I’m at Widgets Live right now. I think there is something cool about the widgets/gadgets craze, and the idea of creating tools that get integrated into other people’s apps and experience. More on this later.
6th Nov, 2006
At Widgets Live!
31st Oct, 2006
Interesting organizations in CnbloggerCon
Social Brian Fundation: The 2nd Chinese Blogger Conference is mainly sponsored by a fundation called “Social Brian Fundation” (SBF) which is morped from CNblog.org, a long time grassroot publishing group sterring in China. SBF believes that “we can be smarter, only when we are more connected.” Issac Mao from Venture in China (renamed to “We make art not money” after the conference in which a blog called “we make money not art” from Europ was introduced.) is an active organizer of the fundation’s projects.
CIC data: “CIC data is a China based Internet word of mouth research and competitive intelligence research company. We enable our customers to leverage publicly accessible data including online conversations (e.g. Blogs and message boards/BBS) and e-commerce product information for insight about their industry, market, products and services.” Founded in 2003 with office in Shanghai, China and Birmingham, AL USA. They help clients to monitor and anlayze 40,000,000 online communities and 6,000,000 individual bloggers everyday.
BlogKu Media: BlogKu Media is the first blog media site in China. It’s developed by ConceptIdea Technologies, a Web 2.0 techonologies company. BlogKu is now running 5 channels, including: video and entertaiment, electronic proudcts, Starpapa, Game fans and Postshow. CEO Edwyn Chan was a little shy in the pannal discussion (maybe because he is a native Cantonese speaker from Hong Kong), but when I talked to him in Cantonese, he was very talkive and passionate. He believes e-commence will be the future road for Blogku media since when people read the great review of an interesting electronic product, they would like to buy it right away. Edwyn designed a different way to do e-commence. First proudct review and commnunity, then online merchants.
We-make-money-not-art & We-need-money-no-art: When we have a few panel disussions on how to make money from blog and blogging, we had another even more exciting section about ART and media. It is a realtime satelite presentation with a group called V2- Unstable Media in RotterdaM. We have three panelists: Qing Zhang, artist and curator of Shanghai Art Musume, Dr. Gino Yu, Associate professor from Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Chinnese blogger/translator/mirror site webmaster of We-make-money-not-art, aaajiao, (Chinese site name is We-need-money-no-art) . Artist/author of We-make-money-not-art Régine Debatty (BE/IT) presented her blog and share her stories about her blog’s growth with us from Dutch. In return, Qing Zhang shared his story how blog.sina.com spent one month to convince him to go blogging. His point about blog is very interesting:
” Blog is really an amusing thing. Art reporters don’t like to read official annoucements in China but like to dig in my blog. They want something with personal feeling, emotion from my words and pictures. After I started blogging, I was interviewed by jiounalists almost everyday. The more they read my blog and know me, they got more questions.”Â
During the dinner after the conference, Qing Zhang was convinced to move his blog out of sina and to set up his own blog. =)
One of my favorite speak in the 2nd Chinese Blogger Confererence (Hangzhou, Oct, 28-29, 2006) is by Jeremy Goldkorn, author/publisher of DanWei, a website about media, advertising, and urban life in China. Jeremy shared his idea how to build a site with personality:
- An easy-to-memorize name: Make no sense to have different domian name and site name, keep it simple for people to remember;
- Reliable source of news: Build your credibility;
- Unique contens: “Publish fresh information about China that you won’t find anywhere else“, as Danwei’s vision.
- Consistancy: We don’t want people to get lost or confused on our style, contents, scope, etc when they visit our sites.
- Transparency: Be brave enough to admit your mistake.You won’t lose people’s trust and, in stead, will have more traffic.
- Focused scope of interest: Don’t blog about everything. Keep the topics in a certain areas.
- Diversity: Cater different needs. Remember that there are a lot of people who are not “Internet Freak”. There are a lot who don’t hang around online all the time, don’t care about IT. Jeremy used a Chinese saying to describe the diversity of blogsophere: æž—å大了,什么鸟都有.(When the forest grows bigger and bigger, there are various kinds of birds.)
- Open: Encourage participating and bulid community.
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How can we “mix and match” the right contents/topics to build a right community?
How to balance the serious stuffs and å…«å¦(the Eight Diagrams) news ?
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Related reports about this event:
Some reports on this event:
Rebacca from Global Voice: Keso’s keynotes, the session on “From China to the world, from the world to China“, and discussion about the future of blogging in China.
