2012年7月31日星期二

bMobilized, Instant Mobile Site Making Tool

As global smartphone penetration keeps accelerating, more and more people do almost everything that they can with PC before with mobile now. Witnessing the trend in shifting from desktop to mobile, a lot of enterprises raced to launch their own mobile sites, with mixed results.

Creating websites for mobile devices has been proved to be a tedious and frustrating experience, as mobile devices come in numerous screen size and resolution, varied computing power and mobile Internet access. New York-based startup bMobilized is aiming to tackle all these itches with its instant mobile site making solution.

Feeding it with the domain name of your desktop site, the service would automatically analyze the layout – it claimed to use 300 different algorithms to identify and analyze the different parts of the website – and then generate a mobile site that fits on all major devices. bMobilized also provides a easy-to-use Customization Suite in case you’re not totally satisfied with the mobile site it produces, or just want to make some changes to it. You can edit, create or replace menus and submenus, or adjust menu color schemes and designs. You can also create a unique mobile logo, color scheme, or style sheet (CSS), mobile headers and footers. With the tool one can hands down customize a nice looking mobile website.

For now, bMobilized claimed its Mobile Engine could detect more than 13,000 combinations of handsets and browsers, including iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Nokia, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson. So regardless of how customers views a company’s mobile site, the layout would always be optimized for best look.

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Fleetbit Making Cab Companies More Efficient

I met Yilun Zhang and Aidan Nulman, co-founders of Fleetbit couple days ago in Beijing as they flew over here to take part in an investor-pitch product-launch startup competition focusing on “cloud computing areas”, the competition is part of a bigger plan charted by local government of Harbin, the capita city of China’s northeastern Heilongjiang province. Harbin is looking to turn itself into some sort of a cloud computing innovation center of China.

Speaking of Fleetbit, the Canada-based company provides a solution that helps cab companies work more efficient, rather than usually just an app to connect cab drivers and passengers. Just like it said on its website, Fleetbit is more than an app.

With Fleetbit’s solution, cab companies can have apps customized for them with their brand recognition and then sent out to passengers, saving them a lot of troubles of either in-house developing or outsourcing it. Fleetbit app could be integrated into cab companies’ existing dispatch systems to attract new customers, strengthen your brand, and increase customer retention. It currently supports multiple platforms like Blackberry, iPhone and Android. It also has a web version that passengers could use to book the car online.

And on the consumer side, passengers get to book cab services from their mobile and then pay with their mobile upon receiving the service. Meanwhile, passengers can use the app to rate drivers and their services. Tapping into these ratings could help fleet operators keep drivers accountable and motivated, improving overall customer service.

Yilun said that Fleetbit has teamed up with some local fleets in Canada, where the company headquartered. I guess Beijing could really use their service as the city is notoriously famous now for its huge traffic and big jam from time to time.

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Tencent Might Shop Social Ecommerce Site Meilishuo?

Words has been whirling lately that Tencent is in talks with Meilishuo, one of the most popular social shopping site over here, about a potential acquisition. Meilihsuo later on denied the rumor though.

Launched in March 2010, the Beijing-based startup raised a US$ 20 million round of Series C last November at a valuation of $150 million. The company claimed more than 150 million registered users and 3.2 million daily active users. Being two of the hottest stars (another one is Mogujie) in the rising and promising social ecommerce area – think how hot Pinterest is now in the States – it’s reasonable that people are speculating some big guys might’ve kept an eye on it and are waiting to snag it up if possible. Some while ago people were just speculating that Baidu is interested in buying the company.

Tencent is revamping its e-commerce arm after the recent restructure that consolidate the company’s ‘sophisticated’ B2B2C business, buying Meilishuo seems a nice move since the service claimed to bring huge amount of traffic and transactions to Taobao. According to the company, it contributed RMB 700 million worth of orders to Taobao. That said, don’t forget that Tencent enjoys a user pool of more than 700 million users in China and itself is one of the largest portal site in China with heavy traffic, it might not need a Meilihsuo a Mogujie to route traffic at all.

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2012年7月29日星期日

Web Game, A Blue Sea for Game Companies?

A new report on China’s game industry in first quarter by IDC showed that, as client games were shrinking in both revenue and market, web games are enjoying a rise in users (205 million) by 27.7% and in revenues (RMB 3.82 billion) by 46.7% year on year. A statistics by Beijing-based Internet think tank Analysys International showed that web game market hit RMB 2.32 billiion and RMB 2.24 billion in the first and second quarter of this year respectively, totaling RMB 4.56 billion in the first half, signaling a market of tens of million for this year.

