Zorpia, it turns out, is a startup founded and run by Jeffrey Ng and based in Hong Kong. Launched all the way back in the early days of MySpace, Zorpia began as a social network that would facilitate unlimited photo sharing. Over time, Ng says, it has evolved into a service that’s more focused on helping people make new friends (he likens it to a digital bar or a town hall). It has also built up a very substantial base of registered users, growing from just 1.5 million users in 2005 to around 28 million users today, although just one million are monthly active users. Most of those users are in Asia, Ng tells me, and the service is especially popular in India, with over ten million registered users.

When I asked about user acquisition, Ng told me the site used a variety of techniques, mostly based around people inviting their friends. I explained about the emails I had gotten from my friend and my wife and asked Ng to explain why I was getting messages from people suggesting they had left me private messages on Zorpia when they clearly hadn’t. He told me he’d look into it, and but was never able to satisfactorily explain how that had happened.

To get to the bottom of things, it was clear that I needed to sign up for a Zorpia account myself. And so I did. As with all test accounts that I create for work, though, I used none of my real information, opened the account via a browser I don’t normally use, and registered using a unique email address created specifically for that test account.

Things looked bad pretty much immediately. On the account activation page, I noticed that three hyperlinks users might expect would lead to help pages or a “resend email” prompt actually redirect users to sketchy free-survey sites that seem an awful lot like scams.

(Ng confirmed that the links are there intentionally as advertising, but said that Zorpia has no control over what the links lead to as it varies based on the user’s geographical location UPDATE: Ng says that he was referring to the site’s banner ads, and that there should not be text-linked ads on the authentication page. “We simply do not understand how those links could appear on the screenshot you provided unless there was tampering,” he says. However, as evidenced by the screenshot above, they did appear when I activated my account.)

Once I logged in to my new account, I found another surprise: Zorpia was worried about my password security. A banner across the top of the screen blared that my password was “more than six months old.” Given that the password is one I’d never used before and had created only moments before, I was not expecting this. (Ng told me the message appeared to be a bug; however, as of this writing it has not been fixed UPDATE: Ng says the bug is now fixed.). But I ignored it because as you can see in the screenshots below, I had two new messages.

When I opened my messages, one of them was the boilerplate welcome greeting you’d expect from the Zorpia team. The other was an absolute shock. There sitting in my inbox just a minute after I first opened this account, was a message from my real life friend “Mike”:

That’s when I started getting goosebumps. That’s also when I double-checked with “Mike” to be sure he hadn’t somehow sent me a message — he hadn’t — but frankly, even if he had wanted to, it should have been impossible. I didn’t use my real name, my real email, my usual browser, or any real information about myself when setting up either the Zorpia account or the email account it is attached it. I also hadn’t told “Mike” I was planning to set up a test account of my own, and we live thousands of miles apart. It would have been nearly impossible for him to find my account even if he had wanted to in a sea of more than 28 million registered accounts. And of course, when that message was sent, he wasn’t using Zorpia anyway. He says he has never used Zorpia.

Zorpia CEO Jeffrey Ng told me that this was “very odd,” and that he’d have his tech team look into it. While I waited, I was thinking about Occam’s razor. How likely was it that some convoluted bug could randomly link two people who actually know each other from among the site’s nearly 30 million members? How likely was it that “Mike” could have found my account in the first place even if it was really him sending the message? The simplest explanation seemed to be that somehow (possibly through my IP address, which I foolishly forgot to obscure), Zorpia had linked my test account to my real identity, and then confirmed that I knew “Mike” through the access it apparently has to his email contacts list.

When Ng got back to me, he confirmed that that was indeed what had happened. Although I was using a separate browser to do everything related to Zorpia, I did load the “confirm account” page with my default browser once by accident because it is what opened when I clicked the account activation link. Previously, I had used the same browser only to unsubscribe from Zorpia emails — I have no Zorpia account — but nevertheless Zorpia apparently used the cookies from that interaction to connect my real identity (and thus my friendship with “Mike”) to my new test account.

Ng told me that when a friend joins, the system automatically sends them a private message from their friends already on Zorpia welcoming them. So, even though my new email couldn’t possibly have been listed in “Mike’s” contacts, his account automatically sent me a private message without his knowledge simply because I happened to once use a browser that once previously had been associated with unsubscribing from the spam emails Zorpia was sending me on his behalf.

After he explained this, even Ng admitted that this was a bit beyond the pale:

We do realize this comes off as creepy and poses a potential security threat to the user. Therefore we have disabled Zorpia from using cookie to store friend relationships already.

But he still wasn’t able to explain how Mike’s contacts — and my wife’s — got into Zorpia in the first place. Both deny having intentionally provided them to the service, and while Ng stops short of calling either of them a liar, he doesn’t seem to be able to explain how it could have happened otherwise:

From your friends’ experience, it seems like they simply do not recall they have added any friends on Zorpia. We will review our process and address this issue.

UPDATE: Ng says: “Zorpia is not a spam social network that auto-enrolls accounts,” and maintains that my wife and friend proactively invited their friends to join the service, pointing to server logs that apparently reflect this. Both my wife and “Mike” continue to deny having intentionally invited anyone.

My friends are not the only ones having a similar experience though. Although PandoDaily covered the startup last year and didn’t mention the problems it seems to have with emailing people who aren’t signed up for it, there are complaints about this dating back to 2009 at least. Each of the words in the previous sentence links to a different person complaining about being auto-enrolled in Zorpia or having their contacts list spammed by the service, and I found all of these quite easily and quickly via Google (where there are plenty more to be found if you want to go hunting). It seems like an awful lot of people have the same apparent amnesia Ng is suggesting my friends have when it comes to handing their contact list over to Zorpia.

UPDATE: Zorpia responds: “With 28 million registered users on Zorpia, we do not think a few hundred complaints online is statistically significant to merit an overall conclusion that Zorpia is a spam social network which auto-enroll accounts. Even if we assume there were 500 complaints, that represents a complaint to user ratio of only 0.0018%.”

Ultimately, though, the only way to be sure was to do another, more complicated test. After deleting all the cookies in both my browsers, I connected to my VPN (to obscure my IP) and opened up two new gmail and Facebook accounts, called ‘Zorpia Test1′ and ‘Zorpia Test2′. I made sure that the two were friends, and had a history of emailing back and forth. Then, I signed Zorpia Test1 up for a Zorpia account. I authenticated this account using both the Zorpia Test1 Facebook and Zorpia Test1 gmail accounts, but I never invited any friends (Ng had told me that all non-user friends needed to be invited manually by the user). I loaded the Zorpia “Add Friends” section once to be sure that the social network saw my connection with the ‘Zorpia Test2′ account, but I unchecked the name and backed out of the “add friends” dialog. I did not invite the Zorpia Test2 account as a friend or sign it up for a Zorpia account. Then, I waited.

And sure enough, within a couple days, the Zorpia Test2 account was getting messages from Zorpia. In fact, the Zorpia Test2 account somehow acquired its own Zorpia account! In the email below, you can see the welcome message I received about an account I never signed up for, using a username that defied the naming conventions I had set up for this test.

UPDATE: Zorpia says its server logs prove that I did accidentally sign up Zorpia Test2 for an account, and since I didn’t record video of my testing process, I cannot prove that I didn’t.

For me, the question of whether Zorpia is a real social network has been more or less put to bed. For a ten-year-old social network, there are simply way too many “bugs” here, and almost all of these “bugs” seem to result in non-users getting messages aimed at tricking them into joining the network. If years of online complaints haven’t changed the company’s ways, it’s unlikely this article will be any different.

So, unfortunately, I’ve got to say this: if you’re getting messages from Zorpia, your best bet is to click “mark as spam” and move on with your life. Zorpia, from what I can tell, is less a social network and more a mirage, an illusion designed to cajole and trick you into visiting so it can earn a few cents more from its ubiquitous advertisements. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. This is social networking hell.

As time goes on, it becomes clear that this whole internet thing isn’t just a passing fad. Yet somehow, as popular as social networking has become around the world, no one has really managed to solve the problem of what happens to a person’s web presence when they die. Facebook deletes or memorializes the accounts of dead users (meaning that you can still post on their wall, but the account can’t be updated or even logged in to) but that doesn’t please everyone and there are a lot of questions about what should be done, especially when relatives want to update a dead person’s page as a tribute.

The India-based startup Creative Nature’s DepartedLife project hopes to solve this problem with what it calls “the world’s first social networking site for departed souls.” This isn’t actually true; there are a number of other sites like this including one created by Monster.com’s founder. But DepartedLife is definitely the first Asian social network for the dead that we have come across.

It’s not difficult to understand the impetus behind creating such a site, and founder Rahul Suri told us that the site was inspired by the death of his mother:

Gradually, grief gave way to a need for preserving my memory of her for my children – it was like I wanted to build an online monument to her. That was when I felt the need for a site like DepartedLife. I wanted my kids to know what their grandmother looked like and what I felt about her. And I’m sure many people feel the same way.

It’s a noble goal and there’s an increasing demand for it, as our social networking profiles say a great deal about who we are, and that’s all information our family and friends may be interested in after we’re gone.

Unfortunately, in its present beta iteration, DepartedLife doesn’t do much to separate itself from the pack. The site’s design is certainly functional but there’s nothing special about it, and you still have to create the profiles of loved-ones manually rather than directly importing information from a Facebook account (for example). That’s the kind of feature that would really set the site apart from the pack, but sadly, it’s not there yet.

The site does allow users themselves to log in via Facebook, but I’m not sure I would recommend it, as the app asks for permission to do almost everything, including log in as any Pages accounts you might have connected to your own. Obviously, you can opt-out of this, but why would it ask for that kind of permission in the first place? It could just be a bug, of course, but I’d be a bit wary of the Facebook login until it’s fixed.

So in the end, we’re featuring DepartedLife here not so much for what it is as for what it could be. A site that could pull information from Facebook and other social networking sites to automate the memorialization process but then still allow family members and friends to post updates could be very popular. When most startups are thinking about the targets for their services, they’re thinking mostly about people who are alive, but there is definitely space in Asia for services that allow users to memorialize their loved ones. Whether DepartedLife becomes one of those will depend on whether the startup is willing to rethink a lot about the way the site works now.

(Note: normally we’d include a screenshot of the site in a review like this, but it seemed a bit disrespectful to uses photos of the dead in a startup review, so we’ve just pulled an image from DepartedLife’s Facebook page instead).

The Jing.fm player can be made wider, but here it is with the settings open. Click to enlarge.

Jing.fm was one of the coolest new startups to emerge in China in 2012, a music-streaming service sort of like Grooveshark. But I was so happy using rival Chinese site Xiami – a broader and more established social music site – that I never got round to trying Jing.fm. But now that this startup finally has an iPhone app, launched last month, it might get more traction after a fairly slow start. So it’s time to jump aboard; 2013 should be the year that this comes of age.

The Jing.fm site is very cool and minimalist, but to the point that new users will find themselves making a number of button presses with blind luck. My first encounter with the site was not too pleasing either; after registering, I opted to “add some favorite artists” but was then faced with an utterly random assortment of musicians and groups. Yes, that is Justin Bieber right next to Johann Sebastian Bach:

Then I had to click “more” dozens of times until – not being a fan of most pop music – eventually finding some artists that I both knew and liked. Perhaps some people will like this manner of visual browsing, but I found it a pretty frustrating for the entire 10+ minutes that it took to give the service a flavor of the kind of music I’m into.

Thankfully, as soon as I’d made a bunch of selections, music started playing and then Jing.fm became a joy in its great-looking interface (pictured top). The best part is the little rectangle at the bottom of the web app where you can mix up a cocktail of your favorite artists, which then start playing in random order. You have the option to jump to the next, trash the song from ever appearing for you again, or ‘heart’ it to make that track more likely to spring up for you:

On the whole, there’s a pretty wide selection of music both in Chinese and English – with a fair amount of Korean and Japanese pop songs in there as well – and the Jing.fm web app did such a good job of making a magical playlist from my chosen artists that I thought I was listening to one of my favorite iTunes playlists.

This startup’s founder is musician Shi Kaiwen, and it’s not his first online venture, having previously started up (the now defunct) social music site Koocu. It has not yet brought in any major funding, which I imagine will be seriously needed to grapple with issues like copyright and bandwidth as it tries to grow.

Jing.fm’s iPhone app is not yet in the iTunes Store; but if you’re jailbroken, you can download it here. The startup has made this short demo video of the app in action:

The Hubblr dashboard now support's China's Renren (pictured) as well as Sina Weibo.

Last winter we looked at Hubblr, a dashboard for global social marketing that includes support for China’s Sina Weibo as well as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Back then it was in private beta. But now the startup’s founder, Michael Lam, informs us that it’s launching officially this week with lots of refinements and also brings support for brands to engage consumers on Renren, the Facebook-esque social network. Now that it’s fully open, Michael says that the Australian startup’s “target market is brands or organizations who engage with their customers in both Western and Chinese social networks.”

The main web app at Hubblr.com is where all the posting and analytics (pictured below) action happens, and the slick service is reminiscent of HootSuite – except that Hubblr includes China’s two hottest social media that have the kind of moneyed, blue collar workers that brands chase after. The startup has given us some stats from its beta testing period: over 200 organizations signed-up to make use of it; those beta users were managing over 2,200 social profiles with an average of 11 social profiles per organization that participated; and, users came from 15 countries, including China itself, Hong Kong, the U.S., Canada, Vietnam, and beyond.

The Hubblr team has also made some technical changes, such as fine-tuning its pricing system, which has three tiered packages that offer access to a greater number of profile pages. Also, Michael says:

We added representation in Hong Kong [and] migrated our solution across to Amazon Web Services to make it scalable.

Whether you’re a fellow startup that needs to reach out to Chinese consumers on Weibo or Renren, or a major brand with multiple campaigns to run, check out the Hubblr tour, and share your social marketing thoughts in the comments below.

One element of the social media analytics in Hubblr (Click to enlarge); Below is the new Renren login.

Layak Singh, one of the site’s founders, bills it as a unique blend of social network and dating site, but I set up a profile and to be completely honest, didn’t see anything earth-shatteringly unique about it. It does require a legal ID or some other proof of ID to fully register to prevent fake profiles, which is a nice touch. The UI is functional but could definitely be prettier, and there are still a few bugs in the system, but all in all the service is more or less what you’d expect — you set up a profile by filling out a lot of details about yourself and your desired match, and then you can interact with potential dates in a number of ways like sending messages and sharing videos. Mr. Singh told me that the site will feature even more advanced interactions when the next version launches this July.

At present, Singh says, the site has more than 10,000 users — nearly all of them real people thanks to the ID requirement — and boasts a 60/40 male-female ratio. That sounds good, but I must say in my own exploration of the site, it sure looked like the male-female ratio might be a lot lower than that; girls looked to be pretty scarce. But perhaps I was just looking in the wrong places.

DateIITians is also working on mobile apps — “Android, iPhone, [and] iPad apps” — as well as the next version of the site, and an international version targeted at non-Indians at cogxio.com. That last one is probably a good idea, as the current profile system is definitely targeted squarely at Indian users. For example, setting up my profile, I came across the question: Are you a virgin? It’s a pretty simple question, but I was confused by the choices, which went well beyond yes and no, and included options like “Amateur” and “Second-Level.” Virginity in India is apparently a bit more complicated than it is here!

I do have one strong criticism of the site: you can’t delete your account. It can be deactivated, Singh told me, but I couldn’t even figure out how to do that. Regardless, for a dating site, the ability to delete an account seems especially important, and users should have the right to remove their information not only from the public eye but also from DateIITians own servers if they so choose. I hope that’s one feature the team changes before the final version is launched.

Anyway, with 10,000+ users, a new version coming soon, and mobile apps and an international version also in the works, DateIITians is one startup to watch, even if its name is a bit unpronounceable. If you want to learn more, you can visit the site or its Wikipedia page (but fair warning on the latter: it reads a bit like it was written by the founders themselves).

A fresh snapshot of Asia’s social media landscape reveals which service dominates in each country – and it’s especially good news for Facebook, which has added more than 20 million users across Asia in the past six months.

The infographic and its stats were put together by the Singapore-based branding and PR agency WeAreSocial. It points out that Facebook now has more than 192 million users across the 24 main Asian wired nations.

The only countries that prefer a different social network are China (where Tencent’s (HKG:0700) QZone dominates), Vietnam (Zing), South Korea (CyWorld), and Japan (Twitter). In the latter country, Japanese social network Mixi has been struggling and is now getting swamped by both Facebook and Twitter.

