Page 106 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

logo. There are subject tabs for technology, culture, society, and economy and
an online community section for podcasts, photos, and music and video
exchanges. But the business plan is still very much a work in progress. “You
can raise large sums of money,” says AlwaysOn’s Perkins, “but you need a
business plan that works.”
Perhaps the most telling indication that Bokee is in trouble comes from
one of its original backers, Granite Global Ventures. The venture firm is
hedging its bets on Bokee by investing $10 million in late 2005 in a rival site,
the three-year-old Chinese blog-hosting company BlogCN. The main dif-
ference between the two rivals is that BlogCN is more focused on online com-
munities where friends can upload and exchange videos, photos, and music,
whereas Bokee is more news-driven, explains managing partner Jixun Foo.
He took a board seat at BlogCN, and his colleague Jenny Lee stepped off the
board at Bokee. When I meet Foo in Shanghai at a local coffee joint, he
acknowledges that “it is hard to tell” which blogging approach will gain the
most traction in China.
I then arrange to go to Hangzhou to meet with the founder of BlogCN,
28-year-old Hos Ku, a computer science and engineering graduate from
Hangzhou University and former manager of the Nasdaq-listed Chinese
Internet firm NetEase.com. Ku invites me to a private dining room at a local
seafood restaurant and fills me in on his firm’s short history. He tells me how
he formed the company at his apartment with two young engineers in July
2004 and built it to 180 employees and 10 million registered users. His next
major project is to launch blogging over mobile phones. It sounds good, as do
most Chinese entrepreneurial tales—at least on the surface.
For Bokee, the true test of survival comes now. I doubt Bokee can weather
another wrenching transition. I admit I am rooting for Fang because I like and
admire him. Whatever happens, Fang will have made his mark on Chinese
new media history by helping to spread the power of blogging. If Bokee does
go under, it will not be good for the flow of ideas that has bubbled to the
surface in China through blogging. As the China media expert MacKinnon
puts it, “Blogs are creating an independent space for discourse, interaction,
and collaboration.” She says that blogs “can contribute to major socio-
political change in the long run” and that a “new generation will debate
public affairs, engage in critical thinking, and be more ready for reasoned self-
governance.”

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