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This is one of those unusual occasions on which I feel genuine sympathy for Microsoft, which has a hard time catching a break in China. It's true there was, during the Tim Chen era, a brief flowering during which Microsoft's government relations improved and the company appeared to make real progress licensing Windows to Chinese OEMs. Remember ...

Singapore's PAP has discovered its value as a political marketing tool:Said PM Lee [Hsien Loong]: “(This) is how this generation communicates — through YouTube, through images, through sounds — and we have to get our message across in a serious way, but in a way which people can accept, and we’ll resonate with them on our website and on many ...

Predictably for Skype, the mainstream coverage of the TOM.com keyword trapping scandal has grown, with associated reputation damage for the former naive idealists at Skype and their parent, E-Bay. (Browse examples at ZDNet, Reuters, The Register, GigaOM, Financial Times, the BBC, AFP, and god knows where else.) Among the mainstream coverage so ...

If you don't know the story, you can read up on the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal (and again in the Journal here, with more focus on the backlash for Skype). In a nutshell, the story is that the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which focuses on Internet, free-speech and censorship issues, released evidence that TOM-Skype, the joint ...

The Financial Times today has an interesting article (subscription) on the few markets where global search megalith Google is not the market share leader. These include Russia, the Czech Republic, Japan, Korea, and as anyone reading this blog probably knows, China. Here Baidu is king, with about 60% of searches. Google CEO Eric Schmidt had the ...

If you follow either Apple, the Chinese tech scene or Chinese Internet buzz, you've probably heard of ''iPhone girl''. A British man reportedly discovered several photos of this young lady, apparently a quality-assurance inspector at contract manufacturer Foxconn, on his newly purchased iPhone 3G. Reportedly the girl's photos were taken by her ...

For those who are a bit weary of the whole idea of corporate pavilions, Media magazine has a witty review of the pavilions of all of the Olympic TOP sponsors. Each is helpfully compared to the Olympic athlete or icon that it most resembles. Two examples:China MobileSMS a vote on your favourite Olympic photograph and receive a set of stickers and ...

From the Sydney Morning Herald:Organisers had repeatedly claimed that internet would not be censored during the Games but at the press conference a Wall Street Journal journalist produced his laptop and showed that sites such as the BBC in China and Hong Kong's Apple Daily were being restricted. BOCOG media director Sun Weijia initially ...

Via the Wall Street Journal's China Journal, Paul Denlinger at China Vortex has translated an internal e-mail that Alibaba founder and CEO Jack Ma wrote and distributed to his staff recently. The e-mail promptly found its way to Sina and was duly published. The e-mail is interesting because it is very candid about Ma's expectation of hard ...

...says Paul Denlinger at China Vortex, reacting to Thomas Crampton's recent online video discussion with Oiwan Lam on the 50 Cent Tribe:The biggest difference between astroturfing and censorship: astroturfing is a PR term and censorship is a political term. Astroturfing is a PR tactic which can be used for either political or commercial ends; ...