Tencent’s WeChat Could Be Headed For Trademark Dispute in China

Remember Apple’s trademark battle with Chinese company Proview, which registered the Chinese trademark for iPad? Well it looks like Tencent could be in for a trademark battle of its very own over Weixin, the Chinese name for its popular messaging app WeChat. It turns out that lots of companies registered the Weixin name before Tencent, but the relevant trademarks — those for the telecommunications field — were registered by a small Beijing company just one week before Tencent’s application was filed.

Observe, if you will, the dates in the trademark applications below (they’re in the upper right of each application). You’ll see that Tencent’s application (right) was filed on January 24, 2011, but an application for the “Weixin” name had already been filed by a company called Beijing Lianzhi Zhaoyang Cultural Dissemination LLC on January 17.

This certainly seems like a case of trademark trolling, and while we don’t want to jump to too many conclusions, I rather doubt that the timing of these applications is a coincidence. Troll or no, though, it looks like Tencent may have to deal with the Beijing company to secure its trademark, and that could mean giving away a big lump of cash. Still, the company doesn’t have much other choice at this point; the service is already branded domestically as Weixin, and a name change now could negatively impact the service’s skyrocketing growth.

[via Sina Tech]

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China Mobile Hits 7-Year Low in Monthly User Growth

Poor China Mobile. The 3G era has not been kind to the dominant telecom, mostly because the TD-SCDMA network it was allowed to run isn’t particularly popular with handset manufacturers or customers, and though the company has a blazing-fast 4G network, the government will not yet allow it to offer 4G service commercially anywhere (except Hong Kong). The end result is that while competitors like China Unicom are experiencing big growth driven mostly by new 3G accounts, China Mobile had its worst month in seven years for new signups this November:

As you can see, the company picked up just 3.8 million new users in November. That sounds impressive, but it’s China Mobile’s worst monthly performance since 2005. Of course, it’s still not bad by any stretch of the imagination — it’s actually still higher than China Unicom’s total new users in November — but it isn’t the kind of strong growth the company has been used to, and its new 3G user signups are still a little behind Unicom.

So, while November wasn’t a disaster for China Mobile, the company is probably hoping very much that it isn’t a trend, either. New user signups have already been nearly halved since this year’s high (5.96 million new users in February), and if they drop much lower, there really will be a big gap between China Mobile and its more 3G-friendly competitors.

[via Sina Tech]

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MOOCs Won’t Replace Traditional Education. But They Don’t Have To

Image: Learni.st

One of the bigger technology stories of the past year has been the emergence of MOOCs, or massive open online courses. Platforms like Coursera, Udacity, and Udemy offer courses on a wide range of topics and can be accessed from anywhere on the planet with a decent internet connection. They are the logical evolution of the correspondence course realized thanks to the internet.

I won’t be so dramatic as Clay Shirky to say that MOOCs are going to turn institutional education on its head. I think he’s creating a false dichotomy by discussing them in this way. The truth is that many educational institutions are playing a big part in the growth of MOOCs. If I draw on my own recent experience with MOOCs, I’ve been in a Python course with Rice University professors on Coursera, and I did another on data visualization from the Knight Center for Journalism through UofT. Many of these courses bring much of the same information, and indeed the same instructors that you’ll find in universities.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that MOOCs are no replacement for in-class instruction. Posting a cry for help in a forum is hardly the same as raising your hand to ask a question. But MOOCs really don’t have to replace conventional education. They can be a supplement. Or, if you’re like me, a way for old (long-since graduated) dogs to learn new tricks. Or — and perhaps this is where the real impact lies — for a kid growing up in rural India or China, it can be a door to new worlds that’s suddenly as close as the nearest internet cafe.

For our readers who live in the world of startups, MOOCs have a lot to offer as well. The rich offerings of technical courses mean that suddenly your non-technical people can get become familiar with programming — not because you need those people to program themselves, but because it will help them see new possibilities, and thus work better with coders.

I’m curious to know how many of our readers have been taking advantage of MOOCs this year. If you have, do let us know what your experience has been like in the comments.

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Aiming at Indonesia and Beyond, WeChat Launches Beta BlackBerry App

We know that the China-made messaging app WeChat has global ambitions, and that’s made even more clear today with the launch of a beta version of WeChat for BlackBerry. Since pretty much no-one in China uses BlackBerry phones, this is certainly aimed at markets where WeChat is already seeing good growth (and where the BB OS is huge too), like Indonesia, Malaysia, and across the Middle East.

The new WeChat for BlackBerry is not on the app’s front page, and is instead announced on a backroom WeChat page; it seems to be in public testing for a while. It supports group messaging via text, voice, or photos – but it doesn’t have major features like video calling, as seen in the iPhone and Android versions.

