Rand Leeb-du Toit, CEO of Yoick, recently blogged that China is getting ready for a "virtual world onslaught".
The most public argument for this would be Cyworld China. Since launching in June 2005 they've reached 3 million subscribers and are growing by 15,000 a day. Add to this Tencent's QQ with its half a billion registered users, and you have an audience that is accustomed to purchasing virtual items and "forming deeper connections via immersive environments."
As far as virtual worlds, they have HiPiHi (often referred to as a "Second Life clone"), and the upcoming worlds from Shanda, UOneNet and Entropia. Once these worlds have established themselves, expect many more companies to join the virtual world industry.
Hipihi is currently is beta and looks quite nice. The object editor is quite familiar to Second Life users. I heartily recommend it to anyone that enjoys virtual worlds.
Shanda's virtual world and uWorld are, so far as I know, just words. Is there any evidence that these virtual worlds actually exist? Any evidence that there are actually teams working on them?
I've read the claim about a supposed upcoming Shanda virtual world many times now and not seen a trace of anything to support this claim.
Are there any English language links regarding Shanda's virtual world on the Shanda site?
One thing I wonder about: the sites like QQ, why don't some of them add a virtual world, like Hipihi or SL, a real 3D virtual world, to their existing package of features? So you'd enter a virtual world with all your QQ friends and groups and whatever already there instead of starting out in a virtual world where everyone is a stranger and there is no well thought ought system of chat and communication because the programming staff's work is all going into making the 3D world look good and have high frames and such. Having the world look good and have nice physics and such is great, for sure, but it might be that the human connections are more important, such that it would be better to have a virtual world that was a bit less functional in terms of 3D simulation quality and features but more developed in things like being able to send your existing friends screenshots by email, send files, have chat logs, make new groups, connect with msn groups, yahoo groups, etc.
I'd like to see a company like Zoho add a virtual world system, it would be a competitor to the Croquet-based Qwak but would already have a successful and highly regarded 2D collaboration system in existence.
By the way, Hipihi has a new version out, version 30013. Might want to give the new version a try.