This event was organized by the OpenWeb.Asia Workgroup and prominent entrepreneurs and bloggers within Asia's web industry.

While a good local startup in a European country can soon go international, having users from Europe and the United States, in Asia language is the top issue. Attracting users from neighbouring countries is difficult.

Each local web market in Asia is potentially huge, but these markets are still restricted and the global audience still lacks communication channels to understand the Asia web. Social networks are very popular in China. The mobile market is fascinating in Japan. Online gaming originated from and is still driven by Korea.

The India and Singapore markets could be easier entries for English-only service. Local markets like Vietnam are still quiet, but will be a battlefield for big names from China, Korea and Japan when ready for expanding. 

Social Web is Theme

Spurred by a desire to create a high-quality, informative and practical technology conference focused on the Asian Internet industry, Open Web Asia '08 was organized with 'The Social Web' as its theme.

Socialization has been a game-changing development on the Internet, and the social web is an area where Asia has its own strength and vibrancy. Asian countries have a distinct Internet culture and market players, so cross-country comparisons can be made.

Topics expected to be discussed at Open Web Asia '08 include: 1) How the Asia web sees trends in the global Internet industry; 2) The innovations in Asia's web; 3) The mobile and online gaming markets; 4) What are the challenges of internationalizing an Internet business to and from Asia?

Open Web Asia '08 provides a stage where leaders Kim James Woo (CEO, Yahoo Korea), Kevin Day (CEO, Comsenz China), Yoonjoon Hyoung (founder of Cyworld, Korea), Shusaku Maruko (corporate strategy, Felica, Japan) can share their insights with Western experts and entrepreneurs such as Loic Le Meur (CEO, Seesmic) and Kent Lindstrom (SVP, Friendster).

In association with one of the most prestigious conferences in Asia, World Knowledge Forum, the event will be held on October 14, 2008 in Seoul, Korea. For more information, go to the official web site.

It's Open Season

'Open' is one of the hottest words right now in the Asia web. Google is focusing on Asian markets and promoting its open strategies. Sohu has localized Netvibes' UWA. Yiqi was the first Chinese open platform fully supporting OpenSocial.

IDtail brought OpenSocial to Korea, and Mixi said yes the day OpenSocial was announced. Comsenz has developed its own ManYou Open Platform (MYOP) to target the China market.

With many open platforms announced and imminent, China and the Asia web need to assess how to monetize the Open web and prepare for the widget economy. Though the global Internet industry is still dominated by Western giants, opening up Asia will benefit both the regional and global Internet industries.

On its official website, the campaign organizers - three Chinese bloggers by the names of Flypig, Webleon and Babechloe - also released a #080808 buddy icon template (download), to encourage Twitter users to make their own #080808 buddy icon. See the images below for inspiration.

#080808 Twitter Buddy Icons collected by YUKI.N

A note that Twitter is not popular in China, but the Beijing Olympics could be a booster for the product there.

The most well-known Facebook copycat is Xiaonei.com. It was like a simplified version of Facebook in Chinese when it was first launched. The same layout, same colour scheme and even a very similar logo made people wonder if there was an official connection with Facebook. Xiaonei was bought by Oak Pacific Interactive, which recently sold its approximately 35% share to Softbank for $430 million.

Of course, it was not only Xiaonei that copied the design of Facebook. The latest development in the Facebook clone market is a new look-a-like called Yiqi.com - created by Wen Xie, former CEO of Yahoo China and a very influential veteran in China's Web. Also check out UCenter, a customizable Facebook clone developed by Comsenz. The lastest stats from Comsenz is that over 50,000 UCenters have been set up, only 3 months after its release.

Change and Evolution

Similar layouts do not mean these Chinese Facebooks function the same as the real Facebook. Being an online social network for Chinese people, it has to understand the Chinese social culture. Xiaonei released a feature called Market, where you can sell and buy second hand things. The second-hand market is an event almost every student union has to organize at least once every semester in Chinese universities.

UCenter has integrated with Comsenz's other products, such as BBS (bulletin board system) product Discuz!. If you know how popular BBS is in China, you would not be surprised that the number of installations of UCenter soars everyday.

Yiqi is trying to tell users that their real life can be reflected on the online world. In Yiqi, you can find features such as Block, Square, Newspaper etc.

I took screenshots of the top menu and side bar of all these sites. It is very interesting to see that the features on each site are different and have been well localized, which actually reflects the change and evolvement of Chinese Facebooks.

Vertical Social Networks

How many social networks should a user register for? If your friends are on new social networks, you will soon be invited and most likely will have to do registrations over and over again. Later you will receive some invites (application invites, event invites, etc) most of which you just are not interested in at all. What's the value of joining so many generic SNS? China too has this problem. Enter the vertical SNS.

