Group buying site Lashou firing staff, cutting ad expenditures, may be running out of cash. too bad for them their us ipo failed last year

ganji.com being destroyed by ceo divorce

one world, two internets. linguistically and physically, given the GFW//

A new infographic shows that Chinese will soon overtake English as the dominant language online. At the end of 2011, 27 percent of web content was in English, while 24 percent was in Chinese. Despite that, the graphic’s creators, the translation management platform Smartling, lament that the web is still too monolingual, with “56 percent of online content [being] English-only.” It calls for a more multilingual approach to the web.

Android may be huge in China but Google is going to get very little benefit, directly or indirectly, from its proliferation//核心提示：Android操作系统进入中国第一天起，就不再姓Google了。

inevitable decline, between lack of china product focus and regulatory uncertainty that is driving partners onto competitors' mapping API services//

New stats for mobile mapping clients used in China show that Google Maps has, for the first time ever, lost its leading position in the country, losing it by a fraction to Autonavi (NASDAQ:AMAP).

Now, a new operation is under way, with censors aiming to increase controls at the source: journalists at several Chinese media say their employers have started installing new restrictions on weibo use.

A reporter at a Communist party newspaper in Guangdong province said all editorial staff had been requested to register their weibo accounts with editorial management. A journalist at a military newspaper said editors had threatened staff that they could be detained on criminal charges if they spread sensitive information through weibo. At a magazine run by a major state media group, a new committee was set up to supervise how editorial staff use social media. “The committee has the power to punish anyone who reveals secrets or spreads rumours through weibo,” said one reporter at the magazine.

The allure of Silicon Valley has aroused China’s largest Internet company to begin investing in some of America’s smallest ones.
Tencent Holdings has funded about a half dozen young startups, many of them from prestigious business incubator Y Combinator, hoping like everyone else that its relatively small investments will lead to big payoffs.
One of its first seed investments is being put to the test today as Everyme, a new social network, opens its online doors.  Tencent was the lead investor in the startup’s $1.5 million seed round, which closed in October, according to Everyme Chief Executive Officer Oliver Cameron.
Everyme, based in Menlo Park, California, lets people share messages and photos with groups that are arranged automatically based on a user’s address book and Facebook activity.
“We kind of agreed with their thesis that there’s a lot of value in the address book,” said David Wallerstein, a senior executive vice president for Tencent, who is based in Palo Alto, California. Other investors included Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Michael Arrington’s CrunchFund.

Sina, Baidu and Tencent pledge obeisance to the anti-rumor campaign. what else could they do?

The listing, though, comes at a sensitive time for China’s media. Sina’s phenomenally popular micro-blog—the closest thing China has to a forum for democratic debate—had to turn off its comments function from Saturday to Tuesday. That was a punishment for allowing rumors of political instability to spiral out of control after the ousting of top leadership contender Bo Xilai.

Sina already has to fork out for a small army of censors to monitor and delete inappropriate content posted by users. Its Nasdaq-listed stock fell almost 10%  last week as investors bet that heightened controls will add to the company’s costs.

Now investors with access to the Chinese market have the chance to double down. Anyone betting censorship will win out over free speech can buy into the People’s Daily IPO and take a short position on Sina’s stock.

Youku Inc. received a license from the General Administration of Press and Publication that will allow it to provide video and audio content to mobile devices.
Youku received the license on April 5. It will also allow the leading video portal company in China to produce its own video and audio content. The firm was already producing programs for young people, but has not been providing content to mobile devices.
Youku is one of China's YouTube equivalents, with the important difference that viewers also use it to watch TV shows and films.
The company said the license meant it had become a mainstream platform for video programs.
Under rules enacted in August 2002, videos produced by web portals must get GAPP approval.
A senior executive for another video portal company said the firms were prompted to get licenses similar to the one Youku received because of increased government supervision.

On March 31, 2012, China's National Copyright Administration published a draft amended Copyright Law for comment. I have pasted the full text and translated two articles relevant to Internet operators below.

VIE structure not reason debut flopped. but $vips got its cash

Bill Bishop, an analyst in Beijing, says that the deal is far from “game, set and match” to Youku and Tudou. Some lesser lights of online video are backed by giants of China’s internet, such as Baidu, the dominant search engine, and Tencent, the leading instant-messaging site. None seems ready to give up just yet.

Duncan Clark of BDA, an investment-advisory firm in Beijing, says he is optimistic about the long-term prospects of online-video companies, because they give people something they clearly want. In the short term, he is more cautious. Bandwidth and content costs are one reason. Regulation is another, in the shape of SARFT, the film and broadcasting regulator, which oversees the online firms too.

Popular TV shows have been stopped before, so why not online programmes as well, if too few are watching the news on CCTV? In China not only failure is risky.

The merger of China's two major video portals indicates the days of fast growth in the industry are gone, an analyst tells Caixin.
On March 12, Youku Inc. (NYSE:YOKU) and Tudou Holdings Ltd. (NASDAQ: TUDO) announced an all-stock deal expected to be worth more than US$ 1 billion.
A senior executive at a video website said most such sites in China will have to save cash this year to cope with increasing financing difficulty as capital lost interest in the sector.

tudou ceo gary wang voted against deal with youku? $tudo $yoku 25% voting share not enough?

21cbh on suspicious tudou trading in 2 days b4 youku deal announced $tudo $yoku

When I heard about the Youku-Tudou merger last night I immediately thought it could represent one of two things. Either it was another sign that China’s cultural preference against mergers and acquisitions was starting to shift, or it was the Chinese equivalent of Excite@Home. In other words, two much-hyped, money-losing Web giants shoving themselves together in hopes that size will somehow solve their pressing balance sheet challenges.

The reality may be somewhere in the middle.

This much is for sure: Merging was never plan A for either company. Both Tudou and Youku are very different companies, built from very different management teams with very different cultures. While they’ve played mostly nice with one another, I’ve heard the founders of both make plenty of catty comments about the other one.