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Interview Series: Kevin Li from Ku6

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:40:21 +0000

Here we go with another China interview from our Geeks on a Plane Tour participants Adrian Bye. Adrian runs MeetInnovators, which features interviews with founders and CEOs of web-based companies.

The full transcript and mp3 files of this interview can be downloaded on Adrians CEO interview ressource http://www.MeetInnovators.com here.

Personal Info

Hobbies and Interests: Travel, Books and Ping Pong Tennis.

Favourite Books: Books by Lu You and Confucius.

Favourite Entrepreneurs: Jack Welch, Robin Li from Baidu, Charles Zhang from Sohu.

Personal blog: http://user.qzone.qq.com/622005602?ptlang=2052

Company website: http://www.ku6.com

Fast Track Interview

Adrian Bye: I am in Beijing and talking with Kevin Li who is the CEO of Ku6.com. Ku6 is one of the top video sites on the internet in China. Kevin, we’re here to learn about you so tell us who you are and take it away.

Kevin Li: I am from Northeast China and majored in mathematics at Nankai University in Tianjin. I used to work for Sohu.com as the Senior Vice President and the Editor in Chief for five to six years. Three years ago, I quit at Sohu, and I founded Ku6.com, which is a video sharing website. After we launched Ku6, I started to find venture capital. In early 2007, we got capital from two or three ventures companies.

Our operating model is a combination between YouTube with short videos and Hulu with long videos, movies, and television shows. We currently have more than 20 million unique visitors per day and 250 million page views a day. Our revenue was a little more than $10 million last year, and we have around 200 employees.

Adrian Bye: Where did the idea for Ku6 come from?

Kevin Li: While I worked in Sohu, I found that people uploaded their music on websites. I thought if people can upload music on a website, why don’t we encourage them to upload videos to a website. At Sohu, it was difficult to make this idea a reality, so I decided to quit Sohu and fund Ku6 by pulling 2 million RMB from my own pocket. Then I hired some staff to start this project.

Adrian Bye: You’ve never lived or studied in the US, right?

Kevin Li: I am 100 percent Chinese with zero U.S. education. I am "Tu Bie." In China, we call the people who study at the U.S. and come back to China "Hai Gui." The people like me who are 100 percent local, we call "Tu Bie." For example, Tudou’s founder, Gary, is Hai Gui because he studied in France. I am a totally pure Tu Bie.

Adrian Bye: That’s interesting. Are there a lot of guys like you who are Chinese with no outside experience? It seems like a lot of successful internet guys have studied outside of China.

Kevin Li: Most of the first generation of Chinese internet founders came from studying in the U.S. The second and the third generations are more local guys because we learned the internet directly from the U.S. For example, Sohu and Baidu came from the U.S., but the second generation has QQ. More and more, you’ll find local people are more suitable for start ups because we know more about local. We don’t need to live, study, and work in the U.S.

Adrian Bye: You said you raised money. Who did you raise money from?

Kevin Li: I had shared my business model called UGA - User Generated Advertising - with DFJ. The next month we had several meetings, and we got $10 million investment from DFJ. Besides DFJ, we have partnered with DP Capital, and Baidu is our investor also.

Adrian Bye: Can you explain your UGA business model?

Kevin Li: With the model, I can organize many people who are experts in online video creator and record them when they make online videos. I then ask them to invite our good customer advertising into their content. We call this model User Generated Advertising. The content is advertising, and I share revenue with those content providers. For example, I negotiated a deal with Coca Cola where I organized an advertisement video for Coca Cola.

Adrian Bye: But Coca Cola is very strict about controlling its brand, and I don’t believe that Coca Cola would want users making advertising for them.

Kevin Li: Normally, they organize a professional advertising company to make their professional advertising. They found that if they put this professional advertising online, nobody will look at it. If they make use of grassroots advertising, then people will watch this kind of video. Coca Cola, Microsoft, Intel, and all of these great brand companies let us organize this UGA campaign for them. Of course, they can control the content.

Adrian Bye: How is the advertisement selected? Does Coca Cola approve them or can anyone make and run it?

Kevin Li: No. We organize them, and they are selected by Coca-Cola. Only qualified videos can be uploaded online, so we can guarantee that the branding will not be a violation.

Adrian Bye: What are some of the popular examples of advertisements people are making?

Kevin Li: They make new short films or edit different movies and then re-edit the advertisement.

Adrian Bye: In China, there were over 200 video sites and now most of them are gone. What you are doing is very difficult. How are you making this work?

Kevin Li: In China if you run a successful video website, there are four challenges. First is government regulation. In early 2008, China had a law that only government-owned websites could run video websites. Finally, they changed this rule. Now, in China, to run a video website, you need government relations to know and understand the government and what you can and cannot do. Because I used to be the Editor in Chief of Sohu.com, I have rich experience in government relations. Formally, Ku6 is the first video sharing website to get the government license.

The second challenge is copyright, which is becoming more important in China. As I told you, we are a combination of Hulu and YouTube. Hulu’s model uses some movies and some TV. Those areas have copyright issues here. From 2008 until now, we have paid a lot of attention to copyright issues with DVDs. We buy the copyright or we share all the advertising revenue with the content provider, so the only motive is that we are making money together. In other words, I share revenue with the original content provider if I can make an advertisement. If they don’t want to put their movie on here, I just delete it.

The third challenge is bandwidth. I pay a lot of money for bandwidth. I cannot tell you the exact number, but the good thing is that this year our annual bandwidth cost was reduced to one-third, which reduced a huge bandwidth cost.

Adrian Bye: And how did you reduce it?

Kevin Li: Through our new P2P technology and our advanced CDN technology. Also through our business partnerships with a commission deal; if you cannot control that bandwidth cost, you’re dead because it costs a lot of money.

The fourth challenge is the business model. The first year at Ku6, I didn’t even break even. The fourth year, I broke even. Compared to our competitors, our advertising revenue is relatively higher than theirs. If you ask me why I beat so many competitors, it’s because I met these four challenges better than they did.

Adrian Bye: I’ve talked with people who make websites in China. They have found that if they make simple western-style websites, nobody in China uses them. If they make noisy Chinese style websites with lots of noise and advertising, Chinese people love them and use them. You’re a Chinese guy. Can you explain why?

Kevin Li: I don’t know why people like this. Maybe the reason is that in the U.S. you have many channels to find new media and new information. In the U.S, Yahoo is not the only channel for you to find information. You can find information with other news writers and TV stations. Over here in China, it’s difficult to find information and news. People in China lack information, so they look for more information in one page. In China, Sohu and Sina are the main media information channels for us, so people need information more here than in the U.S.

Adrian Bye: Yes, give people what they want, right? How do you see that you compete with PPLive?

Kevin Li: We have different models. We are all P2P and use a method for people to look at videos faster. If you are watching videos in PPLive, you’ll have to upload PPLive P2P. If you look at a video in Ku6, you don’t need to download our client end. With PPLive, if the people don’t download the client, they cannot watch PPLive video. But here, even if you don’t download the client, you can watch it.

Adrian Bye: When you got started, where did your traffic come from?

Kevin Li: As I mentioned earlier, Baidu is one of our investors. When YouTube was acquired by Google, Baidu thought about their video strategy. They decided to invest in one company instead of doing it by themselves or buying one. They chose Ku6, and they gave us a lot of resources. Our first traffic mainly came from Baidu.

Adrian Bye: How did that happen that you got the investment from Baidu?

Kevin Li: Baidu talked with almost every good video website in China and they chose me because they trusted me. Since I used to be at Sohu.com, I have some reputation in this internet area, and they trusted me.

Adrian Bye: I’m interested to understand how you manage your relations with the Chinese government. In the reading that I have been doing about China, when you do something like a video site in China, you have a partner which is the Chinese government. It is not a business partner, but the content you display must be generally in line with what the Chinese government wants, and there are things you can’t run on your site.

If you have users uploading videos, there must be a lot of uploaded content that the Chinese government doesn’t want. How is that handled?

Kevin Li: There are two kinds of ways to manage a video website over here. One model is that no matter what people upload, you let them look and share with each other. By doing so, a lot of sexy videos or videos of political figures are uploaded. In fact, several of our main competitors do it this way. But I did a different thing.

In the first period of our website, I set up a big video monitor team in Xian in central China. I have 80 people there who monitor every video before it is uploaded to our website. We have a very detailed standard for our internal monitor.

Adrian Bye: How long does the review process take?

Kevin Li: Anywhere from 1 minute to 7 minutes because we have new technology. For example, we have a pool with bad videos. If you upload a new video to our site with a scene from another bad video in the pool, you will be cancelled.

Adrian Bye: What happens when a user uploads something bad? Do you report it to the Chinese government? Is there any process or do you just delete it?

Kevin Li: We put the bad video into our internal pool and delete it from the site.

Adrian Bye: That helps control what goes onto the site, but there’re still regulations you have to follow with the Beijing government. What kinds of relations do you maintain with the government?

Kevin Li: In China, government management of media websites is not very strict. They just care about some of the bad videos. For example, you better not upload any sexy videos or political videos on our website. Besides this, you can do anything you want. That’s the only regulation from the government.

Adrian Bye: From the West, we know how to reach the U.S. government. How do things work with the Chinese government? Who do you talk to?

Kevin Li: They have one department in charge of video websites that also has meetings with us. At these meetings, we get clear initiatives and general principles to follow.

Adrian Bye: One of the things I’ve been learning about China is that people are very individual, and often times they don’t want to work for someone else. They want to be independent or run their own business. They’re very entrepreneurial. How do you keep 200 people all focused on building Ku6?

Kevin Li: The number of people who want to be entrepreneurs is very little. It’s too hard to be a successful entrepreneur here. Most of the people want to work in a company and people here like working in a group or a team, so it is not difficult for us to manage our staff.