Hainei was founded by Xing Wang, who was also the co-founder of Xiaonei. Xiaonei has become a Facebook focusing on the Internet industry vertical. On Hainei, most of the users are linked to the Internet industry, which in this case means it doesn't have an active Female user base.

5GSNS was founded by Keso, the most influential Chinese blogger. It is built on UCenter and is a social network helping users find a job in the IT industry (see screenshot below).

Distributed Facebooks

Comsenz's Discuz! BBS platform dominates 70% of the Chinese online forum space. UCenter can be bundled with Discuz!, and together they could become a standard for many Chinese web sites. Whereas the western world Facebook is trying to aggregate all applications into one place, in China many mini Facebooks are distributed and fully controlled by users. I should also mention that UCenter supports Themes, which means that they may end up not being Facebook look-a-likes (see screenshot below).

Conclusion

Debating the copycat model of the Chinese Internet market is getting boring; Facebook's official impact on China is still an interesting question, but there are many more options available to the Chinese social network user. SOHU, the top Chinese portal, partnered with Netvibes for its open blog platform in Oct 2007 [disclosure: Gang Lu works for Netvibes] , a sign of the Chinese Internet embracing the Open concept. The latest news is that several popular local SNSs - including Xiaonei, Hainei, Yiqi - have joined Google OpenSocial. Rumour has it that Sina and QQ are planning their own open platforms too.

Indeed the Open Platform is now one of the hottest topics in China. The question remains though: how will Chinese users respond to open SNSs and will any of the local Chinese social networks go global?

With its massive user base, the Chinese market is naturally one of the most attractive places for Western networks to attemp to set up shop. MySpace has set up an office in Beijing; Facebook might acquire a Chinese SNS, Fenbei.com, and surely will have local presence in 2008; Friendster has done very well in the South East Asian market and expects similar success in China. Xing, a professional network from Europe, set up a Chinese office back in 2005; Last.fm is trying to be more localized in China to compete with 9Sky, Yobo, and 8box.

Surprisingly, though, one of the most popular methods for Chinese netizens to communicate exists far from the web 2.0 scene: traditional Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). BBS actually plays a very significant role in Chinese Internet life. In China, registered BBS users have reached 3 billion (one netizen might register at multiple BBS sites); 80% of Chinese sites are running their own BBS and the total number of daily page views across bulletin board systems has reached over 1.6 billion, with 10 million posts published every day. The BBS is an undiscovered and untalked about Chinese Internet phenomenon. To understand more about why BBS is so hot in China and how it will co-exist with modern social networks, we interviewed Kevin Day the CEO and founder of Comsenz Inc., owner of Discuz!, the first ever social platform - a BBS system - for the Chinese Internet. More than 400,000 BBS sites are built on the Discuz! system in China, or in other words, Discuz! controls over 70% of the Chinese BBS market.

The Phenomenon of Chinese BBS

According to a report produced by iResearch Consulting Group in 2007, around 36.3% of users in China spend 1-3 hours per day on BBS sites, about 44.7% of users spend 3-8 hours, and even 15.1% of users are on BBS sites for more than 8 hours each day. Over 60% of users will log in to at least 3 BBS sites more than 3 times each week.

According to the report, the primary reasons for using BBS sites is finding solutions to problems, general discussion, finding information, and sharing life experiences. 98% of users have contributed to a BBS by publishing articles, replying to posts, participating in polls, etc. Users tend to trust BBS sites because they think the information found on them is first-hand, updated frequently, and presented in a comfortable, community environment.

Chinese BBS life has apparently extended offline, as well. The report also says 64.5% of users have attended some offline events organized by BBS administrators or users. More than 80% of users are using BBS sites to search for information about products they plan to buy, and 61.7% of users are keen to ask other BBS users for opinions before making a purchase. Astonishingly, BBS sites are even acting as ecommerce hubs themselves, with 47.3% of users having bought products directly from a BBS.

The screenshot below shows a BBS set up by the fans of Jinglei Xu, a very famous Chinese celebrity and blogger. This site has over 65,420 registered users, and you can find thousands of online communities like this one built on traditional BBS software.

The History of Discuz!

If you ever log onto a Chinese BBS site, most likely it is built on the Discuz! system. Discuz! was originally developed by Kevin Day when he was at his first year in university. In 2002, the first version of Discuz! was sold to a Hong Kong based company, and in 2003, Day decided to discontinue his studies and founded Comsenz Inc. in 2004 in Beijing.

In 2005, Comsenz Inc. partnered with Zend and established the Zend China support center. Later in 2005, Day announced that Discuz! was going open source, which has been described by local media as an earthquake for the Chinese software industry. Comsenz Inc. got its first round of funding for around $10 million from Sequoia Captial, Morningside, and Google in 2006.

