No quick fix for LinkedIn in China - Ben Cavender

+Benjamin Cavender 

Global job internet search venture LinkedIn has started its China operation  this week, a country where many internet firms have already failed. LinkedIn faces tough competition, but has a chance, says business analyst Ben Cavender in PCWorld. But we should not expect a quick fix.

PC World:

The bigger obstacle for LinkedIn comes from China’s domestic Internet firms, according to Ben Cavender, an analyst with China Market Research Group. Already, many Chinese Internet users are relying on local social networking platforms, such as Sina Weibo and WeChat, to not only communicate with friends and read news, but also find jobs. Both Sina Weibo and WeChat each have over 300 million registered users. At the same time, many of LinkedIn’s prospective users in China—those who speak English and are looking for international opportunities—are already on the site, Cavender said. 

To grow, the company will have to provide a strong contact base as well as job opportunities for Chinese-language users. “I think it’s possible that they could do quite well here,” Cavender said. “They are well established already in bigger cities like Shanghai and Beijing but it will take time to build the user base in other markets in China. The Chinese language version of the site should allow them to do this.”

More in PC World.

Ben Cavender is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´request form.

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Internet companies going global - China Weekly Hangout

Lionel Messi

When the soccer player Lionel Messi appeared in commercials by Tencent's WeChat this summer, we knew something big was happening. Even a month earlier, we cancelled an update of the China Weekly Hangout of November last year on the global aspirations of China's internet companies, because there was not that much to update. But things can change fast in China.

WeChat has signed up over 150 million users outside China, since Messi was retained for the commercials. Sina Weibo has been setting up offices in Singapore and Indonesia. And there is the looming IPO by Alibaba, which will provide the company with a huge warchest to go global. And we might forget about Baidu, that still has a lot of money to spend. And then there was Xiaomi retaining +Hugo Barra from Google for its global aspirations. Did we forget anything big?
China's companies are going global, partly because high growth domestically is not that high anymore. But what do they have to offer to the outside world? Many pundits argue Chinese companies are unable to innovate, let alone offer the world outside China something worthwhile.

The +China Weekly Hangout on Thursday 5 September will dive into this issue together with +Steven Millward of +Tech in Asia, and perhaps you can participate too, of you register at our event page.
The China Weekly Hangout will be broadcast on Thursday 5 September live at this page, at our event page, and at our YouTube page on 10pm Beijing, 4pm CEST (Europe) and 10am EST (US/Canada). You can also leave your questions or remarks here in the comments.
China Weekly Hangout

Can China really innovated, the +China Weekly Hangout discussed in October last year, with political scientist +G. E. Anderson and China consultant at-large Janet Carmosky. Moderation by +Fons Tuinstra of the China Speakers Bureau.

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Where Mary Meeker is wrong on China - Marc van der Chijs

Marc van der Chijs

Cheers from VC Marc van der Chijs for Mary Meeker, who gave a lot of attention to China in her latest "The State of the Internet". She underestimates the size of China's internet companies by using under-reporting figures from Comscore, he writes on his weblog. 

+Marc van der Chijs:

Mary Meeker makes a mistake by saying that the top 8 of biggest Global Internet Properties are all US companies. The data they use (based on Comscore) suggest that #9 (Tencent) and #10 (Baidu) both have less than 300 million unique monthly visitors. This is far below their real user numbers, the Comscore figures for China are always way too low. It should have been clear from some of her other charts that her figures are too low, for example WeChat (a Tencent app that was launched 18 months ago) already has 400 million users. WeChat is just one of many of Tencent’s services. Later she mentions Sina Weibo with 530 million users, which did not even make it in the top 10. Not a big deal, but in my opinion Chinese companies should be ranked much higher in the Global Internet Properties list.

More on Marc van der Chijs' weblog.  

