Business concerning early Q4 2012 and The Great Firewall of China.
China is currently one of few countries that deal with the day to day hardships of restricted Internet privileges. In the video posted below, (courtesy of TED) speaker Michael Anti describes how the foreign Internet laws in China are dictated, while mentioning how other countries (Syria, Iran, and North Korea) operate in a very similar way. To summarize the video, China has a “block and clone” system for restricting and imitating today’s most popular Web 2.0 websites.
Facebook, Twitter, and Google are just some examples of the websites restricted on the Chinanet, which China has created clones for under the addresses of RenRen (Facebook), Weibo (Twitter), and Baidu (Google). Because of this policy, Chinese Internet use is funnelled towards these three websites as opposed to the originals created in NA. In stock market terms, this seems like a potential way to earn some profit. Barron’s magazine dipped its toes into this phenomenon in last weeks issue (08/13/12), suggesting Baidu as one of today’s most valuable Internet companies to invest in; while news on Baidu’s earnings have been nothing short of positive since early 2009.
For the time being, Baidu’s main obstacle is mobile device searches, but this should only be a minor speed bump in the grand scale of this companies up and coming future.
Fri, Aug 17, 2012, by spotless
Social Networks