A look back at 2006, there are very few Internet startups or software companies from Asian countries that surprised the world this year. Most people I talked with still can’t figure the successful companies out other than Google, YouTube, Yahoo!. When thinking on the competition especially on the Web, I’m still very much based on the idea that what a company can do will determines what it should do. What I observed the Asian Internet companies on the Web, they’ve likely to reproduced those successful big players’ business models. Last week, I’ve been at a IT firm, they’ve launched a local video upload services for the Web community in my local country. My sense is that if it’s for localization purpose, it was a successful product but I doubt this product would gained good market positioning when it grow abroad.

This brought another issue here, so where should we put our effort in? I can’t answer this question for you, because it involved with the internal resources you’ve in your own company. However, when talking on the issue of successful startups, I believed this type of companies, at least they are well-aware of what they can do in order to succeed in the market. They have a clear picture on what they can do and they just focusing on doing one-thing. Example, FaceBook, they have a clear value proposition, i.e. social network. On the other hand, YouTube, i.e. share video, and Blogger, i.e. blog.

In retrospect, what matters here is we should not cheer for the successful companies that made it this year. I believed the new startups today should learn from the value proposition examples of these successful companies listed above, yet these value proposition can be found in their own companies. What matters as well is to continue probing and testing a new technologies that can benefit the world.