Chinese IM Giant Business Model

Internet services (digital goods, games, micro-transactions): $344 million (66%)
Mobile services: $110 million (21%)
Online ads: $67 million (13%)

Total Revenues: $523 million

The operational margin has reached 43% according to the TechCrunch article.
I think the Chinese consumers are pioneering in the global digital good & services market after Japan and Korea. [data?]

Facebook Translations

I came across this application on Facebook called Translations. I thought it was to provide me a tool so that I can get some translations on Facebook. Of course, i was wrong. Facebook has no such big knowledge base to provide people with translations. =p

What was it about?
it's here!It was to ask you to help translate or vote on the existing translations for the language that you are interested in. Of course, if you choose a language, portions of Facebook UI will be displayed in the language you choose. of course, it also depends on the progress and availability of the language chosen. At least, for Chinese (Simplified), when I chose it, many words have been translated into Chinese already. It's okay! not too bad!
I guess this is the Facebook internationalization strategy? OpenSource to the facebook community!!!

I've helped translating some of its phrases. It's not too easy to pick an eye-catchy, simple and meaningful phrase for each one. i tried! will continue to participate in this translation! There were only 11 translators yesterday and today there are 28 at this point of time! hope there would be more! More importantly, get it DONE asap! before any rumors that Facebook is going to buy some Chinese companies to enter the Chinese market!
I like Facebook and will support it!

SpaceTime - 3D browsing

i incidentally came across this site - SpaceTime. It looks pretty cool!
I like the quote there

"I think I've found a product that makes the Google interface look like it was designed by Apple. "

Looking forward to the Mac version! I'll try using Windows... Maybe i'll drive the old dell computer crazy using SpaceTime.

Semantic Web

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

the beautiful hockey-stick

what a nice hockey-stick look!
I guess we did something right!
Thanks to Frank's full support!
He's our evangelist.

Looking forward to the April 10 event!

We started BASE

finally the organization i've been brainstorming started its journey!
we had our very first event last thursday right on Chengfu Rd, 5 minutes walk from Tsinghua Science Park. The event absolutely went great and we have thirty people attended.
i was very excited to see so many people at the very first event.

Thanks to many friends that who helped in one way or another. We also gave it a name - BASE.
Beijing Angels and Startup Entrepreneurs.
We want to make Beijing Haidian closer to a true Silicon Valley by having series of event to let people learn about entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship in China, and network.

Looking forward to the coming April event!
before that, i am going to enjoy my trip to hangzhou and shanghai!

Safari Invades Windows!

I received an update notification from Apple Updates this am. I thought there was a new update on iTunes. What's surprising to me was that it was not iTunes but SAFARI.

I think it's a signal to iTune users, especially iPod and iPhone users on Windows. It seems to me that it's a way to better engage apple non-Mac users and convert them to a true Mac user. When I bought my Macbook Pro last july (last day of July, i'll remember it for a long time. I still remember my first ever laptop was purchased on August 13, 2003. Now it's close to its five year "birthday".) at SU, every single day there were several people got converted from Windows to Mac. Mac used to only occupy less than 5% of the consumer computer market. I remember it has increased to 11% in the USA. (not very sure when and where I got the number. )

check this picture out! ( I did not manage to take a screenshot of my own. This picture is from applegazette.com (it's actually a very cool site for any news about Apple products. Thanks, Mike!)

iPhone Pro

Kevin Rose in the recent Diggnation shared with us that there will be an iPhone Pro (not sure if that's the official name of the new iPhone that's coming out!
I guess if you look at the Asian mobile market, 3G will definitely the way to go UNLESS the telecos are so reluctant and want to do something funny about the US market.

Glad that there is some info on this! Great!

Mindfullness & Meditation

look at what you might find out!

Need a Personal CRM?

I looked at the names cards I've collected. Gosh... even though it looks like there are at least a hundred of them!

I feel bad that i could not keep in touch with all as there is seriously no way for me to do that! Then I started thinking over the idea of personal CRM. To be more specific, it should be personal contact management which offers some CRM features like mass emailing. I am so attempted to find one. I did google it and surprisingly i found that Salesforce now offers personal edition to people for free! I signed up and started trying it. 

Gosh it looks so much like the one my previous company has developed for the assisted living facilities. I guess if they really want to avoid extra costs, they can now just use Salesforce.com personal edition! ha ha....

I am still exploring it. Then I felt that I also need a PA at the side to input all the name cards! gosh! there are just so many of them! I wish I can handle all these better!

