TALK TO THE BOX: Li Yanhong, CEO of Baidu.com, introduces the company's new concept called "box computing" (WEI YAO)

Baidu, China's most popular search engine, held its Technology Innovation Conference 2009 at the China World Hotel on August 17. Li Yanhong, CEO of Baidu.com, introduced the company's new concept of "box computing" to the world.

Box computing is a simple and reliable interactive mode for Internet services, he said. With it, users can ask for whatever they want and enter their needs in the search box. Baidu's system identifies the search requirements, allocates the requirements to the optimal applications and content providers and finally returns the search results to users.

"In the coming days, you will find a simple box as the interface to your personal computer or any terminals. Input what you want to do, and then it responds," Li said.

"For instance, a man who is looking for a date through an online dating service would only have to type in the keywords 'single girl' into the box, and the search engine would divine what he really wants instead of just returning text Web pages containing the keywords," Li added.

Although the most mature aspect of box computing is its search functionality, the box can also be used for other transactions, such as playing games, online shopping and scanning for viruses, Li said.

Different ideas

Many people think of "cloud computing" when box computing is mentioned. Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. The name cloud computing was inspired by the cloud symbol that is often used to represent the Internet in flow charts and diagrams.

A cloud service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting. It is sold on demand, typically by the minute or the hour; it is elastic—users can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time—and the service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a personal computer and Internet access). Significant innovations in virtualization and distributed computing, as well as improved access to high-speed Internet and a weak economy have accelerated interest in cloud computing. A cloud can be private or public.

After the birth of cloud computing, many companies linked their businesses with the new technology and tried to bring the cloud-computing model into the Chinese market.

"Cloud computing focuses more on the back end, that is the infrastructure of services and scalable computing, but box computing is more concerned about the front end, i.e. the requirements from users and how to meet those requirements," said Sun Yunfeng, Chief Products Designer of Baidu.com. "We cannot say which one is more advantageous. They are two different systemic concepts."

Baidu hopes box computing can provide one-stop online services by intelligently identifying clients' demands before giving optimized treatments and responses.

"Based on the platform of box computing, Internet content and applications in the future will be richer, which will directly promote an increase in the number of Chinese netizens and lead the next round of a rising Chinese Internet economy," said Lu Bowang, an Internet analyst with China IntelliConsulting Corp. Statistics provided by the China Internet Information Center showed the number of Chinese netizens had reached 338 million as of June 30, rising 13.4 percent from last year.

Many experts believe box computing will push the whole IT industry to achieve innovation.

"Box computing always allots users' demands to the best service providers so that every service provider will try their best to innovate to provide the best services," said Fang Xingdong, who initiated the Internet Laboratory, China's first professional Internet research and consulting organization.