At Transmit China last week, experienced and prominent business people gave keynote speeches. Si Shen, founder of Papaya Mobile was one of them. She told of her ups and downs. Her key message was to “never give up,” an underlying factor of all successful entrepreneurs.
Si Shen grew up in Beijing and entered the prestigious Tsinghua University to complete a degree in Computer Science. She then joined Google in America to become a Product Manager for the China, Japan and Korea Search team. Later she transferred to the Mobile Division.
In 2007, she moved back home to work at Google’s Beijing office. After a while, she told her boss she wanted to leave to start her own company. But her boss persuaded her to stay by offering great conditions. One, she would still earn her salary in USD$ and two, she would be her own boss. Attracted by these terms, she decided to stay and built out the Google Maps team over one year.
In 2008, Si Shen eventually quit Google to found Papaya Mobile, a social mobile gaming company inspired by Japanese companies DENA and Gree. At the outset, Papaya Mobile designed games for both iPhone and Android and wanted to build a platform that allowed users to play all their games and buy virtual goods. Their first hit game was a social farming game for iPhone that was in the top 25 for 2 months and attracted 1.5 million users. Since users could jump from game to game and all were cross-promoted, Papaya was able to attract another 4 million users over 12 games. The target market was outside China because they felt China’s infrastructure was not yet ready to adopt mobile gaming at scale. Plus, Beijing had a wealth of top notch developers yet operating costs were only 1/7th that of America.
Courtesy of Emily Chong
In 2009, things were looking positive so Papaya tried to raise venture capital to accelerate growth. But a major hurdle arose, threatening the deal. Overnight all their games had mysteriously vanished from the iPhone App Store. The investor said if they didn’t get the apps back, they would not sign the term sheet. Desperate to keep the deal alive and sustain Papaya, Si Shen even emailed Steve Jobs himself to ask for his help to restore her games. In the email, she also said how much she admired Apple, so named Papaya after another fruit. After no response from Apple, she flew to their Cupertino headquarters in America to investigate how to re-activate her apps. After three days she received an email from a director, who told her who was responsible for removing her apps. She then waited outside his office for 7 hours. Impressed by her persistence, he revealed that the reason for removing the apps, was because Papaya was running a game engine that worked across both Apple and Android, which they didn’t permit. Si Shen, returned to China to inform her team that they would be forced to migrate to the Android platform. Loyally, her team stuck with her and said whatever she decided to do, they would follow. Consequentially, they lost the investment from the initial investor.
The move to Android, turned out well after all, as the dramatic growth of Android boosted their downloads, users and sales. Papaya was then able to raise a new US$22 million investment. Now Papaya has racked up 25 million users across America and Europe and has over 300 games after working with 3rd party developers on their Android game engine.
To conclude her speech, Si Shen “Never give up, because you can always find something new.”
Found is relaunching after working on their latest iteration from March 2011 (We did a sneak preview of the new Found last July). For those of you who do not know Found, Found was launched at Echelon 2010 last year as Foound (note the double ‘o’) and was actually one the of the best pitches. However, Foound did not do well especially after Forecast (which was built on Foursquare) was launched, which provided a similar kind of service.
What kind of service you ask? Basically Foound provides users with a simple way to share where you are going so your friends can find and meet you easily. The app also allows you to see where your friends are going. Right now with the new Found, in addition to finding your friends through other social networks, Found also allow users to connect to their friends on their phone contacts, which is a better reflection of your real life relationships. Of course, the new and improved version of Found addresses the old flaws that we covered where the app back then was less stable and has a few problem with social media integration. Other than that, the team behind Found made sure that the app is useful for new users by letting them publishes their Found updates to Facebook and Twitter before their friends get onto the network.
When I first downloaded the app and starting inviting my iPhone user friends around me to follow me on Found, the response was really disappointing. I realized that Found is facing the same problem as many other social networking apps: having too little users. Personally, I think while the app provides a whole new way of organizing hangouts, people still prefer using existing “hangout organizing platforms” to organize meetups, and one good example for that is through the Facebook Event feature. At least that was what I gather from a few of my friends, and even I am using Facebook Events to organize hangouts. This is not a new problem for Found and has been identified and covered by Venture Beat a year ago.
