Customers can put their ads on different screens as they wish. Bidding prices can be set different on the two platforms and customers can change the budget ratios between the two. Baidu also rolled out a package of tool for mobile search marketing, including tools for setting up mobile sites, online consulting, and app marketing, etc.

According to Baidu, with regard to search behavior, users do searches on PC mostly at working hours. And mobile search traffic would soar on weekends, which makes a good complement for the PC advertising.

Related posts: How small/big is Chinese mobile advertising market? Baidu Released Phoenix Nest for Mobile Taobao Union to Open Advertising Services to All Online Advertisers

Fensitong, or promoted feed ad program, now has over one thousand customers that have deposited money. Currently most customers that place budget on Weibo are still brand advertisers who has been doing marketing with Sina’s properties, but Sina wants to popularize it among SMEs, according to Charles Chao, chairman and CEO of Sina Corp. Several agencies in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces are managing those customers for Sina.

As offering games is a proven way to monetize a large user base in China, Charles Chao said they’d continue to work on it.

When it comes to its partnership with Alibaba, Charles Chao hopes “over the longer term it will create opportunities in social commerce and mobile commerce which both companies believe are of great potential”, but currently what we have seen on Weibo is targeted ads from Taobao and Tmall. Alibaba has been doing targeted advertising on third-party sites with Alimama program. The ads shown are based on user behaviors such as searches on Alibaba’s properties. What makes those shown on Sina Weibo different is Weibo user behaviors’ may be also taken into account thus Alibaba can push more targeted ads. To Sina, what would be added is just more CPC/CPS-based revenues.

Earlier this month it launched the mobile-only-for-now Page that anything, a location, a topic or a good, can set up a webpage for other users to follow — it sounds like what Douban, an interest-oriented social site, has been doing. It is expected to have users consume more content and spend more time on Weibo by following Pages they like. It’s also possible that it can be used by advertisers to do content marketing.

Daily active users increased about 8% to 49.8 million. Sina Corp. reported $121.3 million non-GAAP revenue with $94.3 from online advertising and $15.9 million from mobile value-added services.

Related posts: Weibo Generated $66mn in 2012 for Sina, Other Businesses in Decline Sina Weibo Reached 368millions Users And $10m Ads Revenue in Q2 YY Music Reports More than Doubled Revenue in Q1 2013, Will Sell Mobile Virtual Items In Second Half

Chuangtouquan (ctquan), a startup investing network, released a report that shows second-tier Chinese cities are hosting more startups in terms of percentage. In 2011, 84% of Chinese startups were located in first-tier cities including Beijing, shanghai and Guangzhou. The rate decreased to 77% in 2012. Second-tier cities including Chengdu, Hangzhou, Nanjing and Wuhan became the new startup scenes.

It’s driven by no more than cost and talent, according to the report.

1 Costs. The average office space rental rate in the first-tier is 3.5 to 4 times of that in the second-tier and is increasing at 30% to 40%.

67% of engineers who earn 10,000 yuan or more a monthly salary are in first-tier cities. The monthly salary range for an engineer in second-tier cities is 2000 to 5000 yuan.

2 No shortage of talents. Some second-tier cities such as Nanjing, Wuhan, Xi’an and Chengdu are full of colleges that can meet the talent needs.

3 Governments of some second-tier cities, like what some big cities began doing ealier, have set up funds to support entrepreneurship.

Earlier this year, Quwan, a social shopping site, moved its headquarter from Beijing to Chengdu. In an interview on it, Zhou Pin, founder of Quwan, says the major reason is his team cannot see a better life in Beijing; for instance, some of them cannot afford an apartment, “I want them to have a better life so that they can do a better job”. Also he wants his team to “settle down” in the next three to five years developing products and services. (in Chinese)

Some employees didn’t want to move. But what to his surprise is all the senior managers and most mid-level managers agreed to move. It turns out that young people would like to stay in Beijing where they think is full of opportunities and future returns will be high. But those middle aged managers know that only a small percentage of people in big companies like Baidu and Tencent can afford a home in cities like Beijing.

Average office rental rate is 1/3 or even 1/6 of that in Beijing. Average apartment price is 1/3. Local senior engineers earn 80% of the monthly salary of their Beijing-based peers’, but average local employees earn much lower a salary. Now Quwan is headquartered at Chengdu tech park, which is established by the local government, who offers them free office space for a three-year period.

But, Zhou Pin said, marketing and business development divisions must still be in Beijing.  Fu Sheng, CEO of Kingsoft ijinshan, doesn’t think a Beijing-based Internet company should leave at all. He thinks that Internet technologies are changing too fast that you’d be easily lag behind if you leave an environment that everyone is exciting about and talking about tech, and pushed forward by it.

image credit: spencerinsurance.com

Related posts: Doing Mobile Business in China? Do Not Only Rely on Tier-1 Cities TechNode Produces Tech Tour in 5 Cities with Zynga, Rovio, Domob and More Startups Chinese Startups in 2012

Somehow the new version looks like QQ’s little brother Wexin. or WeChat. The status info is never displayed in Wexin, and the newly added social idea of “QQ FriendsCircle” is also pretty much same as the “Moments” in Weixin. Actually it is known that management of the company did intentionally want the two chatting tools be closer in function.

