Over Optimistic and Over Pessimistic

Based on my observation on the International companies in China, which failed, or failing, they are swinging from the over optimistic mode to over pessimistic mode. eBay is an example, and Google is another.

They start with big ambition to get the whole country in few months, or 1 year, but it quickly find out that it is mission impossible and then they quickly switch to the over pessimistic mode and claim the failure. They are actually not.

What they need is neither of the two – they just need to be realistic.

Always Make New Mistakes

Last night, I had nice dinner with my friend Doug, Haisong and a group of venture capitalists at Lao Maotou (we talked about the silliness of it’s English name, the Cool Dock).

I was impressed by Pascal Levensohn. He mentioned about his belief of his work: always make new mistakes.

I assume the meaning was

1. Don’t make the same mistakes twice.

2. Be aggressive and brave enough to try new things, acknowledging the possibility that it may be a new mistake.

Thanks, Pascal.

Quora is Growing Crazily

I first learn Quora from Matt, and now, email about someone following me came in like crazy. I got about 120 email like this in the last few days.

The website by few ex-former employees of Facebook, and invested by Benchmark is very interesting. It showed the early characters of a promising website – the feeling of WOW when you first read it.

On my first page, I saw some interesting question answered by interesting people. For example, the best answer voted to “What does Matt do when he was in China” was answered by Matt himself, and the question “What does Craig of Craigslist think about money” also received a lot of answers, out of which, Craig’s own answer was chosen to be the best.

You can have a try there.

Building Safty by Increasing Vulnerablity

I thought about it long time ago. In the GSR New Year Part, I talked about this idea with the audience here. Let me record this simple idea.

There are many system that archived safety, not by making it more safe, but by making it more vulnerable, and thus decrease the barrier of usage, and then as a result, increased the user base, and finally archived lower security incident percentage – a more secure system. Let me give you some examples.

Credit Card

The idea of credit card is crazy. Before the electronic and real-time processing, you can use credit card just by giving a number. At the very beginning, even the card itself is not required, and now when paying online, you don’t need the physical card – just the number.

This is a very vulnerable system. There are thousands of easy ways to hack this system. What if I just oversaw a number, and use it to purchase my goods? What if I gave the number but denied that the transaction? How vulnerable the system looks like.

However, that is the most widely accepted modern payment method. Why? Because by eliminating the need of back-and-forth check, and other steps, it makes it so easy for people to use. Then the user base grows so far – faster than the fraud, because of the simple fact that there are more good people than bad people. As long as the fraud is controlled under a certain rate, the system is becoming more and more secure.

Online Payment in China

The opposite case is the online payment in China. People emphasize on security, and made the system so secure that it is very hard to use. You need to go to the bank in person, sign the documents, and get a certificate (sometimes a USB based certificate). Then you go back and install it, and you need to install an ActiveX control (Sorry, Firefox!), and go through a long process to pay online. Sometimes, it even need mobile SMS confirmation…

Secure? It is more secure than credit card system, but the problem is, much less people are using them.

Percentage = Numerator / Denominator

Let’s define the security as the percentage of fraud of all transaction.

Hold on if you don’t agree on this definition. If the absolute number is more important than the percentage, that is another story.

So, there are two ways you can decrease the percentage – decrease the numerator or increase denominator.

I see huge opportunity to increase the denominator by making the system simpler (but less secure), but not too much upside for decrease the numerator. (If you have virus on computer, they get what ever you enter, both in the credit card case, or in the current China online payment system). You can actually makes the system more secure when vulnerability can get you much more denominator.

More Examples

There are examples of this everywhere. Many hotel or restaurant offers you to book just by phone, email, without credit card guarantee. That is vulnerable because guests can be no show. However, since this system makes it much easier to reserve than requiring advance payment, they get much more customers. Actually, they are paying a No-Show insurance for each guest (they will have to pay the lose related to the no show if it does happens). Again, if the rate is controlled right, this is secure.

