We’re all too familiar with what’s to hate about Chinese web design. My Windows client for online banking is by far the most painful interface that I’m forced to use on a regular basis–and that’s from China Merchant’s Bank, one of the few customer-oriented banks in China. I’d rather pour chili powder into my eyes than set my homepage to one of the major Chinese portals (Sina, Sohu, 163).

Fortunately, it’s getting better.

There’s a renaissance of design in the Silicon Valley today. Apple has long been the standard-bearer for design in technology, but today there are so many more carrying the flag: from Jack Dorsey at Twitter and Square to startups like Path and Pocket.

Inspired design is even coming from some unlikely sources. Google’s new CEO Larry Page has established a mantra to create, ”one simple, beautiful, useful Google”. I love the white-space and content-focused design of Google+–if only they could get anyone to use it. Even Microsoft has significantly upped its game with Metro style, although nobody’s buying it. Craigslist, you’re on notice.

I believe a renaissance of design is also underway in China. Here, it starts with mobile. The small size of the screen and the fat size of the human finger has forced designers towards simpler, cleaner interfaces. Most have realized that it’s a usability train-wreck to cram a replica of a portal site like Sina.com onto a mobile screen (although a few are still trying to do so).

China’s most famous showcase of mobile UI design is the MIUI OS, Xiaomi’s ROM of Android. But there’s many less-famous mobile startups that also merit attention: the Fuubo client for Weibo (which is far superior to the official Sina Weibo app), the  and the karaoke app Changba (唱吧), for example.

And as it happened with Google in the US, inspired design is also coming from some unlikely sources: notably, Tencent. The most obvious example is WeChat, although I actually that’s not the best one. Tencent Weibo, for instance, is minimal and functional. I wish we could all switch to that instead of the throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks design of Sina Weibo (points, badges, levels, chat, games, groups, banner ads, etc.). The flat and picture-heavy web version of QQ Music is also a winner.

This improvement in Chinese UI design isn’t being covered in the English blogosphere. That’s probably because we’re not yet over the post-traumatic stress disorder that follows a visit to your Chinese bank’s website. Yet as design is now part of my role in product management at Wandoujia, I’ve found many sites that delight me in surprising ways, and I want to share them with you.

So that’s why I’ve created this Tumblr: to highlight the best in Chinese web and mobile user interfaces (UI).

Why Tumblr?

So why post here on Tumblr instead of TechRice.com? Because I plan to experiment with a lightweight format: less text, more pretty pictures. The best posts will also make their way over to TechRice.com

I also welcome contributions from readers. If you have a Chinese web design to share, email me at kai [-at-] techrice.com (kudos if I can re-blog it directly on Tumblr!)

This project is inspired first by LittleBigDetails, which does a fantastic job of crowd-sourcing design details. The other inspiration is our own design award at Wandoujia, the Chinese Android app store where I work, which is a constant source of recommendations.

I’d originally planned to host this blog on DianDian ’China’s Tumblr’, but since the site’s founder Jack Xu has all but admitted defeat, I don’t want to jump onto a burning platform. So instead I’ll go with Tumblr and hope that Yahoo doesn’t screw it up.

What is good design?

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Steve Jobs, 2003

Beyond interfaces that look and feel beautiful, I’ll be looking for those that ‘just work’. To assess this, I’ll consider the audience that they’re designed for. Changba’s (唱吧) YouTube of karaoke is not what I enjoy in my spare time, but I can nonetheless appreciate its simplicity, its persistent music stream, and its rich visuals.

I hope you’ll join me in finding more examples. Happy hunting!

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Meeker’s presentation, which was produced with the help of Chinese-born KPCB senior associate Liang Wu, also had a lot to say about China—including an entire section titled “Lots to Learn from China”. Given that we are a Chinese tech blog, we’ll focus on what Meeker had to say about the Middle Kingdom’s tech scene.

KPCB has a diverse list of investments in China, including JD.com (360 Buy), a B2C direct seller with Amazon-like logistics ambitions that’s struggling with profitability in China’s hyper competitive e-commerce sector. KPCB also stands to benefit indirectly from the more notorious side of Chinese tech, hacking, through its stake in U.S. enterprise security firm Mandiant. Mandiant became a favorite on U.S. social media after its report traced hacking attempts to a specific Shanghai address. (One wonders how KPCB’s stake in Mandiant affects its relationships in China.)

