TechNode Weekly Briefing: 18 March 2017

Editor’s note: This originally appeared in our weekly newsletter. Sign up here to get our updates straight to your inbox.

With International Women’s Day at the beginning of the month, our post about the top 6 self-made women billionaires in China was the most popular this week. While the authors of the Hurun report are quite optimistic about what their findings mean, whether all of these are “self-made” is in question: 3 out of the 6 women on the list are there in part because of their husband or brother. Certainly, we do not want to downplay any of their achievements, but it does show that being a “self-made billionaire” is not as easy as the report would like us to believe. Indeed, a post we published on International Women’s Day highlights the many challenges that women are still facing in China’s job market, before and after recruitment into a company.

Baidu has always been an interesting company: ostensibly the “Google of China,” they chose to go into O2O with their purchase of group-buying site Nuomi in 2013 and doubled down when they started their delivery service. However, this defocused them from what (I think) should be their core competency: data. Over the past few years, Baidu has lost quite a bit of ground to fellow giants Alibaba and Tencent as those two capitalize on their e-commerce and social gains. However, recent moves in artificial intelligence, machine learning applications, as well as smart home and electric car technologies seem to be putting them back on track to lead China’s technology into the next stage of growth.

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