China Unicom officially says "ni hao" to iPhone 3GS

Apple and China Unicom have finally succeeded in reaching an agreement to bring the iPhone to China. Details are scarce at this point, but China Unicom officials revealed during a press conference on its recent financial results that it has made a three-year deal to sell the iPhone, and it should go on sale later this year. "This will provide users with brand new communication and information experience," according to a statement released by China Unicom.

The deal is the result of a long and winding process. Apple originally hoped to work out a deal with China Mobile, the country's largest carrier. However, China Mobile balked at Apple's original revenue sharing model. When Apple launched the iPhone 3G and moved to a more common subsidized model, negotiations began again with China Mobile, but supposedly broke down over operation and control of the App Store.

Meanwhile, Apple began negotiations with China Unicom, the country's second largest carrier, sometime early this year. It's believed that being second made China Unicom more willing to court Apple, and its recently built WCDMA 3G network was a perfect fit for the iPhone. (Most carriers in China use a homegrown, Chinese-specific 3G network). Apple apparently made a few concessions, including disabling the WiFi feature—which is prohibited on mobile phones by Chinese law—and adding what appears to be a China Unicom startup screen. Most recently, Apple executives traveled to China to hammer out the final details with China Unicom—today's announcement suggests those negotiations went well for both companies.

As of 9pm Beijing local time, Apple's Chinese website is now taking customer information to be notified when details of the iPhone's arrival are known (as pointed out by iPhone in China). China Unicom expects that to happen sometime in the fourth quarter of this year.

Entering the Chinese market is a major coup for Apple, as the country's roughly 700 million mobile subscribers represent the largest potential market for the iPhone in the world. If Apple is able to reach just two percent of those customers (that's Apple's current share of global mobile market), that represents 14 million more iPhone sales—a 56 percent increase over the roughly 25 million Apple has sold so far, over two years and in 80 countries.
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How Amazonfail was born!!!!!

While millions of people tuned in to Doctor Who and Red Dwarf over the Easter weekend my holiday entertainment was provided by typing 'amazonfail' into the Twitter search engine and watching the stream of outraged posts about the company that used to be the world's favourite bookstore flow across my laptop screen.The PR nightmare started at some point on Sunday when an angry post on the LiveJournal blog site by author and publisher Mark Probst broke through into online consciousness. He had noticed that his book The Filly, though still listed on Amazon's US website, had lost its sales ranking data and was no longer appearing in relevant searches.An e-mail from an Amazon representative informed Probst that his book, a romance featuring gay characters, had been classed as 'adult' and removed from the ratings system so that the search pages would be more 'family-friendly.'Two other high profile gay romance books, Transgressions by Erastes and False Colors by Alex Beecroft, had also lost their sales ranking. This meant it was only possible to find them by looking specifically for the title and author, so people searching for similar books, or similar titles were unlikely to find or buy them.It emerged that thousands of other books had been similarly delisted, including such radical texts as The Well of Loneliness and John Barrowman's autobiography, while a little research by interested bloggers found Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds, the Parent's Guide to Homosexuality and Hitler's Mein Kampf were all still searchable and proudly displayed.

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Amazon Enters the File-Shipping Business

Amazon.com’s curious ambitions as a computing infrastructure provider continue to grow. The company this week revealed a new service that will help companies of all sizes ship files like MP3s and software packages to people scattered around the globe.The “content delivery service” joins Amazon’s existing storage, software and database services where customers can store their data and code at Amazon’s data centers. The idea behind this push is that Amazon has developed vast expertise at running a complex Web operation, so it can lend a helping hand to those customers who would prefer not to manage their own computing systems. In addition, Amazon charges on a per-use basis, so customers can pay for the amount of disk space consumed instead of purchasing an entire storage system.

Some major hardware makers like Sun Microsystems are working on similar technology, but a company that specializes in delivering things like books and jewelry may beat the infrastructure crowd to the punch.

With the new service, which is only in private trials at the moment, Amazon will distribute customers’ files across its data centers in the United States, Europe and Asia. Ideally, people will be able to download the files from computing systems located near them and get the information quicker.

Current Amazon customers can accomplish much the same via the existing Simple Storage Service or S3. The new service, Amazon says, will make it easier for customers to distribute their files to a diverse set of data centers, improving performance. “This makes sense for popular content that may be accessed many times,” said Adam Selipsky, a vice president with Amazon Web Services.

Presumably, customers will need to pay a premium to spread out the files, although Amazon is not commenting on pricing for the new service.

Amazon is looking for large media houses that distribute MP3s and photos to embrace the new service along with customers who ship large amounts of their software over the Internet.

Amazon plans to have the service ready by the end of this year.

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