Taobao.com Launches E-commerce Rights Protection Platform (Wed, 10 Mar 2010)
Chinese online auction website Taobao.com has launched an e-commerce rights protection platform with the approach of March 15, World Consumer Rights Day. Consumers can click to access the platform which is set in a prominent position of Taobao's homepage to make complaints or inquiries about the processing of the complaints when they purchase goods via Taobao. [...]
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General Manager Departs Baidu Youa In China (Wed, 10 Mar 2010)
The public relations department of Chinese search engine Baidu.com has confirmed to local media that Li Mingyuan, general manager for Baidu.com's Internet shopping branch Baidu Youa, is departing the company for personal reasons. Baidu.com has appointed Cai Hu, former general manager for Baidu Alliance, as the new Baidu Youa general manager and Cai's position will be [...]
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Alibaba's Wholesale Website Welcomes 6.39 Million Traders On First Day (Wed, 10 Mar 2010)
Chinese B2B e-commerce company Alibaba.com has announced that its new online wholesale website, 1688.com, was formally launched on March 9, 2010, and the wholesale traffic reached a whopping 6.39 million people on the first day. Integrated with Alibaba's former Chinese website Alibaba.com.cn, 1688.com is a newly upgraded platform that aims to be the world's largest online [...]
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Revenue Rises In China for CDC Corporation (Tue, 09 Mar 2010)
Hong Kong-based enterprise software and new media firm CDC Corporation announced financial results for the fourth quarter and year ended December 31, 2009, and stated total revenue in the quarter was USD83.0 million, compared to USD76.6 million in the third quarter of 2009. Adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter of 2009 was USD14.0 million, an increase [...]
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China's Baidu.com Adjusts Alliance Policy, Creates New Client Department (Thu, 04 Mar 2010)
Chinese search engine company Baidu.com has recently adjusted the policies of its Baidu Alliance and will stop business cooperation with some members. So far, the members affected are mainly non-contracted website navigation sites and the traffic involved is estimated at nearly one million daily visitors. This policy adjustment is implemented following Baidu Alliance's evaluation of cooperating partners [...]
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Announcing ChinaMode Winners (Tue, 02 Feb 2010)
After two weeks of public vote, ChinaMode Awards 2009 have received 121446 votes. We are now happy to announce the winners of the first ChinaMode Awards in each 7 categories. Best Internet Applications: Taobao, Google, Baidu; Best User-Experience Applications: Google Chinese search service, Sogou Pinyin Chinese Input Method, Alipay; Most Promising Applications: Google Music, Sina [...] Related posts: ChinaMode Awards Now Open to Nominate ChinaMode: A China’s Web Awards Initiated by Bloggers
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Douban Raised $10M in Series B (Mon, 25 Jan 2010)
Douban, a symbol of web 2.0 services in China, announced its $10 million series B financing today. The new round is led by Trustbridge Partners, and co-invested by its existing investor Ceyuan Ventures, who invested in $2 million in 2006. Douban started from a social networking sites for book lovers, movie lovers and music lovers [...] Related posts: Douban To Add Book Series Douban Adds Miniblog Service Douban Launched Blog Recommendation
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[Event] Third Digital Future Symposium Beijing (Thu, 21 Jan 2010)
The post is to introduce an event which our readers might be interested in. The post is drafted by the event organizer. The Digital Future Symposium (DFS) is a highly successful event first launched in 2007 by the CENTRE FOR CONTENT PROTECTION (CCP). It has conducted successful events in Japan, Singapore, India and Malaysia. [...] Related posts: Event: Web 2.0 in China: What’s Next? [Event] Geeks On A Plan Events: Barcamp Beijing & New Era, New TV Seminar
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5 Predictions for China Social Games in 2010 (Thu, 14 Jan 2010)
（This is a guest post by Kai Lukoff. Kai Lukoff is an analyst at BloggerInsight and an editor on China Social Games. Follow Kai on Twitter @klukoff. You can find more information on China Social Game at the end of this post. ) The social game market is still in its infancy, but growing up fast. [...] Related posts: Is SNS+Game the Next Big Thing? Kaixin001 Has Ads on Apps Kaixin001: A New SNS with High Growth
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Four Years of Google In China (Thu, 14 Jan 2010)
No matter Google will finally withdraw all business from China or not, I think it is time to review Google’s four-year operations in China. So I made the following list, if I omitted anything important or made any mistake, feel free to leave your comments. July 19, 2005, Kaifu Lee joined Google, which was also a [...] Related posts: Google China Partners With Sina Google Answers Rebirth From China Google Investment In Xunlei To Be Announce Next Week
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New Tag Results, from Technorati and Ingboo (Fri, 05 Mar 2010)
Technorati and Ingboo have partnered together to provide an all new kind of subscription experience for Technorati content, including tagged posts. Look for a blue Ingboo icon for a full range of subscription options. Feeds are also available for: Hottest Blogosphere Posts Latest Original Articles from Technorati The Technorati Blog We also have channel feeds, writer feeds, and editorial tag feeds, which can be found on their respective pages.
