About Web: 八月 2012

2012年8月30日星期四

San Francisco High Tech Bloggers: Meet Your International Counterparts, Including TechNode!

Starting from 17th September, on behalf of TechNode, I will be in SF and join the Orange Blogger Bus Tour. A big thanks for Orange Silicon Valley (the Silicon Valley arm of France Telecom-Orange), together with an elite team of bloggers from around the world, we will spend a week in the Bay Area visiting local companies and startups. And to start with, on behalf of Orange Silicon Valley, I’d love to invite all tech bloggers to attend Blogger Day event on 17th.

The following announcement is originally posted on Live Orange Blog.

On September 17^th, Orange Silicon Valley are hosting an exclusive gathering of local and international tech bloggers in San Francisco to ponder about technological innovation.

eCairn and Orange Silicon Valley (the Silicon Valley arm of France Telecom-Orange, one of the world’s leading telecoms with over 170,000 employees worldwide) have worked hand in hand to enable this congregating of tech enthusiasts and experts to take place in the world capital of innovation.

These men and women from around the world will explore cutting edge technologies and consider the following question:

Where will innovation in Silicon Valley come from and how will it disrupt everyday life as we know it?

Consumer tech demos from Orange Silicon Valley will be followed by discussions about innovation, talent acquisition and data infrastructure as it applies to Silicon Valley. This event will also enable bloggers from the Bay Area to share thoughts with their counterparts from France, UK, Australia, China, and Finland.

These international bloggers are all part of the Orange Blogger Bus Tour, an elite team of bloggers from around the world who will be spending a week in the Bay Area to find out how the Valley functions, and meet with companies and start-ups to get an idea of where innovation is heading in the near future.

If you are a blogger in Silicon Valley or San Francisco and you want to join in to share your thoughts about innovation and find out what Orange Silicon Valley are up to, then register now (all registrations pending validation by the organizers)!

Date and location

Monday 17^th September 2012, 11am-5pm

Orange Silicon Valley

60 Spear street, 11th floor

San Francisco, 94105

GuoheAD MIX, Puzzle out the Marketing Dilemma for Mobile Game Developers

During the latest ChinaJoy game festival held in Shanghai couple weeks ago, we got constant lectures from big names predicting that client game is yesterday, web game is today, while mobile game is tomorrow. In what seems to be echoing the prediction, we’ve seen innumerable startup riding on the trends which supposedly lead to tomorrow and flocked to gold mine the future by making their contribution to the thriving mobile game world.

Burgeoning Mobile Game Market

According to a recent report, over 70% of Apple app store’s IAP (in-app purchase) were made within game apps, even though game only represents 17% of total apps in the Apple ecosystem. The sheer revenue potential speaks to a grand future picture. However, what always accompany the opportunities are risks and competition. Spotted the early promising sign of mobile gaming, in addition to some long-established mobile game developers like WiStone, PunchBox and so forth, big guys like Juren, Shanda and Renren also branched out to the new and untapped territory.

With deep pockets under their belt, they could hands down beef up a brilliant team during short amount of time to craft mobile games and then splash tens of millions RMB to promote the outcomes. So facing the mounting competition and changing landscape, how to stand out from the crowd and bring as much attention as possible to its offerings at minimal and even no cost becomes a big challenge for small and medium-sized mobile game startups.

Unmet Needs of Low Cost Marketing

Previously at the very early stage of mobile gaming sector, “free for limited time” is one of the most common tricks developers resort to when coming to marketing within the Apple ecosystem. It’s free and generates a lot of buzz, which is good, but the practice is neither scalable nor durable. For example, when an app is provided “free for limited time”, in the first few days the downloads might be skyrocketing, then gradually it’d decline.

Often times, other than “free for limited time”, developers’ll have to seek help from CPC-based mobile ad platform. With more and more developers entering the market, the costs for CPC-based ads are rising irrationally. For example, UAC (user acquisition cost) has hit RMB 20 per user which is unaffordable for smaller teams. Given the fact that most mobile games won’t last for 3 months, you might not even able to make enough revenue off the players during such short life cycle to justify the marketing cost.

According to Neo Zhang, founder of GuoheAD, with traditional mobile ad platform, you won’t know who’ll see your ads featuring your latest title which costs you ten months and big money to get shipped. Sounds like the classical problem of “Yeah we knew that half of our ads budget was wasted, it’s just we didn’t know which half”.

On the other hand, it seems that CPC-based mobile ads were employed to do some tricks working around Apple’s App Store. According to some industry insiders, developers buy mobile ads in an aim to play around with ASO, namely App Store Optimization, to rank up in App Store. It works for a while, but requires a lot of input and you better pray that Apple doesn’t alter its ranking algorithm from time to time.

So are there any decent ways of promoting mobile games that are cost-efficient, durable and actually effective?

Cross-promotion Platform MiX to the Rescue

Well there might be. Leveraging on the experience in its well-received mobile ad platform and understanding on the needs of small and medium-sized game developers, GuoheAd, one of the leading mobile ad platform in China debuted the first Chinese mobile game-centric cross promotion platform MIX to make app marketing an easier task for developers with limited budget.

The CPA-based platform delivers GuoheAD’s interpretation of mobile game startups’ needs in marketing: it should be targeting the right AUDIENCE in the right CONTEXT with delightful EXPERIENCE, or ACE by initials.

MIX gives developers the opportunity to pop up full-screen billboard ads in game apps when someone is playing with the game, which gives you the right audience (players) in the right context (while they’re playing games). And since the ads was fully customizable (appearance, when and how to show up), the ads experience is also good without interrupting users too much. For example, ads can only show up when player pause the game or level up in the game. And you can change the ads appearance like backgrounds, buttons, images and so forth to make it fit in. This is utterly important if you don’t want users to get fed up with pop-up ads.

Most importantly, MIX is totally free to use for now. It comes along with an Exchange community where you can find other developers whom you can do cross-promotion with. Better yet, you can cross promote your own game pipelines to route users from faltering games to new titles. That could be a very practical solution for small time developers with big pipelines.

The service which can increase conversion rate by 10 times has been sent live here http://mix.guohead.com/home/, you can check it out and give it a try if you’re currently developing and marketing you own mobile games. At the end of the day, what could be the better place to advertise a mobile game than do it within a mobile game?