One thing that could be improved is that the app should provide more incentive for users to use Found. Maybe Found could introduce new mechanics like the Foursquare badge system to encourage existing users to use Found whenever they want to organize hangouts, because right now even the users that I follow are not using Found that frequently (except the team behind Found), and whenever I want to organize a hangout, I don’t think of Found immediately. Take Foursquare for example, I have only downloaded the app a few days ago and have been checking into it ever since, as opposed to checking in on Facebook like what I usually do, simply because there are badges on Foursquare which motivates me to check in. Badges could also be awarded to users whom successfully invited their friends to Found.
In any case, Found was one of the few Singapore startups that made it all the way to the states and certainly deserve some credits (in my opinion). Personally I feel the least we could do to support Found is to download the app and give it a try, because it definitely value adds to anyone who wants to organize hangouts by integrating the whole process into an app that is fun and easy to use.
If you find some areas of improvement or have any suggestions, do comment or drop the team a feedback at team@getfoundapp.com
As China's Silicon Dragon evolves as a startup frontier with multiple
undercurrents, it could even one-up the original Silicon Valley and become a
technology superpower. That may be only a decade or two from now. We will debate this topic Oct. 6 at 'Chinov8!' Link to full article
A Silicon Dragon tech economy began in 2002 with Chinesereturnees—so-called sea turtles who came home to lay their eggs—who clonedGoogle, YouTube, and Amazon, grabbed Sand Hill Road money, and scored on NASDAQand the NYSE. Today, homegrown Chinese entrepreneurs are snapping up venturecapital from Chinese currency funds for even more clones—Beijing techie WangXing alone has cloned Facebook, Twitter, and a Chinese GroupOn.
Theneedle is gradually moving from “made in China” to “invented in China.” Micro-innovationstweaked for the local culture are cropping up more often. Sina’s Weibo, a hybrid Twitter-Facebook, layered in video and photosharing before Twitter did.The long-awaited promise of disruptive technology from China is coming, too,symbolized by China’s climb to fourth place worldwide for new patentapplications. GSR Ventures–funded LatticePower in Nanchang counts more than 150patents for making low-cost efficient LED lightbulbs.
But China technopreneurs are still in those awkward years of adolescence. The next Jack Ma of Alibaba fame has yet to emerge.
The fissures in the wall are there, for sure. Doing business in China also means dealing with corruption, fraud, lack of the rule of law, inflation, censorship of Web content, and China’s notorious counterfeiters, who have popularized a whole industry of cheap knockoff or shanzhai cell phones.
That’s a long list of ills, but the tides are shifting and swiftly. As China’s Silicon Dragon evolves as a startup frontier with multiple undercurrents, it could even one-up the original Silicon Valley and become a technology superpower. That may be only a decade or two from now.
Our expert panelists include Brad Bao of Tencent, Bill Tai of Charles River Ventures, Tim Draper of DFJ, Richard Lim of GSR Ventures plus Marguerite Gong Hancock of the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. We’ll be hearing more from our featured Chinese tech entrepreneurs Jeff Chen of Maxthon (China’s Internet Explorer plus) and Haidong Pan of Hudong (China’s Wikipedia plus), who are flying in from Beijing to speak at Silicon Dragon ‘Chinov8!’ during China’s National Day Holiday. Read more at my Forbes post: http://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccafannin/2011/09/22/from-made-in-china-to-invented-in-china-chinov8/
Private investor Silver Lake, DST of Russia, Chinese private equity firm Yunfeng Capital together with Temasek Holdings are leading a $1.6b tender offer for stocks held by Alibaba employees, according to people familiar with the situation. The offer valued the company at $32b.
Joe Tsai, CFO of Alibaba, posted on Alibaba intranet BBS saying the deal is primarily intended to offer liquidity to Alibaba employees.
The offer might signal that an IPO for Alibaba is far off.
Yahoo, Alibaba’s biggest shareholder is said to not sell one single share in the tender offer. And interestingly, Silver Lake and DST are reportedly jointly considering a bid for Yahoo.
Pluggd.in team is super excited to announce the next edition of UnPluggd – #UnPluggd4 which is scheduled for November 19th in Pune.
