Accessing the Internet in China
So much has been made of the Great Chinese Firewall and the reports of the government blocking portions of the Internet, I wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of browsing from China. Turns out my normal surfing habits must be reasonably close to government expectations. This must either mean I’m really boring or those activist types in the U.S. are in a huff about the Chinese internet because they are too lazy to look for serious problems closer to their own backyards. I know there are taboo topics in China, but I was frequently surprised by things I would consider offensive that are readily available in stores. For instance, all the graphic photos are still in The Rape of Nanking (the book title referencing both abuses to the city and its people), which might be because it makes Japan look bad but still seemed out of character considering the lynch mob mentality surrounding improper treatment of Chinese women by foreigners - I digress.
In the normal course of my daily usage, I found exactly three sites I couldn’t get to. Blogspot.com seemed to have intermittent outages - no loss there, I’m still of the opinion Google’s free blogging service is one of the biggest spam portals on the Internet. Technorati was inaccessible during my entire stay in China, which likely means it’s blocked outright - will the Chinese people really miss all those search results clogged with Blogspot spam blogs? And Wikipedia wasn’t available when I wanted to find out some additional information about one of the sections of the Great Wall - it’s a rare day when I find info on Wikipedia that isn’t also available in a hundred other places, so I’m not convinced that’s really preventing the dissemination of information.
Another surprise about accessing stuff online was my ability to login over RDC to my computer at home. Had I really needed to access blocked sites, I could have used my home connection as a proxy (and I did once or twice to ego search on Technorati). I had made contingency plans to bring anything digital I might need with me, just in case I couldn’t get in. Turns out all the digital comforts of home were still right where I need them - at home. My favorite coffee shop in Seattle blocks RDC usage so in my book that’s a win for the Chinese government.
I’m sure people living in China can site hundreds of examples to trump my three, but I can only base my information on my own habits, not someone else’s. I can’t say with 100% certainty that these sites were blocked, but consistent lack of access suggests they must be. Firefox and Internet Explorer both displayed their standard ‘This page cannot be displayed’ message so there’s really no verification. Comcast brings me that same message on an almost daily basis, without the predictability of knowing what information produces failure, so in which case am I really worse off? At least if I know which actions result in failure I can learn how to adapt or route around to achieve a desirable result. There is of course a much more complicated political issue surrounding free speech, but here I’m referring only to the (in)convenience of trying to locate useful information online.
Television is a completely different matter - when the government doesn’t want something on screen it just goes black. I didn’t turn on the television very often in China, but I did watch CNN after hearing from Lee LeFever that some portions of coverage of the 30th anniversary of Mao’s death were being censored. There was a particular woman who got censored every time she came on so I can only make wild guesses at what was being said. The tone of the coverage in general didn’t seem particularly biased either against or in favor of Mao.
Which brings me to something else that surprised me a little. I couldn’t find any local events that would suggest the country was acknowledging the anniversary of Mao’s passing. I walked by the Mausoleum in Tiananmen where Mao is on display and it looked just like it did on any other day. There was a bigger deal made on the 30th anniversary of the JFK shooting here in the U.S. Before I get tons of hate mail, I’m not comparing JFK and Mao, but both men do have a distinctive cult of personality and JFK is the only other world leader I can think of with a fairly recent death milestone. The only noteworthy event that took place while walking across the square was haggling with a peddler who wanted to sell me a Chinese/English version of Mao’s infamous little red book of quotations. There seems to be at least an 80 RMB window of price flexibility as long as you know just a little of the language. I couldn’t help feeling a sense of irony in negotiating to a market price for that particular work.
Maizhaopian Photo Shopping and Printing Site
Flickr recently added a feature to allow users to order prints of photos from their own collection or from any other collection with the right set of permissions. Chinese site Maizhaopian.com (which translates to: shopping for a picture) takes this concept and enhances it by offering a full framing and delivery of photos to your doorstep. At this point that doorstep needs to be in China, but hopefully they will take the concept worldwide in the near future.
