Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 26th May 2009
1 COMMENT 
Pieter-Paul,
Language is an obvious barrier for foreign companies trying to tap into the Chinese Internet market. Many foreign entrants have underestimated its impact and the distinct market characteristics it has resulted in. To name two: language has contributed to the autonomous character of the Chinese web and as lots of netizens are not familiar with the commonly used Pinyin input system they prefer to click instead of type.
In some cases also the name of a company entering China can be a problem. In this respect Facebook is not very lucky with its name: some people say that in Pinyin it sounds like ‘fei si bu ke’ which means ‘doomed to die’. Also Google has not proven to be a good name. Zhang Tao, International Sales Manager at Baidu, expressed: “I believe that around 15 percent of the Chinese people cannot spell Google.” To cope with this – to make it easier for Chinese netizens to remember – Google has acquired the domain name G.cn back in 2007.
Back in 2006 Google was looking into adopting a Chinese name. Eventually it was decided the 
official Chinese name was to become Guge (谷歌), which means ‘Harvesting Song’ and sounds very much like Google in Mandarin. Google’s officials said it expresses “the sense of a fruitful and productive search experience in a poetic Chinese way.” Alternative sound-likes opted by Chinese netizens that filled in an online poll at news portal Sina.com were: NoGuge, Gougou (dog dog), Goule (enough), Gugu (auntie), Gugou (ancient dog) and Gege (elder brother). (more…)
Written on 10th November 2008
2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I’m touring around China with bloggers. I hope to give you as many updates as possible about this land of endless opportunities. Thanks to Spil Games for sponsoring me.
The two killer features in the early times of the web were portals and email. Here in China, the first one is still very popular (While in the western world this is absolutely not the case). The latter however, never really quite made it in China.
As you can imagine, I was rather surprised when Andrew Lih – author of the upcoming book The Wikipedia Revolution – told me this. During a magnificent lunch in the Yunnan restaurant he gave us, bloggers from the west, a brief introduction on China and the web.
Influential portals
The largest sites in China are still portals. Lih mentioned that most Chinese Internet users hardly use the address bar while surfing. Instead, they click their way through the web. Not surprisingly, the main portals are huge. Sina for example, is so influential that even government officials put @sina email addresses on their business cards. Other big names are Sohu, 163, and 51.
As you’ll see, a lot of Chinese web services have a number as their name. When you speak out these numbers in Chinese, they sound like certain phrases. 51 sounds like “I want”. Put a word like jobs behind it and the numbers suddenly make sense.
Forget email, Chinese use IM
So what about email? Why isn’t that popular? A survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences showed that only 30 percent of the Chinese Internet users check their email on a daily basis. They would rather use IM. Particularly because their private conversations aren’t saved – or at least they have that impression.
China’s most popular IM service QQ counts a stunning amount of 341900000 active users. That’s actually more than the total number of Chinese Internet users (253 million), which means a lot of people have multiple identities.
Written on 19th May 2008
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Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
China’s most popular news and sports site Sina has launched an English version to provide international readers with the latest on the earthquake that took 32.000 lives and made millions of people homeless. Sina president and CEO Charles Chao told AFP: “We have chosen to launch our English news site now as we would like to provide up-to-minute coverage of the earthquake for overseas people who are concerned about the tragedy”. Quite a digital after shock, if you’d ask me. But just a nasty little thought here, is it really an aftershock? Or does a media hype, how terrible it may be, comes in handy for China’s leading portal?
Chao: “Over the longer term, we intend to make this site a window for international communities to have an easy access to China-related information and to have better understanding about modern China.” Right, there it is. Sina is just an ordinary media giant with a healthy ambition: to conquer the world. Revenues are expected to grow with 30 percent over the next few years, thanks to the Olympics, so Chao and his executives probably aren’t afraid of investing some capital in international expansion.
You don’t here me complain though. I’m sure there are some Sina editors that genuinely want to tell the world how their fellow citizens are suffering. Yet I just don’t buy the noble words by Chao.
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