At the same time, Baidu recently partnered with Nokia to provide widget on Nokia’s Widsets platform. It is said the Widsets has over 4 million users in China already.

51.com raised $51 million: we reported in May that 51.com is closing another round of about $50 million, it is official now. The Nasdaq listed online gaming company Giant Interactive invested in $51 million to take 25% shares of 51.com. Therefore, game, esp. web-based games will be a very important feature of 51.com. It is said that Jack Ma of Alibaba was also very interested in 51.com, and make the same offer to the company, but Yuzhu Shi of Giant Interactive finally won the deal.

Fundraising of Ku6 and Youku: Ku6.com and Youku.com both announced new round of financing. Youku raised $30 million equity financing led by Maverick Capital and $10 million equity loan. Ku6.com is said to have raised $30 million in this round, and the details to be announced in next week. Ku6 also announced that it got the licence from CCTV to broadcast video clips on Beijing Olympic Games.

Youku and Ku6 were both founded by former Sohu managers. Youku was started by ex-Sohu COO and president Victor Koo, and Ku6 by Li Shanyou, who began his career at Sohu in human resources but ended up as a senior vice president and Chief Editor at the time of his departure in mid-2006.

Check Kaiser Kuo’s post for more information.

Telstra buys stake in Chinese vertical portal: Australian telecom operator Telstra announced that it has acquired 55% stakes in both Norstar Media and Autohome/PCPop. These two companies both operate popular vertical portals on IT and auto information. Norstar operates IT168.com and Che168.com, while Autohome/PCPop operates Pcpop.com and AutoHome.com. Besides Telstra, CNET China owns several IT vertical portal and an auto information vertical portal xcar.com.cn, PConline.cn, a Hongkong listed company, owns PCOnline.com.cn and PCAuto.com.cn. In 2006, Telstra acquired a 51% stake in Soufun, a real estate vertical portal, for $254 million.

Event: Entrepreneur 27 Singapore Unconference: Entrepreneur 27 Singapore will be organizing the 5th Unconference on the 12th of July 2008. The event will start off with a pitching session, followed by breakout sessions which comprises of 4 simultaneously running tracks. Check out the unconference site for more details.

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There is only very limited information about Baidu C2C so far, we don’t even know when the service will launch. According to a post by a seller who attended yesterday’s roadshow in Beijing,

• Baidu C2C is a free platform, you can even get a free domain name
• Baidu C2C generate revenue from Baidu P4P service, i.e. keyword search results listing, and other online ads platform. Will Baidu P4P has a cost per sale plan for C2C sellers? Baidu Tieba(BBS service), Baidu Zhidao(Q&A service), and Baidu Space can also be used as resources for products promotion.
• Many infrastructures and preparations are ready, including Baidu Hi (IM tool), online payment and logistic service.

According to its C2C promotional materials, Baidu will help sellers to sell to targeted users based on analyzing user profile and behavior in Baidu.

If you can read Chinese, you can download Baidu C2C brochure here(.rar file), and you can track its roadshow news in this blog.

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55BBS.com, established in May 2004 by Hua Han, is an online forum for users to discuss lifestyle information, covering shopping, food, wedding, travel and other consumption-related topics. Currently, 55BBS has over 800,000 registered users who will publish over 100,000 posts every day on the site.

It is not the first BBS acquired by CNET China. On Oct 2004, CNET China acquired Fengniao.com, an online photography community, and on July 2006, it acquired Xcar, a leading car-focused forum. The series acquisition of BBS sites by CNET China also approves the importance of BBS in China’s Internet. Consumers in China gather together on various BBS to discuss their consumption experience and review businesses and brands, BBS is a key social media in China.

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The report also studied the online video users behaviors.

• 65.9% user view online videos by their routine way for visiting video site, 63.7% through recommendation by friends, 56.3% though search engine, and 42.5% through links of other websites.
• Over 86.3% users would like to watch movies and TV episodes online.
• Most of the users (about 64.2%) watch video on browser
• About 94.1% users tend to use IM, as QQ or MSN, to share videos with friends.

The hot money is still chasing China’s online video projects. Nubb.com, an online video site focusing on sports matches, recently announced its around $10 million fundraising from KPCB, Paclink and iD Tech Venture. On the other hand, the video sharing site 56.com has been down for over two weeks.

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How to deal with the voice on social media in China, esp. on BBS, is an issue concerned by brands. Just in last week, BusinessWeek published an article “Inside the War Against China’s Blogs” which featured Daqi.com and other companies which try to manipulate voice online. Sam Flemming, Paul Denlinger, David Wolf and William Moss all have great posts to respond BusinessWeek’s story.

The article is titled “Inside War Against China’s Blogs”, however, in fact, it mainly talks about BBS. Since there is still no popular blog search and aggregation service in China, a post on a big BBS is likely to be more influential than a post on a blog. Most of the companies who work on Internet word of mouth mainly monitor online forums/BBS.

BBS is very important in China’s social media, but for PR purpose, blogs and even QQ groups are also important. Since BBS is moderated by someone, a post could be easily deleted by moderators, that’s why companies will urge forum leaders to delete negative posts for brands, as mentioned in BW article. Companies might be able to control some big BBS, but they cannot control numerous blogs and QQ groups. A blogger can have control over his blog, most of the bloggers will not delete a negative blog post per request by companies. Furthermore, If bloggers know a brand are trying to delete an article on BBS, they will have stronger interests to copy and paste the articles on their own blog, or distribute it on QQ groups.

