I spent a summer in Taiwan, half learning Chinese and half working on a startup.
I highly recommend that any entrepreneur spend at least a couple months in a Chinese country. There are billions of consumers, all eager to spend money, and only 42% of them are on the Internet so far. Clearly Asia is an attractive market, but if you've never experienced Chinese culture then you will have no idea what the context of it looks like. You need to go see for yourself.
Much of this post resonated with me. Still, if you've only read the post, and not seen the culture, you are missing a lot. After a few weeks in Taiwan, a few things were very clear. Most notably, LINE is incredibly popular. It's the dominant messaging app, ahead of even iMessage, MMS. People love the stickers, btw, and they pay for them!
Also, Taipei has a 7/11 on every corner, no joke. You can do all sorts of useful things at 7/11. You can pay your bills, pickup packages, order meals, and more. You can also use a refillable "EZCard" which is an RFID chip that works at many retail outlets as well as subway stations. In general, the 7/11's in Taiwan make an effort to integrate as many products as they can into their economy. You'll see a lot of offline (hah) LINE promotions, e.g. partnered with drink companies and 7/11.
It seems like in general, once users in Asia are entrenched in a service/network, they are fiercely loyal to it. That's why you don't see users switching from LINE to other apps, and why certain Asian countries might prefer one paritcular messaging app over another.
What I miss most, though, is the unlimited 20mbps tethering with my $40/mo pay-as-you-go plan...
Oh, and here's a prime example of how crazy loyal Chinese consumers are for their products. Watch this video of a Xiaomi product launch, f*ing crazy. [0]
From what I heard, people in mainland use Wechat, which is probably why you haven't heard of LINE. Still, it has 700 million users, started in Japan, and is far and away the most popular in Taiwan (from what I could tell). It looks like wiki says 17 million Taiwanese users, but that's probably higher now, and anecdotally, it seemed that almost every college-aged student I met used LINE daily.
As I mentioned, they do a lot of visible sponsorship/partnerships. You'll see a lot of "LINE contests" attached to juice bottles, running at the bottom of newscasts, etc.
Yeah, I wrote a 15-page paper on this for my "next china" economics class. My thesis was that although the primary purpose of the Great Firewall appears political, with a goal of censorship, in actuality the CCP keeps it around for economic reasons. Effectively, the GFW is a way of subsidizing domestic tech companies. As long as it exists, it keeps foreign competitors at bay while domestic counterparts launch their own services, often in conduit with the CCP censorship authorities.
My prediction was that we will see the GFW come down in a few years, once the "human rights" debate reaches critical mass, but moreso once the userbases of domestic companies reach critical mass. Once the big Chinese tech companies have enough of a head-start on all their US counterparts, and they're ready to expand Westward, the GFW will come down.
China realizes that it has a population of 2 billion, and therefore wields far more raw economic power potential than any other country. Therefore China wants to develop its own domestic tech economy to serve its users in a way that conforms to its culture and benefits the Chinese economy overall. Furthermore, there's no reason that its domestic companies would not eventually branch westward in the same way that US companies are attempting to branch eastward.
We're starting to see the same thing in Russia. Geographic Internet isolation is becoming a common trend and a useful geopolitical powerplay. I suspect we'll see more of it from large countries interested in nurturing their own domestic tech economy.
1.3 billion people. Chinese companies are still in the steal technical ideas and focus on business model innovation phase, so they still need the GFW to survive, and would get slaughtered even in Hong Kong or Taiwan, which are kind of Chinese also. I'm not sure if they'll every break out of it, the perspective here is very local.
Well, a counter example is eBay, Paypal, Amazon did not compete well in China regardless of GFW.
They are not blocked and they have localized Chinese versions.
Another example, one of the greatest enemy in the history of QQ is, guess what, the re-branded & died MSN Messenger (plus the dead Live Space blogging platform)
We use Amazon a lot, along with JD and sometimes even Taobao. I don't think Amazon has failed in China at all.
Even when western companies come into China, they are often hampered by different rules and forced into JVs with entitled princelings. It is not an apples to apples comparison.
QQ's emoticons (the 70-or-so yellow base set plus a few others) are indeed incredible. Somehow, for every single feeling you want to convey at any time of the day, you will find one and exactly one matching icon. It's like they created a perfect bijection. And they did this while keeping the icons perfectly readable on small low-resolution screens, and with animation frames you can count on one hand. I have no idea who the original artists are but they have my eternal respect.
The drop in emoticon quality was the second worst thing with going back to Skype (which I have to use because everyone else here in the US does).
The reason that the emoticons are so well targeted is not for the users themselves. If someone includes one of the emoticons, it makes machine-identification of sentiment trivial (compared to reading and interpreting the text).
(not sure whether this is something that everyone knows already : Perhaps I only just got the news... (Presuming this is actually true, of course))
I use :/ a lot in wechat because I don't consider any of the faces to match. Also, there are a few faces where the feeling is right but I don't use them because the pink cheeks (and, in one case, eyelashes) make them seem female-only. It'd be nice to have male equivalents.
The most interesting pieces to me are the ones that work to bypass the walled gardens: the in-app third-party app stores with OTA installs, and the in-app wallets.
The former knocks apple/google out of the gatekeeper role, and the latter presumably lets somebody else take a percentage fee off the top.
In the US, I understand ios and android try their hardest to not allow apps that do these tricks into their app store. Not at all familiar with China... are there different rules for being listed there, different players, or just an unregulated wild-west where everyone has jailbroken functionality?
I suspect, but am not totally sure, that vendors jailbreak the phones before you buy them. At least, when I bought a nexus S in China in 2011 (I think), the bootloader was already unlocked and it had had a ton of chinese crapware preinstalled onto it.