SlideIdea, A New Presentation Tool To Get Audience Engaged

What is the most important thing for events? To get the audience engaged. If you ever hosted any event, spoke at conference or moderated panels, you might find that for a long time there’s NO easy way for speakers and audience to interact with each other. There were some ‘traditional’ ways, e.g. audience sends question in text message to certain gateway number, then the text could be picked up and projected to the screen. It sounds easy but remember the organiser should talk to SP to get a number set up which could be quite annoying. What if you wanted to do a ballot? Asking every audience to send keywords to the gateway number maybe. The set-up would be even more complex and you may also suffer a long delay if there is a large crowd.

Beijing-based startup SoftCompass developed a new Windows 8 based application called SlideIdea which might bring a good solution for the issues addressed above. SlideIdea is a new presentation tool designed for the new mobile era. It’s different from old tools like Keynote or Powerpoint in that sense that it focus on the actual showing of the presentation and include cool features where the audience can engage in voting or send speakers a message or post question simply using their mobile phones.

Since SlideIdea is based in Windows 8 which runs on both PC and Tablets, it is designed to enable you create presentation easily and smoothly on both PC and mobile devices. Like other presentation tools, SlideIdea comes with some handy functions for presentation, such as whiteboard, highlighter and pen. But the uniqueness in SlideIdea is the features which allow the audience become an important part in your presentation. Even there is a huge crowd, the audience can still ask questions, post comments or participate in surveys arranged by the speaker via their mobile phones or other connected devices (by accessing m.slideidea.com). The result will pop up on the screen so that the speakers are able to know what the audience think and wonder during the presentation.

You may question on how many users will actually use SlideIdea to create presentation as MS Powerpoint and Apple’s Keynote are very popular. Kristin, the lead of product & marketing for SlideIdea thinks it would not be an issue. “In our formal release version you will be able to use your ppt’s in Slideidea, as well as the other way around. The same with keynote, with the exception that you will not be able to use your Slideidea presentation in Keynote.” She said.

The iOS and Android version of SlideIdea will be available by end of this year. I asked Kristin why they decided to work on Windows 8 as the first platform. She told us that Slideidea was one of the first developer team in China to received a developer token from Microsoft for their new Windows 8 platform and saw this as a great opportunity to create something fresh and innovative for a new platform.

SlideIdea is a re-invented presentation tool for the mobile era. As a startup company it’s a challenge to release a product into a mature app store and your marketing activities needs to be really intense. To be one of the first apps into a new platform like the Windows 8 can therefore be a great opportunity for us and our app to get publicity and users attention.

The mission of SlideIdea, the new PowerPoint or Keynote of this new era where Share, Interact & Mobility is key works.

NEST To Nurture Entrepreneurs in Hong Kong

NEST, a newly-founded investment venture is to support entrepreneurs and enterprising new start-up businesses in Hong Kong. Its mission is to eventually take HK brands around the world.

Founded by Mr. Simon Squibb,the founder of creative design consultancy Fluid, NEST is structured to deliver both financial, backing, branding, sales and marketing support, enabling the city’s entrepreneurs to build their businesses and help them develop new, iconic Hong Kong brands.

We talked to Simon who told us that Nest has historically invested sub $1 million per deal, and then brought in 3rd party investors for between 1-5 million USD follow-on capital. The companies invested by NEST so far include successful new business concepts: Red Packet, Foodie, I-Love.com brand including iLoveSoHo and iLoveLKF, as well as Loft-Asia and Millionaire-Asia. “We are most interested in technology-enabled and brand-driven consumer businesses”, said Simon.

Talking about the Hong Kong market, in Simon’s opinion,

HK market is a key test market and anchor market for branded consumer businesses. We enter at a stage where the supportive HK environment is highly beneficial to the early development and positioning of these businesses.

Besides funding, what NEST can provide for the startups is deal specific, said Simon. It’s an investment venture, but for Simon, it’s also a platform that provides not just capital but the business consulting, marketing and brand building expertise that is needed to grow a good idea into a great scalable business.

The way to connect with NEST and apply for the fund is very old-style, just like what you find on its simple website: Write to them.

The startups in Hong Kong might be different, but the startup space definitely is getting more and more active. (You may check our previous coverage on Hong Kong startups space).

Once You Go Down the Wrong Path

Look here, here, here, even on our very own Technode, you can see a detailed description of the fall of Chinese luxury B2C. The high flying industry of yesteryear crashed and burned after several years of rapid growth. In this regard, it is better than the group-buying trend, which buckled almost as soon as it got started. But what’s devastating about the luxury B2Cs is that, almost everyone who was paying attention knows the business model was doomed right from the beginning.

The luxury B2Cs seem to share the vision and business model: China is rapidly becoming one of the biggest markets for luxury goods, and there is a large market untapped. The luxury B2Cs want to reach beyond the nouveau riche. By offering steep discounts to luxury goods, these sites hoped to allure the Silent Majority to splurge on LVs.

So basically, B2C sites will do what the Internet is good at, providing a democratizing experience and make a boatload of money doing good. This all sounds fine, except for one little glitch: this is not how the luxury goods business works.

Tod’s do not spend millions hiring the likes of Anne Hathaway to sell its product in shoes-for-less. While everyone is price conscious at some point, luxury brands usually don’t aim at the shoppers of 99 cent stores. So a person with the most rudimentary understanding of the luxury good business would know that these brands would do everything in their power to prop up the price of their goods.

That’s why famed American journalist James Fallows’ observation that there are no shoppers in Prada stores in China actually makes business sense: making profit is only part of the store’s function. Premiere brands need to have stores in the most exclusive part of the town even if the act itself loses money, because this is the only way to convince consumers the outrageous price of their goods make sense. Once the consumers buys into this logic, the brands can make money many times over.

That’s not to say luxury brands don’t give discount. But even when these brands are cutting price, they want to give off the appearance it is doing so as a special offer, thereby protecting the brands’ exclusive and high profile image.

This is something that Gilt grasped but most Chinese B2Cs didn’t. Gilt makes luxury brands’ discount seems exclusive, thereby enhancing the brands’ image even when it is actually offering a discount to consumers and getting rid of inventories for the brands. Chinese B2Cs, on the hand, emphasized cost saving. This act is almost sabotage against the brands’ efforts.

Therefore, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that no brands would provide these B2Cs with goods. Faced with this hurdle, the B2Cs had to resort to make individual purchases overseas, bring them back to China clandestinely, and then sell them on their sites. In essence, there is no different from individuals who buy from overseas then sell the goods in China, a trend that has been growing long before the B2Cs got started.

