At the last count in China (a month ago, at end-June 2008), there were 253m Internet users, and 601m mobile subscriptions. But there’s an interesting twist. According to the CNNIC’s last full report published at the end of 2007, “According to the survey findings of CNNIC, each mobile phone subscriber has 1.33 mobile phone cards [SIMs / subscriptions] in average”. (It’s on page 35 of the report, or page 36 of the PDF). In other words, there are about 450m unique individuals using mobile phones in China - considerably less than the 600m suggests.

What appears to be happening is that Internet use in China is being catalysed by wider availability of broadband, and more affordable PCs. 214m out of the 253m users are broadband-based. At the same time, there is some mobile use of the Internet - 73m users of the total access on phones - but virtually all of these are PC-Internet users as well. (There’s no double-counting of mobile broadband as China doesn’t have 3G yet).

Looking at some of the charts on the CNNIC website, it looks like China’s Internet use has hit a sudden point of inflection in the past 12 months, and is now on a steepening S-curve trajectory. Mobile is still growing extremely fast, but it doesn’t seem to be accelerating at the same level.

This does not necessarily mean the same trends will be seen elsewhere in the developing world. It’s worth noting that China is heavily pushing the roll out of fixed broadband - something which is much slower in markets like India and most of Africa. But it does suggest that China is extremely unlikely to have a future population of mobile-only Internet users.

One other interesting snippet from the CNNIC report - the average home Internet-connected PC has 2.7 users. This is worth remembering when considering all the stats on PC vs mobile handset shipments.

Source: SeekingAlpha.com

After the mp3 domination with iTunes, now apple is looking seriously to the Movie Market. Apple made a serious upgrade and presented new layout today to the Apple Movie Trailer section. The new features include:

1. Not all trailers are located in /hd anymore
2. HD trailers can now be mixed in with standard trailers
3. There’s 2 layouts so far: single vs multiple trailer mode

Furthermore there is an AJAX style pop-up window and the user can preview the cover and the video is loading in the parent window while the user can have the movie preview. The user can now have the option to view actor’s filmography, studio’s philmography, etc.  

If you’re a Firefox and Google Reader user and you haven’t yet installed the Feedly plugin, you’re going to want to install it today after you hear this: Feedly has now integrated its own results - that is, links to the relevant posts from your Google Reader - right into your Google search results. This integration essentially adds a layer of social search directly into Google, and all with no extra work on your part besides simply having installed the plugin.This integration adds an immediate social filtering aspect to searching the web by promoting your favorite sources to the top of your search results. It even takes into account your reading patterns and the favorite metadata to sort the results.

With this feature, it doesn’t even matter if you want to use Feedly to read feeds - this behind-the-scenes social filtering makes it a killer add-on for anyone who uses Firefox and Google Reader. You can download Feedly from here.

Amazon today announced that it will acquire AbeBooks, the online marketplace for used and rare books. Given the breadth of Amazon’s product line, it is sometimes easy to forget that, at its core, Amazon is still a book seller, even if its product line now ranges from hosted Web 2.0 services to bulk groceries. AbeBooks, which was formerly known as the Adcanved Book Exchange, launched in Canada and the US in 1996 and has since expanded to Germany, Italy, France, the UK, and Spain. AbeBooks will continue to operate under its own name.

In many ways, buying AbeBooks is almost the antithesis of of what Amazon has done lately with pushing into electronic books with the Kindle and hosting Web 2.0 services like EC2, S3, and its recently launched Flexible Payment Service.

AbeBooks has generally stuck to its roots, by creating a thriving marketplace for rare and used book sellers worldwide. It is not clear if there will be any direct benefits of this acquisition by Amazon for the merchants on AbeBooks, though chances are that Amazon is going to start integrating the AbeBooks inventory into its own store. This will give the AbeBooks sellers access a far larger market to sell to than just the AbeBooks community, though many of them were already listing their inventory on Amazon (and other services like Alibris and Biblio.com anyway).

SocialThing, a lifestreaming/social aggregation site, has been acquired by AOL. We currently have no information about the final price of the acquisition, but given that SocialThing was still in private beta, we assume that it was relatively low. SocialThing was founded in 2007 with $15,000 in seed capital from TechStars. AOL seems to be rather interested in the lifestreaming and aggregation business these days, as it just released its AIM BuddyUpdates yesterday.