 

Game Companies Find a New Blue Sea 

Zou Tao, CEO of Xishanju, a game studio, said confidently that, “Browser game is the blue sea, its monetization model is much stronger than that of client games.” But he also pointed out that to make this market a blue sea, you need innovation.

A lot of people in the industry resonated to Zou’s view. Since last year we’ve seen more and more game companies adjusted their strategy to put more focus on web games. LineKong, a Beijing-based game maker is gradually increasing the significance of web games within the company. And according to its CEO Wang Feng, revenues generated from web game would grow to between 50% to 70% of total revenue this year. Apart from LineKong, other players including Perfect World, Shanda and ZTGame all increased their input into this gold mine.

VeryCD, a Chinese emule community which was on the verge of out of business was saved by a web game titled Shengxiandao. Now the game has become one of the most popular web games in China and generated between RMB 60 to 70 million for VeryCD monthly.

 

Bubble in the Sea?

 It is true that when everyone sees opportunity in the same area, then the competition can be bloody. Over the past two years the marketing costs of web games have boomed by 10 times. If the trend goes on, the so-called blue sea will end up becoming a red one just like group-buying market last year.

Actually web games also have their own shortages. Firstly, their life cycle is shorter; usually less then 2 years with some could be as short as several months. Secondly, the low entry barrier certainly attracts flocks of copycats or poor products, disrupting the market. Another problem is that the churn rate of players of web games is as high as over 95%, which is very risky cause game makers always have to come up with new titles to attract users.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto

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Zynga China Sent Chinese Games Overseas

Andy Tian, GM of Zynga China revealed in a recent interview that one of the company’s latest strategy this year would be help more Chinese game makers shoot their pipelines into the overseas market.

The San Francisco-based social gaming giant now claimed more than 300 million monthly active users.

According to Andy, Zynga China has set up three goals for this year. First and foremost, strengthening partnership with Tencent and Sina Weibo while on the look out for potential partners with substantial user base and channel advantage. Secondly, beefing up Zynga China’s R&D and operating team, currently the team is staffed by 150. Thirdly, leveraging on Zynga’s platform, helping Chinese game developers expand into overseas market. The last point has been going well said Andy, and in the second half of this year, more China-made games will launch in overseas market.

Zynga surely could attract many Chinese game companies for its mature platform and user base. In Andy’s opinion, social games have more opportunities in overseas market for foreign users are more interested in them and have higher ARPU than domestic users. Going west is good for companies’ branding and revenues as well.

Though the line between social game and web game was blurred since the two are similar in many ways, Andy still thinks that social games have their own mechanism – it’s more about interactions among people you know, while web games which usually are more fierce are more suitable for strangers.

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2012年7月27日星期五

App Annie Mobile Games Study: Short-Term Hype is No Guarantee for Long-Term Returns

“No one remembers second place” is an old adage that rings particularly true for the mobile gaming market. The attention-grabbing headlines go to Rovio’s “Angry Birds” or Halfbrick’s “Fruit Ninja” but, for mobile game developers and publishers, it can be demotivating to never see your smart, engaging game “in lights”.

In order to shed some light on what really “wins” in mobile gaming, App Annie conducted a study of the U.S. Apple iPhone App Store using market estimates taken from their premium product App Annie Intelligence. The study compared gaming apps in terms of popularity and revenue rankings in the short-term versus the long-term1. Our analysis found that while many iPhone games fly under the radar, never appearing in the Top 25 Grossing rankings of iPhone Games, those that hold a consistent position over a longer time actually outperform the quickly rising stars in terms of revenue. Contrary to popular wisdom, ranking dominance and media buzz are not the only keys to game success. The winning strategy lies in creating solid games that people love to play over and over again and that stay popular over a long period of time, instead of going out in a flash.

Defining “long-term” and “short-term” success

For total U.S. revenue generated within 12 months after launching, “long-term” games outperformed “short-term” games by more than 32 percent on average. In respect to the individual apps that made the most money, the best performing “long-term” game made 83 percent more than the best “short-term” game.

