More on our virtual future in China

China Web Review 2.0 also dives into the HiPiHi buzz and interviews CEO Liu Xinhua. New: HiPiHi was already under construction before Second Life became a hit.

At the very first of establishment[in 2005], they has planned to develop a virtual world, of course, Second Life sparked some new ideas to them. The popularity of Second Life also make it easier for them to promote it.

The system will be very much focused on the Chinese internet users, with games, networking and entertainment as major drives.

Hipihi will make it much simpler for users to create objects by using pre-fab stuffs than what they can do in Second Life. User will have much better experience in building something they are interested in.

Counting your visitors, part II

Figuring out how many visitors you site has is not only problematic for me. Jan van de Bergh of the online advertising company I-merge recalls an experience with a website that overestimated the number of visitors about ten times, at least that is his estimation.

Digital ad spending can only really start here in China when all online media who want to attract advertisers were audited by independent third-party firms. A recent survey in the US "asked online planners and buyers in North America about key issues in digital marketing. More reliable metrics came out as the top concern." Read the complete article here. Want More Ads? Get Better Metrics.

It is of course a tradition that started in the non-digital media, where print publications keep their real circulation also secret.
O yes, I lost the code of Google Analytics again when I changed the lay-out of this weblog. I decided to kick it off, since the huge differences in patterns with Awstats made me only confused. I will later look into Jan's link about Better Metrics.

Internet filtering at the Shanghai Daily

You do not expect a state-controlled newspaper like the Shanghai Daily to inform their readers about the filtering of your internet traffic. So, I was checking their website for something safe, the weather for this weekend, when I stumbled on their Google Adsense adds. (you can click on the picture to enlarge it.) All about internet filtering. No clue how these algorithms work, but this is a funny combination.
Finding news about the upcoming weather was much harder today, since none of the diligent editors had written about the only issue that interests us all.

Caijing pulled as NPC discusses property law

The latest edition of Caijing, one of China's leading financial publications, has been pulled from the shelves, reports the China Digital Times, based on an unlinkable story in the Wall Street Journal. Suggested is that the ongoing heated debates on the new property law have caused this last-minute action.

From the WSJ:

It wasn't immediately clear who blocked the issue of Caijing -- a move that came during one of the busiest periods in China's political calendar -- or why. But according to a person familiar with the situation, the issue included articles, among others, on the bankruptcy of a government-controlled brokerage firm and on the piece of property-rights legislation, which has drawn vocal criticism.

A revised edition is expected later next week.
Update: China Digital Times has additional information that basically confirms all this was because of the discussions on the property law. More details, but no new developments.

New Skype service: ask me advice and pay me directly

You must know the embarrassing situation: You are picking somebody's (like mine) brain over Skype, you do not want to bring up the issue of a retainer right the first minute, but you still want to compensate me a little bit for the information I'm sharing with you. No worries, from now on you can.
Skype offers now a new service for this kind of phone calls, the Skype Prime. Of course, I will still talk for free with good friends, but otherwise you might better get a Paypal account.
Anyway, business will not be brisk for the first months, as people have to download the latest beta-version. Better start downloading today.

Update: The downside is that Skype takes 30 percent commission. I hope they will to in return a bit more than just offering a connection.

Shi Jixing

China Mobile official breaks ranks on 3G policy

In a remarkable interview with the Financial Times, China Mobile vice-Chairman Shi Jixing has slammed the government's dealing with the third generation mobile communication, 3G. Shi is also member of the NPC.
China's government has been delaying the decision making on issuing the 3G-licenses process over the past few years, not only causing desperation among the potential foreign investors, but also among the key Chinese players.

Beijing was missing an opportunity for 3G networks – which allow the use of data-intensive services such as video on mobile handsets – to become a telecoms powerhouse, said Mr Shi, who is also a member of China’s National People’s Congress.
Policy, he said, was deadlocked between the Ministry of Information Industry, the Nat­ional Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), a state assets commission, and the State Council’s “informatisation” office.
“There are unclear responsibilities and low efficiency,” he said. “This means the excellent strategic opportunity presented by 3G is not being grasped in time.”

