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. upload photo. On the other hand, YouTube, i.e. upload video, and Blogger, i.e. upload text.

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.

I just came across a new web platform developed by Alibaba China on the web. This platform has not been given an English name by Alibaba at this moment, as you can only see the Chinese name listed in the image above. The main objective of this platform is to served as a value-added service for all the Alibaba users to ask question whenever they face the business problems, and then they would received answers from the web community.

I wonder this idea was derived from the success of Yahoo! Answers. In short, I like the web 2.0 concept and I also believe this new platform is a valuable solution that can compliment Alibaba’s portfolio of businesses.

A new web 2.0 relationship advice community namely YouMe.us has entered into the market. This web application is still in beta and it has been backed by a company, i.e. Prisma Star Software. This company has offices in the U.S. and Czech Republic. The goal of YouMe.us is to allow visitors to quickly post relationship issues and receive relevant responses from other users. In fact, Prisma Star Software has tried to create a community by utilize web 2.0 concept in achieving this goal.

I visited their official blog, they are still improving the features of this web application. They are going to launch Mobile alpha which will allow users to post issues and receive advice via mobile phone. In addition, they created the content filtering for teen and adult content. Upon entering the site, users will automatically be directed to the section of the site most appropriate for their age group, but may freely view both content groups by toggling a simple filter button, as they stated on their blog.

On the website, with the teenage girl’s image there, I believed that they are targeting the market of teenage girls. I wonder if teenage girl market is potentially huge and majority of them are really looking for the real love, and indeed, amid the relationship problems. This type of community service, I believed is similarly to online match-making services, the services is excellent but most of the initial matches are often imperfect. In this case, they’re not guarantee the answers contributed by other users must be correct. In other word, if you let other people to decide your relationship problems, the web community may shoot the Cupid’s arrow in the wrong direction.

YouMe.us may captured the first-mover advantage in the field they’ve entered. I tend to believe that they would eventually attract a group of web audience. However, I think they need to explore ways to provide the relationship advices and improve the users’ experiences in order to sustain its market growth. For users, don’t forget, it always takes resilience to find a true love.

On the Blogger home page, I noticed there’s a statement that stated ‘We’re out of beta and ready to go’. Blogger has officially released a new version this month.

Prior to this blog, I’ve been blogging with Blogger.com for a long time before moved to my own domain. In fact, it is interesting to know that Blogger are now out of beta version and also improved its features. I remember when I blogging with Blogger.com, I encountered several difficulties in publishing my posts, especially that time I was using dial-up through telephone line, as you can well imagine. I know now Blogger has improved this publishing control with just one-click and many other features such as, label (I more prefer to call it tag), drag and drop of the elements, and etc.

However, one thing I dislike about this new Blogger, i.e. it’s difficult to export your blog to some other blogging softwares. I’m thinking maybe this is a new strategy for Blogger to nurture the users’ technological lock-in. In addition, it’s nearly three years now when Google bought Pyra Labs in early 2003 and thus, acquired Blogger. I tend to believe this is the first time Google has upgraded this Blogger software, my question is why does it take Google so long to upgrade Blogger? With Google now a domain name reseller, I wonder are they going to let the users buy a domain name and hence allow domain mapping at Blogger?

Two days ago, I’m in doubt on the rumor of the partnership between eBay and Tom.com and did posted a post on this matter. I also posted a post on the possibility of the split of eBay China’s business units.

On this matter, Bloomberg just published a news that entitled, eBay to Shut China Unit, Form Venture with Tom Online. According to this news, eBay will close its unprofitable China Web auction unit and form a venture with billionaire Li Ka-shing’s Tom Online to run the business in the world’s second-biggest Internet market. In addition, eBay will pay $40 million for a 49 percent stake in the venture, both companies said in a statement today. You also can read the announcement made by eBay China here (in mandarin).

But I still do not know what is the detailed plan for this venture. My own view is China seems to be the tough market for the U.S. internet giants. I’m not sure whether this is due to China people are more favor to the Chinese-owned websites or portals when they come to merchant or do some searches online, or etc. I guess the venture for a foreign company with the Chinese company is the only strategy that can be work up temporarily.

