Whatever Google's reason for threatening to leave China , the latest numbers from StatCounter , a free online stat service, show that it certainly isn't for lack of opportunity. Google has been steadily gaining ground on China's premier search service, Baidu, since last August. Sponsor According to StatCounter , Google held just 28% of China's search market back in August and since has climbed to nearly 43%. That's a 15-percentage-point gain in just four or five months. Yahoo and Bing account for just over 1% of China's search engine market. While estimates put Google's projected 2010 income from business in China at around 2% of the company's entire revenue, the long-term implications of pulling out of the country are much larger . If any company should just give up the ghost and get out of China before making any more PR (and human rights) gaffes , maybe it's Yahoo. Discuss

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Google Gained Ground on Baidu in 2009

With tourists flocking to the Boston to walk the cobblestone streets of the Freedom Trail and visit various historical landmarks, Boston is often thought of for its ties to the American Revolution. But Boston is also the birthplace of a revolution of a different sort. In 1946, Georges Doriot, a professor at the Harvard Business School, founded the American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) in Boston - one of the very first venture capital firms. In 1957, the ARDC invested $70,000 in Digital Equipment Corporation, a company founded by two former Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers working on transistor-based computing. The ARDC was later able to turn around and sell their investment for $450 million, quite possibly the best return on an investment ever at that point. Sponsor RWW's Never Mind the Valley series: Boulder Los Angeles Coming Soon: Portland, OR and Austin, TX Half a century later, Boston is a thriving and vibrant community not only for venture capital and startups, but also for large technology companies and research corporations. With nearly a hundred regional colleges and universities - like MIT and Harvard - and over a quarter of a million students, Boston has quickly become a breeding ground for innovation in the tech sector. "The thing that's amazing is we don't have to worry about attracting people into the Boston community," said Jeffrey Bussgang of Flybridge Capital Partners in a speech at the Harvard Business School last October (see video embedded below). "The challenge is to retain people." And retain them they will, thanks to a plethora of resources available to young entrepreneurs and startups in Boston. Monthly meet-ups like Mobile Monday and Tech Tuesday as well as other events like the biannual Mass Tech Leadership Council Unconference are just a few of the great ways startups can get their feet off the ground. Other organizations like TechStars and Stay in MA help Boston startups set up shop in Beantown with scholarships, funding, and mentorship. And why wouldn't startups want to stay in Boston? Massachusetts boasts the highest per capita VC investment rate in the United States, eclipsing California and New York with $457 per person. Data released today from information and data-services company ChubbyBrain shows that while other Northeaster states are suffering from floundering VC investment, Massachusetts is alive and expanding. While New York and Pennsylvania fell to just $513 million and $254 million respectively in the second half of 2009, Boston's home state soared to $1.2 billion. Figures like these have vaulted Massachusetts past New York into the number two spot behind California for VC investments. Bussgang says that reasons like these and the overall economic stability of the state have encouraged startups and entrepreneurs in Boston, despite being across the country from sunny Silicon Valley. "Yeah the winter sucks, but Massachusetts has delivered a budget on time and balanced the last couple years... unlike what's going on in California," he says. Bussgang also points out that California continually ranks last on Chief Executive Magazine's list of Best and Worst States for Business, though Massachusetts is usually not too far away. The close-knit technology and innovation community of the greater Boston area has fostered spontaneous collaborations resulting in several successful companies across numerous industries. Cloud computing solutions like Carbonite and GlassHouse , robotics companies like Roomba-maker iRobot , online video providers like Brightcove , and e-commerce startups Vistaprint and Shoebuy are all examples of the firepower Boston's potential can produce. Boston has even seen recent expansion from larger corporations, such as Google , Microsoft and Cisco Systems . Having these larger companies in the Boston area provides excellent opportunities for startups, says Bussgang. "Boston has become an outpost for a lot of these satellite R&D centers, and a place where the companies that we fund can find a home," he says. To learn more about the Boston startup scene, check out Don Dodge's extensive list of events, resources and people, as well as Larry Cheng's Massachusetts VC Blog Directory , which you can import right into your RSS reader to stay on top of what VCs in Boston are talking about. Photo by Flickr user the-o . Discuss

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Never Mind the Valley: Here's Boston

