Via its AdWords program, Google already uses anonymized data to tell advertisers about “store visits” – how what customers view online correlates with where they shop in real life.
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In response to Google’s desire, Shen Si, the CEO of Chinese mobile advertising company, Papaya Mobile, and a former Google employee, mentioned in the related report, “Having a product in China would be a symbolic gesture to show that the company values the market”.
Back in 2010, the company pulled all its services from China, including Google Play, after refusing to continue self-censoring in the search results, as stated by Reuters. The Chinese version of the app would be set up only for China and will have no connection to the current version of Google Play.
Of course, there were a lot of critics claiming that it’s a bit too late for Google to take such a decision, since they lost ground to major Chinese players. They had maintained a limited presence in the world’s biggest smartphone market but most of Google’s services including Google Play has been nearly borderline inaccessible.
“There are a substantial number of free ways people get music in China that makes it hard for any service, especially from the West, to get into the market”, he said.
Regarding the timing of the launch, the sources said that it could be made some time after Chinese New Year in February next year, and before early summer. And holiday shoppers are expected to rely to their smartphones more than ever to research and compare products, with 82% of smartphone users pulling out their devices while in a store this year.
Instead, the company will simply comply with Chinese laws, including those referring to data storage and content filtering.
Personally, I’ve rarely found a list of an app store’s top paid apps useful for discovering new things to download; Google’s continued reticence to add more human curation to its app marketplace is both a shame and a wasted opportunity.
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Since services like mapping, email and search are blocked inside China, this U.S. firm is trying to cement their partnership with partners like Mobvoi who offer technology that is similar to Siri and Google voice.
