500 million users

You might worry that I'm getting a bit obsessed by this China number game. I posted on Saturday about SMS frenzy over Chinese New Year and the week before about the prospect of half a billion mobile phones all ringing at once.

We couldn't help, then, but notice the posting on Read/Write Web about Tencent's QQ service which now has 572.3 million registered users. OK, so only 221.4 million of those are active, but still! It's an Alexa.com global top 10 site now and must be regarded as one of China's top purveyors of media and communications. Not much B2B focus yet, but with those numbers, as we've said before, there must be opportunities.

Did you know that, through Naspers' investment in around 36% of Tencent, this must also rank as one of South Africa's most successful offshore internet media investments in Asia. Over at Seeking Alpha, Siwei Zhong ranks it as "Out of the many Chinese internet related stocks, my favorite pick is Tencent Holdings (TCEHF.PK)". He notes, "Tencent still has a lot of room to grow in both increasing market penetration and by introducing new services".

Talking of size and technology, and on another tack altogether, we see that McDonald's is working together with DoCoMo to promote through mobile phones what is arguably America's greatest export success: obesity.