Page 152 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

and mobile 2.0 services. “We don’t want to be too close to the phone
carriers,” Wang says. “It is better to be independent and focus on value for
the users.”
PingCo is rooted in China, from its well-grounded founder to its investor,
GSR Ventures, down the road from the start-up’s office in Beijing’s high-tech
zone. PingCo is not making money yet, but Wang says that his start-up will
break even in 2007 on $1.5 million in revenues. Wang has raised a solid $8.5
million from investors, and his goal is to take PingCo public in two or three
years. Revenues, which are climbing steadily, come from new premium
offerings, including a popular program that lets people log on to PingCo to
vote for “superboy” in a TV show similar to American Idol. Also boosting
the bottom line are mobile service
advertisers for dating, commerce,
and e-learning. Kodak and Cisco

“The only thing holding PingCo back from are in the wings as prospective
becoming another Skype is awareness; that’s marketers.
it.” If China Mobile doesn’t do
PingCo in—and that’s a big if—
Kevin Fong,
PingCo could be another Hotmail,
managing director, Mayfield Fund
the Web-based e-mail service that
debuted in 1996 and in little more
than year had nearly 8.5 million
users including grandmas who discovered the joys of sending e-mails to
friends. Within two years of its start date in May 2005, PingCo signed up 7
million users, with 10 million in sight by the end of 2007.
The fact that a finely tuned consumer creation like this sprung out of
newly reforming China is exceptional. China has come a long way from the
earlier era of copycat entrepreneurs who took ideas from the West and
brought them home on a high-tech Silk Road. But history has come full circle:
A thousand years ago, China was far more advanced than Europe and it was
Europeans doing the copying.
The experienced tech investor Kevin Fong, a managing director at
Mayfield Fund in Silicon Valley, made sure PingCo was one of his firm’s first
Chinese investments. “The only thing holding PingCo back from becoming
another Skype is awareness; that’s it,” Fong says.

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