While it is not unusual for a company to be bought up this quickly, it is interesting that SocialThing was acquired before it even came out of private beta. This could mean that AOL was less interested in the technology behind SocialThing and more in the team behind the service. SocialThing, after all, is still in such an early phase of its development that it doesn’t even support Microsoft’s Internet Explorer yet.

While SocialThing does the things it does well, it never quite got the hype and user base that its nearest direct competitor Friendfeed has been getting for the last few months. While SocialThing CEO and founder Matt Galligan pointed out to us that he doesn’t think SocialThing is actually competing with FriendFeed, the similarities between the two are just too striking.

It is true, though, that SocialThing is less focused on creating an internal community and puts more emphasis on sharing information back to the aggregated services than Friendfeed, especially since they just integrated ping.fm updates.

It will be interesting to see what AOL is going to do with this new property. Chances are that it will be integrated into AOL’s new BuddyUpdate service or that the SocialThing team will move over to work on BuddyUpdates while SocialThing itself will become a thing of the past.

Some people believe that Facebook Connect will transform the web from the still closed system to a massively social experience - it’s the “always logged-in internet.” On the other hand, the company bringing this web to us is Facebook, the same people who had to be told by their users why Beacon was a huge mistake. Do you trust Facebook to control the next iteration of the web?

Through the seamless Facebook Connect integration, sites can access your Facebook account details and friend graph and move that data back and forth between their site and Facebook. For example, people commenting on a blog using the Moveable Type platform will be able to login via Facebook Connect. Their comment will link to their Facebook profile and the commenting activity itself will make its way back into your activity feed. On Digg, another site adopting Facebook Connect, you can login with your Facebook ID and your digging activity is returned to Facebook, too.

Unlike with OpenID, Facebook Connect put the power of the social web into the hands of one company. One private company. Not only that, but a company that’s known for rolling out changes without so much as a warning to its users then having to react to the ensuing uproar.

Even the introduction of the Mini-Feed was protested upon launch. And Beacon - the advertisement system that sent data from external web sites back to Facebook, telling your friends about your purchases on 40+ partner sites - was literally a fiasco. It launched before there was a way to even opt-out.

In the past, user privacy on Facebook seemed always seemed to be an afterthought. Although their direction appears to be changing a bit now - recent updates to Facebook today make sure to cover how your privacy is going to be affected - it’s only because they’ve learned to cater to their users’ demands. It’s harder to believe that it’s because they genuinely care.

Facebook has always known that their value - that is, their monetary value - is selling off bits and pieces of your privacy to advertisers. The “real you” on Facebook is a holy grail for marketers. Now, with the power to spread that to sites across the entire web, Facebook will need to figure out how to cash in. In the process, they may again make another misstep. The problem is that this time it might not be something as innocuous as the video you rented at Blockbuster that finds its way back to your Facebook profile. As more of the corporate and business-oriented web adopts Friend Connect, the greater the chance for privacy intrusion.

LG Electronics on Thursday said this fall it would sell a high-definition Blu-ray disc player that can stream to a TV more than 12,000 movies and TV episodes from Netflix The LG BD300 player will rely on a wired broadband connection and a queue-based user interface to display on a TV a variety of content selected by the Netflix subscriber. Once selected, movies will begin playing in as little as 30 seconds, the companies said.

Netflix members will be able to use the player’s remote control to browse and make selections on their TV screens, as well as read synopses and rate movies. They will also have the option of fast-forwarding and rewinding the video stream. “The BD300 is another LG industry first and provides consumers with an advanced high-def disc player with unparalleled flexibility and networked access for services such as Netflix,” Teddy Hwang, president of LG Electronics USA, said in a statement.

The LG-Netflix deal is not exclusive, so LG could add similar services from Netflix rivals in the future. Netflix has said that its long-term goal is to get Sony, Panasonic, and LG to integrate Netflix services into their digital TVs.

The partnership was expected. LG and Netflix said at the International Consumer Electronics Show in January that they would provide a device for streaming content from the Web to the TV in the second half of the year. Pricing was not disclosed.

