Like all Chinese, I’m on social media a lot. I check Wechat every other minute, I read Linkedin and Twitter from time to time, and then I post on Weibo and Douyin occasionally. (One minute—let me just check Wechat).

But even as Wechat—which recently claimed 1.1 billion global active users and Douyin (the Chinese counterpart to Tiktok) continue to gain new users in China, I have been wondering if there is space for a new social network in China, especially for the Generation Z, native to mobile Internet and known to be fickle, and maybe even for everyone.

We do have a very competitive landscape of social apps in China. There are three types of social apps here:

• Close-knit social apps where people can communicate with the friends, family, and acquaintances they already know offline. Examples include Wechat and QQ. As a result of the instant message focus of the apps and the extensive contacts most users, people don’t post user generated content in Moments tab as enthusiastically as a few years back. In addition, these apps do not provide an open platform for meeting new people.
• Content and media-driven apps. Examples include Little Red Book, Tiktok, and most of the apps that host online influencers. Users put out a lot of content, often quasi-professionally made, on these apps, and other people can comment or leave messages about the content and follow such influencers or each other. The downside, however, is that there is usually only one-way communication. There are few opportunities for meaningful two-way discussions. Often only influencers receive significant attention and quality feedback.
• Tool-type social apps like Momo or Tantan—known as the Tinder of China. These types of apps are highly effective for meeting new people, but are often hormone-driven and focus on appearances and social status more than any other attributes. This type of app tends to be limited to one-on-one conversations, with almost no content creation (other than profiles filled with photoshopped selfies) or opportunities to meet and interact with groups of people.

So is this the endgame for Chinese social networks? My answer is NO.

There are plenty of things you don’t want to share on Wechat Moments because you don’t want your friends, family, or colleagues to see them, and you don’t want to want share on Weibo because you may not get quality responses at all. You may ask yourself—when you click the “like” button on Wechat Moments, do you do that because the content is truly fascinating, or just because you want show some respect to the person who shared it?

This is why this app called Soul really gets my attention. It is quite a special one, unlike all others social apps in the market.

In fact, Soul is not that new. Founded by veteran consultant Zhang Lu, Soul went online in November 2016.

Soul promises an oasis in the complicated social media landscape, by promoting content based on users’ interests and lifestyle, and allowing users to express themselves and interact with one another in a stress-free, largely anonymous, environment. Users, which the platform calls “Soulers,” build a brand new virtual identity for Soul, with avatars and develop extendable virtual relationships without disclosing personal information.

The app encourages users to connect with strangers based on shared interests. Much like Bilibili, you need to take a survey while registering to be a user. But unlike Bilibili, where you have to answer 100 questions about online pop culture, on Soul you dig deeper into yourself by answering questions ranging from your personality to your daily habits, from your biggest fears to your pet cat’s favorite snack. And a personal profile is set up, tagged with your NERIS personality type as a tag, among other interests you have. Profile photos, locations, ages are not required, even discouraged, and never disclosed on the platform. You then leave the rest to an algorithm, which suggests friends and posts that may interest you based on the data you have entrusted to the platform. 

Soul is already a popular app among China’s Generation Z population, who use it to publish UGC, ranging from diary, voice clips to photos, short videos of their own performances. According to data from Iresearch, Soul is more focused on Generation Z than any other major social network in China, with 35.6% of the app’s users falling in the age group.

Much like Snap was to Facebook, Soul is a complementary platform for young people. Like Facebook, Wechat is all based on real-name, real-life relationships. Soul provides a home for the type of UGC that you don’t want people in your usual social circle of offline relationships to see. Soul users also foster and maintain relationships on the platform based on their interests and engage in interactive features such as giving each thumbs ups, commenting on posts, or discussing specific topics through tagging their posts à la Pinterest.

Soul has positioned itself as the “next generation social playground for Gen Z” in China. But to me, Soul app is potentially not limited to only the Gen Z audience. Everyone, no matter what age they are, is sometimes lonely and wants an opportunity to express themselves with authentic interaction.

I don’t know how far Soul will go, but definitely in China, the social networking space is NOT done yet.

Whenever I go on stage to introduce myself, I always say: tech blogger is the best title I’ve had, ever. As a blogger, I always want to write; as a frequent traveler who gets to see innovation all over the world, I always want to share. But unfortunately, as founder of a company, I have to spend more time on management work. So a big thanks to TechNode’s English media team, who pushed me and also helped me set up this column. And I do hope I can force myself to write more, as a tech blogger, like the old days.

I spent last week at the TechCrunch Shenzhen 2019 conference. As you may know, TechNode has organized the event as TechCrunch’s China partner since it began in 2013, and we’ve seen tech trends come and go. As you can see from the image below, there were so many true innovators who were almost unknown when on our stage but what they work on now is huge in China and the global tech space.

This year’s TechCrunch is no different, and we managed to keep the standard of high-profile VCs, founders, and influencers.

But to me what stood out this year were the ones that came from overseas.  Just two or three years ago, every time we organized a TechCrunch event, we’d think about which companies from Silicon Valley we could invite to China. But now it’s different—there are loads of good startups in Silicon Valley, but the focus in the global tech space from China is more and more diverse.

Southeast Asia

What we saw the most of this year was Southeast Asia. Quite a few VCs, or even companies, were from SEA. They are looking at the Chinese ecosystem, and they wanted to discuss, meet each other, and meet the Chinese VCs. SEA also accounted for two whole side stages, and on the main stage we also had sessions talking about the region.

Today, you can feel the gap between China and the United States getting further, speaking from a non-political perspective. Frankly speaking, three to five years ago, every time we talked to a Chinese startup, they’d always start their pitch: “I’m kind of like Facebook” or “I’m kind of like Uber.” They’d always use some Silicon Valley benchmark. That meant that their model has been proven by Silicon Valley, so it’s more likely they receive money from VCs.

But now the situation has changed—if you look at all the stages at TechCrunch, and all the Chinese unicorns on stage, they don’t really have benchmarks from Silicon Valley.

However, if you go to Southeast Asia now, there it’s the time for copying from China. I met quite a few SEA-based startups, and when they come to pitch you, they would say something like, what we do is like Eleme, like Bytedance, etc. Even when you talk to SEA-based VCs, they say they want to work with Chinese VCs to co-invest in SEA startups. This is a lot like China VCs a few years ago—then, if you could raise USD money, it was a kind of endorsement.

China tech’s history with Silicon Valley is repeating itself with SEA and China. What’s next? Just to give you an example, in the e-commerce sector, when Alibaba’s Taobao was recognized as a popular e-commerce platform, there were loads of agencies to help traditional businesses set up e-shops on the platform. The next wave is probably going to be more and more merchants, who want to sell stuff not only to Chinese people, but to Southeast Asia. So I’m quite interested in ecommerce agencies like the Lazada alumni-founded one, named Intrepid.

Of course, China eventually outgrew the “as seen in America” approach. In another three to five years, who knows who could be going to Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur to learn from SEA models and bid for VC money?

Japan

For Japan, it’s a different story. We know the mobile internet business China is ahead of Japan, and the language barrier in Japan is truly painful. However, it does not mean Japan has stopped innovation or that there is nothing we can learn from Japan.

This year, we invited a few people from Japanese big corporates, government, and VCs to talk about the innovation situation in Japan, and how the Japanese ecosystem can work with the Chinese ecosystem.

In recent years, when we talked about tech innovation, we talk about the US, we talk about Israel. And we talk about SEA for the market. It is true that Japan does not have that many startups, or you can say at least not many startups from Japan want to do global business. But I’ve started to notice an interesting trend: we see more and more Japanese corporates that have money—and huge resources as well—but they can’t find that many good startups inside Japan. So instead of looking for local startups they can work with, corporates are coming to China, looking for startups that they can work with and then bring the technology back to Japan.

These corporates believe Chinese startups are more aggressive, working even harder than Japanese startups. Coming to China, Japanese corporates want to invest, work with, or buy services.

Europe

With the EU and China, we see something similar to Japan, but a little different.

Like, there’s quite a good few good family businesses, or corporate businesses, which have huge of industrial resources are looking at China. Examples are, BMW brought its corporate innovation program “Startup Garage” to China; Airbus is looking closer than ever into the smart transportation sector in China.

Communication between China and EU is missing. In China we know the AI company DeepMind, but most of us consider it as an American company. It’s actually headquartered in London. Offstage, I met investors from France and other EU countries. Everyone is thinking now is a good time to do something in China. They all agree on this: in tech space, it’s time to educate China, and educate the EU market about each other.

There are still, or at least we still expect lots of, interactivity and partnership between China and Silicon Valley. And technology wise and research wise, there is still lots China needs to do to catch up with Silicon Valley. But the whole tech world is a lot like the mobile phone market: iPhone is still important, but we have many more options besides Apple. Silicon Valley is not the only place to go for technology innovation.

China is known for following the innovations of other countries. Three or four years ago, it was common to hear startups pitch themselves as the Google, Facebook, Twitter, or [insert name of well-known Western tech company] of China. Times have changed. We hardly ever hear that phrase anymore.

In fact, the Chinese market is less and less interested in what Silicon Valley has to offer. Companies like Ele.me, Bytedance, and RED (aka Xiaohongshu) are building business models unique to China. Nowadays, many other developing markets are looking to China for insights into how to develop their business.

Here at TechNode, we’ve been following China tech since 2007. We stand at the front lines, giving the world the latest news and information about China tech. However, when we report on popular startups, we are occasionally met with confusion from overseas readers, who want to know: What is that company? Where did it come from? To help you answer those questions, we present: China Investment Trends, an investment tracking platform for an international audience.

Since January, we’ve been tracking and analyzing the daily investment deals in the local market. That means you can now—on a daily basis—check all investment made in China: which companies received investment, by which VC firm, the investment stage, the industry sectors, and more. So far, we have compiled 670+ companies that have raised funding in 200+ sectors, 129 Chinese unicorns in the 10 hottest sectors, and 700+ investment deals.

In the future, we’ll be adding more features and launching our members-only database with more tools to help you better understand China’s startup ecosystem.

Recently, for work-related issues, I’ve used the flagship phones of several major Chinese Android phone manufacturers, ranging from Xiaomi 8 and OPPO Find X to OnePlus 6. They all have their own advantages. Xiaomi’s MIUI operating system is easy to navigate, OPPO Find X’s borderless screen is stunningly beautiful, and OnePlus 6 is thin and light and feels good to hold. All of a sudden, I realized I haven’t used my iPhone 7 Plus for nearly 2 months. At least in my heart, the iPhone has fallen from grace.

I have been a loyal fan to iPhone. I’ve used iPhones as my primary phone since the first-generation iPhone. I changed my laptop to MacBook Air from Thinkpad and used it for a long time. At the moment, I am writing this on my iPad Pro. For a long period of time, I thought iPhone was my only choice as my primary phone and even though I didn’t update my phone to iPhone 8 or iPhone X, my next phone would still be an iPhone. However, after watching Apple’s September event on Thursday (September 13th), I started feeling uncertain about that thought I had because, for the first time, I found iPhone is replaceable.

Apple disappointed us several times in recent years, but, like the Chinese national football team, we placed higher hopes after being disappointed each time. However, this time, I feel more lost than disappointed.

When Tim Cook used the usual “the most advanced” type of phrases to describe their newest iPhone models, what I saw was a weak argument no matter how eloquent Cook was. Apple seems to be digging a hole for those who don’t know about Chinese smartphone manufacturers and transporting those people to the bottom of the hole, telling them Apple’s the most innovative.

Maybe those people aren’t aware that OnePlus is the best selling phone model in the high-end smartphone markets of countries include Finland and India. Xiaomi tops the Chinese and Indian phone market. Apart from strong sales momentum, OPPO and vivo are also surprisingly innovative. Those who praise iPhones’ borderless screens, they should take a look at Find X; those who claim iOS is the only smooth operating system, they should at least try MIUI; those who commend the big screen of iPhone Xs Max may have not heard of Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, all which have bigger screens. Those who compliment iPhone’s dual-camera system may not know that Huawei’s P20 Pro already supports tri-camera. Those who are stunned at a dual-sim card may not understand dual-sim card has been extremely normal in China for years and it’s totally a Shenzhen-developed tech.

Cook has visited China several times and the Apple Events become more and more Chinese characteristics – mentioning only Apple’s advantages and ignoring its weakness. I don’t understand why Apple is so proud of building the biggest iPhone of all time. Why don’t they mention the aspect ratio? Furthermore, I can’t figure out why emphasizing the battery of the new iPhones can last 30 more minutes than iPhone X. Why not tell if new iPhones support the quick charge function?

I believe Apple is still competitive as one of the world’s most innovative companies. Apple is indispensable because it has its own chip, a smartwatch that allows consumers to give themselves an electrocardiogram, MacBook, iPad, and most importantly, a closed ecosystem built on iOS and MacOS. In terms of constructing a closed ecosystem, Chinese companies look fairly naive in comparison.

However, iPhone is no longer the shiniest jewel in Apple’s crown. iPhone has become optional.

I wanted to buy an Apple Watch 4, but suddenly I feel embarrassed. If I don’t use an iPhone, why would I buy an Apple Watch?

Translation by Jiefei Liu

Bridging the Chinese and global tech ecosystem has always the mission for TechNode since its first day. In the past several years, we’ve been not only reporting Chinese tech scene in both Chinese and English but also actively engaging with the local community

Started as a must-read media covering Chinese tech news and startup stories, TechNode has become an innovation platform that includes media, events, acceleration, corporate innovation, and startup data analysis, and is one of the most trusted resources connecting the Chinese and global tech ecosystems. The launch of our Singapore office as our first overseas regional office is a very important milestone for TechNode.

With the presence of our Singapore based team, we want to open our huge resources in China to help Singapore and the Southeast Asia tech communities to access the Chinese market, while also helping Chinese companies and capital to move into SEA. We see huge potential between China and SEA; TechNode aims to become to be the #1 gateway for that. The opening of our Singapore office is just our first step into the global market.

Stay tuned.

Beginning with 2015, foreign technology media started questioning the blind worship of unicorns, but in China, the idea of “unicorn” still prevails. Add “unicorn” to anything and suddenly it’s the next big thing.

Last month, I held a roundtable discussion in Hong Kong with several unicorns from Hong Kong. I asked them what they think of the label. They were very modest—they did not feel the label means they were already successful. But for hundreds of Hong Kong entrepreneurs, becoming a unicorn is still their goal. It is a great achievement but it is also very hard to become a member of the unicorn club.

A unicorn, a company valued at $1 billion, does not fully reflect the long-term value of any company. Becoming a unicorn is just a new starting point. Its future development is worth deeper consideration, and there are innovations coming from “non-unicorn” deserving our attention and praise.

Beyond unicorns—this is the theme of our TechCrunch International Innovation Summit in Hangzhou. For the first time, we are also bringing the summit to Hangzhou, perhaps the fastest-growing city in China. It is not just the birthplace of Alibaba—it is now a leader in e-commerce, new retail, business services, and smart cities. Our aim is to bring the best companies and the whole ecosystem of Hangzhou to the international stage and join them with entrepreneurs and startups from around the world as well as other hot areas in China.

During the TechCrunch International Innovation Summit in Hangzhou, our main focus will be on artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, blockchain technology, new retail education, smart medicine, international investment, and other hot spots. We’ll also bring to Hangzhou the traditional innovation areas of the summit, new product launches, VC Meetup sessions, four major theme sessions, the Media Day, and pure Silicon Valley tech parties.

Innovation beyond unicorns, Hangzhou beyond e-commerce! See you in Hangzhou in July!

Dr. Gang Lu

TechNode, founder & CEO

TechCrunch China, Director

TechCrunch International Innovation Summit 2018 Hangzhou early bird tickets are now on sale. Originally, RMB 999, they are now only RMB 199. First come, first served!

When I wrote this, I was attending the TechSauce Global Summit held by my friend in Bangkok, Thailand. On the stage, the host introduced that our annual TC International City Event in China has attracted a lot of entrepreneurs from other countries in Asia. Below the stage, friends from Southeast Asia said: Hey, I have been to your TechCrunch events in China. There were also Chinese participants who told me that they knew this summit in Thailand when attending our TC Shenzhen event. For four years, from Shanghai to Beijing and then to Shenzhen, we made TechCrunch International City Event the top innovative event in China, even in the whole Asia! China to the World, and the World to China, this is one of the most important values of this innovative pageant.

Because of work, I have attended a variety of events. As you may know, there are many PR events held in China. Every event will only promote their speakers and the number of participants, etc. but ignore the quality of the speaker and the speech content, which makes Chinese internet summits become more and more boring and impractical. What is the expectation of coming to our event for everyone? This is what I think about every day. We are not the exhibition company; then as a Chinese-English technology media, what indeed we want to show to everyone?

Every TC event, we are adhering to our own attitude. Our guests and audience come from all over the world. They truly represent the future, the latest trends, and the latest and hottest innovation. So, we reduce the keynote speech as much as possible and replace it by using dialogue or roundtable discussion, guided by our journalists. We give more space to the startups and solemnly introduce more than 200 of the startup booths during the whole event. What’s more, all our sessions are designed for every part of the startup community, from Hackathon, Startup Competition, Startup booth, to the VC Meetup and Product Release. We value internationalization: every time you will see over 20% of attendees and companies from dozens of countries and regions.

This year in June, we brought the TC to Shenzhen for the first time, where we attracted 6000+ attendees, 170+ media professionals, 80+ domestic and foreign investment institutions and 200+ startups. Our friends say, we completely shocked the Shenzhen startup community. One and a half years later, we will return to Shanghai again, the city we are very familiar with, but has gradually faded away as the waves of the entrepreneurship reach deeper and deeper into china.

People always say that China’s Silicon Valley is in Beijing, the world’s hardware industry is in Shenzhen, the paradise of e-commerce is in Hangzhou. What about Shanghai? Shanghai wants to become an international innovation center; Shanghai also has a large number of international companies and talents. However, when we compare Shenzhen with Shanghai, it is surprising to find that foreigners in Shenzhen are more active. The most important reason behind this is that there are a large proportion of foreign entrepreneurs in Shenzhen. What is more, Shenzhen is closer to Hong Kong, which possesses the higher degree of internationalization. Shanghai, therefore, needs a new starting point!

Back to Shanghai, we will, as always, focus on those hot topics such as sharing economy, intelligent hardware, VR/AR, etc. We will also especially focus on the areas of innovation such as biotechnology, new retail, artificial intelligence, blockchain and ICO, and the industrial internet. We strongly expect the entire Jiangsu-Zhejiang-Shanghai startup community and international innovation influences to reunite in Shanghai.

Dr.Gang Lu

Founder & CEO of TechNode, Head of TechCrunch China

In this TechCrunch International City Event, there will be:

As a tradition of our events in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen over the past four years, the Main Venue will bring you 60+ top international tech industry figures, big companies, and promising startups to speak and share. Our past speakers have included Alphabet (Google) executive president Eric Schmidt, Tencent CEO Pony Ma, Sequoia China founding managing partner Neil Shen, investor and former Google China head Kaifu Li, and founders of popular startups like ofo and Mobike to name just a few.

TechCrunch Shanghai will include an exhibition hall, which, at our events in China, has housed more than 1000 startups and tech companies in total showing off a mix of hardware, software, and other innovation.

TechCrunch China’s annual Startup Competition is also back in Shanghai. We are welcoming early stage startups from across China and around the world to apply and compete for the prize. The judges include top VCs and seasoned entrepreneurs. Past competition participants include names like Ehang, Coding, videobang, Ruff, and KapBook.

Before the main event, we will kick off with the Hackathon, which has brought together more than 1000 attendees including coders, designers, and tech heads. This 24-hour challenge is full of creativity, energy, team work, and booze.

VC Meetup has become a signature part of TechCrunch China events since its launch in 2015. For entrepreneurs who are still shopping about from one venture capital institution to another with your business plan, we offer you the opportunity to meet a stack of VCs for 10 minutes of face-to-face communication. More than 3,500 pitches have been made since day 1, making VC Meetup one of the most popular spots at the event.

Aside from the Main Stage, every event we are also presenting Side Stage to give you in-depth talks of specific vertical topics. The past hosts include Google Play, Gobi Ventures, Taobao Crowdfunding, and Opera.

【Cooperation】

For business and sponsorship, please contact:

huhaoying@technode.com

For startup booth, please contact:

shengli@technode.com

For VC Meetup, please contact:

lock@technode.com

For Hackathon, please contact:

maofeng@technode.com

For media cooperation, please contact:

wangjuan@technode.com

For tickets issues, please contact:

xibaoxin@technode.com

Others, please contact:

shenkunqi@technode.com

When I participated the Paris Le Web conference back in 2006, I was really excited about a China-themed panel called the The Dragon’s Web, dedicated to China’s internet landscape. However I was disappointed to find the whole conversation was completely focussed on the firewall and China’s copycat culture. In the past decade, the middle kingdom has undergone dramatic changes, and so has the internet ecosystem both here and abroad. So what can we expect from the ‘Dragon’s Web’ in 2015?

We still have to face the frustrating fact that the compact culture here in China is still running rampant. It will continue to be a malign feature of China’s internet scene, especially when it comes to technology innovation. But we can also acknowledge that Chinese companies are making great breakthroughs in terms of business model innovation. WeChat’s transformation from an instant messaging tool to an all-inclusive service is one of many tributes to that innovation. Many new business models with unique Chinese elements are emerging, including trends in Online-to-Offline (O2O) and Internet Plus, a government policy bringing traditional industries online. Although, these concepts might sound confusing for foreign investors at first, they have a huge number of applications in the country. China’s internet market is massive, but its traditional market is larger and urgently needs reform. That’s why online education and online finance are becoming buzzwords in China.

In Shenzhen, the hardware Silicon Valley, we see hopes of a “hardware renaissance” in China in the coming years. The emergence of a slew of promising fields including Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, wearables, smart homes and virtual reality are bringing new hopes to China’s tech market thanks to their inseparable connections with hardware.

Traditional manufacturers such as Huawei, ZTE and Lenovo used to represent the major powerhouses of China’s tech companies in exploring overseas markets. But now, China’s startups are tapping foreign consumers with confidence and ambition. Xiaomi, DJI, LeTV and OnePlus are snapping up overseas sales, while more domestic companies are catching up including Cheetah Mobile, CamCard, Kingsoft, Camera 360 and APUS to name only a few. Moreover, gaming companies are winning in a big way in the U.S. and Southeast Asian markets.

The Dragon’s Web has thoroughly remolded itself. However, in this era of mass entrepreneurship and innovation, it is crucial for us to notice that spoon-feeding entrepreneurship can harm innovation. We need to stay clearheaded about our advantages and weakness, as well as what is in our future?

We are really excited about the upcoming TechCrunch Beijing summit on Nov. 2-3, where we can illustrate to you the best of The Dragon’s Web in 2015. Here, you will not only meet Chinese startups representing China’s innovation spirit while covering the red-hot sectors of O2O, fintech, hardware and IOT, but also top entrepreneurs and investors from home and abroad. TechCrunch Beijing will be an international carnival for all techies, celebrating entrepreneurial spirit with a main conference hall accommodating 1,000+ attendees, a 200+ startups demo zone, two parallel sessions holding 500+ participants respectively, an O2O marketplace, a new product demo stage, and a VC meet-up session.

In addition, we will hold TechCrunch Hackathon in Beijing for the first time to bring more opportunities for early-stage entrepreneurs to prove themselves. TechCrunch’s Startup Competition is also recruiting for contestants now.

As always, welcome to Beijing! We look forward to seeing you this November.

From early 2007 to March 2011, TechNode was just a little personal blog where I wrote about tech news and startups as a hobby.  TechNode as a company has grown from a blog to a fully-fledged part of the media, but it hasn’t been a short and easy journey. As it enters its fifth year, the Year of the Sheep, I’d likee to say some words:

TechNode has changed

In four years, TechNode has been through many changes. Starting as one man’s hobby, it grew to an 8-person team, then for quite a while had only 4 full-time staff, but now we have 17 full-time staff.  TechNode is building a media platform for startups, but it’s also a startup itself, which has been a happy if not painless journey. Bring part of the tech media in China (where people and the industry still don’t really respect copyright) is not easy, but we have survived and made our voice known not only throughout the Chinese startup ecosystem but also globally, in USA, Israel, Korea, and Japan for example. If you want to gain insights into Chinese tech space, TechNode is always an unmissable resource. Unlike other English media are reporting about China’s tech market, we are really in the local market and have direct, close connections with investors, startups and entrepreneurs. And now we have also started covering Korean startups.

I still remember that early in TechNode’s history, when we organized events for  around 100 people, but now we can manage big events, like the TechCrunch Beijing we did last August, which had around 5000 attendees. XFounder Club, a young but promising community we are building for talented startup founders, has gathered around 500 startup founders and investors. In early 2014, with a partner, we launched our first co-working space, theNode in 751DPark, 798 Art Zone, Beijing. It has 3000 square meters of floor space and has attracted around 30 startups there. Today many of these startups have received investment from angel rounds, A rounds and even B rounds. The co-working space itself is already profitable.

The market has changed

I used to think there was no way we could be as influential as tech media like TechCrunch, simply because before 2011, the market was dominated by Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, who always wanted to kill off startups. At that time, there were not much space in the market for startups; there was no mobile internet and many shanzhai phones.

Now, many resources, from the government and venture capital to universities have become supportive of startups. Mobile internet is already familiar, as everything is about mobile nowadays. Online-2-Offline, On-Demand services, and IoT are the hottest keywords now. Beijing is still the center of the startup ecosystem in China, but we see blooming startup communities in Hangzhou (because of Alibaba) and Shenzhen (the heaven of hardware). There are still lots of startups following the Copy-2-China (C2C) model, but we have seen amazing innovation on the business side, of which WeChat may be best example.

The media industry has changed – but not much

Thanks to the booming startup culture in China, we have also have a booming so-called tech media in China right now: probably too many. If we forget the copyright issue (I know we shouldn’t, but…), more tech media in the market is a good thing, at least for the startups.

The Year of the Sheep – where will TechNode go?

How to judge a member of the media – by web traffic, its influence, the loyalty of its readership, the offline community it manages, the size of the events it holds, the revenue it generates, or by its impact on the industry on which it focuses? 

In 2014, we’ve seen lots of early startups we’ve written about getting funding, raising millions, and growing fast – not only in China but also globally. Startups will remain our most important focus, even though most of their stories does not generate much traffic and revenue. In January, we launched our first app, Startup Daily, which has one simple function: introducing one startup a day (in Chinese). And this is just a beginning, In 2015, we do everything for startups, from delivering great, unique content online to operating co-working spaces for startups across the country. 

If you are passionate about startups, we are looking for more writers, business developers and a community manager. Please email: job AT technode.com. As a startup, TechNode will push you!

Finally, but most importantly: at the beginning of the Year of the Sheep, and on behalf of all at Technode, thank you all so much for supporting us all the way!

Editing by Mike Cormack (@bucketoftongues)

We brought 9 startups to San Francisco last year to join TechCrunch Disrupt. And this year, 8 startups founded by Chinese young entrepreneurs forms the China Pavilion to show case their outstanding works. If you are around at the startup alley, please go to visit their booth.

ClearClouds is a cloud service company providing network-based data collection and analytic platform, to realize the intelligent management of large data centers, greatly reduce their operational costs, and increase revenue. Founded in 2011, ClearClouds is headquartered in Wuxi, with branch offices in Nanjing, Beijing, and Silicon Valley. Our products have been deployed in a number of well-known enterprises in China, including Ctrip, Xiaomi, Lakala, Dianping.com, Dr. Peng Group, 21 vianet and etc. The company’s mission is to make a one-stop solution for data collection.

Agora provides the building blocks for developers to add HD voice calls to any mobile app through a simple yet powerful SDK. With proprietary and proven technology that handles billions of voice minutes every year, developers can support as many callers as they want in a single call. One to one, many to many, and millions to millions. Agora handles the hard parts – so that developers can focus on innovation and building great products.

Founded in June 2010 with 50 engineers at Beijing, Lonshine Technologies Co. is dedicated in development and manufacture smart wearable product and .mobile wireless devices, including the latest innovation design on smart analogue watch.

Ghost is an intelligent drone, a super-easy flying machine that carries GoPro camera, help you shoot amazing aerial videos. Ghost is made by Ehang Tech.

Founded in 2004, Qyer.com is principally engaged in providing suggestions and information to outbound tourists. The company’s core products cover travel guide, forum, inquiry and tips, among others. The website now boasts nearly 10 million users and 5 million activated mobile app users.

Sensoro was founded in July 2013 at the Microsoft Ventures’ accelerator. Our team hails from some of the best universities in Asia including Tsinghua University and Hong Kong Polytechnic. We have previously worked at organisations like Netease, Microsoft Research Asia and the China Aerospace Research Institute. Our expertise includes large scale parallel processing, mobile internet, big data mining, digital circuits and inertial navigation.

Orbeus is a computer vision company that empowers computers to see better than humans. They are the first and only company to provide a proprietary cloud-based image analysis solution that makes sense of faces, scenes and objects all together.

In a world where our schedules are packed and breaks fragmented, we are unhappy how we interact with the events because of maintaining long invitees list, hassle in communicating with the participants, and coping with time schedules. Blleep is here to provide an efficient way to utilize our free time. It allows users to advertise events and connect with the community. List an event–like a recruitment drive, a fundraiser, or just a house party–and track attendance. Once you list an event, nearby Blleep users will be able to see the event and once they RSVP, you will be able to chat with them, bringing a whole new dimension to RSO outreach.

Bonjour! TechNode is taking a further step to bridge the Chinese and global startup ecosystem. Today, we, together with VELVET Group are proud to announce the launch of TechNode.fr, the French language version of China tech news portal TechNode.com.

Over the past few years, China has undergone exponential growth in digital with an Internet population of 618 million, 500 million mobile Internet users and more than 100 million tablet owners. In 2013, China overtook the United States to become the world’s largest e-commerce market with over €217 Billion in transaction value. TechNode.fr is designed to address French speaking countries & regions (France, Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, Canada, etc.), opening doors for the 220 million French-speaking community to witness and understand the fast evolving digital landscape of China.

TechNode teamed up with the Sino-French digital consulting agency VELVET Group to design and operate this new website. VELVET is leveraging its team of Chinese, English and French copywriters based in Shanghai to deliver the latest news around China social media, mobile, e-commerce, startups and new trends.

With this new site, we just can’t wait to bring more online & offline interactivity between China and French web. Merci beaucoup!

WeChat is super popular in China and definitely the hottest channel for social marketing in China. We see more and more companies launching their official accounts on WeChat and have their 2D code printed on all sorts of materials, on brochure, site, t-shirt etc. Scan the 2D code and follow us on WeChat, has become the most common method for companies to be engaged with their users/customers.

The Embassy of Denmark understands Chinese social media very well. As the first European embassy in China, it just launched its official WeChat account. We feel super honoured to have the chance to talk to Mr. Friis Arne Petersen, the Danish Ambassador to China. The Chinese social media service, particularly for some foreign media, is always controversial as it’s often involved with the potential censorship and government control. We are very glad that Ambassador Petersen gave us an open talk and are also impressed by his understanding and insight on social media in China.

Do you have a team working on all sorts of Chinese social media? Is it easy for an embassy to get its official WeChat account approved by Tencent?

Our press and communication secretariat is handling all our Chinese social media platforms. It is mostly them who come up with the ideas for our Weibo, though I do try to be creative and come up with some of my own. It definitely took time to get our official WeChat account approved. We started the process the 10th of June 2013.

How do you think the importance of using social media in China for a foreign embassy, and what did you do before (on weibo etc)?

It is of great importance that we as a public organisation that wants to brand Denmark and Danish culture are present on the Chinese social media. There are today more than 600 million people on the Internet in China, and especially on mobile platforms the growth is huge. The explosive growth in the number of netizens has also resulted in an explosive growth in the number of users of social media. According to a study by McKinsey conducted in April 2012 based on 5,700 Internet users, 95 percent of Internet users living in major cities, registered on a social media, and 91 percent of users said that they had been using social media in recent six months. The corresponding figure for use should be compared with 67 percent in the U.S. and 70 percent in South Korea. Therefore social media is taking a more and more important role in Chinese society.

The public debates that you find on Weibo are in many cases the same that you would find in many other Western countries. There’s hate, pettiness, jealousy but also thoughtfulness, rationality and curiosity amongst the many comments. Sometimes criticism of government and corruption appears. The public debates that you find on Weibo are in many cases the same that you would find in many Western countries. The social media in China offers a quick insight into the thoughts and mindsets of Chinese citizens. In order to get a more whole picture of China today, you need to follow its social media.

We’ve been on Sina Weibo since March 2011 and today we have four Weibo channels that we maintain, where we in total have more than 350.000 followers. There we posted information about Denmark, Danish culture, the work of the Embassy, Danish cultural activities in China as well as Danish foreign policy. We try to make our news appealing so that people learn something about the aforementioned issues while also being entertained.

Why launch WeChat official account? What are you going to do with it (e.g. what information you plan to deliver through WeChat on daily basis) and what would be your expectation from this ‘new’ social media channel.

The Danish Embassy needs to be present with relevant information on Denmark where the users are. More and more Chinese netizens are starting to use WeChat as it is a more personalised platform than Weibo. Therefore the Embassy needs to be on Wechat. We hope that the information that we post on Denmark and Danish culture will hopefully be able to inspire even more Chinese netizens to get more interested in Denmark and going to Denmark as well as getting to know Danish culture. I think the intimacy that you have on WeChat allows for more lengthy and personal stories from Denmark that you won’t find on for example Weibo. On WeChat you have a one-to-one dialogue with people following you, while on Weibo you have a big virtual megaphone speaking to a large crowd. It is two distinctly different ways of communication.

You may forget about Weibo, even forget about QQ, now it’s really the era of WeChat. If you want to reach out to your Chinese users and customers, do make sure you are on WeChat.

(Photo taken by Zhang Peng)

We launched the TechCrunch China site almost 2 months ago and we said it’s just something to start with. We wanted to bring more to the local startup ecosystem, and now we are announcing the first TechCrunch event, TechCrunch Shanghai, on 19-20th Nov. You may check the official site, http://tcsh.technode.com for tickets, locations and many other details are coming soon. We will be posting updates here on the event from now on.

“The Red Web”, is the theme of this event. What we want to present on stage will be the latest development in Chinese web industry, such as Smart TV, Online Financing, Smart Photo, Wearable Devices, Mobile Gaming etc. We are going to have some special sessions named Founder Talk and VC Talk at which we are going to on stage interview some shining figures in local and international industry. What’s more, we will welcome a few international speakers to share their strategy, thoughts and experience on Chinese internet market. We do hope the event will a valuable platform for them to enter China market too.

For startups which want to pitch local and international media and venture capitalists, we also prepare a Startup Alley area which could accommodate ~40 startups each day. It’s an event at Shanghai, but for sure, startups from Hong Kong, Taiwai, Asia and any other countries/regions are welcome to join us.

The early bird tickets are now on sale,  and for media you may apply for the media tickets here. If you are interested in participating startup alley, you may check here and send us your application. For any other inquiry, please drop us an email on event@technode.com

See you in November!

Beijing Design Week 2013 marks a new era in evolution by approving the 3D Printing Festival held at the TheNode International Innovation Center (TechNode’s to-be-open office) in 751 DPark from September 28th – October 3rd, 2013 powered by 360Fashion Network.  The 3D Printing Festival showcases 3D Printing, 3D Scanning, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Worlds with hands-on training for industrial designers, architects, artists, and fashion designers to learn how they can harness 3D Technologies in the form of their prototyping, industrial product design, brand building, retail, and advertising campaigns. The 3D Printing Festival at TheNode is located 100 meters away from the 751 Train Station next to the Xiaoke Theater.

According to Anina Net, Founder and CEO of 360Fashion Network, the 3D Printing Festival 2013, allows visitors to experience the power of 3D as presented in eight workshop areas within the venue.  

DIGITAL ME. See your own replica in 3D !

Visitors can start to explore 3D by first creating their “Digital Me” persona the moment they step into the 3D Scanning Booth. Using eight high-precision scanners developed by TianYuan 3D Scanner company – the leading 3D Scanner company in China – visitors will create an exact replica of themselves in 3D. After creating their “Digital Me”, visitors have the choice of three different ways to output themselves by using 3D Printing, 3D Augmented Reality, or upload to a 3D Virtual World.

Play and Discover possibilities in 360 Fashion Network Tech Zone

Visitors can bring their “Digital Me” scan to the on-site technicians and 3D Print their very own statue of themselves. They can even combine their Digital Me with their friends scans, freezing themselves in time forever in a unique and personal memento to take home or share.

ANIMATIONS

The 3D Printing Zone offers visitors the opportunity to view powerful precision industrial. In the Showroom Space, visitors can discover the space through reading explanations and seeing animations by downloading the 360AR iPhone app (http://getap.ps/360AR) and pointing their screen at photos in The Showroom Area. In this area 751 Virtual World Map awaits them to uncover facts about the historical landmarks around them using Augmented Reality.

GUIDED TOUR

With step-by-step instructions both enthusiasts for home-use can attend Daily workshops from 14:00- 14:45, along with creative professionals for business industrial-use can attend Daily workshops from 15:00 – 15:45. Workshop attendees can walk away having created 3D objects and printed them out directly on our Tiertime printers.

There are different daily conferences with guest speakers every day on different topics. Guests can sign up here: http://yoopay.cn/event/3DFestival2013 or download the program App powered by 360Fashion MobileMags technologies, to any iOS & Android mobile phone by typing this url into their mobile phone browser: http://mobilemags.mobi/15814 .

TELEPORT YOURSELF

When stepping into the conferences zone guests have the opportunity to teleport into the 751 DPark Virtual World, posing at the entrance of the Gasometer together with the Anina 3D Model. Photos with the 3D Anina character will be posted on @360Fashion sina weibo for everyone to download.

“The 3D Festival is a continuation of our large scale educational and demonstration exhibitions aimed at preparing industries to understand and use the latest technologies. The demand for efficient production and economical prototyping design solutions has been increasing globally. 3D scanning, printing, and augmented reality technologies are definitely an answer to creating a more sustainable economic marketplace where supply meets demand,” Anina said to us.

TechCrunch.cn went live last week. You may have read the announcement on TechCrunch that day, but we waited till today to share it with you after having collected some feedback.

Some of our readers, as exiting as we are though, were not quite happy with the font & font-size, page layout, load speed and the translation style.

The font and font-size have been changed accordingly. The load speed cannot be improved at the moment as we are on WordPress VIP — WordPress.com itself isn’t accessible in China. TechCrunch is about to launch a new design, so we’ll have a brand new web layout then. It may take us some time to polish up the translated articles as we try to keep the flavor of the original as well as having them informative enough in Chinese.

Currently our focus is the content with which we hope to benefit all the Chinese readers that have been educated by pirated Chinese translations of TechCrunch. But the launch of TechCrunch.cn is just the very beginning and a small part of value we want to add to China’s startup ecosystem. We’ll launch offline events later with resources from TechCrunch and TechNode to make a difference in China’s tech media. Please stay tuned.

If you read Chinese, please tell us whenever you spot anything incorrect on TechCrunch China. Also please feel free to reach out if you think we can work together on a business partnership. Your feedback or help would be much appreciated!

TechCrunch’s flagship event Disrupt will be held in San Francisco again on 7th – 11st Sept. As the official partner in China, TechNode is setting up a China Pavilion at the Startup Alley to maximise the exposure for China-related startups (the startups are founded by Chinese, or based in Greater China or mainly targeted at Chinese users). All startups in China Pavilion will be interviewed on TechCrunch TV.

If you are based in China and would love to come with us, we are also planning some local tech meetups, visits to cool companies (such as Tesla, Flurry), startups (such as gTar), incubators (such as 500.co), co-working space (such as Rocket-Space) etc. We want our tourists to ‘touch’ the spirit of innovation in Silicon Valley, so the group will be trying services like Uber for transportation, staying in Airbnb for experience.

It’s only one month away, so if you are interested, please do drop an email to Reeves Li (reeves.li At technode.com).

TechNode is bilingual tech media. Our ultimate goal is not just to be an influential media in Chinese tech space but to be a leading tech media with focus on China in the global tech space. In other words, we are reporting China tech news, educating the global industry about China startup ecosystem and also influencing both global and local industry.

We have been lucky, with a small team and our passion, we have done a good job and achieved some milestones, such as the honour of being the official partner of TechCrunch in China. Obviously, there is so much we can do in near future, but the most important responsibility for us is to deliver more news, analysis and reports to our readers daily.

We are expanding our editorial team! Either part-time or full-time, if you’d love to be involved with the startup ecosystem and share your thoughts about the industry with our world-wide readers, please do let us know and you are very welcome to join us.

TechNode has built a strong presence in and outside China. Our reporters will have access to not only local tech community but also our resources in other Asian countries, the U.S and some European countries.

We need you to

• be based in mainland China, Hong Kong or Taiwan, and read Chinese  (native English speakers preferred). You can also apply if you’re in other countries or regions but should write about China only.
• have a thorough knowledge of China’s tech scene and are passionate about startups. Being interested in or knowledgeable on certain areas such as hardware is preferred.
• regularly attend tech events to get involved in the local startup community and expand contacts.
• be capable of communicating ideas faithfully and accurately to our readers.

Please e-mail job @ technode.com with your resume. Thanks!

People love photographs. Though still and silent, they carry a touch of memories. But sometime you may feel the photo is not that good enough. When your baby was born, you would be surely eager to take a snapshot of his first laugh, but in the meanwhile you might want to record a few seconds of his first laughter too. An camera integrated with a sound recorder, could this idea work?

Camera360, the leading photo app, sent me its new version which features a new function, so-called Phonograph Camera. Basically when you switch to Phonograph Camera mode,  several seconds of sounds will be recorded simultaneously when you are taking photo. So you can later browse this photo, sounds will be played automatically.

This Phonograph Camera might not be a must-have feature, but in my opinion it sort of re-defines the photo. We for a long time take it for granted that photo and sound can not be merged,  but Camera360 tried its effort to prove there is a possibility. There are several similar local apps playing with photo and sounds, such as Papa. But Papa requires users to take the photo first then say some words about the photo before it gets shared.

I first wrote about Camera360 back in late 2010 when they were still nobody. I still remember that several days after the post is published, Xu Hao, cofounder of Camera360 called me and ‘complain’ me giving them too much compliments. It is a team really focusing on its product, no on marketing. But I think I was telling the truth: it’s getting very popular now not just in China but also in countries like Thailand, and I can’t wait to see its branded phone too.

I have been educated by TechCrunch, since 2006. It taught me the Web2.0 and opens my eyes to see the fast growing and fancinating web and mobile business, more importantly, the fun of doing Startups and the spirit of being entrepreneurs. I started TechNode to cover news and stories about Chinese web at the end of 2006, and have been driving it from a personal blog to a bilingual tech media which is now luckily respected by  local and international startup ecosystems.

I still remember that when I was on stage with Instagram founder, Kevin Systrom at Disrupt Beijing 2011, I said, Thank you TechCrunch,  for finally coming to China. And today, I am more than happy to say so again, welcome back TechCrunch, and we TechNode is so proud to be your official partner in China!

The official announcement has been given out by TechCrunch. A big thanks to Ned Desmond (COO of TechCrunch) for his great effort to make this happen. As the partner, TechNode will manage TechCrunch’s official Chinese site (.cn), and TechNode & TechCrunch will be working together to bring TechCrunch events, including TechCrunch city event later this year and TechCrunch’s Flagship event Disrupt to Asia in 2014! And there are much more in our plan!

The partnership is really about linking the Chinese and the global startup ecosystems. We see more and more Chinese companies and Startups doing great work in oversea market and everyone is interested in Chinese massive market. We want to help, as media with independent voice and. deep understanding of startup spirit, and as platforms with strong local and international resources.

Together with TechCrunch, we will be working harder!

Thank you, All!

Israel and China, how do you see these two startup ecosystems could work together? This is the question I was often asked when I was in Tel Aviv.

What Israel has and China don’t

Innovation, that is the most important keyword to describe Israeli startup ecosystem. Most of the startups in Israel, no matter it is the big one like SkyTram, or the relatively small one like Slide.ly, they all have the similar spirit: find a new solution using latest technology to solve existing issues in people’s life. Copying is not a part of Israeli culture, and Failure is just another word of Success. As we said before, a small country with no resources and surrounded by sea and enemies, the only way to catch up with the world is to embrace the technology and maximise its value. On the other hand, Israel has invented a bunch of cool technology and products but as a matter of fact it is a country with only ~8m population, i.e. a small market. Israeli startups have to go out. There is no big enough of user base to sell, but Intellectual Property (IP) means a lot because it could bring fortune for Israeli companies.

Looking at China, as a big country it owns far more rich resources than Israel and it has 1.4b population too. The pity is, at least in the web/mobile industry, China is lacking of innovation. So the market is dominated by copycats which results in a very tough competition for local startups. So the entire industry become really market-driven or be more clear, money-driven, instead of tech-driven. In other words, people in the industry is looking at monetisation and innovation is just something good to have.

Israel and China, What in Common

For different reasons, Israel and China’s web industry all look up at one place, Unite States. Israel needs the market and louder voice; China needs more proven models to learn and a more healthy market where users are more loyal and happy to pay for good service. Fair enough. But don’t forget that Israel and China do have something else in common, both are Developing countries which means both countries may face similar issues, traffic, water shortage, urbanisation etc. So can Chinese startups learn the technology from Israel, and Israel take the advantage of Chinese market?

Israel to Innovate, China to Consume?

So, Israel to Innovate and China to Consume seems the way to go? USA and China, 15h time difference; Israel and China, 5h only. Both Chinese and Israeli startup ecosystem should understand that two markets geographically are not that far at all. There must be some difficulties, such as language barrier, copyright issue, user behaviours, but these are also known issues which every foreign company might face when enters a local market.

Enter the local market carefully, and Tune and market your product for the local market smartly.

[photo taken in Google Campus, Tel Aviv]

Beidou, China’s navigation satellite system has been developed and started operation in China/Asia region for a while. We knew it but did not pay much attention to it. The reason is that we have not heard many successful stories about China developing its own systems to compete with global ones. I mean Chinese authorities were trying to develop our own operating system to compete with Windows and Linux, we have been working on so called Chinese Chip to fight against Intel but we are not sure about what’s its latest status, and even now we are thinking of building our own operating system for mobile phone to compete with Android…

But, after I watched the video-clip below which gives good information about Beidou system (if the video doesn’t play, try the original link), I feel this project is again Huge, but might work this time.

Do remember, Windows, Linux, Intel, Android, GPS etc, if we want to find something to replace them, it’s not just to replace the technology, what really matters is to replace their ecosystems which is actually the hardest part.

Facebook and Twitter back in China? You may feel this is a rather old topic and I admit it is. I have no interests of talking about why these international service can’t be in China, the censorship issue etc. Here is just a piece of my true feelings.

I have been travelling intensely this month and more than half of my time I spent outside China. I am reading and sending tweets on Twitter, posting photos and interacting with friends on Facebook, people I met at different events find me on LinkedIn or Facebook, and occasionally I use Path coz I love its photo filters. The only Chinese service I am using heavily is WeChat, because it costs me little to communicate with friends and colleagues in China and I enjoy sharing what I saw with them too. For a consumer, This is simple and convenient.

I am going back to China tomorrow, and what am I going to do when back there? RenRen, the successful clone of Facebook is still there but I don’t even remember my logins and apparently it is going down and now a gaming company rather than a social network; Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, I have been lazy with clicking that Refresh button for months. I am really bored with those rubbish and self-promoting comments from those so-called experts. What really pissed me off is that Sina wants Weibo to be Facebook which makes the products way more complicated. It really innovated in some ways when it started but now the only thing they desperately want to talk about is its revenue. Weibo used to be my news source, now it just sucks and we see it’s getting less active too; I’ve been to lots of conference in China, how to reconnect with people I met at these events is always my headache, there is just no a single place, like LinkedIn in which I could possibly find all of them online. This is frustrating.

