China Web2.0 Review

[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

Related Posts

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.

Related Posts

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.

Related Posts

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.

Related Posts

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.

Related Posts

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.

Related Posts

Baidu Personalized Startpage

Luyi Chen — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:17:28 +0000

Baidu’s startpage is now available at my.baidu.com. The domain should be available since around April 1st. Certainly it’s not an April fool. Before that, a lot of us have seen an earlier version through a public IP address.

In one word, it’s just like iGoogle or any other startpage services. You can add service widgets or RSS feeds to the page and organize them into tabs. You can re-order them through drag and drop. You can find more modules at here. There’re currently 55 modules listed. Maybe finally, those 885 modules of Baidu Space would be ported to startpage too.

On the default homepage, you will find a calendar module. There’s currently no calendar service from Baidu. This module can serve as a simplified solution. Baidu has been providing calendar service for its postbar for a while now.

There’s also a music module on the default page. It’s not from Baidu mp3 search, but from Qianqian, a popular music player. Qianqian was rumored to be acquired by Baidu for years.

There’s no clue if Baidu will open API for the startpage or not. The current modules are mostly news and ranking list.

Update: The domain my.baidu.com is not new. Originally it’s an old version of startpage under the flag of Baidu browser bar. You can find some clue on this help page.

Update2: A lot of users are complaining that the new version don’t have customized link, which is available in the old version. Customized links are static links to frequently used sites like those on hao123 and 265. Refer to the according postbar.

Related Posts

Douban To Add Book Series

Luyi Chen — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 07:07:12 +0000

Douban, the book reviews and recommendation service, has just announced a new expansion of book attributes, series. Via Wikipedia, a book series is a sequence of books with certain characteristics in common that are formally identified together as a group.

Book series look like a public and collaborative version of another more private feature — book lists. According to douban, some initial data coming along with the new features would have been converted from a group of well maintained book lists. Contributors to the book series would be listed on the according page in the same way like other wiki services.

What’s not clear is who has the final decision of the qualification of those series. Apart from those formally identified by publishers, you can group book series according to topic or author. Is there minimum number of books for a qualified series? In theory, any author with multiple publications would eventually have a series named by his name. By adding another dimension to the data, the management would become more challenging.

Book series is also a feature used in recommendation. Douban mentioned that since books in the same series will be listed on book profile, they won’t include them in recommendation any more.

Related Posts

What Are Top Apps on China’s Open SNS Platforms?

Tangos — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:22:25 +0000

Last year, many China’s social networking sites have embraced open platform ideas, including leading player such as Xiaonei and 51.com. After several months operation, you may want to know the development of the apps on these platform.

Appleap.com, launched in last October, is a website which monitors apps on four main SNS platform in China. According to its website, it currently monitors 2,352 apps, 999 of them on Xiaonei, 242 on 51.com, 234 on Myspace.cn and 877 on Sohu. According to Appleap, on Feb 23rd, total daily active users on Xiaonei is about 3 million vs. 2.35 million on 51.com.

On its website, you can find the lists of top apps, top app developers and the top changed apps on these four platform. For example, currently the most popular apps on Xiaonei.com is Happy Farm, which has been installed for over 5 million times, and has over 1.4 million daily active users. Compared with Xiaonei, the most popular app on 51.com, Slave only has about 300k daily active users. Appleap offers an estimated value for each apps based on its stats, which they briefly explained in its blog. Appleap shows growth curve of traffic and estimated value for each app in last 30 days as well. Appleap also enable you to compare apps on different platform.

If you are interested in apps in China, you should check its website. And you might also be interested in incoming event on apps organized by Appleap.com.

Related Posts

Qzone Recorded Over 200 Million Monthly Users

Tangos — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:16:15 +0000

QQ, the most popular IM tools and social networking platform in China, announced in last week that its Qzone service recorded over 200 million monthly users in January 2009, doubled in less than one year. In March 2008, QQ reported that its Qzone reached over 100 million users.

Among these 200 million users, about 150 million are “writing” on Qzone, including posting blogs, sharing photos, and interacting with other users. In Qzone, every day about 4 million users will upload 60 million photos on average, and write about 9.5 million blog posts.

Besides Qzone, QQ actually has other social networking services targeting various market. QQ Xiaoyou, a service targeting campus users, has over 20 million registered users, since its private test in last June and official launch in January.

Meanwhile, on Feb 9, 2009, QQ, the instant messenger, recorded over 50 million peak concurrent users.

Related Posts