Mingtiandi

Is Search Now A Strategic Industry in China?

After not too much time observing China’s economy it becomes clear that the government likes to arrange organised competition in industries it considers strategic. Thus the country gets three major airlines – China Eastern, China Southern and Air China, as well as three major mobile phone networks in China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom.

Now, with the announcement last week of two major new search engine companies, it appears that search is joining transportation, phone networks and Internet service providers as a strategic industry to be managed more directly by the government. And maybe China will soon have three search giants to match up with its telephone and airline triplets.

The first search engine deal announced last week was an alliance between ecommerce giant Alibaba and online portal Sohu to upgrade Sohu’s existing search product, Sogou.com. In a statement on Monday the 9^th, Sohu announced that Alibaba and Yunfeng, an investment fund cofounded by Alibaba’s chairman, Jack Ma would be buying 16 percent of Sogou.

Another 16 percent of the company would be invested by a fund affiliated with Sohu chaiman Charles Zhang. And Sogou could use the help. In a search market dominated by Baidu with 70% share, and Google with 24.2%, Sogou currently ranks third, but has only 0.8% market share according to recent market research by third party analysts.

The second, and more surprising deal was a link up announced on Friday between Xinhua and China Mobile to start yet another search engine. Xinhua, a news agency belonging to the central government which also acts as a propaganda organ and sometimes intelligence gathering body and China largest cellular carrier seem like unusual partners for an Internet venture, and the exact terms of the transaction have yet to be announced. The New York Times on Friday described the deal as follows, “In an apparent bid to extend its control over the Internet and cash in on the rapid growth of mobile devices, China plans to create a government-controlled search engine.”

While these two new search engine ventures being announced in a single week, particularly so closely following the recent Google controversy, could be a coincidence, very few major transactions in an economy that is still largely government controlled happen in such a random way.

Although Baidu, Sohu and Alibaba are all private companies, and thus very different creatures from state-owned enterprises such as China Mobile or the airlines, in practice China’s government requires any large media enterprise to be closely aligned with the bureaucracy and these major firms often serve as unofficial market champions for the nation, particularly once they have gone public and become internationally recognisable symbols of the country’s media markets.

At the same time, the government is careful not to have any market dominated too much by a single company and it actively works to encourage (and organise) some competition among industry heavyweights. Thus the airline industry was split into three companies from a single parent, and part of the 3G market was set aside for the lesser cell phone players, China Unicom and China Telecom.

Now a similar scenario seems to be appearing in search and it most likely means that the government is taking search engines seriously as strategic national interest. (Bad news if you are Google). In a story that Xinhua published regarding its new joint venture with China Mobile, the news agency portrayed its search engine enterprise in a directly political manner. According to the report, the new search engine is intended to “better serve the work of the Party and the nation and to practically protect national interests…and to expand the reach and the ability in and outside China of the country’s mainstream media to guide public opinion.”

While that mission statement would seem to doom the new search product with consumers, the massive market penetration of China Mobile could give the new project a significant advantage with mobile users.

While it is too early to tell what will happen in China’s search market, if the moves last week were officially sanctioned measures to “harmonise” the market, there could be some moves in the pipeline to curb Baidu’s dominance and provide a boost to the new players. This could take the form of reserving parts of newly developing markets for the newcomers or through other measures designed to keep a what would be perceived to competitive balance in the market.

The other side of this equation is that if this recognition of search as a strategic industry is happening as speculated here, then opportunities for Google or other international companies to achieve gains in the market are likely to all but disappear.

While China welcomes foreign investment in most industries, it is still ambivalent about international involvement in the media sector, particularly with regard to consumer-facing products. Anything which smacks of mass media is likely to be all but closed off to foreign involvement, and search, with its ability to lead users to new information may be seen as too strategic to be left to the open market.

Posted in Economy | No Comments »

Google Smartens Up — Starts Copying RightSite

There was big news in the tech world today as sources within Google let it be known that the company was moving away from using Windows on its workstations.  At RightSite, we can only say, “What took you so long?”

