By: Yinglan Tan
The pace and style of innovation in China is producing some weird, some wonderful and some odd new products. Yinglan Tan concludes the three part series on Chinnovation.
There are many ways for Chinnovation to have a positive impact on your business, career and life. I will just list 10 here.
1. Video Call, without roaming and call charges. “ImiChat”, developed in Shanghai, is the first software in the world to make mobile video communication work effectively on 2.5G networks. It has entirely changed the concept that mobile video communication only works on 3G era. imiChat is not only a great innovation of technology, but also creates a new way of human communication. With “imiChat”, no matter where you are, which telecom network you are on, you are able to make video chat with any of the IMI users at anywhere, on any of network, without roaming charge and call charge, as long as with GPRS coverage.
2. Increase your business followers exponentially by unlocking China’s demand. Want to increase your followers on social networks, apart from Twitter, Facebook and Youtube? With Twitter blocked in China (along with other popular American websites like Facebook and Youtube), Bill Gates signed up for the Sina microblog, writing his posts in English. More than 114,000 users have begun following the microblog as of Thursday afternoon. Sign up for Sina microblog here: t.sina.com.cn/
3. Source for suppliers at half the cost. Trying to find quality suppliers? Founded by Jack Ma in 1999, Alibaba is a Hangzhou-based family of Internet-based businesses that includes business-to-business international trade, online retail and payment platforms and data-centric cloud computing services. It serves to bring together importers and exporters from more than 240 countries and regions. These marketplaces have more than 50 million registered users. Find your suppliers http://www.alibaba.com/
4. Double your sales lead via disruptive targeted advertising. Focusmedia Holding (NASDAQ: FMCN) is a Chinese media company which operates the largest out-of-home advertising network in that country, consisting predominantly of digital signage screens. Providing targeted advertising for white-collar workers Focusmedia’s network includes: 83,256 screens showing advertising in sites including office buildings and outdoor, 40,736 screens in retail outlets, including 842 supermarkets, 1,196 hypermarkets and 1,897 convenience stores, 124,542 poster frames in elevators.
5. Wheels on demand. Foreigners who have been to China understand the pain of renting a car. On the occasion when a car is required, one SMS your coordinates on your mobile phone, and the reply is the nearest rental car options with various models and colour selection. You walk over to your chosen car and you unlock the car via a secure SMS and password. A parking ticket that you pick up on the road is scanned and sent to your email address with billing options. As you reach your destination, you park your car in a designated parking lot and lock the car with an SMS. Science Fiction? No, welcome to eHi.
6. Co-habit with a movie-star / virtual girlfriend. Want to cohabit with a Chinese movie star? This is not Fiction. Ipart allows users to interact with each other (in a Habbo hotel format) within an apartment-like environment like those idols on TV. In addition to that, the feedbacks from distributed questionnaires helped formulate the design of the site, making the site more romance-centric with high level security and a space free of online pornography and sexual trade, having found all these needs and concerns. Check out their services in www.ipart.cn
7. Help your children get the perfect SAT and GRE score. Think twice about the pricey Princeton Review prep classes for your children. New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc. (NYSE: EDU), is a provider of private educational services in China. It offers training on GRE, TOEFL and SAT training. It is well-known that all its instructors have to have perfect scores to have their contract renewed. Despite the class being conducted in the native tongue, its graduates consistently scores the highest in SAT, GRE and TOEFL worldwide.
8. Skip the movie theatre. You have checked Youtube and they took out all your favourite shows? Don’t worry. Watch the entire series of Friends and the latest movie for free. On Tudou.
9. Watch TV where and when you want. Watch TV-on-the-GO where you want, when you want and enjoy your media on-the-go. Stay connected to your digital entertainment on-the-go and help meet the demands of your mobile lifestyle. Capture and convert your home videos, recorded TV shows, and movies into popular video formats such. and take them with you on your portable media device and watch them anywhere you go.
10. Washing now takes half the time. In response to rural workers expressing the need to wash potatoes and clothes but could only afford one washing device, Haier released a washing machine capable of washing both clothes and potatoes. The Haier Ventless Washer / Dryer Combo (HWD1500) is the compact laundry solution for small spaces that requires no venting making it the perfect companion for small homes apartments cabins RVs and boats.
By Yinglan Tan
About the author
Yinglan Tan is the author of Chinnovation – How Chinese Innovators are Changing the World (Wiley, 2011) and The Way Of the VC: Having Top Venture Capitalists On Your Board (Wiley, 2010). He is a Kauffman Fellow and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University.