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China Consumer Behavior Information Technology Trend Watching

Internet in China: online shoppers spend 2.3 billion U.S. dollars in 1st half of 2008

Online Chinese shoppers spent 16.2 billion yuan (2.3 billion U.S. dollars) in 19 major cities in the first half of 2008, China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) said on recently. The findings were based on a survey carried out in four municipalities directly under the central government — Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing — and 15 developed cities such as Changchun, Dalian, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Jinan and Guangzhou, among others […]

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China Information Technology Trend Watching

Internet in China: Google banks on Chinese market

Google expects its position as the world’s most popular online search site and sales from fast-growing Asian markets, including China, to help the company weather any United States recession. ‘One of the very good sources for Google is the very rapid growth in Asia,’ said Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, which gets almost all its revenue from advertising next to search results. Historically, people tend to shift their money to the most ‘highly measured’ advertiser when there are ‘economic difficulties,’ he said recent at a briefing in Beijing […]

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China Consumer Behavior Information Technology Trend Watching

Internet in China: Over 100 Million Youth Seek Fun Online

On April 25th, 2008, China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) released the Research Report of China Youth Internet Behaviors. The report studies the online behaviors of 107 million China’s netizens under the age of 25. According to the report, China’s youth netizens are more inclined to entertainment demand. The most used online serves for youth are IM(91.3%), online music(91.1%), online movie/video(82.9%), search engine(73.4%), online games(68.2%), online news(63.4%) and email(58%). If compared with the average usage level of all Internet users, the usage rate of online games, online music and online movie/video among youth are much higher than average rate […]

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China Economics Information Technology

Chinese People and Their Mobile Phones: 6 Telecoms to Merge Their Assets

China has told its six telecommunications companies to merge their assets, allowing fixed-line carriers to expand into wireless services and creating three operators that will offer phone and Internet connections to 1.3 billion people. Under the plan, the parent of China Telecom will buy a mobile phone network from the parent of China Unicom, which in turn will merge with the company that controls the China Netcom Group, the Ministry of Industry and Information said in a statement on Saturday. China will issue three third-generation wireless licenses after the overhaul is completed, it said…

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China Information Technology Software Trend Watching

Internet in China: Virtual Worlds Roundup

BusinessWeek published a special report on virtual world recently, with one article on virtual World in China which featured Hipihi, Novoking and UOneNet (a.k.a. uWorld). Hipihi has announced the beginning of its public beta testing phase, after over a year private test. uWorld, another virtual world on BusinessWeek’s article which was first profiled in October 2007, finally started its close test in March. As Hipihi, uWorld also partnered with IBM on virtual world development. Kaiser Kuo is more optimistic on it, he thought “deep-rooted MMORPG culture” in China and “willingness of Chinese to strike up online friendships with strangers” will help them in the long run […]

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China Information Technology

Internet in China: Baidu To Operate Online Game Service

It is reported that Baidu will partner with online game operators to operate online game service soon, the official news will be announced early next week. You can access the Baidu online game channel. Baidu now partners with Shanda, Joycub.cn and 51wan.com to operate six browser games. Among all six games, four of them are offered by 51wan.com, a browser online game company recently got financing from Sequoia Capital China […]

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China Information Technology Trend Watching

Chinese People and Their Mobile Phones: junk text message nearly doubles in 2007

About 353.8 billion junk text messages were sent in China in 2007, 92.7 percent year-on-year, the anti-spam committee of the Internet Society of China said recently. Illegal and fraudulent messages accounted for 49.7 percent, while ads made up 45.48 percent. Group spam companies accounted for 36.67 percent of the total, service provider firms made up 32.18 percent and net operators 20.75 percent. At the end of 2007, China’s cell-phone users topped 500 million.

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China Trend Watching

Chinese media revenue to reach 77 billion US dollars in 2008

Chinese media industry revenue is expected to increase 13.1 percent to 554 billion yuan (about 79.14billion U.S. dollars) in 2008, said a report released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences recently. The figure was 481.1 billion yuan (over 68 billion US dollars) in 2007, up 13.6 percent year on year, according to the report, which was based on data collected up to February 2008. Mobile and online media saw rapid growth, earning a revenue of 105.3 billion yuan (around 15 billion US dollars) and 29.7 billion yuan (almost 5 billion US dollars) in 2007 […]

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China Information Technology Trend Watching

Internet in China: World of Warcraft logs over 1 million concurrent players

Chinese online game operator The9 Limited has announced that Blizzard Entertainment‘s World of Warcraft has logged more than 1 million concurrent players in mainland China alone, the highest concurrency since the game’s official launch in China in June 2005. The9 is a major online game operator in China, and operated servers for World of Warcraft players in China. The9 attributes the growth of WOW gaming in China in part to The Burning Crusade expansion pack, which added significant new content to the game, bringing previous players back to the franchise while drawing new gamers in […]

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Design Information Technology Innovation Software

“User Interface Design in an Agile Environment”: Jeff White and Jim Unger’s talk at IxDA | Interaction ‘08 Conference

In their talk at IxDA | Interaction ‘08 Conference, they describe their experience with the merger of user centered design into agile (team) development practice as manifest in a one day design studio […]