Adrian Bye: You don’t have any problems?

Kevin Li: Yes, we have problems. Every company has problems. I don’t always have problems because people want to be entrepreneurs. That’s not my first problem with employees.

This interview was led by Adrian Bye from the exclusive CEO interview online magazine MeetInnovators.com.

Chinese game developers invading Japanese social networks

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 04:56:45 +0000

Asiajin has an interesting post on Chinese game developers infiltrating Japan's largest online social network Mixi. And yes: its farm games :-)

Mixi's no 1 ranked app currently is Sunshine Farm by Chinese developer Rekoo. The game reached two million users in less than two months since its launch. On no 3 is already the next China-developed game Everyone’s Farm with 500,000 users by Yicha.

Interview Series: Nick Yang from KongZhong Corporation

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:41:11 +0000

After our Geeks on a Plane Tour, one of the participants Adrian Bye was so thrilled that he decided to stay in China for another 2 weeks to do some 1:1 interviews with Chinese entrepreneurs. Adrian runs MeetInnovators, where he publishes interviews with founders and CEOs of web-based companies. Today's interview is with serial entrepreneur Nick Yang. The full transcript and mp3 files of this interview can be downloaded on Adrians CEO interview ressource http://www.MeetInnovators.com here.

Personal Info

Hobbies and Interests: Art collecting, golf.

Sports teams: Manchester United.

Favourite Books: Books by and about Confucius.

Favourite Entrepreneurs: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs.

Company website: http://www.kongzhong.com

Fast Track Interview

Adrian: I’m here with Nick Yang in his offices outside of Beijing. Nick has founded and built a couple of companies. Nick, maybe you can just tell us a little bit about who you are and where you come from.

Nick: I consider myself a professional entrepreneur. I’m 34 years old and starting my third company. My dad went to the States in 1983 when the Chinese government sent him to study engineering, and we ended up staying in the States. In 1999, I graduated from Stanford and started my first company.

What I decided to do was come back to Tsinghua University in China to start the company. I came back with two of my partners who I also graduated from Stanford with: Yunfan Zhou and Joe Chen. We actually raised $250,000 in capital for our company from about 20 of our classmates in the States.

Adrian: What drove you to go back to China?

Nick: The three of us went back to China in 1998 prior to our graduation because one of Yunfan’s family friends owns a big company in China and wanted him to work for him. We saw what was going on in China and decided that instead of working for him we’d start our own thing.

We felt that everything had sprung to life. It was almost like spring with all the little plants shooting new leaves. We were at the brink of a big and tremendous opportunity, like at the brink of a tidal wave. We were like surfers looking for a big wave. We felt that the waves were coming, and we just had to get in front of those waves.

Adrian: What happened after you got back to China?

Nick: We needed people, so we went to the top engineering university here in Tsinghua. We then went to the dormitories of the computer-engineering department, and we started knocking on doors and saying, "You guys are computer engineers. We are Stanford graduates, and we are starting an internet company. Do you guys want to work for us?"

A lot of students decided to work for us. As a result, we had to find a place outside of Tsinghua where the students could go to work and go back to their classes. That’s why we set up shop right outside Tsinghua.

We built a community site with the students called ChinaRen. The name is a combination of the English name of China and the Chinese pronunciation for people. This is a site for Chinese people, and it’s a fusion of the east and west. Our western background was our education; the Chinese culture and Chinese philosophies was the eastern side. We ended up selling the company to Sohu for $35 million of Sohu stock.

Adrian: Why didn’t you just retire on a beach some place?

Nick: We ended up in Sohu, for a year and a half and very depressed because the entire industry was depressing at that time. After 2002, we saw this new tidal wave coming up. Remember, we’re surfers. Whenever there’s a wave, you can be sure we’re going to get in front of it.

We have realized that the mobile wave will be even bigger than the internet wave, which we are still at the beginning of today. We decided to start another company called KongZhong.

Adrian: And how did you get funding this time?

Nick: It was very tough in 2002 to get funding because all of the VCs were just coming off the first bubble. Nobody wanted to invest. It ended up that only one leading VC, DFJ, decided we were the one. They invested $3 million for 33 percent, and that’s the only round we raised. We had also put in $500,000 when we started. We went public after only one round of fundraising, two years and two months after the setup of the company.

Adrian: You’re still related to that company, right?

Nick: I am still related with the company. I’m still the founder, the Vice Chairman, but I have resigned as President and CTO, so I don’t have a day to day role.

Adrian: Can you tell us a little bit about what KongZhong does?

Nick: KongZhong is a leading player in the mobile internet business in China. The business is called wireless band services, which is premium SMS, ring tones, logos, image downloads, mobile games, mobile communities, etc.

Adrian: Where does the revenue come from?

Nick: It comes from revenue sharing from the operators. We work with the major Telco operators in China: China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom. Another revenue source is through mobile advertising where we get direct payments from major brands.

Adrian: You have a U.S. education and are building businesses here in China. That must give you quite a head start, right?

Nick: In the beginning it did because of the information asymmetry between the US and China. We saw how things were done in the West, adapted it to China, and did really well. Right now, with the information flow being so freely available on the internet, especially on technology and business, a lot of the Chinese entrepreneurs can actually have the same worldview as us. Now we have less of an advantage.

Adrian: Now you are starting a search company called Monkey King Search right? Nick, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your plans for your search company?

Nick: I’m involved with Monkey King Search in China because it’s always been my passion to build a search engine. We’ve been building things before like KongZhong, which is about services, mobile games, etc. These I consider soft drinks, like Coke, Pepsi, and iced tea. You can live without those, but you can’t live without tap water. I think a search engine is fundamentally as important to people’s lives as tap water, and I want to make a difference in people’s lives.

In many sectors of the Chinese internet, there are a lot of public companies, but in the search engine business there’s only one. Baidu is the one public search engine company of China. That number is too small. There should be at least another one that could go public.

Adrian: I’m sure it can be done but how?

Nick: I believe the idea is a conceptual search engine not a keyword search engine. You hear that talked a lot, but it’s actually very difficult to do. I really believe that search engine is a technology challenge.

There are basically two strategies in building search engines. One is a technology strategy. The other is a human strategy. There are also two extremes. One extreme is Google, which uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and machine everything. Then there’s the other extreme, which is Naver in Korea. All their results are human produced, not in real time, but they just keep on producing it. We’re more toward the technology field because I believe in the future of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Adrian: How do you know there’s a market for this? Have you done sample test results, shown those to users, and said, "Users, if you had answers like these from a search engine would this be better for you than Baidu?" How do you validate what you’re doing?

Nick: I don’t trust study groups. I don’t trust surveys. I don’t trust any of that. My personal belief is that a true entrepreneur has to be the passionate guy and the passionate user. That’s who I am. I’m the user checking for myself.

The current search engine doesn’t solve my problems. I have been searching for myself, and if I feel this is a good search engine, people will like it. It’s like they say, "The dog eats the dog food." I’m building it for myself, my teammates, and my employees.

I build things that are used by hundreds and millions of people in ChinaRen, in Sohu, and in KongZhong. I pretty much know what the general population thinks, and I feel that the current leading search engine sucks. That’s why I’m doing this.

Adrian: This time around you’re funding it yourself, right?

Nick: Yes, I’m self-funding this. I’m going to raise funding at the end of this year or early next year. I’ll probably raise one round, and then hope for an IPO.

Adrian: One of the things I’ve been hearing while I’m here in China is that management is a real problem. You can’t scale up like you can in the US because people become very individualistic. It’s like there is a cap on how big you can get companies. Is that understanding correct?

Nick: It’s the difference in culture. If you’re in Germany or Japan, it’s very easy to scale up very big because of the people’s culture. German workers and Japanese workers are very similar. They’re like robots and just toil away. In China, people think a lot more, and these guys are not as team oriented as in Japan or Germany. People here are very creative and very entrepreneurial.

With the right manager, the right motivator, the right coach, it could be done. It just takes a lot more work. You have to line people’s objectives with yours. Since we’re much more entrepreneur-focused in China, the head guy or the boss has to be the smartest and most capable guy in the company. Otherwise, people will leave you. There’s no way you can hire someone better than you.

For example in marketing, the head guy has to be the smartest marketing guy in the company. Otherwise, the guy will leave. It would be like, "Why should I work for this dumb guy? Why is he the boss? Why is the money I earn taking such a big cut by him?" In China, people think that way. You’ll have to be the smartest guy in your company. You can’t get guys who are smarter than you to work for you.

Adrian: How many people work for you now? And what’s the organizational structure?

Nick: I have 40 people working for me. I actually have a very innovative way of management. We have what we call the Senate. I told the company that we run a constitution monarchy. There are certain things I decide. There are certain things the Senate decides. The Senate is a representation of the teams. Every 10 guys have one Senator. The Senate decides on things such as budgeting, salaries, and compensations.

Adrian: Why are you doing it that way?

Nick: Because you get more involvement from the company and from the employees when they feel part of the team.

I actually learned this from the Swiss government. Have you been to Switzerland? The Swiss Government doesn’t have a head of state. It has a Council and in terms of foreign affairs, such as traveling overseas, it rotates. For example, this month it’s this guy and the next month that guy. There are about 20 guys who run the country.

That’s how I run things here and people feel they’re really part of the team because we have so much empowerment. Some issues, such as "Where do we go for our spring trip?" or "How do we spend our team building budget?" are decided by the entire employee body. Other things are decided by the Senate.

Adrian: How is it working so far?

Nick: Very well. People are very involved and happy that they have such empowerment. Any other type of company is a pyramid scheme. It’s like who decides for the salary and the bonus? It’s your boss. I’m doing a whole new system here.