In China, Tencent’s Qzone looks monstrously huge, but its user numbers have dropped by five million since we last checked on the Asian social media scene last year. That squeeze will have been caused by increasingly popular microblogs (weibo), such as those from Sina and Tencent itself.

Here’s the current view across the region, with the newest site-reported stats that are available for each country (click to enlarge):

Check out which social networks are the most popular in each nation in Asia (May 2012) - Click to enlarge.

[Source: WeAreSocial blog]

Here’s a very handy cheat-sheet – created by CIC, the Chinese social business analysts – showing you the leading Chinese web services in each category alongside their western counterparts.

The CIC ‘social media landscape’ for 2012 infographic has all bases covered, from local dating networks like Jiayuan (NASDAQ:DATE), social review sites like Dianping, and the most popular aggregator reading apps such as Zaker. Those are the popular equivalents to Match, Yelp, and Flipboard respectively.

Of course, the Chinese web is not a total parallel universe – there are still some much-loved foreign social media services here such as MSN, Skype, and, er… well, that’s it really.

For CIC’s future reference, it’d be good to add in some other popular categories next time, such as hugely popular photo-sharing apps (eg: Tuding as a local usurper of Instagram) or up-and-coming social video apps as well. But those are missing for now. Perhaps a task for Ogilvy, which does a very similar – not sure who conceived of this first! – ‘digital influence’ circle every year. (Here’s Ogilvy’s for 2011).

Without further ado, here’s CIC’s new creation embedded as a PDF (or Chinese readers can click the source link below) so that you can zoom in and explore it full-size:

[Source: CIC blog - article in Chinese]

The location-based flirting app Momo, which we reviewed last December, has hit an impressive milestone – its user numbers have shot past the two million mark.

Momo allows people to chat – or hook up – with people nearby using its Android or iOS app, and it also allows you to filter by gender. From its launch in August, it zoomed to 500,000 users by December, and its current figure is 2.1 million. At this kind of rate it’s picking up about 18,000 new users per day and actually accelerating. That’s a pretty awesome uptake for a small startup.

To celebrate the achievement, the founder of the startup behind the app, Tang Yan, revealed that about 1.4 million of those people are on iPhones, while the remaining 600,000 or so are on Android [1]. That’s an interesting little stat that contradicts the general trend of Android out-selling and out-browsing iOS in China. Plus, the Momo app apparently has a number of celebrity users, and has even brought about a number of marriages between couples who have met via its app. Which is sweet. Though if too many of its users were to marry each other, surely member numbers would go down!

A user's profile and enlarged photo in the Momo app.

The social app has a lot of competition in this sector, both from fellow startups doing very similar apps – such as Mix – and from some major Chinese web companies who are creeping slowly into this kind of service. For example, China’s biggest group messaging app, Tencent Weixin, added a feature a while ago to find nearby people, which sort of cannibalized Momo’s main function. But Momo and the other startups do it better and in a more focused way.

Find the apps on the Momo homepage.

[Source: 36kr - article in Chinese]

Amid the glut of Pinterest clones in China, there are some interesting such social pinboard sites that are highly specialist – such as MeiShiXing.

As its Chinese name implies, it focuses totally on food, allowing users to photograph, describe, check-in to restaurants and cafés, and share their culinary experiences. Curiously, the startup behind MeiShiXing launched it with apps for iOS and Android (pictured below) a few months ago, but the website that you see above launched only this past weekend. The new website gives a nice overview of the now considerable collection of entries, but most of the action at the users’ end is still going on in the mobile apps. The web app seems more like a good way to browse things, with the ubiquitous option to share items of interest to Weibo, Renren, etc. Rather than a ‘like’ button, there’s a more apt ‘I wanna eat’ icon to hit.

MeiShiXing.com is a blend, then, of social pinboard, SNS, and location-based service (LBS), thereby making it something of a competitor to check-in service, Jiepang. It’s equipped for six major Chinese cities at the moment, so its rollout is certainly nowhere near nationwide – but the LBS element will inevitably require more care and data to be applied so that venues are already listed.

At the moment, there’s no clear way for the site to monetize, but restaurant and other merchant tie-ups seem like the best way forward. In contrast, fashion-oriented Pinterest clones, such as Renren’s (NYSE:RENN), can bring in cash more immediately by driving traffic to e-commerce sites such as Alibaba’s Taobao.

Currently, MeiShiXing is invite-only, indicating that it’s not wanting to rush the opening-up process. If you have an invite code, new users can sign in with either their Sina or Tencent Weibo accounts.

[Source: Tech2IPO - article in Chinese]

One of China’s leading music-streaming and subscription music sites, Xiami, has this week launched a Turntable.fm clone to let its users be DJs. Called Xiami Loop, it’s centred around virtual rooms where up to five people can take it in turns to mix tracks, impress the gathered audience of avatars, and win new fans.

With the emphasis on being social, the rooms resemble nightclubs (pictured above) where those gathered to listen can chat and rate the music mix (as ‘strong’ or ‘weak’), dance with your baby [1], or follow along with the lyrics for a bit of private karaoke.

On a sidenote, a smaller music service named Duomi made this move first, last October launching its Duomi DJ site.

Announcing the launch of Loop on the Xiami company blog, a staffer wrote, “Welcome to the era of social DJs […] You can look forward to more themes, more avatars, and more fun to come.” The service is free, and is tagged onto the original Xiami music-streaming site, which closely resembles Last.fm.

Xiaomi itself is free so long as users only ever stream music (pictured above), but downloads require payment via its own virtual currency. According to TechRice, Xiami has grown to have five million registered users since its inception a little over four years ago. Its main rivals include the hobby-based indie social network Douban, Tencent’s (HKG:0700) QQ Music, and Baidu’s (NASDAQ:BIDU) Ting.

But, in contrast to Tencent’s and Baidu’s efforts, not all of Xiami’s music is licensed, leaving it at great legal risk. It currently relies on users uploading entire albums and then, insists its CEO, it’ll get round to trying to license much of its music in due course. But that’s far from complete.

By happy coincidence, I just signed up for Xiami a few weeks ago, and so I’ve played around with Xiami Loop just now and had a chance to browse a few rooms and see what the social DJs are playing. With all the music coming from Xiami’s large – and admirably eclectic – collection, there certainly are plenty of tunes to spin on the decks.

Give Xiami Loop a go, though it requires free registration, with the option of third-party login via Renren or Sina Weibo.

With grim inevitability, we see that the Chinese social media behemoth Tencent (HKG:0700) has today launched a Pinterest clone called Dutu. Like all such social pinboard sites, it’s all about sharing and collecting interesting images.

The site, at dutu.qq.com (pictured above), comes fully integrated with Tencent Weibo, its popular microblogging service, as well as a user’s wider QQ account. This makes Dutu into, potentially, the world’s biggest Pinterest-like site from day one. If someone is already signed-in to the Tencent Weibo web app, then Dutu allows users to share anyone’s publicly pinned photos with just one click.

It’ll be interesting to see if the company’s main microblog rival, Sina (NASDAQ:SINA), feels the need to copy this as well. Sure, Sina Weibo already has image storage and photo libraries way beyond what Twitter offers, but the Sina Qing light-blog concept was a bit of a flop, so perhaps a Pinterest-like offering of its own would gain more traction.

Tencent’s clone comes just a month after similar imitations by other major Chinese web companies, such as Renren’s Plaza, and Qihoo’s awkwardly-named I Like.

[UPDATE one hour after publishing: The CEO of one of China's largest startup Pinterest clones which is called Mogujie (lit: Mushroom Street), says that his site has 6 million registered users. Also, it's interesting to note how simple Tencent's Dutu is, compared to Mogujie or Renren's Plaza, as those latter two are mostly focused on sharing images of clothes and linking to e-commerce sites so as to drive traffic to a user's own online store].

Sing it with me: Ah, ah, ah, ahh, stayin' alive, stayin' alive...

The Chinese social network Kaixin has announced its 2011 results – and despite a rough year that saw folks move towards using Weibo rather than its Facebook-like site, it was mostly good news. Guo Wei, the company’s VP, told the media that Kaixin saw its revenue rise 41 percent last year, rising to 380 million yuan (US$60.3 million).

The site, also known as Kaixin001, puts great emphasis on social gaming, and hosts – as well as produces – a number of popular casual gaming titles. Mr. Guo revealed that the site will continue to roll out new games in 2012, as well as focus more on mobile in general, and social e-commerce in particular.

Perhaps more pertinently, Kaixin also revealed its user stats: 130 million registered users and 60 million monthly active users. That contrasts with the 250 million registered on Sina Weibo, or the 300 million signed-up to Tencent’s own microblogging service. Renren.com (NYSE:RENN) remains China’s most popular broad social network.

[UPDATE Feb 17th - After reaching out to Kaixin, we're told by the company that the '60 million' figure was "in reference to a 2011 ballpark revenue figure" that is the "top-line unaudited" (in USD) number being bandied about internally, and was not meant to be applied to user numbers. It was, we're told, used mistakenly by Mr. Guo. We're also informed that Price Waterhouse will do a routine audit of the company soon. We'll update in a new post if we get some official stat for active users].

China’s social media behemoth, Tencent (HKG:0700), actually owns a significant but non-controlling stake in Kaixin, which happened last November.

[Source: TechWeb - article in Chinese]

‘To do’ lists can be a quite a chore for some people, and are not the kind of things that we share. But the Indian startup Votodo wants to change that and make not so much a social network as an “action network.” The Votodo site, currently in private beta, allows people to create, share, and follow lists, encouraging users to comment on them or adopt some of the inspirational ideas.

Votodo’s founder is Nirav Shah, a Columbia University graduate who quit his Wall Street job to become an entrepreneur. He explains to PO that his startup’s service aims to be forward-looking:

If status updates, check-ins, or tweets tell you what’s happening, ‘to dos’ on Votodo can tell you what’s going to happen: What people want to do, and how they’ll do it.

Anyone who creates a to do item on the site can then see it accrue comments from other people, who might also click the two other options: ‘want to’ or ‘done.’ Likewise, you can weigh-in on other people’s items, and browser popular to do ideas or search for people by location. In the picture below you can see a bunch of people reacting to the topical ‘buy gifts for your Valentine’ item:

On your own Votodo page, which resembles a simplified Twitter site, you can add things you wish to do, and optionally broadcast them on Facebook or Twitter:

Nirav informs us that Votodo was one of the eleven startups that recently graduated from the three-month long iAccelerator program at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, (along with MakeHappy, the charitably-minded e-commerce site). The startup’s core team of four, based mostly in Mumbai, is now working on apps for iOS and Android so as to take the idea mobile.

Those with an invite to the site can join via Facebook or Twitter login credentials which will plug you in to your friends, ready to share your to do lists. Apply for an invite on its homepage and Nirav promises it’ll be approved within a couple of days. Or hit me up on Twitter (@sirsteven) and I can send some out.

Jeremy Lin's - @jlin7 - Weibo page.

American-Chinese basketball player Jeremy Lin has shot to stardom in the past few days after an astonishing run of performances for the New York Knicks. This has rocketed the 23-year old’s fan-base on Sina Weibo well past that of his number of Twitter followers, and Lin now has nearly 348,000 microblog fans in China. That dwarfs the 78,000 he has on Twitter.

I notice that his Weibo followers are currently going up at the rate of about 1,000 every 30 minutes. The Mail Man Group helpfully points out that Lin “multiplied his Weibo followers by 13 [times] in just 5 days.” That’s down, presumably, to his past few games, and especially the dramatic 99-92 Knicks victory over the Nets last week in which the young Lin scored 25 points. After that game he posted on his Weibo, in Chinese as well as English:

The 'J-Lin' blue tongue. (Image source: sportsgrid.com)

God is good during our ups and our downs! Glad we got the win tonight! Thanks to Landry for lettin me crash on his couch last night too lol.

That got him 3,400 comments. Using the same @jlin7 handle on both Weibo and Twitter, Lin seems to have captured the imagination of Chinese netizens, partly for his skills, and also because he’s the first American-born NBA player of Chinese or Taiwanese descent. As with some ethnic Chinese, he retains a Chinese name: Lin Shu-hao. His ascent is also very fortuitous timing for sports enthusiasts, filling the (large) void left by national hero Yao Ming who retired last year.

Jeremy Lin is also good news for Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) though not so much for its rival, Tencent (HKG:0700), whose own microblog platform is now devoid of the hottest NBA star. Tencent has been aggressive with signing-up sports stars in order to get more people onto its own Weibo site, and we’ve recently seen it work closely with Barcelona football club. But Tencent has missed out this time.

Lin joined Sina Weibo back in May of last year, but this month is when we’ll see the number of his Chinese followers go through the roof. It no doubt helps that he usually tweets on his Weibo in the local language.

With an iPhone app and browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox, Justaple is a Taiwanese startup that aims to surpass the likes of Delicious, Instapaper, and Read It Later as a very connected, social bookmarking service.

Justaple's pitch here at Startup Arena 2012. Click to enlarge.

Justaple rips and saves your entire saved page – with the addition of videos in a future update – so that your collection will be totally searchable. It also means that broken links will not be an issue. The main differentiator is that your catalog of saved pages can be collected in unison with friends, and made either public or private.

Co-founder George Chiu (pictured right) just pointed out, giving his pitch here at our Startup Asia event, that it’ll soon allow users to actively discuss their saved items in the future, making it all into a sort of Oprah’s book club – except for webpages.

The Justaple iPhone app, a free download, allows offline reading as well as syncing of your saved stuff across mobile and desktop.

In the pitch, Justaple’s George looks to a coming implementation of ads based on keywords so that there’s a freemium option for casual users, as well as a pro version with a touted price of US$10 per month to unlock a lot more cloud storage space.

Take a look at the Justaple homepage and grab the app and browser extensions.

Qihoo 360 (NYSE:QIHU), the Chinese anti-virus vendor, has made yet another move into social media with its launch today of a Pinterest clone called ‘I Like.’

Just like the original, the site is for sharing and ‘liking’ random images that people post, which tend to be ones related to fashion, gadgets, and showing off what individuals own.

It’s the second such Pinterest-like site from a major Chinese web company just this month, following hot on the heels of Renren’s (NYSE:RENN) new Plaza. But whereas Plaza users seem obsessed with linking to items that they’re selling on the Taobao e-commerce site, the peeps on ‘I Like’ seem to be more laid-back and with no set agenda.

I’ll admit I’m not at all a fan of such sites – especially as the sole premise for a new startup – since they’re just glorified and prettified BBSes/forums. A number of Chinese startups have already launched localized social pinboard sites, with Huaban.com emerging as the most prominent independent service. But for established web players, it seems to make a fun addition to a social platform.

Qihoo’s other big social push came last summer with the launch of its group messaging app, Kouxin.

The app uses your profile image on Facebook, breaks it down into many tiny parts, and re-organizes a new image of you made up of small pieces of your Facebook friends’ profile images, as pictured below. It takes around one to three minutes to complete the own mosaic, which can be placed on your Facebook timeline with tags of the friends whose pictures it consists of.

Prior to the mosaic picture app, the company also introduced a Facebook app called Friendly Cover in November, which aggregates profile images of your Facebook connections and creates a cover image that fits your Facebook timeline. Osamu Yazawa, a manager at Voyage’s new FB app section, unveiled the app and said that it is currently used by 40,000 people in 160 countries worldwide.

According to CNET Japan, Mr. Yazawa was majoring in social welfare at his university and had been interested in developing an app that helps people meet, inspired by the need to tackle Japan’s low-birth rate issue. In May, he released a Facebook app that helps you find your potential partner, which is called ‘Menurut Anda?‘ (meaning ‘what do you think?’ in Bahasa Indonesia), and now it has more than 130,000 users in Indonesia.

[Hat-tip to Yuhei Iwamoto for his awesome story on CNET Japan - article in Japanese]

Renren (NYSE:RENN), China’s biggest Facebook-like social network, has today launched a social pinboard and sharing website called Renren Plaza. As with the US service Pinterest, it allows users to post up items that they like – typically clothes, gadgets, and random cute things – and then discuss or ‘like’ them.

And so Renren Plaza consists mainly of theme-based image boards created by users, such as the ones shown below. There’s also a microblog/weibo element to the site, as it has a system of followers and direct messages that’s separate from one’s main Renren profile. This allows Plaza users to share images and thoughts without total access to more personal information that might be inside their regular accounts.