It is really a bad Internet culture in China that when one service grows huge the operator will start believing it could be the god of everything. When they start doing this, it actually starts ruining everything which is bad, at least for the users.

Therefore I bring back this old topic: We need Facebook, Twitter etc back in China, or may we just do some new Clones of them. Not easy, but the market has re-emerged. Think!

So there is no more Better Place in the Electric Vehicle (EV) space. Sadly to say that I actually just visited Better Place’s office in Israel last week and had good experience of test-driving the car. We do highly respect this company’s dream and mission, but obviously trying to destroy a well-established industry together with its value chain then to rebuild a new one is not easy. However, the death of Better Place definitely does not mean the end of EV industry.  At least one company is doing a good job nowadays. We saw its stock soaring, and it seemed having a nice sale number in Q1 too. This company is Tesla Motors.

No surprise, Tesla Motors has smell a Better Place for its potentially fast growth: China. You may already read that Tesla is to open its first shop in BJ, and recently we also heard from Tom Zhang, HR of Tesla Motors that the company has appointed Kingston Zhang, ex-Bentley China GM, to lead Tesla in China.

Assuming Tesla can build its infrastructure right and sort out some regulation issues in China quickly, I think Tesla does have the chance to please the Chinese market. One simple reason is that, as you know Chinese love luxury stuff so at least some of them will love to buy Tesla car too. No need to remind me that the price for Tesla in China might be double due to various tax (Tesla’s original price in U.S. is not cheap, either.), you know how Chinese consumption power could be when buying luxury goods.

I heard that Lei Jun of Xiaomi, William Ding of Netease who have already visited Tesla Motors Silicon Valley office and both show great interest to be the first person who owns Tesla in China. Even one of my friends just flew to US several days ago to get his car ordered months ago. Note that he is based in China and knows he can’t ship the car back in near future.

Tesla, once it’s ready, I bet it can even do a Group Sell, the sales number could be good too!

The past week in Israel was amazing, and I am sure the following days will be very exciting too. I’m landed at Moscow and will attend Startup Village conference tomorrow and the day after. FYI, Startup Village is the first annual youth entrepreurship and innovators conference, one of the most ambitious startup conferences in Russia, organized by Skolkovo in cooperation with partners.

For me, the most interesting stuff I heard is that this conference is culminated from a nationwide roadshow, called Russian Startup Tour 2013 which was held from 1st March to 29th April in 16 regions of Russia. Among 200 startup projects presented during the tour, 35 startups were selected and will participate in the final competition on stage of Startup Village conference. I am really eager to see what these Russian startups are working on and learn from them about the local startup ecosystem.

I  will also join a panel in the morning of 27th with a group of high profile speakers from different background, including Martha Maznevski (IMD Business School), Mikko Kuusi (Startup Sauna Foundation), Peter Vesterbacka (Rovio), Edward Crawley (Skoltech President), Mark Shmulevich (Deputy Minister of IT and Telecommunication, Russian Federation), Anna Khan (Enterpreneur), Duvieusart Jean-Pascal (Investor). The topic is, Developing an Entrepreneurial Community. What can be learned from other startup societies? TechNode is doing a OK job in China driving Chinese web/mobile startup community. Sometime we are proud of we’ve contributed to the community, sometime we also feel frustrated as you have to face lots of issues existing in the not-so-healthy ecosystem. So I am really looking forwards to hearing the panelists’ opinion and experience, and explore how we can work with them in the new era of mobile industry.

With ~3000 attendees, 1000 representatives from local and international companies and 300 Russian and investors, Startup Village will definitely be a good show. See you around!

Israel, the country with ~8m population and ~20,000km2 (wikepedia) really impressed me in past 4 days. I know Jews have done great works in many areas but what I learned, seen and felt during my stay in this country is still beyond my imagination. It’s called the Startup Nation, now I will never doubt that and I think no one should..

Some facts to share here, thanks to the presentation given by Reinhold Cohn Group, the Israel’s leading IP firm.

• No. 1 in number of startups per capita: ~1 startup per 1,800 Israelis
• No. 2 in absolute number of startups. (U.S.) is No.1. You may check out this the Israel Startup Map to have a visual sense of the startups, incubators and R&D etc in Israel.
• No. 3 in number of companies traded on NASDAQ after U.S. and Canada.
• Venture capital investment per capital in Israel is 2.5 times over the U.S. and 30 times than Europe. The absolute amount is the sum of Germany and France.
• Israel is the world leader in No. of patents per capita, and it’s also No. 1 in R&D spending per capita;

There are quite a few fascinating technology/products invented in Israel, including: Cell phone technology, top of the line Intel processors, USB flash drivers, ICQ instant messaging system, drip irrigation, firewall technology, ingestible pill video camera (PillCam), voice-over-IP, electric car network system (Better Place), community-based navigation (Waze) and iron dome. And one third of all new ‘game-changing’ medical technology are orginated in Israel such as Oridion, InSightec;

Jews are smart and well-educated, have only 0.2% of world population, but they have 54% of Chess champions, 27% of Nobel Laureates in physics, 31% of Nobel Laureates in medicine, 6 Nobel Prize in recent years: 4 in Chemistry and 2 in Economy.

The consequence of all the achievement above is that it has become a growing trend for establishing major R&D centers of multinational companies in Israel. Right now, the big players include IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, Google, SanDisk. Therefore, we have no surprise to see that Israel is the NO.1 export country in Intellectual Property (IP) which is the greatest value that Israeli bring to the global industry.

Regarding the hot spots of Israeli innovation, we’ve been told they are Communication, Digital printing, Internet & Media, Green technology, Waste management, Water technology, Solar energy, Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Medical devices.

Israel is small and lacking of all sorts of resources, and it’s surrounded by the sea and those so-called enemies. The only way to survive and become stronger is to innovate, said the officials from Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Well, if you have read about the history of Jerusalem and are also aware that the war sometime still takes place only ~80km away from Tel Aviv, the startup ecosystem this country is building is surely amazing.

Almost every time I tell my friends I am going to Israel, the response back to me is: is it safe there? Then I told them I will be there visiting tech startups and internet companies, I can always see the doubts on their faces.

Israel, is a nation that most of people here think it’s it’s really far and full of mystery. As for its web industry, they have little knowledge about it too. But in fact, as Saul Singer says in his book, it’s a Startup Nation with full of talents, startups and innovation.

In 20-22nd May, organized by Israel-Asia Center, Israel-Asia Summit will be held in Tel Aviv. The event is to be an interactive platform for ideas share on the biggest challenges facing Asia in the next decade and how Asian industry can work together to find innovative solutions.

On behalf of TechNode, I will have the honour to join a panel on stage talking about the innovation and startup scene in China and Asia. Of course, the most exciting part for me is that I will finally have the chance to explore the true spirit of this startup nation. Lots of startups and places I am planning to visit, including:

It should be a very exciting journey. If you are interested in this trip, please just email us on: contact At technode.com

Honestly, it’s not easy for us to organize an event like ChinaBang conference. This year, we made it 2-days (11st-12nd, April) in Beijing, and 1-day (20th, April) in Shanghai.

We managed to invite >100 high profile speakers and >30 venture capitalists for the startup battlefield. The companies which came to speak include big ones such as Google, Tencent, Facebook, 3G.cn, Xiaomi, Kingsoft, Rovio, Alipay, Meituan, MediaV, Dianping etc, and you could also meet with tens of great startups which focus on different vertical markets such as mobile gaming, healthcare, digital music, travel, mobile payment, social ecommerce etc.

And we also brought some really fresh air to the local startup community: Singularity University (TechNode is proud to be its local partner), TechCrunch (It’s great to have its COO, Ned Desmond sit on stage with me for fireside chat), Hunan University Media Lab (Shenzhen) which aims to be China’s MIT Media Lab, Cooliris, PunApp from Taiwan etc to share their thoughts and opinions on innovation.

For the Startup Battlefield, we carefully selected the final 10 fresh new startups which are working on different areas such as Hardware, App Accessories, mobile social networks, healthcare, B2B solution etc which we do believe they present the trend.

We even tried some cool ideas by having our ChinaBang Awards printed by 3D printer, working with a Rock band to compose an official ChinaBang theme song named Change (which I just love it!).

I know that we made some mistakes and there are lots we need improve, but I am happy because I do feel TechNode’s team is getting stronger and is ready for the next level.

Thanks to my team and our readers & supporters. And we have some very exciting news to announce in next a few days. Stay tuned!

By joining forces with China’s Ministry of Public Security, State Administration for Industry & Commerce, General Administration of Quality Supervision, State Intellectual Property Office and General Administration of Press and Publication, Alibaba today announced the war against the piracy and aims to create “synergistic online and offline mechanisms” to identify and shut down factories and other sources of counterfeit goods.

It’s been a long while, Alibaba group’s sites, especially the No.1 B2C ecommerce site Taobao Marketplace are suffering the complains about its counterfeit products from thousands of independent Chinese vendors. It’s obviously not an easy job to stop the piracy. According to Alibaba’s official news site Alizila, the company hopes to solve the piracy issue by the combination of digital “big data” technology with traditional law enforcement resources which could make investigation and enforcement of China’s intellectual property laws more effective.

Jack Ma, calls this country’s counterfeiting industry a “cancer” and a “tumor” in society. He did not exaggerate it. According to Alizila, “In 2012, a total of more than 94 million allegedly infringing listings were removed from Alibaba Group platforms. Approximately 5.5 million of them were taken down as a result of complaints from rights owners.”

People like shopping on Taobao in past years mainly because the products there are usually cheaper, even sometime they know the stuff they are about to buy are counterfeit products. It’s definitely good that Alibaba is now taking the lead, but we have to bear in mind that this must be a very long term effort as it is not just fighting against the piracy market but also many Chinese customers’ expectation.

We’ve reported that ZHANG Xiangdong, the President and Founder of 3G.cn, gave a keynote speech at ChinaBang 2013 conference about the internationalization of its very popular Android app: GO Launcher. According to him, Go Launcher today has reached 200m users and 70% of them come from oversea. The company recently also set up an office in San Francesco, which obviously shows its ambition: to build Go Launcher a truly influential brand worldwide. Xiangdong really meant it!

Today in the email from Mr. LI Lao, Director of Branding of 3G.cn, it reads,

You are cordially invited to the launch of GO Launcher – an exciting new app for Google Play brought to you by the world’s fifth largest Android development team. We can’t wait to share with you our first public demonstration.

GO Launcher has 200 million users worldwide, making it the world’s most popular desktop software tool in Google Play, with total downloads ranking fifth. In 2012, GO Launcher established a North America branch office in cooperation with GetJar, Tapjoy, Facebook and other well-known companies. Bringing you the news about GO Launcher will be the app developers and co-founders of GO Launcher.

Since 2010, GO Launcher has been developing Android apps for China’s mobile Internet, known for creating popular efficiency customization services. To mark GO Launcher first day with international business operations, we will be honored if you could come to our press conference.

Please confirm your attendance with an e-mail or phone number. We look forward to meeting you there.

Venue： W San Francisco Work Room 2,3rd floor

Address: 181 Third Street, San Francisco

Date： Friday, May 17th , 2013 Time: 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM

Please RSVP to: Jenelle Li, Email: Jenelleisme@gmail.com before or on 10 May 2013 at noon

I personally am very exciting about 3G.cn’s international move. It’s for sure we will see more mobile app developer companies to officially enter international market.

If you are interested in attending our ChinaBang annual conference, the good news is that the registration has open today. It’s free but we have limited seats, so be quick! The online registration page is here: http://chinabang2013.technode.com/register/

Starting from today, we will be announcing our great speakers who will be mainly the entrepreneurs and founders from China local industry and also mixed with our VIP friends from the world. Today I am very proud to give you:

Ned Desmond, COO of TechCrunch & Peter Vesterbacka, CMO of Rovio

And I am sure you don’t need me to tell who they are! 😉

If you are interested in sponsoring this event, you are welcome to send us a note on <contact At technode.com>

ChinaBang, the annual conference organised by TechNode, is the leading startup-focus event and biggest party designed for the startup ecosystem in China. The conference comes with three parts: main conference (keynote, fireside chat and panels), ChinaBang Awards and Startup Battlefield. Last year, we managed to make it a 2-day events for the first time (if you were not there, check out the video, our coverage, the startup battlefield reported by TechCrunch and photos for Day 1 and Day 2) and we received lots of good feedback along with expectations.

Today we are very excited to announce the ChinaBang 2013 edition. There are still lots to do to get everything ready, but what we can promise you now is that, this year’s ChinaBang will be bigger:

1. ChinaBang Awards (http://chinabang.org) – the online voting page for the best in Chinese internet industry in 2012 has open for the public. Be honest, it’s been quite a headache for us when we decided on the awards categories. Unlike 2011 when you’ve seen loads of mobile apps developed (we had 12 awards categories, such as Best Mobile Social Network, Best Mobile Messaging Apps etc), the market of 2012 seems a bit more quiet and the startups more focus on certain vertical markets. Therefore we decided to pick up the hottest market as the awards categories, including Mobile Game, Mobile Social Game, Digital Music, Social Apps for Tourists, Apps for Health-caring and Apps for Travelling. Of course, we want you to vote for the award of Most Innovative Startups of 2012 too.

2. ChinaBang main conference (http://chinabang2013.technode.com) – We said we wanted ChinaBang to be the biggest party in Chinese startup ecosystem, so this year we will try three parallel tracksin the afternoon of 11st April. Two tracks will focus on Mobile Game industry and eCommerce industry respectively, and the third one we calls it Life track which will have speakers from daily life-style markets such as digital music, health-caring, travel markets etc. The draft agenda for the 2 days has been published here, and in coming days we will get you updated here with the names of those great speakers and startups too.

3. Startup Battlefield – we are sending invitation to all top venture capital and angel investors in China and this time we are expecting 10 finalists on stage on 12th April. Last year’s winner took away cashes as well as invitation and sponsorship from Rovio to its headquarter in Finland. We have not announced the prize for this year yet, but please don’t hesitate to submit your application via here. I am sure the prize and the judges we are going to announce in 1-2 weeks will not disappoint you. 🙂

At last, there will be some very exciting news we are planning to announce during ChinaBang 2013 conference too. So, please mark your dates!

The ticket to the conference will be free and the online registration will be open later this week, please stay tuned! If you are interested in speaking at the event, you may apply for it; if you are interested in sponsoring this event, please check out here (where the information is in Chinese but you may drop us an email on <contact At technode.com>).

I am a fan of Path, and it is probably my 3rd favourite mobile social apps (WeChat is the one I am using most and Linkedin seconds). I even visited Path’s San Francesco office and had a good time there. ” I have some friends who love this beautiful app too and they were excited about Path’s new 3.0 release. But, unfortunately, complain on Path’s spamming SMS from several friends arrived at my email box today, “Path sent me 200 spam SMS and still continues!!”, said in an email.

Hi, I was a Path user and, for the purpose of seeking help and helping maintain a clean Internet, I’d like to report that Starting from this morning (Shanghai local time), all 1000 contacts in one of my friend’s iPhone address book, including myself, were spammed by SMS from Path. The SMSs’ contents contain invitations for me to join Path, or simply junk text. Till now (8:20PM Shanghai time), I have received 200 spam SMS from Path and it still continues!

Spams like this have severely affected my and my friends’ normal life. It also is a severe breach of users privacy. As far as I know, Path CEO Dave Morin used to apologize for secretely uploading contact address book of users, but now, they are still doing this!

For well-known internet services like Path, we’d like to draw media’s attention to help maintain a clean Internet environment and protect users privacy. Please report this if possible to help. This will help path eventually as well.

And a minute ago, I just got another spam SMS from Path! For evidence, please check attached JPGs.

For my friend and myself, we’re angry about this and reserve the rights to accuse Path of their behaviors.

Best regards,

Adam (from Shanghai, China)

Well, I am not sure if this affected all Chinese users, and I would hope this is just a technical issue. But, my Path friends, please talk to someone and do something asap.

(Update, ~10:00pm: we got  a quick response from Path team, and also confirmed by the user Adam who sent me the email, the issue seems being solved. )

PanoPlaza, one of the winners of 2012 OpenWebAsia Awards, is a Japanese startup providing the technology that transforms online store to 3D panorama virtual shop to resembles the shopping experience in physic stores. The company just announced its partnership with discount chain store Don Quijote Co.,Ltd. that adopted PanoPlaza to share panorama virtual shops on their intranet.

Don Quijote is famous for its store design and display with full of merchandises. Conventionally when the new store opens or the store’s interior changes staffs from the headquarter and other stores needed to visit each store to share the know-how of merchandise shelves. Since Don Quijote has hundreds of stores all over Japan and it’s difficult for them to go around all the stores.

With the support of PanoPlaza, Don Quijote has constructed a framework to check stores on line. They are using one shot panorama camera and upload panorama photos to PanoPlaza. Thus the company is able to create panorama virtual tours of their shops and share them within their group or their company. This framework shortens the time of sharing newly opened store’s display environment and reduced the cost of store management and transportation.

According to the press release sent from Soko Aoki from PanoPlaza, since April 2012 when Don Quijote started to use PanoPlaza, about 600 panorama photos in 21 stores have been uploaded on PanoPlaza. This covers 50,000 square meters of store area and speeds up intelligence sharing within the company.

Buying power of Chinese middle class continues to grow and more Chinese are moving online to satisfy their retail cravings. In 2012, China’s total online retail shopping market increased by 55% to $194 billion. This infographic produced by Alibaba group maps out their online spending patterns:

Founded in June, 2011 by Grégoire Prouvost and Cédric Bourlet, two French entrepreneurs living in Shanghai, the premium beers e-retailer Cheers-In.com/Qiyin.cn (in Chinese, Cheers-In is Qi Yin 齐饮 which literally means Drink Together) just raised $230K from Kima Ventures, an investment fund of Xavier Niel and Jeremie Berrebi.

Beer market is really a niche one, but no double it has massive potential in China. Grégoire told us, “China global beer Market is the biggest in the world (around $40 Billions). ‘Premium beer’ segment is 5% of this market but it is growing twice faster than the rest of the market. There are more and more beer connoisseurs and specialty beers are now considered like wine or cognac.”

Cheers-in currently has around 5.000 customers in Shanghai and it is growing. This first round of funding will help this startup’s operational expansion to other Chinese cities and put the last steps to its franchising project of premium beer boutiques concept. Pioneer on its sector, the click and mortar startup aims to stay on the impressive Chinese e-commerce wave of growth but also want to keep physical presence in the main 1st tier cities (already 3 boutiques in Shanghai).

Grégoire also shared his thoughts about Chinese e-commerce market,

Chinese e-commerce market is very exciting! But of course one of the key is logistic. As a specialist we can deal with that with good partners which are now everywhere in the country. I also think that chinese consumers trust more reliable brands, service, marketing and are less using the C to C plateform. We have chosen our niche and till now customers are following us, that’s great.

“The specialty beers lovers’ community grows as fast as the middle class everywhere in the country. One of the Cheers-In team objectives is to bring Chinese wine connoisseurs to high end beers (Trappists, limited editions, vintage)”, Grégoire added.

BH Media, a subsidiary of Singapore headquartered Borderless Healthcare Group today announced the launch of HealthValley.Asia, the first and only online platform that offers Asia-centric healthcare TMT (technology, media, and telecommunications) news and analysis. HealthValley.Asia is to document, map and champion companies and products in this space as well as the people behind them.

Talked to Dr Wei Siang Yu, medical doctor turned entrepreneur and founder of Borderless Healthcare Group, we’ve been told that HealthValley.Asia offers news and analysis on cutting-edge services such as mobile health applications, health-cloud services, mobile medical concierges, super health portals and digital home health. HealthValley will also showcase innovative healthcare startups, health-related mobile apps and products. He said in the press release, “we hope to bring various stakeholders, thought leaders and experts to this platform so that we track and facilitate growth in this emerging sector. We are seeing a lot of innovation in healthcare in Asia and our goal is to highlight and facilitate these innovations which leverage technology, telecommunication and media.”

HealthValley.Asia will also be the virtual hub for the HealthValley Global Chapter Network, which is made up of appointed council members in different countries, spanning over 20 countries across the globe during the launch of HealthValley.Asia. Invited members in each country can join as a council member of the country’s respective chapter on an honorary basis. Profiles of each council member will be featured on the HealthValley.Asia website. Appointed council members in each country will assist HV in the facilitation of global healthcare TMT business matching, inbound trade missions, conferences, and exhibitions including the organizing of the annual Borderless Healthcare Forum in their respective countries.

Dr. Yu added, “HealthValley.Asia is Asia’s premier online content hub that features the latest news and trends in the healthcare TMT space. By featuring commentary from respected and renowned thought leaders in the fields of healthcare and technology, we want HealthValley.Asia to be the online home of healthcare TMT in Asia and, soon, the rest of the world.”

According to Sina, the leading online 3C retailer, 360buy has just confirmed its new round of funding of $700 millions! The news has been confirmed by 360buy today which is the first working day for Chinese after the Chinese new year holiday, so likely, 360buy will be having a happy Snake year.

The news also mentioned that $400m of this new round from Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan had actually been secured back in November 2012, which gave 360buy $7.25b valuation. Besides Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, 360buy now has one more new board member, Kingdom Holdings Company.

Rumor said 360buy was planning its IPO last year, and it was denied by 360buy. Now, 360buy says the new round will be used for new business development and improvement of its logistic system. So we would not see its IPO this year for sure, then the question is obvious, when can we see it? Let me remind you that in early 2011, 360buy’s raised last round, which is $1.5 billion!

Jailbreaking the iOS device is NOT a good thing to do. I know that, and every time when I speak about the Chinese mobile internet market I always mention this issue. Jailbreak for Chinese iOS users basically means they are able to download most of the popular apps/games on so-called third-party iOS App Store such as PP Assistant, 91 Assistant etc, for free. According to the latest research from UMeng, even it says that by end of September 2012, the percentage of iOS devices got jailbroken has drop to 42.4% from 51% of 2011, it is still kinda embarassing.

So when the long-waiting iOS 6.1 jailbreak tool is released today, Chinese iPhone/iPad fans just love it!!

But seriously, it’s not just about the free-download of the pirate apps. in China, we do need Jailbreaking, for two reasons:

1. Connection with Apple’s App Store is stupidly slow. It may take 15min to get an app like FlipBoard, Facebook downloaded. For those apps with size over 100m? Forget it…and I wanted to subscribe some magazine on Newstand, but it just takes ages to download one issue.

2. the default Chinese input method is difficult to use. I just hate to use iOS’s default input method for Chinese. Switching between Chinese and English is so user un-friendly, the number of Chinese vocabulary is also very limited. We so miss Sogou Input, Baidu Input or TouchPal Input method. With them, I can type at least 2 times faster.

Seriously, Apple please listen to this, if you are pissed off by the Jailbreaking issue in China and want to boost the iOS revenue from China, gets those issues fixed first.

MIUI  (pronounced ‘Me–You–I’), developed by Xiaomi, is a ROM for Android devices. It is used on all Xiaomi phones and can be flashed into other Android mobile phones. As one of the most successful ROMs, MIUI takes customization on Android devices to a new level with its limitless themes, wallpapers, icons, lockscreens etc.

Today, we heard the news that MIUI has reached the milestone of 10 millions users with supports to over 30 Android handsets after 850 days since it’s first released.

The mobile Internet is changing our life, and the way of starting up a company is also changed in the mobile era. The big players, like Google, Apple, and Facebook, have built global technology, social and marketing platforms, which lowered the entry barriers for startups. Many entrepreneurs’ dream is turning into reality.

Mobile internet is born to be global. But how to leverage global platforms for growing your startup business? How to avoid competitions and restrictions posed by the global platforms? These questions are every startup with focus on global market has to face.

Organized by SVCWireless, the event “Internet Technology Inspires Innovation and Entrepreneurship” is to bring investors, technologist, and executives from both Silicon Valley and China to share their visions and insights. The confirmed speakers include Yiwei Liu, BD Manager, Google Admob; Leo Zhou, VP, Limei; Ramon Zeng, Investment Principal, DCM; Xiaobo Wang, Executive Vice President, Beijing eTown International Investment& Development Inc.; Victor Tong, Founding Partner, Webplus Investment; Steve Lau, Entrepreneur, Angel Investor and Founder of Eagle Fund; Jianzhong Ni, Executive VP, CMCA; Yuan Liao, GM BDA Fiber Communication; Mark Beckford, Founder and CEO, NetBridgeGlobal and Qiming Huang, Board Director, Silicon Valley China Wireless Technology Association.

The event will be held on 5th Jan, 2013 at Innovation Angel Incubator of Beijing Development Area, Beijing. You may check the agenda and register for free tickets here.

There are tens of foreign Internet companies failed in China, and you don’t need me to repeat those stories. Why? You may complain about the highly competitive market, the Chinese management style, the ‘Cheap’ copies etc. Some of you may consider these as sort of Weaknesses in China. But James Gwertzman, GM of PopCap Asia/Pacific who has been running PopCap China team for over 4 years, has his own understanding of these points. They are actually Strengths, not Weakness, James said so, at Global Mobile Game Conference, Chengdu.

Understanding the local culture is one thing, but learn to adjust your mindset then manage to turn weaknesses to strengths is way more important for a foreign company’s success.

The photo below tells James’ insights:

If you are Apple fans, you must know Macworld/iWorld, the biggest event dedicated to Apple related products. Macworld/iWorld 2013 will be held in San Francesco from 31st Jan to 2nd Feb. If you think about the consumer market, hardware manufacturing and app economy, it’s absolutely no doubt that China has become the most potential market for Apple related products, meaning Macworld/iWorld needs more voice from China!

We are very excited to announce that TechNode together with IDG World Expo China will co-host a half-day event on the first day (31st Jan) of Macworld/iWorld, named China Innovation Forum. We will bring some cool Chinese startups, companies and entrepreneurs who come from different background (apps, accessories, research etc) to share their insight and experience on current Chinese mobile internet market.

So far, the confirmed speakers are from EverNote, Adition, Taomi, Soco, Adsage, Moji, Adwo, Chartboost etc. The topic will truly focus on China mobile market, especially on the startup ecosystem and gaming market. If you are interested in speaking at or sponsoring this event, please feel free drop an email to <contact At technode.com>.

We will announce the full list of our speakers very soon, and more information about this forum can be found here: http://www.macworldiworld.com/special-events/china-innovation-forum/

Blueseed, the planned startup community on a ship, has just announced seed funding from leading venture capitalists. The project’s backers include Floodgate Fund, Correlation Ventures, and Xu Xiaoping and Wang Qiang of ZhenFund.

Based In Palo Alto, CA, Floodgate Fund is led by visionary investor Mike Maples Jr, an early investor in Twitter, digg, and Chegg. Palo Alto and San Diego, CA based Correlation Ventures raised $165M in 2012 with its revolutionary analytics-based startup evaluation approach. High-profile Chinese venture capital firm ZhenFund which is co-founded by famous Chinese angel investors and entrepreneurs Xu Xiaoping and Wang Qiang, raised $30 million for its most recent fund, launched in conjunction with Silicon Valley heavyweight Sequoia Capital.

Blueseed is creating a high-tech startup community in international waters 12 miles from the California coast. Its model is to take in startups from around the world, connect them with resources in Silicon Valley, and help them scale until they’re ready to move into Silicon Valley proper. As Dan Dascalescu, the press officer of Blueseed said, its mission is to create jobs and fostering technological innovation.

So far, Blueseed has formalized partnerships with over 70 organizations, including Start-Up Chile, Startup Weekend, Fenwick & West, RocketSpace, the Unreasonable Institute, Entrepreneurial Poland, and Nanyang Technological University.

Blueseed was actually introduced by us to Xu Xiaoping at TechNode’s event at InnoSpring back in September. Xu Xiaoping was saying that it one of the craziest idea he ever heard of.

I was in Sanya, Hainan once. It was for holiday with my family and I felt in love with the beautiful beach there. Now I came back with the team of TechNode, for the big event coming in Monday, the OpenWebAsia 2012 conference. Arrived yesterday, we could not get relaxed as there is lots of preparation, but facing the sea and blogging is kinda of cool.

“No swimming in the sea”, that’s the message printed on the badge. It sounds a bit weird and funny, but it’s indeed a good reminder that, OpenWebAsia 2012 is held by the Beach in Hainan. No joke!!

Stay tuned, we will be live blogging about the event soon!

Invited by NetEase, I was on stage with Chris Anderson, the long-time chief editor of Wired, the author of the popular book Long Tail at NetEase’s Global Mobile Media Summit.  The conversation with him only last ~15min, and it covered some topics I am personally very interested, such as the trend of the traditional media, whether his Long Tail theory still works in the mobile era, why he decided to leave the web world and be in love with hardware stuff, as well as his new book, Makers.

The following is video clip of the interview recorded by NetEase, hope you like it. (You may ignore the first 10s ads.)

[Editor: I got an email this morning from a friend who is working for Jiepang, the leading check-in service in China. Surprisingly, it came with an internal email sent from its founder David (who’s a long-time friend of mine too). Is Check-in business dead? I guess many of you are wondering if service like Foursquare can keep growing as it was expected. I believe in the idea of check-in, but I also think the key to success in the type of business is to adapt to the need of the market as well as the users. Adapt or Die, as David said in this email. I think this rule actually applies to every business, especially for startups in the very crowded mobile internet. So, I decide to publish this letter here (without the consent from David and hope he would not mind), and trust me, it worths your reading and thinking.]

Dear Jiepang team,

In the past month, I am blessed to have had a few great meetings reviewing the company with our board, as well as a few founders and CEOs from bigger, respected Chinese tech companies that are true role models for me and all of us at Jiepang to learn from.
I want to share with you our focuses and perspectives for the next 12 months into 2013-

#1 Expand Our Vision for Jiepang as a Service

As a few startups and big companies pivot away from LBS social services, we could focus on their failures and be obsessed with why they failed. But at Jiepang, that’s not our focus. At Jiepang, we continue to 100% focus on inventing Jiepang’s future, failing and learning our way to success.
As we work towards this goal, here are a few of the most important perspectives I want our team to have:

#1 Jiepang users are uniquely awesome people, doing something truly amazing together

Jiepang users are people who love sharing & exploring the world together. Amazing people with amazing taste, influence, and a passion for life. As a community — with every single check-in, photo, shout, tip — Jiepang users building a uniquely valuable layer of user generated content across the biggest cities in China, as well as uniquely valuable histories of places and lifestyle preferences. In 2013, we will radically start to leverage this data to personalize and improve our service in a way that only Jiepang can! What do we want to see? People that “live differently” because of what they discover and share on Jiepang.

#2 Remember what we believe at- “Live different”

I think Jiepang’s team and community culture is truly special because of how we view life as a gift. At Jiepang, we believe everyday is special, and should be lived that way. And we serve the people who believe with us, they “live different,” and their lives bring special purpose, meaning, and joy to the lives of people and places nearby them. Our dream is scaling or spreading this lifestyle to the world.

#3 Think bigger, and be brutally honest with ourselves

We are serving the world’s largest population smartphone users, and last time Lee Kaifu blogged (probably 0.5 seconds ago) I heard it’s still growing really fast! This means we have many, more users to connect with and serve in the next year. This also means there is newer, tougher competition. But we love strong competition- it really does make us better, and it forces us be brutally honest with ourselves to improve our service for our users more. Ultimately, I know that competition will help us make Jiepang users happier 🙂

#2 Grow Higher Revenues through Higher Relevance

At Jiepang, we believe that great advertising should be great information. And great information is entertaining, useful, and worth sharing with friends.

In 2012, we made progress on our commitment to “advertising-as-information”, working with partners to connect their brands and venues with Jiepang users through local, social, mobile advertising formats and campaigns that were fun, useful, and worth sharing with friends.
Our commitment has paid off. Since we first started generating revenue less than 2 years ago, our sales has grown steadily 20% quarter-over-quarter (we are sincerely thankful to have GREAT users, GREAT teammates, GREAT advertising partners).

Next year, we’re aiming to break-even. We aim to do that by making Jiepang’s advertising even more relevant (through data and personalization) and more social (through better technology, mechanics, and partnerships).

#3 Finally, I want to share a quote: “Adapt or Die” (Brad Pitt in the movie “Moneyball”)

Not many startups and teams get to where we are, but we all did it together. I am thankful for everyone here as our friends and partners on this journey 🙂 In the past 2+ years of serving Jiepang users with you, I’ve seen our very young team grow to be more self aware, more humble, and much, much more hungry. This is a killer combination.

However, to be more killer, and killer enough for the next phase of developing Jiepang, the time is right now for more senior, experienced leaders to join and mature our team. What does that mean?

Change is going to happen on this team. Change that I believe is better for all of us. A few new friends and partners will join us, and a few old friends and partners will move on. In the end, I think it will be great for all of us who have done much to contribute and make Jiepang what it is today. For the few, old friends who are going, they will be missed but I know they will find themselves to be stronger for new challenges and opportunities for their work and personal lives. All of us personally wish them the best – they will always be family to me (once a crab, always a crab!). And with a few, new friends coming in, I know the entire Jiepang team will be stronger, more experienced, and better adapted to help Jiepang fight new challenges, and win new opportunities.

Dear team, partners, friends, be ready to embrace the changes, and remember this moment where you stopped to read this and thought about where we’re all going and what we’re striving for together. Look forward to looking back with all of our teammates together after 6-12 months when will have all learned and grown together even more, and worked our hearts out to getting Jiepang to the next level. This is an incredible journey we are on together, and I believe it is about to get even more incredible in the next year.

Proud to serve Jiepang users with you, looking forward to 2013 together.

-Dave

[image credited to theshowponies]

China’s music industry is about to go through a major shake-up by year-end as, according to people familiar with the matter, Chinese government, partnering with portal site Sina, is setting up a new firm to pull off toughest ever regulation over digital music copyrights. In other words, the new venture, from which all Chinese music services would have to purchase copyrighted music, would be monopolizing China’s digital music market.

The music industry insider also revealed that, some final details are still under careful deliberation as the scheme involves the whole music industrial chain. When being asked how the change would affect Chinese digital market, he commented that even though the market seemed to be dominated by one company, it can still be interpreted as a positive signal for the market on grounds that government’s involvement would lead to heavy strike on piracy, which in turn could be a boon for the whole industry.

That said, there’re still some concerns. Monopolistic basically is the synonym of high costs and low efficiency.

The new venture , which would be led by a Sina exec, is said to be opened up by January of next year.

iResearch recently published a report on the China Top 20 internet companies by users scale for 1st half of 2012.

No surprise that Tencent is still the No.1. Thanks to its PC softwares (IE, Office and MSN), Microsoft takes the No.2. Believe or not, 360 is now the 2nd biggest Chinese internet company by user scale, ahead of Sohu, Baidu, Sina and Alibaba.

For people who think China web is no more entertainment-centric and online video market is in a mess, the reality is that out of 20 there are 8 companies (Xunlei, Youku, iFeng, PPlive, Tudou, iQiyi, LeTV, PPStream) whose major products are online video.

[source: ChinaInternetWatch]

Baidu, the largest Chinese search engine was rumored to restructure its map service with the setup of a new LBS BU in an aim to capitalize on the current O2O heat.

Baidu has been stealthily integrating local services into map service for quite a while after sniffing out the profitability on that front. With the ongoing proliferation of mobile devices and constant emerging of new services leveraging on the power of O2O, we’ve seen more and more big-names stepped their toes into the area which was previously dominated by startups like Dianping, Jiepang, Buding, Dingding and so on. For instance, Tencent is counting big on turning Weixin  – one of the most popular mobile app in China – into some sort of a marketing tool that links local businesses and mobile users.

Dai Zhikang, deputy GM of the company’s ecommerce department for life services once disclosed in an internal meeting that Tencent will be using a fancy combination of “QRCode+QQ account system+QQ connections+LBS” to better serve local businesses, like help them deliver digital DM through channels like Weixin at very low or nearly none cost.

Statistics showed that in the first eleven months of 2011 more than RMB 7 billion worth of venture capital was poured into the so-called O2O market. Chinese O2O market size was put at RMB 56.23 billion in 2011 and was expected to hit nearly 100 billion in this year.

Baidu has failed many times in tests regarding ecommerce, Youa, Baifubao, JV with Rakuten, to name a few, and its Leho.com and Shenbian – two ‘martyrs’ of Baidu’s LBS attempt – weren’t as appealing as they were expected to consumers. More than 90% – conservatively speaking – of Baidu’s revenue comes from monetizing its huge traffic, while it’s previous efforts to diversify revenue sources all failed to yield good results.

One of the biggest changes that the Internet and World Wide Web brought to the world is the enabling of participation. Today, everybody can publish content, and everybody can access that content. But leaving aside cat videos and Instagram food pics for a moment, a closer look reveals that what is published is mostly textual content. Now, take a look at the events that take place in your city this week. There is a talk about Lean Startups, here is one presentation about urban farming, and there is another event on building your own robots. Wouldn’t it be so valuable if all these presentations were available online so that you could take part without having to go there?

That is the vision that the Shanghai start-up VastCast is working on. As Carsten Ullrich, one of the co-founders of VastCast explains, VastCast enables online access to presentations and lectures. Conference and event organizers as well as educational organizations can use VastCast to live-stream and record speakers and teachers, together with their presentations. The online audience views the presentations and the speakers using any browser and their mobile device (iPhone/iPad/Android).

VastCast was founded by Carsten Ullrich, Jiajun Wang and Weikai Xie, three scientists at the e-learning lab of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). The software has been used for several years at the School of Continuing Education of SJTU (SOCE), SJTU’s online college. Carsten explains that the 35,000 students of SOCE use the system to attend classes remotely whenever they cannot come to the classroom. “The students are part-time students, namely adults who have a job and family. They can not come to the classroom in person each and every time. Therefore, we use VastCast to live-stream the lectures while they are ongoing, and also to make them available as recordings afterward for rehearsal.” The college produces 4 GB of content every single day.

Since beginning of this year, the teams has worked on making available VastCast as a stand-alone system, available to customers other than SOCE. “We realized that VastCast offers amazing opportunities for all kind of educational institutions and also for event organizers. So many interesting events are going on in just Shanghai every week, but most of the time most of those people who are interested in it are unable to attend. Imagine you as an event organizer can make your event available to this audience, by simply starting a software. VastCast makes that possible. All you need is our software, a web cam and microphone”. Compared to other solutions such as Adobe Connect, VastCast is very simple to install and use, and does not require complex configuration. It offers a very high visual quality of the presentation, while requiring only limited bandwidth. Carsten says “we wanted to make VastCast foolproof. Live-streaming your event should be an opportunity, not an additional burden.”

From the audience side, VastCast offers a very elegant user interface, which combines two video streams. The left-hand side shows a very high quality video of the screen content, and the right hand side contains the video of the presenter. Tapping or clicking on each of the videos increases them to full-screen. According to Carsten, “the development of VastCast is driven by three factors: simplicity, quality and mobile. We wanted to create a tool that is easy to use, offers a high visual quality, while requiring little bandwidth. It had to be a mobile app, as we want the audience to participate as conveniently as possible. In fact, we first developed the iOS and Android apps, and only then the Flash-based browser access”. The very high quality of the screen content is made possibly through VastCast’s proprietary screen compression algorithms, which are the results of extensive research done at the lab from which the VastCast founders come from.

VastCast has been used for several events in Shanghai and world-wide. For instance, for an introduction to Learn Startup, watch this Techyizu talk by Gabriel Paquin. Last month, the European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning, one of the most renowned European conferences on technology-enhanced learning, has been using VastCast (log in with username and password “ectel”). VastCast is currently in private beta and the team is now actively inviting and welcoming organizations and individuals to join VastCast.

This weekend, on Saturday, 13th, VastCast will be used to live-stream the TEDx Suzhou event. So, even if you are not physically nearby, participating at the most amazing talks is just a click away.

With its massive user base and prominent incubators aiming to drive global innovation, China’s becoming the second hottest startup ecosystem. It’s not only about the massive user base, but a very different internet culture; it’s not just about hot money and venture capitals, it’s now more about angel investment, incubators which could drive truly innovation from China; it’s not only about China local market, it’s now with more focus on global market, thanks to global mobile industry; Silicon Valley is without a doubt the best place for startups and the centre of innovation still. But we’ve heard more and more great startups curious in Chinese market, Silicon Valley based Chinese entrepreneurs are creating their own startups with interests on Chinese local market. Still lots of questions about China internet waiting to be answered: How is the current startup environment, what is the venture capital ecosystem like, what is the hottest area for investment, and what is the dynamics of a typical startup?

The event will be hosted at InnoSpring. Address:

Register for the event NOW (link to Eventbrite)!!

Hong Kong was reported 13.8millions mobile subscriptions by 2010, which means around 2 subscriptions for each local citizen. There are 5millions smart phones in Hong Kong, which also implies ~70% of local populations has a smart mobile device to access the internet. So clearly, mobile market is what every HK based startup should consider seriously.

AcceleratorHK, funded and supported by Telerik (the maker of KendoUI and Icenium, tools that make cross platform mobile development easier) is a new accelerator for mobile startups on hybrid development, and it is organized by Stephen Forte and Paul Orlando, two successful entrepreneurs and educators with passion for startups and disruptive technology. AcceleratorHK invests US$15,000 in each company for 5%-8% equity, and also provides co-work space and mentorship program to the startups invested.

The interesting point about AcceleratorHK is that it focus on mobile with the emphasis that the startups’ apps must be using hybrid development method (hybrid development means a native, downloadable app that runs all or some of its user interface in an embedded browser component, i.e. HTML5). As for the reason, Stephen Forte mentioned on his blog, Gartner predicts that by 2015, 80% of all mobile applications developed will be hybrid or mobile-Web-oriented. AcceleratorHK is to follow the trend in mobile apps development.

AcceleratorHK’s first semester (Nov 5, 2012 – Feb 8, 2013) has opened for applications. As Paul told us, 5 startups are expected to participate the program for the first time.

Starting from 17th September, on behalf of TechNode, I will be in SF and join the Orange Blogger Bus Tour. A big thanks for Orange Silicon Valley  (the Silicon Valley arm of France Telecom-Orange), together with an elite team of bloggers from around the world, we will spend a week in the Bay Area visiting local companies and startups. And to start with, on behalf of Orange Silicon Valley, I’d love to invite all tech bloggers to attend Blogger Day event on 17th.

The following announcement is originally posted on Live Orange Blog.

On September 17^th, Orange Silicon Valley are hosting an exclusive gathering of local and international tech bloggers in San Francisco to ponder about technological innovation.

eCairn and Orange Silicon Valley (the Silicon Valley arm of France Telecom-Orange, one of the world’s leading telecoms with over 170,000 employees worldwide) have worked hand in hand to enable this congregating of tech enthusiasts and experts to take place in the world capital of innovation.

These men and women from around the world will explore cutting edge technologies and consider the following question:

Where will innovation in Silicon Valley come from and how will it disrupt everyday life as we know it?

Consumer tech demos from Orange Silicon Valley will be followed by discussions about innovation, talent acquisition and data infrastructure as it applies to Silicon Valley. This event will also enable bloggers from the Bay Area to share thoughts with their counterparts from France, UK, Australia, China, and Finland.

These international bloggers are all part of the Orange Blogger Bus Tour, an elite team of bloggers from around the world who will be spending a week in the Bay Area to find out how the Valley functions, and meet with companies and start-ups to get an idea of where innovation is heading in the near future.

If you are a blogger in Silicon Valley or San Francisco and you want to join in to share your thoughts about innovation and find out what Orange Silicon Valley are up to, then register now (all registrations pending validation by the organizers)!

Date and location

Monday 17^th September 2012, 11am-5pm

Orange Silicon Valley

60 Spear street, 11th floor

San Francisco, 94105

During the latest ChinaJoy game festival held in Shanghai couple weeks ago, we got constant lectures from big names predicting that client game is yesterday, web game is today, while mobile game is tomorrow. In what seems to be echoing the prediction, we’ve seen innumerable startup riding on the trends which supposedly lead to tomorrow and flocked to gold mine the future by making their contribution to the thriving mobile game world.

Burgeoning Mobile Game Market

According to a recent report, over 70% of Apple app store’s IAP (in-app purchase) were made within game apps, even though game only represents 17% of total apps in the Apple ecosystem. The sheer revenue potential speaks to a grand future picture. However, what always accompany the opportunities are risks and competition. Spotted the early promising sign of mobile gaming, in addition to some long-established mobile game developers like WiStone, PunchBox and so forth, big guys like Juren, Shanda and Renren also branched out to the new and untapped territory.

With deep pockets under their belt, they could hands down beef up a brilliant team during short amount of time to craft mobile games and then splash tens of millions RMB to promote the outcomes. So facing the mounting competition and changing landscape, how to stand out from the crowd and bring as much attention as possible  to its offerings at minimal and even no cost becomes a big challenge for small and medium-sized mobile game startups.

Unmet Needs of Low Cost Marketing

Previously at the very early stage of mobile gaming sector, “free for limited time” is one of the most common tricks developers resort to when coming to marketing within the Apple ecosystem. It’s free and generates a lot of buzz, which is good, but the practice is neither scalable nor durable. For example, when an app is provided “free for limited time”, in the first few days the downloads might be skyrocketing, then gradually it’d decline.

Often times, other than “free for limited time”, developers’ll have to seek help from CPC-based mobile ad platform. With more and more developers entering the market, the costs for CPC-based ads are rising irrationally. For example, UAC (user acquisition cost) has hit RMB 20 per user which is unaffordable for smaller teams. Given the fact that most mobile games won’t last for 3 months, you might not even able to make enough revenue off the players during such short life cycle to justify the marketing cost.

According to Neo Zhang, founder of GuoheAD, with traditional mobile ad platform, you won’t know who’ll see your ads featuring your latest title which costs you ten months and big money to get shipped. Sounds like the classical problem of “Yeah we knew that half of our ads budget was wasted, it’s just we didn’t know which half”.

On the other hand, it seems that CPC-based mobile ads were employed to do some tricks working around Apple’s App Store. According to some industry insiders, developers buy mobile ads in an aim to play around with ASO, namely App Store Optimization, to rank up in App Store. It works for a while, but requires a lot of input and you better pray that Apple doesn’t alter its ranking algorithm from time to time.

So are there any decent ways of promoting mobile games that are cost-efficient, durable and actually effective?

Cross-promotion Platform MiX to the Rescue

Well there might be. Leveraging on the experience in its well-received mobile ad platform and understanding on the needs of small and medium-sized game developers, GuoheAd, one of the leading mobile ad platform in China debuted the first Chinese mobile game-centric cross promotion platform MIX to make app marketing an easier task for developers with limited budget.

The CPA-based platform delivers GuoheAD’s interpretation of mobile game startups’ needs in marketing: it should be targeting the right AUDIENCE in the right CONTEXT with delightful EXPERIENCE, or ACE by initials.

MIX gives developers the opportunity to pop up full-screen billboard ads in game apps when someone is playing with the game, which gives you the right audience (players) in the right context (while they’re playing games). And since the ads was fully customizable (appearance, when and how to show up), the ads experience is also good without interrupting users too much. For example, ads can only show up when player pause the game or level up in the game. And you can change the ads appearance like backgrounds, buttons, images and so forth to make it fit in. This is utterly important if you don’t want users to get fed up with pop-up ads.

Most importantly, MIX is totally free to use for now. It comes along with an Exchange community where you can find other developers whom you can do cross-promotion with. Better yet, you can cross promote your own game pipelines to route users from faltering games to new titles. That could be a very practical solution for small time developers with big pipelines.

The service which can increase conversion rate by 10 times has been sent live here http://mix.guohead.com/home/, you can check it out and give it a try if you’re currently developing and marketing you own mobile games. At the end of the day, what could be the better place to advertise a mobile game than do it within a mobile game?