Adrian: One of the books I recently read said that because the Chinese are so entrepreneurial, there’s a sense of right or wrong, but Chinese people still just do what they want to do. As a result, you always need to have a strong system in place so Chinese people will understand that there’s consequences if you do the wrong thing. There’s not this internal code that a lot of other western societies have where there’s a feeling of right or wrong. Would you agree with that?

Nick: Not necessarily. In China, people consider three codes. There’s only one code in the US, there’s a code of law, which means that the code of law rules the land in the United States. If you do something wrong but the police didn’t use the proper procedures, you’ll be let go.

Traditionally in China we have three codes: the code of heaven, the code of law, which is the code of country, and the code of all emotions. For example, in China, a woman kills her husband because her husband beats her a lot. In the United States, the law says how you’re punished, so that is how you’re punished. In China, the law of emotions could let her have a very light punishment because a very wide scheme Hall of Judge can decide.

It’s more of those three codes governing China rather than just one in the United States. People here have a lot of emotions, so that’s how things work here. That’s why relationships are more important here.

This interview was led by Adrian Bye from the exclusive CEO interview online magazine MeetInnovators.com.

Lunch 2.0 Shanghai - Oct 23 @ ChinaNet Cloud

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:52:27 +0000

Oh no … we’ve been lazy announcing our Shanghai Lunch 2.0’s here recently since it all runs through our Facebook Group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=13224258265. Anyways, here is this weeks event:

October Lunch 2.0 is on Friday!

For the month of October’s Lunch2.0 we’ll be going over to the China Net Cloud offices near Xujiahui. This month’s theme is Expo 2010. Is your company doing anything Expo related? What project/business ideas are out there to tap into Expo potential? Does the Expo even mean anything, particularly for tech businesses in Shanghai?

Lunch will be provided courtesy of China Net Cloud — A big thank you to them!

Please RSVP through the Facebook group or by email to Toffler@redte.ch so we can accurately budget for food.

Date: Friday, October 23rd, 2009
Time: 12:00pm - 2:00pm
Location: X2 Space 1-601
Street: 1238 Xietu Lu 上海市斜土路1238号1-601室
City/Town: Shanghai, 200032 China
Subway: Line NO 4 to Damuqiao Road. Exit #4. 5 min walk.
Map: http://ditu.google.cn/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=%E4%B8%8A%E6%B5%B7%E5%BE%90%E6%B1%87%E5%8C%BA%E6%96%9C%E5%9C%9F%E8%B7%AF1224%E5%8F%B7&ie=UTF8&ll=31.198413,121.465187&spn=0.006433,0.013443&z=17

If you get lost or need help with directions, please call Junjng at 13918056958.

午餐会2.0将于10月23日周五举行!

本次午餐会主题是“世博会2010”。我们会讨论世博会对上海公司的商机.

午餐由云络提供 — 感谢云络团队!

如有兴趣，请提前通过Facebook 或者发送邮件 (Toffler@RedTe.ch) 回复我们，以便我们准备分量合适的午餐。

日期: 2009年10月23日，周五
时间: 12:00 - 14:00
地址：上海市斜土路1238号1-601室
地图： http://ditu.google.cn/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=%E4%B8%8A%E6%B5%B7%E5%BE%90%E6%B1%87%E5%8C%BA%E6%96%9C%E5%9C%9F%E8%B7%AF1224%E5%8F%B7&ie=UTF8&ll=31.198413,121.465187&spn=0.006433,0.013443&z=17

如果你不幸迷路，请联系云络的Junjing: 13918056958

See you there!

Exclusive: Clarification from the Ministry of Culture on Chinese online game investments

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:03:34 +0000

Tuo Zuhai, deputy-director of the Culture Market Department of MOC during GDC China

We have just received several documents relating to last weeks announcements from the Chinese General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP) “prohibiting foreign investment in domestic online gaming operations through joint ventures, wholly owned enterprises and cooperatives.”

We had reported earlier this week about the contradicting statements from the Ministry of Culture and the GAPP, as well as the underlying reasons for this continuing power struggle between the two institutions.

The first document is a transcription of the speech from Mr. Tuo Zuhai, deputy director of MOC’s Department of Cultural Market, that he gave during GDC China this week.

He started by saying “General Administration of Press and Publication must stop the surly interference in domestic online game enterprises. It is MOC’s duty to ensure the long-term development of China’s culture industry, especially the game industry.” He went on by clarifying the roles of the three involved government bodies Ministry of Culture, State General Administration for Radio, Film and Television, and General Administration of Press and Publication, referring to it as the “Three-Determination” Regulation.

Mr. Tuo made clear that “(the) Ministry of Culture is further stressed to be the competent authority in charge of the administration of online games” and continued by referring to the recent GAPP announcements saying “recently General Administration of Press and Publication issued another notice and this will surely accelerate the full control by MOC. This is an major and important issue of right and wrong, and is a matter of principle, as mentioned the day before yesterday by the officials of the Office of Central Institutional Organization Commission. We will never compromise on such a matter of principle.”

The second document we received is a translation of an older notification from the Ministry of Culture from September this year, just before GAPP issued its counter announcement. The document clarifies once again that it is the administration body for the operation of online games in China. The document also refers to the delays in re-launching World of Warcraft in China, after Blizzard had decided to discontinue working with The9 as their exclusive operator and awarded the contract to its competitor NetEase. NetEase had launched World of Warcraft on September 19, after it had received approval from the MOC already in July but without the approval from the GAPP.

You can find both documents as downloads below.

Transscript
Transscript Mr. Tuo Zuhai speech.doc
Microsoft Word Document [22.0 KB]

Translation
Office of Central Institutional Organiza[...]
Microsoft Word Document [27.5 KB]

China bans foreign investment in online games: O RLY?

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:22:09 +0000

Apparently good news for people that love bad news: just in time for "GDC China" which is taking place in Shanghai these days (not to be confused with "China GDC" ...), the Chinese General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP) issued several notes, which were instantly picked up by Western media, reinforcing once again its announcement from earlier this year that "foreign businesses were banned from investment in China's online game operations through setting up wholly owned enterprises, joint ventures and cooperatives."

However, as Inside Social Games quotes a Beijing investor correctly: This is a) not a new policy and b) "total BS".

Its just another display of power in the ongoing fight between the Chinese Ministry of Culture (MOC) who is backing up Think Services "GDC China" event and GAPP which supports the rivaling China GDC event from Howell Expo (Think Services former 2007 JV partner).

All of the large Chinese game companies (see our post of the most valuable internet companies in China here) are listed on international stock exchanges and/or invested by foreign VC, so are all of the currently most promising rising stars.

How to publish or operate a game title in China:

For simple licensing deals or software development in China, a WOFE or in some cases even a rep office is sufficient. However for actually publishing or operating games in China foreign companies are not entitled to hold the required game licence.

There are 2 work-arounds for this:

JV with the Chinese partner holding a majority stake
The the so called "Sina Structure" - see graph below

For licensing deals, approval usually takes around 8 months (not including time required for localization and other revisions).

According to GAPP each application will take up to 80 business days before any decision to be made. This however does not include game testing time, which can lead to GAPP ending up testing your game forever.

For the second option the entire process can take between 18 to 30 months or longer.

The key to success (as with all business in China) is of course your domestic partners relationships with all involved parties.

Interview Series: Chen Yu from YeePay

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:15:22 +0000

Welcome back after the Chinese October Holidays! Here is our next China Tech CEO interview from our Geeks on a Plane participant Adrian Bye. Adrian runs MeetInnovators, where he publishes interviews with founders and CEOs of web-based companies. The full transcript and mp3 files of this interview can be downloaded on Adrians CEO interview ressource http://www.MeetInnovators.com here.

Personal Info

Hobbies and Interests: Traveling, Reading.

Favourite Books:

A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Favourite Entrepreneurs: Google Founders.

Company website: http://www.yeepay.com

Fast Track Interview

Adrian: I’m in Beijing, China and talking with Chen Yu who is the co-founder of YeePay. YeePay is a payments company based right here in Beijing. Chen, can you tell us about yourself and where you come from?

Chen: I was born and raised in China, but I lived in the States for about 10 years. I was in Chicago for three years and in Silicon Valley for seven years. I actually went to college here in Beijing, and after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, I spent a year in the Chinese military as well. Then I went to graduate school in the States. I worked in the States mostly in the IT industry for about eight years before I moved back to China and founded this company.

We started YeePay in August 2003, and we officially announced the service in early 2005. We are one of the leading payment service providers here in China.

We provide a variety of payment service products that merchants can use to collect payments from their consumers. We work with many merchants across all different industries from e-commerce to digital entertainment, like online gaming websites, as well as major airlines and travel agents.

Adrian: What kind of volume are you processing right now through YeePay?

Chen: We process roughly $400 to $500 million per month. Last year, we actually grew about five times compared to 2007. This is a very fast growing market, because the starting point in China is really low. For example, if you compare the payment segment to a lot of other internet segments, payment is one of the areas that we are so behind in.

More people actually have either a credit card or debit card, but the problem is that a lot of people do not know how to use these debit cards or credit cards for online payments. As of last year in China, the number of online payment users was around 50 to 60 million, which compared to the overall market is just a small percentage.

Adrian: Are these billion dollar internet companies in China being built on a base of 50 to 60 million users?

Chen: Not necessarily. Not all these internet companies necessarily have to collect online payments from their users because they have different business models. Many of them rely on advertising where you don’t need a payment mechanism to collect money from your users.

Even gaming companies don’t necessarily rely on E-payment. They have what we call the prepaid card system with a distribution network where physical prepaid cards are sold by vendors. In other words, people can go to any newsstand or convenience store to buy a prepaid game card and use that as a payment method.

