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August 16 - September 16, 2019
Despite years of Mark Zuckerberg’s maneuvering, Facebook is still blocked in China;[1000] Google twice floated plans to unveil a Chinese search engine but backed down both times;[1001] Uber tried expanding into China but found it too expensive and sold its Chinese operations to local rival Didi Chuxing.[1002] What’s more, Chinese law requires tech companies to hand over user data to the government,[1003] which has made Facebook[1004] and Google[1005] reluctant to try expanding again.
The e-commerce giant Alibaba is like the Chinese Amazon.[1008] Tencent is the world’s biggest gaming company[1009] and the creator of the juggernaut social media app WeChat,[1010] so it’s a parallel to Facebook. Baidu dominates Chinese search[1011] like Google dominates the rest of the world. Keeping homegrown tech companies insulated from foreign competition has clearly worked for China, so they’ll probably want to keep it that way.
Facebook still manages to make money in the country: a tenth of Facebook’s global revenue comes from China.[1015]
This is because Chinese companies are eager to advertise to Facebook’s international customers, buying billions of dollars in Facebook ads a year.[1016]
(India has more smartphones than toilets![1019]
The reason smartphones are so popular in India is that most Indians didn’t experience the internet until the smartphone boom of the 2000s was well underway, meaning that
India skipped the PC era and went straight t...
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Releasing apps in India isn’t just a matter of repackaging Western apps; they need to be tailored to the market.
Localization is especially key[1031]
Southeast Asia:
it’s the world’s 3rd-largest market in terms of internet users,
(The general pattern is that India is Western companies’ blueprint for how to tackle the developing world, and after products get traction there the next stop is usually Southeast Asia.[1044])
Southeast Asia has 46 times less retail space per person than the US![1045]
Lazada[1046]
Tokopedia,[1047]
Brazil has been called the “social media capital of the universe”[1053] because 97% of all internet-connected Brazilians use social media.[1054]
M-Pesa,
KaiOS,
internet.org
India banned Free Basics for violating net neutrality, for instance.[1068]
the Kenyan telecom company
Safaricom
launched a money-transfer ser...
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M-...
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M-Pesa as Venmo minus the smartphones, internet, and bank account.
M-Pesa users send money to Western Union users
and vice versa, meaning that a Kenyan could use M-Pesa to send money to a German whose bank uses Western Union.[1083]
it’s a sign of how much mobile payments can grow with even the simplest technologies.[1084]
900 million people use the app[1087]
many consider it the “official” app of China.[1088]
WeChat has become the “Swiss army-knife” app of China.[1089]
You could also write a digital “message in a bottle” and send it to a random WeChat user in the hopes they’d respond.[1090] These features might be odd by Western standards,
but Chinese users loved them and started adopting WeChat in droves.[1091]
hongbao,
hongbao
hongbao
Chinese government announced in 2018 that it would integrate WeChat with China’s electronic ID system[1104]
perhaps because it’s so tailored to the culture and laws of China
iPhones’ only unique feature in China is that they’re luxury status symbols.[1111]
WeChat impacts the entire globe — and people around the world can learn from it.
Grab
Go-Jek.[1126]
(Incidentally, Grab is backed by Alibaba[1127] while Go-Jek is ba...
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Go-Jek lets you hail motorcycles[1129] and dominates Indonesia,[1130]
Grab lets you call taxis just like Uber does (its founders explicitly wanted to make “Uber for Asia”)[1131]
Getting people to store money in your app is a big hurdle — but once you’ve gotten them to do that, whether with a clever hongbao promotion or making them pay for ridesharing, you can start selling them anything.
(What do all these features have in common? They’re all selling you stuff, which is why having the mobile payments already set up is key. You might not go through the hassle of setting up payments in an app just to get a massage, but if you already have money in the app, it becomes way more tempting to get that massage.)
Paytm got a big boost when the Indian government in 2016 “demonetized” 500- and 1000-rupee notes
once you get people’s payment info, you can try to become the next WeChat and utterly dominate your country’s tech scene.
China and the US are widely considered to be in a “race” to dominate artificial intelligence,[1147] telecommunications tech,[1148] and even the future of the internet.[1149]
