China Digital Media Readings for February 21st

• Posted by bbishop
• on February 21st, 2012

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• China’s Tencent Enters U.S. With Twitter Rival, Facebook Games | ClickZ – This is the first in a two-part series. Read part two.
  Chinese social media powerhouse Tencent is rapidly moving into the U.S. market, quietly rolling out an English-language version of its Wiebo microblogging platform and assembling a team to launch online social games on Facebook. The company recently opened offices in Palo Alto, CA. in the shadow of Facebook’s headquarters, to take advantage of Silicon Valley’s pool of gaming talent and tech-savvy Mandarin-speaking applicants.
• Forget Twitter Fans, China’s Tencent Wants U.S. Brands to Sign Up | ClickZ – China’s Tencent, a multi-pronged Internet company, is trying to stay ahead of its rivals by moving into the U.S. market and offering new opportunities to overseas marketers. The Beijing-based company is rolling out an English-language version of its two-year-old Twitter-like Weibo service and is hiring a team in Silicon Valley to launch new games on Facebook.
  Experts say the English-language Tencent Weibo isn’t interested in competing with Twitter for U.S. users. Rather it wants to sell U.S. brands new avenues to tap the growing Chinese consumer base. “There is a far greater opportunity for Tencent in providing Western brands with access to the Chinese market than them investing heavily in Western adoption of their solutions,” says Rick Williams, AKQA creative development director, based in London. The Tencent microblog has already signed up a sizable number of international brands, says Leo Chu, managing director of Tribal DDB Shanghai. Among the companies that advertise on Tencent’s network of messaging, gaming, social media and web portals are Nike, Coca-Cola, KFC and Ford.
• Tencent Pivoting From PC to IPhone for Ads – Bloomberg – Tencent Holdings Ltd. (700) is China’s biggest Internet company, with 430 million users. Even so, it is only No. 6 in attracting advertising because its customers are considered students and farmers without much discretionary income.
  Enter the smartphone.
  China’s online advertising market expanded more than 40 percent to $4.2 billion last year, according to Media Partners Asia. The industry may exceed $10 billion by 2015, it said. Tencent Chief Executive Officer Ma Huateng is wooing that money by shifting his focus from personal computers to mobile devices.
• Chinese Computer Games | Foreign Affairs – Assembling an international consensus on norms about cyberspace, however, is a strategy that will probably take a long time to pay off, if it ever does. There is little the United States can do to alter China’s conception of cyberspace, a vision it is actively promoting abroad. With a growing population of 500 million Internet users, it is easy to see why the Chinese believe that the future of cyberspace belongs to them. In the meantime, the most pressing tasks for the United States are to raise the costs incurred by Chinese hackers and to improve the security of networks at home. Yet U.S. officials should be realistic: Chinese-based cyberattacks will not disappear anytime soon.
• William Farris – Google+ – Baidu Begins Censoring “Bo Xilai Tenders Resignation” The… -
• Yahoo Has No Bearing On Alibaba.com Privatisation, E-commerce Site Says | paidContent -
• Apple’s China trademark battle moves to Shanghai | Reuters – Apple Inc’s trademark battle moves to one of China’s richest cities on Wednesday when a Shanghai court will deliberate a request by troubled technology company Proview to halt the sale of iPads across the city.
• 京东进军电子书 刘强东押注“第三条”路 – 产经 – 21世纪网 -

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