These cards are very similar to mobile phone prepaid cards except these cards are issued by vendors and online game operators. You can actually buy a China mobile prepaid card and also use that as a form of cash to pay for other games. In other words, instead of using the mobile prepaid card to recharge your phone bill, you can use that $20 card to pay for online games. That’s what we call a universal prepaid card.

Adrian: Can you talk about debit cards and credit cards and how they work in China?

Chen: Absolutely. Overall the debit card and credit card penetration in China is still relatively low, but it’s taking off very rapidly. Over one billion debit cards are issued by various banks in China. The overall population of China is 1.3, if you assume that one person has two or three cards that would translate into 20 to 30 percent of the people actually have bank cards.

People still heavily rely on the legacy payment system, such as cash on delivery, postal wires, and bank wires. E-payment is just taking off in this market because there is now a very practical need for it.

In regards to the cards, all the banks are required to connect into China UnionPay network. As a result, every bank issues their own debit cards or credit cards, but ultimately they have to brand this card as China UnionPay cards. Many of these cards also have the Visa and Mastercard logo but don’t really go through those networks.

Adrian: Do consumers feel comfortable buying things online with their debit cards?

Chen: A lot of people still do not feel comfortable buying things online. It’s probably because of a cultural thing. Asian people, in general, believe in tangible things, so in a way trust is a much bigger issue than payment and the technology itself. People here usually do not trust each other even when they’re doing business face to face, let alone when they’re doing business over the internet. On the other hand it’s changing, especially for the younger generation because they’re quicker when it comes to adopting new technology and new ways of payment.

Adrian: I’ve heard that in Germany there is no such thing as a chargeback. When you charge something on your account, there is no right to turn it back. How do chargebacks and refunds work in China?

Chen: That’s pretty much also the case in China. There’s no credit card chargeback. As a consumer, you can’t say I don’t want to pay for this or this was not a transaction made by me. You don’t really have the right to say that because it’s very limited protection for the end users here in China. Overall, the end users bear the ultimate responsibility for their own card.

This is both good and bad. The bad thing is that it probably slows the adoption of credit cards while the good thing is that there is less risk for the banks and payment operators.

Refunds work in a different way because they are actually initiated by the merchants. If a merchant agrees and initiates a refund to you, you can get your money back.

Adrian: If there is no chargebacks and no refunds, what about fraud?

Chen: There is still fraud. As long as you are dealing with money, you can expect a certain level of fraud because people might use stolen cards to pay for online transactions. Sometimes if they can prove that those cards were indeed stolen by someone else who made the payment, the bank has to refund the charges. There might be some on the merchant’s side as well who are involved in fraudulent transactions.

As a payment company, you need to be able to detect those fraud transactions, and you need to have a very sophisticated risk management system to constantly monitor all the transactions. We do have a dedicated risk management team who actually plays this role.

The other, more fundamental difference in China is that most people use debit cards for online payment even when using credit cards. In other words when you’re using a credit card for an online payment, we treat it as if it’s a debit card payment because all transactions are considered debit card transactions protected by a password. As a result, there is more protection for the transaction intrinsically.

It is not like in the U.S., where you simply go to the merchant’s website, put in your credit card number, expiration data, and authorize payment. In China, it’s a very complicated process, and the user experience is not as friendly as what you see in many other countries. Here you have to enter your card number, your password from the card-issuing bank, and then there is also a check code to make sure you are a human being instead of a robot. Theoretically, it’s definitely much safer because all transactions are protected by a password. You can’t just authorize a transaction by giving out your credit card number and expiration date.

Adrian: Another model used a lot in the U.S. is recurring billing where you sign up for something and then are billed $10 or $20 a month. Do you have the ability to do that?

Chen: We have a product called ePass for recurring billing. Essentially it’s a service that allows you to set up your own YeePay account and link that with a bank card. By default, the banks would not allow you to charge something automatically without issuing a password because all transactions are protected by a password.

Adrian: In other words, the consumer can’t authorize it if it’s recurring every month. The password can only be used at the time each transaction is made unless they sign up with that system and they explicitly give it to you. Does that mean you don’t end up having much recurring billing?

Chen: We have very limited adoption, but we do see that as a trend probably in the future. It comes down to the trust issue and probably a cultural factor. Because the Chinese people tend to trust in more tangible things, recurring billing is something far in the future.

Adrian: Can you talk about mobile payment and how that works?

Chen: When we talk about mobile payment in China, we are mostly referring to remote transactions, not retail situations. It is where you are using your mobile phone to pay remote transactions that happen on the internet or mobile network. We also have different methods for mobile payment. One form is to use a mobile bank card payment gateway, which allows you to use your debit cards or credit cards on the mobile phone by putting in your card number and password to authorize the payment just as if you’re doing it online. The adoption of that kind of payment is still relatively small.

Alternatively what we have is universal prepaid card payment on the mobile phone, which is the most popular form of mobile payment. It’s the same as using the universal prepaid card online. People can just go to a convenience store, buy any prepaid card, and use the card’s PIN number as a form of cash to pay on the mobile phone by entering that PIN number on your mobile phone either through a WAP interface or directly in an application.

Adrian: What types of industries use mobile billing?

Chen: Mostly digital contents like gaming, fortune telling services, weather forecasts, and all kinds of digital content services that you can buy from your mobile phone.

Adrian: I know direct response TV is quite big here in China. How do people pay for that sort of stuff?

Chen: You can pay either when you order the goods or you can pay upon the arrival of the goods. In the former case, you can use a debit card or credit card through the telephone to pay for the transaction. In the latter case when you pay upon the arrival of the good, you can pay in cash, which is cash on delivery or you can pay through a mobile terminal the delivery guy uses. The mobile terminal has really taken off and is supported by more and more vendors.

Adrian: Is there anything that you want to talk about that we haven’t covered?

Chen: One thing I can touch upon is that we are not the only player here in the Chinese payment market. If you ask us what are the major differentiators that we have compared to some of our competitors, it is mostly in three areas.

The first thing is we provide total solutions. Not only do we do support online payment we also support telephone payment as well as mobile payment. Not only do we support bank card payment we also support universal prepaid card payments. Our philosophy is to give the maximum options to the end users and the merchants.

The second thing is that we are industry-focused. We are trying to provide custom-made solutions for different verticals. For example the requirements of the airline industry could be very different from the requirements of the online gaming industry.

The third area is that in addition to the core payment service we also provide a lot of value-added services. For example, we actually have online platforms that help our online game operators promote their contents and products. We also have a credit lending service where we lend travel agents money so they can buy tickets from the airline, but at the same time we also help them collect the money when they sell the ticket. Their money has to go through our system first, so the risks are totally manageable.

This interview was led by Adrian Bye from the exclusive CEO interview online magazine MeetInnovators.com.

Interview Series: Dan Brody from 360quan

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:56:14 +0000

Heres another China Tech CEO interview from our Geeks on a Plane participant Adrian Bye. Adrian is from MeetInnovators, where he publishes interviews with founders and CEOs of web-based companies. The full transcript and mp3 files of this interview can be downloaded on Adrians CEO interview ressource http://www.MeetInnovators.com here.

Personal Info

Hobbies and Interests: Volleyball, Triathlons.

Sports teams: Boston Red Sox, Boston Celtics, and Miami Dolphins.

Favourite Books:

To Change China by Jonathan D. Spence
Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Favourite Entrepreneurs: Sergey Brin, Larry Page.

Twitter url: http://twitter.com/danbrody

Company website: http://www.360quan.com

Fast Track Interview

Adrian: I am talking with Dan Brody who is the CEO of 360quan.com, which is part of the Koolanoo Group. Dan is a pretty interesting guy. He certainly speaks Chinese very well and is probably more integrated than most foreigners that I’ve come across here. Dan, tell us about who you are and where you grew up.

Dan: I wish I had a log cabin story to start out with, but I was born and bred in Washington, D.C. I went to school there all through college and graduated from Georgetown School of Foreign Service where I studied International Relations. I wanted to live abroad, so I studied at Nanjing University in China in 1994. After I graduated in 1996, I lived in Nanjing for 2 years as a student, teacher, then translator. In 1998, I moved to Beijing, and I have been here ever since.

I moved into the tech circle in 1998 when I was running a small office called the US Information Technology Office. I was doing both business development and government relations representing the American tech industry, from semiconductors to software and everything in between for both small and large companies.

After that, I moved to Motorola where I was in charge of government relations and BD director for China. Then I went to work for Google where I was the first employee for Google in China. I stayed there for about 3 1/2 years, and then left to join Tudou, which is sort of the YouTube and Hulu of China. After a year there, I came to take over as CEO for the Koolanoo Group. That was about 6 months ago.

Adrian: Can you tell us about Koolanoo Group?

Dan: Sure. Koolanoo is a new media and internet investment company that has been going for around three years now. Under the group we also have a browser company, gaming websites, fashion websites, and several other websites.

Adrian: 360quan is your social networking site for kids, right?

Dan: Yes. Quan means groups, so the idea of 360quan was to capture people who are interested in similar things and groups across society, such as ski bums, fashionistas, skate boarders, etc. They would all come and congregate and make us their online community.

For us we are mostly focused on “After 1990s” kids. In China, there is a cultural and generational gap between these kids and kids born in the 1980s. These are kids born in 1990 and after. These are kids born after 15 years of China’s economic reform and opening. There is a lot of angst ridden hand wringing in Chinese popular culture today about “what’s happening to the kids these days!” That’s our target market as we found ourselves focusing more on the young hip, urban creative crowd. The hip hop artists and break dancers and the “cool” kids basically.

We have an editorial team that tries to find cool content to show the kids and guides them towards a certain branding or a certain definition. Then we find cool kids on the site. We promote them onto our various channels and to our homepage as well. The kids are very much into self expression, so we’ve become sort of an alternative, funky, cooler, edgier version of MySpace in China.