Over the last three editions, UnPluggd has come out as the India’s largest platform for technology startups and we continue to outdo ourselves with a different format, candid speakers and importantly, great startup demos.
We will soon announce details of the event/startup demo slots, but if you are a startup who wants a BIG launch platform – you know when to launch your product.
This time, apart from Entrepreneurs, VCs/Angel investors, we are also bringing in media companies/partnerships and have them look at India’s top notch Indian technology startups. We will soon announce the details, but recommend that you block the date/finalize your travel schedule in advance.
UnPluggd4 – Details
Date: November 19th (Saturday)
Venue: MES Auditorium, 131. Mayur colony, Near HDFC Bank, Near Karishma chowk, Karve Road, Kothurd, Pune , India.
UnPluggd4 – You Decide
Like Pluggd.in, UnPluggd is all about the community and we’d like to understand your expectation/incorporate your suggestions regarding the event content/format. Do join our Facebook group and have your say in the next edition. Tell us what do you want from us.
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I was off-late wondering on the nature of social graphs in general and what maybe the functions and context of use of these graphs. Social graphs being the root of many business and scientific discussions, requires a common scheme of things that are used in well defined way in the conversations to broadly make sense.
I am breaking down my thoughts into series of posts to manage the size.
In this series, I thought I can take a first-cut of my understanding and opinions on what this scheme can be (in a common business like language) and represent a preamble to my future posts based on social graphs.
Probably the following distinct scheme of things are obvious at a higher level during social graph discussions.
Individuals who participate in a social graph. (Identity)
Relationships between the individuals. (Relation)
The Domain and its functions. (Context)
The standing of an Individual within a social graph based on the values, behavior and outcomes of his activities. (State, Reputation)
The tools that are used to communicate. (Edge Device)
Lets get the academic definitions out of the way
Social: refers to the interaction of organisms with other organisms and to their collective co-existence, irrespective of whether they are aware of it or not, and irrespective of whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary
Social Graph: A graph that is constructed by connecting the organisms to each other forming relationships and ‘How’ they are related.
Defining each of these schemes further
Identity: Each individual will have to establish a unique ID to distinguish herself across other within a graph. This can be email, TwitterID, FacebookID etc..
Relation: The nature or type of relationship you hold in real life, such as, employee, employer, friend, spouse, buyer, seller etc..
Context (Functional Domain): A social graph can be formed between humans relative to many functional domains. Which means, it does not necessarily have to be between a type of relationship such as friends (friendship being a functional domain). You can construct a social graph of organized sellers in a market place relatively connecting with each other to create the sell side dynamics like price control, logistics, bill-of-material, turns ratio, availability etc. You can also have a social graph between organized buyers in a market place connecting with each other enabling the buy side dynamics. Then another graph having participants from a work hierarchy (linkedin), another between a seller & a (adhoc) buyer in a market place (eBay et al). It can be between structured sellers (Amazon, eCom…), it can be for a specific community of aggregators (who are not producers or consumers) such as co-op societies. You get the idea of functional domain specific social-graphs by now.
Functions: Note that the relationship drawn between two people connected in a social graph has certain functions that are enabled to make sense within the context of that domain. In Facebook for example, you chat between friends, you are more casual in your status, you poke friends, upload family photos and comment on them etc… But when you get to Linkedin, you are more focused on getting connected to people from your industry, hiring, marketing, selling, defining job responsibilities accurately, enable recommendations etc. These are the functions you perform over the domain specific graph to engage meaningfully.
State: You seamlessly cut across all the functional domains of different social-graph that you belong to. You as a individual know your personal state and verify your state against activities across different graphs. You also update your residual state which is very specific to the functional domain of the graph. For sake of brevity, each graph carries only enough context and state to play within the domain boundaries of the graph. To illustrate, you may update Facebook that you just became a father (and your demographic profile in FB). You may update your new promotion and brief job responsibilities on Linkedin. As a Individual, you are aware of both these states, but as LinkedIn or FB the graph only knows what it needs to know.
