File this one under ‘people are vain’ and ‘not great publicity for Android.’ Some users of Tencent’s (HKG:0700) social network and IM service, QQ, are paying one of several dubious hackers up to 8 RMB (US$1.25) per month to have their status messages appear with a fake ‘Sent from my iPhone’ or ‘Sent from iPhone QQ’ tagline. The service is available only to Android users, as it requires usage of a modified version of the QQ for Android app which will transmit that fake tagline on your QQ IM profile, making ...
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Feb 22 2012
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Chinese Police Crack Down on Cybercrime, Tianya, Sohu, Baidu BBS Services Implicated
China's police are on the back end of a three-month long crackdown on cybercrime, and apparently, they've found an awful lot of it. Over the course of the crackdown, police told Xinhua, they cleaned up more than 1.2 million pieces of harmful information, closed over 7,000 illegal websites, and investigated harmful information posted on 1,075 prominent sites. Among those prominent sites were Tianya, Sohu, and Baidu's Tieba. The BBS services these companies offer are theoretically self-censored, but the police found that on these and many other sites, illegal information was present. ...
Feb 22 2012
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Tudou Reveals New User Numbers, Says It’s the Video King of Weibo
In newly-released numbers from Tudou (NASDAQ:TUDO), China’s second-largest video-streaming site, it claims to be the king of video views of Sina Weibo, the hugely popular microblogging site. Tudou cites figures from comScore in saying that “among all video views on Sina Weibo in December 2011, approximately 41 percent, or 180 million video views for the month, were from Tudou.” That’ll be a growing war in the long-term between it and Youku (NYSE:YOKU), its slightly larger rival. For now, Tudou has won this battle. Earlier this month, Tudou revealed that it had ...
Feb 21 2012
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Made-in-China Mobile Browser Takes off in India
China’s social media and online gaming giant Tencent (HKG:0700) has a stake in India’s largest gaming site Ibibo, and thus was born the iBrowser, a web browser that was conceived in China and is now taking off in India having just passed the six million download milestone. The Ibibo iBrowser app is available for Android, Symbian, and JAVA-based phones, thereby making itself available to nearly all of India’s 860 million mobile users, most of whom are on basic feature phones. iBrowser’s six million milestone comes a very short time after its formal ...
Feb 21 2012
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MiniGames: A Review of Sina Weibo’s ‘One and One Story’
In a bid to monetize its user-friendly but financially dragging giant, Sina recently imbued its Weibo microblogging platform with its own currency — the weibi — and games. But are these games actually any good? I dove into a few of them to find out. This is the seventh in a series of reviews of Sina Weibo games. One and One Story is the casual game I wish I'd been playing this whole time instead of slogging my way through all those other dumb games. Put simply, One and One Story rocks. Unfortunately, I have ...
Feb 21 2012
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Chinese Academy of Social Sciences: ‘Real Name’ Weibo Isn’t A Viable Solution
The real name requirements for Weibo in China is about to get realer. On March 16, 2012, all Twitter-like service providers in China need personal ID data from all users (old and new). Even though you may still post under your alias, they'd know who, say, "TomCat1234" would be, as they have your ID data on file. In a recent Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) Annual Report on China's Rule of Law, as reported by China.com.cn, the real ID requirement has been singled out as something that could "bring new ...
Feb 21 2012
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One Day After Deadline, Tuanbao’s New Services Still Missing
Tuanbao, the group buy clone that snagged the Groupon.cn domain before Groupon could, is in trouble. That much has been clear for a while. But, like many group buy sites looking to change things up as it became clear succeeding with the group buy model wasn't as easy as originally thought, Tuanbao said it planned to offer new services. In fact, it even plastered a big red banner across the top of its website announcing the new service would be arriving on February 20th. That was yesterday. The new service? ...
Feb 20 2012
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Ctrip Robot Answers Your Travel Queries on Sina Weibo
The Chinese travel e-commerce site Ctrip (NASDAQ:CTRP) has a new team member - a microblogging ‘robot’ that can reply to users of Sina Weibo, the popular microblogging service, and recommend them hotels or flights. It’s a smart bit of social marketing, allowing Weibo users to get travel suggestions right from their Weibo app of choice, with no need to even search for info. The Ctrip robot - this is its page - will reply to queries with an answer in a flash, in the form of a Weibo message containing one ...
Feb 17 2012
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Chinese Video Streaming Site Gets Tiny Penalty After Pirating Ultraman
One of China’s leading video-streaming sites, PPTV, has been ordered to pay fines by a court after it effectively pirated the Japanese kids series Ultraman (pictured right) on its site last year. The Shanghai court ordered PPTV, owned by PPLive, to pay a fine of 25,000 RMB (US$4,000) for its infringement - but the local rights holder says that penalty is far too small. The iconic Japanese children's sci-fi is managed in China by Shanghai-based SCLA. It made notarized evidence of PPTV’s piracy after the whole 52-episode series was added ...
Feb 17 2012
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Japan’s Freco Lets You Share and Discover Interesting Places with Like-minded People
Earlier this week, Tokyo-based startup Kaditt introduced an iPhone app (available in English and Japanese) that allows users to discover places to visit based on your friends' recommendation. It's called Freco, which is a combination of the two words, friends and recommend. The app allows you to disocover places to visit from a selection of sight-seeing and dining spots recommended by like-minded people you know on Facebook, Twitter, and Mixi. The startup calls it a "location-focused social bookmarking service." You can save sites and shops that you fancy as a "card" with their geographical ...
Feb 16 2012
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5 Features in Mac OS 10.8 That Apple Has Added for Chinese Users
Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has just released an early preview of its next version of Mac OS X, which will be called Mountain Lion. Along with a bunch of new features come several that are aimed exclusively at Chinese users. And so the update, which will go on sale this summer and be numbered 10.8, adds five elements that’ll be useful for users in China. They are: Support for Tencent QQ, and Netease 163 or 126 email, in the Mail, Contacts, and Calendar part of the settings. Support for login to Sina Weibo in ...
Feb 16 2012
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Octopost Automates and Analyzes Your Facebook Content Updates
As a Facebook page owner, one common problem you might face is content drought. You know you have to come out with content for your fans but find it hard to do so. And even if you have great content to share, you might not be there physically to post them on Facebook. Octopost, which was first launched at Social Media Week in Malaysia was created to solve these problems. It allows Facebook page owners to schedule updates and even suggest content based on certain categories. The free version allows you ...
Huawei Chairman Boasts MediaPad 10 Will Be ‘Most Powerful Tablet Ever’
Feb 22, 2012
One Day After Deadline, Tuanbao’s New Services Still Missing
Feb 21, 2012
InMobi Makes Mobile Ad Deal With Detikcom in Indonesia
Feb 22, 2012
GREE Gets Games from Gameloft, Ubisoft for Global Gaming Platform
Feb 21, 2012
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Feb 22, 2012