Now Comsenz Inc. has grown to a household name with 200+ staff and a complete product line that includes Discuz! (bulletin board), X-Space (social Network platform), SupeSite (content management system), ECShop (open source B2C and C2C system) and SupeV (online videosharing system). It is also running a few Internet services, including a free forum hosting service 5d6d, a free B2B shop hosting service Maifou, and a community advertising network Insenz. Day is just 26 years old, but he has been publicly recognized as the one of the most successful entrepreneurs born in 1980s.

The BBS and Social Networks

With 70% of Chinese BBS sites built on Discuz!, Day is obviously a key figure behind the phenomenon. So we asked him why he thought BBS systems have become so popular in China. "The first Chinese BBS was probably set up back in 1997. Like Email, BBS is one of the first Internet services recognized by Chinese netizens," he told us. "Chinese like the communities, they are normally a bit quiet in real life but in Internet they love to express their opinion and to follow up some discussion of hot topics. BBS provides a perfect and easy-to-setup show stage for everyone. BBS has evolved as a media platform, it is not the main stream media yet and might never be in China, but the latest and hottest news are always from various forums, spread and discussed by millions of users.

"Take a look at how fast the blog grows in China, you will understand my point here. The BBS users are more mature, they are mainly at the age of 20 to 40, well-educated and with various professional background, and their contribution to all sorts of forums make BBS a valuable information source."

With social networking on the rise in the Western world and also in China, we asked Day if he thought social networking sites would eventually replace the BBS in Chinese culture.

"BBS will not be replaced by SNS and they will not be the competitors to each other either," he answered. "BBS is a must-to-have application in SNS, at least in China. The features of BBS can help the social network users to exchange their ideas efficiently. On the other hand, SNS is a people-centric networking platform but BBS is a topic-centric platform. SNS is to map the social relationship in real life into the cyber space, which in my opinion is one of the reasons people love Facebook; But BBS is there for users to follow the hottest topics and expand your social experience virtually. In BBS, people go there because they are interested in the topics, and whom they communicate with does not really matter."

The Monetization of BBS

The global social networking market is still struggling to seek the best methods for monetization, but it seems that BBS sites have already found a way to drive revenue. Day introduced us to his Insenz product, a BBS-based marketing service that was launched about six months ago. At its core, Insenz is basically a Chinese version of Google's Adsense/AdWord services focused on BBS sites. If you are running a BBS focusing on the mobile phones market, for example, you can join the Insenz advertisement program and get mobile phone related ads or articles posted on your BBS.

Insenz's customer are from all sorts of industries, car manufacturers, telecommunications, IT companies, etc. Insenz will monitor user feeback (e.g. how many replies to the article, how many times the post has been viewed, etc.) during the campaign and issue a report to marketers that includes valuable first-hand marketing information. The BBS sites that participate in the marketing campaigns get a cut of the revenue.

Of course Insenz takes the advantage of Day's Discuz! kingdom. But actually, in China, Insenz is not the only company offering this service. Daqi.com, which started as a portal service, is now also taking advantage of the BBS phenomenon for marketing purposes. Instead of distributing ads across forums, they invented a technology to help gather and analyze discussions about the products of their customers. Daqi closed its second round fund from WI Harper in 2007.

Conclusion

A universal BBS search engine will definitely be more valuable than blog search in China, though Day said that he would not bother to do this simply because he thinks the search engine giants Google or Baidu have better technology to implement it. It seems that Google China has noticed the popularity of BBS sites in the Chinese Intneret market, and have recently taken a stake in Tianya.cn, a very popular BBS-based social network with 6+ million registered users and 200,000 online users daily. So should MySpace, Facebook, and other traditional Western social networks endeavor to enhance their BBS features if they want to play in China?

What do you think? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

EditGrid, which we last covered in February 2007, was built by the 8-person company Team and Concepts Limited (TnC). The actual development of EditGrid began in January 2006 with funding from Silicon Valley-based angel investors and matching funds from the Hong Kong government. EditGrid was actually present in this market before Google Spreadsheets. Its public beta was launched in April 2006, two months before Google launched Google Spreadsheets. EditGrid got out of beta on 14 February, 2007 and then launched its subscription services. Since then, EditGrid has been partnering with a large variety of partners world-wide. Currently EditGrid has partnerships with Central Desktop, Salesforce, ShareMethods, StartForce and ThinkFree.

