The Brazen Strategy Behind China Tech’s Growth

View Chinese tech world from a set of starting conditions: rules of the game that then affect actions of the players.  In China, these were having mobile as the default installation base, a rich heritage of free-to-play (F2P) developers and a large time-rich but cash-poor population who want to consume entertainment.

Livestreaming as a medium is a conflation of a product as well as as a distribution channel. It exists on a spectrum of being pure entertainment on one-side and a new go-to-market strategies on the other, with different kinds of monetisation models for each side. While western startups have centred around the 'livestreaming as product' theme, China... See more

Building this alternate universe didn’t happen overnight. It required market-driven entrepreneurs, mobile-first users, innovative super-apps, dense cities, cheap labor, mobile payments, and a government-sponsored culture shift. It’s been a messy, expensive, and disruptive process, but the payoff has been tremendous. China has built a roster of tech

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How did an app designed by two guys in Shanghai managed to run circles around U.S. video apps from YouTube to Facebook to Instagram to Snapchat, becoming the most fertile source for meme origination, mutation, and dissemination in a culture so different from the one in which it was built?

In the short run, this cash-flow stimulated the Chinese economy and pumped up valuations. But the long-term legacy of this movement is the data environment it created. By enrolling the vendors, processing the orders, delivering the food, and taking in the payments, China’s O2O champions began amassing a wealth of real-world data on the consumption

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