When we say this chap was trapped in the toilet, we don't mean he was stuck in the bathroom, he literally jammed his arm down the porcelain-encased pipe. The poor gentleman from Jiangsu Province in China was clearly in desperate need of his cellphone, as not even the typically repugnant idea of diving down for it was enough to prevent him from trying to chase the thing down. Good news is that emergency services rescued him with only minor cuts and bruises to his arm, though we suspect the injury to his ego will take a long, long time to heal.

[Thanks, Adiwidya]

Continue reading Man traps himself in toilet trying to retrieve cellphone, has time to re-evaluate life priorities (video)

Man traps himself in toilet trying to retrieve cellphone, has time to re-evaluate life priorities (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Oct 2010 03:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Man traps himself in toilet trying to retrieve cellphone, has time to…

Today at Y Combinator’s Startup School, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down for a lengthy interview with Jessica Livingston. The topics discussed ranged from Facebook’s beginnings (including a brief discussion of The Social Network) to the social network’s strategy in China, which has proved to be problematic for other Western tech companies like Google.

Zuckerberg says that for years Facebook didn’t have a strategic plan for international growth — each month, the site would take off in a seemingly random country with no apparent pattern (obviously this approach paid off). But there are still a handful of countries that Facebook isn’t winning in, or isn’t on a path to win: China, Japan, South Korea, and Russia.

“China is extremely complex,” Zuckerberg says, and the site is taking its time to make sure it approaches the world’s most populous country with the  right strategy. The hope is that if Facebook can show that, as a Western company, it can succeed in a place where no other Western company has before (like Russia), that will help it get the momentum to figure out the right partnerships it needs to succeed in China.

With respect to openness in China (or lack thereof), Zuckerberg says that different countries around the world have different values, which Facebook has historically respected. For example, in Germany it’s illegal to post content about Nazism, so Facebook blocks it in Germany (but not in other countries). It has a similar policy with regard to drawings of Muhammad in Pakistan, where it’s illegal to post that content.

Zuckerberg says that he’s spent a lot of time personally examining Chinese culture (including daily Chinese language lessons) to help with this. Above all, it’s clear that Facebook would like to establish a strong presence in China down the road, explaining, “How can you connect the whole world if you leave out 1.6 billion people?”

Oh, and about Zuckerberg’s wardrobe? He says that while The Social Network got a whole lot wrong, he actually owns every shirt and fleece that appears in the movie.

Image by Robert Scoble

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Mark Zuckerberg On Facebook’s Strategy For China (And His Wardrobe)

The third quarter IPO market is like looking at a Rorshach test: You can find data to support that liquidity is getting better or data to support that it’s getting worse.

Here’s the reality check: There is an increase in deals– a big increase if you look at the first nine months of the year and compare it to the first nine months of 2009. And the pipeline is building: 67 new companies entered IPO registration since July, and if they go out, they could be the biggest issues so far this year.

Let’s hope that’s the case because the downside to the news is that deal value is falling substantially year-over-year. In the third quarter of 2010, there were 32 IPOs, compared to just 20 in the third quarter of 2009. But only one was valued at more than $500 million. (All numbers are courtesy of PricewaterhouseCoopers’s third quarter IPO watch.)

That means the deals going out are small and when you’re talking about venture capital returns, the smaller the deal the more thinly it’s traded. In essence, a lot of these “exits” aren’t really exits at all because VCs aren’t getting much liquidity. If they sell their shares, they tank the stock. In practice, some of them may give investors less liquidity than some late-stage secondary rounds out there.

There’s another ripple effect to anemic deal values– it hurts the price of acquisitions because there’s no threat to anyone going public. Think of it like listing a house on a market and getting one bidder. That bidder has all the power.

The quarters when deal values have been higher, the top line numbers were heavily skewed by a few large deals– and most of those are coming from other countries, especially China. Year-to-date, 30 non-US companies have raised $4.1 billion, about 30% of both proceeds and total offerings. And 19 Chinese companies have made up about 20% of the deal volume. Yep, they’ve taken over Japan in GDP, taken over US manufacturing, it’s the world’s largest Web audience and now Chinese companies are making up one-third of own IPO volume.

Get used to it, America. Beyond China, more nascent emerging markets are taking advantage of the overall smaller deal sizes to IPO on more prestigious and stable US exchanges. India’s online travel site MakeMyTrip went public in August and had a 90% first day pop. It has held up well since, opening the door for more mid-sized ecommerce companies from countries under represented on the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange. Argentina’s outsourcing firm Globant is still eying an exit in the next year, and there are no doubt some issues coming from Brazil. It’s all about growth when you’re talking about IPOs this small and until a Facebook or LinkedIn IPO steals the attention, emerging markets are the best growth story out there.

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The Good and the Bad of the IPO Market

We feel your pain: you love your BlackBerry at work and your iPhone for personal use, but as hardware goes, nothing gets your motor running quite like the Pre's pebble-esque shell. Trust us, we've all been there! Well, a new clone out of China seeks solve all your technological woes by combining an iOS-inspired user interface and the Pre's body -- with an iPhone home button thrown in for good measure, of course -- and when the time comes to throw on the suit and tie and head to work, you can switch the UI over to BlackBerry mode. As far as we can tell, it still functions like an iOS clone here, but at least the skin will remind you of the good ol' Bold days. Looks like you can't buy this thing online, but considering how well the software works in most of these things, it's probably for the best.

Palm Pre fake tires of waiting for webOS 2.0, takes up iOS and BlackBerry OS lookalikes instead originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Palm Pre fake tires of waiting for webOS 2.0, takes up iOS and…

With Groupon now expanding into Japan and Russia, the company’s plans for world domination continue apace.

In this week’s episode of our (newly retitled) show, we spoke to Chairman and COO, Rob Solomon about the strategy of expansion-by-acquisition, the risks of fraud, what keeps Solomon awake at night — and why China is conspicuous by its absence amongst the company’s recent launches.

Video below.

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Groupon’s Rob Solomon: “Over Time We’ll Figure Out China, And…

China may overtake Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy this year. On its heels is India, and countries such as Brazil and Russia are not far behind. What does this mean for entrepreneurs? That, increasingly, the big opportunities lie outside the U.S.  Most people aren’t aware of another advantage in emerging markets: you can freely leverage the wealth of proven intellectual property that has already been created in developed economies. Most countries outside the U.S. and Europe lie in a Patent-Free Zone—where companies have not filed patents because they believe there is no market for their goods. So this intellectual property is available to anyone in those nations who can find a use for it.

Take the iPhone as an example: it has over 1000 patents; yet Apple does not apply for patent protection in countries like Peru, Ghana, or Ecuador, or, for that matter, in most of the developing world. So entrepreneurs could use these patent filings to gain information to make an iPhone-like device that solves the unique problems of these countries. Apple has so far received 3287 U.S.-issued patents and has 1767 applications pending: a total of 5054 (for all of its products). Yet it has filed for only about 300 patents in China and has been issued 19. In India, it has filed only 38 patent applications and has received four patents. In Mexico it has filed for 109 and received 59 patents. So even India, China, and Mexico are wide-open fields.

Now consider diabetes technology.  At the end of 2009, there were more than 12,070 patents issued or pending in the U.S. In Jordan there were only 36, and none were filed in most of Africa. Big pharma considers these markets either too small or too poor; it also hasn’t produced affordable drugs for the millions of desperate people who are increasingly suffering from disease in Africa and the developing world.  But there is nothing stopping entrepreneurs from completing these tasks. The blueprints are readily available in the U.S. patent database.

JiNan Glasgow, a North Carolina–based patent attorney and CEO of NeoPatents, has been researching the global patent system and developing technologies to explore and map the patent databases. She found that only 5–10% of patents that are filed in the U.S. are actually used to provide commercial value. The rest go to waste.

