ReadWriteWeb Interview | China’s Silicon Valley?

Is Beijing the second best place in the world after Silicon Valley to build a startup? Is it the first one? Or something totally different like cupcakes and mooncakes? Our take is on ReadWriteWeb. Some extracts below:

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Plus Eight Star CEO Benjamin Joffe further addresses China’s meteoric growth in gaming and virtual goods. Joffe frequently presents emerging trends in China’s mobile, telecom and Internet markets.

Explains Joffe, “The online gaming market is still booming despite being already very large. There are nine companies listed on NASDAQ and Hong Kong stock exchanges including Tencent. Their total market valuation is over $52 bln.” Joffe argues that while many Chinese companies began similar to their Western counterparts, founders quickly realized the need to generate revenue beyond the ad model. As the leading community portal in China, Tencent earned more than $1.5 billion dollars in revenue last year with 90% of that generated through virtual goods.

In addition to watching the social gaming space, Joffe suggests that technologists look for interesting plays from the business social networking space and from a unique matchmaking service with a hybrid call center/online component called Zhenai.

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Some additional quotes from the CEO of our partner company CMUNE, developing real-time 3D social games.

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Because of China’s leadership in the gaming sector, CMUNE CEO Ludovic Bodin is taking Chinese revenue models and applying them to his Western-launched products such as Paradise Paintball.

Says Bodin, “China is one of the most advanced country in the world for online gaming and has strong knowledge of the sale of virtual goods as a primary business model. CMUNE is taking the best practices in China and adapting for a non-Chinese context and audience. Developing here gives us an advantage to later launch into the Chinese market. ”

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+8* | Plus Eight Star looks at China, Japan and Korea because with more Internet and mobile users than the US and Europe combined, they must be up to something. @plus8star