China IT Review

Half year after Sogou’s Cloud Input, Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) and Tencent (HKG:0700) are going to provide Cloud Input Method to their users.

Talking About IME

Different from the Lartin languages, typing Chinese on a computer requires an IME. Because there’s no Chinese word on the keyboard.

There’s a long history about Chinese IMEs but Sogou Pinyin was the 1st one who broke the rule and combined IME with Internet. After Sogou Pinyin, Google China relased Google Pinyin, as a competitive product.

The war of IME also started on mobile devices. However, now, Cloud may become the next battlefield.

Baidu’s IME for Search Box

Baidu’s Cloud Input is still in alpha version and only Baidu staff can access. Form the leaking out screenshots, Baidu’s new Cloud IME is an option in the Preference Settings page.

I think this can be an enhancement for Baidu’s Search. With this IME, Baidu can know better about what the user really want, especially for those lazy users who type pinyin directly in the search box. So far, there’s no idea about whether other products are taking advantage of Baidu’s cloud IME.

Tencent’s IME as a common tool

Comparing with Baidu’s new IME, the Tencent’s is more likely to be a cloud IME that can work on any web page which contains a input area.

What’s more, Tencent’s IME also works well on senior mobile devices.

While more and more client applications became web applications, IMEs followed the same trend. For cloud IMEs, only an interface is not enough, the power of data learning is more important for these IME service providers.

On Apirl 28th, 2010, Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) announced the Q1 2010 earnings. The revenue shocked experts, and Baidu’s shares soared 14 percent after the bell.

Baidu switched their customers to a new AD platform called Phoenix Nest (Feng Chao) in 2009. And now, the strong revenue growth, proved that Phoenix Nest is a more powerful tool. From the mass observer’s point of view, Phoenix Nest is totally nothing new but changed the display form of ADs. However, in deep, the new platform allows competitive terms as Google does.

Once the competitive terms can be bid, I’m pretty sure the term price will grow higher and higher. This explains why Baidu’s revenue has improved so much, while Baidu has been weak in Q1 in so many years.

Recently been found, image-ads appeared in Baidu Image Search results. While other search engines (like Google) still put text-ads on top of  Image Search result. Check out the snaps below:

When search “长城” in Baidu Image Search, the result may contain ads about tour of the Greate Wall (“长城” means great wall, in English). From my perspective, I think this type of ads is fairly intuitive, however, I don’t know whether the ROI is higher than those normal text link ads.

As a comparison, I’d like to take a snap from Google.

Well, Baidu is exploring various forms of advertising, in order to raise the income. And placing image ads in image search results, is a really great idea.

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.