VentureBeat

Scores of cities in China have more than a million people, and 51.com has beat out its rival social networks to be the most popular in many of them, even if it’s not the most popular in cultural centers like Shanghai and Beijing. It faces both international rivals looking to enter China — including Friendster, Facebook and MySpace — as well as domestic startup rivals like Xiaonei, and social networking features on Tencent’s Qzone.

But, the company’s popularity in what some call “second and third-tier” cities in China contributes to its 31.5 million monthly unique visitors and more than 120 million total users. So it’s only a little smaller than Facebook’s monthly visitors in the US.

51.com isn’t sitting still as more social networks eye the growing Chinese market. When I wrote about the company’s $50 million funding in May, it said it was looking at offering a developer platform, as many of its international competitors were.

Today, the company has announced the name of its new backer: Giant Interactive Group, a publicly-traded Chinese game development company. This is a strategic move by Giant, the rough Chinese equivalent of game maker Electronic Arts buying a large amount of stock in Facebook or MySpace. More from Giant chairman and chief executive, Yuzhu Shi:

“[W]e are positioning Giant at the forefront of the trend towards increasing convergence between online games and social networking communities. Enhancing the community-building and social networking aspects of our online games has been one of our key strategic initiatives, most recently highlighted by the launch of our expansion pack Neighboring Friends for ZT Online. The combination of Giant’s online game platform and expertise at free-to-play game monetization with 51.com’s social networking business provides a unique opportunity to broaden our player base, expand our community-building opportunities, reinforce user stickiness, and extend the lifecycles of our games.

The company bought a 25 percent interest in 51.com, for a more-symbolic $51 million — valuing the social network at $204 million. Previous investors also particpated, including Sequoia Capital China, SIG, Intel Capital and Redpoint Ventures.

Here’s the latest action:

Google tests out a new, more functional iGoogle (with a friend update stream) — The company’s personalized homepage service is looking more and more like a — dare I say? — social network. The latest version has side tabs that can contain elements such as a Google Talk widget so you can instant message from the page and a Gmail widget so you can email from the page. Neither of these are new, but the layout of them is.

Most notable is the addition of an “Update” widget that looks like it will work exactly like Facebook’s News Feed, giving you updates of what your friends are doing around the Internet. In this regard it also seems a bit like the social content conversation site FriendFeed. (Which happens to be started by a bunch of ex-Googlers.)

Google appears to be making it so iGoogle is your main hub on the Internet. Facebook and MySpace along with the other social networks may have something to say about that.

Click on the image above for a slightly larger picture and notice the update stream on the right of that image.

Ahead of the iPhone 3G launch, Apple orders up more — The company’s stated goal for 2008 is to sell 10 million iPhones. However, with the excitement swirling around the iPhone 3G and its impending worldwide roll-out, most analysts are now projecting the number sold to be higher. Apple seems to agree, as it’s reportedly revised its build orders to more than 15 million iPhones by the end of the year, according to FBR Capital Markets analyst Craig Berger. Interestingly, the same report indicates that Apple ordered up two million of the original 2G iPhone as well. Maybe they’ll be stocking stuffers for the holidays?

Giant Interactive takes stake in Chinese social network 51.com — We noted last month that the site was closing in on $50 million or so in new funding, now we know the backer, thanks to Ogilvy China’s Digital Watch blog. Couldn’t they have made it $51 million just for kicks?

NIN continues to pioneer in the digital space — Rock band Nine Inch Nails has created an amazing layer for Google Earth that lets you see where exactly in the world people downloaded its latest work, The Slip, from.

Habbo hits 100 million avatars — The world’s largest virtual community for teenagers today announced the milestone. Since launching in 2000 the network has grown quickly, now attracting close to 10 million visitors a month.

The iPhone and iPod Touch: Your new remote control — You know that dinky white remote Apple gives away with many of its computers? Yeah, it’s about to get blown out of the water. A new application for the iPhone/iPod Touch will let you use either device to control iTunes remotely, according to MacRumors. Text indicating the feature is buried in the pre-release of the new iTunes 7.7, which is currently being seeded to developers to test.

BlogTalkRadio gets a $4.6 million first round — The social network lets users create their own radio stations on the web. The round was led by The Kraft Group, yes the same group that owns the NFL’s New England Patriots. Investor Scott Sipprelle also participated. The company is based in Lakewood, N.J.

We’re number one! (At predicting news…kind of.) — VentureBeat has risen to the top spot on the HubDub PunditWatch leaderboard, The Wall Street Journal’s Numbers Guy blog was kind enough to point out. The debate is still out as to what exactly constitutes a prediction, but we’ll take it and predict a long run at the top.

