Robin Li or Li Yanhong - co-founded the Chinese search engine Baidu and is ranked as the seventh richest man in mainland China with a net worth of US$9.6 billion as of September 2015. He is ranked as 119th richest man in the world, according to the Hurun Report Global Rich List 2014. In addition, Li also serves as the member of the 12th Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

Childhood and Education

Li was born in , Shanxi Province, China, where he spent most of his childhood. Both of his parents were factory workers. Li was the fourth of five children, and the only boy.

He enrolled at Peking University where he studied information management and earned a Bachelor of Science degree. In the fall of 1991, Li went to the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York in the US to study for a doctorate in computer science. He received his Master of Science in Computer Science degree in 1994 after deciding not to continue with the PhD.

Career

In 1994, Li joined IDD Information Services, a New Jersey division of Dow Jones and Company, where he helped develop a software program for the online edition of The Wall Street Journal. He also worked on improving algorithms for search engines. He remained at IDD Information Services from May 1994 to June 1997. In 1996, while at IDD, Li developed the Rankdex site-scoring algorithm for search engine page ranking, which was awarded a U.S. patent. He later used this technology for the Baidu search engine.

Li worked as a staff engineer for Infoseek, a pioneer internet search engine company, from July 1997 to December 1999. An achievement of his was the picture search function used by Go.com. Since founding Baidu in January 2000, Li has turned the company into the largest Chinese search engine, with over 80% market share by search query, and the second largest independent search engine in the world. On 5 August 2005, Baidu successfully completed its IPO on NASDAQ, and in 2007 became the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100 Index. He appeared in CNN Money's annual list of "50 people who matter now" in 2007.

What is Baidu now and what plans for the future?

Eight years later, we can say that it’s almost a flawless victory because Google lost almost all its market share in China and the value of Baidu is more than 40 billion dollars, and all the local competitors dwarfed by the shining data of Baidu. However, the government starts to develop its own search engine in collaboration with China Mobile and the press agency Xinhua. The problem also for the competitors is that Baidu has a lot of other services such as a counter-part of Wikipedia called Baidu Baike, an e-commerce platform (Baidu Youa), a question/answers platform Baidu Zhidao, a music platform Baidu MP3, etc.

Concerning the future, Baidu doesn’t hesitate to show their ambition for markets overseas, they got a small presence in Japan but the competition is too fierce with Google. The problem abroad will be also with the piracy of the music. Indeed, Baidu is black listed by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).

http://marketingtochina.com/the-whole-story-of-baidu/

Eric Xu Yong - Chinese entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist, best known as a co-founder of Baidu, the largest Chinese search engine.

Xu is the founder and chairman of YIFANG Group Holdings Limited, an investment holding company engaged in venture capital investments and asset management activities. He also founded three family philanthropic organizations: The Xu-Chen Family Foundation, The Xu Family Charitable Foundation Limited, and YIFANG (Beijing) Foundation.

Childhood and Education

Xu Yong earned his B.S and M.S. degrees in biology at Peking University from 1982 to 1989.

A Rockefeller Foundation fellow 1990-1993, Xu obtained a Ph.D. degree in Biology from Texas A&M University. Xu was also a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley from 1994 to 1996.

Career

Xu's career ranges across the fields of biotechnology, film production and information communications technology. Later in his career, he expanded into venture capital and fund management.

Biotechnology

Prior to Baidu, Xu worked at Qiagen, Inc. and Stratagene, Inc, two biotech start-up companies in California in technical support, sales and marketing.

Television

Xu is a producer of the first Chinese TV documentary on Silicon Valley's unique history and culture in 1999. Titled "A Journey to Silicon Valley", the TV series brings to light the history, start-up culture, business management and venture capital mechanisms of the Valley in an objective and comprehensive fashion, and profoundly reveals the mystery behind the success of Silicon Valley as the world model for high-tech undertakings and innovation.

Baidu

In 1999, together with Mr. Robin Li, Dr. Eric Xu Yong co-founded Baidu, the world's largest Chinese search engine (NASDAQ:BIDU) and served as an Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer from 1999-2004. His main responsibilities involved private financing, sales and marketing, business and corporate development, corporate governance and general management.