Unlike Flickr and photo sharing sites that are essentially free repositories of photos from anyone with an account, Maizhaopian.com takes a more vetted approach. The site is closed to the average photographer, with current photo offerings hand-picked by company staff. This makes Maizhaopian a little like stock image sites like Corbis and Getty, who enlist qualified pros to shoot photos made available for licensing.
Limiting who submits photos is both a plus and minus. It creates a higher caliber set of photos to search, which is great for someone shopping for an artistic wall hanging. The downside is a limited playing field making the average individual unable to order a framed print from their recent trip to the Egyptian Pyramids. In the long run catering to both markets might look like a smart business move to compete against the many boutique outlets offering services like custom coffee table books made from the family vacation photos.
When purchasing an image for framing you get to select the image size, matting color and frame style from among all the available options on the site. There seem to be a few quirks with the preview mode at the moment, like not properly centering every image in the matte, but overall you get a good sense for what the shipped photo and frame will look like.
In addition to supporting the sale of photos in frames, the site also offers some familiar features for online photo sharing. Star ratings of your favorite images might influence other people’s purchase decisions. Comments about photos can either give kudos or offer criticism of a photo depending on your taste.
Two things about the business model are particularly interesting. First, Maizhaopian.com is offering a revenue split with the photographers to create an incentive to list photos in the service. The company gives a larger cut to the photographer, although they didn’t disclose the exact percentage. This provides incentive for photographers to promote the service as a place for people to buy framed images. Like a more traditional offline framing shop, most of the money is in the value-added service of framing and shipping images to the customer.
As a niche play, this seems like a no-brainer. At low volumes, one or two people could make a nice living printing and shipping photos throughout China. To scale the business to something wildly popular, the company will need partners in major economic centers on each continent in order to keep shipping costs at a reasonable level. There’s also a major risk in entering a business that could get competition from something like a Yahoo backed Flickr at any time.
Wireless Health Monitoring System
Beijing Perfect Sky Information Technology Co. Ltd. presented a demonstration of their vision for health monitoring via wireless technology. Their appropriately named Wireless Health Monitoring System is designed to keep physicians and concerned relatives informed of changes in the health of a remote patient. This technology has broad reaching potential both in China, where many people are moving to the city for work and wiring money back to family in smaller towns, as well as in rural areas in other countries around the globe.
The system monitors health data for cardiogram readings, pulse, blood pressure, body temperature and a number of other factors to track changes in vital signs. Data is sent wirelessly to a server that tracks patient information to check for any changes that represent an out-of-normal condition. In the event of a dramatic change in health status, the service will alert physicians, family and anyone else scheduled to be notified in an emergency.
There are several scenarios where this Wireless Health Monitoring System might offer critical feedback. Often people go to the doctor complaining of an ailment, but do not exhibit the symptoms during their appointment with the doctor. With a wireless monitoring system, a patient can wear a monitor outside of the medical facility and automatically notify the doctor of any abnormal symptoms through the wireless monitor as they happen. For people with elderly parents living a long distance away or people without relatives to check in on their well being, the Wireless Health Monitoring System provides a method of insurance to make sure a sudden heart attack or other life threatening illness is discovered quickly through ongoing monitor of vital signs. A third interesting scenario would be a wireless monitoring system that keeps track of vital signs and notifies a patient when it’s time for them to take a medication to prevent additional health complications, like low insulin levels, for instance.
