10.18.06
Posted in Technology Ventures, Globalization at 12:41 am by Ray Wu
It seems that most of VCs are investing in China by “exporting” the successful US business model and technology innovation. I have not seen a lot of successes based on this strategy. Most of the US companies including major Internet heavyweight can not compete well with Chinese domestic vendors, ie. Google vs Baidu, or eBay vs Alibaba. Many failures are due to management and culture difference, others are because of scalability and business model required to win in the unique Chinese environment.
There is no doubt that China is a unique market and innovation is definitely there. One good example is mobility. China has the world’s largest number of mobile phone subscribers. The Wall Street Journal reported that China had 398.8 million wireless phone subscribers at the end of January 2006, more than the entire population of the United States. In fact, mobile users in China outnumber conventional “landline” users by about 38 million.
What that means is that if the mobile technology works in China, regardless if it is mobile gaming or mobile commerce, it probably has a solid scalable and reliable technology foundation. The same thing applies to online gaming such as MMOG technology. Even though Korea has the largest online gaming market (ie. cyworld), China is the fastest growing market according to IDC.
Why not take these technology, apply US business model and import it here? Some of the technologies such as ring tone or song recognition by humming have been utilized in China for a long time, yet, it is so “innovative” when it was introduced to the US market. I go back to China once and while and there are definitely a lot of opportunities there…
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09.14.06
Posted in Technology Ventures, Events, Globalization at 2:31 am by Ray Wu
I will be speaking at this SDForum event with 8 Korean companies & Cyworld USA on how to partner in the valley. The topics are about mobility and gaming, probably 2 of the strongest technology areas we can learn from Asia. If you are interested to see what’s up in Korea, this might be a good event to attend.
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09.07.06
Posted in Technology Ventures, Globalization at 1:09 pm by Ray Wu
According to Venture Source, there were 54 mainland China deals, totaled $480.1M, in Q2 of 2006. It represented the highest aggregate capital investment in 2 ½ years and was double the amount invested in the same quarter of 2005. At the half-year point there have now been 85 deals and $757.9 million invested in China.
With GDP growth forcasted at around 9.5%, China is becoming more and more dominate as the growth driver for world economy. Actually, you can even see the Chinese influence within corporate environment. Lenovo recently hired Gerry Smith, former vice president of Dell’s Singapore design center and displays unit, to oversee its global supply chain.
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10.12.05
Posted in Technology Ventures, Globalization at 5:12 am by Ray Wu
As a native Chinese, I love globalization and impact of that in Asia Pacific. Some of the technology advancements are amazing to look at. For example, South Korea is one of the leaders in broadband usage. In a country of 48 million people, there are 12 million broadband lines that pump data between 20 to 400 times faster than the old trusted 56K dial-up telephone lines. Of the nearly 16 million Korean households, 78 percent now have a broadband connection, which is more than four times the home broadband penetration rate of North America. China also expects 200 million Internet users by 2005, and majority of these people will be on high speed Internet. What this means is that digital entertainment, online gaming, digital TV, voice/video/data integration are all reality in Asia market, but not possible in the US because of current last mile rollout issue. Also, the advancement in wireless technology and functionality of cellphone handset is at least a generation ahead of US.
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10.05.05
Posted in Technology Ventures, Globalization at 5:13 am by Ray Wu
Even though globalization presents significant saving for an enterprise, there are hurdles that need to be overcome. One of the top issues is performance and optimization for timely remote access. This issue is not new. In order to save cost and create a consistent data warehouse, an enterprise tends to centralize data operation and consolidate web infrastructure. This is great from a management perspective, but the assumption is that the network is fast enough to deliver the performance. This kind of design works well if majority of access comes in from well-connected US and Canada, but as an enterprise becomes global, the central server is not that ideal and performance degrades quickly, especially from remote locations such as Asia and Middle-East. Keep on buying more bandwidth in developing countries could be costly. Companies tend to address it by several kinds of techniques:
- delta bandwidth optimization (ie. fineground) which was acquired by Cisco recently
- local dynamic edge data caching ( ie commendo)
- deploy WAN optimization technology from Peribit Networks, acquired by Juniper.
All of these solutions work, depends on how much control an enterprise has end-to-end and whether the data is dynamic or static.
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