While the BD300 supports high-definition content, Netflix does not offer HD content for streaming. It does offer HD movies via its by-mail service.

Netflix has offered subscribers the option of streaming movies to their PCs at no additional cost. The company is hoping to stay ahead of the curve as the Internet matures as a distribution mechanism. Netflix rival Blockbuster is also expanding its digital offerings.

	1		Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams   YouTube 2088 new posts 5,611,856 views
	2		Where the Hell is Matt?   YouTube 1989 new posts 19,763,582 views
	3		Christian the Lion - the full story (in HQ)   YouTube 1155 new posts 8,394,821 views
	4		Radiohead - House of Cards   YouTube 1152 new posts 2,099,368 views
	5		Feist on Sesame Street   YouTube 1033 new posts 674,915 views
	6		The Dark Knight Trailer *NEW* Good Quality!   YouTube 678 new posts 13,497,712 views
	7		Produced By Pharrell - Santogold, Julian Casablancas, N.E.R.D.   MySpace 618 new posts 1,140,828 views
	8		Western Spaghetti by PES   YouTube 593 new posts 921,948 views
	9		Simon’s Cat ‘TV Dinner’   YouTube 590 new posts 1,685,869 views
	10		Lively by Google   YouTube 545 new posts 871,611 views
	11		Celeb   YouTube 513 new posts 1,188,723 views
	12		Bert & Ernie tries Gangsta-Rap   YouTube 503 new posts 600,262 views
	13		Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Trailer   YouTube 473 new posts 979,583 views
	14		JibJab - Time for Some Campaignin’   MySpace 439 new posts 1,034,055 views
	15		Critical Mass Bicyclist Assaulted by NYPD   YouTube 428 new posts 1,201,495 views
	16		Ode To Joy   YouTube 427 new posts 1,668,036 views
	17		The Process   YouTube 411 new posts 306,447 views  This video has been removed from YouTube
	18		Max Payne The Movie - trailer   YouTube 403 new posts 1,091,980 views
	19		I Met The Walrus   YouTube 374 new posts 666,309 views
	20		Official Jason Mraz - I’m Yours video   YouTube 374 new posts 7,773,416 views

  Source: www.viralvideochart.com

On July 17, ValueClick provided lower revenue guidance of $163M to $164M and EPS guidance of 17c to 18c. The company also lowered its 2008 revenue guidance to a range of $655M to $675M, and EPS of 69c to 71c. Craig Hallum said it believes the Q2 weakness and reduced outlook are less about ValueClick and more about macroeconomic issues. Except for Google, the firm had doubts that any of the big boys of online advertising will be posting solid results and forecasting strength.

The CEO of ValueClick said, “Due to increasing macroeconomic uncertainty, we no longer anticipate the seasonal strength in ad spending we typically see in the second half of the year.” Craig Hallum expects the company will start putting its $101M buyback authorization to work sooner, rather than later. In its opinion, the dramatic decline in fundamentals has been more than captured in the stock price.

Other recent Street commentary: July 30, JP Morgan assumed coverage and downgraded ValueClick due to a lack of near-term catalysts as they expect business to remain weak through 2008. Also, on July 28, Needham said it thinks the potential for downside is limited and already priced into shares, and it thinks the company could become a takeover target. Throughout the last few months’ ValueClick options, the calls have been active on renewed takeover chatter by someone of the likes of Microsoft.

Motorola said Thursday that it earned $4 million, or less than 1 cent per share, in the three months ended June 30. That includes charges of 2 cents per share. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial had been expecting a loss of 3 cents per share. In the same quarter a year ago, Motorola lost $28 million, or 2 cents per share. Its sales fell 7.4 percent to $8.1 billion versus $8.7 billion a year ago. Analysts had been expecting sales of $7.69 billion. Motorola shares were up 83 cents, or 11 percent, at $8.50 in pre-market trading.

The company shipped 28.1 million cell phones, up from 27 million in the first quarter, and said it maintained its share of the global handset market.According to research firm IDC, Motorola’s market share actually slipped slightly from 9.4 percent of the global market in the first quarter to 9.2 percent in the second, but the company narrowly maintained its third-place ranking, just above South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc.. with 9.1 percent. Nokia Corp. is the largest maker of cell phones, followed by Samsung Electronics Co.