One user on Renren Plaza - most items link to her store on Taobao.com

Importantly, most items have a ‘go buy in the store’ link which leads to the item on an e-commerce site – usually the consumer-to-consumer Taobao.com, which is owned by Alibaba. This could help turn Renren Plaza into a nicely curated storefront for especially cute things that people are selling online. Or it could just lead to spammy sellers using it as free advertising. In contrast, Pinterest tends not to have online store links, and so is more focused just on sharing images.

In addition, there’s an ‘avenue’ section where you can browse trending boards or a certain category of images, such as Korean-style clothing, or home decorations.

This is the first major new development from Renren for quite some time. The site listed in the US last May where it went from a brief high of $20 per share down to its current $3.85. We’ve contacted Renren HQ to hear their aims with this new Plaza feature, and will update when we get a response.

Sina Weibo is the much-talked about Chinese microblogging platform which now has about 250 million users. But language barriers can make it tricky for many people around the world to get a window onto what’s happening on Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) service. And that’s why the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre (JMSC) has cooked-up a useful website that’ll allow anyone to do a visual search for what’s hot right now on Weibo, in pretty much any language.

The JMSC folks call it WeiboScope, and it features two kinds of search: a gallery of the most reposted tweets that have images in the past 24 hours (pictured below), or a more specific keyword search (pictured above) that makes use of Google Translate so that you don’t need to be able to search in Chinese.

Either a lot of people are talking about winter boots, or that's a lot of Weibo spam!

On JMSC’s Rice Cooker blog, Cedric Sam explains how this can help anyone – ie: non-users – peek into what Chinese netizens are chattering about right now on Weibo. Plus, it can help fellow academics get a better handle on issues that are being discussed than by using the native Weibo.com search feature. That’s because it eliminates Sina’s algorithms for a fresher perspective. Cedric explains:

Rather than let Sina Weibo dictate the way the data produced by users should be displayed, we borrow a bit from the open data movement and repackage posts in ways that may be a bit more useful to users. This is how a WeiboScope search by image came to be.

[It] demonstrates that when you are allowed to mash and mix, and remix data, it may lead to some discoveries and realizations that may not have been made possible otherwise.

Or, if you’re like me, you can use it to find funny GIFs (here’s one), and perhaps pick up a story idea about tech issues that are trending on Weibo.

Right now, the ‘most reposted images’ are very diverse, suggesting there’s no major news story that everyone is focusing on. But a few days ago, the JMSC team points out that the wall of images was dominated by Kim Jong-un, the successor to the North Korean leadership.

Give WeiboScope a try.

[Source: HKU’s JMSC Rice Cooker blog]

One of this year’s most prevalent trends among startups in China has been for sexy-looking location-based apps that help you chat – or hook-up – with people nearby. And here’s another, called Momo app, by a Beijing-based startup called Momo Tech.

Momo now has a brand-new app for Android, as well as its iPhone version which has been around since August. In that time, the startup claims to have garnered 500,000 users, and will be hoping the Android platform can strengthen that further.

The Momo app uses the tagline “Hello stranger” – which gives a good indication of what this is about: using your smartphone with its GPS to see who’s nearby and perhaps chat with them, for conversation, curiosity, or possibly even dating.

Making Friends…

A user's profile and enlarged photo in the Momo app.

Unfortunately, there’s no third-party login, so a separate registration needs to be made within the app. Once in, you just create a quick profile, and off you go. There seemed to be no shortage of people on in my area, most of whom had been online today. After this point, it’s a pretty conventional IM service, with buddies you can add and chat to, profiles to view (pictured above), or black-lists you can make if there any annoying folks.

Momo integrates well with Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo, so for users who’ve chosen to link the service, you can browse their full Weibo timeline from within the app. It does everything well, but it inevitably fails or succeeds on how it can retain users in the face of so many other apps like this.

These apps – which seem to be a phenomenon in China where youngsters can find it hard to connect with new people – could well be wiped out before they’ve even started, as social media giant Tencent (HKG:0700) has added a LBS-based chat feature into its popular group-messaging app, Weixin. And because that has 50 million users – and growing – such a niche app as Momo and its counterparts could well be swallowed up by this new feature, especially if other group-messaging apps make use of it as well.

To give you some idea of how many such LBS find-and-flirt chat apps there are out there, we’ve recently looked at Youjia, Mojing, and Mix.

Try out Momo for Android on the Android Market; the iOS version is on iTunes.

[Hat-tip: Toumingti (article in Chinese) for spotting this]

The former CTO of video-streaming sites Tudou (NASDAQ:TUDO) and Ku6 has reinvented himself as an entrepreneur, and now has his first app available for download. It’s a video-recording and sharing app for Android and iPhone called iSheHui.

After the huge success of Instagram and other Chinese-made photo-sharing apps – such as TuDing, which now has four million users – Zhao Liang (pictured below) is banking on video-sharing from mobiles being the next big thing.

The iSheHui app is, of course, socially engaged, allowing users to share videos to services such as Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo, Tencent (HKG:0700) Weibo, and Renren (NYSE:RENN). It claims to have very clever encoding so that video files are shrunk down to one-tenth of their actual size when uploaded whilst keeping pretty clear. That’ll be important in a country where only about 10 to 12 percent of people have 3G, and most of those are on rather limited monthly data plans.

Naturally, it has filters, so that videos can be made to look romantic or old-timey, futuristic or grungy, before uploading and sharing. And as with most lightweight social networks like this, you can follow fellow users, comment on their videos, and browse recent vids in a timeline.

Chinese tech site DoNews reports that Zhao Liang has received VC investment for iSheHui to the tune of at least 10 million RMB, though that hasn’t been made official.

Although not quite the same, Youku’s (NYSE:YOKU) recent smartphone app update also permits video uploads, showing the China’s mobile users are now ready to make and share videos on the move.

The iSheHui homepage has direct downloads of the iPhone app, because it hasn’t yet been listed in the app store, meaning that you’d need to be on a jailbroken device to install this right now. The Android app is on there as well.

Twitter’s slick new redesign has brought it – visually and practically – closer to China’s most dynamic microblogging platform, Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo. It shows, perhaps, that Sina’s rapid rate of change on its most popular service is now actually leading the way for Twitter. How the tables have turned!

More seriously, though, the two companies have a very different philosophy, so we won’t engage in the kind of “copycat” name-calling that we usually discourage. Whereas Twitter has been evolving very slowly, and espouses “simplicity,” Sina has been throwing major new features at its Weibo platform – such as social gaming accompanied by a virtual currency – in an aggressive land-grab approach that’s more typical on the Chinese web where it’s necessary to seize users before a rival does pretty much the same thing.

And so, inevitably, the fast-changing Sina Weibo service – which is up against Tencent’s (HKG:0700) microblogging site that has the same generic ‘weibo’ name – is already doing some things that can be seen in Twitter’s latest redesign this week. And that’s no bad thing. Here are five key areas where it has grown more like Weibo (all five images can be clicked to enlarge):

Customized Brand Pages

Twitter’s brand pages get the same nice redesign as all users get, and seem to have only one differentiation in terms of layout: the option to customize the long rectangle above the tweets (see the area showing the sea of sugary soda in the picture below). Weibo’s brand pages have a vastly different look to those of regular users, allowing them to embed a corporate video at the top, and lots of other tweaks. It’ll be interesting to see if Twitter relents and permits more customizations in future for its branded pages:

Embedded Videos, Photos, and GIFs

Twitter now has much better support for embedding images in the site, obviating the need for so much clicking away. Of course, a lot of third-party Twitter apps have been doing this for some time, which is why a lot of Twitter’s core users prefer desktop or web apps – such as Tweetdeck, or Echofon – to the Twitter.com page.

Weibo, meanwhile, has had these baked-in videos and images er… baked-in since its roll-out last year:

Photo Albums

…And all those photos and GIFs will now be added into a ‘recent images’ folder on Twitter, just as Sina Weibo has been doing since a redesign earlier this summer. But Sina’s folders are more powerful, allowing you to add multiple folders, or view only your friend’s images in a highly visual stream:

Separate Page for Mentions

Twitter’s new ‘@connect’ tab finally gives all your important mentions the separate space they deserve, just like Weibo’s area for all your comments – yes, it has blog-style comment too – mentions, and retweets:

More Info in Side Panels

Finally, Twitter’s side pane now shows more information, such as suggestions as to who to follow, and some of the hottest trends. Of course, Facebook has been doing this for even longer, as part of the way it draws you in to the service:

Having said all that, I really like the redesign, and I like how it follows Twitter’s ethos whilst also adding some much-needed features.

The twitter redesign should be automatically showing-up for many people, but if not I believe you can force it to do so by downloading the updated mobile apps whilst signed-in to Twitter’s new preview page.

Two screenshots from Kaixin001's new photo-sharing app, 'TuTeng'.

Oh, great… another photo-sharing app with lots of filters. We haven’t reviewed one of those for, like, 24 hours. Yes, Kaixin001, China’s second-largest Facebook-like social network, now has its own app for snapping and sharing grungy photos of the cappuccino you’re about to drink. Called TuTeng, it’s out now for Android, with an iPhone version already in the works.

Kaixin’s TuTeng arrives very late to the funky party that was first started by Instagram (which is now weighing up a move into China). But unlike most of the other photo-sharing apps that we’ve looked at recently – such as TuDing, and Vida – TuTeng is locked-down to Kaixin, with no third-party login options. But thankfully it does support sharing of images to some other social media, such as Weibo.

In terms of appearance and philosophy, TuTeng is less like Instagram and more like Google’s soon-to-be-shuttered PhotoVine, with a gentle creamy-beige UI graced by leaf-green accents. The photo-filters are impressive and stylish, including some textures not usually seen on local photo apps; and they’re complemented by a very localized set of cartoony characters that you can add onto a photo and resize by pinching-in or out with your fingers.

Less impressive is the selection of photos seen in the ‘popular’ column when you first open the app (pictured above), which seems to suggest that not many users are posting original photos that they’ve snapped. It’s a grouch that I voiced recently with the Baidu-acquired PhotoSola – I don’t want to see random images that people are recycling from off of the web; if I want to see images of models hugging trees or an egg with a funny face drawn on it, then I’ll walk down to my dentist’s reception area and flick through some crappy magazines.

Grab Kaixin’s TuTeng app for Android from the homepage.

[Hat-tip to Sohu Tech news (article in Chinese) for spotting this]

The inevitable rush to build an Instagram-like photo-sharing app that’s localized for China has resulted in a nice, wide variety of apps and services. But there seems to be one winner so far, with a claimed four million users – and that’s TuDing.

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s a rare overseas success story, being made by GeoSentric (HEL:GEO1V), a Finnish company with a long track-record in location-based technology. It’s TuDing app – it means ‘thumbtack’ in Chinese – is one of the most well-developed, social, and cross-platform of all the local photo-sharing services, supporting sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, Kaixin, Renren, and more; it has apps for iPhone, Android, Symbian, and BlackBerry. In terms of third-party logins, it allows usage via six local social media platforms.

The TuDing app for iPhone.

GeoSentric has made it an international product, too, which it markets worldwide under the TudingMe name.

A few other tidbits about TuDing: of its four million users, about 20 percent use the service in some way once a week, and they have now amassed over 6 million photos which are uploaded at the rate of five per minute. Those numbers were revealed to the local tech news site 36kr, but it’s not clear if all those users are based in China. But that doesn’t matter too much, as other Chinese social photo apps such as PhotoSola – which was acquired by Baidu last month – have been gaining users in other countries too.

The Finnish company clearly nows how to do business in China, having formed a joint-venture with Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) in June of this year to form Gypsii Shanghai (GSSH), which operates all of Sina’s location-based services such as its Weilingdi, a check-in service loosely tied to its Weibo platform

Give TuDing a try, starting by getting one of its mobile apps from its homepage.

[Source: 36kr - article in Chinese]

[UPDATE, 12/02: I've been emailed by the folks at Gogobot.com who point out that Weyup is a pretty shameless, pixel-by-pixel rip-off of its own site, which is over a year old. Though we support clever localization of a service, a blatant clone is pretty mean and exploitative. We saw the same issue in October, with the local startup Pengyou totally stealing Path's website.]

With interest – and financial potential – now booming in the travel and leisure industries in mainland China, it’s inevitable that some startups are rising to the challenge of making a business out of networking day-trippers and holiday-makers. Weyup is one such attempt – a vertical social media site that sort of combines Quora and Tripadvisor whilst keeping it fun and useful.

Weyup – which allows third-party sign-up with seven platforms, from MSN (NASDAQ:MSFT) to Renren (NYSE:RENN) – lets people connect with like-minded travelers, ask and answer questions, plan out a trip, and perhaps even connect with a fellow user whilst on your journey. The startup’s site concentrates on listing accommodation, sights, hotels, food, and shops. There’s no accompanying mobile app as of yet.

There’s a lot of depth to the site, and the user-generated content covers most of the globe. Surprisingly, there’s no e-commerce element to it, and no clear monetization strategy. Overall, it’s a very nice community, and it’s also good to see a startup that actually has some content and a profound usefulness, in contrast to all-show-and-no-go ventures that have fancy apps that leave me scratching my head and thinking what’s the point in this?

Baidu Travel (left) vs Weyup (right) in terms of social-minded traveling sites.

The only trouble is that the big boys are doing this already. Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), the country’s biggest search engine, already has a nice-looking travel portal (pictured above on the left) that has a lot of the social and Q&A functions that Weyup has. (In fairness, I think Baidu did it first). Plus, Baidu has invested over US$300 million in the online travel agency Qunar, so it’s damn serious about the travel sector, and probably about its socially-minded travel portal as well.

Baidu’s travel section already seems to be winning, if you compare it with Weyup on the sight-page for the historic and picturesque village of Lijiang, in Yunnan province. On Baidu’s site, 1,437 users have been on a trip to the village, while on Weyup just 607 of its peeps have been there.

Give Weyup a go, starting on its homepage.

Malaysia, Indonesia and Korea represent a huge growth area in Asia and we’re tremendously excited to help millions of local professionals establish their professional identity and network. The addition of three new languages is the latest step in our strategy of making LinkedIn a more relevant experience for our growing professional member base around the world. We believe there is a lot we can learn from our local members that will also benefit our global member base.

LinkedIn has also provided us with the user breakdown in the respective countries:

• More than 800,000 professionals in Indonesia
• Nearly 300,000 professionals in Korea
• Nearly 700,000 professionals in Malaysia

LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) already has more than 135 million users worldwide, 20 million of whom are in Asia. After opening its Singapore and Japan offices, LinkedIn continues to push hard to be a truly globalized company by today introducing three more local languages in Asia — Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malaysia, and Korean.

With the additional of these three new localizations, it makes LinkedIn available in 14 different languages. In fact, Arvind Rajan, MD and VP for Asia Pacific and Japan, actually blogged about the news on the official LinkedIn blog yesterday. He commented:

The launch of the local languages will better support the growing number of professionals joining LinkedIn. Local language availability often precipitates a whole new generation of LinkedIn members locally, enhancing the experience for the entire community. The member base in Asia Pacific is growing and we believe LinkedIn has a massive opportunity for growth here.

For sure, Asia has massive opportunities for any company who cares to localize. And I’m particularly pressing hard to find out when LinkedIn is going to introduce Chinese on its platform. But of course, LinkedIn hasn’t revealed anything whenever I’ve asked the team that question before.

Meanwhile, its competitor in China, Tianji, recently told us that its professional network is growing very quickly, picking up 100,000 new users each month in the middle kingdom alone. Assuming that LinkedIn’s growth isn’t as strong as Tianji’s, that news must have given LinkedIn some pressure to structure a proper growth plan in China. So it is safe to assume that LinkedIn – one of the very few foreign social network sites to not be blocked there – is studying China very closely. But when it will execute its plan is still a mystery.

Anyway, rejoice for Korea, Malaysia, and Indonesia – have fun with the new localized LinkedIn site. That also makes me wonder if Singapore will have a localized LinkedIn built on Singlish. Unfortunately, I don’t think so!

New stats reveal the astonishing and meteoric rise of Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo service from a simple, Twitter-like microblogging platform, to being a Facebook-rivaling online gaming powerhouse. Since Sina Weibo launched its gaming portal in July of this year – along with a virtual currency called the weibi – it now claims to have nearly 10 percent of its total amount of users (now up to 250 million) as active social gamers.

