Jawfish Games, a Seattle-based startup run by a former professional poker player and the engineering team that built the Fult Tilt Poker site, launched a gaming platform that can host more than 100,000 simultaneous players in real-time tournaments across iOS, Android and the web.

While asynchronous, turn-based games have done well on mobile platforms and Facebook over the last five years, pure, real-time multiplayer games haven’t caught on as quickly partially because data connections haven’t been fast enough and because a game developer would need a critical mass of players to match them synchronously.

But Jawfish, which has raised $3.65 million in funding from firms like Founders Fund’s angel fund, Right Side Capital and other angels, says it has built a platform to do just that. Their platform can support more than 100,000 simultaneous players and host 1 million tournaments for less than $10 in bandwidth.

They initially came out with a few games in partnership with Seattle’s Big Fish Games, but now they’re bringing out more of their own titles.

Because Jawfish’s CEO Phil Gordon is a championship professional poker career who has hosted The World Series of Poker and published five books on the game, the company is doing a poker game (of course). The poker game is designed to have the look and feel of a broadcasted game with Gordon’s running commentary throughout play.

They’ve also launched a basic word search game, called Jawfish Words, that lets players compete on the getting the highest scores, finding the longest words or the most diagonals. There more obscure goals too, like finding the most words with a single vowel. They launched that game last month through a partnership with Amazon. The company has pointed out some promising stats: the average player spends 21 minutes and plays 10.7 tournaments a day. Each tournament is about 60 to 90 seconds long.

They plan to building out a suite of classic games, from casual to casino titles that make use of the platform. “Basically what we’re looking to do is to take games that people know and love and reinvent them for multiplayer real-time tournaments,” Gordon said. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do across a wide spectrum of games.”

While Jawfish hasn’t opened its platform up to third-party developers, there are other gaming networks that add multi-player mode to indie titles that are blowing up. Nextpeer, an Israeli startup, went from having just a few games in its network to well over 1,000 developers in the last several months.

“Barring a top 10-kind of franchise wanting to use our platform for multiplayer mode, it’s incredibly unlikely that we’re going to work with other studios,” Gordon said. “Certainly not for anything but the top tier. We know that our platform is the only one of its kind in the world and we think that it’s in our interest to keep the platform close to the vest and develop our own games.”

GiftCards.com, a Pittsburgh-based company that has been around for more than a decade and has sold 5 million gift cards, agreed to buy San Francisco startup Giftly to grow out a mobile platform.

The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Giftly had raised about $2.8 million from investors including Baseline Ventures, SoftTech VC, Floodgate, Thrive Capital, and Techstars’ David Tisch.

Giftly’s acquisition follows a number of other ones. Karma was picked up very early by Facebook although it may not produce meaningful revenue for some time for the social network, according to its earnings results earlier this year. Another gifting startup, Giftiki, which pooled together people’s money to get gifts, was acquired by Launchrock.

Giftly built a platform that avoided the hassle of individually dealing with merchants and point-of-sale systems. They came out with a native mobile app last fall that made it easier to send presents to friends and family.

The company’s platform didn’t put any limitations on what kinds of presents you could send because the company had a web of relationships with banks and credit card processors. When a recipient would go to redeem their gift, they would pay out of their own pocket, but Giftly would reimburse them that amount through their credit card.

GiftCards.com said Giftly will be rolled into their operations, but will maintain offices in San Francisco.

“We will continue to build out Giftly,” said Giftly’s CEO Timothy Bentley. “Our backend infrastructure will be used for their next generation products. We’ll continue to expand
the ways our technology and services are available to developers, through our API, and merchants, through our merchant services.”

The company is also looking to raise a first venture round, even though it’s been around for more than 10 years. That round will go toward completing the acquisition of Giftly. GiftCards.com has been around since 1999; they sell personalized, pre-designed and discount gift cards.

For years, the iPhone has carried a small etching on the back that says ‘Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.’

It’s fueled the stereotype that China is the world’s factory, but hasn’t had a flexible enough education system to produce R&D talent that can also design world-class products for a global audience.

But that’s a stereotype that isn’t exactly true anymore.

A small group of companies — both small, bootstrapped app startups and multi-billion dollar giants like Tencent — are showing that they can design apps or higher-end hardware with international appeal.

Tencent, one of the country’s gargantuan Internet powers with a market cap of $72 billion dollars, often likes to point out the international reach of its messaging app Weixin or WeChat. That app has blossomed to more than 190 million monthly active users over the past year and with about 40 million of registered users outside of China.

“I’m very glad to see the internationalization of Tencent,” said the company’s CEO Pony Ma this month at the GMIC conference in Beijing. He later added, “The manufacturing sector in China went globalized and the service industry can be internationalized as well…. It’s difficult, but if we can make it, it would be a revolution.”

Interestingly enough, WeChat’s growth abroad is being fueled by the Chinese diaspora — immigrants are taking WeChat with them to stay in touch with their families back home, according to app-tracking services like Onavo. They base this hypothesis on the correlation of WeChat active usage with that of other Chinese-language apps.

Younger Chinese startups are also building internationally as well. I met a Shanghai-based startup called Intsig two weeks ago that has a business card scanning app called Camcard with 50 million registered users and 10 million monthly actives, with half of them outside of China.

“A lot of people are surprised when they find out we’re a Chinese company,” said Louisa Cao, who heads marketing for the company. It helps that exchanging business cards is much more ritualized and formal in China and Japan than it is in the West, so that gives startups in Asia a competitive edge on understanding what consumers want in a product in this area. Similarly, messaging apps out of Asia like Line, Kakao and WeChat are leading the way, with Western startups like Path arguably borrowing some of their strategies like stickers.

Blux, another company out of Xian, the second-tier Chinese city that’s home to the famous army of Terra Cotta warriors, has built a higher-end photo app called Blux Camera that’s been featured by Apple more than 100 times on the iTunes homepage for global audiences. As the cost advantages that China has over Western markets narrows, the co-founder Jo Yin told me that it now can make economic sense to run global market-facing startups outside of the traditional hubs of Beijing and Shanghai (as they’ve become too expensive).

One of the reasons that all of these startups can built products for foreign audiences is because they’ve been trained either at Western universities or through working for multi-nationals. Some are run by “sea turtles” or Chinese who have returned home after years of working or studying abroad. Intsig’s CEO Michael Zhen spent years at Motorola where he picked up ideas on how to manage teams and think globally.