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Xianguo, Online RSS Reader Raised $1Million, Chinese RSS Market Is Not Dead (Sun, 07 Mar 2010)
RSS, one of the key and famous technology of web2.0 used to attract lots of attention in web industry. Although services such as Bloglines, Newsgator and Netvibes are still active, it is Google Reader holds the market dominance. RSS is still important, but lacking of reliable business model may let you think if RSS market [...]
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30%-50% Traffic To Existing Chinese Video Sites Is From Baidu, CEO of Baidu’s Qiyi Said. (Sat, 27 Feb 2010)
Is Chinese online video service getting more complicated or more clear? as Gary Wang, CEO of Tudou predicted, the threat would eventually come from the big guys. Qiyi, Baidu’s online video service is about to launch in March. With $50 millions investment confirmed, the reason for Baidu launching Qiyi is simple, as Gong Yu, director [...]
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The Founder Institute Expands To Singapore To Boost Local Startups Ecosystem (Wed, 24 Feb 2010)
Silicon Valley-based The Founder Institute, a four-month training and mentoring program for technology entrepreneurs, recently announced its first-ever Spring 2010 semester for Singapore. With this expansion, the Institute will be the first Silicon Valley mentoring programme in Singapore, and will now be on pace to graduate over 700 founders creating over 500 companies per year in nine [...]
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Premier Hu Jintao On China People’s Daily Online Microblogging Service (Sun, 21 Feb 2010)
What impressed me most during my trip to Paris two weeks ago? It’s a tweet from Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, french Minister of Development of the Digital Economy, who I met in person in Forum NetExplorateur. First, I did not expect she, as a Minister, is using twitter daily; Secondly, when I was told her twitter id [...]
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Google Said To Its Chinese Staff Happy Chinese New Year, And Please Wait (Tue, 16 Feb 2010)
Chinese new year is now here, and happiness is all over the places in China. It’s the time when every Chinese is expected to look back the year passed and long for a fruitful new year. As usual, Google’s wonderful designers drew some nice logos to celebrate this Chinese Tiger year, and also in an [...]
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techblog86: Chinese blogging pioneer @isaac Mao's Twitter account has been unexpectedly "suspended". @Twitter — look into this maybe? (Fri, 03 Jul 2009)
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techblog86: On @techblog86 now: why the "Real Name" system isn't such a big deal... http://bit.ly/146DWv (Wed, 01 Jul 2009)
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techblog86: Main coverage of #CHINICT has wrapped up. Thanks for tuning in! techblog86 update shortly. [DF] (Fri, 22 May 2009)
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techblog86: Day 2 Morning updates at #CHINICT now in. http://bit.ly/179rDU [DF] (Fri, 22 May 2009)
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techblog86: Here's Part Two of Day 1, CHINICT 2009. http://bit.ly/uAqWJ [DF] (Thu, 21 May 2009)
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6waves - Social Gaming Developer Raises $17.5M (Fri, 22 Jan 2010)
6waves, previously highlighted in 2008, has seen their social gaming business expand and become one of the leading developers in the market (Inside Facebook has the details). While their competitors have already raised their series B and C rounds, 6waves has just raised their series A round of $17.5 Million from US based VC, Insight [...] Possible related posts: Skype cofounders to invest in Frenzoo Frenzoo, a Hong Kong 3D social networking company, will be... EditGrid lands Series A funding Team and Concepts Limited, the parent company of EditGrid has... Startup Hong Kong @ Frenzoo Event Recap I wouldn’t call this up to date, but never too...
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Ankoder - Video Encoding in the Cloud (Wed, 23 Dec 2009)
Ankoder brings video transcoding to users and business everywhere. Ankoder uses Amazon’s S3 and Elastic Cloud to provide a proven and scalable solution to anyone or any business working with video. With video becoming a big part of many businesses, any business looking to incorporate their own video site, cloud encoding is something they could [...] Possible related posts: Vcasmo - Online presentation platform Vcasmo is an online presentation service that users can use... Learn Mandarin, web 2.0 style. There is another new site to learn the Mandarin language,... Zendesk - Serve Your Customers Better Zendesk is a Copenhagen-based startup focused on helping companies put...