Of course, this is also a business model that cannot be scaled. In addition, this business model does not in any way enhance the capacities of the B2Cs. Without anything valuable and distinctive to offer to the brands, no brand will cooperate with B2Cs, and the B2Cs are forever stuck as very small time players. After all, once you go down the wrong path, there is no coming back.

Shanda Games To Release More “Light” Games

We once wrote that game companies in China have found a blue sea of web game. Actually more and more companies have realized that a “lighter” game portfolio could be the new driver to their business. Compared to traditional client games which are experiencing slow-growth in both revenue and market, mini-client games, it seems that browser games or mobile games are about to bring along more prominent results.

Last week, game publisher Shanda Games revealed that it would release more ‘light-weighted” games in the near future. Currently the company has already been operating two successful mini-client games Miracle3 and Wushuang, which are co-operated with other game platforms like 9377 and 37wan. The next plan of Shanda is to launch some in-house developed mini-client products including CaihongDao, and Xingchenbian.

As to its web games, CEO Tan Qunli told that the Championship Manager Online (co developed with Square Enix) and the web version of a Miracle Series called Hanjiang will be officially launched by month’s end and next quarter respectively.

What’s more, this Shanghai-based game company has also been building up its own mobile game platform with a 3^rd party app store. Within this gaming center of Shanda, various products could be launched and downloaded easily. The mobile version of its classic MMORPG The World of Legend will be made available on this new platform. Also, through the partnership with Square Enix, Shanda will be entitled to publish the mobile version of Final Fantasy I, II, III.

All these moves in shifting the company’s direction implied that Shanda currently is undergoing a transformation period. Rumor has it recently that Tan Qunzhao CEO of Shanda Games will quit his job very soon, following the departure of Shanda Game’s president and two VPs last year. Tan is the founding member of the Shanda Group. He joined the company in 1999, taking charge of many significant businesses like the Shanda community and the R&D department of the gaming arm.

Industry insiders said that Shanda’s client game business has been remaining stagnant for quite a while, a transformation into “lighter” games and efforts into overseas market could be the new momentum for the company. Though it requires a lot of cash injection. On the other hand, the privatization of the company has cost the group nearly RMB 3 billion thus giving the game branch even greater burden in monetization.

Tencent Has A Tiny Gadget For Weixin Lovers, An Earphones With a Push-to-Talk Button

With over 100m users and dramatic growth, Weixin is becoming a life style for Chinese like people here indulging in QQ. Tencent is not only looking at the big picture of Internet TV market by bringing you the iCE Screen, but also working on some tiny things which may make your digital life more easier.

ZHANG Xiaolong, the leader of Weixin team posted a photo on his Weixin account. It’s an earphones. Like Apple’s one, it comes with convenient buttons that let you adjust volume, control music and video playback and (possibly) even answer or end calls on your iPhone. The interesting bit is that it also has a PUSH button which allow you send Weixin voice message. So no need look at the screen when using Weixin, you can just use the Playback button to listen to coming message and hold the PUSH button to send out voice message.

Weixin team is based in Shenzhen where you may find tens of hardware manufacturers, so making a tiny gadget like that should not be a big deal. We are not sure yet how Tencent’s going to do with this earphones (a real product for sale or just a gift for fun?) and how much it costs. The thing is what Tencent’s doing on hardware and on Weixin is getting more and more interesting, isn’t?

Take Care, Gary Wang! So Long, Tudou!

18th August, 2011 Tudou, the respected leading online video company got listed on NASDAQ; 21 August, the merge of YouKu and Tudou has been approved; 24 August 2012, th trading of Tudou on NASDAQ is suspended; 00:34 of 24th August 2012, Gary Wang, the cofounder and CEO of Tudou said on its weibo, quite emotionally,

7-years old Tudou, is going to retire tonight. Thanks to everyone for every piece they’ve left in this story… I will see you in next interesting dream.

Last time I spoke to Gary is back to 2011, 18th August, hours before Tudou’s IPO. He said, “I am very excited and also very looking forward to the new journey for Tudou.” And I guess few people could expect the new journey would only last one year. Not sure if it’s good ending for Tudou, probably only Gary can tell.

According to some report, with the merge, Youku side will take 71.5% share of the new company and the rest 28.5% is for Tudou. Gary will be the board member of the new company for a year, but will not be involved with any daily operation, in other words, Gary actually retires too.

The industry cheers the merge because the new company is clearly the leading online video company in China which could largely bring down the cost of video content. Anyhow, we will see how it goes soon in near future.

Gary, is one of few Chinese entrepreneurs I truly respect, he is a poet rather than a business man, which make him very unique in Chinese internet. Take care, man! We really looking forward to seeing your new dream.

Vancl Tightened The Belts And Cut Down on Ads

The great input in marketing surely will become a big burden for the bleeding fighters in the ever-lasting B2C war. Recently Vancl, the Beijing-based apparel B2C decided to stop squandering by putting on a more economical marketing budget.

Back at the beginning of 2011, the founder Chen Nian once boasted that the company would spend RMB 1billion in total on ads. “Celebrity endorsement has just cost millions RMB, but there is more to come in the future series of promoting”, Wang Chunhuan, SVP of the company, said in a recent interview. She also revealed that last year the company actually had spent about RMB 500 million on advertising.

The cut-down will first being with ads on portals and vertical sites and outdoor ads at bus stops and metro stations. According to Wang, the effect of the previous marketing input will still last for some time, thus the retreat won’t affect its traffic for now.

Last year, Vancl rolled out a series of eye-catching advertisements all over major Chinese cities featuring controversial celebrities and funny slogans, which became a hot topic and generated a lot of buzz. The company has finished six rounds of fund raising by now.

screenshot of VANCL

Umeng Data Insight Report Q2 2012: There Is One Samsung Phone in Every 4 Android Phones in China

Umeng, the Beijing-based leading and largest provider of mobile app analytics and developer services in China, just released its Data Insight Report for Q2 2012.

The report gives a very informative overview of current iOS and Android market in China. Here are some highlights:

In Q2 of 2012, the growth rate of active iOS and Android devices in China is higher than that globally.
iPhone4S share in China grew 4.6% and is projected to become the main iPhone model. As of end June, despite its not being launched in China the new iPad share still increased to 13.5%.
Samsung has been the top brand for Android device in China, with one Samsung device for every 4 Android devices. HTC and Moto take the 2nd and 3rd place.
Samsung Galaxy Ace, Motorola Defy, Xiaomi Phone, HTC Incredible and Samsung Galaxy SII are the Top5 Android phone in China, local brands ZTE and Huawei are also getting popular.
Android 4.0 is now the most active Android version in China with share in Q2 grew 2.8 times, rising to 8.9%.
The number of smart phone users is growing rapidly in 2nd and 3rd tier cities in China. The Android usage in particular has caught up with top tier cities.

