Baidu posted double-digit percentage revenue growth in 1Q2013–but its earnings still missed analysts’ expectations as the Chinese search giant’s costs soared.
Baidu’s 1Q2013 net income increased 8.5 percent to $328.9 million (2.043 billion RMB), short of the $354.9 million (2.19 billion yuan) expected by analysts polled by Bloomberg. Total revenue rose 40 percent from $961 million (5.97 billion RMB), missing the 5.99 billion RMB analysts expected.
Whether you’re designing a website for a certain up-and-coming personality or just doing some Photoshop or Illustrator projects for kicks, you can never underestimate the power of color schemes in finding the right colors for your project.
There are so many sources for combination of colors for a specific project. For starters, you can just look out of your window and see which colors look good in your eyes and which ones look revolting when combined; nature can be a good source of inspiration. However, there are more sophisticated tools in choosing the right color combinations, like the products offered by Pantone, where you can easily see which colors look good when juxtaposed. But if you are looking for other places to look for color schemes, here are some tips.
The White House is talking tougher in its growing public conflict with China over cyber attacks on American businesses, which have reportedly been linked back to hackers operating within China's boundaries. On Monday, Tom Donilon, the US national security advisor to President Obama, gave a lengthy address to the Asia Society in New York City, delivering the White House's sternest warning yet to China that the US could retaliate against suspected Chinese cyber attacks if and when it sees fit.
"Increasingly, US businesses are speaking out about their serious concerns about sophisticated, targeted theft of confidential business information and proprietary technologies through cyber intrusions emanating from China on an unprecedented scale," Donilon said in his prepared remarks posted on The White House website. "The international community cannot afford to tolerate such activity from any country. As the President said in the State of the Union, we will take action to protect our economy against cyber threats."
In a lot of ways, China's Internet isn't the sort of Internet you want to be using. It's ridiculously censored, for example. But in other ways, it's way better than the stuff we have over here. According to a recent report from the New England Complex Systems Institute, China's 'net infrastructure is head and shoulders above what we've got here in the west.
The report, compiled in 2008 and only recently released to the public, outlines two major areas in which China's got us beat. For one, there's the security feature known as Source Address Validation Architecture (SAVA). SAVA puts checkpoints across a network and systematically builds up a database of trusted computers and their IP addresses, and authenticates who's really sending what. The result is that malicious spoofing becomes near impossible, instead of ludicrously easy. It's a system that Steve Wolff, one of the Internet's founding fathers, tells New Scientist "should be much more widely adopted." And China's got it baked in.
Liu Bolin is best known for his "Hiding" series of images, in which he paints himself and others in a sort of urban camouflage, so that they disappear against the background. At TED 2013, Bolin demonstrated the technique on stage, and shared a bit of insight into how he manages to create such convincing work. "For the talk, I stood up on stage with my outfit pre-painted," he explains, "and then one of my assistants worked with the camera and stood back to instruct the other painter on what to do, where to paint, what colors to use, until from the camera I appear invisible."
China's economy is still on fire, with expected GDP growth of 8 percent in the first quarter of 2013. So it's no surprise that e-commerce is also soaring. According to compiled industry research from Alibaba Group, 2013 will mark the first time Chinese online spending exceeds that of the U.S.
Alibaba expects e-commerce in China to reach $265 billion this year, up from roughly $194 billion in 2012. The U.S., which generated $209 billion in e-commerce sales last year, will add a mere $21 billion this year, according to the projection.
Of course, China's 242 million online shoppers (out of an overall population of more than 1.34 billion) outnumber their U.S. counterparts by a cool 75 million. They buy lots of clothing and accessories, but relatively little in the way of household goods, digital media and electronics. Surveys show that China's online shoppers like the fact that they can save money on the Web, but still worry about product quality. product quality).
“Love your Enemies, for they tell you your Faults.” Benjamin Franklin wrote that.
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” The Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu wrote that.
Both come to mind as the world is waking up a newly disclosed body of evidence from the Internet security firm Mandiant, publicly illustrating, in the starkest terms yet, how wide, deep and pervasive computer hacking attacks from China have become. As reported on the front page of today’s New York Times, numerous attacks on American, Canadian and British companies, dating as far back as 2006, have been carried out by a single unit of the China’s People’s Liberation Army. Mandiant, a firm based in Alexandria, Va., has identified it as Unit 61398, operating out of a single building just walking distance from the point in outer Shanghai where the Huangpu and Yangtze Rivers meet.
In November, mobile app services company Flurry announced that China was on track to top the U.S. and Android install base at some point in the first quarter of 2013. Today, Flurry says that has happened. China has passed the U.S. to become the world’s top country for active Android and iOS smartphones and tablets, a year after the country became the fastest-growing smart device market in the world.
For its report, Flurry sourced from its entire data set of over 2.4 billion anonymous, aggregated app session daily across over 275,000 applications around the world. The company says it reliably measures activity in over 90 percent of the world’s smart devices.
In January of this year, the U.S. and China were neck-and-neck in terms of their active smart device installed base, at 222 million and 221 million, respectively. By the end of this month, Flurry estimates that will change to 230 million in the U.S. and 246 million in China.
More importantly, the U.S. will not regain the lead after this shift occurs, due the size of China’s population (over 1.3 billion people vs. 310 million in the U.S.). In fact, the report notes, the only other country that could eventually challenge China is India, which has just over 1.2 billion people. But China’s smart device installed base is significantly larger than India’s, where today there are only 19 million active devices.
China is considering lifting a decade-long ban on video game consoles, the official China Daily newspaper reported on Monday, sending shares of major hardware makers such as Sony Corp and Nintendo Co Ltd surging.
