Baidu has announced that they will be free to provide Baidu iPhone input method-SDK for iOS APP developer (Software Development Kit), the developer can be ’embedded’ input in types of APP, so that users under normal circumstance use Baidu input in some relevant application.

As the iPhone is not open permission of input method, user need to ’Jail Break’ if they use third-party input method. Once the user who are not going to ’Jail Break’ or familiar with operation, then the choice of input method is limited, only Apple-approved. Input Method ‘embedded’, when text goes into the input state, it will start the associated applications.

Sogou (a kind of search engine in China, http://www.sogou.com/) had also been announced to open implantable input method SDK for iOS APP developer.

According to related reports, Baidu Search App iPhone version has been released recently. The relevant responsible person of Baidu mobile phone input method said:”This is just beginning”, “In fact, before we announced, there are many developers to contact and seek cooperation. At present, we are starting to co-operation with many well-known application providers, and we expect that there will be more ‘embedded’ input method applications on-line in the future. ”

China Mobile?s revenue will rise 7 percent to 484 billion yuan ($72 billion) this year, according to the average of 29 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. That would be the slowest increase since the company?s 1997 Hong Kong listing and the analysts estimate growth to keep decelerating through 2012.
Growth is slowing as more than 60 percent of China?s population owns a mobile phone, compared with less than 10 percent at the beginning of the decade.
China Mobile Communications Corp., parent of the listed company, last month reached agreement with China?s official Xinhua News Agency to partner in Internet search.
The company may also double sales of SIM cards over an unspecified period as the chips used in mobile phones are used in a wide range of products to give them communications capability, China Mobile Chairman Wang Jianzhou said. For example, putting a SIM card in a car would allow it to transmit details on its performance at any time, he said.

Source : Konaxis

As the company grows, it aims to add ?meaningful revenue? outside China in the next five to 15 years, Li said, without providing a target for international sales.

Li didn?t indicate how much the company would invest in acquisitions, or provide a timeframe for making any purchases.

Baidu?s cost of continuing to comply with domestic self-censorship laws is giving Google a competitive advantage in the market, Baidu?s Li said in an interview in Beijing earlier Thursday.

Source : Konaxis

Entering Google’s own recruitment information page, we can see on Google’s list of vacant positions are including departments of research and development, products, user interface, sales, management, human resources and marketing. The job locations are mainly Beijing and Shanghai.
The advertisements look interesting – they are not on recruitment sites but on news portals. So we can see Google’s purpose is not really to recruit, or at least its main purpose is not really to recruit, but to speak to the public “Google is coming back to China, and we are recruiting again.”
At the mean time, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Google’s CEO said to the press that they made “a mistake in China”.

Sine April 2010, Baidu and other Chinese internet companies started to recruit Google’s senior executives, leaving great vacancy in Google’s headquarter in China.
According to a senior official from Sohu, Google’s recruitment advertisements are sending a signal to the Chinese government and netizens that they have faith in running their business in China after their ICP licence was renewed.
The other thing that is shifting with Google’s recruitment strategy is its attitude toward Chinese government.

Google’s CEO Schmidt said , in an interview, he was an advocate of entering the China market, figuring it was better to engage even if Google had to operate with restrictions.
According to an insider from Baidu, China’s leading search engine service provider, which takes up 70% of China’s market share, “Google is looking forward to cooperation with China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs). In the third quarter we will see a series of moves conducted by Google. And of course, searching services will still be their main service. Baidu has obtained an 25% increase in the last year, especially since Google’s trouble in China Mainland. I think Google’s return is driven by the great developments of other internet businesses, especially American and other foreign internet companies in China.”

Google said in a post last night that “Wave has not seen the adoption we would have liked” and that elements of Wave’s technology, including drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are now as open source so users can “liberate their content from Wave”.

Urs Holzle, in his blog, said that Wave has not met Google’s expectation so the company has decided to terminate the development process of Google Wave as an independent product. Holzle also said, although Google Wave has a firm fan base, its popularity does not meet their previous expectations.

Google introduced their new cross-platform communication tool – Google Wave in the past year, looking forward it would become another revolutionary product following twitter.

However, the online community at the time was not very optimistic about Google Wave, who considered Google Wave was simply “a combination of email, Twitter and Google Talk”. They don’t know what actually they can do with Google Wave.

The initial goal of Google Wave was to reduce the reliance of Google’s revenue on adwords.

Regarding the news that Google Waves Googbye to Wave, former CEO of Google.cn, Li Kaifu expressed that in his Sina Weibo “Google has decided to abandon Google Wave and Microsoft did the same thing to their product Kin. Chinese companies should learn the wisdom of giving up. I talked to a superior official of an Internet company. He told me that many Chinese Internet companies don’t want to abandon their products of failure because they don’t want to lose face. But taking the company’s resources as the price for avoiding to lose face is not worth it.”

Chinese netizens have commonly expressed their disappointed on Google’s move. It seems most of Google’s SNS related services have failed. Orkut is not drawing much public attention, neither is Google Wave.

Baidu earned 837.4 million yuan ($123.5 million), or 2.40 yuan (35 cents) per share, up from 383.3 million yuan, or 1.10 yuan per share, a year earlier. Excluding stock options expenses, Baidu earned 36 cents per share.