So, in the four months since the inception of Weibo games, here are some eye-watering figures from Sina:

• Weibo Games active users: 22 million

• Greatest Weibo game user adoption: 1 million new users in 7 days

• Highest game revenue in one single day: 500,000 RMB (US$78,800)

• Highest single game revenue so far: 4 million RMB ($630,200)

The most profitable game mentioned there is actually Texas Hold ‘Em Poker, which we reviewed before accompanied by the Sartre quote that “hell is other people.” Its maker is the Shenzhen-based Boyaa Interactive, which also has titles on DeNA (TYO:2432), Renren (NYSE:RENN), and Facebook. Its poker game on Sina Weibo is quite light on the sales-pitch compared to some other online titles, and monetizes itself mainly by users who use real money to buy Sina’s weibi to get a mountain of in-game money. (Read a trio of our Weibo game reviews here).

Remember that Sina is currently taking zero percent of a revenue cut – in contrast to Facebook’s 20 percent slice, or Apple’s and Google’s 30 percent on their respective platform’s mobile apps – but that’s most likely just a promotional stunt which will be reviewed on June 6, 2012. Sina has been spending big on Weibo this year, and it needs to start making some money from it.

And that’s a glimpse deep into Sina’s newly-discovered goldmine with which it can perhaps beat Tencent’s (HKG:0700) own microblogging service – which has the same generic ‘Weibo’ name – and then challenge China’s decade-long social gaming king: Tencent’s QQ and QZone killer combo.

[Source: TechWeb - article in Chinese]

The social gaming publisher and distributor SNSplus – aka SNS+ – has wrapped up a round of funding worth US$12.2 million that was led by WI Harper Group and Matrix Partners. SNS+ makes games – many of which are on Facebook – mostly for Asian markets; it’s based in Taiwan and also has two offices in mainland China and one in Thailand.

Along Chang, the CEO of SNS+, said the injection of funds would be used to “increase the influence” of the company going forward. SNS+ already has 60 social gaming titles on Facebook, and 15 other games distributed on platforms such as Friendster, or as freemium apps on iPhone. The multi-lingual titles are focused on Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, Korea, and Indonesia, and comprise some hits such as Happy Manor, Ant Empire, and Wonder Garden (pictured below). As is clear to see, many games are Zynga-style, cutesy online games.

WI Harper, meanwhile, is a Chinese venture capital firm, and it ploughed in a full $4 million in this round. Its founder and chairman, Peter Liu, commented:

SNS+ title 'Wonder Garden' in Korean, on Facebook.

SNS+ has many advantages including in-depth market research, local platforms collaboration, local payment systems collaboration, localized operation strategies, and diverse marketing plans. SNS+ is not just a Taiwan and China play, but even more so a Southeast Asian play.

We are deploying capital in our Fund 7 portfolio along the gaming industry wisely by focusing on HTML5 based mobile and online developers, publishers, and game platforms.

SNS+ has already been in business for about ten years, so this funding is a boon to its shift to social gaming, and a vindication of how it can pay to be so well focused on the Asian market.

Yahoo Koprol, the first location-based social network in Indonesia, has announced that a major update to the Koprol app for BlackBerry has integrated it into Blackberry Messenger 6 (BBM6), the newest version of the hit group-messaging service.

With this integration there are interesting features that will be made available. There’s a real-time chatting feature with Koprol users through the BBM6 API, which is really exciting because with Koprol on your Blackberry, you just have to follow that user on Koprol and you don’t need to ask for their Blackberry PIN. It’s all available using the newest Koprol Blackberry app and BBM6.

A few more important features:

• You can change your avatar in Koprol to your BBM6 display picture.
• It’s easy to update your personal message or status in BBM6 right from Koprol.
• It’s now easier to invite your contacts in BBM6 to download Koprol.

Yahoo Koprol is also holding a competition whereby users can win Blackberrys such as the newly released Torch 9810, and Bold 9790 and Curve 9380. To participate, users can go to koprol.com/bbm. The contest started on November 21 and will end on January 15, 2012.

As a local success story, and the only LBS social network in the region that has amassed more than a million users, Koprol has been doing pretty well. It was one of the local apps that was featured in the recent RIM press conference in Jakarta. With a few competitors such as Bouncity and Yotomo, Koprol cannot be resting on its laurels. – hence this major app update for BlackBerry.

To get the updated Koprol app for BlackBerry you can direct your mobile browser to m.koprol.com.

CheWen.com is the Renren Inc. (NYSE:RENN) owned, car-oriented social network that’s a mix of Quora, microblogging, and automotive news. And it’s doing pretty well – the GM of CheWen, Xiu Yu, has told the media that the site has now revved up to four million users, a mere six months after its launch.

The social network for car fanatics is separate from Renren.com, but makes use of the latter’s third-party login. It doesn’t integrate with its rivals, Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) or Tencent (HKG:0700) Weibo, but it does allow sharing of pages with other social media. CheWen, though, is a clever spin-off from the parent company – one that looks ahead to keep hold of some of the wealthiest netizens who would be valuable to advertisers. But, at the moment, CheWen is refreshingly free from ads (or, rather, they’re minimal and unobtrusive). The website has been active in promoting itself, attending the biggest car shows in China this year.

CheWen has microblog elements, such as its allowing users to follow each other and automotive brands as well, and to retweet what others have said; it incorporates the ask-an-exert aspect of Quora too, with all that crowd-sourced knowledge and banter searchable; plus, it picks up some car news from around the web.

At the moment, Audi (ETR:NSU) is the top brand (pictured above) in terms of followers, with nearly half a million fans out of CheWen’s four million user-base. With that German automaker being the biggest-selling luxury car brand in China right now, that’s not too much of a surprise.

Renren has other sites as part of its empire. It also owns Nuomi, the group-buy site that’s doing well in Taiwan – although the last time we looked at it, Nuomi was actually losing money overall, along with pretty much every other daily deals site.

[Source: DoNews - article in Chinese]

Specialist social media can be super-useful in their specificity – and Tong Xing (‘Journey Together’ in Chinese) is a prime example of this. It’s a light-weight social network for people who want to make a plane, train, or taxi ride with another interesting individual in order to brighten-up their travels. If that isn’t niche, then I don’t know what is.

Tong Xin has an iPhone app already (though, disappointingly, no Android version) which allows users to search by flight or train numbers – or specific locations – in order to see who else is making that exact same trip on the same day. That gives users the option to make contact, and be assured that the other person is not a psycho. And, best of all, the two might have some mutual interests and thereby connect to make the journey together.

In addition to providing some company, the Tong Xin service integrates with other social media such as Sina Weibo to make your journey even easier to microblog. Plus, it provides some ancillary functions, such as reminders of flight delays and severe weather warnings, and ‘mayor’-like rewards that are familiar from LBS such as Foursquare and Jiepang.

The founder of Tong Xin is a university senior named Cheng Lu who’s at business school, and the Chinese start-up team’s average age in 23. Interviewed by a Netease (163.com) reporter, Cheng Lu said that he’s aiming for 100,000 users soon, and then his team will look more seriously at business models.

If you want to try out Tong Xin, here’s the iTunes App Store link, or just check out its homepage.

[Source: 163 Tech news - article in Chinese]

HTC (TPE:2498) has today unveiled a so-called ‘Renren phone’ – an Android-powered smartphone with baked-in widgets and features crafted especially for Renren.com (NYSE:RENN), China’s largest Facebook-like social network. The phone is dubbed the HTC Daren (pictured above). It’ll be priced at 2099RMB (US$330) unlocked, available only from official HTC or mobile telco outlets, and will launch a bit later this month.

It was unveiled by the Taiwanese handset maker at its HTC Week event which is taking place in Beijing (in the same place where we were at for TC Disrupt and the 2011 CMDC last week).

In actual fact, the HTC Daren is just the budget HTC Explorer handset with a slight tweak in its Sense UI that ditches Facebook and Twitter integration in HTC’s Friendfeed feature, and replaces it with Renren instead. So it’s nowhere near as special as it’s made out to be. The phone has fairly low-end features, such as a low-res (480px by 300) 3.2-inch screen, and a 3-megapixel camera. It’s totally out-run by the new dual-core Xiaomi phone, which is a few dollars cheaper.

Back in July of this year, HTC did a similar thing with its ‘Weibo phone’ called the HTC Weike. On that occasion, it was a disappointing reworking of an aging HTC Salsa handset. At least this new device for China is based on a brand-new model.

Boosting Android in China

At the HTC event (pictured above), CEO Zhou Yong-ming also outlined the company’s revamped China line-up of five new Android smartphones, which includes the Sensation XE coming to the mainland for the first time.

HTC Android phones are so popular in China that they’ve been given nicknames whereby each new one is a higher number suffixed to a ‘G’ – thus the fairly new HTC Sensation has become commonly known as the G14. The Taiwanese firm will be hoping to continue this success – which is taking away a good deal of sales from Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) – with this new line-up.

[Source, inc. images: HTC’s official Renren Page - in Chinese]

There are a lot of social media dashboards out there that try to bring together your social missives, but only one includes integration with China’s hippest social network – that’s Hubblr.

It’s a brand-new, enterprise-oriented web app from an Australian start-up that’s aimed at making PR and online marketing across the globe – including China – a safer and slicker experience.

Hubblr’s CEO and co-founder, Michael Lam (pictured right), gave me a guided tour over Skype, and then we coincidentally ran into each other again at TC Disrupt Beijing last week, giving me ample time to get a feel for the service.

Right now, Michael says, it’s in private beta and free – but it will launch soon and come ready with a number of packages for brands to do their global marketing and PR. Apart from multi-posting to Twitter, Facebook, Sina Weibo, and LinkedIn, it also features analytics, a profanity filter, one-click translation, embedded image viewing, scheduling, and some advanced gizmos for marketing professionals to follow-up on individual tweets. They’re also “working on Renren and Tencent Weibo” integration.

Hubblr is, he tells me, a spin-off from Cornerstone Tech, and is “now boot-strapping, looking for funding.”

Weibo Marketing to China

The main Hubblr dashboard, showing a mix of tweets from Twitter and Sina Weibo.

Asked what Hubblr offers, he says, “It’s aimed at global brands who operate in China. It gives them visibility. Plus, it’s real-time and instantaneous, and gives brands immediate feedback.” Michael adds:

It can prevent a PR disaster by blocking swearing, and you can add any words to monitor, such as your brand name – or even a misspelling of your brand name.

The stats and analytics begin from a user’s first day on Hubblr, and include monitoring of posting levels and follower counts.

The last time we looked at corporate use of social media across Asia, we found that microblogs – i.e. Twitter and Weibo – were now second only to broader social networks such as Facebook in terms of them being used for engaging with consumers. But, in China, a brand’s presence on Sina or Tencent Weibo is now arguably more essential than being on, say, Renren.

Simul-Posting Dashboard

Hubblr analytics allow you to visualize followers, engagement, activity, etc.

The Hubblr post box allows single or multi-posting to numerous social networks.

Aware that his start-up risks getting blocked in China, Michael has “implemented an IP filter” so that it cannot post to Twitter and Facebook for users in China. And so the emphasis is firmly on enterprise users overseas reaching out to Chinese consumers, and not for individuals looking to tweet behind the GFW (as HootSuite and Seesmic used to be able to do, before Net Nanny blocked them).

Personally, I don’t think it’s a good idea to multi-post the exact same thing to different social networks – especially not if there’s a language barrier between the two. But that’s not an issue on Hubblr, as it can be used as a launchpad for posts to any social network either separately or simultaneously, and you still get the benefits of the other features. That means an overseas company can easily manage its Sina Weibo account, despite the original site not having an English localisation.

If you’re with a company and would like to take Hubblr for a blast, click the link to reveal the Hubblr email address and fire them an email with “Penn-Olson invite” in the subject – you’ll be given priority access to the private beta.

TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing hackathon winners: (L-R) David Ruiz, Mathieu Dardenne, and Guillaume De Lazzer

Three Frenchmen caught the judges’ eyes at the TechCrunch hackacthon to scoop the prize, despite plenty of international competition and local talent. Their winning ‘hack’ was a web app that tuned into the API of Tianji, China’s biggest business-oriented social network, and was deemed a winning combo of good-looking, useful, and easy to potentially monetize.

I caught up with the trio – David Ruiz, Guillaume De Lazzer, and Mathieu Dardenne – on the sidelines of the TechCrunch conference. They admitted that the idea for the web app only came to them on 6pm on Saturday evening – perilously close to the 8am Sunday deadline.

That’s when their alma mater, Epitech in Paris, inspired them to work together all night long on a focused project. Just like they did back in college. The three friends, of varying ages, all went to Epitech at some point – and now they all find themselves in various tech companies in Beijing.

The hackathon-winning web app was very much built with one website in mind. David says:

We worked with the Tianji API and we thought: Who wants to pay to use it? Maybe people who need to hire!

The web app allows users to input specific keywords related to a job position they’re hoping to fill, and then, with Tianji’s API, that sends a custom form to the people who match the search keywords. Those individuals on the professional social network might then fill out the form. Mathieu points out:

So then you can see the grade of each candidate, and you didn’t waste any time searching. It could be a Tianji feature.

Guillame says it got a good reception from the judges – among whom were Tianji’s API director, Freferic Leroy – who told them it was “innovate, and useful.” The trio get a prize of 5,000 RMB and a chance to work with that company to develop it further.

Using social media in Asia: BMW's official Sina Weibo account.

Burson Marsteller (BM) has just released its Asia-Pacific Corporate Social Media Study for 2011, giving insights – and infographics – that cover how companies are using social media in the region.

This year’s study paints a picture of brands being ever more keen to engage with consumers via social media, yet still not doing some things very effectively – such as failing to use video on social video-sharing sites, and not maintaining corporate blogs where more complex issues can be covered.

Without further ado, here are the ten key points…

Number of social media channels with corporate activity - BM is heartened that 81 percent of top Asian companies have a branded social media presence this year, compared to 40 percent in 2010. It means that a great deal fewer are ignoring this useful form of communication:

Corporate use of social media channels by market; 2010 compared to 2011 - In these two we see that South Korean and Malaysian companies are the most aggressive users of social media for corporate communications and marketing. South Korea remains the most adept at all this – but it’s clear that its neighbors are catching up. Taiwan is still lagging behind.

In terms of particular channels, microblogs are popular for their reach and share-ability. But there’s an element of superficiality to it, as it obviates the need for more detailed dialogue:

Top social platforms used for corporate marketing and communications - That lack of deeper dialogue is shown by these platform stats. Microblogs – from Twitter to Weibo – are great for extending a brand’s reach, but there’s not too much more to it than that. Social networks such as Facebook or Renren give a bit more scope for this. But it seems to be coming at the expense of corporate blogs.

Video-sharing is strangely neglected in the region. Videos – especially informal ones that give insights – can be so useful, but Asian companies don’t seem to have figured out that magic:

Top global social platforms used for corporate marketing and communications - Engagement is up across the board here. BM notes:

Twitter is emerging as the predominant social media platform used by corporations, although corporate Facebook pages have more “likes” than Twitter accounts have “followers”

Levels of corporate activity on company social media channels - Here again we see the dearth of video-oriented output from brands, with so many seemingly inactive – or too infrequently updated. Across the region, 62 percent of social channels surveyed were inactive:

Integration of social media channels with company website - In many countries in Asia, brands are keeping their social media efforts very separate from their other online presences. But why not bring them closer? There could well be some reticence on the part of companies around here, say, to embed tweets in corporate home-pages. BM speculates it could be about the risk of ‘losing face.’

South Korea is here doing the best in bringing the two entities closer together, followed by Malaysia and Australia:

Use of company video-sharing channel - Getting back to the subject of visuals, we see here the average number of videos uploaded to the surveyed branded video channels, such as those on Youku (NYSE:YOKU) or YouTube:

Focus of corporate social media activity - Time for some more pie… So, what are all those corporate social tweets, wall posts, and fan pages about? The survey suggests that, to quote BM:

Asian companies are focused mostly on ‘pushing’ news to users, including journalists, bloggers and other opinion-formers.

Few Asian company CEOs or senior executives are actively using social media.

Well, we can think of quite a few who do in China, such as DangDang‘s (NYSE:DANG) Li Guo-qing, or Xiaomi’s Lei Jun. But perhaps those are not great examples, considering that they’ve caused quite a few firestorms with their Weibo posts in recent years:

Corporate use of social media channels by industry - Financial service providers in Asia are found to be most behind in using the web socially. And, surprisingly, technology companies across Asia are not doing the best job of reaching out to the many consumers who might be using SNS on that company’s own gadgets:

For the full story, head to Burston Marsteller’s SlideShare page for both the highly-detailed study overview, or the summary presentation.