On to Meeker’s points:

1) China Internet Penetration—Market Size

China has the largest internet user base in the world with 504 million users. Its internet penetration rate, however, has not yet reached 50% (currently 42%) despite that over 50% of Chinese are now urban. Chinese internet users are more mobile than desktop, with 75% accessing the web via a mobile phone, but only 71% accessing the web via a desktop computer. Thought to be the emerging power next in line to China, India’s internet penetration rate pales in comparison at 11%. Interestingly, the ratio of China-to-India internet penetration is nearly identical to the ratio of China-to-India nominal GDP, at about 3.8x.

Even with this tremendous user base, Tencent and Baidu are the only two non-American companies in the “Top 10 Internet Properties by Global Monthly Unique Visitors” (as of 2/13, Slide 6).

2) The Propensity for Chinese to Share

According to the Ispos Open Thinking Exchange, 33% of Chinese respondents indicate that “they share everything or most things online” compared to only 15% in the U.S. (the global average is 24%). Whether this is evidence of a dynamic Chinese Weibo full of dissenting Chinese discussing social issues or merely reflects narcissistic youths photographing themselves at Starbucks is not explored by Meeker. While the capabilities of government censors are well-documented, this supposed propensity for sharing could easily spill over from cutesy photos to something more politically charged. At the very least, it should mean more ad dollars for the relevant platforms.

3) How Alibaba Measures Up with U.S. E-Commerce Titans

Alibaba’s properties have surpassed the comibined GMV of Amazon and eBay at over US $150 billion. This number has grown from 0 nine years ago and from $50 billion over the past three. While Alibaba may aspire to compete with Amazon or eBay in the U.S., it is better off solidifying its supremacy in China because of…

4) Domestic Threats to Alibaba’s Dominance

Alibaba previously wiped the floor with former China market favorite eBay EachNet, but now faces a rising threat from its domestic rival, Tencent, a giant in social, mobile and gaming. Tencent is leveraging the rapid growth of its mobile social app WeChat and the QR Code trend to increase its e-commerce power beyond its comparatively unpopular platforms 51Buy (b2c) and PaiPai (c2c). As Slide 64 points out, QR Code scanning is up 4.5x year-on-year in China, allowing ‘offline businesses to drive online connections’. In March 2013, there were 9 million QR codes scanned compared to 2 million in March of 2012. Meeker notes that WeChat’s growing base of over 400 million users gives SMBs a platform to “manage customer acquisition and relationships”. SMBs can “send offers, take online orders and provide customer support” via the Tencent mobile product. I discussed the threat of Tencent to Alibaba earlier this year, and Alibaba’s stake in Sina is widely viewed as move to combat it.

5) China Spends More Time on Mobile + Internet Media than TV

Compared to the U.S., where Americans spend 42% of time on the TV and a combined 38% on mobile + internet, the Chinese spend a much larger percentage of their media consumption on mobile + internet (55%). While this may in part reflect the dismal quality of Chinese television and the need to go online for American TV, it could still enable and encourage Chinese innovation in the mobile space.

6) Facebook vs. Tencent by the numbers

Slide 80 takes a look at several of the world’s most prominent technology companies by the numbers and gives a nice side-by-side comparison of Facebook and Tencent. As you might expect given the labor market in China compared to Silicon Valley, Tencent has 5x as many employees. Tencent has a significant edge in free cash flow and market cap, but Facebook enjoys superior gross margins (72% to 56%) and users. The globalization of WeChat could change the latter.

China’s Role in Global Smartphone Penetration

Meeker also mentions the huge potential for smartphones globally with 5 billion mobile phone users but only 1.5 billion smartphone users. As Tech Rice co-founder Kai Lukoff has explained in his pick for story of the year, China will play an instrumental role in spreading budget Android smartphones to developing world consumers.

Check out the complete deck on 2013 internet trends at KPCB’s website. For another great deck by Meeker and Wu, check out “Immigration in America & The Growing Shortage of High-Skilled Workers,” which illustrates how vital immigration is to the U.S. technology sector.

About the Blogger
James Hopkins is a former employee of Alibaba.com and has lived in China for nearly four years. He will begin the Wharton-Penn Law MBA/JD Program in Philadelphia this fall. 

