Another great BASE event! Thanks all for attending. During this meeting we started Twitter /basecn. The theme of this event was a discussion about what the differences between the internet growth in China and the internet growth in western countries. In the discussion several interesting points were made:
- In Chinese webpages, there seems to be a preference to links over searching. It appears that people prefer to click rather than enter text in a Search box, for example. Speculation is that entering Chinese characters is more cumbersome than, for example, the latin alphabet.
- There was a great debate about whether Baidu created a better search experience for Chinese folks than Google. Some members of the group felt that putting ads in the same format as organic search results was preferable to Chinese, while others disagreed, and attributed Baidu's market share to other factors, like MP3 search.
- The differences between uses of email in China vs. the west were also noticed. The dependence on email appears to be less here in China, as is the use of custom domains for email accounts.
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[edit] Demos and Talks
- Reshma presented (this website) PseudoLocal, and showed off some of the features and next steps for the site.
- Tracy Chou and Helen, two students at Stanford presented their upcoming symposium for Beida students, giving them information about entrepreneurship. Here's the symposium proposal.
[edit] Companies Represented
- Mari-Liis from Ambient Sound Investments Inkubaator
- Jon Thoms, serial entrepreneur and founder of Comic Wonder and Social Helix
- John from the Hina Group
- Chris from Finn Evdemon Capital Partners
- Huang Dong and Sean from ???
- Brice from Tongo translation services.
[edit] Extended Interview with David Feng
Below twinterview (interview on Twitter) with DavidFeng - founder of Beijingology. These notes were taken by David: it's the first time we tried twittering at the very beginning of the event while waiting for attendees to arrive. It's fixed at 7pm but people do not come until about 8pm or something. =) I guess the reason is that there's no speaker to attract them to be here.
David Feng and I had a conversation about the topic. the topic is a question: "What are the current characteristics of the growing internet use in China that are different from the historical growth of the Internet use in the US?"
This question is rather to help the entrepreneurs who want to understand the Chinese Internet market...
David F. has been in China since 2000. He was at Switzerland during 1988-2000. He was born in China.
basecn: very cool... nice... well... that's the period of the fast economy development.
DF: Yup, real fast... especially with what we have right now.
basecn: today we want to talk about what characteristic of the growing use of internet use in CHina. We also want to compare that with the US one. how's your internet experiences like so far? especially in China?
basecn:i started using internet on a regular basis starting in 2000... it's kinda when you started in china
DF: My first Net link was back in 1995, first email account in 1998, back on CN Internet for good starting late August 2000. I've been in "hiding" till late 2005, when I (only then!) first started blogging...
DF: We have to content with invisible sites in China, but hey, being on the ground for 8 years, I get used to it or reroute around. They don't call it the People's Republic for nothing. Just the SHEER number of netizens in the PRC. This is absolutely amazing.
basecn: what are the three things you want to say about the growing china internet?
DF: First, there's a bit of rail-linking to do. Folks in China have to get a bit of what the Net is outside the nation. People outside China have to be clued in what's happening inside the PRC. I did blognation China and techblog86 to this end. Second thing about the Chinese Internet is that I hope we get access to more information. And I mean healthy information. Multiple voices on a single topic would be pretty good. Let the flowers bloom. Finally, I hope that we get more Tweeters in China. Twitter is a fan-freaking-tastic "thing" and me love it! :-D
basecn:i agree with you on the information access. i found that it is just easier in the English world... do you think it is because the web is more organized?
DF: In fact in terms of organization, quite a bit of those sites in China are a tad difficult to navigate... even in Chinese...
davidatsg: most of the Chinese websites are flooded wth information, ads, and texts ... just too much... what's your opinion about that?
DF: That's the thing I don't like. We have too many semi-porno ads on even the news sites. It's absolutely disgusting.
davidatsg: well... another thing is that the english ones look very clean and neat
DF: Thing is not all look clean and neat I think, but quite a few do. Chinese sites can be clean, too, if efforts are made. I mean imagine reading the latest subway news with a semi-done lady ad next to the text. Totally sick-o. This "ca bian" (擦邊)-ism has got to stop. For good. I don't mind the ads. I just don't like those that have little or no taste and cater just to your money and nothing else.
davidatsg: you are right... so... i don't really experience the development of the US internet development... do you see any similar patterns happening in China that happened to the US one? what's your opinion on that?