• Real-time Collaboration: multiple people can access and edit the same spreadsheet at the same time, with updates synchronised to all active instances of the same spreadsheet.
• Remote Data: Live data on the web can be connected to designated cells and used in calculations. Currently EditGrid can retrieve stock quotes, currency exchange rates and even generic web content from the web.
• My Data Format: EditGrid can export data in XML format. Users data exported to XML can then be transformed to other formats using XML Stylesheet Transformation (XSLT), through EditGrid's My Data Format (MDF) feature. This technology is useful for exchanging data between enterprise applications, especially XML-enabled ones.
• Data and Partner API: EditGrid has a comprehensive API layer. The EditGrid Data API allows manipulation of data stored in EditGrid spreadsheets. The EditGrid Partner API further supports user provisioning and can be used to incorporate EditGrid on the partner's platform on a white-label basis.

The "Dragon's web" is attracting more and more VC from overseas. With close to $400M under management, WI Harper is one of the first U.S.-based venture capital firms to create a value-adding bridge between the United States and Greater China. For nearly a decade, WI Harper has been building companies internationally by facilitating the flow of capital, technology and management best practices across both sides of the Pacific. WI Harper's star portfolios in China include Focus Media, Beijing Xinwei, 3G.CN, Maxthon, VeriSilicon, and more.

As for the future of EditGrid, David told us:

"Microsoft defines spreadsheets with MS Excel. It has become entrenched as part of the "Office" set-up. Our take of online spreadsheets is that it will be the second most important online application after email - and this is the proposition we are working on."

Hong Kong, along with much of Asia (with the exception of China), is still playing catch-up with Web 2.0 in 2007. This is due to lack of initiatives by companies and lack of knowledge and interest from the market. It was only late 2006 that we began to see more Web 2.0 information being fed to the public; at that time we also noticed an increase in the number of startups being formed in Hong Kong and releasing services to the public.

Although many are still new to Web 2.0, Hong Kong is a market that follows the trends. So the people here are familiar with popular services from recognized companies in the US and are likely to adopt those services. In fact, they are less likely to use those from China, including local services, and even more unlikely to create their own Hong Kong services. As such, websites like Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, and others with brand recognition, are popular here.

In terms of innovation, aside from the lack of interest, creativity and the 'why build when there are services already available' attitude that many people have, the lack of availability of online resources and localized APIs (e.g. some APIs may only pertain to the US market) are some of the issues that are hindering the development in the local Hong Kong market. The popular mapping mashups with Yahoo! and Google Maps, and other types of mashups, are basically non-existent here. This is very different from China, because we are also less likely to find any clones in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong Startups

In the past year or so, there have been a number of startups that have been formed and pushed their services out to the market. As of this writing, there are a handful of startups based in and operating from Hong Kong. There are a few startups that have registered their startups in Hong Kong, but have ventured into mainland China to utilize their workforce and test the waters in China. Even though Hong Kong is part of China, startups from Hong Kong have as much difficulty competing with China as any foreign companies trying to take a piece of the China market.

• EditGrid: Online spreadsheet (profile)
• aNobii: Book lovers social network (review)
• Bullpoo: Interactive stock community and a personalized investment tool (profile)
• Recruit.net: Vertical search engine for jobs in Asia
• Zorpia: Social network
• Frenzoo: Virtual social network (interview and screenshots)
• Lifesterblog: Blog community (profile)
• Wazhua: China entertainment virtual world and social network (profile)
• Roompage: Personalized homepages (profile)
• Jijija: Matching community through discussions (profile)
• China-8.com: Education community - Chinese language
• Moochi.com: Video-sharing site with online video-editing

World market

Just as Hong Kong users adopt services from the US, the majority of the startups here build their ideas to serve foreign markets - and so they largely ignore the local market. Having heard from some of the individuals behind Hong Kong companies, there is a consensus that the Hong Kong market is just too small and the general public still lack interest and knowledge in fully utilizing web technologies.

Funding

The majority of the startups here, like many others around the world, bootstrap anyway they can to get started. Some continue to bootstrap as they ramp up, while others seek out funding. The funding here rarely comes from local or even foreign VC firms, but rather from the Hong Kong Government. The HKSARG offers several schemes to assist web startups, or indeed any startups, including allocating funds and office space to get projects started.

The Big Companies

It seems there aren't any initiatives by big companies (like Yahoo! Hong Kong, Google and others) to push web 2.0 services to the public. Providing localized versions of their existing global services is usually the path those companies take, instead of developing their own services for the local market.

Yahoo! Hong Kong is the number one destination for Hong Kong people (according to Alexa), but they haven't been very proactive in providing Web 2.0 services. Localized versions of their popular services include Answers (aka Yahoo Knowledge) and Maps (which does not understand Hong Kong addresses). Other services like Travel and Real Estate are localized versions of the Yahoo! US site equivalents. In addition to the popular Yahoo! Blogs, the Hong Kong office has a web service called Hui Bin Doe - which allow users to rate, review and recommend restaurants, food and stores. However, detailed restaurant articles are still done by a selected source instead of allowing the users to fully contribute.

