While all of China's major portals are now public, therefore creating their own time-money continuum, the Dot has more money, and therefore, more time. It also provides an additional advantage: $500 million can make up for a lot of mistakes, such as a lack of vision or strategy or revenue. It even makes you profitable when it earns interest.

The company's recent moves show a distinct increase in its business IQ. Rather than make seemingly scattered investments and partnerships that lack coherence, chinadotcom's acquisitions and other deals give us a somewhat clearer picture of its future.

Despite positioning itself as a more regional player, chinadotcom's focus of late has been the country that is its namesake. First there was the acquisition of chinaholiday.com. Not just any old China travel site, the company has an exclusive franchise to sell China Travel Service (CTS) services. While it doesn't have the vise-like lock on China's travel industry it did earlier in its history, CTS pulls a lot of weight and would be a valuable partner as red-tape scissors for any further online travel ventures.

chinadotcom entered a JV with wireless technology firm InfoIsLive.com, in which it already holds a 30 percent stake. If the pan-Asian holding company wants to ride the ultimate pan-Asian trend, wireless is the way to go. The move was Dot's third in two months, including the WAPification of hongkong.com by New World Mobility. The usually tight-lipped dotcompany has hinted that they'll be doing a lot more with wireless, especially in China, which just elbowed Japan out of the way to become Asia's largest mobile phone market.

Add to this chinadotcom's partnership in July with Planet Payment, an e-commerce facilitator, for the former to take the latter into China. The Planet Payment arrangement may also eventually extend to wireless, given some of the m-commerce initiatives that company has already undertaken.

Slowly but surely, the Dot is answering questions like: got payment? got wireless? While the Planet Payment deal is a page from chinadotcom's old play book of importing Western players into the China market, this is a practical move that will directly benefit any move towards e-commerce that chinadotcom makes in China, and perhaps elsewhere in Asia.

This week has been a significant one for chinadotcom. First, it brought competitor Sohu.com to heel when the Beijing-based portal signed a seven-year exclusive global advertising deal with dotsubsidiary 24/7 Media Asia. Sohu.com CEO Charles Zhang stressed "co-opetition" and the strength of Sohu's domestic Chinese sales force, and denied rumors of an ultimate acquisition. But for a one portal to put the business that represents the bulk of their revenue--advertising--largely into a competitor's hands means one thing: Resistance is Futile. You Will Be Assimilated.

chinadotborg closed the week by announcing an increase in their stake of 24/7 Media, to seven percent, making them the ad network's largest shareholder. This is a serious move, one that goes beyond even the regional deals we're accustomed to seeing.

(Author's mea culpa: this writer is kicking himself in the buttocks repeatedly for not having seen this coming. At the Sohu.com press conference, 24/7 Media Asia's MD for Greater China, Sandy Kwong, introduced the various products that 24/7 (Asia) would be offering to Sohu as part of their agreement. A more astute observer would have realized that up to that point, 24/7 Media Asia only had access to the parent company's banner technology, not other tools such as 24/7 Mail. An exclusive is a terrible thing to waste.)

Now, let's not get too excited. chinadotcom is still not profitable, interest or no interest, and allegations of wrong-doing that regularly plague the company, such as those recently reported by Singapore-based gunslingers TechBuddha continue to follow it around, although to date none have stuck. However, lately, instead of acting like an 800-pound gorilla, chinadotcom seems to be evolving more towards an upright primate.

[Opinions expressed in Asia Net Rumblings are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of internet.com.]