China Web2.0 Review

Apple Acquired EditGrid?

Tangos — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:57:29 +0000

Apple4us, the leading Chinese blog on Apple, reported that Apple has acquired EditGrid, an online spreadsheets service provider in Hong Kong.

In April 2006, we profiled EditGrid when it just launched public beta test. EditGrid actually is one of my personal favorite Chinese web 2.0 services, since it kept on introducing innovative features and its good user interfaces. In June 2007, EditGrid raised a US$1.25M Series A financing from WI Harper.

David Lee, founder of EditGrid, posted an article on EditGrid’s blog on Sept 24, it may make people suspect it is dying, because it discontinue its customer support for 30 days.

I’m excited to announce that we are making some changes to our business that will allow the EditGrid Team to focus on developing new and exciting web apps. … Effective today all EditGrid.com online services will now be available for free, including our premium subscription services. … in order to focus our resources on new R&D efforts, email and forum user support for EditGrid.com shall be discontinued 30 days from now on 2009-10-24.

In crowded online office service market, EditGrid, as a stand-alone service, has little chance to make a profitable business. I’m not surprised to hear that it is acquired, but I’m surprised to know it is Apple.

Why Apple buy them? EditGrid’s capability on online office apps, esp. online spreadsheet, will strongly enhance the development of Apple’s iwork.com online service.

According to Apple4us, the acquisition is valued between $10m to $30m.

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Sina Starts Twitter-Like Service

Tangos — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 15:43:13 +0000

About ten days ago, Sina started testing its Twitter-like service, Sina Microblogging, when many other Twitter-copycats in China have been shut down by the authorities.

Like Twitter, Sina Microblogging allows users to post short messages less than 140 Chinese characters, you can follow other users to get their updates, but Sina called followers as fans. You can send SMS or MMS to update messages after you set up your mobile phone. It also support hashtag # syntax for easily tracking topics. Users can also add an image to their message. Sina even provides official url shortener too, all url will be shorten as http://sinaurl.cn.

However, for two most important feature of Twitter, i.e. @ and Retweet, the features are quite different in Sina Microblogging. Sina has a feature called reply which is similar to @, but actually totally different. Sina’s reply acually is comment feature in blogs, the reply will not show in your “tweets”, so it is a one-to-one conversation, not one-to-many conversation for Twitter’s @.

Several years ago, when Sina started its blogging service, it was a late-comer in blogging market, but it successfully invited many celebrities to start blogging in Sina’s platform, which attracted many readers and made it one of the top blogging platform in China. It is expected that Sina would adopt similar strategy for its micro-blogging service, to promote celebrities’ micro-blogging, maybe that’s why they called followers as fans.

Sina is not the first one to copy Twitter in China, but many copycats have encountered many troubles from government regulators, and Twitter was blocked for months already. That might not be a big problem for Sina, since Sina already has a strict self-censorship policies and methods.

Tencent actually has launched a Twitter-clone, Tencent Taotao.com, in 2007, but it is not very influential in the market. But some reports said Taotao has 40 million users already. Will Tencent starts to make efforts to promote Taotao after Sina enters this market?

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Baidu to Build Product Database for Ecommerce

Tangos — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 09:04:25 +0000

Youa.com, the ecommerce site of Baidu, announced an “Ark Plan”, which aims to build up standardized products database for online shopping.

The purpose of the Ark Plan is to build an unified and structured products database, which include all the information needed when a buyer go shopping online, such as the specification of the product, price info, users’ reviews, related products and etc. The information can be used by sellers on Youa.com, then they don’t need to bother to input basic information of products. On the other hand, after the implementation of the database, sellers on Youa.com cannot list products which are not included in the database.

The product database of mobile phone is online already, for example, this is the product page for Nokia N97.

According to Baidu, the Ark Plan will be an open project, and collaborated by Youa.com, B2C ecommerce sites and some information portals. But we don’t know so far whether the database is open to third-parties through open API.