Adrian: How much traffic do you have?

Dan: We are a mid-sized website by Chinese standards. We are averaging around 10 million to 15 million page views a day on weekends, which is when our traffic spikes. We do anywhere from half a million to a million log-ins per day and obviously more on weekends and vacations. We have around 25 to 30 million uniques a month.

Adrian: Does that then drive traffic into your other sites?

Dan: Honestly, we don’t drive a lot of traffic in between our properties right now. We want them to sink or swim on their own to a certain extent. Once they get to a certain level, we’ll do cooperations.

One of the great things about our culture here is allowing “a hundred flowers bloom” as the Chinese say. In other words, we try to find synergies across our properties. We say, “Alright, we want to get in that space. It’s very competitive, but we want to get in.” We try it for six months, and if it fails we kill it. If it works, then it graduates to the next level. Then we look at another space and go through the same process.

Actually we’ve generated here an atmosphere where a thousand flowers can bloom, but then that means you have to let some of them die. I consider myself a greenhouse administrator more than an incubator. We walk around the greenhouse, give water to this, give some fertilizer to that, and try to make sure to prune a bit here and there.

Adrian: Some of the models that worked the best are when a lot of business models are tested at once and then focusing on the ones that work. On the other side, I know incubators where businesses get a ton of money, try a lot of stuff, and they end up with not very motivated employees who just keep on spending all this money so different businesses get tested but they don’t work. Can you maybe just give me your thoughts on that?

Dan: We want to test a lot of things and see what works. In my experience no matter how smart you are, it seems really hard to predict what’s going to be successful. One of the things I learned with Google is that even with all these incredibly smart people sitting around, you don’t dare to presume to know what the user wants. The most important thing is to put it up, test, adjust, and be able to iterate quickly.

The other thing is it’s really hard to guess beforehand what is going to be the break out success. For example, we have a feature on our website called PK. PK is a common term in Chinese modern slang from online gaming. It is basically going one-on-one against somebody to duel. It has become a verb in Chinese to PK somebody or to PK with somebody meaning to go one-on-one.

We set up PK for people with their photos for voting. No other website had it, and it was huge. A PK will only last for 7 days, and most votes on pictures will be around 15 to 25 votes or 40 to 50 votes. When a lot of the online clans get together and PK against each other, they’ll get 50,000 versus 80,000 votes or a 120,000 versus a 140,000 votes within a single week. These are kids who are going crazy over PK online. Our entire PK function was from one engineer who said, “Hey, this would be fun. Let’s build it.” It was built in three hours.

PK is now probably 10 to 12 percent of our overall site traffic. It also accounts for a higher portion of our site’s monetization because we allow users to buy multi-votes by spending virtual currency. It’s amazing what kids are willing to spend in order to come out ahead of somebody else.

Now I can’t base a business model or an entire company on that type of thing happening on a regular basis. However, I can set up platforms for seven or eight companies where that is happening at the same time. Then whenever I see something like that happen, I can run with it.

Adrian: How do you know that your engineers who develop things like this are executing really well compared to if they were only doing it for themselves and they knew that everything was on the line. Your guys are given a comfortable office space, are taken care of, and know they’re going to get paid tomorrow. They might think, “Dan’s a nice guy. If it fails, we’ll just go on to the next thing. No big deal.”

Dan: That is a major challenge that we have here. The way I get around that is basically by not being a nice guy. I don’t move people on to new projects. If their product fails, they move on. We try to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit here where people need to eat what you kill, which means you occasionally need to go out and kill something.

Everybody shares in the upside as well. We definitely take care of our people. We do give awards for successful product launches, successful teams, increased stability, and reduced page-loading speed. What I found works very well in a bunch of the Chinese companies that I worked for, and maybe this is not specific to Chinese companies, is daily and regular recognition of people’s hard work, which is more important than anything else.

Adrian: You’re a tall white guy and speak pretty excellent Chinese. You understand China better than most, but you are not Chinese and you’re not a Chinese kid born after 1990. I don’t understand most things here, so if I came here and try to do business in China, these guys would eat me alive. Why are they not eating you alive or are they? How can you understand the Chinese mindset really well given that you’re a white guy?

Dan: There are two aspects that I look at. One is the product side. The other is the business side. Since our product is geared towards young Chinese urban hipsters, I try not to interfere too much in the product specifics. I do spend a lot of time working on the product fundamentals, such as having the page load quickly and a logical flow for the product.

When it comes to the business side though, things are not dependent on nationality. First, we work with dozens of payment channel partners to collect payments from our users. It’s a complete bitch to manage payment channel partners in China because all of them are collecting money on your behalf from users and they figure out ways to not pass on as much as they should to you.

They tell you they didn’t actually charge the users for this amount, but then the users complain that they did charge them for that amount. There’s this constant going back and forth between them, and this is not nationality specific. This is just working in the wild, wild west of Chinese capitalism.

There’s obviously going to be different networks that support each other, and there’s too much ink spilled on the question on whether or not white people or black people or non-Chinese or non-PRC native yellow people can succeed in China.

My best advice on this is to read Jonathan D. Spence’s book called To Change China. It’s a book about foreigners coming to China and trying to change the country beginning in the 1400 or 1500s through the 1900s. His central thesis, if I remember correctly, is that none of them actually changed China. In the end, China changed them.

I don’t have any missionary objectives in trying to change China. My experience here has changed me quite a bit. Whether or not one can be effective I think is sort of a red herring argument because if foreigners couldn’t be effective in China they would have all left a long time ago.

Adrian: I would like to see more foreigners who are being wildly successful here, which I haven’t seen yet. Is there anything that you want to talk about which we haven’t covered?

Dan: I would briefly like to mention that we have a browser called the IQ browser. It came out of alpha about six months ago. We launched it and it is still in beta. It’s a browser based on the idea that kids, who don’t own PCs, will go to an internet café and log into all their online services in their browser.

The main point is to provide a home for you. In the home you can keep your bookmarks, keep your passwords, and keep you signed in to various online services. You can also save as a quick link any pictures you viewed, music you listened to or videos you’ve watched.

It’s kind of like Flock, except Flock is focused on information because Americans are very much about producing and consuming information. The power user in America is going to be posting to lots of blogs. They’re focused on RSS readers and posting them into blogs and things like that. Whereas the Chinese users are much younger and more focused on entertainment. The most important things here are instant messenger chatting, music, video, and then after that the search, email, news, information, and the rest of the things that are much lower in the priority scale.

This interview was led by Adrian Bye from the exclusive CEO interview online magazine MeetInnovators.com.

Event report. Alibaba "Alifest" 10 Year Anniversary Conference

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:48:43 +0000

Last weekend Web2Asia's George Godula had the the opportunity to attend Alibaba Group’s 10 year anniversary celebration, dubbed the “Alifest”.

Alibaba is best known for its international B2B e-commerce and sourcing market place Alibaba.com, but also operates Taobao – the “eBay of China” and largest C2C Internet retail web site, Alimama – an online advertising exchange and affiliate network – as well as Alipay, China’s most popular third-party online payment system modelled after Paypal but offering additional features such as escrow services.

Alibaba’s chairman Jack Ma, a former English teacher, founded Alibaba in 1999 out of his Hangzhou apartment. Ten years later the company has grown to China’s second largest Internet company, after digital entertainment giant Tencent. His company Alibaba.com’s 2007 IPO on the Hong Kong stock exchange was the second largest Internet offering ever after Google’s debut on NASDAQ in 2004.

Since 2005, Yahoo! is a strategic shareholder when it acquired 39% of Alibaba Group for US$ 1 billion. In return Alibaba operates the portal Yahoo! China, but the secondary role Yahoo! China plays for Alibaba became evident when Ma shared his vision for the next 10 years of Alibaba during this weekend’s press conference. This was once again underscored yesterday when Yahoo! sold $150 million worth of shares in Alibaba.com.

Jack’s dream is to focus on empowering and encouraging small and medium sized enterprises (SME’s) across the globe and it centers around 3 major goals for the next 10 years:

Goal 1: 10 million people “work at” Alibaba

By “working at” Jack symbolically referred to millions of SME entrepreneurs that will not literally be employed by Alibaba but are turned to “netrepeneurs” and independently utilize and work online with Alibabas trade platforms and software solutions:

Alisoft was established in January 2007 and offers software as a service solutions for SME’s. In July 2009, Alisoft was merged with Alibaba Group R&D Institute to lay a solid technology foundation to further develop Alibaba Group’s businesses. At the same time Alibaba Group this weekend announced the establishment of a new subsidiary focusing on cloud computing. In the medium run, it is evident that Alibaba will strive to emerge as a leading software solution provider for SME’s, eventually competing with Western players such as Salesforce.com.

Goal 2: 100 million new jobs created worldwide by Alibaba

A megalomaniac target at first glance, this could very well become reality when considering Alibabas resources and Jack Ma’s obviously wide-reaching personal connections that became more apparent to me through the course of Alifest.

In May 2007, Alibaba.com introduced the Ali-loan program offering financing to small Chinese businesses in partnership with leading Chinese banks. This model was now hinted to be extended across other countries in cooperation with Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen bank. The second corner stone to achieve this goal involves Alibabas training department, Ali-Institute that was upgraded this July to become a new profit-oriented business unit under Alibaba.com.

During the cleverly staged Alifest program speakers such as Nobel prize winner Muhammad Yunus, former president Bill Clinton (both over video) and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz underpinned the importance of fostering SME development across developing nations and endorsed Alibabas global efforts. This is quite remarkably for a Chinese company. Provided, you still consider it as such: “In 10 years we wont make differences between local or international companies any more, but only between differences in integrity”, Jack Ma said during his speech this weekend.

