tag = "China"

GeoSentric Oyj, developers of the GyPSii mobile social networking application, announced its partnership with China Unicom’s Shanghai Unicom, to become the premier mobile social network solution for its new consumer 3G SNS Service, UniSpace.

More than 5 million Shanghai Unicom customers are now able to download the GyPSii client directly on to their mobile device from the UniSpace website. This roll out will expand to 130 million subscribers in China. As part of the GyPSii community, UniSpace members can immediately start to create “geotagged” content for sharing in “real-time” with friends, family and the growing global community of GyPSii members.

Popular location-based mobile social network GyPSii has released a Java ME-based client, which will work on a majority of feature phones. Aimed primarily at the Chinese market, the application is available in both English and Chinese languages.

Java ME is an ideal solution for majority of users and according to the company, this way around 70% of the 650 million phone owners in China will be able to access GyPSii.

Mobile/Wireless
- China's mobile internet market develops rapidly on diversified application products and improved long-run user rates. Most of the mobile internet users were male, accounting for 74.6 percent of the total. Female users, however, are catching up year after year and the sexes are expected to merge within five years. People born in the 1980s accounted for 70.8 percent of mobile internet users. People were inclined to access the internet via handsets more frequently, and 34 percent users surveyed accessed several times per day. In terms of mobile internet application products, instant messengers remained popular as usual, accounting for 31.2 percent of the total, thanks to its huge user base.

Tencent, China’s largest Internet portal mostly known to us for its hugely popular instant messenger product QQ, published an updated report on the user numbers of its social networking service QZone last week. The report was only available in Chinese, but the folks over at Web2Asia were kind enough to translate it.

And if the self-reported numbers are not too much of an exaggeration, they’re nothing short of mind-blowing.

While some say the success of 3G in Japan is mostly hype, the country, which has over 80 percent adoption rates, has become home to a "thriving mobile ecosystem," said Joffe, noting that second-generation (2G) handsets are no longer sold there.

Two of the richest mobile social networking companies in the world are based in Japan, along with a number of other highly profitable firms that have developed cool content and even cooler applications, such as mobile commerce and mobile auctions, for 3G phones.

Similar businesses have begun to emerge in China and are creating mobile platforms aimed at the country's technologically savvy youth, hungry for entertainment on-the-go and turned on by flashy 3G phones.