Tech News

 in the area of brand value growth we were surprised to see Chinese search company Baidu take second place overall with 141% growth, while Facebook was way ahead of the pack at 246%. Baidu now becomes the 29th most valued brand with a $22.56 billion value, up from 75th position in 2009.

Chinese internet giant Tencent has bought 27.8 million shares (amounting to a 4.6% stake) in TV producer Huayi Brothers Media for around 450 million RMB ($69.2 million).

China's most popular dating website, Jiayuan.com, is set to IPO tomorrow. It's a free service, but users can opt for paid accounts if they want access to premium services.

Rumors have been swirling since February about Alibaba acquiring traffic stats company CNZZ. This evening a spokeswoman from Alibaba Group confirmed with us that this is now indeed a done deal.

Instead of creating a brand new group-buying site, Singapore-based online news media, AsiaOne announced its partnership with Outlet.com.sg to syndicate its group-buy offers on its site.

We reported on Indonesian telco XL Axiata launching its BlackBerry data roaming service a few days back. Now Telkomsel, one of its biggest rivals is jumping in with a competitive plan as well, providing BlackBerry flat data roaming service to its customers.

China has approved something called the 'Development Plan for the Zhongguancun National Innovation Demonstration Zone (2011-2020).' This plan aims to boost Zhongguancun's total revenue to 10 trillion RMB ($1.54 trillion)  by 2020, which would be an 85% improvement on the 1.55 trillion RMB ($239 billion) from last year.

Livlis allows users to understand who exactly they're dealing with through Twitter social graph; A huge plus when engaging in activities like e-commerce.

Despite the fact that Indonesia is a country with high use of social media and technology, there are still some regions in the country that lack computer literacy. To remedy this, a social program called Computers For Indonesia (or simply called Comp4id) are giving away old computers for schools in small towns. On Saturday May 7th the "1st Impact Day" event was held, and ten used computer units were donated to SMK PGRI Jatinangor (a vocational high school) in Bandung, Indonesia.

Apple has confirmed a glitch with the Verizon iPad 2 that is causing users to experience connectivity problems.

For BlackBerry users in Indonesia, Intel has launched a local application called "Warnai Hidupmu" (Color Your Life).

The Great Firewall of China keeps getting better

The anatomy turned out pretty true, especially on coffee spending, at least from personal experience. I could easily relate to it and I knew I had to write about it for the many start-up founders reading our blog.

To support Blackberry's Internet Service, Indonesian telco XL Axiata is cooperating with AT&T in the US and Telstra in Australia to expand Blackberry's flat data roaming service, launching Blackberry Prepaid Roaming for both countries.

Apple's threat to Nokia's number one position is certainly big news, but the growth of Asian handset manufacturers Samsung and HTC over the last year stands out as well.

IndiaMART.com, India's largest online B2B marketplace announced yesterday that its 4,000+ employees across 75 locations in India will now be using Google Apps for Business as their primary messaging and collaboration suite.

Leveraging the popularity of the wildly popular game Angry Birds, Nokia Indonesia is holding a competition titled "The Angry Birds Challenge."

When our Ambassador asked Yahoo of the quality of their new Indonesian techies, the Yahoo executive answered that the Indonesians "are as good as our people here in Silicon Valley.