While Google continues to digitize everything from the view from the driver's seat to the contents of your appointment book , their tremendous attempt at digitizing the written word, Google Books , has run into a snag in the most ironic of places - China. While the country is infamous for copyright infringement , especially of intellectual property, it too is working to prevent the unfair use of its citizen's copyrighted works. Bloomberg reported this morning that Google "has agreed to meet demands from a local writers' group that it stop scanning and uploading books to the company's online library without authors' permission." Sponsor The company found itself in a Chinese court last month facing allegations of copyright infringement by Chinese author Mian Mian, whose book can still be seen in preview on the Google service . This certainly isn't the first time Google has run into complaints over its practices with the project. Last month, the company was convicted of violating France's copyright laws . A Globe and Mail report on Google's practices stated that over 80% of the French books offered were still under copyright. The company has also faced criticism in Germany over its Google Books service, where today the German minister of Justice warned that the company may be reaching monopoly status, requiring government intervention. The Bloomberg article notes that in China, Google trails behind the search engine Baidu . This is in a country with more Internet users than the entire population of the United States. But is the problem of supposed copyright infringement a public relations issue in a country where the average consumer sees counterfeit products in nearly every storefront window? While we stand on the side of writers getting paid for their work, we're not sure this issue would really stand in the way of Google gaining popularity in China. Discuss

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Google Faces Copyright Trial in Chinese Courts

With the first week of 2010 in the books, we thought we would take a look at the most popular posts of the new year in ReadWriteStart - our channel devoted to entrepreneurs. In this ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup, we've got tips for funding advice , keeping organized and building loyal communities , but be sure to check out the newest post in our new series "Never Mind the Valley," highlighting thriving startup communities outside of Silicon Valley. Sponsor 5 Web Apps To Keep Your Startup Organized In a world where emails, phone calls, texts, and Tweets constantly bombard us, it is getting harder and harder to manage the firehose of data and information being thrust our way. For young companies to succeed this environment, it is imparitive they become organized and efficient lest they fall behind and quickly become overwhelmed. While there is no shortage of online solutions, it can be hard to know which one is the right tool for the job, so here's a list of five web applications to help kick-start your company and keep it organized without breaking the bank. 5 Great Blogs For Funding Advice The best advice we can give you is to know your audience. You don't try to sell booze to pregnant women, you don't make God-jokes in Utah and you don't get a term sheet without tailoring your pitch. Investors are already blogging about what they want from potential portfolio companies, so if you're looking for funding you should be reading their blogs. While we know there are plenty of useful investment-related blogs, here's a list of five to get you started. Community First: How Wufoo Created a Captive Audience So you've got a fabulous idea for a startup? That's great, but before you get wide-eyed and start thinking about wireframes, venture capital and moving to San Francisco, get your feet wet first by beginning to build your community. Having a strong and loyal community behind you is an important step in the startup process. After all, it will be much easier to convince a potential investor of the viability of your product if there is a thriving community eager to get their hands on it. Never Mind the Valley: Here's Los Angeles Best known for its movie stars, sun and surf, Los Angeles probably isn't the first place you'd think to breed technology. But when you consider the influence of investors like Jason Calacanis and Mark Suster, in addition to the fact that companies like

