China Mobile announced their third quarter results yesterday, as well as one little, small tidbit of a milestone – they just passed half a billion subscribers. However, even with 508 million users and plans to have 3G networks set up in 238 cities by the end of the year, China Mobile is still facing stiff competition from both China Telecom and China Unicom, the later gearing up to launch the iPhone 3G & 3GS in Q4 (which should be a boom for content providers such as QQ). Bloomberg has more info and analysis on the results. Continue reading “China Mobile – Half a Billion Users and Counting”
China’s GAPP (General Administration of Press and Publication) announced yesterday that foreign investment in China’s online gaming industry won’t be allowed (I presume from this point on and not retroactive). In this case, foreign investment includes foreign entrepreneurs, as the edict from the GAPP also denies foreigners from setting up wholly owned enterprises (WOEs) and/or joint ventures. Continue reading “China’s GAPP to foreign investors: You Don’t Have Game”
Today, a day after MMS was finally released for the iPhone in the US (I like the quote “now you can do what you did with your Razr in 2003!”), I was just using the Yahoo Instant Messenger iPhone app (yes, I still have some friends and relatives that hangout there so I go on once and a while begrudgingly), and it got me to thinking about what the iPhone means for IM-focused companies in China. Continue reading “QQ and the iPhone 3G & 3GS – the penguins are aligned”