Glasgow also found that most U.S. companies have been ignoring emerging markets and not filing any patents there. When she compared the geography of patent filings with the UN Human Development Index, she noted a strong correlation: the richer the country, the greater the number of patents. This means that the wealth of the developed world’s intellectual property is freely available for use in the emerging regions, where patents are not filed. Glasgow called this the Patent-Free Zone—which covers most of the world, except for the U.S. and Western Europe. BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) have only recently seen increases in patent filings—so all the patents filed in the U.S. over the past few decades are still within the free zone.

The way the patent system works is that when you have an idea that is new and unique and you want to protect it, you file a patent application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). If the USPTO determines that you are indeed the original inventor, it grants a patent, a temporary monopoly that stops others from making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing your invention in the U.S. for 20 years. But this is only in the U.S. To restrict people in other countries, you need to file a patent in that country, and to do so within one year of receiving a U.S. patent. Most U.S. inventors don’t care, because they are focused on local markets.  But multinationals do usually file patents in every country where they expect to do business. It is legal for anyone in the countries where patents aren’t filed to use these ideas.  And this opens up big opportunities in those countries.

Take desalination, in which GE is one of the largest players. GE has spent more than $4.1 billion to acquire its part of the desalination business. Yet a decade after commencing, they’re still nowhere close to making desalination affordable and sustainable. GE’s progress depends on the patents it owns. As of 2009, GE invented 47 of the 832 U.S. patents in this field—just 5.6%, or a little more than one-twentieth. Consider the progress that GE could make if it could also use any of the patents that it doesn’t own—of which there are many.

How much better would the world be if we didn’t have to spend another ten years waiting for innovation in the desalination space? There are many areas of collaboration in the Patent-Free Zone that could produce innovative solutions for our world. Solar power, electric cars, mobile technologies for the poor, disease eradication, medical devices, food processing—to name a few. Wouldn’t it be ironic if poor countries ended up solving the problems of the rich? And I’ll ask my entrepreneur friends the same question I’ve asked before: What’s Better: Saving the World or Building Another Facebook app?

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

Images: Women Barefoot Solar Engineers of Africa by Barefoot Photographers of Tilonia, Jerry Stifelman, and United Nations Human Development Index

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Opportunities In The Patent-Free Zone

Don't worry, it's not déjà vu -- these SmartQ T7 tablets may appear just like their Ubuntu-riding R7 sibling, but they offer Android 2.1, an integrated 3G option, a speedier 720MHz CPU, and a colossal 4,700mAh battery -- 1,400mAh more than before! If that's woken you from the slumber brought on by yet another boilerplate tablet, SmartQ's also boasting support for a similarly impressive range of video codecs, meaning you can grab any RMVB, AVI, MKV and WMV files (even at 1080p) from your various, ahem, sources, and just play them back on the 7-inch LCD (probably at 800 x 600 like the R7) as they are. If you're cool with just WiFi connectivity, then go for the ¥1,480 ($219) T7; if 3G is a must, be prepared to dole out ¥1,880 ($278) and ¥1,980 ($292) for the EVDO and WCDMA flavors of the T7-3G, respectively. And if you're hanging out with China Mobile, price for the TD-SCDMA version's to be confirmed later.

SmartQ T7 and T7-3G Android 2.1 tablets announced and priced in China originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Jul 2010 10:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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SmartQ T7 and T7-3G Android 2.1 tablets announced and priced in China

True revolutions in faucet designs may be few and far between, but China's Renshui is certainly doing its part to shake things up, and has now introduced yet another faucet sure to amaze and confuse visitors to your humble abode. In addition to breaking with the usual faucet design, this model packs a touch panel that will let you switch between hot and cold water, or dial in the exact temperature you want -- which is, of course, displayed on the faucet itself (it'll even warn you if the water is getting too hot). No word on availability over here, but it did recently win a red dot design award, so the chances of a release may have gotten a bit better.

Renshui rethinks the bathroom faucet originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Jul 2010 20:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Renshui rethinks the bathroom faucet

Ericsson, which provides technology and services to telecom operators around the globe, estimates we’ve hit another milestone in the Internet becoming increasingly mobile. The company claims, based on estimates based on industry information, that the 5 billionth mobile subscription was accounted for on Thursday, July 8.

The 5 billion mark was hit largely thanks to a surge in mobile subscriptions in emerging markets like China and India, the company says. In the year 2000, about 720 million people had mobile subscriptions, less than the amount of users China alone has today, still according to Ericsson.

Mobile broadband subscriptions are growing at similar pace and are expected to amount to more than 3.4 billion by 2015 (from 360 million in 2009).

Furthermore, Ericsson estimates, 2 million mobile subscriptions are added on a daily basis, and the number of 3G subscriptions has now exceeded 500 million worldwide. The company also posits we’ll be at no less than 50 billion connected devices by the year 2020.

(Photo via Ericsson)

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Ericsson Estimates 5 Billion Mobile Subscriptions Worldwide, Growing…

I’ve written several posts about the innovation, entrepreneurship and promising Web audience I’ve found over several weeks of reporting in Indonesia. As such, friends in the venture capital business are peppering my inbox asking round-about-questions that all go back to the same central query: Should we be investing in Indonesia?

The seatback pocket on my flight from Jakarta to Surabaya seemed to think so. A pamphlet blared “INVEST IN REMARKABLE INDONESIA,” and included some testimonials from companies like Coca-Cola and Unilever, and some charts showing Indonesia’s economic stability. This was the second time I’d heard the words “Remarkable Indonesia” in as many days. Dino Patti Djalal, the spokesperson for Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and soon to be Ambassador to the US said they’d trademarked it as the country’s new marketing tagline. It called to mind the “Incredible India” push of a few years ago which even included purchasing ads during the Oscars.

Compared to “Incredible India,” “Remarkable Indonesia” seems to express muted praise for the country—especially considering the infrastructure in Jakarta was far better than the infrastructure I found in most major Indian cities, the food cooked with some 30,000 locally grown spices was amazing, the cultural heritage and diversity was just as rich, and Bali has some of the most beautiful beaches anywhere in the world. Only remarkable?

The biggest reason for Valley-types to think about investing in Remarkable Indonesia wasn’t in that pamphlet. It’s the fact that for all the promise and nascent bubbling growth in technology and mobile, almost no one is there. Indonesia has 240 million people and a Web audience around 30 million to 40 million people, not including the surging mobile Web. It’s curious how little venture capital is going after that, given that in the first quarter nearly $1 billion in US startup funding flowed to India, China and Israel, with each country reporting surges in capital from between 20% to more than 100% over the last year.

This post is one that many people in South Africa, India and China have begged me not to write, because they are having a field day expanding mobile and Web services in Indonesia. In this age of global venture capital and emerging markets hype, how many markets this big is the US mostly ignoring? In this age of globalization and outsourcing, how many markets this big have so few multinational jobs driving up employment and developer costs?

But all of this opportunity doesn’t necessarily mean Indonesia is a market where US venture capitalists can do well. Recently Indonesian tech blogger Rama Mamuaya was cold-called by a Valley venture firm and asked if he had a million dollars to invest in one Indonesian Web startup, which one he should pick. He thought about it and answered: None. It’s not because they aren’t promising, but because the costs of building a company are still so low in Indonesia—as opposed to markets like China and India where a flood of multinational jobs have pushed up salaries and rents—that any company would have a hard time putting that much money to good use.

There are concerns about politics, stability, the banking system and, of course, how to get liquidity as there are with most emerging markets. There’s especially a visceral fear in Indonesia—a country that was brought to its knees by the late 1990s Asian financial crisis, and one that most Americans know very little about. These are not waters to be navigated from thousands of miles away.