It’s also helped that the Chinese government has gone far in protecting and nurturing domestic technology companies and startups, a trend which continues with the government’s recent investment into a GPS alternative called Beidou and an Ubuntu-based OS that would help Chinese firms move off Western software platforms. Now that companies like Tencent have reached a certain prowess in domestic markets, they can look outwards.

To be fair, achieving global reach is something only a small fraction of local Chinese startups can do. It requires an international fluency; founders have to understand what kind of design and marketing attracts foreigners. Chinese web services can seem noisy and busy; they can be filled with more links and text as Mandarin characters are complicated to create on QWERTY keyboards.

There are even a few U.S. growth-stage companies that haven’t been dissuaded by Google’s very public about-face on the Chinese market and are hiring design and developer talent locally. Evernote recently launched a China-focused version of its enterprise service and they very intentionally took on local hires to develop product.

“It’s easy to sell your products everywhere. But when we say we want to be a global company, it’s because we want to make our products everywhere,” said Evernote CEO Phil Libin, when he launched Evernote for Business locally in China.

He went on to say that China’s copycat reputation is unfair.

“Chinese companies don’t have a good reputation for innovation in the West. The reputation that Chinese companies have is that they don’t really innovate. They just copy and I don’t think this reputation is right. It’s not a problem that Chinese companies copy. It’s that everyone copies. Chinese companies don’t just copy. They copy and improve. Copy and improve is what everyone does everywhere. That’s what Apple does. That’s what Microsoft does. That’s what Facebook does. Very few companies start with a first-of-a-kind idea.”

Indeed, probably the most interesting company to watch as it expands globally is Xiaomi, which did just that. They took Android and improved upon it.

They’re probably the best example of how China is moving up the value-chain from low-cost manufacturing into high-end design.

Just three years afters being founded, the company is on track to do $4.5 billion in handset and accessory sales. Some have made the metaphor that Xiaomi is the “Apple of Android” in that it’s an integrated hardware and software maker that has built its own special skin of Android and sells high-end hardware at or around the cost of materials. They compete head-to-head against Samsung in mainland China, and according to third-party mobile app analytic services like Umeng, they’re in second place.

Although Xiaomi will only publicly talk about its plans to sell handsets in Hong Kong and Taiwan, a source close to the company says it’s been on the lookout for a general manager that could bring their Android skin, the MIUI, to North American audiences.

They’ve been able to develop a rabid fan base locally in China because they allow people to participate in the designing of the phone by requesting features. Internally, they have small teams of engineers, product managers and designers that work alongside each other on a very fast cycle. They release a new version of the MIUI every week.  

But they don’t know if the model will translate abroad yet. Chinese consumers are very comfortable with paying for the full-cost of the phones upfront and buying devices online instead of through brick-and-mortar stores.

“We don’t know how developed regions like Taiwan and Hong Kong will accept products like Xiaomi,” said co-founder Lin Bin in an interview. “Greater China is just one step beyond mainland China.”

With India’s annual GDP growth of about 5 to 6 percent per year, a new wave of affluent consumers is coming. While there have been e-commerce successes like Flipkart, a handful of local startups are targeting the upper-end of the market.

Squarekey is a startup that brings high-end fashion brands to India for the same prices as ones that a consumer would pay in the West.

“Retail is stagnating the Western world,” said founder Avantika Daing. “The growth story is now in markets in India. We’re really addressing a big unmet consumer need. Our core base will include about 300 million users by 2015. Those are the potential users — the aspirational class that spans from the middle class to the upper-middle class.”

The site offers clothes from about 65 brands including Nanette Lepore, Nicole Miller, BCBG Max Azria and Ben Sherman. While the site only opened last fall and Daing declined to share volume numbers, she did say that sales were growing by 30 percent month-over-month. Their average price point is around $175.

India has strict regulations about allowing in “multi-brand” stores, or ones that offer multiple clothing brands. At the same time, individual clothing brands may not be at the point where they’re willing take the financial risk of entering the Indian market.

“A Bloomingdale’s or a Barney’s cannot enter india with the current regulatory environment,” she said. “Single brands are permitted in India. There are some foreign direct investment nuances around minority and majority shareholders, but you do need a local partner.”

She said brands give Squarekey access to their current season inventory, and they take care of everything from fulfillment to the last-mile delivery. They can drop ship to the first-tier cities in India within a few days for most of their goods, but other pieces that are flown in from the U.S. may take 10 business days.

Over the last few years, a slightly older generation of e=commerce companies has figured out the logistical hurdles of delivering goods to consumers in the major cities. Plus, credit card penetration is improving.

“Things like credit card usage are issues of yesterday,” Daing said. “The marketplace has evolved and an ecosystem of small and large e-commerce players have helped make barriers disappear.”

She adds that Squarekey doesn’t take on inventory risk by buying merchandise upfront.

“For the first six months, we did take inventory risk just to prove ourselves out,” she said. “It was just a kind of good faith move to prove to brands that we were creating this compliant and trustworthy platform.”

But now, Squarekey pre-stocks from clothing in India after taking products on consignment from the brands. They also let Indian shoppers buy pre-season clothing if they’re willing to wait six to eight weeks.

With Squarekey’s model, Daing says she’s not playing the discount game that has made other Indian e-commerce startups less profitable. Local investors have rationalized a bit over the last year, according to a survey from one of Squarekey’s backers, the Indian startup accelerator GSF India.

“What happened last year was that we had a lot of your Amazon-like business models come up in India, then a lot of me-too Gilt Groupe-like business models. One questions the sustainability of the latter model.”

The biggest difference from one year ago with China’s mobile startups is that the local market is actually viable.

China now has more active iOS and Android devices than the U.S., up from about 40-50 million in circulation the last time I visited in late 2011. What that means is local entrepreneurs can finally build real, scalable mobile software businesses.

iDreamSky, which started four years ago, is one of the companies riding this wave.

They started back in 2009 and have grown to about 200 people through publishing some of the West’s best-known mobile games like Halfbrick’s Fruit Ninja and Imangi’s Temple Run in China.

The Chinese market isn’t like the rest of the world. There are myriad Android app stores, run independently of Google. There are different social media channels through platforms like Tencent’s WeChat and Sina Weibo. Then there are different local tastes for music and art.

“Finding a partner that knows how to localize your game doesn’t mean just translating the game in Chinese,” said co-founder and executive vice president Jeff Lyndon. “It’s also about adding unique content.”

He said in Fruit Ninja, iDreamSky added Chinese blades for cutting the fruit and localized backgrounds.

