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Six Apart Cracks China's Blog Sector
[March 23, 2006]

Six Apart Cracks China's Blog Sector


(Comtex Business Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)GUANGZHOU, Mar 23, 2006 (SinoCast China IT Watch via COMTEX) --Blogging software developer Six Apart has reached partnership with Chinese weblog high flier Bokee to localize and distribute Movable Type, Six Apart's web publishing platform, to Chinese corporate users and educational institutions, beginning in the second quarter this year.



"There are an estimated 15 million blogs in China, most of them written by individuals," said Anil Dash, Six Apart's vice president of professional products.

"We believe business blogging in China will also grow, becoming as enthusiastically embraced in China as it is in Japan, where Movable Type is the de facto standard for business blogging. Movable Type's support for Chinese language blogging now gives Chinese businesses a first-rate choice for installable blogging tools."


With Movable Type's user-friendly interface, users do not have to rely on web designers or IT professionals to create weblogs. Instead, they can easily design and maintain weblogs that are richly featured, scalable and customizable, enabling vibrant communication with those who are central to their businesses.

"Six Apart has the best blogging products in the world and I believe Movable Type can bring great value to our customers," said Fang Xingdong, chairman and CEO of Bokee. "Six Apart is the one of our most important partners in helping us reach our ultimate business goal of enabling blogging for all kinds of customers in China."

Adding this Movable Type service to Bokee's stable of services will allow it to better compete with other Chinese blogging platforms like Blogcn.com and ChinaBlog.net. The two privately-held companies did not provide financial terms for the deal.

Six Apart has offices on three continents working to help people everywhere communicate using the Web. Six Apart hopes it is making it easier for you. Six Apart is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, with other locations to offer its services throughout the world. Six Apart is a privately held company funded by August Capital and Neoteny Co., Ltd.

Bokee.com, which original name was blogchina.com, was founded by Mr. Fang Xindong, an famous IT analyst, in August 2022.

By the end of 2003, Bokee.com became the biggest Chinese blog website in terms of number of subscribers and website traffic.

In January 2005, Bokee.com further sharpened its competitiveness by taking over budding blog website blogdriver.com.

Shortly after then, Bokee.com officially launched Podcasting services in China in April 2005, setting the paces for China's Web 2.0 industry.

Facing the huge potential in China's corporate blog market, Bokee.com unveiled corporate blog services in October 2005.

In December 2005, Bokee.com came up with Bmail service at bmail.bokee.com, which was the first integration of email and blog.

Bokee.com was awarded the number one blog website in late 2005 by the China Internet Industry Association.

The number of subscriber of Bokee.com outpaced 100 million in February 2006. In terms of the China Web 2.0 Report released by the association, as much as 51.4 percent of interviewees prefer bokee.com, 26.3 and 18 percent for Sina's blog service and Sohu's blog respectively.

Bokee.com is likely to reach profitability in the coming one or two years and it is brewing initial public offering on NASDAQ at the moment, says Fang Xingdong.

BlogChina.

As a high-tech start-up, Bokee.com still can not see a clear way to profitability at the moment, but, Mr. Fang says that it will show the investors with an explicit profitable operation mode when the number of its subscribers hits ten million.

[USD 1 = CNY 8.04958545]

From Guangzhou Daily, Page 1, Wednesday, March 22, 2006
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