The full report can be download via here on Slideshare (Note, you need VPN to access from China).

Umeng Data Insight Report 2012 Q2 from Umeng

Tencent TV Is OUT! Tencent and TCL Present A Smart Screen, Named iCE Screen

Tencent said it would not make smart phone, and it might be true. But it does not mean Tencent does not want to enter Hardware market. Instead of jumping into the messy smart phone market, Tencent smartly picked the one Steve Job also loved, the TV. Today, Tencent and TCL held an event together presenting a new super gadget named iCE Screen, a 26 inch smart TV.

iCE Screen runs a highly customised Android-based system (Android 2.2) which integrates Tencent’s popular services, Video Chat, Online Video, Music, Games and Photo Album. It also comes with an App Store where you can download hundreds of applications from third parties.

Some hardware specifications:

CPU – Duo-core Cortex-A9 1G
GPU - GPU Mali 400 with OpenGL ES 2.0
Screen resolution – 1366*768
RAM – RAM:768M; FLASH 512M
USB2.0 slots x 2, HDMI x 1, SD card slot x 1

iCE Screen is now available to buy on QQBuy and the price is set to a very attractive price rmb 1999 (almost half of the price of the New iPad 16G).

Jing.fm: Talk To Your Personal DJ

Are you also a music junkie like me who always make a long collection of playlists on iPod? For instance, “Classic Piano” is for quiet nights, “Crazy Techno” for party and “Jazzbaby” for lazy afternoons? We surely want various music styles at different moments. But how to find the right song at the right time without the pain of sorting and organizing? Jing.fm might be your solution, the music start-up lets people find songs by tags describing occasion, music genre and most importantly, how you feel.

Jing.fm is designed in a minimalist way, which looks just like a radio app. Type key words into search box, for example “Female voice + Classical”, Jing.fm will present you with the songs it thinks fitting you. It’s like you are talking to a smart DJ, and he is only playing the music for you.

Jing.fm playing music

Choosing music by tags

Recently we had an interview with the founder Shi Kaiwen, and he shared the story of this product and some insights into Chinese digital market.

Shi himself is a big music fan, he plays the piano, and majored in electronic music producing in college. He can be called a music entrepreneur for his life and work has always involved music. Jing.fm is not his first startup project, five years ago he had founded two other music startups, respectively focusing on social music platform and music recommendation. Throughout all these years, he gradually taught himself coding language and developed an in-depth knowledge of the digital music market.

Jing.fm allows users themselves to describe the music they want and choose the right songs according to certain algorithm. “This kind of service has never been done by any music sites ever. “said the founder. When speaking of another popular music product Douban.fm, he commented that, “It’s very nice though still sort of monotonous in that users’ needs for music styles can be very changeable and spontaneous sometimes. You can not meet their demands by just analyzing the listening history.”

Though still in beta testing, the service was warmly welcomed by lots of music fans. The team now has only 10 staff including coder, editor slash musician, system architect and even psychology researcher. Shi advised entrepreneurs on that,” If you do not really understand the digital music industry, please don’t try it impulsively. The problems of copyrights and bandwidth can be much more troublesome than you ever imagined.”

360 Search Now No.2 Largest Web Search Engine in China, Here Is Why

360 (NYSE:QIHU) quietly launched its own search engine 5 days ago. We can’t remember how many years it took Google to become the No.2 largest search engine in China, but for 360 it turns out 5 days are enough. News broke out today that 360′s market share on search has soared to be No.2 in China. Baidu surely is still the No.1, but 360 has taken place of Sogou with ~10% market share.

How could that be possible? I called several industry friends including one manager-level 360 staff, the response from them is more or less the same: 10% market share might be a bit exaggerated, but they are not surprised that 360 could achieve this in such a short time.

Thanks to 360′s two core product, 360 browser and 360 landing page.

According to 360′s Q1 financial report, 360 browser has 273millions monthly active users, and its landing page hao.360.cn (which is the default landing page when you open 360 browser) has average 77millions daily unique IP, and the average daily click-through on page is about 295millions. So where the magic happened is that 360 has now set the browser’s and the landing page’s default engine to its own one (see the screenshot below). Before, by default, 360 was using Google search engine. The users of both product don’t even notice the change of the default search engine, they have started using 360′s search engine. With the huge user base, 360′s taking the No.2 would not be a surprise, right?

360 obviously is announcing the war against Baidu, although 360 promises to leave the options to users to choose which search engine (Baidu, Google etc) is the default one. It’s not a big threat for Baidu for now, but 360 might be very tough and ambitious in future (You may still remember the fight between 360 and Tencent). And, sadly that Google’s search market share will be shrinking again without 360′s support.

There were no further official comments from 360′s management level, yet. They only confirmed that, “Yes, we are still testing our own search engine.”

Founder of 115.com: We’re Not Dying, We’re Getting Better

Last week we wrote about cloud storage service 115.com shutting down public sharing service. Very soon the news stirred up discussion on the status quo of the company. Users are concerned that this popular platform was on the edge of closing down, and some even claimed that 115.com was already dead.

The company’s announcement on discounting its public sharing service reveals that the decision was made “upon notification by the departments concerned”, and “due to copyright infringement concern”. Lai then went into details about the change. “It’s inevitable, the public sharing service involves risks in privacy, copyright and policy. Some of the users are utilizing this function to spread some illegal and inappropriate contents.” The company has always aimed at going public, while the goal might be compromised by the sudden blow.

Cloud storage market has been seeing many new players coming into play these days including some big guys, but why 115 risked being the first to discontinuing this most favored feature? “We took the lead in closing the public sharing service, because the bigger the company develops, the greater the risks it will face in this area. For a healthy and steady future of 115, we made this decision calmly, and I think it is actually a must for this market. We are doing this to set a good example for the peers.”

Just like Lai said, the three main problems of policy, privacy and copyright have always been very big obstacles for storage services home and abroad. Earlier this year, the online file storage and viewing service Megaupload was shut down by the United States Department of Justice for copyright infringement.

