秃公
加入时间: 2006/09/12
文章: 1667
经验值: 1777
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作者：秃公 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Lecture1: Starting, financing and selling an Internet startup
Lecturer: Xing Wang (founder of www.xiaonei.com)
Xing is a 2001 graduate of Tsinghua University with a degree in Electrical Engineering. He then went on the PhD program at the University of Delaware, but left in 2004 to return to Beijing and start a general social networking website. In late 2005, he refocused this website for the college market and launched Xiaonei.com in December 2005. Today, Xiaonei.com is one of the most successful social networking websites in China and within 1 year of launching Xiaonei.com, Xing successfully sold the company to Mop.com in October 2006.
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Blatant Facebook Rip-Off Gets Acquired
t was announced today that China’s leading college social networking site has been acquired for an undisclosed sum. That sounds reasonable, since the Chinese social networking space is growing fast. But I was shocked to load up the site and see that it’s an exact clone of Facebook - how did they take this all the way to acquisition when the site is such a blatant rip-off?
Xiaonei.com, the Beijing-based social network for college students, was acquired by Oak Pacific Interactive (OPI), a Chinese Internet consortium. The plan is to merge Xiaonei with 5Q, OPI’s own college social network. Xiaonei has close to a million active users, and together the two sites will have a similar stranglehold on the Chinese college market that Facebook has in the US: they now serve more than 90% of the active online student population. A price wasn’t given, but the co-CCO (Chief Operating Officer) of OPI has been quoted saying “We paid a premium, but the team deserves it.”
The story isn’t quite the same as Zuckerberg and Facebook, but there are echoes: Xiaonei is a one-year old startup founded by Tsinghua university graduate Wang Xing. It soft-launched in October 2005 and the official launch was in December. Even the strategy was a clone of Facebook - Xiaonei focused on the top schools first, realizing that widespread adoption would follow. They even received angel funding from investors that included an ex-CTO of Amazon.com. Facebook, meanwhile, was founded way back in July 2004.
From what I can see, Facebook haven’t pursued any legal action against the site, although they almost certainly know about the problem: even the site’s users have reported the similarities in the interface and functionality, and there are multiple blogs and mainstream news outlets that called them out on it after launch. But somehow this big payout for the founding team seems to rub salt in the wound for Facebook, a site that’s yet to be acquired despite rumors of a Yahoo deal. It also sends a signal to would-be founders that they can clone a popular site, get away with it, and go on to sell that property for a large sum.
作者：秃公 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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Xing Wang is a 2001 graduate of Tsinghua Uni
