China’s E-Commerce Sales Day Tomorrow Looks Set to be Bigger Than America’s Cyber Monday

Wait… Is this how e-commerce works? I’ve been doing it wrong. (Photo: Getty Images)

November 11th became a bizarre and jokey Single’s Day in China in the 1990s, celebrated as a sort of anti-Valentine’s day. But back in 2008, the iconic date – 11/11 – got a new meaning, and a greater urgency, when China’s top e-commerce site, Tmall, decided to turn it into a huge online shopping sales day. It quickly became a new national institution, and now all the country’s e-commerce sites join in the cut-price e-commerce spending spree that’s known as Double Eleven. 2012’s Double Eleven looks set, for the first time ever, to surpass America’s Cyber Monday in terms of sales volume.

Last year’s Cyber Monday in the US, in data from ComScore, saw $1.25 billion in sales, which was up 22 percent from the previous year. But China’s Double Eleven, with discounts of up to 50 percent on many items – is poised to pass that huge stat. 2011’s 24-hour online spending spree in China raked in US$830 million in transactions for just the two largest sites in the country, Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao – and that figure was up 373 percent from the previous year. Sadly, nationwide stats for all sites are not available.

So – brace yourselves for this – China’s Double Eleven online shopfest tomorrow will not only be bigger than America’s comparable day, but just two Chinese sites will likely beat that $1.25 billion sales figure by themselves.

Shop Till You Drop

Tmall’s special sales page…

… and this is 360Buy’s. Nobody said it’s gonna be pretty.

Looking at China’s top B2C e-commerce sites, they’ve all put up promotional pages ready for tomorrow (pictured above), and for months beforehand have been stockpiling inventory, hiring extra staff, and making sure that their site is up to the task of being hit by hundreds of millions of shoppers all at once.

The top five B2C shopping sites in the country – Tmall, 360Buy, QQ Buy, Suning, and Amazon China – are all pushing their Double Eleven deals to varying extents. The brick-and-mortar electronics retailer Suning (SHE:002024) is being particularly aggressive – as it has been in general for the past year or two, pushing its business more online – by giving away a small selection of stuff for free; plus, some of its other deals are available for three days, not just the regular 24-hour window.

China’s e-commerce market is also a ferocious area that has seen a few specialist sites fail earlier this year as the major e-tailers consolidate power and market share. It’s also a sector that sees a lot of price wars, so the Double Eleven shopfest is actually one of many chances for consumers to get a discount. Hopefully consumers will be looked after and not exploited tomorrow – we don’t want a re-run of some previous price wars that have seen stock for some items severly limited, leaving e-commerce shoppers feeling angered by an apparent bait-and-switch tactic. After all, sales should not be a blow-out, but a chance to win over new customers.

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Newsreel [Nov 10] Companies with Stanford roots have combined annual sales way more than India’s GDP

Stanford-Rooted Companies have annual sales turnover more than India’s GDP: Almost 40,000 active for-profit companies trace their roots to Stanford University, and if they formed an independent country, it would be the world’s 10th largest economy, a study found. The companies’ combined annual sales of about $2.7 trillion have generated an estimated 5.4 million jobs since the 1930s, according to the study released last month by Charles Eesley, an assistant professor in management science and engineering, and William Miller, an emeritus professor of public and private management, at the college near Palo Alto, California. Read more here. Google Is Blocked in China as Party Congress Begins: All Google services, including its search engine, Gmail and Maps, were inaccessible in China on Friday night and into Saturday, the company confirmed. The block comes as the 18th Communist Party Congress, the once-in-a-decade meeting to appoint new government leadership, gets under way. Read more here.

Android Veterans Tom Moss, Mike Chan Head To Accel As Entrepreneurs In Residence: Tom Moss and Mike Chan, who were early leaders and engineers on Google Android, are heading to Accel Partners as entrepreneurs in residence. Moss just left Google for the second time, after his enterprise mobility startup 3LM was acquired by Motorola (which was then acquired by Google). Moss originally ran carrier partnerships and business development for Android, just as the project began to take off. This was years before Android became the force that it is today in a dual platform world. Chan worked on Android as a senior software engineer for nearly five years. Read more here.