Breaking down Mary Meeker’s Latest: Trends in China & the Global Internet is a post from: TechRice Follow TechRice on Facebook, Twitter, or Sina Weibo

In his quest to build a better phone, Lei Jun visited hardware manufacturers from around the world. At Nokia, the head of R&D agreed with many of ideas, but had no ability to implement them. In the end, all of his hosts listened politely, but Lei Jun had nothing to show for it. Instead, he decided to build it himself.

The rest is already a part of history: Xiaomi Technology is likely the fastest growing tech company ever. In its first full financial year, Xiaomi generated $2.1 billion in revenue. That dwarfs the $713.4 million that Groupon did in its second full year of business, when it was said to be the fastest-growing company in history. In its second full year, Lei Jun, CEO of Xiaomi, expects the company to generate $4.5 billion.

But it’s fan participation, not revenues, that had Lei Jun most adrenalized in an interview at the GMIC conference (all translations of his Chinese are my own).

Lei Jun was at his most animated when discussing Xiaomi’s model of fan participation. Image source: Caixin

Lei Jun’s eyes shone and he leaned forward from his chair: “The current model doesn’t support this kind of participation. You have no idea what Apple is doing with iOS 7.” He spoke for over 10 minutes straight to explain this one point, Xiaomi’s model of fan participation.

He appealed to us foreign journalists: “Please, please don’t label us an Apple copycat. I’m an Apple fan too, but I believe there’s no way to imitate Apple. So I want to build a completely different company.” This came as a surprise for me. I’ve owned the Xiaomi 1S phone and always thought of the product as a ‘cheap iPhone for China’.

Lei Jun is eager to set the record straight among foreign media, who he thinks have largely missed this point. Fan participation is what truly sets Xiaomi apart from everybody else. ”Our goal isn’t to make a cheap phone in China. We’re building a toy for our fans,” says Lei Jun.

The MIUI OS, Xiaomi’s heavily-modified version of the Android operating system, is the star example of fan participation in design. MIUI has a hyperactive forum that the product team watches like a hawk. The best ideas rise to the top by a voting system and are frequently tested in the next build of the system.

Here’s an example of Xiaomi’s fan-driven design in-action: MIUI recently made changes to its sound recording app on the basis of suggestions by a group of journalists. First, the phone is now muted when recording. Second, incoming calls don’t interrupt the recording. Lastly, MIUI is considering a feature to upload recordings to the cloud in real-time, so that a journalist won’t lose his recording even if someone snatches away his phone, as is apt to happen when a journalist is reporting upon a sensitive topic in China.

These aren’t your run-of-the-mill customers who participate in the forums. ”Our customers are picker than those who buy iPhone or Samsung. If they encounter a problem, the first thing they do isn’t to go repair it, they first curse us. Our users are extremely demanding,” says Lei Jun. If Xiaomi can satisfy these rabid fans, then they figure they can satisfy anyone.

To accommodate fan participation, MIUI has a new approach to OS development. Instead of releasing once in a blue moon at a major press conference as iOS and Android do, MIUI pushes out a new version every single week. It’s similar to a web app: development is highly iterative and updates are frequent and seamless.

There are three pillars to Xiaomi’s business model, according to Lei Jun:

1. Fan participation in the design of the product;
2. Sell the phone directly to the fanbase;
3. Keep distribution costs low (50% of the competition) through business model innovation (e-commerce). 

It’s a model that Lei Jun believes can be applied to many different products, not just the Xiaomi phone.

“Every user becomes your R&D. Every user becomes your salesman. And every user becomes your friend. That’s the company we want to build.”

I was sold by Lei Jun’s daring concept. I walked out of the conference carrying a newly purchased Xiaomi 2S.

Xiaomi’s Daring Plan to Let Fans Design the Phone is a post from: TechRice Follow TechRice on Facebook, Twitter, or Sina Weibo

SILICON DRAGON BEIJING 2013

What do Neil Shen and Hans Tung have in common? Both are ranked by Forbes as top 100 venture capitalists globally, and both are speaking at the third annual Silicon Dragon Forum in Beijing, May 29.

Register HERE

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For one, China is the only market in the world where Halfbrick does extensive internationalization. ”We’re not going to do a different version for Germany anytime soon,” says Larsen. But China’s both large enough (the second-largest market for the game) and different enough to justify the extra effort. The China-specific adaptations came in two steps: 1) monetization; and 2) new content.