Revenue rose 74 percent to 1.91 billion yuan ($282.3 million), the Beijing-based company said.

The company had about 254,000 active online marketing customers during the quarter, up 25 percent from a year earlier.

Baidu had about 64 percent of China’s search market in the first quarter of this year, up from 58.4 percent the previous quarter, according to research Analysys International.

Industry analysts expect Baidu to benefit from Google Inc.’s decision to close its China search engine in a dispute over Beijing’s Internet censorship, requiring users to go to its Hong Kong site. Analysys said Google’s share of advertising slid from 35.6 percent to 31 percent in the first quarter but it said there was no significant decline in search traffic and revenue appeared stable.

For the current quarter, Baidu forecast revenue in the range of 2.2 billion yuan ($324.4 million) to 2.26 billion yuan ($333.3 million), an increase of 72 percent to 77 percent from a year earlier.

Source : Konaxis

July 13, shoes e-commerce site – Le Tao CEO told reporters that as Google search was suspected of infringing Le Tao’s rights, it had sued the latter to court, and Beijing’s Haidian District Court had accepted the case which was expected to be on trial on July 15.

Early in May this year, as Le Tao staff accidentally entered in the Google “Le Tao”, the sponsored links under search box was “to buy sports shoes, Le Tao is not as good as xxx”. Le Tao believed that Google China sold “Le Tao” as keywords to competitors, resulting in the public saw the above bad words used by competitors when searching in Google.

Lawyer of Beijing Tian law firm said: Google’s sale of Le Tao to their competitors in search engine which has a great influence on public was against the Le Tao’s reputation and economic interests.

Bi Sheng further said that from early May to the last exchange of evidences, Google showed distinct five faces, which intended to impute and appease, “After Le Tao staff discovered bad words, they called Google, but was told legal affairs was on leave -it was the first face; after filing in court, this was still not addressed, the staff answered the phone in bad attitude – this was the second face; a few days later, followed quickly by additional legal letters from Le Tao, the result was still not addressed – this was the third faces; after receiving a court summons, Google attitudes was reversed – this was the fourth face; in exchange of evidences, the attitude changed once again, Google denied its acts – this was the fifth face. “

Similarly, another search company Baidu also encountered trouble because of online promotion. On July 8, at the Ministry of Public Security press conference, Deputy Secretary Ministry of Public Security Network Security Protection Agency, Gu Jian, said Baidu Guangzhou Branch Staff provided marketing services for the gambling website “777 live entertainment field” and gained 600,000 yuan of illegal profits.

The move, announced by Google on Friday, removes another thorn in U.S.-China relations and reflects Beijing’s desire to be seen as friendly to major foreign companies in spite of ideological differences, analysts said.

But analysts said Google’s position in China remained fragile and that the country likely would account for a fraction of Google’s revenue for some time.

Google said on Friday that China had renewed its webpage license, which means it can continue to run the Chinese language search site google.cn.

Last week, Google offered Beijing a face-saving compromise: it stopped automatically rerouting google.cn to its uncensored Hong Kong site. Now, visitors to google.cn must click once to go to the Hong Kong page.

Analysts said Beijing had sent a reassuring signal to foreign businesses that it would play by its own rules while keeping an innovative global company such as Google in its domestic market, where Chinese companies can compete with and learn from it.

Analysts estimate Google’s revenue in China at $300 million to $600 million out of its $24 billion annual revenue. It has around a 30 percent share of China’s 7 billion yuan ($1 billion) search market, which local rival Baidu Inc dominates.

Source : Konaxis

The google.cn search site will stop automatically redirecting users to Google’s uncensored search portal in Hong Kong — instead, visitors will be required to click a link to access the Hong Kong site, Google said on Tuesday.

The move comes ahead of a Wednesday deadline for China to renew Google’s operating license. Google said Beijing had made it clear it was unhappy with the company’s three-month old system of re-routing Chinese Web surfers to google.com.hk.

“Without an ICP license, we can’t operate a commercial website like Google.cn so Google would effectively go dark in China,” wrote Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond on the company’s corporate blog.

The website tweak is Google’s latest attempt to strike a delicate balance between standing up to China’s policy of Internet censorship while maintaining a presence in a market considered key to its future growth.

If accessed from mainland China, the Hong Kong search engine does not offer unfettered access to information the government wants blocked as domestic firewalls prevent connections to many websites that Beijing objects to.

The Google.hk.com site is also periodically unavailable from mainland China, and searches can be unstable.

At least three other licenses for Google business units in China are due for renewal in June, said industry experts.

Source : Konaxis

Song Zhongjie quit as head of China sales at Google this month, Marsha Wang, a Beijing-based company spokeswoman, said in an e-mail today. Wang didn?t comment on a Yicai.com report that Song will join a Chinese Web site called Aibang.

Song joins Wang Jin, the former engineering director who defected to Baidu Inc., in leaving a month after Google moved its service to Hong Kong in defiance of Chinese censorship laws.

Tom Online Inc., a Chinese Internet portal controlled by billionaire Li Ka-shing, last month ended an agreement to use the Mountain View, California-based company?s search services. Motorola Inc. last month said it dropped Google?s search engine from one of its phones in China.

Source : Konaxis