Lee Kai-fu’s decision to quit his job as head of Google China has been portrayed as a major setback for the company as it struggles to catch up with mainland rival Baidu. Yet his successor’s background and preference for a less-technology heavy approach could play very much in the United States company’s favor. Read article in Asia Times.

This three-page write-up will be tremendously helpful to someone interested in how Google’s advertising programs, AdWords and AdSense, work. It follows from a discussion we have in Chapter 3: Traffic alert: Baidu of the book.  ( view as pdf | view as html )

In a sudden move, Google China President Lee Kaifu said he would leave the company later this month.

But, industry insiders have been talking about that Lee Kaifu is only the face person for Google China for a long time. The real person in charge is John Liu, the head of sales, Google hired from SK Telecom in 2008.

Lee used to the only one left among the first batch of executives Google hired in China, now, every one of them has gone. This is in fact good for Google, as they are not the right kind anyway – too many of them come from multinational companies, and they are not familiar with local culture.

John Liu understands Chinese users and Chinese business environment better, if he is in charge and if he is also in charge of Google’s R&D direction in China, Google can have a better chance of coming up with popular applications in China – and catch up with Baidu.

Lee’s ideas are similar to Google headquarters’, but they seemed too sophisticate to the ordinary Chinese internet users – who are just young people looking for fun, and friend, online. That’s why Baidu’s MP3 and now Post Bar are magnet to them.

Google, whose Internet search engine has struggled in China to replicate its market dominance elsewhere in the world, is bringing all the firepower it can to overwhelm local rival Baidu in the vast new frontier of Chinese third-generation mobile-phone Internet search.

China didn’t introduce 3G mobile-phone technology until the start of this year, and companies such as Baidu and US-based Google are looking to cash in as the world’s biggest mobile phone market switches to the faster technology. Read the article in Asia Times.

For people interested in founding their own ventures in the China, this week’s article in Global Times might be an inspiration to them. Many foreigners worked in the country’s first Internet ventures. And many have arrived since. We look at several stories of westerners who founded their own companies in China – people who had only a smattering of Mandarin at the start and ended up running companies where everyone else is Chinese.