Unfortunately, Beijing Perfect Sky Information Technology Co. Ltd. does not have a web site related to their Wireless Health Monitoring System as of this writing. For more information on the project, the company can be reached at their Beijing offices:
地址：东城区 和平里东街 民旺乙19号 中粮凯达大厦308室
城市：北京
省份：北京
国家：中国
邮编：100083
主要联系电话 13801354892
主要传真号码 010-64275627
QuDing - News Submission and Voting Site
One area where Chinese tech companies seem to find success is adapting Web services successful in the English speaking world to a culture that primarily reads Chinese. It was not surprising to see QuDing.com present something that is sort of a cross between social booking marking sites like del.icio.us, Digg, and even a hint of online news reader Bloglines. China already has its fair share of Digg clones. Dingr and diglog are both very similar to Digg in the way they function. A couple of others have been shut down for names and appears that looked too much like Digg itself. China Web2.0 recently pointed to the new Linkist foray into the land of Digging based on open source voting engine Pligg. Of course Linkist is itself a social networking clone of Linked In
QuDing users create a profile and then have access to submit stories, tag stories, make comments and vote on favorites. Profiles are customizable with details like email address and a 48×48 icon. Users have a number of ways to interact with information on QuDing. You can simply vote for a story just like Digg. Readers submit stories, complete with tags and supporting descriptive information. Stories submitted by other QuDing users may be bookmarked in your own personal collection of information. You can add a story or site to a list of watched information. Commenting on stories is supported. One thing I find most useful is the ability to make modifications to information submitted to QuDing, allowing for correction of mistakes, which is something other sites in this category generally don’t handle well.
Another feature lets you add headlines to your own Web page. Options include most recently added sites to all of QuDing. Recent posts from sites submitted to QuDing. Your most recent sites added to QuDing or posts from sites you added to QuDing. Here’s an example:
It’s too early to tell whether QuDing (which loosely translates to “take a look”) will find success with their formula for news discovery. Voting currently seems to be flawed, allowing me to give multiple thumbs up or thumbs down to the same story. I hit a SQL database error when putting the wrong type of information in a form field. It’s likely something that could earn a small team enough money to live on, but scaling to the popularity of an international success like Digg is a much bigger hurdle. At the moment, QuDing needs to scale beyond the less than 10 users currently in the system. I appear to be #8 in all the people to sign up and the first to add an image to my profile.
Google Losing Ground in Chinese Search
This is a slight sidetrack from DEMO China write ups, but something I think is important to understand about the Chinese tech space. One of the things I asked people in China throughout my visit was what search engine they use to find information. Almost everyone named Baidu as their choice. As someone who can’t live without Google here in the U.S., I was somewhat surprised, especially following the huge deal made about Google’s entrance into China with Google.cn earlier this year. Apparently my unscientific sample of a population of English-speaking native Chinese tracks fairly closely with two recent studies on the topic.
Red Herring is reporting on China IntelliConsulting’s findings that Baidu now makes up 65.4% of searches in Beijing, while Google is now about 20.6% of searches in the sample group. This represents a 13% increase for Baidu and a 12.3% drop for Google. CNNIC offers similar statistics for their recent survey. The chart below is combined data for Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Baidu is showing 62.1% of the CNNIC sample and Google is at 25.3%. While the CNNIC sample suggests a slightly smaller drop in Google’s percentage of the Chinese market, the trend is still downward.
More charts available from Sina.
While people here in the U.S. were very critical of Google locating servers inside China and making claims about Google and others being bad world citizens by supporting the Chinese government in censoring some information from the people of China, the people I spoke to in China have a very different view. The concern isn’t about government involvement. As one person put it, being number one in Chinese search means always recognizing that the Chinese Government is number one.
Among people I spoke with from the tech community, the prevailing opinion is that Google isn’t taking China seriously. By dictating business decisions about China from Mountain View, CA in the U.S., the opinions feel that Google isn’t making an effort to understand the Chinese search market. By failing to keep servers in China, companies like Google couldn’t ever successfully compete against companies who do business in China. Until management in the China division of the company is given decision making authority over the direction of the company. More importantly for the search equation, everyone I spoke to felt like they got better results when searching with Baidu.