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No Xiaonei Anymore, Here Comes RenRen

Tangos — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:10:48 +0000

If I ask who are the popular social networking sites in China? I think most of you will talk about Kaixin001.com, QQ, 51.com and Xiaonei.com. However, since yesterday, there is no Xiaonei.com anymore, Joe Chen, CEO of Oak Pacific changed its name from Xiaonei.com to RenRen.com.

But why changing the already well-known Xiaonei.com brand to Renren.com (brief history of Renren below)? Some people think it is because Xiaonei means “in campus” in Chinese, which limited its users bases on university and college users. By changing its name to Renren, which means “everyone” in Chinese, can help to promote to white collar users, this market is now dominated by Kaixin001.com.

That’s why there is also rumor that Joe Chen plans to merge all three SNS sites under Oak Pacific, i.e. Xiaonei, MOP and Kaixin.com, into Renren.com. But they denied the rumor. If so, they already have Kaixin.com which compete head-to-head with Kaixin001.com on white collar users, why bother to change the name of Xiaonei. After Xiaonei changed name and strategy, will there be another site who can dominate the university and college users SNS market? Will it be QQ Xiaoyou?

Renren.com actually is not a new site, which was founded in 1999 and was a quite high-profile website during the Internet Bubble, it went bankruptcy in 2001. Joe Chen bought Renren.com domain name in 2005. Joe Chen relaunched RenRen.com as an online classified site in 2006, but it was shut down again in 2007.

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[Event] Geeks On A Plan

Tangos — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:07:32 +0000

From June 8th to 16th Web2Asia in cooperation with Dave McClure and Founders Fund are organizing a tour of Silicon Valley tech investors & entrepreneurs through Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai. In each city they will hold several events to have leading local companies, startups and experts in their respective field present to the international crowd, events in China include:

Beijing:

Thursday, June 11th: Startonomics Beijing 09:00am - 06:00pm. I will be on a panel at this event. If you runs a startup pre-series A, please contact us for a discount code for registration.
Thursday, June 11th: VIP Dinner 07:00pm - 09:00pm, please contact george@web2asia.com for an invitation
Friday, June 12th: Startup2Startup Dinner Beijing 07:00pm - 09:00pm. Again, if you runs a pre-series A startup, please contact us for a discount code.

Shanghai:

Saturday, June 13th: VIP Dinner 06:00pm - 09:00pm
Sunday, June 14th: Barcamp Shanghai 11:00am - 05:00pm, free to attend!
Monday, June 15th: Geeks & Glamour Dinner and After Party 07:00 - 10:00pm

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The Day Of Site Maintenance

Tangos — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:58:36 +0000

VeryCD, a very popular eMule download site, is down for website maintenance.

Fanfou, a Twitter-copycat in China, is down for website maintenance.

Some features of Xiaonei, a Facebook-clone, are under maintenance.

The comment function of PPLive, a leading p2p video streaming service, is under maintenance.

Today is the day of site maintenance in China.

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Roundup for CHINICT 2009 Day One

Tangos — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:14:16 +0000

In last three months, I haven’t updated any post in this blog due to my busy day job. But after attending today’s CHINICT event, I decided to write down something.

Most of the following information can be found on Twitter, mainly by @davidatsg, @sioksiok and @DavidFeng. You can also search #CHINICT in Twitter.