Venture capital and asset management

Xu is the founder and chairman of YIFANG Group Holdings Limited, an investment holding company, engaged in venture capital investments and asset management. Dr. Eric Xu Yong also serves as a board member for several technology start-up companies in China and the US. YIFANG Group Holdings currently invests in information technology, new media, bio-pharmaceuticals, healthcare and clean-technologies, etc. It counts Allele Biotech, GC-RISE, BioHermes, Viatime Media, Kuwo and Baihe as its portfolio companies, among others. The YIFANG Group is also a limited partner of several world-class venture capital and private equity funds. Some partner funds include: Sequoia China, Tsing Capital, Morgan Stanley PE Fund.

Philanthropy

Xu is the founder and chairman of three family philanthropic organizations: The Xu-Chen Family Foundation, a US 501(c)(3) exempt private foundation, The Xu Family Charitable Foundation Limited, a Hong Kong exempted private charitable foundation limited by guarantee, and YIFANG (Beijing) Foundation, a registered charity organization in Beijing, China.
 

The Foundations are grant-making organizations. Grants primarily go to support non-profit researches that may eventually spur policy change and/or adjustment. YIFANG (Beijing) Foundation will seek to commence investing in social enterprises in China in 2015. Dr. Eric Xu Yong founded the Foundations on the premise of promoting social equality in a professional and in-depth manner, supporting public philanthropy, and promoting the development of positive and sustainable welfare organizations and projects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Xu

Early development (1994 - 2010)

In 1994, Robin Li joined IDD Information Services, a New Jersey division of Dow Jones and Company, where he helped develop software for the online edition of the Wall Street Journal. He also worked on developing better algorithms for search engines and remained at IDD Information Services from May 1994 to June 1997.

In 1996, while at IDD, Li developed the RankDex site-scoring algorithm for search engines results page ranking and received a US patent for the technology. He later used this technology for the Baidu search engine.

In 2000, the company Baidu launched in Beijing, China. The first office was located in a hotel room, which was near Peking University from where Robin graduated.

In 2003, Baidu launched a news search engine and picture search engine, adopting a special identification technology capable of identifying and grouping the articles.

Domain name redirection

On January 12, 2010, Baidu.com's DNS records in the United States were altered such that browsers to baidu.com were redirected to a website purporting to be the Iranian Cyber Army, thought to be behind the attack on Twitter during the 2009 Iranian election protests, making the proper site unusable for four hours. Internet users were met with a page saying "This site has been attacked by Iranian Cyber Army". Chinese hackers later responded by attacking Iranian websites and leaving messages. Baidu later launched legal action against Register.com for gross negligence after it was revealed that Register.com's technical support staff changed the email address for Baidu.com on the request of an unnamed individual, despite failing security verification procedures. Once the address had been changed, the individual was able to use the forgotten password feature to have Baidu's domain passwords sent directly to them, allowing them to accomplish the domain hijacking.

Baidu workers arrested

On August 6, 2012, the BBC reported that three employees of Baidu were arrested on suspicion that they accepted bribes. The bribes were allegedly paid for deleting posts from the forum service. Four people were fired in connection with these arrests.

91 Wireless acquisition

On July 16, 2013, Baidu announced its intention to purchase 91 Wireless from NetDragon. 91 Wireless is best known for its app store, but it has been reported that the app store faces piracy and other legal issues. On August 14, 2013, Baidu announced that its wholly owned subsidiary Baidu (Hong Kong) Limited has signed a definitive merger agreement to acquire 91 Wireless Web-soft Limited from NetDragon Web-soft Inc. for $1.85 billion in what was reported to be the biggest deal ever in China’s IT sector.

2010s announcements

On July 31, 2012, Baidu announced they would team up with Sina to provide mobile search results.

On November 18, 2012, Baidu announced that they would be partnering with Qualcomm to offer free cloud storage to Android users with Snapdragon processors.

On August 2, 2013, Baidu launched its Personal Assistant app, designed to help CEOs, managers and the white-collar workers manage their business relationships.

On July 18, 2014, the company launched a Brazilian version of the search engine, Baidu Busca.

On October 9, 2014, Baidu announced acquisition of Brazilian local e-commerce site Peixe Urbano.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu