Shanghai housing price heated up again recently, according to famous Shanghai blogger Wang Jianshuo. It’s no secret the stock market (Shanghai composite index) rebounded from 1,700 in last Oct. to 3,400 in last couple days, an 100% increase.
CNN had an article How to say bubble in Mandarin. Video below.
Bonus: US mobile text messaging market
US lagged a few years behind China on this. When I was in China in year 2006/2007, I saw people texting when walking or commuting (subway). One thing puzzels me though, is most Chinese use the basic phone for text messaging (remember there are many Chinese input methods, but they all need to go through the 0 to 9 (ABC to XYZ) keyboard to do this). And I was amazed at the typing speed of some people. On the other hand, it seems to me the growing popularity of Blackberry among consumers, is most BB has a dedicated QWERTY (wiki) key.
The following is some of the statistics I saw on the US text messaging market. This will fuel the growth for a while, but in longer term, I think data (web) application will take over.
2009: FierceWireless:
Milch said most Verizon Wireless customers “pay less than a penny per message,” a reduction of almost two-thirds since 2006, and that almost all choose to purchase various “buckets of minutes” to obtain the best prices for their levels of usage. He said customers are notified, even in the middle of the billing cycle, if they would benefit more under a different plan.
“As the result of the price cuts, usage has grown six-fold,” he said.
2008: Goomzee: US text message use is approaching nearly 73% of subscribers, 6 times that of mobile web and 12 times that of mobile search…
* There are over 255 million US mobile subscribers
* Nearly 70% of US cell phone users have sent or received a text message
* US mobile operators reported over 75 billion SMS messages sent in June 2008
* 73% of new cell phone buyers cite ‘text messaging’ as the ‘most important’ feature on their device.
* Text messaging has surpassed talk from 13-44 year old US cell phone users
2004: Mobiledia: In 2004, mobile data accounted for just 4.8% of operators’ total mobile services revenue in the USA, compared to 15.9% in Western Europe and 22.0% in Japan. A key reason for this was the relatively low usage by US subscribers of SMS and other messaging services.
However, this is beginning to change, according to Analysys, as US operators are now addressing the factors that have stifled usage of messaging services. By 2008, mobile messaging alone will account for 10% ($16.4 billion) of operators’ total mobile services revenue.