Is Retargeting Coming to Twitter?: Is retargeting, one of the hottest areas of online advertising, coming to Twitter? If recent moves by the social platform pan out, it just may be. Twitter is sucking up data all over the Web via its tweet button and other widgets. Right now, that data informs its “Who To Follow” feature only, a Twitter spokesperson said, but it could use it to inform ads, too, as it continues to develop its advertiser offerings. Access to this off-site data could prove extremely powerful for marketers and extremely lucrative for Twitter itself if and when it makes it available to them. Read more here.

Apple still perched high, but seems vulnerable: Apple, the world’s biggest and perhaps most admired company, seems to have lost some of its luster.Despite the hugely successful launch of the iPhone 5 and iPad mini tablet, shares in the California tech giant have slid some 20 per cent from all-time highs, and analysts are questioning whether Apple remains the leader in “innovation.” Read more here.

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How One Singaporean Offline Travel Agency Embraced the Web and Social Media

I used to work for an online travel classifieds startup in my early undergraduate days and work with a lot of travel agencies in Singapore. The nemesis of these local agencies, I was often told, is the internet.

With the advent of the internet and social media, local travel agencies are losing business due to the “more perfect” knowledge that is readily available at the click of the mouse. These traditional businesses are sometimes run by the older generation, with a huge inertia to adopt new and innovative methods and customer acquisition channels. On the other hand, with more information available, travelers are no longer keen on following packaged and guided tours, in which offline stores often specialized. With these two factors combined, travel agencies realize that they are slowly losing market share – and sales.

But those who prevail are the ones who embrace and use technology to their advantage. One such Singaporean travel agency, Maple Aviation, is an example. It has been around since 1988, and prides itself as the first local travel agency to adopt social media as its primary platform to reach out to its customers. It is also the TransAsia Airways Singapore’s general sales agent (GSA), and so it takes charge of all TransAsia Airways bookings in Singapore.

More recently in May, Maple Travel launched a “Book My Flight” tab on TransAsia Airways’ Facebook page that allows users to book Singapore to Taipei air tickets direct without having to leave Facebook. It has also integrated PayPal as its payment solution, which streamlines and simplifies the purchasing process for customers, thus enhancing the purchasing experience. It has since seen over 200 return flights sold through Facebook in the first three months.

Tan Meng Aun, director for Maple Aviation, also shared with us that 20 percent of its customers are between 18 and 24 years old and 50 percent are aged between 25 to 34 years old. It is mainly made up of students, couples, young working adults, and newlyweds. Unsurprisingly, these customers are also the ones who are constantly on the popular social network, adopters of PayPal payment services, and look to blogs as well as online guides to prepare for their next holiday destination.

Meng Aun also adds that with Facebook, it brings the brand closer to its customers:

They are able to answer their questions and solve their problems on a platform that the customers are already very comfortable with. This is in contrast to a static website where customers are unable to ask any questions or have to call in and hold before being able to speak to a company representative. With Facebook, they can simply leave their question as a message and later check the answer on their mobile phone while on commute. In addition, having PayPal integrated seamlessly together makes it easy to streamline the purchase process and improves the customer service experience when businesses merge these two platforms.

This also means that local travel agencies are able to coexist with the internet, when technology is embraced. Meng Aun adds:

While the internet is certainly muscling its way in to be a dominant sales channel in the travel industry, the local travel agencies are still able to find their niche, especially in the form of the customer service they provide. Airline ticketing and hotel bookings are no longer a major value proposition for travel agents to pitch to customers, as these customers are able to do that themselves on the internet. However, the nature of travel is always complicated. [For instance,] if a flight is cancelled or if the passenger’s travel plans change, and this is where the immediate service a travel agent can provide, will prove to be of value to customers. Hence, while the internet will continue to grow its dominance in the travel industry and the roles of the local travel agencies continue to evolve, the local travel agencies will never become redundant.

But really, how many local travel agencies, especially the smaller ones, would have the resources and money to integrate a platform like this? Not many. Perhaps the bigger ones will survive, but it’s still a tough task for the smaller players to take their business online.

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HAXLR8R Calling upon Gadget Hackers

Over the course of past few years, when talking about startups, spotlight was always on web service or mobile service. It seems that people are fine with leaving stuff like hardware innovations with Intel, Lenovo and Taiwan OEMs.

HAXLR8R, a venture fund focuses on entrepreneurs building hardware devices is trying to shake up the status quo of hardware world by offering seed funding (US$ 25k), office space (San Francisco and Shenzhen) among other resources for 2-4 person to make tangible things happen.