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Thumbdive down but not out - focuses on the enterprise (Tue, 01 Sep 2009)
Less than a year and still in private beta, Thumbdive will be shutting down their service. We first profiled their service back in January and found their privacy control approach and a different UI a good change from the other services in the market. I had hope to see it go further, but apparently [...] Possible related posts: Thumbdive - Privately share your lifestreams Thumbdive, currently in private beta, is a microblogging/lifestreaming app that... Harbork - Make Money with this Content Driven Community Harbork is a new social network from Hong Kong. It... 3 Hong Kong Doubles the Price of 3G iPhones We all know the 3G iPhone will be a hit,...
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The iPhone 3GS with something special (Sat, 18 Jul 2009)
So I finally got my Apple iPhone 3GS, but to my surprise it came with something extra. I unpacked it and found a hair stuck in the packaging, appears to be nose hair. This maybe a minor issue to all but I find it kind of disgusting. What do you guys think? Does that [...] Possible related posts: iPhone 3GS available now in Hong Kong The news is out! The new iPhone 3GS will be... iPhone 3G Available without Contracts Now that the hype has died down a bit. Apple... Hong Kong web 2.0 startup meetup Couple days back, I had the opportunity to meet with...
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iPhone 3GS available now in Hong Kong (Thu, 09 Jul 2009)
The news is out! The new iPhone 3GS will be available come this Friday, July 10th, at 3 HK stores. I’m not sure if we’ll see the Apple online store and authorized Apple resellers across Hong Kong carry the new phone on that date (it’s not out now at midnight) Now available online. [...] Possible related posts: iPhone 3G Available without Contracts Now that the hype has died down a bit. Apple... 3 Hong Kong Doubles the Price of 3G iPhones We all know the 3G iPhone will be a hit,... Forget the web, onto the iPhone It appears there’s less and less noise about local startups...
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More about going wireless on the move (Mon, 08 Mar 2010)
In reply to a computer user seeking advice on "Going wireless on the move" (Lifelines, Jan. 5), M.H. wonders why Bic Camera ( www.biccamera.com ) and Emobile ( www.emobile.jp/en ) were mentioned, but not UQ WiMAX ( www.uqwimax.jp/service/trywimax/ ). UQ WiMAX has two payment plans: a flat rate of about ¥4,500 a month and a "per packet" rate with a ¥380-minimum, ¥4,900-maximum monthly fee. (Japan Times)
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Japan's top web forum an outlet for free speech -- and hate (Mon, 08 Mar 2010)
Japan's biggest Internet forum, where anonymous netizens trade anything from cooking tips to death threats, has long been an anarchic zone of uninhibited free speech and a magnet for controversy. This week the raw commentary on 2channel - which with 10 million visits a month is one of the world's largest online bulletin boards - saw tempers flare anew. A massive hacker attack from South Korea crippled the site in retaliation for users' online slights against Olympic skater Kim Yu-Na, after she beat Japanese rival Mao Asada to take gold at the Vancouver Winter Games. The site was attacked on Monday, the anniversary of a 1919 uprising in Korea against Japanese colonial rule, and shut down for two days. (independent.co.uk)
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Illegal Net access jumps to record high in 2009 (Thu, 04 Mar 2010)
Police uncovered and took action in a record number of cases of unauthorized access to Internet sites in 2009, a National Police Agency survey showed Thursday. The number of cases in which illegal Net access was recognized by police surged 22.1 percent from the previous year to 2,795 in 2009, the highest since the agency began compiling data in 2000. The number of cases in which arrests and other police actions were taken jumped 45.6 percent to 2,534, also the highest, the agency said. The figure jumped more than nine times from 2005 and 84.7 percent of the cases involved fraud using Net auction sites. (AP)
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Newspapers lead online charge (Sun, 28 Feb 2010)
An increasing number of domestic newspapers have started charging readers for their online content. The newspapers hope to attract new readers by providing more specialized and detailed articles online, with the aim of making such services a pillar of their business operations. Nikkei Inc., which publishes the Nikkei business daily, will launch a fee-based online service on March 23 in which subscribers can access news flashes and articles carried in the newspaper's morning and evening editions. (Yomiuri)
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Nikkei to offer online subscriptions (Wed, 24 Feb 2010)
Nihon Keizai Shimbun Inc., publisher of Japan's Nikkei business daily, said it will become the first of the country's four major national newspapers to offer an online subscription version, opening the door for other Japanese dailies to follow suit in one of the world's biggest newspaper markets. While U.S. newspapers have struggled for years with declining readership as more people turn to free news available online, Japan's major national dailies have fared somewhat better because of their huge circulation base. (Wall Street Journal)
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New Tag Results, from Technorati and Ingboo (Fri, 05 Mar 2010)
Technorati and Ingboo have partnered together to provide an all new kind of subscription experience for Technorati content, including tagged posts. Look for a blue Ingboo icon for a full range of subscription options. Feeds are also available for: Hottest Blogosphere Posts Latest Original Articles from Technorati The Technorati Blog We also have channel feeds, writer feeds, and editorial tag feeds, which can be found on their respective pages.