All points considered Alibaba is indeed in a powerful position to shape the worlds economy in the coming decade. Taking Alibabas already undisputed status among SME manufacturers in what is soon to become world’s largest economy, even the third proclaimed goal by Jack Ma can seem plausible:

Goal 3: 1 billion people trading on Alibaba Group’s platforms

The roadway to Alibabas most eager goal was visualized to us impressively when Alibaba.com’s CEO David Wei gave us an exclusive tour of his company’s new headquarters. (Which by the way also has a basketball court inaugurated by another of Jack Ma’s friends Kobe Bryant, who was also present in Hangzhou this weekend)

David presented us Alibaba’s realtime trading statistics generated from the three pillars of its business: international trade, domestic Chinese wholesale and domestic Chinese retail. (the according graphs can be seen in the picture above from left to right).

During the time of our visit last Friday evening at around 7pm Chinese time, 2.87 million concurrent users were active on Alibaba.com’s B2B portal. According to David the daily average concurrent user number is 4 million, around 10% of its 42.8 million worldwide registered users. The groups domestic C2C e-commerce marketplace Taobao holds around 78% of the online consumer market in China. As of mid-2009, it served 156 million registered users. Transaction volume on Taobao reached nearly US$ 11.8 billion in the first half of 2009, and by that exceeded the largest retailer in China in transaction volume during the same period.

David continued to say that “Alibaba’s combined trading statistic give us 3-6 months lead time to predict Chinas domestic trade and export volumes”. These are without doubts immensely powerful insights to possibly the biggest driver of our current world economy. Not without reason, Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma was one of the first to recognize the economic downturn in February last year, when he predicted “a though (economic) winter is coming, dark clouds are forming and the thunder is coming closer” during the annual Alibaba all-employee conference. “Today, the darkest period for Chinese exporters is over”, Alibaba’s CEO David Wei confirmed to us.

I asked David to tell us more about AliExpress – a new international wholesale platform for small-sum orders from its Alibaba.com database of Chinese manufacturers. He confirmed “the platform is still in beta but bound to launch in rather weeks than months from now”. The service offers minimum orders as low as 1 item, escrow payment and delivery with full tracking. Advertising “factory prices on even the smallest orders” the service is de facto a B2C marketplace just like Amazon and in part eBay that connects the Chinese manufacturers on Alibabas existing B2B portal Alibaba.com with the US consumer market. It will also be the first international roll out of Alibaba’s online payment and escrow system Alipay now competing with PayPal China in fight for Chinese SME merchants. Alipay currently facilitates about 4 million online payments worth up to US$100 million per day. It surpassed 200 million registered users in early July 2009.

With AliExpress the company for the first time attacks eBay directly in its home market. In China the US company already lost against Alibabas Taobao, giving up its domestic eBay platform and partially selling it to Chinese Internet group TOM Online in 2006. Not included in that sale, however was eBays and PayPals cross-boarder business of Chinese merchants selling to US consumers, that continues to be operated by PayPal China itself. This remaining eBay asset is now under serious threat, with Alibaba entering the B2C export business.

The move nevertheless comes with many risks for Alibaba. Only in December last year, Alibaba’s competitor Global Sources Direct, a division of NASDAQ-listed online sourcing platform Global Sources, announced it would discontinue its wholesale services. The platform was established in 2005 as a joint venture between Global Sources and eBay. A major part of the failure was attributed to the fact, that in such a cross national market place setting, it is impossible for its operator to guarantee quality, availability and delivery times. Instead it has to rely on the goodwill of its merchants, which in a developing market like China is a huge challenge. It remains to be seen how Alibaba can solve this problem better than its competitors.

Additionally to its international challenges Alibaba Group is under constant attack from rising Chinese rivals such as Baidu’s new C2C e-commerce platform Youa. Since the end of last year China’s number one search engine Baidu.com has blocked all Taobao merchants offers in its natural search results, leading to a huge loss of search volume. In retaliation Alibaba Group, previously one of the biggest ad spenders on Baidu, stopped all its PPC campaigns.

In the “Art of War”, Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu writes “concentrate your energy and hoard your strength”. However, Alibaba’s Jack Ma seems to ignore this advice by competing on multiple battlefields both at home and abroad, potentially stretching his company’s resources too thin. Yet the man reinforced his modesty in yesterdays closing speech when he said “looking back we are now a big company, but looking ahead we are still a very small company”. Having seen Ma passionately in action this weekend, it is clear that he’s lost none of the tireless energy that has made him successful, instead gaining in charisma and determination that will be necessary for the next 10 years ahead.

Interview Series: Marc van der Chijs from Spil Games Asia

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 11:45:22 +0000

During the Geeks on a Plane tour, one of the participants Adrian Bye ran a series of interviews with China CEOs. Adrian runs MeetInnovators, where he frequently publishes his interviews with the absolute best minds and most influential founders and CEOs on the Internet. Here is a re-post of Adrians interview with Tudou co-founder and Spil Games Asia CEO Marc van der Chijs. The full transcript and mp3 files can be downloaded on Adrians CEO interview ressource http://www.MeetInnovators.com.

Personal Info

Hobbies and Interests: Endurance sports, good food and wine.

Sports teams: Doesn’t have any favorite teams; just does sports himself.

Favourite Books:

God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens
The World Is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman

Favourite Entrepreneurs: Jason Calacanis, Steve Jobs.

Twitter url:: http://twitter.com/chijs

Personal Blog: http://www.marc.cn

Company website: http://www.spilgames.com

Fast Track Interview

Adrian: Today I am sitting in the Shanghai office of Marc van der Chijs, who is the CEO of Spil Games Asia. He has also worked in a start up called Tudou, which is basically the YouTube for China. This is an interview I have really been looking forward to doing because Marc is living in China as an expat. Marc, thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a little about who you are and where you come from?

Marc: Sure. I’m Dutch originally. I’m 36 and married with two kids. I have been in China for about ten years now. I came here originally working for DaimlerChrysler in Northeast Asia and did that for a couple of years. During that time, I saw a lot of entrepreneurial opportunities in the market, but they were things I couldn’t do while working for a multinational.

In 2002, I decided to quit my expat job with its good life, nice car, nice house, and business flights all over the world to go back to a smaller apartment with a bicycle and study Chinese for a while. My idea was to study for one year and then see if I could set up my own business. After one month, I started setting up my business along with working on my studies. In January 2003, I quit my studies after I finished the first semester of Chinese and started my first real business full time.

Adrian: Let’s talk about some of the companies you have been involved with here in China. Let’s start with Tudou. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about how Tudou works?

Marc: Tudou is basically comparable to what YouTube is doing in the US. The main difference is that we’re only doing it in China with all of our servers inside China. The content is similar in that it’s a lot of user-generated content, but it’s also a lot of professional-produced content with TV shows and movies. We have our own HD channel too.

Tudou is much more than just the funny clips you see on YouTube; they’re there as well, but it’s just one part of it. Professionally-produced content is much more important. It’s also the direction that we are going into ourselves. We are investing in our own productions and co-producing feature films at the moment.

Currently, Tudou has over 100 million uniques per month. That’s only China, of course. People will play about 3 billion clips a month on the site.

Adrian: Why don’t you tell us about your current company Spil Games?

Marc: Spil Games is originally a Dutch company that started in 2001 with affiliate deals, chatting and all these kind of things. In 2004, they decided to look at online games as flash games, and they built some flash games websites, mainly in Europe at that time. In 2005, they started to look at more international markets, and asked me to help as a consultant to set up a website for them in China.

When I was building the first website here and trying to get the licenses and all these things in China, I realized that the game market was going to be huge. After about one or two months, I called them and said, “I think I want to do this full time. I think I see a huge opportunity here, but I want to do it independently. I’m not going to be a subsidiary to your companies. Let me handle this here.” Basically, the original deal was that they invest money in the company, but let me run it.

Then it became a bit bigger than we originally thought. Originally, the idea was to build one website in China. Now, I have two big portals here. We’re probably number two in the market for flash games at this moment with about 32 million uniques per month.

We also have a game studio here where about 50 people make flash games and produce one or two new games a week. We also run websites in India and Indonesia and just started in Japan.

Adrian: Can you help me understand the casual gaming market and the business model behind it?

Marc: The games are normally single player games. Some have multi-player games, but most are relatively simple games. You play them for 10 to 20 minutes maybe. The users are different. It’s not something you play for hours like World of Warcraft or lots of big MMO games.

The business model at this point is still mainly advertising around the game or advertising inside the game. For example, a pre-roll before you start playing the game or billboards inside the game. For instance, you click on a game and it opens a small window and around this window you see some banner ads.

I do see the business model changing to virtual items more and more. For example, people will not pay for these games because they’re too cheap. People may want to pay for additional levels though. For example, if the game has five levels, but you can see in the game that there’s three more levels that you can’t enter, they may be willing to pay a small amount like a quarter or 50 cents for those extra levels. When they’re hooked to a game, people may feel like, “Okay, it doesn’t really matter if I pay a quarter right now.”

If you build casual games into a social network such as either on your own social network or play them on Facebook, people may also be willing to pay more to get a better sword, a better car, a high score, or to beat their friends. Actually, I think that’s going to be a new revenue stream for flash games. You see that already in the big, massive multiplayer online games, and I think it’s going to be something in the more simple flash games.

The other thing for casual games is it’s going to be on mobile phones, I believe. It’s still not that big, of course, but I think Spil Games could do a lot more in a few years.

Adrian: Is the company profitable?

Marc: We’re making money. I feel now is the time to grow in the Chinese market. If you sit down, relax, and think that things are going well, people are going to pass you on the left and right. You have to keep on growing and investing in the company. We decided to spend almost everything that we’ve earned and put it back into the marketing through building new good games and being present on direct websites.

