The latest market research of Analysys conducted in China has revealed that Baidu still maintained its dominant position in the search engine market in China. It has gained 57 percent of the Chinese search engine market share, three more times than its closest rival, i.e. Google China. Below is the statistical charts I searched through the services offered by Statsaholic.

Source: http://www.statsaholic.com/baidu.com

Source: http://www.statsaholic.com/google.cn

However, from the recent statistics shown in the above charts, there is an increased number of users went to Google.cn. A recent buzz in China was whenever an user went to google.com in China, the page will redirect to Google.cn, however Google China has denied such technical strategy. Meanwhile, the competitive landscape was still interesting, Google China was rumored to plan its own integration between Google.com and Google.cn into a single search engine in China; currently still operated separately, according to this article (in Mandarin).

I’m not sure I will be as hilarious as many of the people when they first saw the Vudu box, that deliver the movies to the TV without the PC or the cable box. Vudu, aka Marquee, Inc. is getting a lot of buzz when The New York Times has wrote an article that surround the stories, background, industry analysis on this stealth mode company. This company was founded in year 2004 and their senior executives are holding the vast experiences in developing the digital video recorders, and has $21 million funding from Greylock and Benchmark Capital. What caught the eyes of the venture capitalists is their Vudu box; planned to be launched in this summer in the U.S. Their technologies is indeed a breakthrough technology in the sense that it helped the users to download the movies in the peer-to-peer (P2P) manner, but the selling point for this Vudu box is the users could get the instantaneous experiences when watching the movies through Vudu, without the needs of waiting hours in downloading a particular movie. To get the first grasp of what Vudu box is all about, you can click here to read the Vudu story covered by Gizmodo.

I read that this Vudu has patented some of its unique designs in the Vodo box, but until this moment I could only found one of its patents that called, “Method and system for providing instantaneous media-on-demand services by transmitting contents in pieces from client machines,” that they trademarked in year 2005. With respect to this Vudu box, they claimed that this is a method of providing instantaneous media-on-demand services over a network, their first core technology. Since there are more than 105 million TV-watching households in the U.S., I’m interested to know what is their product strategies in order to penetrate the U.S. market? Will this company focus on obtaining the patents as one of their market protection strategies when they officially launch their Vudu box in the summer? In order to empower users, how usefulness it is, will their users claimed with Vudu box, viewing movies, or videos will be a lot more enjoyable. Also, will the users recommend to their friends or relatives? I really interested to know the answers in this summer.

If you’re a Jaiku user and the operating system of your computer desktop is Windows Vista, you should ‘try’ this sidebar widget, i.e. Sideku that I just found on the Microsoft’s Windows Live Gallery. Just released a beta 2 version today and it can help in keep track of every move of an user’s friends, but at this moment not that many users that downloaded this widget.

It allowed an user to use the Jaiku services directly from his/her desktop or laptop. However, the limitations are that only three (3) Jaiku updates an user make are showed on this Sideku and currently it only support Windows Vista.

A report in China last week has revealed that an online dating site Love21cn.com has raised $10 million. I still remembered this site was a major takeover target of several bigger U.S. players that would want to expand in China and at certain point, I even believed that Match.com is in the middle of the process in acquiring this company, according to the rumor (in Mandarin).

Love21cn was founded by a lady that was a graduate of Chinese Studies at Beijing University, also hold a Master at Fudan, another well-known University in the world. She got the idea of founding an online dating site when she pursued her Master at Fudan. Having searched for few hundreds of domain name, she named her proposed idea of online dating site as Love21cn and two months later, she bought a server to host this aforesaid online dating site, according to this article. On the lading page of Love21cn, you’ll discover that they have matching more than 570,000 of people on the web successfully. Though the rising popularity of this site in China, they still having the financial difficulty in running this company. However, I’m not surprise this company will able to survive in the market particularly the number of users they got in their database.

I read that some said China’s Internet players would definitely poised for growth in term of subscribers’ base, and financing from venture capitalists is not a major problem for them, but other than the top players such as Baidu, Tencent, all having the problems in monetize their unique business models. However, the growth outlook for the online dating industry was very good, particularly I came across a statistics that entitled, “30 million Chinese men will not find a bride,” talked about the shortage of men that partly due to the China’s One Child Policy. But the paramount reason for the gender gap would not be further discussed here just because this blog is not a sociology or political blog, and I also not born and grew up in China.

As I visited the Love21cn site, I’m not surprise most of the guys and ladies looking for their soul mates on the web would tried to promote their educational backgrounds, jobs or career, short life statement and etc.

