SubscribeGoogle’s New Approach: Say No to China
Google’s announcement of its new China approach is the biggest tech news today, there are tons of comments and analysis on news, blogs and tweets already. I currently don’t have much more to add to the discussion. I just pick up some posts I read and share with you.
Google’s statement is very controversial, some people believe that it is because of the lose of business in China. Sarah Lacy of Techcunch think “I’m not saying human rights didn’t play into the decision, but this was as much about business”, and ” Google has clearly decided doing business in China isn’t worth it, and are turning what would be a negative into a marketing positive for its business in the rest of the world.” Sun Yunfeng, the Chief Product Designer of Baidu, also questionned Google’s sincerity in his personal blog, “If Google gain 80% search engine market share in China, will Google’s executives announce do no evil and quit China”? (The original post has been deleted from his blog.)
Obviously, Google doesn’t do well in China market, and revenue from China is immaterial, PaidContent pointed out that the estimated Google China’s $600 million revenue in this year “only represents just over two percent of the $26 billion in revenue that most analysts expect Google to post this year.” But it still keeps about 30% market share in this high potential Internet market. Leaving China in this way, without saving face to China’s government is not an easy decision to make.
Robert Scoble quoted, a Google Spokesperson “This is not about market share. While our revenues from China are really immaterial, we did just have our best ever quarter [in China].” Scoble also thought “China is a HUGE market”, “Google has EVERY INCENTIVE to kiss Chinese ass. That’s why this move today impressed me so much….It doesn’t matter to me that Google played footsie up until today, either. They were the first to stop playing footsie and THAT deserves a HUGE round of applause”.
It is not the first time for Google to think leaving China. Keso, the most famous IT blogger in China, said, according to his sources, Google had planned to withdraw from China in the year before last year, but Kaifu Lee sought help from Gary Locke to solve this problem. You should read Scoble’s second post to feel the push and pull of China market.
“As an American I saw two opposite poles [of China]: one of unending opportunity and one of unending frustration of dealing with the government…..I both disagree with [Sarah's article] and agree with it. Why? Because I’m feeling the push and pull of China. Is Google doing this because of business or because of ethics? Probably a little bit of both. Or, maybe, just sheer frustration from the push and the pull of China.”
You should also readJames Fallows’ post, “It is a significant development. Significant for Google; and while only marginally significant for developments inside China potentially very significant for China’s relations with the rest of the world.”
Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba commented that a company will encounter many difficulties when operating in any country. It is easy to leave China, but giving up is the biggest failure for Google. But Xie Wen, a prominent internet commentator, saidhe admires Google, and “China’s Internet companies should not take pleasure in other’s misfortunes, today’s Google China may be your tomorrow”, and “China’s Internet will enter into the Age of Stone”.
You can also find the translations of Chinese Tweets on it, “It’s not Google that’s withdrawing from China, it’s China that’s withdrawing from the world”.
Kaifu Lee responded on his Twitter, “A captain would never run away from his duty, if he knew the ship was sinking”.
It seems the best predictor is Robin Li, in about five years ago he said “we will not see Google in five years”, though he will not know Google will leave in this way.
HK Startup Summary 2009
It is an excellent post on HK online startups by Rex Chung, thanks Rex for republishing it on China Web Radar. Rex Chung is the founder of Ankoder, a cloud based video transcoding web service that was launched in 2009. He also previously founded a web and ruby on rails consultancy firm RoRCraft Ltd. in 2006 with head office in Hong Kong Science and Technologies Park.
There’s alot of startup activities in Hong Kong and not many people know about it. Since I didnt have much time myself during the year I’ll try to summarize what I know in one post and also making some predictions for 2010. In 2009 there’s some successes, some fell into the deadpool and I’m sure some companies you have never heard of. Please excuse me if I have missed anyone and I have no intention to exclude anyone for any purpose. However, I do believe HK startups need more press!
2009 is the year of iPhone and Facebook apps.