I think what Indonesia could use is something in between the current state of no high-growth capital and the money that goes to countries like India and China: A Y-Combinator-style incubator that could help Indonesian entrepreneurs make sense of the pitfalls of modern startup life, including things like recruiting and managing talent, how to deal with Silicon Valley giants, how to make money online and when and when not to raise outside funding. The funding amounts and exits would be small, but a Yossi-Vardi-style angel could clean up where many classic VCs might crush startups under the weight of millions. Someone to coax these entrepreneurs as they develop organically, but not bind them to a Western-way of building companies. Someone local–or at least transplanted fully– who understands when all those Valley rules need to be modified or broken.

In the Valley, the ecosystem for starting companies grew organically over several decades, a luxury that China and India didn’t have. Those countries have entrepreneurs, they have tons of venture capital and big market opportunities—but when they got flooded with American cash in the last decade, the ecosystem’s natural development accelerated, and the step of developing local angels and mentors was largely skipped. That’s the single biggest complaint I hear from entrepreneurs in these countries. Indonesia has a rare opportunity to develop a huge startup ecosystem in the right order.

The question is who will fill this void, because someone will. Will it be an American who moves and becomes embedded in the market? Or will it be a branch of a firm that’s sprung up in recent years in China or India, places that understand emerging market economics and risk better than we do? It’s not going to be easy, but Indonesia is too big and too untapped—too “remarkable”–to stay undiscovered forever.

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Is “Remarkable Indonesia” the New “Incredible India” for…

After exploring the mobile and Internet landscapes in Shanghai and Beijing, the GeeksOnAPlane (GOAP) group (30+ techies mostly from the Silicon Valley) continued their Asian field trip to Korea today. In Beijing, the GOAP attended two of China’s largest tech conferences: CHINICT, “the largest conference on China tech innovation” (which was livestreamed on TechCrunch), and the “Global Mobile Internet Conference” (GMIC), both of which are held in the city every year.

The GOAP got in touch with and gained unfiltered insight from dozens and dozens of local entrepreneurs, VCs and industry observers during the conferences and the events that took place around them. What follows are just a few learnings and impressions the GOAP group picked up during their China web crash course in Beijing (the size of the tech landscape is summarized in my previous post).

Innovation & Adoption of Business Models: The Chinese way

Before CHINICT and GMIC took place, Benjamin Joffe from Asia-based digital strategy consultancy +8* | Plus Eight Star delivered a primer during the Startup2Startup Beijing event on how innovation in China works, and how local companies adjust proven business models from abroad to meet the peculiarities of the Chinese market.

There’s a ton of valuable information on these and other topics in Joffe’s presentation (embedded below):

A lot has been written about how quickly China’s web entrepreneurs rip off successful concepts from the US and elsewhere, with one local VC half-jokingly at some point telling the GOAP group: “Every site that gets on TechCrunch is sure to have at least one Chinese clone a week later!”.

But there are some startups that don’t just churn out 1:1 copies. Instead, a few clever entrepreneurs find twists to make concepts working abroad more China-friendly or mash up existing, successful ones to create original offerings. One case in point is a startup called Lashou whose eponymous service marries Groupon with Foursquare-like mobile mechanics. I had the chance to talk to Lashou CEO Bo Wu during the Startup2Startup Beijing event, and according to Wu, user numbers are currently exploding.

This presentation provides more insight on how Lashou works:

China’s mobile web: The three finalists of the GMIC startup competition

CHINICT and GMIC were held at the same time in Beijing (Thursday and Friday), forcing the GOAP to choose between the two conferences and me to decide about which event I should report back (I attended both). I have a personal penchant for covering yet unknown startups (and CHINICT was livestreamed on TechCrunch), so I decided to cover the launch pad that took place at the GMIC.

Find short profiles of the three finalists below. The selection highlights three mega trends that can currently be observed in China’s mobile scene: the fragmentation in hardware and software, the rise of mobile gaming, and the low number of people who are ready to make payments over the cell phone.

Multi-platform solution by Crossmo
Crossmo is a “cross-mobile” solution that has already been licensed by a number of top tech companies, including Motorola, Orange, Baidu and a number of Chinese operators. Orange, for example, runs its Chinese App Store based on Crossmo, basically as a white-labeled, generic “iTunes” for non-Apple platforms.

For end users, Crossmo intends to solve the fragmentation problem in the mobile space by offering an online data management and synchronization tool for cell phones that’s completely hardware agnostic. Just connect your phone to your PC, and the service backs up, synchronizes and pushes all mobile data (music files, ringtones, wallpapers, and other content) into your own personal online “Crossmo Space”.

Cross platform engine by Softgames
Alexander Krug, CEO of Berlin-based Softgames, said that when it comes to offering mobile content across different platforms, his company has an edge over established gaming giants such as Zynga or Playfish. The Softgames game engine apparently makes it possible to “rapidly” design a social mobile game and then distribute it across a total of six platforms (i.e. iPhone, Android, or Java). SoftGames also pitched CrimeCity at the GMIC, a browser-based mobile RPG that’s available on “all devices and platforms”. Like many foreign mobile content providers, Softgames is currently looking for distribution partners in China and other Asian markets.

2C2P Mobile by 2C2P
Market research firm Gartner expects the number of mobile payment users worldwide to ballon to 190 million in 2012, up from the 70 million counted last year. And since 85% of those 190 million people will be based in Asia/Pacific, Singapore-based e-commerce payment solutions provider 2C2P is looking at a huge future market for itself. The core offering in the mobile area is 2C2P Mobile, a solution for cell phones that uses QR codes, Bluetooth, BUMP and other technologies to transfer money between different credit/debit cards without friction. The company was selected as the winner of the GMIC startup competition.

Find a larger cross section of local mobile startups in my previous article on the 3G Industry Summit in China from last year.

Many thanks to the CHINICT and GMIC organizers for the special treatment the GOAP group received.

Challenges for China’s web and mobile companies

China’s high-speed Internet industry is already huge, still offers plenty of room for even more growth, produces one startup after the other, is eager to globalize quickly, and has – unlike its counterparts in many other Asian countries – an iron grip on the domestic market.

But Silicon Valley and the planet’s other technology hotbeds still have a bit of time to breathe before the dragon takes over, as even in China’s web market all’s not well. The GOAP heard local mobile and web entrepreneurs and VCs deploring the

• lack of valid industry data across a number of tech sectors
• strict legal and political frameworks (one industry veteran told me he checks if his popular micro-blogging service is still online every morning, as Twitter is blocked by the government)
• low online spend (just one telling example: the ARPU in China’s social gaming sector is said to be 5-20 times lower than in the US and other regions)
• insufficient online payment systems (still low circulation of credit cards hampers growth in e-commerce and other areas)
• overheated VC market
• trouble for young startups to find seed capital and angel investors
• lack of competent staff (especially engineers)
• propensity of highly skilled team members to quickly quit even successful startups to join others or set up their own
• lack of innovative power in the industry (Korea invented the virtual goods-based business model, Japan invented the mobile web, and China?)
• rampant copycat culture (which is not really a China-only phenomenon)
• fierce domestic competitive environment in the mobile and web fields
• and other factors (for example, copyright problems or the fact that no foreign entrepreneur- with one exception – has realized a sizable exit in China so far).

After gaining a 10,000 foot overview of China’s tech scene, it’s now time to explore what’s currently hot in Korea, the next stop of the GOAP Asia tour. The GOAP will be attending a Korean startup pitch event and the Startup Weekend Seoul (the country’s first ever), before moving on to echelon 2010 in Singapore.

For information in real-time, follow the adventures of the GOAP via the #goap hash tag (the official Twitter account is here). GOAP pictures are being uploaded regularly over on Flickr.

