China Tech News

Robin Li, chairman and chief executive officer of Baidu, reportedly stated in an open letter to his search engine company that the company's management has decided to cut its medical business unit.

The dissolution method has reportedly not been determined yet. Related staff may either be merged to a new department or transferred to new positions.

Prior to this, Li said that they would make internal adjustments and eliminate products with no market competitiveness. They would allocate their resources to projects with advantages or strategic importance. So the severing of this healthcare unit means the services never materialized into much for Baidu.

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China's Lenovo Group confirmed that Jiang Zhen, former executive of Samsung, has joined Lenovo as vice president and will be responsible for the product strategy and product management of its mobile business group in China, covering product portfolio, product planning and operation.

With the joining of Jiang, Lenovo's vice president Chang Cheng will have a position adjustment. Chang will focus on the construction of software and hardware ecosystem. Both Chang and Jiang will report to Qiao Jian, Lenovo Group's senior vice president and co-president of mobile business group.

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Facebook issued a ban to its advertising agencies, asking them to suspend all advertisements for certain kinds of Chinese utility apps.

Facebook said that recently they found many irregularities from Chinese tool and utility app advertisers. Therefore, the company decided to suspend all advertisements for Chinese tool apps and the major focuses are apps related to smartphone clean-up, memory reclamation, and battery optimization. The company claimed that many of these advertisements deceived users, for example, by telling them their phone storage is full when it actually is not.
Facebook made a clear requirement to its advertising agencies to ask them to suspend all ads about clean-up and battery apps; otherwise, the agencies would be included in a blacklist.

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Ma Weiying, assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Asia, has left Microsoft and joined Toutiao.com as vice president.

In his new role, Ma will lead Toutiao's artificial intelligence laboratory. The news has been confirmed by Toutiao.
Ma joined MSRA in April 2001 as director of the researcher in the network search and mining team, leading the studies of information retrieval, Internet search technology, data mining, multimedia management, and mobile information browsing. `Ma worked for HP lab between 1997 and 2001.

Ma gained his Master's degree and PhD of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of California, Santa Barbara in 1994 and 1997, respectively. During his PhD study period, Ma participated in the Alexandria Digital Library project of UCSB.

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It seems to be a tough job being the head of the online commerce division of one of China's biggest conglomerates.

Wanda's e-commerce subsidiary Ffan.com just revealed that its chief executive officer Li Jinling submitted his resignation in December 2016 and formally departed the company in February 2017.
Meanwhile, Wanda Network Group vice president Xu Hui will take the CEO role.

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Baidu Ventures announced that its first investment project cooperating with American VR/AR company 8i has been completed.

Baidu Ventures participated in the B round of financing of USD27 million of the company. Apart from the investment, Baidu said they will begin deep cooperation with 8i in the product sector.

8i was founded in 2014 and headquartered in Los Angeles, U.S. and Wellington, New Zealand. The company focuses on 3D character imaging in the VR/AR/MR sector. It is committed to realizing large scale, low cost, and high precision 3D character imaging and has developed a series of image capture, splicing and compression core algorithms that are compatible with all AR/VR platforms.

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Smartphone maker Meizu will move its Shenzhen branch back to Zhuhai and its smart home services department will begin a round of employee layoffs.

For those employees who do not want to move back to Zhuhai, they will reportedly be considered as part of the voluntary turnover. At the same time, an insider revealed that Meizu's Zhuhai headquarters will also cut at least 10% of its employees.

Meizu's Shenzhen branch was founded in August 2014 and it mainly focuses on the gaming center, smart home services, and network development. At present, this branch has 350 employees.

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Alibaba's affiliate Ant Financial Services Group is betting big on growing South Korea's Kakao Pay past its current user base of 14 million.

Kakao Pay is the mobile payments service of Kakao Corp., which gained fame as a mobile messaging service.
"South Korea is an important market for Ant Financial in its global expansion, and we see many opportunities in the market for innovative services and growth in mobile payments. Given Kakao’s leading mobile platform offering and vast customer base, we believe we can bring Ant Financial's broad experience in digital payments and technology-driven financial services to offer exciting and innovative products to South Korean customers," said Douglas Feagin, President of Ant Financial International.

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The China National Development and Reform Commission has granted Baidu regulatory approval to launch an artificial intelligence research center.

The Chinese search engine will focus on deep learning, computer vision, machine hearing, biometric identification, human-computer interaction, standardized services and intellectual property in deep learning.
It will also participate in the joint development of national laboratories for big data system software and brain-like intelligent technologies and application. Baidu recently also hired Lu Qi, formerly global executive vice president at Microsoft, to lead its AI research.

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Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi recently confirmed that Manu Kumar Jain, Xiaomi's director of its Indian market business, has been promoted to global vice president.

Prior to this, Xiaomi's global vice president Hugo Barra departed the Beijing-based company due to work pressure and health reasons associated with living in China. Barra has since joined Facebook in the United States to lead its virtual reality business.

Jain is a co-founder of India's local e-commerce company Jabong and he joined Xiaomi in 2016. He played an important role in Xiaomi's rapid development in the Indian market. Under his leadership, Xiaomi sold 2.5 million to 3 million smartphones each quarter in the Indian market and about 75% of those phones were made in India.

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