What is the most important thing for events? To get the audience engaged. If you ever hosted any event, spoke at conference or moderated panels, you might find that for a long time there’s NO easy way for speakers and audience to interact with each other. There were some ‘traditional’ ways, e.g. audience sends question in text message to certain gateway number, then the text could be picked up and projected to the screen. It sounds easy but remember the organiser should talk to SP to get a number set up which could be quite annoying. What if you wanted to do a ballot? Asking every audience to send keywords to the gateway number maybe. The set-up would be even more complex and you may also suffer a long delay if there is a large crowd.

Beijing-based startup SoftCompass developed a new Windows 8 based application called SlideIdea which might bring a good solution for the issues addressed above. SlideIdea is a new presentation tool designed for the new mobile era. It’s different from old tools like Keynote or Powerpoint in that sense that it focus on the actual showing of the presentation and include cool features where the audience can engage in voting or send speakers a message or post question simply using their mobile phones.

Since SlideIdea is based in Windows 8 which runs on both PC and Tablets, it is designed to enable you create presentation easily and smoothly on both PC and mobile devices. Like other presentation tools, SlideIdea comes with some handy functions for presentation, such as whiteboard, highlighter and pen. But the uniqueness in SlideIdea is the features which allow the audience become an important part in your presentation. Even there is a huge crowd, the audience can still ask questions, post comments or participate in surveys arranged by the speaker via their mobile phones or other connected devices (by accessing m.slideidea.com). The result will pop up on the screen so that the speakers are able to know what the audience think and wonder during the presentation.

The iOS and Android version of SlideIdea will be available by end of this year. I asked Kristin why they decided to work on Windows 8 as the first platform. She told us that Slideidea was one of the first developer team in China to received a developer token from Microsoft for their new Windows 8 platform and saw this as a great opportunity to create something fresh and innovative for a new platform.

SlideIdea is a re-invented presentation tool for the mobile era. As a startup company it’s a challenge to release a product into a mature app store and your marketing activities needs to be really intense. To be one of the first apps into a new platform like the Windows 8 can therefore be a great opportunity for us and our app to get publicity and users attention.

The mission of SlideIdea, the new PowerPoint or Keynote of this new era where Share, Interact & Mobility is key works.

NEST, a newly-founded investment venture is to support entrepreneurs and enterprising new start-up businesses in Hong Kong. Its mission is to eventually take HK brands around the world.

Founded by Mr. Simon Squibb,the founder of creative design consultancy Fluid, NEST is structured to deliver both financial, backing, branding, sales and marketing support, enabling the city’s entrepreneurs to build their businesses and help them develop new, iconic Hong Kong brands.

We talked to Simon who told us that Nest has historically invested sub $1 million per deal, and then brought in 3rd party investors for between 1-5 million USD follow-on capital.  The companies invested by NEST so far include successful new business concepts: Red Packet, Foodie, I-Love.com brand including iLoveSoHo and iLoveLKF,  as well as Loft-Asia and Millionaire-Asia. “We are most interested in technology-enabled and brand-driven consumer businesses”, said Simon.

Talking about the Hong Kong market, in Simon’s opinion,

HK market is a key test market and anchor market for branded consumer businesses. We enter at a stage where the supportive HK environment is highly beneficial to the early development and positioning of these businesses.

Besides funding, what NEST can provide for the startups is deal specific, said Simon. It’s an investment venture, but for Simon, it’s also a platform that provides not just capital but the business consulting, marketing and brand building expertise that is needed to grow a good idea into a great scalable business.

The way to connect with NEST and apply for the fund is very old-style, just like what you find on its simple website: Write to them.

The startups in Hong Kong might be different, but the startup space definitely is getting more and more active. (You may check our previous coverage on Hong Kong startups space).

With over 100m users and dramatic growth, Weixin is becoming a life style for Chinese  people here indulging in QQ. Tencent is not only looking at the big picture of Internet TV market by bringing you the iCE Screen, but also working on some tiny things which may make your digital life more easier.

ZHANG Xiaolong, the leader of Weixin team posted a photo on his Weixin account. It’s an earphones. Like Apple’s one, it comes with convenient buttons that let you adjust volume, control music and video playback and (possibly) even answer or end calls on your iPhone. The interesting bit is that it also has a PUSH button which allow you send Weixin voice message. So no need look at the screen when using Weixin, you can just use the Playback button to listen to coming message and hold the PUSH button to send out voice message.

Weixin team is based in China’s southern Guangdong prov. where you may find tens of hardware manufacturers, so making a tiny gadget like that should not be a big deal. We are not sure yet how Tencent’s going to do with this earphones (a real product for sale or just a gift for fun?) and how much it costs. The thing is what Tencent’s doing on hardware and on Weixin is getting more and more interesting, isn’t?

18th August, 2011 Tudou, the respected leading online video company got listed on NASDAQ; 21 August, the merge of YouKu and Tudou has been approved; 24 August 2012, th trading of Tudou on NASDAQ is suspended; 00:34 of 24th August 2012, Gary Wang, the cofounder and CEO of Tudou said on its weibo, quite emotionally,

7-years old Tudou, is going to retire tonight. Thanks to everyone for every piece they’ve left in this story… I will see you in next interesting dream.

Last time I spoke to Gary is back to 2011, 18th August, hours before Tudou’s IPO. He said, “I am very excited and also very looking forward to the new journey for Tudou.” And I guess few people could expect the new journey would only last one year. Not sure if it’s good ending for Tudou, probably only Gary can tell.

According to some report, with the merge, Youku side will take 71.5% share of the new company and the rest 28.5% is for Tudou. Gary will be the board member of the new company for a year, but will not be involved with any daily operation, in other words, Gary actually retires too.

The industry cheers the merge because the new company is clearly the leading online video company in China which could largely bring down the cost of video content. Anyhow, we will see how it goes soon in near future.

Gary, is one of few Chinese entrepreneurs I truly respect, he is a poet rather than a business man, which make him very unique in Chinese internet.  Take care, man! We really looking forward to seeing your new dream.

Tencent said it would not make smart phone, and it might be true. But it does not mean Tencent does not want to enter Hardware market. Instead of jumping into the messy smart phone market, Tencent smartly picked the one Steve Job also loved, the TV. Today, Tencent and TCL held an event together presenting a new super gadget named iCE Screen, a 26 inch smart TV.

iCE Screen runs a highly customised Android-based system (Android 2.2) which integrates Tencent’s popular services, Video Chat, Online Video, Music, Games and Photo Album. It also comes with an App Store where you can download hundreds of applications from third parties.

Some hardware specifications:

• CPU – Duo-core Cortex-A9 1G
• GPU – GPU Mali 400 with OpenGL ES 2.0
• Screen resolution –  1366*768
• RAM – RAM:768M; FLASH 512M
• USB2.0 slots x 2, HDMI x 1,  SD card slot x 1

iCE Screen is now available to buy on QQBuy and the price is set to a very attractive price rmb 1999 (almost half of the price of the New iPad 16G).

360 (NYSE:QIHU) quietly launched its own search engine 5 days ago. We can’t remember how many years it took Google to become the No.2 largest search engine in China, but for 360 it turns out 5 days are enough. News broke out today that 360’s market share on search has soared to be No.2 in China. Baidu surely is still the No.1, but 360 has taken place of Sogou with ~10% market share.

How could that be possible? I called several industry friends including one manager-level 360 staff, the response from them is more or less the same: 10% market share might be a bit exaggerated, but they are not surprised that 360 could achieve this in such a short time.

Thanks to 360’s two core product, 360 browser and 360 landing page.

According to 360’s Q1 financial report, 360 browser has 273millions monthly active users, and its landing page hao.360.cn (which is the default landing page when you open 360 browser) has average 77millions daily unique IP, and the average daily click-through on page is about 295millions. So where the magic happened is that 360 has now set the browser’s and the landing page’s default engine to its own one (see the screenshot below). Before, by default, 360 was using Google search engine. The users of both product don’t even notice the change of the default search engine, they have started using 360’s search engine. With the huge user base, 360’s taking the No.2 would not be a surprise, right?

360 obviously is announcing the war against Baidu, although 360 promises to leave the options to users to choose which search engine (Baidu, Google etc) is the default one. It’s not a big threat for Baidu for now, but 360 might be very tough and ambitious in future (You may still remember the fight between 360 and Tencent). And, sadly that Google’s search market share will be shrinking again without 360’s support.

There were no further official comments from 360’s management level, yet. They only confirmed that, “Yes, we are still testing our own search engine.”

Anipang, the Korea’s mobile social puzzle-3 type puzzle game was launched on July 30, 2012. Only took ~20 days, Anipang has reached 2.5m installs and 1.5m DAU. It’s now the No.2 on the Top Grossing Apps and No.1 on the Top Free Apps in Google Play Korea. “No ads, No cross promotion, just by word of mouth online and invites using Kakao’s social graph, we are very surprised and excited to see the super-fast growth of Anipang.” Angus Lau, the business development VP of SundayToZ, the owner company of Anipang told us.

SundayToZ is the leading social games developer in Korea. Established in 2009, SundayToz games have been played by 7 Million users in South Korea and abroad. In the past year, the company have shifted focus from web to mobile social games. It currently offers six different games, including the hit title Aqua Story, which has over 3 Million users on both social networks and mobile platform.

Angus told us, Anipang is not a brand new title but rather a re-release of an earlier title the company launched in Cyworld in 2010.  “On Cyworld, there has been 400,000 installs since the game first released in 2010, but since we released the new Anipang on Kakao’s game center on July 30, it only took ~15 days to reach 1m installs and ~20 days to get 2.5m. ”

KakaoTalk, the very popular mobile messaging apps claims over 50m users from the world (mainly from Korea) recently launched its game center (for Android at this moment) where mobile social games can be hosted and take the advantage of Kakao’s social graph.

As we reported, Kakao’s also invested by Tencent which owns a similar Weixin (aka, WeChat). If you ever questioned about Weixin’s business model, given Weixin’s 120m registered users, obviously it could do a better job once its game center launched.

You must be familiar with the term Open Platform which is one of the key invention driving the modern Internet business. OpenLanguage, founded in 2012, the Shanghai-based  startup is trying to extend the Open idea to language-learning market. Its mission is to use mobile technology to help busy adults learn languages. In this article, Jenny Zhu, co-founder of the company walks us through what she is trying to accomplish with OpenLanguage.

OpenLanguage is actually founded by the core team is behind the immensely popular ChinesePod. Hank Horkoff, co-founder of ChinesePod, a Canadian entrepreneur living in Shanghai for the past 10 years is the other co-founder of OpenLanguage.  Together with Jenny Zhu, they started OpenLanguage after the acquisition of ChinesePod in the beginning of 2012.

As the name suggests, OpenLanguage’s open to students, publishers, teachers and schools. OpenLanguage is a software platform that provides them with modern publishing tools, language learning materials in addition to the best of modern web and mobile study tools. As Jenny introduced, “The development of mobile technology has opened up tremendously exciting opportunities for us to rethink language learning. There’s so much more that we can leverage than the current options out there.  We want to help people learn and teach in a much more convenient, enjoyable and data-driven way.”

Jenny explained to me the three key problems OpenLanguage’s trying to solve.

1. Modernizing lesson publishing – If you look at traditional publishing, language books are usually general, outdated and hard to customize. But this one-size-fits-all economics no longer needs to apply. With a web-based publishing system, OpenLanguage seeks to empower talented teachers to produce world-class learning materials and distribute them throughout the world onto smartphones and tablets.  Looking at my experience with ChinesePod, learners’ success largely depends on convenience, relevance, practice opportunity and motivation. And that’s what we want to work with publishers both traditional and new to deliver.
2. Bringing technology to the classroom – While adult students are increasingly demanding a more convenient study option, most schools either lack the experience or funds to build their own technology solutions. OpenLanguage offers software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to help them (and individual language teachers) to take advantage of these modern, digital tools. Students can use the OpenLanguage Tablet Textbook, while teachers and administrators can use the Open Academy features to manage their students and track their studies. Jenny believe that the form factor and content of the Tablet Textbook helps increase students’ interaction with their learning input. Users can study on their way to work or class and be primed about the key language. Therefore, in class they can dive right into speaking practice and receive very targeted feedback. This could make the classroom much more efficient and effective.
3. Using data to solve student problems – As more and more study activity migrates to digital devices, the resultant data-footprint can be used to solve student problems. At the heart OpenLanguage wants to target traditional language proficiency exams. While those exams are the predominant benchmark for school enrolment officers, HR and immigration officers, they are often poor reflection of one’s real communication competency. “That’s why so many high TOEFL and IELTS scoring students can’t even deal with basic daily exchange.” Jenny said, “But as more study moves online, it enables us to track students’ learning over months or even years and provide a much more comprehensive and realistic assessment of their language ability.”  Just as Facebook is increasingly used as an alternative to traditional resumes by potential employers, OpenLanguage believe something similar will happen for language learning. OpenLanguage wants to help create a “big data” alternative to traditional language proficiency exams. This “Language Graph” will be a collection of all students’ study activity (collected with their consent) with a simple dashboard overlay to help potential employers, university enrollment offices or immigration officials to get a more accurate sense of their language abilities. “It’s almost like Google Analytics, but for language learning.” Jenny said.

Education is a long-term commitment, and you need to be in it for the long haul and want to make an impact. Obviously Jenny and Hank understand that. They’ve got a 5-year roadmap for OpenLanguag. As they said, the first stage is to promote the idea of the Tablet Textbook which is done by their iOS and Android apps for smartphones and tablets.  It’s designed as the next generation textbook. It provides all the learning input of a traditional book, but brings all the content into life. For example, all the dialogues and review content come with text, annotation and recordings. Students can also save target words and study them as flashcards. They can also choose from a wide range of topics in our lesson library to match their own level and topic needs.  Smart features such as the SRS flashcards help students memorize words and learn how to use them in real contexts. All in all, it is a much more convenient, multimedia and “smart” learning experience.

For the international market (i.e. English as instruction language), OpenLanguage now has Spanish, French, Italian, English and Arabic, and has also signed on partner publishers for Russian, German, and Portuguese.  I asked Jenny about the relationship with these partner publishers. Jenny said, the publisher are language experts in their chosen language. So they provide the content and academic backbone where OpenLanguage gives them powerful publishing tools and modern lesson media production training as well as some sales and marketing support. This alliance helps student study the most practical, updated and authentic language on their favorite mobile devices.

As for the business model, for the end-users (students),  OpenLanguage use the subscription business, i.e. students purchase a monthly or annual subscription; and for schools, it’s an SaaS model. (Note, OpenLanguage offers a white-label solution for schools, i.e. their students will see an app from their school powered by OpenLangauge. It’s to help schools with their branding and gives them a mobile strategy.) OpenLanguage does a revenue split with publishers.

Jenny and Hank both are firm believers in the Lean Startup approach. They’ve iterated very fast based on customers feedback, whether it’s from individual customers in the US, in China, publishers and school customers. Jenny said, now over 95% of OpenLanguage’s paying customers are using smartphones and tablets to access our service, which confirms their belief of the advantage of the Tablet Textbook and using mobile device to learn languages.

“After all, why can’t you learn a language like you use Facebook?  Learning should be convenient, smart and fun.” I can’t agree more on this.

Today Sina (NASAQ GS:SINA) released its financial report for Q2 this year. According to the report, by end of June this year, Sina Weibo has reached 368millions registered users and 36.5m daily active users; and for the first time, Sina disclosed its revenue generated directly from the advertisment on Weibo, over $10m which is roughly 10% of total ads revenue on Sina.

According to the local media, Charles Cao, CEO of Sina is quite happy with these figures. He said, “the social media ads is still at very early stage in China, and we need more time to educate the market. We need keep improving our ads display algorithm and accumulate more user data, but what we have achieved from Weibo so far is still very encouraging. ”

It’s reported that in Q4 this year, Sina Weibo will launch its AdWords like self-service ads system. And the payment system, credit system and data mining system will be ready in Weibo platform by end of this year too.

Although we heard more and more negative comments about Sina Weibo, like less active users, more censorship etc, from this financial report, it’s a bit strange we don’t see that sign at all. It says in Q1, the number of daily active users was about 9% of total registered users but in Q2 it has reached 10%.

Talking about the future plan for Sina Weibo, Charles admitted that the company still need keep investing the Weibo to make sure it becomes the No.1 social media in China, by then Sina will be more confident on monetizing Weibo, the new social media’s value.

Tencent revealed in a semi-annual report that it has completed the acquisition of Singapore game company Level Up. The Shenzhen-based Chinese Internet giant announced earlier this year that it’d buy 49% of Level Up with US$ 26.95 million.

Games play a more and more importance role in Tencent’s businesses. According to Tencent’s latest earnings report, peak simultaneous online for its QQ Game Platform user accounts were 8.8 million while online game revenues increased 4.6% QoQ to RMB5,564.7 million. Meanwhile, bolstered by heated social game titles and item-based sales within these games, revenues from Tencent’s community and open platforms also increased 7.8% QoQ to RMB 2.22 billion.

Ma Huateng, chairman and CEO of Tencent said that by leveraging Tencent’s leading social platforms across both PCs and mobile phones, the company continued to build stronger user engagement and gain tractions among players. On the other hand, the company’s open platform initiatives paid off according to Mr. Ma, bringing benefits to both Tencent users and partners.

Martin Lau, president of Tencent disclosed in the latest earnings call that the company grabbed more than 30% of China’s SNS/Web game market. Luo Shuohan, CFO of Tencent also mentioned that ARPU for causal games on Tencent platform is between RMB 55 and 100 yuan, while for MMORPG the number is between 100 and 140.

This post is about the B2C eCommerce market in China, but nothing technical and I don’t even feel I am writing a tech-related post… well, you may take it as a drama.

Believe or not, starting at 9am today (15th August, 2012), several major B2C sites will cut down the price of all home appliance, and everyone promises they will offer the cheapest price. In the bloody price ware, one side is 360buy, and the other is the union of Suning, Gome, DangDang and 51buy.

360buy – Starting from 9am, we promise all home appliance sold on 360buy will be cheaper than Suning. If Suning dares to set the price of any product to RMB1.00, we will sell it for FREE;

Suning – 9am, 15th August 2012, we promise any product sold by Suning including home appliance will be cheaper than 360buy. If you find out the price of any product is higher than the one on 360buy, we can change it at once. And if you have bought that product at the higher price, you can get refund with twice of the price.

Gome – Starting at 9am, we promise the price of any product sold on Gome online shop will be 5% cheaper than 360buy.

DangDang – Today, we will fight together with Gome, against 360buy.

51buy – All price will be cut down from 9am. Starting from September, we promise any product sold on 51buy will be cheaper than 360buy.

So it seems that 360buy has pissed off everyone. But don’t ask me why, it just happens…like this.

You never know eCommerce can be so entertaining, don’t you? Anyway, make sure your wallet is ready and check out these sites at 9am. Hopefully you can even get something for FREE.

We said we wanted a SXSW style event in China. Obviously it’s very hard as we TechNode only knows the technology, little about Music and nothing about Movie. But we did not give up trying, and we are making our first step.

We are very happy to announce the partnership between TechNode and WMusic, one of the fast growing digital music publishers in China. This weekend, 18th-19th August, WMusic’s MaxStar music festival will be held at Ditan Park in Beijing, and for the first time, you will see quite a few Internet companies setting up their booth there introducing their service/apps to thousands of young music fans.

I know we don’t have much time left, but if you have something (maybe a music app, a mobile game etc anything targeted at young generation) to show at the festival, please you can just drop us email on contact At technode.com. We can try to find a place for you and some free tickets for your users. 🙂

It should be fun!

Hugo Shong, Executive Vice President of IDG, Chairman of IDG Greater China and Founding General Partner of IDG Capital Partners, is one of the most influential and experienced venture capitalists. At Macworld Asia conference, I had the chance to do an on-stage interview with Hugo Shong. The conversation covers many topics, including venture capital, angel investment, mobile internet, doing startups, and innovation in China.

IDG China has invested ~20 mobile internet companies. I questioned about the business models in mobile service as the hottest startups like Instagram, Path etc did not make money with millions of users. Hugo said, We (VCs) invested companies like Tencent, Baidu etc 12 years ago, at the beginning (probably during the first 5 years), no one knew how they could make money because at that time China only had 20millions internet users, but now they are hugely successful. We are now betting on mobile internet and we must be patient.

China now had around 100millions 3G subscribers last year, now the figure is about 170millions. I think the mobile market will be booming and getting more mature when we reach 300-400millions 3G subscribers, which may take another 2 years.

“What are the most important criteria for you to pick up the startup to invest? ” I asked Hugo. “For us, the team is always important, ” he said, “but even more important is the market they are working on. Picking the market is like picking a river for a journey. If you pick up the one running towards the right direction, then no matter how long it may take for the boats (startups) to arrive at their destination, you will be fine because the water flow will eventually take you there.”

Hugo also criticised a bit on the angel investment in China,

Angel investor is a very respectable title. China needs more qualified angle investors, but now it seems we got too many un-qualified ones.

To drive the true innovation from China, we need not only good angel investors, but also high-quality venture capital firms.

High-quality does not stand for how many successful companies the VC firm has invested. Instead, what matters is how many investment cases the VC firm fails so it can share with other startups and make sure they will not make the same mistakes again.

More and more startups are seen nowadays in China. Talking about the difference, Hugo thought in last decade, we see most of the successful entrepreneurs were graduated from universities oversea. But now, especially in the mobile internet industry, we see more and more ‘local-educated’ young men who are doing startups. Mobile internet market is young, so being young is the most important advantage for young entrepreneurs. If they failed, they can restart it again.

Hugo does not believe mobile advertisement can be the key revenue source for mobile services. “I think the content will be the key. Startups and ‘traditional internet service provider’ should think over how to generate/present good content in mobile and convince users to pay for it. And Big Data is something I am really interested in too.”

Hugo was a reporter for the Xinhua News Agency. “Just curious, will you consider to do a startup if one day you restart your career?”, I asked, and Hugo gave me a definitely ‘No’. I was laughing and told him that answer might disappoint many young entrepreneurs. Hugo explains, he still love to be a journalist.

I did not see much difference between a journalist and a VC. The only difference might be, journalists love to share the best and most exciting stories to the public at the first place, while VCs always keep the best as secrets and tell people the bad things.

Make sense, isn’t?!

Now it’s the 5th year for Popcap, the creator of the very popular mobile game Plants vs. Zombies (PvZ) since it entered China back in 2008.  ZHOU Yun, the director of business development of Popcap China, recently gave a speech in a developer forum hosted by TechNode at Macworld Asia, sharing this foreign company’s experience in Chinese market.

We all know in China people does not want to pay for download, which happens to Popcap too. At the early time, Popcap set the price for one of its games RMB88 which was already cheaper than the price set in the global market. “Sadly we only managed to sell it to less than 100 users, while later this game has >100millions players.” Yun said.

Yun cited a comment by his boss, James Gwertzman, General Manager of Popcap Asia

In China, anything is possible, because the market is massive, growing very fast, and it is weird too.

Talking about the success of Popcap in China market, Yun thinks Localisation of the product is the key. “We had one rule: what happens here should NOT impact on company’s strategy for rest of world. Our team in China only focus on Chinese market and Asian market because we believe the culture in Asian countries/regions are quite similar.” Yun said. ” For China, we not only translated the interface of PvZ into Chinese but also introduced Chinese elements such as Great Wall into the game. The result is that it only took 3 days, PvZ (Chinese) became the No.1 downloaded games in China.”

Now Popcap China has grown to a team with ~70 staff. The company is targeting at different platform in China. It worked with local social platform such as RenRen to launch its social version of PvZ in 2011; In May 2012, Popcap China partners with Metersbonwe and started merchandising in China, and the licenced products include books, t-shirts, toys etc.

We even have more revenue from merchandising than from gaming.

By end of 2011, 12% company’s revenue is from Asia. “We are expecting that in 3-4 years, 1/3 of our revenue will be from Asia, and  surely China is the most important market here.” Yun told the public.

You may earn little directly from gaming, but as long as you can build up millions of fans in China, merchandising could be a good revenue source too. Another famous mobile game developer, Rovio (Angry Birds) obviously is following the same strategy.

17 millions vs. 100millions, obviously in terms of registered users, Xiaomi’s mobile messenger MiLiao (Mitalk) has failed in competing with Tencent’s Weixin. But it does not means Xiaomi will give up. LEI Jun, CEO of Xiaomi recently said on his weibo,

Xiaomi has reached 17 millions registered users and 1 million concurrent users online. I believe this is just a beginning.

Xiaomi’s Miliao is changing its strategy and looking at the future of IM.

Instant Messenger Labs

Xiaomi’s Instant Messenger (IM) Lab has been established. On its official website, it asked the question to all Xiaomi’s fans: “We are using QQ and Weixin for instant messaging for now, but what shall we use in future?” Xiaomi’s IM Labs is to explore the next generation of IM. It encourages users to open their minds and send innovative ideas to the lab.

Acquisition of MSNLite

MSNLite is a third-party PC-based MSN client which simplified the official MSN client (which I think it became really a crap). MSNLite also enhanced the original, for examples,  it enhanced the security of MSN as it has all instant messages encrypted; it offers message backup to cloud which allows users to access their chat history using any PC; it supports offline file transferring which means you can send files to someone who’s offline. MSNLite’s first released in April, 2010 and is reported around 1 millions active users. With this acquisition, surely we are going to see Miliao’s PC client coming soon. And this will obviously trigger the war against Tencent’s QQ.

Xiaomi is to battle for the future of instant messenger, and not just on mobile.

GuoheAD, the Beijing-based mobile ad startup announced the launch of Guohe MIX, a CPA-based cross-promotion platform specified for the cross promotion of mobile games.

The new initiative from Guohe is characterized by the full-screen billboard ad format which aims at ramping up conversion rate and an exchange center where developers can find app and app developers with whom they’d like to do cross promotion.

GuoheMIX claimed to be the first who introduce full-screen billboard ad into mobile ad sector, the unique format which pops and takes up nearly the whole screen space leads into higher conversion rate for advertisers, namely mobile app developers in this case. And for the sake of user appealing, you get to fully customize the appearance of the ad in terms of backgrounds, pictures, layouts and even as small as buttons. Also you can control when you want the ads to show up, like when players pause the game or when they make it to the next level. The smart integration of game experience and mobile ad reduces the risk of alienating users with annoying ads interrupting the game.

The new exchange center for developers is also a great plus. You could find your potential “ads partner” by posting in the community, just like post a classified ads on Craiglist.

Some highlights about Guohe MIX:

• Full screen billboard ads that integrates into game experience with full customization
• Powerful yet easy-to-use ad managements
• Ad exchange center where developers could hands down find partners
• Light-weighted SDK with few lines of codes without compromising the game experience

Only one year ago, Dianping, the Chinese Yelp-like service announced its amazing $100millions funding which gave the company ~$1billion valuation. Despite that Zhang Tao, CEO of Dianping recently said to the public the company still had good amount of cash, today Dianping confirmed its $60millions Series D funding. It’s also reported that the new valuation is a little more than $10b.

Dianping’s founded back in April, 2003. By Q2 2012, Dianping has offered its service to over 2300 cities/towns in China, has over 1.5millions merchants registered in its database. Thanks to the fast growth of mobile Internet and Group-buying model, now the number of monthly active users has reached 48millions, its mobile applications also claims over 40millions users. According to Long Wei, VP of Dianping, the traffic to Dianping mobile already exceeded the traffic to its website. The company claims break-even in November 2008, now has around 3000 staff nationwide.

One more interesting fact we found out is that at early stage, Dianping also received $4m investment from Google. I guess Google should be proud of this, event itself is not really in China right now, it’s still the share holder of the most popular Chinese “local King”.

There is no doubt that the money raised from the new round will be mainly used for Dianping’s expansion in mobile Internet. The question still waits to be answered is that with $1bn valuation, when will Dianping be able to get listed?

Starting a startup then getting funded is always a good news to share with the public (You may not want to reveal the exact amount of the funding, though). But for music startups, at least in China, the fundraising status seems a highly classified information.

No.1 rule: don’t tell people you are funded, which is what I’ve been told by several music startups.

The reason sounds simple. Usually startups when they starts don’t have money to pay for the license fee, so most startups have to play with the pirated music content. The music publishers know that they will get little or even nothing if they sue the startups for copyright infringement. But if they know you have extra money in pocket, they will not let you walk away easily. “The licensing fee is now an important revenue source in digital music industry.” a startup founder, who has years of experience in music industry and recently founded a mobile music service, said so.

People love digital music and look forward to using new music service, but the copyright licensing is killing the startups who want to innovate. In China, I heard that Xiami, a very popular online music site is burning out of money. And another ‘good’ example of this is 9sky which might be the first online music site. 9sky was founded in 1999 and started as a free pirated music download site. The company actually was doing quite well when playing non-licenced content (good revenue from ringtone download etc). Ever since it raised some venture capitals they started paying a significantly huge amount of licencing fee to the publishers, things are changed. A large portion of capital raised went to the publishers. Copyrighted music is good, but it also brings a huge burden to the company.

And maybe this is not just about China. GigaOM recently reported that the music service Wahwah.fm is killed by license costs.

Online digital music service is expecting that users can pay to cover some costs for the licensing, but in China this is no working. Catherine Leung, the ex-general manager of Baidu Music Entertainment dept. is right: For the music entrepreneurs, China is still in a “Wild Wild East” state.

The digital music industry has a bright future, we know that, but how far is it?

Amy Gu, the GM of Evernote China, announced at the developer forum organized by Macworld and TechNode, Evernote’s China-specific API is available and Chinese developers can now apply for the testing accounts. Evernote’s Chinese branding, Yinxiang Biji was officially launched back in May 2012.

With the launching of Chinese API, Amy is expecting more Chinese developers who will join the Evernote Trunk, its open platform to develop more applications for Chinese users. It’s reported that Evernote Trunk currently offers over 12,000 applications from all over the world.

Amy’s also very excited to announce that China has replaced Japan and becomes the 2nd fastest growing market worldwide.

Catherine Leung, GM of Music Entertainment at Baidu, will be leaving Baidu soon, reported by 163.com. Catherine used to be the General Manager of Universal Music, China, and joined Baidu to lead its digital entertainment department in 2008.  She has done a great job helping Baidu sort out the long-time licensing dispute between Baidu and the digital music publishers, and she’s also the lead of Baidu’s music service, Baidu Ting which was launched in May 2011.

And according to a friend from digital music industry, we’ve been told that Catherine’s next stop might be Amazon.

It was reported that Amazon recently signed licensing agreements with hundreds of music publishers and distributors, including Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music, Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group. Yesterday, Amazon also unveiled its music matching service to rival Apple’s. Obviously, Amazon is really working hard on something in the digital music industry.

We are very curious about Catherine’s role if she joins Amazon. Catherine used to speak at our TNT event sharing her insight and opinion on China’s digital music industry. She once said,

For the music entrepreneurs, China is still in a “Wild Wild East” state.

But given her impressive background on both digital music and internet service, whether Catherine is to lead Amazon’s online music service in China will be an interesting question to answer.

163 also reported that BeiNi ZHANG, the product manager of Douban Music and ex-Baiduer back in 2004 will re-join Baidu as the new lead of Baidu’s music service.

As global smartphone penetration keeps accelerating, more and more people do almost everything that they can with PC before with mobile now. Witnessing the trend in shifting from desktop to mobile, a lot of enterprises raced to launch their own mobile sites, with mixed results.

Creating websites for mobile devices has been proved to be a tedious and frustrating experience, as mobile devices come in numerous screen size and resolution, varied computing power and mobile Internet access. New York-based startup bMobilized is aiming to tackle all these itches with its instant mobile site making solution.

Feeding it with the domain name of your desktop site, the service would automatically analyze the layout – it claimed to use 300 different algorithms to identify and analyze the different parts of the website – and then generate a mobile site that fits on all major devices. bMobilized also provides a easy-to-use Customization Suite in case you’re not totally satisfied with the mobile site it produces, or just want to make some changes to it. You can edit, create or replace menus and submenus, or adjust menu color schemes and designs. You can also create a unique mobile logo, color scheme, or style sheet (CSS), mobile headers and footers. With the tool one can hands down customize a nice looking mobile website.

For now, bMobilized claimed its Mobile Engine could detect more than 13,000 combinations of handsets and browsers, including iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Nokia, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson. So regardless of how customers views a company’s mobile site, the layout would always be optimized for best look.

I met Yilun Zhang and Aidan Nulman, co-founders of Fleetbit couple days ago in Beijing as they flew over here to take part in an investor-pitch product-launch startup competition focusing on “cloud computing areas”, the competition is part of a bigger plan charted by local government of Harbin, the capita city of China’s northeastern Heilongjiang province. Harbin is looking to turn itself into some sort of a cloud computing innovation center of China.

Speaking of Fleetbit, the Canada-based company provides a solution that helps cab companies work more efficient, rather than usually just an app to connect cab drivers and passengers. Just like it said on its website, Fleetbit is more than an app.

With Fleetbit’s solution, cab companies can have apps customized for them with their brand recognition and then sent out to passengers, saving them a lot of troubles of either in-house developing or outsourcing it. Fleetbit app could be integrated into cab companies’ existing dispatch systems to attract new customers, strengthen your brand, and increase customer retention. It currently supports multiple platforms like Blackberry, iPhone and Android. It also has a web version that passengers could use to book the car online.

And on the consumer side, passengers get to book cab services from and then pay with their mobile upon receiving the service. Meanwhile, passengers can use the app to rate drivers and their services. Tapping into these ratings could help fleet operators keep drivers accountable and motivated, improving overall customer service, according to Fleetbit.

Yilun said that Fleetbit has teamed up with some local fleets in Canada, where the company headquartered. I guess Beijing could really use their service as the city is notoriously famous now for its huge traffic and big jam from time to time.

How popular is Sina Weibo in China? The Chinese Twitter-like service saw a penetration of more than 88.8% among China’s digital populace aged more than 20, according to a report by DCCI, a Beijing-based Internet think tank. The whopping penetration means that almost every Chinese netizen has a weibo account.

As of this June, according to statistics by CNNIC, China Internet Information Center, China has more than 538 million Internet users and 388 million mobile Internet users.

As Sina’s core advertising business is confronting with a gloomy picture due to swooned economic, Sina Weibo is what the Beijing-based portal site counts on to turn around, which explained why Sina Weibo launched a flurry of new products/services to monetize the offerings, like membership account that costs RMB 10 yuan per month. Weibo users  who subscribed to membership will enjoy privileges like can follow more than 2000 people (normally a Weibo user can follow up to 2000 accounts), audio post, and so on. In the past, Weibo released Wei games, Weihao and so forth to capitalize on its tremendous user base and traffic, though all these efforts failed to generate substantial revenue for the service.

Sina Weibo is said to be launching a social ads platform in the second half of this year to tap into its revenue potential. Sina invested more than 120 million and is planning to invest another 160 million into the service, now it’s time for these investments to pay off.

MacWorld Asia will be held in 2nd-5th, August in Beijing. Today, we are very happy to announce that as the official partner of MacWorld Asia, TechNode will be hosting a half-day Developer Forum in the afternoon of 3rd August at CNCC.

The forum is compose of three sessions: Mobile Games, Design of Apps, Product and Marketing which we believe are the most important keywords for app developers. We are also thrilled to have a couple of great speakers from local big companies such as CEO Kingsoft, Director of Tencent Open Platform, from international companies such as Popcap, Flipboard, EverNote etc, from wel-known local startups such as Chukong Co. Inc., SNSGames, Intsig, Domob and from academy, Hunan University, The Central Academy of Fine Arts etc.

To be a good developer in the mobile industry, you need not only good knowledge of latest technology, but also good sense of product design and marketing strategy.

Please do come if you are free, and it should be fun and worthy of your time!

The detailed agenda below:

13:00-13:30 Registration
13:30-13:50 Keynote by Fu Sheng, CEO of Kingsoft

Sesstion I: Mobile Games

13:50-14:10 Keynote by Gray Mi, Director of Mobile Popcap Asia
14:10-14:50 Panel Discussion:

Gang Lu, TechNode.com (MD)
Jia Yan, VP of Chukong Co. Inc (producer of very popular iOS game, FishinJoy)
DIAO Jinchong, VP of Yinpei Games (Unreal Engine)
XU Lei, CEO of SNSGames (publisher of Zombie Farm)

14:50-15:10 Keynote by Shi Jing, Manager of Tencent Open Platform

Session II: Design of Apps

15:10-15:30 Keynote by VP of Product, Flipboard
15:30-16:10 Panel Discussion:

Zhuohao Wu, Director of UE, Innovation Works (MD)
Prof. Fei Jun, Interactive Design, The Central Academy of Fine Arts
Prof. Ji Tie, Vice Dean of Design Institute, Hunan University
Zhang Wei, Co-founder & Chief Innovation Director, EICO

Session III: Product and Marketing

16:10-16:30 Keynote by Eric Chen, Marketing Director of EverNote
16:30-17:10 Panel Discussion:

Linda Jiang, VP of UMeng (MD)
Samuel Chen, Account Manager of IntSig
Xinhua Liu, CMO of Kingsoft
He Zhang, CEO of Domob
Seng Li, VP of Dolphin Browser

Founded 2009, WebGeek Philippines, is a community that serves as a venue for Geeks, Developers, Startups and Tech Enthusiast in Philippine. WebGeek has organized and hosted several major events over the past years as part of WebGeek advocacy to create a thriving community of like-minded tech and startup devotees.

Pinged by John Arce, founder of WebGeek Philippines,

On August 25, 2012, WebGeek Philippines will bring you the WebGeek DevCup, an all-day hackathon extravaganza that will give rise to the most creative and most skillful team to deliver the best web application.

John told us, “in this day-long hackathon, each team will be given six hours to develop a web application based on the theme to be given that day. Presentations will be delivered from 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM. During this time, teams are expected to have accomplished a web app that will either be fully or partially functional. The web apps will be evaluated according to technical complexity, user experience, social relevance, and originality. The panel of judges consists of seasoned gurus in the field of web application development. Registered participants only need to bring their own laptop and development tools (pre-packaged libraries, widgets, and frameworks), and Internet connection, power, space, food, and drinks will be provided.”

The details about this hackathon and registration can be found here.

If you are not that familiar with Philippine startup scene, we highly suggest you read this great post on SGEntrepreneurs.

Jiepang just updated its API platform to provide improved POI data and algorithm that developers could better tap into. The new categorized sorting method coming along with the revamped API will significantly accelerate the growth of location-based startup apps. Meanwhile Jiepang now supports contents synced from 3^rd party app, which allows users of 3^rd party apps to post locations and pictures to Jiepang. Not only does Jiepang shares it’s POI data, but also opens a door for partners to capitalize on its 3.3 million users.

Jiepang as of now has partnered with hundreds of popular social media apps such as Weico, a 3^rd party app for Sina Weibo, and Camera 360, etc. Weico integrated Jiepang into its app so people who use Weibo can check into their whereabouts directrly from Weibo, the quite popular Sina Weibo mobile client.

Weico co-founder and business development director fu Jingnan thought that the update has presented a better playground for the Chinese LBS service through the new API platform.

Over the past months Jiepang has been seeing fast growth of POI (points of interests, 2500 being created per day) as well as the picking up of active users who’re dedicated to improve the quality of each POI.

Yang Yuancheng, co-founder of Jiepang said that the service now has over 2 million POIs under its belt, the number is growing at about 14k per week.

JFDI (the Joyful Frog Digital Incubator), founded in 2010, is one of the earliest startup incubators based in Singapore. Although on its official site it gives the reasons why they chose this name, I really love its un-official one: Just F*cking Do It, which sounds perfect for doing startups.

Recently at the HUB Singapore, a nice co-working space located at Somerset road, I bumped into the founders of JFDI, Hugh Mason and Meng Wong who were doing a workshop with a group of first freshman from the Singapore University of Technology and Design.

“There are more and more startup incubators set up in China, which I can understand because the market there is massive and we are not lacking of startups.” I said the Hugh, “but Singapore is a small market, how successful can you drive a startup incubator you think?”

“Singapore market is small, but the market itself has its unique characteristics, for example, the mixture of culture, the very international local community etc, which actually creates loads of opportunities for startups to solve all sorts of problems. And Singapore is also the tech hub of South East Asia, it’s common to see Singapore-based startups with focus on South East Asia market. JFDI’s focus is on digital applications made in Asia, for Asia, not just for Singapore”, said Hugh.

Meng Wong explained to me how JFDI’s accelerator program works. Each startup selected by JFDI will be given S$15,000 pre-seed funding and JFDI takes 5-20% of the equity depending on the stage of this project. The startups are given 100 days before the final Demo day when each startup will give a talk on stage to pitch ten of investors invited by JFDI.

JFDI just finished its first semester. The outcome seems pretty good, about 60-70% of the startup incubated will close seed funding in the next few weeks, totalling around S$4million. Hugh and Meng are definitely happy with it. Talking about the future plan of JFDI, Hugh said that there will not be another edition of the program for this year. “It’s the first program we’ve done and it’s quite successful, but there is lots for us to review and think what we were good at and what could be improved. Starting from next year, we are planning to run similar program twice a year, and by end of 2015, we want to accelerate 100 startups!” Obviously, JFDI believes that startup incubator model can work very well in Singapore.

ShopSpot, a C2C mobile app that makes buying and selling items as easy as sending a tweet.

Kark Mobile Education, a B2C tablet game platform using collectible QR cards to make 4–12 year old children masters of a simulated world.

Tradegecko, a B2B web-based service providing supply chain management for independent brands and their retailers.

Remember, a B2C mobile app is the family Time Capsule in your pocket that makes it simple to capture and relive memories on your smartphone.

FamilyKo, a B2C multi-platform app that allows families separated by business to bond and grow together.

Flocations, a B2C web travel service that visualizes nearby destinations on an interactive map, so leisure travellers can browse by budget and book their next getaway in minutes, not hours.

Fetch Fans, a B2B web service that gives brand franchises with local businesses control and analytics as they use social media to maximise impact for all their franchisees.

Trafflers, a B2C web service that makes it fun to discover and plan vacations with friends, thereby increasing the frequency and size of group travel bookings online.

Stubb, a B2B document sharing service for the masses that connects your printer to the cloud. Anything you can print, you can publish online.

Wildby, a fun talking encyclopedia on your iPhone that 5 to 12 year olds can enjoy without needing any literacy skills.

TribeHired, the social recruitment platform for fast-growing start-ups that puts friends to work.

It’s been a long while that the “Made in China” represents cheap and low quality. But this needs to be changed, and in the global mobile industry we have seen the change already: Tens of Chinese mobile application and games developers have started rocking. They are based in China, but their focus is on oversea market and earning U.S. dollars;

We know sooner or later, Chinese internet companies will go abroad and try to conquer the global market. It is the trend, and we thought Chinese big companies such as Tencent, Baidu etc will take the lead, but we are wrong, in fact the companies already in the journey to the west are mostly Chinese startups, mainly from mobile industry.

A big Thanks to Google which gave us the opportunity to bring a group of China startups to visit Silicon Valley during Google IO conference. These startups you may never heard of their names, but I bet many of you have tried their applications or games. As Leon Zhao, the head of Mobile, online partnership group at Google China, said in his speech at our San Francisco event,

If we do a simple math, these startups actually present over 410 millions downloads in the global mobile app economy.

It’s a journey to the West which you should be aware of. So in this series of posts, we will try to give an in-depth report on these companies, and analyze why they are taking this move and what are the difficulties they are facing.

First of all, let’s solute to these Chinese startups which are rocking the global mobile market!

INTSIG is the premier provider of innovative mobile applications specializing in pattern recognition and image processing. INTSIG holds hundreds of Independent Property Rights and patents for Optical Character Recognition, Handwriting Recognition, Image Processing and so forth. With expertise in delivering simple but effective applications among different mobile handsets, INTSIG develops a portfolio of applications comprising CamCard, CamScanner and CamDictionary to enable users to digitize access and manage information anytime and anywhere more effectively. As a leading business application provider, INTSIG has been partnering with leading operators, mobile manufacturers all over the world such as Softbank Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, Motorola, Samsung, HTC, Lenovo, ZTE and etc. Furthermore, INTSIG provides custom-made enterprise solutions such as business card scanning, document scanning and management, business contact management, expense management and so on.

DroidHen is a leading game provider on Android platform. It’s based in Hangzhou and founded by several graduates from Zhejiang University. DroidHen’s games has got over 160 million total downloads with high ratings by users. The company is invested by Sequoia Capital, but as Andrew Zhang said to us, they have not really used that funding yet, because the company has positive cash flow since the first day. One of its games, Defender was ranked Games.com’s Top 10 Free Android Games of 2011. DroidHen has done a great achievement in the global mobile market, but surprisingly they don’t have any representative based in U.S. and the founders have never visited the West before. Reported by InsideSocialGames, DroidHen is the top 3 targets Zynga might consider to acquire.

TouchPal is one of the fastest growing mobile startups in China. It is the top 6 finalists of TechCrunch Disrupt, the winner of GSMA Mobile Innovation Award at MWC, and the partner developer at Google I/O. It is 2nd largest mobile input solution provider in the world and has over 50 million users worldwide, and has shipped with over 20% of Android phones worldwide. Rumor says the company might sign a big contract with U.S. top mobile operator Sprint which means Sprint’s contracted phones will have TouchPal pre-installed. TouchPal is making millions of dollars from the mobile operators which pay license fee for pre-installation.

3G.cn, established in March 2004, is the pioneer of China’s free mobile internet, and is the leading mobile internet company. The company owns China’s earliest and largest mobile internet portal, 3G.cn, and the Go apps, which consist of a series of mobile applications that were developed based on the multiple operating system platforms. Ever since its establishment, 3G Portal has had over 170 million registered users and more than 25 million active users daily. Since 2010, 3G.CN has quickly turned to the operating system platforms, such as Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. Currently on the global market, 15 of the company’s apps have been downloaded for more than 200 million times, for instance, Go Launcher, GO SMS and Go locker, etc.  Among them several apps have been ranked the first on Google Play Store.

InfoLife focuses on developing productivity apps for android devices. Their apps, such as Advanced Task Manager, Easy Uninstaller etc have been downloaded for more than 30 millions times in total. It’s a 5-person small company which is making good money without raising any venture capitals. TANG Chen, the co-founder of InfoLife said to us, he spent a day to develop the first version of the Advanced Task Manager and did not expect it can drive that many of downloads. The company is working on its first home application for Android which will bundle with its popular apps, Tang said.

TopGame is a Beijing-based mobile game developer. It was founded in April 2010 by Xu Le and Leon Qiu, and now has over 60 people in the team. Xu Le who also founded the company SNSGame, was recently featured in FORTUNE China’s 2012 list of top 40 business elites under the age of 40. TopGame has a global user base of over 10 million, and it is the exclusive publishers of Zombie Farm, the world’s 6th biggest iPhone game, in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia.

The companies listed above are just good representatives of those travelers, and there are tens of more. These companies are growing at different stage, some are ready to set up office in the west, some are looking for local representative for expanding business and marketing purpose, and some others are still learning the market.

The reasons drive these companies go abroad are also varied, so coming next, The Journey to the West (Part II) – Why the West? is it Better than Home …

Chinese mobile ads platform Guohe just earned itself a top award at the Smarties(TM) 2012 China ceremony of the Mobile Marketing Association for its Starbucks Crhistmas promotion case that calls on tens of thousands of young Chinese people to flock into Startbucks to tweet and check in at the coffee franchise for a yuletide drink upgrade.

Guohe won both the Gold Award for Mobile Interaction and Special Gold Award of all categories, which means Guohe will get to introduce their Chinese wireless marketing case studies to the rest of the world.

How did Guohe make this happen? Well, the mobile ads company got started a two-week-long “Let’s Merry” campaign by baking banners ads featuring Starbucks into some quality Chinese mobile apps ranged from magazine app Business Value, Weico a iOS client for Chinese Twitter Sina Weibo to China’s Foursquare Jiepang. The ads called upon users to change the default app theme to a Starbucks theme by downloading a “Let’s Merry” app skin and to use social media sharing and LBS check-in functions to spread the words.

