Talking about passionate users! Just got this in from Tony Gang, one of the new guys at Maxthon who posted this on the Maxthon Blog. This music video is made by LinQi and GuangChen ,students of Northwest Polytechnical University of China.
It’s in Chinese but Tony have promised to supply one with English subtitles over the next couple of days. Since I know that I have many Chinese readers, why don’t we run a competition? The one who sends me an English translation first, will get a U3 key with Maxthon 
Love it! Keep sending me more.
I often get the question of how I got involved with Maxthon. I mean how does a Swedish/Israeli guy becomes a partner in a Chinese company? The answer is, thorough LinkedIn. Belive it or not. Not directly, but in-directly. Here’s the story:
It all started when I was working at ICQ (an AOL subsidary) and was trying to track down Nicklas Zennstrom from Skype for an idea I wanted to explore. I then found that the missing link between be and Niklas Zennstrom was a Danish fellow called Morten Lund (early Skype investor). To get to Morten I had to go through a contact I had at MTV in London, another Danish guy called Henrik Werdelin – now VP at Joost.
Morten was quick to respond, but said that Nicklas was just too busy those days (I doubt it has changed ) so why don’t I come by Copenhagen and he would give me a bunch of more interesting deals… I accepted his invitation, went to Copenhagen and then spend a day with Morten discussing Bullguard (his main baby then) and a number of other ventures for ICQ.
Nothing really came out of this meeting, more due to the lack of action from ICQ and less from Morten. However, it was the beginnning of a friendship that led to countless hours of IM chats for over a year. Morten kept pitching me on behalf of all kinds of ventures he was involved in or was planning to get involved in. At that time, I was really fed up with the total incompetence and lack of understanding of what was going on on the Internet at ICQ (and AOL too for that matter) and had started to look around for the next challenge.
Of all the ventures Morten and I discussed, nothing really seemed attractive to me at that time. Partly because I didnt want to relocate from Israel and partly becasue it just didn’t make me excited. But things changed.
One early morning in late November 2005 Morten Skyped me from the Arab Emirates and asked me to have a look at a new browser he had stumbled upon. He was quite excited. 20 Million download in a year! And it was created by a Chinese developer living in Hong Kong!
Since I just had downloaded and converted to Firefox, my inital reaction was” Who needs another browser” ? But Morten just said: “Just download it and you will see..” Said and done, I did. I was converted – again! Maxthon was so cool, and they story behind so fantastic that I agreed to take on the challenge.
Morten wanted me to become a business partner and take the company to the next level. How could I refuse? After I made up my mind I spend the 4 months in endless IM conversations with BloodChen - Mr. Maxthon himself a.k.a. Jeff Chen. It was my first experience in Chinese psychology and negotiations. It taught me a lot of patience..
Jeff and I finally reached an agreement and signed it off – without ever having met…Talking about an original start of a new venture. Two years has passed since I joined and I haven’t regretted it for a second. Maxthon is an amazing piece of software, but more than that, Maxthon is more like a movement of passionate fans and co-developers all over the world. We have actually become the only Chinese Internet/Software company with a true global footprint. And we keep on growing like crazy.
That was my little LinkedIn story. Hope you liked it. What is yours?
Technorati Tags: Maxthon, China, LinkedIn, Morten Lund, Skype , China, Joost, icq
Here is a very interesting video about Google in China. Kai-Fu Lee, Greater China President (the man Google took from Microsoft that made Steve Ballmer throw a chair across his office in anger  taken last week. Kai-Fu spoke about the current development of Google’s offices in China and about the challenges and opportunities facing Google China as well as collaboration between the US and China offices.
I met Kai-Fu Lee in October last year in Beijing at Google China’s Headquarters and guess what…He loves Maxthon! |
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Danwei is pointing out that we have had a record month of Jewish-Chinese coverage in the western media. Since I am slowly but surely immersing more and more into China, and as an observant Jew, I find Chinese-Jewish relations very faschinating.
Here is a great video from the Sexy Beijing, about the opening of the first Mikveh in Beijing in modern times. And by the way, good news for all China visiting Jews! There is finally a kosher restaurant in Beijing !
Kaiser reports that the "Chinese Joost" UUSee, just received $23.5 in VC funding from DFJ’s Growth Fund, Highland Capital Partners and Steamboat Ventures. P2P is really flourishing in China with such players as Google invested Xunlei – a Maxthon partner, PPLive and PPStream. I agree with Kaiser’s prediction that it is only a matter of 3G time until we will see mobile P2P services popping up all over China
Update: Talking about the future of video & P2P, there is an interersting article on Technology Review by Hui Zhang called "Peering into Video’s Future".
Technorati Tags: China, Joost, Maxthon, p2p, PPLive, PPStream, UUSee, VC, Venture Capital, Xunlei
After a very good board meeting with Maxthon, I paid a visit to HiPiHi - Chinas answer to Second Life. This came about after I had written a short post on them earlier and got an invitation to swing by their office. Kaiser Kuo (Ogilvy) and Xinhua Liu (early investor in HipiHi & Technology Director at Burson-Marsteller).. also joined me.
Armed with camcorders, cameras and curious minds, we invaded HiPiHi physically and virtually. I must say that I was really impressed. I always felt like Second Life was too geeky and to inaccessible, and therefore had only signed in a couple of times and flied around out of boredom.
