AutoNavi Holdings Ltd, China's No 1 navigation provider by market share, is expecting mobile Internet could drive the growth of the company in the coming years as the number of smartphone users hits nearly 300 million in the country.

"Map and navigation services on mobile devices are set to be a gateway for us to embrace mobile Internet, the next big trend in the industry," said Jiang Derong, co-founder of AutoNavi.

Students play simulated instruments on iPads, including Chinese instruments such as the guzheng and pipa, and Western ones such as the piano and violin, at the Lilin Primary School, affiliated with Shenzhen Nanshan Shiyan School, in Guangdong province on Monday.

CHINA'S largest e-commerce group yesterday reported record transactions of 1 trillion yuan (US$159 billion) in the first 11 months of this year, or equivalent to 5.4 percent of the country's total retail sales last year.

Alibaba.com said its consumer-to-consumer site Taobao.com achieved 800 billion yuan of sales and the business-to-consumer arm Tmall generated around 200 billion yuan. The total figure nearly doubled that of the whole of 2011.

eBay , the world’s leading online marketplace, today announced a new relationship in China with Xiu.com, a leading Chinese online fashion and luxury retailer. Together, eBay and Xiu.com are launching a new and fully localized online shopping experience, called eBay Style that brings the very best of eBay to Chinese consumers, particularly in fashion.

“Our long term vision is to connect Chinese consumers to global products and brands that they want and love in a seamless and safe way. By partnering with Xiu.com we are able to surface our best inventory to Chinese consumers, while providing a simple and easy shopping experience.”

IN the first case of its kind in Shanghai, a court ruled that an Internet domain name, as a kind of virtual property, can be seized and auctioned off to pay a debt.

The ruling went against a local debtor company that had avoided paying a 120,000 yuan (US$19,251) judgment to a local film and television company for five years.

A local Party chief has been using micro blog to solicit public opinions for the last two years and he found it hard to stop the habit.

Xu Gang, 54, the Party secretary of Quanzhou in Fujian province and a delegate at the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, said on Saturday that he spent an average of two to three hours on his micro blog every day.

THERE was excitement but a little heartache too for millions of bargain hunters yesterday as China's Singles Day evolved into what is probably the world's biggest online shopping event.

The 50,000-plus merchants on Alibaba's consumer-oriented Tmall.com took in 13.2 billion yuan (US$2.1 billion), the company said, after discounts of at least 50 percent were promised on a massive range of goods.

China is studying a standard for testing broadband speed, a move to stop network operators from offering services that are slower than advertised, a top official said Thursday.

"We have found that some unqualified network operators exaggerated the speed of their services, while offering low prices to entice users," Zhang Feng, spokesman for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), said at a press conference.

Dear Yahoos,

Today we communicated to our colleagues in Korea that we plan to close Yahoo!’s Korean business at the end of this year. Since 1997, our team in Korea has provided high-quality editorial content and services, and has built a successful search advertising network. We’re proud of the work they’ve done. Despite the hard work of the team, the Korean operation has faced serious and growing challenges over the past few years that now make scaling our business very difficult. Ultimately, today’s announcement is part of our effort to focus our resources on building a financially strong, global business that’s set up for long-term growth and success.

First we had 'the box', then the flat screen. Next it'll be interactive

Chinese online video website LeTV.com's idea of producing smart television sets may provide an edge for the Internet company because they are set to overtake traditional TVs in the coming years. However, LeTV should tackle a couple of difficulties before it can hope to lead the industry, analysts said.

CHINA has the world's largest number of microbloggers, according to the latest report on the country's new media development.

The annual report, published by the Social Sciences Academic Press, quoted the China Internet Network Information Center as saying that about 274 million Chinese people had microblog accounts as of June this year.

BAIDU, China's largest search engine provider, will invest about 10 billion yuan (US$1.6 billion) to build cloud computing centers to attract web-based software developers as it seeks to offer more services to users.

Baidu will also allow application developers to access freely its cloud computing capabilities, the firm said yesterday. It hopes this move may help attract more smartphone users by providing them with a wider range of web-based services.

According to a Netease Tech report, Gong Wenxiang, an e-commerce industry veteran, revealed on August 28 that employees from Chinese consumer electronics and home appliances retailer Suning's (002024.SZ) B2C site Suning.com have been in talks to acquire B2C e-commerce site Redbaby for the past month.

According to Gong, talks between the two companies have progressed to the assessment and due-diligence stage, with a final amount being the sole remaining stage prior to an acquisition.

But calls are made for it to be better monitored to ensure more fairness

With an Internet population larger than that of the United States and Japan combined, China saw its online shopping maintain an annual growth of 140 percent in sales since 2004, making it a powerhouse in driving up domestic consumption.