Users could easily check in at a Starbucks using Jiepang, and message their friends using Sina Weibo. Guohe took the “Let’s Merry” campaign one step further by integrating yet another medium: Outdoor ads placements. A large electronic billboard at Raffles City in Shanghai lit up with special Christmas wishes enabled once enough people had checked in on the Starbucks ad.

During the promotion, total Starbucks brand exposure totaled 4.6 million impressions. 670,000 people participated in the promotion. 450,000 users downloaded the “Let’s Merry” branded app skin. 40,000 tweeted about Starbucks, 60,000 checked in via Jiepang, 27,000 downloaded the Starbucks badge via Jiepang for an upgraded Starbucks drink, and as many as 21,000 people followed Starbucks in a single day.

Starbucks said that the campaign was the very first trial for them as well to integrate mobile advertising in our marketing matrix, and was impressed by its efficiency in converting mobile users into actual consumers. Neo Zhang, co-founder of Guohe Ad said that the Beijing-based would keep on innovating and bringing more new and fresh ad formats for advertisers and mobile media.

Oftentimes, we heard of developers complaining about difficulties in monetizing their offerings that took a lot of money and energy to build up. The cruel truth is, a lot of app developers couldn’t make money off their products, while the rest who did make money, they did so by branching out into overseas market. We once mentioned that “every iOS app download generated only an averaged $0.03 in China, which is only 1/10 of the $0.28 generated from every download in the US and half of the $0.06 in Vietnam.”

San Francisco-based Chartboost is trying to solve the problems for Chinese developer by help them monetize their games in the international markets, particularly in the fast-growing Asian markets. Dozens of Chinese game developers are now monetizing their iOS and Android apps by making deals with and promoting apps from Chartboost’s growing network of more than 1,500 games, according to the service.

Developers can use Chartboost to address and capture a large and monetizable international market. We recently wrote that the Chinese market only accounted for an average of 1.53% of the Top 10 developers’ total revenue. Beijing-based App Annie, a Apple Store Analytics and Market Intelligence firm, has found that the these top 10 Chinese players are mostly game developers.

Pictured below are the ‘score cards’ of a typical Chartboost user. 

English tech media, sometimes including us, always love to report this type of news: XXX site(s) is/are blocked in China. I found it’s really boring, as the majority of Chinese Internet users actually dose NOT care about the existence of any of them, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook whatever. So services are not accessible from China, fine, not big deal?! We understand People who are reporting or reading this may expect some change, but be realistic, the situation could be like this for another long while, I am sure.

However, when you think over about this from another angle. It’s been years, none of the replacements of these un-accessible services is Good enough and make us proud. I mean, it’s fine even if we don’t have Google, Facebook etc, as long as we can develop some similar service with the same quality. But so far we don’t have any, that sucks and we should feel embarrassing!

I am a big fan of Google, I am still using Google for web search in China, and am even a paid user of gmail even though I have to suffer its unstability from time to time. But that’s just a small piece of Google offers to the human being. When I am in San Francisco, I see friends using Google NOW and Voice search which is accurate and efficient; using Google map to find places and direction,  and Google Navigation for free navigation; using Google plus and Google Calendar to share and organize your life moments; and using Google Drive to collaborate with colleagues on work; using Google Wallet to check-out at street shop. Google is so powerful, and so useful.

But look at what Baidu’s doing? Baidu’s the No.1 in web search and operating like money machine because Google’s out, but for the consumer, what else impact it is bringing to our daily life? I am not aware of any. RenRen, the so-called Chinese Facebook, seems completely losing its way since its IPO, a company lives with no dream!

Google, Facebook is changing the world, but no one can change China. Give us some service which are good enough to make us forget about Google, Facebook etc, can we?

Only Apple is avalable in China, it may has great chance, but it changes China from totally different way, the Apple’s hardware, is definitely changing the way of how chinese spend the money on digital life.

We wrote about the “Jiepang X Starbucks” cooperation in promoting NFC (Near-field communication) technology last year, the two just announced the 2^nd anniversary of their partnership, by giving customers unprecedented beneficial packages activated through checking-in at any Starbucks retail stores in eastern China (including Shanghai, Jiangsu province and Zhejiang province).

People who check into any Starbucks in the aforementioned places and share the check-ins to other SNS services like Sina Weibo, Renren and QZone would be awarded with Starbucks branded Frappuccino®virtual badge. What’s more interesting is, people who has one badge under belt can apply for the however-you-want-it workshop where coffee masters will teach you how to make a cup of coffee that only for you.

Starbucks certainly is one of the longest and most creative partners of Jiepang with two years of partnership. The coffee franchise is very popular in China, as Dave Liu, co-founder and CEO of Jiepang noted that ”Starbucks has always been the most check-in spot among Jiepang users. You can find traces of Jiepang users’ check-ins in every Starbucks retail store through the tips and photos they have posted.” An infographic made by Jiepang showed that since Jiepang first launched in 2010, 409k users have checked in at Starbucks via the service in Greater China region with 810k check-ins generated.

And these data gathered from check-ins and UGC tips, could be well leveraged to bring more fun and excitement to Jiepang users and also to better serve Jiepang partners with more consumer insights, according to Dave.

Chinese consumers have grown accustomed to the annual summer promotion buzz when major Chinese B2C sites like 360buy, Amazon, Dangdang and Taobao Mall tout to  buyers with discounts, rebates. And now the buzz for the first time spread to the OTA sector with eLong, MangoCity and Ctrip successively announcing big money for the OTA price warfare.

Chinese meta search Qunar might be the few ones that remain cautious and behave differently in comparison with its peers, the company said it’d spend US$ 30 million to develop a Travel Service Intelligent Platform to provide more upgraded and consistent user experience to its customers.

The new platform, according to the company, consists of a bundle of services like call center service, guaranteed booking service dubbed “Danbaotong”, third-party payment integration, fast track orders processing, real-time reaction to complaints and complete monitoring of user complaint process, which enable 3rd party agencies to reduce their costs and concentrate on providing cost-effective products.

When you read call center, don’t picture yourself a giant office seated by rows and rows of operators, Qunar said its call center will have only 60 people, and the number won’t grow magnificently. Well, all thanks to its intelligent platform. The call center is meant for handling after-booking issues, customers need to provide their order number to get access, then Qunar will prioritize all these calls based on flight departing/hotel check-in time, namely based on figuring out which call is more urgent – that’s why they need the order number. For example, customer A and B dial in at the same time, A’s flight departs in 10 minutes while for B it’s more than 2 hours. Apparently Qunar will pick up customer A’s call first.

Considering Qunar’s popularity, one concern might be, with the fast-paced growth of business, could just 60 people handle it all even with the intelligent platform’s help? Qunar said that more operators would be added if need be, but not likely it’ll turn into a thousand people team cause that doesn’t fit into Qunar’s technology guru gene. And the Beijing-based company believes that a call center of 60 people plus a highly efficient IT system can finish what usually needs over 6,000 people to do in other companies. With such service platform, Qunar’s partners can increase their capabilities by 10 times.

As of now, Qunar boasts more than 1400 staff while more than half of which or 700 of them are R&D related. When it comes to partners, Qunar has signed up with almost all flight OTAs in China, and more than tens of thousands of hotel OTAs, including TravelbyEye, Lvxinjia, and Star of Sanya, to name a few.

Kayak, the U.S. meta search filed to go public just now, and when asked about Qunar’s IPO planning, it responded that they’re waiting for the right timing as market condition turns around, though there’s no exact time table for that.

Speaking of the current price war, Qunar thinks it’s a sign that prices of travel services are now finally on a track back to rational. Chinese travel services have long been criticized as anything but transparent. The price war would certainly help reduce the opacity, which eventually will benefit all customers and the whole industry.

We’re written Path clone, then we’ve written Path clone again, and then we’ve written them again and again. And now its Sina Weibo, the most popular Chinese SNS’s turn to pay tribute to the Valley-based private SNS community.

Sina Weibo just launched its own approach to Path, dubbed Meyou, (translates to Close Friends in Chinese). Meyou also lets people keep in close touch with close friends by sharing “location, photos, posts” and so on. You can log in directly with your Weibo account, and all your connections on Weibo will be automatically transferred to the app, though you need to add them one by one again as “close friends” in Meyou because all these connections are open on Sina Weibo for its one-way follow mechanism.

photo credit: TechWOM

In addition to the sharing feature, Meyou enhanced weibo’s private messaging feature, you can message your Weibo friends from the app, just like what you can do with the official Sina Weibo mobile app.

It seems to many that, just like Twitter will never make a Facebook, Sina Weibo will never make a QZone or Tencent Pengyou because of its rooted openness. So Sina Weibo now comes up with a “hypercorrection”, making an app like Path that is even more closed than Facebook.

Prior to the launch of Meyou, Sina Weibo debuted another new product called Weiba as the latest addition to the grand Weibo product arsenal. Just like we said before, Sina Weibo is heavily leveraging on the platform to produce a flurry of products to ramp up user stickiness and, probably potential revenue sources.

BesTV NewMedia just announced that it had acquired 35% of Funshion for US$ 30 million, a move to help the company branch out into multiple platforms. Founded by SMG (Shanghai Media Group) in 2005, Shanghai-based BesTV is one of the first Chinese IPTVs.

Funshion was also set up in 2005. The service developed its own patent technology like FSP to speed up P2P-powered online video streaming. It currently provides users with Windows client, iOS apps (for both iPhone and iPad) and Android app. Previously a Windows client is required to play around with its vast video repository, even if you just want to watch the video from browser. The restriction was later on removed because it though to some extend prompts some people to install Funshion’s Windows client but also send more prospective users away, especially when all the other video sites like iQiyi, Youku and Sohu Video open up to anyone.

As of now, Funshion claims a DAU of 20 million on a total of 270 million registered users. It’s client software ranked top three among its peers.

In addition to video streaming, Funshion also built up a SNS centered on TV shows and movies and an ad network dubbed AdVideo in 2008. According to Funshion, AdVideo generated RMB over tens of millions in revenue in 2008.

Funshion has always been an advocate of long video or premium contents, while Youku and Tudou first started as UGC service and then pivoted to the so-called Hulu model, namely attracting users as well as advertisers with quality contents.

BesTV believes that the acquisition will achieve some sort of synergy between the two on fronts like technology, content, marketing and so on. It’ll also ramp up BesTV’s strength on Internet.

According to a report by market researcher Niko Partners, China’s mobile game players will hit 192 million by the end of this year, surpassing the number of PC players in China, which is expected to reach 180 million by year-end.

Another point raised in the report is that mobile game revenue is likely to grow six times  from last year’s $600 million to billion dollars in the next five years.

VentureBeat cited Lisa Cosmas Hanson, the managing partner of Niko Partners saying that “Niko projects fast growth in mobile games revenue in China led by the rising adoption of 3G usage, soaring sales of smartphones from a wide array of vendors, and the desire to play entertaining, inexpensive games on these smart mobile devices”.

Well, let’s take a look at some numbers.

According to ad agency GroupM Interaction, by 2011 in China there’re:

• 190 million smartphone users
• 360 million mobile Internet users
• 120 million 3G subscribers

which means at least 240 million mobile users access mobile Internet via much slower 2G network. And according to GSMA, China’s mobile Internet speed ranked second to last, only better than India.

My point here is, without a relatively mature mobile Internet infrastructure, China’s mobile gaming industry might not grow at the expected fast pace. Meanwhile, lacking of sophisticated mobile payment solution and attractive mobile titles are the other factors that hinder mobile monetization across the board.

screenshot of Wei Zhuang, a popular mobile game by Tencent

Xiaomi could generate a gross profit margin of more than 20% percent on its own-branded smartphone, according to a teardown analysis by a Chinese semiconductor analyst.

Xiaomi phone’s profit margin is always a mystery to outsiders. Lei Jun, founder and CEO of the company first claimed to make not even a dime off hardware, saying software and Internet services are how Xiaomi makes money. Later on he admitted that the company gets RMB between 100 and 200 yuan by selling every Xiaomi phone. On the other hand, Zhou Hongyi, CEO of Qihoo 360 which just jumped into the own-branded smartphone war of Chinese Internet companies and launched its own smartphone AK47, insisted that the profit margin for Xiaomi phone could be as high as RMB 700 – 800 yuan.

Liu Hui, a Chinese semiconductor analyst concluded after a teardown analysis that the reasonable profit margin for Xiaomi phone would be 20%, or more than RMB 400 – 500 yuan, while the cost for Xiaomi phone is around 1500 yuan.

An Analysys International analyst said that, Chinese phone vendors’ profit margin varies as some could get up to 40% while the others could only get as low as 10%. So Xiaomi’s 20% is not a bad score.

Especially in a time when the so-claimed “making money off Internet service rather than on hardware” practice hasn’t been really proved yet.

Tencent, the largest Chinese Internet company by market cap just debuted a major revamp of its homepage with simplified layout and deeper integration of the company’s social network offerings like Tencent Weibo, QZone and Pengyou.

On the new homepage, a big Soso-powered search box is placed right next to the logo of QQ.com, highlighting the importance of Soso Tencent’s search effort.

A small toolbar that integrated QQMail, QZone, Pengyou and Tencent Weibo is pinned on the top right corner, where you’ll get real-time notification across these sites.

In the middle of the homepage, people who logged in will see the stock trends of their own picks, new episodes from their most watched shows on Tencent Video and so on.

The overhaul implied that Tencent again led its peers in riding the trends of personalization of Internet. These new personalized modules cater to everyone’s needs and then display suitable contents to them accordingly. Unlike the previous version where different people see the same old thing, now different people log into QQ.com and then will discover contents curated just for them.

Chinese portal site’s homepage has long been criticized for too long too messy that sometimes chokes people’s eyes. Refer to Sina and Sohu if you want to see for yourself, and hopefully Tencent is making a great start that people would follow. Stop choking our eyes!

screenshot of Tencent’s new homepage

According to a Weibo post by Gan Jiawei, CEO of Meituan, the Chinese group buying site, the service just hit RMB 407 million in sales.

“An hour and a half ago, group buying marches into the era of 400 million yuan.”

Founded in early 2010 by Wang Xin, serial entrepreneur who gave birth to Xiaonei (acquired and rebranded as Renren later on), Meituan first crossed 250 million sales in last November, the first Chinese daily deal site to grab in 200 million monthly sales. Again in this March, Meituan announced to record 300 million sales, making it the first to achieve so.

According to the Beijing-based company, Meituan generated RMB more than 1.819 billion last year.

Chinese group buying market has been seeing the downturn trend since last year, a Tuan800 report shows that by the end of last month there’re only 2996 group buy services in China, almost halved from its more than 5500 high in last year.

Duowan reportedly acquired photo-sharing app Tuitu at RMB tens of millions. Both parties didn’t comment on the matter when being approached. Guangzhou-based Duowan is a gaming portal site that provides industry news, game downloads and so on.

Tuitu rose to the scene amist the Instagram heat last year. With the app, you can take and beautify a picture before syncing it into the mainstream Chinese social networks including Sina Weibo, Renren, Kaixin001 and so on.

It’s powerful photo beautifying functions allow users to one-click enhance pictures by using filters, create personal photo diary by collaging pictures and add text bubble and frame etc.

Currently there’re many similar apps in China, like PhotoWonder (acquired by Baidu), Camera360, Camera+, Meitu Xiuxiu and so on. Though sharing a dream of becoming the Chinese Instagram, brutal reality tells them it’s not happening anytime soon.

They all failed to curate an engaging photo-sharing community in addition to just being a tool, even though some like Meitu Xiuxiu claims more than 100 million users on PC front and 40 million on mobile.

While its siblings are still in the living struggle, being acquired could be a positive thing for Tuitu, it could be further developed or integrated into Duowan’s services. Duowan also owns a very popular real-time video and audio service dubbed YY.

By end of 2011, China has over 513 million Internet users and 356 million mobile Internet users. China’s now the biggest internet market in the world and it’s mobile Internet market is also the hottest sector in which we see more and more startups working on apps and mobile games. Thanks to the globalization of app market, we have seen quite a few local mobile apps and mobile games startups which are doing great jobs in oversea market in terms of revenue, user base and innovation.

TechNode.com is the leading and very influential bilingual tech blog covering China tech news, especially Chinese startups. For the first time, TechNode will hold its event in San Francisco and bring the best China mobile apps and mobile game developer companies to local tech communities, thanks to Google IO 2012! The event is sponsored by Silicon Valley Bank and supported by SF City Hall and ChinaSF.

Online registration here: http://technode2012us.eventbrite.com/

Date/Time: 3pm – 6pm (registration opens at 2:30pm)

Venue: Soma Central, Suite 535, Steuart Tower, 1st Market St.

The speakers and companies include:

1. Robin Cao – VP of 3G.cn
2. Samuel Chen/Michael Zhen – Co-Founders of Intsig
3. Andrew Zhang – Co-founder of DroinHen
4. Michael Wang – Co-founder and CEO of TouchPal
5. TANG Chen – Co-Founder of INFOLIFE
6. XU Le – Founder of TopGame
7. Leon Zhao – Head of Mobile, Online Partnerships Group, Google China
8. Gang LU – Founder of TechNode.com
9. Fu Sheng – CEO of KingSoft

They will present their great works and share their valuable experience on China and Global mobile internet. If you are interested in getting in touch with them, learning about China mobile internet in practice, the trend of global mobile game market etc, please do come to join us.

The following are brief introduction of each companies:

3G.CN was established in March, 2004. It is the pioneer of China’s free mobile internet, and is the leading mobile internet company. The company owns China’s earliest and largest mobile internet portal, 3G.cn, and the Go apps, which consist of a series of mobile applications that were developed based on the multiple operating system platforms. Ever since its establishment, 3G Portal has had over 170 million registered users and more than 25 million active users daily. The web traffic and the number of users of 3G Portal are far leading at the first place. Since 2010, 3G.CN has quickly turned to the operating system platforms, such as Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. Currently on the global market, 15 of the company’s apps have been downloaded for more than 200 million times, for instance, Go Launcher, GO SMS and Go locker, etc. Among them several apps have been ranked the first on Google Play Store.

DroidHen is a leading game provider on Android platform. Invested by Sequoia Capital, DroindHen’s Defender is ranked Games.com’s Top 10 Free Android Games of 2011. It has over 150 MM total downloads with high ratings by users.

TouchPal is one of the fastest growing mobile startups in China. It is the top 6 finalist of TechCrunch Disrupt, the winner of GSMA Mobile Innovation Award at MWC, and the partner developer at Google I/O. It has over 50 million users worldwide, and has shipped with over 20% of Android phones worldwide.

INTSIG is the premier provider of innovative mobile applications specializing in pattern recognition and image processing. INTSIG holds hundreds of Independent Property Rights and patents for Optical Character Recognition, Handwriting Recognition, Image Processing and so forth. With expertise in delivering simple but effective applications among different mobile handsets, INTSIG develops a portfolio of applications comprising CamCard, CamScanner and CamDictionary to enable users to digitize access and manage information anytime and anywhere more effectively. As a leading business application provider, INTSIG has been partnering with leading operators, mobile manufacturers all over the world such as Softbank Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, Motorola, Samsung, HTC, Lenovo, ZTE and etc. Furthermore, INTSIG provides custom-made enterprise solutions such as business card scanning, document scanning and management, business contact management, expense management and so on.

INFOLIFE focuses on developing productivity apps for android devices. Their apps such as Advanced Task Manager, Easy Uninstaller have been downloaded for more than 30millions times in total.

TopGame Global Limited is a mobile game developer located in the heart of Beijing. Topgame was founded in April 2010 by Xu Le and Leon Qiu, and now has over 60 people in the team. Xu Le was also featured in FORTUNE China’s 2012 list of top 40 business elites under the age of 40. TopGame has a global user base of over 10 million. It is the exclusive publishers of Zombie Farm, the world’s 6th biggest iPhone game, in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia.

Chinese mobile ad exchange Adwo announced that it has raised US$ 12 million in Series B round of financing led by Translink and Japan’s Vangoo Investment Partners.

The Beijing-based company raised a million dollars first round in the first half of 2011.

According to Wang Xudong, CEO of Adwo, that the company’s ad network now covers more than 80 million smartphones and over 20,000 mobile apps in China with a monthly sale of RMB 10 million. They’re targeting RMB 100 million sales in this year.

Wang also revealed that they’re planning branch offices in Hong Kong and Japan.

Mobile advertising sector has been seeing momentum growth as smartphone shipments skyrocketing in China. A bunch of creative startups including ad networks like MadHouse, MediaV, Adwo and Admob and aggregators like GuoheAd and Adview emerged upon the scene to tap into the mobile shifting trend.

Lei Jun, chairman and CEO of Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi announced today that the company has completed a US$ 216 million Series C round of financing last week, the new funding valued the company at US$ 4 billion. Investors were not disclosed due to non-disclosure agreement.

Xiaomi Funding Records

Series A   late 2010   $41M  MorningSide, Qiming Ventures, IDG

Series B   Dec 2011   $90M  Qiming, IDG, Qualcomm, MorningSide, Temasek

Series C  June 2012  $216M  Undisclosed investors

As we noted before that Xiaomi phone which was characterized by its low price tag and strong tech spec has gained traction among consumers in tier-2 and tier-3 cities where people might not familiar with iPhone but they certainly heard of Xiaomi through word-of-mouth recommendation.

Lei Jun once revealed that the company has sold more than 3 million Xiaomi phones since it was made available on market last Oct. Not sure how much credit we could give to that though.

In addition to Xiaomi, the past months have seen many Chinese Internet companies tapping into the trend of “making my own phone”, I’m talking about Baidu, Qihoo, Shanda and Alibaba.

The Android powered smartphone which comes in Toshiba or Sharp 4 inches screen, Qualcomm 1.5G Duo-core CPU, Samsung RAM, 800M camera is targeting 5 million shipments by the end of this year, according to Lei.

Flipboard, the iOS app which “revolutionized publishing world” just announced launching an Android edition in China in the wake of the app made it to Google Play in its home turf.

In addition to Google Play, considering the fact that a vast majority of Chinese Android users choose 3rd party app markets over the original Google Play ‘for some reason’ (not saying it), Flipboard also partnered with two local Android app distributor — Wandoujia and AppChina — to promote the new edition. Wandoujia which claimed 40 million downloads could be deemed as the iTunes for Android devices, while AppChina is more like a 3rd party Android markets. Both were incubated by Kaifu Lee’s Innovation Works and raised tens of millions dollars in their previous fundings.

Wang Junyu, co-founder of Wandoujia said that “Flipboard and Wandoujia both aspire for a design concept of simplicity and elegance. We hope the partnership could promote the value of design among Chinese Android developers.”

In a public speech in China last month, Mike McCue, founder and CEO of the company once said that “in engineer-driven companies like Google in the U.S. and Baidu in China, designing Internet product is all about data. This is especially true for Google, which is well-known for its data-powered product design discipline”. Mike, though acknowledging the importance of data in the craftsmanship, suggested that sometimes it’s better to leave data alone while add emotions and soul to the product if one is looking to making ground-breaking stuff.

That discipline applies to Flipboard, as well as many other apps that aspire for better design to stand out from the crowd.

You can download the Android edition from Wandoujia (link) or AppChina (link).

Ever since Fab.com made its name with the flash sale model, we’ve witnessed some of its alternations sprang up in China, while the latest one of those caught our eye, is 51yugou.com, which just went online about two months ago.

In general, it’s website resembles the feel of Fab.com, with some differentiations. For example, the service which has its own buying team in Seoul, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan and Holland added a Voting section where users can vote for their favorite product so the company could decide on what to sell based on customer feedbacks.

Voting up an item you like is easy, just click on the heart-shaped icon will do.

It’s current offerings covers a wide range from artistry items, kitchen supplies, furniture, accessories, stationary, gadgets, pet supplies, lamps, gifts and so on. You can filter the site to see what fit you by categories, price range and even color.

Hiris Tam, CEO of the site doesn’t think they’re just another clone of Fab, his goal is to “surpass Fab.com in every way.”

51yugou.com links its account to a bunch of popular SNS in China, including Sina Weibo, QQ account, Douban and Taobao. It also rewards users with cash for inviting their friends.

At least for the time being, it seems that the site still couldn’t keep up with its American counterpart in terms of inventory and variety.

Jiepang, the leading Chinese location-based service, just baked its offering into the Weixin open platform with tight integration, part of the company’s broader plan of leveraging on general social networking services to further curate LBS market.

Other than linking QQ account with Jiepang, which give the LBS service access to a vast 700 million user pool, Jiepang users now could also sync their check-ins into all Tencent’s social networking offerings, like QZone, Tencent Weibo, Pengyou and of course Weixin.

Weixin debuted its open platform earlier this year, 3^rd party developers can plug their service into the platform and then share all kinds of contents – messages, audio, video, URL, pictures and check-ins – among a user’s connections.

Leveraging on Weixin is a decent step forward for Jiepang, as the former has turned itself into the No.1 of its kind in China. Weixin to date has more than 100 million registered users and more than 50 million active users. A rich land waiting to be tapped by 3^rd party apps like Jiepang.

After the heated year of LBS in 2010, the sector now gradually calms down with few players survived while many others either failed to weather the winter or pivoted itself to other service, for instance, Digu just found itself a new life in the form of Pinterest.

Jiepang which just celebrated its two-year anniversary has long explored in the realm of O2O with creative thinking and initiatives like virtual loyalty card and a system to help local merchant gain more customer insights. The company is also an early-adopter of new technologies like NFC. It teamed up with Nokia to promote NFC last year, where users can check in by scanning NFC stickers in local merchant’s window with Nokia’s NFC enabled phone. It makes check-in easier and more fun, one doesn’t have to open the app and then search for the location, it’s all done at just one touch.

We yesterday wrote about Lashou, the Chinese daily deal site, filing with SEC to withdraw its IPO plan, citing “focus on corporate development”. Niu Lihua, VP of the company, said yesterday it’s the best decision for the company, staff and shareholders both at present and in the future.

What else she also said? Local news broke that Niu didn’t rule out the possibility of a perspective initial public offering for the company if market turns around in the future. She also claimed Lashou enjoys the highest cash reserve among all peers with no less than RMB 500 million at hand.

While refused to disclose the exact number Lashou pocketed every month, Niu did mention that the revenue range is between RMB 200 and 300 million monthly.

Meituan claims to turn profitable by year’s end. Niu was thinking of the same for Lashou as well. She revealed that as of now two thirds of Lashou’s city branches are making money while Lashou as a whole has broken even. “We believe that all our city branches will be making a profit at the end of this year”, she said.

According to Tuan800, Lashou dropped out of the the Top Three in terms of monthly sales in April. Lashou fell to the fourth spot with a sales of RMB 194.07 million in April. Meituan, 55tuan and DianpingTuan made it to the Top Three with transactions of RMB 303.61 million, 264.73 million and 216.16 million respectively.

Lashou, the Chinese daily deal site yesterday filed with SEC to cancel its IPO plan.The company filed for an up to US$ 100 million IPO on October 29 last year, which was later on delayed due to auditing problem and weary market.

Founded in 2009, Lashou has raised more than US$ 166 million in three rounds of financing from investors including GSR Ventures, Rebate Network, Norwest Venture Partners, Milestone Capital, Reinet Fund SCA FIS and so on.

According to its SEC filings, Lashou generated US$ 1.62 million in revenue in 2010, while it’s net loss over the same period hit more than 10 million.

If ask Groupon, the inspiration of Lashou, it’ll probably tell you that even made it to NASDAQ  isn’t as good as it supposed to be now. The company’s stock price has been nearly halved to about 10.93 dollar in the latest trading day.

Groupon’s lifeless stock makes it harder for its Chinese counterparts to gain confidence among investors.

55Tuan, another Chinese group buying service also put its IPO planning on hold. The company scheduled to go public last year due to credibility crisis plagued market and concerns over US-listed Chinese companies‘ accounting problem at that time.

Meituan, at the same time, might be the most silent one among the IPO fancy. The company pulled in nearly RMB 380 million sales in last month, claiming to turn profitable by year-end.

Sina Weibo, the de facto King of Chinese social networking has been keeping itself quite busy with either launching new services to monetize the offering or tweaking it along the way to make it stickier.

Just two days ago, Weibo launched the long-rumored membership service, charging users RMB 10 per month to provide them with services include – fancier homepage customization, benefit to follow more than 2000 people as well as audio posts. Prior to the offering, Weibo debuted a ranking system, users can grow from Level 1 to Level 20 by staying online for at least 2 hours per day, sounds exactly like Tencent’s offering in engaging users. Both membership service and ranking system are what Tencent’s is good with. Shenzhen-based Tencent is the first one of its kind in China to devise such offerings that eventually were turned into big profit and user stickiness.

weibo membership privileges

Inspired by Tencent, Weibo also launched it’s MicroNumber (微号）service that users can register special number combination for their weibo for a fee. For example, one’s own birthday.

And yesterday, people found that in Weibo’s latest Android app, s feature called “Smart Sorting” was founded in its drop-down menu located at the top of it. Pictured below.

According to Sina, the algorithm behind the filtering mechanism lies on “who you’ve followed/tags/weibo posts” and so on.

With Sina’s portal business declining, Sina Weibo now is under a lot of pressure to monetize itself, especially with an expected US$ 164 million investment into the service in this year. As of the first quarter of this year, Sina Weibo claims more than 324 million registered users.

China Telecom, the second largest Chinese carrier announced to procure more than 40 million CDMA phones in a concerted effort with channels and retail chains like Suning and Gome. The move is a positive sign for China’s 3G market which seems to be plateaued.

 Yang Xiaowei, deputy GM of the carrier said that as of this April there’re more than 400 firms in the CDMA upstream segment of value chain, including 200 phone manufacturers which contributed over 1300 terminals.

 China Telecom now owns the largest CDMA network in the planet by subscribers, which reached 136 million in this March.

 Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs once predicted that China will become the largest smartphone market in 2012 with more than 140 million sold, in comparison with the 137 million in North America and 115 million in Europe.

 Wang Xiaochu, chairman of China Telecom said last week that China’s 3G market has reached an inflection point, the huge 2G users will be getting started moving toward 3G.

 As China Telecom and China Unicom are scrambling for the market, China Mobile, the de facto king of 2G services with a market share of 72% which lost its dominance in 3G area, is betting big on 4G, the next generation of wireless. China Mobile raised in an internal conference last year that the company would make the transition from TD-SCDMA to TD-LTE in five years,

 China’s three SOE carriers all carry their own 3G technology, for China Telecom it’s CDMA2000, for China Unicom it’s WCDMA, which is more mature, while for China Mobile, it’s TD-SCDMA, a home-grown wireless technology.

photo credit: bigstockphoto

The rumor has been flying around in Chinese media that Baidu is to acquire UC, Chinese No.1 Mobile browser. According to an insider, UC was actually in talk with Baidu last year, but its $1b valuation is turned down by Baidu; later Baidu offered $400m to by 49% share of UC, which was refused by UC.

According to a report from Baidu Mobile, 33.2% of the traffic to m.baidu.com is from UC (QQ Browser generates 14.8% and Opera contributes 1.0%). Baidu does not have any super star service or application for mobile, which might leave Baidu losing the war in mobile market. The acquisition of UC could give Baidu the immediate ‘control’ of the entry to mobile internet again.

Yu Yongfu, the CEO of UC used to tell local media that UC could be listed within 2 years, and its valuation has reached $1b. So the rumor is true, it would be a cheap deal. Note that, last year Baidu paid $306m to buy 62.01% share of Qunar.

Today at Japan’s Infinity Venture Summit (IVS), NHN from Korea, the maker of LINE the world-wide popular mobile messaging application announced that LINE has reached 40 millions users in the global market, with ~25m from Japan. The most interesting comment from Jun Masuda, the CSMO of NHN Japan is that, LINE is now clearly the No.1 mobile messaging application worldwide, except Wexin (aka WeChat) which the No.1 in China, developed by Tencent.

Akira Morikawa, the head of NHN Japan said, “LINE is now the leading mobile social networks. Its users range from housewives to students. LINE has become part of Japanese daily life, and now 84% of the registered users are active monthly, 44% of the users are using smart phone.

LINE is aimed to a platform to integrate various service, such as photo filters. In future, it’s said social games could be integrated into LINE too. NHN officials admitted that the business model for LINE is still to be explored, but it’s not the company’s major concern at this stage.

Jun Masuda said LINE is growing super fast in Japan, HongKong and Taiwan. “LINE will spend more effort in those markets which are not yet dominated by Facebook, and SouthEast Asia is the current hot target.”, said Jun.

We used to report that Tencent’s Weixin (WeChat) had the ambition to conquer the world as well. But it seems that LINE has already become a very tough competitor in global market.

Finally it’s Dangdang’s turn to do so, the Chinese B2C site reportedly just launched a new service dubbed Dangdang Share to tap into the Pinterest fever over here. Over the course of past few months, we’ve seen numerous new startups doing Pinterest or big companies making similar service on top of existing offerings, like Taobao Wow (lately pivoted to Taobao Love) and Renren Guangjie.

Dangdang share is still in beta testing, it centered around on book sharing in the beginning. And of course the classical waterfall layout is all over the place (pictured below).

Hu Yi, head of Dangdang’s mobile Internet business believed that Dangdang users have the urge to share and recommend items they bought since it’s very natural for them to share.

Well, that’s exactly what Dangdang thought about when they tried to make a book rating and review service to combat Douban. Li Guoqing, founder and chairman of Dangdang, once said that Dangdang was working on something similar to Douban, so he advised Douban’s investor sell the company otherwise in a year the online community would become a ghost town.

Today Douban is still alive and kicking whereas Dangdang’s booking rating community has been totally muted in the wind.

Via: OnlineEducation.net

China’s Wikipedia Hudong is reportedly raising US$ 50 million Series C round, partly via Xpert Financial, a platform that private companies use to raise later-stage funding.

Hudong raised a total of more than US$ 45 million in previous rounds from investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetso.

Hudong is one of the largest Wikipedia-like services in China among peers like Baidu Baike, Youdao Baike and Soso Baike. It boasts more than 4.53 million users and over 6.36 million entries at the end of this February.

The service has tried many efforts to monetize its content, for instance, In April 2011, Hudong.com officially launched Baike.com, a platform of strategy importance aiming at enterprise market for monetization. And in last April, it launched a spinoff program – Xiao Baike to combine knowledge platform and commercial platform. So far these attempts didn’t seem to fare quite well.

Hudong currently is under serious attack from competitors like Baidu Baike, while new Web 2.0 style of Q&A sites including Zhihu also stole some thunder from the traditional Wikipedia offering.

The BeSuccess team is all geared up for South Korea’s first and biggest global startup event BeLaunch 2012. With 1000+ attendees, 142 startups from Korea participating in the startup battle, international investors and media, they claim to be the biggest such event in South Korea.

Told by Vallabh Rao from BeSuccess, BeLaunch2012 will have 20 startups taking part in Startup Battle Demo, 45 startups taking part in startup booths, it will be the biggest gathering of startups in Korea so far.

BeLaunch has 5 major components, it is not just another startup event with panel discussions and keynote speeches but offers startups and investors tangible networking opportunities and an opportunity to collaborate and learn.

• Part 1 Global IT/Startup Conference – Get to know the latest IT/Tech trends, startup incubation programs and learn about strategies to go global.
• Part 2 Start-up Battle – 20 Startups will compete in the beLAUNCH Startup Battle and will demo their product/service.
• Part 3 Start-up Booth – beLAUNCH 2012 is the first such event in Korea to feature startup booths . There will be 45 start-up booths present. One startup from the booths will be selected for the startup battle demo.
• Part 4 Technical Workshop – Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft will hold exclusive technical workshops during beLAUNCH 2012.
• Part 5 Networking – Networking party will be held on June 13th at 6:30PM at the conference hall.

We wish we could be there! If you will attend and are happy to blog about the event, please do let us know!

Orbis, the long-established fund bought 1.875% of Shanda Literature (or Cloundary) for US$ 15 million from Shanda Investment Holdings Ltd, as Shanda’s latest F-1 filing with SEC shows, the deal valued Shanda Literature at US$ 800 million.

Shanda made a profit for the first time in the first quarter of this year, with a net income of RMB 3.06 million on revenue of RMB 191 million.

It started planning an IPO last year, while the slump in capital market put many companies’s IPO on hold. Some of those companies, including Shanda Literature and 360buy, postponed their offering waiting for the market condition to turn to the rosy side. Shanda targeted getting listed on NYSE.

Shanda Literature to date accounted for more than 72.1% of Chinese online literature market by sales, the company has cemented its position in the market through a series of acquisition.

In addition to Shanda Literature, Orbis also invests into Sohu and NetEase, two portal sites in China.

screenshot of Shanda Literature Homepage

Guess you’ve noticed, right after Mary Meeker the Queen of Internet gave a speech about Internet trends at the D10 conference, her slide deck dubbed Internet Trends 2012 out of question dominated headlines once again.

Interestingly, though titled Internet Trends, a large chunk of the slide deck was talking about mobile Internet, on its rapid growth, its monetizing progress, its ads spending and so on.

Indeed, the the slide was eyeing the global market while China especially felt the heat over the past two years with abundant capital injecting to the market and numerous mobile-targeted startup sprang up from like no where.

However, it seems that starting the first quarter, the growth lost its momentum in China. According to Beijing-based market researcher Analysys International, in Q1 of this year, Chinese mobile Internet investment declined to US$ 52.93 million (5 disclosed cases), or down 88.1% year-over-year and 91.5% quarter-over-quarter.

While only couple months ago, in the last quarter of 2011, a total of US$ 290 million was invested into 14 cases (all disclosed cases).

Gloomy global economy, increasing concern over mobile product’s monetization ability, too many copycats without too much differentiation among other reasons altogether contributed to the shrink in mobile heat. Are we seeing it turning around soon? Probably not. For startups who already raised a timely funding before the cooling down, make the funding last, money-bleeding marketing campaign won’t be the best strategy for now. For those who failed in securing money, survival would be the first and foremost thing you should be considering about from this moment on.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto

Baidu reportedly will be integrated into iPhone for China users, the latest move of Apple to offer Chinese consumers with more tailored local services.

Prior to this, Apple has already added many China’s home-grown services like QQMail, 163 and 126 Mail (both by NetEase). And In Mountain Lion, the company’s yet-to-launch next generation of OS X will be adding more China-centered offerings, like integrating Baidu into Safari, baking Sina Weibo, Youku and Tudou into the system for quicker sharing.

Currently Baidu holds tightly a search market share of more than 78.5% in China, according to a report by Beijing-based Internet think tank Analysys International. China is one of the largest overseas market for Apple, accounting for 20% or US$ 7.9 billion of the company’s sales last quarter.

Latest news broke that Apple plans to open two new Apple Stores in Chengdu and Shenzhen, meaning there’ll be a total of 7 Apple Stores in China soon including the two in Beijing and the three in Shanghai.

Local news broke that Quixey just secured US$ 24.2 million in the second round from Atlantic Bridge Capital, SK Telecom, TransLink with participation of previous investors including US Venture Partners, WIHarper and Innovation Endeavors.

One potential tiresomeness coming along with the mobile app proliferation, is that with so many choices it’s very hard to find what just fits you. Quixey, on the other hand, smartly addresses the problem by asking “what do you want to do” and then giving accordingly app recommendations based on what you’re up to. And you need not to worry about which platform the app is on. Tomer Kagan, founder and CEO of the company, said, “Quixey is the only app search engine that connects people and apps regardless of platforms and devices”.

Basically, Quixey pulls different data like blog posts, discussions, social media contents from web and use the data to analyze what a specific app is capable of while normally search engine only reads the description in App Store. These data could well be used to help user quickly find the most suitable app for them. Imagine of yourself trying a flurry of apps before finding the perfect one. It could be horrible.

For example, by typing into the search box “find restaur…”, the dropbox menu then would lead you to apps that could locate restaurant around you. (pictured below)

screenshot of Quixey

Currently, Quixey can search apps on a wide variety of platforms including Android, iOS, Facebook, Windows, Blackberry, Chrome Web Store, Firefox Add-ons, Mac, Symbian and Salesforce.

Microsoft is conducting some research into start-up companies in China. They are interested in understanding the China startup environment and the tools which are being used to build the next generation of companies.

As the partner of Microsoft on this survey, we do wish our China-based readers can participate this to help Microsoft to better understand China startup scene, and Microsoft can therefore brings more value back to startup society in China.

This survey is short and should only take 10 minutes. Microsoft will randomly select 50 respondents who have completed the survey and email Amazon gift cards worth 100RMB to each winner. Survey closes at end of day on June 15, 2012.

Link to the Survey in English: https://illumeweb.smdisp.net/collector/Survey.ashx?Name=Short_China_Startup_Survey_En

NetEase yesterday launched its own URL-shortening service 126.fm with APIs for the convenience of 3rd party developers.

Similar to the offering of Bitly, you can use the service to turn a really long URL address into something much shorter like 126.fm/XXX. For registered users, you get to customize the shortened URL address.

In addition to shortening URL, NetEase also armed the service with basic statistic function, you can gather data like clicks, PV, UV as well as geographical information about the target webpage.

Services like Bitly and TinyURL aren’t accessible in China.

Sina Weibo also owns a similar effort http://t.cn that automatically shortens urls people input into their Weibo post. NetEase’s 126.cm could well also be used for the same purpose – to serve the NetEase Weibo.

Meituan, the group buying service founded by Chinese Internet veteran Wang Xin claims to turn profitable by year-end, it also rebuffed a newly spread rumor ascribing it’s self-claimed RMB 380 million turnover in May to cheat.

A local report asserted that Meituan inflated a sales of RMB 100 million to 300 million by self-buying and then refunding items. Meituan disputed the saying, revealing that in last month it refunded customers RMB 19.41 million, representing 5% of total turnover.

Wang Huiwen, VP of Meituan said the rumor came from one of its competitors which is on the verge of draining money. He also disclosed that its gross profit now rebounded to 10% from last September’s 3.55% and orders coming through from mobile will account for 25% – 30% of total revenue by the end of this year.

Latest statistics from Tuan800 puts Meituan on the first spot of Chinese group buying service in April with a sales of over RMB 303.61 million, ahead of 55Tuan (2nd) and DianpingTuan (3rd place).

We have been trvalled intensely in past two weeks for our Tech Tour. Together with international brands such as Rovio, DeNA etc and many local statups including Jiepang, Touchpal, DoMob, Camera360, Candou and so on, we have successfully hold four events in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guangzhou and Chengdu, and the 5th one will be hold in Beijing this weekend. But We are not going to stop there, and today we are exciting to announce the 6th city of the tour, guess what, it will be San Francisco, USA.

In the week of 24th June, TechNode, together with a group of Chinese startups will be visiting SF and the Bay Area. We will attend Google IO conference and are also planning to visit some local companies and startups, and to hold a China-focus event there.

The Chinese companies includes top mobile app/game dev companies such as 3G.cn, Intsig, DroidHen, SNSGame, Trinity Interactive, InfoLife, Dolphin Browser, Touchpal etc. We will announce the date and venue very soon. So please stay tuned!

And if you want to be involved (co-host the trip, arrange business meetings, etc), please feel free to drop us an email contact At technode.com. We are also looking for venue, dinner, drink sponsors.

See you soon in San Francisco!

Chinese group buying services Meituan, 55Tuan and DianpingTuan ranked in top three by transactions in April, according to a report released by Tuan800, a Chinese group buying market researcher.

Meituan is the only player who generated a sales of RMB 303.61 million, topped the chart while 55Tuan and DianpingTuan grabbed in 264.73 million and 216.16 million respectively, came in second and third. It’s worth to note that, DianpingTuan’s momentum growth help it replacing Lashou as the third. Lashou now falls to the fourth spot with a sales of RMB 194.07 million.

Geographically, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are still the hottest place for daily deals.

The report also finds that in April there’re 3052 group buying service in the market, they concertedly pulled in a transaction of RMB 1.69 billion, declined 2.4% quarter-over-quarter.

In April the sector has undergone a series of consolidation, for example, FTuan’s merge with Gaopeng, 55Tuan taking over GanjiTuan’s operation and so on. As investors remain skeptical over the market and survivors keeps struggling, we could expect more similar consolidation in the following months.

See full report (in Chinese) here.

Youdao, the Chinese search engine by NetEase claims 1% of China’s search market, according to it’s SVP Zhou Feng.

Zhou said that NetEase’s Youdao will be more focusing on product rather than some sort of concept. He believed that as long as the service attracts a large amount of users, making money off it with 3 ~ 5 years won’t be something that difficult.

Particularly, Youdao’s Shopping Search which is a direct competitor of Taobao’s Etao has already signed up 1000+ Chinese ecommerce company to aggregate their items across the web. The price engine can help users save money and find better bargain.

Youdao Shopping Search

Zhou revealed that there’ll be a big surprise coming up regarding Shopping Search in the third quarter, he didn’t go into details.

According to iResearch, in the first quarter of this year Baidu, Google and Sogou ranked top three in China’s search market with a market share of 77.6%, 17.8% and 2.7% respectively. Soso came in fourth with 1.5% while NetEase’s Youdao falls under the “Others” category.

As Baidu continued to cement its position in the market and Sogou managed to gobble up a bigger chunk of the area, smaller rivals like Soso and Youdao don’t really have decent opportunities if they still rival them in an all-around way.

NetEase launched Youdao in late 2007 to compete in the heated market.

Yes, we did the successful 2-days ChinaBang 2012 conference which we also believe it is now the No.1 annual event truly focus on startup space. But, I just realized that we had not published the video recorded during the event, yet.

So here you go, and hope you enjoy it. 🙂

No matter if you came or not, what I want to say here is that, in 2013 ChinaBang conference will be bigger, guaranteed! So see you all soon!!

Renren, the Chinese social networking service reportedly will be spinning off its gaming arm for independent IPO. The spinoff may come as early as this September, and then Renren will get started with the IPO process.

 It’s not something unforeseeable as the Beijing-based company’s latest earnings report showed that in Q1 2012 it incurred a loss of more than US$ 13.6 million. It’s advertising business showed a sign of slowdown, however, it’s gaming business upped  90.7% from a year earlier, largely thanks to its ongoing efforts in developing new browser-based games and mobile games. Just like what the company’s CFO said at it’s conference call, “gaming business turned to be the highlight in this season while our monetization ability has been effectively improved with the growth of mobile traffic”.

 If we compare Renren to Tencent, we’ll find that in last quarter gaming represents more than half (55.1%) of Tencent’s revenue while gaming also contributes 54.5% to Renren’s last quarter revenue. Though both being seen as the top-rank SNS in China, their social-related ads hasn’t really picked up yet. Tencent launched a self-service social ad platform lately while ads bought through the platform will be placed on QZone and Pengyou, both are Tencent’s major SNS initiatives. As for Renren, if we look at its revenue breakdown, it now looks more like a gaming company.

One big reason for me to have my iOS device jailbroken is that its pre-intalled input method for Chinese is not convenient to use. Using QWERTY keyboard to input Chinese is slow; you can not really input a long sentence with it, and it is a headache if you need input English & Chinese mixed message as you have to switch between English and Chinese input method.

Good news is that Apple seems to realize this issue and wants to introduce a solution. Instead of developing a new input method for Chinese, Apple might be working with Baidu to have Baidu’s mobile input method pre-installed into iOS. We heard this rumor yesterday from an experienced entrepreneur, but he refused to tell us who’s his news source.

We contacted Michale Wong, the founder of Touchpal, a Shanghai-based startup which claims the No.2 popular input method in the world. He told us, in Chinese local market, Sogou is clearly the No.1 in input method market, and Baidu now has taken the 2nd in terms of number of downloads. The newly released Baidu input method supports iOS5.1.1, and comes with cool features such as voice input, cloud library, pinyin input, stroke input etc.

What I am quite curious about is that, if the rumor is confirmed, does that mean Chinese version of iOS will also have Baidu search as the default search engine, and Baidu map the replacement of Google Map? That would be another sad story for Google in China.