Another fictional example is, windows are very easy to break. However, if all the windows do not have any protection against a rock, the chance for your window to be broken is actually extremely low.

You Control The Fraud to be Proportional to Users

The criteria for this to happen is, you must control the fraud, and limit the damage of any individual bad guy. In the window breaking example, if someone can only break handful of window per night, the whole system is secure because of the assumption that there are less than 0.1% of people who want to break other people’s window. However, if there is anyway for the 0.1% to press a button to break 100 windows at the same time, this insurance type of mathematics model does not work.

That explains why certain vulnerable system works, and others don’t. If the bank set a limit to the credit for each card (which they do), or for the hotel booking, limit people to reserve just one hotel room (they never allow someone call in and reserve all the rooms of that night without guarantee), that will be a simple, and secure system as a whole.

Trend Against Semantic Web

Semantic web is one of the hottest trend in 2009 and should continue to be so in 2010 (like in this article: Top 5 Web Trends of 2009.) We talked about this during the dinner time with Gao Xiang of Hubs1, and other great guys.

I personally don’t see huge potential of semantic web.

X.400 vs SMTP email address

If you compare the two implementation of email address,

X.400 representation:

G=Harald;S=Alvestrand;O=Uninett;P=Uninett;A=;C=no

SMTP address:

Harald.Alvestrand@delab.sintef.no

The later is better, I think. The first one is very semantic, and contains organized, structured information, like the country (C), the organization (O), private management domain Name (P), Surname (S), Given Name (G), but is that all that important for human even computer to understand that?

Human is not Semantic

Basically, as Gao Xiang pointed it out, human beings are not semantic. They love to dance, to drink, to sing, but don’t like to act as machines. Machines like semantic. It should be the machines moving toward human, not the other way.

Look at this “Semantic way” of representing an EMAIL address:

Attribute Type Abbreviation Label

(where necessary)

Given Name Given name G

Initial Initials I

Surname Surname S

Generation Qualifier Generation Q

Common Name Common Name CN

Organization Organization O

Organizational Unit 1 Org.Unit.1 OU1

Organizational Unit 2 Org.Unit.2 OU2

Organizational Unit 3 Org.Unit.3 OU3

Organizational Unit 4 Org.Unit.4 OU4

Private Management Domain Name PRMD P

Administration Management Domain Name ADMD A

Country Country C

Physical Delivery Personal Name PD-person PD-PN

Extension of Postal O/R Address

Components PD-ext.address PD-EA

Extension of Physical Delivery Address

Components PD-ext.delivery PD-ED

Physical Delivery Office Number PD-office number PD-OFN

Physical Delivery Office Name PD-office PD-OF

Physical Delivery Organization Name PD-organization PD-O

Street Address PD-street PD-S

Unformatted Postal Address PD-address PD-A1

PD-A2

(there are individual labels for PD-A3

each line of the address) PD-A4

PD-A5

PD-A6

Unique Postal Name PD-unique PD-U

Local Postal Attributes PD-local PD-L

Postal Restante Address PD-restante PD-R

Post Office Box Address PD-box PD-B

Postal Code PD-code PD-PC

Physical Delivery Service Name PD-service PD-SN

Physical Delivery Country Name PD-country PD-C

X.121 Network Address X.121 X.121

E.163/E.164 Network Address ISDN ISDN

PSAP Network Address PSAP PSAP

User Agent Numeric ID N-ID N-ID

Terminal Identifier T-ID T-ID

Terminal Type T-TY T-TY

Domain Defined Attribute DDA:

DDA:

I am so happy that the collective wisdom of Internet age didn’t adopt this form, and used the current somebody@example.com type of system.

How to Access Twitter and Facebook in China

I setup my connection to Twitter and Facebook via SSH tunnel again. When the original tools to access Twitter, and Facebook failed, I just lost interest to setup proxy. Now, I am back and just accepted the 109 Facebook friend request. (My rule: Accept everyone in jianshuo@Facebook, but be very selective on Kaixin001.com. Here is how I did it.