In November, Sony’s PlayStation 3 received a quality certification from a Chinese safety standards body, prompting speculation that Beijing would lift the ban, which the government said was imposed in 2000 to safeguard children’s mental and physical development..
China has long been the world’s supplier of low-cost solar panels, and now it’s a major market for them, too. According to research firm NPD’s SolarBuzz report, in the last quarter of 2012 China bought up 33 percent of the world’s solar panel supply.
In contrast, two years prior China accounted for less than 10 percent of the world’s solar panel sales. The shift is a combo of slowing sales in Europe and strong subsidies for solar panels in China.
A Chinese company thinks they've simplified the construction process so much that they can build the world's tallest skyscraper in 90 days.
Broad Sustainable Building Corporation will lay the foundation for their "Sky City" project this month. The company, famous for building tall buildings in ridiculously short time spans, plans to construct a 220-story skyscraper in 90 days, with construction starting in January and finishing in March. Sky City, if successful, will be 10 meters higher than the current tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
How do they plan on doing it? BSB eschews architectural beauty for simplicity. Their building are tall and block-y. They essentially make buildings out of lego blocks, but in real life. The National Post has a nice graph explaining how they plan on achieving their 90 day goal. "Traditional construction is chaotic," BSB chairman Zhang Yue recently told Wired magazine. "We took construction and moved it into the factory." BSB prepares the pieces offsite and then brings everything together so it slides in easily when construction begins, exactly like Lego blocks. By breaking everything down into simple blocks piled on top of one another, it allows them to build at an amazing pace -- their goal for Sky City is 5 stories a day.
China will be 2x the US smart phone market in a year! Only two years ago, China was a laggard with a tiny portion of the US. What happened?
Originally, China's market developed more slowly because of two reasons. First, usable 3G networks took much longer to develop than other countries. Second, there are few subsidies in China, so users had to pay one or two month's salary for an iPhone or Android. These inhibited the growth.
But both issues have changed. Broadband wireless is now over 58%, and smart phone prices have dropped to about $100 for an acceptable Android phone, and about $200 for a full-featured Android phone. Smart phones are now spreading like wildfire.
Huang Qingjun spent nearly 10 years travelling to remote areas in China to convince people to have their picture taken along with all of their household possessions. Huang wanted to offer a glimpse into the lives of ordinary Chinese people and document the level that they have been swept up by modernisation like those in the cities. At first glance it is striking at how few possessions they have, but as you look closer at each image you can see items that might be unexpected, such as a satellite dish, TV, DVD player, etc. Huang says, “I wanted to shoot the families outside their homes with the items they lived with, so people could see the fast development and changing lifestyles Chinese families were experiencing both inside and outside of their homes.”
According to its engineers, this will be the tallest skyscraper in the world by the end of March of 2013. Its name is Sky City, and its 2,749 feet (838 meters) distributed in 220 floors will grow in just 90 days in Changsha city, by the Xiangjiang river. Ninety days!
It's not a joke. According to the construction company, the skyscraper will be built in just 90 days at the unbelievable rate of five floors per day.
It's hard to believe, but they claim the building has been designed by some of the engineers who previously worked at the Burj Khalifa. It is also the same firm that built a full 30-story hotel in 15 days—which yes, is still standing and in perfect working condition.
Foundation work is beginning at the end of the month, once the Chinese authorities give the final go ahead to the project.
Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that manufactures devices for Apple, Nokia, and Sony, has over 1.2 million employees, mostly in factories on the Chinese mainland. By 2016, it would like to replace as many of those as possible with robots that can do the job 24/7.
That would address the human rights concerns about the company's working conditions. But is it worth putting 1.2 million people out of work? It's the classic globalization question.
Foxconn declared its intentions to go robotic last year, announcing that it had 10,000 robots online, ramping up to 300,000 this year. The goal as stated in the 2011 Xinhua article was to get to 1 million robots by 2014. This TechWeb post from January (which was brought to my attention by John Biggs at TechCrunch today) says Foxconn would reach the goal this year.
Just in time for the 18th Communist Party Congress, all Google services have suddenly been blocked in China. Traffic fell off Friday according to the Google Transparency Report.
“We’ve checked and there’s nothing wrong on our end,” Google said in a statement. So what is wrong, then?
Search, Gmail and Maps are all blocked, and searches for Google services are being rerouted via DNS spoofing to another site located in Korea. This blackout kicked in at the outset of the Communist Party Congress, a major event that takes place every ten years at which the government’s new leadership is appointed through a secretive process.
While we don’t yet have comment from Chinese officials, the two possibile causes are government restrictions or a doozie of a job by hackers. Given the timing and the extent of the outage, an official intervention seems more likely. Either way, Google's response will be seen as a test of its character. How much is Google willing to put up with to do business in the Chinese market.
At a pace never before achieved in history, Broad Group, a construction company that specializes in sustainable architecture, has built a 30-story building in 15 days. The remarkable time-lapse video (below) was shot over the course of just 360 hours and shows a 328-foot-tall tower rise from an empty site.
Visitors have flocked to the the Magic Art Special Exhibition in Hangzhou (China) which displays interactive 3D art by 20 talented South Korean artists.
To the delight of the kids (and some adults), there aren’t any signs saying “do not touch”. You can interact and take photos of every painting. The exhibition takes place until August 6, so if you’re around, don’t miss an opportunity to come and interact with these 3D paintings.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg would like to reach the country's 513 million Internet users. Too bad local entrepreneurs have beaten him to the punch.
Many may consider China a copycat country. But some of its biggest tech players are taking western ideas and improving upon them. Baidu shows off its own steps forward in several product categories.