They also changed the monetization strategy in Temple Run. The Western version of the game asks players to buy virtual gems to revive their character. But in the Chinese version, Temple Run will ask players to either buy virtual gems or directly pay 2 renminbi (about 33 cents) to revive their runner.

Lyndon said re-routing players through a separate interstitial to choose packs of gems deterred Chinese players. “It’s counterproductive to impulsive buying behavior,” he said.

While other top local developers like Chukong have revealed that they’ve been making between $6 million per month, mainly from the Chinese market, Lyndon said top foreign indie games could realistically gross $4 million to 5 million per year before iDreamSky’s take.

The company splits revenue 70-30 with the developer getting the bulk, but they graduate their take to 50-50 for better-performing games. Their network has grown to about 15 million daily actives in China.

They’ve raised roughly $10 million from Redpoint Ventures and Legend Capital and compete with companies like Chukong, which publishes games while developing its own first-party titles. Yodo1 is another publisher that recently took funding from Singtel.

“There’s a new batch of the competitors, but the market is big enough for all of us to survive,” Lyndon said.

But he said one advantage that iDreamSky has is that it doesn’t have a dual role. It only publishes games; it doesn’t make its own titles. Having a dual model can sometimes lead to conflicts of interest if a studio promotes its own games over a third-party title, or even borrows ideas liberally from a third-party studio, he said.

“We have a very strong mandate,” he said. “If we want to be a publisher, we should never be a developer.”

He added that the market is changing rapidly. Tencent’s WeChat, which blew up over the last year and grabbed 190 million monthly active users, is poised to be a major distributor of mobile games. South Korea’s Kakao has pioneered this model; games distributed by the Kakao messaging platform dominate the top-grossing charts in the country.

“WeChat is going to be one of the biggest trendsetting elements of 2013 for the Chinese market,” he said. “Once it opens up, as Kakao and Line being have already shown, WeChat will deliver the same results or even better.”

For foreigners, Lyndon said there’s a limited window to break into the Chinese mobile gaming market (which might be a bit of a self-serving thing to say.)

He said local developers are getting increasingly better at catering to the local market, and they already dominate the charts with the exception of titles like King’s Candy Crush Saga.

“The Chinese market has changed dramatically. It’s getting harder for Western developers to come in,” he said. “If you don’t come into China earlier, you might not be able to come in in after next 24 months.”

While there’s a perennial debate on the West Coast about whether and when business cards might become irrelevant, they continue to be at the center of business customs in China and Japan.

It’s just basic etiquette when meeting a new contact to offer your card with two hands and a slight bow.

That’s why it’s natural that a Chinese company — not an American one — might be able to dominate this market and behavior globally. LinkedIn’s Cardmunch had scanned 2 million business cards a year after their 2011 acquisition, and hasn’t released stats since.

But Shanghai’s CamCard boasts 10 million monthly active users, with 50 million registered in total. About half of them are outside of China.

The company is part of a new wave of Chinese startups that are either run by very internationalized Chinese founders or foreigners that are able to build and design consumer products and apps with global appeal.

Intsig, the company behind CamCard, originally launched the app back in 2009 and has quietly grown it since.

They use a freemium model that caters to both consumers and enterprises. On the consumer side, there’s a free version of the app. And then there’s a paid version, which costs about $2.99 in the West or $11.99 in Asia. It feels like price discrimination but Intsig justifies it by saying it’s more technically different to do optical character recognition for Chinese and Japanese and because Asian consumers may be willing to pay more for a business card service.

The paid version has a cloud syncing service that lets people save cards across all of their different devices.

On the enterprise side, companies pay for extra security features to make sure their client and business partner lists stay safe. In China, the vast majority of smartphones are Android devices and Chinese consumers are much more concerned about getting viruses.

As for the parent company itself, Intsig has raised roughly $10 million from investors including Matrix Partners in China and other local investors. The company’s CEO Michael Zhen had a long career at Motorola, where he says he picked up the skills and ideas necessary to start his own company.

I’ve seen one other regional competitor, Japan’s Sansan. They’re an older rival that is transitioning to a smartphone-centric world through a card-scanning app called Eight. Before that, they were actually leasing scanners to local Japanese businesses.

QFPay‘s card reader admittedly looks a bit clunkier than its U.S. or European equivalents Square or iZettle.

It looks like a wonky, old calculator. But that’s because Chinese consumers don’t trust merchants easily and a basic phonejack reader without a keypad makes them nervous, says COO Tim Lee. He says consumers are worried that their PINs will get stolen by unscrupulous merchants.

“Aesthetically, it’s not that beautiful,” he said. “Square is very Apple-like and we’d want to have good design, but we are practical for two reasons. We must have a PIN pad in China and secondly, we have limited money so we’d want to build a minimum viable product and then keep on improving.”

Because of these more practical modifications, QFPay is seeing traction that has it processing close to $400 million per year on an annualized basis.

They have 30,000 merchants all over China and recently picked up funding from Sequoia China, although the size of the round is still undisclosed.

Among their clients are better-known names like Groupon-like 55Tuan, which uses QFPay to collect fees from merchants all across China.

QFPay’s model is slightly different from Square’s. For one, they don’t give away their readers for free. They charge 899 renminbi or just under $150 for each one. Competitors like Lakala also charge for their readers at about 199 renminbi a pop.

QFPay’s transaction fees also legally have to be a lot lower than what U.S. and European companies can charge. They don’t charge more than 0.78 percent per transaction, which is one-third of the 2.75 percent that Square charges. That cuts the company’s margins on every swipe, although Lee says that R&D costs are substantially lower in China.

QFPay also recently released an API that lets third-party developers create payment experiences. (Square does not currently offer an API.) It’s still early so there just 100 developers on the platform.

The Chinese market has myriad challenges, which could also be good opportunities for QFPay.

For one, penetration for point-of-sale terminals is still quite low. Lee says only about 5 million merchants out of China’s estimated 100 million have proper point-of-sale machines, so QFPay has to do a lot of education on why its products are valuable.

The country is also heterogeneous with different provinces having different business cultures.

“In the north, merchants just have a leisure life. They open the shop and go home at 5 of 6 p.m.,” he said. “But in the Southern provinces, they will stay open until midnight.” The Western provinces are also far less developed than the coasts, with many Chinese merchants still carrying feature phones.

Lee said they started working on the company about six months after Square launched. The company’s management team has experience working for PayPal, MasterCard, HSBC and Western Union; that breadth of experience spans the entire history of digital payments in the country.