Looking at Chinese social media space, we see the fast growing of Weibo (led by Sina and Tencent), going-down of social networks Kaixin001 and RenRen, the missing of Facebook and rising of social ecommerce. The following infographic produced by Chee Seng of bestfreeonline.net gives a good overview of the social media in China.

The high-resolution version can be downloaded here.

Mogujie, the Hangzhou-based leading Chinese social ecommerce site and Pinterest-like service is rumored to be acquired by Taobao, according to a VC friend. She said the deal has almost been closed and the valuation of Mogujie is unknown.

Mogujie is growing amazing fast. According the infographic released by Mogujie back in March this year,

Mogujie has reached ~2.2 million UV per day and ~9.5 millions registered users. It drives 750k UV traffic to Taobao daily and generates average ~60k transactions daily on Taobao.

Also according to a spokesman from Taobao affiliation program, he said, Mogujie now can earn rmb ~100k commission fee from the transactions. And, Mogujie also confirmed that every month it can generate rmb ~160million turnover  on Taobao.

I always think Mogujie will be acquired (or strategically invested) by Taobao one day, as its current social ecommerce model heavily replies on Taobao and its founders and angel investor are all ex-Taobao staff. But I did not expect the deal came this quick. So how much does Taobao valuate Mogujie? We may see an shocking figure.

Another question is that how Taobao is going to do with its several Pinterest like sites, such as Taobao WOW? Mergied into Mogujie or just leave them with focus on different vertical markets, maybe?

QQ is for Chinese young generation, MSN is for white-collar, Skype is for people who have international background, and Gtalk is for geeks. This is how people were using instant messengers in China, several years ago. I was using MSN, just because it’s neat and simple and QQ was ugly and looked messy. But things are changing. Local media reported today that, MSN only has <5% share of Chinese instant messaging market.

Not sure if that figure is accurate, but indeed I see less and less friends are on MSN. You may think that QQ has been doing some tricky staff to beat MSN. But I don’t think so. MSN should complain about the product itself, no one else.

I am not using it for years (since MSN 7.0 maybe?), not only because I am on Mac and the Mac version of MSN is buggy, but also because I really hate its UI/UE (especially when it becomes the Live Messenger). MSN has been trying to aggregate many service Microsoft has, which makes MSN more and more heavier and become too complicated to use. You could laugh at QQ which is a copy of ICQ, but the fact is that even though Tencent has bundled lots of service into QQ, QQ actually is getting improved a lot on the UI design, new features and more important, the user experience.

It’s reported that MSN might have around 40% share of global instant messaging market, which I doubt. Dose MSN still have a team working on its next version? For how long we have not seen any major updates?

The local media said MSN’s failure was just another example of foreign Internet companies’ failure in localization. What I worry most is that MSN’s strategy for mobile internet. QQ’s always one of top downloads in China in both iOS and Android markets, but how’s Live Messenger doing for mobile?

If foreign companies want to enter China market and take a share of it, they need relatively good product and very strong local team for daily operation; but if you don’t even have a good product, Byebye now!

Once you built your brand and reached certain good amount of users, the next to-do might be to launch an open platform to integrate various services from third-parties. If you can manage this open platform well and make it the no.1 choice for third parties, you will see a brilliant future ahead. That’s what Facebook taught us.  And Tencent’s Weixin, is following what Facebook has done in the mobile space.

We reported that Weixin’s to launch its open API. About 1 hour ago, the official site for Weixin’s open platform has been launched. The introduction, the documentation and the SDK (for iOS) are all available on the site. With current API, content from third-party services can be shared to users’ Weixin contacts and Weixin Circle (group). So Tencent wants Weixin to be the No.1 distribution channel for any content on the mobile.

I might be wrong, but my understanding of the ultimate goal for Weixin on the open platform is that any third party can integrate their service into Weixin (like Plugins), i.e. Weixin’s users can play with various third-party service without leaving Weixin. Think about you playing FarmVille on Facebook. I don’t see that feature, yet, but no doubt Weixin is growing fast with a hugh ambition.

Even you are a subscriber of 3G service, when sitting at a public place like cafe, airport, hotel etc, you may still want to connect the WiFi because 3G sometime really sucks. Then on the list of the public WiFi networks, you may always find some SSID names such as CMCC which is the nationwide WiFi network deployed by China Mobile. Obviously they are not free service. So you may be wondering how we can get them ‘Hacked’?

WlanPlus, an android-based app does the magic (Google Play download). You just run the app, once it finds the public WiFi (currently it only supports CMCC WiFi), click its SSID name, then done! You get online. Simple like that, and the most amazing thing is that you will not get charged. With WlanPlus, if you need, you may also check the places around you which have WiFi hotspots.

Developed by a Hangzhou-based startup, WlanPlus may have a brilliant future ahead. Mr. Lin, the founder of WlanPlus told us that, the support to CMCC WiFi network is just a start, soon WlanPlus will be able to support ChinaNet (by China Telecomm) and ChinaUnicom (by China Unicom) etc, and it iOS app is on the way as well. Talking about the business model, Lin said it would be a freemium model, i.e. you could use WlanPlus for free but ads may be displayed, or you could subscribe the service with a small amount of money to get rid of the ads.

What’s the secret inside WlanPlus, you may ask. Some people believe they have CMCC WiFi hacked, and some think they just bought a bunch of CMCC WiFi accounts then share the time slots with its users. No matter what, the idea is indeed very interesting and super convenient for the users.

Apple, HTC, Samsung, Nokia, Microsoft etc are playing the war of phones in the global market; In Chinese market, we have a local version of the war: Baidu phone, Shanda phone, Alibaba phone, Tencent-branded phone and Xiaomi phone. Well, since China has overtaken America to become the largest smartphone market, having that many brands in the market is not a big deal. Chinese Internet giants just love the hardware business. Qihoo 360 is going to release its branded phones soon.

ZHOU Hongyi, the CEO of Qihoo 360, tweeted on his weibo,

I have been thinking of this for over 6 months. We developed the free anti-virus software, but how can we bring more value back to our hundreds millions of users? Everyone wants a high-end phone, but not many people can afford for the iPhone. 360 is an open platform and we promise not to manufacture a phone ourselves. But we are willing to work with both international and local phone brands to build some 360 branded phones.

So tell me, what’s your favorite brand? what specs are you expecting and at what price?

No official announcement is given by Qihoo 360 so far. But obviously, Qihoo 360 has again started challenging on everyone, this time is on the hardware.

It’s sad to write about a startup’s closing down, especially when the startup is founded by friends. I got the email from Casey Wilson, Cofounder and CEO of Wokai, an online micro-finance platform helping micro-entrepreneurs living under the poverty line in China. P2P lending model is still hard to survive in China as this country is still lacking of a mature credit system. (I am surprised that Wokai’s able to have 98% repayment rate, though).

The email from Casey is followed. Can you help?

Dear Wokai Contributors,

We regret to tell you that we are starting the process of winding down Wokai and concluding operations.

Wokai has been actively searching for a new CEO to take the organization to the next level in China. However, as of our application deadline, no clear candidate came to the fore. In addition, we have met unexpected funding road blocks, which have left us without the reserves necessary to extend the search further.

Considering Wokai’s current situation, our Board of Directors has unanimously decided to take the resources that we currently have and wind down Wokai’s operations. This approach will ensure that all of the resources that we have built up are used to continue our mission of growing microfinance in China.

Over the last 5 years since starting Wokai and 3.5 years since the launch of our website, our team and global supporter community has raised over a half a million dollars in loan capital for micro-entrepreneurs living under the poverty line in China. We’ve worked together to fund over 1,500 micro-loans to 961 borrowers, all at an over 98% on-time repayment rate. When you take into account the families of our micro-entrepreneurs, these funds have supported over 4,000 people to start the process of moving out of poverty. Not only have we directly impacted the lives of these individuals, but our over 30 major media features in the likes of CNN, Bloomberg, MSNBC, Phoenix TV, and China Newsweek and our global volunteer community of over 300 volunteers in 20 cities around the world has brought our cause of growing microfinance in China onto the global radar.

Moving forward, our Field Partners have committed to use the loan capital contributed to date to provide a continuous cycle of new loans to micro-entreprenuers in China’s rural Sichuan and Inner Mongolia Provinces. With this commitment, over the next ten years, over 9,000 micro-entrepreneurs should have the opportunity to lift themselves, their families, and communities out of poverty.

I cannot thank you enough for all of your support. Even as Wokai winds down, the legacy that we’ve built together will continue on, empowering a generation of micro-entrepreneurs to achieve their dreams and laying the groundwork for the future growth of microfinance in China.

Sincerely,

Casey Wilson
Co-founder & CEO, Wokai

KingSoft, one of the most famous software companies which developed KingSoft Office (replacement of MS Office), PowerWord (dictionary) and Kingsoft Antivirus etc, is testing its own web browser, named Liebao (meaning Cheetah).

We are still waiting for the invitation code to test it out. But according to its newly launched official site, this dual-core (built on webkit and IE core) browser is promised to be more safe, better designed (UI designed by Rigo) and 3 times faster than Chrome.

KingSoft is the expert of Antivirus technology which is somehow integrated into the core of Liebao Browser. KingSoft called this invention as BIPS (Browser Intrusion Prevention System). In other words, even with no antivirus software running on your system, the browser itself still has the capabilities of e.g. Anti-Phishing, Anti-Trojan and code-injection-proof etc.

The site also says that some parts of webkit core has been rewritten/improved which makes Liebao three times faster than Chrome.

So why KingSoft wants a browser? An easy answer, I guess, would be, to fight against its long-time enemy, 360 which always claims its own 360 Browser the most safe one in the world.

We will get back to you soon once we try it out.

Google’s future in China is still unclear. Nothing can be done on web search market; there is huge opportunity for Android market in China, but Google Play is still not available because of content control and the license for Google Checkout; Google+ is on and off from time to time; and the newly Google Drive was also blocked minutes after it’s launched.

But, Google China seems OK with that. About one month ago, Google Shanghai has moved to a new office, located at 60th, 61th floor of the expensive Shanghai World Financial Center (SWFC). I paid a visit.

It’s surprisingly high security. First, you need go up to the 52/F Sky Lobby of SWFC, and present your Chinese ID card or foreign passport at the reception to get a Visitor swipe card. Then you should find the even-floor elevators, swipe in and go to 60/F,  then walk to the Google lobby and get you a Google Visitor badge at the reception.

It’s a bit hard for me to describe how the new office looks like in English. I can only say, it’s not easy for Google to localize its products in China, but the decoration and design of its new office, is quite Chinese.

Photos can tell.

So Google Drive just went live, here in China it’s 1:10am and the news even has not spread into Chinese media, the site drive.google.com has been blocked in China. That’s what we call China Speed.

Cloud service is a hot topic in China web, but apparently some people does not like the foreign service. As you may know, Dropbox is also not available here. Well, you may see the good side: Chinese local service may have more chance…

Read a comment from weibo, If a product is blocked in China, basically it implies that product should be a Good one…

Tencent has just released its new version of Weixin, the mobile group chatting service with over 100millions users.

We have reported Weixin’s ambition on international market, so not a big surprise, we see

1. Weixin officially has an English name, WeChat;

2. Weixin now supports 7 language including Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesia, Portuguese, Traditional Chinese and English;

3. WeChat’s official site is also launched, http://www.wechatapp.com and it even gets an Facebook Page;

4. International users can now login WeChat with its Facebook account.

Feature-wise, WeChat added one called Circle, which allows users to share photos with a group of friends. I would say Circle is just like Path, but with a bad UI.

If you have it downloaded, my id is: ganglu.

Facebook unveiled its Timeline feature back in September 2011. Soon, QZone, Tencent’s social network which claims 552millions active users, will release a new feature, named the same, Timeline.

My friend, Peter Zheng, the product manager of QZone shared a screenshot of Timeline on his weibo. He tweeted:

Users will be able to share every great moment on its Timeline. Images, videos, diary or any shared information, even activities on the 3rd parties sites, anything could be memorized and cherished using Timeline.

Timeline feature currently is only open to a very limited group of users to test out, so we have not got chance to tell the difference between QZone’s and Facebook’s, yet. But,  According to a developer from QZone’s Timeline team, he described this feature on his personal blog as such:

QZone Timeline is a cluster of functions that allow the user to describe, integrate and document the previous, current and approaching  information which he/she values with resources of text, picture, video and etc. into the basic unit of event.

He also said the team studied Facebook Timeline, but it’s Not a copy because this project actually started in middle 2011, i.e. even before Facebook unveiled its own. The idea initially was just a Calendar + Events, he wrote.

The following is a screenshot of QZone’s Timeline from Peter Zheng. It does not look like Facebook’s Timeline, I guess.

Weixin, Tencent’s group messaging service has made the history: from 0 to 100m users, it only took exactly 433 days. Days ago, we were the first broke the news that Weixin is preparing for the oversea market; now we also heard rumor that Weixin will release its 4.0 version soon and it may come with Facebook login and functions like Instagram or Path.

We approached Allen Zhang, VP of Tencent and the lead of Weixin team.

You may never heard of his name but Allen Zhang is actually one of the most famous geeks and product managers in China. Allen is the founder of the popular Chinese email client Foxmail which’s acquired by Tencent in 2005; He’s also the lead of QQ Mail which is integrated with QQ and now regarded as the best replacement of Gmail.

Weixin’s voted the best Mobile Social Network and the best Mobile Messaging application of ChinaBang Awards 2011. In the short video recorded by Allen, on behalf of Weixin team, he first sent his thanks to us (Note: TechNode is the lead organizer of ChinaBang Awards) and to the users, and also gave a brief talk about the future of Weixin.

Allen said,

1. Weixin is more than a tool for communication, it’s a life style, because we hope Weixin can have impact on every aspect of your life.

2. Weixin will provide the open API to enable third parties integrate Weixin’s messaging service.

3. Weixin will provide more cool functions to enhance its social networking capability.

The video followed (it’s in Chinese, and sorry I am not sure how to rotate it… 😉 ) –

Just 3 days ago, we wrote about Tencent Weixin’s rumor of moving to global market. We said that by end of last year, Weixin had ~50 million registered user. But that was just history. Early this morning, Pony Ma of Tencent, tweeted several words on his weibo: Finally, 100 Millions! He did not say it’s Weixin, but what else it could be?

This is damn incredible. It only took around one year to reach this figure, and the 2nd 50m only took ~3 months! According to Tencent’s latest quarterly report, by end of 2011, its instant messenger QQ has ~720m registered users. If Weixin keep growing like what’s happening now, it could be bigger than QQ in only several years!

Last week, I got a voice message on Weixin, and it’s from a ~45 years old man who’s a driver of my ex-boss. So I voiced back asking how come he’s using this fancy stuff (I thought it’s still a bit geeky and for young generation only), he said it’s just because his daughter and some friends are using it. I was shocked. Weixin is going to be a killer application for Chinese mobile life, and making a new history for Tencent.

That Unstoppable Penguin.

300 millions Chinese are overweight, 120 millions Chinese are obese, 96.8 millions Chinese suffer from diabetes mellitus and 236 millions have high blood pressure. James Huang, the founder of 4jia1 shared me with these scaring figures. So we’d better try more good health and fitness apps, he said, and I can not agree more on that.

4jia1 (meaning 4 plus 1), the project claims itself the first Chinese mobile social network with focus on users’ health and fitness, starts in March 2011, and 7 months later, its iOS and Android version were released. So how does it work? Basically, you run the application and leave it on while you are doing exercise. The application will use its patent pending algorithm to automatically monitor your movement, calculate and record the calorie consumption. You can also share your experience and figures with your friends on social media such as Weibo or those located close to you.

Still focusing on health and fitness, James’ 2nd application was also released, named Being on Diet While Eating (边吃边瘦). It extends the idea of photo sharing: you take a photo of what you are eating, type in the name of food, then you will be told the amount of calorie in it. By doing that every time you are eating, you will be able to monitor daily health as the application can return your analysis and suggestion based on the records. The photos of food and the amount of calories in it can be shared on social media too, so that being on diet can be more fun.

The team of 4jia1 is based in Nanjing, and has received a angel fund from iCamp and STEFG.

Innovation Camp (iCamp), the new Internet startup accelerator and incubator opens in Shanghai. Located at the KIC high-tech and Innovation Park in Shanghai YangPu district, iCamp will focus on the internet and mobile application and provide systematic startup coaching and incubation to the SoLoMo application projects. In addition, iCamp also provides $2m seed funding named China Startup Republic (CSR) Fund .

iCamp is founded by 4 very experienced entrepreneurs with mix of local and international background. Jun Li, member of Band of Angels Silicon Valley, has invested and incubated 10+ early stage companies in US, Japan and China; Andy Wang, MBA from Harvard Business School, is the co-founder and managing director of eBaoTech, a leading insurance software company; Michael Feng is the co-founder of 51job which’s listed on NASDAQ; Yong Wang is the CEO of DeNA China (DeNA is the leading mobile social network in Japan).

We were invited to its opening party and talked to its founding member, Jun Li.

Quite Silicon Valley style, is the impression we got about iCamp. It’s not just about angel investment, it’s more about mentorship. As Jun introduced, iCamp now has >30 international coaches and advisers who come from different background and help on the growth of startups incubated in iCamp. Furthermore, iCamp is also building a close relationship with silicon valley ecosystem. “Dave McClure is also one of our advisors and come to coach our startups.” Jun said, “His famous incubator 500Startups is iCamp’s partner, and we are planning to bring our startups to their place to experience the spirit of silicon valley.” 150 startups to be incubated within 4 years, Jun has set up the goal for iCamp.

Two startups have joined iCamp, 4jia1 is a mobile social network with focus on users’ health & fitness, and Moboq (our coverage in Chinese), is a location-based mobile Q&A application.

So Apple’s CEO Tim Cook is here, and it seems that he is not coming on his own. The great accompany he got, and his name is Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook! Early today, Mark was spotted in Shanghai together with his girlfriend.

Local media reported that Mark and his girlfriend have visited several shopping districts, including the famous Tizifang and the Apple store at Nanjing road. From the pictures uploaded by the witness, Mark’s having a good time in Shanghai’s sunshine today and looks quite curious about everything Chinese.

This is really interesting. Two great guys, representing two hottest tech companies of the world. Both visit China at the same time. One in Beijing, the other in Shanghai; One for business, the other is for vacation; One is the first time in China, the other is at his second trip and even understands a bit of Chinese; One is growing its business amazingly fast in China, the other has almost conquered the entire cyber world but is still not available in China. But I bet there is only one keyword in their mind right now, which is: China, China!

If you are an influential tech media reporting stories about startups and tech companies, can you also run a fund to invest startups? If you are educated in western culture, the answer most likely will be a NO. Media and venture capital, there should be a line between. If the media cross the line, people will argue that those startups invested in by the media would receive preferential treatment, e.g. more exposure. The latest famous example, as you may know, is Michael Arrington, the founder of the famous tech blog, TechCrunch. He is now a venture capitalist in charge of $20million CrunchFund, but the consequence was that he had to leave his job as the chief editor at TechCrunch.

China web, in many ways, is quite different from the rest of world, even in the tech media space. If Michael lives in China, TechCrunch and CrunchFund, will cause no conflict and argument, instead, people may see it a perfect match. Whether or not media can be involved with the investment, well, in China, is not a big deal!

The Founder Magazine, one of the most influential printed media focus on entrepreneurs and startups, is running a fund named Dark Horse fund for early stage investment; they also organize a so-called Dark Horse startup contest via which the best startups can be selected and be invested/co-invested together with other VCs.

The Cyzone Magazine, competitor of Founder Magazine, is the organizer of DEMO China serial contests. Cyzone may not have the fund for investment, but the husband of the founder of Cyzone, is actually in charge of a famous local venture capital called Zero2IPO. So, Cyzone and Zero2IPO always cooperate.

The examples could be many. There is no doubt that these media is producing very good content to educate and encourage local startups, but does this phenomenon seem a bit weird?  The thing is, so far everything works well and no one question about it. Well, Michael might be wrong to name its fund as CrunchFund which sounds directly linking to his media TechCrunch, but he is honest, at least he said so, to his readers by giving the disclosure if the startup is invested by him, which is often missing in Chinese media.

According to Tencent’s official, its mobile messaging service Weixin (which was launched in January 2011, basically combines the ideas of Kik and Talkbox as core functions) has over 50millions registered and 20millions active users by end of 2011. Tencent is already un-beatable in China with its instant messenger QQ’s huge user base in past ~10 years, and with Weixin’s rock’n roll in mobile market, it may become un-stoppable again in next 10 years?!

Thanks to the globalized mobile app market, Tencent’s ambition seems not only on China any more soon. We recently talked to an insider who told us that Tencent’s planning a big Ads campaign to promote Weixin oversea, on both Android and iOS market. Tencent is usually Shy to talk about its English product. Remember that when we first broke out the news of its launching its multi-language version of QQ, instead of saying it’s for the global market, they told us that the product is to help foreigners who live in China to plug into Chinese communities. So I asked the guy, what Tencent wants this time, to attract more Chinese users who live oversea? He said No and it’s for foreign users. That clearly implied to me that the campaign is to promote Weixin’s English version for foreign users and it’s to compete with Kik, Talkbox and other English mobile messaging service.

You may argue that Weixin copied the idea of Kik and Talkbox, but, the fact we have to admit is that, when you play with Weixin, and you will realize it’s truly better than those origins. Weixin’s English site has been launched, and the English versions seems already available for Android, iOS, Windows Phone and even Symbian.

Tencent, do you want to become a global King?

Cloud service is attracting more and more eyeballs in China. Looking at the cloud storage sector, we got startups such as Kanbox, YUNIO, QBox and so on, and big ones like Everbox from Shanda, Kuanpan from KingSoft, DBank from Huawei etc. Now we just got a big one, Baidu which currently is testing (invitation only) its own Dropbox’s like service, named Baidu NetDisk.

Function-wise, Baidu NetDisk offers you more or less the same core functions: file (video, image etc) upload with 1GB as max size per file, public or password-protected file-sharing, clients (now only PC, Android versions available) etc. The difference is that Dropbox offers 2GB storage for free and Baidu is generous enough to give every registered user 15GB. As you may know Dropbox is blocked in China, and I tested out Baidu’s and have to say that the uploading/downloading is super fast.

I did not find any price plan on Baidu NetDisk, assuming that it would this service for free for a long while. Giving the “Free” culture of Chinese internet, you may need a huge amount of capitals to keep the Cloud storage service alive. It’s surely good news for users to have more free and convenient cloud service with more giants jumping into the market, but then it ends up with the question, how could those startups survive?

To incubate startups from the ideas to fast-growing companies, you should understand what they really need at different stages. Incubation is definitely not a one-time offer: you feed the startups some money, then leave them to do whatever they want to. We need a pipeline for the incubation process.

Startup Weekend, a two-days program to help startup founders set up the team, approve the idea, work out a simple demo and receive feedback from experienced people or VCs is a good starting point. We’ve reported about the Startup Weekend Taiwan. Then the team should have more time and a small amount of funding to implement and enrich the core ideas, then have a good working product which can clearly showcase the value of the idea. This stage is where the Startup Labs fits. The Startup Labs Taiwan gives every startups 22 days to get their idea out. This so-called acceleration program awards teams 1,000,000 NTD (~US$30,000) in exchange for 8% of company equity (read our coverage on 5 startups in this program). Then for the startups, what would be the problems to solve next: user acquisition, angel or serial A funding, HR, or globalisation strategy etc. They may still need help.

Josh Fu of Yushan Ventures pinged us with a good news, they are launching the so-called YSeed program which is designed to help early stage startups GROW. Read from its official site,

YSeed supports your start-up and helps you in defining a valid business model by applying effective user acquisition strategies to move on to the next stage, get funding and internationalize.

So far, the pipeline of this incubation process seems working quite well. Startup Labs held a demo day recently at Google Taiwan office. As Josh said, two startups have attracted lots of attention, Lucent Sky has sold their products to 5 different clients; Gumhoo has increased its user base to over 2,500 active users and has made commission based sales on products through their users.

The startup ecosystem is getting more healthy, good news for Taiwan startups, and we see the happy faces.

Beginning this morning, Baidu began providing real-time search services from the top four weibo service, including Sina, Tencent, Netease and Sohu. In other words, the search results on Baidu will now include microblog posts from these four major Chinese Internet major portals’ microblog services. Baidu will even return up-to-date Sina Weibo content that matches keyword searches for breaking news or popular trending topics, and the real-time search result will be displayed near the top of the search engine results page.

The official press release highlights the partnership of Baidu and Sina with quotes from high level officials of both companies.

Zhang Dongcheng, executive assistant, Baidu

When Chinese Internet users need to find something online, they turn to Baidu. We process billions of search queries on a daily basis, and many of those queries are related to the real-time information found on microblog posts. With this deal between Baidu and Sina Weibo, Baidu has completed its integration of high-quality content from China’s four leading microblog platforms.

Peng Shaobin, Sina’s vice president and general manager of microblog operations

As China’s most influential online social networking platform, Sina Weibo has always seen open platform as its direction for development. Sina hopes to encourage the continuous development of China’s Internet industry by actively cooperating with other major online platforms. To date, Weibo has accumulated more than 300 million registered users, and logs more than 100 million microblog posts daily. Sina is excited to further expand the influence of its Weibo service by cooperating with a search engine, as it is a highly efficient channel for extending the reach of quality real-time information to more netizens.

Real-time information is always the most precious value provided by microblog service. Google wanted to acquire Twitter and later integrated Twitter’s real-time search result, which leaves me no surprise Chinese weibo services now partner with a leading search engine. Good news, indeed.

I thought that Baidu will now return real-time results on anything users search for, but I was wrong about it. As Kaiser Kuo, the Director of International Communications of Baidu clarified, the real-time results appear only when you search for breaking news or popular trending topics. That makes some sense, as people may more care about real-time updates on breaking news. The result page may looks messy if we return all real-time results for anything searched, Kaiser explained. Hm.. But still, I would suggest that at least Baidu could give a switch button which allows users to switch on/off real-time search.

Note that Sina Weibo officially launched its own search service last October. So how Sina is going to monetize its real-time information next?

A few days before Chinese New Year, when ChinaBang Awards was still in the online voting stage, I visited a very popular tech media’s office. I told them I would do a two day conference together with an awards ceremony right after the holiday. My friend was surprised and looked worried. “Have you got enough sponsorship?” He asked. “Um… I have not really started looking for sponsorship”. I was telling her the truth. These days, people can make loads of money from so called non-profit projects, but I’m not sure if it is kind of embarrassing. I am always good at turning a good business model into a non-profit project.  Back in 2006, I first met TechCrunch and attended the first international conference LeWeb. Since then, I have had a ‘simple’ dream: To create a conference, less focused on commercial motivations and more focused on start-ups and encouraging true innovation.

In 2011, the Chinese internet market was hot! We had lots of  money, internet café’s for start-ups sprung up, start-up incubators and tech parks run by individuals and government were established, more angel investors and more passionate entrepreneurs joined the start-up community.  The tech sectors that boomed included social media, location based services, mobile messaging, mobile social networks, social e-commerce, mobile photo services, cloud, mobile games. 2011 was exciting and 2012 should experience the same boom.

However, in the mobile internet industry and especially in China, business models are still not quite clear. There are copycats everywhere and even many local VCs just follow the Silicon Valley investment strategy. Very good start-up incubators and early stage investment funds are still not so easy to find. Experienced angel investors and the driving force of innovation are still missing in the eco-system. In 2011, the eco-system did improve but it is still not very healthy.

So I hope ChinaBang 2012 will help China’s entrepreneurial eco-system by bringing people together and talking honestly about how we can all play a part of it. Some of the questions we will explore are what true innovation is, how to operate a good start-up and incubator what opportunities exist for Chinese companies in the global market.  To inspire start-ups we will talk about internet TV, augmented reality, mobile games, technology in life. ChinaBang is designed for idea sharing and awarding the best start-ups as well as review 2011 and importantly to have the first big party in Chinese internet in 2012!

Of course, I cannot make all this happen by myself. I want to say a huge thank you to my TechNode team. In 2011, I “forced” this tiny team to work on all sorts of things like producing bilingual original content, organizing startups events and conferences etc. Thanks to them for understanding my dream of being a true TechCrunch in China. A big thanks to our platinum sponsor Silicon Valley Bank; to Lilly Huang and her team for their trust and support on XFounder Club. Thanks to all the sponsors: Paypal, GSR Venture, Singtel, Google, Popcap, Tianji and Silicom. Without their help and financial support we could not make all this happen. Thank you to my good friends Josh Zhang, Tony Zhao and many more who offering me lots of help only because they believe in my simple dream. Most importantly, I want to thank all our partners, bloggers, media and communities who support and promote ChinaBang Awards from the very beginning. You are all my mentors and good friends. At last, I would like to say thanks to Sarah Lacy, Heather Harde and the TechCrunch team. Although some of them have already left to start new ventures, I still feel grateful to TechCrunch which has been the guide for TechNode for years.

The Chinese web still needs a healthy ecosystem, which requires everyone’s effort. Hopefully ChinaBang can deliver the right startup spirit and become an independent stage for every startup to magnify their voice. As long as we keep trying, we will be more confident to speak out these two words: China, Innovation!

Dr. Gang LU

Founder of TechNode.com

You may know that we will be running a startup launchpad contest at 19th, the 2nd day of ChinaBang conference. Sixteen finalists will be presenting on stage and compete for a cash prize sponsored by Silicon Valley Bank and a trip to Rovio Headquarter and cool prize from Infinity Venture. Only five days to go, you may wonder who will be sitting as judges. So here they are:

• Zhou Hongyi – CEO of Qihoo 360
• Kevin Dai (戴志康) – Comsenz 康盛创想
• Lilly Huang (黄莉莉) – Silicon Valley Bank (硅谷银行)
• Steven Hu （胡斌）- Qiming Ventures (启明创投)
• Wayne Shiong (熊伟铭) – Bertelsmann Investment (贝塔斯曼投资)
• Akio Tanaka – Infinity Ventures Partners
• Kelly Poon – Atomico
• Jackie Liang Chen (陈亮) – Taishan Ventures (泰山天使投资)
• Li Xiaojun – IDG
• Li Feng (李丰) – IDG
• Dai Zhouyin (戴周颖) – CyberAgent
• William Bao Bean – SingTel
• Jiang Tao (蒋涛) – CSDN
• Gu Xiaobin (顾晓斌) – TechWeb
• Zhao Qi (赵祺) – Paypal China
• Qiu Hao (丘浩) – Innovation Works
• Paul Chen – Angry Birds China
• Ru Haibo (茹海波) – Matrix Venture (经纬创投)

Furthermore, we are also happy to tell you that our ChinaNetCloud friend will be the new launchpad sponsor and offer the TOP 3 winners one free server for a year.

If you want to check out how these startups perform on stage, just do the registration asap.

I feel a bit tired but also excited. We only had about one month to prepare for this, but we are getting there. All speakers have been confirmed. It’s early to say that it is going to be a successful one, but I am proud that it will be different from any other internet industry conference in China.

Speech/Panels+Awards Ceremony+Startup Launchpad

The two days (18th-19th,Feb) event will be mixed with speech/panels with over 40 great speakers, the ChinaBang 2011 best startup awards with ~40 best startups of the year come on stage to receive the trophy, and 16 startups presenting on stage in the afternoon of 19th. As long as you are startup related, no matter that you are investors, founders, learners etc, you can be sure that you will see some interesting stuff there.

Topic Focus: Entrepreneurship, Startups, Innovation

If you are bored with those PR style speeches, hope ChinaBang can bring you some fresh air. The speakers have very different background, high level from big companies, investors, managing director of government-backed incubators, startup founders, experts etc, they will all focus on entrepreneurship and encouraging true innovation from China.

Big+Small, Local+International

The event will bring you the speakers from best Chinese Internet companies, such as Jeff Xiong, the CTO of Tencent and Zhou Hongyi, CEO of 360, the best local startups such as Dolphin Browser, Cootek, Talkbox, Mogujie, AppChina etc, and international companies like Rovio, PopCap, DeNA, Zynga, Neowiz (Korea) etc will be also there to share their thoughts on China and international market.

So this is it. The conference website is here: http://chinabang.technode.com, and you may register yourself for FREE at http://chinabang.technode.com/register/ .

Big thanks again to the platinum sponsor Silicon Valley Bank and other golden sponsors, Google, Paypal, Singtel, GSR Ventures, launchpad sponsors, Infinity Venture Partner, ChinaNetCloud, gift sponsors: SwissVoice and Popcap, Mixer sponsor: Taishan Venture and VIP dinner sponsor, Tianji.

2012 is finally here. Happy new year, everyone! And Thanks so much for your great support and trust in 2011. TechNode, has grown up from a personal hobby to the most shinning independent media in/from China tech space.

1. Probably you only read our English content, but actually we do have Chinese version of TechNode, and it has become one of the most influential tech source to discover the hottest local startups. Besides news report and market analysis, at least one startup is covered on TechNode Chinese everyday. We are the Only one plays important roles in both English and Chinese tech blogsphere.

2. TechNode’s Collide series conference has attracted the CEO of HTC China, VP of Lenova as the keynote speakers and many other top level speakers in local industry.

3. Started in July, Over 10 TechNode Touch (TNT) monthly events (Chinese-speaking events) have been held in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wu’han, Chengdu, Xi’an. Each event attracted in average 120 audience from local, and over 50 high-profile entrepreneurs including Nicolas Zennstroem, co-founder of Skype.

4. Nodeble, the database for Chinese startups has been launched. The platform is still quite beta and we did not promote it much due to our very limited resource, but it still gets nearly 600 startups registered!

5. It was our honor and great pleasure to partner with TechCrunch hold its first international Disrupt conference in Beijing.

6. ChinaBang Awards is still on-going, but as we wrote in details here, ~80 influential Chinese tech media and tech blogs joined this awards, which is very exciting.

All these, have done by a 5-person team with support of several guest writers and friends.

This is the first post we wrote in 2012, so supposedly I should write about the plan in 2012. With more details coming in next several days, here are the highlights, which you might find aggressive and indeed quite challenging, but I just feel, those are the stuff we should do and we could!

1. Content –  still bilingual and the content will be more well organized. Furthermore, we will partner with some strong international and local media to make sure our Original content can reach more audience worldwide.
2. TNT events in English – As usual, Chinese TNT events will be held in Beijing and Shanghai and other cities every month. And soon we will announce our English TNT monthly event. We have built a strong connection with international and local ecosystem, and the English version of TNT events are aimed to be most valuable platform to link with local and international entrepreneurs.
3. TechNode conference –  TechNode’s first conference in 2012 is on the way. It will be held in late February together with ChinaBang Awards ceremony. The draft agenda will be announced soon and I am sure it will be Different than any other Internet industry conference held in China. We have not finalize our plan for our Collide series conference in 2012 yet, but definitely we will still make it happen.
4. I co-founded OpenWeb.Asia workgroup and co-organized OpenWebAsia conference. The last OpenWebAsia conference is held back to 2010 in KL, Malaysia, led by Daniel CerVentus (@cerventus) from Malaysia Entrepreneurs. And I am very excited to announce that we will bring OpenWebAsia to China in Q3 2012, and most likely it will be held in association with APEC SME Summit 2012.

It sounds a bit crazy, isn’t! 🙂 We will keep on Rocking in 2012, and we are really trying.

On behalf of TechNode team, I wish you and your family a fruitful 2012 ahead.

Be honest, I may go to Israel for holiday, but for business? I’ve never thought of that. When I asked a few friends if they were willing to do their startups in Israel, they thought I was joking. For some reason, safety is always the first concern for people including Chinese to consider going to Israel.

However, I do know a few friends who are originally from Israel and now doing great in web business. And when I met Saul Singer, the co-author of Start-Up Nations: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, he even told me this,

There are ~500 startups in Israel. In terms of the number of Venture Capital companies by population, it’s even 2 or 3 times more than the States. So Israel, actually has a very good environment for startups.

And the most interesting point he mentioned which I also agreed is that,

Israel, as the developing country and emerging market like China it may have more issues need be solved using technology, i.e. more opportunities for technology startups.

Google recently set up its incubator in Israel, and the 15 growing Israeli startups look quite promising. As Saul said, Israel is no lacking of innovation which is actually what China needs. So Chinese and Israeli startup ecosystems should join force, and Israel could be the source of innovation for China?

The Israel Project for China will be kicked off soon next year to attract Chinese startups. Are you going?

In July, it was reported that Sina, had turned down Digital Sky Technology (DST)’s $500m investment in Sina Weibo. But it seems that the talk between two parties is still on going. We just heard from a reliable source that Sina finally accepted the investment from DST. He said, it can be ‘almost’ confirmed that,

The deal is a convertible bond ($200mm) which converts into Sina stock at $65 per share. In addition to that, DST might also buy straight stock in SINA (equity). And the convertible bond likely has a small interest and could be converted into the stock at $65 per share at any time.

This deal will give Sina Weibo ~$1bn valuation.

Is it a better deal if we compare it with what’s reported in July? You may simply tell it from the figures. In July, Sina stock has ~$120 per share and the report said the valuation offered by DST was at $5bn. And now its stock is down to $52 per share. Sina Weibo claims 250m users in November, and Twitter which claims 100m active users, recently received $300m investment from the Saudi Prince and the company is now valued at $8.4bn.

Also the interesting part is that DST is partially owned by Tencent Holdings Ltd. (0700.HK) which holds 10.26% of its shares. But as you may know, Sina Weibo’s biggest competitor is Tencent Weibo which even claims larger user base (310m registered users in Nov 2011).

Why Sina needs the investment? Your thoughts?

ChinaBang Awards is designed to discover and reward the best Chinese startups of the year. This year’s nomination started at 1st December and will be closed by end of this week.

It’s for very first time, initiated by TechNode, ~80 influential Chinese tech media and tech blogs co-organized and co-promoted this award, including the portal 163.com, QQ.com, leading online tech media CSDN, TechWeb, 3G etc, research authorities like iResearch, DCCI, Analysis International etc, independent blogs like 36kr, Mr.6 (Taiwan), Web20share etc. Android App stores such as AppChina, 91, gFan also joined the co-promotion. ChinaBang is the truly Open awards in Chinese startup space!

If you are running Startups in China, do take this opportunity to possibly bring your startup to greater stage. If your startup manage to be nominated Top 20 in each category, the list will be sent to ~80 most influential thoughts leaders, journalists, experts who will get it shortlisted to Top10.

Here are some links, you can just click on any of them to start the Nomination!

• http://www.chinabang.org (official site)
• http://tech.163.com/special/chinabang11/
• http://tech.qq.com/zt2011/chinabang/
• http://www.techweb.com.cn/special/zt/chinabang/
• http://www.dcci.com.cn/information/view/id/361/cid/9
• http://www.kaixin001.com/home/?uid=132593351
• http://bbs.gfan.com/android-3273354-1-1.html
• http://ibbs.91.com/thread-96170-1-1.html
• http://www.eoeandroid.com/thread-148040-1-1.html
• http://de.appchina.com/invest/chinabang2011-startups-vote-starts/
• http://blog.guohead.com/chinabang/
• http://blog.umeng.com/index.php/2011/12/chinabang2011/
• http://www.guokr.com/post/77403

Hardware or Software, which is the more important driven force for the internet industry? I’ve been thinking of this question for quite a while. Every day, we see new startups bringing new services and applications which keep the industry fresh and exciting, however,

1. Thanks for the 3G infrastructure and new generation of smart phone, we see the booming of mobile internet;

2. Everyone now talks about Location-based Service (LBS), but remember GPS is there for years and LBS comes alive because people finally managed to make the GPS chip cheap and small enough for a phone;

3. We now use QR code more or soon we may see more Augmented Reality (AR) applications, as smart phones all come with auto-focus cameras and powerful core chips;

4. If you may ask what could be the next in mobile industry, one of the answers could the NFC, only if we see more phone manufacturers makes more NFC-enabled phones in 2012.

So we may need more hardware-focus startups which could be truly disruptive and more likely change the world?! I don’t know what’s your take on this, but anyhow, the issue we have right now is that we seldom see these types of startups. We know you can NOT make a hardware by just sitting before the screen and hitting the keyboard, as doing a hardware startup definitely needs more support and resources.

So I am very excited to hear the launch of HAXLR8R, the Accelerator Program for Hardware Startups.

HAXLR8R is a 111 days accelerator program, which is focused on providing hardware-focused startups from all over the world with the appropriate support to deliver their concept into a competitive reality.

Told by Cyril Ebersweiler from Chinaaccelerator and SOSVentures, HAXLR8R plans to run from March through June 2012, with a first stop in Shenzhen (a ideal place to find local hardware manufacturers), and ends in Silicon Valley for the HAXLR8R demo day. In Shenzhen, startups will finalize their prototype or work on scaling their businesses if they have a working unit. Every week, startups will meet with mentors that will offer feedback on the team’s concepts and prototypes, as well as provide valuable insight about scaling a company in terms of manufacturing, supply chain management and distribution.

Chinaaccelerator incubated OrderWithMe, the winner of the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing, which just closed its $3m Serial A funding from Infinity Ventures and SOSVentures, which may give you more reasons to apply for the program now.

I really love this propaganda, by the way.

Thanks to Akio Tanaka of Infinity Ventures Partner, I was invited to join the panel at his Infinity Ventures Summit (Fall, 2011). The topic of this panel is pretty interesting, Everything You Wanted to Know About China Internet, But were Afraid to Ask. Other very experienced panelists include: Fritz Demopoulos the founder of Queen’s Road Capital Founder (also the co-founder of Qunar), Patrick Liu the CEO of Rekoo, Marc van der Chijs the co-founder of UnitedStyles.com (co-founder of Tudou), and Richard Robinson, the co-founder of Youlu.

I gave a 10min presentation to trigger the panel discussion which Akio wants every panelist to share their honest and no-bull-sh*t comments about China. So I gave the presentation a very straight-forward title, This is What We Call, the China Web, which I would love to share in this post.

Not sure how much the presentation can help, but before your read it through, please Note that,

• It’s impossible to summarize the China Web in only ~20 slides;
• I just highlighted some of the most interesting and maybe controversial parts;
• Every point mentioned in these slides actually you can view them from different angles;

It’s not the first time for Alibaba trying to enter the social network. Taojianghu is its first product with serious interest in social networking. It makes sense for Alibaba’s eCommerce business as Taojianghu is built around Taobao, in other words, it’s meant to be a social eCommerce platform. The bad news is that Taojianghu has not gone really social at all, still.

However, Alibaba did not give up the social network market. Today, a new social networking site Laiwang.com is quietly launched, and the domain is registered by Alibaba.

Laiwang, in Chinese means In Contact. Also Read from its About, it says Laiwang is to help everyone to keep in touch with the connections with their good friends, track your wonderful moment in your life, anytime and anywhere. The service is available to on both Android and iPhone. So it sounds like a social network for mobile.

Mobile market leaves plenty of opportunities for everyone. The launch of Laiwang, does it mean Alibaba wants a bit market in mobile social work? and will it become a sort of mobile social eCommerce service? We will see.

Yesterday, we held our TechNode Touch (TNT) monthly event together with AppChina, the leading third-party Android App Market, in Shanghai. Eight local companies/startups including VeryCD (the largest eD2k-link file sharing site in China), Mobcent, 173zy.com (web/mobile games development company), Zuikong (eBook publisher), iBobar (a portal for audio content distribution), iKuaishou (a video content aggregator for mobile), iKeepU (a content discover platform) and mBook (a leading eBook store) were invited to present on stage, and share their thoughts/experience on how to manage and market their mobile apps. There were around ~280 pre-registered the event and the venue was fully packed.

The speakers’ sharing is indeed very interesting, but I have to say that the most interesting and exciting things for me actually came from the audience.

We have heavily reported about the Beijing-based Garage Cafe which is now even got featured on TechCrunch. I’ve heard that there are several groups of people were planning to open their startup Cafe in Shanghai. Finally I met Caesar Chen, co-Founder of Aita Cafe which is about to open at the beginning of 2012 in Yangpu District. And just last week, I got a call from a local early stage fund and was told that their Cafe at Zhangjiang, Pudong is ready.

I also met Bob Zheng who is the founder of People-Squared, an coworking space. He said their space can even hold events for ~200 people and it’s actually quite close to the downtown Xujiahui. You may know that for a long while, Xindanwei is the only one in Shanghai.

I also met Jing Zhou and Yanran Li, both from GITChina (GirlsInTech China). As you can read from their site,

GITchina’s sole mission is to spread this message by providing a platform on which women in technology can connect, empower and learn from one another. With the increasing importance of technology and its convergence with other professions, the necessity to educate, celebrate and support women in this field has become impossible to ignore.

At last, two incubators are about to launch in 2012 in Shanghai. One is from our famous Kaifu Lee. The local government of Yangpu District has offered him a whole building so his Innovation Works Shanghai branch office is definitely on the way; Shanghai Technology Entrepreneurship Foundation for Graduates (STEFG) is planning its own incubator program in Yangpu district too.

So, is Shanghai, really catching up with Beijing in the startup space?

2011 is coming to the end. It’s the year of Mobile, we have seen lots of applications developed for your mobile life. In this exciting mobile market, more and more young entrepreneurs, geeks and developers believe they are really change the world; The whole ecosystem for startups seems getting more healthy in 2011, as we saw more angel investors and incubators, more passionate young teams and more independent tech blogs; We saw the big guys like Tencent, 360, Sina, Alibaba, Baidu etc are playing all sorts of dramas from time to time, but the good news is that now everyone is talking about the Open web and finally they are more willing to work with startups and help them grow; You might still question about those listed Chinese Internet companies, but what we believe is that after several years the founders of those companies will take the responsibility of encouraging the true Chinese innovation, thanks to their wealth and valuable experience.

China Internet needs the Bang!, the perfect sound to present Chinese startups’ passion and ambition;

Bang, in Chinese can be written as 邦 (meaning Nation, Country). Everyone in this Bang should learn what is the fair play, so that the market can grow even more faster in a more healthy way;

Bang, in Chinese can also be written as 帮 (meaning the Gang). We have seen more and more Chinese companies doing very well in oversea market, and we need the experience to be shared with each other and find the synergy to help everyone in this China Gang.

So, to wrap up the year of 2011 for China web, today we are very exciting to announce the ChinaBang Awards 2011 to reward the best startups in local market. Thanks to everyone who are involved with ChinaMode Awards in 2009 and 2010. We have to move on and we promise that ChinaBang Awards will be more open, more professional and still independent.

This year’s ChinaBang Awards will still come with both online and offline parts. The online part includes three stages, Nomination, Shortlisting by Advisory Board and Public Vote. The offline ceremony will be held together with a TechNode’s startup-focus conference in late February.

The official site for ChinaBang Awards (chinabang.org) is now up and the details will be revealed very soon by early next week. If you are interested be ChinaBang’s co-organizers, media partners, sponsors etc, please do drop us an email on [contact At chinabang.org].

[This post is written by our guest editor Minman Gu who is the Investment Analyst from Shanda Innovations.]

StartupWeekend entered into Shanghai this year and held the event first in July. Last night it hosted its second run in Shanghai, with an impressive mentor team and 16 projects.

Here are the four winning ideas:

Winner #1: Yes Or No(YON)

Yes Or No (YON) is a mobile application enables people to vote for a picture with simple attitude: Yes or No. For example, a boy wants to buy a gift for his girlfriend can use this app to ask users of YON for advice. As far as I know, a lot of similar apps already exist in China. OOXX, Bilin(比邻)and kuaiwen(快问) share similar idea and product design. Especially OOXX, this app offers super experience in user-interaction. I tested it with a random photo and got 20 feedbacks within ten minutes. How to compete with existing products leaves a big question for YON.

Winner #2: Toy Story (云端漫步)

Toy Story is a hardware project. Robert toys with the control function editable by self-generated programs. A judge commented “this product is just what I need for my naughty kids”.

