Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).

Google and Baidu at the KTV: Via blognation China, a photo gallery that shows some creative repurposing of the Google and Baidu trademarks.

Guangzhou real estate companies to list in Hong Kong: The Financial Times reports:

[Hengda Real Estate Group and Star River,] two property developers based in southern China plan to list in Hong Kong next year, underscoring the continuing appetite for development capital to take advantage of the mainland’s surging real estate sector....A number of privately owned Chinese property developers have listed in Hong Kong recently and dealmakers say that there are more in the pipeline...

...Also making its debut in Hong Kong last month was Soho China, a Beijing-focused commercial property developer, which raised $1.7bn.

Yahoo! settles with victims' families: the big picture: Rebecca MacKinnon discusses Yahoo!'s settlement with the relatives of Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning:

Yahoo! has definitely evolved over the past two years since Shi Tao was sentenced. They started out on the defensive, with statements that sounded as if they believed that Shi Tao, dissident Wang Xiaoning and at least two other people were acceptable collateral damage in the noble effort to bring the Internet to China. After being featured as number one negative example on the cover of human rights reports, yelled at in congress twice, a victims' awsuit, and countless anti-Yahoo campaigns by free speech and human rights groups, they are finally doing what many have been advising them to do for some time: admit that their actions have helped to ruin human lives, and admit that they made mistakes.

Dongtan - where's the news?: ResponsibleChina looks at the one-sided reporting about Dongtan, an "eco-city" that UK design firm Arup is planning to build outside of Shanghai:

Dongtan sounded too good to be true. An entire eco-city three-quarters the size of Manhattan built from scratch? Who's building this? Who's paying for it? What Chinese companies are involved? What are the obstacles and challenges to this endeavor? Have there been setbacks? Is the technology behind it feasible? How will construction affect the surrounding wetlands? Will local Chinese people be able to afford living there? Why build a new city when so many of China's other cities need sustainable design? Has actual progress been made? (Apparently, by 2030 there will be more than 500,000 people living in Dongtan. Has anyone moved in, yet?)

Legitimate questions, I think, that demand thorough answers.

Power shift in Shanghai: At China Dialogue, Kan Zhe writes about a Shanghai professor who has outfitted his home with solar panels:

The roof's owner is Zhao Chunjian, a professor at Shanghai University of Electric Power, who last winter climbed up and installed his self-designed "domestic power station". On December 15, 2006, Zhao's solar power plant produced its first watt, and to date it has produced 2,750 kilowatt-hours. In fact, the clean energy the panels produce is enough to power Zhao's entire apartment below.