Google - Similar to Yahoo! HK, Google has only provided localized versions of their popular services - e.g. Docs, Notebook, Blogger.

PCCW - The local Telecom giant has just jumped into the Web 2.0 waters by providing a Flickr-like photo and video sharing service, called Snaap!. However it's only available for their service subscribers.

This post is part of Read/WriteWeb's continuing coverage of international Web markets. Other countries profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy, Brazil, France, Japan, India, Austria, Sweden, Australia, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Latvia and Ireland.

HiPiHi was founded in Beijing in October 2005 as a privately held company funded by GCIG. HiPiHi is the only Chinese virtual world and probably only the second company worldwide after SecondLife to offer a truly collaborative, immersive and open-ended experience for users to create, inhabit and govern a new world of their own design.

HiPiHi is very young, only 1.5 years old, and its private beta test just started a few days ago. People might feel it is just a business strategy to copy SecondLife, just as there are over 200 hundred video-sharing sites declaring themselves as Chinese YouTubes. However, unlike most of these startups, the HiPiHi management team is very experienced in this market.

Hui Xu, the founder and CEO of HiPiHi, was the General Manager of MyWeb China and was nominated as one of the “Top Ten China Internet Heros” in 1999. Hui was also the chairman and CEO of JingQi XiShu Co. Ltd, which became one of the most successful e-commerce site in 2000. Xuewei Rao, the Director & COO of HiPiHi, founded Iscreate Communications Co. Ltd in 2000 and was also the vice-president of the Guangdong High-Tech Chamber of Commerce. Its vice-president, Tracy Ji, was the PR director of ZhaoPin.com - the leading provider of online career and recruitment resource in China.  Another founder, Xinhua Liu, was the vice-president of 3721.com (a leading software development company acquired by Yahoo in 2003) and also the co-founder of “EMBA Club International”.  

The HiPiHi World

The Chinese Internet is still not mature and web 2.0 is just heating up here. We asked Hui and Xinhua why they started an online virtual reality. Hui Xu said that while most users will treat HiPiHi as another 3D game, he said they are aiming to build a complete 3D visual background which reflects different environments in the real world. It also provides users with a powerful creation engine and tools, which helps users to create their own world step by step. Hui explained that before the full public beta, they are going to invite around 100,000 users to be the original residents of the HiPiHi world. 

There are four phases involved in the current private test. Note that these four phases reflect Chinese mythical events, but for better understanding here we are translating it into the corresponding Biblical story of God’s creation of the world in 7 days. They are:

Phase 1 - In the beginning God created heaven and the earth = the tools for rendering the terrain, hills, fields, terraces, water, flora etc are introduced.

Phase 2 - God created Adam and Eve and the human race using the image of Himself = the tools for creating more detailed avatars are introduced.

Phase 3 - God created all earthly things = the tools for creating all sorts of objects are introduced.

Phase 4 - The Mirage = the economic system and social system are established.

Hui commented:

“Every phase is given a distinctive theme, in the hope of guiding users in the creation of the virtual world. This arrangement mirrors the real evolution of human society, from barbarians to civilized society. We want to let the users experience the course of civilization, instead of forcing most of our arbitrary creations down their throat from the get-go, which will surely confuse them.”

HiPiHi and SecondLife

HiPiHi has obtained lots of media coverage, most of which inevitably link it to Linden Labs' SecondLife - a few of them even call it a clone of SecondLife. We asked Hui for his thoughts on that:

“When we started discussing the HiPiHi back to 2005, actually we had no idea about SecondLife. SecondLife came to international attention in late 2006, then we studied it and found out we are both working towards a similar direction. It is absolutely a misunderstanding of virtual worlds if people think HiPiHi is a copycat of SecondLife. The virtual world is not just a 3D environment, but a complicated social system including the property policy, financial policy etc. HiPiHi is born in China, [so] we really hope it can embrace our own culture”.

Xinhua also added that “according to the CNNIC’s report (Jan,2007), over 70% of Chinese netizens are under 30 years old, but the average age of SecondLife is reported to be 32. Chinese users have different interests and views on the Internet market. HiPiHi and SecondLife can learn from each other, but neither of us can simply copy the culture from the other”.

The Future of HiPiHi

Discussing the future of HiPiHi, Hui Xu told us: 

“We have invited many sociologists and economists to sit down with our technicians to discuss the future of HiPiHi. We are working hard to improve our 3D environment, and we do hope we can create a perfect society - a shared and fair world which will finally embrace the various cultures of the real world”.