DF: I'm of the opinion that the Web is to serve everyone, not just those people looking for "刺激".Finally I believe the Net extends our daily lives (real lives!). As a result I favor a real-name registration system.I mean what we say on the Web is part of us. There's no escaping. The anonymous era is pretty much over as I see it. Having said that, I favor RESPONSIBLE freedom of speech. Speak ahead -- but BE RESPONSIBLE and stand by what you say.The Chinese Internet will only go up and up. Only 200M are wired up. The PRC is 1.3B+. There's nothing scary about using your real name on the Internet. Use it well and it "adds glamor" to you (so to speak).Don't see anything too clear here, except for that I use the Web not for games, but to get actual things done... ;-)
davidatsg: any cultrual differences you see here?
DF: But then again I do see a bit of a difference in the West and China. On the Chinese Web people are more "人情". But then again on the Western Internet, the so-called "nobody" can speak freely, too. In China it's much the same, but... Having said that, people in China "favor" those with authority or with a proven track record. Nothing bad about it, tho'.
davidatsg: yes... we know DavidFeng... don't we.... is that a real name?
DF: Yup, @DavidFeng is David Feng. It's "real". ;-) I am afraid I'll have to run. Tweet to you after about 21:45! :-) and the rest -- feel free to tune it at 20:00 if you wish! Thanks for the twinterview! ;-) And all the best to tonight's BASE. I'm sure it'll be great. All the best! :-) Thanks for having me. All the best! :-)
davidatsg: thank you verymuch! "DavidFeng"... enjoy your radio show and we will catch up on twitter and the tweet meet up (end of twinterview) I was using twhirl and it was kinda slow to receive the so fast updates from DavidFeng. I was not able to follow him very closely. I guess twhirl is definitely not good for twinterview then. way too slow to get message out and in at the same time. Thank you very much, David! We will try another time and make it a much better one, for sure!!! =)
[edit] Extended Discussion Notes
The Chinese internet markets is so different from the US one. In China, it was all started with the news portal, like Sina, Sohu. Sina and Sohu are not content providers but rather more like agents to pull all kinds of information from other places and put all together at a news portal. thus, the new portal really worked here in China and many other websites grew, NetEase (163.com) etc. Don't forget the media in China is controlled by the government. The Chinese website cannot be like the vertical news site in the US. for example, US can have a news site tailored just for sports. and the sports site is both the content provide as well as the portal. but it cannot be like that in China in the vertical manner. Content is censored.
Why Baidu is more successful in terms of ads in China than Google? (higher CTR) The main business values and beliefs are different for the two companies. Google is user centric and Baidu is business-centric. Because of that, the way ads being displayed are so different now. (I guess it really has something to do with the characteristics of the netizens in China. as DavidFeng said earlier, they don't believe anyone but some sort of authority figures). How different? Google puts ads in texts formats on the side of the search page. But Baidu puts the ads within the search results and on the side of the search results. It has a lot to do with the business beliefs. The Chinese mentality is that if you pay to advertise, it must be something worth advertising and the ads really want to get people's attention (CTR). as the users, they believe that if somebody is paying some big amount money to display some ads at some prominent places, it ought to be something great or useful. Because of that, the users clicks more on Baidu. more clicks attracts more enterprises to advertise on Baidu.
[Baidu ads picture]
Baidu search of "kaixin"
[Google ads picture]
Google.cn search of "kaixin"
He also shared with the attendees that the netizens in the Chinese Internet Markets can be categorized into three: one is to obtain fame, generate awareness of him/her - social status; one is to gain materialistic benefits; and the last one is the SO-BORED people that have nothing to do but to surf the net.
the first blogging provider in China is blogchina.com but it did not make people blog and blogging did not take off as a common thing on the net. who did? Sina.com did. It provides the super star a place to talk about what they do (blogging), which attracted so many readers and generated awareness not only for sina, sina blogging but also blogging in general. [The Chinese people are naturally more introvert and not too expressive but they are looking for other people's privacy and gossips, especially the super stars. he added] as you may know, the most viewed blog is xu jinglei's sina blog.(so you can imagine how it worked there.) Sina till today is still the top one blogging provider in terms of readership and membership.
because there are so many so-bored internet users, entertainment on the net has been a common place for the Chinese websites, even down to simple SNS applications. A similar application to "friends for sales" on facebook is called friends trades (朋友买卖） on Kaixin. If you paid some virtual $ to buy a friend that is on your friend list, you could assign some tasks to him to do, like clean the toilet, get starved for a day etc. These are very entertainment centric for the users. [maybe we can interpret that to certain extent, a web shall be of entertaining values to users in China]