The accelerator program is currently looking for applications for their Winter 2013 Class, the second batch of the program. Check out their website if this intrigues you.

For Batch II, it all begins in Shenzhen from January through April 2013, with the last week spent in the Bay area.  And at the end of the program teams have the opportunity to present their company to US-based investors during our HAXLR8R DAY.

Shenzhen, which produced numerous PCs, laptops and Apple’s iDevices, is literally the hardware center on the planet with lots of factories, matured value chain and so forth. On the other hand, it’s also the origin of Shanzai products, or copycats. The city from every perspective could be deemed as a bless for hardware hackers.

Here’re some of the graduates from previous batch:

Axio

Axio’s mission is to revolutionize how people interact with their brains. We are a new breed of “connected health device,” using our EEG headband to monitor users’ focus and neurofeedback to improve their performance. Our Bluetooth© enabled headband and connected software give people the ability to communicate with their brains and get “in the zone” when it counts.

Axio hopes to be the premier focus platform in the emerging cognitive enhancement market, declared by Forbes to be the next “trillion dollar market” (Forbes Magazine, 2012).

 

Nomiku

Food lovers no longer have to salivate in vain at the delicious foods their favorite chefs make in immersion circulators for sous vide cooking. Now you can make 72 hour sweet and sticky ribs and Heston Blumenthal’s scrambled eggs conveniently in your own kitchen.

Nomiku is one of the fastest project on Kickstarter to raise $100,000 and now ready to deliver its beautiful product to the world.

 

Kindara

Trying to get pregnant can be a huge pain in the ass. If pregnancy doesn’t happen easily, women have limited options: confusing urine test strips, or expensive doctor visits.

Kindara founder Kati Bicknell knew there had to be a better way, and set out to create it.

Kindara is the intelligent and organized way to get pregnant. With Kindara for iPhone women can track their daily fertility signs and gain new insight into their reproductive health. Users can see if and when they ovulate, find the optimal time to conceive, as well as identify potential fertility issues should any arise. Help is built into the app so women feel supported every step of the way.

Kindara gives women an amazing new window into their fertility, allowing them to be an active participant on their path to motherhood.

 

Bilibot

Everybody loves robots.

But where is our R2D2, promised by science-fiction movies three decades ago.

Imagined by a team of robotist from MIT, Bilibot is a robotic platform aiming at making robots more affordable, easy to use and of course – useful.

 

Makeblock

Makeblock is the next generation of construction platforms. Smart designed, easy to use, with strong parts mostly made of hardened aluminum enables you to build easily every kind of robots, 3D-printers, artwork or what ever you want.

Open to other electronic and mechanic platforms you can attach different kind of Arduino boards, sensors, motors, drivers, industrial standard parts and even Lego.

 

PortableScores

Make every game a world class event.

The portable electronic scoreboard is a connected device that makes recreational and league sports more exciting and professional. It is built to fit in a backpack, mount on a floor, wall, or tripod, rugged and water resistant, but with a large bright display and connectivity via remote control, USB, Bluetooth, and accessory switches.

You can integrate the scoreboard easily into any aspect of your life and share it with the people there, or the people who aren’t via social networks.

 

No related posts.

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Shuabang: The Great Evil in China

In China, if you don’t know what the word “shuabang” means, you are definite out of the loop. It is the hottest topic in the Chinese mobile circle nowadays,

“Shuabang” is the practice of using various shady methods to propel an app onto the top of the App Store ranking for free apps. App Store is the preferred victim here, because despite the fact that Android is three times as popular as iOS, the inherent fragmented nature of the Android ecosystem means that there is no universal ranking that everyone adheres to, and rigging the system is deemed too simple and common place.

App Store, on the hand, is generally deemed to be an accurate representation of user’s taste and preference. But from a developer’s perspective, it is rather difficult to emerge as the odd on favorite out of more than 700,000 apps.

Of course, there are ways to publicize an app, but none compares to “shuabang”; it’s simply the cheapest way to attract users in an age where that’s hard to come by. It takes a bit less than $10,000 for a game to reach a top 10 ranking, while making the top 100 list takes as little as $1,500. After you reach the top, there multiple benefits: users are proven to be more attracted by items, with a top 10 ranking capable of generating tens of thousands downloads a day, and VCs are willing to pay to invest in companies that could rocket to the top.

After all, there already is an entire industry of people who specialize in “shuabang”. They have millions of iTunes accounts (in China, you don’t need a credit card number to register for an account), and have the necessary labor force, expertise, and the necessary software to get the job done.

