China IT Review

In the afternoon of September 28 Beijing time, Alibaba(HKG:1688) announced that they will invest RMB 540M (USD 80M ) in HiChina (net.cn) for about 85% share.  And the investment will be settled before the end of 2009 by 2 steps. This is the largest investment to outer companys ever since Alibaba got IPO.

HiHhina is an old IDC in China, which holds a great market share in IDC field. However, HiChina is poor on reputation. Alibaba believes the firm cooperation with HiChina will lead to better service to its customers.

These years, SME (Small & Medium Enterprises) is a growing group, and also a growing market for companys like Alibaba, Baidu, etc. This investment can express the determination to customers of Alibaba, whereas, the poor reputation of HiChina may affect its parent company. In a word, risks and opportunities exist side by side.

There’s more than a month since Baidu launched it’s box computing at Baidu World. Most experts thought box computing must be something like Google Universal Search or Yahoo! Onebox. However, box computing surprised them.

With box computing,  things go creative. Try search “126″ in Baidu, the 1st result is no longer a nomal text link but a login form. As 126.com is one of the biggest mail service in China, Baidu provided a form to help user login directly.

box computing

So what’s the difference? For one thing, this simple form simply saved a click to the login page; for the other thing, this strategy can easily prevent primary users from being cheated. This is neither Universal Search nor Onebox can provide.

Another sample is related to E-commerce. When searching for a mobile phone, such as “诺基亚5800” (means “Nokia5800″ in English), Baidu will give basic infomation about the phone, like camera, operation system, etc. Baidu also shows different prices from different B2C websites of this phone. It’s really cool.

box computing

The last sample is also about E-commerce. Taobao.com, the biggest C2C platform in China, announced to block Baidu’s spider in 2008. But Taobao now relies on Baidu’s box computing to display its customer service number. It’s funny.

taobao is a clown

That’s right, Taobao is a clown.

Box computing is cool, and it will be better when combined with E-commerce.