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Microsoft Factory Conditions In China(0)The accusations have arisen following the release of a worrying report by the National Labor Committee (NLC), in which it slams the working practices of KYE Systems Corp. which is based in the city of Dongguan in China?s Guangdong province.
According to the report, the production facility is guilty of hiring hundreds of students aged 16 and 17 who are tasked with working through 15-hour shifts for six and seven days per week in return for scant little payment.
While such conditions may seem harsh, the report also claims factory employees often spent up to 97 hours per week on-site (working for around 80 of those hours) in 2007 and 2008 ahead of the recent economic downturn. During 2009, employees were spending 83 hours per week at the factory and working for 68 hours.
Adding insult to injury, the NLC adds that workers at KYE Systems receive a take-home wage of just 52 cents per hour and are not permitted to talk, listen to music or even take bathroom breaks while on shift. Those who break the rules are reportedly forced to clean the factory toilets.
Source : Konaxis
Microsoft MSN China(0)Xiao Chen, MSN China’s Vice-President of sales who has been with the company since its inception, will leave at the end of March to pursue his own start-up, a Microsoft spokeswoman told Reuters.
MSN China, which was launched in 2005 with local partners, is struggling to compete against QQ, a chat messaging and social network operated by Tencent Holdings, China’s most valuable Internet company.
MSN China ran into trouble late last year when its microblogging site, Juku — created by an independent vendor — was accused of copying another start-up. Microsoft subsequently suspended the service.
For its part, software giant Microsoft is pinning its China hopes on search engine Bing, currently a minnow in China’s 7.2 billion yuan ($1.1 billion) search market.
Microsoft said earlier this month it will stick to its strategy for China’s Internet search market regardless of the outcome of Google’s high-profile spat with Beijing.
Motorola Inc said last week it has reached a deal with Microsoft to put Bing search and mapping services on its phones that use Google’s Android operating system.
Source : Konaxis
Microsoft to stay its China(0)Microsoft and local players, including Baidu, China’s search leader, and Sohu.com, must also comply with local laws requiring censorship of certain content.
“We hope to achieve a relatively important place in the China search market,” Zhang said. “But we must be very patient, we still need a lot of time.”
Zhang added that other key development areas for Microsoft in China this year would include search and advertising platform technologies, and development of mobile platforms and cloud computing technologies.
Microsoft considers China a vital market for its Web search business, and is hoping to duplicate early progress for the U.S. version of Bing in China.
Zhang added that Microsoft planned to spend about $500 million on research and development in China this year, and another $150 million on outsourced projects.
Source : Konaxis
Microsoft China search market(0)Since launching its English-language Bing search site in June, Microsoft has been gaining steady share in the United States, with 10.3 percent in November versus 17.5 percent for Yahoo and 65.6 percent for dominant player Google, according to comScore.
Microsoft hopes to get off to a similar fast start with its Chinese-language Bing site, which is still in its beta phase following a low-key launch in June.
“We specially set the search technology center in China to get a deeper understanding of what Chinese users need, to be able to deliver the best product to them,” said the company.
Analysys analyst Jin Naili said users will need time to try out and get used to Bing before it has any chance of becoming a serious rival to any of the established players.
But she added that since Microsoft launched Bing’s China beta version in June, the number of users who have visited the site at least three times a month has increased 30 percent as of October.
“Within one or two years, there could be large changes in China’s search market,” she said.
Source : Konaxis
Microsoft suspends China’s Juku(0)Microsoft is working with the MSN China joint venture to investigate the situation, the company said in a statement on its website.
In a blog post on Monday, Plurk, considered a rival to Twitter, said about 80% of the client and product codebase for Microsoft’s Juku appears to be a copy of its own service.
“Plurk was never approached nor collaborated in any capacity with Microsoft on this service,” Plurk said in the blog.
Microsoft launched MSN Juku, which was created with an independent vendor, in November, allowing users to find friends via microblogging and online games.
Source : Konaxis
Stop Windows sales in China(0)The order Monday said Microsoft exceeded its rights under licensing agreements with Zhongyi Electronic Ltd., a Beijing company that developed Chinese character fonts used in the software.
Microsoft must stop selling versions of Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 with Zhongyi’s fonts, the Beijing People’s No. 1 Intermediate Court said in its ruling, a copy of which was released by Zhongyi.
Microsoft said it would appeal. The company said its license agreements with the plaintiff cover its use of the fonts.
Zhongyi said its agreement with Microsoft allowed the Seattle-based software producer to use its fonts only in Windows 95 and they were added to later products without permission.
Source : Konaxis
Bing in China(0)The Microsoft portal, an effort to spur use of its services in a market crowded by local competitors, offers downloads of mobile clients for Bing and Windows Live Messenger, along with instructions on how to use Microsoft services, including Hotmail, from a mobile phone.
Bing has not caught on in China and Microsoft has done little to promote it in the country. However, Bing, launched in June, has grown quickly in the U.S. and attracted about 9 percent of online searches there last month, according to Internet monitoring companies.
The Bing mobile client lets users search for local information such as maps, restaurant locations and weather forecasts. Microsoft “will continue to strengthen and expand the service scope of its mobile Internet products,” the company said in a statement. While Baidu and Google have well-established search services for free music downloads that keep Chinese users coming back, Microsoft so far has done little to localize Bing, Cavender said.