Obviously 115 has prepared for a rainy day, when it discontinued this controversial service of public sharing, it promptly launched a new service called “115 Circle” (in beta testing). It is a private social platform based on 115 cloud storage service, providing users with a safer and more effective way of sharing. The 115 Circle will be a paying service aiming at SMEs, organizations, public institutions and some social platforms like alumni sites.” For companies, this service can definitely replace OA, QQ group and RTX Tencent’s corporate IM tool. And it works even better”,said Lai.

On rumor of 115′s death, the CEO responded that, “This is entirely groundless doubt. 115 has been running very well, the user data is in safety, and the capital is sufficient.” The company has invested RMB 70 million into developments, and also finished raising more than US$ 20million in Series A round late last year. B round is still under way and many VCs have showed their interests.

Founded in 2009, 115 is among the first batch of the Chinese cloud storage service and is also the most used one. The platform is favored by over 40 million users for its convenience in use. CEO Lai is a young entrepreneur who founded two tech start-ups in seven years, and both of the companies were valued at over hundreds millions RMB. Last year he left his startup Startos and focused on 115.com.

Korea’s Mobile Social Game, Anipang Hits 2.5M Installs Within 20 Days, Thanks to Kakao’s Game Center

Anipang, the Korea’s mobile social puzzle-3 type puzzle game was launched on July 30, 2012. Only took ~20 days, Anipang has reached 2.5m installs and 1.5m DAU. It’s now the No.2 on the Top Grossing Apps and No.1 on the Top Free Apps in Google Play Korea. “No ads, No cross promotion, just by word of mouth online and invites using Kakao’s social graph, we are very surprised and excited to see the super-fast growth of Anipang.” Angus Lau, the business development VP of SundayToZ, the owner company of Anipang told us.

SundayToZ is the leading social games developer in Korea. Established in 2009, SundayToz games have been played by 7 Million users in South Korea and abroad. In the past year, the company have shifted focus from web to mobile social games. It currently offers six different games, including the hit title Aqua Story, which has over 3 Million users on both social networks and mobile platform.

Angus told us, Anipang is not a brand new title but rather a re-release of an earlier title the company launched in Cyworld in 2010. ”On Cyworld, there has been 400,000 installs since the game first released in 2010, but since we released the new Anipang on Kakao’s game center on July 30, it only took ~15 days to reach 1m installs and ~20 days to get 2.5m. ”

KakaoTalk, the very popular mobile messaging apps claims over 50m users from the world (mainly from Korea) recently launched its game center (for Android at this moment) where mobile social games can be hosted and take the advantage of Kakao’s social graph.

As we reported, Kakao’s also invested by Tencent which owns a similar Weixin (aka, WeChat). If you ever questioned about Weixin’s business model, given Weixin’s 120m registered users, obviously it could do a better job once its game center launched.

OpenLanguage, The Open Platform for Language Learning

You must be familiar with the term Open Platform which is one of the key invention driving the modern Internet business. OpenLanguage, founded in 2012, the Shanghai-based startup is trying to extend the Open idea to language-learning market. Its mission is to use mobile technology to help busy adults learn languages. In this article, Jenny Zhu, co-founder of the company walks us through what she is trying to accomplish with OpenLanguage.

OpenLanguage is actually founded by the core team is behind the immensely popular ChinesePod. Hank Horkoff, co-founder of ChinesePod, a Canadian entrepreneur living in Shanghai for the past 10 years is the other co-founder of OpenLanguage. Together with Jenny Zhu, they started OpenLanguage after the acquisition of ChinesePod in the beginning of 2012.

As the name suggests, OpenLanguage’s open to students, publishers, teachers and schools. OpenLanguage is a software platform that provides them with modern publishing tools, language learning materials in addition to the best of modern web and mobile study tools. As Jenny introduced, “The development of mobile technology has opened up tremendously exciting opportunities for us to rethink language learning. There’s so much more that we can leverage than the current options out there. We want to help people learn and teach in a much more convenient, enjoyable and data-driven way.”

Jenny explained to me the three key problems OpenLanguage’s trying to solve.

Modernizing lesson publishing - If you look at traditional publishing, language books are usually general, outdated and hard to customize. But this one-size-fits-all economics no longer needs to apply. With a web-based publishing system, OpenLanguage seeks to empower talented teachers to produce world-class learning materials and distribute them throughout the world onto smartphones and tablets. Looking at my experience with ChinesePod, learners’ success largely depends on convenience, relevance, practice opportunity and motivation. And that’s what we want to work with publishers both traditional and new to deliver.
Bringing technology to the classroom - While adult students are increasingly demanding a more convenient study option, most schools either lack the experience or funds to build their own technology solutions. OpenLanguage offers software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to help them (and individual language teachers) to take advantage of these modern, digital tools. Students can use the OpenLanguage Tablet Textbook, while teachers and administrators can use the Open Academy features to manage their students and track their studies. Jenny believe that the form factor and content of the Tablet Textbook helps increase students’ interaction with their learning input. Users can study on their way to work or class and be primed about the key language. Therefore, in class they can dive right into speaking practice and receive very targeted feedback. This could make the classroom much more efficient and effective.
Using data to solve student problems - As more and more study activity migrates to digital devices, the resultant data-footprint can be used to solve student problems. At the heart OpenLanguage wants to target traditional language proficiency exams. While those exams are the predominant benchmark for school enrolment officers, HR and immigration officers, they are often poor reflection of one’s real communication competency. “That’s why so many high TOEFL and IELTS scoring students can’t even deal with basic daily exchange.” Jenny said, “But as more study moves online, it enables us to track students’ learning over months or even years and provide a much more comprehensive and realistic assessment of their language ability.” Just as Facebook is increasingly used as an alternative to traditional resumes by potential employers, OpenLanguage believe something similar will happen for language learning. OpenLanguage wants to help create a “big data” alternative to traditional language proficiency exams. This “Language Graph” will be a collection of all students’ study activity (collected with their consent) with a simple dashboard overlay to help potential employers, university enrollment offices or immigration officials to get a more accurate sense of their language abilities. “It’s almost like Google Analytics, but for language learning.” Jenny said.