A Chinese start-up is trying to ride a new wave in health and fitness in the country with its multi-platform exercise app called Codoon. As more younger Chinese folk move away from the traditional calisthenics or tai ji quan (tai qi) in the mornings, and instead take up jogging and other work-outs, Codoon is aiming to beat Nike (NYSE:NKE) and Adidas (ETR:ADS) – or indeed Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) or Tencent (HKG:0700) – to the punch.

The start-up is called LeDong, and is based in Chengdu, western China. It has made a whole suite out of Codoon, with free apps for iPhone, Android, Windows, and Mac. On smartphones there are actually two separate apps under the same service: one called Codoon Running, and the other being Codoon Body.

The Codoon Running app, with GPS for recording routes.

Of course, for more detailed analytics, a hardware sensor accessory is needed. And so Codoon users can snag either the company’s own ‘Scale’ (for 150RMB) or ‘Fitness Tracker’ for (199RMB) to get read-outs of, say, sleep patterns or body-mass index. All data generated during your runs – or walks, or tennis games, or whatever you’re up to – gets synced to the Codoon servers to be cataloged and viewable across the apps, or even on the web app. The company uses the B2C Tmall.com site to sell its hardware – obviating the need for more tricky physical distribution across the country.

For a social element, selected friends can view your activity and post comments – or you can challenge other folks to stretch your athletic range. In theory, you could even use it to find fellow health-freaks in your area with whom to play a match or jog a few blocks. As with a few other such services, your GPS-enabled smartphone will enable you to track cycling, walking, or running routes.

Major sportswear companies have such apps already, of course – such as the Adidas MiCoach, or Nike Running (aka Nike+) – but no major Chinese web company has yet sprinted in to this segment, perhaps because of the software-hardware combo being difficult to get right.

LeDong secured just over 10 million RMB for Codoon at the end of last year, and so far claims 50 million registered users, and 50,000 hardware units sold. Most of the service’s income comes from hardware sales, so its something they’ll need to push harder.

Sign-up at the Codoon homepage, and snag the free apps as well.

[Source: 36kr - article in Chinese]

There are so many location-based service (LBS) Chinese start-ups appearing of late, that even some of the ones that look fantastic don’t seem to serve much of a discernible purpose. A case in point is Fasae, made by a Chengdu-based start-up, which has a superb UI atop a mobile app which does… pretty much nothing.

The concept behind Fasae – which has an Android app out now, with an iPhone variant in the works – is that it uses geolocation to show you where others users are, and you can then choose to go see them face-to-face, or chat with them online. And that’s pretty much it. Once you’ve virtually, or actually, encountered someone, you can then add that person to your contacts – or “encounters” to use the app’s own term – for future reference and chatting. It seems to be all down to fate, chance, and whimsy. There are no check-ins to be made, as with Jiepang or Foursquare, although you can pin-point your location at any time, along with some thoughts in the form of text or a photo.

I played with the app the other day (pictured above), and didn’t encounter a soul who was also on the service in the vicinity. That’s the major downfall of group- and location-oriented apps like this – it either fails or thrives on the number and enthusiasm of its users. And, with no detailed info on its users, or any particular ‘hold’ on them, the whole service could die a death within weeks. I should point out that I’m sure I could find a handful of fellow users if I went downtown. Perhaps this app best suits a smartphone-toting urbanite singleton who needs a way to meet a girl and ask her out for a coffee.

Last week I looked at a similarly aimless LBS-oriented mobile app called KanGuo, and didn’t see too much utility in that either. In contrast, a cheeky little app called Mix recently caught my eye, as it does a much better job – better than Fasae does – of connecting you with people nearby. For example, when you use the Mix app, you’re greeted with lots of faces and a distance-marker to show how far away they are. But on Fasae, you open the app and see… probably nothing.

Check out the Fasae homepage for the Android app download.

Inside Facebook's Hyderabad office. (Image courtesy of Singla Ji Deepak).

A bit of data-delving by Western Union has revealed that British Facebook users have more friendship ties to India than anywhere else in the world.

The data was gathered using Western Union’s Your World Facebook app, which allows users to visualize where their buddies are in the world. Perhaps surprisingly, it reveals that the UK’s social media mavens have more ‘friended’ more people half the world away in India than in closer countries such as France or the US.

Of all the Facebook users in the UK who used the app, a full 11 percent of their overseas friends are Indian; American buddies are the next most numerous, making up eight percent. Here’s the infographic (which you can click to enlarge a bit, if you wish):

Watching TV is almost always an anti-social activity – but one Chinese start-up wants to change that, and is building a social network on discussions around popular TV shows. The TV-time SNS – with newly-made apps for iPhone and Android – aims to fuse China’s love of online discussion boards (BBS), with a fully-fledged mobile social network that encourages either fun or expert analysis of what’s on TV.

A TV series discussion in the TV-Time app for Android.

The TV-time mobile apps break things down into three searchable segments: what’s playing now on TV; ‘hottest’ TV series; and program listings. Using any one these, users can find the shows they like, and then read and/or engage with other viewers in the apps, in the form of comments or starting new discussions. As with BBS, which are so popular in China – especially in the form of Baidu’s (NASDAQ:BIDU) Tieba, or the indie MOP.com – TV-time encourages expert users to lead the way, and thereby make the service into a more insightful watching companion than general news or showbiz websites.

Annoyingly, TV-time demands a separate sign-up, with no third-party login – eg: via Weibo, or Kaixin – yet available.

Similar TV-oriented social media sites have taken off in the US, such as GetGlue.

The only trouble I can see with this TV-time is that – in its current, limited form – it’s easily replaceable. If Chinese TV stations were to get a bit more with it and think up hashtags for some popular TV shows – as is now common in the UK and the US – then viewers could engage with each other more easily on Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) or Tencent (HKG:700) Weibo instead.

Check out the TV-time website to sign-up and get mobile downloads.

[Source: ShowWeb2.0 - article in Chinese]

Alphatown is a social network and virtual community created in real-time by its users. It was developed by Douban – now China’s fifth largest SNS – and launched on September 1. It’s now in public beta, and represents an innovative attempt to go both beyond conventional social networks, and to monetize Douban with its own virtual currency.

When you login to Alphatown, the interface works like an online map, just like Google’s or Baidu’s. But Alphatown is not a real place. You can use the W-A-S-D or arrow keys to move through the city, exploring its shops and streets. You can rent a room, set-up or visit shops, take the subway, or just simply stroll along the street. It’s kinda like what we do in reality. But note that this isn’t Second Life, with amazing graphics and first-person viewpoints.

The aim of Alphatown, then, is not to replicate your life on the web. Essentially, it is a new kind of SNS, unlike Facebook, Renren, or Twitter – though it has parallels with some of the social games that users of Facebook, Renren, and Sina Weibo like to use. Let me be your guide to this curious city:

Every street (pictured top) works like a public chatroom. Conversations are viewed in the form of chat bubbles that appear, just like you “heard” it on the street. It may be hard to strike up a conversation with somebody in reality, but in Alphatown the experience is less awkward as you can see their thoughts and messages, and connect with users you are interested in (pictured above).

Shops (pictured above) in Alphatown don’t sell anything at this early stage, but in future shop-owners will be able to sell virtual items. Shopkeepers can put pictures and articles in the shop. It works a bit like a blog, but things become interesting when these shops are neatly lined up along the street. For example, there is a street called Diagon Alley where there are Harry Potter themed shops with names like Three Broomsticks, Flourish and Blotts, and the Leaky Cauldron. You can set up a shop by paying about 25 douyou, the Douban-created virtual currency in Alphatown.

Dormitories are on the opposite side of the street to the shops. You can rent an empty apartment in a street of your choice. Right now it’s free to do so until the virtual currency becomes properly exchangable. Apartments are like microblogs where you can tweet.

Yang Bo, founder of Douban, told DoNews recently that:

Alphatown is a very diverse, vibrant city, and there exists much possibility for developing business models in the future. The future direction of Alphatown, whether it’s a game or a virtual community, depends on the users.

Try out Alphatown here, though it requires a Douban login.

A screenshot from Renmo's darkly sexy promo vid.

“Are you a human or a devil? Let people know your other side.” That’s the suggestive tagline of a brand-new, somewhat twisted, Chinese social network called Renmo (which means human-devil in direct translation). It will launch on October 20. Renmo wants users to be deliberately two-faced, and possibly evil, by providing them with two different IDs and social zones at the same time. In this way, Renmo wants to overturn the traditional pattern of SNS such as Renren (NYSE:RENN) and Weibo, which enforce real-name IDs and non-disruptive conduct.

Although the web site is not online for another week, the start-up’s marketing campaign is in full swing, with adverts across cities luring users into ditching Renren so as to give voice to their darker side. There’s a darkly shot promo video (see below) named “the most beautiful devil ever” featuring a sexy model stripping off.

But despite all this hype, it’s not clear what the new social media site aims to be: is it just a hook-up site, a dating site, or a sort of anti-Renren in which you’re not obliged to upload photos of your food or chit-chat with co-workers. Also, how will it monetize if advertisers don’t even know what kind of demographics are on the site?

Renmo's outdoor ad campaign is in full swing.

This week, Renmo’s outdoor advertising kicked off, with mostly bus-stop box-light ads (pictured right) in major cities saying things like, “When Renmo’s on show, Renren trembles.” The “renren” name in this context is a pun referring to “everyone,” as well as China’s Facebook-esque SNS.

If this is supposed to be a flirtatious site for potential hook-ups, then it has been beaten to launch by a more cutting-edge, LBS-based mobile social network called Mix, which allows you to connect with people nearby.

We’ll check out Renmo in full once it launches next week. In the meantime, you could follow Renmo on Weibo, check out its promo page, or – I get the feeling you’ll prefer this – watch the darkly erotic video promo:

Tencent’s (HKG:0700) QQ is the most widely used IM service in China. However only Windows users can enjoy the complete QQ experience – though the Mac version finally got video support this summer. In 2009, Tencent released WebQQ, a web app for the IM service which was widely welcomed by Linux and Mac users (and Windows users who could sneakily use it in the browser at work!). Yesterday Tencent totally revamped WebQQ to become Q+, which is a full-featured web app with icons and a dock that looks more like a mini-OS.

Although the name makes us think of Google Plus, we should point out that Tencent thought of the name first, as this has been in testing since before G+ came along. Also, Q+ is quite different. Q+ integrates lots of Tencent’s services, such as QQ Mail, Tencent Weibo, and QZone (a kind of blog and photo album service). There are lots of third-party web apps in there too, such as Douban FM (see the radio icon, pictured above), and widgets for things like stocks, and weather. You can do all kinds of things simultaneously in this single page.

Q+ provides a cloud-based input method editor for typing Chinese, which means users can type Chinese characters on the web without installing an actual IME app. Files can be transmitted whether your buddy is online or offline. A nice handwriting pad is attached, on which you just click your mouse to scribble stuff. Video chat is supported, too – just click the camera icon to start it; but note that it requires Flash, which means it won’t work on your iPad.

Buddies can be dragged to the desktop directly for quick access in future. To emphasize how much this is like a desktop OS, Q+ even allows users to switch among five desktop spaces, sort of like the Mission Control feature in Mac OS Lion.

Several themes are available. Users can also upload pictures as Q+ wallpapers as well.

Thousands of web apps are available in the Q+ market now (pictured above). Apps are categorized, and range from office utilities to entertainment apps. Developers can utilize Tencent’s open APIs to make their own web apps for Q+.

Q+ works fine on different operating systems, which was the aim of Tencent with this revamped product. Q+ also has its own desktop app, which is the same as the web equivalent, but for Windows only. Overall, Q+ is no longer an afterthought and a mere IM web app – it has now become a mature service, to the point of being like a mini-OS. Give Q+ a try in your browser, and tell us what you think in the comments.

Kandian is a new social TV service from Sina, launched over the weekend. Essentially, it’s a multimedia viewing and sharing service linked closely to Sina’s own Weibo platform. Users can upload or live-stream – in a manner similar to the Americam site, Justin.tv – and then share and discuss the content with friends. In addition to user-generated content, there are some proper TV channels on the site that can be streamed for free. The site is still in private beta.

The UI design of Kandian.com is simple and clean. The navigation bar contains three tabs: Channels, Surrounding, and Live…

Channels (pictured above) is your personal channel, where users can set their favourite programs by subscribing to channels. What’s more, Kandian allows you to create your own albums which can be shared with friends.

Surrounding (pictured above) is a good choice when you can’t find interesting programs in the Channels section. This tab is sort of like your timeline/stream, which documents things like what friends watched, read or listened to. You can dip in to watch whatever you want from all that, or make a personal program list.

The Live page (pictured above) contains Sina’s live channel, and satellite TV channels from around China. The coolest part of Kandian is that users can make a new program by splicing and editing the programs you have watched already.

This is an impressive new product from Sina, which expands its Weibo platform even wider. In recent months, the company has added social gaming and a virtual currency and many other features. They come together to make Sina Weibo a fully-fledged social network, and not just a Twitter-like site.

[Image source: TechWeb]

The main Duomi DJ interface - exactly the same as Turntable.fm's. Click to enlarge.

Chinese music-streaming service Duomi has launched a clone of Turntable.fm, dubbed Duomi DJ. Currently in private beta mode, it’s a very social music service that incorporates sharable playlists, voting on songs that you rack up as a DJ, and chat-rooms.

But whereas Turntable.fm links to Facebook, Duomi DJ will hook up to Renren and Tencent/Sina Weibo (or both) – but all that doesn’t seem to have been implemented yet.

Although it’s good to see a fun service getting a localization that ties-in with Chinese social media, it’s a pity that Duomi just basically ripped off the entire Turntable.fm interface and design, without bothering to think up how to make it look distinctive. We saw a similar laziness recently with a Path clone called PengYou – although Path’s CEO, Dave Morin, was a good sport to say it was “hilarious and flattering” in the article’s comments. We’re not sure if the Turntable.fm crew will feel the same way.

Anyway, Duomi DJ shows that the Chinese music industry is now ready for lots of licensed and legit music services. The market leader in China is hobbies-oriented social network, Douban. But there’s also big-hitting competition from Baidu’s (NASDAQ:BIDU) new Ting music-streaming service – although that’s not so fully social. Last month we heard rumors that the American social music service Pandora (NYSE:P) might be looking to launch in China.

Here’s the Duomi DJ frontpage, but it’s not much use without an invite.

[News source: DoNews - article in Chinese; Screenshot from Sina Weibo user, @xigualing]

A Chinese start-up has this week launched China’s most flirtatious social network, called Mix. It’s a mobile- and LBS-based service that aims to connect – well, hook-up – people in the same area. The start-up’s own description of the service is that it’s like your favourite nightclub.

It’s very simple: you can sign-up for Mix by connecting it to either your Sina Weibo or Renren account, and then you’re good to go, with your other profile’s avatar and gender imported for use on Mix.

Thereafter, it’s just a case of using the app – iPhone only for the moment, with an Android version in the works – to browse people in your area. You can sort only by gender, and see how far away that other person is. Being outside of Shanghai at the moment, there was no-one within 30 kilometres of me, but the new SNS seems to have gotten a fair amount of traction in just its first week, with a good few dozen people online right now in a neighboring city.

Inside Mix, users can add extra photos. You can comment on these, and follow more users, all separate from your Weibo account. In many ways, Mix is a bit like the five sweet, Chinese photo-sharing apps we looked at recently – but without that added sexiness.

A similar Chinese service – though with a more straight-laced, work-oriented focus – is Zazzer, the LBS-based group messaging app.

The Mix website for some reason shows only English. Perhaps this is the start of taking it international in later versions, once alternative logins – i.e. Twitter or Facebook – have been implemented.

Check out the Mix website, or grab the flirty app over on the iTunes Store.

Photo-sharing apps and smartphones go together like the proverbial horse and carriage. So in China it’s no surprise that dozens of start-ups have gone the route of forming a light community based on a neat photo app.

Before dismissing them as Instagram clones, remember the limitations of Instagram: it’s for iPhone only; has no browsable photos on the desktop, meaning its website is functionally useless; and it supports only four American social networks. Plus, Instagram moves so slowly that it might take years before it deigns to support other mobile platforms or social media. So, rather than just twiddling their thumbs, a whole host of Chinese start-ups have made photo-sharing apps and light communities that are arguably better and richer than Instagram. As we like to say on PO: screw the idea – it’s the execution that really matters.