With the popularity and coolness of the iPhone, HK has spurred a new industry and group of indie developers. Here’s some indie and startups of note. (My apologies for not having much detailed research on HK iPhone apps market. This is purely as a user point of view)
Bill So: Finger: Turns iPhone/iPod touch into Chinese writing tablet.
Nuthon (Leo To – 杜Ｂ): Developed various Location based application like Toilet Rush and 行Guide.
Conceptable.net: HK Weather, Reading.
ThinkBulb: Puri (Photo Sticker app with 580k+ downloads)
Stepcase (Leon Ho): Darkroom, Meeting Time, Lifehack, Enroute.
Crispy Comics: Casey Lau, first publisher for original comics distributed on the iPhone, it kicked off this Summer with “Super Kaiju Hero Force”.
iPhone App generators:
motherapp – A Science Park incubated company released their multiple mobile platform application generator. Some successful application using the technology are OpenRice, TDC. They also won the Bronze prize of HK ICT Innovation and Research award.
Kanchoo – A web application that generates iPhone apps specifically for news publishers. Founded by cubicle muses – Aaron, William and Michael.
aNobii – A book lover social network very popular in Italy released iPhone app that can scan barcode and add to your own virtual book shelf. A Facebook app. The same team also launched a mooshnow.com + iPhone app, which is a movie reviews web site.
Facebook apps
6wave: Ex-Yahoo workers Ng, Cheng, and Lee, a startup that has developed social applications and casual games on the Facebook platform with 32 milion monthly users.
Pencake – A successful DIY e-card web portal. I know the two brother team has recently built some popular facebook applications. Some of you might have used their app without knowing – polling, quizes and 成份分析. They are targeted at the Chinese speaking communities like HK, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia. Now they are helping companies promote their facebook fan page. They also moved into HK Science Park in 2009.
Online Video – my area of interest 
Ankoder – Obviously I’m biased here. I believe Ankoder was the first platform as a service based on Amazon’s cloud computing services launched out of HK. Also based in the Science Park, I will definitely have more product news in 2010. So far the clients are coming from US, Europe and Australia.
goyeah – A free online movie portal, basically saves you from buying the old favorite on VCD. I’m not sure what their plans are in 2010. There’s some cool flash interactive video campaigns with HK comedian.
anyplex – Subscription based movie portal that works directly with setup boxes. They actually moved out of Science Park in 2009. They have agreements and partnerships with movie producers in place so they are set for a bright 2010.
vcast.tv – A video portal with some 2nd tier video content going on with advertising model. Still too early days to tell if it’ll work or not. Their core competency is doing event video streaming. Their mobile video portal also won the Gold prize in ICT mobile award 2008.
vcasmo – Synchronize your video with power point presentations. Launched in 2008 have a strong client base in Japan. Similar to Omnisio.com which was acquired by Youtube early 2009.
choochootv – an artists video blog.
Groups and Meetups
Startup networking events were more than ever, too much that I couldn’t attend all of them.
HKSUA – They have held numerous useful workshops that are very informative to startups.
Wordcamp – Matt Mullenweg came over to HK and held a wordpress fan + blogger meetup.
0 to 0.1 – Organised by Greg and Leon, which provided mentorship to a few groups of University students during the summer holidays. The goal was to launch their lean startup in a few months.
Amazon Web Services Evangelist – Jeff Barr visited HK.
Web Wednesday – Napoleon managed to invite Guy Kawasaki (Jackie Chan of VC) along while he was in HK.
Barcamp:
Most notable was probably the presentation by Ko Kin, who is a 100% Hongkonger that started and established a mobile game company in Mainland China. He wrote a book about his 10 years experience and released the PDF version under creative commons license.
Here’s Aaron’s review of the day.
Cyberport Venture Capital Forum (CVCF)
This year’s theme was angel investment. Some well respected celebrity in the VC world made it to HK. – Dave McClure and Aydin Senkut.
Startup Mondays -
A group of entrepreneurs formed a regular meetup after seeing the gap from CVCF.
Also a group blog at startupshk.com
Other groups and events of note:
香港青年創業家聯盟
Punchparty Cantonese speaking events with local bloggers and tech enthusiasts.
