QQ Tech and various other sources have reported that Shanda Interactive Entertainment Ltd.((ADR) NASDAQ: SNDA) is about to launch a private beta of its e-book reader product, Bambook.

The product site has already gone live and the private beta will start on August 12. The beta testers will be limited to 3,500 users, who will enjoy a special price of RMB 998 (US$145). Any registered Shanda users can apply to participate in the beta.

Bambook has Wifi built-in and supports all three of the Chinese 3G networks through external expresscards which will have to be purchased separately.

According to QQ Tech the OS will be based on Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Android, but it also says it’s based on the Palm WebOS — now part of Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ) — which sounds confusing to say the least. When looking through the product specs on the Bambook website, no mention is made of the OS.

Probably the most novel feature is an optional solar charging accessory, which makes the product always available on-the-go. Of course we’ll have to see more details of this accessory to see if it is practical in actual use.

If you clicked on the product site link, you’ll probably notice some subtle similarities in design to Apple’s website. I think the bookstore section reveals the Apple influence even more, as it looks iTunes inspired. The actual content offerings are based on Shanda’s strong online literature presence, which boasts “more than 3 million titles, and more than a million online writers adding 100 million words of original content daily”.

While Shanda is obviously comparing Bambook to Amazon.com, Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) Kindle in hardware design and features, the offerings are really quite different. Shanda’s online literature properties own rights to some big name authors, but my understanding is they are by and large driven by user-generated content, such as fan-fiction. A casual look at the bookstore suggests majority of the books are such works, which would be updated daily / weekly, so it’s very much a subscription type of consumption.

While there are some classics and some contemporary books by professional writers, the offering seems quite limited. For instance, I did a search for the 14 novels of Jin Yong, arguably the best-selling Chinese author ever, and I only found tons of fan-fiction (maybe they need a better search function). Kindle, on the other hand, is very much about New York Times bestsellers. I do think there’s a fundamental difference in the business model.

Which brings me to the issue of price. While QQ Tech contends the RMB 998 price-tag is much lower than competitors’ offerings, which easily go as high as RMB 4000 (US$ 580), I still think it’s too high. It’s about the same price as the Kindle and Barnes & Noble, Inc.’s (NYSE: BKS) Nook, which means if you look at it in purchasing-power-parity terms, it’s significantly more expensive than the Kindle. Fundamentally, I don’t see people spending RMB 998 to get a single function device with a black and white screen, and which is really only good for reading fan-fiction. Of course, pirated books would be a big use case – but even then, physical pirated books sell for RMB 10 (US$1.4) on the street, so the price gap is pretty substantial – a Kindle is about 15 times the cost of a paperback, while the Bambook would easily be in the 50-100x range. Which is why Shanda is probably doing such a small beta.

There is no doubt that Android has been a success, especially in terms of offering consumers more choices. US consumers now have a perhaps overwhelming number of smartphones to choose from, across the major carriers. This is certainly a great development.

What I want to focus on in this post, however, is looking at Android from the eco-system players’ perspective – Google, the handset manufacturers, the carriers, and the app developers. My position is that while Android is full of promise as a platform, some fundamental dynamics of the eco-system will make it very challenging to navigate, especially in terms of financial gains – at the end of the day, these players are in it to profit.

I would like to start by going through each player’s objectives from participating in the Android eco-system. Starting with Google, its objectives are:

• Gain a permanent foothold in mobile, ensuring Google’s future when the web becomes increasingly mobile-driven
• strategically, prevent dependence on Apple in mobile, limit its bargaining power
• Increase traffic to Google properties, most notably search, which will in turn grow Google’s ad revenue
• Offer users a consistent Google user experience across mobile devices
• “Lock” users into Gmail, Google Maps, Youtube etc. (think Microsoft shipping IE with Windows)
• Develop a mobile go-to-market channel for future Google products

In essence, it’s all about Android being the hook which will retain the user in using Google products.

What about the handset manufacturers’ objectives?