So, here are five of the best Chinese-made photo-apps, almost all of which support at least two mobile OSes and numerous local social networking sites, as well as some global ones too…

Vida

For: iPhone, (Android under development)
Connects to: Sina Weibo, Douban

Vida is the newest and perhaps the most gorgeous of the group, setting a new standard for design and attention to detail among Chinese-made – or, indeed, worldwide – photo-sharing apps. Not much is known about the start-up behind it other than that it’s run out of Shanghai. A unique aspect to Vida is that the app itself can be themed, so that its glaring pink colour-scheme is easily changed.

In terms of actual features, it pushes ahead of most other photo apps with built-in group sharing of images that you and your friends have snapped, in the manner of the much-hyped (but failed) Color app. Plus Vida’s calendar-like timeline gives you a fresher and more contextualized way to browse people’s photos. Right now, it comes with ten filters, which is a fairly good start for a v1.0 app, and the Android version is en route.

PhotoSola

For: Android, iPhone
Connects to: Tencent, Sina, Renren, kaixin, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Myspace, Wretch

PhotoSola – or YouTu as it’s called in Chinese – is an Innovation Works incubated start-up, which means it’s getting some of the best mentoring in Asia. It’s also pushing for some global – or at least Asia-wide – user-ship, with a fully English localization and the ability to connect to SNS such as Facebook and Twitter.

The photo app itself has grown a lot recently, adding popular features such as easy-to-make collages and animated GIFs, the likes of which are now all over Weibo. Like any light community, it limits itself to some simple ‘like’ and friending options. At the moment, PhotoSola has 15 filters, but they’re only slight colour variations, with no particularly amazing effects.

TuDing

For: Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, and Symbian
Connects to: Facebook, Twitter, Renren, Kaixin, and the Weibo services of Sina, Tencent, Sohu, and Netease

TuDing is the only one of today’s group of apps with overseas roots, as it is made by GeoSentric (HEL:GEO1V), a Finnish company with a long track-record in location-based technology. They’re better known as the makers of GyPSii, the LBS-oriented mobile social network. The company is claiming three million users for the TuDing app.

The app features a calendar that encourages users to upload at least a photo a day, and a pushpin motif that pushes the idea of also geotagging your photos more so than in other apps. At present it has 20 filters, and a good range of other effects and collage styles. Adding all things together, TuDing feels like the most developed – though not the most gorgeous and visually appealing – of the five we’re testing.

LomoKR

For: iPhone only
Connects to: Kaixin, and the Weibo services of Sina, Tencent, and Sohu

LomoKR is made by a start-up called MobSharp, who seem to be not very discoverable. Regrettably, this app is the only one of the five to not have an Android version either released or in the works. Another annoying thing is that you need to register a separate username before then hooking the account up to your preferred social media. All the other apps here let you do a direct third-party login, which is personally what I like to do.

Despite all that, LomoKR has a pretty hip and lively crowd of users, who seem to be mostly smartphone-toting youngsters aged from about 15 to 25. It has only 15 filters so far, but they include some unique effects that seem to be popular.

Lemeleme

For: Android, iPhone
Connects to: Tencent Weibo, Sina Weibo, Kaixin, Renren

Lemeleme is quite a new entrant in this segment, though little can be divined of the start-up team behind it. People who want to see their photos/account on the website are out of luck, however, as this service is the only one here without that feature.

For the moment, I’d say that Lemeleme has the most distinctive and funky set of filters and effects, with the most flexibility in matching different frames with certain styles. Plus, it’s the only one of today’s selection that does HDR photos. This company is the only one of the bunch to also have a paid app – Leme Camera Pro – for sale in the iTunes App Store. In total, there are 16 filters in the free version so far.

…A case in point is the new Chinese social media app PengYou which is a clone of the social media dashboard-cum-diary Path.

So it’s absolutely fine – and most welcome – that PengYou has made a localized kind of social media diary app that plugs into Sina Weibo, Douban, et al. In fact, I want to sign-up and try it out. But it crosses the line when it also so shamelessly copies Path’s entire website too. Compare upeng.me and path.com (pictured side-by-side in the above image) and see the exact same design elements at the exact same heights, with a distinctive (and cool-looking) blurry photo of a girl offset by a close up of the app on an iPhone 4.

That’s taking it too far, and makes you wonder whether the start-up knows how to run itself, or just how to hit Ctrl-C and then Ctrl-V.

On a similar note, fellow blogger Willis said earlier this summer that “it’s the execution that really matters,” and not the idea. And while I agree with that, and love to see a localized idea beat-out some wrong-headed opposition – hello Taobao, goodbye eBay! – there’s an extent beyond which the localization is conceptually closer to ripping-off. And that’s a line PengYou crossed with its website.

Anyway, no hard feelings. I’m trying out the PengYou service, and love the slick app, which looks even better than Path’s. It borrows some design cues, but it’s mostly distinctive. Could well be worth a review…

The idea of the site is to promote healthy living, which — unlike another generic social network — is something that China actually needs. Plus, it’s got a cool name. Huofar (活法儿) means “Ways of Living” in Chinese, but if you pretend the “far” part is English, then it means “Living far” (i.e., living a long time), which is kind of cool too.

Also, it’s not really clear yet just how social this social networking site is actually going to be when it’s launched. The site is still in beta and closed without an invitation, and the team is currently focused mostly on spin-off apps like their upcoming iOS app.

1. How did you come up with the idea for Huofar?

As I get older, I gradually see more of life, death, and illness and the suffering that comes along with them. Everyone suffers. An illustration of this is how in China most people have large savings [rather than using credit or investing]. This is because people don’t have a sense of security, and people don’t have a sense of security because they fear for their health or that they won’t be provided for when they get old. We want to use a little power to change that. We personally don’t have a lot of power but the internet is a massive force. If we can use it properly, we have a chance to influence and change people’s lifestyles, and improve their health.

2. Can you tell us about the development and history of Huofar?

Our site has gone through four major overhauls. It started in 2009 as a site based on health management and Western nutritional science, but we discovered this required users to input too much every day, and not enough users were willing to do it. So we changed to a focus on lifestyles based on Chinese traditional nutritional beliefs. In February 2010 we launched a 60-question Chinese medicine survey (in accordance with national standards) for entering users, and through word-of-mouth began doing business. In half a year, we got over four million test results. Near the end of 2010, we started to get into Taobao, and now over eight million people have installed our Taobao application. We’ve been constantly adding awesome new people to the team. Recently we dug up a Wall Street investment deal modeling expert to design the algorithms for our personalization services. We started with three people on the team and have now grown to 15.

3. Can you describe the user experience?

Huofar’s service is entirely based in personalized design. We have used nutritional science and traditional Chinese nutrition data and edited it into a database. Our system can automatically provide personalized health recommendations, taking into account differences between people, times, and locations.

4. China has a lot of social networking sites; why should investors or users care about Huofar?

Our website hasn’t yet opened publicly, because we’re not ready to explode yet. If you’re not prepared to explode [in popularity] then it’s better not to open up.

Huofar is a new taste, and there’s no precedent for it anywhere in the world. For our model, there’s no “American dad” that we can just clone, so the path leading up to now has definitely had some twists and turns. As far as users go, the age of personalization is already here. Huofar provides a completely new health life experience, and what each person sees on the site is our personalized and comprehensive service.

5. How has business been so far? Can you talk about your business model?

Up to now, it’s all been the team investing, but we have started to come into contact with some investors. Our business model is simple: personalized recommendations. Everyone’s needs our different, and our system was designed from the outset to fulfill individuals’ needs and help each person find the “Way of Living” that’s best for them, to make them healthier and happier.

6. What’s next for Huofar?

We’ve got an iPhone app coming very soon, that will help users make healthy life choices. Keep a lookout for it!

Indeed! When the iPhone app comes out we’ll grab a copy and review it here.

A new annual report from the L2ThinkTank has been released today, giving insights into which big-name luxury brands are best engaging with Chinese consumers in 2011. The researchers dub it a “China IQ” – a measure of a company’s effectiveness on the web and social media among China’s growing middle-classes.

The report’s authors stress that “success in the world’s fastest-growing prestige market is inextricably linked to digital competence.” They’ve identified a list of top 100 companies in this regard, but we’ll boil it down to 20 top web and social media engagers.

Before we identify those brands, how big is the luxury market in China?

Looking at the above graph, we see a realistic, “addressable” market amongst the world’s populace who have an income of over US$30,000. China, pictured in red, is the only region that’ll experience exponential forecasted growth from now to 2025. Europe still has potential, as eastern European areas develop and its own middle classes emerge. The US, however, looks stagnant. These figures point to how crucial it is for a brand – especially in the luxury sector – to follow the new money to China and other parts of Asia.

Top 20 “China IQ” List For 2011

And the winner is… Audi. The German carmaker has already been a hit in terms of sales in China, and now they’re getting better at digital engagement as well. The report praises the way that Audi “maintains presence on six different social media sites in addition to its own OurAudi.com.” The lead image shows Audi’s official Sina Weibo page. Now if only Audi drivers can raise their own IQ and stop driving like asses…

Second is Burberry, the British fashion label that we’ve seen working with check-in service Jiepang, and launching a new brand channel on Youku.

BMW is in third place, and rounds out the three companies that are labelled as “genius”-level in terms of digital engagement in China.

The Swedish – oh, wait, I mean Chinese – automaker Volvo had a good social media year with a Sina Weibo-based campaign in which Weibo users could design the plot of its next TV ad.

Going Up, Going Down…

Some brands had a good year, upgrading their status from “feeble” – such as the cosmetics company Benefit which made better use of Youku, Weibo, and Kaixin to promote its products. Likewise, Dolce and Gabbana raised their game this year, with a wider social media presence and even a new app for Nokia phones available in the Ovi app store.

A lot of brands seemingly forgot to update their social sites in China this year, such as Scoth whisky maker Chivas Regal. The report’s authors lament that its Douban page has barely been touched since 2010.

Getting Your Brand on Baidu, Not Google

A lot of brands seem to be having issues optimizing their online presence for Baidu, which is China’s dominant search engine, with about three-quarters of the market share. So, it’s not much use being well indexed on Google if you’ve not made your brand-name highly visible on Baidu.

On the plus side, luxury companies are doing a better job of using Baidu’s paid search services, such as “brand zone.” This year, paid searches account for 31 percent of all online ad spending in China.

Shopping Overseas

Astonishingly, “fifty-six percent of Chinese luxury purchases are made abroad.” That’s because China’s middle-classes travel a lot these days, and they know that China’s excessive import taxes make things a lot cheaper overseas. Hong Kong, with its zero VAT, is especially popular. For fashion items, many like to go to the source, in France or Italy, where a strong RMB makes the price tags even more desirable.

Despite all this, not many brands are clued up. 42 percent of companies lack an overseas store locator function on their Chinese sites, and a huge 68 percent don’t provide website settings for prices to be viewable in RMB.

Genius Ideas

Lastly, the report has a “flashes of genius” section to highlight how some brands have found some brilliant ways to engage and promote in China. One of which is Lamborghini’s official TMall store, which we reported on back in May of this year.

Another is the Chinese rice wine brand Wuliangye, which set up a good-looking site (pictured above) to help combat counterfeiting of its spirits. It comes replete with an authentication section to check that your bottle is genuine baijiu, and not paraffin or something (though I don’t think I could tell the difference, even by taste).

Readers can follow two of the report’s authors on Twitter: @sagebrennan, and @maureen_mullen.

[Report: L2 Think Tank (see/download the full report), in conjunction with the George Washington University School of Business]

Journal+, a website that gathers popular posts from Google+, was released by User Local last week. It’s a web magazine that brings together popular pictures, videos, and news articles on Google+ by various categories, or by country.

Taking a quick look at Journal+, users can get a snapshot of what’s most popular on Google+. The number of times a post has been reshared, and the amount of +1s it has received, are some of the factors that decide what is displayed on the site. There are more than 6.2 million posts on Journal+ right now, and it has already acquired more than 4.2 million users.

Main features include:

• Ranking of popular posts, pictures, videos, URLs (which are then browsable worldwide or by country)
• User rankings, according to how many times a user is added to a circle (also worldwide or by country)
• Rankings of popular shared posts and +1s for each user
• Sharing on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ itself

For example, you could browse only China posts on the Journal+ custom page for that country. Also, there’s a page just for popular G+ pictures and movies posts from across the globe.

Journal+ is a good way to get raw G+ stats too. They reveal that in terms of the number of Google+ users, Japan is placed 8th in the world – but the number of posts emanating from Japan sees it ranked 2nd in the world. It can be said that Google+ is taking off pretty well in Japan.

Journal+ shows the top ten Google+ users around the world. (Click to enlarge)

Here is the global top ten list of Google+ user numbers.

1. U.S.： 30.03%
2. India： 16.15%
3. England： 3.14%
4. Brazil： 2.98%
5. China： 2.82%
6. Indonesia： 2.82%
7. Canada： 2.57%
8. Japan： 2.07%
9. Germany： 1.95%
10. Vietnam： 1.76%

User Local is a technology development venture company located within Waseda University that provides analytics tools. Its products include User Insight which is a heat maps-based tool, and TwitTraq which provides twitter analytics.

Gezbox is a stylish Chinese social network that centres around sharing images of the stuff that you own – gadgets, brand-name clothes and shoes, etc. – and connecting with people in brand-oriented interest groups.

There’s a new, good-looking Gezbox iPhone app (now just at version 1.0) where all the action happens. That’s where you snap an image of your beloved possession (pictured right) and upload it along with a brief description, the name of the shop where you bought it, and its price. You can comment on people’s items, follow individuals that you’re interested in seeing more from, and also participate in discussion groups within the app with, say, other fans of Apple’s gadgets.

Gezbox is a very new start-up, and is based in Hangzhou, the home of e-commerce giant Alibaba. To get some behind-the-scenes news of the team and its aims, I talked to Gezbox CEO, ‘Frank’ Zheng Feike (pictured below):

Gezbox CEO, 'Frank' Zheng Feike.

How does Gezbox work for users, and what do they get out of it?

The first version is basically a try with a new concept, which is connecting people with what they have. We hope people can express their questions, opinions, and feelings about what they have and what they just bought. Meanwhile, our users can find someone like them and something related to what they share. With people, things, and the information between them, we’re trying to help people find what they need and make the right purchase decision.

Have you had any VC funding for this? How big is your team at the moment?

Not yet, we started-up with our own funding. The team has eight members now.

Will your SNS open out to embrace signing in with, say, Sina or Tencent Weibo?

We have considered it, but not right now. The first version is still in a small range spread. We’re continuing to develop more functions and make adjustments from users’ feedback.

How do you encourage your users to engage with brands?

Recently we’re trying different algorithms for recommendations. The brands forums – like general users’ content – are just one way for you to explore the “world.” We’re trying to build flexible circles base on what you have and your interests. We’ll release version 1.1 in two weeks. Change always happens in GezBox.

How will you expand or monetize this in the future? If not, what’s the next step?

We have considered monetizing, but it’s still not the right time now. We’re continuing to develop more functions, and prepare Android and iPad versions. Also, we’re still hiring, and we’re actively looking for more engineers and designers.

You can get the app on the iTunes App Store. Unusually for a new Chinese start-up, the app has English localization from the get-go, and Gezbox’s website has an English-language section too. There’s also the de rigeur funky video to show you how the app works:

A Chinese start-up is going very ‘elastic’ by mixing location (LBS), social, and IM/group messaging into its Zazzer service, which has beta Android and iPhone apps.

The service’s Chinese name is a lot more descriptive: ZaiZher IM, which basically translates to Here IM. The firm behind this is Bejing-based Rooster Tech. It combines checking in to venues with a much greater element of meeting new people than most LBSs – more easily allowing users to chat online with people in your area.

In this way, Zazzer is a lot like traditional IM platforms – such as QQ – or the new wave of group messaging apps, like Xiaomi’s Miliao, or Tencent’s Weixin. Except the location-based element affords a much greater likelihood of meeting new people who have similar interests as you, since they’re checking in to some of your preferred venues. But it’ll remain to be seen if Chinese netizens want to use such a service to connect with strangers, or prefer to use other apps to keep it to friends only.

Zazzer’s reach is not limited to trying to chase hot girls in your nearest Starbucks (though I can imagine that would be a popular usage), and can be used to exchange electronic business cards.

Rooster Tech/Zazzer CEO Robert Xiong, in a screenshot of the Zazzer iPhone app.

Rooster’s CEO is Xiong Shang Wen (pictured right), whose English name is Robert. As a serial entrepreneur he has recently had success with the group messaging service Foxfly, which really took off in the US.