On the economics, while SecondLife created its Linden Dollar, it may've been the Chinese Internet giant Tencent QQ which first introduced a virtual currency - Q Coin. It has been reported that the China government may restrict the usage of virtual currencies, because of concerns about undermining the nation’s financial system. So we asked Hui Xu if HiPiHi is going to introduce its own currency - and if so how it would work. Hui said that “[certainly] we have considered this, but it is still too early to finalize this topic. We have to take all sorts of factors - inside and outside of HiPiHi - into account and we will introduce it when the virtual world is ready for trading”.

Conclusion

HiPiHi is very young, but it is very special [to Chinese users] and also unique in the massive Chinese Internet market. I had a chance to pay a visit to the HiPiHi world, and it was actually a very nice experience.

Founded by Pony Ma in Shenzhen, China, in November 1998, Tencent is now recognized as the leading provider of Internet, mobile & telecommunications value-added services in China. QQ, Tencent's instant messaging service platform, officially launched in Feb 1999 and announced in its 2006 Q3 report that it has 221.4 million active users. What's more, the total registered user accounts has climbed to 572.3 million!

Tencent Innovation Center, also called QQ Labs, was founded in May 2005 and acts as QQ's Web2.0 service incubator. So far it has launched Tencent's  web2.0 service QQVideo and a social bookmarking service called QQ Bookmark is in public beta testing. So this Chinese IM giant is obviously showing a lot of interest in the web2.0 market. 

We recently interviewed Richard Chang, the Founder and Director of QQ Labs. In this talk with Richard, we cover Tencent's business model, its web2.0 services and the overall mission of QQ Labs.

Richard told us that Tencent's industry model is unique in the global market and that all of their current businesses are built on top of the QQ IM service and its user base. QQ is famous for its IM client, but after 7 years QQ has built up several more excellent services - QQ.com, QQ Game, QQ Zone, QQ Show, Paipai.com, and more. All of these services have been seamlessly integrated with QQ IM and can be accessed with a user's QQ account. QQ even introduced a virtual currency named Q-coin, which can be used by QQ users to buy their IM avatar's virtual clothes, hairstyles, furniture - and even virtual pet food for their virtual pets! 

QQ.com is in the global top 10 websites in the world, as ranked by Alexa.com. As of now, it is number 9 in the world - just behind Orkut and Windows Live. It has also made some sharp business moves. For example Tencent partnered with China Mobile, the state-owned mobile operator, to offer mobile messaging services such as QQ ringtone downloads, QQ MMS, and similar services. And earlier this year, Tencent and TCL announced a joint iTQQ service - an IPTV solution, bundled with QQ's other services such as IM and games.

QQ's Web2.0 Services

According to Richard Chang, Tencent's goal is to become the most respected Internet company in China. He told us that while you can already see lots of web2.0 characteristics in their current services, he hopes that QQ Labs can offer even more web2.0 services and interesting web-based applications to QQ's user base. 

QQVideo, a video-sharing site, was the first web2.0 service developed by QQ Labs. There are over 200 YouTube-like services already in China, but Richard Chang thinks that QQVideo can be special. He said that QQVideo has a user base from the very beginning - and it is those users that "help us decide what should and what should not [be] in the video-sharing site". Some neat features in the service are: Online Recording, V-Pub, Views Details (where the user can track on which sites a video is embedded and played).

The QQ Bookmark service is a very nice del.icio.us-like service. But the most important thing about it is that QQ can integrate this service with its hugely popular IM service and so encourage its millions of users to share their favorite websites and stories.

The Mission of QQ Labs

It is an interesting phenomenon in the Chinese Internet that QQ IM might be the first Internet experience for many Chinese netizens, especially for young people who get on the Internet because all their friends are on QQ . If you are a professional or experienced on the Internet, it should be easy to understand the new ideas of retrieving, publishing and sharing content via technology like RSS feeds, blogging, widgets and web-based applications such as online bookmarking. However most Chinese netizens don't know what RSS is, or how to use feeds, or the benefits of using online bookmarks.

"QQ has a massive user base, and it can be [a] very effective channel to distribute the concept of web2.0 to the Chinese netizen", Richard Chang told us. "Our mission", he said, "is not only to create new services, but also to help the Chinese Internet [become] more mature." 

Chinese Internet ramping up in 2007

The Web space in China is heating up. Myspace.cn will be launched in China this year and will join the existing social network competition there. Also Baidu, the leading search engine in China, has announced it will move into the Japanese market in 2007. So there will be lots of news - inwards and outwards - from the Chinese Internet this year; and as part of that it will be interesting to see how QQ expands its kingdom abroad.