Daqi.com has a dedicated team to draft and publish posts for clients on various BBS. There are also many other similar companies in the market. Many of them have BBS writers in whole country, who pretend to be users of a client’s product, and post positive comments online, or negative posts on competitors. Actually, many of the hot topics and issues on China’s BBS are created and controlled by PR firms intentionally. However, when more and more companies are doing so, consumers are becoming more skeptical on online product reviews, at the same time, the development of SNS makes it possible for consumers to rely on reviews by friends.

Many opinion leaders are bloggers, they want connections and respects. Brands should try to build relationship with influential bloggers, not regarding them as newspaper, and pitching them with news release. They should start conversation with bloggers. There is a copy&paste culture on China’s BBS, a post by an influential bloggers can easily be reposted onto numerous BBS. We see blog will play more important role in social media, to learn how to deal with PR issues with bloggers, not just BBS is required by each online PR firm.

For more about Internet word of mouth in China, you should closely track the blog by Sam Flemming, CEO of CICData.

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In addition to MySpace.cn, CityIn and Tianya.cn, seven other Chinese social networking sites will jointly promote OpenSocial platform on their sites, including Xiaonei, 51.com, Douban, Hainei, Tianji, Yiqi.com and a web-base online casual game website 51wan.com. So both Xiaonei and 51.com, two SNS with large user base, will support OpenSocial standard. All these websites are leading or at least 2nd tier SNS in China, if all of them really embrace OpenSocial platform, it would be a great news for those widget developers.

Partly because of lack of hosting sites, the development of widgets in China is far behind the development in Silicon Valley, esp. when you consider how quick a copycats could emerge in China. Now, with the efforts of OpenSocial by Google, we can see the feasibility of building widgets and third-party apps. On the other hand, if the main stream SNS in China adopt OpenSocial platform, it will, at least to some extent, reduce the complexity of developing apps to be in compliance with different platforms.

Of course, there are still some big giants in China’s web who might not join this OpenSocial alliance, such as Tencent and Baidu. What they plan to do will affect the landscape of open platform in China. However, we don’t expect they will launch open platform in near future.

In order to promote OpenSocial in China, Google China will held a OpenSocial hackathon event in Beijing on June 13.

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We heard many social networking sites started OpenSocial platform, maybe this is the first time you hear a BBS site has a OpenSocial platform. Actually, it is not related to the BBS features of Tianya.cn, but a front page.

In Tianya.cn, each users has a customizable front page, you can add various modules on this page, such as rss feeds. Now they start to allow OpenSocial-based third party apps to be added into the page. But currently there are only three apps available, all from Google. We did not know the details of this Tianya’s platform yet. I haven’t been able to find out the instructions for developers, only an email is provided for Opensocial inquiries and contact.

In 2006, Google China invested in Tianya.cn, so you can understand why Tianya adopts OpenSocial.

With more and more websites in China launch open platform, 2008 will be the year of platform for China’s web. Who will be the next one to join this platform game? How will the whole web ecosystem in China develop when more platforms are ready? Do you think open platform strategy will work in China or not? Is it just a buzz word? Do not hesitate to share your opinions in the comment.

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We cannot imagine a video sharing site can take such a long time just for data maintenance, or because of server malfunctions. According to Kaiser Kuo, 56.com was “temporarily shut down by the Guangdong provincial branch of the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT)”. There are various version of rumor on the reason of shut down of 56.com, but we don’t know the exact reason yet.

The new regulation by SARFT, which became effective since Jan 31st, requires all video sharing site to have a license to operate video business in China. 56.com has not obtained such license so far, nor did Tudou.com and Youku.com. Some of the VC-backed video companies who have obtained the license include 100du.com, Ku6.com, 6.cn, and P2P video service UUSee.com.

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Obviously QQ want to make Xiaoyou another China’s Facebook, it also has the similar UI as Facebook. However, The net culture of Facebook is quite different from that of QQ. In Facebook, people tend to use their real name in offline life, and bring their offline connection online, while in QQ, almost all users take online ID not real name, use avatar not their own photos, and make online friends. Now, QQ Xiaoyou requires its users to use their real name and real photo, and will verify it strictly. Now you need to let QQ Xiaoyou approve your information within three days.

Actually, this is not the first campus sns service by QQ. On Sep. 2007, QQ launched a service called QQ Campus, but it did not make the progress as QQ expected. Will this new QQ Xiaoyou challenge the leading position of Xiaonei.com in this market in China? Yes, QQ has huge user base and it can integrate QQ Xiaoyou with other popular QQ services for cross marketing. But Xiaonei also got quite good momentum, plans to open platform, and have enough financial supports.

QQ Xiaoyou still takes time to be a strong challenge of Xiaonei, but when QQ is here, maybe you cannot say “the war of SNS in China is ended already”, as Joe Chen said before.

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Actually, when you log in Goofy2, it may remind you of Twitter. Because just similar to Twitter, Goofy2 also use a small input box for you to enter your ideas in limited words. But on Goofy2, you can also attach a link to a multimedia file, such as a mp3, a video and images. To encourage better interaction among users, Goofy2 let people have various ways to respond to your updates besides comments, for example, they can “cheer” you, “hug” you, or express that they have the same thought as you. Goofy2 also automatically find out related thought by other users.

However, unlike Twitter, you can only update messages on Goofy2’s website so far, though the support of IM bot and mobile phone might already be planned. Even after rolling out the IM bot, the feature of various response can still be performed on website, I guess.

The comparison of Goofy2 and Twitter? I think I still favor Twitter a lot, if we don’t consider its performance problems recently. Yes, Twitter is simple, and doesn’t have many fancy features as other similar services. But simplicity is just the power of Twitter. The simplicity of Twitter enables efficient and straightforward information delivery and communication across platforms and in real time. Goofy2 is targeting similar but somewhat different demands, it can still learn a lot from experience of Twitter.

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