Joost has finally unveiled its official site for the China people. A bit surprise that the domain of Joost’s Chinese version is not carry any Joost or Tom’s letter (Joost partnered with Tom.com in developing and marketing the Joost Chinese site), but a new domain name called My100Fun.com. The general thinking is that a lot of startups that come to China building a sister site likely to use another domain name for the site, with number included in the domain name. An example is a startup mulu100, owned by edgeio.com, a classified advertising platform that shut down last year.

My100Fun inherited the same home page design as Joost, featuring some of the most popular English shows on the landing page. However, not that many Chinese shows can be found on this site. if we consider this My100Fun will help Joost to open the China market, it only showed that it is not completely ready yet.

By the way, you also can find the Joost advertisement (as shown in the below) on Tom’s Skype Web site.

via [cnBeta]

There was a buzz on the Web that Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, holds a majority stake in TOM Group has invested $60 million in Facebook, equivalent to 0.4 percent stake in Facebook, however TOM Group has denied such a report.

“TOM Group advised that it has not made any investment in Facebook,” said in a statement issued to the Hong Kong stock exchange, reported by Hong Kong newspaper 明報 (in Mandarin).

EachNet is a new platform that jointly founded by eBay and Tom.com in China, and now it has opened to the public. As announced on EachNet’s community forum (in Mandarin), the existing eBay China users are required to re-activate their membership on this new platform. The existing and previous eBay platform in China, i.e. ebay.com.cn will be shut down permanently after this coming 10th July, as stated in their Memo. A bit sad to read this type of news after I examined the history, the growth, the launched of eBay’s platform in China in September 2004, and the fall of this great Internet company in China.

The shift from the wholly-owned to a joint-venture EachNet platform reminded us many things, overseas market, not to mention China alone, most companies will face the cultural shock that they ever imagined. I’m not agreed to a statement that joint-venture is the only business model that one Internet firm can work on in China, this type of statements can be misled, I rather believe the management theory of “distance still matter,” how easily things can go terribly awry in overseas markets.

See also my June 2007 post on eBay China, entitled, “New eBay China Platform Launches.“

In April, I did posted a post that entitled, “Tom eBay China To Be Launched In July,” and now the new platform is goes live, with the domain name is as follow: kaifa.tom.com, and the platform is shown in the above picture. The domain name chosen became quite profound to me: Are eBay is going to destroy the goodwill of EachNet? However, at this moment while I access to EachNet.com, it will bring me to the eBay China’s home page.

What sets EachNet apart is it was the first China’s online auction platform. Founded in year 1999, eBay first partnered with EachNet in March 2002, and increased its investment in EachNet in June 2003. Later in July 2003, eBay completed the EachNet investment, amounted to a total $180 million of cash in acquired EachNet.

Founded in 1995, since then eBay has grew into the world’s largest and most popular person-to-person auction community on the Web. And despite the fact of the huge success of eBay in U.S., Europe and some other countries, it having the difficulty in entering China’s Internet market and eBay China was thinking that the best solution for them is through the joint-venture approach. I previously have posted that eBay will close its unprofitable China Web auction unit and form a venture with billionaire Li Ka-shing’s Tom Online to run the business in the world’s second-biggest Internet market. There are, of course, downsides to this approach. It means eBay China will only hold a certain stake of the new venture. The aforesaid news was announced in December last year and according to the latest news (in Mandarin) pertaining to this, the new venture, i.e. Tom-eBay China is under development and will launch to the market in this July. This new venture will focusing on the Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) businesses while eBay China’s existing businesses would target in international business and remain controlled by eBay management. Moreover, eBay China will become a subsidiary of the above mentioned Tom-eBay China.

Nonetheless, Tom has enjoyed a good relationship with eBay and it makes sense because eBay’s Skype partner in China was Tom.com. As I visited the Tom.com & Skype, they have developed the latest Chinese version of Skype that targeting the Chinese users, i.e. version 3.1. For Tom-eBay China, I suspect the domain that they’ll use is tom-ebay.com.cn.

In fact, the person-to-person auction arena is not entirely a new market. The competition in China’s auction market is fierce and there are several direct competitors for the Tom-eBay China when it officially launched in July, these include Taobao, owned by Alibaba and paipai, owned by Tencent.