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The Man Who’s Beating Google
Andy Greenberg,
Forbes Magazine dated October 05, 2009
Robin Li has built the most popular search site for the world’s biggest audience–in China. That’s round one in epic battle.
On a smoggy August morning outside Beijing’s China World Hotel, Li Yanhong’s fan club is assembling. “We’ll use his English name, okay?” a wrangler shouts over the chattering young crowd. A black Mercedes-Benz approaches, its door opens and the masses do as they’re told. A boyishly handsome 41-year-old executive steps out. “Ro-bin! Ro-bin!” scream his followers, hoisting led-encrusted placards for a few obliging paparazzi.
In his keynote at the Baidu World conference a few hours later, Robin Li describes to a crowd of thousands how the search service he created ten years ago is becoming China’s gateway to the world of information. Then he parades across a stage, surrounded by smiling children as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” plays in Mandarin and soap bubbles fill the room.
Li has earned his share of Olympic-style marketing. In a decade he has transformed Baidu from a handful of employees putting in sweat equity to an enterprise with 7,000 workers and a market value of $12.8 billion. Li’s personal worth has swelled, too: Last year he was the seventh-richest person in China; today his Baidu stake is worth an estimated $2.1 billion. In 2008 the company netted $150 million on $460 million in revenue. In the process Li has become a national symbol of China’s burgeoning identity as a global Internet player, with a digital population of 338 million online users. Baidu has captured a huge slice, each month racking up 8 billion searches and 145 million unique visitors, according to ComScore ( SCOR – news – people ), making it the most popular non-U.S. site in the world.
“A lot of Chinese people have wondered if knowledge really means power in today’s market economy,” Li says during an interview with forbes in Baidu’s no-frills Beijing conference room. (By year-end the company will move to a new headquarters designed to resemble an enormous, long rectangular search box.) “I think I’ve proven that it does.”
That proof won’t do much to hold off Li’s biggest rival. While Baidu has a 2-to-1 lead in China, Google ( GOOG – news – people ) has been steadily winning eyeballs there (see graph, right) and plans a near-doubling of its sales force, now in the hundreds, over the next 12 months in what is shaping up as an epic battle to dominate the world’s search business. “China’s going to be the largest Internet market in the world,” says Gary Rieschel, a cofounder of Qiming Ventures in Shanghai. “If Google isn’t the leader there, will it really be the leading search company in the world?”
On another front, China’s e-commerce giant, Alibaba, has declared war with Baidu over online shopping. Baidu has also suffered some serious self-inflicted casualties, thanks to a profitable but shady practice of mixing advertising and search results and a willingness, in at least one highly publicized instance, to put revenues ahead of customers’ safety.
@Mentions Are Now Live on Facebook
Written by Frederic Lardinois / September 14, 2009 12:23 PM
Facebook announced that it would soon support Twitter-like @mentions a few days ago. Today, Facebook actually enabled this functionality. Now, when you type a status update and type ‘@,’ an auto-updating drop-down menu with the names of your Facebook friends will appear. While users could always write the name of their friends in a status update, these names are now linked to a user’s profile. Soon, Facebook will also allow users to tag friends in applications as well.
Whenever somebody tags you in a status update, a notification will appear. For now, however, there is no place where you can easily find all the updates where somebody tagged you. It is also worth noting that while Twitter actually displays the @ symbol in status updates, Facebook just replaces it with the full name of the tagged person.
Obviously, this now makes Facebook even more like Twitter than ever before. At the same time, though, this is also a very useful feature, as it allows your friends to easily head over to the profile of the friends you tagged in your updates. Facebook’s Twitter-like new Facebook Lite interface, however, doesn’t support @mentions, yet.
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