More comment on this is available from China Herald and China Web2.0
NETV Health Management and Media Platform
NETV pitched a three-tiered service offering that couples health information services in medical facilities with individual member offerings that are proposed as a method for individual to educate, plan and keep track of medical information. On one end of the spectrum, the company is working to get IPTV-connected screens in health care facilities around China (the plan is to have 200 screens in 90 hospitals by the end of 2006). These screens provide information to patients at the hospital who need more details about their health care options and provide revenue to NETV through advertising. Additional fees would be generated through the sale of terminals, although I can’t imagine too many medical facilities purchasing a screen and then allowing the seller to generate advertising revenue post purchase. On the member side of the equation, NETV is proposing a fee-based member service for managing health care, identifying preferred providers and negotiating discounts on rates, which sounds a little like a HMO in the U.S. although the company doesn’t draw the comparison in its proposal.
NETV appears to be in a more challenging position than any of the other companies presenting at DEMO China for a number of reasons. The idea of providing screens capable of delivering individualized medical information to people in a hospital is valid, but a goal of approximately 2 screens per hospital is far too low to make any significant impact in providing patient education. At best that represents a limited beta test, which would be better concentrated in one hospital to get adequate coverage.
Unless the medical information is generalized to the point of mass consumable for everyone sitting in a waiting room, the line to get more information at these kiosk stations will be longer than the waiting list to see doctors because the daily patient load at any hospital is far too high for 2 screens to be highly effective. From an advertising perspective, if too few people are seeing the advertisements, the paying advertisers will take their dollars elsewhere to get a better reach.
On the member side, if NETV is in a position to negotiate better rates for patients, they may have a market. From what I understand of Chinese health insurance, people who want adequate coverage are currently looking outside the country. Even providing a means of convenient scheduling may assist improving patient experience dramatically, although it’s hard to say whether anyone would pay for that convenience (they certainly wouldn’t in the U.S.) If they are simply providing information to patients, thousands of resources internationally provide an outstanding breadth of information in most of the known languages of the world at little or no cost to the reader. The U.S. has yet to see any healthcare sites with significant numbers of paying subscribers and already saw a number of online healthcare failures during the 2001 dotcom fallout.
NETV cites HealthMedia as a direct competitor in the LCD healthcare information business. NETV claims an advantage in providing data via real time playback and interactive broadcasting, compared to HealthMedia’s use of DVD information playback. While this could be a potential advantage, without a massive penetration of screens in each hospital to support all potential patients, I can’t see the company effectively meeting patient needs on an individual basis. More likely, HealthMedia is providing generalized information that doesn’t require interactivity and reaches a broad audience simultaneously. Seeing more than 50 people swarmed around a television in a Tianjin alley makes me think there’s currently a large market for mass health education initiatives.
Maybe there’s more to what’s planned than meets the eye. Under the hood at NETV, they maintain a portal for streaming movies, television and adult content in something that appears to be linked to founder Haiyan Peng’s streaming company Blue Sword.
Fluorescence Gastric Juice Analytic System
Yinchaun Kangjie Science and Technologies Co, Ltd. presented the Fluorescence Gastric Juice Analytic System (FGJAS) as a cost effective method for early detection of stomach cancer in patients. According to statistics presented by Yinchaun Kangjie Science and Technologies Co, Ltd., the incidence of stomach cancer among people in China remains quite high as compared to stomach cancer rates in other parts of the world. The company cites the prevalence of widespread access to endoscopic and barium tests in countries like the U.S. and Japan as a key reason that stomach cancer is caught early and more effectively treated in those countries. According to the presentation, the expense of endoscopic and barium tests make them less widely available throughout China, despite a continued need to detect and treat stomach cancer more effectively.
The FGJAS system works by gather gastric juice and analyzing it for particular characteristics common to Helicobacter pylori (a bacteria that causes digestive illnesses like gastritis and peptic ulcer disease) as well as proteins in the stomach commonly associated with the existence of stomach cancer.