BloggerCon- Annual Blogger Conference.
Agile HK was pretty much dead in 2009 since the financial crisis and Thoughtworks moved out of HK.
Ruby on Rails HK – Sorry I was supposed to organise this one, my bad.
Cocoahead – Bill has been keeping up with organising this iPhone+Mac developer group while he also helped out with TEDx Taipei.
tweetups, twestival.
iPhanatics – organised by Casey Lau, who also created Popcorn Network – Hong Kong’s first e-commerce blog network featuring the best of fashion, gadgets and wine.
Funding:
Although I didn’t see significant funding activities for HK startups, there’s some good news and groups formed that are showing good signs.
Tolo Harbour Angel Group. I have never joined or invited 
, but there’s definitely some activities there. I could see Dominic from Darkhorse in the pictures and Chinese University and Science Park staff are involved.
Cyberport Creative Micro Fund (CCMF)
YCombinator style – 100K HKD to be awarded to 5 companies. Deadline was late October and granted companies announcement will be on Jan 11 2010.
Zendesk, although a Danish company, one of the partner Michael, was based in HK during the early days and had sponsored some local startup events. They received series A and series B in 2009, now with their headquarters in San Francisco.
Editgrid – the iconic HK Web 2.0 startup had rumored to be acquired by Apple.
Outblaze – Although not really a startup, their messaging service was acquired by IBM.
Deadpool – Social Networks
Unfortunately there’s some companies to be classified into the deadpool, interesting most of them are social network companies.
CityIn – launched in 2008, wanted to be “the” social network for south China.
Thumbdive – iPhone social network, got swamped by more focused applications like twitter, foursquare.
Harbork – Subscription model probably didn’t work.
Another social network you probably haven’t heard of – Missu.
Although Zorpia seems to be doing well, I haven’t talked to the founder myself, at least they didn’t need to fire sell like friendster. Duedee (used to be bullpoo) – A virtual stock trading social network is still hanging in there, although I heard there’s not much new development done to the site.
Another social network focused on entertainment celebrities with a name “AliveNotDead” is still alive not dead and exploring different business models like merchandizing.
More startup companies that are just doing their things.
muecs – Another science park incubatee, launched two products. One is enterprise twitter – Molaboration, similar to Yammer. Another product seems to be their first iteration was a social media market place if I understood it right.
We also have threadless like crowdsourcing designer Tshirt / products websites.
Foncept, dookaz and not so well known comedaily are peacefully propelling the crowdsourcing market in Hong Kong.
Frenzoo – A 3D avatar design your own fashion social network. They are funded by ex-Skype employees and an incuTrain graduate. They launched their virtual items market place in 2009 and have some big plans for 2010.
Sampiplan – Project management tool designed specifically for product design and production.
I know I mentioned alot of Science Park incubatees already, but there’s more.
getogeto – A social events invitation website.
gearapp – Highly customisable CRM that is adaptable to all business needs.
cartforge – Targeted ecommerce and analytics platforms.
Innoverz – Fast RIA store front.
StorBackup – Cloud based backup solution that works over unstable internet connections.
Intuitive Automata – Dr. Cory Kidd from MIT – A Robot coach designed to help people who are trying to lose and keep off weight.
2010 will be Social Media, Cloud Computing and Android
Social media marketing will get serious, especially measuring ROI. There’s a few social media conference in 2009 and more planned in 2010 already, and even Hong Kong Government CIO is on twitter. HKAIM has already organised a few social media related events
in 2009 and more to come in 2010.
There’s 2 companies I know that are in this space.
Admomo – Online Advertising Competitor’s analysis.
kmatrix CI - Social Media Buzz Monitoring system.
Any stealth startups hiding in HK?
Anyone in stealth mode should make yourself known now, because nobody cares about your secrets! But I know there’s some startups to look out for in 2010.
Jeff Lyndon – Experienced online game expert is working on something.
Thomas Pun is working on a project joining the YCombinator.
Kenneth Kwok is writing up some informative posts on web analytics tips and techniques.
Eugene Lam, ex-Googler developing a social software review website.
