Tourists enter the Louvre museum in Paris.With a rising middle class and stronger currency exchange,Chinese tourists have been flocking to Europe in increasing numbers,providing a boost to the continent’s tourism industry. [Bloomberg]

Internet-savvy youth provide growing market for online tour companies

BEIJING – To catch a glimpse of the mystical northern lights, ride scooters across snowy forests, or catch a 15-kg king crab from the cold sea, is a privilege that is being enjoyed by more and more wealthy Chinese.
The “Chasing Northern Lights” voyage …

One day this January, I was standing at the entrance of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and was happy to find there was an audio guide in Chinese  available. It was an exciting sign that the increasing number of Chinese tourists had caught the attention of the curators, and that their needs were starting to be seriously taken into consideration.
With so many Chinese tourists eagerly flooding into the outside world, China can’t remain a mysterious country in the Far East.
A recent report in the Financial Times says Chinese tourists’ “overnight” …

ChinaTravelTrends.com, new interactive platform for China outbound tourism, launched in Berlin, with backing of PATA

Chinese affluent citizens increasingly like to travel abroad, but distrust official information.
With more than 50 million outbound travellers expected to leave China in 2010, the Chinese outbound market is attracting more and more attention of destinations around the world.
As part of the ITB Convention 2010, a workshop organised by the German-based COTRI China Outbound Tourism Research Institute and the Chinese company Dragon Trail, presented Social Media Marketing as the most …

Oak Pacific CEO Joe Chen Yizhou revealed the company’s social networking site renren.com has broken even four years after being set up.
Analysts have hailed the move as an achievement for such a relatively new service. The site, which changed its name from xiaonei.com last month in order to attract a wider user base of white collar workers, is next month embarking on a publicity blitz across all media to capitalize on the growing numbers of Internet users.
Without revealing figures, Chen, 40, said the site had been losing money despite having …

Online travel services provider eLong (Nasdaq:LONG) and Beijing-based online entertainment company Oak Pacific Interactive plan to release an eLong booking widget for Oak Pacific Interactive’s social networking service site Renren.com (formerly called Xiaonei.com) September 4, Sina reported August 28 citing eLong CEO Cui Guangfu. Reports in mid-August said that Oak Pacific Interactive will continue to purchase shares in eLong in order to gain “speaking rights” and better integrate the companies’ user bases.
Source: JLM Pacific Epoch (August 28, 2009)

Huawei has expanded into online social networking business by launchingAiMi, another SNS targeting the white collar.
Source: China Internet Watch (May 9, 2009)

Now, all China Mobile users can register at 139.com. Users currently can manage and send their SMS messages, manage contact book, use free online storage, and play online games. 139.com also provides unlimited email storage.
Source: China Internet Watch (Ma6 6, 2009)

Two-Third of Global Online Popular visits These Sites Each Month.
“Time Spent” on These Sites Growing Three Times Faster than Overall Internet Rate, Now Accounting for Almost 10 Percent of all Internet Time.
The Biggest Increase in Visitors to These Sites were 35-49 Year Olds.
Now visited by over two-thirds (67 percent) of the global* online population, “Member Communities,” which includes both social networks and blogs, has become the fourth most popular category online – ahead of personal email. It is growing twice as fast as any of the other four largest sectors …

A new social media study from Universal McCann published in AdWeek may come as a big surprise. It says that consumers in US and Western Europe like to watch created by others while people in Asia are more into the content creation side.

1. Despite the popularity of Facebook and MySpace, other countries dwarf the U.S. in joining social networks. The Philippines, Hungary, Poland and Mexico all boast participation rates over 75 percent, while just 43 percent have joined social networks in the US.
2. About a quarter of Internet users in …