As reported today in the Financial Times, Google has put in place measures that make it difficult for employees to get a Windows machine and encourage users to rely on either Mac OS X or Linux for their workstations.  As reported by the FT,

“We’re not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort,” said one Google employee.

At RightSite, where we are big proponents of free, open-source software (FOSS) we applaud this move. But we also have to wonder what took them so long.  Virtually since day one at RightSite we have been using Ubuntu Linux workstations, and there is very little that would make anyone on our team miss Windows.

And there is a whole lot more that makes us glad that we don’t use the world’s most security-exploited operating system.  One reason that RightSite goes open-source is because we are a poor startup operation that wants to stay legal.  But an even bigger reason we forgo Windows is that we don’t want the security hassles that come with Bill Gates OS baby.  Viruses, malware and other nasty stuff are very common in China, and instead of chasing staff to be careful about what they click on or hiring a squad of geeks to keep everyone’s machines clean, we just avoid most of the problems by not using Windows.

Not very often does RightSite get the jump on Google, but it’s nice to see those guys in Mountain View starting to catch up in the innovation game.

Try downloading Linux for your machine and see you next time here on Mingtiandi.

Posted in management, technology | No Comments »

Spoken Abbreviations in China

For any of you who stopped by Mingtiandi today looking for an update on China industrial real estate, let me start by apologising for disappointing you.  Although we took a trip to Jiaxing today to visit three industrial parks and meet with the investment promotion bureau of the city government, the most interesting ideas that came up today actually are about language, not about real estate.

Besides helping me to learn about China’s many industrial zones, working at RightSite has also given me many opportunities to brush up on my Mandarin and learn new vocabulary. I guess that I must be getting good at this stuff because I have started to notice what is to me a pattern in using abbreviated place names in spoken Chinese. These abbreviations are not only used to refer to single geographic locations, like a province or a city, but also for more informal areas such as groups of cities or sub-regions in a province.

The example that came up today occurred when at lunch with the leaders of Jiaxing’s investment promotion bureau we began discussing the differing styles of economic development practiced in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces. (Both of these province border Shanghai and make up part of the Yangtze River Delta, however, their governments take different approaches to fostering economic growth).

In comparing the northern region of Zhejiang near Shanghai (where Jiaxing is located) with the southern area of Jiangsu province which adjoins Shanghai to the north, our hosts referred to northern Zhejiang province (Zhejiang beibu 浙江北部) as “Zhebei (浙部),” and spoke of southern Jiangsu (Jiangsu nanbu 江苏南部) as “Sunan (苏部).”  Terms neither my local coworker nor myself had ever heard before, but seemed to be part of their normal conversation.

I was ready to cast this aside as some local quirk, except that we had encountered a similar case last week.

In meeting another investment promotion official in Shanghai, we were introduced to another similar spoken abbreviation for place names.  When comparing their city to its competitors in Jiangsu province, an investment  official from Jiading referred to the nearby cities of Wuxi, Suzhou and Changzhou as “XiSuChang” — taking the “Xi” from Wuxi, the “Su” from Suzhou, and the “Chang” from Changzhou. This kind of naming convention can be seen other places in referring to Chinese geographic locations, such the Hujingping highway (which connects Shanghai – also referred to by the character Hu — with Nanjing — thus the “Jing” character). You can also see an example in the name of the Sutong bridge in Jiangsu which connects Suzhou with Nantong.

Of course if you trace this thread back a little further, the name for Jiangsu province itself comes from the name of two cities in the region, Nanjing (customarily abbreviated as “Jiang”) and Suzhou — which contributes the “Su” in Jiangsu. Still further back, this same linguistic approach can be seen at work in the names of provinces like Hubei, Henan and other place names in Chinese.

In one of my many previous careers I studied linguistics for a couple of years, and learned to speak Vietnamese and Thai. However, I haven’t encountered another language that takes this particular type of “dice them up and splice them back together” approach to place names.  If any of you have other examples of how this convention is used in Chinese, or instances of it being used in other languages, I would be interested to hear about them.

Now I have to get back to helping China’s emerging cities link with the world on RightSite.

Posted in Language | No Comments »

Is RightSite the Biggest Drupal Site in the World?

