Side note (but interesting): I noticed that people here barely know who Google is (not the techies, but common Internet users). I noticed that several times. One example: Other day I had to talk to the apt manager, and her English is bad (and my Chinese is worse than her's English!). So she uses a translation web site on her office to communicate with me. She goes to a Chinese portal, does a few clicks and so on... To my surprise, I noticed the translation service she uses is actually Google, but it was inside an iframe on this Chinese portal. I pointed to Google's logo right there on the screen, and she actually didn't know what that was!! For her (and I bet for a lot of people) this translation service is actually provided by the Chinese portal, and not Google.

There are other instances that I noticed too (this was not an isolated case), but in summary, I think Google has a loooong way to go here in China.

Sounds like someone vested.

Best of luck to him. It was probably frustrating to see the slow going progress in China and a startup is a good cure for that.

Given the struggle that Google is having here in China, and all the hullabaloo surrounding his hire with Google in 2005, this is pretty big news, actually.

Google is doing much better here than in 2006, but it's still all uphill for them, and for a company that doesn't work with people much, has required lots of changes in the way they do things.

Is there a Chinese alternative to youtube? Or does the government block all video sharing sites?