What does a massive social network following and criticizing China’s government from within the country get you? For Kai-fu Lee, the former head of Google in China, it was a three-day ban.

Lee, now chief executive of the Chinese startup incubator Innovation Works, announced on his Twitter page that he has been banned from Sina and Tencent’s Weibo microblogging sites for three days. Bloomberg confirmed the ban with him by phone.

Lee urged his Weibo followers to join him on Twitter, where he has almost 1 million followers, but given that Twitter is banned in China, only his most hardcore fans would be able to follow that advice. (It’s possible to access banned services from within China, but it takes a bit of technical know-how.)

While Lee didn’t say why he was banned from Weibo, recent postings suggest the move was related to his criticisms of China. As Bloomberg points out:

A Feb. 16 post summarized a Wall Street Journal article about how slow speeds and instability deter overseas businesses from locating critical functions in China. Last month, he also posted support for staff of a Guangzhou-based newspaper during a standoff with government censors.

The tone of Lee’s comments, coupled with his massive social media following within China, likely don’t endear him to China’s authorities.

For all of his criticisms, Lee also believes in China’s ability to spark strong businesses. He raised a $180 million fund for Innovation Works in 2011 and explained to VentureBeat how he views the difference between China and the United States.

In reality, it’s not that different from the United States. Companies that have a good product and business model and a good culture that cares about users will succeed. Some companies are overvalued and maybe even bubble, but just as many are very good and show great promise. The trick is picking the winners — just like in the U.S.

Posterous announced the acquisition Monday in a blog post. For now, Posterous will remain the same and the “Spaces,” or blogs, you’ve created will still be active until future notice. Posterous even created a FAQ for current bloggers to navigate the changes that will arise with the acquisition.

The blogging site started out letting you post to your blog via email. Last year, Posterous created Posterous Spaces, personal websites populated with text and photos that you can make as private as you’d like. The concept was born out of the company’s iPhone app, designed to share pictures you take on the go.

As is common with these types of deals, no purchase details have been released. Twitter released a statement saying that it will be bringing the Posterous team on board and continue to keep Posterous Spaces alive. There’s no word on why Twitter wanted to buy up the blogging site, but perhaps the company wants to branch out beyond microblogging and get a leg up on Tumblr.

Posterous is backed by Y Combinator, Redpoint Ventures, and Trinity Ventures and raised $15 million as of September 2011. The company was founded in 2008 and is based in San Francisco.

VentureBeat has reached out to Posterous for comment and will update this post if we get a response.

Posterous CEO Sachin Agarwal photo via Sachin/Facebook

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

New York-based startup MightyMeeting has its sights on boosting mobile productivity in the enterprise. In keeping with the growing trend of using tablets to do work, MightyMeeting is unveiling a collaboration app called MightyTeams for the iPad and Android tablets.

Several apps have popped up in the last year that have pushed the enterprise into adopting tablets. Apps such as Skype, Dropbox, Yammer, and SalesForce Mobile have paved the way for more enterprise-minded apps to be released.

MightyMeetings seeks to eliminate the need for multiple apps to communicate with your team and share work with its new application MightyTeams. While popular services DropBox, Skype, and Google Docs give companies an easy way to share documents, collaborate on projects, and communicate with entire teams, you still need at least 2-3 apps on your tablet to use these services. MightyTeams rolls several collaboration services into one app, letting you share files, work on documents between teams, message team members, and hold conference calls in one interface.

MightyMeetings previously released an app of the same name which focused on presentations via video and PowerPoint and attracted customers from the pharmaceutical, manufacturing, and financial services industries. The new application, available online and for iOS and Android devices, focuses on collaboration between employees includes features such as microblogging, group messaging, voice conferencing, and file sharing. Each service is something you’d find in a stand-alone app. For example, Yammer is a enterprise social network that includes activity streaming and microblogging, and Skype offers group messaging and video calls.

MightyMeetings isn’t the only company to release an app like this. Veeva Systems has released similar software-as-a-service applications to enable companies to work on projects together. Veeva’s Vault service, for example, facilitates file sharing and project cooperation. Veeva’s products are primarily aimed at the pharmaceutical sales industry.

MightyTeams will be available Tuesday, Feb. 21 in the Apple App Store and the Android Market. It can also be accessed with any browser. The app will cost you a subscription fee of $4.99 per month, but current MightyMeetings members can get it for free.