To enter China, Halfbrick turned to the publisher iDreamSky. CEO Jeff Lyndon told me that they spent the past year focused on adapting the monetization model of Fruit Ninja. To really thrive in China, the game required more than simple localization (translation, Chinese payment SDKs, Chinese game center). It also had to be internationalized–parts of the gaming experience had to be redesigned and rebuilt–for the China market.

When the game was originally launched about three years ago, the paid download was still the way for developers to make money, so that’s how Halfbrick designed it. The pay-to-download software model, of course, sells just about as well in China as chicken feet sell in the US.

iDreamSky first tried creating a trial version: the user could play for free for three minutes before the game shut down. That worked better than the paid model, but piracy still flourished. Next, iDreamSky launched a free version with advertising support. That prompted a lot of customer complaints, so ads were scaled back to cross-promotions and ‘branded ads’ rather than the low-quality fare served up by most ad networks. Now the latest version finally in-app purchases, which has become by far the most popular monetization model worldwide, not just in China.

This year, iDreamSky have big plans to localize the content inside of Halfbrick games for China: they’re currently running a competition where fans can suggest new ideas for inclusion. Winning ideas will be presented to Halfbrick Studios for consideration, and, if approved, will be developed by iDreamSky’s China team. They’re currently considering adding a Grass Mud Horse (草泥马) into Jetpack Joyride as a vehicle.

Halfbrick has experimented in toys and licensing, but hasn’t achieved the same success as Rovio. The last China version of Fruit Ninja that I played linked to a store where you could buy watermelon and strawberry plush toys. But the Fruit Ninja game doesn’t have characters in the same way as Angry Birds.

While Rovio has renamed itself Rovio Entertainment, Halfbrick still considers itself a games company. Halfbrick wants to keep its team small and focused on its core competency: building great games. That’s why–unlike Rovio–it doesn’t do nearly as much in licensing and merchandising, and doesn’t have an office in China. ”Rovio has like 700 people and we have like 80. We want to preserve that special culture,” says Larsen.

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Vericant is a “common app” for video interviews of Chinese applicants applying to US schools. It’s a badly-needed filter for US schools to separate the wheat from the chaff among their Chinese applicant pool.

For tiger mothers, a university degree from America is the gold standard of parenting achievement. As Chinese get rich, applications to US schools have soared. For US schools, it’s at once a huge opportunity (most international students pay full tuition) and a daunting challenge for the admissions office.

Application fraud is the most immediate problem: ”90 percent of Chinese applicants submit false recommendations; 70 percent have other people write their personal essays; 50 percent forge their high-school transcripts; 30 percent lie on financial-aid forms; and 10 percent list academic awards and other achievements they did not receive,” estimates Zinch China, an education company here. China’s flourishing ‘education consulting’ industry is sophisticated and almost as sketchy as the Chinese milk industry.

But even in an honest application, it can be difficult for a US schools to assess the ‘soft skills’ of an applicant. A Chinese student will arrive in Ohio who’s aced the TOEFL, but will still lack the social and language skills to join in classroom discussions.

So what’s a US admissions office to do? Enter Vericant.

This past application season, Vericant conducted interviews with applicants in cities across China. Applicants appear in-person, pay a fee, and answer a few questions in English from a trained interviewer. Vericant’s questions are randomized–so applicants can’t recite a memorized answer without raising eyebrows when an admissions officer watches the video.

Then, so that the applicant can let their personality shine through in their own mother tongue, there’s also a question or two in Chinese (Vericant adds English subtitles). Finally, there’s also a handwritten writing sample. An HD video of the interview and all the supplementary materials are digitized into an online system that’s accessible to US schools who’ve paid the nominal annual fee to subscribe to Vericant’s service.

Real Vericant questions used in the past include: ”What’s the best thing to have happened to you this past year?” and “What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done?”

Now the admissions officer in Ohio has a chance to go beyond the paper version and meet the real Zhang Nan from Wuhan, China. Maybe she discovers that he stares at his shoes and responds in stunted English. Or maybe she discovers that he’s actually a real talkaholic who quotes Dr. Dre just as quickly as he solves differential equations.