They face internal competitors like Lakala and iBoxPay, but Lee says those are consumer-facing solutions. He says they basically target reader sales at consumers that want to pay for utilities and other services through their phones.

But QFPay is aimed at merchants and the company is working on all sorts of software tools to handle CRM, analytics and loyalty products.

One interesting thing to watch is how social networking platforms mature divergently as businesses around the world.

Sina Weibo, the public microblogging platform that has had a huge impact on online discourse in China, is veering down a path toward e-commerce and transactions after Alibaba took a stake worth $586 million in it last month. The platform is one of the two more influential social networks in China today, with the other being Tencent’s messaging app WeChat.

But unlike WeChat, Sina Weibo’s growth has slowed over the last year and its parent company Sina has had visible issues in monetizing the platform. (It feels a little bit like the heat Twitter had a few years ago for taking longer to bring in revenue-making products like promoted tweets and in-stream ads.)

“Weibo is pretty mature right now,” said Alibaba CTO Wang Jian in an interview. “It’s not in a fast growth period.”

In the Sina’s last earnings report, the company said Weibo made just under $50 million in revenue, or about 12 percent of overall advertising revenue. But investments in the company contributed to an $8.5 million operating loss for Sina last year.

Now with Alibaba’s investment, it looks like Weibo will take a different money-making path than its Western counterparts, which are more dependent on sponsored stories or in-stream ads.

“I think the best way to monetize Weibo is through e-commerce, not by ads,” Jian said. “That’s what I believe. That’s my personal thought. Weibo has a very good chance to integrate with the Alibaba business.”

It’s a win-win deal. Alibaba, which is veering toward an IPO, is China’s dominant e-commerce company and has an extremely data-driven culture. But it hasn’t been as successful with its own homegrown social networking efforts. At the same time, Sina isn’t widely considered to have the same caliber of technical talent as China’s other flagship Internet companies.

While Jian didn’t give a lot of detail on how they would integrate the two platforms, one could imagine that users could get targeted offers on goods and services related to things they’ve posted status updates about.  

“We just need time to find out how to have a synergy of data between the two companies,” Jian said. “Weibo just gave us a new challenge for that.”

As for Aliyun, the smartphone OS that Jian is overseeing, Jian says that he doesn’t think the platform will fit Weibo — which is sort of hard to believe considering that Weibo is a mobile-centric product.

“I don’t think Aliyun really fits the Weibo deal,” he said.  

While Tencent’s WeChat, which has surged to 190 million monthly active users over the past year, isn’t a direct competitor, Jian says it is in terms of other metrics.

“If you’re thinking about time that people spend on their devices, then you can say it’s a direct competitor. If you look at it from just a media perspective, I don’t think it’s direct competition. Two years ago, everyone spent time on Weibo, and now Weixin (WeChat) is becoming that app. It’s really a time spending problem.”

Whom do the idols idolize?

Lei Jun, the CEO of Android handset and OS maker Xiaomi, is arguably the face of tech entrepreneurship in China as a long-time angel investor and serial entrepreneur behind companies like Amazon-acquired Joyo.cn and the recently IPO’d YY.

He’s been called the “Steve Jobs of China” in the sense that Xiaomi is an integrated hardware and software maker that has altered Android for Chinese tastes. They sell high-end Android phones at or slightly above the cost of materials and profit through accessories and eventually, software and services. While the country has been known for lower-end hardware makers, Xiaomi is pushing the idea that world-class products can be both made and designed in China.

The company has its own fanboys to prove it. Just two years after launching their first device, Xiaomi plans to sell 15 million devices this year, bringing the company $4.5 billion in revenue. Last year, they sold 7 million phones. Sales in batches of 200K to 300K phones on their website regularly sell out — sometimes in less than an hour.

But Xiaomi also has incredibly high expectations to realize; the company’s valuation is not just predicated on raw hardware sales, but also on the idea that Xiaomi will eventually be able to monetize software services — something it has yet to prove against giants like Alibaba and Tencent in the ridiculously competitive Chinese market.

While founding the company three years ago, Jun thought about the history of Chinese business and entrepreneurship to find role models.

“What kind of company in China can last for a century?” he asked at the GMIC conference in Beijing this week.

He said he ultimately looked up to two companies: a 340-year-old traditional Chinese medicine company called Tongrentang and hot pot chain Hai Di Lao.

He said Tongrentang’s mission taught him two things — never produce lower-quality products for the sake of cost and never spare any effort in creating the best quality products.

Hai Di Lao, which is indeed a delicious hot pot chain (yes, I’ve tried it), taught him about the value of customer service. In a separate interview, co-founder and president Lin Bin suggested that I order items not on the menu or even praise the dishware in the restaurant.

“They take customer feedback very, very seriously and always leave you with a surprise,” Bin said.

In a way, Jun is critical of the prevailing business culture in China. “There’s a big problem with integrity in China,” he said. “People sell pigs but you’re not eating pork,” he added on-stage, alluding to recent health scares where rat meat has been marked as lamb.

Appealing to a Fanbase

Paired with this focus on high-quality parts is a marketing model that’s unusual for any handset maker globally.

Xiaomi sold 72 percent of its phones directly through its online store last year, bypassing the costly logistical headache of dealing with brick-and-mortar retailers. Right now, they have two models: one that retails for 1999 renminbi ($326) and a more basic version that goes for 1499 renminbi ($245).

They can do this because the company has cultivated a unique participatory model of designing phones. Every week, the company releases a new version of its customized Android experience: the miUI.

Of their millions of customers, there are a few hundred thousand “hardcore” fans who do the teardowns, scrutinize every spec and offer suggestions on how to change the phone.

“Chinese consumers are actually very critical in the sense that they compare not just the build and look and feel of phones, but also everything that goes inside — the CPU, memory, speed, the specs,” Bin said. “They are pretty savvy about the money they pay for these phones.”

Jun uses Weibo, the public Chinese social networking platform that sometimes draws comparisons to Twitter, to solicit advice and communicate with Xiaomi fans. He’s offered different levels of hard drive storage based on user feedback. He said they even added a sound recording app at the behest of a reporter.

“We co-develop the phone,” Jun said in another interview. “I’ve used more than 70 phones in the last couple years. I have lots of suggestions, but will they change their phone? Even Nokia? Most likely not. So I created a model where I’ve invited all of my fans to be involved in designing the phone. It’s one of the most exciting things for them.”

He says this is a key part of why Xiaomi spends less than its peers on marketing.

