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Notion, <\/a> the fast-growing work collaboration tool that recently hit a $2 billion valuation<\/a>, said<\/a> on Twitter Monday that its service is blocked in China.<\/p>\n The productivity app has attracted waves of startups and tech workers around the world — including those in China — to adopt its all-in-one platform that blends notes, wikis, to-dos, and team collaboration. The four-year-old San Francisco-based app is widely seen as a serious rival to Evernote, <\/a> which started out in 2004.<\/p>\n Notion <\/a> said it is “monitoring the situation and will continue to post updates,” but the timing of the ban noticeably coincides with China’s annual parliament meeting, which began last week after a two-month delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Internet regulation and censorship normally toughen around key political meetings in the country.<\/p>\n Notion could not be immediately reached for comment.<\/p>\n For Notion and other apps that have entered the public eye in China but remained beyond the arm of local laws, a looming crackdown is almost certain. The country’s cybersecurity watchdog could find Notion’s free flow of note-sharing problematic. Some users have even conveniently turned the tool’s friendly desktop version into personal websites<\/a>. If Notion were to keep its China presence, it would have to bow to the same set of regulations that rule all content creation platforms in China.<\/p>\n Its predecessor Evernote, <\/a> for example, established a Chinese joint venture in 2018 and released a local edition under the brand Yinxiang Biji, which comes with compromised features and stores user data within China.<\/a><\/p>\n Just before its ban in China, Notion surged on May 21 to become the most-downloaded productivity app in the domestic Android stores, according to third-party data from App Annie<\/a>. The sudden rise followed on the heel of its decision to make its core feature free for individual users<\/a>. It also appears to be linked to its Chinese copycat Hanzhou (\u5bd2\u821f), which stirred up controversy within the developer community over its striking resemblance to Notion.<\/p>\n In an apologetic post<\/a> published on May 22, Xu Haihao, the brain behind Hanzhou and a former employee of ByteDance-backed document collaboration app Shimo, admitted to “developing the project based on Notion.”<\/p>\n “We are wrong from the beginning,” wrote Xu. “But I intended to offend nobody. My intention was to learn from [Notion’s] technology.” As a resolution, the developer said he would suspend Hanzou’s development and user registration.<\/p>\n Some of the largest tech firms in China are gunning for the workplace productivity industry, which received a recent boost during the coronavirus crisis. Alibaba’s Dingtalk claimed<\/a> last August that more than 10 million enterprises and over 200 million individual users had registered on its platform. By comparison, Tencent’s WeChat Work said<\/a> it had logged more than 2.5 million enterprises and some 60 million active users by December.<\/p>\n Tags:<\/b> Rita Liao<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Notion, the fast-growing work collaboration tool that recently hit a $2 billion valuation, said on Twitter Monday that its service is blocked in China. The productivity app has attracted waves of startups and tech workers around the world — including those in China — to adopt its all-in-one platform that blends notes, wikis, to-dos, and team collaboration. The four-year-old … Continue reading Work collaboration unicorn Notion is blocked in China<\/span><\/a> Continue Reading <\/div>\nRivalry in work collaboration<\/h2>\n
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Rita Liao<\/p>\n
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