I just come back from Mobile Monday Beijing’s 16th event, today’s topic is Mobile and Web Reunited, to talk about the trends of convergence of mobile and web services. However, Paul and I did not figure out why it’s RE-united.
Today’s session invited Alvin Yang from Tencent, which has most popular mobile client in China, Mobile QQ; Jyri Salomaa from Nokia; and Alan Zhang from Baidu. They all give some introduction about their companies offerings in mobile Internet before the panel discussion.
Obviously Tencent has a large scale of services on mobile as it does on web, so you can chat via mobile QQ, play casual games, have virtual pets, and so on. Alvin said Tencent now has over 288 million active users either on mobile or on web, that’s about two times of the number of whole Internet users in China.
Nokia is working on the transition from a hardware manufacturer into a Internet service company. It also has a big plan on providing various services from social networking to content distribution on mobile phone. Jyri said there are about 90 million hits of Nokia’s mobile sites every month, among them about two third comes from China. I’m just curious that Jyri did not mention Widsets in his presentation, but when I talked with him later, he said Widsets is a very important part of Nokia’s Internet strategy, it is related to most of Nokia’s services and he likes it.
Alan introduced Baidu’s mobile search services, including web search, local search, Baidu Postbar, Baidu Knows, News search and others. The traffic of Baidu’s wap site increased 74% in 2007Q2 than Q1. Alan said they have done tried all current SMS search services, he think the “sms search is simple, but not reliable”, the search results are from from ideal, so Baidu doesn’t provide sms search. Acutally, Google China has just launched its sms search service in China recently.
When asked about business model, the sale of virtual items on QQ is the major revenue source as it does on web. Baidu’s mobile search has two kinds of revenue source so far, one is search related ads, esp. local search ads based on pay per call model, another is revenue sharing with ringtone and picture content providers. But the revenue from mobile search is still trivial so far.
I also asked a question: many mobile Internet service providers try all means to work with mobile phone manufacturers to have their software pre-installed in phones, is it a key success factors for mobile Internet. Even though Alvin and Alan thought the most important is the service which will address users’ demand, they all thought it is critical to have partnerships with manufacturers in this early day to get more people to have chance to try the service. So both Tencent and Baidu are close partners of Nokia. But for startups, maybe it is not so lucky for them to have opportunities to work closely with handset manufacturers to pre-install their clients. What’s your opinion on this problem.
ps. I’m not sure whether I remember all the data right, just correct me if I’m wrong.
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