The Chinese site Techweb, after talking to Robert, said that Zazzer has great untapped potential in a business environment. It wrote:

At a crowded event such as a conference it can be difficult to target people who you’d be interested in … On such occasions, Zazzer would help users find people based on interests, and then communicate with them and exchange [electronic/real] business cards.

Of course, that presumes that those around you also use the app – which is a fundamental issue with any group messaging service: it’s only useful if those around you are jumping on board too.

The app is available on the iTunes App Store or the Android Market, if you want to give it a try – though it’s available only in Chinese and designed for use in China.

The web traffic stats site Alexa reveals that China’s former top social networking site Kaixin001.com has lost 65 percent of its traffic in the past 12 months (see the graph above).

In another blow to Kaixin, a gauge of Chinese netizens interest in the site measured by Baidu Index, has hit the rocks. Today’s ‘user interest level’ for the Kaixin site is rated at 1,500 (see the graph below), which is its lowest ebb since March 2009, before the social network really took off.

The Alexa and Baidu Index measures point to a trend towards Twitter-like microblogging platforms, pulling people away from the ‘one stop shop’ approach of China’s early Facebook clones.

A measure of 'user interest level' by Baidu Index (index.baidu.com) shows Kaixin001.com at the same level it was at back in March 2009.

A greater plurality of ways to share news and keep in touch with friends is also hurting Kaixin’s traffic. Note that traffic figures are not an indication of user numbers, and might not be taking into account sessions on mobile apps.

While Renren’s (NYSE: RENN) traffic is holding up for now, it’s interesting to ponder how China’s first web 2.0 sites now seem to have been superseded.

Back in 2009, smartphones were not so common, so a lot of Chinese casual game fans then had fewer channels for a bit of light gaming. Now, millions more people have iPhones and Android smartphones – and social games can now be found on nearly every Chinese web platform…

A little less conversation, a little more gaming please

Although Kaixin has plenty of games on it, such as the social game Happy Farm – and more involved multiplayer ones too, such as Shanda’s soon-to-launch Legend of Immortals – the casual gaming market has changed a lot in the past few years. It was back in 2008 that Kaixin’s great rivalry with Renren began, when Kaixin was full of advertiser-friendly white collar workers, and Renren.com was just packed with ramen-slurping college students.

In terms of games, Tencent is growing stronger across both its QQ and Pengyou.com platforms. Just last week China’s SNS giant scored a coup, getting an exclusive on Zynga’s CityVille. Sina, meanwhile, last month added a games portal and a virtual currency to its popular Weibo platform.

So it seems blogging has metamorphosed into microblogging, and along the way a number of China’s major portals – such as Sina and NetEase – got their groove back as they jumped on the 140-character bandwagon, while the indie social networks didn’t innovate so much. It is believed that Sina Weibo now has some of China’s most engaged and wealthy social media users.

End of the American IPO dream?

Renren got its US IPO in May this year, but it has proven to be a rough year to be a new Chinese tech IPO amid dubious user stats and the Longtop accounting scandal.

Kaixin had been moving towards its own US IPO earlier this year, but that looks nigh on impossible now, after fellow Chinese tech firms Xunlei and Shanda Cloudary suspended their share offering plans on the same day last month, citing concerns about their fragility on jittery global markets.

Chinese start-up Let’s Powwow is a unique location-based service (LBS), social network, and group buy/deals site. Located at letspw.com, the site has nine employees now, and is notable for having a triumvirate of founders from China, Italy, and the US.

Rather than just focusing on check-ins or brands, Lets Powwow instead aims to connect its users more closely with actual venues, create hyperlocal deals, get users to “redeem” deals at venues, and encourage people to bring along friends to a store. There’s an iPhone and Android app to accompany the site.

Let’s Powwow seems less like fellow Chinese LBS Jiepang.com – whose CEO we interviewed recently – and more like the Indian Geosocials. That’s because both Geosocials and Let’s Powwow put less emphasis on check-ins and are instead oriented towards being hyperlocal and ‘game’-like.

To find out more about Let’s Powwow and where it’s heading, Penn Olson talked to its American CEO and co-founder Adam Guli (pictured below):

1. What inspired you to launch this start-up?

Well I have been part of start-ups in the past – always the guy working for someone else. I gained a real taste for the freedom and fluidity of the whole experience, even though each project ended in failure. I learned a lot from those failures to hopefully give me some insight into how not to make the same mistakes. But ultimately it was working for huge organizations and not having my ideas or strategies amount to more then a pat on the back and a “What are you going to do for me now” attitude.

2. What kind of financing did it take? Have you had some venture capital backing?

My two co-founders and I started with a pooled US$40,000 to start this thing. It meant we had to be creative in how we spent our funds. Over the past year we have had seed funding and some angel funding of nearly $200,000. We are in major fund-raising mode now and hope to bring in some bigger fish to help take us to the next level.

3. You position Let’s PowWow as an LBS with group buy deals and a “game” element thrown in. How does it work for a user?

We stress the social aspect of the app to our users. We do this by encouraging them to share their thoughts, feelings and ideas about their surroundings. The problem with LBS at the moment is that the games are focused on an individual raising his/her own status. This provides little value both to their friends and the venues they “check-in” at.

Our deals are aimed at identifying a venue’s target customers and develop promotions that will attract that customer and his/her friends. We want each user to be a social influencer to their circle of friends so we can reward them. Moreover, we are implementing gaming mechanics that encourage group behavior, and can reward users for sharing their ‘liked” establishments.

4. How do you reward a user who acts, in your words, as a “social influencer” to his/her friends?

The concept is simple. Because we are tracking the users who are frequenting a venue often and redeeming deals, checking in and ‘liking’ the place, we can identify them as a possible social influencer. We can target these users via push notifications for more rewards if they bring other friends into the place. For example by saying: “Bring three friends to enjoy our lunch special and you eat for free.” Those who actually follow up and bring their friends in are instantly identified as a social influencer.

But in reality, anyone who likes a place and shares the venue with their friend, and checks in with their friends at a place or event, can be an influencer. The beauty of the system is that we can make anyone into a social influencer once we know what they really like. Then we can build rewards around that to have them influence their friends to partake.

5. You’ve said you don’t emphasize checking-in so much, and prefer to focus on a user “redeeming” stuff at a location when they buy stuff…

Checking in is a social act that is based on the internet world to show your friends where you WANT them to see you at. As most LBS apps do not actually care if you are at a location or not when you check-in, it decreases the value of that user for the venue itself. By creating a redeem function in our deals, the venue actually validates that an individual is at their establishment and spending money.

This is a lot more interesting to us because we believe if a user/customer is actually at a place and spending money, then we can make money from that. Too little focus has been put on the venues in the LBS world at the moment, and therefore little revenue has been produced for these companies. When you have the venues participate in the entire experience some interesting business models end up developing.

6. You seem to be up against both LBS such as Jiepang, and group-buy sites such as Dianping and Lashou. How are you persuading clients/venues that your way is the right way (or that your users have more income, etc)?

Because we add value for the venue. It is simply not enough to have people looking at or seeing what people have said about a place. Venues are more interested in seeing what are the buying behaviors their customers have. Then they can target loyal or active customers and have these customers draw similar-minded customers to their establishment.

Because we work with the venues in creating deals that can identify these buying behaviors we collect and give reports on what is working and what is not. We become the platform that can be used to understand gaps within the business. More importantly, because we do not populate our search of venues simply using distance, but rather in terms of popularity. That ranks personal interest and friends’ interests, which is a natural ranking system. That’s what happens in the venue list in Let’s Powwow – it does not happen with other LBS companies.

In effect, we are creating a meta-game for the venues to try to bring their ranking up. It is similar to Google analytics, but focused on a 500, 1,000, or 2,000 group of search results around a particular individual. No one else does this at the moment, and it creates great appeal for our service.

7. Because your service is more focused on venues and what users actually do in them, will this only work at high-end places, such as upscale hotels or boutique stores? Can it be scaled?

We are easily scalable within reason. We are targeting mid- to high-end venues. In China, the middle class demographic is expanding rapidly and there are new places popping up daily to feed their desires. We believe that through this range we have more than enough room to grow and become profitable.

8. Why did you decide to launch this start-up in China, rather than any other country?

300 million mobile internet users and growing! The math does not lie. We can accomplish more traction in one market then others are doing globally. Foursquare has 10 million users globally. China already has 18 million LBS users. Imagine what will happen if we can make this thing really popular. Ask [Sina] Weibo how they are doing and it gives you a hint of where our ambitions are. It’s very exiting to be here. Besides, I fully believe that it will be Chinese companies re-shaping the commercial world, and we want to be part of that new shift in power.

Chinese actress Yao Chen has just passed the 10 million follower mark on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular microblogging platform.

It means that Yao Chen, aged 32 (here’s her Weibo page), is fast approaching the 12 million count of followers of the singer Lady Gaga on Twitter.

With 195 million Chinese now on various microblog sites – such as those from Tencent and Netease – it’s possible that Ms Chen could become the world’s most followed tweeter by the end of the year.

This microblogging milestone passed with only a small acknowledgment by the actress. In a tweet in Chinese accompanied by a photo of a soaring cormorant, and filled with word-play on the number, she said:

Passed 10 millions fans. Normally a cause for celebration, but now it’s inappropriate. I just want to tell my 10 million fans: do not be bound up by this number. I also want to tell my fans: always strive for peace, for freedom, and for happiness.

It seems Ms Chen felt that celebrating this would’ve been somewhat insensitive and trifling so soon after the Chinese bullet train crash tragedy at the weekend.

Sina Weibo is expanding a lot this month, with an overhauled interface, some small new features for users such as photo albums, as well as a virtual currency that can be used on social games on the site.

The folks over at Enovate China have come out with their 2011 Digital Lifestyles Report, dubbed “Youth Go Mobile” which focuses on China’s 300 million 18 to 30-year olds, who are driving massive growth in social networking, e-commerce, social gaming, and smartphone purchasing.

For the report and the accompanying infographic (below), 500 Chinese youngsters, aged from 18 to 30, were surveyed and interviewed about their digital habits and attitudes.

What are some of the key findings? Well, it seems the younger 18 to 22 demographic is a lot more in love with their phones than the 23 to 30s. The university-aged kids spend quite a lot more time finger-tapping their mobiles, and 77 percent of them would rather give up their computer than their mobile device.

When it comes to usage, the 23 to 30-year old respondents are more likely to use their phones for reading articles or BBS posts, but in every other mobile-centric activity the 18 to 23s are more prevalent. They are especially more likely to be engaged in microblogging, SNS updates, social gaming, and online novel reading.

It’s interesting to see how there are disparities even between the same generational age. I’d be curious to see how differing income-levels and time constraints affect the mobile habits of the two age ranges – but that’s perhaps a subject for a different infographic.

To download the full PDF, or read more research reports, head on over to the Enovate site. Here’s the full infographic:

From a sampling of 1 million people on the site, 5.88 percent are based in India. US users dominate the site for the time being, accounting for just over 49 percent.

MTV India was the first Indian brand site to spring into life on the site on June 30th.

However, with Google+ gaining new devotees so quickly, it’s worth noting that Google’s buzzing SNS could hit 20 million users by the weekend – well, so says PC World – which makes the sampling increasingly small.

PC World also notes that G+ “reportedly grew by 350 percent between July 4 and July 10 from 1.7 million users to 7.3 million.” That effectively means 1 million new people per day on G+, allowing us to estimate that today there are 11 million global early adopters on the site.

The statistics come from Find People on Plus, which has a reasonably large sample of nearly 1 million G+ users from which to draw their stats.

At the moment, G+ early adopters tend to be male – on a 74:25 Male:Female ratio – and in rather geeky occupations, such as engineers, developers, designers and software engineers.

[Source: Find People on Plus]

DuiJiao launched this week with a stylish iPhone app already in tow, and an Android version promised to be in the works. Similarly with rival Jiepang.com – which we reviewed in detail last month – the new DuiJiao allows users to check-in to venues across China, and share their activity amongst anyone they choose to follow.

The new service joins a growing flock of Douban.com features which now range from movie and book reviews, user blogs and brand minisites to its original Last.fm-style music streaming.

DuiJiao has decided to open the gates a lot more by allowing Sina Weibo users to log-in and use all the features by connecting with their Weibo account, for a single sign-in solution. Douban users can, of course, use this new LBS with their existing account.

When at a location, DuiJiao’s app (there’s no standalone website for it yet) gives you the option to “roar” or “ask” (see the picture below), which is unusual compared to the usual “check-in here” that we’ve all grown accustomed to. The “roar” element actually equates with checking-in, while the more unique “ask” option is clearly designed to make the venues themselves into conversational focus-points – in a manner closer to a microblog – where you can ask questions as well as give share your expertise (offering useful tips being the more common procedure on LBS, such as Gowalla).

Another different approach within DuiJiao can be seen in the ability to “follow” venues, as well as individuals, which is, again, more akin to microblogging than LBS. Almost inevitably, parent company Douban will be wanting to get brands on board their new LBS, so that users can closely follow the action at a brand’s stores.

Right now in the first week of operation it’s alarmingly quiet in DuiJiao, and the version 0.1.0 app is very basic, yet stable. The company will be hoping that the ease of signing-in with your Sina Weibo account will speed things up, although the more-established Jiepang already offers this for both Sina and Tencent Weibo users.

On the plus side, DuiJiao has the most stylish Chinese-made app that I’ve ever seen and a lot of smartphone-toting Douban users that should be quite receptive to trying an affiliated new app.

With photo and music albums, it looks like Sina Weibo is expanding to be a fuller social-network, not just a launchpad for 140-character missives.

Earlier this week I reviewed the closed-beta Sina Qing, which is a Tumblr-style blog that’s very tightly integrated with Sina Weibo, allowing cross-posting and further interactions between the two sites. It’s likely that the new photo and music album features will be similarly cross-functional; we’ll find out when Sina opens its Weibo Beta – here’s the Beta teaser page, though there’s nothing else on there – to those who wish to experiment.

Why the new features now? Well, aside from meshing it more tightly with Qing, Sina will be aware that photos, music and a few other relevant features can keep users on your site for longer, and make them less likely to get their kicks elsewhere, such as on ‘fuller’ SNS such as Renren or KaiXin.

Look out for a full review of Sina Weibo Beta here on this site, when it rolls out.

[Hat-tip to iChinaStock.com for spotting the beta page]

Clearly, Sina wants to extend vertically, giving its users the full run of 160-character tweeting on Weibo, super-fast blogging on Qing, and then their more traditional offerings of portals, profiles and old-style blogs (on blog.sina.com.cn), all under the remit of one Sina ID. It’s all about engaging, and keeping users on your domains, and getting them sharing more things. No doubt corporate Qing pages will appear in due course.

But Sina Qing and Sina Weibo are especially closely-linked. If you’ve used Weibo already, then upon signing-in to Qing you’ll notice that all your ‘fans’ and the people you follow are listed already – they might not be using Qing too, but nonetheless all the activity of your Weibo buddies is in your stream. With a toggle on the main Qing homepage, you can switch between viewing your entire Weibo+Qing stream, or just content that friends have shared on Qing.

Re-tweeting and commenting

Yes, just as with Sina Weibo, there’s the dual engagement option of re-tweeting or commenting upon something interesting in your stream. If you re-tweet someone’s microblog, then it goes back into the stream of all your followers. But, that re-tweet won’t appear on your personal page.

Posting

As with Tumblr, there are numerous options for how to post on Qing – well, only three, in Qing’s case, but this might grow with time. For now, you can post text with an optional photo, or just a photo, or just a video. With the video, all that’s needed to post is a single link, making it as fast as sharing an item as on Weibo, or on rival SNS such as Renren.com.

At the moment, I can’t see any way to post via email, which is one of the killer features of Tumblr and Posterous, who first pioneered this type of ninja blogging.

Customizing

Qing most closely resembles Tumblr – that über hip blog platform – when it comes to customizing, or ‘skinning’ your Qing. For the moment, the choices are very limited, but will likely expand with time.

Here are five more choice snaps from my first day on Sina Qing:

Firstly, you might want to skin your page…

then do a lightning-fast post on it…

then take a look at your Qing personal page…

or browse your Weibo+Qing stream…

or even hit the ‘discovery’ tab, to see what everyone else is up to…

A few days ago, Jiepang’s CEO and founder, David Liu (pictured, above), took some time to talk with me over the phone from Beijing HQ, to talk about their users’ needs, brand tie-ups, testing out NFC, and working with China’s tech giant, Tencent.