The process is pretty straight forward, but it is not free.

First, you need to have an account with any web hosting service provider that supports SSH. My list:

bluehost.com (Cheaper: 6.95 USD/month)

mediatemple.net (More expensive, $20/month)

There are many other very cheap hosting services. The only thing you need to check with them is, whether they allow SSH (Secure Shell) access.

Then you need a tool called PUTTY (download for free)

Double click PUTTY to run it, and enter the server name (your host service provider will give you, typically your domain name) into “Host Name (or IP address)” field under the default Session tab. Keep all the rest unchanged, like port 22, and Connection type as SSH.

On the left Category pan, expand SSH under Connection and click Tunnels.

Under “Add New Forward port:”, enter 7070 into Source Port, and select Dynamic for Destination. Keep the rest unchanged, and click Add. You will see D7070 appear under forward ports.

Then click Open to start the SSH session. You will be promoted to enter your user name and password (given by your service provider). When you are at the command line, the SSH Tunnel is established.

Then you need to setup your browser to use this proxy. Let me just talk about Firefox. IE is similar.

Open Firefox, click Options under Tools menu. The Options dialog appears.

Click Advanced button (on the right most of the pane), and select Network tab.

Click “Settings…” button under Connection section. The Connection Setting dialog appears.

Select “Manual Proxy Configuration” radio box. The input boxes under that become available to enter.

Enter “127.0.0.1” without quotation mark into SOCKS Host: field, and 7070 into Port field. NOTE: IMPORTANT Please make sure only enter into the Socks Host field, and keep all the rest fields empty.

Keep Socks v5 selected (unchanged), and click OK three times to close the configuration dialogs.

Now, you should try to enter “google.com” into address bar. You should be able to visit all the sites that you CAN access without proxy, like Google.com, www.sina.com.cn, or 163.com. However, you still cannot access Facebook.com, Youtube.com, Twitter.com. This is because the DNS record was hacked and changed. A small trick will help.

In Firefox, enter “about:config” into the address bar (Yes, it is a strange URL, just in the location where you typically would enter http://….) After click “I’ll be careful. I promise” button, you will see a long list of configuration options started with Filter input box.

Enter “network.proxy.socks_remote_dns” (without quotation marks) into the Filter input box, and you will see a line with network.proxy.socks_remote_dns as Preference Name appears. Double click it so the Value field changes from False to True (and you will also notice the line becomes bold).

Congratulations! Now you should be able to enter “Facebook.com” into your browser, and starts to surf on the Internet without limitation.

Why Chinese Prefer Mobile to Access Internet

There was a thread on Webmasterworld about the Internet population in China. There are questinos around:

But why do the Chinese / Japanese so prefer a mobile over a small laptop?

. Here is my attempt to answer the question.

This is just my guess about why Chinese use mobile much more than Japanese or American.

1. More Hand-Free. With relatively very low penetration of cars in China, most of people either walk, or take bus to move. Their hands are not occupied. There is much more waiting time than average American (this is very similar in Japan).

2. Chinese characters. With the same area of screen, Chinese characters can deliver much more information than English. Maybe it is a better user experience.

3. It is not “prefer”, it is the only choice. For most of the users who access Internet via mobile, they have no option to access computer at all. Think about these two numbers: there are 298 million Internet users, and the number of Mobile users was already 547 million (twice as Internet users). Among the Internet users, 1/4 or more of them don’t have a computer – they access via public Internet cafe. If I am presented a choice of using computer or mobile, I may prefer to use computer, but what if computer is not an option?

Just my two cents.

I Now Prefer Inexpensive Hotels

I am sitting in the lobby of the Arctic Club Hotel, Seattle. This is a nice historic hotel in downtown, at 700 3th Ave, Seattle. Since I still have 1 hour before YLF car pick me up, I think I should take the time to write down some of the thoughts during my US trip so far. I will beginning with the experience I gained from this trip.

