http://rekursive.com/blog Chinese Internet, Software and Information Technology Fri, 03 Oct 2008 03:17:27 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The recent discovery of Chinese authorities snooping in on Skype communications is big news in the English Internet. However so far the issue has received little coverage in China; it's likely to be censored. I noticed a single news article about it on the Chinese portal tech.163.com, it looks like the link ... http://rekursive.com/blog/53/electronic-surveillance-in-china-skype-qq-and-sms/ Ever heard of PPG? I'm guessing not, unless you live in China or follow the VC scene there. I thought I'll talk about them since it's reported that they just got another 100 million US dollars of funding (their 4th round of funding). News reports claim that the majority of ... http://rekursive.com/blog/52/ppg-the-dell-of-china-that-sells-mens-shirts-ties-and-slacks/ According to iResearch, the total volume of consumer transactions online in China during the first half of 2008 was 53.1 billion RMB - not far off from the 56.1 billion RMB total for all of 2007. During the first half of 2008, China's leading online shopping website Taobao.com alone commanded a transaction ... http://rekursive.com/blog/51/the-explosive-growth-of-online-shopping-in-china/ Internet forums and bulletin boards occupy a very unique and important place in the Chinese Internet, much more so than I've noticed in the English-language Internet. To truly understand the nature of the Chinese Internet, you need to regularly read posts in the most popular Chinese Internet forums. Chinese Internet forums ... http://rekursive.com/blog/50/the-wild-world-of-chinas-online-forums-bulletin-boards-tianya-strong-nation-forum-etc/ China's rapidly growing computer gaming industry is currently facing a shortage of 600,000 game development professionals according to this report. In the ChinaHR.com ranking of the most in-demand jobs, "3D/2D developers" are currently the most highly sought after employees. "Game developers" and "Game product managers" are also ranked in the ... http://rekursive.com/blog/49/china-faces-a-shortage-of-game-developers/ The C2C (customer to customer) ecommerce war in China is in full swing - the website of Baidu's new online payment system Bai Fu Bao (百付宝) is now online. It currently only displays an announcement banner though and does not expose any functionality yet. In the past week, it was announced ... http://rekursive.com/blog/48/baidu-online-payments-site-baifubaocom-is-online/ According to a June 2008 CNNIC report, 71.3% of online shoppers in China use online payment solutions. 35.7% do Cash-On-Delivery and the remaining 14.7% of online shoppers remit money to the seller at post offices.   Here's a breakout of the current most popular forms of online payment (amongst users who pay online): Alipay (affliated w/Taobao) 76.2%   Bank transfer 32.5%   Credit card 11.6%   Tenpay (affliated w/Paipai) 5.8%   Mobile phone ... http://rekursive.com/blog/47/the-most-popular-forms-of-online-payment-in-china/ Beijing     Shanghai Guangzhou Other municipalities and sub-provincial cities* Total Internet users (million) 7.37 8.30 3.95 37.57 57.19 Internet shoppers (million) 2.87 3.75 1.26 8.10 15.98 Online shopping peneration rate 38.9% 45.2% 31.9% 21.6% 27.9% Half-year online shopping expenses per person 1098 yuan 1107 yuan 856 yuan 966 yuan - Half-year online shopping expenses 3.1 billion yuan (453 million USD) 4.2 billion yuan (614 million USD) 1.1 billion yuan (161 million USD) 7.8 billion yuan (1.1 billion USD) 16.2 billion yuan (2.37 billion USD) *These cities are Chongqing, Tianjin, Harbin, Changchun, Shenyang, ... http://rekursive.com/blog/46/online-shopping-penetration-and-revenues-in-chinas-major-cities-2008/ I recently wrote about CSDN (one of China's biggest software developer community websites) being taken offline during the 0lympics because a single user uploaded an unauthorized 0lympics related video. About ten days later the website was back online. Here are some of the comments left by CSDN users after the ... http://rekursive.com/blog/37/csdn-offline-during-the-olympics-colorful-comments-by-csdn-users/ The Chinese Internet is very different from the American Internet. Anyone who believes that succeeding in the Chinese Internet is as easy as localizing their website to the Chinese language is in for a big surprise. For example you need to consider that Baidu is the search leader in China, not ... http://rekursive.com/blog/36/the-chinese-and-the-american-internet-compared/