Global Strategy: For the Time Being Avoid the U.S.A.

China's biggest search engine company, Baidu Inc., is more dominant than ever now due to Google's pullback (moved its search to Hong Kong due to censorship demands that were placed on Google by China government).

Baidu's 41-year-old founder and CEO Robin Li has to figure out how to grow the business amid investor concerns on just where the growth will come from since there will be an intentional avoidance of the U.S.A. market for now.

More than two-thirds of China's population is still not on the Internet so there is room for Baidu to squeeze out additional local growth over the next 5-10 years.

But other revenue streams will be critical for Baidu to maintain and sustain its position in the local and global marketplace.

Read the interesting Bosstalk interview conducted by Owen Fletcher (WSJ) with Robin Li (at Baidu's Beijing headquarter office) -- here.

Illustration credit (very striking -- scary -- how much it looks like Google): Baidu search engine service, China

Posted by: Laurel Delaney, The Global Small Business Blog

A Crackdown by China's Web Censors; But Wait, There's More!

Google's search sites in China abruptly stopped working earlier this week, but the explanation for the outage got a little loosey goosey as the day wore on. The Internet technology powerhouse first blamed itself, noting a technical change, but later reversed course and pointed to the heavy hand of China’s “Great Firewall" -- even as service appeared to be back to normal.

Read Google Runs Into China's "Great Firewall" over at the AllThingsD.

What do you think is really going on?

Then, I read the following and find it terribly unsettling yet fascinating at the same time:

Why Foreigners Can't Win in China

And to top that off, which I didn't think was possible, I catch this disturbing piece related not to Google-China relations but to China, the country itself, that makes me want to never ever write about China again:

China Body-Dumping Case Highlights Clash of Values (I'll say)

All of this gives us an idea of the country and the people we are negotiating with.

Posted by: The Global Small Business Blog

World Population

Since 95 percent of the world's population resides outside the United States, I thought you'd like to know what you are missing out on if you run a only a local business.

World population:
6, 692,030,277 (according to Google in 2008)

That's a mighty big pie.

Look at the United States relative to the world here (very cool tool)!

Another look at population again powered by Google Docs (2008).

Chart source: Interesting outlook -- 1965-2050 -- from Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat (2007)

Message to China: Stop Carving Up Cyberspace with Boundaries

My fellow readers, I am sure you have been following every last little detail concerning the China-based hacker attack on Google and as many as 34 other companies, including Adobe Systems Inc., Juniper Networks and Yahoo. As a result of the cyber attack and the fact that the China government continues to force Google to neuter searches, Google has threatened to pull out of China.

This is a very critical juncture in the history of international business but it's not the first time a company has walked away from China. Levi Strauss & Co., 17 years ago did too, and returned. Funny thing, Levi's brand is currently made in China and they just opened their 501st retail store in Beijing last November. What happened in between? Take a look at this.

But this predicament is different -- far more public thanks to the Internet (go Google!) -- and will most likely bring foreign-policy implications. It will be interesting to see what happens when Google shuts off the valve in China on censoring search results and how fast China's government blocks or shuts down Google.cn, if at all.

In the course of determining what really happened, we will unveil more evidence of weird things going on.

Needless to say I admire and respect Google's bold move here (tough place to be but I always like to see people/companies take a public stand, exhibit backbone and show a strong sense of world good) and it's in line with this fine commentary, appropriately entitled, "Google Gets on the Right Side of History," written by Rebecca MacKinnon, a fellow with the Open Society Institute.

My feeling is you can't be part pregnant; and when you are Google, you most certainly can't be part-search engine in China.

We'll keep you posted.

Learning a Language?

Holy cow! Google has added an amazing 285 languages to its Translator Toolkit which brings the total number of languages to 345.

Google says its focusing on minority languages. This includes regional, heritage, indigenous, and threatened languages. Google wants to help preserve these lesser known languages so that these smaller cultures won't be forgotten as history constantly unfolds.

One of the minority languages is Māori. Read more here.

Photo credit: Maori Language Week protest march

Bing vs. Google on "I Love You"

John Yunker at Global by Design elaborates on the difference between using Bing (owned by Microsoft) versus Google on a simple search string translation of the words: "I love you."

Read more here.

Why not just go straight to: Bing translator?
Or how about Google translator?

Full disclosure: I'm a HUGE Google fan (no affiliation whatsoever). John is a Microsoft program manager and co-founder of Byte Level Research.