When it comes to soft skills, even Vericant’s own US-China team had to learn how to communicate effectively in a cross-cultural context. ”Westerners need to listen, Chinese need to speak,” says co-founder Guy Sivan, adding that it’s now much smoother than at the start.

Vericant made a calculated decision to begin with boarding schools. Guy told me that soft skills are absolutely critical at this early stage in education: these young students are going as much to be socialized as they are to be educated. And unlike undergrad admissions offices, neither boarding schools nor this echelon of parents have much concern over the extra fee incurred by the applicants (RMB 2499 or USD 380) for the Vericant interview video. These Chinese parents are already committed to a minimum half-a-million-dollar investment in their child’s education (4 years boarding school x $50,000, 4 years university x $60,000, plus flights and expenses).

When Vericant first launched, Executive Director Chris Boehner spent weeks traversing the US: in his first trip, he put about 5000 km on his Toyota Prius rental. But building these relationships has paid off: in 2012, 35 schools used Vericant’s service to screen their Chinese applicants, which co-founder Guy Sivan estimates as one-third of the addressable market for boarding schools in the US. And most clients have now made the Vericant interview a required part of the application.

What’s next for Vericant? The team has decided to expand to Engineering MA and MBA programs in the upcoming admissions cycle. If the Wall Street Journal’s graph (above) is any indication, it looks like finance MA programs could be fertile ground too.

Wannabe startup founders should study Vericant’s stamina. Vericant’s business targets a traditional industry, faces a long sales cycle, and requires a large, seasonal offline operation. It’s the the kind of startup idea that Paul Graham, the Godfather of Y-Combinator, says most founders would pass over due to the “Schlep filter“:

Most programmers wish they could start a startup by just writing some brilliant code, pushing it to a server, and having users pay them lots of money. They’d prefer not to deal with tedious problems or get involved in messy ways with the real world. Which is a reasonable preference, because such things slow you down. But this preference is so widespread that the space of convenient startup ideas has been stripped pretty clean. If you let your mind wander a few blocks down the street to the messy, tedious ideas, you’ll find valuable ones just sitting there waiting to be implemented.

Vericant has embraced a messy, tedious idea and invested years to build out its solution, with many more to go. It’s a level of commitment that fly-by-night founders should learn from.

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Cooliris is speaking on a panel at the GMIC today entitled, “International Apps Doing China the Right Way.” At 15 employees, they’re far smaller than any of the other startups on the panel: Flipboard, EverNote, and Glu Mobile.

So can such a small startup enter China successfully? Cooliris co-founder and CTO Austin Shoemaker thinks so and his startup is testing this theory in a lean way.

Cooliris makes a photo-browsing and sharing app for iOS. It’s a jaw-droppingly gorgeous and seamlessly connects to social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The company was previously asked by Andy Rubin to create the default gallery app for Android, which comes pre-installed and remains ‘something like the 7th most-popular Android app ever’, according to Shoemaker.

Their new iOS app has amassed 3 million downloads since its launch in August 2012. 30% of those downloads come from Asia, with China being the largest contributor.

Yet Cooliris didn’t have concrete plans to enter the market until Renren, China’s Facebook lookalike, knocked on the door. “We took a leap of faith. We were hesitating, we know it’s a different world. So working with local partners was critical for us,” says Shoemaker.

Cooliris also made sure it was a relatively low cost and low risk proposition: they didn’t set up an office or hire any Chinese employees. Neither the language localization nor the Renren integration was especially difficult.

The Renren partnership to enter China looks like a win for this little startup. Engagement went up by 30x after Chinese-language localization and the Renren integration, says Shoemaker. In its next version, Cooliris plans to add Sina and Tencent Weibo integration too.

But local partnerships actually have a very mixed track record in China. Gaopeng (Groupon x Tencent) is in fact a prime case study of Doing China the Wrong Way. As an aside, that’s a panel I’d like to request for next year’s GMIC: among foreign Internet companies that have entered China, the charred corpses still far outnumber the success stories.

However, I think two other factors are boosting the chances of a new generation of foreign entrants like Cooliris.

First, the distribution channels for mobile apps are far more open and fair towards foreign companies. In the past, foreign PC and social games were thwarted by a combination of draconian regulations and imbalanced partnerships. Yet today the Apple App Store (the sole distribution channel for Cooliris at present) is the same everywhere in the world. In Android (the Cooliris app is under development), the fragmentation means that a foreign developer has leverage in choosing between the different app stores.

