Sina, one of the China famous portals has launched “the famous Chinese bloggers column.” On Sina blog home page, if you scroll down to the bottom, you’ll find all the Chinese blogs that classified under different headings. There are blogs classified under celebrity, entertainment, sport, writer, grassroot bloggers, culture, business, academia, feel, media, and IT.

This famous blogs column is particularly helpful for one if she want to know more about what happening in China, the China trends, or what’s on their minds of several successful business or Internet entrepreneurs. From there, I found few blogs that interested me, such as the blog of Kaifu Lee, the head of Google China, 余秋雨 (a famous author), Jackie Chan, and etc.

Visit this site and select which blog you might want to follow.

The China Internet firm Sina is launching a new Webmail service to the public called Sina Webmail 2008. It is a new Webmail that formed as a result of the rapid growth in the subscriber base of China. User that sign-up for this Webmail will have her email address with the personal identity such as “name@2008.sina.com.” Since this Webmail is targeted at the individual, I believed it will works like any prominent Webmail, an advertising-supported Webmail system.

This 2008 Webmail delivers all the features and benefits of email that include anti-virus, fast-access, free of charge and reliable. As it is positioned as a Webmail with the subdomain 2008, but Sina has announced (in Mandarin) that users can continue to use this Webmail system even after year 2008.

Update: Sina Webmail 2008 is appealing to the China users because the number 8 mean prosperous in Chinese pronunciation and China hosts Beijing Olympic Games in year 2008. However, Sina Webmail 2008 only offers 2G of storage space, not the 8G. In addition, a potential user need to submit three right objective answers before proceed to the final registration page.

Google is proactively penetrating the China market, if you’re the one that regularly visit this blog, you know that I’m tracking closely on every strategic move by Google. Two months ago, I did posted a post that talked about the strategic alliance of CNCMAX and Google China, and now Sina was the latest partner Google found in China. From now on, users at Sina can search through Google’s search toolbar that embedded on Sina’s home page. Both companies agreed to work strategically on areas such as search, advertisements and information hand-in-hand, according to this article (in Mandarin).

However, I have no idea whatsoever on how Google and Sina going to work together, but I do know it would eventually be a win-win situation for both of them. In a conservative view on the Internet market in China, Baidu was the leading player and will always be the main search engine in China, and for Google to be successfully scale up their businesses or search traffics in China, teaming up with players other than Baidu or Yahoo! China is the only solution temporarily. On the other hand, Sina needs a way to reinvent its wheel of online advertisement business in China, where this is an area that Google have strength in. To note, Google’s expertise in collecting information from web search activities and using the data to target advertising would help Sina in the long haul, particularly in view of its online advertisement revenue has first time fall short of Baidu, as reported by an article (in Mandarin) and the statistics is shown in the below picture.

Purple color: Sina
Deep red color: Baidu

Source: available at http://medianet.qianlong.com/7692/2007/06/11/2681@3887618.htm, accessed 11 June 2007

Sina.com of China just ran an interesting news, entitled, “2006 IT Awards in China” (in Mandarin). This is an annual ceremony to honor and pays tribute to the top 10 IT firms and most important people in China. This award was jointly organized by these three parties, i.e. Yesky, Sina, and Nanfang Daily.

I’m not going to talk about any of the top 10 most important people. The main reason is this, I feel it’s a bit of trivial to talk about the successful people here, as you probably would understand I will only focus my writing on startups and companies. Please pardon my viewpoint.

The top 10 IT firms in China is as follows:

Alibaba, Google China, Gome, Lenovo, Hasee, Shanda, Tencent, Tom.com, Xunlei, and Intel China.

I believed most of the readers have heard of Alibaba, Google, Lenovo, and Intel. For Alibaba, I also wrote some of the latest news of Alibaba, you can check with the sidebar of this blog to know more about it. For other companies, I will briefly explain here and you also can click the links as I provided in the above. Gome is a portal that mainly sell electronic products. And Hasee, it is a successful portal that sell PCs, laptops, and computer related items in China. Shanda, i.e. Shanda Interactive Entertainment Limited, went public and listed in Nasdaq, is a leading interactive entertainment media company in China and offers a portfolio of diversified entertainment content that is accessible via the Internet. Whereas Tencent is a successful company that released the well-known QQ messenger. I also wrote a post that entitled, “TM 2007 Beta 1 First Impression” recently. Another company, Tom.com, it is a company that partner with eBay China and they are going to jointly-launch a new portal and I will write on that soon. And lastly, Xunlei, as you probably heard of Google has bought a stake in Xunlei, to know more about this company, you can read my another post, entitled, “Google China Invested in Xunlei“.

My sense is that from now on, it is interesting to know which firm will going to succeed in China this year. 2008 will tell.