A typical transaction with a “shuangbang” company goes something this: once you pay up, they will hire and subcontract 150 to 200 (if the occasions calls for it, maybe even more) part timers, who will log on using the “shuabang” company’s millions of Itunes account, and this vast army will download and review the apps however many times to fulfill the order. If the “shuabang” company fails to deliver any part of the bargain, be it number of downloads, the desired ranking, or the period over which the ranking is maintained, it will refund the customer, no questions asked.

In fact, the “shuabang” service is so good now that you could even have a set of choices, as there are different styles of how “shuabang” is done .Some jack up the ranking all at once, usually within a couple of hours. Others do it on Friday, seeking to maximize exposure during the weeks. Another popular choice is to employ “shuabang” over course of a month. During this period, every time an app’s ranking falls according the laws of gravity, it is jacked back up again to maintain the appearance of the Potemkin Village.

While most people do not condone “shuabang”, there is no doubt the practice has gone mainstream. Every new Apple release is another opprutunity for people who utilize “shuabang” to exploit, and even RenRen and Tencent, the biggest of Chinese companies, cannot afford to choose this path of least resistance to success. (adding a screenshot here to see the top chart apps and their daily ranks could be very interesting)

So far, Apple seems to have neither an apt response nor the desire to address the problem. It would appear there is little Apple could do any way.

Ultimately, however, everyone recognizes that “shuabang”, as form of tragedy of the commons, is detrimental to the entire ecosystem. To have your work not appreciated and not recognized is already bad enough, but to have it buried before it has even gotten the chance is simply intolerable cruelty. Idealistic pursuit aside, to not be able to make a living undoubtedly also diminishes enthusiasm. Users who are disinclined to trust the ranking would be less likely to explore and download new apps, while investors would also shy away from an industry that’s full of obfuscation.

All in all, “shuabang” is turning Apple’s guarded and well tended garden into Android’s wild wild West, and this spells bad news for Apple, developers, and consumers alike, and it’s happening in one of Apple’s most important markets.

It is understandable that in a age where promotion and user acquisition costs are growing by the day, some developers would consider “shuabang” to gain traction. However, there are also other methods that are equally valid and cost effective. Even for a boot strapping app developer with no budget, there are still methods such as cross promotion.

And that’s where hope lies. It is possible the growing stringent criticism of “shuabang” would deter the practice, and everyone involved would see through the trick and instead choose other innovative methods to get the words out about their apps. “There is no virtue like necessity”, and no matter how you spin it, deter “shuabang” is a necessity.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto

Related posts:

1. The great debate about user centered design in China
2. Rebuttal: The great debate about user centered design in China
3. Sina Weibo, Don’t Be Evil! Its Kandian, a Social TV Service Is In Private Test

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Shanda Innovations Stepping away from Innovating

Many years later, Shanda would probably remember 2012 with much bitter. The company is in secular shake-up this year with exodus of execs and missteps in many so-called innovations. And according to a report by local media Donews.com, it’s Shanda Innovations’ turn to going through a major restructure with some switch-offs and refocuses.

Insiders revealed that the research unit ranked (see below for final ranking) all its 21 incubating programs at the end of this August in an internal appraisal. Out of all the programs, the top 20% would be entitled to more resource while the bottom 30% would be advised to either shutdown or merger. The last 6, namely from No. 16 cloud router to No. 21 Qiyu, would definitely be gone.

Here’s the rankings:

1. MKNote (like Evernote)
2. WIFI Key (free wifi hotspots aggregator)
3. Tongtong (Free audio call)
4. Lezhong ROM (customized Android)
5. Tingting(Text to Speech)
6. Shanda Input (Chinese input method)
7. Smart Album (enhanced Android album)
8. Image Enhancement Engine (image processing)
9. Cloud Computing Front End system
10. Shanda Voice 360 (like Siri)
11. vku(video)
12. Voice Note (Speech to Text)
13. Daguan reading (mobile reading app)
14. You mail (mobile email client)
15. 17 startup (Chinese Crunchbase)
16. Cloud Router
17. muses.fm (like Shazam)
18. Mpwc (social game)
19. Quanloo (video aggregator)
20. 18 guard
21. Qiyu (mobile networking for strangers)

This knock-out round was said to be judged by Shanda COO Chen Danian and some senior execs of its investment arm.