Winner #3: Chatbox (话匣子)

Chatbox is a SNS based user-generate-content game. It catches pictures and text contents about a certain topic from SNS and generates html5 game simultaneously. The team wishes this product can be used by advertisers to attract audience for branding and marketing purpose. Plus, with html5 engine, they can immediately cover all the platforms including web service and mobile platforms.

Winner #4: Medhome

Medhome is an app for people to find doctors and get diagnosed by phone, video and text. The basic idea was from a friend’s personal experience who went to a foreign country and got trouble finding a trust-worthy economical medical service. With medhome, user can enjoy familiar doctors’ service wherever he is. However, these medical-related product faces two main obstacles: 1. How to win the trust from users; 2. How to deal with issues of medical accidents. Still, I believe these in-pocket-doctor products may find a way to improve people’s health.

The champion team will represent China to enter the Global Startup Battle. Wish them good luck!

We’ve been talking about Sina Weibo’s fast expanding to social games, eCommerce etc, you might be wondering what’s Tencent’s plan about it. Even with 310millions registered users (vs. Sina Weibo’s 250million users), Tencent would never get relaxed. Yesterday, Tencent made the first trial toward the monetization of its weibo platform, introducing eCommerce with partnership of B2C platforms such as OKBuy, 51Buy etc.

Similar to what Sina Weibo offers to 360buy, Tencent Weibo users can now visit companies like OKBuy’s official account page to browse the products. Once you pick the product, you will be redirected to OKBuy’s main site to make the purchase. Since Tencent Weibo could bring huge of exposure and traffic to the merchants, we would assume that Tencent could ask for revenue share or commission in future.

When eCommerce is on Weibo, it’s all about word of mouth. Tencent obviously understands it well and even develops an idea to make it more viral. Basically, given a limited time period, if the sale news got retweeted by one user, the price for that product will be cut down a bit (for the case of OKBuy, 0.1 yuan less per retweet). So if you want more discount, just get more friends to retweet the news and it may turn out you can get that product for free. Smart marketing idea!

Finally, Baidu Map added the long-waiting feature: Satellite View (only available for China). Now it supports three view modes: Map, Satellite and 3D. I never used Baidu Map, so it is a bit surprise that Baidu Map just gets it launched today after years’ of operation.

We have no idea about how Baidu gets the satellite images, but if compare it with Google Map’s Satellite View, Baidu’s view actually looks a bit more clear. Google Map also offers Street View mode which I doubt Baidu can get it implemented soon.

There is still no sign of Google Map getting its license soon, so sadly we’ve heard that more and more local companies had to go for other choice. deCarta is now also active in China attracting local developers. The opportunity is now open to everyone.

We first wrote about the Tips for luxury brands doing eCommerce in China back in August 2010 as we predicted it’s going to be a trend. We now see a few sites offering eCommerce for luxury products, such as VIPShop, Xiu, 163’s Shangpin etc. They are now the favorites for VCs as the market is expected to hit 16 Billion Yuan by this year.

This trend has been caught up in Vietnam.

While cloning a group buying website is hype in Vietnam with nearly 100 Groupon clones in the market, a new online shopping destination in Vietnam is trying a different way. Brandsfavor, a member only private shopping club where Vietnamese fashionistas can buy branded fashion, accessory products up to 70% off retail prices, is launched.

Founded by a team of experienced fashion and technology professionals, Brandsfavor is the first online private shopping club in Vietnam selling international fashion, accessory brands exclusively to members at privileged prices with premium delivery and customer services. All sales are event based, last from 2 to 5 days, members will receive the email notifications when campaigns start.

According to Jason Vu, one of the co-founders, Brandsfavor merchandising team works with local dealers, distributors of international brands to find best deals for members. For brands not yet available in Vietnam, Brandsfavor buyers will source from suppliers in Europe and the US.

Jason believes that Brandsfavor’s model could create new sales and marketing channel benefits both customers who can buy branded products at good prices and retailers can clear excess inventory and reach new customers.

If you are super addicted to Internet (just like me), you may hate traveling with the flights. The feeling is like you gonna be disconnected from the world for hours (sometime it’s good excuse, though). Now things might get changed, at least for the first time in China (I know there are a few international airlines which have been doing that for a while), Air China will offer In-flight WiFi starting from this week. The first flight with In-flight WiFi service, flight CA1405/1407, will take off from Beijing to Chengdu.

According to Sina, Air China has developed a so-called e-Chat service so that the travelers can chat with others, and you can even see the seat no. and pick up the right person you want to connect with. Sounds like a good market for speed dating, uhm… 😉 You will never feel alone when you are in the air!

It looks like there is lots to do with the WiFi. But hold on, the In-flight WiFi is not connected to the Internet yet, meaning the whole group of travelers are now connected but it’s still isolated from the ground. Air China says that the technical issue with WiFi connecting with Internet has been more or less solved, the question left now is just when. If that happens and if it’s free or not expensive, sure it will create a new market for mobile web.

We wrote about Aliyun, Alibaba’s cloud computing service, and we said Aliyun Cloud OS phone is the most aggressive part in Alibaba’s cloud computing strategy. With Aliyun’s first phone (W700 by K-Touch) in hands, we are now able to tell our readers more about Alibaba’s vision on the cloud service.

Android-based or Linux-based Cloud OS

There is still a debate whether Aliyun Cloud OS is Android based or not. I asked the guy who was the lead of the OS team. He confirmed the system’s built on Linux, not on Android. The reason it can run Android applications is that they developed a transcoder so all Android applications are actually got transcoded first before installation in order to run Aliyun Cloud OS.

Why Cloud OS for phone

Dr. WANG Jian explains,

You may feel OK if you lost the phone, but you definitely don’t want to lost the data on the phone; You may not want to share your phone with your friends, but you may be more willing to share some of the data with them even strangers.

So a Cloud OS for phone could be the ultimate solution.

Native App will be dead

I am reading a post on VentureBeat, The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history. HTML5 will be the key driving force for the mobile service market, and Alibaba, this eCommerce-focus Kingdom has seen the trend and been planning for this for years. The W700 phone has integrated cloud strorage and sync service (the data such as photos, messages, call history, note etc can be synced with Aliyun cloud system, and accessible on my.aliyun.com), cloud local (Koubei is the Yelp-like service which got acquired by Alibaba) service, price comparison service, group buying service (Taobao’s Juhuasuan) and more important the Cloud Application store (currently hosts several hundreds applications). You can see the screenshots below to get better ideas.

We heard that W700 did not have a good sale number. I don’t want to comment on the hardware part, but for the insight on the Cloud OS, I think what Aliyun’s doing now is really respectable.

2011.11.11 is named the “Super Singles Day” in China as you have to wait another 100 years to see next 11/11/11. I don’t know why this date’s getting so special, but people including couples did celebrate it for fun and it did bring huge commercial opportunities. The online shopping platform, Taobao and TMall has just done a superb job, and you could even call it a Miracle.

According to Taobao’s official data we just got,

• Started at 00:00, 3.42 millions users jumped onto Taobao within only 1 minute;
• It only took 8 minutes to reach rmb 100millions (~$15.8m) transaction volume, another 13 minutes to reach rmb 200millions (~$31.5m), and 11 minutes later the transaction volume reached rmb 300millions (~$47.3m).
• At the time 11:11am, the transaction volume reached rmb 1.154billions (~$182m);
• By 24:00, the total transaction volume reached rmb 3.36 billions (~$530m);
• On the date 11/11/11, the total transaction volume on Taobao and TMall reached rmb 5.2billion (~$820m), and the number of transaction reached 336.9 millions.

Well, I am wondering with that amount of orders, how could Taobao/TMall get them delivered on time.

Lei Jun, the investor of Miliao (Kik+Talkbox-like service) was wearing Miliao t-shirt everyday (before he announced its Xiaomi phone). He should be proud of Miliao which was the No.1 downloaded social app beating QQ iOS client for several days.  But, never ever underestimate the power of Tencent. Once it gets more serious and spend more effort, things may get changed easily.

According to an insider we recently talked to, Weixin, Tencent’s Kik+Talkbox has now the user base close to 20 Millions (Miliao said it had 7 millions users; Talkbox claimed 6 millions). I can not get the second resource to double prove the figure, even Pony Ma refused to give the exact number in the interview with us at TechCrunch. But, recently I got a few invitations from a few friends who are not working in the Internet market at all, well… it really gives me the sign that Tencent is winning this market, again!

We reported that Sina Weibo, the No.1 microblogging service has now 250 millions users. Yesterday, Tencent’s official said in its quarterly financial meeting, QQ Weibo has now 310 millions registered users and 50 millions active users. So will Sina Weibo beat QQ Weibo forever, it’s a Maybe as far as we can see now, but never say it’s a Must.

Tencent, is it really unstoppable?

Over 100 hundreds of top local developers and media flew to Shanghai yesterday to attend Samsung’s Galaxy Note’s launch event. All cost including flight and 5-stars hotel are covered by Samsung, and they even are promised to have a Galaxy Note in next several days.

The launch event only lasted ~30 minutes, but Galaxy Note did not disappoint the audience. 5.3′ screen with 1280×800 super amoled display and innovative S Pen technology with some very handy functions (such as the one-touch screenshot, easy note-taking etc) could make itself really stand out in the market. As one Samsung staff said to me, it’s the one can beat iPhone 5. I personally like its S Pen a lot. At least for Chinese users, especially for business people, drawing and writing is still more convenient than typing.

There was nothing wrong with Galaxy Note itself, but storm of curses came from Sina Weibo right after the debut. Terrible and unacceptable mistake on the map of China used in the presentation of Samsung’s Korean official was spotted by audience: Taiwan is displayed as a part of China, and even worse part of north-east China was separated from China. Samsung, now gets cursed by Chinese netizens of not respecting China.

An impressive commercial product show, ended up with a political issue. Really a painful lesson should Samsung learn.

Galaxy Note is priced at RMB5900, not cheap but might be worthwhile for business people. The SDK for S Pen will be released for developers in December too.

Pony Ma, started as a developer and now is the founder and the CEO of Tencent, the No.1 Chinese Internet company.

At TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing, we got the chance to chat with Pony at the backstage right after his talk with Sarah Lacy of TechCrunch. Instead of talking about Tencent which we may hear a lot from different media, our talk focus on doing startups and entrepreneurship. As Pony said,

An opportunity like this could allow me share my ideas with people, including those details that may not be interesting to journalists but of particular interest to entrepreneurs.

What do you think is the most difficult part for doing a startup now?

Yes, the general business environment is much better now than before. The most importantly, financing is relatively a lot easier. Also, there are more opportunities. However, the most difficult part is also because it’s easier to finance, which means you will have many competitors. There will also be many people or teams who have the same kind of idea with you and also have received fundings. So I think, how to stand out among those similar startups in the competition is the most difficult. I think having a very strong executive capacity including knowing the best about the needs of users and be able to make adjustments based on the response from users and market, is the most crucial. As we can see, there are a lot of teams ran successfully at the early stage with nice ideas, but lack of sustainability. Maybe three months or one year later, their response speed of iteration would slow down, which is a disastrous problem from my opinion.

People always say that programmers are geeks, and geeks can change the world. Do you think there will be another Pony Ma in such an environment in China?

I believe there will be. I truly believe in it. Because I think that the so-called geeks represent an ultimate demand for the development of a thing or the experience of it. They need to seek the perfection. In fact, you will see that all the popular commercialized products and service are the ones who can meet the ultimate needs of users. Only those can succeed. So there might be such situations like geeks before commercialization. Once he has a nice idea, a team, and the capital to operate well, I believe there would be opportunities to make a product for everyone to wow. In that case, he would succeed.

As a founder, how do you define a good entrepreneur? What’s the spirit of entrepreneurship？

I think first and foremost is to have a good team. In the very beginning, you may be able to write a good program by yourself. But soon enough, it will be developed into a team. Then it will become a bigger team with hundreds of people. Its structure will become increasingly complex. For how to manage the organization with continuously growth, the relationship with your shareholders, your partner, and among the whole team is very important, I think. Therefore, a successful entrepreneur needs to have, or learn and develop such ability. Or at least that you can adapt your mental attitude to such a development, so you can possibly succeed. Most of the ideas cannot be carried out by the entrepreneur alone. So you need to infect others and convince your colleagues, to enter into an entrepreneurial state as you do. Of course you need to adapt the incentive mechanism too, to be more suitable for its development. This is a precondition.

What will Tencent do to support young people in China start doing their business?

Yes. Our focus for this year is our open platform. We want to open our QQ account system, the whole social networking platforms including our desktop clients and our payment channels to the startups. We do hope that we can help maybe a small team to realize their value on our platform. In fact, it works exactly like the early stage of our company who’d achieved development on the Monternet platform of China Mobile operator. We‘ve been through this process, so we are truly aware of how important an opening platform is for start-up companies.

The interview (by TechCrunch TV) below (with English Subtitle):

China-based Huohua (means Spark) uses semantic analysis to find your social circle instantly.

Founded by Carl Wu, Huohua is trying to solve a problem of “where and with whom to have fun” by introducing a smart feature dubbed Instant Circle. Basically, it works like this: open the app to tap a keyword like ”basketball”, “hot pot” or “mountain climbing” to locate people with same interests around you, then live chat with them.

Thanks to the semantic search, the updates published on Huohua such as “get something to drink” and “drink beer” can be considered as the same interest and users can be thus connected. So based on where you are and what are you interested in, Huohua will be generating a location-and-interests-based instant circles just for you.

There are tens of location-based mobile social networks in the market, Huohua’s Instant Circle and Semantic Analysis features will definitely help it stand out in the market, if they function well as promised.

Huohua will be available on both iOS and Android.

[Note, this post is co-published on TechCrunch. The video is recorded by TechCrunch TV.]

If you read the lists of the startups incubated by TiSiWi, you may question if any of them can be big one day. I love most of the ideas. They are good, but it’s also true that the technology barrier is low and there are a few applications or service already in the market. It could be so hard for some of them to survive.

I was on stage and talked to Kevin, the founder of Instagram at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing. What most impressed me is that they can now manage 12 millions users with only 6 staff. Even now, Japan has become it’s 2nd largest market. It’s a small application, but now becomes big! In silicon valley, if your product is good and distinguishing, you can open up your platform and it’s a fair market where you may win the respect. You may find plenty of examples like Twitter, Foursquare and even Facebook etc.

People ask me if I see any small startup can have the chance to be big, my answer is the possibility is so low.

1. Being a platform is just a dream. If you are relatively small and have a bunch of users. To expand quickly, you may think of being a platform, i.e. announcing your API to expect more third-parties can join you to drive the market together. That’s what Instagram, Foursquare and Twitter did. But here, it’s so hard. Why should people follow you and your standard? Even you are big like Tencent, don’t forget Baidu, Alibaba, Sina etc are there and they would not be ‘regulated’ by your game rule. That is why, there are many so call Open Platforms but none of them can be the dominant.
2. Cooking a good startup takes time, meaning not to question much about the revenue model etc. But Chinese market is lacking of patience, the founders usually don’t have it, so do the investors. It’s getting better these days as in mobile web, almost all the hottest sectors don’t have clear business model even in silicon valley anyway, investors are more willing to tell you, they invest it not for product but mainly because of the team.
3. Probably we should not complain about market environment which can not be expected to be changed tomorrow. The most disappointing one is, and we are short of disrupt ideas which give people the confidence that we can be Big.

Everything starts with tiny and small. You may find lots of successful company in China starting as one-man business. What I want to emphasize here is that, in China web, we need give more space and better ecosystem for Innovation.

Google’s official Android Market is not available in China, leading to a plethora of independent markets – over 70 at last count. The system works – sort of – but users may find it annoying because you actually don’t know how to find the good stuff. China is still lacking any sort of innovative search mechanism to help people identify the apps they really need in daily life.

Discovering the apps should not be boring, and the core value of Qiuqiu is to bring the pleasure of discovering apps during different activities. Qiuqiu’s app search engine is unique because it offers results based on your location, the time of day, and the things you like and do. Each scenario is expressed by a series of apps – education apps for the school day and travel apps for your vacation. It’s a compelling and interesting change from the traditional “editor’s choice” and selected apps lists found in many markets.

Qiuqiu, the new app discovery engine is developed by AppChina, one of the leading third party Android markets. The founders are a group of very experienced senior engineers and product managers from STC Bing search technology centre and graduates from Tsinghua, Beijing and Fudan Universities. Being successful in the Android market, as Luo Chuan, the co-founder of AppChina, formerly CEO of MySpace China, said, means suppling the right apps at the right time. AppChina is moving forward to the field of search engine and data mining and try to develop a new way of discovering Android apps most suitable for you.

[Editor: this post’s first published on TechCrunch, and the video is from TechCrunch TV.]

Yesterday, Hangzhou-based incubator TiSiWi held its first Demo Day to wrap up its 3-month accelerator program kicked off in August (read our previous coverage). 15 startups presented their projects on stage to pitch over 40 VCs and angel investors.

Pang Xiaowei, the founder of TiSiWi picked up a nice place where a weekly speed-dating event is held. He said, the Demo Day is the speed date for the startups and investors too.

15 startups are founded by 40 young men (including only 1 girl), and unsurprisingly all of them are more or less Mobile-related. Here is the quick roundup:

Confone.com –  an event management service. Comes with web and mobile version, Confone helps users easily publish their event information, agenda, speaker profile etc;

Whohelp.me – a LBS application to solve so-called people’ 3km-range problems. The idea is that user can publish anything he wants help and others located within 3km can respond;

Muerr.com – you can drag & drop any file (photo, pdf etc) on the site and the files can be auto stored in the cloud. Any update made on your personal page (e.g. muerr.com/username) will be seen simultaneously by other visitors no matter they are on iPad, PC or iPhone;

Bailty.com – like ShopSavvy, users can use Bailty to scan barcode to obtain the product’s information. Furthermore, using Semantic Analysis, Bailty can also gather the comments on products from the web to help users make the decision on purchase;

Cuoluo – randomness could be the best. Cuoluo’s idea is to entertain every user with random content to read, listen and play with. You can even upload a set of names and do a luck draw;

Youyur.com – a service help companies find interns and freelancers;

Miihuu.com – a search engine which can help users search for updates from their social media (weibo, social networks, etc)

Juupoo.com – a LBS application helping users publish/explore events organized by cities.

52hz.com – a StumbleUpon-like service helping people to discover interesting sites;

Timap – a calendar applications with voice recognition feature;

Xiaoenai.com – an interesting service designed for couples and loves. You can send a request to your boyfriend asking for a gift, and the couple can even get the debate settled online. For the long-term plan, eCommerce can be integrated into the service;

Hupo – a mobile social network focus on campus students; China has now 30millions university students, which is definitely a large market to target at;

Fanyor.com – a service help business people, friends to organize lunch/dinner, thus social connections can be built;

Tongxin (itongxing.com) – an application founded by an ex-Ctrip staff. It’s to help people to share transportation, e.g. taxi anytime and anywhere;

Mati – an innovative travel service. You pick up the places to go, and the system can auto generate a travel schedule for you. The beauty is that, say the system “thinks” you need 2 hours to visit one place, but you actually only stay there for an hour, you can easily use the service to update the whole travel plan;

I would not say that most of these startups are superb as some competitors can already be found in the market, and from the technology point of view, some of the startups’ tech barrier is not high enough too. But I was totally impressed by the passion and confidence delivered by these startups on stage. It’s a nice debut for TiSiWi and we definitely need more like this.

In the closing speech by Pang, he sent its respect to Y Combinator which inspired him to set up TiSiWi. He also announced that there will be 2 seasons of accelerator program and 25 startups are expected to join each season.

The Shanzhai industry is always beyond your expectation. The idea can get copied very quick, and because you have to compete with other copies, you have to make sure you can bring something fancy in order to stand out in the market.

Recently we met iBoxPay, another Square liker from Shenzhen. Unlike Yeahka which is Shenzhen-based, iBoxPay’s product is not available in the market, yet. But, what impressed me is that the features promised on its official site are just amazing. RFID reader, Barcode Scanner, the Square-function, USBKey for secure, e-signature etc, it looks like iBoxPay is going to offer you a All-in-One solution combines with all future’s mobile payment methods. I just can not wait to check out how it will work.

Even more interesting, we also realized that the founder of iBoxPay is also the share-holder of GooApple, the Android-powered iPhone 4 clone. The founder also confirmed that iBoxPay had just closed its funding from a very famous international VC.

You’ve been wondering when Sina Weibo will be launching its English version. Today, we talked to one official from Weibo management team. He confirmed that the English version of Weibo would be out very soon.

However, launching the site in English is not a big deal (Tencent Weibo’s English version has been launched) .

It’s not about accessing the oversea market, it’s about the oversea companies to access the Chinese users.

The official said they’ve seen a good demand of oversea services which want to connect to Sina Weibo’s service to entertain Chinese users. For the first batch of oversea partners, FlipBoard and Instagram would be in it. With the integration of the Weibo, the Chinese users of FlipBoard and other oversea services would be able to share content on the hottest Chinese social media. “FlipBoard will be launching a Chinese version.” He said, “and of course they will find out a way to get accessible again (Editor: FlipBoard currently is not accessible in China).”

Furthermore, Sina Weibo is also secretly testing its Kik-like feature which can be seen when you send direct message to others on its app. Rumor says Sina Weibo might launch a standalone Kik-like app too, attacking Tencent’s Weixin.

Alibaba’s kingdom seems in big doubt: It is rumored to buy back Yahoo; Jack Ma got criticized for his controversially transferring Alipay to his own company; and TMall, the B2C eCommerce platform is suffered from very serious protest and complaints from small merchants; even worse, Jack Ma who was considered the hero helping thousands of small merchants is now suddenly the evil of killing the chance to them. 

We would not know the future of Alibaba’s eCommerce. But as least, with reported ~3000 staff and the fund of rmb 1billion to build the ecosystem, Alibaba’s cloud computing, so called Aliyun looks exciting.

Aliyun comes with four levels of cloud services, Cloud Storage, Cloud Computing, Cloud OS and Cloud-OS Phone.

• Cloud Storage – as Dr. Wang Jian, the CEO of Aliyun said at its Mobile Internet Summit last week. “You may feel OK when lost your phone, but you never want to lost your data.” With the Cloud Storage, Aliyun is to enable everyone to seamlessly backup/sync his data on mobile devices via cloud;
• Cloud Computing – Amazon is playing a very important role in the startup ecosystem in silicon valley as its AWS service leaves thousands of startups with no worry about the server’s capability. But for a very long time there is no Amazon in China, and Aliyun wants become the one. Developers and startups can now use it at different price.
• Cloud OS – which is going to dominate the mobile OS market, iOS, Android or WM 7? Aliyun’s answer is the Cloud OS, a highly customized Android system which can help you easily access the (HTML5-based) cloud service as well as the normal Android-based apps. Aliyun even prepares rmb 1million to run a Cloud OS application development competition.
• Cloud-OS Phone – this is the most aggressive part. Aliyun partners with K-Touch, a famous local phone brand and have launched their first Cloud-OS phone, W700. With this phone, you can easily access hundreds of HTML5-based cloud service, including Alibaba Group’s Taobao, Koubei, Group-buying service, Cloud Storage etc.

So, Alibaba is to make the change, from an eCommerce-focus to a more technology-focus company. When you think about its entire cloud computing strategy, especially on the mobile part, does makes a lot of sense. Mobile payment gateway (Alipay) and mobile eCommerce (Taobao, Yitao search, TMall etc) are the most important services on mobile and they are what Alibaba is strong with on the web. Aliyun cloud service platform looks like giving an all-in-one package for third-parties.

First of all, we have to apologize to our readers. We’ve been blogging little in past week or so. Being recognized by the mainstream industry is a super good thing, and being invited to many conference/events is also good for social networking, but when you spending too much time on all these occasions, you actually have little time to read, to think and more importantly, to write. As a tech blogger, it is not the way to get stronger, as the content people are expecting you to write is always, the key.

Thanks to our readers who kindly consider TechNode as the TechCrunch in China. We are really trying, for a long time, as my personal hobby and now a small team’s dream, to build TechNode for China/Asia in the way as the TechCrunch’s doing for the global startup ecosystem.

TechCrunch is the hero, and finally it is here. I can’t say how exciting I am, expecially for TechNode we also have the chance to work with them on the big Disrupt Beijing event. I do not know if the Disrupt Beijing will be a huge success or not, but having the chance to work with them in past a few days, which basically makes me understand one thing, TechCrunch’s success does has its reasons. It’s all about Doing Everything for startups, the pure DNA of helping startups growing. As I told our team, working with TechCrunch is our honor and we need learn the way they are working for the ecosystem, and the spirit of being the truly tech bloggers.

TechNode will be back blogging more and reporting TechCrunch’s Hackathon, Disrupt and Startup Battlefield in next a few weeks. It’s time for a Different tech media for Chinese ecosystem, but We still have a long way to go.

TechNode’s partner, Xyologic, an app search company with cutting edge technology that helps users find the best mobile apps recently released over 220 reports, covering 4 platforms (Android, iPhone, iPad and WP7) and 29 countries including China.

The report comes with Top 100 Publishers, Top 150 Most Downloaded Apps, Top 150 Most Downloaded Apps in Categories which giving a comprehensive and valuable information about each local mobile app market. For users who are always looking for good apps, for investors who are seeking good teams to invest, for ads publishers who are interested in most downloaded apps to embed their ads and for research people like us who want to understand more about local market (what’s the hottest categories, which are the leading development companies etc), this report is definitely a very good reference to check every month. Here we are happy to share with you the reports for Android, iPhone and iPad (the data is gathered from 8th Aug to 8th Sept, 2011).

In general, in August 2011, there are 22.14m Android App downloads, 78.29m iPhone app downloads and 31.7m iPad app downloads.

1. Android App Downloads

First of all, we should note that Xyologic’s report only counts Google official app market. Giving the fact its official app market is not available in China (it only offers free apps), there are several other popular independent Android market such as AppChina (Innovation Works’ companies), gFan (angel invested by CyberAgent and recently announced its $5m Series A funding), hiApk, eoeMarket etc. And, big guys like Tencent, 360 etc have its own app stores and Android phone manufacturers such as Motorola, Samsung, Lenova etc all runs its own app market too. So figures in this report are most likely not accurate (much less than the actual downloads), but still it can give us the ideas of who are the top players right now.

2. iPhone/iPad App Downloads

Compared with Android report, the figures comes with the iPhone/iPad reports should be much accurate. Although we need mention that 91 Assistant, a iOS app store offering cracked apps is still quite popular in China.

Google’s Android app market only offers free apps, but on Apple’s App Store (China), paid apps are also available. Therefore, it’s interesting to check out which are the most popular paid content, who their publishers are and what types of apps Chinese are more willing to pay etc.

iPhone Apps –

iPad Apps –

3. InApp Purchase

We say that in general Chinese app market is a free market, meaning you can not count on paid apps to generate enough revenue (unless you are a bit of luck). So Advertisement and InApp purchase (for iOS) said to be one of the key approaches for apps publishers.

As for the global apps market, Xyologic also predicts that the number of monthly Google Android apps downloaded will exceed the number of monthly Apple iOS (iPod, iPad and iPhone) apps downloaded by June 2012.

We used to write about deCarta’s plan for China. As the leading global location-based service, deCarta has to be more serious about the fast growing Chinese market. It’s been 6 months, finally deCarta made the decision. To kick-off its China plan, deCarta, together with its partner NAV2 will host its developer event across China.

In October, the events will be held in 5 major cities for local developers which include Shanghai, Beijing, Xi’an, Wuhan and Guangzhou. Besides some high level speakers from deCarta/NAV2, several local LBS providers such as the leading check-in service Jiepang and the popular Yell-like service Fantong are invited to give speech too.The topics will cover from some general overview of LBS market, the know-how of deCarta LBS service, the case studies from Jiepang and Fantong and a workshop for deCarta’s LBS API. The details and online registration (Free) can be found here: http://www.decarta.com/developerseminar/index.html.

As the media partner of the event, TechNode’s editor will also visit each city. It’s a great pleasure to help deCarta get in touch with local developer communities as bridging the international and local market is always TechNode’s top mission which also makes us standing out as the independent tech media. We want to take the opportunity to meet local startups and entrepreneurs to understand more about local startup environment. So if you are running startups and want us to write about, please do catch up at the events.

Looking forward to meeting you all.

If Tencent’s penguin is hungry, it can be very dangerous and wants to (also has the potential to) eat everything. Taobao has its open B2C platform launched just a month ago, today Tencent’s open B2C platform is also launched, giving the domain buy.qq.com.

Tencent’s B2C platform comes with six categories: 3C, sportswear, cosmetics, clothes, grocery and jewelry, and for each category Tencent will be working with different B2C eCommerce sites and sell their products. For example, Haolemai is one of the most popular site selling shoes so it powers the shoe channel, Yixun is famous for selling 3C products so it enriches the items in 3C category. Now you can just go to buy.qq.com and are able to buy them all. Taobao Mall said it had 38 independent B2C sites integrated when it first launched. It’s not clear yet how many eCommerce site/brands buy.qq.com now has partners with and how many of them will be by end of this year. Considering the huge user base and potentially the massive traffic/transaction Tencent can drive to the partners, I am sure there will be tens of eCommerce services are waiting for the green light to plug into the platform.

Currently, the service is only available for Guangdong province. Obviously, the battle between Tencent and Taobao is on.

We know eCommerce for luxury products is getting hot, and players are raising huge amount of money. I don’t buy luxury stuff so can not share with you any customer experience on those sites. I can not tell if their service is good, but what I can definitely tell you is that never think of buying luxury products on Amazon China or DangDang. I know both are huge and listed, but the fact is they are selling counterfeit products. Shame!

TechWeb today published a long article to condemn both sites’ irresponsibility. Just to give an example, for Emporio Armani AR0257 watch, I found the average price with discount listed on a few foreign eCommerce sites is like $150 and on Amazon US a used one is priced even at $199, but on Amazon China, the same model it only costs ~$86. You may know usually luxury or international brand products are more expensive than the ones in US/EU, so how come that watch is just 1/2 of the oversea price? There is only one reason can explain that, the product is counterfeit. 5 comments out of 8 on that watch from previous buyers also prove, the quality is very disappointing. The most controversial part is that on the product page, Amazon China clearly says Genuine Product Guarantee. Ridiculous!

If Dangdang, Amazon China are doing this, who can promise other B2C eCommerce sites would not? The West doubt and question about Chinese companies’ IPO run, well, I guess they should.

Sina Weibo is the hottest microblog service, sorry, to be exact, is the hottest social platform right now in China web. It has a very active user base, and more important it has become a Social Hub which almost every other social services want to link to. Now with Sina Weibo account, you can login many popular social services, including quite a few mobile apps; and almost every service syncs their content on Sina Weibo in order to generate more social buzz. It’s good to see Sina Weibo is growing fast and is building a great ecosystem, but, the question is always in my head is that whether Sina one day will take the advantage of the weibo and build some social services on its own.

Well, now I realize the answer is a Yes. Kandian, Sina’s Social TV service has been revealed today (in private test still). On Kandian, you can watch online video, TV program and live show; and you can also publish comments about the program and interact with other users. You can even create a collection of the programs and share it as your own video channel. And thanks to Sina Weibo, obviously all these user generated content can be sync with users’ weibo account.

Kandian indeed looks like a promising service. We wrote about iFeng’s WeiShiTong social TV apps and believe social TV will be an interesting market to be explored. Like WeiShiTong, Sina seems also working with several satellite TV stations so that users can watch/comment/share their TV program live on Kandian.

It’s quite a surprise that Sina has picked up this market and took it as its first try of building a seperate social service around its weibo. It is not clear yet how Sina will integrate its online video service with Kandian as well as Kandian’s future plan on mobile. I might be overreacting to this, but please, Sina (Weibo), just don’t be evil and do leave a healthy ecosystem to the startups.

It’s expected that in 2011 there will be 7.58million graduates looking for job in China. Job search sites are the key channel for young generation for job-hunting. Finding a good job is that easy, unfortunately those popular Chinese job search service could really drive you mad too.

ChinaHR, Zhaopin, 51job, they are huge and you can see their advertisement everywhere on TV, newspapers, outdoor display etc. But if you can just spend 2 seconds looking at their sites, you will understand what I mean. Every main page of each site is just packed with hundreds of company logos. Are they still job search sites? For me, they look just like very annoying spam ads windows.

Users are buried by all these ads and logos, well, apparently the logo means money, the bigger is the logo, more comes the revenue, which is the key business model behind all these service. Probably I should not complain on that.

But the worst thing is more and more users, both job publisher and job-hunting people are getting unhappy about the service. Job-hunting people get little clue about the best jobs fit for them and the job publishers (companies) may receive hundreds of spamming CV.

Things is going terribly wrong with Chinese job search sites. This market needs change and needs new players with fresh ideas.

1. More social features- especially for job-hunting people, they would love to know their friends’ recommendation and communicate more with each other and with the job publishers online;

2. New business model – there is no doubt that companies should pay for publishing jobs. Removing those annoying logo ads is one thing, we may get job-hunting guys to pay a little money too. If you need a job, then you have to be serious about each of your applications. Instead of sending your CV to many companies for free, you will be charged in order to get more details about the jobs you are really interested in getting.

3. More social channels – instead of running the job search service on your own, the operators should learn how to take advantage of social media such as Weibo, other social networks etc.

People are trying. UShi (professional SNS), Baibo (run by Baidu), Dajie (social job search site recently raised $10m) etc are giving us some new hope.

The market needs a fundamental change. Honestly, if they can not catch up the trend, those traditional job sites could be eventually, dead!

In China, no matter what you do, the competition could be always tough. And if you have to face a few competitors, the most important factor to win the market is the Speed, i.e. fast development, quick execution plus efficient marketing. QFPay is the first Square-like mobile payment solution we reported in early August, it is still in stealth mode; 99Bill’s Kuaishua is the second but there is still no sign of its official launch. Here comes the third, called Yeahka, developed by a company based in Shenzhen. The thing is, it is officially launched!

Yeahka’s solution looks exactly like Square: the card reader is plugged into the audio jack. The card reader priced at rmb 9.8 (~$1.5) is now on sale. The application is also available for both Android and iOS. Yeahka now only supports two banks: Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and Construction Bank of China and on its sites it says more banks will be supported soon.

As described on Yeahka’s site, with Yeahka’s solution you can now top up your phone credits, deposit money to your Tenpay (the payment gateway operated by Tencent) account and buy credits for game cards. Users can also logon Yeahka’s site to check the transaction history.

I’d love to buy one card reader and give it a try.

Over the next 15 years, the global addressable market for luxury goods is expected to grow by 600 million consumers, provoking growth forecasts of 2.2 times GDP. Much of this growth is projected to come from one market: China. In 2000, the Chinese market accounted for a fraction of luxury sales globally, however torrid growth means in 2015, China will likely overtake Japan as the world’s largest luxury market.

McKinsey reports (PDF download) that 73 percent of Chinese luxury consumers are under the age of 45, and upwards of 45 percent are under the age of 35, suggesting that the majority of prestige purchasers are digitally native. In the U.S., the average female prestige consumer registers household income of $150,000 and spends $3,000 annually on handbags. In contrast, the average female prestige consumer in China makes $18,300 and spends $2,000 annually on handbags. Often these purchases occur after two to three months of research and consideration, most of it done online.

None of global internet leaders is taking the lead in China and we have tens of popular local social networks, hundreds of BBSs with significant traffic, fast-growing Weibo and other digital channels, which makes marketing in China digital space a real challenge for foreign brands. Which brands are doing good in China, what we can learn from them and what are the key factors of doing digital marketing in China, etc. These are the often-asked questions when we discuss the social marketing strategy for brands.

L2 Think Tank‘s latest research, the Prestige 100®: China IQ (download), ranks the digital footprint of 100 prestige brands (of which 91 compete globally, and 9 are of Chinese/Hong Kong origin) on over 300 data points across four dimensions: Site, Digital Marketing, Social Media, and Mobile. This study attempts to quantify the digital competence in China of these iconic brands and the aim is to provide a robust tool to diagnose digital strengths and weaknesses and help managers achieve greater return on incremental investment.

Audi, Burberry, BMW, Volvo, Benefit Cosmetics, Cadillac (tied), Estée Lauder (tied), Land Rover (tied), Mercedes-Benz (tied), Porsche are the top 10 brands doing the best in China’s digital, according to the research.

It also comes with some key points such as:

• Selling Is Knowing: The percentage of e-commerce enabled brands has doubled since 2010. Those prestige brands with online selling capabilities boast an average IQ 16 points higher than those without online sales. Beauty & Cosmetics has the highest e-commerce penetration of any category with 11 out of 15 brands selling online.
• Digital Disparity: Over 50 percent of Chinese luxury purchases are made abroad, yet only 58 percent of brands provide U.S. and European store locators – missing an opportunity to expand global reach.
• Wild About Weibo: In the highly fragmented Chinese social landscape, Sina Weibo, the Chinese microblogging site, is the platform of choice. Fifty-seven percent of prestige brands maintain a presence on this platform.
• Buried on Baidu: Local search engine Baidu possesses 76 percent of the Chinese search market. However, visibility on this search engine is on the decline with 42 percent of prestige brand sites appearing outside of the top three search results. This suggests that brands are optimizing for global platforms versus Chinese specific platforms.
• Mobile Incompatibility: Two-thirds of China’s 485 million Internet users access the web via their mobile phones, yet only 25 percent of brands maintain a mobile optimized site.

The full report can be downloaded via the link here. Hope you also find it intriguing and any comment is surely welcome.

Samsung is holding two Bada developer events in Beijing and Chengdu today and this weekend at 24th. To build a good ecosystem, the developers obviously are the key. To make them happy, I heard that from a friend from Samsung’s management team, they are willing to give some Bada phones for free to the developers.

I never tried Bada phone, so could not comment on its performance. A friend who used to working for Samsung in London said that Samsung had over one hundreds engineers working on it, in other words it must be a serious operation system for smart phone. But my concern is that how serious Samsung is about Bada? As you may know, Samsung also makes Android phones, and also Window Mobile phones.

Talked to an insider last week, here are his comments on my questions:

• Samsung’s strategy on mobile device is to be the Cross-MobileOS, which is the reason that you see Samsung’s Nexus 2 in Google I/O and its Windows tablet in Microsoft Build 2011 conference;
• Samsung (at least in smart phone market in China) will continue to focus on Android. (He said ~85% of effort will be on Android, ~15% on Bada);
• As a traditional phone manufacturer, Samsung needs the Bada, its own mobile operating system (they used to compete with Nokia’s Meego). Bada is now in China, but Samsung does not have an ambitious goal for it. Like my friend said, it just has to be here in the massive market.

Bada’s app store for Chinese market is also available. Let’s see how fast and efficient Samsung can drive it.

Apple’s revenue from China for the 2nd quarter increased by more than six times from the same period last year, and Apple COO Tim Cook even believes “There is incredible opportunity for Apple there”.  But, things seem not going that well as everyone expected.

iPad 2 (3G) is available in Apple Store in China starting from today. As usual, Apple hired tens of safe guards standing outside the Apple Store waiting for the long queue and exciting Apple fans. The store opened at 8am (2h earlier than usual opening time), but surprisingly, there was just no queue. Only several iPad 2 (3G) were sold, reported by a local TV channel.

Reading the comments over the net, there are several reasons for Chinese to say No to Apple for the first time.

1. Too expensive. iPad2 (3G) 16G version is sold at rmb4688 which is around rmb1000 higher than iPad2 Wifi-only version;

2. No Jailbreak. People worries that the Jailbreak for this 3G version is not available yet;

3. iPad is not the only choice. Several other brands are also in the market and with cheaper price;

4. China Unicom does not come with any data plan for iPad2 (3G). Some people think it might be a cheaper option.

Twitter now has a Chinese version, and Sina Weibo might have an English version by end of this year. It seems that more and more foreign media love to talk about Sina’s Weibo and compare it with Twitter, the creator of microblog. I’ve been reading those stories, some points I agree with, and some I don’t and some I think are really nonsense.

Before we talk about Sina Weibo and Twitter, I do think there are 5 facts you must know.

1. Twitter is Never popular in China

Even before Twitter got blocked, it did not have many users in China at all, probably only geeks were playing with it. Now we got millions of Weibo users, I bet most of them do not even know Twitter’s existence. I was in a panel discussing about Weibo’s business value in APEC SME Summit, the panelists sitting besides me even have over one million followers and are now so-called social media experts, but they never used Twitter.

2. Twitter has No Chance in China

Twitter is coming to China because it’s launching its Chinese version? Come on! The answer is not something like, if it comes it is already too late (which could be the proper answer to Facebook’s coming to China), etc. The answer is just a Definitely Impossible. How can Twitter handle the content monitoring? You can not imagine how much effort Sina spent on it and the enormous pressure from different authorities. Besides, Twitter’s Chinese version is just a finished project from its translation community. Twitter is to serve oversea Chinese? it sounds silly, the oversea Chinese can still use Weibo, and if they can live oversea they should understand at lease the foreign language.

3. Sina Weibo’s English version, so What?

I don’t think Sina is serious about oversea market. English version of Sina Weibo is coming by end of this year? Mightbe. But if it’s just an English interface, it is an easy job. Sina said 10% of its weibo users are from oversea, fine, but how many of them are Not Chinese? I have some foreign friends now on Weibo, but they are living in China! Sina Weibo has an ambitious goal ahead in Chinese web market, which is big and interesting enough to keep it very busy for a long while.

4. Weibo is Not Twitter

It’s better not to compare Twitter and Sina Weibo. Sina Weibo is Not a simple microblogging service any more. We have discussed this many times, and the new version of Sina Weibo makes it even more clear. Microblog is the core in Sina’s ambitious plan, but Sina eventually wants an all-in-one social platform which comes with games, eCommerce, applications etc. Although I still think it is risky for Sina to mix so many stuff on Weibo. If Sina can not leverage the media and the platform, it might piss off many loyal users who have already positioned Weibo as a reliable new media resource.

5. Sina is Not the Mighty God

This actually happened to some Chinese media which believes Sina Weibo is creating a new world. We can not overstate Sina Weibo’s value. I do agree Sina has done a great job on Weibo and has been innovative to drive a microblogging service to the next level. However Cao Guowei, CEO of Sina is not the father of microblogging, and we can not ignore the fact that Weibo is inspired by Twitter. Before Sina Weibo’s launch the power of microblogging has been discovered by Twitter and other microblogging service, and it is Not Sina Weibo’s magic!

Whether you like it or not, Sina finally rolled out the new look of its Weibo to a small group of users. Like other typical Chinese web site, the page is now fully packed with menus, information and links. For the readers who are interested in the new layout but don’t read Chinese, here is the anatomy of the new Weibo. I don’t think it makes much sense to company it with the Twitter any more, but you probably can have some sense that if Sina Weibo is more than a microblogging site, i.e. is it evolving to a social network?

Layout – The page is re-designed and now has three column instead of the original two to give more space for more content and features.

Online Chat – the most interesting feature the new version brought in is the Online Chat. Just like Facebook online chat, user now is able to see which friends (Note, Friends here mean you two follow each other) are currently online on Weibo and chat with them. The conversation is saved as the direct messages;

Sina Apps – Like other social network site, Sina now list its own apps on the left column to give better exposure. Photo, Music, Events, Vote etc, obviously Sina has developed all the standard features for social networks by its own.

Third-party Apps – the third-party apps user has been using are listed on the left column too. Sina wants to better promote its open platform which hopefully can be the cash machine to bring Sina Weibo to the real success. Remember, that’s how Facebook started with.

Plaza – Sina Weibo is growing very fast in terms of the number of users and the amount of content generated. A good mechanism to push the interesting users and content to the users is getting important. In addition to Hot Topics and Recommended Users on the main page, Sina Weibo also has a Plaza which is the place you can find all sorts of featured content and users.

At last, Sina Weibo’s virtual currency, Weibi is now listed in My Account. On Weibi page, you can check the mini-games in which you can buy virtual stuff with Weibi, your purchase history and add credit etc.

We should welcome more Silicon Valley-based energy coming to educate and enhance the local ecosystem. So it’s great to see Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) Financial Group has taken the initials and is serious about China. Ken Wilcox, the Chairman of SVB, has moved to Shanghai three months ago to head up SVB’s creation of a joint venture bank with Shanghai Pudong Development Bank Co. Ltd.

SVB Financial Group, headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., the company offers its clients commercial, investment, merchant and private banking, as well as value-added services using its knowledge and networks. It is founded in 1983, now serves clients around the world through 26 domestic offices, has international subsidiaries in the U.K., Israel, India and China with 1,400 employees and $19.4 billion in total assets, and an extensive network of relationships with venture capitalists worldwide.

At the night of September 22nd SVB Financial Group is hosting a “CEO Dinner” at the Kathleen’s 5, Shanghai (Note: It’s an invitation only event.). Together with Ken Wilcox, SVB also brings other two entrepreneurs from Europe and U.S: Jacob Hsu, CEO of Symbio, and Marc van der Chijs , Co-founder of Tudou who have successfully started and grown their business venture here. I am really honored to be invited to moderate to moderate the panel discussion.

The following topics will be discussed (but not limited to):

• The differences of entrepreneurship between East and West
• Experiences in doing business in China, what is the must and what is the must-not
• Suggestions on setting up the startups in China, what are the key factors driving companies to succeed
• Views on local investment environment, what are the current and next investment sectors
• The trends in Chinese tech industry
• SVB’s China strategy and views on Chinese market

Date: 5:30-9:00pm, September 22, 2011 (Thursday) Venue: Kathleen’s 5 Rooftop Restaurant
325 Nanjing Xi Lu, 5F, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai

Agenda:

• 5:30 – 6:00 Sign in and cocktail
• 6:15 – 7:15 Panel discussion
• 7:15 – 7:45 Q&A
• 7:45 – 9:00 Dinner

On behalf SVB, we’d love to invite you, our readers (startup founders, entrepreneurs etc) to be there. Please RSVP to Libby Tang to reserve your seat (Tel: 86-21-6143 3812, Mob: 86-139 1706 8210), or via email (LTang AT svbank.com or contact At technode.com). (NOTE: it’s an invitation only event, so RSVP is a MUST. 🙂 )

I remembered that back in February, I had a conversation with some friends from Google discussing on what Google could do in China. We were talking about Group buying service, and I said that’s market Google China should look into, but instead of doing a Groupon liker, a group-buying aggregator site might be the best and easiest entry for Google China. And in a meeting with Marissa Mayer when she visited Shanghai with a group of young product managers, she also asked for advice on Google’s focus in China, I said one is Android market, the other is an aggregator service for Chinese group-buying.

Today, Google China really launched its group-buying aggregator service, called Shihui. Using Shihui, users can search for the deals on a couple of local group-buying sites by cities, categories, price etc. It’s not a complicated service, but it’s neat and convenient.

Baidu has its group-buying aggregator launched in June this year. According to a friend from Meituan management team, he said Baidu’s and 360’s aggregators are now the top 2 bringing them the traffic. Startups like Tuan800 seems doing ok too. As for aggregator’s business model, it’s simply the Ads model, i.e. group-buying sites need pay in order to be featured on aggregators.

Understanding the local trend is one of the keys for international web companies to succeed in China. I love Google China’s effort on Shihui, but maybe next time, they can get these sort of Local ideas executed earlier and faster.

I guess in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, every young man knows Jay Chou, a super super star who is a musician, singer-songwriter, music and film producer, actor and director. I mentioned his name here not because I am his fan (and I am definitely not), and the reason is that he just invested a mobile messaging app, called 31SMS. The mission is quite clear, to beat Whatsapp in Taiwan and maybe later in China.

We’ve written about several local mobile messaging apps. Be honest, 31SMS is the one we’ve never heard of before. Well, it’s true we don’t know Taiwan market that much (so readers, please leave your comments if you know: which are the leading mobile messaging apps in Taiwan?). I’ve tried 31SMS’s iOS version, and I have to say it’s a very disappointing product. But fair enough, I guess Jay needs time to learn how to make a good app.