Photo credit: Craig Fisk

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GeeksOnAPlane at the GMIC And CHINICT Tech Conferences In Beijing:…

Adam Hocherman, 34, is an entrepreneur and founder of the consumer electronics company American Innovative in Boston, MA. Adam founded the company in 2003 with the help of the US Government’s SBA loan program and is currently the 100% owner. He holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA, both from Cornell University. Adam’s writings can be found on his blog at DesignTheatre.net and through his Twitter feed. He welcomes your comments. Read more about sourcing in China here.

Part III of the Going It Alone series will answer the question: What is a factory and how can I tell one from another?  I will answer the question from a consumer electronics perspective and I will assume an audience that has little or no prior knowledge of manufacturing.  The purpose of this article will be to try to introduce the burgeoning entrepreneur to the basic components of electronics manufacturing in China.

I will do this in the context of manufacturing the simple electronic product shown below – a digital kitchen timer that we call the Klip!
Read more…

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Going It Alone, Part III: Inside the Factory Walls

The9, an online game developer and operator in China, has acquired a majority interest in US-based Red 5 Studios for a total of approximately $20 million.

With the move, the Chinese online gaming company says it is beginning to shape its global strategy. For Red 5, the additional capital means more means and potential users for the game(s) that they’re currently developing and extra resources to effectively turn the company into a multi-game studio.

The9 Limited is a relatively unknown, publicly listed online game company located in Shanghai, China, whose business is primarily focused on developing and operating games for the Web. The9 directly, or through affiliates, operates licensed MMORPGs and casual games including Soul of The Ultimate Nation, EA SPORTS FIFA Online 2 and Atlantica, as well as its proprietary games World of Fighter and Jiu Zhou Zhan Ji, in mainland China (with more in development). The company has also obtained exclusive licenses to operate other games in mainland China, including Audition 2 and Kingdom Heroes 2 Online.

Red 5 Studios is an online game developer located in California, formed in 2006 by former executives and developers from Blizzard Entertainment.

The pitch from its corporate website is quite intriguing:

We believe that the future of games lies in connecting millions of gamers together into shared, epic, and fantastic experiences. These online communities, these tribes, are what make online gaming a richer and deeper experience than any standalone game.

We imagine bold new worlds for our players to inhabit, explore and adventure within. Original story, art, sound and code meld together into powerful and wonderful new ways… creating not just games, but worlds for players to live out their heroic alter egos.

We always ask ourselves “what’s next?” We want to transform gaming through our online technologies. We ask ourselves “what we would create in a future where bandwidth was free, where players had unlimited storage, and our games were powered by supercomputers?” We want to create the answers, one game at a time.

Will be interesting to see what this investment and alliance will lead to for both companies.

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Chinese Online Game Developer The9 Invests $20M In Red 5 Studios

Last year we interviewed Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This year we interviewed her again. Notably, I brought a tripod with me and didn’t cut off Sheryl’s forehead.

A year ago Facebook had 150 million users, and more than 200 million people visited the site monthly. I noted “You realize it’s like 1 in 5 people in the world that are on the internet visit Facebook.” Sandberg replied, joking “So we have 4 in 5 more to go.”

The thing is, they’re well on their way to getting those other 4. Facebook has more than doubled in size to 350 million registered users in the last year. By this summer well over half of all Internet users will likely visit Facebook each month.

What’s more dramatic – Half of all registered users still log in to Facebook every day, says Sandberg in the interview. That’s 175 million people. And that doesn’t include Facebook Connect logins, only those people that visit the Facebook website.

Facebook continues to limit the number of friends any individual can have to 5,000. Last year Sandberg said that users would eventually be able to have any number of connections on Facebook. She said “I’m not going to give you a specific date, but I will reinforce the message that this is coming..we’re not providing that functionality and we think that’s important so we are working on this and we’re working on it currently. We look forward to your having 80,000 friends… 100,000 friends.”

This year, when I noted that users are still limited to 5,000 friends, she admitted “I failed you miserably,” and wouldn’t say if or when the limit might be eliminated. She did note that pages have no limit on fans, though.

I also asked Sandberg about her views on how the tech community should respond to allegations of Chinese government sponsored hacking and censorship. Facebook doesn’t currently operate behind the Chinese firewall, although the site is available in Chinese. Sandberg’s response:

It’s a hard question and everyone knows it’s a hard question. China is an important market, it’s a growing market and there are a lot of people that live there. And so when you provide a service, you provide a great service, you want the rest(ph) of the world to use it. And when you think about our mission, we want to connect everyone in the world. Connecting everyone in the world without China is not connecting everyone in the world. And I think that when you do go into China, you have to figure out how to work with the government, that’s very clear. When you go anywhere in the world, you have to work with the government and that’s poses different issues for different models. For us right now, we launched in Chinese. We are not easily accessible if you’re in China, very hard to access us and we haven’t figure out what our plans would be at. So, we’re still thinking here all the issues. It’s complicated.

I was unable to get Sandberg to give me a direct answer on who she thinks competes with Facebook. But she did say that she hopes to integrate with her competitors broadly via Facebook Connect. They’ve certainly made progress there.

At the end I asked Sandberg what her biggest regret was over her last two years with the company. Her response – “I would still like to see us move faster.”

Facebook’s competitors, ranging from Google to Twitter and just about everyone in between, would probably like to see Sandberg do exactly the opposite of moving faster.

The full transcript is below, courtesy of PhoneTag.

Mr. MICHAEL ARRINGTON (Founder and Co-Editor, TechCrunch): I’m here with Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook. Hello, Sheryl.

Ms. SHERYL SANDBERG (COO, Facebook?): In our annual-

Mr. ARRINGTON: Or traditional.

Ms. SANDBERG: Traditional and annual.

Mr. ARRINGTON: Yeah, second annual.

Ms. SANDBERG: Second annual at Davos.

Mr. ARRINGTON: Davos interview.

Ms. SANDBERG: Interview.

Mr. ARRINGTON: Yeah.

Ms. SANDBERG: With a flip(ph) phone. It’s a TechCrunch flip phone, I noticed it’s branded.

Mr. ARRINGTON: This year, your forehead is not cut off. And I have a tripod.

Ms. SANDBERG: It’s very, very exciting.

Mr. ARRINGTON: And so the production value of the TechCrunch is going up significantly.

Ms. SANDBERG: Very exciting.

Mr. ARRINGTON: So, we just have a few minutes of your time and I appreciate it. I know you’re running between meetings. Few questions. First of all, Davos is here. What do you think compared to last year? Last year, you said it was a bit somber, economy was down. What do you think this year?

Ms. SANDBERG: I think in terms of overall economic perspective, it’s more unknown. Unknown. You see, so start to (unintelligible). You see that some people are saying, there’s a real recovery happening and looking forward to growth. Actually, particular focus I think on growth, China, India, Brazil emerging markets and others are saying, we’re not sure. The recession isn’t over. Job loss is a very, very serious issue. A lot of, you know, anger being expressed due to the lack of financial reform that still hasn’t happened. So, I would say, I’ve been here when I thought years were very, you know, sobering(ph).

Mr. ARRINGTON: You’ve been here 10 years now, right?

Ms. SANDBERG: I’ve been here a lot of years. I’ve been here years. Yeah. Where, you know, the world is on fire and, you know, everything is giving up and last year, I would say, the world is about to fall apart. And this year, it’s more moderated. It depends on who you are, where you are, and what you’re specifically talking about.

Mr. ARRINGTON: Did you participate in the panels this year? What were your favorite sessions? What do you think?

