Wizag Discoverer vs. Readers and Aggregators

Google released a new version of Google Reader, and the reactions are very positive, see TechCrunch post. It has a nice UI. There are many readers and aggregators that are as good or even better as Google reader, however, since it is Google, many people may use it simply for the reason of having most of their services with one provider.

While reading comments on TechCrunch, it surprised me that some people even use Netvibes as a feed reader. I subscribe to about 100 feeds. I know many people who subscribe to a lot more. Netvibes gives you these small boxes, one box per feed. I find scanning hundreds of headlines in tens or even hundreads of tiny boxes gets blurry very quickly.

In my opinion (biased, of course), all these readers and aggregators lack an important function: auto-scan the feeds and identify the emerging topics that match the user’s interest. That is what I call topic discovery and it is what Wizag’s personalized topic discovery engine does. With Wizag’s Discoverer, a user can quickly see what topics are being talked about in the feeds he subscribe, and get to the posts that cover a topic of interest with one click.

This is in contrast to all the readers and aggregators which simply pile the posts up in your inbox, and you would have to read hundreds and hundreds of headlines to know what are being talked about and find the ones of interest to you.

This is different from a “smart folder” that filters out posts containing pre-defined keywords. That is easy to do. What is hard is to find the emerging topics (thus, you do not know what they are beforehand), and ranked them according to a user’s attention.

Doing Internet business in China and Asia

TechCrunch reported today that ebay is bailing out of China. This is after Yahoo sold Yahoo China to Alibaba. ebay’s Whitmen set herself up for failure when she said “Whoever wins China, will win the world.”

I had always maintained that it is very difficult for US based Internet companies to succeed in China, and many other Asian countries.  People are speculating political and many other reasons, but I contend that this is mainly a culture issue and it is not just China.  An example is Yahoo sold majority of its Yahoo Japan to Softbank long time ago.

I believe that most if not all western Internet businesses will have a lot of difficulty to gain or maintain market share in Asian countries, unless the country’s cluture is totally westernized. Internet portals are not like cars and Gucci bags. Mercedes and Gucci are things, they are not part of your inner cultrue. Internet portals are words, images, and interact with the core of your senses and inner culture. A western company may hire local managers, but these local managers are bound by western corporate culture and are often too westernized. They just won’t totally “get it.” I believe that it is because these reasons that it is extremely difficult, if not impposible, for western companies whose businesses deeply involve with culture to be successful in China and in other Asian countries that have a long history and strong culture identity. This applies to Google (Google losing market share in China) and many others, and it is not something one can fix by throwing hundreds of millions at it.

An analogy is that Shakira, Beyonce, or whoever the current pop stars are will never be as popular as the Chinese pop stars, the Korean pop stars or the Japanese pop stars in their own country. Another is none of the NYT best sellers (of course translated into the local language) will ever outsell the popular books in these Asian countries. These inner culture values are subtle, difficult to describe, and deeply engrained with thousands of years of history and hundreds of thounsands of years of evolution.

Then how do you succeed in China in the Internet market? My advice is to make people think you are a Chinese company; align with the interest of the local stakeholders; be more like a shareholder in the background rather than in the forefront; let its local management give it its own corporate culture and really run the show.

Online Storages, what do you put there?

Lots of online storage companies offering more and more GBs of free space, see TechCrunch reports.

My question is what do you put there? Unless it is pictures, videos or stuff you want lots of people to look at, why do you want to put your files on a server that everyone has access to?

I would not put any of my personal or business data in any place that I do not have physical control and cannot control who may connect to it. I would like to be able to unplug the cable when I need to.

Plus, it takes a long time to upload a few gigs of data, and once uploaded, it is not really available everywhere, at least not yet, e.g., when you are in a plane or on the road in most places.

So I see the free online storages mainly limited to audio, photo and video sharing, and to spammers who want their contents everywhere. Am I missing anything?