Reputation: Based on your state, activities and interactions in the social graph, you manage to hold a reputation as an Individual within the functional domain. In Facebook maybe you are known to be overtly quite, but extremely chatty when it comes to Twitter. You may be a super connector when it comes to LinkedIn, a top commentator when it comes to Disqus. Reputations are based on likes, rating (and other esoteric parameters such as relationship weights based on frequency, recency, reputation of people you have connected to etc… PeerIndex and Klout are examples to manage such reputation). Also graphs themselves internally manage reputation based on internal algorithms which may be used to show you news-feeds of friends who you interact the most etc.
Edge Devices: There are many types of devices that can be used to access social networks today. PCs, Tablets and Mobiles being the broad category. Each device has advantages and disadvantages around form factor, resolution, input functions (keyboard), nearness (always with me?), bandwidth, processing capacity, memory etc. Assuming there is connectivity for the device to access the graph, the functions of the graph that you would access is based on the context of the graph and the capability of the device to allow a reasonable experience for the consumer to engage with the graph.
Given this scheme of things, it probably becomes meaningful to have reasonable discussion about a social graph in any functional domain without getting overtly confused on the terms used. In the next post I will talk more on the edge devices and its functions which sets the base to understand the pivots of utilities when the edge device capability amplifies or hinders a social graph function.
[Guest article by V V Preetham, founder of Quantama, a LBS service. Reproduced from Preetham’s blog]
How deep has the Facebook phenomenon penetrated into your life? Are you worried about the wilting crops in Farmville or starving fishes in Aquaville? Oh wait!
Do I see Facebook open in the other tab in your browser? So now you have told Facebook so much about yourself, do you wonder how all this information is stored and with whom is it shared? It is interesting to know that Facebook has come a long way in privacy and like its engagement architecture, even the privacy features of Facebook have evolved over time.
The Good Old Days !! Now it is time to dig deep into Facebook and see what we get! Facebook was founded in 2004 and when you go to that era to search about privacy, you will stumble upon links where it is being argued that the data you share is not available to Facebook alone but to other ‘trusted partners, it sure is going to ring a bell for you’. But what you see is that privacy concerns started with the Newsfeed itself, which we today take for granted.
The newsfeed and mini-feeds faced a lot of resistance from users . There was also a group “Students against Facebook newsfeed” which was protesting the same openly on Facebook and the number of peoples joining it showed the huge discontentment among users. The popularity of the newsfeed was falling int o a deep pit as users were cribbing about it all the time. It seems the now seemingly innocent newsfeed had stirred quiet a buzz with it’s induction to the site.
Now then came other major improvements like targeted advertising by Facebook. Facebook escalated its use of personal data to target advertisements to individual users, despite mounting privacy concerns surrounding social networking sites, Facebook was boldly looking for revenues and users felt the chils of their data being shared. Though the idea was great, you would be getting advertisements on the topics you liked and which are actually useful.
This was followed by the decision of making the Facebook profiles searchable by Google, now people wouldn’t like that to be the default options, and as it should have, it raised a storm and as usual Facebook shrugged off these concerns, or indirectly they said Facebook’s 40 million users should not worry that personal details will be available to anyone searching the net.
Privacy, The Scary Phase !!
In 2008 bombshells of lawsuites were dropped on Facebook, a canadian privacy firm found 22 breaches of privacy in Facebook. Everybody started anticipating another privacy scandal by Facebook or finding loopholes as to how these matters were of serious concern. Moreover, it was realized that the applications had access to information which they might not even require, and this was a whooping 91% of the data accessible to them, which meant that the applications needed just 9% of the data. Concerns were legitimate. But as a response, all Facebook did was to send a small press release about information control for user, providing them better control on their content . Now this showed how insecure the information was getting. Applications to which you had not given permission also seemed to get hold of your personal data. This was getting more difficult for Facebook.
- The Good: Simpler Privacy Settings and Per-Post Privacy Options
- The Bad: EFF Doesn’t Recommend Facebook’s “Recommended” Privacy Settings
- The Ugly: Information That You Used to Control Is Now Treated as “Publicly Available,” and You Can’t Opt Out of The “Sharing” of Your Information with Facebook Apps
- Facebook was receiving all the serious frowns of it’s users, now it was more aware users who wanted their privacy maintained.