Ms. SANDBERG: I did. I participated in a bunch of panelists. This morning, I did a thing on CNBC on how we get corporations to do gender equality and to care about gender equality. And that was actually pretty interesting. I was really impressed with Muhtar, the CEO of Coca-Cola. He said a couple of things that I really do not heard a lot of CEO say. He said that they’re really thinking about how they do. How they catch up real kind of more gender equality and took his corporate ranks. He got an example where there’s a woman he wanted to be (unintelligible) Europe and she (unintelligible) and couldn’t move and he said, traditionally, the career path of Coke is you have to move. And he said, this is going to work. So, we’re going to have, you know, exact, this is going to work. So, she had to stay, I think, it was France. We let her stay. Her team is not there but she is running Coca Cola Europe, obviously a huge (unintelligible). We need to make this work for her. And I thought, I’ve not heard a CEO say that. That was pretty incredible.

Mr. ARRINGTON: Are you joining the board of Coca Cola? You’re on Disney and on Starbucks Board?

Ms. SANDBERG: I’m not joining the board of Coca Cola.

Mr. ARRINGTON: That’ll be a kind of a cool third one

Ms. SANDBERG: I am. I am (unintelligible) sports joining up the Disney work soon.

Mr. ARRINGTON: Last year, Facebook did a bunch of in panel Facebook surveys and you have hundred of thousands of participants. Do Facebook do anything special this year in the event?

Ms. SANDBERG: Yeah. I would say last year, we were more experimenting and we didn’t. This year, we really did this. This year, we did polls at the last discussions(ph) and I think we had over 400,000 users participated in the poll. For me, you know…

Mr. ARRINGTON: 400,000?

Ms. SANDBERG: 400, 000. You know, Davos is a great event and I think an important event for getting world leaders together and corporations and you know, living(ph) in a very global world so keeping everyone together, you know. But, real people, they’re not really invited to Davos. I mean, they try and they reach out and they do a lot of reach out but they’re not here. And so for us being able to bring real people and real users into the Davos experience is incredible. We saw example after example of, you know, panel where experts are sitting there talking about something and they’ll say, what do people think? And we could do that in like 5 minutes and get, you know, 13,000 responses to whatever the question was. It was pretty interesting.

Mr. ARRINGTON: Last year, you had a 150 million users of Facebook when we sat down exactly a year ago. Today, you have- is the last number you announced is 350 million?

Ms. SANDBERG: 350 million.

Mr. ARRINGTON: What’s the office poll(ph) when you hit half a billion? It’s summer, right? Early summer?

Ms. SANDBERG: I don’t know what the office poll is but – and we’re not taking bets but we are really excited that even at such big numbers, our growth is continuing and so continuing to be so strong. As you get big, it sometimes easier to not grow at the same percentages and we are seeing incredible growth. I think, as importantly as a growth, is the continued engagement of our users. When I joined the company, we’re about 70 million and-

Mr. ARRINGTON: Which is two years ago?

Ms. SANDBERG: About two years ago, yeah. Almost two years. And we kept saying, probably 50% of our users come back every day. And you know, I keep telling people, God, stop saying that. Because every Windows(ph) or later adapters(ph) are not as, you know, engage. So, our later adapters are not going to come back everyday or 50% won’t – stop saying that. But, this is Facebook and people do what they believe in, no matter what I think and people kept saying 50% and-

Mr. ARRINGTON: You’ve almost stuck to that, haven’t you?

Ms. SANDBERG: We’re actually still at 50%.

Mr. ARRINGTON: Forrester(ph) said a 130 million people a day sign in to Facebook. So, that’s even higher than that?

Ms. SANDBERG: So the numbers are in the range(ph) of 50 million plus users and 50% comeback everyday, our numbers. 50% come back everyday. And I’ve never seen that and no one I know have seen that-

Mr. ARRINGTON: Does that include your Facebook Connect, by the way?

Ms. SANDBERG: No, that’s Facebook only.

Mr. ARRINGTON: That’s completely separate. Yeah. How many people use Facebook Connect everyday?

Ms. SANDBERG: I don’t know-

Mr. ARRINGTON: That’s on your website actually. It’s like 30 million (unintelligible).

Ms. SANDBERG: Yeah.

Mr. ARRINGTON: Last year, you made me a promise. There has to be at least a couple of hard questions. That soon Facebook users, not fan pages, Facebook users would have the ability to have more than 5000 friends. And that hasn’t happened yet. So-

Ms. SANDBERG: I failed you miserably. I’m here to apologize publicly for our loss. So, what we’ve done already here is we know there’s an issue for people like you who have a lot of followers and more than 5000 people want to see what you have to say. We have made progress on(ph) year is opening up fan pages and giving them a lot more functionality. So one of the reasons when we talked about last year, you didn’t want to switch from having a personal page to a fan pages, you couldn’t, you know, post two users, you cannot reach out two users-

Mr. ARRINGTON: You can have sort of one-on-one communication with-

Ms. SANDBERG: That’s- you could(ph). You couldn’t do any outreach from fan pages last year.

Mr. ARRINGTON: So, now you can.

Ms. SANDBERG: Now, you can. So, now, while we still haven’t got you more than 5000 people on your front page, we’ve opened up fan pages and so that if you- people want to follow you and you want to respond to people and push information to them, you’re able to do that from your front page. So we have that developed.

Mr. ARRINGTON: OK, great. So we’ll have normal user pages more than 5000 friends?

Ms. SANDBERG: I don’t know but they will add more functionality to the fan pages or we’ll do that. Either way, I think the goal is, you know, you want to be able to communicate with people. They want to hear from you. They fanned you. They friended you. We want to enable that in the best way possible. So it’s clearly (unintelligible).

Mr. ARRINGTON: One of the big things here this year is China. And obviously, the Google situation is still playing out. Facebook is still banned in China, is that right? And think of it you’re not behind the firewall.

Ms. SANDBERG: Yeah.

Mr. ARRINGTON: Yeah. I’m not asking any specific question on what Facebook plans are in China. It seems they haven’t changed. But as a sort of a leader in the tech community, what do you think should be our community’s response to China? Should we work with the government as Google tried it and others tried to do? Should we pulled out and wait? What’s the right thing to do as human beings and as businesses?

Ms. SANDBERG: You know-

Mr. ARRINGTON: It’s a hard question.

Ms. SANDBERG: It’s a hard question and everyone knows it’s a hard question. China is an important market, it’s a growing market and there are a lot of people that live there. And so when you provide a service, you provide a great service, you want the rest(ph) of the world to use it. And when you think about our mission, we want to connect everyone in the world. Connecting everyone in the world without China is not connecting everyone in the world. And I think that when you do go into China, you have to figure out how to work with the government, that’s very clear. When you go anywhere in the world, you have to work with the government and that’s poses different issues for different models. For us right now, we launched in Chinese. We are not easily accessible if you’re in China, very hard to access us and we haven’t figure out what our plans would be at. So, we’re still thinking here all the issues. It’s complicated.

Mr. ARRINGTON: Just a couple more questions. I’ve and others have stated that Facebook is clearly on a tear(ph). I mean, you probably don’t have all of the internet users at some point. Last year, you had 1/5. Now, you have 2/5 or more. But one thing is- it’s not clear to me that you’ve monetized well your profit in the business. But if you found what I called the Google moment when Google paired excellent search with amazing, an amazing monetization model to become one of the largest companies in the world. For Facebook to do the same, it seems to me you have to have this some monetization magic. Have you found that yet? Is it a process of tweaking what you have now or you’re still experimenting? How do you bring in the billions or 20 billion in revenue?

Ms. SANDBERG: Yeah. So, I think this was the year that we changed from being experimental ad platform to really being able to go big and we are going big in lots of ways. What Facebook does and I think we do uniquely well which is part of why I’m so excited about the Facebook opportunity when I was offered it two years ago is we’re a place where users express themselves and we’re a place where people share. And when you think about building brands(ph), not just giving someone something they search but before they search. When they’re talking about who they are and affiliating and, you know, finding things typical demand generation, which is still 90% of global ad spenders(ph). I think we’re best property anywhere, with any media to do that because friends want you to affiliate. They want you to say, you know, I am, you know, a Starbucks drinker. I like Starbucks latte and they want you to tell your friends about it.