 

Long-term games in the Apple iPhone App Store are classified as games that spent 12 months or more in the Top 26-125 Grossing ranking by revenue. Likewise, a short-term game denotes one that spent three months or less in the Top 25 Grossing ranking. For comparison, an equal amount of the 14 highest grossing apps were analyzed under long and short-term. The purpose of the study was to understand if a game that never made it into the Top 25 but was consistently in the second tier of rankings had an equal or better chance of outperforming those that made it into the Top 25 for a short time. This mutually exclusive comparison removes the ability for a game to be counted twice in each category. The sampling for our analysis included 14 apps in each category. For long-term, games included “Cartoon Wars 2 Heroes”, “The Sims 3,” “Cut the Rope “and “Gun Bros.” For short-term, games included “Global War,” “Need for Speed Hot Pursuit,” “Spider-Man Total Mayhem” and “Stick Stunt Biker.”

Hype isn’t everything

For many outside the gaming industry, it’s easy to think making a hit game is really just a lot of luck. While a hit game does take an element of luck, more can be attributed to game mechanics and an acute understanding of what app consumers want. Playing games is a psychological activity akin to gambling. Although players don’t know it, playing a game for one more round is like pulling the handle on a slot machine. The more you play, the better your chances of winning, and for mobile game developers and publishers looking to make real money, the goal is to keep players playing and spending. The mobile game app market is becoming quickly saturated, and the competition for user attention is heating up. A recent report from mobiThinking found that 1 in 4 mobile apps downloaded are used once and then deleted. This is a painful reality for many developers that invest time and money to create an app. That’s why it’s important to make apps that have longevity – to keep users coming back rather than play for a few weeks only to throw it away like an unloved toy. Such short-term, hyped-up games are like fireworks that explode with downloads, gain all the attention but then fizzle and fade away into thin air.

Freemium games do better than paid games

Price points also play a significant role in the long and short-term success of mobile games. It is important to note that Top Grossing rankings include both paid and free games. For the top ranking long-term and short-term games, 8 of the 14 were free. Long-term games had an average selling price of $3.99 and short-term games had an average of $4.08. Within long-term games, the most expensive game was priced at an average of $9.99 versus $6.99 for short-term. Since more than half of the games do not require payment to download, the no-barrier-to-play strategy gives freemium games a higher chance of revenue success, which is instead generated by in-app purchases.

Action games are good for a quick buck

According to the study, the type of game also played a determining factor in the success the app experiences. For instance, the long-term category was dominated by strategy games. However, action games are the best bet to turn a quick buck as it dominates those classified as short-term games. These findings are not surprising since strategy games take longer to complete whereas action games can be played on and off. Interestingly across both long and short-term, simulation games account for the second largest share.

With games that hold a constant position in the second tier ranking outperforming the quickly rising stars of the gaming app world in terms of average revenue, developers and publishers should craft a strategy to align this with immediate and long-term business goals. These insights don’t necessarily mean that all developers should be in it for the long haul, as making an application involves a great deal of investment. A less established shop may prioritize making many quick games that will be short-lived but drive buzz. Others, perhaps more established with more capital and time to invest, will emphasize building a game around a community that lends itself to longevity. In any case, ranking in the Top 25 need not be the final judgment in evaluating the success of your next mobile gaming app.

1All data is based on iPhone Game Grossing Estimates from App Annie Intelligence.

Click here to access the PDF version of this report.

Find out more App Annie Store Stats here

Note: I wrote this post, originally for App Annie’s blog

 

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2012年7月26日星期四

Complex Problems, Quick Solutions

For a man who seemed to know everything and can do no wrong, hiring John Scully surely sucked for Steve Jobs. But then again, no one except Jobs himself thought he would conquer the world by coming back to Apple, so there are two sides to the story.

Jobs’ job anecdotes only go to show an old wisdom still stands tall: nobody knows anything.

Lest everybody forgets, let’s all walk down memory lane and remember the victims of Yahoo’s unwise hiring streak. That would explain why after all angle of the recent hiring of Marissa Mayer by Yahoo have been explored, the New York Times would run an article title When Picking a C.E.O. Is More Random Than Wise.

Obviously, Yahoo’s board hopes this hiring will correct pass wrongs, and that Mayer would not only be able to appease angry stockholders and skeptical analysts, but she would also be a shot in the arm the company sorely needed. Of course, when it comes to Yahoo, you would think their picking of Mayer, however logical on the surface, would fail in the end, somehow.

