BASE April-23-2008 Meeting Notes

Hi Everyone, Thanks for coming to the April 23 BASE Meeting! Good times were had by all. The theme of this week was Business Models, every group that demoed was asked to outline their business model. David also provided some short videos from entrepreneurship gurus their thoughts on business models.

[edit] Videos

As a group we watched a few videos on business models, with regard to entrepreneurship. Below are the videos:

1. New Business Model by Guy Kawasaki (Garage Technology Ventures) on 10/20/2004
2. Economics of Free: A New Business Model by Janice Roberts (Mayfield Fund) on 1/17/2007
3. A Successful Business Solves Problems by Mitchel Kapor (Foxmarks) on 1/16/2008

[edit] Demos

1. Beijing Olympic Games by Yundong, Darius, and Weiwei. These guys met @ BASE, and are our organization's first launch!
2. Qifang - a P2P microfinance loan system for Chinese college students, presented by Calvin Chin. Qifang was featured on Techcrunch!. Qifang is just 8 months old, and is going through the motions of incorporating in HK and on the mainland. Their business model is taking part of the transaction costs of the loans, combined with some targeted marketing. Typical costs of a college education in China are 10,000RMB per year, inclusive of dormitory, food, communication and facilities fees, and tuition.
3. JuKuu - presented by Yue Zhang. JuKuu is a website that helps Chinese/English learners speak more natively by using sentence based tranlation from their extensive translation database. They have a website (18,000 visitors per day!), and mobile phone based product. Yue demoed the mobile technology - it makes your cellphone "speak" in the language of your choice based on Text-to-speech technology. Phone need not have a data plan (GPRS/EDGE) to run the application. Their revenue model includes advertising on their website and selling their database of tranlations to companies that make cellphones.
4. GeneralV - Mingju Zhang presnts GeneralV. Highly efficient video streaming service. Generalv.com provides video hosting services to enterprises. Custom clients are like "The Goverment Offical Website of the Nanjing City", "Shenyang Industry Machine Factory", "IResearch", "China.cn", etc. Till now, Generalv have more than 3000+ clients like above. Generalv make the biz through the biz model of "Channel", it is a triditional biz model for internet enterprises(especially the most successful enterprises such as Baidu.com and Alibaba.com). Also, Generalv provide video transcoding services and server to the enterprises which could save alot of money to the UGC Video Share websites. The website of Generalv is "http://www.generalv.com".

[edit] Companies Represented

1. Reci-P - Social bookmarking for recipes
2. web2asia - Interactive Media Expansion Partner for China, Japan & Korea.
3. Pegatron - Design, manufacturing, service company for differnt industry verticals. Works on designs, for example, for Lenovo computers.