What’s worse is that the apps with whom you had shared information seemed to share it with other companies. In the same article you see how Facebook was seriously limiting the personal data available to the apps. Isn’t it too little too late? And poeple now realised how their information was being shared. EFF again released a set of data which was an eye-opener for the masses. You can clearly see how the circa of yourprivate information was increasing.
The main concerns were that even if you set your information to private, it would not be very difficult to access it, remaining ignorant was certainly no longer an option. Your information, a huge chunk of it, could be easily accessible in public web.
Now the Facebook privacy concerns were growing and as you can see, it made Mark remove his hoodie, as he was sweating the questions posed about privacy.
Everyone knew that the privacy concerns need to be addressed and there was no more scope to just shrug off privacy concerns. So the year 2011 was supposed to be the years of reforms. As a Facebook user I myself started seeing random changes.
There was this mysterious ticker appearing now and then, seems I was not alone. This surely invited the fury of many users. You can browse the forums and listen to the hues and cries of the users. Then Facebook decided it’s time for a change in privacy settings, which people suspect is an outcome of competition from Google+, well it seems everyone was supposing the same, even eweek thought the same.
Now you could decide who all see your posts, also the tagging policies changed and you could add your location with more comfort. To get a complete preview of the latest privacy settings you can look atthisofficialblogpostaboutit. The latest addition to the bandwagon of privacy and sharing has been the subscription button, that makes anotherFacebookblog. Now you need not be friends with a person to see the things they share publicly. Also now you could customize what degree of updates you want to get from each friend.
Facebook now is slowly rolling out the latest newsfeed format, which has little to do with privacy, but the ticker is sure a concern. You see what your friends are doing online, even if the other person is not in your friend list.
In the top right you can see the ticker, telling us what my friends are doing, it’s the ‘UNFILTERED’ newsfeed, I am sure you must have got an idea of it by now. Below that is the suggestion of the people I might like to subscribe to. This is what Facebook looks like in September 2011.
Finally !!
If you have gone through the above mentioned points you already have been wondering about the way the privacy issues are growing and the ways Facebook is adopting measures to address the concerns. Facebook has already been in news for all the lawsuits it has faced, as I have mentioned above.
The social competition is heating up. Google+ won hearts with its simple and fast UI and more transparent privacy settings and Facebook had to act fast. The latest changes make people wonder if Facebook is moving more towards the twitter way of sharing information. Though Facebook has addressed the concerns to some extent, the constant changes may leave the average Facebook user confused. The latest tagging facility does help us decide if we want to be tagged or not but makes tagging a more tedious job.
Facebook has the advantage of a huge user base which it’s competitors do not enjoy at the moment. Facebook now needs to be on its toes to be able to retain it’s users. It has surely come a long way from the privacy settings that “The Facebook” had, but these may not be enough. With the rolling out of unfiltered newsfeed (which has horified many users) and other features Facebook needs to take into account the privacy concerns. Facebook seems to reset the privacy settings of the users when rolling out changes in the privacy options which leads to the dismayofmanyusers.
The user today is more informed and more alert than ever. Facebook cannot shrug off concerns as it once did and this is the era of a more mature audience and users Facebook is going to experience. Happy Facebooking !! (Hoping) Your privacy not be violated!!
[This guest post is written by Aram Bhusal. Aram works at Kuliza. You can read more of his posts at the Kuliza blog]
As Sina Weibo is growing its user base and traffic to the next level, more people have an inclination to share photos rather than just texts with the help of the prevalence of camera-equipped smartphone.
However, one thing annoying about social media is that its inherent fragmental nature makes tracking and viewing weibo messages as well as pictures an uncomfortable and non-intuitive experience. And none of current popular Weibo apps including official Sina Weibo iOS app has addressed the prickle properly.
Stepcase, the Hong Kong based-startup behind photo community Step.ly which has over 7.5 million users must have realized the setbacks. The company is launching a photo viewer tailored for Sina Weibo to provide users with consistent, intuitive and light-weighted photo-viewing experience.
The Story And Idea Behind Chaopin
According to Leon, founder of Stepcase, the idea of creating Chaopin stems from an experimental concept to create, design and develop an app in just 2 week to meet Chinese users’ needs of scanning weibo pictures.