Mayer is becoming Yahoo’s fifth CEO in as many years. First, there was Terry Semel, who turned Yahoo into a conventional company from an Internet pioneer, then dropped the ball on search, Google, Facebook, Flickr, Yahoo Answers…. That led to the co-founder Jerry Yang to the rescue, who promptly rejected Microsoft’s 45 billion dollar offer, only to watch the company stay stagnant, causing its stock price to fall off a cliff. Carol Bartz wasn’t much better, and her two years stint at the helm is known more for her swearing than for the marks she made on the company. Somehow, Scott Thompson’s reign became even more disastrous, as he is alleged to have fake degrees on his resume, forcing him to quit only after months on the job.

So if the past is any indicator at all, the Yahoo may just be a bridge too far, even for the first female engineer at Google. However, to expect Mayer to become a cure-for-all is probably why Yahoo failed to find a suitable CEO in the first place. Power originates from the top, that is true, but one man or woman is just an island, and the greatest thing about this concept we call corporation is that the sum will be bigger than its parts. So there is only so much that one person can do, and whether or not things will work out in the end is extremely complex, with a lot of randomness in between. This is why all analyses and predictions are bound to be “too simple, sometimes naïve”, and so are hopes for silver bullets.

Of course, Yahoo is not the only company plagued by this line of thinking. China’s Internet scene is also rapidly becoming a merry-go-a-round. On surface, the most prevalent reason for this phenomenon seems to be that the people are hired to fulfill a specific function, and once things didn’t go according to plan, both sides feel it would be best to separate. But behind this façade, the real problem is that people bring simple and linear solutions to complex situations. As such, things are destined to not work out, even for the best and the brightest.

 

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Report: Almost Every Chinese Adult Netizen Has a Weibo Account

How popular is Sina Weibo in China? The Chinese Twitter-like service saw a penetration of more than 88.8% among China’s digital populace aged more than 20, according to a report by DCCI, a Beijing-based Internet think tank. The whopping penetration means that almost every Chinese netizen has a weibo account.

As of this June, according to statistics by CNNIC, China Internet Information Center, China has more than 538 million Internet users and 388 million mobile Internet users.

As Sina’s core advertising business is confronting with a gloomy picture due to swooned economic, Sina Weibo is what the Beijing-based portal site counts on to turn around, which explained why Sina Weibo launched a flurry of new products/services to monetize the offerings, like membership account that costs RMB 10 yuan per month. Weibo users  who subscribed to membership will enjoy privileges like can follow more than 2000 people (normally a Weibo user can follow up to 2000 accounts), audio post, and so on. In the past, Weibo released Wei games, Weihao and so forth to capitalize on its tremendous user base and traffic, though all these efforts failed to generate substantial revenue for the service.

Sina Weibo is said to be launching a social ads platform in the second half of this year to tap into its revenue potential. Sina invested more than 120 million and is planning to invest another 160 million into the service, now it’s time for these investments to pay off.

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2012年7月25日星期三

Parking + Mobile App Helps You Easily Locate Your Parked Car

If you’re like me and you have a bad sense of direction and poor memory, trying to find your parked car can be stressful.  On countless occasions, I’ve spent walking up and down and around a car park trying to find my car. This problem always results in stress and frustration that really doesn’t need to happen. Now thanks to a company called Dvete, they have developed a mobile app solution called ‘Parking +’ that allows a user to easily and quickly relocate their car in time every time. The app was recently released on the Apple App Store.

Coming from Sydney, I know how notorious the Sydney City Council is for imposing steep fines for not moving your car on time if the parking meter has run out. Parking meter inspectors are usually hated and have even been in public fights over parking infringements. But if someone were to use the Parking + app, there is really no excuse for not finding you car on time.

(Video is on Youtube.com)

So how does it work? Let’s say there is a huge music festival and everyone has parked their car on the surrounding streets. In frustration you park your car really far away from the venue and feel that you aren’t familiar with the location. You know right after the concert you have to rush to your mother’s birthday dinner.  So to be safe, you turn on the ‘Parking +’ app, pick your car brand model such as Honda, then your mobile will automatically detect your exact location using GPS.  You can also add notes and shoot a video or take a picture of the surrounding environment to later jog your memory. You can also set a timer to remind you when you need to return to your car. After exiting the application you rush to the festival. A few hours later you feel a little tired and delirious and you have to get home to rest. Good thing you used the app! Now you switch the app on and it will draw the route on a map and calculate the time you need to get there.  All you have to do is follow the directions and wallah, you end up back at your car in time to head to your mother’s birthday.

