Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on November 20, 2008 – 1:14 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The problem with crowd sourcing is the overabundance of opinions, suggestions and remarks you’ll get from the community. How to sort these out? And how can you decide which ones can be taken seriously? A possible solution for this selection problem is to add an expert layer.
BloggerInsight has done just so. The service connects Chinese expert bloggers with high tech companies which want to enter the Chinese market. According do BloggerInsight, there’s little reliable market research and that which does exist is expensive and generic. By asking bloggers for their opinion, companies might get better information on how to enter the tough market.
BloggerInsight CEO Lucas Englehardt wants to redefine market intelligence. In the press release he says, “By connecting clients and expert bloggers, BloggerInsight hopes to fundamentally alter the economics of information and lower the barriers to success.”
Then he adds a rather interesting point: “In doing so, BloggerInsight hopes to reward new media for its independent voice”. Of course BloggerInsight just wants to make money, but a new way of monetizing blogging can be an interesting side effect. Most bloggers are experts on their field of interest and their opinion is worth a lot of money.
Bloggers roundtable during China2.0
In the US and Europe, many bloggers act like consultants in their free time - or the other way around. In the hard Chinese market though, an intermediary like BloggerInsight might be necessary. Only if it was just for breaking the language barrier.
BloggerInsight is the portfolio company of Web2Asia, one of the three parties which organized the China 2.0 tour I participated in last week. Read an interesting interview I had with co-founder Markus Fuhrmann here.
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Written on November 16, 2008 – 9:49 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I’m touring around China with bloggers. I hope to give you as many updates as possible about this land of endless opportunities. Thanks to Spil Games for sponsoring me.
Lunch with Andrew Lih
Blogging is fighting for its image in the US, where one web influential after the other declares the medium dead. These statements by Calacanis and the likes seem rather odd, as blogging is the communication channel in thousands of niches. In China however, blogging might be really dead.
In the west, blogs ousted bulletin boards and forums from the market. This never happened in China, where the bulletin boards still flourish. Better yet, the discussion platforms keep growing. According to author Andrew Lih, there are two main reasons for this phenomenon.
- BBS are anonymous. Well, actually, semi-anonymous since people do have nicknames and build up reputations. For reasons well known, anonymity comes in handy in China.
- Users get more comments on their BBS writings, sometimes thousands. As for blogging, it can be lonely out there.
Impressive numbers
When Web2Asia’s George Godula gave a presentation about Chinese social networks, he mentioned the following numbers about BBS. There are three billion registered BBS users (users can be members of multiple BBS). More than 60 percent of the users log on to at least three different BBS more than three times a week. Every day, ten million posts are published which manage to attract a total of 1.6 billion page views.
Source for journalists
No wonder Chinese journalists use BBS to see what the public opinion is like. Especially in the occurrence of breaking news. When the disastrous earthquake rocked Sichuan in May this year, journalists scouted the BBS to see what the Chinese people were really thinking of the disaster and its implications. “Because,’ said Lih, “that’s where the honest conversations take place”.
Photo credit: CN Reviews
Written on November 13, 2008 – 8:04 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I’m touring around China with bloggers. I hope to give you as many updates as possible about this land of endless opportunities. Thanks to Spil Games for sponsoring me.
During this China 2.0 week, a rather large group of Beijing bloggers gathered in the Blue Frog, an American haven in China’s capital with excellent wifi. During a square (as in not round) table discussion about business 2.0 and outsourcing, tweets were pumped onto the web. The hashtag “china20” even ranked no. 1 trending topic at some point. The part of this discussion which interested me the most was the annoyance of Chinese bloggers about us, the western ones. The issue: we don’t paint a gray picture of China.
“Bloggers who speak little or no Chinese do lousy research”, complained Brendan O’Kane. “They find one English-writing blogger from China and project his beliefs and writings on all Chinese bloggers. Hence our image of being online nationalists”.
Richard from Peking Duck agrees with Brendan, but also admits he used to do the same when he started blogging back in 2002. “My blog used to be a wealth of misconceptions, a mess full of prejudice. Now I know better.”
“When my favorite bloggers from abroad address China, even the most liberal ones paint a black and white picture,” said Richard, concerning reports about human rights and censorship.” It’s actually pervasive in all western media”.
Brendan O’Kane
After hearing these complaints, I asked the two gentleman how we could paint a gray picture of the country they reside in. “Read lots of blogs about China to broaden your view”, said Brendan. “Try Fool’s Mountain“. Richard added that Peter Hessler from The New Yorker also writes interesting pieces about China.
I’d like to add that Brendan’s and Richard’s blog are also worth reading. They both have a sharp pen and use it to publicize their refreshing thoughts.
Photo credits: CN Reviews
Written on November 11, 2008 – 7:48 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I’m touring around China with bloggers. I hope to give you as many updates as possible about this land of endless opportunities. Thanks to Spil Games for sponsoring me.
