I had the pleasure of being part of a panel on the business aspects of the Internet industry in China on Friday during the Wilber K. Woo Greater China Business Conference at UCLA Anderson. I was a last minute sub for Sage Brennan of Enovate, and shared the panel with Bobby Chao of DFJ Dragonfund (seed investors in Baidu) and Eddie Chen, CEO of THQ*ICE (a gaming joint venture between THQ and Shanghai’s ICE) moderated by Richard Colback. It was a fun conversation in a lecture hall setting, and was mainly attended by Anderson students and a few China enthusiasts from around Los Angeles.
One of the more interesting parts of the discussion was the question of whether Mainland Chinese MBA students (of which there were a good many in the room) would – and should – go back to China once they get their US degrees to be Internet entrepreneurs. Continue reading “Internet Opportunities Knocking Across the Pacific for New MBAs?”
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”