For the application to function properly, it requires internet connection and you need to have activated the “Location Services” on your iPhone.  Currently the app supports 130 car brands including Audi, Bently, BMW, Honda, Mitsubishi and Mazda. The app is available in 20 languages including English, Chinese, German and French.  It is compatible with the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod Touch and iPad.

So if you’re like me and you don’t want to lose your car and be at risk of paying ridiculous parking fines, try Parking + out.

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BarCamp Beijing on Aug 5th, Talking All Things Start-Up by Doer’s

 

 

 

 

 

BarCamp Beijing is Back on Sunday August 5th. BarCamp is a FREE, international, user-generated conference featuring open discussions, workshops and demos by people from various industries, backgrounds and walks of life.

If you have a great project, idea, or demo to share with the world? Sign up now to be a speaker at Barcamp Beijing!

Talks are brief (~20 minutes) and audience Q&A/interaction is encouraged.  Anyone with the ability to inspire is welcome – past speakers range from techies, scientists, artists and designers to doctors, musicians, social entrepreneurs and chefs!

If you have knowledge you’d love to share, or a project you’d like to get feedback on – BarCamp is the place for you.

Time/Place:  Sunday, August 5th, at Jin Tai Art Museum, the Hub Culture’s newest coworking space, inside Chaoyang Park West Gate.

Remember this event is FREE and is a great format to speak up and be heard. You may even find potential co-founders or team members there.

 

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58.com Pivoting to An E-commerce Infrastructure

Yao Jingbo, CEO of 58.com once revealed that the Chinese classified site would be making some transition and in the future it won’t be a just a classified service. The company’s latest moves signaled that 58.com might turn itself into an ecommerce infrastructure for local merchants.

Last week group buying service aggregator Qianpin.com partnered with 58′s in group-buying business. On the other hand, the “Flea Market” channel of 58 has introduced new services like payment guarantee and even courier service. What’s more, 58 has already invited companies like Ctrip, Kuxun and Juqi to operate on its premise. All these efforts implied an upcoming transition into an open e-commerce platform for 58.

Speaking of the changes, Yao said that the biggest challenge for Chinese classified sites is credibility because of fake postings. 58 wanted to make a difference by involving itself deeper into the payment process to protect consumers from trapped transactions with the introduction of an Alipay-like service. “When the problem of credibility is solved, 58 will grow into an open e-commerce platform for local life services. What it really means is to better serve the users with classified life services. Anyone who logs into 58 for life service information can directly buy the service online and then enjoy it offline in brick-and-mortar stores. ”

The second biggest challenge to Chinese classified sites, is that the business model of just selling users’ postings/information to local service providers is too simple. What 58 is trying and exploring on O2O and e-commerce platform is a natural step further. His outlook was like:

a) A good sales team that can strengthen the offline service;

b) The original classified site could be hands down turned into an O2O platform;

c) The accumulated traffic and user base can speed up the monetization.

“Users will gradually learn that they can also directly buying services from 58 instead of just looking up the information and then consume offline, and the online payment process should be reliable and controllable. ” Yao introduced that in the near term 58 will focus on ramping up consumer protection.

58 protecting users from trapped online transaction

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How Big Data is Changing Every Business

[This article is written by our Guest Editor Dr. Wenzhe Zhou, Co-founder of Brainpage, which is a big data processing & analysis start-up, focused on cloud-based engine for time series data and sensors. The company’s Hadoop-based service provides developers and industry partners easy-to-use, scalable and flexible database and analysis solutions.]

The world’s information is growing at an incredibly rate. In 2011, 1.8 Zettabytes of data was created – enough to fill trillions of CDs that would stretch beyond the moon. But that’s just the start. Fueled by increasingly diverse sources of rich data such as social networks and “tweets”, mobile devices, a plethora of public and privates sensors, the amount of data collected is expected to grow 50% per year.

More data from more sources opens up more opportunities. You can use the 12TB of tweets generated each day to market products more precisely; analyze thousands of billions of smart meter readings to predict energy use and increase saving; or look into your business performance data to understand failure and increase margin.