Shanda Innovations was supposed to be a strategic incubator for the future decade in Shanda CEO Chen Tianqiao’s plan. However, it never really delivered on its expectation.

Rumors was spread back in a month ago that Shanda Innovations was subjected to a big lay-off with 3/4 staff being cut and the institute itself would be fell under Shanda Wireless arm’s control.

 

screenshot of MKNote homepage

Related posts:

1. Orbis Invested $15M into Shanda Literature at $800M Valuation
2. Rumour: Shanda is going to list another of its divisions next year
3. Shanda e-book unit file for IPO in the U.S.

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Vancl CEO: Sales Up 30%, Vancl Approaching Profit Goals

Vancl CEO Chen Nian

Clothing e-tailer Vancl has had a rough year and has only recently started to reemerge from its shell, with Vancl CEO Chen Nian finally weighing in on the IPO cancellation and the company’s future plans. Recently, Mr. Chen revealed that Vancl’s numbers are also looking up; at a conference in Hong Kong the CEO revealed that income from sales is up 30 percent from last year, and the company is nearing its profit goals.

It’s not all the result of sales growth, of course; earlier this year Chen cut staff and advertising in order to decrease the company’s overhead and hopefully achieve profitability within the year. Thanks in part to these measures, the company is close, although it isn’t clear exactly how close it is or whether it will actually be in the black before 2013 rolls around.

On a tangential note, the company has also released some official statistics that might interest you: Vancl has about 20 million users, who make purchases an average of 4-5 times per year, according to the company. Sixty percent of these users live in first tier cities, and they spend $24-$32 per purchase on average.

[via Sina Tech (including the image)]

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Vancl CEO: Sales Up 30%, Vancl Approaching Profit Goals

Vancl CEO Chen Nian

Clothing e-tailer Vancl has had a rough year and has only recently started to reemerge from its shell, with Vancl CEO Chen Nian finally weighing in on the IPO cancellation and the company’s future plans. Recently, Mr. Chen revealed that Vancl’s numbers are also looking up; at a conference in Hong Kong the CEO revealed that income from sales is up 30 percent from last year, and the company is nearing its profit goals.

It’s not all the result of sales growth, of course; earlier this year Chen cut staff and advertising in order to decrease the company’s overhead and hopefully achieve profitability within the year. Thanks in part to these measures, the company is close, although it isn’t clear exactly how close it is or whether it will actually be in the black before 2013 rolls around.

On a tangential note, the company has also released some official statistics that might interest you: Vancl has about 20 million users, who make purchases an average of 4-5 times per year, according to the company. Sixty percent of these users live in first tier cities, and they spend $24-$32 per purchase on average.

[via Sina Tech (including the image)]

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Microsoft Introduces Cool Speech-to-Speech Automated Chinese Translation

Have you ever wanted to speak and hear what you said played back instantly in another language in your own voice? Now you can, according to Microsoft, which has just introduced technology purporting to do just that with English and Chinese. Microsoft says that the technology has a better correct-to-incorrect words ratio than previous attempts at automated translation. Plus, it talks in your own voice, or at least a synthesized simulation of it.

The tech is very impressive, and it was quite accurate in its translation of simpler sentences, but we’re afraid that the translation aspect is still not quite ready for primetime yet. Microsoft is well aware of this, but just for fun, I thought I’d point out a couple of the more blatant examples of areas where the translation robot went awry:

Original English sentence: “So now we’re taking the things that I’m saying and we’re converting them into Chinese text.”
Meaning of translated Chinese sentence: “So now the things we want I shouldn’t be saying, we put them in China.”

Original English sentence: “I’m speaking in English, and hopefully you’ll hear me speak in Chinese in my own voice”
Meaning of translated Chinese sentence: “I am am [sic] speaking in English, hope you can hear me speaking in a Chinese person’s voice.”

So, simultaneous interpreters aren’t out of a job just yet. With that said, the technology is still very impressive. I wasn’t totally sold on the hearing-your-own-voice thing — it still just sounded like robot speech to me — but I have to admit that the software got some sentences right that I wasn’t sure it would. Moreover, some of the errors in translation were really the result of errors in transcription, which means that the tech will get even better at translating when Microsoft can teach it to better understand the original English input. With a few more years of development, the technology could be ready for practical uses, although I don’t think I’d want to use it for anything to important until it has been quite thoroughly tested.