On Hotel Selection

I love Renaissance Hotel in Beijing, I love Shangri-la in Beijing, I enjoy the current hotel I am staying, but on the money wise, I seem to enjoy cheaper hotels with easy parking, like Super 8 in US, or Hanting, Rujia in China.

On Comparison

The good hotels have too much to offer. I will definitely choose a better hotel when I take vacation, but for business trip, and for sightseeing, I don’t need too much of the facilities.The only thing I need is a wireless or wired network, and a bed.

Next time, I am more clear about what I need. I don’t know why, but I am still not in a phase to feel comfortable to stay in expensive hotels, if I pay it by myself or by my company.

Avoid Towntown in US

After visiting bay area, I enjoy so much about having a car and stay somewhere near highway. Although it is far from downtown, I enjoy that life. I drove from Seatac airport to downtown, and suffer a lot. I parked my car on the street, but need to wake up early enough to drive it away, and send them back to Avis, and then get back to hotel again.

The other problem is, when I check out my room at 12:00 PM sharp – they don’t allow late check out today – I have to sit in the lobby. Not a very good idea.

However, a motel outside the city enjoys much more room for parking and the flexibility with a car…

Next time, I will definitely avoid city downtown if my main destination is not city sightseeing.

Online Survey Need Participants

I am happy to help one reader to conduct his online survey about cross-cultural values. It seems interesting topic to me. Here is the letter.

Hello Jian Shuo,

I am a doctoral student doing cross-cultural values research and am in urgent need of help to complete my dissertation research. I have encountered a serious problem obtaining enough participants in China and am hoping that you may be able to help me. I found out a short time ago that copies of my survey were not distributed weeks ago in China as planned. Only a small amount of the data I had expected to receive by now has arrived.

I have now created an on-line version in (simplified) Chinese that could be distributed and collected quickly (on-line survey link):

http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB226D77RPTBB

My urgent request is that if possible, please forward the link below to friends, relatives, and colleagues in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. I would greatly appreciate it.

At this point, I am hoping to get about 30 additional respondents (more is better). The only mandatory requirement for a respondent is that they be at least 18 years old. I will be collecting responses for a few more days and will start analyzing responses as soon as I get enough.

Please let each person know that no personal information (like name, address or phone) will be collected, only the data they chose to enter.

It is okay if the participant does not want to answer some of the background questions, but it is very important for them to provide answers for age, travel, internet usage, and all of the 57 value items.

I realize that some of the standard web survey commands are in English, and it is important to ask all respondents to click on the purple arrow at the bottom of each web page marked “start survey” and “submit.” This needs to be done to have the responses recorded.

Thank you in advance for any assistance that you might be able to provide.

Regards,

Matthew Knight

24 Hours Internet without U.S.

It is exactly 24 hours after the earthquake in Taiwan. The earthquake caused 6 major fiber cable between China and U.S., between Korea and Hong Kong, and between Hong Kong and Shanghai were broken.

This is according to local news:

20:25 China-U.S. Cable broke

20:25 Asia-Europe #3 Cable broke

00:06 Asia-Pacific #2 S7 broke

02:00 Asia-Pacfic $2 S3 broke

20:43 Flag from Korea to Hong Kong broke

04:56 Flag from Hongkong to Shanghai broke

For the whole day, servers outside China (in U.S. or Europe) were not accessible. From my personal experience, this is a list:

home.wangjianshuo.com (very slow. It takes 5 minutes to open this editing page).

Gmail.com – very very slow, and almost not accessible

MSN Messenger – completely unable to logon

Skype – it still works

All other sites in US, very slow.

In China, the Internet experienced 24 hours without connection to U.S.

Local v.s. International Sites

In the morning, friends started to spread out QQ numbers, and I know many people have to turn on QQ or register QQ.

Gmail is not working, and hotmail.com is not accessible. To send a file to my friends who uses @163.com email address, I registered a new @163.com email address to ensure delivery.

eBay.com.cn is not accessible for many hours, and I don’t know how many users switch to Taobao.

