DigiCha

I am happy to be included in a terrific group of bloggers over at Forbes’ new China blog-China Tracker.  China Tracker has posts about all things China, and I highly recommend it.

Qiyi.com launched this week. It is a partnership between Baidu and Providence EquityPartners, an investor in Hulu. Qiyi flatters Hulu with a front page nearly identical to Hulu’s.

John Markoff of the New York Times discovered more information about the attacks on Google that precipitated the company’s retreat from China. In “Cyberattack on Google Said to Hit Password System” he writes that: …a person with direct knowledge of the investigation now says that the losses included one of Google’s crown jewels, a password [...]

There is a report in the Chinese press that Netease is in talks to buy into Microsoft’s MSN China joint venture by purchasing the 50% share owned by the current Chinese partner. MSN China is a joint venture that was established in 2005 between Microsoft and Shanghai Alliance Investment Ltd. (SAIL). This report is unconfirmed and [...]

The Machinima film ”网瘾战争 War of Internet Addiction” won top prize at the 2010 Tudou Festival, as Tudou co-founder Marc van der Chijs describes on his blog. Congratulations to 性感玉米 SexyCorn ( @CorndogCN on twitter) and his team for making such a good and important film. You can see it on Tudou below, or watch an English subtitled version [...]

Caixin has published a good English article on the Li Xiangdong case-The Rise and Flight of China’s Ringtone Lord. Li was head of China Mobile’s mobile music service, making him one of the most powerful mobile content executives in China. He is alleged to have taken at least 400m RMB, and probably more, in bribes/kickbacks/side [...]

I wrote a guest post for GigaOm Pro on why it is so hard for most US Internet firms to succeed in China. GigaOm Pro is $79/yr, and after spending a couple of weeks using it I’d say it is well worth the very reasonable price. GigaOm excerpted my post on its free site, which [...]

By now we are all familiar with the concept of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) as four nations whose “combined economies could eclipse the combined economies of the current richest countries of the world” by 2050. Today China’s largest Internet firm Tencent announced a $300m investment into Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies Limited (DST). DST is the [...]

The China Social Game Summit 2010 was packed, and Rockyou, a sponsor, was one of the stars of the conference. Jia Shen (沈佳), co-founder and CTO of Rockyou, gave an excellent presentation in Chinese to a standing room only crowd of Chinese developers. He not only introduced his company but also gave a very informative talk [...]

Inside Social Games reports on a couple of rumors making the rounds recently: Social Rumors about Chinese Gaming Companies: Tencent Looked at CrowdStar, Shanda Going for RockYou?. I doubt either of these transactions will occur; Tencent is said to have backed away from Crowdstar when the price approached $200m, and Rockyou, which has raised $117M, is [...]