China’s social and mobile companies set to shake the tech world

Abstract

The days of China simply being a country that copies,
pirates and counterfeits US and European technology are coming to
end. Platforms like social and mobile are at the forefront of
China’s current technological revolution. The interconnectedness of
the modern world is creating a whole host of ways to market a
product and/or a service. Chinese blogs, micro-blogs, content
communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds and
virtual social worlds are leading this new technological
revolution. Companies like WeChat, QQ, Weibo, Hexun, Youku,
Jiepang, Qieke, Ushi, Taobao and Ku6 are all experiencing
exponential growth. In China, the competition for consumers is
incredibly fierce, especially in the social media space. This
competition, however, does have a dark side: many companies
regularly employ ‘artificial writers’ to seed positive content
about themselves online and attack competitors with negative news
they hope will go viral. On the e-commerce front, Taobao has formed
a synergistic partnership in which store owners on Taobao create
accounts on Weibo and utilise it as a channel to market their
products and communicate with customers. On the virtual social
world front, China might also be leading the world with sites like
yy.com, which have found a way to monetise karaoke. Technology has
always moved at the speed of light, but today the barriers of
culture, language and communication are falling by the wayside and
China is finding itself at the forefront of this new technological
revolution.