Tuyuan, A Photo-Centric Social Network

By Gang Lu on May 15, 2008 · Filed Under China Web2

Tuyuan, a Beijing-based startup allows users to do the online social networking by using Facial Recognition technology. Surprisingly, Tuyuan was first discovered by TechCrunch, but as usual, Mike seems not very serious about the Chinese market, still.

In Tuyuan, once you upload the photos, the faces on these photos can be automatically recognized, i.e. your friends can be discovered automatically and tagged by their faces. We had a chat and also a few email exchange with Huazhang Shen, the founder of Tuyuan. The following summarizes our conversation:

1. About Tuyuan

Tuyuan.com is a very new web site, but as a project it was started in early 2005. Like many other startups, Shen started it in his living room, together with several friends. The project was not really like what Tuyuan.com is doing today, but both focus on the basic elements, Photos and People.

Shen said, “Many people own digital cameras or camera phones nowadays. Like most of us, I enjoy taking photos of my family and friends, but I am far from a real photographer. Tuyuan is for people just like me - none-professional photographers. We are accumulating more and more photos in our hard drives, which vividly record our lives and memories, but it’s still very hard to share and enjoy them. That’s why I started this project. I think if we can build something to solve this problem for us, we can help many people to better share and enjoy their photos. ” Read more

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UCWeb, The Next Maxthon On Mobile?

By Gang Lu on May 12, 2008 · Filed Under Mobile Solution

There is no doubt that Maxthon is still the No.1 Chinese browser in the market, but we can see that the competition is getting more intense. Tencent has its so called TT browser bundled with QQ for a long time, Firefox is more and more accepted by high educated Internet users; If you search for 浏览器 (means Browser in Chinese), there are a couple of Chinese browsers which are good alternatives. I have tried one called EnjoyIE developed by a team based in Beijing. Even though the founder told me that he was doing this for his own interest, but the fact is that this browser has already got 2 millions users and for me it is working even faster than Maxthon.

Who can compete with Maxthon in China? It is far too early to have an answer. However, if we turn our eyes to the Mobile browser market, the answer seems a bit more clearer. A Guangzhou based company called UCWeb really has the chance. Reading the propaganda I got weeks ago in Beijing and playing it on my N95, UCWeb is an impressive product on mobile devices indeed. It has the versions for Java (MIDP2.0), Symbian, SP/PPC, Brew and MTK; has the download management; supports web page optimisation for mobile devices; multi-tab browsing; RSS subscription and some others. UCWeb now has over 25 millions users, 1.5 millions daily active users. The future of UCWeb is quite promising.

Firefox’s mobile version is still somewhere, but UCWeb has released its English version (version 5.1) last July, hopefully its recent version 6.0 will come in English soon. And, the exciting news I heard is that the iPhone version of UCWeb is coming soon.

Whatsoever, the battle field of the coming browser war will be on mobile!

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