But the investment is actually a secondary deal, meaning Alwaleed bought the shares from existing Twitter investors, reports Fortune’s Dan Primack. That means Twitter won’t be seeing any additional funds from the investment.

Referred to as a “strategic stake,” or more than 3 percent in the company, the investment is Alwaleed’s first in a social networking site, but he also has holdings in Apple, General Motors, and News Corp. Alwaleed is the largest individual investor in Citigroup.

“We believe that social media will fundamentally change the media industry landscape in the coming years,” said Ahmed Halawani, KHC executive director of private equity and international investments, in a statement today. “Twitter will capture and monetize this positive trend.”

Update: The investment suggests Twitter’s valuation is at around $10 billion, given that Alwaleed is willing to spend $300 million for at least 3 percent of the company. That’s a big jump from Twitter’s ~$8 billion valuation from September.

The news follows Twitter’s latest round of updates, affectionately dubbed “new new Twitter,” which aim to make the service more accessible to mainstream users. The injection of new funds could help Twitter to speed up development, and make it better suited to compete against Facebook in the fight to attract a general audience. Facebook is expected to raise $10 billion through an initial public offering (valued at $100 billion) early next year, according to the latest reports.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Here’s a quick break from all-things-American on July 4th:  Apple just sent us a tip about a shoe shiner in China reunited with her daughter after five years, thanks to an iPhone and Chinese microblogging site Weibo.

A 71-year-old shoe shiner hadn’t seen her daughter after the girl moved from home. A lack of internet, cell phones, and several address changes resulted in the separation. On June 24th, the shoe shiner saw someone with an iPhone and begged the man to do a search online for her daughter. There was no WiFi available in the area, so the man took a picture of the woman and later sent the image to his followers on Weibo, along with a phone number to reach the woman.

After just a few hours, with the help of celebrities and new organizations, the message was re-tweeted 100,000 times. The story spread through other media as well and on June 27th, the daughter saw her mother’s photo online and called the number.

One can only imagine how amazing that conversation must have been.

Here’s the full story from Chengdu Commercial News. Google Translate does a very rough job of converting it, but you’ll get the idea.

As the service climbs toward mass user adoption and stabilizes its ground — having recently replaced its CEO, pushed out the next iteration of its product, and stepped toward implementing a monetization strategy — the finding adds some perspective to its growth so far.

Based on phone interviews with 2,257 partipants, the survey revealed that the service was notably more popular among men than women, 18-29 year-olds than other age brackets, and minorities — such as Hispanics and African Americans — than white Internet users.

In 2008, the group had asked participants whether they use “Twitter or another service” to post or see others’ status updates, to which 6 percent answered in the affirmative. The same question, when asked in September of this year, had the number escalate to 24 percent. To clarify doubts by readers and analysts, this new survey was carried out with a question phrased to refer strictly to Twitter.

For comparison, it is estimated that approximately 130 million Americans use Facebook, equating to roughly 41 percent of the population. Also, similar surveys by Pew Research have found in the past that 4 percent use geolocation services, and 24 percent use mobile apps.

He may be set to correct that mistake, according to Bloomberg, which reports that his firm, Kleiner Perkins, and Russian Internet investment group DST, are set to invest in Twitter in a deal that would value the young company at $3 billion. Its most recent fundraising round, in September 2009, valued it at $1 billion.

That’s a hefty price for a startup whose revenue strategy is still questionable, as even its own executives admit. Twitter has launched a suite of advertising products based on users’ posts, or tweets. Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, Trends, and Accounts allow businesses to highlight search terms or particular posts, or sign up new subscribers to their posts.

But to date, most of Twitter’s revenues appear to have come from deals to license data to search giants like Microsoft and Google, as well as smaller companies like Jive and Gnip.

So the notion that Twitter is worth $3 billion on the current state of its business is nonsense, of course. And anyone who argues that it’s based on some solid projection of future growth is huffing whiteboard-marker fumes.

There is a classic investing theory that explains the price Kleiner and DST are willing to pay: It’s called the greater fool. If Doerr and company are paying such a high price for Twitter, they must be betting that in short order, someone else will be willing to pay much, much more.

If you’re willing to say Twitter’s worth $3 billion, why not $10 billion? The beauty of the speculative market for startups is that there’s no need to actually analyze a business: If someone actually pays the price, it’s true.

“We just hired our 300th employee. Wowza!,” tweeted Twitter’s recruiting arm, JoinTheFlock around noon Pacific time.