Second, I’ve noticed that this new generation of foreign entrants show far greater humility. Perhaps they have studied the failures of their predecessors.

“In China, we need to stay in learning mode,” says CTO Shoemaker. Here’s to hoping that Cooliris proves to be the little startup that could.

Cooliris: Can A Little Startup with a Great App Enter China? is a post from: TechRice Follow TechRice on Facebook, Twitter, or Sina Weibo

Steve Mushero, co-founder and CEO of ChinaNetCloud, is a veteran of the both the Silicon Valley technology industry and one of China’s most successful Internet companies. When I told him that I was hoping to learn more about the cloud computing ecosystem in China and how it compared to that of the U.S., his response was eye-opening: when it comes to cloud computing, he noted, “the whole world is far behind Amazon and China is far behind the rest of the world.”

With that provocative teaser as inspiration, I spoke to Mushero recently about where he sees cloud computing going in China. Mushero moved to China in 2005 to serve as Chief Technical Officer of Tudou (土豆网), a wildly popular Chinese video sharing website that is often compared to YouTube. In 2008 he left Tudou to establish ChinaNetCloud, a global Internet server management company, and the first company in China to offer access to cloud computing services to the general public. ChinaNetCloud’s official corporate vision is to “manage all the world’s Internet servers.”

Cloud computing: the gold standard

I asked Mushero to elaborate on his statement about Amazon’s dominance – what makes it the gold standard and what makes cloud computing so technically difficult that China lags far behind? He answered by painting a basic picture of how cloud computing works. Envision a classic problem – a single computer household: one system with many different programs on it and many different people who want to use it, often at the same time. This, in essence, is the challenge faced by cloud computing specialists – they have to find a way to manage a single server, or a number of servers, in a way that allows them to provide many users with the opportunity to access resources, share resources, and control resources, typically at the same time. Furthermore, they have to make sure memory is distributed in a way that makes such use efficient, all while guaranteeing the security of the data being transferred.

Therein lies the technical difficulty. What makes Amazon such a dominant force in the cloud computing realm? Amazon’s cloud provides the fundamental building blocks – the infrastructure – for the more complex cloud ecosystem that currently exists places like the U.S., Mushero noted. In short, the company’s physical servers and management of them make possible the higher-level cloud services offered by many consumer applications, from iCloud to Dropbox. Amazon’s cloud system, then, underwrites many of the every day experiences Americans have with cloud computing; we’re just often unaware of it.

The Chinese cloud computing ecosystem

The gold standard, however, is absent in China. According to Mushero, China’s own cloud computing ecosystem, like its Internet realm more generally, is dominated by local players. Leading the pack is e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba, whose Aliyun (Ali Cloud) is the largest cloud in the country. Alibaba, Mushero notes, aspires to achieve Amazon-like dominance in China and is pouring forth the resources to make it possible. In second place is HiChina, which struck a deal to merge with Aliyun earlier this year. Shanda, Tencent, and 360buy, all prominent Chinese Internet companies, are also engaged in cloud related initiatives.

The development of cloud computing and proliferation of companies offering clouds or cloud services in China has been swift. Mushero’s ChinaNetCloud offered the first public cloud in 2008. The second cloud initiative, 21Vianet’s CloudX, quickly went out of business. [Note: 21 Vianet now licenses cloud technology from Microsoft]  Thereafter, a number of new players entered the field, with a particular upsurge in interest in the last one to two years. This development, Mushero notes, is being pushed by a rise in Internet company interest in cloud technology, while corporations have adopted a more cautious approach. According to Mushero, most companies in China still buy their own servers, as was the case in the U.S. a few years ago. He expects that China will develop in a similar way as the U.S. in this regard, with more corporations choosing to forgo servers for cloud storage and cloud computing services as time marches forward.

Opportunities for foreign companies in Chinese cloud computing

So why aren’t Amazon and other foreign companies more heavily involved in China’s cloud computing industry? After all, if Amazon is the gold standard, wouldn’t it want to seize the opportunity to make its mark on cloud computing in the world’s biggest market? While Amazon is working in many parts of Asia, including Japan, Singapore, and Australia, it hasn’t come to China in a big way. Mushero attributed this, as well as a general lack of foreign involvement in cloud computing in China, to regulatory issues associated with data centers and the special licenses needed for foreign companies to operate a cloud. Mushero doesn’t see these challenges lessening in size moving forward and therefore doesn’t expect any foreign player to become a dominant force in the Chinese cloud computing ecosystem. He does, however, expect to see a rise in foreign entities looking to invest in the development of cloud computing in China.