• Develop handsets that rival the iPhone’s value proposition, capture market share in the booming smartphone segment
• Differentiate from competitors
• Reduce OS R&D costs

And the carriers:

• Retain some degree of control in the device, unlike Apple’s terms with AT&T
• Prevent becoming “dumb pipes, up-sell users on carrier VAS (value-added services) such as mobile video, ring-tones, gaming etc.
• Reduce Apple’s bargaining power
• Differentiate from other carriers

There is one thing all players agree on – counter the iPhone; but beyond that, there are some immediate points of tension. As smartphones seem to converge on the single big touch-screen form factor, hardware manufacturers will find it increasingly difficult to differentiate in shape and design. In that sense, HTC / Motorola / Samsung would very much want to tweak the UI or customize the OS, but that would quickly run into conflict with Google’s wish to offer users a consistent experience; and practically speaking, UI may really be too much a core part of the OS for the manufacturers to customize. Hence, manufacturers face the dreaded prospect of following the footsteps of PC manufacturers – low differentiation leads to low profits.

At the same time, carriers and Google’s interests aren’t that well-aligned, either. Google recently shuttered its Nexus One online store, which was hailed to disrupt the status quo of handset distribution by offering a contract free model instead of the typical carrier-subsidized model. Obviously this did not please its carrier partners. On the flip side, carriers perennial fear of becoming “dumb pipes” drove them to loading up Android phones with hard-to-remove bloatware, which consumers generally dislike and probably is making Google cringe – and just serves as more ammo for Apple’s value proposition of a refined experience.

My point here is that the logical implication of these interlocking conflicts is compromise. Google aggressively wants Android to become the de facto mobile OS – so much so that not only is the OS free to manufacturers, Google is also reportedly sharing search revenue with carriers / manufacturers. (Pretty amazing that you can think of this as almost the opposite of Apple’s original iPhone terms, where Apple got a share of AT&T’s revenue.) Manufacturers will get away with deals such as putting a Baidu search box on the phone, which would obviously go against Google’s interests. Carriers will get to keep their finger in the OS.

Sometimes these compromises result in degraded user experience, such as bloatware. Most often, they call into question the financial returns on Android. It would be a very difficult task to model how much incremental revenue Google will generate by owning Android, as opposed to not owning an OS and just receiving mobile search traffic from all devices. Manufacturers will get to ride the smartphone boom for a while, but then will again be hard-pressed for innovation – again, the PC manufacturers come into mind. The biggest winner from all this seems to be the carriers – especially Verizon – they finally have options other than Apple, and they can keep their old business model.

This is one of the most entertaining Internet stories to come out of China in a while, and it is really full of Chinese characteristics – all the bad ones, unfortunately. Tang Jun, who was once heralded as the “emperor of professional managers” for his high profile roles – former president of Microsoft China (NASDAQ: MSFT) and ex-CEO of Shanda Interactive Entertainment Ltd. ((ADR) NASDAQ: SNDA) – is currently at the center of a massive controversy over his diploma.

QQ has a short summary (link in Chinese) of the event’s development – on July 1st, Fang Zhouzi, a biology PhD who is famous for exposing plagiarism and fabrications in Chinese academia, commented in a series of posts on his Sina Weibo (microblog) that Tang Jun had lied about his education and his patents in his autobiography, “My Success Can Be Replicated” (book name my translation). In the book, Tang had said he held a PhD from Caltech.

Tang initially refused to respond to Fang’s allegations, but on July 6 he stated in public that he has never claimed to hold a PhD from Caltech; instead, his doctor’s degree is from Pacific Western University. Unfortunately, that only fueled the flame, as Fang quickly pointed out that Pacific Western University is a “fake” university with a controversial history and was shut down by the State of Hawaii (check out the wikipedia link) – essentially, this is an institution engaged in the business of selling diplomas and wasn’t accredited. Tang then responded that he went to the other Pacific Western University, the one in California, not in Hawaii; but Fang quickly responded that the two shared the same ownership prior to 2006 (as the wikipedia articles show).

Then Chinese netizens jumped in and started digging out other dirt around Pacific Western University, and in the past week netizens have been circulating “manifests” of notable Chinese businessmen who are rumored to be Tang’s alumni at that institution.

Perhaps also very damaging evidence is Tang’s own LinkedIn profile. Currently the education section lists “Pacific Western University, PhD”, with no timeline attached; but just a few days ago the education section looked like this:

(image courtesy of Dongxi.net – this is an edited version of the screenshot that has basically been cropped to highlight the education section of the profile)

Notice how on the education section it still clearly stated a PhD from California Institute of Technology. A search on Baidu Inc. ((ADR) NASDAQ: BIDU) for the keywords “Tang Jun linkedin” (the name in Chinese) also reveals a whole range of blog posts and discussions which expose Tang’s LinkedIn profile change.

