The Global Venture

I cannot refrain from posting the story of my Hong Kong co-citizen: Bus Uncle.

He got famous from scolding an innocent boy in the bus while somebody was filming the scene. The video was published in you tube and zillions of Chinese watched it.

Bus Uncle became the first phenomenon of this class in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Mainland China and even further. People has also written Wikipedia pages about the incident.

Bus Uncle phrases are already much more part of the culture of Hong Kong than 150 years of British government: "I have pressure. You have pressure. Why do you provoke me?"

Once I was eating in a fast food bar of Hong Kong with my Chinese colleagues and a lady asked me if I was about about to finishing so that she takes my table. I answered her: "I have pressure. You have pressure. Why do you provoke me?" and everybody laughed a lot.

Apart from the anecdote, what I want to show you is that China has much more potential for web 2.0 than we had ever expected.

Don't miss this wonderful video in Cantonese with Chinese and English subtitles.

Foreign companies or foreign entrepreneurs in China (called sinopreneur) find it very difficult to compete in the Chinese market due to:

• Language barriers,
• Difference in culture
• Lack of understanding of local netizens' tastes
• Government policies and regulations
• The fact that foreign web 2.0 initiative are all concept-copied and adapted by local players in no time
• The fact that Chinese cost are low but expected revenue is also low (most Chinese people don't have a lot of money in the wallet)

To illustrated this issue, I show you a viral video by Baidu making fun of a foreigner, representing Google. (Video in Mandarin without subtitles.Explanation of the video below)

Explanation of the video:

The story is based on a Hong Kong film (The flirting scholar) inspired on the life a famous poet an painter from the Ming Dynasty called Tang Yin.

The foreigner (Google) knows nothing more about China but keeps claiming he knows : "I know (wo zhidao)".

However Tan Yin plays some tricks by separating the words {I (wo), know (zhidao), you (ni)} in various ways to mean completely different things: "I know, you don't know. I know you don't know that I know you..." and these kind of stuff.

In front of this, the foreigner can only utter "I know" but in fact understands nothing about China and at the end he loses his beautiful concubine and is humiliated by everybody.

Source:

• What is your China strategy in Web 2.0 Asia
• Top web apps in China in ReadWriteWeb

By the way, if you want to know about how some sinopreneurs are doing, you will find some interesting podcasts on China Businesscast by Robert Osazuwa Ness

I would like to make a post about a tool a usually use a lot. Simple Spark is an online catalogue of web applications.

It is really a very useful site to use when you are brainstorming about start-up ideas.

I would like to make a summary of a very long article (but very intreresting) written by Mike Mace in his blog MobileOpportunity.

The article is called:

Will flat-rate pricing make mobile data take off?

No. It's a nice start, but the operators need to take several other steps as well.

Recently flat-rate pricing for wireless data service has become a big issue in Europe and some other parts of the world. Data service to mobile phones there has often been metered, with users paying by the megabyte. This led to some frightening stories on the Internet of people accidentally ending up with 800-Euro monthly phone bills for browsing too much. Needless to say, this has made many people very cautious about using mobile data.

Recently T-Mobile in Europe offered a flat-rate data service, in which the user pays a single fixed monthly fee for virtually all the data access they want (the limit is about a gigabyte a month, which is a lot for a mobile phone). Then on November 16, Hutchison Whampoa, the owner of the "Three" wireless network in Europe and Asia, announced its own flat-rate plan (more details below).

The Mobile One network in Singapore just cut its unlimited 3G data price by about 2/3, to around $13 a month, in order to compete with fixed broadband services. And on December 1, the CEO of Vodafone went even further, predicting that within a few years we'll have flat-rate billing for all mobile services, including both voice and data.[...]

Has Hutchison revolutionized the mobile Internet?

I don't think so. Unfortunately, just offering flat-rate pricing is not enough to make mobile data take off. This is one area in which the US mobile phone market has been a leader, believe it or not. The top four mobile operators in the US have offered flat-rate data for years, ranging in price from $15 to $40 a month. Some of them even let you use your mobile phone as a modem, something that Hutchison bans. [..] The result? Some happy Blackberry and Treo users, but nothing like a mass migration toward mobile data.

Five steps to make mobile data a success

In addition to offering flat-rate data, here are the other steps a mobile operator must take in order to make that mobile data ecosystem work:

1. Provide a consistent architecture that works offline. This is probably the most critical need. Web applications depend on having a constant connection between the user's computer and the Internet. That's not practical for the mobile Web. Even in countries with heavy 2G coverage, there are lots of gaps in the 3G network, and will be for many years. Mobile Web apps need to work like RIM's e-mail client, which stores both the program itself and the user's data locally and then sends the data to the network when a connection is available. [...]

2. Kill security certificates. But today the operators treat websites and applications completely differently. The new flat-rate data plans let you browse just about any website you want. But operators are starting to insist that applications obtain a security certificate before they can be installed. The certification process is slow, inconvenient, and unreasonably expensive for small software companies and those that create a lot of applications. Since small software companies are the most innovative, this has an enormous chilling effect on mobile innovation. [...]

3. Unlock the user's data. This is the other security-related problem area. Many operators make it very difficult for an application to access the user's data stored on the device, such as the address book, the dialer, and the user's current location. But many of the most interesting new mobile applications need to be able to work with this information. Users should be informed when they give an application access to this information, but it should be very easy for them to say yes. [...]

4. Make it easy to discover new content and services. The mobile data ecosystem will evolve faster if it's easy for users to find new services and applications. Today the content discovery tools and software stores on mobile devices, if they are installed at all, are often buried under several layers of icons, or are very hard to use. We need the mobile equivalent of an Amazon.com -- an online content store that's easy to find, browse and search, and that makes suggestions to you based on what you've used in the past. [...]

5. Get ready to go to a flat rate for everything. Vodafone's comment shows that they understand this: the logical outcome of putting the open web on a mobile device is that voice and data merge under a single flat fee. If a Skype call is free, then eventually all calls need to be free, or the users will just switch everything to Skype. Same thing for SMS messages once they're directly in conflict with instant messaging. The operators' old financial model won't evaporate overnight, but it's now officially dying. [...]