Education is a long-term commitment, and you need to be in it for the long haul and want to make an impact. Obviously Jenny and Hank understand that. They’ve got a 5-year roadmap for OpenLanguag. As they said, the first stage is to promote the idea of the Tablet Textbook which is done by their iOS and Android apps for smartphones and tablets. It’s designed as the next generation textbook. It provides all the learning input of a traditional book, but brings all the content into life. For example, all the dialogues and review content come with text, annotation and recordings. Students can also save target words and study them as flashcards. They can also choose from a wide range of topics in our lesson library to match their own level and topic needs. Smart features such as the SRS flashcards help students memorize words and learn how to use them in real contexts. All in all, it is a much more convenient, multimedia and “smart” learning experience.

For the international market (i.e. English as instruction language), OpenLanguage now has Spanish, French, Italian, English and Arabic, and has also signed on partner publishers for Russian, German, and Portuguese. I asked Jenny about the relationship with these partner publishers. Jenny said, the publisher are language experts in their chosen language. So they provide the content and academic backbone where OpenLanguage gives them powerful publishing tools and modern lesson media production training as well as some sales and marketing support. This alliance helps student study the most practical, updated and authentic language on their favorite mobile devices.

As for the business model, for the end-users (students), OpenLanguage use the subscription business, i.e. students purchase a monthly or annual subscription; and for schools, it’s an SaaS model. (Note, OpenLanguage offers a white-label solution for schools, i.e. their students will see an app from their school powered by OpenLangauge. It’s to help schools with their branding and gives them a mobile strategy.) OpenLanguage does a revenue split with publishers.

Jenny and Hank both are firm believers in the Lean Startup approach. They’ve iterated very fast based on customers feedback, whether it’s from individual customers in the US, in China, publishers and school customers. Jenny said, now over 95% of OpenLanguage’s paying customers are using smartphones and tablets to access our service, which confirms their belief of the advantage of the Tablet Textbook and using mobile device to learn languages.

“After all, why can’t you learn a language like you use Facebook? Learning should be convenient, smart and fun.” I can’t agree more on this.

Rules of the Game

If TV ratings are fake, in what should advertisers trust? Some is the dilemma in China today, as news leaked that, CSM, the only Chinese company still churning out TV ratings data, may be massaging numbers for customers willing to pay the price.

This is big news (for some people), because after the withdrawal of Nielsen from the Chinese market, CSM is the only game left in town. Nielsen left because of a corporate re-shuffle, but also because it could not crack the Chinese market. The problem was twofold. First, for all the hoopla regarding the death of TV, it is actually doing okay. In the United States, while traditional media like magazine are going down faster than a rock, TV is apparently is holding steady, both in terms of viewership and revenue.

Call it the paradox of the Internet era. People went negative on TV because in this age where everyone is connected and could get everything they want. The scholar Cass Sunstein famously worried that, with the Internet rapidly becoming a mass media, every consumer will get a routine dose of “daily me” tailor specifically for them. That did happen, but TV didn’t suffer as big a hit as other media; apparently, the habit of sitting in front of a tube and doing nothing is just too strong.

This fortunate fate has left TV as the last true mass media; while less people are watching TV today, its relative importance has only grown, and this has allowed TV stations to charge a great deal of money for their time. This is especially true in China, where TV remains the king, and big players such as the state owned CCTV and local powerhouses such as Hunan Satellite TV can still draw millions and make fortunes.

With the media business still being within the realm of political control (what isn’t), the likes of CCTV wields enormous political power in addition to its financial strength. And lo and behold, it is a major backer of CSM. Obviously, this is put Nielsen at a disadvantage from the get go.

Yet, what really sunk Nielsen was not its lacking of major backers. As an international standard bearer, Nielsen could afford to stand on its own. What it truly lacked, however, is the understanding of how the ad game is really played in China.

The advertising business has always been opaque and filled with its share of under-the-table type of deal, a la Mad Men Season 5 style. But the game in China is especially fierce. Again, there are two reasons for that. First of all, the majority of Chinese business don’t really have any use for marketing if it cannot bring back the dough (and then some) immediately. In the Wild East, tangible assets (preferable accumulated quickly and can be transferred overseas a.s.a.p.) are all that matters. Secondly, Chinese businesses have no use for the so-called third party and the rule of business. In an environment where everybody have a mentality of “I got mine, Jack” and where everything goes, no one thinks anyone has impartial or any rules as set in stone.

So basically, Nielsen got the business run from the beginning. Ratings themselves are important, sure, but how it is used is even more important. Only when the ratings become part of the Chinese way of doing business can they truly function, and sadly for Nielsen, its products were simply never part of the mix.

So while CSM’s negligence, even malignance is detestable, it probably wouldn’t come as a shock to the industry. There, then, is the lesson for everyone who wants to break into China or the Chinese advertising business: get yourself dirty and learn the rule of the game.

The Ice Age of Chinese Luxury B2C

Word has been whirling that luxury site Jiapin.com would be shut down. Throughout the luxury e-commerce market, more players are losing their flame. The downturn started since second half of 2011 when Wooha.com closed down, Xiu.com layed off its staff and CEO of VIPKu resigned. Why the crisis all of a sudden and any chance they can weather the downturn?

Bad News Pouring In

The Chinese luxury B2C market got started from 2009 on. At that time, lots of entrepreneurs and investments saw the picking up trend in this sector and flocked to it. Unexpectedly, in two years bad news pours in. Nice dream becomes a nightmare and a hot potato for many investors.

Jiapin.com once boasted that, “In the luxury B2C area, we are definitely best of the best. Our monthly sales reaches tens of millions RMB.” While lately rumor has it that the company is having a major downsizing with 200 jobs cut (almost half of the startup). CEO Yang argued that it was just a strategic layoff in which some unnecessary positions and expenses were cut off, and the aim was for an efficient and optimal group.

Jiapin isn’t the only bad news broke out lately. Luxury channel of the portal site Sina is also said to stop business operation very soon. Another one ShangPin.com shared the bad luck in that it did a big layoff this February…

Excess Supply?

China has undoubtedly become the second largest luxury goods market now, but why the great demand hasn’t brought great profits to e-tailers? Actually even many top designer brands have come to China, they are not really into the idea of e-commerce. Mostly luxury companies are very serious about its brand image, and they want to protect the image under luxurious price. They don’t need to compete with low-price merchants by allying with e-tailers, because that will go against its marketing positioning and may also violate its own pricing system.

According to iResearch, the market researcher, sufficient supply is the biggest problem for luxury B2C sites. When the top luxury brands hold their supplies, the e-tailers can’t ensure the stock, and even can not have a say in pricing. Furthermore, the brand licensing is also strictly controlled by the luxury brands, which puts the e-tailers in a dilemma. As a result, most luxury B2C players resort to overseas purchasing agents for supplies. This is clearly not a good solution for the order will thus take a long time to finish (sometimes over months), and the quality of the goods can’t be guaranteed either.