Just came across the twitter page for Hillary Clinton. Fourteen (14) followers and two (2) friends, i.e. Barack Obama and John Edwards at the time of writing. In fact, Hillary Clinton was the latest Democratic candidate that did the Twitter. Unfortunately, her page still haven’t updated yet. But ultimately, Twitter is another alternative way that should be leverage on the mobile access for the large group of followers.

eyeVio, a new social networking and video sharing site with the slogan “my life, your emotion” owned by Sony has launched in Japan today. However, as I visited the site and trying to get a first grasp of it, I noticed that they have posted a report (as shown below), i.e. system failure that caused by power problem happened in the data center as at 18:20.

2007/04/27 システム障害のご報告
本日18:20分過ぎ、データセンター内の電源トラブルのためシステムがダウンしました。現在、電源の方は対策を実施済みです。引き続きアクセスのしにくさの改善に全力を尽くします。ご不便かとは存じますが、どうぞよろしくお願いいたします。

2007/04/27 ただいまアクセスが集中しております
ただいま、アクセスが集中し、つながりにくい状況になっています。現在、対策中です。ご迷惑をおかけしまして申し訳ありません。

2007/04/27 本日よりeyeVio一般公開です。

eyeVio is an Ajax based social network web 2.0. When you visit some of the member profiles listed in eyeVio, you’ll find the well-designed, highly customized, and the features, appearance, as well as the functions of this web application is favorably received not only by the Japanese people, but the Chinese people as well, albeit that it just officially rolled out to the market this morning 10a.m. One of the profiles that I visited, e.g. KIKI, her page has allowed the public to view, vote on, and a personal short clip, thumb up, score points, i.e. appraisal value have been integrated with the page. Some famous people have also set up their personal profile on eyeVio and this included the yoga Master Duncan Wong; I even read that he is teacher of choice to Madonna, Sting and Demi Moore. In addition, the special feature offered by eyeVio is the videos can be download through the use of walkman, PSP and iPod, but television will be in the future, according to this article. Though the loading of each member profile is slow, eyeVio has achieved nearly 1,000 members so far. I even came across the landing page with the following message appeared in the midst of writing:

ただいま緊急メンテナンスを実施中です。復旧までしばらくお待ちください。

利用者の皆様にはご迷惑をお掛けしますが、ご理解ご協力のほど、よろしくお願いします。
(Urgent maintenance)

eyeVio, can be registered by using any email address. If an user use Gmail address to register, this email address will become the login address for his/her eyeVio account. Users can set their videos to be “private”, and file uploading is restricted to 150MB. Moreover, eyeVio staff monitor the videos posted by the users 24/7, i.e. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Any video that violate the copyright issues or any harmful content found on eyeVio, it would be deleted instantly. Currently, videos can be viewed on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari browsers.

In fact, eyeVio is another social network venture of Sony as Sony Pictures Entertainment has bought Grouper.com in August last year, according to this Japanese news.

I previously have posted a post entitled, “MySpace Set to Launch in China,” and today they have officially released its public beta. MySpace China recognized the potential of China and planned nearly a year in order to launched this China version. It is not a Chinese version but should be claimed as an ideally China version. They owned the MySpace dot cn domain and proactively promote their Chinese slogan “友你 友我”, i.e. friend you, friend me. Using the dot cn domain does not giving up some of the competitive advantage MySpace achieved over the years, MySpace China has indeed integrated with MySpace International and the members registered in this MySpace China will allowed to “friend you and friend me” with their friends regardless where they registered their MySpace profiles in. Moreover, the CEO of MySpace China is Luo Chuan 罗川 and he has assumed the key man position at this newly found venture after he left Microsoft MSN in December last year.

As I visited the Myspace China’s landing page, there are well-designed twelve (12) channels such as home page, browse users, search, invite, mailbox, blog, favorite bookmark, forum, groups, events, schools, and music. If you well familiar with the features offered by MySpace US, you’ll notice that there are not much differences between the features offered by these two entities. MySpace China has the extra “schools” category whereby the Chinese people could find their friends through the schools that established in China. Meanwhile, MySpace US’s features offered are far more complete, an user can even reach film, videos, comedy and classifieds from the landing page there.

MySpace China positioned itself as a “locally owned, operated and managed company.” However, after I thoroughly observed the business processes and design matters of MySpace China, it should be a Chinese “clone” version of MySpace International. It’s still a long way for them to crystallize their localization strategy to reality.

Google Transit, released in December 2005 and still a lab project under the umbrella of Google has expanded to Japan. Google Transit Japan (as picture shown in the below) basically is a public transportation information especially trains at your finger tips.

Started in Japan at 23th April this year, the launched of Google Transit that integrated with the Google Maps’ services is pretty new to the Japanese people, according to nikkei BPnet. Not only the departure and destination station names were input in the service. The availability of shortest route, address and any landmark were also included in this Google Transit Japan. For some destinations such as Tokyo 東京 and Fukuoka 福岡 where the huge demand is there for the public transportation, it is no surprise that Japanese people would use their cell phones to track those transportation information through the offered of Google Transit.