Since it began its meteoric growth, Twitter has nearly tripled in size, adding 400 people since June. It’s a massive rate of addition, considering Twitter had only 110 employees at the start of 2010.

In contrast, it had only 22 employees on its roster at the start of 2009 and had moved into spacious new headquarters—the former office of Bebo, another social-networking startup—in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco by the middle of November 2009.

Now, however, the company appears to be outgrowing its current digs. The company told the San Francisco Chronicle last month that it was on the hunt for new offices with at least an additional 200,000 square feet.

“Based on our current growth trajectory, we can’t stay in the two floors that we currently have. So at some point, we’re going to have to look at other options,” Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner told VentureBeat today.

But where exactly that may be remains to be seen. In appearances with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, company cofounders Ev Williams and Biz Stone have expressed their commitment to staying in the city of San Francisco.

Williams blogged on October 4 that the company had reached 300 employees, but Twitter clarified those numbers to TechCrunch today, saying, “We had 300 full-time + contractors + interns at that time. Now we have 300 full-time employees.”

Activity on the network of Tumblr blogs skyrocketed over the first half of the year and reached about 1.7 billion page views in the month of August. (Automattic’s WordPress.com, an older, more established blog platform, recently reported 2.1 billion monthly pageviews.) But Tumblr, which employs about 10 people, has been unable to provide service for hours at a time to its users, because of high traffic.

“It’s got humongous potential, and humongous potential to fail,” said JD Rucker, president of Hasai Media, a digital marketing firm that builds Tumblr blogs for corporate clients. “We know it can fail. It was down 10 hours straight in July. It goes down way too often. How are they going to turn a profit without pissing people off?”

Both WordPress and Posterous, another competing blog service, have experienced downtime, but not nearly at the rate or amount that Tumblr has, Rucker said.

Blogging has a long history. But the space has gotten more competitive over the past year, as investors have funded startups that promise to simplify the process of self-publishing for the masses.

Tumblr, based in New York, raised more than $10 million by April, with three rounds of funding led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. Competitor Posterous raised $4.4 million in March in its first round, led by Redpoint Ventures. Automattic, which hosts blogs on WordPress.com and supports an open-source blog-software platform, has raised about $30 million in venture funding including a strategic investment from The New York Times Co., as well as backing from True Ventures, Polaris Ventures, and Radar Ventures.

The commercial promise of these services remains untested. Six Apart, a blogging pioneer whose TypePad service competes most directly with Automattic’s WordPress.com, recently announced it is folding the simplified blogging service Vox, which never gained firm traction after four years of existence.

Tumblr lets users create their own blogs from an existing library of templates, hosted for free by the company. Tumblr’s success has drawn comparisons to Twitter of 2008 and early 2009, as the company racks up big numbers of new bloggers each day.

Hundreds of companies, too, have created Tumblr blogs because of one simple reason; it does not require users to learn how to use WordPress or any other similar content management system.

Tumblr has not yet made public how it plans to make money, though it has toyed with some ideas, like sales of virtual gifts and premium themes.

“It’s ironic because you can actually put Google Ads on your Tumblr blog if you want and make money that way,” Rucker said. “But the company itself isn’t doing anything like that.”

Tumblr has separated itself from services like Vox in part because of several key features. The service has won over fans who love its flexibility. Some users only post Twitter updates on their blogs, while others put videos or original work.

“You don’t have to grab embed codes,” Rucker said, of the virtues of blogging on Tumblr. “You find a video you want, upload the URL [website address] and you put it in there. Tumblr automatically resizes it for you. You can give this to somebody who can barely program a VCR and they can do a blog post in a minute.”

One of the the most popular features of the service is an option that doesn’t require you to write anything: Users can “reblog” other users’ content, with a link back to the original. That serves commercial users’ purposes in two ways: It spreads content through word of mouth, and it creates links which can potentially boost a piece of content’s ranking in Google and other search engines.

That’s the upside of Tumblr. The downtime and site errors have raised concerns about the long-term scalability of the company and its service, however. Big increases in traffic have brought “Error” messages to visitors. The hurdles come at a crucial time for the site.

“They are definitely growing faster than they can hold,” Rucker said. “And right now it’s an issue because they are at such a delicate stage. They have reached that tipping point where they can explode onto the scene, but all it takes is poor preparation in the form of server problems that could basically piss people off enough to where they might leave.”

Could Tumblr rival Twitter? Rucker says yes.

