The other day I was on a taxi in Seoul (Korea) with my boss.
We were discussing about something else but suddenly he looked at me and said: "There are going to be big business opportunities in China when 3G licenses are granted"
Well, this everybody knows. My boss was thinking of corporate opportunities. But was thinking of entrepreneurship in the web 2.0 sector for mobile in China.
The leading Chinese ISP China.com, announced last year in november that it will invest up to US$20 million in local firms to develop a range of "Web 2.0" applications including online video, social networking, blogs, 3G and broadband content and mobile search.
Apparently China.com will select small to medium size developers with the "technological skill, innovative vision and deep understanding of what drives the Chinese Internet community". As I said in my previous post, understanding China is a must for being successful in China.
With about 140 million PC Internet users and 450 million mobile subscribers, I wonder whether the mobile device will become one day the primary means for accessing the Web in China. After 3G licenses are allocated we will start to know little by little about this
When I was working in Paris I got to know a friend of mine (Frederic Crochet) who proposed me this idea. At the beginning of 2006 my friend had a wonderful idea: "everybody is trying to sort images, videos, messages on maps. But nobody does it on a time line".
There're lots of prototypes of timeline application available. The most significant of them is the open source MIT Simile project. But today I would like to talk about two of timeline services:
ourstory.com, which, from my point of view, was the most elaborated solution back in 2006
xtimeline.com, recently launched in Shanghai (China) in July 2007 and with the ambition to become the Wikipedia of timelines
One of my business ideas I wanted to propose in this blog for my start-up was precisely my friend's idea about timelines. But since I discovered xtimeline.com I really think it is very difficult to do something better tham this Shanghai company.
Coming back to the myth of the great idea (from the blog "I will teach you to be rich"), which I already discussed here, what is really important is not the idea itself but how you implement the idea.
Ourstory
Ourstory was created in 2005 but I have to say that it has not been very successful yet. Why not? well, Ourstory is a service I would never use because of the approach they implemented the idea.
The site is complicate to use: the are timelines, FAQs, blog-like tools, photo sharing tools. You never know where you need to click. The user who wants to make a timeline does not really care about all that staff.
The site is focused on family stories (marriage, children, buy a house...). This is really a market niche and probably a very boring topic for most netizens.
Xtimeline
The story of Xtimeline is just amazing. The site has just been launched 3 weeks ago and has already got much more attention in the blogosphere than Oustory.com. I really believe that Xtimeline is going to be a very big thing so let's pay attention to it. Why? because the approach of their idea: the Wikipedia for history buffs
Their site is attractive, organized and simple to use.
Their content is much more universal than family stories (Oustrory) and is very interesting:
biography of celebrities (have a look at Angelina Jolie's timeline)
One of the most successful Internet entrepreneurs related to China is probably the Irishman Ken Carroll. Ken created ChinesePod, a great example of successful small niche web business.
The primary goal of ChinesePod is to teach spoken Chinese to foreigner by using podcasting. I love their podcasts and usually listen to them while working in the office!
The idea would be to create the contrary: a "ChinesePod" to teach Chinese people another language. I am Spanish, so let's say teaching them Spanish. I like the appraoch of Chinespod much more than that of hablame.tv. By the way Ken Carroll is also behind "Spanish Sense", a project to teach Spanish to English speaking people.
I used to have a Chinese teacher in Beijing who is currently learning Spanish at the Cervantes Institute. I will see her in two weeks in Beijing and will ask her how she is doing with her Spanish.
The problem is that no many people learns Spanish in China. The first foreign language to learn is of course English. many people also learn French. But not so many learn Spanish.
There may be several reasons:
Spain and Latin America is not very present in China.
The image of Spain in China is very bad. Every time I am in China I enjoy discussing with the taxi driver. When I tell him I am Spanish, the always answer me two things: bullfighting (90% of times) and football (10 %). I feel like crying!
I am a bit confused abut this idea:
Do you think a "SpanishPod" for Chinese people would work?
I know I enjoy foreign languages but .... do I want to become a Spanish teacher?
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.
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
The other day I was on a taxi in Seoul (Korea) with my boss.
When I was working in Paris I got to know a friend of mine (Frederic Crochet) who proposed me this idea. At the beginning of 2006 my friend had a wonderful idea: "everybody is trying to sort images, videos, messages on maps. But nobody does it on a time line".
I used to have a Chinese teacher in Beijing who is currently learning Spanish at the 
Foreign companies or foreign entrepreneurs in China (called sinopreneur) find it very difficult to compete in the Chinese market due to:
