Netease Opens North America Office

Niko on Forbes.com

Check out Lisa Hanson’s latest Forbes.com post, which was promoted on the Forbes Asia homepage. The article is The Chinese Internet Gets a Stronger Backbone. It has lots of interesting facts about the Internet infrastructure.

NetEase Opens North America Office

NetEase (NASDAQ: NTES) set up an office in North America, located in California, focused on creating new mobile games for western audiences. NetEase operates Blizzard titles World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, and other hit titles in China.

New Regulation for China’s Social Media

A new regulation for China’s Internet users: social media users will need to limit the choices of user names for social media accounts in the Internet Account Name Regulation released by the China National Internet Information Office. The new rule starts March 1, 2015. User names cannot violate the constitution and other laws, and cannot: endanger national security, leak state secrets, subvert state power and national unity, incite ethnic hatred, incite ethnic discrimination, spread obscenity, contain pornography, promote gambling, conduct violence, promote or conduct murder, and more. It seems those rules would apply more to the body contents than to the user name, but now it also includes the user name.

Internet Economy a Driving Force for China

Mr. Lu Wei, Minister of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), stated the following: “Over the past year, China has made striking achievements in Internet development. The number of Internet users reached 649 million. There are more than 4 million websites; e-commerce transactions exceeded 13 trillion yuan, and Chinese companies reproesnt 4 of the world’s top 10Internet companies. The Internet economy has become the main driving force of China’s economic growth.”

Ragnarok Online Shutting Down in Philippines

Level Up! Games Philippines (50% owned by Tencent) announced it will cease service of Ragnarok Online (RO) in March. This game was one of the very first hit MMORPGs in Southeast Asia, and it was launched in 2003. Philippine accounts will migrate to the RO international servers operated by the company Warpportal.

Over 588 Million Chinese Instant Messaging Users

CNNIC announced that there are 588 million Chinese instant messaging users, of which 508 million are mobile instant messaging users. The population of China is 1,300 million.