Internet & Tech

Top Chinese internet firm trades profits for ethics
Dec 11, 2009 (WiC 42)

In China, if people want to look something up on the internet they don’t “Google it”. They “Baidu it”. The nine year-old company is wildly popular among the 360 million people now online in the country. It accounts for 64% of ...

Western web favourites fail to wow China users
Dec 4, 2009 (WiC 41)

They didn’t know what he was twittering on about, at President Obama’s ‘town hall’ gathering in Shanghai last month. Specifically, the president was talking about internet freedoms. But in the process he admitted too that he had never ...

Cities compete for investment from Taiwan's most famous businessman
Nov 20, 2009 (WiC 39)

The important thing in any organisation is leadership, not management. A leader must have the decisive courage to be a dictator for the common good.” So says Taiwanese electronics mogul Terry Gou in ‘Gou’s Quotations’, a ‘little red ...

Government ministries clash over online game rules
Nov 13, 2009 (WiC 38)

A man in Wuhan took his pregnant wife to see a doctor. He was worried that she had some sort of disease as she got up in the middle of the night “too often” to drink water. The doctor did the usual checks and declared that he couldn’t ...

Will the e-book captivate Chinese consumers?
Oct 23, 2009 (WiC 35)

Knowledge, rather famously, is power. And in ancient China, book ownership was also a prerequisite for prestige and political authority. Qin Shi Huangdi, the first emperor, ordered the burning of all ancient books and records for fear that they ...

Online authors build up huge followings. Who are they?
Aug 28, 2009 (WiC 28)

Blogging has never been bigger. Estimates now put the number of online scribes in China at 107 million  (that is the number of blogging accounts that have been set up, at least). For some political theorists, this all portends an era of freer ...

The latest craze: an online game that encourages the stealing of vegetables
Aug 28, 2009 (WiC 28)

One of the reasons Chairman Mao was so keen on collectivization was that he believed farmers were thieves. Well, a new online video game would seem to give some credence to his view. The game is called Happy Farm and it is hosted on social ...

Alibaba offers its shareholders a nice surprise: some cash back
Aug 21, 2009 (WiC 27)

Those that remember the heady days of dotcom investing, will also remember “cash burn” – a term invented to assuage befuddled shareholders and give some accounting logic to a process in which web firms lost money each month. Most dotcoms ...

Why the controversial internet filter Green Dam has been put on ice
Jul 3, 2009 (WiC 22)

Imagine a Cheney-Rumsfeld presidential ticket and then try and conceive of something even less appetising. Well, look no further than China’s Green Dam software – so unpopular it even earned its developer death threats. What is ...

Chinese company outflanks Facebook
Jun 26, 2009 (WiC 21)

Despite Facebook’s growing global clout, China is a market the social networking titan has yet to crack. In a country that boasts over 300 million internet users, Facebook can claim only around 750,000 members for its “China” network. ...

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