Marc van der Chijs is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

+China Weekly Hangout 

One of the reasons China's labor force is changing, is because people are better connected than ever. Workers can complain anonymous via chat rooms in QQ, explained +Dee Lee (Inno) of  Inno, a Guangzhou-based hotline, who joined the China Weekly Hangout last week.  Heleen Mees, NYU professor in New York, entrepreneur +Sam Xu and +Fons Tuinstra , of the China Speakers Bureau, ask him questions.

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China's unique social media landscape - Sam Flemming

Sam Flemming

A common mistake outside observers make is taking their own social media experience, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, as the reference point for what is happening in China. Wrong, tells CIC-president Sam Flemming in China Innovation. China has a unique social media landscape.

Sam Flemming:

I think the first thing you have to understand about Chinese social media is that it is not new. Before Facebook, before MySpace in the West, they had these things called BBS which is the equivalent of forums or message boards and the BBS sites have always been very mainstream – it’s been a place where netizens in China would go to get the latest information about cars, cosmetics etc. particularly high quality products. These forums have always been very important in China. In the past few years we have had the launch of Weibo – a mircoblog that is similar to a Twitter that has exploded. (There are 400 million people on Weibo) Most recently you have something called WeChat which was launched by Tencent which in the past 2 years or so has only got 300 million users and is continuing to grow like crazy. I think the challenge for Americans/Westerners coming into China is that China is a very unique social media environment – we know the players that are popular in the west (Facebook or Twitter) – but in China there are unique fragmented players, there isn’t one dominant platform, there are multiple popular platforms which are dynamic. Netizens are also more active on social media in China but the media landscape is ever evolving and I think WeChat is case in point with that. Just 2 years ago, it wasn’t even on the map and now it has 300 million users. Unique, fragmented and dynamic are the key words!

More in China Innovation.

Sam Flemming is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

China tries to limit access to the free internet. Internet users in China try to circumvent those filters, using VPN's, but China's censors are fighting a cat-and-mouse game, trying to close those loopholes. The China Weekly Hangout discussed in December 2012 the state of the VPN's in China with  Sam Xu, John R. Otto, Gabriel Rueck and Fons Tuinstra.

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The genuine debate on Weibo - Jeremy Goldkorn

Add caption

China's lively micro-blogging services might have to face internet controls, but that does not mean the national and local debate is curtailed, explains internet watcher Jeremy Goldkorn  to Australia's ABC.

ABC:

Jeremy Goldkorn is another avid follower of Weibo and other Chinese social media sites. 

He was the founding director of Danwei.com and is a respected Beijing-based researcher of the Chinese internet. 

JEREMY GOLDKORN: Social media has, perhaps for the first time in Chinese history, given every citizen a space where they can express themselves that really never used to exist in any institutionalised format. China's never had a very uncensored letters to the editors pages in its newspapers etc. and social media has given people a place to express themselves that is just unprecedented. 

STEPHEN MCDONELL: And on Weibo can you just talk about anything, or are there certain subjects completely off limits, or where are the lines? 

JEREMY GOLDKORN: People do try to talk about absolutely anything on Weibo but there are lots of subjects that you can't talk about. And most of the subjects that you can't talk about if you do start talking about them your postings get deleted and if you continue to talk about them your account may possibly be deleted. And this censorship is done by Sina, the company that controls Weibo, because they have to because their business licence is dependent on government approval of them, and the government expects them to make sure that the content is clean. But it is nonetheless remarkable, despite the censorship what a wide and vibrant range of discussion there is on Weibo about every issue imaginable of concern to the Chinese people.   

STEPHEN MCDONELL: So it's not just people chatting about their love lives and stuff like that; there is genuine discussion about serious issues in China? 

JEREMY GOLDKORN: Oh absolutely, there's genuine discussion. There's a lot of quite bitter name calling and feuding between different intellectual camps and different writers and bloggers and tweeters but it ranges the gamut from people uploading pictures of their kitties to serious political discussion.

More at ABC.


