btrax blog

It’s been a while since Sramana Mitra has defined “Web 3.0”. She predicted that the next generation of Web technology would aim to integrate a variable “Place” with Content, Commerce, Community, Context, Personalization, and Vertical Search. And the trend is following. Nowadays, for example, you search for a local (community) car dealer near you. You see the locations on maps, and you can drive there instantly. But if I were a customer, I would need more information. Even after these recall news, suppose I am still interested in the gray color the Prius with a sun roof. I want to test drive it to make sure that the pedal is fixed.  I want the best deal. Which dealers have the exact car in stock? I don’t want to waste my time driving around to dealers on the map to find the answer to my question.

I Want...

Photo by xwelhamite

According to Sramana, the “place” variable is more than just location, but it shows where ‘things’ and ‘places’ are that you are searching for through GPS. Then people want to take actions. They want to visit the place and make a purchase or dine out after they search “Place”. So people want to be sure that they do not waste time when they visit these places. They want to know inventories, available spots, menus, and other information when they search for their target places.

Photo by rnair

As these data became accessible by the general public,  it will get difficult  to draw a line between trade secret and public information. If a competitive company gets the data of your inventories and prices, it can take an advantage of them. They may offer a lower price of the same item or they may promote an item in different colors which you don’t have. Suppose you want to protect your website code from viewers, then you need to hide the “View Source” option. If you want to disclose anything to a certain group of people, you could send out passwords and login names. But it prevents timely interaction and people may not want to go through the trouble of getting login information.

It is said that Silicon Valley has a spirit of sharing information. Its employee mobility rate is very high. They also move within a small geographic area. And people talk! So off the record, it is hard to keep trade secrets. In addition, it is said that Silicon Valley does not appreciate people suing former employees over the trade secret violations.  So it seems that the Silicon Valley’s love for Information Sharing is likely to prevail.

If someone asked you to name the top 10 websites in Amercia, most likely you could come up with a few or even most of them. Google.  Facebook. eBay. Wikipedia.

But could you name the top 10 in China?

What we think of the web is shaped largely by the few sites we use constantly. But those sites can differ widely country to country.

As businessness continue look for new markets, especially in Asia, knowing web landmarks becomes critical to succesfully navigating a foreign audience’s home landscape.

Towards that, Alexa’s ranking of the most trafficked sites in China is a good test of your knowledge of China’s Internet world:

1. Baidu.com
Baidu is the Google of China. It is the most popular search engine site, indexing over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files. Baidu was also the first Chinese company listed on the NASDAQ-100.

2. QQ.COM
People in China do not use AIM or Google Chat. This is were juggernaut QQ comes in with its popular instant message platform serving over 300 million users. It includes videos,  online shopping, search, games, and ringtone downloads for users.

3. Google China
Although much is made of Google lagging behind Baidu in search, Google’s China engine still has 30% of the search market while hauling in enough traffic to make the top three among all website in China with 338 million internet users.

4. Sina (新浪新闻中心)
Founded in 2001, Sina.com is the largest Chinese-language infotainment web portal with almost 100 million registered users. Users can read news, discuss with others, and browse photos.

5. Taobao 淘宝网
Taobao was founded by Alibaba Group and is the Amazon of China with 78 percent of the Chinese domestic online consumer market for online shopping. With over 170 million registered users, it has become the primary e-commerce site for people in China.

6. Google
Google’s English site also performs very well in China with a healthy showing in traffic.

7. 163.com 网易
163.com is a rapidly growing web portal site with 1.8 million visitors annually. The site’s primary draw is online gaming, and majority of the visitors visit the site to play online games.

8. Sohu 搜狐
Sohu is another search engine that provides latest news and information, entertainment, and communications. It attracted 250 million visitors with its online gaming.

9. SOSO搜搜
SOSO is a sister company of QQ – both are owned by web business giant Tencent. It is rapidly growing more popular in China with users drawn in by photos, entertainment, and music.

