China's leading internet search engine Baidu's stock price tumbled after its first quarter earnings year over year dropped 80% leading to its first quarterly loss since inception. Baidu posted a net loss of 327 million renminbi ($49 million), contrasted against 6.7 billion RMB profit a year earlier. Revenue increased 15% year over year.
Baidu stated that strong demand for ads in the education, retail, and business services markets failed to offset "less vibrant" demand from the healthcare, online gaming, and financial sectors. Baidu also stopped disclosing its growth in active online customers, and Hailong Xiang, the senior VP of its search unit, abruptly resigned.
Meanwhile, TAC (traffic acquisition costs) rose 41% annually and accounted for 13% of its total revenue and 18% of its marketing revenue. Those percentages were in line with previous quarters, and indicates that Baidu isn't spending too much money to lock in advertisers.
For comparison, Google and Sogou (one of several competitors in the Chinese market) spent 2-4x as much on TAC as a percentage of revenue.
Instead, Baidu is heavily investing in various Google-alike alternative technologies including smart speakers in
its virtual assistant DuerOS, its short video app Haokan, its autonomous driving platform Apollo, Mini Programs for the Baidu App, cloud services, and other ecosystem expansion efforts.
Baidu competes against Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance in the Chinese market. Bytedance also suffered some from the slowdown in the past year. Alibaba and Tencent which also compete with Baidu in the online advertising and streaming video spaces, both posted significant gains.
The search giant has promoted Dou Shen, previously over its mobile products, to senior vice president to replace Xiang, and interestingly, has also rebranded its search business as its mobile business.
Whether these adjustments and investments will pay off in the long run remains to be seen.
Some previous Baidu related Articles
Baidu Entering The Driverless Car Race
Baidu's Web Browser Eliminates Privacy
Alibaba Challenges Google, Amazon With New Echo-Like Device
Baidu Launches 'AI-powered Digital Assistant' Duer to Take On Google Now, Siri
Computer Scientists are Astir After Baidu Team is Barred From A.I. Competition
Related Stories
A group of researchers at the Chinese web services company Baidu have been barred from participating in an international competition for artificial intelligence technology after organizers discovered that the Baidu scientists broke the contest's rules.
The competition, which is known as the "Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge", is organized annually by computer scientists at Stanford University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Michigan.
It requires that computer systems created by the teams classify the objects in a set of digital images into 1,000 different categories. The rules of the contest permit each team to run test versions of their programs twice weekly ahead of a final submission as they train their programs to "learn" what they are seeing.
However, on Tuesday, the contest organizers posted a public statement noting that between November and May 30, different accounts had been used by the Baidu team to submit more than 200 times to the contest server, "far exceeding the specified limit of two submissions per week."
Jitendra Malik, a University of California computer scientist who is a pioneer in the field of computer vision, compared the accusations against Baidu to drug use in the Olympics. "If you run a 9.5-second 100-meter sprint, but you are on steroids, then how can your result be trusted?" Mr. Malik said.
The episode has raised concern within the computer science community, in part because the field of artificial intelligence has historically been plagued by claims that run far ahead of actual science.
[Related Paper]: Deep Image: Scaling up Image Recognition
Original Submission
Chinese search engine giant Baidu announced on Tuesday [Ed: Javascript required] the launch of a new digital assistant that will be integrated into its latest mobile search app and use artificial intelligence to tailor suggestions to a user's tastes.
Similar to Google Now or Apple's Siri, Baidu Duer processes voice requests to connect users with services such as food delivery or film ticket sales.
"In the past, only the privileged few – those in very senior positions in companies or other organisations – had personal assistants," said Baidu chairman and founder Robin Li Yanhong.
"With Duer, every ordinary person can now have a powerful personal assistant who can provide valuable life services – for free," he added at the company's 10th annual Baidu World conference in Beijing.
It's an article of faith that more competition produces better products and services.
Baidu is reportedly ramping up efforts to develop its own autonomous vehicle in a bid to compete with other tech giants.
The online search company is talking to city authorities in China, and has designs on launching autonomous cars in 10 Chinese cities within three years, reported Bloomberg. The company also plans to test out their vehicles with a small group of drivers this year in a closed environment, said Wang Jing, senior vice president overseeing Baidu's driverless vehicle project.
http://fortune.com/2016/01/25/baidu-driverless-vehicle/
Alternate Article: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-24/baidu-enters-the-global-race-to-dominate-era-of-driverless-cars
Baidu, China's top search engine, offers a very insecure Web browser:
Today, the Citizen Lab is releasing a new report, "Baidu's and Don'ts: Privacy and Security Issues in Baidu Browser."