The Chinese government and the development of cloud computing

As my contextChina colleague Eve Cary has written, the Chinese government has identified cloud computing as a “strategic emerging industry” and has significantly increased investment into its development. This prompted me to seek out Mushero’s thoughts on the role the Chinese government is likely to play in the growth of the industry.

Mushero believes the government is more likely to make a difference as an early adopter of cloud services than by attempting to innovate through top-down, heavily funded R&D programs. He noted that the government and many of the companies that provide clouds are tightly connected, increasing the likelihood that government departments will make an early transition to cloud storage of their (non-sensitive) information. Indeed, this process has already begun, he said, as evidenced by a recent government decision to allow public organs to spend their IT budget on cloud services, an act which was previously prohibited.

Mushero doesn’t believe, though, that the government will be able to produce major innovations in cloud computing itself. The international cloud computing industry is developing too quickly for the Chinese government to push the industry forward. For now, China is focused on catching up, making expectations of a leapfrog in development of the industry unrealistic.

This article was produced in collaboration with contextChina, which reports on and analyzes the development of Chinese industries including tech, healthcare, clean tech, and aviation. To learn more about contextChina and Robert O’Brien, visit www.contextchina.com and follow @contextChina and @RobertD_OBrien on Twitter.

Cloud Computing in China: An Insider’s Perspective is a post from: TechRice Follow TechRice on Facebook, Twitter, or Sina Weibo

Here are the actual numbers for 2012: 650 million worldwide, 224 million in China. Moreover, the worldwide figure is Google’s official count of Android activations, which excludes about 41% of Android devices sold in China. If you add that in, there were about 750 million Android devices worldwide by the end of 2012.

Luck is important for any startup. You have a vision of the future, and you put yourself in position to ride that wave. For Wandoujia, it’s come as a tsunami. When I showed Junyu Wang, our co-founder at Wandoujia, he said, “Android’s actual growth is far beyond our wildest expectations.”

It’s said that technology revolutions arrive slower than expected, but are then adopted faster than expected. That’s certainly the case here.

Disclosure: If it wasn’t already clear above (!), I work at Wandoujia, an Android app store and search engine based in Beijing.

China’s Android Growth is Far Beyond Our Wildest Expectations is a post from: TechRice Follow TechRice on Facebook, Twitter, or Sina Weibo

So at Wandoujia we wanted to create an to infographic (below) to help foreign developers understand the market and also promote the launch of our own developer center–it’s in English now!

Here’s what stood out to me in creating this infographic:

• In games, foreign developers make big hits. For the most part, Chinese play the same mobile games as the rest of the world: it’s a huge opportunity for developers like Rovio, Com2Us, and Halfbrick. But watch out, local developers dominate in apps.
• Monetization is growing quickly, especially over the past 6 months. Or to put it more precisely, we track bid prices for advertising slots: that is, how much developers are willing to pay for the download of their app. This is a strong proxy: as monetization improves, developers bid more. For some RPG ‘hardcore’ mobile games, developers are even willing to pay 10 RMB (1.60 USD) per download.
• Tencent has sprinted far ahead in mobile, with 4 of the top 10 apps. The distance of Tencent’s early lead is breathtaking: I never expected QQ and WeChat to be installed on almost 60% of phones while most of the other top apps are at less than 20%. I’ve seen lots of lists of China’s top apps, but haven’t this coverage rate reported anywhere else.
  • A note on our methodology: The Wandoujia user tends to be slightly more high-end than the average in China, so that means that the coverage rate of Tencent’s apps (especially QQ) are probably slightly undercounted. Our own app isn’t counted here because it’s on 100% of the phones for these users–that’s how we’re able to get this data on which apps they’ve installed.

Disclosure: If it wasn’t already clear above (!), I work at Wandoujia, an Android app store and search engine based in Beijing.

From Inside the Black Hole: Data on China’s Top Android Apps [Infographic] is a post from: TechRice Follow TechRice on Facebook, Twitter, or Sina Weibo