China, which will see Renren create a special channel… → Read More
China is currently the largest mobile market in the world, and that is having a knock on effect on mobile investments into startups in the country: I-Media, a mobile ad network that claims to be China’s largest with over 100 million impressions per day and projected 2012 revenues of RMB 300 million ($47 million), today announced that it has picked up a $20 million Series B round of funding led by… → Read More
A little over a week after finally settling its iPad legal case against Proview to the tune of $60 million, Apple today is delivering some more good iPad news in China: it’s going to start selling the new iPad on the mainland starting July 20.
The Retina-display-enhanced model will be priced starting at $499 for the 16GB model ($629 with cellular access) (3,176 yuan), $599 ($729 with… → Read More
As you may recall, Microsoft recently got into the startup accelerator game, launching its first self-directed and self-run accelerator in Israel. The program is different from Microsoft’s Kinect Accelerator, for example, because Microsoft is the owner and operator of these new programs, which are now rolling out elsewhere in the world, including India and China. Unlike your typical YC clone… → Read More
Beijing-based Yodo1, a service that helps game developers enter the Chinese market, is today announcing it has closed $2 million in seed funding from Chang You Fund. The round was led by Chang You Fund’s Managing Partner and former Focus Media CEO Zhi Tan.
In addition to the funding, the company also noted that its developer partner Robot Entertainment will bring its “Hero Academy” game to the… → Read More
Looks like The New York Times’ groundbreaking, paywalled deal with Flipboard was yesterday’s news: today comes another development for the Grey Lady and how she is working hard to leverage social media for the next stage of growth. The New York times appears to be preparing for a launch of a NY Times China website tomorrow, and in the lead-up to that it has created its own account on Sina Weibo… → Read More
According to a brief in the Want China Times, workers in the Foxconn plant in Chengdu rioted in a male dormitory, throwing bottles, trash, and furniture after plant security came to the dormitory to investigate a thief. → Read More
Those who don’t live or haven’t recently traveled to China may not have experienced this first hand, but Google Search has been known to be “inconsistent and unreliable” in mainland China — to use Google’s words. Error messages like “This webpage is not available” or “The connection was reset” are common and those errant queries then prevent users from searching again for a period of time. In a… → Read More
It’s been just over nine months since Google announced their intentions to acquire hardware manufacturer Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, and now it seems that the final pieces of the deal have fallen into place.
According to a new report from the Associated Press, Chinese officials have finally given the Google-Motorola deal their blessing. → Read More
China’s Internet juggernaut Tencent announced today that it would undergo a restructuring of its business units into six groups. Ren Yuxin was also named as the new chief operating officer and will head up the media and social-networking groups.
The six groups include: → Read More
Big mobile plans afoot for Baidu, the Google of China that leads in search and has launched a host of other services in the wake of that business. The company today unveiled the first smartphone to be built on its own platform, the Changhong H5018. And while that device is designed on a “forked” version of Android — forked Android devices being very popular in China — Baidu says that it doesn’t… → Read More
Evernote, the company that makes software to help people take personal notes and archive information about their daily lives, today debuted a new standalone version of its service specifically for the Chinese market called Yinxiang Biji (印象笔记.) In English the name translates to “Memory Notes” or “Impression Notes.” → Read More
Mark Zuckerberg’s visit to China back in December 2011 created a storm of speculation on whether Facebook was preparing for a full scale entry into the most populous country in the world. Photos of Zuckerberg visiting Sina’s headquarters in Beijing, leaked by a Sina employee and reports of him meeting with other major Chinese Internet companies such as Baidu and Alibaba have further fueled… → Read More
Are Amazon’s Kindle tablets and e-readers ready to break into the world’s biggest market? We’ve spotted some Chinese Help documentation for Amazon Kindle devices on the company’s China-facing site in a sign that they may be coming for real this time.
Even though the online documentation vanished, we have a screenshot of Google’s cached version of the site (see below). Amazon’s China… → Read More
A sign of a crack in the Great Chinese Firewall? Internet users in China today are reporting that they are able to access Facebook in the country: some say they can access the site through mobile Internet connections and iOS apps; others are reporting access using HTTPS connections on their computers.
The social network has been having problems in the country as far back as 2009, when the site… → Read More
As research from the Startup Genome is beginning to show, the world has become a global entrepreneurial playing field, as cities from Tel Aviv to Santiago evolve into thriving startup ecosystems, becoming both regional and global engines of job creation. With such a large, increasingly Internet-connected population, China, too, has become an important part of this conversation for web startups. (… → Read More
In the U.S., 61% of all households currently have WiFi networks installed at home. According to data from Strategy Analytics, this means the U.S. is ahead of countries like Spain (57.1%), Mexico (31.5%) and India (2.5%). At the same time, though, this only puts the U.S. somewhere in the lower half of WiFi adoption among developed nations. In countries like South Korea (80.3%), the UK (73.3%) and… → Read More
In the hullabaloo over Mike Daisey lying about meeting injured workers, the spotlight turned from actual employment problems in Asia onto the face of the orotund and penitent former colonialist. Now that the news cycle has passed, we’re no longer interested in the topic of Chinese manufacturing and, judging by the positive response to my April Fools’ post on Sunday, the world now understands… → Read More
A big step today for both Nokia and Microsoft in their bid to be at the center of the huge smartphone growth currently underway in China and other emerging markets: Nokia today paired up with China Telecom to launch the Nokia 800C, the first CDMA Windows Phone to hit China, and the first of Nokia’s Lumia line of high-end devices tailored specifically for that market.
The two also said that it… → Read More
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