In March I wrote a post about the fact that Facebook means “doomed to die” in Chinese. I also mentioned some other East Asian misunderstandings. While I’m touring China, I see tons of other cultural differences that make the interaction between China and the west even more interesting. To give you an idea, I’ll highlight some examples the coming days.
Blogger and writer Shel Israel experienced one of those cultural differences first hand. He now has two sets of business cards - of which one is for Chinese people, as his normal business cards have lead to some misunderstandings while meeting web professionals here in China.
The card I got says “Writer. Speaker. Nice Guy” as his title and has the following Hugh MacLeod cartoon on the back:
But that’s not the one Israel hands out to Chinese business relations, he told me. “They don’t have the same kind of humor”, Israel says. “I had to explain what lifestyle I referred to and then they still didn’t get why anyone would put that on his card.” Joking around with your job title also didn’t have the planned effect. Some people actually thought that being a nice guy was an actual role in the American corporate world.
So take this lesson from Israel. If you have an original business card, think about the effect it can have on people from a different culture. Same goes for your personal branding online, of course.
Written on November 11, 2008 – 2:51 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I’m touring around China with bloggers. I hope to give you as many updates as possible about this land of endless opportunities. Thanks to Spil Games for sponsoring me.
After breaking with their “do no evil” principle, Google is running smoothly in China. But this wasn’t always the case. Here’s an interesting blast from the past.
There’s a story about Google which functions as a fun icebreaker when discussing censorship in China. It certainly caused some laughs here and there during lunch yesterday. Back in 2002, the Chinese government blocked Google in a rather original way. Instead of using, say - just a black page, the government linked to a search engine that did have their blessing.
That’s right, if you typed in google.com six years ago, you’d be redirected to Baidu. This is China’s largest search engine, better known as “the Google of China”. A few years ago, you could take this literally. Baidu indexed 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files. The domain baidu.com attracted at least 5.5 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com study.
When we, the China 2.0 group, later visited a presentation of upcoming social network Kaixin001 - it turned out that the founders were proud of the high Google usage under their users. Why? Well, it proves their users have a good education, as Google is mainly used by students for English searches. When searching for info in Chinese, Baidu is the better option, author Andrew Lih told us.
He also mentioned that Baidu has a huge marketing machine rolling. When going to a James Bond movie, you can’t miss the message saying Baidu made this movie possible.
Written on November 10, 2008 – 6:00 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I’m touring around China with bloggers. I hope to give you as many updates as possible about this land of endless opportunities. Thanks to Spil Games for sponsoring me.
The two killer features in the early times of the web were portals and email. Here in China, the first one is still very popular (While in the western world this is absolutely not the case). The latter however, never really quite made it in China.
As you can imagine, I was rather surprised when Andrew Lih - author of the upcoming book The Wikipedia Revolution - told me this. During a magnificent lunch in the Yunnan restaurant he gave us, bloggers from the west, a brief introduction on China and the web.
Influential portals
The largest sites in China are still portals. Lih mentioned that most Chinese Internet users hardly use the address bar while surfing. Instead, they click their way through the web. Not surprisingly, the main portals are huge. Sina for example, is so influential that even government officials put @sina email addresses on their business cards. Other big names are Sohu, 163, and 51.
As you’ll see, a lot of Chinese web services have a number as their name. When you speak out these numbers in Chinese, they sound like certain phrases. 51 sounds like “I want”. Put a word like jobs behind it and the numbers suddenly make sense.
Forget email, Chinese use IM
So what about email? Why isn’t that popular? A survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences showed that only 30 percent of the Chinese Internet users check their email on a daily basis. They would rather use IM. Particularly because their private conversations aren’t saved - or at least they have that impression.
China’s most popular IM service QQ counts a stunning amount of 341900000 active users. That’s actually more than the total number of Chinese Internet users (253 million), which means a lot of people have multiple identities.
Written on September 8, 2008 – 1:07 pm
Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
The Estonians who brought world wide fame to the Internet telephone Skype are working on a new and interesting software solution enabling free video calls via television.
The project, currently named InkSpin1, hatching in the Ambient Sound Investments (ASI) investment group’s incubator, incorporates the development of the user interface utilized in the Skype Internet phone for LCD televisions. This development would enable video calls to be conducted not on small cell phone screens or even computer screens but on gigantic TV screens.
Just turn on the tube
InkSpin1 leader Martin Villig says the objective of the described solution is to make video calls as simple and convenient as possible and thus introduce an even larger user base.
Today, free Skype video calls are available to computer users, all you need in addition is a web cam. “Today, we have a solution for computer users. Yet, for an average home user, video calling is too difficult and thus they are not taking advantage of the opportunity. Our goal here is to make such calls equally easy for kids as well as parents. So that if people know how to turn on the TV and change channels, they would know how to make video calls,” Villig explains.
According to Villig, the company already has the first TV-video phone (or VTV solution) prototypes up and running and they are doing so efficiently. At the moment, additional services are being developed and they are making contact with television manufacturers, with a view to integrating the software device into television sets. Those unwilling to change their TV sets can, in the future, purchase a digibox-like supplementary device.
