Chinamode 2010[C] is a competition to choose the best web services and apps in Mainland China, which is co-organized by 25 tech blogs and 10 tech news media in the country. Its award-presenting ceremony is scheduled to be held in Beijing on the 24th of this month, where 17 experts from VC firms, tech media and successful tech companies will choose the best in each service category. Currently 45 finalists are nominated as a result of online votes by Chinese Internet users. Let’s see them and foresee what will lead Chinese Internet trends in the year of 2011.
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Category 1: Life and Consumer-related Services
Meituan.com[C] (美团网) is China’s first deal of the day service and offers discount coupons for restaurants, bars, karaoke rooms, spa and hair salons in major cities of the country.
Lashou.com[C] (拉手网) is a flash marketing site like a combination of Groupon and Foursquare features. Their deals of the day are now available in more than 200 cities across the country.
Nuomi.com[C] (糯米网) is also a deal of the day site and intend to target relatively high-end consumers. The synergy effects made from integration with social network Renren.com[C] (人人网) and entertainment news portal Mop.com[C](猫扑), both of which belong to Nuomi’s parent company Oak Pacific Interactive (千橡互动集团), help them spread the discount deals out more efficiently.
Booksfly.com[C] (书飞网) is an online book rental service. They provide several types of membership programs for families, colleagues and roommates.
Taotaosou.com[C] (淘淘搜) is an image-based shopping search engine and helps you find a product you want at lowest prices only with a picture of it. You never need to enter keywords. Taotaosou aggregates product data including image, price, style and color from a bunch of e-commerce sites such as Taobao[C](淘宝网), and sorts them out in accordance with the attribute similarity, so Taotaosou users can easily compare them in a page.
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Category 2: Social media
Sina Micro-blog [C] (新浪微博) is a Twitter-like service by China’s leading portal site and allows users to publish text and pictures through PC/mobile web access, SMS and MMS. It has the largest number of micro-blog users in the country. On the service, more than 250 million tweets are published every day, and 38% of them has come from cellphone handsets.
Mtime [C] (时光网) is a place to find movie related information and to criticize movies. It is similar to IMDb (The Internet Movie Database) in U.S., and has engaged relatively veteran movie fans. It has taken several years to achieve a database covering tens of thousand of movies and the world’s latest hits, and tens of thousand of movie fans visit the site every day.
Tencent Micro-blog [C] (腾讯微博) is also a Twitter-like service by China’s leading portal QQ.com[C] of Tencent. You’re allowed to publish updates in 140 Chinese characters each.
Xianguo.com[C] (鲜果联播) is a popular online RSS reader and a Twitter-like micro-blog by China’s Digg-like Xianguo. With an API for integrating with popular blog service platforms, you are allowed to share updates with more users by inserting a text in your RSS messages.
Category 3: Entertainment Services of The Year
Beijing-based Ismole.com Game Network Inc.[C] (奇矩互动(北京)科技有限公司) has developed a new social game called Ninja Village that allows you to not only cultivate crops but also design and construct a village as you wish to. It is promoted in association with major Chinese portal sites.
Douban.fm[C] (豆瓣电台) is an Internet radio service launched by Douban[C](豆瓣), a Chinese website providing user review and recommendation services for movies, books and music. You may listen to the programs with the FireFox plug-in, the iPhone app and the Android apps. It’s very similar to Last.fm. Based on accumulated data records, it lists you a recommendation of what you may be interested in listening to.
Qiyi.com[C] (奇艺网) is an independent online video website launched by China’s search engine tycoon Baidu in January 2010. In February 2010, Qiyi got an investment of USD 50M from Rhode Island-headquartered Providence Equity Partners. Then the shareholders of the company invited Dr. Gong Yu[C] (龚宇) as the CEO, and the service was officially launched in April 2010. By setting up multiple channels such as dramas, movies, cartoon, music and arts, a variety of licensed programming meet the growing needs of Internet video watchers.
Sanguosha[C] (三国杀 , meaning the battles of three kingdoms) is originally a card game of battle, and its online edition was developed for an Internet game platform in June 2009. Every player plays as an either general of three kingdoms in the game.
Kugou.com[C] (酷狗音乐) is committed to Internet users and digital music industry by providing the best solution. The company aims to be the largest hub of promoting digital music content in the Asia Pacific region. It provides a free music player having several features such as recommended song search results, artist ranking and karaoke subtitles.
Via: Social Beta [C]
(To be continued to an upcoming post.)
千橡互动集团
Masaru IKEDA
Masuru, great post! Thnaks for this sum-up in English of nominees of Chinamode 2010 with description of each service!! Not so easy to be aware of what is hot in China when you are not fluent in Chinese. Looking forward for the next articles!
Thanks. I’m trying the next (2/3).
A few weeks ago I wrote this, and its award winners are described on @CNNGo at http://www.cnngo.com/shanghai/life/chinamode-awards-china-awards-homegrown-innovation-736090
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