It wasn’t supposed to end this way.  A massive 54-foot bright yellow Rubber Ducky that found its way to Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor while on an international tour was found, so to speak, belly up.  

Indeed, this was no ordinary bird, having captivated the world and press alike.  The featherless fowl was even featured in the WSJ.   Along its journey, happy crowds that totaled in the hundreds of thousands had flocked to see it in all of its yellow radiant glory. 

But now, a Weibo-nation stood stunned. The demise of the yellow ambassador soared to the most commented thread on this forum as rumors flew and perhaps children cried (ok – the children crying is my own embellishment).  

Yesterday, Sohu’s shares popped 5.5% to $64.04 on continued rumors that Qihoo360, Baidu, and Tencent may all be looking to acquire its search engine, Sogou, which owns both an 8% market share and valuable pinyin input technology.   But perhaps more importantly, a Soguo takeover will change China’s search engine landscape. 

No wonder Qihoo360, Baidu, and Tencent’s shares all dropped yesterday.  This is going to get expensive for the winner.  In the last month, Sogou’s shares have had a run up of 37%.  

WeChat, Tencent’s massively popular messaging app, is strangely addictive.  Untied from the PC, it’s built with the smartphone in mind.  It’s also built to be an exclusive private club.  Unlike Weibo, which serves as an undiscriminating public forum, where anyone can follow or be followed, WeChat is about creating a discerning walled garden that is by invitation only. 

Only friends need apply, unless of course, one is in the mood to discover new friends.  In that case, WeChat provides a feature, which allows users to send a message to nearby WeChat users.  Yes, it’s a little unnerving but interesting nonetheless. 

First, it came to a sleepy town in the Midwest called Kansas City, and then Austin was next, followed by the fair city of Provo, Utah.  Now, Omaha, Nebraska must ready itself for Google Fiber, the experimental 1 Gbit/s broadband service, where everyone in the household can watch a streamed movie at the same time with plenty bandwidth to spare or better yet, upload an hour-long HD video to Youtube in 5 seconds.[1]  In other words, Google Fiber will be at least 100 times faster than the average U.S. broadband plan of today. 

For a long time, ISPs and telecoms proclaimed that there was no such demand for such a thing.  Instead, consumers suffered through slow Internet connection speeds and high broadband-costs basically because of a lack of competition. 

Are you curious about Weibo, China’s twitter-like platform, which got some of its street cred back when Alibaba bought a partial stake in it?  Here’s an easily digestible infographic about the who’s who and what’s what on this sometimes messy, yet irresistible space that has recently been duking it out with Tencent’s Wechat for eyeballs. Credit for the infographic goes to Dr. Mathew McDougall, who writes for the “Digital Marketing Inner Circle” blog. 

We can skip over the numbers, they are probably inflated after all.  But regardless, the numbers are huge and favor the youth under the age of 30, who represent 92% of Weibo’s user base.  It’s also interesting to note that male users are slightly overrepresented on Weibo.  Here, they represent 57% of the overall users whereas in society at large they make up about 52% of the population.  

Google is a disrupter of markets, even in places where you would least expect it.  Take for example, China’s ecommerce space.  Who would of thought that Google’s free Android software would already be changing the way people shop? 

But as this wonderful infographic by the Alibaba Group shows, Chinese consumers are switching off their PCs and shifting to a new bold world, where mobile is king. 

In creating the massive 109-page Future of Mobile slide deck, the Business Insider may have missed the memo on the beauty of brevity.  Nevertheless, this epic slide deck is a worthy read if you have an insatiable appetite for all things mobile. 

For those of you who are looking for the CliffsNotes or who haven’t gotten around to taking Ritalin today, I’ve pulled some of the juicer slides as it relates to China.  For those who are just looking for a way to avoid work, click here for some great market research that you can impress your friends with at the next happy hour.  

We really don’t have much to add to this infographic, which was originally posted on TechinAsia and was created by Umeng.com.   One takeaway is that people are spending much more time on apps.  In fact, they’re spending 12x as much time as in the beginning of 2012.  

Earlier this week, @BenedictEvans tweeted this bar graph, which shows CapEx expenditures across a selection of industries.  What it reveals is that mobile is a relatively expensive proposition.    

For the last several months, folks have been trying to figure out what Xi Jinping’s new China Dream is all about.   Bill Bishop, an old China-hand whose valued opinions can often be found in the New York Times, believes the Dream may represent for the Chinese government “national rejuvenation, improvement of people’s livelihoods, prosperity, construction of a better society and military strengthening as the common dream of the Chinese people that can be best achieved under one party, Socialist rule.”

However as Evan Osnos, who writes for the New Yorker, points out, there is also the possibility of a populist element to the dream.  Previously, the government could try to define the dream for others.  Now, it is getting harder to do so.  Therefore, the China Dream probably means different things to different people and with 1.3 billion people that’s a lot of dreams to fulfill. One may ask what does the China Dream have to do with business?  Plenty.  Like reading tea leaves, it is best to get a sense of which way the leaves are blowing in Beijing.