China has been working hard to get its own Chinese standard TD-SCDMA out in China to give the technology a head start. For government officials like Mr. Shi - he is still more an official than a business man - it is very uncommon to criticize the government publicly.

and Mr. Kuo himself

A peek behind China's Second Life

Kaiser Kuo might no longer be a journalist, but he is still doing the same stuff: visiting interesting people and reporting about them. His peek behind the scenes at Beijing-based HiPiHi shows a company with potential. With a huge team they want to do things better than Second Life:

Getting anywhere in Second Life--being able to create things that don't suck--really does require patience, technical proficiency, and even a good measure of design sense. Many people I've spoken to about SL simply give up, frustrated at not being able to participate in the economy because they can't make anything anyone would want to spend their Lindens on.

The story started to bubble last month.

Updated my blogroll

Since I was doing some maintenance work anyway, I decided to update my blogroll too. I have to do that manually and sometimes the blogroll does not reflect really what I'm reading. This evening I was in a very generous mood and added close to twenty new weblogs that appeared on my radarscreen or - for the wrong reasons - were forgotten in the past. Seek the differences.

Update: Well, this is working. Already a few people expressed their regret I did not add their weblog to my blogroll. First: I have never been very good in getting things 100 percent straight, so I might have missed you, although you are on my RSS-reader. That happend once. Sometimes I think blogs do not add value, and then I skip them. Sometimes I have missed useful blogs all together. Do not hestitate to let me know, so we can argue about that.

Changing the lay-out

As you might notice, I'm changing the lay-out of my weblog. I was sick and tired of it already a long time, but migrating to another service was really to tiresome. Then Google announced they had upgrade the very out-dated Blogger.com software, but until recently I could not use those, because this weblog is simply too big, they said.
Now it is possible. I'm still working to get the old features party back. I'm afraid that Haloscan might drop out. Having two comment systems was not very effective and migrating Haloscan to the new system is a bit too much. Most parts should be functional again.
The new lay-out is still not really what I want, but the initial choices are pretty limited. Maybe I will play later a bit more with it.

How to stop the virtual money?

The decision by the central authorities to limit the use of virtual money got quite some attention. But none of the news articles I have seen went into details on how to do that, most likely because there are no details.
That means most likely that for a long while nothing might happen, as is the case more often when an issue is really difficult to handle.
The same goes for the internet cafes. Not issuing any licenses for new internet cafes does not mean that much when most are illegal anyway.

Shen Aiqin

NPC delegate calls for nationwide CSR-criteria

NPC-delegate Shen Aiqin has called for a nationwide system of criteria for Corporate Social Responsibility, reports China CSR. She is the chairperson of the board of the Wensli Group, a silk company in Zhejiang Province and one of the more wealthy women in China.

Corporate social responsibility has become a key topic for the National People's Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference this year. Shen Aiqin says that many problems in China are related to corporate behavior such as tax dodging, environmental destruction, loan defaults and food safety accidents. One of the key elements for these problems is the lack of a unified criterion for corporations to fulfill their social responsibility.

We are just in the middle of discussions of who to focus on inthe our upcoming Speakers' Bureau. This is the kind of people I would love to have on board.

"We pay for ringtones, avatars, not content"

Net. gives a nice overview of a panel discussion at the Piper Jaffray conference in Beijing where they actually listened to some Chinese youngsters. Obvious an activity they did not do too often:

What I found most interesting was they all freely and openly spoke about that as soon as they wanted content forbidden by the government - they went Online to get it. Nobody seemed to be the least concerned with saying that openly. This is what I have been saying over and over: young people in China are not concerned or worried about saying what they want - no one is being arrested for a statement like the above...

