According to a news (in Mandarin) in China, QQ, a popular instant messenger released by Tencent is quitting the Taiwan market. Known as 麻吉QQ, a product collaborated by these two parties, i.e. Tencent and Yam in November 2003. However, this product is not well acceptably by the Taiwan people and not generated the astonishing returns as expected. Since the released in Taiwan’s market, it has only reached one (1) million users, not a substantial amount of users when compared to another instant messenger such as MSN.

I wonder why they can’t made the above mentioned instant messenger a well-known name as QQ in China? Was it just a product born in a wrong timing? Was it just bad luck? Or was it the starting of the rise and fall of Yam.com, the first portal and content provider created in Taiwan, now far lag behind of Yahoo! Taiwan.

Despite the growth of China search engine market, most of the U.S. search engines in China seem not doing very well in there due to the high degree of competition and the Chinese people are more favorably on local players. For the past few years, we have seen a seductive view that when the U.S.-owned search engines applied the localization strategy, they could made it in China or the Chinese market. Examples of these are: use a Chinese characters as the main company name, set up a local team, ask for the feedbacks of Chinese people and etc. This week, big and multinational companies such as Google and Yahoo! China applied two different strategies, both indicating that they still have the grander ambitions in China market, albeit that China market was a long and strenuous battle for them.

What did Google has done in this week? They have provided their back-end technologies to another Chinese-owned, i.e. Tencent’s search engine in China that called Soso.com. This move no doubt has extended Google’s reach in Chinese’s search engine market. As you see the picture below, every page’s search results are provided by Google. It does means more than a strategic alliance for Google with a local player, it will put a desired positioning among the Chinese web surfers that Google really put in effort in helping to grow with a local player.

On the other hand, Yahoo! in China has changed their company name and logo to “China Yahoo!”, i.e. 中国雅虎, as the picture shown in the below. What they hope is the name change is a realization that their search engine is truly a “made in China” product.

What should these U.S.-owned search engines do next to extend their China’s “localization” strategy? It is a big and tough question for them. I think they need a miracle. A miracle not necessary be completed by them. In certain countries, local player always played an important role among the users. A formula of success for the Internet startups or what set these companies apart is the localize strategy; some people have a bias on the foreign players, be true or not, well I don’t know, but certain questions from small group of people before they trying to use a site will be like this: Whom behind this site? Where do this site come from? When people asking this question before they use or know the features of the site, THIS REALLY PEEVES ME!

In the meantime, what Google and Yahoo! China need is a miracle, when a China site or an Asian site really open, break into and favorably received in the U.S. and Europe market, then it is indisputably that they should also be favorably accepted by the China people there. Sarcastically, this miracle will not happen too soon.

It’s hard for any company that stand out amid all the competition in the China’s Internet market, but QQ, owned by Tencent has done it. It gained popularity in China through offering the services of instant messenger, later launched the social bookmarking tool, and now with the Qzone portal and Qzone City Elites services offered to the Chinese people. Qzone City Elites is a sub-domain of Qzone. As you visit the Qzone, it comprised of several features that acted as free services to break into the Chinese market, such as blog, photo gallery, mini house, forum, and etc.

Qzone City Elites has just launched in the Chinese market. A platform that allowed the Chinese people in China to post about their personal particular such as occupation, hobbies, educational background, celebrity they admired, personal character, and many more. Within the beta pre-release to the stage of official goes live, Qzone City Elites has attracted more than 15,000 members and the hot cities include Chongqing and Wuhan with the growing members of 2704 and 2259 respectively.

Founded in 1995, since then eBay has grew into the world’s largest and most popular person-to-person auction community on the web. And despite the fact of the huge success of eBay in U.S., Europe and some other countries, it having the difficulty in entering China’s Internet market and eBay China was thinking that the best solution for them is through the joint-venture approach. I previously have posted that 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. There are, of course, downsides to this approach. It mean eBay China would only hold a certain stake of the new venture. The aforesaid news was announced in December last year and according to the latest news (in Mandarin) pertaining to this, the new venture, i.e. Tom-eBay China is under development and will launch to the market in this July. This new venture will focusing on the Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) businesses while eBay China’s existing businesses would target in international business and remain controlled by eBay management. Moreover, eBay China will become a subsidiary of the above mentioned Tom-eBay China.

Nonetheless, Tom has enjoyed a good relationship with eBay and it makes sense because eBay’s Skype partner in China was Tom.com. As I visited the Tom.com & Skype, they have developed the latest Chinese version of Skype that targeting the Chinese users, i.e. version 3.1. For Tom-eBay China, I suspect the domain that they’ll be using is tom-ebay.com.cn.