We had such a great start in organizing meetups for entrepreneurs at Haidian. It was great! We had about 30 people showed up! it was three times more than our very initial targeted number - 10 people. wow... it was fantastic! can't wait till the next one already! =p

all the best and have a great weekend!

an Anti-facebook Application song

I found this video from my Fun Wall application on my Facebook profile.
The melody sounded very familiar. Maybe, i've seen this video long time ago. I found it very funny, as some of the lyrics are really interesting.

I have been playing around with the privacy settings on Facebook. it seems that you can have more control over what you want to expose to people but if you have more than 200 friends. it will take a lot time of your. What's the problem? I have over 12 hundreds of friends. It simply took me a long time to go through the list and organize my friends. wow... it was some hard work and really time consuming.

I guess when you have too much control over certain things you might not like it.What's cool about it is that if you just joined Facebook. Like my test account, it's much easier to manage. I don't know how other people think of the new group and privacy setting?

Do you like the idea of better control over your privacy but having to spend too much time managing it? or just keep it simple and add only people you want to add. it's very hard. it's still no personal CRM in the market place that a lot of people are using. I don't see one myself yet.
If you do, please share with me. managing personal contacts nowadays can really be a pain in the butt.
well, do enjoy the song! =p

what happened after the song? Facebook maintenance. lol

Facebook New Features

Just read the TechCrunch articles on the Facebook press event and related new Facebook features.
I still trying to see how things will be different from the existing set of features.
According to the article, the major change will be on the privacy settings. you can really better control what to share, when to share and whom to share with now. As for the limited profile, there seems to be some role-based management that I can assign different level of limited profile to different roles/groups.

I like it a lot. I have been facing some inconvenience of the existing privacy settings. I cannot just let people access my full profile, either do I want to receive the right access permission to people that i am not familiar. I don't need to know all that's going on there. Simply because one person only has limited energy and time to keep up with all. Hopefully with the new set of privacy settings, we can really set access permission down to individual level, or at least the group level. (you know we can make use of groups to get down to individual level, otherwise, there might be too many changes to the already built architecture.) I am not really technical savvy but my internships offered me the chance to understand and learn some of the technical aspects of how things might work. =) I found it useful now. ha ha...

alright. another big one is Facebook chat. I think xiaonei.com has it long ago. finally, facebook has realized how important the chat function can be! While people are on facebook, they don't want to switch windows and use IMs because it's too much a hassle and often you forget one of the two. Great that they finally doing it.

on the other hands, facebook is getting more and more complicated and for new users, it can be overwhelming sometimes! Good luck to the Facebook team. Appreciate your work! I support you guys! =)

QQ is ready for Mac

I was downloading the QQ client for my almost five-year-old IBM R40 laptop as I needed to be able to chat with some of my friends. While browsing the web pages, I found out that Tencent has already released its first QQ for Mac preview. I was so happy and felt I am better served in the land MS Windows. It's nothing that I dislike about windows! Simply, I like Mac a little more! =)

In the previous post, I mentioned about I think Tencent is the most innovative technology company in China. Clearly, with the move it took to start supporting the Mac Community. I believe it has seen what Apple is doing. Of course, it might indirectly agree with what iPhone has done to the mobile industry! Maybe QQ for Mac ultimately is the goal to support iPhone so the iPhone users in China can just QQ wherever they are. A friend of mine carries his Nokia phone with him, he has reached the stage almost always online via QQ. he did not really like iPhone that much but he mentioned that he might get one. sometimes, it is good to try something new. personally, I always take it as a chance to learn to to adapt. if you always adapt to the environment, you will not stay sharp enough to innovate.

wow... after I installed the QQ on my Mac, I do enjoy using it. At least I can have the basic functions of what QQ can do on windows - Friends, Groups, add, search and notification!

yeah! looking forward to the official release of QQ for Mac!
Hats off to those developers who worked on the QQ client for Mac. You might now know how valuable your work has been! it's like you paved a path for the mac community to enjoy their lone journey even better! Appreciate it!

Free Facebook Party in Beijing

Last Friday at Yu Gong Yi Shan, a pretty cool bar outside the Zhangzizhong Subway Station, the first free Facebook part was held. Marek and Yang were the two organizers. Thousands of people on Facebook were invited and more than 400 invitees replied on Facebook and marked it that they were going to attend. It turned out that over 260 confirmed guests actually came and attended the party. wow... over 250 people... that's pretty good already!


I did not go there early for the part as I went to a cleantech gathering at Ritan Park. There is a nice bar inside the park right on the bank of the lake - Stone Boat. It's a nice place, small and cozy. more importantly, the place was an old pavilion, used to enjoy the cool and watch the scenery outside. The pavilion is of ancient Chinese architectural style. The space inside is not really big with all the modern furnitures and tables. The gathering is called Green Drinks. It's for people who are interested in clean technology, green energy, alternative energy, and energy related industries to meet and mingle.