Preferences: Asian and European movies (French), no Hollywood, Baidu and Alipay for payments.

Migrant workers turned into online video hit

The Chinese internet has a new hit: migrant workers, the heroes of the country's economy. China Digital Times has the story and - more important - the links.

Spam hits my Skype-connection

Not sure what is happening today, but suddenly I get swamped by spam messages over Skype. On the screenshot you see one of a few dozen that came in today.
Skype was being used now and then for spam, but today it went all out of hand. All the messages seem to come from two or three Chinese sellers of Skype applications and it is really a nuisance.
I'm on Skype in the 'invisible' mode, so I can actually sometimes get some work done and that stops actually legitime services like the RSS-provider Anothr.com, who does not seem to work when you are 'invisible'. But spam does get through, for sure.

Update: That was quick. This evening I switched on Skype and it offered a new service: it allows me to receive only chat from people on my contact list. Have started that of course right away.

life - A GPS with Chinese characteristics



Shanghaiist noted this taxi with GPS-system. Having been in Europe for a while, I have noted the blessing of those systems who must have saved already many marriages. The machine is not only affordable, less than 3,000 Rmb, but allows the taxi driver to write characters on the screen.

The unit speaks to you and announces each approaching intersection. Our driver still somehow managed to get lost, but we don't think it was the device's fault.

Shanghai stock exchange this morning

economy - The investors are having fun again

I just had a glimpse at the Shanghai Stock Exchange and it looks like the people outside are having fun again. It always makes sense to keep your fingers crossed, when you have made some bold statements.
I'm not disappointed by the Shanghainese.

politics - The Party is here to stay

For years people with different political sympathies in the West did find common ground in the conviction that China's political systems was going to change. The country could not manage its economy and other problems without more political participation of its citizens. Economic growth would push China's middle class to more political demands.
Tha arguments were different, but the outcome would be the same: after the economic changes, political changes were inevitable.
I have never been too sure about that. In China you could see how the government was able to manage it multiple crises and learn from it. And as long as the economic growth continues, there are not reason to expect much to change in the mostly a-political attitude of its citizens.
Arthur Kroeber points in the same direction in the Financial Times, here in a pick up by A Glimpse of the World:

The China-must-reform-as-we-say-it-must fantasy has been most clearly articulated by two recent books. China’s Trapped Transition, by Minxin Pei of the Carnegie Endowment, claims that corruption has so overwhelmed the Chinese state that it is rapidly losing the capacity to deal with all sorts of social problems. The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century, by Will Hutton (reviewed by Martin Wolf in the FT on February 2), asserts that “the Chinese economy and the Chinese Communist Party are in an unstable halfway house” between socialism and capitalism, and that the party must surrender its monopoly on power – soon – or risk economic collapse.

internet - Apologies to the commentors

I have just been upgrading my Blogger-accounts and discovered that in the past month the system had blocked quite a few comments without notifying me. Sorry about that, they should be all in place. My account could not be upgraded earlier, because of the larg number of entries here. Hope I can make more improvements soon,

economy - Preferential tax regime expected to end

On Monday China's legislators are expected the twenty year tax honey moon for foreign investors, writes the International Herald Tribune.

"Companies are largely profitable, in it for the long term here and willing to put up with a change in the tax system that is more clear and more fair," said Robert Poole, vice president of the U.S.-China Business Council, which represents 250 American companies.
Until now, new foreign investors have been exempt from income tax for two years and got a 50 percent cut for another three. After that, other breaks such as for investing in special economic zones could keep taxes as low as 10 percent.
By contrast, Chinese companies pay 33 percent of their profits in taxes.

The ending of the preferential tax treatment has been on the political agenda as long as they are in place. The reason this measure could not be reversed was not because foreign companies were having so much power. After the introduction of the preferential treatment many Chinese companies moved their headquarters to Hong Kong so they would technically also qualify as a foreign company. They have been working against the abolishment as hard as the foreign companies.