We don’t really use things like Google ads or Baidu ads. We use our games to do the marketing. We build new games and give these away for free to other competitor-based websites. They get free content, but they’re branded with our website game.com.cn. Then people see one or two new games every week on their website where they only play games. Eventually they will click on our logo in the games, go to our site, and realize that game.com.cn is a little bit better than the site they are currently playing on. That’s the major reason why we have grown so much over the past two to three years.

Adrian: How do knock offs work here and how do you guys defend against them?

Marc: People copy all the time, and that’s fine. We always think we have better game designs and better game play. Copying is not enough, though. You need more. You need innovation. You need to understand the game play.

That’s also why we give away our games actually. We feel that if we give away our games, we have branding. If people copy them, the game play wouldn’t be as good as our game play, so it doesn’t really hurt us that much. People probably realize that the brand of games we distribute is a lot better than the people who copy our games.

Adrian: You talked a little about social networking. Is there any kind of social networking built into Spil Games or is that going to come out in the future?

Marc: We’re working very hard on these things. At this point, in China, we actually have social networking functions as part of the passport function we have, but it’s not enough.

We’re now seeing that social networks are actually becoming competitors. The social networking sites in China are more gaming sites than real social networks. People don’t really post their private life and pictures anymore, but they post their high scores and even screen shots from the games. It’s also extremely viral.

This wouldn’t work outside China probably, but it does work here. The market here is so different from the market outside China. For example, I always assume that pop ups would be death for the website. If I look at pop ups on our websites, we don’t see any change in traffic. It doesn’t deter people, and here you don’t even have complaints.

Adrian: Could this be because China is still in a state of change and not all these people are engaged in what they are going to be doing yet?

Marc: No, it really has to do with the fact that people like a chaotic look on their websites. For example when I started the first Spil Games websites, I started with a very clean, nice design from Holland that made it very easy to find the right games. The games were all in categories, and there was not too much advertising. We launched it and drove some traffic. People started playing the games, but they didn’t come back. We were like, “What are we doing wrong?” We tried it for about a month. Some people were coming back, but most people just came once and didn’t return.

I thought, “Maybe we are not doing the right games?” Then I was talking to my team, and we decided to give it a try with a very Chinese looking site. We built a Chinese website with blinking ads, a chaotic look, and pop ups. We launched it, and from that moment it started growing. We drove traffic, and people stayed and then returned. It completely blew me away; China is so different. In every single country in the world, even India, we use a similar design for our website, except for China. The design doesn’t work. China is really different.

Adrian: Why do you think people are attracted to a more chaotic look?

Marc: I think they’re used to a more chaotic life. Look on the streets: all the neon advertising to the sounds blaring from all those stores, the honking cars, and people screaming. They’re used to this. I think they’re sort of looking for it in the internet as well. I feel they may not feel happy when it’s too quiet somehow. That’s the only thing I can think of. It’s probably in the minds of people who are used to a chaotic life.

Adrian: I’m fascinated by China. If I want to move to China and get started here, what would your advice be to someone like me who would be an expat?

Marc: Learn Chinese. That’s the mistake I made originally. I should have learned more Chinese. It would have made my life a lot easier. I still need translators for meetings because you want to make sure you understand everything. Second of all, spend some time here before you get started. Build your network. If you’re really right off the plane, you cannot start a business here because you just don’t know how it works.

Things work differently from what you read in the official laws. You need to know the right people. Some of the things are still done the old way. You really need your network here. You cannot rely on regulations, and you need to really understand how it works.

Find a good local business partner. There are so many regulations you have to go through, and you need to know the right people. As a foreigner, if you’re not going to do it, you’re going to fail. Find a good Chinese business partner, and then the chances of success are a lot higher.

As far as working with foreign companies, if you look at what Google has been doing or Yahoo over the years here, none of them have really been successful. The main reason is they’re too dependent on their mother company. If you do something for another company here, make sure you’re independent where you can decide what to do, run your own business the way you think it should be done, and not have to wait for the mother company to make decisions.

For example, last year we had the earthquake in China followed by a three day national mourning period. We were informed on Sunday night at 3:00 a.m. that all the sites had to close down. If you have to wait for your headquarters in the Valley, for example, to wake up, it would be like 18 hours later to get their approval to do this and maybe they need to have a meeting there.

You’re going to be too late, and you’re going to be punished because they didn’t close their sites. With those sorts of things, you need to be flexible and react quickly. If you have to wait for your headquarters to make a decision, you’re going to be too late because the local entrepreneurs can make decisions right away.

This interview was led by Adrian Bye from the exclusive CEO interview online magazine MeetInnovators.com.

Job opening @ Web2Asia: China Country Manager

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 03:29:07 +0000

Web2ASia is hiring a Country Manager China for one of our foreign Web 2.0 portfolio companies. Your tasks will be to drive the companies localization and further expansion in China. You will coordinate with the European HQ, local partners and agencies, manage a small Shanghai based tech and customer support team as well as lead local marketing and business development efforts.

Requirements:

native Chinese speaker
excellent English
long time experience in and passion for Internet, Web 2.0, E-Commerce
previous experience in online marketing, SEO, SEM, CPA/affiliate relations, etc.
previous management/team lead experience

Contact george@web2asia.com for details.

Top 30: China's most valuable Internet Companies

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 01:12:00 +0000

In response to Serkan Toto's Post on Japan's most valuable Internet Companies, we compiled a list with the Top 30 Internet & Telecommunication Companies on the Chinese market.

They are ranked according to their market capitalization, whenever possible we link to the English Version of their homepage. Note: Market Cap is based on the stock prices of the 18th of August 2009, for their current value click on the Stock Exchange Link.

While currently most companies are listed either in the US (NASDAQ and NYSE) or on the Hong Kong Stock Market (SEHK), it will be interesting to see if the Chinese Mainland stock market (SSE) can attract more investment in the future.

Rank	Company	Market Cap	Stock Exchange	Description
1	China Mobile	US$ 214 Billion	NYSE/SEHK	Nationwide Mobile Telecommunication Provider
2	China Telecom	US$ 39.71 Billion	NYSE/SEHK	Nationwide Telecommunication Provider
3	China Unicom	US$ 32.44 Billion	NYSE/SEHK/SSE	Nationwide Mobile Telecommunication Provider
4	Tencent Holdings	US$ 26.8 Billion	SEHK	Internet & Mobile Phone Value Added Service
5	Alibaba	US$ 11.95 Billion	SEHK	B2B Trade & Online Retail
6	Baidu	US$ 11.75 Billion	NASDAQ	Search Engine
7	Netease	US$ 5.34 Billion	NASDAQ	Web Portal & Online Gaming
8	CTrip	US$ 3.41 Billion	NASDAQ	Travelling Site
9	Shanda	US$ 3.13 Billion	NASDAQ	Online Gaming
10	Sohu	US$ 2.93 Billion	NASDAQ	Web Portal & Online Gaming
11	Changyou	US$ 1.91 Billion	NASDAQ	Online Gaming
12	Perfect World	US$ 1.89 Billion	NASDAQ	Online Gaming
13	Giant Interactive	US$ 1.76 Billion	NYSE	Online Gaming
14	Sina	US$ 1.6 Billion	NASDAQ	Web Portal
15	Focus Media	US$ 1.14 Billion	NASDAQ	(Internet) Advertising (Allyes Information Tech.)
16	China Distance Education Hold.	US$ 1.13 Billion	NYSE	Online Education
17	Kingsoft	US$ 1.17 Billion	SEHK	Software Company
18	Kong Zhong	US$ 428 Million	NASDAQ	Wireless Value Added Service Provider
19	Netdragon	US$ 425 Million	SEHK	Online Gaming
20	51Job.com	US$ 405 Million	NASDAQ	Job Platform
21	Tom Group	US$ 284 Million	SEHK	Media Company
22	CDC Corp	US$ 269 Million	NASDAQ	Online Gaming (CDC Games) & Business Software
23	Giga Media	US$ 240 Million	NASDAQ	Online Entertainment Software & Services
24	The9	US$ 228 Million	NASDAQ	Online Gaming
25	ChinaCast Education	US$ 224 Million	NASDAQ	Online education
26	China Finance Online	US$ 220 Million	NASDAQ	Financial Information Portal
27	eLong	US$ 164 Million	NASDAQ	Travelling Site
28	ChinaEdu Corporation	US$ 148 Million	NASDAQ	Online education
29	Linktone	US$ 89 Million	NASDAQ	Interactive Entertainment Products
30	Hurray! Holding	US$ 77 Million	NASDAQ	Wireless Value Added Service Provider

Tencent (Top 4) and their Flagship Product QQ

Chinese SNS Xiaonei changes name to Ren Ren Wang

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:15:41 +0000

Oak Pacific Interactive Chairmain Joe Chen announced this week to change the name of popular Chinese social networking website Xiaonei.com to Renren.com.

Xiaonei.com's literal meaning ('inside school') highlights the fact that it was originally designed as a platform for graduates to keep in touch. However this also proved to be a barrier for extending its user base beyond students. Ren Ren Wang now seeks to attract a wider audience by literally meaning 'everybody's web'.

OPI announced at the same time that they will focus to extablish their Kaixin001.com clone Kaixin.com as an entertainement site whilst positioning Ren Ren Wang more as a communication platform.

The Actionscript Conference 2009: Singapore Sept 14-15

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 23:37:14 +0000

The Actionscript Conference 2009

Interested in Actionscript and Web 2.0? Always wanted to make a trip to Singapore? September would be a good month: Additionally to the Social Networking World Forum Asia Sept 22-23, the city will also host The Actionscript Conference (TAC) on Sept 14-15 at the NTUC Auditorium.