Fang also raises the interesting issue of the legal repercussions of Tang’s controversy – he points out in Shanda’s F-1 filing with the SEC before its IPO, it states,

JUN TANG has served as our president since February 2004. Prior to joining us, Mr. Tang served as the president of Microsoft China Co., Ltd. from March 2002 to January 2004 and the general manager of Microsoft Asia product support and service and Microsoft Global Technical Engineering Center from January 1998 to March 2002. Mr. Tang holds a doctorate degree in electrical engineering from University of Pacific Western, a doctorate degree in electronics from Nagoya University, Japan, a master’s degree in electronics from Nagoya University and a bachelor’s degree in physics from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

Obviously, this is another version of his education – the part where it states that he has a PhD from Nagoya University. It doesn’t indicate that in either the current or earlier version of his LinkedIn profile. Fang therefore raises the interesting question of whether Tang is liable for lying to the SEC.

Questions about Tang’s fake diploma and personal integrity aside, what I find to be really interesting is the surprisingly divided reaction of Chinese netizens. Indeed, there’s one camp of people who are vociferously defending Tang, saying “don’t ask about a hero’s roots”, or “you shouldn’t judge a manager by his education background”. As the other camp rightfully points out, we’re not attacking Tang because of his (relatively) poor education achievements; we’re attacking him because he lied about it.

But the drama doesn’t end there. In the past few days, discussions have intensified around the mystery of Tang’s education history in Japan – he went there to pursue a PhD, but according to most versions of his education background, he did not finish the PhD and went to the US instead in 1990. There were immediately speculations that he went to the US to get what Chinese netizens call a “blood card” – a green card issued by the US to Chinese students abroad who sought political asylum from the Tiananmen incident of 1989.

On this last point, I don’t think there is enough data to support the claim, and even if it were true, I don’t see it as a breach of integrity (I think a lot of Chinese people look at such cases as profiting from the bloodshed). But a consequence of such discussions is that there has been a crackdown on Chinese microblogs, for the obvious reason that the June of 1989 is a banned topic. So right now all the major microblogs are running with a big “beta” sign on the front page, and trending topics of Tang Jun are being harmonized (they have resurfaced on Sina).

Interestingly, netizens are now speculating that Tang has used his influence to get the authorities to censor the topic – another conspiracy theory thrown into the mix. I think the censorship is still more to do with discussions of 1989, rather than Tang’s powerful connections. But such are the dramatic twists of everyday Chinese Internet soap opera.

And before I end – the most recent rumor is Tang’s current employer, Newhuadu Industrial, has fired him. Totally unsubstantiated, but I won’t be surprised if Tang does lose his job because of this.

Well, that was a temporary fix, as Google’s China ICP license is up for renewal, and they need to appease the Chinese government. Google is again trying to do so with a half-measure.

The Atlantic has a good summary of major tech blogs’ response. Opinions are somewhat divided on how things will progress, but if anything no one is talking about how moral and upright Google is, this time around. Good. In my original piece back in January I had argued how dubious Google’s stance was:

… a cyber-attack is illegal by any country’s law, whereas what is censored and what is not censored can be different due to country-specific issues like religion or in the case of China, politics. So for Google to use the hacker attacks as justification that it can’t tolerate Chinese censorship anymore is somewhat dubious, since this is not exactly the same issue.

Google’s latest announcement just further confirms my position. It seems that, after all, Google does care about its business prospects in China; but it appears to be too smart for its own good, trying to get away with both being morally righteous and doing business as usual.

Read this together with another piece of news today, which talks of Google’s ambitions for Android in China and India, and I’m starting to feel that Google internally does not have a coherent strategy for China. Obviously, having a row with the Chinese government is not good for business, especially when looked at from the Chinese perspective – nothing had changed in the government’s policy throughout the years of Google China’s existence, and Google’s January fit seemed completely out of left field (again, cyber-attacks and government censorship are very different things).

I remember a few months back, at an investors event in San Francisco, Kai-fu Lee, the former head of Google China, had mentioned in passing how his company – Innovation Works, a early stage VC / incubator – had a few projects that were basically picking up the development of Android in China after the Google debacle (if my memory serves me correctly). Essentially, quite a few Chinese companies are interested in Android, but dealing with Google has become a politically charged issue, so you’d almost have to have an intermediary. This is especially true of the major Chinese carriers – it is unthinkable to see China Mobile do a high profile partnership with Google while this political spat is ongoing.

