China Mobile's Chairmain of 12580 service leaves for Baidu

Gong Yuyi, Chairman and COO of China Mobile's
Information Service Platform 12580, has left to
take charge of Baidu's online video service. He was
previously COO of Sohu, and moved to China Mobile
December of last year.

Postbar launches "Baidu Lighthouse"

An interactive marketing tool companies and individuals
can use to collect groups of customers on Tieba. The tools
available include videos, images, polls and posts, which
the receiving individuals can then repost, triggering a viral
campaign. China Mobile is advertising its mobile music
service, "Miguhui", one of the first users of Lighthouse
("Dengta"). Baidu is providing the service free to over
230 celebrities and media outlets.

Oppenheimer maintains "perform" rating

Equivalent of neutral.

Baidu fined for unfair business practices

A district court at Chaoyang fined Baidu and
Evercare for hijacking the branded keyword
Shianba, belonging to Evercare's cosmetic
surgery competitor. Baidu's subsidiary, Baidu
Times had argued they did not have the ability
to police the bidding for keywords, but the court
rejected that claim, pointing out Baidu does
reserve the right to inspect keywords bid on.
The court held the the right was a responsibility
as well.

The combined fine is RMB 130,000 , and will be
effective in fifteen days.

Baidu wins anti-monopoly lawsuit

Renren Information Services company had filed the
suit, the first of its kind in China, with the Beijing
First Intermediate People's Court last December.
At issue was Renren's website showing up further
down in search results, after they stopped using
Baidu's ad-placement system.

iTieba - the SNS service - has 12 million users

Growing fast. Baidu expects the service, just launched
after one month of beta testing, to overtake
kaixin in another four months. The Baidu service
focuses heavily on celebrities and fans, distinguishing
itself from Kaixin001.com, which focuses on game
applications cloned from facebook.

Baidu Library adds new file formats

Earlier known as Baidu Docs. The new formats
are . Vsd,. Pot,. Pps,. Rtf,. Wps ,. et,. dps. The
library now has almost 90,000 shared docs.

Baidu Space updated

The mobile Baidu Space has been updated. The new version is at waphi.baidu.com, and accessible from wap.baidu.com.

Phoenix Nest still has ads on the leftside

Advertisers, however have to improve the quality of
ad-text, that is have it be more relevant to the search,
to be listed on the left. The top three leftside ads,
where they exist, are shown on a gray background.
The others are mixed in the search results.

As Robin Li stated in the Q3 earnings call:

Phoenix Nest is a new option, a new system, it’s
a new mechanism and it’s independent of where [ads]
are displayed. So this switch that we are talking about
means Phoenix Nest as the auction system, as the
bidding system, as the keyboard management system,
will take over all of the inventory we have on our search
results page, meaning the main panel will also be powered,
if you will, by Phoenix Nest.

Rumours Baidu may buy Youku for 200 million USD

Baidu had invested in online video site ku6.com, acquired
recently by another company. Baidu VP Ren Xuyang, in
charge of investments and purchasing, refused to comment,
and Youku denied the rumour. Youku had received a new
round of financing fairly recently.

Youa updates

Baidu's e-shopping channel Youa now supports a fast
checkout mechanism. Users need not register on the
site, and and can checkout by providing just their
cell number or email address.

In addition, Youa has launched a lottery ticket
sales service, working as a proxy sales agent. Users
cannot purchase tickets directly on the site, but
can enter the number they choose. The site then
contacts a lottery sales organization to purchase
the ticket for the user. The winnings are deposited
to the user's account, subject to a limit of 10,000 RMB.
Larger amounts require user authorization.

Piper Jaffray maintains Neutral rating

and $315 price target.

Recruiting interns to research grammar of foreign languages

Specifically German, French, Russian, Arabic, Malay,
Turkish and Persian. The intern researches have to
sum up the grammar syntax and search usage patterns
in those languages.

Teaming up with Media outlets to create city post bars

Baidu is aiming to locate a user by IP address, and
recommend local media outlets. These media
outlets will have exclusive rights to operate the
regional headline section of the Baidu PostBar page.
The scheme is in place in Hangzhou, the tie-up
being with the Hangzhou Daily, in Shijiazhuang
with the Yanzhao Metropolitan News, and in
Fujian with the Southeastern Express.

Shanda lit. planning to sue in January

Shanda Literature listed seven reasons

1. Baidu.com infringed the copyright incomes of
contracted writers of Shanda Literature.

2. Baidu.com was responsible for content and url
thefts of its key literature works

3 Baidu.com manipulated the ranking list and blocked
Shanda Literature's works for no reason.

4. Baidu.com's Post Bar has become a hotbed for pirated
Internet literature.

5. Baidu.com's response to requirements of pirated content
deletion is slow.

6. Baidu.com's tolerance for pirated websites has harmed innovation

7 Baidu.com caused great losses to Shanda Literature.

Shanda Literature said it will sue Baidu.com in
January 2010 for five pieces of severely infringed works.
The lawsuit will involve a compensation of over
CNY1 million.

News channel adds video

The video channels have subchannels for national,
international, sports and entertainment feeds.

C2C shopping site, Youa, underperforming

As per Analysys, Youa had just 1% of market share
in Q3 2009, despite having over 5% share in volume
of merchandise and number of retailers. Analysys had
predicted around 6% market share a year ago. Few
buyers, and underfunding seem to be the issues.

User search share grows

As per iResearch, Baidu now has an all-time high user-search
share of 77%, up 1.3% points from last quarter. The second,
Google, is at 17.9%, falling consecutively for three quarters.
Volume of webpage search requests reached 54.5 billion in
China, a 7.4% rise quarter-over-quarter, of which Baidu had
41.94 billion, a rise of 9.4% qoq.

Children's search service shutdown

following CCTV reports of porn in the results.
Shaoer.baidu.com has been up and running since
2006.

Self policing for vulgar Internet content

Sina, Sohu, Netease, Baidu, Zhongsou, China Yahoo
and Qihoo have agreed to take measures to stop
linking to vulgar or pornographic content, and to not
provide network services to companies offering such
information. This seems to be in response to CCTV's
recent reports on porn on the net and on mobile
phones. A number of Chinese departments have
launched a crackdown on port on the net.

Kaufman Bros starts coverage with Hold

Aaron Kessler places of PT of $470, pointing out the
positive long-term potential of the company. Believes
the stock may be flat in the near-term till the Phoenix
Nest transition is complete, at which point, monetization
should improve, making for better earnings. EPS 2010
estimate of $9.24.

Postbar has a new top-level domain name: tieba.baidu.com

The State Administration for Industry and Commerce
has granted Baidu exclusive use of the trademark
Tieba (Postbar).

Tie-up with China Mobile and Unicom for charge cards...

to be used on Baifubao, the e-commerce system.
There is a 5% surcharge.

Outstanding corporate citizen award

Baidu has been awarded the outstanding corporate citizen
award from the Ministry of Civil Affairs, China Association
of social workers, corporate citizen committees, and China
Central Television Business Channel. They jointly organized
the "2009 China Forum and the good corporate citizen
Corporate Citizenship Award Ceremony". Baidu was credited
for its strong sense of mission in fulfilling corporate social
responsibility, in providing a special search service for older
people, helping at times with various crises and natural
disasters, and promoting innovation among University
students.