“If you invented a feature in the Xiaomi phone, will you tell your classmates and friends that you invented a feature? Most likely you will.”

Their approach ties into a big trend that is fueling a hardware Renaissance globally: the ability to feel out product-market fit through social media before a capital-intensive manufacturing process — be it through Twitter, Weibo or a Kickstarter campaign.

Through that feedback and Xiaomi’s own in-house engineers and designers, miUI includes improvements over the standard flavor of Android. Jun says that they’ve tweaked how applications run in the background so that a Xiaomi phone can go up to six or seven days without a recharge. (I’ve been carrying an older Xiaomi around and it has held up for a few days at a time, unlike my iPhone, which needs to be recharged every day.) There are also lots of UI flourishes that are, frankly, Apple-like.

Software For Profit And As A Protective Moat

While Xiaomi has done well at positioning itself as much more than a commodity hardware maker, one of its next challenges will be to prove that it can make money off software and services. Because it sells phones at or near the cost of the build of materials, Xiaomi will rely on accessories and services to boost its margins.

Jun is reluctant to say whether Xiaomi is at heart more of a software or hardware company (a question that has also perplexed analysts of Apple).

“We positioned ourselves as triathlon athletes,” Jun said. “We do software, hardware and Internet services, so if you would ask which part of the three is stronger, my answer is: would you ask a triathlon athlete whether they are best at running, swimming or cycling?”

They’ve shared some vanity stats showing traction, although it’s hard to understand what they mean. Xiaomi’s app store sees 3.5 million app downloads a day, 3.5 million photos uploaded to its cloud service a day and has seen 2 billion messages uploaded cumulatively. Its messaging app MiTalk is way behind Tencent’s WeChat, which is the other big China tech story of the year with 190 million active users.

There are some promising metrics, though. Bin says Xiaomi’s customers are twice as active on the mobile web as those of other manufacturers. That sort of engagement could lend itself to interesting revenue opportunities down the line in gaming and e-commerce, although the company declined to share specifics.

Two other growth areas for Xiaomi are international markets and in other types of hardware. The company is expanding to greater China — or Taiwan and Hong Kong. Bin is reluctant to talk about even more international markets, saying that the company just wants to prove itself in these two areas first.

There are unique challenges. For one, these markets rely on more of the subsidized model that’s common in the West where carriers lower the list price through post-paid plans. In China, many consumers pay for the full cost of the phone upfront. They also don’t know whether the marketing model where they heavily engage a core set of fans will work outside of mainland China.

The other growth area is with Xiaomi’s new set-top boxes.  It was a rocky start with the initial sales of the set-top boxes blocked by Chinese regulations around TV content. But they re-launched two months ago. Bin and Jun declined to share figures on sales so far, except to say that Jun has seen second-hand models show up on eBay and Taobao for $90 (which is about twice the list price of 299 renminbi).

Bin is hesitant to share too many targets, because he claims that Xiaomi doesn’t really even have that many internally. Even the goal to get to 15 million handsets is to produce that many, not necessarily to sell that many (although they invariably sell out).

“We don’t have any KPIs (key performance indicators) — not even internally,” Bin said. “Our KPI is to get handsets to everyone who can place an order online and make a full payment.”

Parse, the mobile back-end startup that Facebook recently bought to set up a new developer-focused business, just launched hosting. It’s meant to help mobile developers that have a desktop web presence or companion experience on the web. The acquisition has already given Parse a boost, with the number of apps it hosts up 33% to 80,000 since the deal was announced.

“People were building mobile apps using Parse. But when they wanted a web presence or a dot-com landing page, they were using Parse for the log-in, but the website was being served from something else like Heroku or App Engine,” explained Parse co-founder Ilya Sukhar. “So we’re launching a fully featured web hosting platform.”

Sukhar said the project has been in the works for the last four to six weeks, even while the Facebook negotiations were going on.

The new hosting service lets developers host landing pages, and display user data retrieved using the Parse API. Say if a developer wants to show a leaderboard for their game on the web, they can do it using both the new hosting service and the standard Parse data product.

Parse Hosting comes on top of other products that help mobile developers manage push notifications and user identities and log-ins.

He added that the Facebook deal, which we had independently heard was worth $85 million excluding retention incentives, hadn’t scared away developers. They’re at 80,000 apps now, from the 60,000 apps they said they had when the Facebook deal was announced. “There was an interesting debate about whether people would move off Parse, but all of our metrics are up,” he said.

Facebook had won the deal to buy Parse even as many of the Valley’s best known companies like Apple, Yahoo and Dropbox had looked or expressed interest. They’re starting their very first business-to-business revenue stream through the Parse acquisition and had — like in the case of Instagram — promised the team a fair amount of autonomy to grow their products as they see fit. They’re not tampering with Parse’s SaaS-based revenue model.

He also said that the company hadn’t celebrated the deal yet. “We have a lot of stuff on our plate,” he said.

A year ago, Evernote kicked off its strategy to bring its personal organization app to China, with the launch of Yinxiang Biji on its own dedicated platform. Now, with 4 million users of the Chinese version, Evernote is taking the next step in monetizing that with the introduction of Yinxiang Biji Business. Phil Libin, CEO and founder of Evernote, announced the news today at the GMIC conference in Beijing, where he also noted that since launching in December 2012, the bigger Evernote Business product has now signed up some 5,000 companies.

China is a big market for Evernote: when Libin announced the launch of Yinxiang Biji a year ago, he said that China was rapidly overtaking Japan to become the company’s second-biggest market after the U.S. Today Libin noted that Evernote now has 4 million users in the country; worldwide, the company has over 60 million users, he said.

“We’re in China because I firmly believe that China will be the crucible of innovation over the next decade,” Libin noted in his keynote today.

Today’s news is not only looking to capitalize on that, but also two other trends in the country. The first is a wider trend of a rising class of businesspeople in the country, looking for better ways of collaborating and organizing their information and work — in short, much the same trends that prompted the creation of the original Evernote Business product.

“China now is shiftting from a labor-intensive to knowledge-intensive society, so the continuing creativity will be the basis of its competition,” Libin said today. “The engine of growth over the past 10 years ago has been manufacturing…but right now, in this room, we are seeing the engine of growth for China changing. It’s going to be information… You’ll have millions of small and medium sized businesses suddenly becoming knowledge companies, realizing that their success depends on how easily their employees can process knowledge and information.”

