Tom-Joost and Vakaka, Chinese Joost and Vatata, Video Streaming System

Joost is coming to China, partnered with Tom.com, a popular Chinese portal which is also running a Tom version of Skype. A friend said the Chinese version Joost was planned to be launched around Chinese new year (7th February) of 2008. I guess more Chinese channels will be added into Tom-Joost and the service will be free, i.e. revenue will rely on the video Ads.

Vakaka, reported the Chinese Joost is a Beijing-based startup providing free video on demand (VOD) and live streaming via P2P technology. Vakaka has been running nearly 6 months. Even though Chinese P2P video space is very crowded, the major players include PPLive, PPStream, UUSee and many others, Vakaka seems to find its place to drive itself forward.

Vakaka X-TV has a Joost-like UI, including channels, widget zone, playing control panel and setting panel. Unlike Joost or Babelgum, Vakaka supports both VOD and live streaming. The video offered on Vakaka are from its content partners and all copyrighted.

When I was looking for information about Vakaka X-TV, by mistake I jumped to another P2P video streaming system, called Vatata. I was totally confused by the names of Vakaka and Vatata at beginning, but in the end it is happy to learn that Vatata gets some cool features (assuming there is no connection between them). Vatata has just released a major update today, the last day of 2007. Now it supports most of the video formats, including Microsoft, Real, Flash, Apple, MPEG1/2/4, OGG/MKV etc and H.264. Vatata system consists of two sub-system: Vata, the back-end streaming platform and Tata the front-end player. Tata is absolutely fascinating. It supports On Screen Display (OSD) and allows plugins, which means you can run multiple modules (e.g. instant-messenger, channel list, etc) on top of the video screen, which just sounds like what Joost does. This is really interesting. So if PPLive, PPStream and so on adopt the Tata technology, there will be many more Chinese Joost coming out!

China, most likely is providing the best P2P video service in the world. Now Joost is here to join the competition, whether it can succeed I give it a big question mark. On the other hand, can we expect that one of the local services can stand out in the global market in near future? We will see.

December 31, 2007 · Filed Under China Web2, Webcrunch

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Innobook, A New Open Publishing and Sharing Platform

Innobook, co-founded by Xinyu Mao, Anbudangche and Jia Liu, was launched in late October, 2007. It is a free Chinese e-book publishing and sharing platform. In cooperation with Yeeyan, five e-books have been translated in Chinese and now free to download (25,000+ downloads so far) on Innobook, including Personal Branding (William Arruda), Next Generation Media: The Global Shift (by Richard Adler), The Bootstrapper’s Bible (by Seth Godin), Advertising 2.0 (by Paul Beelen), What is Social Media (by Antony Mayfield) under Creative Commons 2.5 license.

Led by Lei Zhang, founder of Yeeyan, the Chinese version of Inside Facebook has been published through traditional press recently. The three founders of Innobook met each other in Yeeyan, so I am asking Jia how she see the difference between Innobook and Yeeyan. Jia said: “Innobook and Yeeyan are basically partners. Innobook provides collectible PDF form e-books and arouses enjoyable reading experience. Moreover, we will focus more on Chinese content based e-books and that would be a different approach compared to translation. We don’t plan to publish our books through traditional presses due to high cost and time-consuming process. ”

Talking about the plan in 2008, Jia told me, “we will consider to get more contributors to help us out from content generation to editing and PDF production. Everybody could volunteer to contribute but without permission they can’t publish their final work. This policy is very demanding because we need to guarantee the quality of the e-books.”

Currently, the platform is operated in a non-profit manner contributing to Chinese readers by providing valuable free e-books and charity projects such as Red Pencil Plan through placing free advertisements both on the homepage and in the e-books. I do wish that Innobook can be more commercial at some stage. Passion can drive everything, but sometime we need profit to be the fuel.

“Innobook is working hard on e-books’ quality and quantity to enhance its influences within the Chinese Internet world. Future partners and advertisers are welcomed to contact the team regarding any cooperation opportunities.” Jia added.

Technorati tags: Innobook, Yeeyan