As Facebook’s imminent IPO became the talk of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, you might have read from the social networking site’s SEC S-1 filing that it pulled in more than $1 billion in profit on revenue of $3.71 billion last year. What Facebook’s prospectus will not tell you, is that the social giant has taken a page from Tencent’s business model, at least according to the Chinese Internet giant’s CTO.
Xiong Minghua, Tencent’s CTO, said in a speech at the ChinaBang Awards ceremony: “I visited Facebook back in 2006 and they cared a lot about Tencent’s business models—especially our micro payment, they studied it thoroughly.” → Read More
The photo sharing app market is a very competitive battlefield: Instagram, Path, Color and so on. In China, the market is even more tough, several photo and video applications like Camera360, LemeLeme, Tuding etc already claim millions of users. Vida, an iPhone and Android application developed by a Shanghai-based startup, introduces a new and fun way to organize and share the moments of your life.
On the ‘traditional’ photo sharing applications, you usually need take the photo first, pick up the filter for special effect, then share it with friends. Instead, Vida provides dozens of curated Live filters, which make the experience really what-you-see-is-what-you-take. The related information such as timestamp, location, the user name etc will be auto tagged on the photo/video and presented in nice way with timeline. → Read More
China-based Huohua (it translates to Spark) uses semantic analysis to find your social circle instantly.
Founded by Carl Wu, Huohua is trying to solve a problem of “where and with whom to have fun” by introducing a smart feature dubbed Instant Circle. Basically, it works like this: open the app to tap a keyword like ”basketball”, “hot pot” or “mountain climbing” to locate people with same interests around you, then live chat with them. → Read More
Stepcase, the Hong Kong based-startup behind the 7.5 million-strong photo community Step.ly, is launching a photo viewer tailored for Sina Weibo to provide users with consistent, intuitive and light-weight photo-viewing experience. According to Leon, founder of Stepcase, the idea of creating Chaopin stems from an experimental concept to create, design and develop an app in just two weeks to meet Chinese users’ needs of browsing Weibo pictures.
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Getting folks to check into apps is hard. But what would happen if we could automatically check into events – like TV shows – automatically? Today at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing, a Chinese team is trying to take the check-in business into a whole new level.
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Anquanbao is a cloud-based software program that helps protect websites from security violations like malware and denial of service attacks. Its product can be easily installed on any website. All that the administrators need to do is change his or her domain settings. Since abusive bots and crawlers waste bandwidth and server resources, Anquanbao’s product also helps websites load faster.
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Google’s official Android Market is not available in China, leading to a plethora of independent markets – over 70 at last count. The system works – sort of – but users may find it annoying because you actually don’t know how to find the good stuff. China is still lacking any sort of innovative search mechanism to help people identify the apps they really need in daily life.
Discovering the apps should not be boring, and the core value of Qiuqiu is to bring the pleasure of discovering apps during different activities. Qiuqiu’s app search engine is unique because it offers results based on your location, the time of day, and the things you like and do. Each scenario is expressed by a series of apps – education apps for the school day and travel apps for your vacation. It’s a compelling and interesting change from the traditional “editor’s choice” and selected apps lists found in many markets. → Read More