Google needs to work out its priorities. If it wants business in China, it needs to drop its high talk and start showing genuine long-term commitment to the market – otherwise it will be hard to retain its Chinese business partners, and it will always be a distant second.

We’ve covered the launch of Qiyi.com, a new video site backed byBaidu, Inc. ((ADR) NASDAQ: BIDU). The site imitates a lot of Hulu’s functionality and design, and in terms of business model Qiyi is certainly also looking at advertising. Qiyi’s CEO, Gong Yu, was recently interviewed by QQ Tech (link in Chinese), and while it’s a lengthy piece (with lots of marketing talk), Gong did share some interesting perspectives and stats. I’ll try to blend his quotes with some questions I have for the site.

On content acquisition:

“…Our content comes from several sources… Copyright intermediaries are a major source of content in our procurement… We aim to be the biggest legal video content database in China by the end of this year… Our licensing rights for domestic TV series are usually 1-3 years, with some cases being 5 years.”
– Gong Yu, CEO, Qiyi.com

My thoughts: I think one key difference between Qiyi and Hulu is that Hulu is founded by content companies – NBC, Fox and ABC. Theoretically and quite probably in practice this gives Hulu lower acquisition costs to content. Qiyi on the other hand, is an “outsider”, and Gong has basicallyadmitted they need to go through middle-men to get the content. This will definitely raise its costs.

On revenue generation:

“We see three main models for video sites. The first is user-generated content. The second is short clips purchased from TV networks, usually news and documentaries, to form a news-reporting service. The third is long-form entertainment. Almost all of Qiyi’s resources are used on long-form entertainment. This means the amount of content we have will be less than websites such as Youku which does all three models.

However, of these three models, we see offering long-form entertainment to users for free and generating revenue through advertising as the most healthy model, so we are devoting all our resources to it.”
– Gong Yu, CEO, Qiyi.com

My thoughts: Clearly Qiyi is adopting Hulu’s existing model. However, I have reservations on whether Hulu is as successful as Gong believes, since the news last week on Hulu looking at a premium membership model probably suggests that advertising alone is not enough for profitability. Furthermore, online advertising in China has always been a lesser developed business model, which is the very reason Chinese social networks were so creative in using virtual currencies to generate income – pure advertising based plays just haven’t survived that well in China historically.

On site features:

QQ Tech: How did Qiyi come up with innovative features such as auto resume of the clip last watched and “dim lights”?

Gong Yu: This is due to our positioning and the needs of the market… as a new video site [late-comer to the game] our first step is not how to grow the overall market but how to build a brand in a already established market. The speed and quality of the video is important, but user experience is also very important.

Friendly user experience is in the details, such as the auto resume function you mentioned, it’s to address specific user habits…

… Other features such as the “dim lights” which helps you to focus on the video, and video recommendations based on your mood (“happy”, “sad”), are all to make the site user friendly to users of all ages.

My thoughts: Obviously a lot of these features are straight from Hulu.

On feedback from users through beta-testing:

“Users gave positive feedback on the user-friendliness and uniqueness of the site and its design… Users highlighted the high quality of videos… They also noted that more content needs to be added, but most hit shows from recent years are already available.”
– Gong Yu, Qiyi CEO

My thoughts: Video quality may be a differentiator, but that probably won’t last. And these shows are available on most Chinese video sites. Conversely, the availability of copyright infringing content on competitors’ sites (even a casual search on Sina Video returned episodes of US TV series such as CSI) means that competitors will still have an “unfair” advantage, for as long as they can get by the litigations. If anything, Qiyi will be footing the bill for educating Chinese consumers on copyright – not sure if that’s a viable business model.

In sum, I’m somewhat bearish on Qiyi, 1) the ad-based model it’s trying to copy isn’t exactly a blockbuster for Hulu; 2) content not exclusive (as far as I can tell); 3) Chinese online environment still very liberal for piracy / bittorrent, so lots of alternatives for content.

My biggest takeaway from Chirp was how ambitious the Twitter team is. For a company that has long been under critics’ fire for not having a business model, the core of its strategy remains surprisingly attached to “getting the product right” first. The company’s priorities, according to CEO Ev Williams, is “0. Infrastructure; 1. Friction-free; 2. Relevance; 3. Revenue.” Revenue was decidedly last on the list.

