Real Madrid, voted the most successful football club of the 20th century by FIFA, has got no problem beating teams in their own league, which is why, to celebrate their 109th year, they decided to play against 109 Guangzhou children in China.
China is home to a staggering consumer base and Baidu, as we’ve previously reported, is no slouch when it comes to attempting different ways to take advantage of it. Now the wildly successful search engine company and social media entrepreneurs are looking to expand even further, offering Chinese audiences legal music downloads through the recently released Baidu Ting.
The Shanghai-based corporation previously offered listening experiences through Baidu MP3, a service that came under heavy fire for its reliance on directing users to copyright-infringing websites. Baidu’s new music offering looks to rectify this mistake by starting off with a sturdy foundation: the support of several major labels.
Warner Music, Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group have all signed an agreement that will allow Baidu’s social music platform to provide users with a wide selection of content without breaking the law. These companies will receive payment in exchange for Ting’s ability to host an extensive streaming and downloadable catalog.
Luckily the service itself is, apparently quite good, offering a number of handy features. Baidu Ting comes equipped with music browsing and streaming, free downloads, popularity charts and social networking aspects like personalized playlists and more.
While Baidu Ting looks to have the recipe for success set in place, the company will still have to compete with existing Chinese music services in order to eke out its share in the highly competitve market.
Want to take a look at Baidu Ting for yourself? Either know/learn how to read Chinese or take a stroll through a horrendous, automatic translation!
Google+ definitely brings a new methodology to the social networking arena. My first thought after taking the tour is the new platform will help me organize my friends and help me find content that interests me that I can share with others. I can take pictures and instantly upload them to my Google+ page, which is better than jumping through technical hoops. I look forward to the day when I can sign up.
Currently, LinkedIn has a small foothold in the country and is one of the few foreign social networking groups allowed access to Chinese Internet users. Facebook and Twitter are both blocked in China. Earlier this year in February, LinkedIn was temporally blocked by China; but is faring well now.
According to the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China has become the first country to reach a mark of 900 million cell phone users. In April alone, the country added about 11 million mobile phone users, bringing the country’s mobile phone user base to 900.3 million.
China has shown steady growth in the mobile phone adoption over the past couple of years. In April 2009, China had around 679 million mobile phone users which increased to 787 million in April 2010.
Most of us (including me) look at our various connected apps and cry foul when access is limited or unavailable because of wireless data coverage issues, server issues, or some technical glitch. Imagine if your access to content in an app was blocked altogether? That is what Flipboard CEO Mike McCue reported over the weekend.
Access To iPad App Flipboard Compromised In China (TechCrunch)
Flipboard is a free iPad app that harvests links from your Twitter and/or Facebook feeds and creates a beautiful magazine-like interface with the harvested content. Since the content links are provided by people who you choose to follow on Twitter or friend on Facebook, the aggregated content is provided by people who you find interesting.
Flipboard provided a view of tweets and Facebook updates which are blocked in China. They did this by providing access to this data from their own servers. McCue reports that access to all Flipboard served content is now blocked in China.
Note that this information has not been discussed in either Flipboard’s official blog or its Twitter account (@Flipboard).
Shares of the Chinese social networking site Renren surged on their trading debut in New York on Wednesday. The company raised $743 million from the offering.
It’s how you plan your Saturday night, keep in touch with your childhood best friend, and snoop on your workplace crush. It’s on your laptop, you Blackberry, and your iPad. Ask anyone under the age of sixty; Facebook is everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except China. But, is that about to change?
Ogilvy has released an infographic detailing the major social media players and their Chinese counter parts. Although the infographic was first published six months back, the rise of services like Groupon and Quora in the west and Tencent in China rendered the previous infographic some what irrelevant.
Baidu Inc, China’s top search engine, is now planning to branch out in social media services in China in order to compete with Tencent Holdings – a social media giant in the region.
