MobiSights, a blog by the Great Wall Club, has an insightful collection of predictions for China’s mobile Internet in 2012. I’ve chosen my 5 favorite, but I also recommend you check out the entire series of 30+ predictions. These are true industry insiders (folks like the famous angel investor Xue Manzi, Zynga engineering head Ji Xu, and Glu CEO Niccolo de Masi), not just blogging blowhards like myself.
iPhone comes with a pretty standard Safari browser, which leaves much room for improvement. And countless app developers have done exactly that: improved upon it.
Perfecting the mobile web browsing experience on a 3.5 inch screen is no easy task–many features just don’t work that well or feel forced. That is, until Mammoth 4 came along.
NetEase Tech released an outstanding infographic today that outlines the mobile communications market in China. Here’s our breakdown by 1) service providers; 2) mobile population; 3) smartphone market; 4) manufacturers.
To be honest, I was skeptical with Zazzer IM at first. There are already a ton of mobile instant messaging apps on the market.
Its founder, Robbie, has also occasionally written for TechRice, and introduced it to me; and at TechRice we aim to be as transparent and unbiased as possible, not just introducing startups because we know the founders.
But after a week using Zazzer, I’ve become attached to it and would like refer to this startup as China’s mobile LinkedIn.
AR, short for augmented reality is a less explored mobile application field in China, Tencent recently launched a AR mobile translator named Tencent “Intelligent Eye” (腾讯慧眼 – Hui Yan) that can translate English, French and German into Chinese and vice versa by simply having the user pointing his smart phone camera to the text in need of translation and fonts don’t matter.
If you ever run into an iPhone 4 for 1300 RMB in the streets of China you just have to keep on walking. If something seems too good to be true it usually is.
The devices look like the real thing at first glance but usually you’re dealing with a Shanzhai ji. Some of the devices are made so well that it hard to tell from the outside what you’re dealing with. With Shenzhen being the Shanzhai production capital, it was something worth looking into during my visit.
China does not have one so-called “national internet,” instead there’s a great divide. It encompasses the elite with ThinkPad laptops and also the grassroots with MTK Shanzhai mobile phones. Our elites are on par with America, while our grassroots are on par with Vietnam. This is the story of W&L, two representatives of China’s great internet divide.
The Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing on April 27-28 looks to be a must-attend conference. In addition to Chinese giants like Tencent CEO Pony Ma, they’ve also confirmed DST founder Yuri Milner, who dramatically shook up the Silicon Valley with his high-valuation investments in Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga. Let’s see if he has anything in store for China–he certainly knows how to make a statement.
The Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) is held annually in Beijing, and is becoming (if not already) Asia’s largest and most elite mobile Internet conference, as it is specifically designed for mobile Internet executives and leaders to connect, learn, and collaborate with one another.