As followers of this blog may know, RightSite was built using a content management system called Drupal, a development platform that seems to be going thermo-nuclear here in 2010.  While I have seen numerous examples of famous sites the world over being built in Drupal, including the official White House site, it has been suggested to me that RightSite may actually be the largest Drupal site in the world in terms of entries.

For those of you who are newcomers to this blog, RightSite.asia is the industrial real estate website operated by my company, RightSite. We are an online B2B platform for owners and occupiers to exchange information and arrange deals, as well as providing resources for facilitating real estate transactions.  But mostly we have listings.  Lots of listings. And this translates into a big site.

Big site in terms of lots of information.  RightSite now has more than 2700 detailed property listings, as well as listings of nearly 2000 industrial parks and economic zones all over China.  Put together, all of this information makes for a very large site. As of the latest count, RightSite had nearly 40,000 database nodes and the actual size of the database was more than 1 GB.

So does that make RightSite the biggest Drupal site in the world? I can find any data on this at this point.  But I would be willing to wager that we are still the biggest Drupal site in China.  And China is not a small place.

So does RightSite being big help you at all?  Not directly.  But by filling RightSite with this much data, we hope that we have established an important resource base for facilitating industrial real estate transactions. Now we are relying on the members of our community to keep contributing so that the site continues to support economic growth and industrial development across China.

Posted in technology, web development | No Comments »

Idiot-Proofing, Dropbox and the GFW

Most folks can only count on death and taxes. If you are managing a startup, then you get a bonus — you can count on death, taxes and at least one system failure a week.

By necessity, most startups run on the cheap. We forgo expensive systems and big teams in favour of lightweight, low-cost solutions that keep our fixed costs down and keep our companies “agile,” “lean,” or one of the many other euphemisms for flimsy. If you have been working at this game long enough, however, you will learn that running things lean may save you costs, but it can also end up wasting your time, unless you can find some low-cost ways to build in redundancy.

Today at RightSite we were deprived of one of our major systems when the file-sharing service Dropbox was suddenly blocked by the infamous Great Firewall of China (GFW).  We regularly use Dropbox as a combination of online backup and file sharing.  The service allows us to collaborate on files, such as editing the stories for our website, without having a physical file-server in our office or relying on emailing files back and forth.

Of course, we could rely on other services such as Google Docs, but the immense popularity of Docs means that it has always been too tempting of a target for potential blocking, so we have steered away from it for this reason.  Dropbox was innocuous and, I would have hoped, obscure enough to avoid the wrath of the authorities.  However, it seems we were wrong.  I don’t know what exactly the issue is, and no statement has been issued about the blocking (there never is) but I suspect that some naughty individuals were using the service to share anti-government materials.

Does the government have a legitimate beef with Dropbox?  Probably not.  But you have to remember that decisions on what gets blocked are not made at the politburo level. Nope.  It’s some little guy in a room someplace who probably has never heard of online backup, or even offline.  He just knows that somebody somewhere did something bad using Dropbox, so he hits the big BLOCK! button and you wake up with one of your favorite resources unavailable.

For the guys who work at big companies, this is just another thing to moan about in the bar, but if you are running your own company then this kind of down-time can mean a loss that you can’t afford. So we have to look for cheap ways to build redundancy into our systems. By planning for alternate backup and filesharing systems in advance, at RightSite we already have Jungledisk installed on all of our workstations to replace Dropbox.  Now we are busy looking at Opera Unite as a new alternate system.

So while the finance guys and bloggers will keep telling you to keep your company running on the cheap to make it financially viable, you will also have to look for ways to ensure that your company just keeps running when things go wrong. By the way, today is the day that we produce our weekly newsletter at RightSite.  Because we have alternate systems at the ready, our newsletter will get distributed tomorrow morning on schedule. Our customers are counting on it, so we are glad to have systems (and planning) that we can count on.

Posted in entrepreneurship, technology | 1 Comment »

RightSite Rejects Harvard PhD as Underqualified

As many of you who have read this blog may know, at RightSite, we take our recruitment very seriously. However, in case there are any would-be applicants out there who are unaware of our stringent requirements for new team members, I would like it to be known that today we rejected a Harvard PhD as lacking the necessary qualifications to make the cut at RightSite.