Jeremy Goldkorn is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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Blocking US consulate's weibo account "no technical glitch" Jeremy Goldkorn

Jeremy Goldkorn

When earlier in the week the Sina Weibo account of the US consulate in Shanghai was blocked, theories varied. Was it a mistake by Sina? Was it a political provocation by the Chinese authorities? It was certainly not technical glitch, says internet watcher Jeremy Goldkorn in VOA.

VOA:

Consulate officials say they do not know why the account has been removed and that they are working to find out how the service can be restored. 

But Jeremy Goldkorn, the editor of Danwei.com – a website about Chinese media and Internet – told VOA the incident is “almost certainly” more than just a technical glitch. 

“This is very common. Sina, sometimes at the request of governments, and sometimes on their own initiative, to avoid getting in trouble with the government, shuts down accounts and deletes tweets (posts) – they do all kinds of censorship. So almost certainly this is what happened.” 

It would not be the first dispute between American embassy or consular officials and the government of China, which employs a massive team of web censors to remove material deemed objectionable. 

Last month, a senior Chinese environmental official slammed the U.S. Embassy in Beijing's Twitter account for regularly posting air quality readings that are much worse than the government's official figures. 

Goldkorn says Beijing is likely even more unhappy with posts that appear in the Chinese language on locally hosted services, such as Weibo. But he says he does not know of any instances of government censors completely shutting down a U.S. government-controlled account. 

“They have deleted tweets from the U.S. government's Weibo accounts in the past, so in that sense it's not new. But I think this may be the first time that they have completely removed or disabled an account, on Weibo at least.”

More in VOA

Jeremy Goldkorn is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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Online charity: China's drive for trust and transparency - Tricia Wang

Tricia Wang

Free lunch, a Chinese crowd-sourced fund, took off amid charity scandals and public skepticism about giving money. Internet watcher Tricia Wang describes in UKWired how a former journalist free lunches for thousands of malnourished kids by building trust and transparency.

Tricia Wang:

We often think of internet-powered revolutionary change as enacted through a model of forcing political change through civil disobedience, such as the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street. But, here in China, I've been documenting the emergence of a model that uses crowdsourced fundraising, social-media transparency and social pressure to forge a collective action that is apolitical and effective in changing policy from below. It's called Free Lunch. 

On Sina Weibo, China's largest microblog, more than a million Chinese citizens have raised RMB ¥30 million (£3m) to provide free lunches to malnourished children in over 160 rural schools in one year. 

The programme originated with Chinese journalist Deng Fei, who made a name for himself exposing child kidnapping and organ harvesting. When he received a tip from a teacher that schoolchildren in the countryside were too impoverished to eat lunch, he investigated the situation and realised that the problem was nationwide. He quit his job as a journalist and dedicated his time to solving the problem. He started posting pictures of children, accompanied with requests for donations from his estimated 200,000 followers at the time (he now has two million)... 

Free Lunch has proved itself as a model. Seven months after it launched, the government invested ¥16 million in a similar programme. 

Programmes such as Free Lunch are introducing new cultural values and practices to China. They also reveal that crowdsourced fundraising that doesn't track real-time effectiveness may not be suitable for non-Western contexts. 

Free Lunch leverages people's compulsion not just to do good, but to engage in shared responsibility. This kind of innovation builds the foundation for future macro-innovations in transparency. It hacks the system using existing tools, creating viruses of hope that even one person can contribute to social change.

More in UKWired.

What does Google want in China? A public hangout on Thursday 12 July. 

Tricia Wang is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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What do Chinese internet users really want - Sam Flemming

Sam Flemming

They do not care about the censorship and are not longing for Twitter or Facebook. Group buying has been invented in China, and crowd sources is old news for them. Internet guru Sam Flemming takes on a few misconceptions about China's internet users in the Pandodaily. 

The Pandodaily:

Social networking may have been invented in the US, but the Chinese own it. They’re much more active on social media than their counterparts in the Western world. According to Forrester Research, 44 percent of metro Chinese Internet users can be considered “creators” on social media, compared to just 24 percent in the US. Only the Koreans (49 percent) rank higher. 

