This Week in Asia Episode 22: Google Domination

By TWIA on April 2, 2010 in This Week in Asia

On our April 1st episode, our two co-hosts Mike Foong jets off to San Francisco for the iPad, and Bernard Leong isn’t on for the first time with an important discussion to attend – leaving John Lim, Daniel CerVentus, and Michael “Smitty” Smith from Yahoo! to return in our small three-man panel that isn’t short on the news. Our stories focus on Google’s exit from China, mobile platforms and development in Asia, Malaysia broadband and India’s step up recruitment.

Here we discuss the big news that Google Search has finally exited from China, only to move to Hong Kong. It’s a messy break-up not seen since yesterday on E! News Celebrity Couples segment: China plans to erase any blogs, news stories, and Air Supply mixtapes that remind their citizens about anything good Google has done, while Google’s R&D and Sales offices want to stay on in Beijing. Just how will that awkward arrangement work out?
We ramble on a bit about how the BlackBerry is fast losing its appeal among consumers. Also a quick take on Nokia N900 developers event recently in Singapore and Malaysia and also a good mobile discussion on how developers in Asia are grappling with the different platforms (Google Android, Windows 7 and iPhone OS) and the different handsets (Palm Pre, Motorola, HTC and Nexus One) . Also, the death of JooJoo coming soon.
We also touch on High Speed Broadband being launched in Malaysia to a collective sigh of relief. But Smitty says “Meh. So what?”, while Daniel and John scramble desperately to reconnect with him after the Skype connection was dropped due to bad service.
Finally, we talk about India’s push into IT this year, with plans to hire 150,000 new employees in that sector. Can India be the next China, but with more freedom of speech and potholed-roads?