Everyone has a reputation to protect, as I visited a newly launched site called DBuz.com said in its landing page. DBuz is hopping on the web 2.0 train by just officially launched a site that tend to help people in protecting their reputation. Currently has over 20,000 members and the number is still growing daily. “Members can engage in anonymous conversations at Dbuz.com so they can say what they really think. Dbuz.com is a forum to learn about yourself, or your company; what people like about you and where you can improve.” According to Rocky Mirza, founder of Dbuz.com in a press release.

Their concept of founding is great in the way that DBuz is offering a unique customer proposition where members are allowed to share their secrets, comment or say about their friends or co-workers. Also, it remind me one philosophy I learned for long time ago, how to identify your enemies before they destroy you. However, I personally feel reputation is an abstract, you always can ignore some of the negative comments as most of which will not amount to serious threats on you or your organization that you worked. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that reputation is not important. It’s just hard to distinguish whether the comment made is the honest, genuine one and the one is fake, the false alarm. We should continue doing the right things, help to make the world better tomorrow without taking any credits, or solely for creating the good reputation in society.

Muddy water, let stand becomes clear.
~ Lao Tzu Quote ~

PPStream is making headlines around the China’s Internet industry again by raising $10 million in a round B financing, venture capitalists included Ceyuan Ventures and Qiming Venture Partners, according to an economics newspaper in China. PPStream founded in 2005 (brief overview was covered in my another post) secured few million in round A from Ceyuan Ventures when it officially launched in the market. This round B of financing will thus rapidly visualize their product ideas and dreams in China. Industry pundits had questioned whether the funding on this type of P2P companies such as Xunlei and PPStream is the risky investments by Ceyuan Ventures (Note: Ceyuan Ventures and Google jointly invested $20 million on Xunlei; Read my another post: “Google China Invested in Xunlei“) as the return of Investment (ROI) may deter to a few more years. However, few people can doubt the rising popularity of PPStream and Xunlei in becoming the Internet’s “killer applications.” Until now, PPStream had secured the partnerships with SMG, Phoenix TV, Sina TV, Yahoo! China, ESPN China, and etc.

There are few implications of this financing: it mean that China is not an Internet auxiliary market anymore, and it is a testament for PPStream’s success in China as well. On the other hand, local venture capitalists that set up their offices in China have always gain competitive advantage in spotting good ventures. Also, despite the China’s Internet market is fragmented, the offering of P2P services in China is hot; most of the players selling their services like hot cakes. But I wonder with this round of financing, is PPStream preparing itself to go public in the near future?

The other day I came across this article, entitled “/Interview/Dean Hachamovitch,” this article discussed some of the viewpoints with regard to Internet Explorer (IE)7.

Some excerpts from the article:

IE7 is a good browser, …..more standards-compliant, but it doesn’t fully support the CSS2 standard, which annoys many a developer.

Honest, humility, integrity make-up of a successful people. But to propel a business growth, an organization must do something that could optimize the feature-rich of its products. I always wonder why my blog does not look in a proper manner on nice in IE7 or IE6, does it mean my blog is not standards-compliant or IE7 is more standards-compliant, in instance, or I should ask all my friends that read my blog by using Firefox particularly when they visit my blog.

Apple has just released a newest update to its dual boot software, i.e. Bootcamp 1.2 beta that will supports Windows Vista operating system in addition to several major improvements. The concept of bootcamp is great in the way that it offered the flexibility and convenient use of Apple’s Mac to the users. However, for some Apple’s fans, they’ve been using Apple for many years, the compelling experiences that they had in Apple would not be easily overtake by Windows Vista despite the dual boot system is available nowadays.

YouTube has unveiled its first batch of video award winners. OK Go, Smosh, the wine kone, digital film maker, Terra Naomi, Peace on Earth 123, Mad yeti 47 were amongst the seven winners in the YouTube site’s inaugural awards. Most of the videos created by the award winners are well-designed. The establishment of this award would have significant implications for the YouTube users. It will serve as an Oscar-Like award among the YouTube environment and help in create a true marketplace for YouTube users in exchanging their own creative videos.

“2006 was a groundbreaking year for YouTube, user-generated content, and entertaining online videos. With this in mind, we established the YouTube Video awards to recognize the ingenuity and achievements of our community. These individuals put the first stitches in the fabric of the YouTube community. Instead of seeing a way to share videos they saw an opportunity for worldwide visibility and through their success have changed the landscape of how a ‘star’ is defined.” Said Jamie Byrne, head of product marketing for YouTube, according to this press release.

Wikipedia co-founder, Larry Sanger has launched a new project called Citizendium for quite some time and now it is in beta version. Citizendium, stands for “The Citizens’ Compendium” consists of over 1,100 articles in its database and 187 editors at the time of writing, the founding purpose is to create a much more credible information than the predecessor Wikipedia, according to Larry Sanger.

As I visited some of the articles listed in Citizendium, the information, example is business is neither not updated nor is not comprehensive. Meanwhile, you’ll only find the articles categorized under the 1 and A to G. It seems that they are lack of sufficient people in drafting the articles on the web. To report accurately and fairly, to see the world in the global perspective, and to be the citizens’ voice in the world, a simple fundamental an organization must-have is: you need a lot of people. No doubt their idea of founding is good: To better than Wikipedia and thus, the editors are carefully selected and they almost all hold credible qualifications and positions in their own fields, but my sense is that for a news startup, setting a strict criteria in qualifying an editor in such a manner, as real name, biography of up to 100-500 words, and etc. their ideas is great, but I wonder how many of us will want to join as an editor unless one hold a very impressive academic and work background. If not, the peer pressure is there. As a human being, we always need a reason why we should do a particular thing, in this case, join and act as an editor where we still have the chances to make Wikipedia a better place for us to find information that we want.

Broadly speaking, the success of Wikipedia is attributed to the participation of a huge group of people worldwide. Participation, edition, feedbacks, albeit these all are little things, but little things made the big impact and they are the building blocks of a success web 2.0 model.

QQ, a famous messenger service in China, has released the social bookmark service, i.e. QQ Shuqian to its VIP members. QQ is a product of Tencent; I have wrote a post on it that entitled, TM 2007 Beta 1 First Impression in January this year. Frankly, I’ve been quite surprise that they launched this social bookmark service in China. Neither this is not their direction nor social bookmarking service does not compliment their existing product lines. However, as I visited the QQ Shuqian home page, the reception of its China’s members is positive. Some url bookmarks have even been saved by more than 200 people.

Is QQ Shuqian going to be the next del.icio.us in China Internet market? And/Or they going to be the strongest competitor for Mister Wong German (my another post) when it officially launched in China?

I did posted about Sogou in January in a post entitled, “Sogou 3.0: More is More?” As I visited its home page, Sogou has released a new personalized news in this month, as listed in Sogou Labs. It is still in version 1.0 and nearly 85% of the desired features had been archived so far. Sogou Personalized News, a sort of personalized newspaper. It look at your searches’ past history and from there it learn about you, and it will present a customized news or home page for you. The more you use it, the more Sogou know about you, and hence, the better the customized news presented to you.

It seems Sogou is worth tracking closely. It gave an impression that it is a company that always like to try something new in China’s Internet industry. Though many people including me likely to use Baidu as the main Chinese search engine, Sogou seems to tackling the specific interest of the Chinese surfers in the China Internet market. People always question honey attract flies. If Sogou really achieved something in the Chinese’s personalize search industry, I believe the main search engine in China, i.e. Baidu will be after it as well. On the other hand, I tend to believed Baidu is thinking that the personalize search is not that attractive at this moment.