If you really want it, the new release supports BB OS5, 6, and 7, and is in this ZIP file. Here are a couple more screenshots:

WeChat will reach 300 million registered users next month, according to its makers, Tencent (HKG:0700). Whatsapp never reveals numbers, but it’s likely ahead of some newer challengers such as Line (80 million) and KakaoTalk (70 million).

Get more info on WeChat v1.0 for BlackBerry (but in Chinese) on this page. If you test it out (I have no BlackBerry device to give this a spin), let us know how it performs in the comments.

[Source: 36kr - article in Chinese]

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Game Over for Zynga Japan: Tokyo Office to Close January 31

Zynga Japan will be closing down its Tokyo office at the end of January, according to notices posted on its website. We had a foreshadowing that this would happen back in October when Zynga (NASDAQ:ZNGA) laid off five percent of its workforce and proposed the closure of Japan and UK studios as well.

Serkan Toto has posted an informative timeline of Zynga Japan’s short-lived history over on his blog, and I encourage you to check that out. Then when you’re good and depressed, go cheer yourself up with a game of Rage of Bahamut.

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Exclusive: PlaygroundOnline and Sportsnest merge, Secures funding from Blume Ventures

Online sports product retailer, PlaygroundOnline and B2B company, Sportsnest have merged and the combined entity has raised funding from Blume Ventures.

PlaygroundOnline was launched in 2008 (read our coverage) and focused mostly on B2C segment, while Sportsnest is mostly focused on institutional segment.

Sum greater than the parts, these two teams coming together will offer enhanced product portfolio, larger inventory, better delivery times, well grounded domain expertise and increased offline and online synergies. Post merger, PlaygroundOnline will continue to be the consumer face of the entity.

PlaygroundOnline has serviced more than 50,000 customers and post this merger, will strengthen its focus on categories including cricket, badminton, tennis, football, outdoor and adventure, cycling, running and golf. It also plans to enhance its presence in sports nutrition, apparel, footwear and gym equipment.

Sportsnest runs a very strong institutional business catering to the requirements of clubs, schools, academies and corporates focusing on cricket, apparel, footwear, team sports and racket sports.

“Blume is very happy to see two great teams merge and two diverse business models emerge that each can become a fairly large business. Blume and the teams also see efficiencies in rationalizing supply chain, taking on interesting new business models such as franchising, distribution of select brands and a pan-india B2B rollout in the imminent future.” Kartik Reddy, Managing Partner, Blume Ventures.

Earlier, Snapdeal acquired eSportsBuy to enter into this category.

Recommended Read: A Look at Sports365, Mahesh Bhupathi’s foray into Ecommerce Venture

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3. Shared Taxi Service, SharedCab secures funding from Anupam Mittal, Kae Capital, Blume Ventures and Rajesh Sawhney

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Noida based meracareerguide raises undisclosed amount from Vishal Gondal and Ronnie Screwvala

Meracareerguide, a Noida based online career counselling platform for students has raised undisclosed amount from Vishal Gondal and Walt Disney India chief Ronnie Screwvala, reports Techcircle. The investment has not been confirmed by meracareerguide or either of the investors yet.

Through the meracareerguide platform, students from standard 10 and beyond (engineering, or other streams) can seek counselling from industry experts and  counselors via emails, and IVR telephony.

The platform offers psychometric career assessment which helps students to Identify careers that match their interest, ability and personality. In addition, it also helps students to get sense about their strengths and weaknesses to find right career. The psychometric career assessment feature is developed by a team of psychologists who have expertise in the field of education and organisation.

The platform’s career guidance packages are priced between Rs 499 (for psychometric  stream suggestor with sample report) to Rs 599 (psychometric  stream suggestor plus career guidance).

Earlier in July, Ronnie Screwvala promoted UNILAZER and Vishal Gondal promoted FACT had invested an undisclosed sum on OnContract.com. OnContract.com( earlier called as StaffOnContract.com) is a contract staffing platform that addresses the growing challenges of getting quality contract staff by providing an organized internet based marketplace to get people on just-in-time and just-for-time basis.

Currently the Indian online education market is stood at $20 billion and set to grow  100% by 2017 ($40 billion). India has one of the largest education systems in the world with a network of more than 1 million schools and 18,000 higher education institutions. Given such a tremendous opportunity in online education, investors have started betting big on it.

Related posts:

1. Contract Staffing Platform, OnContract secures funding from UNILAZER Ventures and FACT Ventures
2. YourNextLeap.com Raises Series A Funding From Nirvana Venture Advisors
3. StartUp #9 – NextLeap – A Recommendation Engine Which Acts As A Virtual Career Counselor

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