China Watch Blog

China Watch Blog has learnt that the number of Chinese mobile phone users has exceeded 1 billion as of the end of February.

According to a statement posted by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on its website, the total number of mobile phone users increased by 20.67 million during the first two months this year to hit a record high of 1.01 billion.

The number of 3G mobile phone users rose by 15.5 million in the first two months to reach 143.92 million, the statement said.

During the same period, the number of landphone users dropped by 828,000 to 284.29 million users.

The number of Internet users with broadband access totaled 154.96 million as of the end of February, with a net increase of 4.96 million during the first two months, according to the statement as reported by China Daily.

China Watch Blog has learnt that two major Chinese microblogging sites, weibo.com and t.qq.com, have suspended comment functions after they were punished for allowing rumors to spread.

According to a Shanghai Daily report, the t.qq.com, run by Tencent, put up an online announcement this morning that it has decided to suspend comment function from March 31 to April 3 to clean up rumors and other illegal information spread through microbloggings.

The weibo.com operated by Sina also released an announcement today saying it would suspend comment function during the above-mentioned period.

Chinese authorities have closed 16 websites and detained six people responsible for “fabricating or disseminating online rumors”.

The State Internet Information Office (SIIO) and Beijing police said that those websites were closed for spreading rumors of “military vehicles entering Beijing and something wrong going on in Beijing,” which were fabricated by some lawless people recently.

Beijing police also detained six people for allegedly fabricating and spreading the above-mentioned rumors, particularly through microblogging posts, according to the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Public Security.

A spokesman with the SIIO also said with regard to a number of rumors having appeared on weibo.com and t.qq.com, the two popular microblogging sites have been “criticized and punished accordingly” by Internet information administration authorities in Beijing and Guangdong respectively.

China Watch Blog reports that as technology is changing expectations in the airline industry, passengers want to be in control, and they expect airlines to become solution providers and aggregators of value, to provide them with personalized services.

Airline employees expect to be given the tools to do their jobs and to meet passenger expectations. Airline executives expect to make returns that are reasonable and relatively stable through business cycles.

All of these expectations can be met by airlines through the effective and efficient leveraging of information and technology, to shift from begin operations- and product-centric to becoming customer-centric and dramatically improving the overall passenger travel experience throughout the travel cycle.

In his new book by world-renowned airline expert Nawal K. Taneja, the 7th in a series with Ashgate, the author explores and explains the game-changing opportunities presented to the industry by new generation information and technology.

He shows how information and technology can now drive, not just enable, an airline’s strategy to become truly customer-centric at a personalized level, while at the same time enabling the operator to reduce costs, enhance revenues, reduce risks and become much more flexible and agile by better managing complexity.

China Watch Blog wishes to inform readers that Personalized Media Inc., a leader in content discovery and user engagement for online media companies, has launched a new platform for premium publishers, which enables publishers to engage users better with their premium content, and increase the views on their flagship sites.

“Most premium publishers lose 30%-50% of their traffic to search engines. The same publishers spend significant budgets on Search Marketing and Social Media Marketing to drive traffic to their premium editorial content,” said Rajiv Salimath, CEO of Personalized Media. “With our new platform, we help publishers retain users in their premium editorial content pages, and drive users from targeted non-premium sites to the premium sites.”

The Personalized Media platform uses patented semantic Web technology to understand the concepts on a Web page, and then finds interesting and relevant articles, videos and apps from the publisher’s family of sites. The publisher can configure the platform to customize how the content is shown to the user, and prioritize areas to funnel traffic.

The Personalized Media platform increases the following metrics on websites -

No. of views increases by 5%
Time spent on site increases by 10%
The publisher has up to 5% new ad inventory on the premium pages to sell to advertising clients

The platform is designed to plug into the existing ad serving and content management systems used by publishers today, so the publishers can start seeing an increase in traffic to premium areas from day one, without impacting any of their existing systems.

“While there are solutions that recirculate traffic or generate new ad revenues, most of these solutions are not designed from the ground up with the publisher’s needs as the focal point. Our platform is not an ad network, and we don’t collect the publishers’ user data. Our mission is to empower publishers to maximize the value of their premium editorial content,” said Leora Blumberg, the SVP of Business Development of the company.

China Watch Blog has picked up this excellent write-up on marriage and divorce, which is published at Huff Post.

Delia Lloyd, American journalist/blogger based in London, writes that in the months leading up to her wedding some 13 years ago, she and her husband had a series of meetings with the priest and the rabbi who were to preside jointly over their ceremony. She says: “These weren’t exactly pre-cana classes — more like a series of “getting-to-know” you sessions — but they were thought-provoking all the same.”

She continued: “We got a lot of good advice from our respective officiants. The Rabbi leaned in and told us that the secret to a good wedding wasn’t the food, but the music. He then proceeded to recommend a band from the South Side of Chicago called The Gentlemen of Leisure which he assured us would rock the house. The priest, for his part, counseled us that we should never go to go to bed angry.”

“Both kernels of wisdom turned out to be true. But something else the priest said has also stuck with me through the years: “In my opinion, it’s far too easy to get married in this country and far too difficult to get divorced.”

Read the rest of the article at Huff Post

China Watch Blog has learnt that KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has announced its unique 24-hour service to social media. Starting at 12:00 noon and extending late into the evening, 450 volunteers based in a KLM hangar will provide live replies to questions appearing on Facebook, Twitter and Hyves.

KLM does it again!

Live Reply involves the deployment of 450 KLM volunteers, working in three shifts, who will answer Tweets, Facebook posts, or Hyves ‘scraps’ using just 140 characters. It is just one more way for KLM to show how it meets the needs of its customers — up close and personal.

“Today’s campaign should show, in a special — and, more important, personal way — that we’re willing to go the extra mile for our customers,” says Martijn van der Zee, SVP

E-commerce AF KLM. “KLM has been extremely active in social media since the spring of 2010. We can’t imagine communication with our customers without social media anymore.”

KLM believes it is important to let everyone know about the service that KLM offers in social media — hence this announcement. Using the social media, KLM will answer every customer message personally within one hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

‘Followers’ and ‘friends’ can reach KLM through the social media, whether in Dutch or English, and ask anything that has to do with their travel or tickets. And KLM will inform its followers about the latest KLM news and any interesting campaigns.

For those who are thinking of using social media for networking and interacting with your customers, this is one of the ways to do it.