1. Money is not a problem
2. What brother is smoking is not a cigarette, but loneliness!
3. Jia Junpeng - your mother wants you to go home to have some food
4. Life is like a tea table - with bitter cups placed all over it
5. Don’t be obsessed with brother - He is only a legend
6. My debts of gratitude have been repaid with my body
7. What makes you unhappy - Tell us to make us happy
8. You are left behind the times
9. Lei Feng does good without seeking recognition, but he records everything in his diary
10. This matter cannot be explained in detail

Explanations for these phrases can be found at: http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20091230_1.htm

A-B-C,  one-two-three… With this simple line you are basically looking at the future of large commercial aicrafts: Airbus, Boeing and soon Comac hope to share equally the market for 170-190 seater aircrafts.

The C919 - the number 9 stands for long-lasting - will be produced by the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China. Comac was set up in 2008 to develop a large Chinese airplaine. It already markets the ARJ21, the country’s first regional jet. This time the focus is a bit different since the aim is not to conquer the domestic market but to compete with the Airbus 320 and Boeing 737 on international markets.

Akin to what happens in many other industries, the aim is to develop a new aircraft with as much Chinese intellectual property as possible. So far, a lot is borrowed from technologies developed abroad. For instance, the ARJ21 is built using tooling originally provided by McDonnell Douglas. Likewise the C919 will benefit from European and American technologies as Safran (a French company) and GE have entered a JV agreement to build the engine.

So will the C919 seal the end of the duopoly? Not in the short term at least. In the first years Comac’s production capacity will hardly be able to serve the growing demand for domestic aircrafts - it expects to sell 2000 units over 20 years with an estimated demand of 4000 planes for the same period. In addition, the first pilot flight is scheduled for 2014 and the commercial version is expected in 2016.

So, it will probably take a bit longer until Air France or British Airways order their first C919!

Believe it or not but there is one market where Google is not #1. Not the smallest market either. According to Analysys its share of search engine revenues in China is around 30%, or less than half of Baidu - the leading Chinese search engine, now considered as the 3rd biggest search property on the Internet.

Even more surprising is the report released this week by Google in which we learn that the most searched term among Mainland Chinese users of Google is … Baidu.  Two explanations come to mind: “googling” has already permeated the consciousness of the Chinese netizens so well that they don’t realize they are using Google to search for another search engine. A second explanation could be that Baidu uses robots to enter “Baidu” on the Google website so as to increase its ranking.

In any case, the battle between the two giants promises to be interesting!

P.S.: For those wondering, the most searched terms in 2008 were about the Sichuan earthquake, the Olympics opening ceremony and substandard milk powder…

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to tap into a repository of innovative solutions from developing countries to solve the problems of a billion farmers in the rural areas?

No need to go further than the Honeybee Network. The National Innovation Foundation - an NGO affiliated with a number of top-level research institutions - has been building a database of innovations from the “grassroots”. So, if you are looking for an innovative way to store sweet potatoes or a way to ease pedalling uphill, that’s the place to go. Innovations are collected from 545 Indian districts and patents are sold at the national or even international level.

A team of scouts is on the lookout for innovative answers to daily challenges in the rural areas. All propositions are screened and evaluated. Competitions are also organized to tap into young minds’ unbridled approach to problem-solving.

For sure, Honeybee won’t solve all the problems of rural development but it reminds us that innovation happens all the time and everywhere. The rest is just a question of diffusion.

Some 15 years the management literature unearthed coopetition, a concept coined right before World War I. For those who had just got used to this contraction time has come to learn a new one: collaboratories. In a nutshell, the idea is to bring down the walls so that researchers can perform their job without regard to geographical location. So far, nothing revolutionary you may think.

But for some companies, it actually implies a radical change in strategy. For instance, IBM is making collaboration with outsiders an essential piece of its research strategy. The company has been working with China Telecom and China Mobile, two of the biggest operators in the world, applying data analysis technologies to the huge (and growing) databases of subscriber and service information. The sheer scale of the Chinese telecommunication market allows researchers to play with billions of records, a unique chance to test and improve data mining algorithms.

Big Blue is even taking the concept of collaboratory a step further in China. It has partnered with the city of Shenyang to create an eco-city collaboratory, combining transportation, water, energy and food with the aim to define what a smart city would be.

What do a nuclear reactor of the fourth generation and a supercomputer capable of doing 10¹⁵ (one quadrillion) calculations in one second have in common? Not much, except that they both have been unveiled at the end of October in…China.

With Tianhe, or Milky Way, China becomes the second country, after the United States, to build a petaflop computer. The supercomputer is a part of the 863 program – a national initiative launched in the second half of the 1980s to do high-tech R&D. The machine is currently housed in Changsha – the city which saw Mao’s conversion to communism.

If that wasn’t enough, there was the announcement that construction of the first fourth generation nuclear reactor with “home-developed” technology would start in 2012-13. Going local on the technology side makes full sense for a country that plans to deploy 100 nuclear reactors over the next 20 years.

The catch? China is already running short on uranium. For sure, Tianhe will allow to compute even faster how much of the “stuff” they need – each new 1,000-MW reactor needs 360 metric tons of uranium a year when it first starts operations – and how soon they run out of uranium. But then an abacus would have been enough.

What is the link between EVE (a producer of lithium batteries) and Aier (a chain of eye hospitals)? Both have just made their debut on ChiNext, the newly-launched Shenzhen-based stock exchange for innovative firms.

For now, 28 companies are listed. Hundreds have been reported to be lining up for listing, still a paltry in comparison to the 3700 firms trading on the American board. But then, it has been around for almost 40 years.

The NASDAQ-styled stock exchange still hopes to fill an important gap in China: funding small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs). While accounting for 60% of China’s economic output (and 80% of employment), SMEs only received 36% of total loans.

Price-to-Earning ratio (P/E) was at 96 after one week, compared with 35 on the Nasdaq and 33 on the Shanghai index. A good alternative for those bored with Macau’s casinos but probably not exactly what ChiNext would need to succeed in the long-run: patient and long-term investors, something that the neighboring Hong-Kong Growth Enterprise Market (GEM) has learnt the hard way.

In addition to the attempt to standardize the Internet of Things,  the Chinese Internet [community] is also paying attention to the regulation of search engines.

Baidu - the leading Chinese search engine and potentially most formidable competitor for Google in the long-run - has joined the Internet Society of China and the China Communications Standards Association to publish a set of search engine marketing regulations aimed at “developing the sector as a reliable source of news and business”.

Officially, the idea is to drive out disreputable companies who tarnish the reputation of search engine marketing in China. Something of a twist since this comes one year after Baidu came under fire for blocking searches containing words associated with the melamine milk scandal or having accepted money from fraudulent medical companies to figure prominently in search results!

What if this self-enligthened effort at self-regulation was to spread outside of China?  And, more importantly, will Google join the bandwagon?