The Staggering Rate of Smartphone Adoption
In a LinkedIn post from November of 2012, former Director of Google China and head of Beijing-based venture firm Innnovation Works Kai Fu Lee predicted that the installed base of smartphones in China would double to 500 million by the end of 2013 (note that Mobithinking [...]
Whether providing software-as-a-service (SaaS) for enterprise resource planning (ERP), on-premise ERP, infrastructure-as-a-service (e.g. offsite servers and storage), security or something else, enterprise tech companies have been a relative bright spot in U.S. markets compared to overly-hyped consumer facing companies such as Groupon (77% of value lost since IPO), Zynga (66% of value lost since IPO) [...]
Nestled in the hills of Shenzhen in southern China, stands a factory that churns out smartphones day and night. Migrant workers labor for fourteen-hour shifts, six days a week. Most welcome the overtime, which is usually paid. Components stand around in cardboard boxes piled around the edges of the factory: MediaTek chipsets, touch screens, 8GB of flash memory, and a generic black plastic case. After assembly, the device will be flashed with a modified version of Android Ice Cream Sandwich that’s stripped of all traces of Google and pre-loaded with about forty Chinese apps. One ChinaDroid is ready for sale.
As the Year of the Snake is nearly upon us, here’s a quick update for our TechRice readers.
First, the good news: we followed our resolution from last year to focus TechRice exclusively on analysis pieces. We published very few news pieces and zero press releases masquerading as news.
The bad news? We’ve posted far less this year, and barely at all the last few months.
Speaking at the Game Developer’s Conference in Shanghai, Eric Lundberg, GM at mobile advisory firm W3i, shared some insider tips on how mobile developers can cash in:
1. The Bursting Strategy
In the “bursting strategy,” a company will pay for downloads via a third party service like Tapjoy to effectively earn [...]
CEO of Beijing-based game developer CMUNE Ludovic Bodin recently spoke at the China Game Developer’s Conference on what he views as the rise of a combination of hardcore social and mobile gaming. CMUNE’s most prominent title is the 3D First Person Shooter (FPS) called Uberstrike, which was ranked the #1 browser-based FPS game worldwide with [...]
One of the highlights of last weekend’s China Game Developers Conference in Shanghai was the talk given by Kabam Games co-founder, chief technology officer and current Beijing office manager Michael Li, who told the story of the company’s journey to producing the #1 grossing iOS game (both overall and in 26 different countries) and #2 [...]
Journalist Adam Century recently wrote about Weixin in the venerable pages of The New York Times. It’s high time for WeChat to start getting international attention.
The story, Chinese Messaging App Gains Ground Elsewhere, is a sharp overview of the WeChat phenomenon.
I’ve worked with some really great startups and some that have some development opportunities (and some God awful). Here are a just a few pieces of advice for those startups that want to work with brands. These tips are cross cultural and apply to my experiences working in the U.S., China and Singapore.
As I exited the Taipei City Hall metro station, two beautiful Taiwanese girls in short shorts and skimpy tank tops approached me. The ice-cold shower of reality hit me two seconds later when I found that they were trying to sell me something. D’oh.
But my interest was rekindled when I discovered that something is WeChat (or 微信 in Chinese), the mobile chat app that we at TechRice have predicted as the China tech story of 2012.
Now the story has moved beyond China.