This time, not 1 cable was cut off – it was 6 cables that was cut off. It is said it takes at least one month to recover. It takes only 21 days to form a habit. To get used to a new site takes much less time. This must be a huge opportunity for local web sites.

DMOZ Revisited After 3 Years

I was not happy: ODP – Not As Good as Zeal.com. (ODP ~= DMOZ). I was happy: This Site Listed in DMOZ.

Today, I saw a frequent commentor on my Chinese blog, Xiaoma, is a DMOZ editor for blog category (Chinese). It is nice. He is the first DMOZ editor I know.

In the last month, rumor said “ZEAL.com is to be closed”. Today, rumor Google Is Banning Sites That Use Open Directory (DMOZ) Data.

It seems both project is at its hard stage now. Anyway, I quickly submitted my Chinese blog to the Chinese blog category. My previous submission experience was really bad – just as they explained in their help document, it may takes months for a site to get reviewed. In my case, over 1 year…

On Bokee (BlogChina) Staff Layoff

Yesterday, I got confirmed information that Bokee (former blogchina.com) really cut about 1/3 of its headcount. Although the news came out in late Dec 2005, and there are a lot of reports, I still didn’t believe it was true until I personally verified the news.

History of Blogchina

Blogchina.com grow from one person – Fang Xingdong to about 400+ employees by the end of 2005. It was amazing speed of growth.

I was a member of cnblog.org, a more academic group blog that started almost the same time as blogchina in 2002. The two groups (blogchina and cnblog) held very opposite oppions – blogchina goes to the completely commerical way (people in cnblog critized that it is no longer blog. It was going to the wrong way from the blogging spirit), and cnblog focused more on academic/reseach/future side of blogging, and till now, it is still a group of less than 20 people. That was the difference.

The more explicit debate is about the translation of blog in Chinese. Isaac and others in cnblog tend to call it “Wangzhi” or web – log, or Internet diary (if you want me to directly translate it back to English word by word), and Fang Xingdong translated it as “Boke”, or “Broad People” or something like this…

Very Quick Expansion

As a blog service provider, I believe 20 – 30 people at most is the reasonable number. Later, they added a lot of content editors and then technical people. Maybe many of the people are neccessary to support the business. However, when the number exceeded 50, I was worried about the company. Later, during a meetup in Shanghai, Fang told us they have 200+ employees. I was so shocked, and asked how could you support so many people? At that time, there was no clear business model yet.

Later, the number raise to 300. I know something must be wrong. Either Fang or me, one must be completely wrong about the staffing plan.

The Cut

It was said (please note: This information is based on what I heard, and may be misleading, or different from the fact), that more than 100 people was informed to be laid off on the Thusday afternoon around X’mas. The order was effective immediately, which meant the employee need to leave the company the same time they received the information. The life of more than 100 people were affected.

People Strategy in China

This event is not uncommon in current China. The quick expansion of the business, the emerging of startup companies and quick flow of capital money can quickly create a large organization in China, but it is not stable. Especially due to the lower salary level in China compared to western world, and the general practices of many companies, the life of people changes every month.

Someone told me (also, not confirmed) that the rate for university students to get an offer after they graduate is a little bit more than 70% in Shanghai this year. That means, more than 20% university students cannot find a job in Shanghai after they graduate.

What does the number 70+% mean?

I remember, when I graduated, it was so hard to find a job that everyone had to fight aggressively in job markets to secure a position. Everyone (including newspaper, teachers, university official statements) said that the year 1999 was the worst year in the recent history of the university in term of employeement. Job was not was easy to get as previous year. Even in that situation, what was the employeement rate? 95%!

So I understand how tough it is for the students who graduate this year, not to mention those who don’t have a university degree.

That means, to offer a job helped many people (event it is only several month), at least they get several months of employement and get some real working experience, and makes them more competitive in the job market, but laying off is just too bad.