On 31SMS’s official site, we read,

The term Trinity came from an idea in the Bible about the combination of three entities, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, into one being. Using the Trinity as our inspiration, we have coined this 3 in 1, or simply 31, in the name of our new application 31SMS.  In this application we have developed a system for transmitting “Text, Pictures, and Video” to nearly any country you wish.

So it’s clear that like Whatsapp, 31SMS also allows its users to send Text, Pictures, and Video message to any other users for free. But, what surprised me is 31SMS got its patent technology, titled System and Method of Automatic Multi-media Mail. I could not get time to read through that patent doc, but I am wondering it will be kinda of threat to Whatsapp or other mobile messaging apps?

31SMS does comes with several interesting features. Scheduled SMS allows users to send the message to friends at certain time or at repeat time (weekly, monthly, annual). The Channel comes with a few channel such as music channel, English education, radio, job news etc where users can subscribe. It seems for me that the Channel is perfect for Jay to distribute his stuff such as music, video show etc.

Jay has millions of fans in Chinese world, which sounds super easy for him to acquire the users for 31SMS, but how?

iFeng, the portal by Phoenix New Media is really spending effort on new social media business. It just launched its Tumblr like service as we reported, and its mobile application WeiShiTong, a social TV app is also available on App Store.

The current version of WeiShiTong comes with a few features,

• TV guide (time schedule) for tens of Chinese satellite TV stations. Users can also set up the reminders for the programs they want to watch;
• Users can check-in the tv program they are watching and leave the comments, which builds a direct interactive channle for users and program producers; users can follow each other in order to get updated on what programs their friends are watching.
• All comments, discussion etc can be synced with other popular social media such as Sina weibo, Tentent weibo etc.

WeiShiTong is the first Social TV app we’ve seen for local market. The idea is like Miso or GetGlue which are the most popular ones driving the social TV concept. I personally found WeiShiTong’s TV guide along with the reminder feature is quite helpful, but be honest, its social TV function is too simple to be viral. iFeng needs to bring in more entertaining elements to the app, such as Badges etc to encourage users to do the check-in, especially at this stage when quick user acquisition is very important. GetGlue does that perfectly and the future of social TV is quite interesting too.

I had a quick chat with the product manager of WeiShiTong, who said Phoenix TV stations will officially promote this app to start with and later on they plan to pitch it to all other satellite TV stations.

iFeng is making very good initiative in social TV idea, and for the still-unclear local location-based check-in business, it also brings some fresh ideas.

You may read some rumor about Google’s new toy Nexus 3. It looks quite attractive for Android or Google fans as it most likely will come with Ice Cream Sandwich, i.e. so called Android 4. However, the big question is who is going to be manufacturer. Some people think it will be Samsung which makes Nexus 2; and some believe it will be HTC, which is also what I heard lately from a friend who is working close to HTC. And he also confirmed that the Nexus 3 will be NFC enabled, which could really kick off the NFC business in 2012.

After years of development, it seems NFC will finally take off with more big guys joining the ecosystem. Phone manufacturers like Nokia has shown strong interests in NFC. Nokia launched its online NFC shop and NFC phone (which is making fun with Angry Birds); HTC is reported to launch its NFC phone soon. “China UnionPay will be working with HTC for its NFC-powered mobile payment solution” the insider said, “but we will not see a huge promotion about it until early next year.”

Mobile phones with GPS enabled really change the mobile business and make Location-based services real; so for mobile services/apps developers it might be the time to think about how NFC may change their existing business/service models.

Nexus 3 will be on market by end of  2011, said the insider.

We did a roundup about Chinese liker/copies of Tumblr last month, but certainly, the love to Tumblr has not come to the end. Three new players are now in the market, including the leading Chinese social network, RenRen, the leading portal NetEase and a startup.

RenRen Xiaozhan (xiaozhan.renren.com) was launched yesterday. You can use your RenRen account to login and the content (image, video, music etc) you published on Xiaozhan can be synced back to your RenRen profile page.

Lofter.com, the rumored Netease’s Tumblr is now confirmed. It’s now at private test stage and we don’t know how much it’s like Tumblr. But judging by its main page, it’s very nicely designed and I love that promotion video too.

Mibuo.com is launched by a Shenzhen-based company. The most interesting part is that it allows users to login with Fanfou’s account. Fanfou is one of the earliest copy of Twitter launched by Wang Xin who is now the founder of Meituan. But be honest, I don’t even remember my Fanfou’s account and password.

Xu Chaojun, CEO of Diandian gave a nice description and comparison about Weibo, Blog and Lite-Weibo (Tumblr). He said,

If Blog is a Book, then Weibo is the Daily Newspaper, and Lite-Weibo is the Magazine.

It indeed makes sense, but how many magazines do you actually read? I only read IT-related magazines and definitely I am only interested in at most 1-2 magazines every month.

It’s not easy for me to describe this little gadget. I got it from a friend who said it’s only available in certain cities. It looks like an official product from China Unicom, but it’s actually for China Mobile subscribers. My friend said it’s a product that China Unicom is selling under the table.

It’s like a film sticker which you can attach it on China Mobile sim card and it itself is also a sim card comes with a China Unicom data plan.

Thanks to WCDMA and iPhone sale, China Unicom is considered the best 3G provider. More and more China Mobile subscribers want China Unicom’s 3G usage on iPhone, but the dilemma is that they have to sign the contract and get a new China Unicom mobile number. Note that in China, you can not just port the number from one operator to another. So here comes the solution.

Basically, you just attach that film sticker (card) on your China Mobile sim card, then insert it back to your phone. What happens is that you can still make/receive the call, send/receive sms message etc using China Mobile service, but in the meanwhile, you can also surf the internet using China Unicom’s 3G network. As we said before, it is pre-paid data card which means you can just do top-up when the credits run out.

It’s so impressive, and I bet China Mobile will get pissed off by this innovative product.

The following image is found on 91.com.

In the meanwhile, it seems that TechCrunch is also having its backyard on fire. MG Siegler, TechCrunch’s editor published a post saying TechCrunch might come to the end. I don’t believe TechCrunch will get crashed suddenly like this, but the post still shocked me.

I started reading TechCrunch back in 2006 when I was doing my PhD in UK. With a very academic background, I would say it’s TechCrunch really opened my eyes to the Web 2.0 world. I am not a big fan of Mike Arrington because I think he was always biased against China, and I even wrote a post 4 years ago questioning if TechCrunch understands China. But, I do respect his great effort which makes a tech blog so so influential and profitable. TechCrunch is more than a media, it has become the Hub in web business. As a tech blogger, and there is no doubt, Mike is the hero.

I understand everyone respects Mike and considers he is the core of TechCrunch. But as for the CrunchFund, I think it’s unfair to throw all the complains to Tim Armstrong, the guy of AOL. I might be wrong, but in my opinion, Mike is a blogger, as well as a businessman. He has been an angel investor for a while as we know, and I don’t think he’s been forced to set up the CrunchFund.

So because of CrunchFund, people are questioning about TechCrunch’s double standards in future, e.g. blogging more about the companies which are raised fund from CrunchFund. But is it really a big issue? As long as everything goes transparent, I don’t think TechCrunch and its editors will compromise with anything. They have been professional enough and done great works all the way (especially when Mike himself is an angel investor).

I am not against that Mike should not take on an investor’s role. If you have lots of good startups around you seeking for help and you also love their business model along with a bunch of VCs who trust your vision, being an investor might be a natural career path (of course, it is NOT the only path), at least it is still a way of helping startups and not just for money. But I also think the fund itself should NOT be named CrunchFund which may confuse the readers and offend the loyal editors and followers. In any case, media itself must be independent, and the conflict of being a media and an investment firm should (and could) be minimized and even avoid.

If it’s really like what the post assumed that AOL wants to take Mike away from TechCrunch (and Mike knew nothing about it), I think AOL is making a stupid decision, or at least it’s a very bad communication between AOL, Mike and the team. I really admire TC’s editors who stand out to play against their boss and they are very good and professional journalists with passion deep in their hearts. By comparison, thinking about Chinese media, nowadays almost every popular tech media is setting up their own investment fund, and we never heard anyone questioning about it. What would you say?

As a Chinese reader who used be educated by TechCrunch in the web business, as a tech blogger who’s been believing in TechCrunch’s vision for years, and as an entrepreneur who is building our own version of TechCrunch for China startup space, I do hope it’s not an end.

Favspot is a LBS service for you to save your favorite spots, share them with your friends and discover where other user favorite spots are. It’s developed by Tom Group, and we had it profiled before it went on public. Now Favspot is one of the hottest apps in lifestyle category on App Store HK.

Last weekend, we had the chance to talk to Edwyn Chan, the guy who manages Favspot team. Originally from Hong Kong, Edwyn has been in China for six years. He started off doing Web 2.0 consultancy for a Sichuanese Newspaper (chengdu.cn), a blog media experiment and an International MBA at joint Tsinghua-MIT program. After graduation from the Tsinghua, he joined the NBA China before started Favspot project.

A Location Bookmarking Service

The best words to describe Favspot are, as Edwyn thinks, a Location Bookmarking service. Edwyn think there are lots of people including him keep forgetting about those good restaurants they like if they had not visited for a while, and as a huge fan of Delicious, he believes there is the need for bookmarking the restaurants, i.e. the locations.

The Different from Foursquare/Jiepang/Dianping

Edywn thinks the fundamental difference is that Favspot is a service that lets you not only “save” your location but also for you to retrieve it back. In his opinion this is quite different from Foursquare/Jiepang whose focus are not about saving the location you are at but just telling people you are there. They are not built to help you manage your database of spots. He said, “Favspot is about places that you have a emotional attachment to, a place you telling the world you like and some place you just happen to be at.”

As for Dianping which is the leading Yelp-like service in China, Edywn’s comment is that Dianping is a directory of shops, which is rather impersonal. Favspot is more Social. On Favspot, the restaurant is recommended by your friend instead of being “Recommended” by the internet.

The Development Mentality

When we wrote about the Favspot, the product, we said it’s neat and nice designed. So I asked Edwyn for his experience on app development. He said,

The single biggest thing I learnt was the importance of interactive designers in the development process. In the Internet world, everyone’s idea (product functions) are about the same and development is kinda a commodity with open source but what really makes a difference is user experience and you really need to have your interactive design well thought out.

So, in Edwyn’s opinion, Favspot is very product driven, neither marketing nor tech oriented. He believes that a good product is something that serves a unmet need effectively and if so it should market itself. As for tech, its easy for companies with tech prowness to over engineer their products. “Less is more and the best products aren’t the ones that can solve lots of problems relatively well but instead solve a big problem very well.” commented by Edwyn.

Hong Kong and China Market

Favspot’s team is based in Beijing, but it’s launched and doing marketing in HK. Edwyn explained that he was originally part of the TOM/NBA team in Beijing when TOM got the license to operate the NBA official site for China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. After that project ended, the team took on the Favspot project and logically development continued in Beijing. The reason of using Hong Kong as launch market because TOM is part of the Hutchison Group and has a good foothold in the Hong Kong market. Edwyn thought that it made the most sense to market the app and test the business model in our parent company’s “home turf” where they could work with our sister company, wireless operator Three.

As for China, Favspot is in talks with a company similar to Three to be our marketing/operations partner for the China market. But Edwyn could not disclose which telecom company they will be working with.

Favspot was test launched 8 weeks ago in Hong Kong and had around 23000 downloads, which is not bad considering Hong Kong is just a small test market.Edwyn said its original target for Hong Kong was around 30-40k downloads until the end of 2011 and luckily the press has been really supportive. Favspot has gotten 140+ mentions in the press and have gotten favorable reviews in local tech magazines such as PCM.

the Business Model

What’s the Business model is always the big question for LBS service. Edwyn said they were looking at a range of business models and testing them out. Favspot has done a few test runs on location based SMS marketing/Geofencing with some merchants. For the past two weeks and every Thrusday til mid October Favspot will be working with merchants, such as Pacific Coffee, White Spot’s Tripple Os Burger to give out free products through location SMS to test out geofencing as a viable marketing channel for a future product.

What Edwyn is most interested in is making a business out of CRM for merchants. Favspot is to reward loyal customers at their favorite spots, therefore it will be a triple win: users get rewards, merchants get loyal and happy customers and repeated sales and Favspot makes money.

the Next for Favspot

Favspot team is working on stability for the rest of this first version. In parallel they are also working on a full overhaul of the code with some neat new functions for the 2.0 version which will come out late this year.

Lacking of paid apps and additional business models, and facing a tough competition from tens of similar services, as we predicted back in April, most Chinese independent Android app stores will have a hard time sooner or later. GFan is the only one we heard recently raised $5 millions and the others such as NDuoa (early invested by Shanda), eoeMarket etc we don’t even know what they are working on. And we even heard that one popular Android app store has been acquired by a giant at a cheap price (as it’s running out of money). Unfortunately, now the situation is even getting worse, the super giant, Tencent, just released its own Android App Store.

As always, Tencent is very good at the products. Its app store, named Tencent App Center has a nice UI and the user experience is good too. And Tencent is also very smart, unlike other app stores, its App Store comes with friends sharing and commenting feature. In other words, if you log into the app center with your QQ account, you would be able to see what apps have been downloaded by your QQ contacts, and their comments on those apps. You can also rank the app, share it on QQ, email or SMS. The idea is similar to FrienzApp, Chomp, AppGroovs etc but the obviously difference is that Tencent App Center has a hundreds of millions of QQ users already standing by.

So how to make money for both Tencent and developers? It has to be mainly from ads. MobWIN, is Tencent’s mobile ads service.

99Bill, a popular online payment gateway service provider today revealed its mobile payment solution, Kuaishua (meaning quick swipe in Chinese) which enables everyone pay with credit card anywhere just using his/her mobile device. 99Bill’s VP, Bao Haiwei gave a demo today at its press conference, and like Square, Kuaishua’s reader also uses audio input of iPhone 4. It’s reported that the price for Kuaishua’s reader is not decided yet, but Bao told the media it would be rmb10.0 each with amount of rmb10.0 prepaid. Kuaishua’s the 2nd Square-liker service we’ve found in China, and the first is QFpay.

Alipay seems now under a huge pressure recently and its continuous domination in Chinese online payment market suddenly becomes uncertain. Especially for mobile payment market which is fairly new and every player still has the chance. Alipay released its Barcode Pay as its mobile solution back in July but this time 99Bill’s solution obviously looks more fancy.

99Bill claims over 1.1 millions merchants and a total of 103 million registered users by the end of July 2011.

We reported back in May that 360buy had removed Alipay, the no.1 online payment solution from its payment methods. No one really knows what’s going on there since then. But yesterday, in Chengdu, at the same place APEC SME Summit 2011 (I was there attending) was held, 360buy together with UnionPay, the national bankcard association in China, announced their strategic partnership on online payment as well as mobile payment solution. We broke the news on weibo and the tweet has been retweeted ~650 times and commented ~140 within several hours. It’s probably for the first time, a leading Chinese eCommerce site said NO to Alipay.

Apparently, Liu Qiangdong, CEO of 360buy is not happy with the high commission fee charged by Alipay. He used to complain that the commission fee charged by Alipay is almost 4 times than the other payment gateway provider, and thus 360buy has to pay rmb 5-6 million more. According to 360buy’s official, around 80% of its users are using Pay On Delivery as payment method and only 1-2% transactions are paid via Alipay, so taking Alipay off should not be a big problem for 360buy users.

However, the story behind it might be more complex than we thought.  A VP of Dianping (the leading Chinese Yelp) commented on the weibo saying, the true reason caused the split is that 360buy is not happy with Alipay’s keeping the record of all 360buy’s customer data, according to his insider friends.

Also today, on 360buy’s payment methods page, UnionPay has taken place of Alipay and becomes the top recommended payment method. Furthermore, 360buy will also widely adopt UnionPay’s MicroSD Card mobile payment solution for its mobile eCommerce strategy.

Apparently, Alipay is facing a serious threat from UnionPay, not only on web-based online payment, but also in mobile space. 360buy is the first one said No, and I guess it would not be the last one.

When I first see GooApple phone in the video, I thought it is an iPhone 4. I mean, there are a few iPhone clones here, but all of them, you can more or less tell the difference. But GooApple, looks just perfect.

Produced by the HongKong-based GooApple Tech Ltd., GooApple phone is now available on its official Taobao shop. Comes with ultra thin and stainless frame (115mm x 58.6mm x 9.3mm), 3.5″ TFT HVGA (LG) screen, Qualcomm MSM7227 CPU (600MHz), 2.2 megapixel camera, gravity/proximity/light sensor and electronic compass, 8GB storage, WCDMA 3G support and Android 2.2 tweeted just like iOS, GooApple phone’s price is set to rmb 1,499 (~$235) only.

Check the video below for its impressive performance. Do you think it could be one of the best sell Android phone, and better sale than Xiaomi phone?

Sina Weibo wants to be not only a game platform, but also an eCommerce platform. 360buy today announced its strategic partnership with Sina Weibo, become the first eCommerce partner who can sell products directly on its official weibo account page.

On 360buy’s weibo page, you can now see a collection of products in different categories listed with price. Two buttons can be found under the product image: Like and Share. The Share button allows you share the product info on weibo. You can just click the Buy button, then you will be directed to 360buy main site to finish the check-out. I guess the integration or Sina Weibo’s eCommerce solution is not fully ready yet. I would assume that soon weibo users could use Weibi, Weibo’s own virtual currency to make the payment directly on Weibo. That could be the ideal way for Weibo to charge the commission fee.

if Game and eCommerce would be the key approaches for Weibo to make money, I would bet on eCommerce. I wrote about my worry that social games on Weibo might spam weibo users, and only one month after the game platform’s launched we have seen complains: don’t spam me!

The idea of Social eCommerce sounds simple and effective: the user trust friends’ choice or suggestion and place the purchase. Social eCommerce services either have their own eCommerce platform or play as an agency with partnership of third-parties’ eCommerce platforms. This model could work well, we have profiled a few local services and it definitely is the trend of eCommerce.

in Social eCommerce, you basically have to face two things: a naturally growing social network and the eCommerce, and you need find a good balance of both. If you focus too much on eCommerce, the worst case is that lots of merchants might swarm in and spam purchase suggestions to the normal users, which could destroy the entire business model.

Gezbox, the Hangzhou-based startup is also targeted at the Social eCommerce area, but with a different strategy.

“Unlike other Social eCommerce services,” its founder, Zhen Feike told us, “Gezbox wants to focus more on building a healthy social network around people’s real purchase, and will not introduce eCommerce to the platform at this stage. ” And, GezBox excutes the idea with a mobile app (download).

Here is how it works. You take pictures of the product you bought, add some information such as the name of the product, the price, the place where you made the purchase then upload and share them with others. Every user can set which categories of products they are interested and the information can be used for e.g. friends suggestion. You can explore, search for and comment on shared content, i.e. the purchase by other. When users become friends, they can exchange their experience on the purchase as most likely they have the same interests.

Gezbox is self-funded and currently has a team of 8 staff. Zhen said they don’t want to rush into eCommerce, and the real purchase-related content shared by the users and the interaction among them is the key to GezBox’s success in a long term.

According to iResearch, the total revenue generated on mobile application advertising platform is around rmb70 millions (~$11m) only in 2010, but by end of 2011 the figure is expected to reach rmb310 millions (~$48.7m) with ~342.9% market growth. It’s said that there are over 30 mobile ads platforms now operating in China. Phone manufacturers or Telecom (Apple, Google, China Telecom), traditional web ads platform (iMocha, AdChina etc), new mobile ads platform (MadHouse, CASEE, Wooboo, AdWo, Domob etc) and ads mediation platforms (Guohead, AdMob etc), obviously the mobile ads market is a huge fresh cake everyone wants a piece.

Guohe Ad (our previous coverage), China’s largest mobile ad mediation platform just released its first report and infographics for China mobile ad market. Launched in January 2011, Guohe Ad has now integrated 11 leading mobile ads platform in China, serve over 1000 popular apps across iOS and Android system, and its ads has been displayed over 600million times in total on 5 millions mobile devices.

The infographics depict important data points of the emerging China mobile ad market in the first half of 2011. Here are the highlights:

• 80% of ads impressions come from 10 regions in China, and Beijing is lead followed by Shanghai, Guangzhou, Jiangsu and Zhejiang;
• iOS ads impression weighs over Android by 16%
• Given the popularity of iOS devices, Apple receives 58% of ads impressions among all mobile devices;
• Smaller screen mobile devices produce better click-through rate;
• Apart from Apple devices, HTC, Samsung and Moto are the top 3 brands which produce better ads impressions;
• iPad is dominating the tablet market in China, accounting for over 98% of total ads impressions on tablet devices.

Guohe Ads also partnered with iResearch and released a report (in Chinese, free download) with details.

One way to tell if a western startup is really hot, could be just checking if it gets many copycats in China. It’s reported by BusinessInsider that Tumblr’s to raise $75 million to $100 million at a valuation $800 million or more. So fortunately or unfortunately depending on which side you are at, Tumblr has to be hot in China.

Here is a roundup of those copycats/likers.

Diandian, is said to be the best copy of Tumblr. Founded by Xu Chaojun who has an impressive career path, Diandian has raised $10million and claimed 1 million users by June. It is also the most controversial one, not because Xu is from Shanda which also launched Tuita, the competitor of Diandian, but also it is a project of Innovation Works which supposedly should spend money on real innovation instead of copycats. But Xu obviously does not want to be a copy of Tumblr forever, he said Diandian would walk on its own way with focus on localization and mobile usage.

Tuita is a project incubated by Shanda. We just reported days ago that Tuita’s to raise tens of millions USD in Series A funding. The strength for Tuita is, of course the resource from Shanda group. Currently it has integrated with Shanda’s own service such as Ku6 for video, Xiami for music, Shanda online Literature for ebook reading. The most interesting part is that, according to an insider at Shanda, he said Shanda was actually quite upset by Xu Chaojun’s Diandian as he was supposedly to lead a project like Tuita for Shanda.

Qing Weibo is produced by Sina as a complementary product for its Weibo. Unlike Tuita which describes itself Rich-Weibo, Sina introduce its Tumblr as Lite-Weibo (as Sina Weibo is now more like a complex social platform). I still don’t really get the idea why Sina should spend that effort on the light version as its Weibo also allows users to publish rich-media content such as image, video, music etc. It might be more attractive to young generation or creative user group which is the core user base of Tumblr, but how Sina is going to pitch Lite-Weibo to that niche market in near future, I don’t know.

Lofter.com is rumored to be the Tumblr of NetEase. NetEase, as one of the leading Chinese portals, is losing the Weibo war as Sina and Tencent are clearly the top 2 players. But it does not want to give up and seems to shift its resource to the rich-weibo market which is still at early stage.

iFeng Kuaibo is another Tumblr liker developed by iFeng, the portal by Phoenix New Media, a global leading new media company. One of the reasons Sina is able to make its Weibo big is that Sina has very strong resource as an online media, so iFeng, as a very popular media, surely wants to give it a try too. The service is currently in private test.

QZone is going to be revamped and the new look-and-feel is just like Tumblr. Well, you can not say it’s a startup, can you? So the potential impact? could be huge….

Kuantu, is the first Tumblr liker we reported. It seems now rebranded to Kuandao as its founder team has split. With aforementioned five touch players in the market, the future ahead I guess is not easy.

It took Twitter 5 years to reach 200 millions, but for its counterpart in China, Sina Weibo has claimed that it reached 200 millions users at its 2-years old birthday.

To celebrate this impressive performance, Sina even managed to get its Weibo on NASDAQ, with the greeting Share happiness with 200 million people here!.

We have spent lots of words talking about Weibo these days, so better keep this post short. Not sure if it will be actually Listed on NASDAQ and when, and it has not really solved the monetization question yet, but you have to agree, Weibo is changing Chinese daily life.

Opened at $24.41 each on the Nasdaq stock exchange, down 13.4% on their $29 asking price, not a perfect debut, but Tudou, the potatoes finally went public today, raising ~$146.6 million with an offering of 6 million American depositary.  We had a call with Gary Wang, CEO of Tudou.

“It’s been 4 years since we first met, and it’s really been a long way. ” when I asked Gary about his personal feeling after being through so much in past a few months, he said to me, “I am very excited and also very looking forward to the new journey for Tudou. Thanks to our investors who are always confident for us and to the team for their hard work.”

Tudou definitely missed the best time for IPO, and its market valuation is roughly only 1/3 of its competitor Youku which is listed back in last December. With less money in the pocket to burn, Tudou obviously faces a touch competition ahead. Gary admitted that but he said no one is going to use all the money raised and they just need spend the money on wherever it’s needed. He said the money would be used mainly on the content, the bandwidth and the platform upgrade.

Started with the UGC model, Tudou also follows Hulu’s model and spends large amount of money on buying copyrighted video content, addition to that, it also produced 2 drama movies itself. Tudou and Youku both started like YouTube, but now all become a mix of YouTube+Hulu+HBO. “Chinese online video market is more complicated than the western.” Gary said, “UGC is always important for us as we’ve been doing our Video Festival for over 5 years and we will continue doing that to encourage our users to produce good video content. But in China, producing your own video content is also important given the fact that buying copyrighted content is so expensive.”

“Tudou is to be a platform where everyone can find any type of video content at anytime and anywhere. ” Gary positions Tudou as such.

“We will definitely spend more effort on the mobile market. We have China Mobile as our mobile video distribution platform partners which is definitely the key in our mobile strategy.”

The competition is going to be tough still. Gary believes Tudou can be more competitive because its video content is more entertainment-focus and the user base is younger at the age of 14-32. “We have only one competitor which is, Youku”, Gary said.

Ads will still be the main revenue source for Tudou, as Gary said. As for the subscription model, Gary think it may take years to happen still. But he said there might be chance in the mobile space. “Watching copyrighted video clips on mobile by paying monthly subscription fee sounds more realistic”, Gary think.

Personally, I am also excited by Tudou’s IPO as I always think it should be first listed video company. Congrats to Gary Wang, one of few Chinese CEOs who is truly a great entrepreneur with silicon valley style.

If you travel to somewhere which you are not familiar with, usually you can just buy a travel guide which helps you find the suitable restaurant, hotel, tourist points etc. But, usually the travel guide misses one type of information which I mean, when you need it you Really need it, the locations for public toilet.

Ohbaba (app store dowload), is a simple location-based service which can help you locate the public toilets around you. The idea is simple, like other LBS apps, it detects your location and finds the closest public toilets for you. Ohbaba also does UGC (or you can call it Toilet 2.0) as it allows users to submit new entries for toilets. And when you submit a new entry, there is a tick box of Toilet Tissue Available, which you can tick. How sweet it is!!

Ohbaba, is probably the most interesting and simplest Chinese app I’ve ever wrote about so far. I love it for a few reasons:

1. Technology is all about Life. Ohbaba is a public toilet locator, simple as that. But it is really targeted at people’s needs in their real life. The idea might sounds a bit doggy, but it is useful;
2. There are loads of LBS applications helping users to discover this and that. If you talk to the developers of all these apps, probably 95% of them will tell you the big ideas behind the apps. I mean, it’s good to hear. But don’t forget, tiny idea can be big too. Everyone needs toilets, but why only Ohbaba picks it up?

And what’s the next for Ohbaba, I don’t know, but it gonna be joking me if it goes for a toilet-centric social networks.

If you are from EU, probably you know a meetup called OpenCoffee. I’ve been to OpenCoffee London & Leeds when I was in UK. It’s a very casual meetup, people just escape from office for ~2 hours, find a nice cafe, meet and chat. I like it very much, at that time I thought we should have one in China, but instead of calling it OpenCoffee, we should say OpenTea because I assumed Coffee is not popular, but Tea is. Till now, no one ever brought OpenCoffee to China, but I am also partially wrong, more and more Chinese start loving coffee, at least loving to meet with others at the cafe. And we even think Cafe is a Sign for Chinese Internet Prosperity.

I think it is a really good time to do a startup in China right now, not just because the money is there but also the ecosystem for startups is getting improved. As a sign of it, besides quite a few startup competitions organized by different local media, such as DEMO China, more and more western style events such as Barcamp, Startup Weekend, iWeekend, Mobile Monday etc are now in China. Of course, we definitely need more.

However, as a helper of all those events, I keep thinking of one thing, how can these western formats generate more impact on local communities? I mean I love the unconference, I like the idea of people getting together to fully focus on one project during one weekend, but when you see most audience are expats or English-speaking; the quality of the startups showing up needs improved because many good local startups or founders are shy (well, in general Chinese is shy…) and don’t like to expose their ideas at early stage; some of the mentors or judges come nowhere but in fact have limited knowledge about the trend; some organizers are full of passion but lacking of experience, that coffee looks good but is not as tasty as you expected.

And for the tea, the situation might go either way. It’s super nice when you have local gov or software park’s support which can bring you free venue and promise some other resource. But if they don’t really get the spirit of doing startups and don’t understand what startups really need, things may get worse and even out of your control.

It’s hard job to mix the local communities with English-speaking communities in China, as language barrier is really an issue. You can give a presentation in English, but communication and discussion afterwards which is more important turns out hard for both sides. DEMO China is good, but it is a bit old school format and not for early stage startups. We need bring out more local brilliant founders to get them to speak at the events and in the meanwhile, we need those high-profile people, either investors or experts to come down to the grassroot and share their honest thoughts with startups.

Coffee or Tea, or a mix of both, taste is different, what we are expecting is simply the same: a better startup environment from the ground up.

[image via lynnrockets]

We wrote a lot about Chinese professional social networks recently. It seems that the local market is really boosted by the IPO of Linkedin. Especially for those new comers such as Dajie, UShi, Hengzhi which are either raising more money or claiming millions of users. Every player feels very positive about the market, except one man who is actually the truly veteran working on this field for years. It is Lerry Zou, the founder and CEO of Wealink, one of the oldest and leading Chinese Linkedin. We’ve just been told he had resigned and also left the company to start a new project.

Lerry were talking to us about the market, and it’s only 1.5 month ago. In that interview Lerry shared lots of honest experience and thoughts on doing a Linkedin in China. But after 4 years’ trying, the decision made by Lerry is, surprisingly, a Give-up, even at the time when the market is about to heat up.

We called Lerry and he confirmed his leaving. As for his new startup, he said it’s not ready for the public, yet. But he said, it’s still to do with the social networks, but it will focus on mobile. With his experience, I think it indeed makes sense.

Now the question is left to the rest of professional social network founders and the investors, do you still believe China needs a Linkedin? and how long can you stick for it? and how fast and efficient can you adapt the idea to Chinese market?

We are very excited and honored to announce that at 3rd September, TechNode will partner with Innovation Works (IW) to co-host its monthly event (TNT Beijing) at IW’s office. Innovation Works’ Jump-Start program is also opened for applications. Any early stage startups if you are interested in the program (details) and wants to pitch IW investment team face-to-face, please mark your time as you can now apply for 10min presentation here online.

Besides the startup demo sessions, two panels with founders from some shining startups are also arranged with topics focusing on Online-2-Offline business model.

[Date/Time] – 1:30pm – 5:30pm, Saturday, 3rd September 2011

[Place] – Innovation Works office (Address: Disanji Tower Block B, 18/F, 66 North 4th Ring Road West, Haidian District, Beijing, 100080)

[Event Official Site] – http://event.technode.com/tnt/o2o/

[Registration] – for Audience, please register here; for Startups who apply for demo, please register here.

[Agenda]

1:30-1:55pm Registration Open

1:55-2:00pm Opening Speech

2:00-2:45pm Panel I: Online-2-Offline (O2O) model, the reformation of e-commerce

2:45-3:30pm Panel II: O2O model, new opportunity for startups

3:35-3:50pm Presentation by Innovation Works

3:50-4:20pm Startup Demo Session I

4:20-5:10pm Startup Demo Session II

5:10-5:30pm Open Q&A

[Speakers] (more to be announced)

Buding.cn – CEO XU Lei（confirmed）
Hotel Finder – Founder Liu Zhangbo（Confirmed）
Meishidaren – Founder Shen Haikui（Confirmed）
Innovation Works Investment Manager – Cao Fei（Confirmed）

Innovation Works team also released a nice video clip to encourage young entrepreneurs to join its Jump-Start program.

Five startups presented at our monthly event TechNode Touch (TNT) Beijing last Sunday at the Garage Cafe: VGO, ShengDianBao, Ayotime, Papaya Mobile and Guohead.

VGO – an innovative Weibo app. As Weibo becomes a very popular social service, it also becomes common people are asking each other’s weibo account when they meet. VGO provides an easy solution for that. Both of you just turn on VGO and shake your iPhones, then you two will auto follow each other so no need spending time on searching or typing the other’s weibo account. VGO also added a location-based social networking feature, you share your iPhone, it will give you a list of weibo users who are close to you.

Shengdianbao (SDB) – an Android app to help saving battery life. For Android users, most of them are not happy with its battery life. SDB analyzes and monitors the apps running on your Android phone and can auto turn off those tricky apps who are eating your battery power. The founder of SDB said 30%-50% battery life can be saved with SDB installed.

Ayotime – a service which can help users to ‘trade’ their Free time. The site is not fully finished yet. According to its founder, Guan Feng, every user can post his/her Free time slot and set a price for it. If you want to send someone to buy a gift for your girlfriend who is in another city, you can just try Ayotime to find someone who live in that city and how much he charges for his time. Guan said the mobile app is also under development.

You may read more details about Papaya and Guohead in our previous interviews and coverage. Both companies also joined the panel discussion about the business value of SDK, together with UMeng and Mobcent.

“Compared with a year ago,  how do you think of the Chinese browser market right now?” I asked Dr. GONG Li, the CEO of Mozilla China yesterday at his office, “Still a mess, even more complicated than before”, Gong answered.

the Market players

Maxthon used to be the No.1 local browser in China, but now it has been replaced by 360 Browser. Sogou Browser (SOHU’s product) is getting popular as well. “Firefox’s doing OK in China, takes 5%-10% market share according different web stats source”, Gong said, “either you have a powerful distribution channel or you have a truly good technology, you have the chance to win the market.”

Thanks to 360 Anti-virus software which is hugely popular in China because it’s free, 360 Browser describes itself as the most safe web browser and becomes the No.1; Sogou Chinese input software is probably the most downloaded input software for Chinese, and it has Sogou Browser bundled which makes it popular too, and Sogou Browser also describes it as the Fastest one. Both Sogou and 360 are based on IE core. And for Firefox, obviously, it’s truly built on some cutting-edge technology. “Why Maxthon and some other local browsers’ market share is shrinking, because the distribution channel and technology they don’t have either of them.” Gong said.

Almost all the big guys have released their browsers, including Baidu as the late comer. “At least at this stage, they are competing with each other on their distribution channels, not really the product itself.” Gong commented.

Firefox in China

Firefox is well compatible with standard like HTML5 but with that it can not please the local market. One of the biggest issues for Firefox here is the online banking. All the online banking systems only support IE-core based browsers. “We have been working with banks such as Construction Bank of China for quite a long time, but till now, we are still waiting for the final launch. ” Gong said, “the bank is open and wants to work with us, but as the majority of local users are using IE which is the bank’s dev team has to focus on. So even we have worked out the solution, when it comes a bug at the testing stage, it takes long time to get it fixed.” If the online banking issue can be solved, it sounds like a great breakthrough for Firefox in China.

Furthermore, Firefox is working closely with popular sites like Taobao, to make sure the best user experience can be guaranteed. And started from this year, Firefox also spent more effort to drive local communities and organizes events in different cities, like Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Haerbin etc.

Firefox in Mobile

The mobile market is super hot. “If Firefox can’t not do anything now on the mobile space in China, the opportunity might be gone soon.” I said to Gong, and he agreed. “But there is not much we can do with our local team”, Gong said, “We actually have talked to a few phone manufacturers in China since a year ago, but there is one critical issue they wanted us to solve but we can’t, the support of Flash. We need wait for our international team to sort it out.”

We love to talk to local startups and we’ve seen more and more well designed products (sites and apps) are doing great in the local market. But, we have to admit that it’s still not easy to find a product whose business model is kinda unique even in the global market. TradeSparq is one of the exceptions which I don’t know any western service to compare with.

Social eCommerce is the trend. Now you buy stuff online because you trust its advertisement; but it should make more sense that you buy something because your friends recommended it or somehow you notice they have bought it. We’ve wrote about the local service like Duitang, Taojianghu, Meilishuo etc. TradeSparq is also doing social ecommerce, but instead of doing social shopping like Taojianghu which is Taobao + Social Network, TradeSparq is doing so-called Social Sourcing which is like Alibaba + Social Network. And to be more accurate, as Micael Kleist, founder of TradeSparq described, it’s Alibaba + Linkedin.

Why people sign on Linkedin? One of the reasons is that they want to be connected with guys from their partners, sellers or customers. And why Alibaba has been popular for years, because it enables an easy way for buyers to discover thousands of manufacturers which are mainly from China. However, when you are on Linkedin, usually you don’t know what products your contacts’ companies are actually selling; and on Alibaba, as a manufacturer if you want more exposure, you should pay certain membership fee which is not cheap (~$3,012 per year for Gold Suppliers membership). As a buyer, you can be easily got lost as you don’t know which supplier you should trust more. These are the issues TradeSparq wants to solve.

TradeSparq is co-founded in 2010 by Michael Kleist, Brian Hager, William Hund and several other foreigners who are now based in Shanghai. As one of the key guys behind TradeSparq, Michael, the ex-manager of GlobalSources in SEA has been working in the global trade market for years.

Here is how TradeSparq works. Basically, you can set up an account for free then fill up your profile. If you are a supplier, you can add your products with detailed description, images, price etc; if you are a buyer, you can fill up your company information and search for the products. If you find anything good, you can message the person who listed this item and send request for connection which is just like how you build your networks on Linkedin. Through the social connections, you can also be aware of who your contacts are doing business with and got introduced to each other by the shared contacts.

Because it’s Social, TradeSparq has its own metrics to list the search results in certain orders. The products which are supplied by the people who are connected with you or with your connections are listed first. “Because they are the people and suppliers you trust more” Michael said. “We also offers VIP membership which starts from only USD$15 per month, which means the VIP members who are in your social network will have more exposure than those non-VIP members. But we also ensure the suppliers who are linked directly with you always have the privilege than others, meaning your direct connections are always listed on the top of others even they are VIP members.”

TradeSparq has now <10 staff in Shanghai and 50,000+ registered users with 170,000+ products listed. “The great thing about social sourcing is that we don’t need that many of customer support like Alibaba as TradeSparq is dealing with the real persons who can directly communicate online.” Michael said, “and unlike other online global trade business for which more transactions are always the top priority, our goal for this year is to acquire more users. Users come to TradeSparq are always ready for sell and buy.” TradeSparq is self-funded and is now closing to an angel investment.

I do believe that as the ecommerce goes social, Alibaba’s model is dying. But it will take some time until more young generation take in charge of the global business.

Social Computing Lab of HP Labs recently published a paper titled What Trends in Chinese Social Media. In this 10-pages paper, the authors examined the key topics that trend on Sina Weibo and contrast them with their observations on Twitter. This is probably one of the most valuable research (in English) on the comparison of Weibo and Twitter I’ve ever read.

The paper concludes that:

There are vast differences between the content that is shared on Sina Weibo when compared to Twitter. In China, people tend to use Sina Weibo to share jokes, images and videos and a significantly large percentage of posts are retweets. The trends that are formed are almost entirely due to the repeated retweets of such media content.

This is contrary to what we observe on Twitter, where the trending topics have more to do with current events (in other words, on Twitter that trending topics are mainly caused by sources of other media) and the effect of retweets is not as large. Also, there are more unverified accounts among the top 100 trend-setters on Sina Weibo than on Twitter and most of the unverified accounts feature discussion forums for user-contributed jokes, images and videos.

So Weibo, will become the key media source in China?! Below is the full paper:

[images via chinesecultureinstitute.com]

Reported today by Washington Post, Square, the revolutionary mobile payment service is now processing $4 million per day. China, now has over 318 millions mobile internet users, and good mobile payment solutions are definitely needed. So there is no reason we shouldn’t look at the Square.

QFPay (the Chinese name means Money Square), the Beijing-based company is rumored to provide a similar solution like Square. QFPay has been working in a stealth mode for a couple of months, just today it published several messages on Sina Weibo to introduce itself for the first time and also look for more engineers. It says,

QFPay is an innovative mobile payment service which enables everyone to pay with bank cards anywhere and anytime. QFPay team is very experienced with members are from the product teams of MasterCard, IBM, ZTE, Motorola, Baidu, Tencent, Yeecha etc. QFPay is to create a brand new product for online payment.

QFPay’s official site, QFPay.net has not been launched yet, and there is almost zero information published about its bank card reader, yet. But according to an insider, he said,

• the company is backed by a few angel investors with strong connection in the industry;
• the bank card reader may come with a small keypad for users to enter the pass code;
• instead of using the audio jack, the bank card reader is connecting with iPhone’s 30-pin dock connector.

We also heard that the UnionPay, is also working on a similar idea. Instead of working on the hardware solution, Alipay is seeking the software solutions to make the mobile payment easier, such as the Barcode Payment.

You may hear a lot about a company called Second Life and its counterparts in China, HiPiHi, UWorld etc back in 2009 when the concept of 3D Virtual World was super hot. In those virtual worlds, every user is expected to be able to use the virtual tools to build his/her own virtual world containing houses, shops, cars, trees etc. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a hype in the end. There are some technical issues to be resolved but more important, especially in China, people feel lost when they are in the empty virtual world because they are required build almost everything from scratches. Most users in virtual world are looking for fun to play with, are not creative people who are willing to create more fun. In other words, the old virtual world lacks of incentive to keep the users.

Last week in Shanda’s Got Talent party, Tan Qundao, CEO of Shanda gave a keynote and disclosed some information about a new game which as he described could be the best game in the world. It is named World Zero, which actually looks like more than a game. It’s a gamified Second Life.

Shanda has been working on World Zero for more than one year. World Zero is officially described as a 3D MMORPG, but unlike other MMORPG, it will come with a handy tools and rich development resource to allow users to not only create new 3D virtual world (games), but also manage them and share them with other players. World Zero will be like an open 3D game development platform/environment, or you can say an Unified virtual world designed for hundreds of user-generated (small) virtual worlds.

I am not sure how fast gamers can get the idea of creating their own virtual worlds in a game, but gaming elements will definitely give people more interests to explore the virtual world. Tan said more details will be disclosed in October this year. Below is the impressive CG video of World Zero: Your World, Starts from Zero.

Once again, Angry Birds are overwhelmed by meetings/events/conferences in China. The difference, compared with the April at GMIC, is that at that time only Peter Vesterbacka was the super star, but this week in Shanghai, Angry Birds’ new appointed leader for China/Asia, Henri Holm also showed up together with his China team. They came to our Mobile Monday Shanghai event, went to Shanda event and of course the ChinaJoy. We also know they are checking their office places and starts recruiting more key staffs, the Birds are really taking off in Chinese.

With this ambitious goal of 100 millions downloads by end of this year, and the situation, as Peter said, Angry Birds is already the third-most-pirated brand in China, advertisements on a free version might be the major revenue directly from the apps. So one of the most important partners needed in China to start with is mobile ads solution provider(s). MadHouse, the Shanghai-based China’s leading mobile advertising solution company just becomes the first partner for Rovio to work with in China.

MadHouse is founded 2006 and is reported to offer intelligent targeting technology on a network that reaches 75%+ of all China’s mobile internet users. Read from the press release sent to me by Joshua Maa, the founder and CEO of Madhouse:

As part of this partnership, Madhouse will enable and deliver ads to Rovio properties across China – including placement of in-application banners and rich media ads as well as fully customized marketing solutions tailored to the needs of brand advertisers.

With plenty of lessons from other foreign companies, the Birds obviously understand that they must be a Chinese company. PPW has been appointed as the licensing representative of the Angry Birds franchise; A “Moon Festival” version will be released to entertain Chinese players; a line of Angry Birds shoes will be sold on Letao, China’s largest online shoe company too.

Will Angry Birds will eventually be Happy Birds in China soon?

[picture via VentureBeat]

Together with Weibi, the virtual currency, the Game Center of Sina Weibo was launched early this week. The first invitation I got was from Season Xu, the co-founder of Five Minutes which is the producer of Happy Farm that really smashed Chinese social gaming industry back in 2009. Five Minutes is the first to launch the social game on Weibo, the game is called Micro City which is like Zynga’s CityVille. Unfortunately, I am not a gamer, after 30 minutes of playing, I lost my interest. The game itself I think it is interesting, though.

Obviously, Sina wants to take the advantage of Weibo users’ social graph and monetize it with social games. Sina Weibo has been accepted as an effective information center and powerful media channel by users and even traditional media, but Sina wants more, a new social Game Center. Is it possible? I doubt.

Weibo, from a product point of view, is not like Twitter as it has added many new features. But at least at this stage, it still functions as a Twitter – the information center. How many people are willing to play social games on Weibo given the fact reading/sharing/commenting news, rumors and gossips etc on Weibo has been part of their life; I don’t have the stats of the percentage of Weibo users who use weibo on mobile, but I think there should be many. How are they going to actively play these game? The possibility is not high.

We said before that Sina Weibo users are quite overlapped with Kaixin001’s user base. So are we expecting Sina Weibo to replicate Kaixin001’s success on social gaming? Not easy at all. Weibo as a media is so hot right now and it’s getting harder and harder for users to re-position it as something else. It’s unlike Kaixin001 which gave people the impression as a social game-focus social network from the very beginning.

I am not saying Sina Weibo will completely fail as being a game center. Weibi is good to have for monetization, but I doubt social games will be the big hit into the weibo market. And Sina also needs be very careful of its thousands of celebrities or VIP users. They are the core users generating the valuable information, leave them in a quiet and pure space and better not get them feel spammed in a gaming center.

Of course, the success of Weibo’s game center also depends on the types of games to meet weibo’s users need.

We reported the rumor 2 months ago saying UMeng, the Innovation Works portfolio company was to close its serial A funding. Today,  the news has been confirmed by UMeng team: around $10 millions has been raised for this round and Matrix Partners is the lead.

UMeng helps developers analyzing and making sense of all the data that can be gathered from mobile app users, devices and markets. Launched in August 2010, it is currently serving around 10,000 mobile apps and over 50 millions mobile devices.

David Zhang, the Founding Managing Partner of Matrix Partners published a weibo disclosing this deal. He said the reasons:

1. Team – UMeng’s core team is from Google and also attracted many ex Baidu, Microsoft, Samgsun, Taobao staff;
2. Achievement – UMeng’s achievement in past one year has shown its great potential in this market;
3. Future – UMeng is dealing with the data in the mobile industry, and has the chance to become one of the infrastructure-like platform for the mobile internet.

“We will keep up with what we’ve been doing and bring better solution for developers.”Jiang Fan, CEO of UMeng said, “and the mobile advertisement market will be one of our focus in near future.”

[Note, UMeng will join our TNT Beijing Salon – “SDK’s Business Value” at 7th, August. The registration is now open.]

DeNA entered Chinese mobile market by acquiring the local mobile social network Tianxia back in July 2009. It’s been two years, we’ve been wondering how DeNA would bring its popular mobile games into Chinese mobile market. Finally today DeNA released its Chinese version of Mobage, the mobile social game platform which has ~30 millions users in Japan.

The Chinese version of Mobage is only available on Android phone now and it comes with 4 games including its two in-house social games, Ninja Royale and Aqua Collection. “All 4 games are originally Japanese games and localized by our Chinese team.” said Wang Yong, the CEO of DeNA China, “and by the end of next month, we will have 10 games in total available on Mobage China platform.”

On Mobage, the players are able to interact with others by adding friends, sending messages and even playing against each other etc. All games are free to download and play, but in order to buy some virtual goods you need spend real money to get so-called M-coin which is the virtual currency in the Mobage platform. The mobile version of Alipay payment gateway is integrated into Mobage.