“Back when our social media analysis industry started in 2003-2004, we would work with partners in the States and we would get, for any one category, two to three times the amount of conversation in China than they would get in the US,” says Flemming. 

Word-of-mouth has always been important to Chinese culture, and social media has allowed that to become viral. Online bulletin boards (BBS) provided the first public forum for sharing information in China, Flemming says, and they quickly became extremely popular. Flemming’s explanation? “Entertainment is crap in China. There’s no good TV. The news has its limitations. So the word-of-mouth, especially for news and information, has always been very important.” 

Back in November 2002, he heard of SARS via online forums months before the government officially acknowledged the outbreak the following April. “On online forums, people were talking about this strange sickness that people were getting in Guangdong. People were lining up to get into hospitals. Even when the government was not publicly discussing it, or admitting it was an issue, it was all over the BBS.” 

The advent of Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo – microblogging services that were modeled on Twitter but have been localized to serve the specific needs of China’s Internet users – has only added to the social media activity in the country. 

So why would China’s netizens care about Facebook? “Their social needs,” says Flemming, “are being completely met.”

More in the Pandodaily.


Sam Flemming is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Weibo, a force in the public debate - Jeremy Goldkorn

Jeremy Goldkorn

Weibo, China's twitter-like microblog, is changing the public debate very fast, tells internet watcher Jeremy Goldkorn in The National. Even authorities have problems in taming the digital beast, he says.

The National:

This was seen clearly after two high-speed trains collided in July last year near Wenzhou, a city close to Shanghai. Much of the information about the incident, which claimed 40 lives, spread on Weibo and there was little the authorities could do to control it. 

Such unofficial information dissemination, and the use of the Weibo sites by those keen to express views on politics, means the authorities are "very concerned" about the medium, according to Jeremy Goldkorn, the founder of Danwei, a Beijing media website and research company. 

"Weibo is the most powerful tool for public expression China has ever had. It's a very real force that's changing public debate," he said. 

The authorities try to restrict discussion, insisting on real-name registration and deleting controversial material or preventing it from being posted in the first place. 

Users who breach rules, by spreading rumours for example, now risk having their accounts deactivated. Yet the sites remains a potent medium, allowing views to spread. 

"It's certainly a force that's pushing China toward a more pluralistic environment in terms of the public expression of opinions and debates," said Mr Goldkorn. 

Yet as well as allowing more diverse opinions to be aired, online discussion can also magnify hardline views. 

In particular, extreme nationalism can dominate discussions when there are disputes with other countries, such as the recent spat between Beijing and Manila over the South China Sea. 

"There was a lot of very angry nationalism on Weibo," Mr Goldkorn said. This is a potential concern given that a 2010 report, New Foreign Policy Actors in China, published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, warned nationalism was "a dangerous tool" that could harm the government if it is not tough enough with foreign countries.

More in The National.

Jeremy Goldkorn is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Baidu gets Tencent's weibo in search results - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

China's leading search engine Baidu now includes Tencent's microblogs in its search results, tells Baidu's communication director Kaiser Kuo on its weblog Baidu Beat. Search and social media get one step closer in China.

Kaiser Kuo:

This strategic partnership marks the latest effort in an ongoing attempt to streamline users’ internet experience by concentrating online resources on fewer platforms. With a Tencent Weibo feature embedded in the homepage – as shown below – users can directly receive real-time microblog news and post updates... 

Since Baidu released its new homepage in September 2011, it has steadily sought out ways to socialize search, enhancing the search portal with user account information, intelligent recommendations, and quick links to popular sites. Baidu and Tencent believe that joining forces in this way strengthens the services of both companies, allowing information to flow more freely across the two platforms and improving the user experience of millions. 

From the time that we launched the new homepage, Sina Weibo was already supported, as were the popular SNSs, Renren and Kaixin001.

More on Baidu Beat.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Kaiser Kuo, speaking on China's internet, at Storify.

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