Last week I participated in a Sinica Podcast on the Internet in China and Zhang Wuben and his magic mung beans. I somehow ended up as the sole defender if the efficacy of properly practiced traditional Chinese medicine; the other guests seem to believe it is some kind of Chinese voodoo. From the Sinica site: Mere [...]
Rebecca MacKinnon has written a must-read post on the Chinese government’s recently issued White Paper on the Internet in China. She provides the best explanation I have seen of the government’s approach to managing the Chinese Internet–”networked authoritarianism”. As Ms. MacKinnon writes: China is pioneering what I call “networked authoritarianism.” Compared to classic authoritarianism, networked [...]
Leading Chinese map provider AutoNavi holdings is planning to raise $100 in an IPO on Nasdaq under the symbol “AMAP”. The company generates most of its revenue from automobile navigation. Wireless and online mapping services (through its MapABC Technology subsidiary) account for approximately 10% of overall, and Google specifically accounts for just over 1%. (As [...]
In today’s Q1 2010 earnings release Perfect World announced today that it has acquired a majority stake in Runic Games, a Seattle-based game development studio. Perfect World, which already has a deal to publish an MMORPG version of Runic’s “Torchlight“, says it paid “consideration of approximately US$8.4 million” for the majority stake. From Perfect World’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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
According to various news reports March 31 was the deadline for Google to renew its Internet Content Provider (ICP) license with the Chinese government. This morning I could not find an ICP number on any page of the services remaining on Google.cn–Music, Maps, Shopping, Video, Translate–as required by the Chinese government. Google 265, hosted at [...]
Monday evening Beijing time a Chinese person on Twitter discovered that Google.cn appeared to have stop filtering results on an image search for 89学生运动 [89 Student Movement]. For several hours that search returned this: Now, Tuesday morning, the results for that image search are again filtered, as shown in this screen capture: I tested several [...]
The Financial Times reported Saturday that Google is “99.9 percent certain” that it will shut its China search engine at Google.cn. It has been eight weeks since Google said it would no longer censor search in China. The Chinese government has handled this much better than expected given, from their perspective, Google’s very public provocation. [...]
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