]]> http://technode.com/2013/05/16/mobile-qq-users-are-angry-with-the-new-versions-becoming-a-wechat-knockoff/feed/ 0 http://technode.com/2013/05/16/rumors-aliyun-set-top-box-xiaomi-laptop-camera-360-phone/ http://technode.com/2013/05/16/rumors-aliyun-set-top-box-xiaomi-laptop-camera-360-phone/#comments Thu, 16 May 2013 03:07:22 +0000 Chelsea Dong http://technode.com/?p=10521

Learning with TouchChinese is easy. A teacher will be assigned for a student after the latter signs up to a program. The student can schedule lessons at his/her convenience so long as the teacher is awake and free. One-on-one live lessons will be conducted through video messaging software like Skype.

TouchChina said they’d focus on one-to-one teaching so far. With tools like Skype, teaching one to one is easy no matter how geographically far a teacher and a student are. One of the reasons,
however, that online education is regarded as disruptive is that one live or recorded course would benefit numerous people. Also, since it’s one-time cost, such a course cannot be very expensive if it’s consumed by a considerable number of people. Considering time limits and costs, one-to-one education may still be a luxury to many people around the world. Hope $15 or less charged by TouchChina for a lesson isn’t expensive to everyone who wants to learn Mandarin.

Only those who have received professional training in “Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language”  have the chance to become TouchChinese teachers. When asked about whether it’s hard to acquire a large number of teachers with such a strict requirement, TouchChina said that actually the market is oversupplied with professional Mandarin teachers. TouchChina teachers are from across China with most working on a part-time basis.

TouchChinese started as a part-time project in 2009 and the team went on full-time in 2011. In 2012, the team moved into Media Dream Works, the incubator ran by Zhejiang Daily Media shortly after it had been established in Hangzhou where TouchChinese is based.

]]> http://technode.com/2013/05/15/touchchinese-believes-in-teaching-one-to-one-even-in-internet-era/feed/ 0 http://technode.com/2013/05/15/local-portal-platform-19lou-announced-rmb-60-million-series-a-funding/ http://technode.com/2013/05/15/local-portal-platform-19lou-announced-rmb-60-million-series-a-funding/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 05:06:38 +0000 Tracey Xiang http://technode.com/?p=10511

19Lou.com, a platform running local portal sites for Chinese cities, announced RMB60 million (US$9.7 million) in series A funding from two Hangzhou-based early-stage venture capital funds under NewMargin Ventures (announcement in Chinese). An angel round was  raised in 2008.

Founded in 2006 by several local newspaper reporters in Hangzhou and only serving Hangzhou citizens then, 19Lou now covers twenty cities in Zhejiang province and a dozen outside it, including first-tier cities such as Shanghai, Chongqing and Wuhan. A total of more than 30 million users are on all those sites.

Local portals sites are everywhere. Some cities have more than one sites dedicated to them. But 19Lou stands out as one of the most popular and has become a brand speaking for itself. It has created some innovative services and a well-functioning business model.

Huatan is a sub-channel crowdsourcing local news. Citizens are allowed to submit news entries and they can subscribe to topics with entries contributed by others. Another sub-channel Haodian, or stores worth visiting, is a platform for local businesses set up their online presence and for citizens to share pictures and comments about those stores and services.

19Lou charges local businesses for setting up a mini-site there and other forms of campaigns. Its revenue sources also include online advertising and offline activities such as small trade shows. It doesn’t charge users for any services provided.

The new funding will be used for improving online-to-offline services, said Lin Yu, founder and CEO of 19Lou.

]]> http://technode.com/2013/05/15/local-portal-platform-19lou-announced-rmb-60-million-series-a-funding/feed/ 0 http://technode.com/2013/05/15/local-portal-platform-19lou-announced-rmb-60-million-series-a-funding/ http://technode.com/2013/05/15/local-portal-platform-19lou-announced-rmb-60-million-series-a-funding/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 05:06:38 +0000 Tracey Xiang http://technode.com/?p=10511

Beijing-based MadeiraCloud Raises US$1.5 million Series A Funding from Sequoia Capital

Local Life Service Platform DDMap Raising New Round Led by F&H

Innovation Works’ Start-up, Doodle Mobile Raises US$10 million in Series A Funding

Continue reading →]]> 19Lou.com, a platform running more than thirty local portal sites, announced RMB60 million (US$9.7 million) in series A funding from two Hangzhou-based early-stage venture capital funds under NewMargin Ventures (announcement in Chinese). It received angel investment in 2008.

Founded in 2006 by several local newspaper reporters in Hangzhou and only serving Hangzhou citizens then, 19Lou now covers twenty cities in Zhejiang province and a dozen outside it, including first-tier cities such as Shanghai, Chongqing and Wuhan. A total of more than 30 million users are on all those sites.

Local portals sites are everywhere. Some cities have more than one sites dedicated to them. But 19Lou stands out as one of the most popular and has become a brand speaking for itself. It has created some innovative services and a well-functioning business model.

Huatan is a sub-channel crowdsourcing local news. Citizens are allowed to submit news entries and they can subscribe to topics with entries contributed by others. Another sub-channel Haodian, or stores worth visiting, is a platform for local businesses set up their online presence and for citizens to share pictures and comments about those stores and services.

19Lou charges local businesses for setting up a mini-site there and other forms of campaigns. Its revenue sources also include online advertising and offline activities such as small trade shows. It doesn’t charge users for any services provided.

The new funding will be used for improving online-to-offline services, said Lin Yu, founder and CEO of 19Lou.

]]> http://technode.com/2013/05/15/local-portal-platform-19lou-announced-rmb-60-million-series-a-funding/feed/ 0