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フォーブス世界長者番付け2010～日本編：Forbes Japan's Billionaires (Thu, 11 Mar 2010)
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フォーブス世界長者番付け2010～世界は1011人のビリオネア村：Forbes World's Billionaires List 2010 (Thu, 11 Mar 2010)
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サン元CEO「僕もジョブズに訴えると脅されました」：Ex-Sun chief Jonathan Schwartz "Jobs threatened to sue me, too" (Wed, 10 Mar 2010)
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ピカソの名言「神なんて」：Pablo Picasso Quotes "God is really only another artist" (Tue, 09 Mar 2010)
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ハートロッカーの意味：What "Hurt Locker" means? (Tue, 09 Mar 2010)
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Are You Kidding Me? A Bizarre Story About Online Gaming (Thu, 04 Mar 2010)
A bizarre, sad story related to online games. A married couple in Suwon, Korea has been arrested by the police for negligence of their parental duties. The couple left their three month old baby starve to death, because they were "too obsessed with online gaming." Ironically enough, it turned out that the online game they were playing to their baby's death was themed around, well guess what, raising a virtual avatar. So in short, the couple were too busy taking care of their "virtual baby" that they kept their "real baby" completely unattended and starved to death.  The game is called "Prius Online" and the players can adopt an avatar and grow it. Game players can also buy the avatars virtual items such as clothes, or even write a blog about their avatars, much resembling a parenting diary. The parents in charge are said to have been under great parenting stress, presumably due to their financial difficulties, and as their parenting stresses mounted, they became more and more obsessed with the game -- their "escape" from the real world. This is really unheard of, but I'm afraid the world might see more incidents like this as games become more real and blur the lines between the real world and the virtual world. Unlike packaged games, online games and MMORPGs often do not have a clear ending, forcing users to put in endless amount of time and energy into the game. Some players become seriously obsessed with the game and play it for days straight without a wink of sleep. After days of immersive gaming, they might get to confuse the real world and the virtual world, like the way the characters in the movie Avatar gradually became more familiar with the virtual world.
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1forME is Korea's Etsy (Tue, 23 Feb 2010)
1forME is a newly launched Korean e-commerce site that sells hand-made, artists-produced goods. That's quite a mouthful, but long story short: 1forME is Etsy of Korea. Etsy saw a gross merchandise sales of about US$ 180M last year, showing some 105% year-over-year growth. This shows that the handmade goods e-commerce is a proven business model, and for every proven business model there's always an Asia opportunity, especially if the model is culture-neutral. Well, both e-commerce and the love for handmade goods seem to be pretty universal concept, I guess. But according to the company's heatmap, Etsy doesn't seem to have a big Asia presence. This leaves plenty of room for Asian startups to grab the opportunity. 1forME has just thrown hat in the ring, a move that's expected to be followed by many others in the region.