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ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we report on a new "superphone" launched by Google, take a look at how the Web is transforming personal finance, give you 5 reasons why RSS Readers still rock, get a first look at the new startup of ex-Facebook CTO Adam D'Angelo, analyze the trends that emerged from this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and more. And as usual we check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (our daily resource for entrepreneurs). Also read on for details of the newly released printed edition of our current premium report , about the Real-Time Web. Sponsor Now Available: Printed Edition of The Real-Time Web Report At the request of the librarian community and people that just like paper , we have made The Real-Time Web and its Future report available in print . For those of you that prefer it digitally, you can still download it . Don't forget about our Community Management Report . It too is coming in print soon, so watch out for it! Web Trends How The Web is Transforming Personal Finance Not too long ago, personal finance tools like Quicken and Microsoft Money used to be bound to the desktop. Today, free online tools like Mint , moneyStrands and Wesabe make it easy to track financial information. So you can now get a better overview of your personal finances than ever before. Editor's note : This story is part of ReadWriteWeb's Personal Finance series, a weekly, three-month-long look at how the Internet has transformed personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati . 5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock Recently we wrote about the decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news. We noted that while many people still use RSS Readers, usage has decreased due to the emergence of real-time and social flows of information via Twitter, Facebook and other such services. The post sparked a fascinating discussion, with over 160 comments. What we learned from that discussion is that while the RSS Reader market is indeed in decline, there are still a number of compelling use cases for RSS Readers. Welcome to the Age of Robot Reporters Recently, three emergency vehicles responded to a report of an unconscious person at the world headquarters of Nike Inc. in Portland, Oregon. How did we know? An automated form-pumping robot from startup company Nozzl Media told us. Nozzl Media unveiled this week a demonstration of its first product, a widget intended for newspaper websites seeking to display real-time local information derived from Twitter messages, blog posts and automatically extracted public records. Web Apps Meet Consumer Electronics at CES The 2010 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show ( CES ) saw a big trend emerge: web applications being ported to consumer electronics , from the technology inside cars to Web-enabled TVs. Earlier this week we noted that online music service Pandora will be made available in cars , courtesy of a new Pioneer device that will begin selling in March. Other evidence of this trend can be found in Ford's announcement of a new in-car system and Samsung's latest Internet-connected TV . SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY ReadWriteEnterprise Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise , devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations. The Pros and Cons of the Google Nexus One As An Enterprise Phone The Nexus One is another smart phone that we will inevitably see inside the walls of the enterprise. Smart phones seem to have a way of being used for all kinds of work activities. So, what are the pros and cons of using the Nexus One in the enterprise? ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. 5 Web Apps To Keep Your Startup Organized In a world where emails, phone calls, texts, and Tweets constantly bombard us, it is getting harder and harder to manage the firehose of data and information being thrust our way. For young companies to succeed this environment, it is imparitive they become organized and efficient lest they fall behind and quickly become overwhelmed. Never Mind the Valley: Here's Los Angeles Best known for its movie stars, sun and surf, Los Angeles probably isn't the first place you'd think to breed technology. But when you consider the influence of investors like Jason Calacanis and Mark Suster, in addition to the fact that companies like Demand Media and Docstoc call Southern California home, it's not surprising that the community is emerging as one of the country's hottest startup hubs. SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL Web Products Live Blog: Google's Android Press Gathering Google held a press event this week to showcase the new Nexus One , which it described as "Where Web Meets Phone." Google calls this a new category of phones - the "super phones." The Nexus One apparently "pushes the limits of what is possible on a mobile phone today." Google will sell the phone in its own web store. Check out our live blog coverage for more details. Droid's December Boom: Metrics Show Device Use Doubled in One Month The Android platform has grown exponentially since mid-2009, but December's stats show a particular factor that might help catapult the platform to greater heights of user adoption. In figures just released from mobile advertising company AdMob, the Droid singlehandedly boosted calls to their network by nearly 300 million requests. Facebook's 1st CTO Launches His Next Company Adam D'Angelo was a programming genius who knew Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in high school, became the young company's first CTO and has just begun to unveil his new startup company, Quora . Built by D'Angelo and a team of crack young engineers, Quora is a real-time enabled Q&A site. The company calls itself "A continually improving collection of questions and answers." Skype: Coming to a Couch Near You Starting this spring, you won't need to gather the whole family around a 15-inch laptop screen to talk with cousin Joe on the other side of the country. As a matter of fact, you won't even need to get up off the sofa after the evening news, because Skype is coming to the big screen - the big TV screen, that is. Skype announced this week that they have been working with LG and Panasonic to embed Skype in Internet-connected widescreen HDTVs. SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone. Discuss

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Weekly Wrapup: Google Nexus One, CES Coverage, Online Finance, And More...

Best known for its movie stars, sun and surf, Los Angeles probably isn't the first place you'd think to breed technology. But when you consider the influence of investors like Jason Calacanis and Mark Suster, in addition to the fact that companies like

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Never Mind the Valley: Here's Los Angeles

