China’s Internet Empires | Solid Strategy or Reckless Diversification?

China International Business interviewed us for a column on “China’s Internet Empires“, looking at how the largest Internet groups in China were diversifying. Is there a logic to it? Are they spreading themselves too thin trying to cover news, search, gaming, cloud computing, email, payment and social networking?

Is China Innovating? Innovation Semantics

Cultural bias, incremental changes and stereotypes about innovation and entrepreneurs come in the way of finding innovation.

+8* @ SXSW | Social Media and China: Different Than You Think!

This week was Austin’s South-by-South-West (SXSW) Interactive conference in Austin where I joined a panel on Social Media in China.

Tencent’s 2009 Annual Results | US$1.8B and US$765M Net Profit

Tencent made 3 times more money than Facebook in 2009 and could buy one MySpace with profits. How?

Techno-Darwinism | How China Innovates and Why Foreign Companies Fail

In the early 19th Century, Charles Darwin embarked on a five-year journey as a field naturalist. The story of this discovery teaches us that a lot can be learned from small differences. This applies to China’s digital scene as well. Here is how.

Rethinking Innovation at Stanford and Berkeley

Talks given at Stanford and Berkeley on Innovation and Asian tech scene.

Virtual Goods in Asia – The US Gold Rush Begins

This is the presentation we gave at the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco (you can fill the form below to download it). There were over 500+ attendees, it looks like the US market reaching $1bln is now getting a lot of attention.
We received nice coverage from:

Virtual Goods News: “Asia Driving the Virtual Goods Marketplace“
VentureBeat:
read more..

Mobile From East to West

This week we are in Jeju Island, South Korea for the LIFT Asia conference. We were invited yesterday by the Internet portal Daum (Korea’s #2 Internet portal) to give a workshop on the “Current State and Future of Mobile“. We decided to cover US (esp. iPhone), Japan and China.
Interestingly, the presentation already got about 5
read more..

5Cs of Chinese Innovation

This column illustrates how China is innovating, though in a different way we are used to in the West. It is a guest column written monthly for the Chinese business magazine “China Electronic Business” (invested by Jack Ma of Alibaba) and IT news site Interfax.
–
A few weeks ago Plus8Star was involved in bringing a group
read more..

True Names and the Digital Panopticon

This is a guest column written monthly for the Chinese business magazine “China Electronic Business” (invested by Jack Ma of Alibaba) and IT news site Interfax. This month’s column deals with digital identity with interesting cases from Science Fiction and today’s Asian digital scene.