Asia Blogs

China has Asia's--perhaps even the world's--liveliest and most comprehensive e-commerce sector, where pretty much anything can be bought online, and specialist online shopping sites exist for things like only food, baby-wear, handbags, etc. Revenue in China's e-commerce sector amounts to 1.76 ... more »

The HTC Desire was a terrible phone with a low-quality screen tinged with pinkish hues, and an internal storage that could swallow up only a pathetic amount of apps before telling you it was full. Despite all that, it was a ... more »

The new regulation for microblog "real name" registration--on Twitter-like sites such as Sina Weibo, or Tencent Weibo--looked at first like a bad joke, and now it has turned into a farce.

Supposed to go into effect on March 16, the date came ... more »

As someone who likes following what Chinese startups are up to, and who also loves fiddling with new mobile apps, I end up installing and testing out a lot of apps. But one whole genre has become so shallow and predictable ... more »

March 16th is the crunch day. That's the date on which the hundreds of millions of people who use China's microblogging sites--such as Sina's or Tencent's Weibo--need to register with their real names and ID numbers. And that applies to foreigners ... more »

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has come to an end for another year, giving us a pretty clear picture of what kind of gadgets we'll be buying in 2012.

So, with an eye on some of the more realistic gadgets that we ... more »

2011 has been a great year for apps--and that is true in China as well. Here, hundreds of new startups have blossomed, and a good number of them have made some fantastic and good-looking services that are a credit to the ... more »

Tencent, China's social media giant, has finally disclosed how many users are on its group-messaging service: 50 million. That catapults the mobile-based free messaging service past some of its older rivals--such as Kakao Talk from Korea, or Talkbox from Hong Kong--and ... more »

An academic at China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said recently that 98.1 percent of all new PCs sold in China come with a genuine operating system (OS) installed. With close to all of those being Microsoft Windows machines, ... more »

November 11 was China's "Singles Day" due to the date's figures looking like solitary, "forever alone" silhouettes standing awkwardly in a line. But more recently, it is also becoming a day for a national e-commerce spending spree, as local sites such ... more »

Internet services exist to fill a hole in the market, a niche where no one has yet provided the requisite facility. Some such holes are so vast as to always require an intermediary; but some are so tiny as to be ... more »

One of China’s leading venture capitalists, Dr. Li Kai-fu (pictured above)--former head of Google China--this weekend stated that China's tendency toward learn-by-rote education would mean that the next great Web or tech innovations would not be Chinese.
He told journalists, after attending ... more »

Rumors in the Chinese press today suggest that eBay, the US e-commerce site, is looking for acquisition opportunities in China to expand its business.

eBay was one of the most high-profile business failures in China in recent years, where it got roundly ... more »

With the recent official confirmation that Baidu will use Bing for English-language search results in China, it's a good time to take a look at the quality of the results on both Baidu.com and cn.Bing.com when English terms are inputted. It'll ... more »

An IME - Input Method Editor - is a tool for typing various languages on a computer or mobile phone. Android smartphones, like your computer, are highly customizable, and so you have a choice of numerous apps if you want to ... more »