China 3G stirs up mobile Internet frenzy

By Melanie Lee and Doug Young

BEIJING/HONG KONG (Reuters) - China's recent roll out of 3G mobile services is creating a land grab among its Internet firms, old and new alike, salivating over a mobile Internet market the size of the U.S. and Europe combined.

China's introduction from mid-year of third-generation (3G) mobile services, which allow for easy Web surfing over mobile phones, poses a huge business opportunity for both foreign and Chinese companies, from content developers to game operators and providers of other mobile services.

But embedded with that also lies the risks that 3G services could be slow to take off among the nation's 720 million cellular subscribers, that mobile carriers could try to take a big slice of the pie or that Beijing censors could limit or even ban certain kinds of content and mobile Web sites.

"We feel that the expansion of mobile Internet applications and services development needs new product innovation," Feng Zhou, a senior vice president at online game developer NetEase, showcasing his company's new online Internet offerings at a major Internet conference this week in Beijing.

NetEase is being joined in the mobile Internet rush by the likes of Baidu and Google, China's two biggest search engines, all hoping to capitalise on a market expected to rapidly grow to be worth billions of dollars in just a few years.

Also in the fray are start-ups like venture-funded UCWeb, which has developed an Internet browser optimised for use over mobile phones.

Many of those were talking up some of their upcoming offerings at the Beijing show.

NetEase's Feng said his company will focus on three mobile Internet areas: augmented reality, which allows users to conduct searches based on mobile phone photos; mobile language translators; and barcode scanning.