The Chinese search giant has a new venture now. It is now entering the online game sector by providing some games through its newest platform called Baidu Youxi. With the recent release of Baidu Hi (instant messenger service) and this online gaming platform, Baidu is considered the biggest Chinese platform that probably cover all the needs of the Chinese young adults.

At present, Baidu does not develop its own casual online games, but chose to offer a portfolio of entertainment through some partnerships with the renowned interactive entertainment media companies such as Shanda Entertainment, Dreamwork Net, and 51wan. Currently, there are seven (7) free online games available to the Chinese users, and most of them such as 纵横天下, 方便面三国, 天空左岸 are very popular in China. Out of four of these seven games, four are developed from 51wan, as reported by this casual game developer.

There are two main selection criteria that set by Baidu in choosing the games, first it must be home-made, i.e. made in China, and secondly, all its online games must be healthy, which mean all family members are welcome to play and view. There will be no violence, sex that can be found on its casual games. Also, games that allow users to gain access to online casino, poker, with access to third-party betting exchange will not be permitted on this Baidu Youxi. Since Baidu Youxi adopt a business model of free-to-play, I still can’t figure out what will be their major revenue streams. But one thing for sure, as more and more online game users are becoming sophisticated, the games available must be in extremely high quality.

Why Baidu engaged in this online game sector? This can be explained by the market outlook of the online game sector in China. China recorded a CNY$12.8 billion during a fiscal year ended December 2007. It has been project forecasted more than 20% growth each year in the next five years. Thus, by year 2011, China’s online game sector will generate more than CNY$40.1 billion. By then, China will be a mature online game market such as South Korea.

Baidu, the China search giant has officially launched its instant messenger (IM) page. Its foray into the IM market has been a big win. They got a huge publicity on the China Web market, as I observed most of the major online news providers, blogs, most of them are reporting about their latest IM move. In the beginning of the month, I did posted a brief introduction on Baidu IM, now I knew that China users can download the IM software by visiting this page.

Baidu, now not only compete directly with QQ, the most popular IM software in China, it also clear that they’re attempting to offer a full range of Web products to the China users. What will be their next move, Baidu Mail, or Baidu English version of search engine?

Baidu, the China search giant has officially unveiled its instant messenger product, codenamed as Baidu Hi. Currently, it is in the private beta mode, hence not everyone get the chance to test this product. While I trying to access to the Baidu Hi page, the landing page is still not available. There are few information that I found after reading some other Chinese blogs’ about this Baidu Hi.

1) Baidu Hi is developed by using Visual C++, an IDE of Microsoft.

2) The user interface is a Flash made.

3) Baidu Hi may not support Windows 95, 98, or 2000, the Baidu Hi first release will only support Windows XP SP2.

I’ve been follow-up a news that surrounding Baidu, the China search giant and Maxthon, a popular Chinese browser for a couple of days. A buzz from the China Internet industry stated that Baidu has acquired Maxthon for an undisclosed sum. There is certainly no confirmation about this news, and yet no official announcement can be found on Baidu or Maxthon’s site. Frankly, I putting this rumor at mostly 50% to be true. In last year April, the first Internet company that has vast interest on Maxthon was Google (read my April 2007 post). Though buying a browser and make it an asset, so whenever an user in China used this particular browser, the first landing search engine will be Google or Baidu, for Google or Baidu, this is indeed not a necessary move for them.

Apparently, Maxthon browser has great appeal for Baidu or Google, because it is made-in China. While buying Maxthon raises a question of ROI (Return on Investment), but this news offers tips that Baidu has quietly expanded its product lines. Nevertheless, no news is not a good news for Baidu. Perhaps reading a newest article posted by China Web 2.0 Review will tell you more about the secrets of Baidu’s investment.

Baidu, the China search engine giant has launched its new security home page. With a new sub-domain, i.e. an.baidu.com, Baidu has demonstrated their commitment that they concerned about the Internet security that China people faced. Currently, user who use Internet Explorer (IE) and operating system which is Windows 2000 or XP, when visit this page will be prompted to install an security add-on provided by a Chinese Internet security software called KingSoft. No doubt, the main purpose of developing this page is to provide the Chinese users an Internet security software without charge. Though this security offering is generous, but on the business side, will provided the needed confidence and enhance Baidu attractiveness to the China people in the midst of competing with Google China (in terms of providing a safe surfing environment).

Other than the add-on provided by KingSoft, this home page offered a variety of tools to the China users. Users can find some tools that help them clean the trojan, hard disk recovery, fix browser to the previous good state, patch the security hole, and etc. As showed on the landing page, an one-click button is provided to the China users when they want to scan their computers online, which they believed a 100 mark represents a totally virus free environment. Also, Baidu has prepared a spam and virus information page, trying to keep them update on the latest spam and virus trend.

Apparently, this Baidu offering is competes primarily with another firewall program released by Yahoo! China.

Baidu Japan has finally relaunched its search engine that mainly focused on the Japanese. If you want to know the progress on how Baidu ventured into the Japan market, you can read the review on my March 2007 post and the most recent one, the January 10’s post. The relaunched Baidu Japan search engine, as shown in the below picture comprised of four (4) main search services, i.e. Web page search, image (photo) search, video search, and lastly, the Japanese blog search. On this landing page of Baidu Japan search engine, these four main services are listed from left to right, with the top three favorite searches highlighted in orange colors. Their desire to attract more Japanese in using this search engine can be viewed by the redesigned of the search engine, and this is a speculative piece, in order to attract Japanese, it’s imperative that one must heavily focused on the design, you can’t just provide a tiny search bar on the search engine’s landing page, and hope that other people will fall in love with the would-be Yahoo! Japan’s competitor (Yahoo! Japan controlled over 60% of the Japan search market).

Apparently, this is a typical example on how competition in Japan market will increase pressure toward rearchitecting a new search engine to meet the needs of the majority Japanese.

China search giant Baidu is a new dot CN domain reseller in China. As a picture shown in below, Baidu is an official dot CN registrar as found on CNNIC registrars’ page. So far, from all the tactical moves by Baidu, we see this Chinese search giant is engaged in numerous efforts to provide an one-stop services to the end users, from search, online dictionary, blog, anti-virus program, video, news, till this domain, it showed to people that they’ve positioned well as the number one end-user portal for the China people there.

In fact, the source from China cited that Baidu applied to be the domain reseller for dot CN in last September, got approved in December last year. It is the second China Internet startup that listed in NASDAQ that resell domain names.

Baidu appears to have decided that they’ll never abandon the Japan market with the forthcoming new Japan search engine. Its new Japan search engine will be launched on 23 this month. This revamped search engine will included three main services to the Japanese, i.e. video, travel and gourmet. I believe this revamp is much to do with the response of competitive pressure from the continual growth of Yahoo! in Japan market. Yahoo! Japan still leading the search engine market and any new entrants do not seemed to threaten its leadership position there.

Baidu Japan, first launched in February last year, is very much motivated by the Japan market, its first overseas market other than its home base, i.e. China. Rumors also suggested that Baidu was looking at South Korea and the U.S. market as well, and no surprise that they’ll launch their own Korea and English search engines in the future.