The irony is this: while the field is now called “Big Data”, the real value is actually in extracting the micro or individual. Before, a store could only target their promotions en-mass; now they can do it individually. Before, an energy company could only tune their network regionally; now they can do it on a per-circuit level. Before, doctors could only analyze diseases across a population; now they can do it on a per individual genome level. And so on.

In this article we are going to focus on this macro-to-micro value proposition as it relates to businesses understanding their customers better. This is both one of the better-understood use cases of Big Data as well as one that many enterprises are failing to take advantage of. According to Gartner’s analysis, by 2015 enterprises who take advantage of new data will outperform their peers by 20%.

So what does “understanding customers better” really mean? For businesses, gaining customer insight can potentially help in three ways: building existing customer loyalty, gaining new customers, and create new products or business models.

Customer Retention

Earlier this year, a man stormed into his local Target store (Target is a major “big box” retailer, like WalMart, in the U.S.).

“How dare you!”, the man yelled at the store manager, “You sent coupons for baby diapers and strollers to my 17 year old daughter. She’s only 17!” The store manager apologized and, unaware of the company’s big data systems, explained it must have been a mistake. A month later the angry father called back to apologize. He was wrong and Target was right. His daughter was pregnant.

We start with this story – a true example of (attempted) customer retention and up-sell. Customer acquisition often receives more attention and investment than customer retention; however, the 80/20 rule cannot be ignored: 80% of a company’s future profit actually comes from 20% of existing customers. By mining existing customers’ usage patterns (i.e. when someone uses their clubcard, or when someone uses their bank card), smart retailers are maximizing their marketing campaign, supply chain, and upsell efficiency to huge results.

Using advanced statistical methods, smart retailers are creating models that predict what a customer will buy from what they previously bought. By knowing what individual customers will want to buy in the future, these companies can entice consumers to buy from them as opposed to their competitors with targeted coupons and promotions. In our teen-pregnancy example, Target had created a correlation between the change in purchase behavior of the women and when they become pregnant. Indeed, Target claims that if a new parent begins buying baby products from them, they have captured that customer for years. A small amount of analysis and targetting can mean years of customer loyalty.

Tesco is another example. As the world’s second-largest retailer by profit (right after Wal-Marts), the British supermarket has had obtained great results through segmenting their customers and watching their shopping patterns. Using data from the Tesco Clubcard, Tesco will understand what “type” of consumer someone is (“fast-food junkie, family with school age kids, etc.). Segmentation allows marketing efficiencies. Mail or Email promotions can target what a consumer likes, in-store promotions can be tuned to who is in each individual retail location at a specific time and regional advertising can be more targeted. Indeed, this shopping partner recognition has saved Tesco £350 million a year on expensive blanket marketing campaigns since it’s introduced.

Of course, there is also Amazon. Perhaps no company is more famous for their uses of data than this online retailing giant. Anyone who has bought from Amazon is familiar with its “Customers who Bought X…also bought Y” feature. This simple feature is not only useful, but it is also immensely profitable; it is also extremely complex. Amazon doesn’t just look at simple buying correlations, but rather tracks everything a customer does on their site – how long they spend on a page, whether they look at the reviews and so on. They understand there is a simple win-win: if the recommendations are useful, the buyer is happy and Amazon makes more money.

It is this ability of turning data into gold that drove Amazon beyond its traditional shopping model. Amazon mobile apps, which offer users blended online/offline shopping experience, allow Amazon to better understand what each individual consumer likes. The Kindle Fire bring more user preference data onto Amazon’s servers as does their new Silk browser. To a smart company like Amazon, more data equals more sales.

Customer Acquisition

Companies are not just using data to retain and upsell customers, but also to acquire them. “Social” has opened a whole new field for finding customers and big data technologies are transforming how digital advertising works. Here are a few examples:

  • Social Feed Mining – Smart banks and airlines ingest the twitter tweets to recognize a potential customer who might be on the lookout for a new bank or a flight. These companies use natural language processing to look for tweets like, “Can anyone recommend a good home-loan?” or, “Cheapest flight to New York?”. By sending a friendly and targeted response they can achieve huge conversion rates and happy customers.
  • Ad Retargetting – A good sales person will tell you that persistence, or “following leads” is key. Yet advertising has traditionally been hit or miss: either blanket websites, TV or billboards with your ads or hope that one or two targeted ads (i.e. “Search Engine Marketing”) are enough to do the trick. A look at modern advertising metrics will tell you that neither method has particularly good conversion ratios.