“We’re all about offline”
David Liu, originally from Taiwan, moved to mainland China in 2009, and connected with some Beijing friends that he knew from Taipei or Silicon Valley, to work on a new project. When Jiepang took off just a few months after its launch, he and co-founder Yuan Cheng decided, in David’s words, “it was time to focus”, and so the location-based-service (LBS) and social-network got moving, and made a bunch of mobile apps for their service. A short time later, and the inevitable media moniker ‘China’s Foursquare’ meant that Jiepang was getting some global attention, too.

David set out, with Jiepang, to make “a utility for your offline life … to say ‘I’ve arrived!’ at a place”, and “to allow people to share that”. It was being done already, sort of, on Kaixin001.com or RenRen.com – but, David notes, “sharing [your location] wasn’t fun before. On Kaixin you had to type it all out. So we wanted to help people check in faster, with no typing.”

After first hitting on the LBS idea, David and his team did their homework – “I feel China’s young people are more open and transparent now. They’re growing up with social-networking. So they’re ready to share where they are. In the beginning, we held a focus group of 30 to 40 people, and 80% of them said, ‘Yes, we’re sharing our location already on Kaixin’.” So, the course was decided, and the project was set to be China’s first – and biggest – LBS. David points out, “We say ‘We’re all about offline’, because we’re not forcing people to do different things – we’re just helping you to show what you’re doing normally, and we want to make it more fun.”

Connecting Users with Brands. And celebrities…
Being based in Beijing, it’s not too much of a surprise that most of Jiepang’s users are in mainland China: 95 to 98% of them, in fact, with most of the rest in Hong Kong, Taiwan or Macau (ie: the Greater China area). So, how are users engaging with Jiepang itself? David Liu says, “Our user-base is very mobile. The iPhone and Android apps make up just over half of users’ usage. And then a hardcore segment of users will use the website too.”

That’s quite impressive to see so many people using the hottest smartphones. Little wonder that brands – from Wrangler to Louis Vuitton, IKEA to Starbucks – are keen to get into the lives of these users via their Jiepang check-ins, and perhaps even persuade people to come especially into their store thanks to a Jiepang promo. “We’ve partnered with over 300 brands,” says David, “and right now we’re proud to be working with Burberry and Louis Vuitton, and even have special pages up on Jiepang [see the LV page, bottom] for the special occasions, which are Burberry’s fashion show and LV’s exhibition in Beijing.

What do users, and brands, get from all this, I ask? “For brands,” says David, “it’s to extend their personalities; and for users it’s to get a virtual badge [see the LV, Wrangler, and Starbucks badges in the image, top], maybe it’s a limited-edition badge. It’s not really about material benefit – it’s exciting to collect and show.”

A new area for Jiepang is to connect users with celebrities, and by extension whatever brands they’re promoting. It’s something that Sina and Tencent Weibo, too, have done so well since inception (better than Twitter has, for sure) – getting people to engage with specific brands or celebrities that interest them. “At the moment,” says David, “we’re experimenting with celebrities – partnering with celebrity’s venues, such as their own stores, campaigns or events. For example, Jay Chou [Taiwanese pop star] has a fashion shop and an Italian restaurant in Taipei, and they’re really popular check-ins.”

As for getting China’s hottest stars to share their check-ins on Jiepang, David concedes that probably won’t happen – “Celebrities won’t share their locations, I guess”.

NFC & global plans
Like many of China’s top social sites, Jiepang works around the world – David himself checked into various places in Paris over the weekend for the China Connect conference, where Jiepang was talking to numerous French brands which are keen to use social media in China – but is generally confined to China. Any plans to change that?

“Our roadmap is for Greater China,” says David, “but we can’t rule expansion out.” So, where’s the roadmap heading? “We’ve spread across cities in China as they’re relevant to our users … and serve users city-by-city, and make links between cities. We’ve branched out into Hong Kong and Taiwan, which are important, because a lot of celebrities that are relevant to the mainland come from those places – that’s why we have offices there.”

NFC (aka: Near-Field Communications) is an exciting technology, which looks set to allow payments – or check-ins – with a simple swipe of your (NFC-enabled) phone. Jiepang is pushing hard in testing this, rolling out check-in tests before even Foursquare was trialling it at Google I/O last month, and is now heading towards a second-round of real-life NFC tests…

“Our first tests were warm-up exercises,” explains David, “where we worked with 5 bars or cafés. We want to make it natural, and easy. For our second trial, it’ll be a bit bigger, but we can’t share any info yet. It’s still at an early stage.”

I guess NFC hardware is in short supply right now. And China needs to see both the next iPhone, and future HTCs to be rocking NFC chips for this to take off.

Any other new features for the site? “It’s not the right time to add features,” David concedes, “and instead we’re opening up the API, and looking at areas where we can improve, and give more relevant info, like if a friend is in the same area as you at the same time, then that should be a notification.”

David and Goliath
Lastly, I was keen to know what might threaten Jiepang’s position – who are the Goliaths imperially stomping down the road? How about group shopping websites, I proffered to David, such as Dianping.com, could that site hurt Jiepang, or perhaps the whole group-shopping horde could crush the LBS check-ins?

“Group buying sites and LBS are very different to each other,” David says, “and they’re even complementary. They can both help merchants to build a community with users. Also, Jiepang isn’t focused on discounts at all.”

Tencent, then? I put forward to David the image of the Tencent ‘steamroller’ that copies and crushes… David demurs, “Tencent’s doing a great job with its Open API and platform – we’ll be talking about that in Paris at the weekend, in fact.”

He continues: “We’re partnering now with Tencent to link your Tencent/QQ account to Jiepang. The size of the company doesn’t hinder our working together. Of course, it’s very likely major companies will move into new areas, but it’s still great to work with them.”

Many thanks to David Liu for talking the time to chat. Readers can follow me – but not too literally, please – on Jiepang, as SirSteven, which is also my username for Twitter and Sina Weibo.

Apps and Social Connections

So, the review… Since Jiepang check-ins can only be made on the various mobile apps, the site has most bases covered, with apps for iPhone/iOS, Android, Blackberry, and JAVA/J2ME-based phones. There’s also a mobile version of the site, to keep WinMo and various other users catered for too. The iOS and Android apps keep up a good level of feature parity, and both are now available in English as well as simplified or Traditional Chinese.

In a recent development, users of Sina Weibo can sign-in to Jiepang with their Sina ID, so as to avoid a new sign-up process. Once inside Jiepang, users can sync their activities on the service to a number of other Chinese social-networks (Sina Weibo, RenRen, KaiXin, Douban, and FanFou). Sharing/syncing to Twitter, however, is not an option. In addition, you could search for friends who might already use Jiepang by scouring your contacts on all the above SNS, plus the option of Google or MSN contacts too.

The actual Jiepang.com website serves as a place for managing your contacts or editing info, but is not needed for general usage. As with most other LBS, it’s all about the apps.

Going Out, Checking In, and Being Seen

Now it’s time to go out. Jiepang – unlike Gowalla or Foursquare in China – has detailed and accurate listings in every city in China I’ve visited (though it’s much more comprehensive in more developed cities), so there’s no need for the time-consuming manual addition of a new venue, since the restaurant, bar or gym that you’re at is very likely already listed, right there in the Jiepang app’s ‘Places’ tab. Of course, new venues can be user-submitted, but it’s not often that it’s required.

When checking in at a venue, there’s the option to share this with your ‘sync’ social-networks, so that your check-in could hit your various social-network profiles with just one click (see photo, above).

Unlike with Gowalla and Foursquare, there’s no distance-check that might prevent fanciful – ie: false – check-ins, which might be something to do with civilian GPS being so inaccurate in China, or so as not to exclude users on older phones who have to rely on very vague wifi/cell signal triangulation.

Integrated into the iOS and Android apps – I didn’t test the Blackberry or JAVA OS versions – are maps for each venue, which are now served up by Baidu Maps (see photo, below).

Mayorships, badges and points are on offer, as users check-in to different venues, to encourage frequent usage of the app. More enticingly – because we humans love free stuff, right? – there are sporadic promos that give away actual products. Which brings me to…

Brand Partnerships, Coupons and Deals

Since the end of last year, Jiepang has been pushing into brand-based promotions, as a way to monetize the service, and bring in more of its relatively well-heeled young users. At the moment, there are high-profile campaigns running in cooperation with fashion giants Burberry and Louis Vuitton, offering unique, or limited edition (virtual) badges to Jiepang users who engage with the brand by checking-out the promo, or check-in to the brands actual stores. The dedicated LV brand page can be seen here, and shows how Jiepang is tapping into the desire of many young Chinese to be seen at an exclusive place, and to then broadcast that effectively to their social networks.

As for real-world discounts and freebies, Jiepang seems more active with Starbucks in giving away actual things, such as last year’s multiple check-ins for a free coffee, or this summer’s Frappucino badge (see photo, below) that could win you a free drink.

One more brand-oriented aspect – this one being more unique to Jiepang, compared to its western counterparts – is celebrity events or stores, which are also massively popular check-in venues, and which also bring an element of glamour-by-association to users who check-in there.

One more thing…

Please head back to Penn-Olson on Monday (UPDATE: Monday; here’s the interview) to see the full interview with the Jiepang CEO, David Liu, and hear more about the site’s genesis, users, and its future.

Derek Ling, CEO and founder of Tianji

Derek Ling is the CEO and founder of Tianji, the largest professional social networking site (SNS) in China with over 6 million registered users.

Prior to Tianji, Derek was at Motorola to lead the company’s market entry strategy and business development in Greater China. He also served as Apple’s Director of Business Development for Greater China and was responsible for building iPod and education markets in China. He was also the former Vice President at Sina. In this interview, Derek shared with us about Tianji and also the professional social network market in China

1. In your view, what is Tianji and why should people join your network?

Tianji provides Chinese people with a platform to build and maintain their professional networks and to look for career and business opportunities. It’s a place to build their professional identities and to promote themselves, so that opportunities find them. We don’t want it to be simply a site for people looking to get something, but rather somewhere that people can be part of a community.

Most of our members are mid to upper mid-level professionals, ranging from 25 to 40 in age. We have a younger target audience than you might find in other markets. For comparison, LinkedIn’s average age is 43. However, in China, people above 40 are generally less Internet savvy and thus not our ideal target market.

2. What inspired you to create Tianji in China?

The original inspiration came from a realization that professionals in China, unlike their U.S. counterparts, get very little help throughout their career development. Tianji was created to help young professionals connect with like-minded elites of the business world.

From my experience as a VP at Sina, I could see that there was tremendous potential for the Chinese market. We understood that there was real value in a Chinese-focused platform that could help professionals keep in touch and leverage a broad base of relationships. The problem was that nothing in the Chinese market could provide this kind of value. It’s been truly exciting building a base of six million users, and the future looks even better.

3. Do you see yourself as the “LinkedIn of China”?

We feel that the best way for us to succeed in such a unique market is for us to be ourselves. We make great efforts to ensure that our services are specifically tailored to the needs of Chinese professionals.

China is traditionally a connection based society. Everyone knows about the concept of “guanxi,” but it means something totally different in the modern world than it did even 20 years ago. People understand that having three close friends who are well connected, and going to bars and KTV with them is not enough to succeed in modern China. We have worked hard to ensure that Tianji provides our users with a solution for a better way to stay connected in an increasingly complicated and geographically diverse landscape.

4. How does Tianji differentiate itself from similar services?

The value of a professional social networking is the quality of the users and contacts that you can make. We have 6 million registered users, more than any other site in China, and our monthly increase of new users has doubled since the start of the year to 200,000. Our users have access to a broader range of professionals than any other site can offer.

In addition, we target people who already have a few years of working experience. In fact, 90% of our users are age 24-40. We believe that these professionals are best positioned to provide and take value from the site. What I mean by this is that Tianji users are at a stage in their careers where they have something to offer to their peers—adding value—but are also eager to make connections, which draws them to the site—taking value.

The strategy has been highly successful, with 58% of our network reporting that they are management level.

Tianji's homepage

5. What are the obstacles you faced while building a professional social network in China?

It has taken some time for Chinese users to get comfortable with social networking sites that require real identities. When we started in 2005, Chinese users still treated the Internet as a virtual environment and were very hesitant to publish their real names and identities. Only in recent years have users in China begun to get comfortable with the idea of their real identity being on the Internet, which has been largely spurred by the gradual maturation of social networking services.

Professional social networking sites have taken a little longer, but the recent growth has been tremendous. The best analogy is China’s e-commerce sector. In the U.S, Ebay and Amazon were already widely used in the late 1990s. Meanwhile, it is only much more recently that the big sites in China have taken off. However, once people got used to the idea of e-commerce, the sector has been on fire.

While professional SNS is taking hold later than e-commerce, Tianji is now seeing a huge ramp up in new users and we are experiencing hockey-stick growth.

6. How many total registered users and active users are on Tianji now? Are there any non-local users using Tianji?

Tianji has six million registered users, significantly more than any other professional SNS in China. About 15% of the users are active, as defined as logging in at least twice per month.

Part of the value of Tianji is that we really focus on the local market and work to create a product that is particularly appealing and useful to the Chinese professional. This means that we have focused our energy on the Chinese-speaking audience exclusively. We want to make sure that we have a Chinese platform that does what it’s supposed to do, so that’s been our emphasis.

Having said that, we definitely also have Chinese speaking professionals in our network who live and work in other markets.

7. We understand that Tianji is part of the Viadeo Group. How does the partnership work for Tianji? What are the benefits?

It was a great opportunity for us in 2009 when Viadeo Group purchased us. The company has an excellent global track record and is the leading professional SNS company for non-English markets throughout the world. Viadeo has been revenue positive since 2009, which has given Tianji the opportunity to focus on growing our user base and the quality of services. It has been a truly great experience.

8. What is the business model? Is the company profitable?

Tianji is part of the Viadeo Group, a professional SNS, which globally has more than 35 million users. Viadeo Group is the biggest global professional SNS company for non-English markets. You’ve probably seen the Viadeo button in the space for SNS sharing links on the bottom of articles for the Financial Times and other prominent outlets.

Viadeo Group has been profitable since 2009 by tapping into three different avenues of revenue. The first source is subscriptions, which has been highly successful and brings the largest percentage of our revenue. Our two other sources of revenue have been advertising and recruiting, which have also performed quite well.

9. LinkedIn recently went IPO and could be expanding into China. Any thoughts?

It’s great to see that people are finally recognizing the massive potential for China’s professional SNS market. Since we first started operations in 2005, there have been at least 20 professional SNS platforms that have come and gone. We are proud that we have emerged from this early period of fierce competition as China’s market leader.

10. Tianji is the largest professional social networks in China with 6 million users. What steps do you plan to maintain the lead and growth?

Six million users is a great accomplishment, but that’s really just a baseline for us. We have exciting plans for new ways to allow people to find relevant connections and to grow our user base even faster. We’re seeing 200,000 new users a month now, up by 100% for the beginning of the year, and we only see that acceleration going forward. Tianji will continue to create a better experience for our users, which will help us reach our target of 10 million users by the end of 2011.

So far the website looks pretty bare-bones, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You can search out existing groups that you might want to join or you can create your own. Rather than wait for approval to join another group – most are locked and require authorization – I just made my own group for old friends I knew when I lived in Dalian, China (see picture below). Haibei conveniently connects to my Kaixin001 network and allows me to invite friends from there.

As a member of the group you can subscribe to updates via email to stay on top of what’s happening. Photos and other files can be uploaded and shared among the group as well.

If you’re looking for a western equivalent, Haibei functions kind of like Facebook’s Groups. Although I’m not entirely sure why Kaixin001 decided to launch a separate website rather than incorporate groups into the existing Kaixin001 network.

Amid talk of a possible Kaixin001 IPO, this is an interesting experiment by the company.

Quoting sources within Baidu, Sohu.com is reporting that the rumored cooperation agreement between Facebook and Baidu to set up a social networking site in China has indeed been signed.

The reports says that the cooperation between the two companies will not be concerning Facebook.com, but rather it will be to create a new SNS site. According to BusinessWeek representatives from both companies have so far declined to comment, but we’ll be sure to report as soon as we hear something.

Note that even though the report from Sohu has confirmed the partnership between Baidu and Facebook, it doesn’t state that the social network will be working as a separate Facebook.cn domain (which the company owns). It is likely that that both will work on Facebook.cn since Facebook has to follow the Chinese rules and regulations

We previously shared that Facebook might have a good chance to succeed in China with Baidu’s help. If Facebook can succeed where other western companies (namely Google) have failed, it would be a giant accomplisment for the company… And a big personal win for CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.