Mr. ARRINGTON: You still don’t get free Starbucks as a board member?

Ms. SANDBERG: I get no free Starbucks.

Mr. ARRINGTON: Ridiculous.

Ms. SANDBERG: No.

Mr. ARRINGTON: Sorry, but go ahead.

Ms. SANDBERG: But if I wanted to tell everyone I love Starbucks as a board member or not, I will do it on Facebook. And even if I wasn’t trying to do that, if I was just expressing who I am, that’s part of it. And Facebook is a discovery place. You watch your news feed, you’re not going around to look for things even though sometimes you are but your news feed is coming to you. You said, these are the people I want to connect with and they are sharing with me. And that’s a really unique opportunity for brands. You know, the meetings I had at Davos last year were very much- we’re interested, we see, you know, 150 million users we’d like to experiment. The meetings I’m having this year at Davos are very different. They’re saying, we’ve experimented with you, we’ve done some great (unintelligible) in the last year. We’re ready to go big because we really want that kind of very authentic two-way dialogue with our users and we’re excited to help brands do that and help people interact to them in ways that they’re excited about.

Mr. ARRINGTON: So, you like your model? You like your revenue model and now it’s a process of scaling it and convincing one more and more brands to jump on towards (unintelligible).

Ms. SANDBERG: (unintelligible). Because I think that advertising is a great business when done the right way. Advertising that’s interrupted, advertising that’s pushed at you, that’s annoying is not a great model. Advertising which lets you express who you are and then engage in an authentic way is so important. I was just meeting with someone who runs a very important agency and he said what he will use is that right brands of the future are going to be shaped by consumers. What he’s telling his clients is you don’t get to control your brand anymore. You’ve got to work with consumers because they’re going to build your brands. If we are- wait a minute for the noise.

Mr. ARRINGTON: Yeah, yeah. Keep (unintelligible).

Ms. SANDBERG: As I scream, you know, all at Davos. If we are working, if we are going to change the world to take real people and put them into Davos so their voice can be heard. And if we’re going to change the world so that brands have to help and work with people to build their companies and their brands, we think that’s a much better place. And now, we’re starting to do it at scale and I think it’s going to make for better companies, I think it’s going to make for people having better consumer experiences, and I think it makes for great experiences online. So I’m really excited about it.

Mr. ARRINGTON: Who are your competitors?

Ms. SANDBERG: Who are our competitors? A competitive question is always an important one. It’s important for companies to get, right? I think if you draw your focus too narrowly(ph) our competitors, you can get very much blind-sighted by something wrong in company or others are doing. I think you want to think about your competitive case broadly. Well, understanding that you’re working with others to have partnerships. So I think we are competing for how you communicate. We want – when you want to communicate, for Facebook to be the easiest, the most efficient, the most ubiquitous way for you to communicate. I guess that’s a pretty broad communication. Yeah, broad set of competitors, but we’d like to integrate with a lot of this to really make sure that we make it easy to communicate.

Mr. ARRINGTON: So you’re not going to answer that question at all?

Ms. SANDBERG: It’s not an answer?

Mr. ARRINGTON: No.

Ms. SANDBERG: But I talked for a while.

Mr. ARRINGTON: It is an awesome answer, yeah.

Ms. SANDBERG: If I didn’t say anything, is that good? Yeah. No, I’m not going to answer that question. But no one ever answers that question. I’ve seen everyone interviewed here. I’ve never seen anyone answer that question.

Mr. ARRINGTON: No. I thought – you know, I thought maybe you would. But…

Ms. SANDBERG: Try next year. Our traditional annual Davos conversation, you can ask me again who our competitors are.

Mr. ARRINGTON: Two more questions.

Ms. SANDBERG: We will say TechCrunch. TechCrunch will be so big…

Mr. ARRINGTON: That’s right.

Ms. SANDBERG: So they are our competitor.

Mr. ARRINGTON: The TechCrunch threat.

Ms. SANDBERG: The TechCrunch threat to Facebook.

Mr. ARRINGTON: But we’ve already integrated Facebook Connect, so we’ve been board by you, right? So we’re a part of…

Ms. SANDBERG: So it’s become a partnership.

Mr. ARRINGTON: What is your biggest regret in the last two years? What would you go back and do differently as an executive?

Ms. SANDBERG: It’s a good question.

Mr. ARRINGTON: That’s a tough question I throw you without warning, but…

Ms. SANDBERG: No. It’s a good question. It’s a fair question.

Mr. ARRINGTON: Yeah, anything you would have done differently.

Ms. SANDBERG: I think I would still like to see us move faster. I think we move fast.

Mr. ARRINGTON: You mean, in terms of product generation?

Ms. SANDBERG: Yeah, in terms of product generation. I mean, Mark says this all the time, right? The risk of any spaces that we don’t move as that they move too slowly, not too quickly. I think we are moving quickly and I think we’re quicker than anyone. I think we still like to be faster. I would have love to have gotten last year from the experimental part of our brand business to where we are now, which is scaling. I’m excited we’re here now, but would have loved to accomplish that more quickly.

Mr. ARRINGTON: What are you most proud of?

Ms. SANDBERG: I’m most proud…

Mr. ARRINGTON: What have you done in the last two years, when you look back and go, that was awesome?

Ms. SANDBERG: I’m most proud of how Facebook changes lives. I’m most proud of the following example, which hit me because it’s a friend of mine. Her friends, they wanted to adopt a baby and they had a birth mother…

Mr. ARRINGTON: Can you adopt babies on Facebook now?

Ms. SANDBERG: Let me, let me.

Mr. ARRINGTON: I’m sorry.

Ms. SANDBERG: Wait, wait, wait. And they had arranged through an agency with the birth mother and at the last minute, the birth mother changed her mind and wants to keep the baby, which is of course, prerogative in the choice. But for this couple, it was very sad. And they actually wrote on Facebook, they created a page where they really were expressing themselves like, this is so disappointing. We had a nursery, we really want to be parents. We just hope someone else just ask for adoption. And separately, there’s a woman who was looking for a place to give a family to adopt her baby, and she went to the usual process and found it too formal, didn’t find anyone she liked. Found this page, she saw this couple’s desire to have a children and more importantly, saw the community around this couple, saw the friends and the family who are saying we know it’s going to happen for you, we know you’re going to be able to be happy parents and we’re going to be there for you through the experience. And she said that’s where I want my child. I want my child…

Mr. ARRINGTON: And they actually…

Ms. SANDBERG: It’s gone through. The couple has a baby. And what that says to me is that we create community where there wasn’t any, we show people in this very important way the power of what human connection is. We have this page I’m very proud of. I think it’s peace.facebook.com, which you should look at. We’re choosing real-time. Every 24 hours, if personal connections are made between historically conflict groups, so it does Palestinian area and Israel, it does Pakistan and India, it does Muslim and Christian, for example. And you get on there and you know, it’ll say in the last 24 hours, 13,000 connections have been made from Israel to Palestine, 13,000. 13,000 individual people who have connected. You know, if someone else said here it’s really hard to shoot at people you know, it’s just easier to shoot at people you don’t know. And so I don’t claim for a second that we’re going to like create (unintelligible). I’m not that naïve or silly. I think making things more personal makes a huge difference. It’s why, you know, my friend’s friend now has a baby, because they wanted that community. It’s why people are directly connecting in areas of the world where they weren’t before and I’m really proud of that, really proud to just be one of the many people working at this company that’s making that possible. It’s an honor.

Mr. ARRINGTON: All right, we’ll end with that. Thanks very much. I appreciate your time.

Ms. SANDBERG: Thank you. I’ll see you next year.