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fanatic.fm Allows Fans To Sponsor Musicians (Mon, 08 Feb 2010)
With the rise of internet advertising, there were lots of promises for free music, supported entirely by advertisement. (Remember Spiral Frog, anyone?) But the problem of such free, ads-supported music service was that the ads revenue was never enough to cover the licensing and other costs. Meanwhile, paid streaming services like Spotify (or Korea's Melon et al) seem to be gaining ground fast. A new service called fanatic.fm tries to rethink ads-supported free music streaming service. Taking the same old text ads or banner ads and slapping them onto music streaming service is like trying to put a round peg into a square hole, fanatic.fm says. It's just not the best way to combine the ads and music consuming experience, they say. Instead, fanatic.fm built a better ads system for music streaming service. It's more like a sponsorship system, where individuals or brands can "sponsor" artists so that the sponsors' brands or messages can be presented to their visitors in a more powerful way, fully blended with the right music. For example, Red Bull could strategically sponsor certain rockbands popular among X-gamers. Then people can enjoy the rockbands' songs for free, with "sponsored by Red Bull" messages. This would potentially be a better way to present Red Bull brand than simply placing textual ads next to the rock bands' music videos. Also, the sponsor doesn't have to be a corporate brand -- it could be a group of dedicated fans who would do anything that might help the artists they love, certainly including some sponsorship and donation. Looking at the website, fanatic.fm doesn't seem to be fully launched yet, but they had already been mentioned in the MIDEM, the big music industry event held in Cannes, France, as "a company to pay attention to". fanatic.fm is the brain child of a Korean team (the same folks who did QBox), but as hinted on their website, the service is very much eyeing for the global audience.
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NHN Posts All-time High Profits, Yet "Future Isn't All That Rosy," Analysts Say (Wed, 03 Feb 2010)
NHN, the company behind Naver.com, recently announced 2009 financial results. The company posted annual profit of KRW 540 billion (roughly US$ 540mm) on the revenue of KRW 1.3 trillion (about US$ 1.3 billion). Both figures are all-time high, according to NHN. NHN's profit rates, about 40% of the revenue, again proves that NHN is one giant cash generating machine. NHN is actually one of the most profitable companies in the whole Korean stock market, across all industries. The biggest contributor of this financial success is of course Naver's dominating market share in the web ads. Fueled by Naver's 60-70% search market share, Naver also sees a healthy market share of 65-70% in the nation's internet ads market. However, apparently there are some concerns over the company's long term growth potential too. About 1/3 of NHN's profit comes from Hangame's gaming business (Hangame is the online gaming arm of NHN corporation). This is a pretty unique revenue mix; Imagine 1/3 of Google's profits are being generated by games, though clearly Google and NHN are different companies as apples and oranges are. In and of itself, generating huge profits from a gaming business would be perfectly fine; However, the problem is that much of Hangame's profit gets generated from what's called "web board games", or things like Korean poker ("Go-stop"). There are increased social concerns towards these games: As people can exchange virtual currency into real money, these games can become too addictive and potentially become borderline gamling. Also generating investors' concerns is the under-performance of Naver's overseas operations. Naver has always been criticized as a service that achieved its greatness by monopolizing the Korean market, not by building technological unfair advantage that can also work in other countries. To overcome these concerns, Naver has been trying hard to venture into new markets and move the needles there; However, Naver's current progress in other markets can best be described as "still trying". Naver is a great company: after all, it's the world's 7th largest internet search provider, a remarkable position given that the majority of its users are only Koreans. But without meaningful signals coming from overseas market, and less dependency of its gaming business on the poker-like games, at least Naver's stock price could stall for a while.
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MBC finally gives in and embraces P2P sharing (Thu, 28 Jan 2010)
MBC, a major Korean broadcasting company, announced (link in Korean) it will make nearly all of its content available to anyone for sharing. This means any individual or company can freely grab MBC's original content and put it up on their server without any restrictions.  MBC says they are doing this as they are confident they will be able to monetize successfully. End customers who want to download MBC content should pay around KRW 500 per episode (= about half a buck). MBC will collect the revenues from P2P service providers, and has signed agreement with 40 P2P companies. As a way to make sure there is no loophole, MBC will use the technologies that can detect free-riders -- content downloaders who do not pay for the content. There are startup companies, such as Enswer, that can filter out illegally downloaded content.  MBC's new policy can be summed up as: Encourage more sharing/uploading, and monetize at the point of downloading. To me this seems to be a better strategy than what MBC (and all other content owners) have been trying so hard to do in the past, only in vain: Putting heavy penalties to content uploaders, in a hope such measure will scare people away. But the problem is, many of the content uploaders turn out to be 16-year highschool students, who may not be aware of all the laws and regulations, nor are easily scared in general.  MBC says they are giving the new system a try until March this year. 
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New Tag Results, from Technorati and Ingboo (Fri, 05 Mar 2010)
Technorati and Ingboo have partnered together to provide an all new kind of subscription experience for Technorati content, including tagged posts. Look for a blue Ingboo icon for a full range of subscription options. Feeds are also available for: Hottest Blogosphere Posts Latest Original Articles from Technorati The Technorati Blog We also have channel feeds, writer feeds, and editorial tag feeds, which can be found on their respective pages.
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