Once a year, around mid summer, there is the China Digital Entertainment Expo and Conference (or more commonly known as China Joy).  All the major game companies in China and thousands of their fans gather in Shanghai for the 4-day event.  It is like the Electronic Entertainment Expo (or E3) in Los Angeles, but noisier and perhaps more entertaining as the game companies showcase their latest hits with models in game customs.

It is organised by General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP), the government department for regulating online game. The above photo was taken in China Joy 2009, where models dressed up as characters in the online games for fans to take pictures.

More photos about China Joy:

1) The venue of China Joy

2) More models showcasing online games in China Joy

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.

As the last of the 14-part series in Global Times, this week we will try to sum up what are the key differences and how successful Chinese Internet competitors synthesized components from their Western counterparts, all the while innovating to accommodate the unique characteristics of the Chinese market.  Read article in Global 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.

On the day of the migration, traffic to eBay China dropped by half. Despite the serious customer losses, Meg Whitman, then CEO of eBay, only learned about it a month after it occurred, on a visit to Shanghai. Whitman was shocked and very upset. Apparently, even the head of eBay International at the time, who was one of the most ardent proponents of migration, did not tell Whitman about it. Read the article in Global Times.