After years of fierce competition, online video giants Youku and Tudou are joining forces to create a single service to be called Youku Tudou Inc. in a deal estimated to be worth over $1 billion.
Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews. 
Pinterest continues its surge as it grows in the Asia Pacific region. The site has attracted millions of users in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong. The site faces a large host of competitors internationally, including a recently launched Chinese clone from Renren. The site seems to be surpassing all expectations — when will the growth taper off?
China’s dammed Internet wall is common knowledge — Chinese users are blockaded from looking at Facebook, Google+, Twitter and other sites that their government doesn’t allow. With all that pressure building up, though, the dam seems to have had a small crack, and it led to Obama’s Google+ page.
Renren, after a pretty tough couple of months that’s seen the stock come down from an IPO of between $12 and $14 to around $5 today, has joined other Chinese stocks in some of their best rallies of the year. Renren CEO Joseph Chen pointed out that mobile demand is boosting the user numbers. This could mark a revolution in the way Chinese users use the social network — mobile has always been a popular form of networking in the East, as proved by the Japanese social networks GREE and DeNa.
Investors have put some serious volume into investing in Renren, the “Chinese Facebook” over the last three days, seemingly identifying the site as a possible social media growth stock that can ride the coattails of Facebook. Between January 29th and the end of the 30th, the stock rose from around $4 to a high of $6.50, but has since come down to around $5.50. The question is whether the stock will continue to grow as the Facebook IPO goes through.
On December 13th, 2011, Twitter users all over Japan broke a record by tweeting about during a television screening of Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky — it’s a famous anime that is known by all Japanese and Japanese tweeters tweeted quotes from the show during the entire program. That was the world record for message per second on a social network until the first minute of Chinese New Year, Monday January 23rd, when Chinese users broke the Twitter record on their own version of Twitter, Sina Weibo.
Over the course of the last few years China has been running a trial of getting social networks to collect the full real names of all of their users. Currently on popular networks like the Twitter clone Sina Weibo and Facebook clone QQ, users have the ability to be anonymous. The government states it is simply doing this for accountability purposes, but in 2010 a woman was sentenced to a year in a labor camp due to a retweet.
They’re now expanding the trial program to all over China.
If you follow emerging social networks news, you’ll often find yourself standing face to face with odd terms like “renren” or “sina weibo”, and for some, it’s tough to even begin to understand what they represent. Fortunately, the folks over at G+ have put together a fantastic infographic looking at social media behavior in China. From Youku to Jiepang, this one’s got you set.
Developers all over the world have been taking Apple’s slogan “there’s an app for that” very seriously. The latest case in point comes from China where Ubox has apps for Android, iPhone and Java-based feature phones to provide mobile payment services for products in vending machines.
China Has an App For Vending Machine (Video) (MICgadget.com)
The app works like a debit card. People who want to use the service sign up for Ubox’s service and deposits funds into the account. Vending machines outfitted with Ubox’s Internet access service have identification numbers associated with them. This ID number is entered into the app and the person presses an orange button on the vending machine to begin the transaction process. The Ubox app’s iTunes product page indicates that using the app may provide a 10% discount. The Android app is not available through the Android Market. Instead, it is available as an APK file that is sideloaded into an Android phone.
Ubox for iPhone (iTunes China App Store)
Ubox Online (Ubox’s website)
Video courtesy of micgadget
Xiaomi, a Chinese mobile phone manufacturer, has launched its first Android-based smartphone that relies on MIUI OS. The MIUI ROM is a translated Chinese customized version of Android 2.3.5 designed to give a feeling of iOS or Samsung’s TouchWiz, Android platform is becoming increasingly popular in the competitive Asian smartphone market.