A friend of mine went together with me. What was surprising to me was that I me a old classmate at GEM there at the gathering. it was really funny... totally unexpected. Wow... what a small world! I did not know Shawn was there. Well, i made my introduction to other people there. Unfortunately, i have not been able to follow up with them as I fell sick and did not have the extra energy to do so! I bet Arin has already done so. I will have to leverage on his network built. Thanks, Arin!

I went to the party about 10pm. It seemed pretty crowded downstairs. The arrange of bar inside is so interesting that it seems it has so much space and cannot be filled up at all. the second floor was pretty full as well, but not to the extent that packed full. compared to the last few times i was there at some performances, more importantly considering it was only a TUESDAY night, it was well set-up! Well done!


I found it really interesting and thought about "how is it different in a Facebook party than parties of any other kind?"

• what questions do you ask?
  
• do people talk about their applications?
• what are the common topics regarding facebook?

I asked about it to my friend and the friends he brought over. we talked about when we first started using facebook. it was interesting that more and more people are getting onto facebook for sure. 3 months, 4 months, 6 months 1 year... i am with facebook for 21 months. not too long compared to some of my US friends, as it was built for them at the very beginning. Never the less, if we look at the Asian facebook adoption, I guess I am one of the early adopters.

I managed to talked to two Korean ladies and one Vietnamese Danish. They are studying Chinese in Beijing. Well, it was nice chatting with them. it made the boring Tuesday a little bit fun!

At the end, i managed to find Marek and talked to him about it. Then i found that this party was a promotional one for his Friday party and Saturday post-party. Very fresh marketing strategy. However, i did not really receive invitations to these two parties on Facebook and only found out about it at the free party. Of course he publicized the Friday party, the main party by giving out a few free passes. People were really excited about it. Probably about 8-10 passes were given out... unfortunately, I did not get one. it was okay. I would not make it for the party, anyway.

I probably need to talk to him soon, either today or tomorrow. I feel that Facebook has certainly become a marketing tool and an additional free/paid advertising avenue for many events, products and services. Think about what people was doing 1 year ago, today Facebook is into a very different world already!

most innovative comany in China?

In my opinion, there are quite a few out there.
first of all, the MOST innovative company so far in China in the comsumer market is QQ(TenCents). it has not only changed the way netizens communicate with each other. it also inflluenced businesses that how they can engage and better communicate with their customers. QQ is the AIM, Skype(no IDD), & Meebo combined...

if we zoom in a little bit and look at how things are working now on the Chinese Internet. Many popular web 2.0 sites are 'copy-cats' of products/services from the valley. however, the innovation

can be seen a lot from their name of the company and the localization of it.
the Chinese Facebook:
xiaonei.com the name xiao - school/univeristy/college; nei-within/internal/inside
just like facebook itself suggest its use for students. it is actually their first bowling pin to get people on to the system, especially college students. they have limited years on campus. Once they graduate, they started working and traveling. Though founded after facebook, their feature release schedule seemed they have put lots of thoughts over it. it also developed a chat client for the users and just recently the web-based chat was released, too.

hainei.com - founder of xiaonei just started this. it seemed to be a more open network to the general public where everyone and anyone get on it. the features avaiable is a lot like what facebook it is today rather than it was one year ago. the name is nicely selected. "hai nei cun zhi ji, tian ya ruo bi lin" Tianya has already become a very popular BBS/Forum online for many people. the corresponding hainei, a social network really give people some thoughts on what's the chinese way of social networking.

the Chinese twitter:
Jiwai.de - i blogged about this one on my personal blog on blogger.com before when i first found it. i was striken by the name... it is really funny and chinese. just like twitter... jiwai has both sound and actions suggested. Chinese people can really relate to.

fanfou.com - very chinese... when people meet one another, they greet by asking whether you have eaten. if you have such company name in the western culture, i guess the organization will have a huge bill on food. fanfou - eaten or not

zuosa.com - bascially asking you what you are doing. if you listen carefully on the MRT/subway, bus or any other form of public transportation. if you overhear some people talking on the phone, they would very often get "what are you doing/going to do?" - "zuo sa?"

another site i used almost EVERYDAY is www.iciba.com. it's under Kingsoft. Kingsoft not only develop anti-virus software, but also many other software and applications. the web-based dictinary has both E-C, C-E, E-E, examples and related stuff. It also provides some social networking features so that you can connect to the english learners with in the community.

there are also some digg-like websites, techcrunch-like websites. I myself have not personally invested much time on it and will definitely pay more attention to more cool stuff.

my friend is working on a social networking platform. The company is named very86. if you know very cola (fei chang ke le), very means Fei Chang. 86 is the country code of China. All the sites are currently created for different cities - Very[CityName], like verybeijing, verytianjin, veryshijiazhuang.