As Wang Yong introduced, “Mobage platform will be open to all Chinese third-party mobile game development companies or individual developers. We will provide them with the Mobage SDK (ngCore) for the game development. More important, we will leave 70% of the earning from the game to the third-party.”

The Chinese company, Papaya is offering the similar service for both China and oversea market, and it now has ~23 millions users worldwide (80% of its users are actually from oversea), according to Richard O’Connell, the COO of Papaya.

HTC has worked with Facebook and released its HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa which have a dedicated Facebook key to give users one-touch access to their social network. Now HTC did it again in China, but not with the social network RenRen. Instead, HTC partners with Sina Weibo. The phone model is HTC Salsa with the Facebook button replaced by Sina Weibo, for Chinese market, it’s renamed to Weike.

It would be boring to list the specs and features of Weibo phone here. I guess it’s easy for everyone to figure out how Weibo is integrated into HTC Salsa’s Android system. But there are a few questions I am quite curious for the answers,

1. We know Weibo is hot, but the Weike will be good sell in China? I would love to have a HTC phone and big fan of Weibo, but for me, a dedicated Weibo key can catch some eyeballs but is definitely not an attractive enough selling point.

2. Why Weibo, not RenRen. We know RenRen is not the equivalent of Facebook, but HTC believe Weibo will be the one in China?

3. Not just the Weibo application, Sina’s other mobile applications such as Weilindi (the LBS service), Sina Music etc are also pre-installed.  It’s really a Sina phone. We also reported about the Alibaba phone, QQ phone, and Xiaomi Phone is coming in August too. Do we really need a couple of choice of re-Branded phone?

Weibo phone by HTC, a nice marketing cooperation!

Sogou Map, the map service operated by Sohu, today released its new Javascript API. The API itself I think it might be good, but they also offers a so-called One-Click service which makes me laugh to tears.

Basically Sogou Map is telling Google Map developers, they just need one click, their Google Map scripts will be changed to Sogou Map scripts. And if you check the resulting scripts, they just simply replace the word Google to Sogou, then it becomes Sogou Map!! This is damn innovative!!!???

And here is how Sogou Map introduces this one-click service:

If you are worried about the License issue of your Map solution provider,

If you are worried about if your Map service is stable enough,

If you are wondering if it’s going to be complicated if switch to another Map solution,

Try Sogou Javascript API 2.0, just One-Click, then it’s DONE!

From Google to Sogou, Only One-Click away!!!

My poor Google….

Companies like Rovio, which beat all records last May by reaching 200 million downloads of its “Angry Birds” game, PopCap (150 Mil games installed worldwide) and Papaya Mobile (dubbed as the leading mobile social gaming platform in China by VCs and insiders alike) are fighting to make mobile gaming a more social and societal experience. But what is reality in China telling us? Who is really making money? What are the distribution channels and what games can really make it (and why)?

Join us on Monday to find out first hand with our outstanding panel composed of:

• Rovio (the company behind “Angry Birds”), with Henri Holm, SVP Asia.
• Papaya Mobile, with Richard O’Connell, VP of Marketing
• PopCap, with Leo Liu, CEO of PopCap China

Reference:

– About Rovio & Angry Birds

• Interview with Peter Verstabacka of Rovio Mobile – Angry Bird’s Goal for 2011 in China: 100 million downloads, To Be The Most Copied
• Angry Birds Wants To Beat Disney in China Within 2 Years

– About Papaya

• Interview with Shen Si, CEO of Papaya – Papaya Mobile, Over 20 million Users

– About PopCap

• Fun, Fun, Fun! Says PopCap developer Roy Liu
• Plants vs Zombies Music Played By Chinese Guzheng

MoMo Cost: 100 RMB payable at the door includes 2 beverages and canapes. All attendees MUST pre-register. Please feel free to forward an invitation to colleagues or others who might be interested.

Date & Time: Monday, Jul 25 2011 7:00 – 9:30 PM

Location: Kathleen’s 5 – Shanghai
5th Floor Shanghai Art Museum
 325 Nanjing West Road (opposite the JW Marriott hotel, cross street Huangpi Nan Lu).
Tel: 63272221 Map: http://www.kathleens5.com.cn/map.php

Register HERE and you may also check other Tech Events in GeekWeek Shanghai (22nd-29th)

China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) today released its 28th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China.

Some Highlights:

• China’s Internet population has reached 485 millions, but the growth seems slowing down compared with 2010;
• The number of mobile internet users has reached 318 millions
• Microblog users now reached 195 millions
• Chinese Social Network market is actually shrinking
• Instant Messaging, News, Search, Online Music are the Top 3 most popular mobile service

According to this report, China’s Internet population has reached 485 millions by the end of June 2011 and the Internet penetration rate is now 36.2%, increasing 1.9% than 2010. The number of mobile internet users has reached 318 millions which means around 65.5% of Chinese netizens are using mobile device to access the internet.

However, according to CNNIC, the growth of number of Chinese internet users seems slowing down. In the first half of 2010, the number of netizens had an increase of 36 millions; but in the first half of this year, the number only increased 27.7 millions.

CNNIC reports says the Top 5 web services in Chinese is Search, Instant Messaging, Online Music, News and Blog. However we also see some dramatic growth in market such as Microbloging (Weibo) which reached 195 millions users with an increase of 208.9% compared with the number at the end of 2010, Groupon with 42.2 millions users and an increase of 125% and online payment with an increase of 11.7%.

One of the most interesting finding on CNNIC report is that the number of Social Networks users has decreased 5.16 millions in past 6 months, and it is now 230 millions. So the social network market is actually shrinking.

As for the mobile market, the Top 10 most popular mobile service is, Instant Messaging, News, Search, Online Music, e-Reading, Social Networks, Microblog (Weibo), BBS, Online Games and Email.

The full report can be downloaded here (in Chinese).

Microsoft got its Internet Explorer, Google has its Chrome, so there is no reason that the leading web search giant, Baidu should not have its own browser. Today, Baidu finally released its rumored browser. I spent some time testing it out. My comments:

It’s a disappointing browser and a few people will even hate it; but if you consider it as a lite version or the core of a cloud operating system, it sounds promising.

Baidu Browser has a very neat design. It looks like Chrome obviously, but some parts of the design are even better than that, e.g. the default page (i.e. the App-Box page). The Apps can be placed into multiple screens on the default page. You can just drap&drop one app to another screen and switch the screens easily. The idea is probably from iOS’ multi-screens but Baidu managed to get it nice developed on a browser .

Nowaday when we talk about browser, we need first think of its HTML5 compatibility. It should be the highlight if one browser has the best support to latest HTML5/CSS standard. But on the official page of Baidu Browser, I found nothing about HTML5. We don’t even know how it supports HTML5, what’s the core engine etc. Well, this sounds a bit too geeky, but please note that the Chinese browser market is already messed up. IE6/IE7 still quite popular, Firefox/Opera/Chrome are just for techi guys; local browser such as 360 browser (by 360) etc is popular but they are using IE engine. It’s painful for web developers who have to test one simple feature/effect on different browsers. Baidu Browser only scores 40 out of 450 in HTML5 compatibility test. Baidu should be the best company to take this responsibility, but I am disappointed it just ignores it.

Instead, What Baidu Browser is to sell its >30,000 web applications. It’s actually a part of Baidu’s Box Computing framework which enable users access the web-based service/applications such as flash games, travel service, videos when they are doing the search. Currently on Baidu Browser’s App Box page, we see featured applications like News from Sina, Video from Qiyi and Youku, Music from Xiami and Douban FM, Weibo from Sina and Tencent, E-commerce from Taobao, Games from 4399 etc. It is indeed convenient.

This is what Chrome OS or startup like JoliCloud are trying to achieve, the Cloud-based Operating System in which all the applications are basically web-based.

Given the fact that Baidu is dominating the local web search market, Baidu Browser is really a threat to local browser market. So what we expect next? a mobile browser maybe, or we can just call it a mobile operating system?

Analysis International releases its research data on Chinese B2C online retail market share in Q1, 2011. It says that in Q1, 2011 the total transaction value of Chinese B2C online retail market has reached rmb 47.07 billions (~$7.3 billions). Taobao is still leading the market (31.4%), followed by 360buy (10.2%), Joyo (Amazon China, 2.3%) and Dangdang (1.6%).

Kik+Talkbox applications are hot in China. We said that one of the reasons people love to copy this idea is to beat Tencent (potentially). Leijun’s Miliao sounds promising, so Tencent fights back with its own Weixin. But, the fact is that you can not never under-estimate Tencent’s ability. Yesterday, Tencent announced Weishi, a Video messaging application. 

Weishi is still at limited public test stage yet. But according to its official site, it comes with a few very interesting features:

1. Weishi is functioning like Kik and Talkbox, i.e. the social connection built on Weishi users is based their phone contacts. But besides text (not clear yet if it supports voice-only messaging), Weishi upgrade the idea to Video. It actually reminds of Seesmic at its early launch, Loic called it Video Twitter. Seesmic did not work out in the end, but with the Kik model, smart phone and 3G environment, the video chat sounds much more promising.

2. support both iOS and Android – Weishi is now available for iPhone, Android and Android Pad, the iPad version is coming soon. It is like Facetime, but will be cross-platform.

3. High-quality video chat – we could not test it out yet, but the official site says the high-quality video chat is guaranteed.

I would thumb up to Tencent this time. At least, it rarely to see Tencent market its product with the words the First-ever in China.  Just can’t wait to try out Weishi.

Last year when I was interviewing Max Levchin, co-founder of Paypal, I asked him “do you think you are still a geek” after being so successful, and his remarks is still fresh in my memory. He said that “Once a geek, forever a geek.” And geek isn’t just confine to top-notch programmer any more; it should be that kind of spirit that everyone in the internet business possesses. Chinese internet calls for innovation, there’s more waiting to be changed by the geeks.

People who are no stranger to Chinese internet business should have the feeling that, there is always so much going on in Beijing with plenty of meetups, conferences and so on. Shanghai seems lacks behind a little bit. Indeed, Shanghai needs more opportunities for internet peers to share and network. As an independent tech media that covers Chinese internet area, TechNode has always been active in hosting or co-hosting bunch of events. What we are trying to do is to help building up the internet ecosystem.

That’s why we decide to venture into this, to organize the GeekWeek@Shanghai series of events with Shanghai Yangpu Technology Center, Cyzone and some other Shanghai-based web events organizers. In the week starting July 22, we will co-creat a fantastic week, hoping to make more noise and attract more attention to Shanghai internet business.

Listed below are the finalized events schedule, if you have any other recommendations, feel free to drop us a line at contact AT technode. You’re welcome to take an amazing ride in GeekWeek@Shanghai.

July 22, evening – StartupWeekend Shanghai  http://shanghai.startupweekend.org/

Preliminary assessment for StartupWeekend projects

July 23, afternoon – Technode Touch salon (150ppl) http://event.technode.com

Topic: Mobile Ad: Challenges and Predicament

July 24, afternoon – Google Technology User Group (GTUG) (100 ppl)

July 23 –24 StartupWeekend Shanghai  http://shanghai.startupweekend.org

July 24, evening – StartupWeekend Shanghai  http://shanghai.startupweekend.org

Project Roadshow

July 25, evening – MobileMonday Shanghai – Mobile Gaming (100ppl) http://www.mobilemondayshanghai.net

July, 26 – TBD

July 27, evening – Drupal Shanghai Happy Hour Event http://groups.drupal.org/node/160429

July 28, evening – Google Mobile Game development seminar

July 29 – ChinaAccelerater 10×10 Startup Roadshow

Stay tuned for latest updates on our GeekWeek@Shanghai.

QQ International (QQi), the international version of Tencent’s QQ (officially launched in December 2010), just released its new version.

Now this multi-language version of QQ comes with 6 language including English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. Like Google Wave, QQi integrates with inline real-time translator which means you would be able to chat with people in any language; Be more fun, you can now draw and send graffiti with the new Paint Editor from your chat window.

This new release also added a shortcut button for QZone to access Tencent’s popular social network. And it does not forget the hottest Weibo market, QQ micro blog shortcut is also enabled on QQi, so you can now have access to real-time news updates from your contacts.

Pony Ma promised to open up Tencent, which also effects QQi. The most interesting new features comes with QQi is its so-called App Box. The App Box has includes a couple mini-apps from News (ICS), Lifestyle (CityWeekend), Deals (KUUKIE) etc. Users can basically add those apps and later find them in My Apps tab.

“Get QQi and Get plugged into China”, which is what QQi team promises to QQi’s users. Even the QQi’s Facebook Page is set up to welcome comments from non-Chinese speaking users all over the world.

We have reported the rumored Sina Weibo’s virtual currency, Weibi. There is no official announcement from Sina so far on how and when Sina Weibo will introduce its e-commerce system. But, interesting enough, Sina just updated its development document which leaks the information about its Weibi currency.

Here is how Weibi is defined in the Wiki document for Sina Weibo app developers:

Weibi is the virtual currency issued by Sina Weibo platform. Weibi can be used to purchase all sorts of virtual products and VAS (including the ones from third-parties). The exchange rate of Weibi and CNY is 1:1.

The document also details the requirements for Weibo app developers to use Weibi system. In order to have Weibi system integrated into weibo apps, documents like company name, photocopy of company license, photocopy of ID cards, Tax files etc must be submitted to Sina for validation. That implies Individual developers are not eligible to make money on Weibo.

No confirmed information yet about how the revenue is going to be split between Sina and the development companies and when Weibi system will be finally kicked off. But Clearly, Sina wants to see some apps ready before the launch.

By end of December 2010, the payment volume using Alipay per day has exceeded rmb2.5 billion. The number of daily transactions on Alipay reached 8.5 million and 500k transactions were completed on mobile per day. Alipay’s mobile app becomes one of must-have ones for Chinese and has been installed on over 10millions handsets.There is no reason why Alipay should not go mobile.

eBay just acquired mobile payments provider Zong for $240 million in cash, which basically again proves one thing, as the CEO of Zong said,

Most of e-commerce will shortly become m-commerce.

As the counterpart of eBay in China, Alipay is catching up with this trend. Early this month, it reveal its own mobile payment solution called Barcode Pay. Alipay has around 550 millions registered users (by end of 2010) and people are get used to pay online using Alipay which is indeed convenient. But how to get consumer to pay when they are on mobile, which is what Barcode Pay mobile payment solution is trying to solve. Once you logon alipay on the mobile app, you can see a unique barcode. Just present it to the merchant and get it scanned, you will see a pop-up message on your phone asking you to confirm the payment. The money will be charged directly from your Alipay account. See the following illustrations.

Alipay wants to sell this Barcode Pay solution to cafe, bar, gas station, super market and restaurant etc. Alipay’s official blog also said the company is working on other mobile solution for non-smartphone, web-cam and NFC devices.

Everyone thinks Chinese mobile market is hot, which is kinda of true. By end of 2013, we expect 721millions mobile internet users in China. In tier-1 cities like Beijing, Shanghai, iPhone or Android phone seem everywhere; and hundreds of mobile apps developers are based there releasing apps for iPhone, Android phone daily. All these probably give you one impression, if you want to do mobile business in China, you need to focus on the tier-1 cities.

But the latest report released by DCCI implies that the tier-1 city strategy is not that right. The report is written in Chinese, here are some highlights:

• the mobile internet users who are ok to pay >rmb100 are mostly based in tier-1 cities; and the amount of rmb 21-50 seems acceptable for users live in tier-3 and smaller cities;
• Despite there are thousands of apps on all sorts of markets, the average number of apps Chinese users use often is 3-5;
• 80% of users in tier-1 cities love to use mobile internet when sitting in transportation; but 80% of users in tier-5/tier-6 cities like using mobile internet at home;
• Tier-1 cities users actually spend less time on mobile internet. The major group of users spending more than 28h on mobile internet per week is actually from tier-5/tier-6 cities, according to DCCI; Tier-1 cities users usually spend only 3-8h on mobile internet per week;
• The top 3 most interesting info tier-1 cities user want are: Discount information, restaurant information and Map;
• The users live outside tier-1 cities actually consume more bandwidth. ~22% of tier5/tier-6 cities users use 81-150M bandwidth per month, and only ~17% tier-1 cities users use that much;
• In tier-1 cities, users actually get used to Wifi access from home, cafe etc, which might explain why they are using less mobile bandwidth; but for tier-5/tier-6 cities users, over 50% still has no idea about Wifi;
• Talking about the 3G usage, most of 3G users actually live in tier-3/tier-4 cities which DCCI thinks the most potential market;
• The tariff and phone price are still the hurdle for users not willing to use 3G network;
• Reading news, instant messaging and searching are the top 3 activities for Chinese mobile internet users;
• The top 10 categories of apps people are using often are: mobile browsers, IM, video players, games, life & entertainment, e-readers, input softwares, sms, weibo and anti-virus softwares;

Tier-1 city users have better salary which is good, but it does not mean most of them are willing to pay more, and they are also busy and have more distraction. Hope the points above can give you some useful guidance on how to do mobile business in China.

Back to January this  year, we predicted that Kik would be one of most copied apps in China. And we are right. There are more startups working on it such as WaliTalk; the social network Kaixin001 even has one called Feidou and the amazing Tencent also launched its own Kik named Weixin. We did not know about Talkbox (read our interview) at that time, but now almost every clone of Kik has integrated Talkbox’s voice chat function, which some people consider as sort of China style innovation. Well, at least, Kik+Talkbox, is smart.

The question is: Why we are so interested in copying the idea of mobile messaging; and since we know Tencent’s Weixin, Lei Jun’s Miliao etc these tough guys are out there, why people still see it as a chance?

Beat Tencent

Last week I was in Beijing to attend GreatWallClub’s Advisor board meeting and Lei Jun, the investor of Xiaomi (the owner company of Miliao) is the chairman. We were discussing about the trend of Chinese mobile internet. Lei Jun’s quite exciting about the recent achievement of Miliao which beat QQ app as the most downloaded app in the social category in China region for days. He said, Pony Ma is scared by Miliao’s super fast growth and has ordered Tencent’s team to seriously look into the Kik market. Lei Jun believes that there is more open opportunites in mobile internet and beating Tencent is not a mission impossible.

Mobile extension of Social Networks

I also talked to the product manager of mobile department in Kaixin001 asking for his opinion. He said product-wise, Feidou’s Kik+Talkbox, but the difference is that Kik’s user base starts from zero, but Feidou could pull millions of users from its social network’s user base and it would not be a standalone product. He does not worry about iMessenger as Feidou is just a perfect mobile extension of Kaixin001. He also admitted that they are still thinking of the best way to integrate Kaixin001’s services into Feidou. “We tried once to guide Kaixin001’s users to use Feidou, but the number of users log on Feidou was not that good. Users still need be educated because they have not got the idea of Kik yet.” He said.

Easy-built mobile social networking platforms

Everyone sees the chance in the mobile social networks market. Building an Kik+Talkbox is probably the easiest approach to accumulate users in a short time. “Kik+Talkbox is the key function for WaliTalk, but we might build more interesting features, such as games into it, once we have a good and active user base”, the founder of WaliTalk told me. So for the startups like WaliTalk, Kik+Talkbox model is more like an entry strategy into the mobile market.

Even iOS 5 will come with iMessenger which seems functioning like Kik, but it would not stop people using the ideas of mobile messaging, for different purpose.

If we talk about the Linkedin business in China, we should not forget about Wealink, one of the earliest adopter and used to be the No.1 professional social network in China. Launched at June 2007, Wealink has been working on this field for 4 years. Wealink should not be considered as a successful business, but it’s doing well enough as it survives, given the fact that most of the first wave Linkedin copies such as Linkist were in dead pool long time ago. Four years, what can we learn from Wealink? We recently caught up with Lerry Zou, the CEO of Wealink who shared his experience on running professional social network in China.

Wealink, the company now has +30 staff and over 5 millions registered users. There is some good memory. “Actually in the first month after we launched, we spent rmb 1 million on the marketing and managed to acquire 500K registered users. ” Lerry said. “We are giving away thousands of usb-key/mouse for free to attract users. Also because professional network was quite new to Chinese netizen, even social networks like RenRen, Kaixin001 did not exist yet, we caught lots of eyeballs at the beginning. But a couple of months later, we realized that doing a professional social network in China is not that easy as we expected.”

1. China has now over 400millions internet users, however it is still hard to find loyal users for professional social networks.

Professional social network need white-collar users which are mainly based in several tier-one cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, so geographically speaking, there is not much room for a Chinese Linkedin to grow quickly. Compared with Social Networks like RenRen, Facebook, the user acquisition is a totally different story in China. The market is not that big. “I don’t mean having 10 millions users and several-hundreds thousands business accounts is not possible, the market has the potential, but till now, we have understand it’s a slow business still.” Lerry commented.

2. The need for online professional social networks.

In China, a). The successful business people have built huge social connections, but they usually do not need online platform to maintain the connections. Especially for those CxO of local businessmen in traditional business, they don’t even use internet often. And as we already know, Chinese don’t have the culture of negotiating business over internet with someone who never met in person. b). Linkedin is a good platform for people who has connections to look for new job. But in China, people with good connections usually have a stable job, they don’t really need a platform like Linkedin; but for those like young generation who dont have many social connections, they might be active users, but later they might feel dissapointed as the high level people they want to meet are not there. “it’s like an ecosystem, but we don’t have a healthily working one in China.” Lerry commented.

Linkedin’s IPO definitely heats up the Chinese local professional market, Lerry admitted that he has been approached by a couple of VCs recently. It should be an exciting moment but Lerry seems quite calm. “We have been through a lot in past 4 years, and we’ve been learning especially from what failed.” Lerry said, “We also study the other professional social networks in the market, what I can tell is that many features they’ve been trying now we have tried and would not work in the end.” Lerry added, “We even tried Open Platform, but at end of day we realized that our users don’t need some third-parties applications, games on Wealink. Their needs are simple, looking for more business connections; Freemium model is not working in China, only few headhunters are willing to pay for the service.”

One of the biggest issues Wealink were facing is that more and more irrelevant users send requests to others, then people got confused and annoyed, is it a Social Network for fun or Professional Social Network for career. Other professional social network like UShi is using invitation-only model in order to guarantee the quality of users. “Invitation is a good approach, but it’s just temporary solution. You need open up one day anyway.” said Lerry.

So is there any future for professional social networks in China?  ”We would not expect a huge traffic into our site, but we can still find a way to monetize it. It’s a slow growing market, but it has potential” Lerry said, “We need a better solution to hiring/recruiting/job hunting in China, as an alternative to sites like 51job, ChinaHR etc.”

According to Lerry, Wealink will launch a new in August with focus on business accounts. We will target at Shanghai to start with aiming at 100k business accounts this year. Every company can set up its company profile page on Wealink. The HR people or staff from that company will be highlighted so users can interact with them directly. The company has +30 staff and is expecting 20 more by end of this year. ‘These 20+ new staff will be mainly sales person to serve business customers.” Lerry is very confident about the company’s new strategy, “We will announce some great partnership very soon!”

Wealink managed to raise $5millions in 2007 and never looked for new round of funding ever since. I thought the market should be mature than 4 years, but Lerry thinks it’s a Yes and No. The market is more mature because the internet penetration is much higher, but with social networks like RenRen, Kaixin001 and Weibo getting popular in China, it’s even harder to pitch a professional social network in the entertainment-centric environment. However, as the market is stimulated by Linkedin’s IPO, no matter if we do need Linkedin in China or not, a tough competition is definitely happening.

The reason I really love Sina Weibo is that, although it’s inspired by Twitter, it does not simply follow Twitter’s development. Instead, Sina Weibo just keeps bringing new features, new ideas which enable it grow super faster even than Twitter (in terms of user base).

Yesterday, the manager of Sina Weibo published a weibo saying that a new version is to be released, and one screenshot was also shared. It is hard to tell what Sina Weibo will focus on in the new version from this screenshot. But just judging from the layout of the page, it seems that Sina intends to build more social elements into its Weibo. It looks like a social network, the navigation bar is moved to left column and it includes features (or we may say Applications) like Music, Photo Album, Events and Votes.

We also reported that Sina Weibo is to release its PC client about 4 month ago. Yesterday, the beta version of the client named Weibo Desktop is released for public test. I am not able to try it as it’s for Windows only, but according to its official site, it is just like an IM including all functions of weibo as well as the feature fo instant chat with your weibo followers.

I gave a talk to Google’s Assistant Product Manager (APM) guys yesterday in Shanghai. When we discussed the copy culture in China, I said, there are many Chinese sites doing pixel-by-pixel copy from western model, but Sina Weibo as an exception, started as a copy but quickly becomes Innovation.

You probably never heard of Guzheng, the Chinese ancient instrument, but like many others you should know Plants vs. Zombies, one of the most popular games on iPhone. I used to talk to James Gwertzman, VP of Asia/Pacific at PopCap Games who told me that surprisingly China actually the No.4 best sell country for its paid PvZ game. People here love Plants and Zombies. As James recently said in a press conference in Shanghai,

The passion for Plants vs. Zombies here in China is incredible. PvZ has tremendous, unprecedented brand awareness and popularity in China with almost one million people already signed up to a PvZ page on Renren.com. There is superb demand for the game and we are excited to deliver the world’s first online multiplayer adaptation of Plants vs. Zombies in China very soon.

If you are fan of PvZ and also curious about Guzheng, I would suggest you to watch the video below. Two Chinese musician are playing the background music of PvZ with four Guzheng. You will be amazed!

Good news for fans of Camera360, one of the most popular Android photo app,  its long-waiting iPhone version will be available on the app store soon, confirmed by Xu Hao, CEO of Camera360. In a recent interview with Xu Hao, he said that Camera360 had 6million users worldwide, and this number is increasing 20,000-30,000 daily. Note that Instagram recently is reported 5million users, only.

In a visit to Camera360’s Chengdu office, Xu Hao showed me its upcoming iPhone version. It comes with pretty neat design, a couple of cool and high performance photo filters, such as LOMO, B&W, HDR, Japanese style, Handy painted etc, as it offers in Android version. What’s more, it also comes with a few handy functions, such as continuous shooting mode in which up to 180 photos can be taken per minute; two grid, four grid jigsaw shooting mode; red-eye auto removal; focus and photometry adjustment by single finger etc.

I am a bit surprised that the social networking elements is still missing in the new iPhone version, such as photo sharing, comments by users etc. Xu explained that they will introduce the social functions to Camera360 for sure, but they don’t think they are ready for it yet. At this stage, they just want to focus on the core functions, i.e. the photo filters. If our users really love our product, introduce of social functions is just a nature move, and we don’t want to rush for it.

iPhone recently released its iOS5 which causes lots of arguments saying Apple is now startup killers as its iCloud, iMessenger etc might leave cloud storage apps, kik-like messengers in dangerous situation. Photo is of course one of the very basic but also important functions for a phone, there is no sigh of Apple’s trying to improve it yet, but who knows why this giant will do next (Photo Booth is actually quite an interesting applications). “I think Apple should buy you one day.” I was joking at Xu.

The iPhone version would be priced at $0.99.

Tencent today officially announced that, its social network service, QZone was to release its new version (QZone 6.0) this summer. No further details were given yet, but after 6 years operation, it seems that Tencent is going to revamp its QZone service. According to the screenshot revealed on QZone 6.0’s official site, it is just like the Tumblr.

All of sudden, Tumblr-like service attracts more and more eyeballs in Chinese web. Startups like Kuantu and Innovation Works’ Diandian are working on that; Shanda has launched Tuita, and Sina Weibo’s Tumblr-liker is in test as well. And it’s said that QZone has around 500million active users.

We still need wait for QZone 6.0’s final launch. But it becomes like Tumblr, I would be happy to give it a try. (I’ve never used QZone as it is too complex and messy like MySpace for me.)

In some sense, our digital life is really messed up by tens and hundreds of online services these days. We have been talking about an unified online identity for years but seems no solution to it, and now, with the fast growing mobile internet industry (mobile apps, smart phones, 3g/4g networks), the situation is even worse: we have a couple of LBS check-in services to try, quite a few of  mobile photo-sharing service and so on. It is getting more and more difficult to follow our friends online simply because we have no ideas how many online identities he/she has and which services he/she are using more often. No need to say, in the era of mobile web, it’s all about what is happening now, we have to be sure that we can follow our friends’ interests and activities in no time.

So we still need something like FriendFeed, especially in Chinese web where we often see a few sites/apps offering the very similar service.

YouRen.me, founded by mobile internet veteran Stan Chu who also co-founded iNezha and 30Miao and Liu Gangqiang, is in private test aiming to be the one Stop social service to follow up with your friends’ online activities. Launched in May, YouRen has integrated with 18 popular online service including Sina weibo, Tencent weibo, Xiami, Tumblr, Instagram, QZone, Flickr, Diandian etc. Like FriendFeed, user can follow others on Youren so that their updates/activities on those services will appear in his/her news stream. You can then comment on those updates or share the ones you like to your friends. YouRen is to build One online identity for every one, so that every YouRen will be given one unique url (mine is here) which is like an About.me page on which all the social services you use and link to YouRen are listed.

I like YouRen and am more expecting its mobile apps which would be even more convenient for users to follow up and communicate with their friends’ digital life. If you want an invite code to test it out, please just drop a comment with your email address.

The first time and also the last time I was using a voice recognition software is around 10 years ago when I was working on my university thesis. It’s IBM ViaVoice. I was just tired of typing, but I had to give up after several days’ trying as I realized that it’s even more time consuming if you had to do the correction from time to time. iOS now comes with a simple voice recognition function too, but I have not seen anyone using it to play song, make call etc, and it does not work well with Chinese too.

I was totally amazed by Kouxun, the voice-to-text mobile application developed by iFlyteq (app store download). It’s deadly simple to use. Basically you just speak (Chinese mandarin only) with normal speed, the text will be auto typed in which can be sent as short message or email by one-click. Even the punctuations are auto inserted into the sentence. I’ve tried a couple of times, and the results are just perfect.

Kouxun requires the internet access as it’s actually a typical cloud-computing service. You voice is captured and its information is somehow sent to the cloud where it’s processed and return the text back to the phone.

Kouxun is probably the first app I’ve seen truly driven by technology over the cloud. Its owner iFlyteq was founded in June 1999 based on research originally conducted in the National Intelligent computer R & D Center and the Human-Machine Speech Communication Laboratory of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). The company’s principal products were a Chinese Text-to-speech engine and related software applications. “iFlyteq has over 10 years experience serving enterprise and government with the advanced voice recognition technology,” Jiang Tao, VP of iFlyteq said to me, “We saw the huge opportunity in current mobile industry where more and more consumers are using smart phone and get used to internet access over mobile device”.

“Our mission is simple”, Jiang said, “Set your Fingers Free.” Nobody knows if Apple plans to enhance its voice recognition function in future version of iOS. I hope it does as sometime voice is just much more convenient and efficient than moving fingers.

Funzz.com is in public beta. To differentiate from other social networks, Funzz calls itself the new, interest-focus social network.

Obviously, Funzz does not lie about this. When you first log on Funzz, you will be given a list of interests to choose from and the system will then populate a list of users who have the same interests with you. Funzz comes with several major features, Micro BBS, Group, Space, Events and all these clearly focus on one thing, user’s interest. You can interact with other users with the same interests in micro BBS; join a Football-lover’s group; share your interests on your space (profile page) and participate certain event (salon, travel etc).

I would not say Funzz is nice designed and its functions are quite limited right now as well. But it indeed brings some fresh air to the tedium local social networks. Forget about Six-degree theory and it might be time to reshape the social networks from Social Graphs to Interest Graphs.

Funzz is based in Beijing according its About page but its ICP is registered in Guangdong. People feel Funzz is kinda of unique and some of them even suspect Funzz is the rumored Facebook China operated by Baidu. We have no evidence to prove that, but what really caught my eyes and makes me believe Funzz will be special, is the following video produced by Funzz. It’s just too good.

Dianxin OS, aka Tapas OS, the Innovation Works’ portfolio company which offers customized Android system is to partner with Acer and release a new phone called Liquid Mini E310.

According to the source, Liquid Mini E310 comes with 600MHz Qualcomm MSM7227 chipset, 512MB ROM+512MB RAM, 3.2′ screen and 5millions pixels camera.

Popular Chinese services such as QQ, Sina Weibo, RenRen, Kaixin001 etc have been integrated into Dianxin’s customized Android OS. With no surprise, AppChina (aka Yingyonghui), the third-party Android market which is also incubated by Innovation Works will be bundled into E310. It’s said that AppChina now has around 15000 Android apps. E310 will be on market in this July.

You may read more and more comments on Innovation Works. I really respect the dream of Kaifu Lee. No matter what Innovation Works can achieve in the end, I think people should know it’s IW which wanted to lead the Innovation in China; I also understand why people question about it. But every new stuff has a learning curve, and everyone can give a different definition about Innovation which could be re-defined as micro-innovation, or localization or imitation-to-innovation, etc.

The fact is that Innovation Works as the flag of the Chinese innovative startup space, has managed to raise more money from a few big names including HTC, Tencent, DST and so on. It’s a good thing for Innovation Works and the startups it inclubates, of course. But as a guy who knows nothing about financial stuff, I really don’t understand why not these guys just spend the money on copying the Innovation Works, given the fact that we love to copy the western models. Since you have the money, enough resource and are able to attract great mentors, and you are interested in local startups which there are many out there to be reached, why not just set up your own Y-Combinator?

One Innovation Works is definitely not enough to build up a healthy ecosystem in China, and we need more support and awareness to those incubators such as TiSiWi, Chinaccelerator. If there is only one voice makes the judgement on which startups are innovative enough, eventually it might kill the real innovation in China.

[image via http://genychina.com/tag/innovation-works/]

140 millions users by end of April, that’s the latest figure released by Sina weibo. Weibo has become a phenomenon in Chinese web. If you don’t have a weibo account yet, you are out.

Tianjin Airline, has just done probably the most interesting marketing campaign with weibo: one of its planes is now named Sina Weibo. The plane is nicely decorated with Sina weibo theme: a huge Sina weibo logo printed on the body; and on the back of each seat, you will see a message saying:

when you leave the plane, don’t forget your luggage, wallet or other personal belongings, and our Sina weibo official account, weibo.com/gsair.

Seriously, it would be perfect if they can provide internet access so that the traveler can publish weibo in the air!

[source: Sina News]

Pang Xiaowei, founded the Chinese leading retail business portal Linkshop back in 2001. In 2004, Pang invested Edushi which offers web business solution for enterprise customers; He left Edushi in the year of 2009 and started TiSiWi, the startup incubator (Y Combinator-liker) at the end of 2010 in Hangzhou.

In the email Pang wrote to me, he said, “the accelerator program is inspired by Y Combinator which I really respect. I hope TiSiWi to have the same success in China.” Any startup (with no more than 4 people) can now submit its project to TiSiWi and the deadline is set to 15th July. The project plans will be carefully reviewed by TiSiWi team, and the accepted project owners at this stage will be interviewed by phone for the second round. During the 25th to 30th July, the startups pass the second round (30 startups expected) will be invited to Hangzhou to present their project to the TiSiWi in person. 15 startups are expected to join the accelerator program in the end. They are required to stay in Hangzhou for 3 months fully focusing on their ideas, and there will be a Demo day in the end of October when the startups are given to chance to present their work to investors/VCs.

The famous Beijing-based startup incubator Innovation Works also runs its own accelerator program. Pang said in his email,

Y Combinator invests $20,000 to each accepted startup and takes around 7% company share; Innovation Works invests rmb 150k and takes 10% share; TiSiWi is to invest rmb 200k (~$30,000) on each selected startup and takes 8% share which is a better offer for startups.

A number of well-known local entrepreneurs such as the founders of Douban, Baixin etc will be invited as mentors for the startups. At the Demo day, the startups will pitch their product to famous VCs including Matrix Partners, MorningSide Venture, Gobi Venture etc for further fundraising.

China is not lacking of money in the startup ecosystem. What we do need is more startup incubators like TiSiWi which is able to educate the startups in an efficient and professional way.

Be honest, I have not used any location-based Check-in service, either Foursquare or its Chinese likers for over 2 months. I don’t know why I should do the check-in, for social networking with strangers around you? No… sending a message to someone who used to be at the same location days ago does not seem an interesting idea; good discount offer? Maybe yes, but unfortunately we do not have many (especially in Chinese market), yet. I am a big fan of location-based service, but for that sort of simple check-in model, sorry I don’t feel it’s durable.

The Chinese check-in services, in general I would say it’s boring. But there are two exceptions so far, one is Jiepang’s NFC trial; another is the Weilingdi, Sina’s check-in service.

1. Integration with Sina weibo

You can sign in Weilingdi with your Sina’s weibo account. When you do the check-in, you can see a list of people you follow or your followers currently around you; and your check-in action could be published on weibo so your followers will see your whereabout. Considering the advantage of Sina’s Weibo’s >10millions users, once Sina decided to heavily promote it, we might see a dramatic growth.

2. Celebrity strategy

in a press release event organized by Sina’s weilingdi, the speaker emphasized that encouraging the celebrities to check in is an important approach for Sina to educate the market and attract more users. You can not only follow where your stars have been to and the celebrities can also give their fans some tasks asking them to do the check-in at certain places.

3. Wifi hotspots

Sina has been talking to several Wifi hotspots service providers to enable the laptop/tablet users to check in via Wifi. When you sit in a cafe and want to surf the internet, you can just open the browser and login with your weibo account in order to get the internet access. As the physical locations of the wifi hot-spots are known, even without GPS you can still be able to link with other weibo users by the locations; and of course, the good offers around your location could be pushed directly to your wifi-enbabled devices too.

4. iCode solution

How to avoid the fake-check-in or spam check-in (users check in a place but they are not physically there) and for the merchants how to easily manage the check-in customers are two most concerned issues for check-in business. Weilingdi is trying to solve them by introducing an aggressive approach: iCode + iCode scanner (picture left). iCode is basically a colorful two dimension code and every Weilingdi user could have an unique one. When you check in at certain place, in order to claim the special offer, you need present the iCode which is generated after you do the check-in to the cashier. The cashier will scan it with a special iCode scanner. As user’s weibo or weilingdi profile can be acquired via the information encoded in iCode, the merchant can manage them on a backend system provided by Sina. It’s said that Sina has started deploying the scanners to thousands of merchants.

iCode, Wifi Hotspots, Celebrities and Weibo, obviously Sina wants to build a super check-in service. Sina has the resource to get the ideas executed, but it’s still too early to say it’s going to be a winning strategy or not as the check-in market is not mature at all. I asked a founder of a Chinese leading check-in service for his opinion, he said that he actually is not worried that much about Sina’s celebrities, Wifi hotspot and iCode solution at this stage.

“Now it’s all about user acquisition, and integration with Sina’s Weibo is of course a key” he said, “with Sina Weibo’s open API, we can also offer the same functions such as listing your weibo friends around your location. But I do hope that Sina can carry on its open strategy as it promised and do not hide anything which is only available for its own Weilingdi.”

Although when I asked the audience if they had ever bought a Smart TV at home, only one of them raised the hand; even only a few of people were sure they would buy one in near future. Speakers from Lenovo, TCL, Technicolor, Orange France (Beijing) and BesTV at TechNode Collide were giving their positive opinion and advice on the Smart TV industry in China.

David Wei, VP and GM of Mobile Internet Lab & Digital Life Lab of Lenovo gave the keynote speech with the topic Smart TV, the Driving Force of Cloud Computing in Family Life. He defined the Smart TV:

the connected TV with OS, and the content includes broadcasting, packaged media, web content, and applications

David believes that eventually people is able to use Smart TV to watch TV or internet video, online shopping, play games, read news, social chat etc. He said that Smart TV, like Smart Phone, is not only driven by hardware manufacturers but the service providers, i.e. internet service providers, and content providers (traditional video content and internet video content). In China, a couple of companies including Skyworth, Hisense, TCL and Lenovo have released their first Smart TV products this year and the market will be boosted in 2012. “by 2015, 32.4 millions Smart TV will beat the traditional TV with 54% market share.” David Wei said.

TCL has just released its first Window 7 based Smart TV in early May, with partnership with Youku, PPS etc internet companies. Liu Yunfei, Director at TCL Research Supper Smart TV Center also believes that the Smart TV market has to open up and work closely with the popular internet service providers and thousands of applications development companies.

Smart TV sounds fancy but it is of course not an easy business. Kevin Rui, VP of Business Alliance at BesTV, the IPTV operator from Shanghai Media Group (SMG) gave his advice on Smart TV market. Although Smart TV is also (internet) connected TV, Kevin pointed out the TV audience are either kids or older people and both groups are actually not the heavy internet users. So how to educate them to use the internet service on TV is not an easy job; He said the applications on Smart TV are important but the app developers must note that TV is graphic-focus so we can not expect any smart phone apps is playable on TV. Kevin also believe the driving force of Smart TV market will be IT companies instead of TV manufacturers. “Like Apple and Google are now leading the Smart Phone market, not Nokia or other traditional phone makers.” He said in this speech. “Smart Phone is for individual, but Smart TV is for Family.”

To be honest, I am not really convinced to buy a Smart TV to replace my old one, yet. But once the price is acceptable and more TV-friendly apps and internet service are available, it will be definitely the choice.

Recently we have been really overwhelmed by the Cloud. TechNode did one Powering the China Cloud conference which we have it covered intensively, and several days before that, CSDN, the largest developer communities in China co-organized a 3days conference (called the 3rd China Cloud Computing conference) which also focus on the Cloud. Both events were packed with great speakers from different background, ranging from phone manufacturer such as HTC, Ericsson, etc, tablet manufacture such as eBen.cn to traditional internet companies like Tencent, RenRen etc and mobile service provider, doMob (Mobile Ads), iFlyTek (cloud voice solution), Maiku (cloud storage) etc.

We understand that Cloud Computing is not a new concept or technology. It’s been there for years but this Cloud seemed far away, I mean, from the majority of end-consumers in past several years. The reason is quite obvious, there were very few good (Cloud) applications that people really need every day. Thanks to the fast growing mobile Internet market, such as smart phones, 3g/4g networks etc, we have started feeling the change. I mean, from technology point of view, we are more ready for the Cloud Computing. The question is, why is China so excited about Cloud Computing? The answer given by Prof. Ni GuangNan from China Academy of Engineering is a bit surprising, but indeed makes sense:

Cloud Computing is driving China from the era of “Made-in-China” to “Created-in-China”

“In the traditional PC industry, China got no chance.” Ni said, “till now, we still don’t have the core technology of the WinTel architecture, and what we’ve been working on in past is simply Assembling all components.”

In Ni’s opinion, Cloud Computing brings China a huge opportunities. “In Cloud Computing industry, we need the mobile devices such as smart phones, tablets etc and other ‘connected’ device such as Smart TV. And China has the full capability of creating/designing in these industry. In fact, China is already the biggest Internet, mobile phone and cable TV market. In the era of PC, we have to follow WinTel and make sure anything we made is compatible with it as we don’t its core technology. But now we don’t need worry, we can work on the open Linux for mobile OS, and Android is a good example. Companies like Huawei, Lenovo and many others they are now the world-class manufacturers. We are ready for Created-in-China.”

The Shanzai industry also plays an important role in Chinese Cloud Computing industry, Ni believes. “Shanzai does not equal to Copy” Ni said. “We should see it as the example of the Disruptive Innovation, as long as we don’t infringe any intellectual property rights.”

So Shanzai will be one important driving force for Cloud Computing industry in China. Prof. Ni also gave a few examples of good Shanzai products. G’Five, a Shanzai brand has sold 38.6 millions phones to the oversea market (mainly in India where its market share is now No.3 reaching 7.3%); The SuperPad is created in China, it’s much cheaper compared with iPad, but comes with more features such as USB and 2 micro SD card slots; Malata Z-Pad has Mini USB, MircoSD, USB 2.0 and HDMI interface;

I never linked Cloud Computing with Shanzai industry. But I believe it’s time for Created-in-China. How about you?!

Contact, is the key element in your social life; but when you save your contact on your phone, it never becomes ‘social’ again. Think about this, you want to call a friend but forget his number or the number saved on your phone is wrong, luckily you know someone who must have it. So usually what you do is call that guy asking for the number. It’s nothing wrong but it could be more efficient. What if we sync our phone contacts with a cloud system, so automatically the system can build up a huge social graph for everyone as it ‘knows’ who has who’s number.  And the interesting part is that whenever I need a contact, as long as my other friends has it, I can just send a simple request, and the system can even auto push the updated contact info back to me if it identifies there is an update. This is what we call Social Phone Contacts or Contacts in Cloud.  Applications like Kik are working on the similar direction, but obviously there is more you can do around the phone contacts.

I recently talked Liu Ziyang, CEO of Hozom, a social contact solution provider founded in 2008. Having been working on the phone contacts for over 3 years, Liu’s opinion on the social contact, I would say, is inspiring.

So what can we do with the contacts:

• contact management – you can sync your phone contacts with the cloud service so whenever you change your phone exporting/importing the contacts would be a big issue. More important, as we mentioned at the beginning of this post, your social graph is built up in the cloud, which enables you get in touch with someone who appears on your friends’ contact.
• messaging service – obviously, with your phone number you can subscribe to some news feeds, weather service etc via sms/mms. And since the contacts are stored in the cloud, of course you can even do group chat, just like Kik. As your phone number is the unique identity, you can even enjoy some add-on services, e.g. cloud storage (save your pictures in the cloud and the account is linked with your number);
• calling service – as the contacts, not just your personal contacts but also the phone numbers of the public service, are now online, your social life could be much easier. Need the number of a restaurant for reservation, no need to spend time on service like Yell or Dianpin, the cloud would be able to tell in second. No need to say that you can still take the advantage of the traditional Internet call service, such as VoIP.
• e-business card – we need others’ business cards because we need their phone number and emails. I would not say the business card business will die, but it has started changing. If I trust you, maybe you can just send a request to the cloud system, I approve it, then my contact info will be pushed to your phone. Location-based check-in service is hot because we love to meet in person, but looking at the virtual avatars is getting boring, you need the real contact, via the cloud.

“When you leave your phone contacts in the cloud, your social life could be much easier and efficient. ” This is what Liu Ziyang believes. Hozom is now available for Java, Symbian and Android system and the iOS version is coming soon. Hozom has been working on the cloud contacts management in past 3 years, and now is ready for the bigger picture. Liu said its Kik service, called Foncr has been quietly launched for a while.

I believe in the cloud contacts idea too. But what I am worried about is that when this concept is accepted by more users, how can Hozom as a startup, to compete with the big companies such as Android phone manufacturers.

We are happy to announce that TechNode partners with MobileMonday Shanghai to hold the first Augmented Reality event in Shanghai at Monday 30th May, 7-10pm, at Kathleen’s 5 restaurant and Bar.

Four cool AR companies from Japan, Singapore and China will come to present their AR technology and discuss the business opportunities behind the AR:

• Allen Lu | President | Senscape
  Senscape targets the Chinese market with their AR platform and rich local business information.

• Philippe Depassorio | VP of APAC | Total Immersion
  Total Immersion is the earliest mover in the industry. VC-backed provider of Augmented Reality solutions for brands and developers.

Total Immersion will be accompanied by Open-Groupe, represented by their China MD and President, Laurent Levy. Open-Groupe is a Partner of Total Immersion. Open-Groupe

• Kazumasa Morikawa | Co-Founder and CEO | Qoncept
  Qoncept is advancing in vision-based AR and markerless AR technologies and brought to us with impressive service demonstrations.

• Takasak Hiroki | Producer @ Communication Design Center | Dentsu
  As the producer of iButterfly, DENTSU INC. maintains the top share in the Japanese advertising market, which accounts for 10.1% of the global market.

MoMo Cost: 100 RMB payable at the door includes 2 beverages and canapes. All attendees MUST pre-register.

Location: Kathleen’s 5 – Shanghai
5th Floor Shanghai Art Museum
 325 Nanjing West Road (opposite the JW Marriott hotel, cross street Huangpi Nan Lu).
Tel: 63272221 Map: http://www.kathleens5.com.cn/map.php