However, using new data technologies, companies like Chango in the U.S. and Uniqlick in China are changing this in the digital domain. By understanding which internet users are most likely to respond to an advertiser’s value proposition – either by what that user has searched for or the sites they’ve visited – they can deliver targeted ads, continuously, to just the people who are most likely to respond. It’s like Google AdWords (search ads), except across the entire internet instead of just the search results page. The result is more useful banner and non-search advertisements, higher conversion rates for advertisers and more value created by the websites that provide the ad inventory space.

Create New Products and Business Models

Data is not just creating massive opportunities for optimization, but also opening entirely new business practices. In the energy sector, Opower, a Software-as-a-Service company, is using data to improve power efficiency. Partnering with utility providers, the company analyzes families’ power bills and provides a report that compares each family’s usage to their neighbors along with data-based recommendations for energy savings.. Opower’s service has covered millions of homes in the US and is estimated to help American energy consumer save $500USD each year.

In the healthcare sector, San Francisco-based SeeChange sees a better way of designing health insurance plans through understanding clients’ personal health records. The company analyzes a substantial amount of data obtained from personal health records, health claims databases and pharmacy data to identify patients with chronic illness who would benefit from a customized compliance program. In addition, it also offers cash incentive plans to help patients complete specific health action plans to meet clinical goals, with its data analytics engine monitoring the process. SeeChange now provides services for SMEs with employs between 2 and 200 people.

In the retails sector, a customer retention marketing platform Retention Science has launched to provide e-Commerce businesses with actionable data analytics tools to cost-effectively prevent customer churn and encourage reengagement. Its Customer Profiling Engine is a learning engine that uses algorithms and statistical modeling to build custom retention optimization strategies. Analytics are performed in real-time to ensure up-to-date customer behavior predictions, and at the same time, dynamically create offers based on customer unique characteristics. The company has received $1.3 million seed round comes from multiple sources including Baroda Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Double M Partners and several prominent angels.

Whether it’s optimizing existing opportunities or finding entirely new opportunities, big data and new data technologies opens up an unprecedented opportunity to create experiences targeted at the individual. With near ubiquitous information technology being a part of every business in the 21st century, every business is generating data and should focus on collecting every piece of that they can. The difference between the winners and the losers will be those that can effectively store and mine their data for gold.

Related posts:

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2012年7月24日星期二

Divergent Ways of Failing

If you need another proof that the PC ear is gradually coming to an end, here it is: more people are in using their mobile phones for internet browsing, surpassing the PC. The market seems so promising and crucial that even Amazon is developing smartphones. But guess who wouldn’t be basking in this momentous and glorious event? Most of the phone makers.

 The downfall of Kejian (a well-known Chinese phone maker in the 1990s) put the last nail on the coffin of the first generation of Chinese cell phone makers. Not just Chinese phone makers, but overseas phone makers are getting killed as well, and not just RIM or Nokia.

How could that be? First of all, it’s hard for everyone to be winners, so there are bound to be losers. Yet in many occasions, not being first is not synonymous with being broke. Take game, the most popular source of revenue for smartphone, for example. Game as a category may be on the demise, but it’s still making a boatload of money.

Of course, that’s not to say every loser will make money, especially in a contracting market. Take PC games, for example. Playing these games is fun, but making these games is not for the faint hearted, and turned out to be too much even for the man who buried Babe Ruth’s ghost with a bloody sock. But for most developers who didn’t suddenly switch lanes mid-career, gaming, even, PC gaming, still makes money.

So a demising market is tough, but it does not necessarily condemn the participants to death, let alone a blossoming one. Why people lose money requires another explanation, and in the end, it comes down to two things: vision and execution.

Foreign phone makers are crumbling because they didn’t have vision and the ability to adapt quickly, and it’s hard to catch up when you are facing competitors such as Apple, who excel at both the visionary and the execution part of the game. But that doesn’t mean they have problems with execution.

Okay, maybe not RIM, who just sucks at everything and is killing itself pretty quickly, but both Nokia and Sony responded to the challenge with some pretty good products. Lumia 900 and Xperia have good reviews to show for their effort, if not sales. The fact of the matter is, Nokia and Sony are not good enough for Apple and other competitors who are operating at a much higher level, but by ordinary standards they are doing fine. This is like Karl Malone running into Michael Jordan, there is no shame in losing.

