Charles Chao, CEO and president of Sina, announced the company’s plans to finally start monetizing its highly popular microblogging service, Sina Weibo, by introducing advertising to the platform within the year. At the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) 2011 in Beijing today, Chao stated that they are already planning for the commercialization of their microblogging service. It may be about time as Sina Weibo has already more than 100 million users and is growing at a rapid pace....

Reutersreports that Sina Weibo, China’s twitter-like microblogging service, will launch a virtual currency by third quarter this year. Sina detailed the use of its virtual currency for developers called ‘Weibi.’ If true, it will be the firm’s first real push to monetize its highly popular microblogging platform. An anonymous source toldforeign media: “Weibi is in the development stage now, but it will be launched very soon in the third quarter to a small portion of users before a full rollout later in the year....

Born in Jordan, of Syrian origin, raised in Canada and studied and worked in the US, Sinan Khatib now calls Cairo home. He recently joined the Egyptian group-buying siteOfferna, bringing with him the perfect balance of an understanding of the western e-commerce business model and how to adapt this to suit a local Egyptian audience. With experience as a lawyer and an investment banker, Khatib realized that he was on the wrong side of the business tracks....

Wewrote about Postagram this morning, and its response to Apple’s new Card app. The company behind Postagram,Sincerely, isn’t settling for just having an app. The company has announced 12 partner apps today in which you can choose to “Print and Ship” photos and send a physical postcard using its“Ship” libraryinitiative. The company says: Today we are announcing 12 launch partners for our Sincerely Ship iOS library. Users of these applications will be able to start sharing their photos a new way: by sending real physical photos in the mail....

Singapore officials are hoping that the promise of free iPads will help its campaign to increase the number of new military, air force and navy recruits when itbegins issuingthe popular Apple tablet devices in November. The defence ministry said it will provide “about 8,000” iPads to new recruits and is currently planning to issue the devices to other serviceman next year. Troops will be able to utilise the camera built into the iPad 2 to take photos and videos whilst in the field, which then can be uploaded to a central online database called LEARNet....