Vincent Chan, working on backbonehr and writing a nice startup blog at scale.cc
Thats it for 2009, this post has turned out to be much longer than I thought. Hope when I write the 2010 post it will be even longer
Welcome Back, Yeeyan
Yeeyan, a popular online translation collaboration community in China, was back online in yesterday morning, after it was shut down in Nov 30, 2009 by China’s online content regulators. But its domain name changes from Yeeyan.com to Yeeyan.org.
On almost all my list about my favoriate China’s websites, you can find Yeeyan. Since it started in 2006, still a group blog at that time (see our first post on Yeeyan), I kept an eye on its developments. In 2007, Yeeyan becomes an online content collaborative translation community, users can collaboratively translation and publish foreign language articles into Chinese. The translators can also have opportunity to gain financial benefit from the articles translated by them. I think it is the best crowdsourcing website in China.
Yeeyan partnered with both foreign and Chinese media, by translating articles from foreign media into Chinese and publishing on China’s newspaper, magazine and website, it can reward its translators with real money. Yeeyan also translated and published several books by this crowdsourcing model. According to Chen Haozhi, CEO of Yeeyan, some of the translators can get RMB4000 to 6000 a month, and Yeeyan also makes break even.
But partnerships with foreign news media, such as The Guardian, Time Magazine, New York Times, also made troubles to Yeeyan. In Nov 30, Yeeyan was shut down by regulators, because it published news in its website without getting necessary licenses.
Now Yeeyan is back, but the new Yeeyan will focus more on tech, science and business, not on current affairs which might enrage regulators. You cannot find articles from those foreign news media now.
Yeeyan also introduces a pre-publish auditing system, a new translation will only be open to public after it is reviewed manually. The group feature is replaced by a new feature called Project, it also reflect the new Yeeyan tries to strengthen itself on translation collaboration functions, rather than generic social networking.
Anyway, welcome back, Yeeyan. We missed you.
Hello, This is China Web Radar
Since today, this blog China Web 2.0 Review will be renamed as China Web Radar, the acronym is still CWR, and our domain also change to ChinaWebRadar.com.
China Web 2.0 Review was launched in Nov 2005, when the concept of web 2.0 was becoming hot either in the world or in China. I started this blog in order to make a bridge between China’s startups and overseas English-speaking people. Actually, we not only covers small startups, but also wrote lots of posts on big Internet companies, such as Baidu, Tencent and Sina. The most used tag on the blog is Baidu.
I rename the blog, not because I though web 2.0 is dead, but I thought “web 2.0 review” cannot reflect all the content and the position of the blog. Besides it, the name “China Web 2.0 Review” is not easy to pronounce, is too long. Our old domain name (cwrblog.net) is hard to remember. So I decide to change the name and the domain together.
Thanks for all your supports in last four years. In 2010, I will make more updates on this China Web Radar blog than in last year, hope you will still support us.
1 Billion to Invest in Freewares in China
Sequoia Capital China, Highland Capital and Qihoo 360 yesterday announced that they plan to jointly invest 1 billion, I think it should be 1 billion RMB, into China’s free software industry in coming years. The plan targets at startups and individuals in freeware sectors, by means of investment, incubation and M&A.
Neil Shen, Founding Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital China, Chuan Thor, Managing Director of Highland Capital and Zhou Hongyi, Chairman of Qihoo 360 will participate in the plan and provide supports to software developers. Qihoo 360 will use its 360 software to promote these freewares to Chinese users. They will not only help freeware developers in financing, but also offer help them to build strategy and improve operations.
In China there are some quite popular free softwares, such as Maxthon, an IE-based browsers, Xunlei, a mega file downloader, Baofeng, a video player and Qihoo 360, a anti-malware software. However, it is still interesting to see venture capitals to announce future investment plan in this sector, when the trend shows that more and more applications are switching from desktop softwares to cloud computing.
In China, maybe there are too many uncertainties in Internet industry, since you can lose the control of your domain and the site can be inaccessible just because of command from governments without any notice. Cloud computing is too far away to Chinese users, we still live in the age of desktop softwares.
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