Here is actual proof of our selectivity in action:

Yup! Smart, beautiful and educated just isn’t enough to land a job at RightSite.  You have to show some style too.

Until next time, enjoy life in China and keep looking for the fun in every situation.

Posted in Whimsy, human resources | No Comments »

Setting Up an Intranet with Open Atrium

One of the key factors in the whether a startup is successful is how effectively the team collaborates in accomplishing their goals.  At RightSite we are a small team producing a very big website so we are always looking for tools that help us to share information and work together more efficiently, and setting up a company wiki or intranet is one of the key steps in attaining collaboration nirvana.

We use our intranet to share materials, especially documentation, on how RightSite works. Like any organisation in China, or team is constantly changing and we try to document all processes in the company and make sure this documentation is easily accessible and constantly updated.  Over the recent May holiday I downloaded Open Atrium and found it to be an easy to set up, free solution for building your own intranet in an afternoon.

Before you run away screaming, “I’m not a tech person,” let me add that I have no tech skills myself, and if you can set up a Wordpress blog and have a hosting package somewhere, or even a server in your office, then you can set up Open Atrium without help.  If you can’t muster that much tech savvy, then get your office tech guy to set it up.

Open Atrium is a pre-packaged installation of the Drupal CMS that comes set up with a blog, a project management system, a calendar, an email notification system and a user management system. When I was working at Global Sources about 10 years ago we had a three person team developing an intranet system for our company.  The project lasted several months and I’m not sure the product was anywhere near as powerful as what you are now able to download for free and set up in an afternoon.

Prior to setting up Open Atrium, RightSite had been using Google Sites, but that later was blocked in China. We also looked at using Zoho’s Wiki app, but found that the free version had a ridiculously low storage capacity (we store a lot of reference documents) and the paid versions quickly started costing about US$20/month.  Considering that the server that hosts RightSite costs less than US$100/month the Zoho solution seemed too expensive.

Now we were able to get the entire system running in an afternoon, on the same server that hosts RightSite, and we will be set to start working more effectively. Specifically, I am hoping to reduce the training time for new hires, ensure that we stick to best practices more effectively and allow all team members to contribute ideas about how to run our company better.

There is no technology that can give you an effective company culture, but smart managers need to be on the lookout for easy to use tools that will help keep their companies on the right track (without costing them more than a new salesperson).

If any of you have input on Open Atrium, or on setting up Wiki systems, then I invite your ideas.

Posted in human resources, management, technology | No Comments »

Advice On Getting Hired in China

Not This Kind of Reference!

Much is happening at RightSite these days. We are cashflow positive thanks to some strong sales this year, RightSite now ranks among the 5,000 most popular sites in China according to Alexa.com, and we have been putting countless hours into recruiting new team members so that we can grow even more.  (Which might be why I haven’t updated this blog in so long).

In doing all this recruiting, on top of the hiring that I have done in previous years and at prior jobs, I have learned a great deal about the hiring process in China, and would like to share some of this wisdom with both employers and job-seekers.

Despite whatever economic downturn may have occurred in China and all the newspaper stories about unemployed university graduates, 2010 seems to have brought the most competitive hiring market for employers in recent memory. Job advertisements bring in fewer applications and employers who attempt to follow methodical recruitment processes will find the most desirable candidates snatched up before their process is complete.

At RightSite we follow a fairly involved hiring process for a small firm.  We require all candidates to fill out an application, insist on resumes in English, do pre-interview screening by phone, have skills tests before interviews, face-to-face interviews and reference checks after the interview before we make any offers to candidates.

And it is this next to last step — the reference check which seems to be a rare creature in Shanghai.  After being an employer in Shanghai for eight years and employing somewhere north of 300 people, I have only been contacted for a reference twice. Even with the advent of online tools like LinkedIn.com which make it considerably easier to track down and contact former employers, virtually no one gets in touch.

Which leads me to my advice to job-seekers.  Feel free to inflate your resume. Pad your educational criteria. Fib about your employment history.  Even mislead people about your skills and experience. Because no one is really checking.