Amy Gu, GM of Evernote China (which has a dedicated staff of 17, Libin noted today), says that Yinxiang Biji Business is the ninth product from Evernote to hit China, “and the first one dedicated to serving business users. I hope Yinxiang Biji Business will grow up together with Chinese enterprises,becoming the second brain of the domestic enterprises and making them much more smarter.”

The other is, of course, the smartphone boom: Evernote works on multiple platforms, but its sweet spot is in how it was built with the mobile experience of accessing information as a primary goal. China is now the world’s biggest smartphone market, and for many consumers there (and business users), smartphones and tablets are the only devices that people use to access the Internet and stay connected. That means that apps like Evernote’s — which are not created first for desktop use as so many other personal information management apps are — has a key opportunity.

As with Yinxiang Biji, the Business product was created to offer local users a better experience with the Evernote platform: at the time of the original launch of Yinxiang Biji, Libin noted that local users were having a poorer experience because of the difficulties of internet connections between China and the U.S. The Yinxiang platform localizes the experience, which no longer has to pass over the Great Chinese Firewall to work.

As with the original Business product, the Chinese version will give users increased storage space of 4GB monthly. Users also will have the ability to create Business Notebooks to share with colleagues, as well as keep personal notebooks for their own use, in accessible to their business administrators. And as with the other product, users have access to a Library, a common repository of data posted by others; a search feature for scanning across all the data in the files; and a Related Notes feature for suggested relevant content. It will come at a price close to that of Evernote Business: 60 yuan ($9.74) per user per month, or 688 yuan ($112) per user per year, according to the site; Evernote Business costs $10 per user per month.

Libin took the opportunity in his keynote also to weigh in on his opinion of what role China is playing in world innovation.

“Chinese companies don’t have a good reputation for innovation in the West…the reputation that Chinese companies have is that they don’t really innovate. They just copy,” he said. “I don’t think this reputation is right. I don’t think it’s correct…It’s not that the problem is that Chinese companies copy. Everyone copies. Chinese companies…copy and improve. That’s what apple does. that’s what Microsoft does. That’s what Facebook does. Very few companies start with a first of the kind idea.”

In addition to China, Asia is increasingly an important market for Evernote also for partnerships: last week the company also announced a deal with Korea’s messaging giant KakaoTalk for users to be able to record in Evernote memos to themselves while using KakaoTalk, as well as exchanges from the messaging platform. As the Korea Herald points out, the global deal also helps KakaoTalk expand outside of its home market. It also works closely with Docomo in Japan both for selling Evernote in that market, and as a partner in its new accelerator program.

It wasn’t until widely respected economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff shared the Excel files behind their influential paper on the relationship between government debt and economic growth, that a very basic and consequential spreadsheet error was discovered.

Suddenly, a conclusion that policy makers around the world had seized on for years to justify steep spending cuts was thrown in doubt.

That’s why Richard Price, the CEO of a social network for researchers called Academia.edu, says that sharing raw research data should be expected from the start. His platform is adding a feature today that lets researchers post the data behind their work through embeddable data-sets and code on their profile pages.

“They literally drew the wrong rectangle and dropped off the last few rows of data. It wasn’t a hardcore programming error,” he said.

Price asserts that the Reinhart-Rogoff controversy along with another recent scandal involving a Dutch social scientist who faked data for 10 years is damaging public trust in scientific research.

Price said the Dutch scientist Diederik Stapel justified his fraudulent data by saying he felt pressure to make conclusions simpler for the journals.  ”He said, ‘They want elegant results and elegant data with beautiful conclusions. But the data behind an experiment can be so messy.’”

Because of incidents like the Stapel fraud, Price believes that a pushback against traditional, less transparent and more expensive publishing models is gaining steam. Other competitors like ResearchGate and ScienceExchange are jumping on the bandwagon too.

“The academic community is getting a bit radicalized about publishing,” he said. “It’s literally happened in the last 12 months with a series of things that are spreading a wave of awareness.”

Historically, academics have only shared their finished work in the form of a paper that’s vetted by a journal (that’s then sold back to universities at sometimes thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a year).

Academics have been slower to jump on behaviors from consumer social media where people publish quick updates instead of longer-form content. He says that about three-quarters of the world’s scientific data isn’t shared because the right incentives and platforms haven’t existed.

“Publishing scientific research is changing from being a very focused discipline to one where a fuller range of outputs and multimedia is being shared,” Price said. “Part of pushing this forward is about getting the incentives right.  If you share your data, you should be able to build your reputation.”

One benefit is that collaborating researchers might be able to take the basic data and tease out totally different ideas than the original academic.

You can read more in Price’s blog post here.

While Foursquare has been the most hyped location startup out of New York, there is actually another startup that is growing a real business from serving merchants with about 150,000 locations globally.

Yext has quietly grown to 200 employees through a platform that makes it easy for brands and small businesses to manage their location data across more than 50 search engines, mapping companies and on Facebook. They’ve raised more than $65 million to date after spinning out and selling an older pay-per-call business to IAC, in favor of going after this opportunity.

CEO Howard Lerman thinks of his company as the “quiet location giant,” which could eventually become one of the New York tech scene’s serious IPO candidates.

They’re making their connection to the Facebook platform even more seamless today with the launch of Yext Sync. Through a mobile app, businesses can manage their Facebook Pages, whether they have one or one thousand of them. It’s designed so that a local employee at one of a franchise’s hundreds or thousands of locations can update the page with real-time content like photos or status updates.

“If a Starbucks barista is interacting with customers every day, why can’t they manage the local Facebook Page?” said Yext CEO Howard Lerman. He said that Facebook is now a growing source of local search; according to a study from Neustar, Facebook has about 13 percent of local searches now.

The app they’ve built, called Yext Sync, kind of feels like any other social networking app where you can just add photos or updates to a stream (which ends up being the Facebook page). Facebook actually has its own Pages Manager App, but it isn’t multi-platform, Lerman says.

“When a business or brand posts into Yext, it appears not just in Facebook, but also, optionally on our network of 50 sites,” he explained. “So, post once, and it updates more than 50 platforms with one touch. This is better than updating each platform individually.”

Yext is looking to have 300,000 locations on its platform by next year. They have a subscription model with tiers that range from $149 a year to $499, depending on the number of sites a business wants to manage.

Shakil Khan, an angel investor and advisor to Spotify, just launched Coindesk, a Bitcoin resource and news site, amid a boatload of hype and VC interest in the crypto-currency.

Khan says Coindesk was a project he conceived of about four weeks ago, around when Bitcoin was surging to an all-time high. It’s now trading at around $124.38, or about half as much as it was trading at a few weeks ago.