Infrastructure is easy to understand – Twitter has been hurt by scaling pains so many times that it makes sense that the company is focused on coping with the growth first and foremost. Friction-free is about making the service easier to use, especially in the context of retaining new users, which was Ev’s rationale for the Tweetie acquisition. Friction-free is also the thinking behind the @anywhere initiative – so that users can use Twitter anywhere on the web, and not be interrupted by having to open another web-page etc. Relevance is partly about search, and partly about new features such as location and annotations.

And this is where things start to get interesting. For a long time, Twitter itself did not have an inbuilt search function; a number of 3rd party developers offered competing Twitter search products. The leader of these products, Summize, was eventually acquired by Twitter; but as Ev described it at Chirp, it was more like a merge of equals (size of team etc.). While the Twitter team didn’t talk a lot about search, I felt the key to the service’s relevance, and future business model, would be search – how do you organize this world of information (to paraphrase Google’s mission) stored in the billions of tweets, so that value can be extracted?

This is by no means an easy task. The distinctiveness about Twitter is its timeliness – you can literally find out what’s going in the world right now. However, this also makes search, or any other type of data organization, technically complex. Annotations and other types of meta-data helps reduce the complexity, as well as efforts to understand the users’ intent – are you looking for info on a specific location or event – but it will still be a daunting problem. (Google and Bing has had access to Twitter’s data-stream for a while now, but whether it’s for lack of trying or the complexity of the issue, their current use of Twitter data in their search results seem largely inconsequential.)

Still, if the Twitter team can crack this nut, then they may have on their hands a truly blockbuster product. The beauty of Twitter is how many different usages people have come up with for it – as a communications tool, it is simply an enabler of numerous services. If they can make their information much more organized through search, then the value of the communication tool is enhanced, as well as the services built on top of it. The recent story of how Twitter can be used to predict box office success is just one example of the potential value.

(This post was written over several days so the thought-flow is somewhat broken.)

When I was interviewing for my summer internship, I got asked the question “if you had funding to build a new search engine, what would you do?” My response was you can either tackle the existing search problem through a drastically different algorithm, or focus on specific verticals (e.g. travel) or new markets (mobile, location). If we change the phrase “search engine” to “method of organizing information”, then certainly both Twitter and Facebook are taking on a differentiated approach from Google. While the three companies may at face value be in very discrete markets, they are on a unavoidable collision course in terms of competition. While Google is all about indexing the static web, Facebook and Twitter are built on the social web, and they may well grow to become the Google killer that many have been searching for.

This is not as far-stretched as you may think. Think about the last time you performed a search. Did you ask any friends first? Was it only when they said “I don’t know” that you replied, “don’t worry about it. I’ll just Google it.”? Google search is powerful and hugely useful, but only to the extent of how useful the static pages it indexes are. When you do a search on a specific question, you often have to tinker it a few times. Click on a few different search results. Read through them. Often the pages won’t have the answer to the exact question you have, but enough info to give you pieces of the puzzle so you can piece it together. This is still much, much more efficient compared to doing research at the library, but the power of the social web is that you are not confined to static pages and information – the odds are that there is some person out there who knows exactly the answer to your question, and the power of the social web is that it enables you to ask that person directly. Quite a few of the people I follow on Twitter use it as a magical search engine – you pose a question on Twitter and your followers answer it.

Of course, this is just one specific scenario where social web services such as Twitter and Facebook have the upper hand against Google (and for the many, many instances where you need static information Google is still the better option – e.g. what is the year that the US was founded); but it does highlight Google’s key vulnerability – its lack of presence in social. Be it Orkut, Wave or Buzz, Google has repeatedly shown its inability to come up with a competitive social networking product. Maybe Google simply doesn’t have the social genes in its DNA – which is fine, as for the foreseeable future they will still make a killing in Adwords/Adsense. But the danger for Google is that search gets demoted from a primary instinct into a secondary instinct, the same way that Kayak / Mobissimo / Bing Travel and other vertical search engines have made Google irrelevant in travel search. It will still be a huge market, but only a less efficient/user-friendly alternative. And it’s clear from Facebook this week and Twitter last week that these companies have huge ambitions too in organizing the world’s information – hence the competition will be inevitable.