“Realistically it can easy surpass Twitter in overall value,” he said. “It would be valued at nine figures based on just the page view number. But the real reason is because you can find a whole lot more of value on a Tumblr page potentially than on a Twitter page. People will revisit a Tumblr blog because of a wealth of content whereas they don’t re-visit a Twitter page nearly as much because it is made up of 140-character messages.”

StatusNet

The company targets businesses looking for a service that will enable internal communications and collaboration, unlike more public-facing services, like Twitter. (StatusNet’s service can be used publicly, too.)

StatusNet is accessible in two ways, including a Web-hosted version and a downloadable version. While the Web-hosted version enables a company to start posting updates quickly, the downloadable version offers more control and customization, according to StatusNet.

As Twitter continues to grow in usage, a recent survey shows social networks dominating Americans time spent online, it isn’t suprising a company might want to keep control of their communications through an in-house microblogging service for employees or customers. Other companies also have had the idea to provide businesses with a communication and collaboration tool similar to Twitter, including JaikuEngine, an open-source project; Six Apart’s TypePad Motion; and Yammer, which recently closed a round of funding for $10 million.

StatusNet, a Montreal-based company founded in 2008, has secured $2.3 million in funding to date. The round was led by FirstMark Capital and included Boldstart Ventures, iNovia Capital and Montreal Start Up.

Scott Switzer, Founder of OpenX, angel investor and FirstMark Capital venture partner, will join the StatusNet board.

Scoopler, one of the startups that launched during the real-time search craze of last year, has a new way of tracking news on Twitter.

It’s called @wtf. Twitter users can post a message starting with that Twitter handle with a topic they’re interested in like “Facebook” or “technology.” Scoopler’s @wtf account will receive the message and start referring popular stories about that topic. It looks for stories that are retweeted heavily and alerts users about them by mentioning their handles in a tweet, a process known as an @reply (which Twitter highlights for users on its site, making them easy to find). When you want it to stop, you can reply ‘s’ or ‘stop’ to the Twitter account. @wtf only delivers tweets about one topic at a time.

The idea is pretty simple, but it’s different from other methods of tracking news on Twitter. Normally, if you want to follow news, you might follow other accounts that tweet often about topics you’re interested in. Another option is to follow a Twitter search, but it’s usually overwhelming and doesn’t filter for repeated tweets or links.

After Google launched real-time search last year and Twitter finally started improving its own offering, real-time search startups have been retooling their business strategies. Scoopler is shifting away from its standalone real-time search property, while OneRiot has turned on an advertising network. Tweetmeme earns revenue off advertising on its page and is testing new types of advertising that’s “retweetable,” playing off the behavior of Twitter users who repeat or “retweet” messages that they like to their followers.

Twitter announced its own ad network last week, putting ads into search results and directly in people’s streams of updates. Once it nails down the details, Twitter will begin serving ads through other startups built on its platform that want to deliver them. This could bring another revenue source to Twitter startups like Scoopler.

Karp hasn’t commented on the valuation, but in a comment on a blog post, investor Fred Wilson of Union Square said it was “a huge step up” from the company’s previous funding, in which Tumblr raised a similar amount from Spark and Union Square. That means Spark and Union got a smaller piece of Karp’s company in this deal. The company has raised $10.2 million in total.

So why does a company with more than 4.5 million users and 1 billion pageviews need more funding? Karp hasn’t quite figured out how to best monetize his company and is “pretty opposed” to advertising on the site, according to a recent Los Angeles Times interview. Advertising is a traditional way for many companies to generate revenue, usually through services like Google, whose AdSense service scans the content of a page and places keyword-linked ads.  Karp decided this was not to the benefit of users and is currently testing other ways to monetize the service.

The company is exploring and testing several nontraditional ways to make money, including virtual stickers, which users can send to others or post on their own blogs. Other interesting revenue-based services include letting Web designers sell Tumblr “themes,” or designs which make up the style and background image of a blog, for a 30 percent cut. Another possibility: selling reprints to photos that appear on the site (like the one above, which comes courtesy of Karp, from one of his Tumblr posts).

Tumblr makes it easy for users to create and publish content, such as text, pictures, videos or links. The company has implemented several intriguing features which separate it from similar services like Twitter. A new commenting feature lets users choose to either allow or not allow comments from users they follow. It’s an interesting way to handle the onslaught of spammers and disruptive commenters who plague other blogging services.

Another feature, called photo-reply, lets users reply to others using photos rather than the traditional comment or re-blog, a way to instantly share content with followers.