Xiaonei and Facebook, though these two websites have different valuation mainly because one company is originated from America and the other China, which translates to different user groups, popularity, marketing strategy, etc., are funded equally well, with Xiaonei a 430 Mil for the latest round, beating Facebook’s 378 Mil. Well frankly I hope Xiaonei will produce something fantastic with the investor’s money, like the wonderful game Tap Tap Revenge for iPhone, and not merely adapting what Facebook is doing for the Chinese market.
Speaking of the social networking website, there is a Facebook clone in German called StudiVZ. The founder sold the company to a German publishing group at 100€ Mil January last year. What’s interesting is that it was recently sued by Facebook for IP infringement. The website is a very nicely translated from the original English version of Facebook into German
I talked with Bernard Leong on this issue when shooting the Geek Goddess Show yesterday, when he tossed the idea about the reason why Facebook avoid suing Xiaonei was because Xiaonei has more money. Well, that might seem to be a good reason but no, that’s only the result of its success. While StudiVZ remains to be just a rip off of Facebook, Xiaonei has adapted from what Facebook was doing and successfully marketed the product to the Chinese market. And any businessman knows that the Chinese market barely overlaps with the western market on these Internet Technology. Not only Xiaonei has marketed the products, the things they have done to encourage user interactions and create better user experience are unique to its market: a blacklist option to block the unwanted, allowing people to interact with each other publicly without being friends, VIP title for purchase, and more. All these make Xiaonei a roaring success in the Chinese market.
With the recent addition of MP3 search in Google.cn (which can only be used in China, comparing that universally available Baidu Mp3 Search), we can the trend of western companies start to abandon their dogma of doing business at home and start to learn and adapt to the users in its own market. We hope to see more to come.
Update: I am updating the recentpostsaboutREMIX 2007 to provide you with more photos, reviews and contents.
In short, REMIX 2007 is Singaporean Version of MIX 2007, which is a conference held in Las Vegas, for web developers, designers and decision makers. And PREMIX 2007 is an event organized by Microsoft and The Digital Movement to get people in Singapore aware of the core technology Microsoft is developing, and advance and easiness of the technology.
Nic Fillingham from Microsoft started the event by giving us a brief introduction to MIX 2007 and REMIX 2007, with the purpose of doing the preview event, which is explained above. If you still unsure, you can leave you comments here.
Leon Brown introduced to the audience the current shipping version of Microsoft Expression Studio, and he explained to me later that Microsoft started the development of version 2 right after the start of shipping version 1. This might be the best practice in business, but it makes a developer me happy: we can always have something new to play with: Blend 2 CTP is neat, for those of us working on the new version of Sliverlight.
Lee Brimelow, a senior design technologist from frog design, presented to us his work using Window Presentation Foundation (WPF). He started developing on WPF a year ago, which is not that long, but the demos he presented, those blew my mind away. The demos were awesome. You can write to him to ask for the code
He shared with us his experience of learning WPF: he treated WPF like Flash in the beginning, and found it hard to use until Microsoft Blend came up, and then he felt the right tools are there for the right people. According to Leon, Blend was developed on WPF for Vista, the first application that actually use WPF to develop. It really looks nice and easy to use.
The 3D performance of WPF is quite impressive: rendering 100+ 3D letters produced in real time @ >=30 fps
Lee then introduced to us Silverlight, the direct competitor for Adobe Flash, with a totally different underlying technology for Deviners (Microsoft Term: between Developer and Designer) and Wimestreamidists (People doing Window Media Streaming). Silveright has very good video streaming capability! You can check out the demos on Sliverlight.net. Silverlight 1.0 has similar performance as Flash AS3, and it is believed that Silverlight 1.1 has faster running speed than Flash AS3 (*not confirmed though*).
Beau Amber has done a lot of work on Rich Media Applications before, using mainly Flash. He has built his company Metaliq based on Flash development. He shared with us that he was not keen to go for MIX2006 because he thought Microsoft was not listening, but after he went and gave his feedback, he found out that Microsoft actually listened to people’s feedback and adjusted their software for the developers! So he went for MIX2007 and presented in the keynote presentation about his baby: Top Banana
He motioned a long process of converting GPS data to XML, using a self written Binary2Text Converter ->Edit Text in Word->Save as CSV->Open in Excel->Convert to XML. If I were him, I would use .NET 2.0 do write a direct Binary2XML program.
When were listening how beautiful the program is, which includes a Vista Gadget, a 3D model algorithm to map your XML to 3D models and the ability to automagically resize the window without screwing the image, Mevlin Yuan took a photo of us watching attentively to the speaker Thanks Bro
Beau mentioned that some of the cool apps are hosted on Microsoft sever, so the bandwidth is paid for by Microsoft and they scale well thanks to live storage. And he went on talking about Microsoft Express Media Encoder Preview:
: You define a portion of the timeline, put down some makers to indicate some changes and add some effects. Click a button and wait for a short while. Walla, your video is encoded @ 512Kbps, put on a HTML page, with video controls and pictorial markers for yout to jump to any time you like. Check his blog here:
Oh man, this is really cool, you can encode and put any content on the web page automagcially! It is interesting that Beau said they were transiting from Flash to Silverlight. I think Silverlight is going to penetrate the market because of its advance in technology and ease of use because of surrounding technology, though I am still waiting for my SilverBox to come online soon.
Just to mention, all the tools you see people use to develop these demos are not free (Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft Expression Suite). You gotta buy it to feel the money put in worth every penny. Yet. there are something bothering me, iPhone does not support Silverlight yet, how Microsoft is responding to that? A updated Zune that does the phone?
Anyway, here is something fun from Melvin:
Just as I suspected… “Estee Teo” is a handbag brand. Estee Lauder; Estee Teo…. makes sense…
Talking about lift span of Silverlight across the different platforms., Nic said this to me:
“Sliverlight is like XBOX360. Microsoft is committed to build Silverlight as long as RIA development needs a plugin[for different platforms]“.
Today I was reading my Financial Accounting Textbook, and I started to discover how interesting it is to read through a corporation’s annual report. Having gone through Microsoft’s annual report, I am really amazed and shocked by the performance it has and once had.
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/ar04/nonflash/default.html Take a look at their P/L and Income statements over the years, you might be amazed and as well as amused.
fancyfly:
Is accounting your major? I don’t think it interesting because i’m now suffering from my CGA FA3. Lot’s of things to consider when it comes to practice. >_<
me:
I am not accounting major. But I am interested in reading the annual reports of various companies. Maybe I will take some advanced financial course next sem/year like managerial accounting and finance. The module I have taken merely enables me to read those reports instead of proceducing them.
Having watched the HP advertisement for the digital photo, I am amazed. They use frame indicating photo while the real face is included in the frame which is exchangeable. You feel the frame is totally merged into the face while face is contained in the frame as well. Really cool, man, a seamless integration of the photo and reality. The way of taking a picture is just simply put your hand beneath his/her fact and TAKE IT OFF!
That’s really cool. HP has really nice design and publicity for its video
Image via Wikipedia 
1.Static Model Rotation
2.Video Player Rotation
3.Flickr:the New Hello World Program
4.Keyboard Input -> Rotating 3D text
5. Rotating 3D circles
Track GPS data and map to a 3D skiing model
Thanks Bro