The Chaopin team holds a unique perspective on China market, which can be boiled down into a few theories. First and foremost, busy city life keeps Chinese people from taking photos in the same way that people in the West do. Secondly, cities are sprawling and those who regularly access social media have less interest to take/share photos. Thirdly, people like to consume and re-share photos.
Based on these, Chaopin team made several hypotheses to help point towards the direction for the app prior to development:
*People using Sina Weibo want a good photo viewing experience.
*People are more likely to connect with their Sina Weibo account if it’s not a pre-requisite.
*There is a demand to view and rate fashion themed photos.
The HongKong-based startup also realized that viewing street fashion photos seemed quite popular among weibo adopters even though the viewing experience isn’t that pleasant. That’s why they came up with the idea of curating an app that makes it a beautiful experience to browse street fashion related photos posted or shared on Weibo. The app will also allows you to discover and follow the people who are sharing these photos, rate the photos hot or not, see which are the hottest photos and re-share them all on Sina Weibo.
Once the concept has been detailedly fleshed out, Stepcase adopted a design-driven agile development methodology to curate a “MVP”, namely “Minimal Via Product” to test out their idea.
Beyond photo-viewing experience, you can also leverage the app to unearth and explore the latest fashion trends on Sina Weibo.
The store itself is two floors based in IFC Mall and in true Apple style, looks clean and sophisticated. Staff rigorously conducted identity checks to make sure no one leaked any important info. Apple has hired 300 workers to manage the 16,000 square foot store.
The store will officially open on Saturday and will give away 3,000 limited edition T-shirts. A new Shanghai Apple store is to be opened tomorrow.
New Apple CEO, Tim Cook has said that the Greater China region including the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan have greatly boosted the company’s performance. In fact Q2 revenue grew 6 times to an amazing US$3.8 billion for Greater China.
“I see an incredible opportunity for Apple there.” Said Cook.
Tencent today, officially launched Tencent Q+. No, it is not a copy of Google+, but instead a client based open platform for developers to connect to the largest instant messaging network with over 647 million users.
Think about it like this; when you log into QQ and click on Q+ you can also access applications developed by 3rd party developers. Q+ launched with 150 applications ready to go. Applications include news, travel, social networking, games and 7 other categories.
Q+ allows users to quickly share the apps you like with friends on Tencent Weibo and QZone. It also intelligently recommends you apps that you might like, based on apps that you are using.
In the future, Tencent will become more open by releasing APIs that will allow developers to leverage the core function of the QQ client, for example file sharing and audio chat.
For the third time running, Qi 2011 will present the audience with various speakers from different expertise areas. They will share their personal insights on how they create innovative business, social and environmental solutions and where they see future opportunities. You can view speakers list here.
Topics of Interest
Policy and Nation Development
Leadership and Innovation
Impact Investment
Women’s Empowerment
Youth Ambition and Education
Fashion, Art, and Design
Food, Health, and Leisure
Energy and Technology
Architecture and Urban Planning
Conservation and Wildlife
Who Should Attend
Top Level Business Leaders
CSR and HR Managers
Entrepreneurs
Social Innovators
Journalists
Event Details
When: Thursday, 13th October 2011 and Friday, 14th October 2011
Time: 8.30am to evening
Where: School of The Arts Singapore, 1 Zubir Said Drive, Singapore 227968 (Map)
Cost: S$550 – S$650
1. Fruit Ninja Partners With China Mobile To Offer China Market-Tailored Game
Halfbrick Studio, the company behind top-selling casual game Fruit Ninja has partnered with China Mobile, the world’s largest operator by user base to bring a China market tailored version of its sensational hit Fruit Ninja to the latter’s Mobile Market, a service China Mobile positioned as its app store.
According to Shainiel Deo, China Mobile version of Fruit Ninja will be featuring a bunch of local flavors, for instance, adding new fruit peach and background images with the twelve zodiac animals that stem from traditional Chinese culture.
The company discloses that to date all versions of Fruit Ninja have an aggregate of over 60 million downloads. You can play the game on iPhone, iPad, Android phone, Windows Mobile Phone, Xbox, Symbian phone, Samsung Bada phone and even on Facebook.