If you’re interested, we’ve embedded the video of Microsoft’s presentation below. The translation discussion begins around 6 minutes in, and the speech-to-speech translation occurs in the last minute and a half, for those who’d like to skip to the highlights:

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Veteran Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla to start Incubator in India, hires former UID technology head

Veteran Silicon Valley investor, Vinod Khosla is setting up an incubator to nurture ventures that solve bottom of the pyramid problems in India and he has made key hire in the country, according to two people with knowledge of the development. Srikanth Nadhamuni, the former head of technology at India’s unique identification project which sought to give a unique verifiable online identity to more than a billion Indians, will head Khosla Labs in India, sources said.

Srikanth Nadhamuni

The incubator which will focus on companies that solve problems for the bottom of the pyramid will be launched in about six months. We have e-mailed Mr Khosla for more on this, however, there is no official conformation of this development yet. Nadhamuni, who was part of the team that made Intel’s first Pentium processor has worked at many silicon valley companies including Sun Microsystems.

Khosla and Nadhamuni go back to their days at Sun Microsystems. The Indo-American venture capitalist was a co-founder at Sun Microsystems where Nadhamuni was part of the Spark CPU design team.

Khosla labs already has an office in Bangalore and on their website, it says

Innovative, bottom-up methods will solve problems that now seem intractable—from energy to poverty to disease. Science and technology, powered by the fuel of entrepreneurial energy, are the largest multipliers of resources we have to solve our many social problems.

The core technology team that designed the architecture of the Unique Identification Authority of India’s project to give every Indian a unique identification number, has mostly moved out of the project. Pramod Varma, the Chief Architect of the project is now a part of India based business incubator Angel Prime and has moved to a part time role with the government project. He also mentors a few startups.

Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of Infosys who moved out of the IT services company to head the UID project,  had handpicked the team to setup the project’s technology backbone.

Recommended Read: THE list of Accelerators and Incubators in India

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Reports: Google Services, VPNs Blocked in China

With something as finicky as the Great Firewall, it’s hard to ever be totally sure what’s going on, let alone why whatever’s happening is happening, but reports from net users across China are indicating that the country has blocked access to all Google services. We first came across this via the folks from Greatfire.org, who tweeted this:

google blocked and VPNs being targeted – one step closer to fully separating the Chinanet from the Internet

— GreatFire.org (@GreatFireChina) November 9, 2012

Complaints from China based users on Twitter, Sina Weibo and even the commenters on our own site all seem to confirm the outage, although as it has rolled out over a Friday evening, many users likely won’t discover it until Saturday or even Monday.

Of course, everything could be back to normal by then. China’s government never officially announces that it has blocked something, and sometimes blocked sites return after a day or two. No one can be sure whether the blockage of Google services is a temporary bug, a temporary measure that will be undone when the 18th Party Congress ends, or the new status quo in China. But many China web users will be hoping it is not the latter, as the permanent blocking of Google services would leave Gmail users stranded and probably disrupt the operations of numerous businesses that have integrated Google products into their workflows. Moreover, switching on the VPN may not help, as many VPN users are reporting their VPNs are now offline, too.

On Sina Weibo, complaints about Gmail are rolling in quite quickly for such a late hour. “After the web gmail was blocked, now even Pop3/SMTP access isn’t working,” wrote one weibo user, “what can I do?” And indeed it looks like Chinese email clients are even blocking those forms of indirect access to Gmail accounts. “Fuck,” wrote another user, “did they just shut down the ports to the outside world? If I can’t get on Gmail, so be it, but why can’t QQ Mail get the mail from my Gmail account?”

Some users have suggested Google’s disappearance in China may be a DNS pollution issue, but Google has yet to announce anything on its blog, and access to Google services outside China has not been interrupted. The timing of this problem is also a bit suspicious, coming as it does at the beginning of the 18th Party Congress and occurring on a Friday evening (releasing bad news or making unpopular changes late on a Friday is a classic PR tactic, because no one reads the news on Friday evening and most people don’t read it on Saturday, either). But it is certainly possible that all of this is just a technical glitch that will be righted in the morning when China wakes up.

We recently reported that even before this latest blockage, many China based users had been experiencing unusual slowness or other problems with both VPNs and Google services, so it seems unlikely to me that the current reports that many VPNs and all Google services have been blocked are just coincidental. If you’re based in China, please let us know in the comments what you’re seeing, and whether VPNs and Google services are working for you.

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