Through testing done by the company results averaged 83.58% sensitivity, 81.57% specificity, with a diagnostic index of 165.15. I’m not a medical expert, so I don’t pretend to know how that compares with competing detection methods. By the company’s own acknowledgement in documentation provided about the FGJAS project, it’s not suggesting the FGJAS is a substitute for other types of testing. It appears to be best used in conjunction with other methods of testing, while better than not testing at all in situations where resources for acquiring more expensive testing equipment are not available.
Based on presented information, the cost of endoscopic equipment is in the 600,000 -800,000 Yuan range, which translates to roughly US $75,000-100,000. The associated procedure is about $150-200 yuan (US $19-25). Barium testing equipment is 300,000-600,000 Yuan (US $38,000-75,000) with procedures priced in the 50-60 Yuan range. By their estimate, the Yinchaun Kangjie Science and Technologies Co, Ltd., Fluorescence Gastric Juice Analytic System costs 30,000-50,000 Yuan with a price of 50-60 Yuan per procedure. While the actual procedural costs don’t sound that high as compared with common co-pay amounts here in the U.S., salaries in China are not comparable and a single test may be as much as 10% of a patient’s annual income in many parts of China.
The company applied for U.S. patents for unique aspects of the detection system, adding intellectual property to the overall value proposition for what they are seeking to fund. According to research provided, 15 medical facilities in Ningxia are currently using the FGJAS system as part of their regular diagnosis of gastric ailments.
The key thing that makes this project interesting is its potential to help provide an essential service at a dramatically lower cost than the current available options. For developing countries around the world, that presents an opportunity for people to get treatment they weren’t previously receiving. If the test results provide accurate health care information, it may even be disruptive to existing solutions in developed nations, encouraging other small companies to develop affordable alternatives to other types of diagnosis and treatment, and potentially driving down health care costs in the same way that the Web has disrupted many traditional business practices and lowered costs in other industries. At the very least, wider adoption of this technology many mean dramatically lower incidence of chronic stomach pain. At the core, a more dramatic change will happen in dealing with chronic stomach issues when the bacterial source of chronic stomach issues is dealt with through wider availability of clean water and sanitation throughout China.
ClicMobile AreYouHere Social Networking Platform
With all the social networking sites out there, there must be a ton of duplicated code as each company tries to reinvent the way people add friends and interact on a social level. ClicMobile presented their new social network platform, AreYouHere, as an OEM platform for building social networks for virtually any site. Rather than trying to build their own community, ClicMobile chooses to focus on building the tools to make social networking possible, developing both a online component and a fully integrated solution for mobile phones.
The Web component feels a great deal like MySpace (at least in the only live environment currently at France’s YooTribe.com. YouTribe was created for M6 which is one of the larger telecom players in France. Below you can see the example profile I created through the French interface.
On the mobile side, ClicMobile seems to have worked hard at making it easy to interface with the platform through the Web. Depending on what information your friends or friends of friends share, you can even see where people you know are currently spending their evening through a location component that’s a bit like Dodgeball. Upload and download of data is supported for things like posting to the online component of the social network or downloading information from friends.
If I understood the CEO correctly, the platform should be compatible across multiple implementations, so if you sign up for a social network with one Web site and later join another Web site built on the AreYouHere platform, you won’t need to create a whole new profile for the second service. If that is the case, that’s definitely a step in the right direction. One of my biggest frustrations with social networking in general is the need to create a new profile with identical information every time a new site pops up. With only one site implemented at the moment, it will be awhile before we see whether the integration works in practice.
ClicMobile presented at DEMO China in hopes of gaining interest from China-based VC’s in an effort to bring the platform to the Chinese market. The rollout plan is to launch in markets with high penetration of GSM phones, making China among the biggest potential markets. With nothing like a Dodgeball as competition in China as of yet, ClicMobile may have a very good opportunity to connect a community that relies on SMS communication as a highly popular method for keeping in touch.