Tough Situation in Business World

Currently, many people’s lives are tough. People who have a job don’t know about the future, and people who do not have a job don’t have too much current life. So does the companies. This is the situation both employees or employers need to face. The good thing is, the ecomony of the country is still growing and changing is an essential part of it.

Mop Acquires Donews

The news of MOP acquiring 100% share of Donews arrived to me first from Yubo on SMS the day before yesterday. After that, many friends dropped me the news on MSN Messenger. I was not that surprised.

Liuren and Keso are my very good friend in Beijing. They helped me a lot when I just started to work for Kijiji, both on professional or personal aspect. I feel very happy about them after I heard the news. Although there are a lot of controversial discussion on the pro side or the con side, but I firmly support whatever decision Liuren and keso made.

Life is all about making decisions and it is only the person who are involved has the right to make the call. Comments are just comments. Donews is the dream of two admirable persons. It is a great place to work, although there are only 4 people working for the company. (BTW, is it a company already? :-) )

I met Ren in a Microsoft community party in 2001 when I was working for the community team, but the first in depth talk only happened in May this year. It was in a Starbucks somewhere in Western Beijing. Ren said some very good words about me. Thanks for that.

After that, I often visit them and really enjoyed talking with them or reading Keso and Ren’s blog. There are some very interesting threads, like this, going on as well. This summer, I was honored to be one of the people reponsible for the Shanghai Donews meeting. The meeting was so interesting. I even spent the night watching the Super Girl Final in Donews office (a.k.a 5G). Many people thought it was a very important night. I thought so, but Liuren definitely didn’t think so. That was a nice night. They have good wine and chocalates. P.S. I finally bought sofa very similar with the sofa in that office at my home. :-)

Good Luck!

Now Donews is part of Mop family. I believe no matter what changes in corperate structure, people won’t change. I’d like to offer my best wishes to my two friends in Donews and hope they have very good luck in the year of 2006.

beijing-keso.liuren-kijiji.shirt.jpg

Image in courtesy of Keso (left) and Liuren (right)

P.S. I didn’t drop a line on the MSN Messenger to them (for Keso, not on Google Talk yet). I can imagine how much SMS, emails or chat messages they need to handle these days. In short, it is a piece of good news. It is a good decision, and I congrate them for the archivement of 5 years for Donews, and years of wonderful blogging for Keso.

P.S. 2. I like the post from Keso after the acquisition. It is so candidate and well-writen.

Baidu Post

Check out Baidu Post (something like BBS). It has generated great traffic.

For example, under the winner of the Super Girl Li Yu Chun, up to now, 5.1 million message were posted under this single name.

Check out the page. Every time I press F5 to refresh the page, new entries were added – at interval of less than 1 second. Just keep refreshing and we have some idea about how active people are posting on this board.

I didn’t a simple test: at 23:50:00 of Aug 30, 2005, there are 5109585 message. 15 seconds later, which is 23:50:15, the number increased by 50 to 5109635. It means on average, there are 3.3 NEW post on this thread every single second. This has lasted for at least several weeks.

Meanwhile, the SMS Li Yun Chun got is 3.5 million in just one week – this may give people some hint that mobile phone usage is still much higher than Internet.

The super girl is a very interesting case study that reveal some solid facts that many people in IT industy ignore….

screen-post.baidu.png

eGuo One Hour?

This morning, to my surprise, I got an email from the CEO of eguo.com. It was a pleasant surprise to me, since the letter quickly bring me back to the old days of 2000…

2000 is a crazy year in China. Just like U.S., ecommerce is the buzz word. Everyone is talking about it, investing in it and setting up companys around it. 8848.com is the leader in eCommerce in China (now the company has gone) and I, a small potato, just switched from technical team to eCommerce team and running between one meeting and the other, one project to another, to see how to use Microsoft technology to help build eCommerce.

With this background, eGuo.com stands up with its ambitious plan: 1 hour deliver at anytime in Beijing (within the 4th outter ring road). That is amazing – it happens 5 years ago. They setup 10+ center and hired 300+ workers to deliver the goods with bicycles.