TAC is a community conference with the focus on Flash Platform. Attendants will see themselves immersed in a day of learning, knowledge exchange, and networking. TAC aims to bring topics on Actionscript 3.0, Flash development, Enterprise Flex 3 and 4, AIR, Integrating of Flash and other Platforms, and building Rich Internet Application to its audience.

For more information, please visit http://tac.sg or follow the event on Twitter @tacsg

Asian Equivalents of Western Web Services Part 03: China

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 01:21:13 +0000

We have always wanted to use this pic

The last part of our feature on leading Western Web Services and their Asian equivalents (some call them clones or copies ..) is about the largest Internet Market in the world: China. This post is in response to the overview started by Serkan Toto of Asiajin on Japanese equivalents and the follow-up by Channy Yun on Koreacrunch. Here is the response from Taiwan.

General Web Services

Leading Western Web Service	Chinese Equivalent
Tripadvisor	Yiqilai but also Qunar & eLong
Google	Baidu
Wikipedia	Hudong
Facebook	Xiaonei
Flickr	Yupoo & Bababian
Digg	QQ Bookmark, Baidu SouCang, Yahoo ShouCang, eYou, INU.cc, Gotou, Otag.cn, MyURLWorld, BBmao
LinkedIn	Tianji, Renhe & Wealink
Twitter	Digu, Zuosa & Fanfou
YouTube	Tudou & Youku
Amazon	Dang Dang
delicio.us	QQ Bookmark, Baidu SouCang, Yahoo ShouCang, eYou, INU.cc, Gotou, Otag.cn, MyURLWorld, BBmao
dooyoo	Beargoo
Netflix	your trusted street vendor
Craigslist	Baixing & Ganji
imdb	Douban
Wall Street Journal Online	People's Daily
monster.com	Zhaopin
Ebay	Taobao
Alexa	Chinarank
Hulu	PPLive & PPstream
4chan	Our Chinese comrades would never look at such filth. Never.
last.fm	cn.last.fm
Technorati
Yahoo! Answers	Zhidao Baidu
Zynga	making billions off online addicted kids? Tencent! Honorable mention: 5Minutes
MSN Messenger	QQ
Myspace	51.com & Kaixin
Yahoo!	Sina & Sohu
Expedia	Ctrip
Paypal	Alipay
Match.com	Zhenai
Yelp	Dianping

Baidu Screenshot

Blogs

Leading Western Web Service	Chinese Equivalent
Huffington Post	a liberal news website? are you kidding me!?
tmz.com	iFensi
Boing Boing
Gizmodo	evolife
Engadget	Engadget China

Blogbus Screenshot

Web Tools & Software

Leading Western Web Service	Chinese Equivalent
Gmail	163.com & 126.com
Google Docs & Spreadsheets	Baihui
Blogger	Blogbus
iTunes	Baidu MP3
BitTorrent	Xunlei
WordPress	PJHome

163.com Screenshot

Asian Equivalents of Western Web Services Part 02: South Korea

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 01:02:05 +0000

Part 2 of our series on leading Western Web Services and their Asian counterparts is about one of the most wired countries in the world: South Korea. Please visit Koreacrunch to see the original post done by Channy Yun, who again had posted his overview in response to Serkan Totos post on Japanese equivalents of Western Web sites.

General Web Services

Leading Western Web Service	Korean Equivalent
Google	Naver
Wikipedia	Wikipedia Korean & Naver Dictionary
Facebook	Cyworld
Flickr	Cyworld's Photo Sharing
Digg	Mixsh, Daum View & Allblog
LinkedIn	Linknow & Incruit
Twitter	me2day
Youtube	Daum tvPot & Pondora.tv
Amazon	Aladdin
delicio.us	No equivalent
dooyoo	Danawa
Netflix	No equivalent
Craigslist	No equivalent
imdb	No equivalent
Wall Street Journal Online	ChosunIlbo
monster.com	Job Korea
Ebay	Auction
Alexa	KoreanClick
last.fm	No equivalent
Technorati	Allblog
Yahoo! Answers	Naver Knowledge In
Zynga	Hangame

Naver Screenshot

Blogs

Leading Western Web Service	Korean Equivalent
Bloter	No equivalent
Huffington Post	No equivalent
tmz.com	No equivalent
Boing Boing	No equivalent
Gizmodo	No equivalent
Engadget	Engadget Korean

Engadget Korea Screenshot

Web Tools & Software

Leading Western Web Service	Korean Equivalent
Gmail	Hanmail
Google Docs & Spreadsheet	ThinkFree
Blogger	Tistory
iTunes	Melon & Bugs
BitTorrent	clubbox
Word Press	TextCube

Bugs Screenshot

Asian Equivalents of Western Web Services Part 01: Japan

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:03:56 +0000

Our friend Serkan Toto over at Asiajin just updated his list of Japanese equivalents to Western Web 2.0 services. See his overview below - we will also post the Korean & Chinese response to it shortly.

General Web Services

Leading Western Web Service	Japanese Equivalent
Tripadvisor	4Travel
Google	Yahoo! Japan
Wikipedia	Wikipedia Japan
Facebook	Mixi
Flickr	Yahoo! Japan Photos
Digg	Minna no Topics
LinkedIn	No equivalent
Twitter	Twitter Japan
Youtube	Nico Nico Douga
Amazon	Rakuten & Amazon Japan
delici.us	Hatena Bookmark
dooyoo	Kakaku.com
Netfix	Posren
Craigslist	No equivalent
imdb	Nihon Eiga Database
Wall Street Journal Online	Nikkei Online
monster.com	Rikunawi
Ebay	Yahoo! Japan Auctions
Alexa	Pathtraq
Hulu	acTVila
4chan	Futaba
last.fm	Mixi Music
Technorati	Kizasi
Yahoo! Answers	Oshiete!goo & Yahoo! Chiebukuro
Zynga	Hangame Japan, GREE & Mobage-town

Yahoo! Japan Screenshot

Blogs

Leading Western Web Service	Japanese Equivalent
Techcrunch	No equivalent
Huffington Post	Agora
tmz.com	Zakzak
Boing Boing	Zaeega
Gizmodo	Gizmodo Japan
Engadget	Engadget Japanese

Zaeega Screenshot

Web Tools & Software

Leading Western Web Service	Japanese Equivalent
Gmail	Yahoo! Japan Mail
Blogger	FC2
iTunes	iTunes Japan & Lismo (Mobile)
BitTorrent	Share
Opera	Sleipnir

Lismo Screenshot

Web Companies

Leading Western Web Service	Japanese Equivalent
Federated Media	Agile Media Network
Admob	Cirius

Cirius Screenshot

Join us at Social Networking Worldforum Asia in Singapore Sept 22-23

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:21:00 +0000

Web2Asia is happy to invite you to the Social Networking World Forum Asia taking place at the Grand Hyatt in Singapore on September 22nd and 23rd 2009. Our co-founder George Godula will attend the conference as a speaker in the panel "Benchmarking advertising on social networks" to talk about advertising on Chinese online social networks. Conference highlights include:

Two day event dedicated to social networking
Featuring key speakers from social networking publishers, advertising agencies, industry analysts, software developers and equipment manufacturers, pay-TV and network service providers, mobile operators, plus many more
Evening Networking Reception
Joint exhibition combining social networking and mobile social networking formats
Free to attend exhibition only pass available

Click here to register. Early Booking Discount Ends 21st August 2009. 15% discount available to all Web2Asia readers!

Web2Asia is sponsoring the coverage of the event by Netease.com as well as will report from the event for Techcrunch.

Speakers include:

Asia boasts the fastest growing social networking and social media market on the planet. There are also more mobile internet users, with the Asia Pacific region, than anywhere else in the world. It is no surprise that Six Degrees is moving the series to Singapore to learn from the leading social networking publishers, developers, brands and organisations who are currently operating in this exciting region.

The event will be supported by some of the largest global brands and organisations who are using social media to effectively excecute marketing and PR strategies. The event will also learn from regional heads of the popular social networking sites to provide insight on market conditions and learn how they adapted their service to expand to this region. The event will also debate and analyse current trends, market forces and examine how brands and organisations are exploiting this new media to market products and services.

Chinese twitter clones share same fate as the original: gone fishing

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 03:58:04 +0000

Danwei has a very good summary post on the current situation of microblogging in China here. Fanfou (饭否), Digu (嘀咕), Zuosa (做啥) and Jiwai (叽歪) are all down it seems. Only Tencent's Taotao (滔滔) has not been affected for the moment. Danwei points out that its user base is younger and has a different profile than the other micro bloggin platforms. Additionally it does also not allow for search.

We did a quick round of calls with the founders and CEO's of some of the blocked services. The majority was optimistic to be back online soon again, although none of them was able to officially comment on the situation.

China-based Language Learning Website Italki announces partnership with English training company

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 02:01:13 +0000

Shanghai-based language learning social network, italki, has accounced the first　business member of its Language Marketplace: English training company, Eleutian　Technology. The service offers one‐on‐one internet tutoring with US‐certified school　teachers and Eleutian's SpeakENG product, which incorporates Pearson's (PSO) English Language　Learning and Instruction System^TM to italki's members.

Prospective students can visit www.italki.com and register for an eight‐minute trial lesson with one of　Eleutian's American teachers via video‐conference. The product is called Eleutian SpeakENG^TM, and　students can subscribe to an integrated package of online multimedia English courses and videoconference　tutoring. SpeakENG also offers real‐time assessment to measure progress and to track a　student's needs.

This partnership marks the opening of italki's Language Marketplace to language schools. The　Marketplace was launched in March 2009, and began by connecting independent teachers with　students for paid online language teaching. In three months, nearly 3,000 teachers have joined the　Marketplace to teach italki's 500,000 users. The Language Marketplace is now open to schools and　companies that want to reach italki users with their language learning products and services.

For more information please visit the italki blog!