It's been a long and winding road for serial volunteer and social media philanthropist Sloane Berrent . Since her unplanned departure from an L.A.-based startup in 2008, Berrent has traveled through eight countries, documenting and publicizing the struggles of those in developing areas through her blog posts, tweets, images, videos, and her own presence at events at home and abroad. From post-Katrina New Orleans to a trash dump in Manila to a monastery in Burma, read on for her story of trying to achieve social good through social media. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! RWW: "Social media for social good" has become the catchphrase du jour, it seems. What does it actually mean; how much can social media users affect social change, and how? I am a strong believer in the idea that the things you do online are meant to facilitate your offline interactions. People are so fast to click a button, and that can be great. Retweeting, forwarding, and Facebook walls are great engagements. But what's more difficult is the donate button. That's the big hurdle and disconnect. I'm trying to provide these inspirational opportunities in time-boxed campaigns. Social media is slowly catching on, but there's a lot of noise. Standing out is hard; it's important to have an offline component. Berrent was visibly disturbed by what she witnessed at this Manila trash dump, where she saw shoeless children running through piles of debris. RWW: Tell me about your experiences with Kiva borrowers. What kinds of people and enterprises have you seen? In your opinion, does microlending have a measurable impact on struggling local economies? Kiva is really unique. It has a lot of power users - more than any nonprofit I've ever seen. One man has made a thousand loans. It's individual stories, and people really connect. You get updates on that person, and people say it's their favorite email of the month. As a microlending company, Kiva is one spoke in the larger wheel of microfinance. On a global scale, it has a very big impact. Typically, when you go to a village or province, certain industries are prevalent. In a fishing community, maybe the borrower bought a fishnet or a fishing boat. In an area with a lot of bamboo, it's going to be crafts. I worked in eleven branch offices. I met over 40 different female borrowers individually and over 250 in my time there. I can see that the money Kiva provides makes a difference. Microfinance is a very slow process, and there are gems and sparks of people who break through the poverty cycle. When you see villages changing, it's really something. It's like watching grass grow, but it's really beautiful grass. This woman is a pig farmer and a recipient of funds from a Kiva-affiliated organization . RWW: Now you're working on a seven-day, seven-city tour to raise awareness and funds for malaria prevention through bed nets. Where did this idea come from? It's a city-by-city competition on who can raise the most money for malaria nets, but also an opportunity for anyone to donate who wants to get involved. The tour starts this Saturday night in New York City and continues for the next seven days in Miami, New Orleans, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and ends in Los Angeles on Friday... I'd just finished Kiva training, and I was going to the Philippines for three months. And all I could think was, "When I come back, I'm going to be thirty ." I've honed in a lot on my direction - using the Internet to help people. And what if I could use this opportunity to give back, involving people in different parts of the country - something really ambitious? I wanted it to be about saving lives. I wanted to say, "I saved this many lives on my birthday." I've done a lot of work in HIV and AIDS; I looked into that and polio and malaria, and that's what stuck with me. The campaign has no administrative fees. One hundred percent of the funds go to malaria... in rural northern Ghana. Providing malaria nets will really be a part of saving lives there. Berrent met this monk in Burma and spent the afternoon pagoda-hopping with him. RWW: What needs or gaps do you see in philanthropic efforts online? I think it's not having a strategy to begin with, not knowing the tools in your toolbox before you start. There's a lot to be said for jumping in and having fun, but nonprofits don't have the resources to play around online. They think it's about getting interns and getting followers and fans without figuring out why a medium is important and how to make it successful for them. RWW: What's one surprise - good or bad - that you've come across since you started working with Kiva? What did you not expect from this experience, and what did you learn? I learned that it's much more complicated than the website makes it seem. There's an entire division devoted to foreign exchange currency. The operational cost analysis, the challenges of technology in the developing world, the processes of remittance - it's incredibly complex. There are regional specialists. On the site, you can make a loan in five clicks, but a lot of machinery comes together to make it that way. RWW: What's next for you? Is there more globe-trotting in your immediate future? How do you think the web will continue to be part of your life and career? One of the best parts of this past year has been that I've gone through long periods where I didn't have Internet access. That's brought me a heightened and renewed sense of my purpose in the world and my authentic desire to make the world a better place. I'd like to be able to continue to support campaigns - even for-profit ventures - that I believe in, and I think social business is a wonderful intersection of the two. I want to explore avenues with online and offline components, while continuing to blog and tell stories I'm passionate about. Follow Berrent's next adventures on Twitter or at her blog . And all this is just the tip of the iceburg that is Sloane Berrent's fascinating story. For a fuller look at her travels and timeline, check out this list of her nine favorite posts on her blog, The Causemopolitan, covering humanitarianism, her work in New Orleans, the phenomenon of serendipity in international travel, and much more. Many thanks to Sloane Berrent for the use of her videos and images as well as for sharing her story with us and our readers. Discuss

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Kiva's Causemopolitan on World Tour: Social Media for Social Good