[photopress:it_robin_li_baidu.jpg,full,alignright]This is a long, fascinating and quite important article because it is written by Robin Li who founded Baidu in 1999 and which was listed in NASDAQ in August 2005. He has a bachelor of science degree in Information Management from Peking University and a master of science degree in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
What the article says is that the development of the Internet in China and Asia breaks into four major stages.
First came the portal phase – The earlier successful Internet startups primarily served the public as Internet portals.
Then came the games – The next rising commercial crest in the market was driven by the developers and providers of online games.
The third was the avatar. Exhibiting growth paralleling a remarkable tidal surge in the number of Internet users, volume in the trading of avatars grew steadily. Strongly representative of success in this realm are China’s QQ, with 65% of the firm’s income derived from avatar trading.
Fourthly, search and e-commerce. Developments channeled search and e-commerce firms to the mainstream of the Internet market.
Baidu is the world’s largest Chinese-language web portal operator.
Robin Li writes that due to varying factors, the application of e-commerce in China, in scale and in depth, still lags in pace of development – especially when one considers the enormous potential of the Chinese market.
At the mainstream center of today’s Internet industry, search engines have become one of the most commonly used technologies in the developed world, while offering enormous market opportunities and the greatest developmental potentials in the IT field.
In China Baidu has 66.7% of the market, followed by Google and Yahoo, the latter two collectively accounting for 24%.
Seven years ago, when Baidu first introduced its search engine, only 5 million Chinese web pages were indexed, accounting for a mere 2% of global cyber information.
Today, the number of web pages published in China exceeds 4.5 billion, amounting to 20% of the world’s volume.
One might say that the facilitation of this growing enlightenment and sophistication is the most important result delivered by the search engine.
Source: China.org.cn
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