2. China Telecom To Release Mobile IM YiLiao With Free Voice Messaging
As we mentioned last time that China Mobile is launching a Kik like service Feiliao that enables free text messaging after China Unicom announced launching WoYou, a free texting tool. So out of the big three operators in China, China Telecom is the only one who turns a blind eye to the mobile trend.
Now China Telecom couldn’t hold it anymore. According to people familiar with the matter, the second operator in China is also tapping into the market with its own offering YiLiao that allows users to send free text/voice/multimedia messages.
When Kik first made its debut back in 2009, people are screaming it will “Kill SMS”. Now it seems at least the Chinese operators are striking first.
After the hype of Xiaomi Phone and Aliyun Mobile, now it’s the Shenzhen-based giant penguin’s turn to grab attention. Tencent is reportedly initiating a strategic partnership with smartphone manufacturer HTC to offer a new model HTC Cha Cha with preloaded QQ services including mobile QQ client, mobile QZone, mobile Tencent Weibo and so on at RMB2498 ($390).
2. Baidu Online Recruiting Solution Baijob.com Went Online Today
Baijob.com, the online recruiting solution by Baidu went online today. We wrote about the Baidu subsidiary about two months ago and since then have been hearing progress and updates about the service on and off, and now it’s finally up.
Chinese online recruiting market has long been dominated by the big three, namely 51job, ChinaHR and Zhaopin while classified sites like Ganji.com and 58.com are in scramble for the rest of the market.
To some extent, online recruiting is a sales-driven business in China, will traditionally techie-driven Baidu fare well in this particular territory? Let’s see. But as of now if you search for a position on Baijob, it’s patently noticeable that Baijob isn’t on a par with the big three just in terms of the available positions.
Samsung is holding two Badadeveloper events in Beijing and Chengdu today and this weekend at 24th. To build a good ecosystem, the developers obviously are the key. To make them happy, I heard that from a friend from Samsung’s management team, they are willing to give some Bada phones for free to the developers.
I never tried Bada phone, so could not comment on its performance. A friend who used to working for Samsung in London said that Samsung had over one hundreds engineers working on it, in other words it must be a serious operation system for smart phone. But my concern is that how serious Samsung is about Bada? As you may know, Samsung also makes Android phones, and also Window Mobile phones.
Talked to an insider last week, here are his comments on my questions:
Samsung’s strategy on mobile device is to be the Cross-MobileOS, which is the reason that you see Samsung’s Nexus 2 in Google I/O and its Windows tablet in Microsoft Build 2011 conference;
Samsung (at least in smart phone market in China) will continue to focus on Android. (He said ~85% of effort will be on Android, ~15% on Bada);
As a traditional phone manufacturer, Samsung needs the Bada, its own mobile operating system (they used to compete with Nokia’s Meego). Bada is now in China, but Samsung does not have an ambitious goal for it. Like my friend said, it just has to be here in the massive market.
Bada’s app store for Chinese market is also available. Let’s see how fast and efficient Samsung can drive it.
ViKi, an international video site which mobilizes its community to translate programs into more than a hundred languages, has announced major syndication deals with BBC and Netflix. They will also be expanding their content from Hulu. The news was first reported on TechCrunch.
The deals fall in line with ViKi’s aim of introducing more premium content. Nadine Yap, the vice-president of product, has told us that some programs that users would eventually see on ViKi include: Hotel Babylon and Mistresses from BBC, City Hunter and Lie to Me on from Netflix, and a new Chinese drama and Indonesian horror film from Hulu.
ViKi’s user base has also expanded greatly in the past year. Now, they have 8.5 million unique visitors and 36 million visits in the past month, which is four times the traffic from last year.
Their Facebook Page has also seen a massive boost in ‘likes’ in a month, from 700,000 in Augest to over a million now. They are believed to be the first Singapore-based company to do so.
According to Nadine, ViKi has gone on a multi-faceted drive to increase its user base. That includes procuring more content from a dozen countries, syndicating movies and entertainment news, implementing Facebook Share on their site and starting Facebook programming, partnership distribution with Yahoo! Southeast Asia and Singapore’s InSing, community outreach through social media, and search engine optimization.
Mobile is another area they want to hop on to, although no specifics were given. But Nadine did say ViKi wants to enter the feature phone and smart TV space as well.
