China

The Register reports that Baidu, the dominant Chinese search engine, has launched a mobile operating system of its own. It’s called Baidu Yi and is based on Android, but leaves out Google search and implants their own instead. It also has “Chrome-alike browser” and comes with Baidu-created web apps plus their mapping, cloud synch and music download services. The software is now featured on Baidu’s homepage. This may not be good news for Google.

Remember that Baidu recently partnered with Microsoft to provide Bing-powered English search results for their search engine in China. 9to5Google reported in June that Baidu might want to leverage Android to limit Google’s appeal in the country and further reduce Mountain View’s share of China’s search-based revenue. In January 2010 Baidu’s search-based advertising revenue share was at 63 percent versus Google’s 33 percent. The site was valued at $15 billion and enjoyed 300 million visitors.

Baidu isn’t alone in Android forking. Last week, TechCrunch reported that Amazon too will use a heavily customized Android version to power its upcoming mobile devices. Author MG Siegler saw prototypes and said “it looks nothing like the Android you’re used to seeing”, adding:

Expand
Expanding
Close

Motorola Mobility reported June quarter earnings today, nearly hitting Wall Street estimates with the reported GAAP net loss of $56 million, 19 cents a share. Revenues for the quarter topped $3.3 billion and non-GAAP earnings were nine cents a share. One of the noteworthy highlights includes shipments of 400,000 Xoom tablets, although the company wouldn’t divulge actual sell-through numbers. Xoom shipments amount to some 2.65% June tablet market share, per Strategy Analytics’s cumulative figures.The company also shipped eleven million mobile devices in total, including 4.4 million Android smartphones. Analyst Tomi Ahonen wrote on Twitter that Android shipments amount to an eight percent market share, making Motorola “8th biggest smartphone maker and 5th biggest Android”.

Xoom aren’t bad at all, actually a bit higher than the 300,000 units investors were expecting. Furthermore, the Xoom, Motorola’s inaugural Honeycomb tablet, arrived to market with little or no support from third-party developers plus devices from rivals ensued soon thereafter. Motorola benefited from an expanded distribution of the Atrix 4G smartphone and Motorola Xoom tablets in Latin America, China, Korea and Europe. They also rolled out four new smartphones in China. Moving forward, the company previously pledged to launch ten new devices in 2011 with Sprint, including Motorola Photon 4G which launches this weekend. Other tidbits right below…

Expand
Expanding
Close

Bloomberg, The New York Times and Dow Jones today report that Microsoft and China’s Baidu have entered a cooperation pact for former to provide English language results for the the latter’s queries.

“This is not good news for Google,” said Jake Li, who rates Baidu shares “accumulate” at Guotai Junan Securities in Shenzhen. Most Chinese Internet users currently prefer Google’s English-language search results over Baidu, whose service will be improved by the partnership with Microsoft, he said.

The terms of the deal weren’t made public but the deal will likely work similarly to the Bing-Yahoo deal last year where both companies share the revenues from advertisements.  Baidu is the dominant search provider in China, one of the few places that Google doesn’t reign supreme.  It had previously signed a mobile only deal with Microsoft but rumors of this deal first surfaced a month ago.

The Baidu-Bing service will go live later this year.

Expand
Expanding
Close

As if it were any surprise to watchers, TechCrunch reports that Chinese authorities yesterday tapped The Great Firewall of China to block or limit access to social network Google+ from Mainland China. Quoting a Pen Olson report, the publication later added that the Chinese government didn’t block access to the service entirely. Instead, they are slowing it down to a crawl, “which essentially comes down to the same thing: censoring”. Maybe Chinese officials are trying to get even for Google calling them out publicly for Gmail hack attacks?

Expand
Expanding
Close

A lot of potentially far-reaching developments happening right now in China where Baidu, the dominant search engine, is secretly cranking up a mobile operating system of its own. It’s based on – of all things – Android and code-named Qiushi, which means fruits in autumn, explains TechNode quoting a local report by Chinese-language TechWeb.

Baidu says it’s just “an under-developing mobile ad product”, but considering that several Android-built mobile operating systems already exist in the country (i.e. Xiaomi Tech’s MIUI and DianxinOS) – and taking into account that Android benefited a certain search giant in ways more than one – it isn’t so far-stretched a notion that Baidu is leveraging Android to attack mobile on all fronts and further reduce Google’s share of China’s search-based revenue. Should Google be worried? Read on…

Expand
Expanding
Close

The WSJ reports that Google has hit an internet first: one billion unique visitors in a month’s time. The number comes from comScore data released earlier today, citing that the visitors came in the month of May. While on its way to one billion unique visitors, Google saw a 8.4% increase over April month. Microsoft is trailing behind with a close second of 905 million unique visitors a month.

That’s about one seventh of the world’s population visiting Google.com last month.  Considering the difficulties Google is having trying to reach the 1.4B people in China, the news is no small feat.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Motorola’s Droid, the successful smartphone family which put Android on the map, this year enters its third-generation incarnation with the anticipated Droid 3. Surprisingly, Motorola Mobility chose to launch the handset in China under the Milestone 3 moniker, which is a non-US name for the Droid.

Per Motorola’s press release, the handset known as the XT883 will be carried by China Telecom, the country’s CDMA wireless operator. The Android 2.3 Gingerbread device runs on China Telecom’s Surfing 3G cellular network and WiFi networks and supports Android World Phone capabilities in more than 200 countries. The innards are quite beefy…

Expand
Expanding
Close