Engine Yard, provider of the Ruby and Rails deployment platform, today announced it has closed a Series B financing round of $15 million led by New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA), with participation from Amazon.com and current investor Benchmark Capital.

The9 Limited (Nasdaq: NCTY), an online game operator and developer in China, announced that it has entered into an agreement with T3 Entertainment Co. Ltd. ("T3"), developer of Audition game series, under which the two companies will establish a joint venture in the areas of game development and publishing.

Nimbuzz, a mobile VoIP and IM provider, that also brings IM and voice to social networks, has raised $15 million in second round funding. The new round of funding was led by Naspers/MIH with Nimbuzz's other major existing investor Mangrove Capital Partners also participating.

Lenovo has announced the launch of the IdeaCentre K210 desktop, marking the company’s entry into the consumer desktop market outside of China. This announcement follows the recent debut of Lenovo’s IdeaPad series of notebooks, which signaled Lenovo’s jump into the worldwide consumer notebook business outside of China earlier this year.

Chinese online games publisher Giant Interactive Group Inc. (NYSE: GA)  announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire a 25% interest in Five One Network Development (51.com), a Chinese online social networking service provider, for approximately $51 million.

mInfo Inc. (minfo.com),a company that specializes in mobile search and pull-advertising in China, announces it has entered into an agreement with Nokia to deliver its search product onto Nokia's mobile applications platform. The initial release of this product is already available to Nokia users in China and offers users access to finding a variety of search services including travel, local, entertainment, finance and sports.

Video sharing site Youku has announced today that it has received 40 million in additional investment. This is the 4th round of investment for Youku after it received 25 million in investment last year.

After completing its investment in social networking website 51.COM, Giant Interactive is already making moves in combining social networking with online games. In a statement released yesterday, the CEO of Giant commented on the company's strategy.

Apple’s iPhone is getting closer to a launch in China. Yesterday, China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou stated that any difficulties with bringing the iPhone to China were largely solved. Apple, which announced the new 3G iPhone, gave up its usual practice of splitting profits with the local phone operators.  This is expected to clinch the deal with China Mobile and was one of the major obstacles which stalled previous talks. The 3G iPhone could possibly be released in China and Russia by year’s end. In addition, Apple announced the opening of its first official Apple Store in Beijing’s Sanlitun district yesterday.

In this brief, Pearl Research analyzes the social networking sites in China, as part of our syndicated reports. Chinese social networking sites have been heavily criticized for cloning Facebook, with the same literal look and feel.However, upon closer inspection of these copied sites, you will find that there are many areas of creativity and innovation within them. The most famous Facebook clone in China is Xiaonei. When it first came out, it had the same interface, design, and coloring as a simplified Chinese version of Facebook.