Female Social Network I-part raises 3M USD Funding

Written by Luyi Chen on December 10, 2006
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I-partShanghai based I-part is a BSP+sns sort of thing, focused on young female users. Recently it’s reported to have received 3 million USD investment from IDT, JAIC and Cyber Agent.

If you still remember JAIC and Cyber Agent, these two Japanese companies has just invested in Shanghai-based Blogbus.

I-part first launched in Aug. 2003 in Taiwan. This is their Taiwan website. In March 2005, with one million USD or so seed funding from Taiwan-based IDT, they launched their Shanghai website. Now they have over 4 million registered users including Taiwan sector.

Although their business mainly designed for young females, but male users are also encouraged to register. In fact, hundreds of thousand men and women are living as virtual couples on their website.

Their service is monetized by virtual avatar. Their virtual money is called I-coin. It can be exchanged with Chinese Yuan in 1:1 ratio. To decorate your virtual house or to feed virtual pets, you should spend I-coin in I-part mall. Users can also publish diaries and photos. Besides leaving comments on other users’ place, you can also send virtual gifts.

On Sept. 26, 2006 I-part attended Web2.0 International Conference in Taiwan as a speaker. Here’s their slides. (Via Kelvin Wang)

Not many social network services are monetized well like I-part. The reason of their success is that they designed something, mostly virtual avatar here, where users would continuously spend money and time.

One Response to “Female Social Network I-part raises 3M USD Funding”

  1. Winners of Red Herring 100 Asia 2007 from China’s Internet Industry : China Web2.0 Review on August 31st, 2007 12:09 am

    [...] ipart: a female social network which raise $3M funding in December 2006. [...]

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