Personally, I am a faithful user of eGuo.com. When I arrive in Cui Gong Hotel near the Microsoft office, I connect to the net and order some thing to eat. Within one hour, a deliver person will know the door of my hotel and bring everything I need. I can pay him cash and get the goods. I remember once, they even bring me a lot of coke as gift – one coke per 10 RMB of purchase.

I worried a lot and think they may not making any money so I will lose this good service soon. I asked the deliver man – how can you make money because the goods are not more expensive than market price, the nice deliver man just told me he didn’t know either. :-)

eGuo.com inspired me a lot of how we can leverage the advantages of China to do realistic ecommerce in China.

Yisou, Google, Baidu and Yipai

Yahoo! China launched Yisou.com, the Yahoo! search engine in China. I am a keen fan of Google and I love everything from Google – the search engine, the GMail, the Adsense program, and funny things in their lab. I thought Google was the best in search engine world. However, I start to doubt that. Yisou.com seems to be doing a better job in the Chinese market. It is so similar with Google.

Yisou seems to have indexed more content than Google. For example, if you search Wangjianshuo in Google, you get 5,150 results (as of today). If you search Wangjianshuo in Yisou, 7,640 items were returned. Also, the speed of Yisou is really faster than Google – it is almost the same speed as Google when Google just started. It may because not many people use Yisou now.

screen-yisou-homepage.jpg

Screen capture in courtesy of Yisou.com

Google invests into Baidu

It is also reported that Google invested in Baidu, the other top search engine in China. It is interesting that Baidu got the opportunity to grow up during the time when Google was banned.

Yipai

Another auction website, yipai.com, was launched recent. It is a joint effort of Yahoo! China and Sina. I believe it will gain market share rapidly from Eachnet. The functions and interfaces are much better than Eachnet.

Wicresoft

Hi, I am naughty. I just want to check out whether the ranking of this page is somewhere near the top in Google result for Wicresoft. Haha. I hope it is on the first page.

Update It is the Forth Result for Wicresoft in Google May 31, 2004

This entry becomes the forth sites returned in Google for keyword Wicresoft. :-D

Location:

21F, Bund Center,

No. 222, Yan An East Rd.

Telephone: (86-21) 63352266

Map

Update It is the First Result for Wicresoft in Google June 13, 2004

Nirmalya Ghosh reminded me that it is the first result in Google now.

I have been working in the office of Wicresoft for half year. It is a great company with passionate and smart people. They are working hard on Software Support Outsourcing. I believe it is the leading company in this field in China. Here is the official website of Wicreosoft.

How Did I Managed to Do it?

This is a public secret: creating good content and Google will like you. Check PageRank – Higher Position in Google Result

Link to Your Site

Want to have a link back to your site on Wangjianshuo’s Blog? It is easy now.

As you may have noticed, the WWW category is open for public submission now.

Just go to a sub category of WWW directory and click Suggest a site link. Fill in the submission form and your site will be entered into my database and wait for my review. I will try to review your submission as quick as possible.

I do Want to Link Back

A function to maintain links to other sites is on the top of my to-do-list. A lot of kind sites have linked to me but I didn’t provide timely link back. :-( For example, Christina linked my site from Chinese Tea immediately after I started blogging in 2002, but I didn’t find a good place to link back.

There are two reasons:

  • Strong usability mind. I am a firm-believer that by adding any links/features/buttons to the webpage is a barrier for the visitors to perform other tasks.
  • Too many links together, say, a list of 100 links is less valuable to any sites on it. It neither contribute hits or Google PageRank.

Solution

Finally, I decided to create a directory and put similiar sites into the same directory. I adopted Links 2.0 to allow people to submit links. So please feel free to leverage the function and have a place on my blog. I welcome your site.

I do not accept site submission on any category other than WWW. Other categories contains only my article. I will add a category under WWW as related category in other categories if I found it neccessary.