Chow from www.inmediahk.net has also written up a citizen report on the conference (zh).
Luyi Chen from China Web2.0 Review ’s report: Chinese Blogger Conference 2006.
27th Oct, 2006
Winners of 2006 Zero2IPO-China 50
Oct. 13 2006 Zero2IPO, a leading integrated service provider in the China venture capital and private equity industries, announced the top 50 most valuable venture in China. More than 30 top venture capitalists and 100 executives from fast-growing enterprises attended the gala in Shenzhen, Guangdong. Top 3 winners are: Spreadtrum (a wireless chip design company), Wensi Chuangxin (IT outsourcing company) and Oak Pacific Interactive (an internet company).
Selection criteria:
The candidates are either nominated or selected by organizer Zero2IPO. They were evaluated and ranked according 5 criteria:
1) Management team and share structure;
2) Business model and competitiveness;
3) Industry and market;
4) Current financial status and forecast, and
5) Operation risk and contingency plan.
ZeroIPO screened out about 100 companies and more than 30 top venture capitalists ranked the top 50.
Top Three Winners
Intelligence chip (IC) designer SpreadTrum ranked No. 1 with a total score of 127. Runner-up was an IT outsourcing company Wensi Chuangxin (which means “Idea and innovation†in Chinese) with 126.25 score. The third place was internet portal Oak Pacific Interactive. These three were considered to be able to generate the highest ROI for investors.
Statistics
- More than 50% are Internet company: 26 internet companies were in the finalists, accounting for 52% of total. Other industries include: IC design (6), telecom (5), service (4) and software (3).
- About 80% are from Beijing and Shanghai: 25 companies and 14 companies are from Beijing and Shanghai respectively. There are 7 from Guangdong provinces among which 3 are from Shenzhen.
- Around 50% were founded in 2004.
Completed list can be found here: http://www.zero2ipo.com.cn/download/VentureRanking2006News_en.pdf
and http://www.zero2ipo.com.cn/download/VentureRanking2006News_en.pdf
19th Oct, 2006
Back from Shanghai Ad-Tech 2006
I went to Shanghai Ad-tech 2006 expo in Pudong Shangli-La Hotel this morning. Compared to the number of talks, the number of exhibitors is kind of small, only 20. I talked to 65% of them. There are several foreign companies, coming from Japan, USA and even Slovakia, to look for Chinese partners . There must be much more in the audiences.
85% exhibitors are Internet companies, a few are mobile marketers.
They are in three categories:
1. Search engine: Accoona, a business directory and information search engine providing advanced search to modify result by region, scale of company, and person’s name.
2. Marketing/ad technologies: Lyris (ListManager) and Radica (Email Marketing Management, EMM), iCast (Rich media technologies)
3. Advertising network: Creative, campaign management, data management, analytics, and affiliate
Interesting conversations:
Grigo: I heard that your company is No. 1 in China, but while I was visiting your Web site, I couldn’t find much.
Answer: Well, we are a big but low profiled company. (To be honest), we don’t want people (competitors?) to copy us through our site. You can find out more with this brochure.
Grigo: (with a Hong Kong company) How do you like doing business in mainland China?
Answer: Well, we beat Espolon and got a big client in China, but we want to deal with international/global clients rather than Chinese.
Grigo: puzzled… Isn’t it that China has a huge market and plenty of opportunities?
Answer: (continued)… We found that whenever you deal with Chinese, you need to think about the worst cases of how they would cheat you….
Grigo: I read a piece of news that you got a very important Chinese client recently; do you have an office here?
Answer: Not yet, but we are looking for a partner/partners here today. Actually, it was the client first found us in California.
19th Oct, 2006
Is the future a Swarm of Vertical Searchs or Googl…
Via John Battelle I saw a Searchenginelowdown post highlight research that shows higher user satisfaction with Become.com vs. Google for shopping tasks. As you know, I think there are specialized search opportunities that can help people get the information they are looking for much more easily. The challenge for Become.com is discoverability and people’s desire to do better than what they are currently using–something like a 80% satisfaction rate for Google (and a 68% for Yahoo!…sorry I need to look for the source.)
Here’s an excerpt using the broadcast TV vs. cable TV analogy:
“when we talk about Google killers I don’t think we’re talking about a single source - we’re talking about an aggregate of sites that do specific tabs of Google better….This will not be an overnight thing, but rather a year-by-year thing in which we will watch Google’s search share erode to more targeted specialty engines….Cable didn’t kill broadcast, but it certainly hit it hard, so perhaps “killer” isn’t really a precise term.”