“I was just sitting there and I literally had five e-mails that day from very seasoned entrepreneurs, asking me — what do you know about Bitcoin?” said Khan, who has invested in the space. He was part of a roughly half-million dollar round in Bitpay, which is trying to make it dead simple for merchants to incorporate Bitcoin as a payments method.

“There’s a lack of transparent information. Where do you go to read what’s right or wrong?” said Khan, who has been a head of special projects for Spotify for five years. He was also briefly a head of special projects for Path too.

No, Khan’s not starting a Bitcoin media business. (That would be a head-scratcher.)

“I have absolutely no desire to be publisher,” he said. “That is not my goal. I am just fascinated by the digital currency space.”

Khan says that existing resources out there like Bitcoin Magazine and other message boards are too technical for a more mainstream audience. While helping put together the deal to sell Summly to Yahoo over the last couple weeks, he got together a team of people and part-time writers to publish news about the Bitcoin ecosystem.

But he adds that building a news site is not just a side project either. “CoinDesk, Bitcoins and digital currencies are way, way more than a hobby for me,” he said.

Khan has personally vetted about 15 deals in the Bitcoin space, and moved forward with just one.

“The early guys who are having the ideas have not necessarily run businesses before. They’re looking at it more from an idealist perspective or vision,” he said, explaining why he didn’t go in on other deals.

Almost one-third of Facebook’s advertising revenue is now coming from mobile platforms, according to the company’s latest earnings release. About $375 million of Facebook’s $1.25 billion in advertising revenue came from products like the company’s new mobile app install ads.

That’s up from last quarter, when Facebook said it made 23 percent, or $305.9 million, from mobile ads. So this is a nice 22.5 percent quarter-over-quarter increase in mobile advertising revenue.

Because Facebook now sees about three quarters of a billion users per month on mobile devices, the company has to make a commensurate amount from these platforms. Analysts and investors are closely watching to see how well Facebook makes this leap from desktop-based ads to mobile ones.

Unlike Apple and Google, Facebook doesn’t own its own smartphone OS or sell its own hardware. It doesn’t have a way to earn a cut of app sales or in-app purchases like it does with games and apps on the Facebook platform.

Advertising is the key way that Facebook will monetize its mobile users. Up until the middle of last year, Facebook didn’t really have a program to earn revenues from mobile devices. But then it aggressively stepped up ads for apps in the mobile news feed. It’s well-positioned to do this as app discovery and user acquisition is still a hairy problem for mobile developers across the board.

Yesterday, Facebook’s product director of advertising Gokul Rajaram said at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York that mobile install ads were “performing well, and we’re seeing them deliver really high quality users that take actions.”

Viddy co-founder Chris Ovitz has landed at another buzzed-about Los Angeles startup, the mobile gaming platform Scopely. He used to head up business development at the mobile video startup Viddy, which shot up like a star on the Facebook platform and iOS charts only to later come back down just as dramatically.

At Scopely, he’ll be a vice president of business development, where he’ll work on external opportunities (presumably deals with third-party game makers) to grow the network and the business. Scopely is pursuing a playbook that many other mobile game developers are following. They’re trying to grow the biggest network of gamers possible using apps built both in-house and by outside studios.

With an eight-figure number of monthly actives, Scopely is still smaller than other larger competitors that have publishing programs like Zynga and Sequoia-backed Pocket Gems and the Japanese giants like DeNA and GREE. But they say they’ve been able to get all of their games into the top five free apps on the iOS charts.

After Ovitz left Viddy a few months ago, he and Driver started talking about what was next.

“I’ve had the privilege of watching his entrepreneurial career,” said Scopely CEO Walter Driver. “Honestly, I never thought we’d have a chance to join forces, but we recently started having casual conversations about his future and thought there might be a potential fit.”

Ovitz declined to go into a lot of detail about what happened at Viddy, except to say that the company has to be inward-focused right now.

“I obviously got to see the entire spectrum of a startup’s life. It was an incredible learning experience,” he said. “They really need to focus internally on product and technology, so there’s not a lot of business development for me to do there.”

Viddy skyrocketed up the charts as a short video-sharing app last year in the wake of Instagram’s massive $1 billion buy from Facebook. On that momentum and Instagram’s buzz, the startup raised $30 million at a $370 million valuation.

But it and its direct competitor Socialcam started hemorrhaging users after Facebook cut off the viral fuel that was helping both apps up the charts. Socialcam, in contrast to Viddy, took a more conservative route with venture capital, instead leaning on friends and family from Y Combinator for a giant party round. They parlayed that and their momentum into a $60 million sale to Autodesk.

Meanwhile, Viddy’s level of funding has complicated its options. The company recently had layoffs and saw another co-founder and CEO Brett O’Brien leave.

“I’ve been a gamer my whole life,” Ovitz said. “I grew up interning at Activision and tried to start my own gaming company in business school. I’ve always admired Walter as an entrepreneur and I wanted to hop on this rocket ship.”

Scopely has $8.5 million in seed funding from firms like NEA, Anthem Venture Partners, The Chernin Group, Greycroft Partners, Lerer Ventures, The Collaborative Fund, Yahoo’s former CEO Terry Semel, Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut, ShoeDazzle co-founder Brian Lee, Auren Hoffman, Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow, TechStars’ David Cohen and David Tisch.

Mobile enterprise startups are like unicorns. Nearly every VC I talk to wants to have a bet in this space, yet there really aren’t that many new candidates each year.

Everyone knows that workers are bringing their own devices to work and want to use their personal tablets or phones instead of clunky, employer-mandated devices. Yet employers want to make sure that corporate data remains secure and trackable.

Enter Workspot, a startup backed by Kleiner Perkins, Norwest Venture Partners and Redpoint, that’s debuting today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York.

“We’re simplifying bring-your-own-devices for the enterprise,” said co-founder Ty Wang. “The biggest problem that most companies have is that people love these devices. They’re bringing them into work, but they can’t get their work done because the apps the they need like Microsoft’s Sharepoint, are still behind corporate firewalls.”

Wang said older competitors that do mobile device management have solutions that lock the entire device down, that make them unusable in other situations.

Instead, Workspot’s solution is a consumer app that an employee can download through the regular iOS app store. It gives them streamlined access to all of their work apps, requiring just a basic log-in with password. (That’s after a one-time authentication with their work’s network security appliance.)