10. Youku (优酷)
China’s homegrown YouTube 149 million unique visitors and 57 million visitors from internet café, translating into RMB 200 million of revenue in 2009. Visitors spent a total of 229 million hours on the site in October 2009 alone.

Photo by Peter Fuchs

Silicon Valley is the place where Netscape lost its war. The competition of browsers is fierce and harsh here. But without fear, a new browser has entered the market. It was born in Japan. It is named Lunascape. It is very Japanesque when you see the design templates of the background which you can choose from. They have samurai and kimono color backgrounds.

Lunascape opens multiple windows vertically

Lunascape is the world’s first and only triple engine browser. It has been downloaded over 15 million times and it’s available globally in 11 languages. The download is free and you can open three different web design engines in one page and they are Trident (Internet Explorer), Gecko (Firefox), and Webkit (Safari and Google Chrome). They say they are very fast with the triple engine and triple add-ons.

Professionally, I enjoy it when I have to test sites with different browsers. All I need to do is to open all three of them in one page and compare the layout. All three pages can be displayed vertically or horizontally in one page. It is pretty convenient.

The question is how much market share Lunascape can get in this competitive market. Internet Explorer is dominating because Microsoft bundled with computers. Since Mozilla has Mozilla Foundation (non-profit) and Mozilla Corporation (for profit organizations) to support Firefox, the non-profit gets donations which are used by Mozilla Corporation. Firefox gets money from Google by having its search engine on the browser, but besides that it is said that they get donations.  And the strength of Firefox is that it is an open source browser. Everyone tries to fix the problems andmake it better. Lunascape is not an open source browser yet.

Black pins of Firefox Photo by flod

Since Google came out with its own browser, I doubt how much longer it will stay generous to other browsers. The competition will be fierce. But all browsers have passionate fans to protect them. It seems that Lunascape survival depends upon how many passionate fans it can create.

隨著手機網路的技術日益成熟和普及,越來越多公司利用手機網路的方便性來開發它們新的產品，而社交網站就是一個最好的例子。最近最受矚目的莫過於Foursquare了。Foursquare是一個以所在地為基礎再加上整合了遊戲內容的社交網站。 當用戶到了一個地方就可以在手機上用Foursquare “報到” (check-in)以取得分數或徽章, 在同一個地方裡, “報到” 越多的人就可以變成 “市長” (Mayor), 而“市長” 有時還可以獲得特定的促銷。

雖然Foursquare還算是相當新的公司，但是在短短幾個月就吸引了40萬位瀏覽人數，而隨著Foursquare已經越來越受歡迎，最近更多人在談論的就是Foursquare 和Intel 的合作。在今年的消費者電子展(CES 2010)，Intel充分利用了Foursquare來吸引大眾的目光也更進一步達到了宣傳的效果。

隨著以所在地為基礎的社交網站越來越受到矚目, 以讓用戶分享自己去過的地方的經驗而出名的Yelp也加入了競爭的行列。 雖然還不知道最終誰可以在所在地為基礎的社交網站中領先群雄, 但毫無疑問的是, “報到” (check-in) 這個新的點子將會越來越常出現在我們日常生活中。

Photos by Byron Bay Food and Joshua Kaufman

Hello.  I’d like to introduce myself as Erin, one of the new btrax interns.  Lisa asked me to write about my internship experience up to this point, to which I will gladly oblige. But to understand my point of view on my btrax internship experience, I want to tell you a little bit about my work history.

I’ve worked at two other internships within the two years, both for print media, but I’ve never had the opportunity to intern for a web agency.  Initially I wanted to begin my career in website design and HTML/CSS coding, but I slowly gravitated towards print design, as the concepts for me felt a little easier to grasp at that moment.  After my second internship I felt that I wanted to come back into web design since, in the long run, I didn’t want to forget everything I learned about web design and coding.

I started working at btrax a little over a month ago, shortly before Thanksgiving, and the experience has been nothing short of amazing.  What may seem like mundane work to some people is actually very eye-opening to me, as in my past two internships I’ve only worked as a lone in-house design intern at a university organization and a small business, respectively.  Outside of classroom assignments I’ve never worked with a team to complete a project, and so far I’ve learned something new about designing for every day I’ve worked here.