From a consumer perspective, it is easy to assume that most luxury lovers do not really care about the prices. B2C sites offer discounts for its users, but the customers are not grateful. Actually they doubted if these discounted goods are authentic and if the quality is good.

Industry insiders said that consuming habit of the luxury goods lovers and the problem of supplies are the two main causes for the sudden crush of this market. Try out goods in brick-and-mortar store is part of the wonderful shopping experience, which can never be realized online.

O2O: the New Direction

A solution customized for Chinese luxury e-tailers is badly in need, and it might be O2O. Recently Vipmssp.com is launching an “Authentic and Full Price” business model. Unlike the low-price competition, the conception of “original price” sounds very innovative. To obtain authentic goods from the brands and make available the latest products in time can ensure the quality and supplies at the same time. Currently some top brands are still taking a wait-and-see attitude towards this model.

This June, Jiapin.com won a $15 million investment from Macy’s and Intel Capital and the site will cooperate with Macy’s offline stores by selling some Macy-only products on Jiapin’s online channel Omei.com. The O2O model combines the offline merchants and e-commerce platform, which is seemly a feasible transition for luxury e-tailers, as it offers customers with good shopping experiences as well as attractive discounts.

Sina Weibo Reached 368millions Users And $10m Ads Revenue in Q2

Today Sina (NASAQ GS:SINA) released its financial report for Q2 this year. According to the report, by end of June this year, Sina Weibo has reached 368millions registered users and 36.5m daily active users; and for the first time, Sina disclosed its revenue generated directly from the advertisment on Weibo, over $10m which is roughly 10% of total ads revenue on Sina.

According to the local media, Charles Cao, CEO of Sina is quite happy with these figures. He said, “the social media ads is still at very early stage in China, and we need more time to educate the market. We need keep improving our ads display algorithm and accumulate more user data, but what we have achieved from Weibo so far is still very encouraging. ”

It’s reported that in Q4 this year, Sina Weibo will launch its AdWords like self-service ads system. And the payment system, credit system and data mining system will be ready in Weibo platform by end of this year too.

Although we heard more and more negative comments about Sina Weibo, like less active users, more censorship etc, from this financial report, it’s a bit strange we don’t see that sign at all. It says in Q1, the number of daily active users was about 9% of total registered users but in Q2 it has reached 10%.

Talking about the future plan for Sina Weibo, Charles admitted that the company still need keep investing the Weibo to make sure it becomes the No.1 social media in China, by then Sina will be more confident on monetizing Weibo, the new social media’s value.

Why Startups In Hong Kong Are Different

[This post was written by Paul Orlando, an entrepreneur with experience in the US and China who currently runs a tough three-month program called "Startup Bootcamp" in Hong Kong. He co-founded and ran a startup in New York called Chatfe, providing communications services for online communities. ]

There’s an ongoing discussion on what characteristics of the Silicon Valley startup model can be globalized or even should be. Hong Kong is one example of a wealthy city where minimal tech entrepreneurship is currently found. This is detrimental to the city’s long-term competitiveness. But that is changing.

It’s also easy to judge a place by big trends and generalizations without being aware of what’s happening among niche players and leading indicators that can make a difference.

Reasons often given for Hong Kong’s lack of startup culture include lack of cultural support (Hong Kong parents have a lot of sway on their children’s choice of career and prefer corporate jobs), a lack of investors looking at tech (preferring to invest in real estate, for example), and a lack of computer science talent graduating from local universities (where finance, law, and medical degrees are more highly respected). Meanwhile, other tech locations in Asia, such as Beijing and Singapore, see much more activity, both in support from local governments, investors and in terms of development talent willing to work at startups.

But things are changing. Hong Kong today reminds me of New York in 2008 when people started to come together to develop another generation of tech startups in their own way, different from Silicon Valley. For example, startups in New York, similar to startups in Hong Kong, often think about their business model from the beginning — earlier than a startup in Silicon Valley might. Some startups in Hong Kong, like Makible and 8-Securities, are also building on Hong Kong’s historical manufacturing and finance strengths. Realizing that different parts of the world have different realities, what also plays up to Hong Kong’s strengths is a form of grassroots entrepreneurship combining locals and expats from other countries. That combination of different people in Hong Kong’s small market means startups often have a natural focus on serving an international audience.

That makes startups in Hong Kong different.

Tencent Advances in Game with New Acquisition and Rising Revenue

Tencent revealed in a semi-annual report that it has completed the acquisition of Singapore game company Level Up. The Shenzhen-based Chinese Internet giant announced earlier this year that it’d buy 49% of Level Up with US$ 26.95 million.

Games play a more and more importance role in Tencent’s businesses. According to Tencent’s latest earnings report, peak simultaneous online for its QQ Game Platform user accounts were 8.8 million while online game revenues increased 4.6% QoQ to RMB5,564.7 million. Meanwhile, bolstered by heated social game titles and item-based sales within these games, revenues from Tencent’s community and open platforms also increased 7.8% QoQ to RMB 2.22 billion.

Ma Huateng, chairman and CEO of Tencent said that by leveraging Tencent’s leading social platforms across both PCs and mobile phones, the company continued to build stronger user engagement and gain tractions among players. On the other hand, the company’s open platform initiatives paid off according to Mr. Ma, bringing benefits to both Tencent users and partners.

Marlin Lau, president of Tencent disclosed in the latest earnings call that the company grabbed more than 30% of China’s SNS/Web game market. Luo Shuohan, CFO of Tencent also mentioned that ARPU for causal games on Tencent platform is between RMB 55 and 100 yuan, while for MMORPG the number is between 100 and 140.

App Annie Secures $6 Million to Set the New Standard for Global App Store Market Data

App Annie, the industry leader in app store analytics and market intelligence for the global app economy, today announced the company has closed $6 million in Series B financing. The round was led by Greycroft Partners, with participation from a global network of investors, including e.ventures, Infinity Venture Partners, Kii Capital, angel investor Jarl Mohn and Series A lead investor IDG Capital Partners.