Kaixin001.com now has 27m registered users, and 8m daily active users, their average stay time on the site is 1 hour. Actually, I know many users keep on checking Kaixin001.com from time to time during their working hour. Kaixin001.com has no timetable for an open platform. And it seems they don’t need it now, since I heard the rumor that they can charge several million RMB for a big marketing campaign related to apps.
Dangdang, so called China’s Amazon, when its 10th anniversary is coming, start to make profit in this year, and they believe it is sustainable.
360quan.com, a SNS mainly targeting users born in late 80’s and 90’s, will start an open platform very soon, and offer a better revenue sharing deal with developers. And it has about 500k daily active users now.
Now over ten thousand websites has installed UCenter Home to build their own SNS sites. Even Linkist.com, one of the earliest business SNS site in China, relaunched its service recently which is based on UCenter Home now. Comsenz also plans to help those small SNS sites to monetize the sites by longtail advertising and micro-payment premium service on its Manyou open platform.
Among 300 million Internet users in China, 210 millions use online videos, and 140 million go to Youku.com, according to Victor Koo, founder and CEO of Youku.com. Now Youku’s monthly revenues, mainly by advertising, is already 10 million, so it is easy to reach their goal for this year: RMB 100 million. Youku has launched a 3G version on May 17th, but they don’t expect it become significant till 2010. But mobile platform offers an opportunity for subscription-based business model.
6.cn said they are the only profitable video sharing site in China, because they focus on game community, and 70% of their revenue comes from game advertisers. Game operators also feed them video content. They cleaned up all movie content in late 2008. Cost reduction makes them profitable.
UUSee make 80% of their revenue from ads, and the rest from value-added service. They offers fee-based HD content. Their p2p technology helps to reduce costs.
YeePay says cash on payment still rules in China, however, online gaming, airline tickets and travel are major drivers of epayment. Epayment helps establish trust and credit system in China, and transform economy from manufacture-based society.

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Alading: Baidu Wants Your Structured Data

Luyi Chen — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 09:07:33 +0000

Baidu has launched its Alading platform, which is to track the dark web. There’s lots of data on the web, which is not in form of web page, mainly those dynamic content. Users usually get those content by submitting a form query. Search engine sometimes can index dynamic links to retrieve some data, but there’s no way to fully understand them.

Here’s where Alading platform comes into place. If you have some definite data, which is always up to date and publicly accessible, you can submit it to Alading. Basically it’s three steps: 1) You should prepare your data in xml format; 2) decide which query keywords should trigger those data; 3) select a template, which is provided by Baidu, to display your data in the result.

In the first step, you prepared a special feeds of your data. Later on, the search engine bot will query it frequently to retrieve the latest data. The second step is a bit like keywords based search advertisement, but it’s for different purpose. The template you selected decides how your data appears in the top of the search result, including a link to your site with more details.

The platform is still in early stage. I am not sure if it will make big change in short period. In the long run, it do have potential to improve the search quality of Baidu. There’s lots of dynamic data on the web, but it’s not clear if this is the best way to include them into the search index.

Other search engines have been dealing with structured data too, like Google’s OneBox. It’s taking a different approach to analyze data source actively.

The service is a bit like Google Base. But Google base is for your item, while Baidu describes it as integrating your service into Baidu search result. Certainly Baidu’s slogan draws more imagination. If it’s just to include some match score or cinema information, then it doesn’t worth putting so much effort into the platform. I am sure there will be some interesting integrations show up, but you just cannot imagine it before it come into being.

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Google News Chinese Version Adds Subchannel

Luyi Chen — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:08:31 +0000

Google News Chinese Version has just released subchannel, reported Google China Blog. This is the first step in all its language versions. For example, Sci/Tech channel now includes two subchannel, digital and science. Basically all channels have around three subchannels now.

It now looks much like the competitor, Baidu news. It’s single-column, while the international version is two-column. It includes more headlines in a channel without snippet, only the first one has. On the right side within each channel, it shows more news with image thumbnails. And it has a special top channel, Internet, without subchannel of course, which doesn’t exist in other language versions.

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Baidu Tieba Adds Private Group

Luyi Chen — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 14:29:20 +0000

Baidu has just launched a new feature, called club, for its popular Tieba. Club is much like a public tieba. But the master of the club has more privacy controls. In Baidu’s words, club is to provide a more private communication place for special interest groups, but it’s not going to affect or compete with public tieba. Here’s Baidu’s announcement.

Although they look very similar and most probably share the same back end system, they are still different. A tieba is driven by a search keyword, which becomes the name of the tieba. Most users visit tieba through search. Users can post in tieba without login. A club’s name doesn’t have to be a search keywords. Members must login to post content or probably view anything.

Currently only a selected group of tieba users have got privilege to create club. You can see all the clubs on this page. If you visit Baidu Tieba and login, you will see a new tab on the tool bar on top of the page, called my club. You can find clubs you have created or joined in a drop down list.

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