On 30th October, along with a high-profile event in Beijing and 30 ceremonies in major cities, China Unicom started selling iPhones equipped for 3G service officially at 2,000 stores nationwide.

Without a key feature of WiFi connectivity and at higher prices than widely available black market models, China Unicom’s iPhones are absolutely not able to satisfy Chinese consumers. As a result, it is ridiculed as a “Castrated iPhone”. I came across this cartoon last night. It is a classic visualization of such satire……

Xiexielong is a new online cartoon character created by a young creative collective called Dong Li Fang. The team, lead by Zhejiang University of Media and Communications graduate Pangjun, currently has six Beijing-based members.

On October 4th, Dong Li Fang issued it’s latest animation piece, titled Xiexielong’s Private College Diary: Let’s Reminiscence on Tudou and Youku. Check it out below. You will find it contains quite a few obscure Chinese 80-generation cultural references. For example, teasing TV series of our youth, like Legend of the White Snake, Growing Pains, and even the more recent TV show Super Girl……

In the first topic (The Role of IWOM in Purchase Decisions) of CIC’s “Making sense of IWOM” white paper series, CIC suggested that the majority of consumers use IWOM to help them make purchase decisions about products and brands they plan on purchasing. What CIC did not do look at was if they found answers if they left, stuck around or if they posted comments about those products and answer other consumer questions about those brands and products.

To answer these questions, CIC today releases the second topic titled “How IWOM is generated and disseminated”……

CIC, the Shanghai-based Internet Word-of-Mouth (IWOM) research and consulting agency, releases a Chinese Internet trend watch report for the first half year of 2009.

First, CIC has been watching the expansion of Video Sharing. Secondly, let’s see how serious offline social issues and events have been discussed online. Lastly, CIC has also been seeing the emergence of better digital campaigns as brands start to realize the importance of having a strong Internet presence which they can use to effectively connect with their customers……

The 60th anniversary of National Day celebrations is definitely one of the hottest online topics in China recently. In addition to the National Day Parade, the film The Founding of A Republic, and all the other headlines, a look back to 60 years’ cover images of China Pictorial is very popular on Internet recently.

Take a look at these 60 cover images, they are great and visible epitome (though they are not objective enough) of key characters, works, events, and issues in the past 60 years of People’s Republic……

Nonopanda is a popular online cartoon character in China created by Lin Wuzhi, a Shanghai-based “bedroom” animator and cartoon designer. Wuzhi’s latest work was uploaded to Tudou just a few days ago and already has nearly a million views.

Watch closely and you’ll notice quite a few pop culture references, some unique to China (e.g. grass mud horse, green dam girl, etc. – even a dancing panda-ized version of Michael Jackson makes an appearance)……

Twitter is more than a web tool for us. Although it is blocked in China, government still cannot stop it becoming a must-have social community which enable people to quickly and simply share info and interact with others via networking, micro-blogging, following, “@” replying, and so on.

Two Chinese web savvy Riku and Youthfilm have collaborated and created a “Twitter Notebook” so as to extend the online experience of Twitter to offline. The idea is about encouraging people to put tweets on a notebook……

Flash mob is not a very new social phenomenon in China, especially in big cities like Shanghai. The city’s largest flash mob group was established on September 18th 2006 on Douban. The recent increasing awareness of flash mob is due to a frozen flash mob in Raffles City on July 31st. A video of record was uploaded to Tudou on August 2nd, then it was widely spread out on the Internet. Till now, the video has been watched over 260,000 times.

This amazing action is wholly digitally organized……