From participation in my first btrax project, I found that even the small tasks (photo editing and inserting chunks of code into pages) could take hours to do, and understandably without someone to take care of the little things it could easily push a project deadline back a day or two. Designers here often work on two or more projects at a time, leaving a very tight time frame for small tasks like photo editing and placing lightboxes into pages.  I helped the team edit product photos, and with my HTML/CSS knowledge I also inserted Javascript and CSS for a photo lightbox as well as write a basic style sheet and some HTML for their photo credit page.  I won’t lie; it was a little intimidating writing code onto those pages because they contained a lot of PHP, and I’ve never dealt with PHP before.  More importantly, I was afraid I would change something that shouldn’t have been changed, ultimately creating more work for the team than they had already.  But careful navigation helped me change what I needed, and by the end of the day I felt tired yet accomplished, even by doing the “grunt work” for the site.

After that first project, I felt I accomplished something great by allowing the designers to work on the more important parts of the project while I took care of the smaller time-consuming tasks.  Web design called to me once again, and I could not resist this time; I’ve finally found my design comfort zone.  While web and print design both have their pros and cons, I felt more accomplished working on a small part of a website than I did with, say, a large poster or a set of flyers for a given event.  This isn’t to say that I don’t love creating print advertising materials, but in the long run I am more motivated to work on web design than on print design.

I continue to be thankful that I am an intern at btrax; this internship feeds my hunger for knowledge about corporate web design and branding.  Before this I had trouble envisioning and designing on a corporate level; I can safely say that now that I’m learning to tune my style to corporate, professional websites and their respective branding systems.  It is mentally exhausting at times to work on a project, but at the end of the day I always go home satisfied with what I’ve done at btrax.

For those who wished instead to skim my entry, the faces on the oranges are (more or less) how i feel when i come to work for btrax every day.

Twitter and Facebook both have global ambitions. And we know global means China on the horizon.

However, Chinese people already have a huge array of social media options – many of them developed by Chinese. These regional players have been quicker to capitalize on their deeper cultural knowledge, but their approach to growth might look very familiar.

The majority of the users are young, and almost 80% of them are referred by friends, classmates, or colleagues. On average, every user owns 2.78 accounts on social media sites, and most of the users use social media for entertainments, and 27.4% of users play mini games.

QQ alumni
The #1 social networking site in China. In terms of registered users, it has attracted the most users out of all social networking sites in China.
572.3 million total registered users

Facebook
The world’s most popular social networking site isn’t big in China. Although China’s government has blocked them without much explanation, dedicated mainland users still find ways to access it.

In contrast, Facebook is hugely popular in Taiwan (which also uses Mandarin) and is one of the fastest growing countries for Facebook with about 367,400 new registered users each week.
5 million Taiwanese users
56,480 Chinese users

Twitter
There are many clone sites of Twitter in China – partly helped along by the Chinese government’s enthusiastic blocking of Twitter.

TaoTao, which was launched by the same creators of QQ, is the biggest Twitter doppelganger with 51 million users. However, the terms of use limit what content can be put on the site.

Despite the challenges, Chinese users thirst for tweets from celebrities like Britney Spears, Shaquille O’Neal and Ashton Kutcher knows no limit and work-arounds proliferate.

Youku

There are 113 million unique users visiting video sharing sites every week in China. The market is definitely attractive for growing foreign social media sites, but most have failed due to the same challenges facing Facebook and Twitter – including video giant YouTube. Youku is the most popular video sharing site operated by Chinese in Chinaand and ranks among the top ten most trafficked site in China.
Estimated 6 million+

Bababian
Bababian is the Chinese clone of Flickr. One interesting difference is that it not only allows users to upload personal photos, but also images of tings to sell from Tao Bao, a popular eBay-like Chinese online shopping site. Combining these two powerful features has been a boon to Bababian and has attracted a substantial following across the social web.