Event Report | Singapore Entrepreneur Week – Stories of Entrepreneurship from Asia
+8* Cyworld Event reports QQPublished November 30, 2008 at 6:53 pm No CommentsOur friends Howie and Mun Hew from the Mobile Monday Singapore + Open Web Asia mafia invited us to give a presentation on Asian SNS. We eventually decided to add some stories about the entrepreneurs behind the most successful services, and how they came about. The slideshow below was more a visual support than providing content (given the presentation conditions). We talked about Mixi (Japan’s largest SNS), Cyworld (Korea’s), Tencent (China’s largest IM-based SNS), DeNA (Japan’s largest game-centric SNS) and Xiaonei (China’s most popular Facebook lookalike).
The story of the service creation often has to do with foreign influence: Mixi was inspired was Friendster, Cyworld by the “6 degrees” theory, QQ by ICQ and Cyworld, Mobile Game Town by Cyworld and mobile game sites, Xiaonei by… you know who.
The story of the entrepreneurs behind those services is not always a happy one: the founders of Cyworld and Xiaonei ended up selling their creation for a fairly low price. The founders of Mixi, QQ and Mobile Game Town are still around and in a quite good position.
Overall, we wanted to give ideas on how to embrace external ideas, attract good advisors around to avoid losing the company to investors and focus on business models that have been proven, even if not in your territory. We are applying those ideas ourselves with CMUNE, the 3D social app startup we are involved with.
