Page 151 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

pages of thousands of e-books from the Chinese e-book publisher
www.17k.com. How about playing a game online with a friend? For less than
a penny, players can buy virtual weapons to do battle. PingCo has developed
all these unique-to-China services, with the exception of the books and
complex games, on its own.
“We thought that if we could take the most popular Internet services on
the personal computer—chatting, dating, and video downloads—and bring
them to the mobile phone, we would have a killer ap,” says PingCo CEO
Wang, using American tech slang for a hot new feature.
For billing, PingCo uses a virtual currency cleverly denominated in digital
apples, a favored food of its mascot and logo, a prickly but playful hedgehog.
PingCo has leapfrogged past the
current rage of blogs and video
downloads on the Net and gone
straight to the mobile Web 2.0 and “We thought if we could take the most
always-on portable entertainment. popular Internet services on the personal
“The mobile Internet is to the PC- computer—chatting, dating, and video
based Internet what television was downloads—and bring them to the mobile
phone, we would have a killer ap.”
to radio,” says Alan Moore, a
high-tech consultant at Engage- Charles Wang,
ment Marketing in Cambridge, CEO, PingCo
United Kingdom.
The start-up’s original, made-
in-China technology is geared to
capitalize on the Mainland’s gigantic mobile phone market. China leads the
world in instant messaging, and youngsters here can’t wait to hook up wire-
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lessly. Text messaging by phone is more popular than e-mail, voice mail, or
even television and music. Some 126 million people use instant messaging:
more than two-thirds of the “netizens” in the country. Many have more than
one account. College students in Beijing and Shanghai send an average of
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1,000 SMSs per month, or about 33 per day, spending more than $15
monthly for their text message service (SMS) habit.
For drama, you can’t beat the classic David-versus-Goliath battle of
PingCo against state-owned China Mobile. PingCo is one of the first
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Chinese companies to circumvent that near monopoly, and it’s taking a bite
out of the profits the giant mobile phone network makes from text messaging

PingCo—Ping Me, Please 125