The report is the result of many weeks of careful analysis, led by Citizen Lab security researcher Jeffrey Knockel and co-authors Adam Senft and Sarah McKune and is part of Citizen Lab's interest in analyzing the privacy and security issues involved with popular mobile applications.
Reuters has an exclusive story on the report here: http://www.reuters.com/article/baidu-vulnerability-idUSL3N1613VI
The report takes a close look at Baidu Browser, a popular China-based mobile application that is available in Windows and Android versions. What we found was very troubling.
Baidu Browser collects and transmits a lot of personal user data back to Baidu servers that we believe goes far beyond what should be collected, and it does so either without encryption, or with easily decryptable encryption. Data collected and transmitted in the Android version without any encryption includes a user's GPS coordinates, search terms, and URLs visited. The user's IMEI and nearby wireless networks are sent with easily decryptable encryption. Meanwhile, the Windows version sends search terms, hard drive serial number, network MAC address, title of all webpages visited and GPU model number.
Baidu responded to some of the Citizen Lab's questions (pdf). Spotted at The Register .
Alibaba's version of the digital personal assistant will be available on August 8th only in China and without a display:
Alibaba's "Tmall Genie X1" will go for 499 yuan ($73) to the first 1,000 people during a one-month trial, coming in below Apple's $349 HomePod and the roughly $180 Echo. Its biggest competitor, Tencent Holdings Ltd., is developing a voice-activated digital speaker that could hit the market within months, Tencent President Martin Lau said in a May interview. And on Wednesday, Baidu Inc. showed off its own "DuerOS" personal assistant.
Taking a page from Amazon.com Inc. and Google, Hangzhou-based Alibaba's speaker offers voice-controlled services from music streaming to newscasts and calendar-booking, according to its website. Importantly, the gadget -- powered by the AliGenie system -- may eventually simplify shopping for the Chinese e-commerce giant's 450 million active buyers who turn to the website for everything from cherries to makeup.
Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.
Related:
Amazon Rolls out Chatbot Tools in Race to Dominate Voice-Powered Tech
Amazon Dominates Voice-Controlled Speaker Market
Baidu overtakes Google in global smart speaker market
Chinese search giant Baidu is now the world's second biggest vendor of smart speakers, according to a new report from Canalys. The research firm says Baidu overtook Google to capture 17.3 percent of the global market with 4.5 million shipments in the second quarter of 2019, representing staggering year-on-year growth of 3,700 percent. Amazon remains the overall leader with more than 25 percent share of the market and 6.6 million shipments.
Baidu's AI speakers run on an AI platform called DuerOS. The company initially targeted the high end of the market with the Teenage Engineering-designed Raven H speaker, but that product apparently sold poorly. More recently, Baidu has pushed sales of much less expensive models, with the basic Xiaodu speaker selling for as low as 89 yuan (~$12). Baidu overtook previous domestic leader Alibaba in the first quarter of this year in China, according to Canalys.
But the company has faced some trouble lately:
Baidu has lost over $60 billion in value since its peak — now earnings are expected to fall further
TikTok's Parent Pushes Into Search Business in Threat to Baidu
Baidu is facing an unlikely challenger in China's search market — TikTok owner ByteDance
Baidu: 'China's Google' Is Not Done Yet
Related: Baidu Launches 'AI-powered Digital Assistant' Duer to Take On Google Now, Siri
Amazon Dominates Voice-Controlled Speaker Market
Alibaba Challenges Google, Amazon With New Echo-Like Device
Baidu, "China's Google", Shows First Loss
Google Will Give 100,000 Home Minis to People With Paralysis
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 19 2019, @11:40PM (1 child)
"If every Chinaman uses our product, we'll be rich!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 20 2019, @08:38AM
Says the sole post to this Fine Article! Perhaps, if we had had an aristarchus submission. Or not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 20 2019, @02:50PM
Baidu competes against Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance
Actually they are ALL in different markets; search,e-commerce , social media and overhyped-video-app respectively
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 21 2019, @03:07PM
They already robbed Fan Bingbing of twice that. Just go out and accuse another rich person of a crimenso their bank account can be drained.