Baidu launched its own mobile applications platform on Friday and laid out plans to release a mobile operating system based on it in the future,according to a report by Reuters. Named Baidu Yi, the apps platform is based on a heavily modified version of Android. The apps platform launched by the company will allow developers to create applications and games for the company’s upcoming OS, which will be heavily search-centric,as we revealed in March this year....

Baidu, China’s “Google” so to speak, has announced the development and expansion for more social networking services to keep its strong momentum and dominance in the Chinese Internet landscape. According to Chinese blogTechweb, Baidu CEO Robin Li announced that the company will develop more social networking services during the Q4 FY 2010 earnings conference call. This move was reportedly Baidu’s plan to challenge Tencent, which currently has a strong footing in social networking, e-commerce, and online gaming in China....

China is making promising progress with testing its digital yuan currency. Ithas announcedthe success of a pilot in Suzhou City, near Shanghai in eastern China, where 181,000 consumers were given ¥55 (£6) of free money in digital wallets to spend at participating outlets in theDouble Fifth shopping festivalbetween May 1 and 5. This was part of abigger testby the People’s Bank of China targeting 500,000 consumers in 11 Chinese regions since April....

RenRen, China’s Facebook counterpart, has launched a LinkedIn clone calledJingwei. Jingwei recently entered beta, and it functions pretty much like LinkedIn. It also features a question and answer module, which gives it a Quora flavor of sorts. Focusing on those two features, its main competitors in the country would beUShi, the country’s leading invitation-only business social network, andZhiHu, the Chinese Quora clone. The country,notoriousfor blocking foreign social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, also blocked LinkedIn at one stage but made it available again after a day....

China Telecom, the country’s state-owned telecommunications operator, plans to reach 30 million users for itsfiber opticbroadband service this year, and have the entire country run on fiber optic infrastructure in three years. Under theFive-Year Plan, the Chinese government will focus heavily on developing the telecommunications infrastructure, with total investments reaching 2 trillion yuan (roughly $300 billion), around 80 percent of which is allocated for broadband development. The big plan? To cover every city in China with the fiber broadband service in three years and convert all copper lines to fiber,China Dailyreported....