Rupert Murdoch holds forth on newspapers, Obama and Hollywood release dates: What if Rupert Murdoch were to wake up tomorrow and discover that he was the owner of a metropolitan newspaper? “I would run,” the News Corp. owner said today at the All Things D conference. Murdoch also admitted that he’d been involved in the editorial decision of the New York City-based newspaper The New York Post, a News Corp subsidiary, to endorse presidential candidate Barack Obama, whom he called a “rockstar.” Of interest to Hollywood, Murdoch said that he’d like to see the release date narrowed between when a movie comes out in theaters and on DVD and video on-demand. As the owner of social network MySpace and other popular social web properties, Murdoch’s Fox studios has especially strong internal set of formats for movie promotion and distribution. Finally, Murdoch pointed out that Obama’s campaign appears to be spending the most on Google ads, not so much social networking ads or other forms of advertising. You can watch the full video here.

Intelius, thinking about going public, accused of scam — Naveen Jain’s Intelius is scamming millions from users through a subscription-service-posing-as-a-survey scam, Michael Arrington charges, referencing extensive public documents about the company’s finances. Jain, notably, previously faced a number of charges over misleading investors about the value of Infospace, a dot-com era he headed that was briefly valued at $31 billion. Jain’s son defends him in a separate reply to Arrington’s piece, which you can read here.

How much will the housing crunch lead to unemployment? — Entrepreneur turned stock market bear Jon Fisher says unemployment will rise to nine percent in coming months. Fisher uses this Bloomberg chart to show a correlation between a fall in the rate of new U.S. housing creation (white line) and a rise in unemployement (red line) in the last fifty years. You can also read our previous coverage of Fisher’s views on the economy, and the future of tech startups.



More details on Chinese social network 51.com’s social network — 51.com, which competes against established social media services like giant instant messaging service QQ, Facebook clone Xiaonei and others, said last week that it was working on a platform for third party developers. Kaiser Kuo, who writes an excellent blog on the internet in China (in both English and Chinese ), has gotten more details from the company. It will launch a beta version sometime in June, with a set of APIs that will focus around “user information, friend list information, and other basic user activity on the network,” Kuo hears from company founder Andy Yao Yonghe. Top developers will be joining the company in the announcement, and launching applications.

Two more mobile platforms, one from Qualcomm, one from Microsoft — Qualcomm, the maker of mobile software including the BREW operating system, is introducing its own mobile widget platform today, called “Plaza.” Meanwhile, Microsoft is working on its own mobile platform, mysteriously code-named “Echoes.” It will be designed to let mobile operators run a set of Windows mobile applications and other services. Platform is certainly a buzzword now, but the iPhone SDK and Google’s Android both have the most momentum when it comes to offering meaningful ways for third party developers to build mobile applications. Taking into account their out-of-the-gate lead, the name of Microsoft’s offering already seems a little ironic.

Dispatch 1 from Beijing

I’ve just landed in Beijing and I managed to get to a Chinese tech conference called CHINICT in time to hear some interesting local social networking news. 51.com, one of the largest social networks in the country, is closing a $50 million round and plans to launch a platform for third party developers later this summer.

This is notable because 51.com has more than 25 million monthly active users, and more than 100 million total registered users, making it the second largest social network in the country behind Qzone. While I hear that other large Chinese social networks are also looking at launching platforms, 51.com appears to be the first one to discuss its plan publicly. Also, it is separately launching the alpha version of a casual gaming platform in August.

I asked 51.com senior vice president Yonghe Yao if his company was planning on supporting existing open standards provided by Facebook’s platform (which has already been licensed to competitor Bebo), or the rival Open Social standard championed by MySpace and Google. He tells me that his company is evaluating open standards from US companies and hope to incorporate as many standards as possible.

Leading application companies that are already on Facebook and other social networks have been eyeing the Chinese market, as Slide chief executive Max Levchin told me last month. Its not just that Chinese social networks are some of the largest in the world, it’s about revenue.

51.com, for example, made 44 million in revenue last year, 70 percent of which was from virtual goods and other user-related revenue streams; the other 30 percent came from ads. In fact, I hear that the largest Chinese social networks are hesitant to open up too much to third parties because they want to make sure they’re the ones who make money from virtual goods.

Slide — and many other application developers — are also looking at virtual good sales as new ways of making money.

51.com isn’t disclosing further details on its funding at the moment; it has raised previous funding from Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Intel Capital, and others. Its rivals have also been busy on the funding front. Most recently, neck-and-neck rival Xiaonei raised a whopping $430 million round.

More info on 51.com. It recently launched an instant message service that 1.5 million users log on to every day. It has grown large in smaller Chinese cities, and 80 percent of its users are between the age of 14 and 25. Users spend an average of 41 minutes on the site and log in 18 times per month.

You might have also noted that many Chinese companies have numbers for names — video site 56.com is another one. The reason is that these names are homonyms in Chinese. 51.com sounds like “I want.” 56.com sounds like “I’m happy.”

I’ll be publishing more news from the conference. For other English-language sources, follow web2asia’s coverage here, the collection of CHINICT Twitter hash tags here and Tangos Chan’s excellent China Web2.0 Review blog.