Android is open, they just download the code. iOS devices are sold locked and jail broken by those interested using the normal means...it doesn't happen a lot more often here than in the states.
My impression is that applications for Pinyin text input have advanced to a level where they can be used really quickly, often faster than English. They also allow for fuzzy input and dialect-related mistakes.
It's more troubling for older people who haven't studied or have forgotten about Pinyin and need to resort to shape-based methods.
Hong Kongers obviously don't use Pinyin, and I think most are quite a bit slower than Mainlanders in typing characters. Some write in components, others draw the full characters, which is slowed down by the fact that HK uses traditional characters.
(As for Taiwan, I think shape-based input methods are also most common, and I would be surprised if Taiwanese were faster than Mainlanders in typing characters. But I'm not that familiar with input methods in Taiwan.)
This is quite interesting, as the divergence between east and west seems to become more pronounced over time, not less. The divergence in mobile UI styles have given rise to entire classes of apps in China that would find no market in the west. Indeed, I doubt many of these would find a market even in Japan (which has similar text entry problems, though somewhat ameliorated by the existence of the hiragana alphabet).
Should we expect the Chinese search giants (which the author mentions are often easier to use than the host OS) to start releasing their own OSes? It seems that Android and iOS are rather poorly designed to Chinese use cases - though no doubt at least Apple is working to fix that (Google has less reason to because, as the author mentions, it is banned in China).
There are already numerous forks of Android in China that replace Google services with local equivalents (handsets from Xiaomi, for example, come with their own fork).
Right; I mean more than just a fork that replaces Google services. The author seems to lament that text entry services provided by the big Chinese search engines are not available throughout the OS. Text entry seems to be a huge problem in general in China, and from a strategy standpoint it seems to be almost inextricably linked to the discovery function.
Xiaomi is a device manufacturer; I'm specifically referring to Baidu, 360, Sogou, etc. If their search/translation functions really are that much better, they could drive the interface of the phone and create a better experience. The Chinese market is certainly different than the west, but that's what we've seen happen here.
I think that those stats are good reason to focus on that market. I wonder if I would have to have a native Chinese individual to help. The character system employed in their language is so different from a latin based scheme as to be laughable. The site presents interesting differences, but I think Western developers need an English version of UXPin recommendations for Eastern apps.
I hope he writes about wechat's grouping function, which is taking off like crazy now.
Group: In a normal chat, you can unilaterally add people to create a group, and it is permanent, and can be named. The creator has kick privileges, but anyone can add more people. So when people have dinner, they'll just add everyone they want to invite and then send the invite, maps, etc. to the group. Then during/after the event, everybody will send photos. Invitees can also add their own people to the group. I have current groups for weekly dinners, old parties, meetups, and work. It's way easier to set up and does much more than google+ / email / whatever it's replacing.
Some groups (for birthdays, etc.) stay around forever, as that person's social hub. Our work group sees a lot of use.
Once a group gets big you can't force-add people (they have to accept invites when the group is 40+). There are also some very touchy issues with leaving - when you leave the whole group gets a message, so people feel stuck in groups, or have to think carefully about how to get out gracefully.
I think this is what google hangouts / wave were meant to be. Not much management required, and unrelated people can be brought in, so it's under many people's control.
It probably won't happen in China, but I'd love to see anonymous messaging groups - you can see who's in the group but not who sent every message. Sort of like 4chan, and another way to allow more people to contribute; it'd also pull out things you won't be able to find out otherwise.
"Many sites also allow users to log in by scanning a QR code in the site’s own app. In the QR code is an expiring session identifier that, once read by the mobile app, associates that browser session with the logged-in account."
Username and password logins suck for a number of reasons (although keyloggers are mentioned as the primary reason in the post), and as smartphones become ubiquitous this could allow a much easier and more secure workaround.
China is a huge and my guess underserved tech market. I wonder how much of the HN crowd is working on Chinese applications - likely selection bias would mean not that many.
How many of the HN crowd know enough of Chinese culture, market, and business rules to be able to create a successful mobile product for China? I would think there are several barriers to entry than just selection bias.
I highly recommend that any entrepreneur spend at least a couple months in a Chinese country. There are billions of consumers, all eager to spend money, and only 42% of them are on the Internet so far. Clearly Asia is an attractive market, but if you've never experienced Chinese culture then you will have no idea what the context of it looks like. You need to go see for yourself.
Much of this post resonated with me. Still, if you've only read the post, and not seen the culture, you are missing a lot. After a few weeks in Taiwan, a few things were very clear. Most notably, LINE is incredibly popular. It's the dominant messaging app, ahead of even iMessage, MMS. People love the stickers, btw, and they pay for them!
Also, Taipei has a 7/11 on every corner, no joke. You can do all sorts of useful things at 7/11. You can pay your bills, pickup packages, order meals, and more. You can also use a refillable "EZCard" which is an RFID chip that works at many retail outlets as well as subway stations. In general, the 7/11's in Taiwan make an effort to integrate as many products as they can into their economy. You'll see a lot of offline (hah) LINE promotions, e.g. partnered with drink companies and 7/11.
It seems like in general, once users in Asia are entrenched in a service/network, they are fiercely loyal to it. That's why you don't see users switching from LINE to other apps, and why certain Asian countries might prefer one paritcular messaging app over another.
What I miss most, though, is the unlimited 20mbps tethering with my $40/mo pay-as-you-go plan...
Oh, and here's a prime example of how crazy loyal Chinese consumers are for their products. Watch this video of a Xiaomi product launch, f*ing crazy. [0]
[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O89M3CYd8RU