Social network has been around in China in 90’s, with first
company called chinaren, that I used back in 2001. It’s like no face
“facebook”, because back then it’s hard to take and upload pictures. One fun
thing is you got connected and grouped by your high school, your university
alums. The company phased out in 2003 and then is the rise of renren network, a Chinese version of
facebook. The company was listed in NYSE a couple years ago and its major way
of generating profit is through online gaming.
According to the speech of Renren’s CEO Joe Chen, the company is positioned at “bleeding” edge of Solomo. So what is
Solomo?? SoLoMo, short for social-local-mobile, refers to a more mobile-centric
version of the addition of local entries to search engine results. SoLoMo
emerged as a result of the growing popularity of smartphones, and provides
greater local precision to search engine results than what's available via a
PC. Way of monetizing the website now come from gaming and is predicted to come
from e-commerce. Renren has groupon like functions that feeding local deal news
and utilize it’s social network to do some viral marketing for vendors. Speaking
of ecommerce, it’s not fair not to mention taobao, a legend that Jack Ma made
in Chinese internet business. Taobao won the battle with ebay by offering on
line interaction with seller and buyer, and by Alipay, a trusted payment
service. Taobao’s revenue is claimed to
surpass walmart in 4 years but no one knows the profit of taboo since it’s a private
hold company under alibaba. How will these companies do in the future? There
are a lot of hurdles, the censorship, the competitions, etc. It’s an era of
change and only customer centric innovation made at the right time, will be the
winner.
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