Oh yes!

Definitely not to forget the Chinese 'Google' - Baidu...

Get a life today

I started jogging again this morning!

I really should have started much earlier on. I have been staying in the hostel for over 4 months and finally i realized that it's a good opportunity to get a healthy life-style after one and half years bad and unbalanced working and studying life-style...

I went to jog. The weather today is a little bit chili in the morning. It's okay not too cold. I entered the South Gate of Tsinghua U.  It looks really quiet. Not so much as what we saw yesterday during the walk inside in the afternoon. In fact, the weather yesterday was not very good. It looked very foggy and dusty. The sun was out there but it was somehow interrupted by the thick layer of particles in the air. What's good about it is that we might not get as much UV as on a clear day. Nevertheless, we all prefer a clear day, don't we?

It was quiet on campus. Pupils were cycling to their school to start their day of study. Some seniors were out on campus taking a morning walk or getting back home from morning shopping. I did jog by some public areas, like a small garden or grass patch. However, I did not see anybody there reading out-loud. Maybe they like to do it in the evening or something.  There ain't many uni-students at that time. Quite some cars were getting in and out. It made the quiet campus a little bit lively - in the noisy way. Securities were getting the building ready to receive many visitors of the day.  The red car with the most stickers was still parked at the no-parking area. Maybe, it will receive another sticker later. 

Even though the temperature of these few days seemed like the advent of spring, the plants and trees on the Tsinghua campus did not show any sign of Spring. What I saw was just dried leaves falling. huh, maybe it's the sprouts that are kicking the old parts off. =p

I shall continue exploring the Tsinghua campus more! It's very big and there are lots to discover!

Happy Tuesday!

Many events are taking place today!

have a lunch appointment at Wudaokou.

The free facebook part at Yu Gong Yi Shan is at 8pm-next 3am. 

The Green Drinks at Shi Fang Restaurant in Ritan Park is at 7pm-9pm. 

wow... what a busy day ahead! 

Faceboook Ad

Right after I posted the previous post about my visit to Google Beijing office.
I found this ad on my blog.
It's Facebook Ad for Facebook Ad Services.

ha ha... that's a good signal to me!!
Thanks to Google AdSense

Google Beijing

Yesterday I paid a visit to a friend of mine at Google Beijing office. It's located at Tsinghua Technology Park at Wudaokou. It's nice to get in touch with old friends, you know! We met at Google Intern Open House Day 2007 when my friend who was interning at Google invited me back then. While playing pool in one of the main buildings, we came cross the two of them. I guessed that they were Chinese and we were right about it. Then, we started chatting. it was interesting to find out that Zhang is based in Beijing. That's really.

I think it's been more than half a year already. We finally met up and I managed to visit the Google canteen here in Beijing. It's not that big but enough to accommodate the Googlers in the building. There are two sections of food: one is very popular; the other one is not as popular. The reason is pretty obvious that the long queue suggests better food. Due to time constraint, we did not line up for the so-called good food (i'll try it next time and find out, hee hee). We went ahead to the short queue and got our food very quick (in less than one minute). you pick your dishes and go! good food served in the fast-food style...

Something I did not expect was that i spoke with Mr Lee for a little while. He happened to be queuing right in front of me. Just a moment ago, I thought I don't have to bother him because he was receiving guests at the main entrance. I said hi and mentioned that we met at the Stanford talk he gave last year. I also talked about our common friends at Zhejiang University. He asked me "when are you coming over here?"... ha ha... it's really a nice gesture of him to do that. I had a chance with Youtube before and unfortunately there was not any internship position that i can fit in. maybe I shall apply next time... ha ha... definitely. I might be able to have a true taste of a Googler's life!

Gosh! I miss my friends at Google Mountain View... hope they are doing well and working on cool projects as usual!!!!

All the best my Google friends!!!

"Facebook Problem" for Google

As an old post has talked about the Facebook hype and its talent war with Google in colleges, Facebook seems to start digging in to Google's talent pool even deeper.

I think while the "Google problem" for Microsoft continues, Google has already entered a stage where they have to face the "Facebook problem" to themselves.

I love both companies. Many friends work in Google. Working in Facebook right now is considered as cool and HOT. Just like what it was a few years ago at Google.

COO of Facebook has been appointed and she's from Google. Sheryl Sandberg will start her work at Facebook on March 24. What a piece of news!