You can hear an interview with ClicMobile CEO Alex Kummerman on The Chris Pirillo Show.
Hongxiu.com Chinese Fiction Portal
Hongxiu.com is unlike any of the other companies presenting at DEMO China. Hongxiu.com is a content publishing site for users who want to share fiction with the rest of the community. As a publisher I’m fascinated by content sites, learning about where sites get traffic and how other content sites make money. Hongxiu.com is a community of people who post and read fictional works, primarily novels, in Chinese. I’m not aware of a comparable U.S. site. As far as I know, there aren’t any wildly popular fiction sites in the U.S.
According to Sun Peng, Chief Manager for hongxiu.com, the audience is 70% white-collar females with a publication history dating back to 1999. Traffic indicators suggest that online growth is increasing steadily, presumably at least partly instep with the growth of online access throughout China. While I don’t put much stock in Alexa ranks, Hongxiu.com has a 3-month rank of 1,028 and is trending steadily upward for the past two years, despite a brief dip in January 2006.
To put the traffic numbers in perspective with what most of us in the tech industry understand, hongxiu.com is in the same ballpark as TechCrunch and Lifehacker while lagging far behind the entire universe of blogs using wordpress.com.
The site seems to get more page views per reader, which would imply a greater potential for advertisers to reach their audience, but again, this is Alexa data which is more of a guideline than a hard-and-fast set of statistics about the industry.
Hongxiu.com presented at DEMO China in search of funding to grow the company further to increase revenues. I’ll freely admit that I don’t understand everything about the way the Chinese consumer market works. If a U.S. site had the predominantly white-collar female traffic Hongxiu.com gets, the advertising revenue potential would be fairly high. That’s a market many advertisers court in every medium because they tend to spend more money than their male counterparts. Based on the types of advertising I’ve seen throughout Beijing, it appears China is similar.
Currently the company derives revenue from advertising, content deals to adapt stories for television and is offering print versions of any online novel with 5,000,000 or more views. Rather than actively seeking venture capital funding, concentrating on finding a strong advertising sales force familiar with the Chinese market or merely working to optimize existing advertising placements could go along way to dramatically increasing the revenue potential for the site. Another interesting growth area would be partnering with U.S.-based content sites looking to expand into Chinese markets.
Saybot English Language Learning Software
Chinese students learning English and native English speaking people learning Mandarin (Putonghua) face a similar problem - it’s difficult to find anyone who speaks the language fluently without leaving your home country. Saybot is attempting to solve this problem for native Putonghua speakers who want to learn English through a software application designed for education through speaking. While there are currently many language software packages on the market, most are completely passive in the educational process, simply spitting out information, with no feedback mechanism for the student. Saybot provides feedback through the analysis of speech, adding an important component for accurate speech learning.
Courses present the learner with spoken phrases and prompt the learner for a response. Software then analyzes the response spoken into a microphone attached to the computer. If the student’s response is correct, the software moves on to the next phrase. Otherwise, the software attempts to correct the mispronunciation by providing a correct response. This differs greatly from most software language components because the feedback mechanism helps make sure you are accurately learning rather than passively feeding more phrases.
On the back end, the software uses speech recognition technology and a massive database of common speech errors to identify and correct incorrectly spoken English. These two components combine to create the strength of the software. Speech recognition technology processes what’s being said by the student. The collection of mispronunciations is vital for making sure the software is not making any errors during analysis. For teachers who have existing English language curriculum, an author component makes it possible to adapt a classroom lesson plan to work with Saybot, which is where Saybot is seeking to find it’s initial market.
Lesson packages range in price from about US $12 to around US $30. For non-Chinese speakers, the Windows installer includes an English language option which can be downloaded directly.
When they release the reverse version for teaching Putonghua to native English speakers I’ll be first in line.
For more on Saybot, listen to The Chris Pirillo Show interview with Saybot founder Pengkai Pan.