App Annie’s app store data suite is ubiquitous among app publishers, journalists, VCs, media companies and platform owners alike. Eighty percent of the Top 100 Grossing iOS publishers worldwide rely on App Annie’s products for insights into downloads, revenues, in-app purchase and ranking data across categories and geographies, as well as trend analysis across the iOS, Mac and Google Play app stores. In addition, the company’s premium market data service, App Annie Intelligence, is used by major app distributors such as Nokia, as well as more than 50 percent of the Top 20 Grossing iOS publishers, including GREE and Storm8. Today’s announcement follows on the heels of the company’s entry into the Android marketplace with the launch of App Annie for Google Play.

“App stores are driving today’s digital economy,” said Dana Settle, partner, Greycroft Partners. “App Annie is an invaluable tool for any business that needs access to the highest quality app store analytics and market data. As the marketplace for mobile apps and digital goods continues to explode, App Annie is incredibly well positioned to become the de facto analytics and intelligence standard across all platforms.”

As the distribution of digital content has shifted away from the open web to digital superstores, a new standard for app store analytics and market data is required for publishers to inform their content distribution strategies. App Annie’s success to date is a result of the depth, breadth and quality of its data for the iOS, Mac and Google Play global app stores. The company will use the new funding to accelerate its product roadmap and expansion into new app stores worldwide. Within the next year, App Annie users can expect to see new analytics and intelligence services for different platforms and content areas. In addition, funds will be used to increase the company’s presence within the U.S., China and Japan, three key markets in the global app store economy. App Annie has more than 30 employees and plans to significantly increase that number within the next year, particularly in its San Francisco and Beijing offices.

“App Annie’s investors share our vision to establish a new global standard in app store market data, and collectively bring the expertise and networks required to accelerate our plans,” said Bertrand Schmitt, CEO, App Annie. “There is a clear need in the industry for high quality market data, and many businesses depend on our data to succeed in the global app store economy. Within the next year, our customers can expect to see a whole host of new feature and platform integrations for App Annie products.”

The Bloody Price War Starts At 9am Today, 360Buy Vs. Suning/Gome/DangDang/51Buy

This post is about the B2C eCommerce market in China, but nothing technical and I don’t even feel I am writing a tech-related post… well, you may take it as a drama.

Believe or not, starting at 9am today (15th August, 2012), several major B2C sites will cut down the price of all home appliance, and everyone promises they will offer the cheapest price. In the bloody price ware, one side is 360buy, and the other is the union of Suning, Gome, DangDang and 51buy.

360buy – Starting from 9am, we promise all home appliance sold on 360buy will be cheaper than Suning. If Suning dares to set the price of any product to RMB1.00, we will sell it for FREE;

Suning – 9am, 15th August 2012, we promise any product sold by Suning including home appliance will be cheaper than 360buy. If you find out the price of any product is higher than the one on 360buy, we can change it at once. And if you have bought that product at the higher price, you can get refund with twice of the price.

Gome – Starting at 9am, we promise the price of any product sold on Gome online shop will be 5% cheaper than 360buy.

DangDang – Today, we will fight together with Gome, against 360buy.

51buy – All price will be cut down from 9am. Starting from September, we promise any product sold on 51buy will be cheaper than 360buy.

So it seems that 360buy has pissed off everyone. But don’t ask me why, it just happens…like this.

You never know eCommerce can be so entertaining, don’t you? Anyway, make sure your wallet is ready and check out these sites at 9am. Hopefully you can even get something for FREE.

This Weekend, Meet TechNode and Internet Startups at WMusic’s MaxStar Music Festival

We said we wanted a SXSW style event in China. Obviously it’s very hard as we TechNode only knows the technology, little about Music and nothing about Movie. But we did not give up trying, and we are making our first step.

We are very happy to announce the partnership between TechNode and WMusic, one of the fast growing digital music publishers in China. This weekend, 18th-19th August, WMusic’s MaxStar music festival will be held at Ditan Park in Beijing, and for the first time, you will see quite a few Internet companies setting up their booth there introducing their service/apps to thousands of young music fans.

I know we don’t have much time left, but if you have something (maybe a music app, a mobile game etc anything targeted at young generation) to show at the festival, please you can just drop us email on contact At technode.com. We can try to find a place for you and some free tickets for your users.

It should be fun!

Dangdang CEO: Price War Won’t Last Long

The Chinese B2C warfare in this year is more ferocious than ever. And it’s not over yet; many have declared that in the next half it would be even tougher. Fortunately someone is calling for a truce. Li Guoqing said in a recent interview that, “I don’t believe my peers still want a price fight any more. The capital has been run out, and it’s dangerous to drag the merchants into this losing game. ”

Vicious Competition

Dangdang lost RMB 99.5 million in the first quarter of this year, yet it made a net income of RMB 3.1 million from the same period last year. The loss was mainly due to the increasing input from a flurry of price wars.

Li thought that currently the prices wars were more of a show for investors. “If you really want kick your competitors’ ass with price war, do it, not just say it”, said him.

2012 seems to be the year of price war for ecommerce industry. Though allied with Gome, Dangdang still has to fight against Amazon, 360Buy and Suning. As a listed B2C platform, the pressure is high. “If you do not follow any one of the campaigns, the sales drop rapidly at once.” the CEO revealed.

As Li predicted, this war is going to end soon. “There must be a price rise next year. Even though, I doubt if some can survive because the previous loss is too huge. Small and medium sized B2C sites will shut down first, and I think by June 2013, some of the big platforms will quit as well. By then the investors will have calmed down.”

Li obviously is not optimistic about the future of the B2C sector. Not like him, some other e-tailers still are jumping into the playground. Talking of his peers, Li said that, “I didn’t know what Liu Qiangdong (360Buy CEO) said about his capital, personally I thought he has burned it out. And I believe apart from Dangdang, most e-tailers have run out of their money.” When asked about brick-and-mortar stores like Suning’s great efforts on e-commerce recently, Li claimed that they should not panic for the e-tailers just help the sales number grow, but nothing else has changed.

Last Wednesday, partnering with FTuan and Gaopeng, Dangdang started its group-buying service in 30 cities. Li thought group-buying is a low price market, which still belongs to the B2C sector. In the future it will profit by sharing revenues with merchants. Dangdang will operate the business as an open platform, that’s why they chose four partners.

B2C Goes Astray

Recently on Sina Weibo Li replied about the vicious fashion among e-tailers that they overstated their traffic, and false revenue numbers. “I heard from two book suppliers of 360Buy that they can profit RMB 70,000 every week by buying books from the site and sell them to it again.” This is clearly a forge, but in China there is still blank in the administration on that front.

Li pointed out that playing numbers has been a very common phenomenon.

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