Not so at HiPiHi. They have been smart enough to realize that most of us deadly are not geeks and need a more user-friendly user-interface to motivate us enough to play around in this virtual world. Although they are just in private alpha, they have come along way with a team of just 60. The user is offered a bunch of pre-fabricated avatars, buildings, hills, rocks, objects and event water to furnish their own worlds. Should they feel for it later, the user can always customize or create any object from scratch as they see fit.
It is clear that HiPiHi has given much thought into making the virtual world more user-friendly. HiPiHi’s CEO Hui Xu (beside me on the picture above) explained to us that the service will be launched in four stages based on traditional Chinese creational mythology (read Kaisers summary for an expansion on this).
Revenues will come from virtual property sales and advertising. And I can definitely see how advertisers will love this. Especially since HiPiHi is targeting the young and cool rather than a bunch of geeks in pajamas or "social media stars".
I shot a couple of short clips of a walk-through in HipiHi-land with a simple digital camera. Comments are both in Chinese & English. More clips here.
I have a very good feeling about HiPiHi and am waiting eagerly for the public launch.
(Image above: Sunset in HiPiHi-land).
Today I spend the day with knowledge hungry investment bankers, then participated in “Emerging Internet Companies” on behalf on Maxthon before running off to Maxthon’s Headquarters for a sneak peak of a very new cool service and some upcoming product features. Looks great!
I also ran into a cool newly launched streetwear fashion clothes company just kicking-off here in China. Nice to meet with non-Internet related business people for a change . The name of the company is Eno , and the conversation with them certainly triggered some interesting ideas I want to explore…
Tomorrow, I have a breakfast meeting with a leading advertising agency am then off for a board meeting. Time is certainly running fast here and it’s great to see so much activity in the Internet space. Before I head home I am going to pay a visit to HipiHi – the Chinese answer to Second Life. I got an invitation from them after I wrote a short post on them. Will certainly be a lot of fun. Bill Tail & Kaiser Kuo has promised to come along as well. Hopefully I will have time to shoot a short video from the visit – we’ll see.
Finally, if you are looking for some new interesting investment oppertunity in China that are not related to the Internet. Digg deeper into alternative energy…it’s getting very hot..
Technorati Tags: Altertnative engergy, Beijing, China, Eno, Fashion, Hipihi, China Investments, Second Life
The Focus group panel, a permanent panel at any Piper Jaffray conference was especially interesting since this time the discussion was with young Chinese users as opposed to US teens.
Key Points:
- Favorite activities seems to be to download movies and mp3′s
- Baidu is the favorite search engine mainly because of mp3′s
- Google is considered “better” in terms of quality
- Prefer to download movies that are either Asian or European (French!) not Hollywood movies..
- Cannot consider to pay for any content. Especially not for music or movies
- But, are very willing to pay for ringtones, virtual items, avatars etc – One girl even paid to get a doctor to heal her sick QQ pet…
- All users bought online
- All used Alipay to pay for goods online – some cash on delivery
What I found most interesting was they all freely and openly spoke about that as soon as they wanted content forbidden by the government – they went Online to get it. Nobody seemed to be the least concerned with saying that openly. This is what I have been saying over and over: young people in China are not concerned or worried about saying what they want – no one is being arrested for a statement like the above… Censorship is something being practised by all governments, organizations, corporations and even Editors of the “free press” all over the world. It just comes in different colors and shapes..
Technorati Tags: Avatars, Baidu, China, Consumers, Download, Google, Movies, Mp3, Chinese Users, Users
The first day of Piper Jaffrays’s Annual Growth Conference is just over here in cold but sunny Beijing. The panel called "The portal Challengers" dealing with mainly video sites as a new and alternative destination sites as opposed to the big portals, was really interesting. CEOs of Tudou, Yoqoo.com and Mop (Oak Pacific Interactive) shared their view of the challenges and experiences of Chinas 150+ YouTube’s.
Here are the main points:
- Running a video site is a very expensive business
- Nobody is really thinking of making any real revenues in the near future
- Local regulations makes running a similar business in the US look like a dream
- Main thing is to focus on users, build traffic and distinguish your self from all the other 150 sites..
- Download speed key factor
- Chinese users are opposed to YouTube uses are not really sharing videos with each other
- It is still very early days for video sharing sites in China – far away from being a major activity on the net
- Content is mainly of Asian character – not driven by user generated videos like in the US
- Most popular content is of "copyright challenging character"
In short still a long way to go before any of them are making any serious revenues from video content.
Technorati Tags: Piper Jaffray, YouTube, puppy, Tudou, Video, Yoqoo, YouTube
I’m off to China on Sunday for the Fourth Annual Piper Jaffray China Growth Conference, March 6-8 in Beijng. I will be a panelist on "Emerging Internet Companies" talking about Maxthon. Piper Jaffray is known for organizing top events (invitation only) and judging from past events – this one looks very promising indeed with a great line up.
It will be a great opportunity for networking and potential Maxthon deals. Top executives from Chinas major Internet , Wireless, Game and Technology companies will be there. I am in particular interested in the Chinese focus group conversation, since I many times wonder what makes Chinese Internet users tick‘.
Following the conference I am meeting with Maxthon Fan & supporter No 1: Kaiser Kuo, rockstar & Group Director at Ogilvy Interactive in China, followed by a Maxthon boardmeeting. It will be great to meet Bill Tai (CRV), David Zhang, Yuzhu (WI Harper), Jeff and Carol (Maxthon) again – just hope it will not be as cold as the last time..
If you want to meet up in Beijing please let me know, schedule is quite tight – but long is the night..;)
Who knows, maybe I even will have time to shoot some cool Beijing street scenes?
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