china

China's largest Internet company Tencent acquires a Chinese social networking development company. The deal was reportedly worth more than 60 million dollars.

Tencent enters China's BBS market

Tencent is China's No.1 online game operator and operates famous IM service and portal QQ. Comsenz is a Beijing-based social-networking provider which is behind the Discuz online discussion board platform which is extremely popular in China and also other community products.

Over 80% Chinese sites are running its BBS and over 70% of the BBSs are built on Discuz system. Comsenz also developed some other free social software like UCHome with which you can easily set up a Facebook-like social network.

Google invested 1 million dollars in Comsenz two years ago. Comesenz will now operate an a subsidiary of Tencent.

The consequences of the acquisition

First consequence of Comsenz's acquisition by Tencent is that million of Chinese sites will be seen as powered by Tencent instead of powered by Discuz!.

Besides, all the search engine of the BBSs built on Discuz system will be powered by Tencent’s search engine Soso. This could help Soso improve its low market share in China's search market against its main competitors, namely Baidu and Google.

In addition, Tencent might integrate its services like QZone and its microblogging service into the Discuz platform. QQ number could also be used as login with all Discuz powered BBS, so that QQ number could become the truly ‘OpenID’ in Chinese web.

Tencent wants to remain China's biggest Internet company

Other Chinese Internet giant Alibaba recently acquired Comsenz’s competitor PHPWind to enter China's BBS market. Tencent’s move on Comsenz is therefore clever in order to counter Alibaba.

BBS plays a very important part in Chinese eCommerce market since people often look for and exchange information about products. The question is now to see whether Tencent will take advantage of Discuz to promote its Paipai eCommerce platform in order to compete with Alibaba.

Tencent which owns 10% of Russian Facebook investor Digital Sky Technologies could look for more acquisitions as it seeks to expand overseas.

About .CN domain names

.CN is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for mainland China. It is currently the sixth most common top-level domain, after .com, .de, .net, .uk and .org with over 7.62 million registrations.

Second-level domain names include generic second-level domains such as com.cn, edu.cn and gov.cn, and second-level domains of provinces such as bj.cn, hn.cn and sh.cn.

About Chinese domain names

Chinese domain names are domain names that contains at least one Chinese character. Domain names with Chinese characters may also be registered at the second level under the .cn TLD.

Latest June, ICANN approved the use of the internationalized TLD .中国 (".china" in Simplified) and .中國 (".china" in Traditional) by CNNIC. These two TLDs were added to the DNS in July 2010.

CNNIC manages .CN and Chinese domain names

Founded in 1997, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) is a non-profit organization responsible for administering and managing .cn and Chinese domain names.

CNNIC operates under China's Ministry of Information and Industry (MII), an agency that oversees telecommunications, multimedia, broadcasting and satellite transmissions across China.

How to register a .CN or a Chinese domain name

CNNIC accredited Chinese Domain Name registrars responsible for providing Chinese Domain Name registration services. Based on the principle of "first come, first serve", you may select one of them, and go to their website to proceed with the online registration.

Any business or organization, worldwide, can register a .cn name under a new liberalized policy that no longer restricts .cn registrations to  Chinese. Currently the registration is not yet open to individuals.

China's No.2 Internet portal Sohu will sell 32% of its Sogou search engine to investors, including top Chinese eCommerce company Alibaba Group.

Sohu sells shares of its Sogou search engine

Sohu will actually sell 16% to Alibaba Group, parent of Hong Kong-listed Alibaba.com and Yunfeng fund, co-founded by Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma, and another 16% to a fund invested by Sohu Chairman Charles Zhang. The remaining 68% of Sogou will be held by Sohu.

When it launched Sogou, Sohu had big hopes for its wholly-owned search engine, but it has failed to gain market share against Baidu and Google during the past few years. The deal with Sohu will help Alibaba expand in the nation’s $1 billion search-engine market.

China's leading search engine Baidu is looking to go abroad and invest more overseas in the near future.

Baidu plans to go abroad

According to Baidu CEO Robin Li, the company should grab the opportunity offered by the international market. However, he didn’t mention which countries the company was interested in. Baidu already operates a search engine in Japan. 

Robin Li, who opened Baidu's first office in a Beijing motel, expects the move to be made “as early as possible”. He hopes to have significant revenue outside of China in the next 5 to 15 years.

Other Chinese companies have also made efforts to expand abroad, such as Alibaba, the country's top eCommerce site, which recently acquired the US eCommerce site Vendio.

Despite competition, Baidu still leads China’s search market

Baidu currently leads the Chinese search market with a 70% share according to research firm Analysys International. The company's main rival, Google, ranks second with 24%.

Baidu wants to become more than a search company

Baidu is developing several other projects for the mobile market. According to Robin Li, the company is preparing a "revolutionary" product. That should be a mobile OS to compete with Google's Android.

Other sources say that Baidu is also developing its own browser.