In fact, the person-to-person auction arena is not entirely a new market. The competition in China’s auction market is fierce and there are several direct competitors for the Tom-eBay China when it officially launched in July, these include Taobao, owned by Alibaba and paipai, owned by Tencent.

QQ, a famous messenger service in China, has released the social bookmark service, i.e. QQ Shuqian to its VIP members. QQ is a product of Tencent; I have wrote a post on it that entitled, TM 2007 Beta 1 First Impression in January this year. Frankly, I’ve been quite surprise that they launched this social bookmark service in China. Neither this is not their direction nor social bookmarking service does not compliment their existing product lines. However, as I visited the QQ Shuqian home page, the reception of its China’s members is positive. Some url bookmarks have even been saved by more than 200 people.

Is QQ Shuqian going to be the next del.icio.us in China Internet market? And/Or they going to be the strongest competitor for Mister Wong German (my another post) when it officially launched in China?

Sina.com of China just ran an interesting news, entitled, “2006 IT Awards in China” (in Mandarin). This is an annual ceremony to honor and pays tribute to the top 10 IT firms and most important people in China. This award was jointly organized by these three parties, i.e. Yesky, Sina, and Nanfang Daily.

I’m not going to talk about any of the top 10 most important people. The main reason is this, I feel it’s a bit of trivial to talk about the successful people here, as you probably would understand I will only focus my writing on startups and companies. Please pardon my viewpoint.

The top 10 IT firms in China is as follows:

Alibaba, Google China, Gome, Lenovo, Hasee, Shanda, Tencent, Tom.com, Xunlei, and Intel China.

I believed most of the readers have heard of Alibaba, Google, Lenovo, and Intel. For Alibaba, I also wrote some of the latest news of Alibaba, you can check with the sidebar of this blog to know more about it. For other companies, I will briefly explain here and you also can click the links as I provided in the above. Gome is a portal that mainly sell electronic products. And Hasee, it is a successful portal that sell PCs, laptops, and computer related items in China. Shanda, i.e. Shanda Interactive Entertainment Limited, went public and listed in Nasdaq, is a leading interactive entertainment media company in China and offers a portfolio of diversified entertainment content that is accessible via the Internet. Whereas Tencent is a successful company that released the well-known QQ messenger. I also wrote a post that entitled, “TM 2007 Beta 1 First Impression” recently. Another company, Tom.com, it is a company that partner with eBay China and they are going to jointly-launch a new portal and I will write on that soon. And lastly, Xunlei, as you probably heard of Google has bought a stake in Xunlei, to know more about this company, you can read my another post, entitled, “Google China Invested in Xunlei“.

My sense is that from now on, it is interesting to know which firm will going to succeed in China this year. 2008 will tell.

Tencent Inc. of China has released a new version of messenger, i.e. Tencent Messenger (TM) 2007 Beta 1. It is designed to meet the needs of office use, and new features such as e-name card, TM secretary, memo, auto-responder, encryption when sending sensitive message, and etc have been added to this 2007 beta 1. It is only available to use on Windows 2000/XP platforms, and the download size is relatively small, i.e. 9.81MB. Click here for the download page. You need to have a QQ account in order to login for use or you will need to create another new TM account as required by Tencent. I still wonder whether it would be works on Linux or some other platforms than Windows. As you can see in its home page, this messenger’s window is small, and therefore, it convinced the users that it would not consumed a lot of memory or resources of the users’ PC.

Unlike QQ, its target market is corporate office. Since QQ is famous in China, and most of the users are the relatively young people that use QQ for social networking, chat, and etc. This TM seems to be designed for the niche market, i.e. corporate people. What caught the eyes of corporate for this product is its security enhancements. TM 2007 beta 1 is known to have some password protection, encryption system as mentioned above that well-suited for the corporate white-collar workers. When compare these two products developed by Tencent, they have a common characteristics, i.e. free!

I believed the launched of this messenger would posed a threat to the MSNShell, another well-known brand name in the China’s messenger market. Since there are problems as posted by this blog (in Mandarin) when using MSNShell due to the Taiwan quake. The launched of this TM 2007 beta 1 tend to served as an expanded plan to lure away some MSNShell users.

N.B. MSNShell is served as a product that enhance the features of MSN Messenger. Some plugins have been created to further improve the user experiences of MSNShell.