The latest session at TechCrunch Disrupt was a fireside chat between Sarah Lacy and accomplished entrepreneur Fritz Demopoulos — an expat who arrived in China in the late 90s while he was working at News Corp and went on to start (and sell) two very successful companies.
The conversation, which you’ll find a recording of above, focused largely on the issues facing Western companies as they try to make their way into China. → Read More
Ecommerce in China is ready to take off and, more important, it’s ready to reach great heights on its own terms. Lu Dong of La Mui, Haifeng Ye of Mbaobao, and Fangfang Wu of Greenbox are three ecommerce pioneers who are, as we speak, redefining online sales in China.
“China is ready for ecommerce,” said Lu Dong. “People are moving to buying almost anything online.”
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At this point, it’s no secret: Gaopeng (Groupon’s nascent effort in China) is a train wreck. By September of this year, the seven-month old endeavor had already accumulated $46.4 million in net losses with just $2.1 million in revenue. Meanwhile, a number of competitors in the region are predicting profitability within months.
In today’s “Attack Of The Clones” panel at Disrupt Beijing, a few of Groupon’s fiercest Chinese competitors took the opportunity to, well, attack. While obviously a bit subjective, their words do provide some insight on how a company so massive in the US could tank so dramatically on the other side of the world. → Read More
Memo to Chinese startups: You made for a late night of deliberations. We typically pick five finalists. There were a few companies that were clear picks, captivating everyone– from the judges to the staff to people we talked to in the hallways. Then there was another group that each had passionate advocates on staff, making for some tough decisions.
Ultimately, the staff got down to six we liked and couldn’t agree on which one to eliminate. So in the spirit of rule breaking, we decided to pick six finalists. → Read More
To kick off Day Two of TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing, our own Sarah Lacy interviewed Lei Jun — one of the most successful entrepreneurs in China, whose resume includes cofounding Joyo.com (sold to Amazon in 2004), sitting on the board of Kingsoft, and chairing the board of massively popular mobile web browser UCWeb (he’s also made numerous investments in successful Chinese startups).
Most recently, Jun is the founder of Xiaomi Tech, a startup with a very ambitious goal: it wants to take on the likes of Apple in the mobile phone industry, by producing a high quality phone that’s sold at prices significantly below the competition. You’ll find a video of the interview above, and here are some of the highlights:
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Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom took the stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing to talk about the photosharing startup’s international efforts and how it plans to deal with the onslaught of clones, including over ten Chinese copycats.
During the talk Systrom revealed that the startup has now hit the 12 million user milestone, with 100K weekly downloads coming just from China, impressively. The app sees around one download per second worldwide, with that rate increasing on the weekends. “The amount of interest people have [in Asia] is huge,” Systrom said, “Japan is our second largest market.”
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I’ve been able to finalize the TechCrunch Shenzhen and Hong Kong meet-ups and thought I’d post here for folks who RSVPed and didn’t get an email response.
The Hong Kong Event (Facebook Link) will be held at 7pm on November 2 at Pier 7 Cafe in Central Hong Kong. I may be slightly late – I’m landing at 6:30 and will take the train straight there, but I look forward to seeing you all. → Read More
In case you haven’t read through the 50 or so China posts on the site right now, the last day of our first international Disrupt conference will be starting at 9 am Beijing time/6 pm PST today. If you need even more reason to watch, catch Sarah and I above, talking about who we’re most excited about in today’s lineup. → Read More
[tc_ustream_iframe id="9601267"] → Read More
What’s most amazing about TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing is that our Startup Battlefield format has proved applicable internationally; There’s something universal about giving your all in a pitch to people with money I guess. After watching the seventeen companies take the stage yesterday (and blogging all day), TechCrunch’s John Biggs, Greg Kumparak and I went backstage, exhausted and inspired, to discuss our favorites. → Read More
We are kicking off the last day of TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing 2011 at 6pm PST. Thanks to Ustream, we’ve embedded the livestream of the event here.
Be sure to tune in and don’t forget to follow along by searching for the #disruptbj hashtag on Twitter!
The agenda for today is below. → Read More
Anyone who has ever used a MacBook Pro can tell you that they can get awfully toasty after a little while. Countless laptop cooling solutions have hit store shelves over the years, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one quite as handsome as the TILT by madMINDS.
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It hits you when you least expect it. It slips away under a mask of dormant inactivity. And it can ruin your entire day.