EditGrid, the main product of HongKong-based company Team and Concepts (TnC) Ltd., is a leading Web 2.0 online spreadsheet service that focuses on online collaboration and interoperability. Having had 1 year of development and 9 months of public beta with 18 beta releases, yesterday EditGrid officially announced its subscription service and removed the beta tag from its site. We spoke with TnC's founder and Chairman, David Lee, a brilliant young man who was recently nominated by BusinessWeek as one of Asia's Best Entrepreneurs under 25. Also in this post we outline EditGrid's main features and discuss why it's better than Google Spreadsheets.

The online spreadsheet market is crowded and the big players include Google Spreadsheets (as part of Google Docs & Spreadsheets), Zoho Sheet (as part of the Zoho Office Suite -- disclosure, Zoho is a R/WW sponsor), WikiCalc (a part of SocialText), ThinkFree Calc (as part of Thinkfree Office). But EditGrid is the only standalone online spreadsheet offering.

Features and comparison with Google Spreadsheets

EditGrid boasts real-time-update (RTU), allowing users to see changes immediately when someone is editing the same spreadsheet, and extensive collaboration features. It has a feature called Remote data, which fetches data from the web (e.g. stock information and foreign exchange data) and puts it into a spreadsheet. Also EditGrid has many more functions available than Google Spreadsheet - EditGrid has over 500 functions (like SUM () etc), whereas Google Spreadsheet has 230+; at least according to this EditGrid comparison of EditGrid to Goog Spreadsheets and MS Excel 2003.

We were particularly impressed by the toolbox and charts (see the screenshot below). The document-sharing, live chats, etc., are also very impressive. There are really too many features to list here, but check out the full product tour if interested. Also EditGrid's development team maintains a very informative changelog and future plan. 

EditGrid intergrated into other products

With its agile architecture that facilitates integration and embedding into enterprise application platforms, strong data manipulation and distribution capabilities and high usability, EditGrid is ideal for integrating into existing platforms. Right now EditGrid is integrated into start pages Netvibes, Pageflakes and Google Personalized Homepage. It is also integrated into Salesforce AppExchange and several SaaS products and platforms. [Ed: there is also going to be announcement early next week of another Web Office vendor using EditGrid - stay tuned to R/WW for that news]

Some other facts and figures... With its EditGrid Localization Project, EditGrid has been translated into 9 languages by its users. It has 15,000+ registered personal users from 30+ countries, 200+ trial organizations and 4,500+ trial organization users have created +23,000 spreadsheets.

David Lee told us that personal users can still enjoy free service, but they have a new subscription service that allows organizations to utilize EditGrid - which has added security, administration and customization features. It is $5 per user per month, and academic and non-profit organizations get a 50% discount.

Conclusion

It's great to see innovative Web Office technology coming out of Asia and taking on the big guns in the US. EditGrid is indeed an excellent standalone product, in many respects better than Google Spreadsheets. If it successfully partners with existing platforms (e.g. start pages and Salesforce), then it stands a good chance of competing with the Office Suite offerings of Google, Zoho, ThinkFree et al. In a sense, EditGrid takes the 'best-of-breed' theory of Web apps even further - by creating a specialist Web Office app that is best in class, but also requires partnerships with other vendors to be truly successful.

click image to view full-size screenshot

Maxthon (formerly known as MyIE) is a browser that reportedly has 30% of the browser market in its home country of China, second only to IE and ahead of Firefox. It is a powerful tabbed, fully customizable and 100% free Internet browser built on top of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) platform. The milestone Maxthon 2.0 beta was released early last month. We carried out an in-depth interview with SVP & Partner at Maxthon Netanel Jacobsson (former Business Development Director at AOL/ICQ), who told us the full story of this exciting browser and its bid for global success. 

The History of Maxthon

The interview starts with a bit of history about Maxthon, a browser generally not well known in the Western world. Netanel said that MyIE was originally created by a Chinese man called Changyou, who wanted to customize his IE browser. MyIE became the first browser to support tabbed browsing. Changyou posted most of the code onto his BBS, but unexpectedly left the project due to personal reasons in 2000. Luckily, one of his admirers Jeff Chen decided to continue the development and released a new version with the name MyIE2. MyIE2 grew very fast, with massive contributions from passionate users all over the world. They communicated via BBS, Forums and IM - and helped on developing the plugins, sites, skins, debugging, etc.

Netanel said that Maxthon users are very passionate about the IE browser, but they want more from IE than Microsoft provided - so they formed a community to build and maintain Maxthon. 

