Kick Off, Part 2, Day 1

Kaiser Kuo (@kaiserkuo) continued to MC the entire event, bringing onstage Jeremy Goldkorn (@goldkorn) to question — or should we say interrogate — fellow entrepreneurs for the quick, one-hour afternoon session.

Industry Focus - Online Video: Youku

Youku CEO Victor Koo, a familiar figure during #china20 (the China 2.0 tour in November 2008) who kicked off all company-to-company meetings for the whole tour, started off as being introduced as the founder and CEO of Youku.com, which depending on who you beliee, is either “the” or “a” leading video site in China. Tastier morsels of the interview included:

• Victor was involved on the Web since 1998; Youku became big in 2006.

• Revenue stream as of 2008 is advertising; those for 2006, 2007 were more about user acquisition.

• Traffic momentum at Youku sure is going up. This year’s goal is CNY 100 million. This seems easy to reach given recent growth.

• The momentum and speed of this online video market is very big. In regards to mobile growth; they’re looking at post-2009 (”we have to be realistic”).

• Youku fits into the Chinese regulatory environment; unsafe stuff is dumped. (They don’t get the censors upset, in other words.)

• Youku uses their own infrastructure; they’re also very zippy in China in terms of speed. Another Youku plus: the management team.

• They’re into syndicating video content; they’re getting TVs, media outlets as well as user content online.

• The average Youku visitor is little different from the average Internet visitor. Online video is the 4th active Internet app in China.

• In terms of making money: the evolution of the business model is important. They mention diversification. Brand advertising model is merely a start, not an end.

• In regards to 3G: “Most people have been tearing their hair out for 3G during the past five years.” 3G is merely beginning in 2009. RIght now, wifi brings you pretty good experience, but 2.5G is still “pretty garbage”. 3G is to start in big cities and then make the inland move; it’ll take around 12-24 months.

• Futurespeak for the next five years: The PC space has already come of age, and mobile will come of age in the next three years. In the next five years, we’ll see convergence and more views on more devices.

Industry Focus - Online Video: 6rooms

Yan Liu, CEO of 6rooms, was next on stage being interviewed by Jeremy. Spicier bits from the chat:

• 6rooms (6.cn) was founded in 2006. The CEO, Yan Liu, is of “pure local background”. He mentions he’s in the same biz as Youku.

• 6rooms mainly focuses on gaming. At least 70% revenues comes from gaming industry. Advertising is also mentioned. They’re targeting Chinese games; feeding them video content.

• 6rooms has this special “thing” with Internet cafés. 50% of pageviews are from such cafés. As a result, they offer “café-only” content. And that alone is home to over 3 million viewers.

• They sell ads on top of showoing content (as in games-related video content).

• Copyright’s a big headache. They actually purged all movie content in late 2008 and are now focused on games the most.

• In regards to 3G: they’re doing it, but for at least 2009, it’ll still very much be “test-only” and not biz-only.

Industry Focus - Online Video: Uusee

Zhu Li, CEO of Uusee, closed out the first round of interviews for the afternoon. Notes from the interview:

• Uusee’s biz model: entertainment content. These include movies, films, and TV sport content. They actually got rights for the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

• Interesting: They run what’s comparatively a “ROM” system. Users can’t upload stuff; they can only watch clips.

• Uusee is bullish: They’ll make money this year, they say. They also mention value-added services. They’re also into high-quality video content; HD is on heir drawing board (it’ll be fee-based). They’re also thinking of mobile TV.

• Uusee visitors are mainly those aged between 18-70 (that’s pretty wide).

• Uusee started out as a tech company; in this vein, tech is a plus. They’ve the technology so that’s a huge saver.

Industry Focus - Creative Business Models: Yeepay

Duncan Clark, CEO of BDA, interviewed three corporate executives and started off first with Chen Yu, VP of Sales Marketing as well as co-founder of Yeepay. Jots of note:

• Cash on delivery is still heavily relied on in China. But that’s not really e-payment; it’s much more payment verification.

• So where does e-payment mainly come from? Online gaming and airplane tickets; these are mainly all-electronic (e-tickets!).

• And the economic crisis? There’s opportunity. “Everything’s recession-proof”.

• The starting point for e-payments in China is really low.

• In China, market is highly fragmented (it’s not like Korea or Japan; there’s no uniform market).

• The Chinese government has been into licensing and regulations for quite a bit. They started with 3G and now the People’s Bank is thinking about getting in the act. However, the approach at first remains open.

• Yeepay also work with airline companies, where they get bigger payments.

• Social implications: when folks think of payment, they think of it as a tool; you collect cash from your customers. The adoption of e-payment helps you build trust and establish a credit system. Payment’s going to help transform the economy from a manufacture-based society.

• Wenchuan Quake mentioned: online donations were raised.

• 3G: Will be major driver for payment adoption.

Industry Focus - Creative Business Models: nCore and SMSNG

nCore’s Mikael Leinonen was up next. Highlights:

• SMSNG is their new product: it’s SMS but with text colors, different fonts, typefaces, small graphics; still an SMS but with a lot of eye candy. The “eye candy” SMS is sent over the SMS channel, so it’s not really all that “new”. (In fact, SMS started out first as an internal communications tool!) You can write 255 SMS in one; it still goes through as one SMS. Messages are combined in a chain; users see just a single message they write. The software chains everything together.

• Roll-out: This service is under tech preparation and has been so in the last few years; it’s not officially out anywhere. After 2 to 3 years, they’ll have SMSNG instead of SMS.

• China is the place to launch SMSNG. Just look at the sheer number of SMS folks (and phone users) in China! Look at the market!

• SMSNG and ads: you can embed ads in background.

• And yep, they’re looking for funding. They’re a small, 100-person company trying to do “next killer app”.

Industry Focus - Creative Business Models: Alivenotdead

Finally, the afternoon closed out on a bang: Daniel Wu and Patrick Lee went onstage representing Alivenotdead. (Daniel’s the co-founder; Patrick’s the CEO.)

At this moment, cameras went wild as this was obviously a star onstage. The flashing went on for many minutes.

Notes from the chat:

• How did Patrick get into this partnership? He knew Daniel back in college and did martial arts together. Daniel next moved into Hong Kong. Patrick started channeling in cash in the movie Daniel acted in.

• Regarding piracy and Internet video: the Internet and video creates quite a challenge.

• A who’s who of “star domains” is next mentioned: jetli.com, karenmok.com… it sure sounds a bit like Celebrity 2.0! Hulu is also mentioned and is seen as a way to monetize Internet video; a way to monetize something that hitherto was hard to monetize.

• Quote from Tangos Chan, also livetweeting the event: Once a star goes onstage, the thing starts deviating from “just” the Internet.

• Five years from now: what’s the forecast? Silence as they think. Kaiser jumps in (good one Kaiser!): “Alive or dead!”

That ended the first day of CHINICT 2009. We’re back tomorrow!