Backed by Chinese developers
Product development for the Skype founders’ new technological gadget is carried out in Estonia, its software development, however, takes place in Beijing, China. Villig lists two reasons behind this. First, through China, it is easier to cooperate with Asian television producers, contacts with some of whom have already been established. Second, it is more difficult in Estonia than in China to find suitable software developers in required numbers. The Chinese unit of InkSpin1 is managed by Jussi Nyfelt, a Finn who has been promoting Nokia in China for years.
But first, some research
So as to find out what the relevant user expectations are and whether or not users would be willing to pay a bit more for video-cal enabled TV sets, InkSpin1 will conduct preliminary studies in a number of countries; monetary support for this will be applied for with Enterprise Estonia. The TV-video phone could be on the market in a year or two, notes Villig. In addition to everything else, the solution is still awaiting a catchy name.
ASI, which has invested in tens of technology companies is owned by Skype founders Toivo Annus, Jaan Tallinn, Ahti Heinla and Priit Kasesalu. When eBay purchased Skype in 2005 for 2,6 billion USD, the Estonians received a significant amount in their bank accounts.
This is a guest post by Toivo Tänavsuu, editor and founder of TigerPrises.com
Written on August 25, 2008 – 3:35 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
YouTube has become one of Holland’s top 3 most visited sites, a study by Dutch research agency Multiscope shows. Two thirds of Dutch Internet users check the video site on at least a monthly basis, partly due to the network effect of the service (You know the deal, bored people sending each other videos during work). Apart from these impressive numbers, one part in the study report particularly struck me: the extraordinarily high average visit time, which is 8 minutes. Is online video becoming a substitute for TV?
Chinese TV threatened by online videos
In China, this already is the case. The country is the home of the world’s most exciting online video market. The government isn’t afraid to pull the censorship card every once in a while, there’s tough competition, as much rumors as videos, and millions, millions of funding and views. When I interviewed Marc van der Chijs, founder of Tudou - largest video site of the world with 35 billion minutes viewing time in January -, he told me the average visitors stays on Tudou for 47 minutes. “For young Chinese people”, he said, “it is a substitute for television”.
Will Europe follow?
So while the first signs of a similar trend are appearing in the Netherlands, the questions arises whether we Europeans will face a similar scenario in the near future. Comscore recently released data from their online video measurement service, indicating that 23.2 million French Internet users viewed 2.1 billion videos online in January 2008. That number of 23.2 million viewers makes up for 79.5 percent of the total French Internet audience. So almost 80 percent of French Internet users watched on average 90 videos in one month.
There’s of course one major difference though — European television tends not to suffer from censorship threats, thus it’s not as biased as in China. No frightened kids who run to the “unbiased” and fun environment of online videos. Though when I think about it, the quality of Dutch TV isn’t particularly high either. Will we abandon the couch en masse to watch four-minute clips?
[Via: Bright (Dutch)]
Written on August 5, 2008 – 6:47 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Eight members of the European Parliament are pretty fed up with Internet censors like the Chinese government and some obscure dictators. In a proposal for a new European guideline - EU Global Online Freedom Act, representatives from Sweden, Holland, the UK, Portugal, Denmark, Finland, Austria, and Germany ask for a black list of countries that can’t stop themselves from censoring web content.
They believe every citizen has the right to publish information and opinions. Whenever their government violates this human right, the EU should punish these countries with export sanctions. Moreover, European tech companies won’t be allowed to supply software and hardware to support censorship practices.
The eight politicians also believe in a pro-active approach. Therefor, they asked for a yearly budget of €20 million to develop software that visualizes and promotes digital human rights.
I’m glad these European representatives make an effort to battle Internet censors. Especially since China, world’s next super power, keeps pumping money in their censorship efforts. China is even paying commenters to say the ‘right’ thing. Many diplomats expect China to start exporting their advanced firewall.
On the other hand, will the EU be brave enough to punish China for censoring online content? In the end, I’m afraid, the economic benefits will rule out the ethical ones. No country can’t afford to ignore, let alone punish, China.
Written on July 30, 2008 – 10:48 am
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
Contrary to earlier promises to foreign journalists, China will offer limited access to the Internet during the Beijing Olympic Games.
Chinese authorities block information on the Internet that the Communist party views as improper, unhealthy or as a threat to its rule — essentially, all Internet information goes through
gateways in Beijing. The blocking is sometimes referred to as the “Great Firewall of China“.
Last year China introduced new regulations relaxing general media curbs for foreign journalists in the run-up to the Games. “For the first time, foreign media will be able to report freely and publish their work freely in China, There will be no censorship on the Internet” said a spokesman to AFP.
A spokesman for the Olympics replied that there will be sufficient access to the Internet for reporters. However, “sufficient” is not what was promised by China’s communist authorities in the run up to the Olympics. Blocked websites include Amnesty International, Religious websites, Tibet government-in-exile, dissidents and websites that give information about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. These sites would remain blocked for thousands of foreign reporters covering the Olympics. Amnesty describes China as one of the world’s “enemies of the Internet”.
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