There are 2 problems. First, is consumers may already be satisfied with Google, or to be more precise, the halo effect from success with general searches overcomes the specific failings of Google in a specialized area. Second, specialized search engines still face the issue of getting advertisers, and ultimately they are dependent on Adsense or Yahoo! publisher network.
I still think that Become.com and other specialized search plays have a chance. I don’t think the answer is predestined either — if numerous specialized search engines do a great job in their vertical, then people will be trained to look for better search tools, and everyone (in specialized search will win). So lets see if Become.com, Kayak, etc. can prevent us from falling into the Google singularity…
18th Oct, 2006
Everything is a game
I have a weakness for powerful, confident, reductionist theories that seek to explain everything through one single factor or dynamic. In college, it was Marx, Freud, Durkheim, Smith, Mill, Weber and deTocqueville. Now, its all about the fundamental game dynamics that drive all successful applications.
Here are some posts about China:
Living is China is like a Role Playing Game (RPG) - Sinosplice
Travel in China is like a Fantasy Novel - VioletEclipse
Here are some posts about social applications:
Ebay and MySpace are Games - BusinessWeek about Amy Jo Kim
In fact, every great consumer social application is a Game - See Amy Jo Kim’s eTech preso at Shufflebrain.
Today, I was talking with an entrepreneur about some exciting mobile ideas…everything is under NDA so I can’t share! But I find myself evangelizing this insight that I originally got attending Kevin Werbach’s Supernova 2006.
UPDATE: Just found a link to Wired’s guide to Second Life. I’ve been wanting to go to Second Life for a while and this might give me the impetus to go explore there.
15th Oct, 2006
The 95-5-0.5 rule of social applications
Via Hank Horkoff of Network Sense and ChinesePod (I met him via Adam Bornstein), I saw an post by Jakob Nielsen on participation inequality in social applications. Well, the 80-20 rule and even “long tail” have become conventional wisdom, but I think this post highlights the extreme nature of this rule in social applications. I first saw this when I was running ClickRewards, a 5 mm member loyalty program (not really a social application). Getting customers was easier than we thought, but activating them (driving engagement) was more difficult. This applies to blogging and social applications in an even bigger way.
Some examples that drive home the point:
Inequalities are also found on Wikipedia, where more than 99% of users are lurkers. According to Wikipedia’s “about” page, it has only 68,000 active contributors, which is 0.2% of the 32 million unique visitors it has in the U.S. alone.
Wikipedia’s most active 1,000 people — 0.003% of its users — contribute about two-thirds of the site’s edits. Wikipedia is thus even more skewed than blogs, with a 99.8-0.2-0.003 rule.
Participation inequality exists in many places on the Web. A quick glance at Amazon.com, for example, showed that the site had sold thousands of copies of a book that had only 12 reviews, meaning that less than 1% of customers contribute reviews.
Furthermore, at the time I wrote this, 167,113 of Amazon’s book reviews were contributed by just a few “top-100″ reviewers; the most prolific reviewer had written 12,423 reviews. How anybody can write that many reviews — let alone read that many books — is beyond me, but it’s a classic example of participation inequality.
I met Jimmy Wales when I was at Intuit where he really put a point on this. Its really 1000 people who really drive the entire engine at Wikipedia!
Is this your blog? or your membership program? or your loyalty program? or your mmorpg?
Here is Jacob Nielson’s prescription:
- Make it easier to contribute. The lower the overhead, the more people will jump through the hoop. For example, Netflix lets users rate movies by clicking a star rating, which is much easier than writing a natural-language review.
- Make participation a side effect. Even better, let users participate with zero effort by making their contributions a side effect of something else they’re doing. For example, Amazon’s “people who bought this book, bought these other books” recommendations are a side effect of people buying books. You don’t have to do anything special to have your book preferences entered into the system. Will Hill coined the term read wear for this type of effect: the simple activity of reading (or using) something will “wear” it down and thus leave its marks — just like a cookbook will automatically fall open to the recipe you prepare the most.
- Edit, don’t create. Let users build their contributions by modifying existing templates rather than creating complete entities from scratch. Editing a template is more enticing and has a gentler learning curve than facing the horror of a blank page. In avatar-based systems like Second Life, for example, most users modify standard-issue avatars rather than create their own.