I just came across Google’s annual Zeitgeist report on the web. This is a report summarized what people have searched on Google for the year 2006.

The top searches on Google.com were:

1. bebo
2. myspace
3. world cup
4. metacafe
5. radioblog
6. wikipedia
7. video
8. rebelde
9. mininova
10. wiki

On the other hand, the top searches on Google News were:

1. paris hilton
2. orlando bloom
3. cancer
4. podcasting
5. hurricane katrina
6. bankruptcy
7. martina hingis
8. autism
9. 2006 nfl draft
10. celebrity big brother 2006

You can find more categories and results revealed by Google at 2006 Year-End Google Zeitgeist.

In October this year, Google has launched and operated another search engine namely, Searchmash. I’m not going to talk about this Ajax-based search engine here. However, I wonder Google will publish the same kind of top searches report based on the traffic of Searchmash. Obviously, for all the keywords that used to search on Google, I guess most people are searches for some types of entertainment activities on the web. I recall an Internet Study published by Stanford University, the average user is engaging in at least 5 distinct types of activities on the Web: a combination of different types of information searches, entertainment and games, and for one quarter, some commercial transactional activity. This is exactly correct when we match the above keywords that used to search on Google with the search behavior that listed in the Stanford’s Internet Study.

The other day I came across one of the eBay’s business units, Kijiji and it has launched in India. It is an online classifieds website that focused solely in India. In the website, you can find the variety of community services, commercial products, real estate, jobs, events, and etc.

One special subdomain in the Kijiji India is its rural marketplace. It is a special classifieds listing that available in local Indian languages, i.e. Hindi and Tamil. I found this is particularly special because of the social responsibility commitment showed by eBay’s Kijiji in India. This rural marketplace is emerged as the platform targeted at the rural population of India with an aim to help people in villages improve their economic livelihood. Kijiji India has a vision that with this platform, it would eventually enabled the rural populace to trade goods, look for jobs, market their local produce, find and exchange information on services within their village or district.

This is not the first time a big corporation that committed to help the rural people in India. Another computing giant, Intel has launched the ‘Community PC’ for the rural India in March this year. I like these community involvement carried out by eBay’s Kijiji and Intel. This is the opportunity must be fully utilized in order to bridge the rural-urban divide, using platform or free PC as the tools in this case. In the end, the objectives for these two community involvement will still the same, i.e. to empower the rural India.

On the other hand, I believed we also should not over applaud the social responsibility commitment of the big corporation in the market. This is because the reasons for companies becoming interested in social responsibility are diverse. Some doing it simply because they want to gain market positioning. One of the famous article written by the late Milton Friedman , i.e. ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits‘ dates from 1970 provided the great insights on this issue. There is not necessary to conclude that social responsibility must be analogous to sacrifice, it may be a holistic approach to yield greater returns in the long run. In this case, Kijiji India’s community involvement may well served as a market entry strategy that going to attract a huge audience in India, thus establish itself a leadership amongst the existing players such as Vargikrit , Local Indya , India Yellow Pages , and etc.

Overall, I must say I like the idea of rural marketplace launched by eBay’s Kijiji India. I believed it will succeed in India, especially this is not done on an occasional basis, but strongly tied to its overall business strategy in India.

Few days ago, I did posted on the rumor that eBay China is going to split its business units and establish a partnership with Tom.com. Today ShanghaiDaily.com has ran a story that talked about eBay is expected to partner with Tom.com in some strategic areas. According to the news, eBay China and Tom.com will jointly open a new website in January next year that focusing on the China market. But eBay will hold 49 percent stake and Tom.com have a 51 percent stake in this website.

As usual, no announcement pertaining to this news has been made by these two companies. But I think there are benefits of this possible strategic alliance for them. eBay thus can be more focus in their own merchant businesses in China and Tom.com has diversify the company’s portfolio away from its core wireless and mobile internet businesses.