East-West-Connect.com

Baidu’s “Brand Promotion” product allows famous brands to display a lot more information about their brand for branded searches. When a Baidu user searches for a brand that uses Baidu’s brand advertising product, they will see text, images and video related to the brand as well as links that lead deeper into the company’s website. Read more...

Baidu Tongji (Analytics) launched some cool new tools this year that provide some functionality not available in Google Analytics: Heat Maps, Site Speed Test and Baidu Index Checker. Let’s take a look!

Baidu Index Checker

This is a great tool for monitoring how many of your website’s pages have been indexed by Baidu. It not only shows you current data, but shows you historical data as well. Read more...

Echo just made a guest post on Groupon China's counterfeit Tissot watch incident, how they dealt with it and what this might mean for Chinese group-buying websites and Chinese e-commerce in general. Check it out on TechRice.com.

TechRice is a great blog about Chinese web startups and major Chinese-language players on the Internet.

You may have noticed that we have a new red panda mascot for the blog. I think he's pretty cool!

The red panda images on the top and bottom of the blog were illustrated by Agus Prajago of choppic.com. Read more...

Tablet time!

A reader asked for some data on tablet usage on China, so I did some digging around and found a couple semi-relevant articles. I've simplified and 'Englishified' two Chinese-language articles that I found online Read more...

In my earlier blog post “How to Choose a Chinese Online Payment Solution”, I introduced some of the more popular Chinese online payment solutions. Some are fit for non-Chinese companies and some aren’t. Most China-based payment companies know Chinese clients well, but have major problems dealing with non-Chinese companies. Read more...

Although there are over 700 million Chinese people classified as living in rural areas, only about 125 million of them use the Internet. That’s a penetration rate of 18.5%*, far below the urban Chinese rate of 50%. These users are usually the last ones on the minds of International companies that are setting up shop in China’s first and second tier cities. However, when it comes to Internet marketing, rural Chinese Internet users are a rising force. Read more...

Google Maps and Google Places are massively popular across the world. Google has allowed local businesses to get in touch with local customers as well as allow customers to easily review the businesses they patronize. Read more...

If you have a website that receives search traffic from Chinese-language search queries as well as from search terms in other languages, it can be a hassle to find out how much of your search traffic is coming from Chinese-language keywords. Use this simple process, and it won't be a hassle anymore. :) This method will help you track how many visitors are arriving on your site via either Chinese-language search keywords or by searching from within greater China. Read more...

Tudou (土豆) made its formal debute on the Nasdaq on Wednesday the 17^th, US time with the ticker symbol TUDO. According to the IPO, Tudou was valued at 822 million dollars, less than one-third the value of its competitor Youku (优酷), which as a current valuation of about 3 billion dollars. Read more...