I finally get some time to sit down and talk about our web 2.0 panelists. According to registration data, most of the attendees are interested in this panel. I hope you know more about them, before you come to the conference.
In this panel, we are happy to have Andrew Qian of New Access Capital to be the moderator of this panel. The six panelists are City8, 8box.cn, podlook, kongzhong, Mobile Monday Beijing, and hoodong.
City8 is a local startup in Zhangjiang area. It provides a local search services, which is digital map plus location context information. What makes it differenct from other map searvices is the real street view part. On bottom right of the search result page, it provides a virtual tour enviroment with 2D real street pictures. The company behind this is Jietusoft, a virtual tour software technology provider. Its local map search service is a mashup from a Beijing based company, Mapabc. The service currently is a bit slow, and doesn’t support firefox well. But it’s certainly an interesting concept on digital map navigation. One of our team member has already benefited from this service. He forgot the shop name where he bought stuffs, then found it out through real street view feature of City8.
8Box is another startup in Zhangjiang area. The company’s business focused on discovery, experience and sharing of music. To prevent copyright issue, it doesn’t provide explicit dowload links. Users listen to music from original source via streaming. The system learns user’s interest from how they rate music and what music they share. There’re already successful music recommendation engines like Pandora, and Last.fm. 8Box is a pioneer in Chinese music market.
Podlook is a Chinese podcast directory. According to founder of Podlook, the core feature of this service is aggregating, dicorery and subscription. We are already overwhelmed by blog feeds. In the near future, podcast feeds will flood us in the same way. Podcast directory like Podlook will help you filter out the ones really matter to you. Also its subscription service enables you to manage your favorate list from everywhere. This service is much like Odeo. Besides online service, Podlook has hardware and software too. Will they direct Podlook away from its core business? What do you think?
Kongzhong probably is too huge to be called a web 2.0 company. But it’s business in mobile entertainment, media and community is an important topic in this panel based on the fact that there’re much more mobile phones than PCs in China. Mobile value-added service providers in China are a bit like dancing with wolf, since China Mobile, the largest mobile facilities provider also keeps an eye on this market. Recent news on Kongzhong’s slashing workforce shows that now is a difficult time for mobile value-added players in China.
Mobile Monday Beijing is a local branch of Mobile Monday. Benjamin Joffe, organizer of Mobile Monday Beijing, is also CEO of Plus Eight Star, a mobile business consulting company. This kind of professional community is an important communication platform for web 2.0 companies in the same field. Their last event clarified the pretty new concept Mobile 2.0. And their upcoming session is going to talk about another important angle, Mobile Payment.
Hoodong is a wiki community. Besides a wiki system, it provides user group, topic discussion and tagging features. Although some of these features are available in traditional wiki system, hoodong enhanced these features to establish a community around a wiki system. Different from these vertical wikis, hoodong covers general topics. Since Wikipedia is blocked in China, it’s a somewhat opportunity for local wiki companies to grow up.
I don’t think these six web 2.0 panlists can represent web 2.0 in China. But limited by our ability and conference time, these are pretty much we can provide. In our attendees, there’re also lots of web 2.0 startups. If you are doing business in web 2.0 area, welcome to the conference. How about bring a soap box, and tell us why your company matters more than the companies on the stage.
In the begining of our arrangement of this panel, we have got help from China Web2.0 Review and Klogs. We really appreciate this!