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Facebook COO: 175 Million People Log Into Facebook Every Day

Calvin Chin is an American entrepreneur who lives in Shanghai. He founded Qifang, a P2P lending site for Chinese student loans. You can read more about Qifang here. He attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this last week, where China was the center of attention. We asked him to write this guest post and share his unique perspective as an American building a startup in the heart of China.

Here at Davos it seems China keeps coming up in two ways – neither of them positive. One, with the worst of the crisis behind us, people are turning from last year’s hopes of China as economic savior to China as free-rider keeping its currency cheap, bullying its minorities and shirking its responsibilities in Copenhagen. Two, in the tech community, seems everyone is talking about Google, Chinese government hackers and censorship.

My view, and I think it’s one that many in China would probably share, is that while free access to information and the rest of the world is inherently a good thing, so is political stability. The Chinese government has earned a lot of slack for raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and if things did go out of control a heck of a lot of people would get hurt. So even if they want China to be plugged in to the rest of the world to encourage innovation and Chinese tech entrepreneurship (which I think they do), they’d put that priority after getting most Chinese people better lives.

It’s kind of the same deal that Chinese startups all make, to try to do build cool stuff but while working within the system. So Tudou and Youku screen their videos and the fastest growing microblogging service is run by a portal that has the infrastructure from screening blogs to be able to screen tweets. All these companies are making the same decision that Google made to enter China in 2004 too (and stay for now), but for Chinese entrepreneurs they don’t have the option of not being in the China market. It’s what they know and where they have their best shot at success. And I’m sure if you’d ask them, they’d sincerely agree that eliminating poverty and keeping things stable comes way before access to a few articles in a foreign language about events that don’t mean much to them. I don’t think many non-Chinese would like the aggressively patriotic and self-important China that would probably be the outcome of democracy there today anyways.

The Chinese market for startups is growing so fast, is so competitive and is characterized by so many unfair advantages for the big players, that local entrepreneurs just keep their heads down and roll with the political and market changes. Take Digu for instance, they launched as a pretty simple copy of Twitter that focused on celebrity accounts, then pivoted to a social game model when all the startup microblogging platforms got shutdown and Sina (with a lock on celebrity blogs) launched Weibo, and are now back to straight microblogging with a better ability to keep the tweet streams “harmonized.” Digu didn’t whine, they just sucked it up and forged ahead.

This is typical for Chinese startups. Whether they are localizing an international hit, copy-2-china style, at a much cheaper price and a better UI like Kuukie. Or they’re a fit for Chinese net culture with a product that you don’t see elsewhere like Douban’s social network for talking about books (and now other media).

The thing is while the majority of Chinese netizens really don’t care that much about what’s going on outside of China, the ones who do care, people who would start companies, people who want international news, all know workarounds to use services they like or read about sensitive topics from other perspectives. They use Twitter clients like Bage or free (http://hotspotshield.com/) or paid VPNs. So much so that Twitter won in the grassroots Chinamode awards.

So actually, the Chinese government kinda gets the best of all worlds: most Chinese netizens are sufficiently inconvenienced so they’ll never stumble into places they shouldn’t, motivated innovators still find out about, get to, and can track any going on globally, and international companies that would otherwise compete for local market share get locked out.

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In The Limelight: An American Entrepreneur In China Talks About…

About 24 hours ago news broke that Microsoft China appeared to rip off both the look and feel as well as much of the code of a microblogging service called Plurk. Last night they issued a statement saying they took the Juku site down, and suggested an outside contractor was to blame.

Today they issued a final statement on the matter. This boils down to “it wasn’t us, it was our vendor.” But they do take responsibility, and apologize to Plurk. The apology is nice but largely unnecessary. As we said yesterday, this is the best thing to ever happen to the startup.

Microsoft’s statement:

On Monday, December 14, questions arose over a beta application called Juku developed by a Chinese vendor for our MSN China joint venture. We immediately worked with our MSN China joint venture to investigate the situation.

The vendor has now acknowledged that a portion of the code they provided was indeed copied. This was in clear violation of the vendor’s contract with the MSN China joint venture, and equally inconsistent with Microsoft’s policies respecting intellectual property.

When we hire an outside company to do development work, our practice is to include strong language in our contract that clearly states the company must provide work that does not infringe the intellectual property rights of others. We are a company that respects intellectual property and it was never our intent to have a site that was not respectful of the work that others in the industry have done.

We will be suspending access to the Juku beta indefinitely.

We are obviously very disappointed, but we assume responsibility for this situation. We apologize to Plurk and we will be reaching out to them directly to explain what happened and the steps we have taken to resolve the situation.

In the wake of this incident, Microsoft and our MSN China joint venture will be taking a look at our practices around applications code provided by third-party vendors.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Microsoft Gives Final Answer On Plurk Disaster: It Wasn’t Us

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has just written an open letter to Facebook users regarding a privacy overhaul that is due to hit the site in the next few weeks. Soon, users will be able to selectively choose, on a per-post basis, who can see the content they post to the site. Facebook is also going to remove regional networks entirely, largely because some of those networks (like China) consist of millions of users, which makes them useless from a privacy standpoint.

Alongside the change, privacy controls will be simplified. As Facebook rolls out the new privacy settings, users will be presented with a page designed to walk them through the change. Depending on your current privacy level, Facebook will make recommendations, though you’ll be able to change them as usual.

If these changes sound familiar, it’s because Facebook actually announced them way back in July.

From Zuckerberg’s letter:

We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we’ll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You’ll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you’re finished, we’ll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you’re done you’ll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We’ve worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone’s needs are different. We’ll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you’re sharing with online.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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Facebook To Finally Roll Out Revamped Privacy Controls, Kill Off…

Continue reading Dell Mini 3i unboxed in China, capacitive stylus included

Filed under: Cellphones

Dell Mini 3i unboxed in China, capacitive stylus included originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dell Mini 3i unboxed in China, capacitive stylus included

Earlier this week, I was in Kunshan, China, to attend the 3G Industry Summit [CN], a four-day event that has attracted a few dozen speakers and an audience of over 200 people, making it one of the biggest of its kind in this country. The annual event is organized by the Kunshan government and Mobile 2.0 Forum, a communication platform with more than 1,500 members, almost single-handedly run by industry veteran Leo Wang.

The summit reassured me of one thing: The Chinese market for mobile hardware, software and contents is big already and it’s bound to become huge in the very near future.

Just a few stats about China’s online landscape:

• world’s largest Internet population: 338 million Chinese are online (US: 220 million)
• most cell phone users in the world (710 million)
• China Mobile, the world’s biggest cell phone carrier, boasts nearly half a billion subscribers (the US as a whole has 271 million)
• China’s telecommunications industry generated $210 billion in revenues between January and July 2009 alone
• China’s mobile phone penetration rate currently stands at just 53.5% (USA: 88%), hinting at room for massive future growth

The smartphone market and 3G are still in their infancy though. Research firm BDA China says just 17.4 million smartphones were sold in China in 2008 (Nokia commands a 67% market share in this segment), with the total likely to hit 36 million units this year before growing to 56 million in 2010. The iPhone will be released in China next week. The number of China Mobile’s 3G subscribers (who use the company’s homegrown 3G standard) currently stands at just 1.33 million, but the country’s three biggest cell phone carriers (China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom) say they’re ready to invest $66 billion in China’s 3G networks over the next two years.

So the 3G Industry Summit in Kunshan probably couldn’t take place at a better time. The program also included a launch pad, which gave a total of 14 companies from China (two were from Japan) the chance to pitch their services onstage to over 200 top-level executives, VCs and entrepreneurs in the country’s mobile tech world.

Here’s a thumbnail sketch of all of these companies. The list is by no means representative of China’s mobile startup scene but should serve as a reasonably large and up-to-date cross section of the industry.