The company supports four of the leading VPN providers like Cisco and Juniper, which cover about 80 percent of the market and let workers log-in remotely into corporate networks. Employers can easily add in new apps for their employees to use from a control dashboard. Wang said the process takes a few minutes.

“With most of the solutions today, you’d need to set up this system, go through a whole new testing cycle and all kinds of process to add apps,” he said.

The product is actually free for end-users, and Workspot monetizes through offering employers two paid services. One is something called Insights, which gives them analytics into how their workers are using their software and the other is called Events, which gives the employer total visibility into all end-user activity for compliance and auditing.

For those two services, the company charges anywhere from $150 a month for 0 to 25 users to $4 per user per month for companies with more than 250 employees.

The company has raised $1.9 million from Kleiner, Norwest and others and has 11 employees. Their team has a wealth of experience in enterprise. The CEO Amitabh Sinha previously oversaw the integration of acquisitions at Citrix after being a general manager of Enterprise Desktops and Applications. The CTO and co-founder Puneet Chawla spent seven years at VMWare before working as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Redpoint Ventures. Wang, who is also another co-founder, was a vice president of business development for Twilio after being a senior director for platform product marketing at Oracle.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said that he hasn’t spoken to investors in a year and half about raising capital, denying reports that the company is raising funding at a $1 billion valuation.

Reuters reported that story earlier today, citing one source. We had heard similar rumors over the past few weeks but they weren’t substantiated enough to report. That said, just because Kalanick isn’t speaking to investors about raising money, doesn’t mean that VCs or private equity firms aren’t courting him to take their money.

The company, which pioneered on-demand taxi and black cab rides directly from your mobile phone, has raised nearly $50 million to date. The most recent $37 million round was led by Menlo Ventures, which aggressively outbid other competitors on valuation to win the deal.

Bill Gurley, a general partner at Benchmark Capital, which came in on Uber’s Series A round, said the company is growing faster than eBay. Uber now lists about 30 different geographic locations around the world where it operates.

The company started out with black cabs, then went into environmentally friendly vehicles and then regular cabs. But now it’s making its headway into ride-sharing to compete head-to-head with startups like Zimride’s Lyft and Sidecar, which don’t have the same overhead costs and fees as Uber does. With its original black cab model, Uber partnered with third-party limo and taxi services to provide rides, while Sidecar and Lyft hire regular people with cars who want to earn extra income by driving passengers around.

All of these companies, along with Hailo in the U.K. and Europe, and even Chinese taxi apps like DiDi, tie into a global wave of disruption around urban transportation.

.@uber hasn’t spoken to a single investor about raising $ since Nov ’11. Any reports to the contrary (i.e. Reuters) are completely false

— travis kalanick (@travisk) April 30, 2013

Braintree, the Chicago-based payments gateway that’s processing about $2 billion in mobile transactions per year, just poached one of Google Wallet’s creators Rob von Behren from Square.

Von Behren was one of the co-founders of Google Wallet, the NFC-centric mobile payment system that was designed to let consumers pay directly for goods and services with their smartphones.

Wallet hasn’t seen widespread traction thanks to the often conflicting motivations of carriers, banks, credit card companies and Google. But there were also internal politics too, which led to a diaspora of Google Wallet team members out into startups and growth-stage companies like Square and Braintree.

At Braintree, von Behren says he’ll be working on their mobile e-commerce platform. “Smartphones are pervasive in developed economies, and people use them all the time while making purchasing decisions — but actually buying things with your phone is still really painful in most situations,” he said.

Braintree has focused on building out a direct-to-consumer presence with the acquisition of New York startup Venmo over the last year. Before, Braintree had mostly been handling B2B relationships and powering payments for companies like Airbnb and Uber. Venmo gave them a consumer brand, which they then used to launch services like Venmo Touch, which let consumers sign up to pay for services in the Braintree network with one-click.

Von Behren didn’t really comment on why he left Square after spending a year there. Square has seen a string of departures into the venture world with its head of growth Jared Fliesler moving to Matrix Partners, its director of product Megan Quinn moving to Kleiner Perkins and its COO Keith Rabois joining Khosla Ventures after allegations of sexual harassment.

“For somebody as well-known and respected as Rob, getting that kind of hire was going to be fierce competition,” said Braintree CEO Bill Ready. “We’re thrilled to have him on the team.”

He added that Braintree is definitely not doing NFC. “Rob’s passion was never NFC,” Ready said.

Von Behren said he was mostly attracted to the problem of making payments easy and frictionless on mobile devices. Braintree has a critical mass around this area with 40 million customers and $8 billion in transaction volume a year.

He added that the Google Wallet experience taught him about how difficult it can be to work with large retailers.

“One of the most challenging aspects of Google Wallet was working with the long development cycles of large brick-and-mortar retailers,” he said. “While it’s easy to conceive of good technological solutions to many of the problems these retailers face, figuring out an evolutionary path between where they are and where they would like to be is challenging.”

He added, “Google is one of the few companies in the world that has the right combination of tech savvy and resources to be able to tackle something like this, but even at Google this was difficult.”

Sina Weibo, the micro-blogging platform that took root among China’s white-collar class, may be worth more than $3 billion today after Alibaba agreed to pay $586 million to buy preferred and ordinary shares in the company.

The deal creates a strategic alliance between Alibaba, which runs the eBay of China, and Sina Weibo, which is kind of like a Facebook-Twitter hybrid. Weibo grew to 46 million daily users and earned $50 million in advertising revenue last year, according to an SEC filing last week from parent company Sina. It was 12 percent of parent company Sina’s total advertising revenue.

Like Twitter and Facebook, Sina Weibo has gotten a lot more aggressive about pushing in-stream or news feed advertising. Last week, they announced a new product called “Window Recommendations” in partnership with Alibaba’s Taobao. In that integration, about 3 to 5 ads featuring Taobao goods get pushed into a Weibo stream.

The two companies say the deal happened so that both companies could better connect Alibaba merchants to their Weibo users and followers and experiment with new ideas in social commerce. The partnership could bring $380 million in advertising and e-commerce revenues to Weibo over the next three years, Sina said. Alibaba also reserves the right to bump its ownership up to 30 percent.

It’s interesting because no such equivalent partnership exists in Western markets. E-commerce companies like eBay and Amazon have basic Facebook integrations but no deep strategic investments.

Alibaba is also making the deal as it’s expected to go for a very highly anticipated IPO. The company recently did a management re-shuffle, putting in Jonathan Lu Xaoxi as its new CEO, after founder Jack Ma stepped down.