Not so for the bankrupting Chinese phone makers. These companies failed because they cannot even execute. They are not Karl Malone, but Jacque Vaughn. At the height of its power, Kejian was more focused on landing Chinese players in the English Premiere League instead of building better phones.

Kejian is not the only Chinese companies suffering from inattention, of course, because it just seems so either to make money some other ways. Develop real estate or put the money to use in the stock market all seem so much easier than dig deep and make cell phones. The Chinese companies are afflicted by one of the original innovator’s dilemmas as well as the tendency to choose the path of the least resistance, so while they met the same fate as Nokia, their path couldn’t be more different, and that makes all the difference.

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2012年7月23日星期一

TechNode Partners With MacWorld Asia to Host Developer Forum on 3rd August in Beijing

MacWorld Asia will be held in 2nd-5th, August in Beijing. Today, we are very happy to announce that as the official partner of MacWorld Asia, TechNode will be hosting a half-day Developer Forum in the afternoon of 3rd August at CNCC.

The forum is compose of three sessions: Mobile Games, Design of Apps, Product and Marketing which we believe are the most important keywords for app developers. We are also thrilled to have a couple of great speakers from local big companies such as CEO Kingsoft, Director of Tencent Open Platform, from international companies such as Popcap, Flipboard, EverNote etc, from wel-known local startups such as Chukong Co. Inc., SNSGames, Intsig, Domob and from academy, Hunan University, The Central Academy of Fine Arts etc.

To be a good developer in the mobile industry, you need not only good knowledge of latest technology, but also good sense of product design and marketing strategy.

Please do come if you are free, and it should be fun and worthy of your time!

The detailed agenda below:

13:00-13:30 Registration
13:30-13:50 Keynote by Fu Sheng, CEO of Kingsoft

Sesstion I: Mobile Games

13:50-14:10 Keynote by Gray Mi, Director of Mobile Popcap Asia
14:10-14:50 Panel Discussion:

Gang Lu, TechNode.com (MD)
Jia Yan, VP of Chukong Co. Inc (producer of very popular iOS game, FishinJoy)
DIAO Jinchong, VP of Yinpei Games (Unreal Engine)
XU Lei, CEO of SNSGames (publisher of Zombie Farm)

14:50-15:10 Keynote by Shi Jing, Manager of Tencent Open Platform

Session II: Design of Apps

15:10-15:30 Keynote by VP of Product, Flipboard
15:30-16:10 Panel Discussion:

Zhuohao Wu, Director of UE, Innovation Works (MD)
Prof. Fei Jun, Interactive Design, The Central Academy of Fine Arts
Prof. Ji Tie, Vice Dean of Design Institute, Hunan University
Zhang Wei, Co-founder & Chief Innovation Director, EICO

Session III: Product and Marketing

16:10-16:30 Keynote by Eric Chen, Marketing Director of EverNote
16:30-17:10 Panel Discussion:

Linda Jiang, VP of UMeng (MD)
Samuel Chen, Account Manager of IntSig
Xinhua Liu, CMO of Kingsoft
He Zhang, CEO of Domob
Seng Li, VP of Dolphin Browser

 

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Hackathon Coming to Philippine in August, Named WebGeek DevCup

Founded 2009, WebGeek Philippines, is a community that serves as a venue for Geeks, Developers, Startups and Tech Enthusiast in Philippine. WebGeek has organized and hosted several major events over the past years as part of WebGeek advocacy to create a thriving community of like-minded tech and startup devotees.

Pinged by John Arce, founder of WebGeek Philippines,

On August 25, 2012, WebGeek Philippines will bring you the WebGeek DevCup, an all-day hackathon extravaganza that will give rise to the most creative and most skillful team to deliver the best web application.

John told us, “in this day-long hackathon, each team will be given six hours to develop a web application based on the theme to be given that day. Presentations will be delivered from 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM. During this time, teams are expected to have accomplished a web app that will either be fully or partially functional. The web apps will be evaluated according to technical complexity, user experience, social relevance, and originality. The panel of judges consists of seasoned gurus in the field of web application development. Registered participants only need to bring their own laptop and development tools (pre-packaged libraries, widgets, and frameworks), and Internet connection, power, space, food, and drinks will be provided.”

The details about this hackathon and registration can be found here.

If you are not that familiar with Philippine startup scene, we highly suggest you read this great post on SGEntrepreneurs.

 

 

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