Gougou, a search engine that owned by Xunlei which Google has a stake has launched in China last month. My sense is that it is a first attempt of Xunlei to compete effective in the China market by offering the search services that restricted to the entertainment fields. In other word, the Chinese people can search their favorite movie, torrent, MP3, game, episode, software, book, and handphone (pronounce as shouji) through this search engine. A bit of googling shows that there are several similarities between Gougou and Xunlei where these two entities are ventured into the fields that large pool of users are resided. And areas such as movie, MP3, or game are well tailored to these group of users and the launched of the entertainment-like search engine would eventually sound attractive to them. But I should acknowledge that Gougou has a real advantage on the China’s Internet field, this is due to Gougou, means “dog dog” indeed a popular name among Chinese, formerly one of the popular alternative Chinese names for Google in China.

On the business side, I observe that there will be some significant overlap in certain areas between Google and Gougou. Though Google has once again capture the enhance scale in the search engine market in China, but the hidden risks of overlapping of services may occurred sooner or later. However, it’s still great to know that Gougou has became one of the top 100,000 sites since its first inception in this year. As I visited statsaholic in order to get the first grasp of its growth, the result seems to be amazing for the past one week, as shown in the below picture.

Source: available at http://www.statsaholic.com/gougou.com/, accessed 3 June 2007

A new service offered by Xunlei, i.e. Zhao Xunlei has attracted a huge group of users in China and the points accumulated nearly 10 million since it first inception in the beginning of the month. Xunlei, a popular peer-to-peer startup in China and Google has stake in it, see my another post that entitled, “Google China Invested in Xunlei“. What is the meaning for Zhao Xunlei, Zhao is the Chinese word for “find” and “迅雷找到” mean “Xunlei Found”. It is a platform that aimed for the users to find the download links for a particular video, book, music, game, software, TV series, and movie.

The launch of this service/directory was deemed as a strategy to complement the download services offered by Xunlei. The same concept is found as you compare this service to the Google Answers which is now no longer available on Google. An user could post a question on where to find this download link and specify how much he/she willing to pay for that particular link. On the front page of Zhao Xunlei, you notice that the points Xunlei has accumulated at this moment is 9016964 and users normally willingly to pay 20 point to as much as 50000 point. Xunlei offered a scheme that awarded the points in different areas, such as register a new account award 50 point (one-time), visit per day, 2 point gain by an user, and etc. You also can read the full list of how the point awarded to an user by clicking here. On the other hand, the users can pay for the download link by top-up their credit accounts and complete the successful web top-up transaction through Xunlei Pay. The conversion rate for Xunlei money to the point currently is at the proportion of 1:10000, according to this page.

I think Zhao Xunlei has reached and influenced their potential customers by offering the point system. A point-based marketing that targeting the customers’ online egos really work for them right now. An user is perceived as more than happy to help others to find the download links in order to fulfill their inner ego. And it is not surprise that most people are seeking for the successful experience in helping others on the web nowadays.

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.

According to a Chinese News (in Mandarin) in China, Google China has invested in Xunlei, i.e. Shenzhen Xunlei Network Technology Ltd., a fast-growing Chinese P2P startup. Xunlei will officially announce this fundings investment from Google China on 5th Jan 2007.

Xunlei that founded in year 2003, started as a download site and recently switched its focus to P2P distribution market, mostly audio and video. For users, one only need to download and install its P2P (torrent) software, i.e. version 5.5.2.252 and run in their own personal PC, that’s simple is it. According to its product page, this software pre-installed Firefox 2 browser, support fast download, anti-virus, choices of skins, and etc.

Source: http://top.baidu.com/

I think Xunlei has caught the eyes of Google China is mainly due to its popularity. From the image listed above, Xunlei has ranked number 2, just behind qq in daily top 50 search in Baidu China. In term of product strategy, Xunlei has demonstrated some similarities with YouTube, and I also believe Xunlei has some comparative advantage to offer, especially it’s pure Chinese videos. I wonder Google China will capitalize this opportunity to explore the video advertising market in China? For Google, it seems that funding a potentially growth site in China is a good idea for them, at least it’s not the only strategy they can pursue with the dominant position they have in Internet, and money as well. But I really hope that Google will live up with their motto, i.e. “Don’t be evil” in China, and throughout the world.