Demo 1:
UNOH
UNOH CEO Shintarou Yamada showed a mobile (and Japan-only) game his Tokyo-based 15-man team launched in May this year. Machitsuku is a geo-aware city-building simulation (the game’s title means “Build a city” in Japanese) with cute graphics, social elements, surprisingly deep gameplay and virtual items users have to pay for (the game itself is free). Yamada said the game will be provided to leading social networks like Mixi (background) and Mobage-town (background) soon, but I am hoping for an iPhone version.

Demo 2:
Urbian
Urbian develops mobile applications for enterprises, but the company also offers a slew of iPhone and Android apps for end consumers. At the summit, CEO Christopher Kahler, an Austrian based in Shanghai, demonstrated a nifty mobile learning application that will be soon launched in China, Japan, the Philippines and other territories (the China version alone will be used by 5,000 schools all over the country). The solution will be available for the iPhone, Android, Symbian and other platforms.

Demo 3:
CrossMo
CrossMo intends to solve the fragmentation problem in the mobile space by offering an online data management and synchronization tool for cell phones that’s completely hardware agnostic. The service detects everything on your phone once you connect it to your PC via USB and backs up and synchronizes your ringtones, music files, address book etc. This works even after you replace your cell phone with another model.

CEO Lei Jia said 70% Chinese of consumers download contents from the web to their phone, not over the air. CrossMo looks like a very powerful tool and reminds me of DoubleTwist (concept-wise), so too bad it’s China-only.

Demo 4:
MobimTech
MobimTech CTO Yi Liang demonstrated imiChat, which seemed to be a very cool real-time video chatting solution. You can use it to video-chat from cell phone to cell phone but also from the fixed web to cell phones (voice- and text-chatting is also supported). imiChat is free and supports a number of cell phones. It uses GPRS/EDGE networks and doesn’t need to run on 3G (MobimTech actually sells this technology to 2.5G handset makers).

Demo 5:
BokanTech
BokanTech CEO Bo Wang presented iBokan, an iPhone app destination site that features an impressive number of hit apps. He highlighted mobile edutainment apps such as Cute Math (apparently the only app that was featured twice in the AppStore as “new and noteworthy”) and Jumbo Book (an interactive book series with 20 episodes so far). BokanTech also plans to soon release a service called Kukapp, which Wang described as “Google Analytics for iPhone and Ovi apps”.

Demo 6:
NavTeq China
Navteq China Director George Qie focused on how to create an ecosystem based on location-based services (LBS). His main point was that LBS can be used for many applications: navigation, social networking, games, productivity (workforce management, for example), commerce and security. Qie said this versatility is the reason why LBS can be used for the integration of applications of different nature and that the advent of 3G in China will fuel the growth of LBS developed in China.

Demo 7:
SocoGame
SocoGame CEO Ye Shen said at $147 million in sales in 2008, the Chinese market for mobile games is still small but will likely balloon to almost $750 in sales by 2011, with growth expected to accelerate significantly after that year. One major difference to the West: Chinese gamers usually expect a mobile game to be free, but they’re ready to pay later for virtual items, for example, forcing developers to come up with compelling games with long-time appeal.

Shanghai-based SocoGame itself is a major player in China’s mobile gaming sector. The company produced more than 100 mobile games for a number of different markets so far, i.e. Monkey King (specifically designed for Asia) or Jewel Quest Deluxe (specifically designed for markets in North America and Europe).

Demo 8:
LEG3s
LEG3s is an award-winning mobile job hunting service specifically targeted at China’s 200 million migrant workers. The service informs those people about open positions, salary levels, the current situation in the job market etc. in over 100 cities in China. LEG3s has so far attracted 3 million end users who have to pay reasonable fees and can access the service through low-end mobile phones (LEG3s is pre-installed on some of those). CEO Jason Liu expects the user base to grow to 5 million by year-end.

Demo 9:
TrustMobi
TrustMobi is a Beijing-based startup that operates in an often overlooked field: cell phone security. CEO Bing Song expects that the mobile web will grow significantly in the near future and that zombie computers might soon be joined by zombie cell phones. His company offers an integrated security solution that can handle file recovery, virus detection, firewalls for mobile emails, SMS and MMS protection, file encryption etc. for a number of different handsets. TrustMobi was responsible for mobile phone security during the Beijing Olympics last year.

Demo 10:
Apexone Microelectronics
I had trouble keeping up with this presentation due to the slides that were available only in Chinese and the deep technical details CEO James Gao presented on his company’s optical navigation solutions. Check out Apexone’s excellent English web site if you’re interested in this field.

Demo 11:
Playing.com.cn
This Tianjin-based company has so far developed over 50 smartphone games, which are being sold in more than 20 countries and regions. CEO Zhen Su demonstrated what he called a “convenience store for mobile apps”, consisting of an IM client, various games and a virtual pet simulation. The company provides an API for other game developers who can sell their content on Playing.com.cn’s web site.

Demo 12:
MTrend Group
MTrend Group Founding Partner Mano Wang shared interesting information from a recent analysis on mobile web usage in China. Here are some findings from the mobile web user panel Wang quoted from:

• 22.6% of China Mobile users born after 1990 used the mobile web in 2009 for the first time (this is vastly different from Japan, for example, where users start much earlier).
• 63.9% of mobile gamers play between 10 and 30 minutes per day.
• 57.1% of China Mobile subscribers say they’ve already read a newspaper on a mobile device.
• 38.8% are starting to switch to non-pirated music on their cell phones. 13.2% listen to pirated music only, while 26.1% buy all the songs they store on their cell phones.
• The three hottest mobile apps among Chinese university students using China Mobile are Mobile Baidu ( China’s largest search engine), Mobile QQ (China’s No. 1 social network) and 12530 (China Mobile’s music Wap portal).

Note: MTrend is China Mobile’s main brand for data monitoring so these data points aren’t representative for all of China.

Demo 13:
Panda LLC
Tokyo-based Panda is currently preparing a 3D treasure hunting game with very cool graphics designed specifically for smartphones, i.e. the iPhone. The two demo videos Panda Director Issei Matsui showed during the presentation were pretty cool. I’ll add them here once I get my hands on them.

Demo 14:
MotherAPP
Ex-Googler and CEO Ken Law said his Hong Kong-based company’s main mission is to solve the platform fragmentation problem in the mobile space for developers by offering three solutions: Generator lets you create native apps for the iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and Blackberry simply through using MotherApp Language (a restricted set of HTML with special markups), which sounds like a powerful solution to me. MotherBlog converts a blog or your Twitter into a native iPhone app – without any coding. The company also supports other companies in making a given mobile app compatible with all major platforms (showcases), claiming tailor-made end-to-end development takes about 9 weeks.

Demo 15:
Hozom
Why trying to set up yet another mobile social network when you (kind of) carried one in your pocket all along? That’s what Hozom CEO Ziyang Liu asked himself and tries to add social components to a form of network you already have in your cell phone, namely the contact list. The idea is to connect entries in your phone’s address book with services like Twitter, QQ, IM etc. in addition to integrating social gaming and geo-location elements using your friends’ contact data. Another selling point is Hozom’s slick design and elegant UI.

Demo 16:
MoTech
MoTech offers a mobile travel assistant for the millions of foreigners visiting China every year. The app comes with a set of around 1,000 different phrases the average tourist needs to feel comfortable in China (transportation, emergency situations, shopping etc.). Choose the sentence and let your mobile phone speak it out loud in Mandarin Chinese (the app also lists points of interests and the names of restaurants). In his presentation, Motech CEO Austin Xie also touched upon the slew of other interesting products and solutions for Non-Chinese speaking people his company provides.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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Following months of negotiations between Apple and China Unicom, "industry insiders" are reportedly expecting an official announcement to be made by the country's second biggest mobile telecommunications company tomorrow in Hong Kong.

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Apple Finally Signs Deal With China Unicom, Brings The iPhone To China…