Much of ViKi’s operations are conducted in Singapore. They have a smaller Korea office as well, as well as employees in Japan and San Francisco.
So far, ViKi has raised a Series A funding of US$4.3 million. Singapore’s Neoteny Labs is an investor, along with Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, among others, and private investments from media executives, including Rajesh Sawhney, President of Reliance Entertainment of India, and Alex Zubillaga, former global head of digital at Warner Music.
While eCommerce growth is driving everyone in media crazy and getting VCs to think about, “What am I missing?”, the ecosystem around eCommerce stills seems to be ruled by old world companies and is seeing very little innovation. From payment gateways to logistics everything has such high entry barriers in terms of capital investment that not enough people are ready to risk it up. The end situation has come down to eCommerce companies creating their own back-end, as in the case of Flipkart.
Chhotu (or Santa Claus Couriers) is one startup that is daring to venture into the big bad world of logistics. Based in Delhi, Chhotu is a last mile delivery solution targeting the niche eCommerce logistics space. The startup claims to be eCommerce friendly as it is tech. driven and wants to be an extension to the eCommerce sales channel. Going the typical tech. product prototype route, they are keeping investments in control with last mile delivery only, for now.
Chhotu currently delivers only within Delhi and is looking to open shop in Mumbai later this year. They already have some known eCommerce players amongst their 10+ clients including Myntra, GKB Opticals etc.. The startup claims to keep costs and delivery returns low due to effective use of technology. The return rate in their case is about 1.5% for all reasons of failure.
Here’s a quick QnA with Chhotu founders, Navneet Singh and Aadhar Aggarwal.
1. What is it that you think the regular courier guys are doing wrong and how do you make it better?
Regular guys are doing business in a traditional way in which they are suppose to “just make the delivery” and get paid for it. We see our relationship with E-Commerce companies as partners and we act as an “extension of their sales channel”.
We align our revenue model to E-Commerce revenue model. In around 99% of cases, we charge our partner when he is making a sale. In other words, we empathize when a sale is lost on CoD. That is one example of alignment. Second thing I would say is responsiveness. We are working with technology companies where things are suppose to be very responsive, be it their website, customer support or shipment. Other players lack this which makes the whole shipping experience painful for shipper and shippee(if that is a real word). Our technology is very focused on collaboration. Simply put, three parties involved in a process needs to have a predictable streamlined communication medium. Chhotu relies on technology for this. Despite we are small today, our technology is evolving around that philosophy which is really working.
2. You offer last mile delivery, so what happens to the long distance logistics? How is it taken care of? Partnerships?
Currently we don’t do long distance logistics as it requires huge investment and expertise which anyways current shipping companies are doing acceptably well.
3. What is the current team size? What is the structure, delivery vs. technology vs. Business Development?
We are currently 50 odd people, most of which are in the field. We are building our technology and BD teams. We don’t do logistics by the book and are building our own in house specialization.
4. Given the niche you are playing, how sustainable is it as compared to a main stream courier company? Are there enough volumes to play on economy of scale?
There are enough volumes to have a good profitable sustainable business. We are receiving a good amount of attention from VCs and Angels for investment.
Note: Some questions around their operations have been held back in interest of the startup due to IPR sensitivity. They will share once the filings are in order.
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I had a brief telephonic conversation with the founders and they sound quiet sanely enthusiastic about building a business here and not just starting up. With the growth of eCommerce it will be interesting to watch how competition builds up for them.
The logistics in this space is currently ruled by well known players like BlueDart, Aramex etc. who are supposedly good in service but come out to be quite costly, specially for small ticket size goods. Add the return consignments to that and the ratio skews up even worse. There might be some more startups in this space soon and hopefully other courier companies will gear up as well. The space will see action.
So all you guys cribbing about not enough guys solving ground level issues in eCommerce, here’s your answer. Place your bets! And eCommerce guys, do try out Chhotu’s service and help them understand the market better.
If you have received a courier from Chhotu, do let us know your experience.
At Transmit China last week, experienced and prominent business people gave keynote speeches. Si Shen, founder of Papaya Mobile was one of them. She told of her ups and downs. Her key message was to “never give up,” an underlying factor of all successful entrepreneurs.
For the third time running, 