One last note – while Facebook has seemed to garner much more attention and praise with its announcements, Twitter’s efforts, especially in mobile shouldn’t be disregarded. The news today that Twitter has acquired SMS service Cloudhopper may sound insignificant to those of us who are used to iPhone apps and 3G networks, but in the grand scheme of things SMS is still such a viable and active method of information delivery. It will be interesting to see how Twitter uses SMS to its advantage.

When the iPad was first announced, I quickly made the decision that I wanted one, and I justified my decision by telling myself that it would be an laptop replacement for school. I’m pretty big on paperless, and prefer reading cases on my laptop instead of printing them out; so the dream product for me (for this purpose) would be a tablet with a stylus to take notes. The iPad doesn’t support a stylus, but from the original announcement, and the fact that there’s plenty of iPhone apps that support PDF viewing, I thought I could justify splurging $500 on the iPad. (And yes, I decided fairly early on I only wanted the $499 version. I don’t need 3G access and from my previous usage statistics I don’t need big storage.)

However, when the iPad reviews came out last Friday and the product shipped last Saturday, I realized that this 1st gen device does not pass as a laptop replacement, even for the relatively lightweight usage of school (email, PDF, and some basic Office apps). Then again, I’m thinking of using the device in the sense of a traditional computing paradigm, whereas from the onset Apple was looking at the device as an iPhone-esque paradigm, a closed system and a tightly controlled user experience.

The tradeoffs are numerous and huge in implications. Jobs and Apple criticized netbooks for being a device of compromise which doesn’t really excel at doing anything; they claimed that the iPad is “magical” and “revolutionary” in that it sets out to accomplish what netbooks were originally intended to do – convenient access to basic computing tasks (email, web, video) – without sacrificing the user experience. What was sacrificed was an open file system; multi-tasking; flash; multiple channels to access and purchase software. To state the obvious, the iPad copies iPhone’s user environment, rather than that of the MacBook.

This makes the iPad, as it is, primarily an entertainment device. There is nothing wrong per se with this positioning; Jobs’ hyperbole that the product is “revolutionary” still has some merit, in the sense that the device is beautifully intuitive to people with little prior experience with computers. The iPad to computing is akin to the Flip to video recording, or compact cameras to photography. It’s an entry level device (albeit a luxurious one) designed for the mass consumer.

Interestingly, this design philosophy has sparked a philosophical debate among heavyweight bloggers: Doctorow from Boing Boing fears that the iPad era means an era of stifled grassroots innovation and creativity (users are “infantilized” – kids can only play with it, but are restricted from exploring it and programming it – unless you hack it first), while Gruber argues that there will still be creative kids. I’m more inclined towards supporting Gruber’s position. The proportion of users who are interested in programming may decline, but that’s more due to computing becoming accessible to all rather than there being fewer aspiring programmers. I would even argue that the App Store, closed and arbitrary as it is, has leveled the playing ground a lot more for new programmers (ease of distribution and access to users), and therefore there should be more aspiring programmers than ever before.

That being said, the geek in me craves for a more open product than the iPad. I want the flexibility of having access to the file system, of having more than just the App Store to go to find software, and I need multitasking. I need to be able to type up a word document while also doing some web search. Apple has a pretty good history of improving its products – just look at the 1st gen iPhone and see how much it has improved (no 3G, no App Store – in hind-sight can you imagine people actually bought it?) – and give it ten months and I might be seriously tempted to get a 2nd gen iPad.

China Net Television and other Chinese media recently reported (link to video in Chinese) that there has been another death at Foxconn(PINK: FXCNY) on March 30. This is the third death at Foxconn in as many months, and the third case of employees “falling from buildings” in 20 days.

Foxconn, which manufactures products for pretty much all major tech companies – Apple Inc.(NASDAQ: AAPL), Sony Corporation ((ADR) NYSE: SNE), Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ), Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), Nokia Corporation ((ADR) NYSE: NOK), Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT), Nintendo Co., Ltd ((ADR) OTC: NTDOY), Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT), Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) and Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) (as summarized by Techcrunch) – is notorious for its secrecy and probably excessive labor practices (the Techcrunch article above covers the story of how Foxconn security attacked a Reuters journalist). Three suicide attempts in 20 days is a sign that there are serious issues at this company. The above mentioned high profile clients should take action to thoroughly investigate the labor conditions at Foxconn.

