Facebook Inc has signed an agreement with Baidu Inc (百度) to set up a social networking Web site in China, Sohu.com (搜狐) reported, citing unidentified employees at the Chinese search-engine company.
The agreement followed several meetings between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Baidu CEO Robin Li (李彥宏), Sohu.com reported on its Web site today. The China Web site won’t be integrated with Facebook’s international service and the start date is not confirmed, according to the report.
Kaiser Kuo (郭怡廣), a spokesman at Beijing-based Baidu, declined to comment on the report when reached by Bloomberg News. Stephen Dolan, Singapore-based commercial director for Asia at Facebook, also declined to comment.
Facebook, owner of the world’s most popular social networking service, has held talks with potential partners about how to enter the Chinese market, a person familiar with the matter said last week. The discussions have been exploratory and may not result in an agreement, according to the person.
“We are currently studying and learning about China, as part of evaluating any possible approaches that could benefit our users, developers and advertisers,” Palo Alto, California-based Facebook said in an e-mailed statement at the time.
Li met Zuckerberg during the Facebook executive’s visit to China in December, Kuo said at the time.
Zuckerberg, who also held meetings with other Chinese companies including China Mobile Ltd (中國移動) and Sina Corp (新浪), said then that he was on vacation in the Asian nation, the world’s biggest Internet market by users.
Baidu, owner of China’s most-used search engine, plans to develop more social networking services, Li said on Feb. 1. The commercial value of social products is “meaningful,” he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained