Troodon and Interfax presentations can be downloaded here and here .

Here is a round up on the event itself:
(big thanks to Bill Crampton from BTT China for having greatly contributed to this column)

According to Interfax (Iris Hong, China TMT team leader), the mobile market is encountering steady growth (see below for downloadable report) and China Mobile launched a new mobile gaming platform for connected mobile games, charging either on a monthly basis or per item (per level reached in the game) with free download. 9 games have been launched on this platform already.

Current challenges and conclusion from the panel :
- Operators dominates value chain and control the pipe, China Mobile is now owning 2 gaming platforms
- Technical difficulties – launching 3G is everything but easy, especially on unproven technology such as TD-SCDMA.
- Restructuring in industry creates uncertainty (and opportunities, but that remains to be seen actually).
- Current network speed is low, difficult to download over 1 mb in size
-High data fees in Beijing and Shanghai, much cheaper in Guangdong
-Faster data speed SHOULD mean fees go down, even in shanghai and Beijing, which are currently the most expensive in China.

Here is more on individual presentations.

Troodon – Larry Zhang, CEO and Founder

PC Online Gaming (POG) is tje most successful online business model in China
Do players only play Mobile Online Games (MOG) for short periods? actually, no! Average user spends 4.5 hours per day on the game – not snack, but dinner
60 percent are students, also soldiers who are not allowed to use the Internet
Troodon Heroes of Song doing well now
MOG user base is much bigger than POG base
Customers pay no less for MOG than for POG
Traffic fee #1 limitation, many users max out by 20th of the month or so, after they have used up their 100 MB data package.

China Mobile – Mr. Wang WeiXun, Sr Project Manager

China Mobile gaming platform needs work
Long term goal is to support large scale MOG services
China Mobile only invests in platform when business model is well established. Example; Fetion (Feixin) platform developed after QQ established market

Interfax-China TMT, News & Analysis

As a prelude to our upcoming event on online and mobile gaming convergence, Interfax has released, for MobileMonday Shanghai Community, the full summary of a landmark report on China Online and Mobile Gaming 2008-2010. The report is available at a discounted price for Momo members. Contact info (at) mobilemondayshanghai.net or enquiries (at) interfax.cn for pricing on the report.

3 speakers, 7 panelists, to cover the “talk of the town” topic, how to design a better user interface. According to IDEAN, a UI designed with convergence in mind (web, wap, etc) is key to driving better adoption of value-added services, reinforcing the look-and-feel identity and consistency. From a more practical perspective, all our speakers went beyond simply nice icon design to focus on the service to be delivered instead, and how to get there (on the phone) as rapidly as possible. In the case of Microsoft, the Beijing design team created a totally new concept called “Cupid” meant to build a UI environment for 2 mobile phone users, instead of one, enabling the viewing of a single videos between 2 screens, facilitating exchange of photos, multimedia files, contacts, bookmarks etc.
Overall, though, all our panelists, including leading handset vendors, agree that Chinese Mobile operators are still behind when it comes to specifying new UI to their handset suppliers. Brand recognition (some red-ish icons, for china mobile) still primes over ease of access to different value-added services.

Presentations can be downloaded here:

“Microsoft Cupid Concept” MicrosoftCupid_shared Momo shanghai.pdf
“Asentio Design” Asentio Momo shanghai.pdf
“Idean” IDEAN – Momo shanghai.pdf

and again a big thanks to our speakers on June 23rd:

M. Frank Chen, User Experience Designer, Microsoft’s Advanced Technology Center (Beijing).

M. Jonathan Li, Managing Partner, Ascentio Design

M. Marko Vanska, VP Business Development, General Manager APAC Region, Idean

In addition, our panel was composed of the 3 aforementioned speakers as well as:

Ms. Migi Tong, Founder, Shanghai Okra InTech Co.,Ltd.

M. Janny Cheng, UI Manager, Lenovo Mobile Division

M. Lin WeiLiang, UI Manager, LongCheer

 

]]> http://www.mobilemondayshanghai.net/articles/10-wrap-up-on-june-23-2008-event-on-mobile-ui Wed, 20 Aug 2008 03:33:38 -0500 Again a landmark event with record participation of over 130 people. Thank you all for your interest and participation. Thanks to our speakers, especially those coming from out of town (Roboo, Cgogo, Google)!