A recap of the recent incidents at Foxconn (summarized by this Chinese article):

• 4am, Jan 23: employee Ma Xiangqian, a 19 year-old male, dies while working a night-shift in Foxconn’s Shenzhen Guanlan plant. Reason of death is still undetermined.
• 9:30pm, Mar 11: a male employee dies from falling from the fifth floor of the dormitory at Foxconn’s Shenzhen Longhua manufacturing site.
• 8am, Mar 17: a female employee jumps from the dormitory at the Longhua site, suffering injuries; she cites stress as the main reason for the suicide attempt.
• Midnight, Mar 29: male employee, surname Liu, dies from jumping from the 14th floor of the dormitory. Liu, who was 23 at death, graduated from Xiangtan University in 2009 and joined Foxconn in August 2009.

ReadWriteWeb hosted a very interesting panel today, live-streamed on the net. The panelists were famous Chinese activist Ai Weiwei (follow his Twitter feed @aiww for a constant stream of challenges to the Chinese government on various issues), Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus.

The discussion was themed around the role of social media (and especially Twitter) in political activism. I felt the discussion hovered around basic questions, such as Ai Weiwei explaining the basic differences in tweeting in English and Chinese, and asking Jack Dorsey “when will you roll out a Chinese language version of Twitter?” To which Dorsey said it was a matter of time – an answer that Ai said he was not happy with.

Some interesting moments / quotes from the panelists:

• Dorsey: At one point he somewhat surprisingly admitted that he had only learned 3 weeks ago that Twitter was being blocked in China.
• Dorsey: He also confessed that he has no knowledge of how to technically overcome the Great Fire Wall, which must have been disappointing to some users who had hoped Twitter engineering would directly tackle censorship in regions like Iran and China.

• Ai: He commented that the panel with Dorsey was like a “blind date”, since he didn’t know what to expect.
• Ai: Admitted that he is on Twitter 8 hours a day, and he gets most of his news through the service.
• Au: During the Q&A he stated that “If we had Twitter earlier, history would be rewritten, and I would be much more famous than my father [note: his father is a famous Chinese poet].”

• One Chinese American lady during the Q&A took an apologist role for the Chinese government and said it should be given more time to lift China out of poverty before tackling democracy. Ai later asked her name and what her venture was in China (a PE firm). Chinese human flesh search engine in action!

Ai Weiwei was at the center of much of the discussion with quite a lot of the Q&A addressing “sensitive topics” such as human rights and China’s one-party rule. In addition, Google Inc.(NASDAQ: GOOG) was also frequently discussed with respect to the ongoing Google-China content filtering spat.

On the whole, I thought the Q&A was much more interesting than the main panel itself, but the discussion lacked depth, partly due to the wide range of topics that could be discussed, and partly due to issues with language / cultural context. Still, it’s a great publicity event for Ai, and if more people become aware of these activists’ efforts, it’s no doubt a good development for the Chinese web.

You can watch the complete video of the panel and Q&A below:

Fanfou, China’s most popular Twitter clone from about a year ago, has been quiet for more than 6 months, ever since being shut down by the Chinese authorities. Its founder, Wang Xing, launched a new site today. The new discount shopping site,Meituan.com (link in Chinese) — beautiful group, in literal translation, but also a pun on the acronym of group purchase every day — could aptly be summarized as a Groupon.com clone.

[image courtesy of Digital East Asia]

The two websites look very similar in design (aside from the different background colors), which is not a surprise for a Chinese clone. There are similarities in features too. Meituan.com currently runs one product sale per city per day, and offers a heavy discount on the product in question. Since March 8 is Women’s Day, the product on offer in the above screenshot is a spa package.

The site lists 15 major cities in China, though only the Beijing site is actually in service. For information on the product being offered, the site pulls information from other websites – in the spa package’s example, reviews on the spa are scraped from Dianping.com (the Chinese-equivalent of Yelp, which is a very unfair statement since Dianping actually launched first).

With Meituan, Wang Xing is now officially a serial entrepreneur. He started the Chinese Facebook clone, Xiaonei (now branded Renren), in 2005 and  sold it for $2M in 2006. He then started Fanfou in 2007. I’m not too sure on the prospects of Meituan, since e-commerce in China is dominated by Alibaba’s c2c platform Taobao.com. It’s not at all difficult for Taobao to emulate the features of Meituan (and leverage its user base and established best-in-class payment infrastructure Alipay), and indeed self-organized group purchase activities have long been present in Chinese forums.