China Internet Market Analysis

Vicent from New Yorked sent me a set of questionair about Internet in China. I have answered the questions. I am sharing the questions and answers to help you get some idea of the current status of the market in China. Questions published under Vicent’s permission.

1) Of all of the Chinese Internet portals (Sina, Netease, Sohu) which is the most popular and which is best? Is there anything about one that is better than another?

IMHO, Sina is the best. Check my article on Sina, Sohu or Netease. I didn’t visit Sohu or Netease in the last three month but I visit Sina everyday.

2) Is WiFi the future of the Internet in China? Meaning would having large WiFi hotspots all over the country make it easier/less expensive for people to high quality high speed access to the Internet? Are there any problems with WiFi right now?

I beleive so. There are many Wireless (WiFi) Hot Spots in Shanghai. Many buildings has been equiped with Wifi. One year ago, I will ask the servers in a hotel: Do you provide broadband access to Internet? Now, I tend to ask, can I use my wireless laptop here?

The problem is the uncertainty the new WLAN standard GB15629.11-2003. GB standards for Guo Biao or national standard. It is similar to the international Wi-Fi (802.11) standard, but uses a different security protocol. While the Wi-Fi standard uses the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) security protocol, the new Chinese standard uses a Wireless Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure (WAPI). It may be or may not be a big problem. Only time can tell.

3) How popular is the auction site eachnet.com? Is there room in the market for the auction joint venture between Sina and Yahoo!

Unlike Ebay, many goods found on eachnet are brand new. Eachnet has become a market place anyone can sell goods when they have the channel to get it, and is not limited to second hand goods. It has became a good place to eliminate the shop rental fee and the staffing cost. So many people begin to do business at eachnet.com. I have a close friend who quited his good job and start to sell goods on Eachnet.com. He can make a good living from it.

Regarding eCommerce, there are two big names in my mind: Alibaba.com which provide business owners to find buyers or sellers and eachnet.com, who helps people without a business entity to sell goods. Is there any chance for new comers? Maybe.

4) Why is SMS so popular? Meaning: if everyone has mobile phones, why do they need to send messages from a computer?why not just send them from one mobile phone to another?

SMS is popular for its reasonable price. 0.1 RMB is nothing compared to 0.4 RMB per minute if you call someone – remember, the 0.4 RMB is charged from both caller and receiver. That is 0.8 RMB for phone call while 0.1 RMB for a SMS. (Some cards charges 0.6 RMB per minutes).

I cannot see many relationship between SMS and a computer. SMS is SMS. Many people go to a computer and send SMS to friends via Sina, because it breaks down the barrier to input on a mobile device. You know, to input Chinese on a mobile device is ugly. Too slow for most people.

Go to http://sms.sina.com.cn. You will see the whole new world of SMS, which is pretty beyond the plain text (or short message) SMS. It provides rings, pictures and pre-composed SMS messages.

5) How expensive is the Internet to an average person? Meaning, do you feel the need to be careful about how many SMS you send or how much time you spend on the internet at internet cafes?

Internet is not expensive for me. (Keep in mind that I have pretty good job and a lot of things were not that expensive for me). I GUESS it is not expensive for many people. Internet Cafe charges 2 RMB (0.24 USD) per hour for Internet access. Do you think it expensive? Although the environment is poor with too many people smooking. Good Internet cafe charges 5 RMB or higher. Internet at home is still relatively expensive.

6) Is the cost of a personal computer in China very expensive? Can the average person afford one?

Personal computer’s price are still not lower enough for people as TV to them. Computer costs 4000 – 6000 RMB, which is about 2 or three months’ salary. Here is how I see the market: people with university education or higher tend to have a computer at home. People with a child older than 10 tend to buy a computer. Others may not want to spend $$$ on computers.

7) Is there anything else I should know about the Chinese internet market? Meaning what do you think will both cause the most growth and what do you think will prevent the most growth?

Well. Hardest question. You have covered a lot. Good questionair.

Questions? Post it here.