- Reward — but don’t over-reward — participants. Rewarding people for contributing will help motivate users who have lives outside the Internet, and thus will broaden your participant base. Although money is always good, you can also give contributors preferential treatment (such as discounts or advance notice of new stuff), or even just put gold stars on their profiles. But don’t give too much to the most active participants, or you’ll simply encourage them to dominate the system even more.
- Promote quality contributors. If you display all contributions equally, then people who post only when they have something important to say will be drowned out by the torrent of material from the hyperactive 1%. Instead, give extra prominence to good contributions and to contributions from people who’ve proven their value, as indicated by their reputation ranking.
So I think 95-5-0.5 has a more clumsy mouthfeel than 80-20. I used to tell people that “you will have the 80-20 rule in your top decile” which means something to direct marketers but few other people! So maybe 95-5-0.5 it is then.
15th Oct, 2006
Using Technorati RSS Feeds
Steve Rubel’s post on using Technorati RSS Feeds. Need to think about how this applies to China and China VC (which doesn’t really have an active blog ecosystem, or a clear community utilizing a set of tags).
His ideas on how to use this:
- Track when a blogger discusses a specific subject. This seems incredibly useful, even for creating different channels for our own blogging activity. Can we use this on ourselves?
- Drill down deeper into your favorite blogs.
- Track memes that others don’t follow. Its nice to piggyback of off established memes but what if the memes we are most interested in haven’t already gel’ed?
- Bucket your influencers into different feeds. I didn’t really understand this.
Anyway, take a look at the original post and see what this might be used for.
15th Oct, 2006
China Answers - what level are you?
Since I came back from China in late September, I have been thinking about some kind of China Answers service. There are so many How Do I questions out there that seem very difficult to find. I think people are out there answering questions already, so it may be a search problem rather than an answers’ community (like Yahoo! Answers or Baidu Zhidao).
I found this post on The 88s interesting…a bit of quiz to assess how much you know about China. A bit different from How Do I questions, but “levels” and “test” appeal to the competitive nature of people who want to show they are an expert on things…so what level are you?
“Level 0
(The guy at 7-11)1. Can you locate China on a map? (no)
2. Can you name three famous Chinese other than Bruce Lee? (maybe…after 10 minutes)
3. Is there any real difference between China and Japan? (no. or “Yes, Japan has ninjas.â€)Level 1
(Your best friend’s mom?)1. Can you locate China on a map?
2. What is the capital of China?
3. Who is the president of China?….
…9. Who is Zhang Ziyi?
10. Does China have malls? (no, I don’t think so)Level 2
(The graduate student with a “Free Tibet†sticker on his Subaru)1. When did the CCP come to power in China?
2. What language do they speak in Hong Kong?
3. What is Far Lunn Gong?….
…6. Does China have malls? (yes)…
…9. What was your favorite part of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?â€
10. Who was the Chinese leader who started China’s program of economic reform in the 1980’s?Level 3
(The 23-year-old English teacher who’s been in Hangzhou for 2 months?)1. Who is the President of Taiwan?
2. What is the capital of Sichuan province?
3. What is huo guo?…
…8. Who is the father of modern China?
9. What is the current renminbi/USD exchange rate?
10. What are some Chinese perceptions of the US?Level 4
(The infamous China expat)1. What are the prospects for democracy in China?
2. Which is better: Dalian or Dali?…
…7. What is the prevailing theory on the Hu/CYL and Shanghai factions within the CCP?
8. Who is worse: Zhang Yi Mou or Chen Kai Ge?
9. Describe the Chinese management style — if in fact you think such a thing exists.
10. Have you used the phrase 埋头苦干 as a double entendre in a pick-up line in a bar in Shanghai?Level 5
(The “Sinologistâ€)1. Is the yuan undervalued? Why or why not? Does China unfairly manipulate its currency?
2. What is the CCP strategy vis-a-vis the DPP?
3. How many of Jin Yong’s novels have you read in Chinese? Zhang Ailing’s?…
…8. In Beijing’s eyes, how does North Korea relate to the Taiwan question?
9. Is Chinese culture “anti-democratic?â€
10. Compare and contrast May 4, 1919, to Jun-e 4, 1-9-8-9.”
So there it is. This gets very current affairs / political economy oriented at the higher levels. At least that’s my excuse for not being a Level 5. Some of the Level 3 and Level 4 questions are easy, and others I have no idea. Ahhh…to be pwned by a 23 year old English teacher in Hangzhou…
What level are you?