Photos here:

Take aways/downloads

First of all, we are pleased to announce that thanks to everyone’s participation, we have collected a bit more than RMB 5,000 during the event alone for the victims of the earthquake in Sichuan. We donated it to the Red Cross Society of China. More here:

Second, we had a terrific event the other night, and had the opportunity to compare “live” 5 different services. The demo was clearcut. A small competition led with a few volunteers highlighted cgogo has the best service in entertainment and general search (followed by Google). mInfo came first in the local search (followed by Google as well).

Third, when it comes to business models, the preconceived view about advertising seems not that obvious, according to Cgogo. Zhu Bo, the CEO, was actually pessimistic about the mobile search industry’s future, at least for “small players” else than Google or Baidu. In this regards, he considered advertising was only representing a tiny fraction of Cgogo’s revenue. Most of the revenue coming from content download (MVAS). The traditional SP model is back? we can definitely wonder and ponder. if actors like mInfo definitely rely on local search sponsored ads, all the other players (cgogo, Roboo and uucun) who thrive on content and entertainment, have build more balanced revenue streams. 2008 and 2009 will really tell if small actors can truly survive in a world dominated by search giants.

- Download the presentations here:

minfo.pdf
roboo.pdf
cgogo.pdf
uucun.pdf

See you on June 23rd for new event on Mobile User Interface design, with the likes of Lenovo, Microsoft, Longcheer, Ideo Design, etc.

]]> http://www.mobilemondayshanghai.net/articles/8-mobile-search-event-26-may-wrap-up Mon, 02 Jun 2008 10:59:49 -0500 With over 145 guests, including numerous VCs, startups, media agencies, MNCs (Nokia, Alcatel etc), large IT consulting firms, and market intelligence companies, LBS and mobile SNS momo event was the second most successful event of mobilemonday shanghai’s 2 year history.

A big thanks to Interfax for providing a well-suited LBS report, which complemented very nicely the panel, and to the speakers (Mu Rong, Jeff Lin) and Panelists (Iris Hong, Raymond Feng and our two keynotes). The panel was moderated by Bruno Bensaid.

Photos here

Take aways/downloads

Bedo’s innovations are coming from a powerful friend and profile matching algorithm implemented on top of a location-aware platform. The idea is to meet people who match your expectations/profile, locate them geographically and communicate with them anonymously (if needed) over IP (Bedo has designed a VoIP gateway over GPRS). Push to talk and broadcast-to-many are key features of the service. Revenue comes from premium features but mostly advertising from POI etc.
- Download the presentation here

Gypsii, a 2008-Navteq Global LBS Challenge Finalist, is positioned as a mobile lifestyle service. Gypsii is coming from a mapping and GPS background. Their focus and expertise is about sharing life experience (hence the UGC component), rather than communicating real-time with people in the vicinity (Bedo), though it is possible too (via sms, IM, or simply phone of course). The geo-tagging component plays an important part, as well as the “search venues and POI” and directions on how to get there. Search is an important component of Gypsii’s offering.
- Download the presentation here

Conclusion

Location-based services is a (or I would be tempted to say) THE natural evolution and must-have feature of all new SNS and UGC (User Generated Content) based networks. China is still too early here for mobile, as usual, but considering the sheer size of online SNS in China (if counting Tencent, we talk of at least 270 million accounts created, or otherwise 51.com, in the vicinity of 60 million), let’s hope that mobile location-aware components of existing online SNS should pop up pretty rapidly, with Yahoo as a trailblazer (with YahooConnect) in Asia. Note: YahooConnect is not available in China.

See you on May 26 for another landmark event on Mobile Search!!

]]> http://www.mobilemondayshanghai.net/articles/6-april-21---lbs-and-mobile-sns-event-wrap-up Wed, 30 Apr 2008 03:08:04 -0500

Interfax-China TMT, News & Analysis

The Interfax China TMT intelligence service delivers the latest headline news and inside perspective on the forces driving China’s TMT markets. Understand market dynamics through exclusive, unbiased commentary and analysis by our in-house analysts, coupled with interviews with industry experts on the ground in China. www.interfax.cn

Mobile Location Based Services, Investigative Report

Understand the current state of mobile location based services in China.
MobileMonday Shanghai & Interfax are proud to offer the Mobile Location Based Services report. The report provides an in-depth investigation into the development of this industry in China, including an examination of major trends and challenges facing the industry, the outlook for the market, major players and products, current state of the value chain and more. The report will be freely available at the event on Monday evening, and downloadable, upon free registration, after the event (please send download request with your professional detail to info@mobilemondayshanghai.net).

]]> http://www.mobilemondayshanghai.net/articles/5-mobile-location-based-services-investigative-report---for-momo-members Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:47:14 -0500