Source : Konaxis
Little Network TV PPLive headhunt Giant Microsoft executive as CEO(0)PPLive pulled the Tao Chuang who was Microsoft Internet global senior business executive. Yesterday, PPLive company spokesman Chen Zhong confirmed to CBN reporter that Dr. Tao Chuang has officially assumed the CEO, and Yao Xin, co-founder of the company will serve as chairman on board.
Tao Chuang is a well-known expert in the geospatial information field. As early as 2001, by virtue of technological inventions in the field he was awarded the the title of national chief research professor of Canada.
Later on, in the United States he founded the online three-dimensional earth visualization technology company-GeoTango, and developed the first commercial three-dimensional visualization of Earth imaging system, earned a large sum of money at one time in 14 months which made Microsoft, Google very much coveted, who secretly fight for this for a long time.
However, the time he joined the PPLive is not lucky. The external environment is not optimistic, PPLive is faced with heavy financial pressures. Since last year, the “capital-strand breaks” and even the news of the withdrawal from Shanghai is ongoing.
Naturally to raise the money is a big problem. Tao Chuang said the company was planning IPO, the United States, China have both been considered. However, it also needs to communicate with investors.
Sina will launch services similiar to Twitter(0)Today, sources disclosed news to the world network that in June twitter Sina would also introduce twitter service which has a name of Sina Friends. Before this, Chinese domestic market has more than ten websites similar to twitter, such as, Shuo Shuo, Fan Fou, Ji Wai and so on. Their main advantages are good supports to the Chinese language, as well as the binding to domestic mobile communications service providers and real-time chat tools. The leading sites have not been involved in this business yet.
Reporters contacted relevant Sina staff on the matter, Sina said they did not know this news .
Twitter is a variant of instant messaging, which allows users to send the their latest updates and ideas in the form of text messages sent to cell phones and personalized Web sites groups, rather than the individuals. In 2006, a blog technology leader-founder of blogger.com-Evan Williams created a new company-Obvious-launched a Twitter service. Initially, the service was only used for sending text messages to the friends’ mobile phones. By the end of 2006, Obvious upgraded the service, the user need not to enter their own phone numbers but to receive and send messages by real-time information services and personalized Twitter site.
Second Life model can not be copied; there is still hope for virtual world in China(0)Anshe Chung’s Halo and the Second Life’s brilliance can not be copied completely in China. Having experienced blundering imitation, the 3D virtual world in China needs to reconsider the reality of China as well as the issue of landing in China. Re-examining the development of SL, we can divide it into two semi-stages, which reflect the quiet changes of the SL business model.
The first stage: For individual users. At this stage, Anshe Chung is a typical representative of the SL. Anshe Chung gives the closest and distant goal for those Internet users who dream of getting wealth in the virtual world as if that all of us can create a myth of wealth in 3D virtual world.
Anshe Chung really brought enormous users for SL, but no one can go beyond the Anshe Chung. In tens of millions of users among SL, The number of independent users who can really achieve “Balance of Payments is surplus” is no more than 66,000. The number of active users is in stagnation.
Linden Lab may have already foreseen this problem, so when in grand and spectacular scale Anshe Chung myth, it has not been intoxicated by the myth, it is quietly developing institutional users.
This is the beginning of the second phase of it. A considerable number of the world 500 enterprises such as IMB, Intel, Microsoft and so on settled down in China. Even some government agencies also set up its virtual embassies, such as the Maldives, Sweden and Estonia. U.S. presidential election campaign is also camped in SL.
However, in the process of developing institutional users, the phenomenon of withdrawal began to appear in the institutional users in SL. For example, Starwood Hotels Group, Reuters and so on announced withdrawal from the SL because the hits can not bring real growth in the actual business. In such background, SL institutional users strategy was fine-tuned , this is what we called at the beginning – semi-stage one.
In this semi-stage, SL focused on a more pragmatic development to really bring values to the actual businesses of the agencies, such as online education, virtual training. A number of universities in SL set up virtual classrooms, in which IBM held the virtual meetings, in which Britain and the United States military conducted joint military exercises and so on.
From SL development process, we can see the changes from individual users to institutional users, from the retreat to the practical, from the popularity development to a pragmatic number of active users.
At present, China’s several 3D virtual worlds, either imitate SL (actually mimic the first stage of SL), or make a virtual world of games or community. China’s Internet has indeed very obvious entertainment feature, but the demand for entertainment has been seized by games, web video, online music, what can virtual world use to grab users?
The current community-based applications have extremely low threshold, virtual worlds have to use a high threshold to seize the low-threshold application users and it is difficult to provide a better user experiences. How do you convince customers to buy yours?
CNNIC analysts: SL’s several changes worth study by domestic carriers of the virtual world. Under the present conditions in China, it is not possible to realize free convertibility between RMB and virtual currency as the Linden currency to US dollars do, therefore the possibility of developing economies in Chinese virtual world is nearly zero.
What China’s 3D virtual world operators should really learn from SL is their second semi-stage work. The virtual experiences will be combined with the practical application and entities, such as cooperation with the Radio and Television University Virtual instruction; training institutions for the entity to conduct the development of virtual training; cooperation with on-line virtual mall showings, Virtual Dressing, virtual test drive and so on.
Finding and focusing on their target market, we believe the 3D virtual world will be much more successful in China.
Chen,Jiangong, Senior analyst, Internet Development Research department, CNNIC
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