It’s your iPhone 4S battery life, and it sucks.
It’s been 17 days since the iPhone 4S was released — 19 since iOS 5 — and just like the madness that was Antennagate, complaints are churning out left and right. As Erick so clearly pointed out, the iPhone 4S is meant to offer 8 hours of talk time, or “up to 6 hours” of Internet use on 3G. For so many of us — including iPod touch and iPhone-not-4Ses running iOS 5 — that simply isn’t the case. But there may be hope. → Read More
Talk about good timing.
Over the weekend, I wrote a post pleading with Google to please, finally, bring VoIP capabilities to Google Voice — namely, with an app for Android. The app would have some major benefits: it would let you make and receive calls over your home and work Wifi networks whenever they’re available (that means fewer dropped calls at the office, even if you’re deep inside a large building). And whenever you aren’t around Wifi, you could fall back to your carrier minutes. Unfortunately, while Google was actually working on building a VoIP-powered app for Android long ago, it shelved it, likely because it was concerned about infuriating the carriers.
But shortly after that post ran, I started hearing some whispers. Turns out I’m not the only one with the idea — there’s another big (albeit less well known) fish that’s about to make a splash. Get ready for Republic Wireless, a new mobile phone service from Bandwidth.com that will be launching on November 8, and could truly be the phone carrier you’ve always wanted. → Read More
Airbnb, a marketplace that allows people to rent their homes and apartments via the web, is considering entering the car-sharing space. In a survey sent to us by an Airbnb host, the startup is asking hosts if they would rent out their cars along with their residences.
As shown in the screenshots below, Airbnb asks if owners allowed a guest to use a car during a stay, and if owners would rent a car to guests if there is insurance provided. The survey also asks hosts whether they would rent a car to a guest that is not renting their home.
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Everyone knows there’s a war going on today in Silicon Valley: a war for talent. Startups are competing for a limited supply of engineering and product design labor, largely constrained by the failure of the US to invest in STEM education and a terribly restrictive immigration process for work visas. Meanwhile, big companies like Facebook and Google are paying out millions to either retain or rehire engineers through talent acquisitions.
This system is under even more pressure from seed funds (Sorry: I’m a part-time partner at Y Combinator, so I’m probably contributing to the problem). Not only do you have to worry about your engineers going to your competition, you have to worry about them getting seeded to run off and start their own company. It’s often hard to compete against the “grass is greener” dream of being a founder, especially when the theoretical upside of doing your own thing is nearly infinite and there are investors ready to write you a convertible note check today. No cap necessary!
If you want to attract and retain the best talent, you’re going to have to work hard at it. Here are a few lessons I’ve learned in the past couple months: → Read More
Battlefield 3 is here and in a major way. The latest shooter in the long-running franchise hit the interweb and retailers last week and EA just announced that they moved 5 million units within the first week. For anyone that cares, that makes Battlefield 3 the fastest selling title in EA’s 29 year history. And for good reason. EA and DICE conducted a flawless marketing campaign for Battlefield 3. → Read More
Today, Google is rolling out its update to Google Reader which features the promised user interface overhaul, and, more importantly, the new Google+ integration. Now, Google Reader users can “+1″ items directly from Google Reader to share it with their friends on Google+. This feature now replaces the “Share” and “Share with Note” options previously present.
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What do you do when you have more than a billion potential product combinations on your site? You hire a user experience (UX) guru. Gemvara, a jewelry e-commerce site that lets consumers custom-design their own jewelry, just acquired Snipwits, a one-man startup founded by Brian Kalma, who will now be in charge of the customer experience team at Gemvara. Kalma previously headed up UX design at both Zappos (as one of its first employees) and Gilt Groupe. → Read More
Back in November of 2009, former Digg Chief Architect Joe Stump and Social Thing founder Matt Galligan first publicly unveiled their new startup, SimpleGeo, which was slated to become the new infrastructure for location-based services. They called it the “Amazon Web Services” for location, offering products that make it easy for developers to build location-enabled web and mobile apps, including storage, context, API features, and polymaps.
This morning Mike Arrington reports that SimpleGeo has been acquired by Urban Airship for approximately $3.5 million. In July, the two companies formed a strategic partnership which was intended to, put simply, provide better ways for developers to offer location-aware push notifications in their applications. Geo-targeted notifications were expected to be a big source of revenue for both startups, but it seems that it just made more sense for the companies to move forward as one rather than as two separate entities.
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