More than IE - The Features of Maxthon2 Beta

In early November 2006, the Maxthon 2.0 beta was released - featuring a completely re-designed UI and core code. Still, Maxthon 2.0 beta is fully compatible with Internet Explorer. It has the same basic browsing functionalities, but also provides many rich features to improve the surfing experience. Some of the highlights are:

• Advanced proxy function - allows the use of different proxies for different web sites, ensuring the best browsing speed and web site accessibility.
• User Interface Multi-Thread technology - greatly reduces the chance of browser lockup, (e.g. caused by some Ajax operations) and browser crashes.
• Modular design - loads only the required components, ensuring the most efficient use of system resources.
• Highly customizable skinning and interface system - supports anything from the simple windows classic to the most crafted skins and advanced layouts.
• Ultra powerful filter - the system can filter not only ads, but also any malicious code; removing web annoyances and improving browser safety.
• Multi-users password - protected profile system protects users privacy without compromising program portability.

People always complain about IE’s security issues (even the newly released IE7) and its non-compliance with many standards. Netanel said that the Maxthon 2.0 beta provides Online Maxthon Security Updates to reduce the risks of certain un-patched Internet Explorer vulnerabilities; and Maxthon Smart Acceleration (MSA) technology significantly improves browsing speed. He said the Maxthon team is working hard to fully support the Gecko engine, which will be added to Maxthon 2.0 final version.

The Browser Market in China

The Chinese browser market is dominated by IE and Maxthon - Firefox usage is very low in China. I asked Netanel about the 30% market share that Maxthon reportedly has in China. Netanel said it’s actually very hard to give an exact figure to show how popular Maxthon is in China, because sometimes Maxthon is still counted as IE in the figures. Netanel said: 

"We have 12 million active users monthly and over 73 million downloads [over] the world. There is no doubt Maxthon is the second after IE in China and I also hope the market share will be more than 30% very soon."

Maxthon's Revenue

Netanel said that Maxthon's revenues are mainly from search, but also from subscription services and donations. He said that other business models would be introduced soon. It is very interesting to note that Maxthon has been revenue positive since 2005, with a stable business model and low burn rate - not many startups can match that today.

Maxthon in 2007

Maxthon is actually the only Chinese Internet Software company with a global presence. With its success in China and the brilliant features in Maxthon 2.0, Maxthon is ready for the worldwide market. Netanel said they are growing very fast globally, especially in the US. Also a lot of new users are young, which is a good trend for Maxthon. 

In 2007, Maxthon will be working actively with local communities in the US and Europe. It will start organizing Maxthon meetups and developer conferences, to officially show the power of Maxthon and promote its presence in the global market. 

"We will bring fresh air to the [browser] world in the coming new year", Netanel added.

I asked Netanel about the final release of Maxthon 2.0. Netanel said he hoped it would be sometime in the spring 2007. 

Netanel concluded by describing Maxthon as a grass roots movement, more than a product - due to the support of its passionate world-wide user community. Netanel said:

"[…] We can see that the role of the browser is changing and is becoming the focal point of customization and personalization. It is the place where users can choose to run their applications and in this sense it is kind of taking over the role of the OS. […] Maxthon is going to become a major platform for the delivery of the new web services and you can expect to see some interesting examples of this during 2007[…]. "

Written by Gang Lu. See also Read/WriteWeb’s Web Browser Faceoff.

FeedSky is the largest Chinese feed management provider and has just launched its Beta 3. CEO Xinxin Lv described it to me as "mainly a UI update with some performance enhancement".

The web2.0 market is still quite young in China, but its concepts are rapidly spreading throughout the country. The China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC) reported that by August 2006, the number of bloggers had reached approx. 17.485 million and 33.747 million blog spaces had been registered. FeedSky's main competitor, worldwide RSS service provider Feedburner, reported in its Fast Facts and Stats that it has a total of 506,278 feeds registered. But the Beijing-based FeedSky, launched in July 2005, has just announced a company milestone - 1.5 million feeds have been registered and it has partnerships with over 30 BSPs (Blog Service Provider) and 40 media companies from mainland China, Hongkong and Taiwan. Feedsky has become the dominant service provider in the Chinese market and is probably going to be the largest feed management provider in the world.

The Beta 3 version introduced an interesting WAP service, which allows users to read registered feeds on a mobile handset. "The UI update is a sign of our next round growing up", Xinxin said - also noting that "a few killer services will be launched very soon". The next version is in private testing currently. It is a major update and some social networking elements have been integrated - e.g. users with the same interests can join a group and the feeds managed by a user can be shared with others. Xinxin didn't reveal further details to me, but I am really looking forward to this upgrade.

Feedsky just closed its first round of venture funding. It is definitely one of the key contacts, if someone wants to get into the Chinese blog market. Blog-based services such as Google Blog Search are expected to play a much more important role in the Chinese Internet Content market in 2007, so I will not be surprised if there is a connection between Feedsky and these services - particularly those from the western world.