Weibo: Qihoo's Zhou hunts Cheetah, Baidu; Techies hype Huawei's P7

Qihoo 360's (NYSE: QIHU) controversial founder Zhou Hongyi was buzzing through the microblogging realm this week, attacking online search archrival Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) in one instance as he was accused by a former employee in another case of attacking Cheetah Mobile (NYSE: CMCM), a rival in the security software business. Meantime, telecoms giant Huawei was generating some rare upbeat buzz for its latest smartphone, the P7, getting several high-profile tech executives to hype the model in what looks like a page from the playbook of marketing-savvy smartphone rival Xiaomi. 

Let's start our weekly microblogging round-up with Zhou Hongyi, who is always a good source of controversial material due to his willingness to say anything about anyone. If Zhou were in the United States, he would probably get sued dozens of times each year for many of the things he says. In fact, he does get sued occasionally in China for both his words and his company's actions, and Qihoo is currently locked in a series of lawsuits with Baidu over unfair competitive practices.

It's not difficult to see why the pair hate each other, since Qihoo has posed one of the most serious challenges in years to Baidu's dominance in the search space. But Zhou's attack shortly after Baidu's announcement of a major new R&D initiative seems even more mean-spirited than usual, aimed at putting a damper on Baidu's big news.

In his attack, Zhou actually doesn't say anything himself but simply forwards another microblog post from an unverified user named @qyjohn. Interestingly, the original writer later deleted the post, indicating perhaps he got a call from Baidu or had second thoughts about his message. The original post was a message to the new director of Baidu's R&D lab, a Stanford professor named Andrew Ng, pointing out that his new employer's site was host to numerous fraudulent medical advertisements.

Former Qihoo employee Fu Sheng didn't have many nice words either for his former boss. Fu now works as the CEO of Cheetah Mobile, which went public 2 weeks ago and whose security software products are rivals to Qihoo's. Cheetah ultimately had to cut its fund raising target by nearly half and its shares now trade below their IPO level. In this case, it's worth pointing out that broader investor sentiment has been weakening lately towards China tech stocks, which is probably the main reason behind the weak performance.