While every foreigner in the pub has heard stories of dishonest staff and companies being bilked of large sums of cash by sneaky team members, the main reason for this has nothing to do with any tendency towards dishonesty in China. Instead it has everything to do with employer carelessness and sloppy procedures.  If you leave cash lying on the sidewalk, people will pick it up. And if you give people the opportunity to make more money by falsifying their employment history, then they will take advantage of it.  So taking a chance on inflating your qualifications on an employment application is a safe strategy in China.

But not if you apply at RightSite.  Although we are a small company without full-time HR staff, we believe that ensuring a qualified team is the best way to build our company.  So we check references for managers, interns and even the ayi.  Last week we asked for references from four employment candidates. Two of them we never heard  from again. I am sure that those two people will have no problem finding jobs elsewhere.  And I’m also certain that RightSite will be better off with having these reference-less individuals working for someone else. Hopefully our competitors.

Until next time, enjoy the Expo fever and see you again soon on Mingtiandi.

Posted in human resources | 4 Comments »

Alexa Bricked Up in China

That's right -- keep out all possible light

As part of our continuing series on sites blocked in China, we are sad to announce today that Alexa.com is now being censored by the Great Firewall of China (GFW). Access to the site from China was first reported as interrupted on 27 December 2009.

For those of you unfamliar with the service, Alexa provides independent rankings and ratings of websites around the world.  While not the most reliable of measures, they do provide an independent means for judging the popularity of sites. Alexa achieves its rankings by anonymously registering the surfing habits of volunteers who install the Alexa toolbar.

There has been no word from the Chinese government (there never is) as to why this seemingly innocuous service is being blocked, nor any confirmation that it is indeed being blocked. However, users in Shanghai and other parts of China are unable to access Alexa, while users in other parts of the world can.  This also means that users in China who have installed the Alexa toolbar will no longer be able to have any of their traffic registered with Alexa.

The upshot of this move is two-fold:

• Users in China will have to find some other means of comparing website traffic (or access Alexa through a proxy)
• Sites located in China or who depend on users in China for a significant amount of their traffic (like RightSite) will see their Alexa rankings drop dramatically.

Since Alexa’s site contains no content other than rankings of sites, and since it is big enough to run its own servers and not share IP addresses with other sites, we are going to surmise that someone in the government was not happy with the way that the company was gathering its data.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Alexa launched a Chinese version of their site on October 15th of this year.  As services and sites in English are much more likely to be overlooked by the censors than those operating in Chinese, I would suspect that this development is somehow related to the authorities choosing this time to block this service that was founded in 1996.

Alas, since RightSite had only recently broken into the top 50,000 sites on Alexa worldwide, we are taking this news a bit hard.

Posted in Marketing | No Comments »

Gaining Ground on Google

RightSite Starts to Get Some Love

While the site that my company runs, RightSite.asia, is an industrial property website, our company’s core purpose is online marketing.  The service that we provide for our users is Internet-based promotion and that’s why RightSite’s online marketing is critical to our mission.  If we are successful at making RightSite popular on the Internet, then we have the means to help our users find more deals on the Internet. You can think of it as a specialised online marketing service for members of the industrial asset management community.

So it was a big milestone this week when I received a Google Alert that showed five new entries on the Internet related to RightSite. I have these Google Alerts set up to track information related to a number of topics on the net and I use the RightSite.asia alert to track our success at spreading the word about RightSite. The alert works by gathering the results of an Internet bot that automatically searches the Internet for new entries related to the keyword that I select, and then sending me an email with the results of that search. You can set these alerts up for various time intervals, but I have this one set up for daily reports.

So the upshot of all this boring tech stuff is that there were 5 new entries found on the Internet on that day about our company. Since my usual alerts show only one or two new links, this means big progress.  I’m sure Tiger Woods generates a few more hits than that, but I have no intention of driving into any fire hydrants just to improve my search results.

And if these links bring more visitors to RightSite, then it means more benefits for the businesses that list their properties and services on our site.

Posted in Marketing | No Comments »