Gao Consulting and Secneo offer security for Android applications

Secneo, a Beijing-based software solution provider and Gao Consulting have signed an agreement on business cooperation.According to the agreement,  Gao Consulting represents Secneo in Europe by promoting and marketing the advanced services offered by Secneo to the mobile application ecosystem.

Secneo has developed a unique security solution for Android mobile applications. Secneo offers a shielding service that encrypts the Android application and makes it immune to illegal actions. The shielding service is available online at http://www.secneo.com. By registering online, you can have a free trial and test the Secneo security yourself. No need to submit your source code. No back-door!

As known by all the professionals, an Android application package is open by its nature and thus, vulnerable to all sort of illegal actions like hacking, tampering or intrusion of malicious code in to the code base. Pirated copies cause significant problems to the original developers, publishers and distributors. Pirate copies steal the business from the legal beneficiaries. Typically, the payment functions are turned off or removed in the pirate copies and sometimes replaced by a some sort of business model chosen by the illegal distributor. In case of mobile games, a cheating tool (there are many openly available) is inserted into the application. In this way, the original gaming experience is distorted that can cause harm to the gaming community as the whole.

In addtion to the shielding service, Secneo provides security testing services and so called channel monitoring. Channel monitoring is a invaluable offer to anybody selling Android apps in China (or any developer who wants to know there are illegal copies of  his/her application distributed in China). The mobile ecosystem in China differs from what we experience in the West in the sense that there are almost 300 application stores for Android applications: by mobile operators like China Mobile, internet players like BaiDu and Tencent, dedicated distributors like 360 and many many smaller actors. For this reason, practically no developer has the capability to follow up where the legal and especially illegal copies of his applications are available for download. The channel monitoring system of Secneo is fully automated: it scans continuously all the application stores.

Secneo (or “Bang Bang” 梆梆 as known in China) is a software company founded in Beijing 2010. In addition to Beijing, it has an office in Chengdu. Secneo is a well established company and the technology is field-tested and mature. Secneo has shielded thousands of applications and secured a 10 billion USD worth of business. The company is backed by IDG and Redpoint venture capital companies. Secneo is also a member of IEEE Industry Connections Security Group. The shielding solution has been adopted by many game studios, publishers, banks and other financial institutions.

Gao Consulting is a high-tech consultancy company specialized in promoting Sino-Nordic business co-operations. The company is based in Espoo, Finland with offices in Nanjing and Beijing. Gao Consulting has an extensive collaboration network in China with signed cooperation agreements with a number of governmental agencies, technology parks and VC companies especially in Jiangsu Province and in Beijing.

Feel free to contact us to learn more about Secneo or services offered by Gao Consulting. We are happy to provide you a free test trial for Secneo to make you convinced about the powerful technology. Regarding Secneo, your contact at Gao Consulting is Markku Ranta, markku.ranta@gao-consulting.com or mobile phone: +358503246233.

 

China leads the online shopping race

Still the market figures from China continue to surprise me. There was a good summary and infogram about the Chinese online services lately on techinasia, based on a groundwork by We Are Social from Singapore. Some findings that make me go out of breath:

• China is the largest online market in the world, mid-2012 there were 242 million online shoppers in the Middle Kingdom
• increase 25% from previous year
• 43% on internet users buy online
• online shopping turnover is 40 ooo USD every second
• the number of online shoppers in China in double compared to Japan
• the leading e-commerce sites are Taobao (C2C) and Tmall (B2C)
• both of these are managed by Alibaba !
• 90% of online shoppers earn less than 27USD per day
• mobile commerce is growing even more rapidly
• 146 million mobile shoppers last year, yearly growth rate 136%

Global information technology report: Nordic countries rank high, China “faces challenges”

Recently published edition of the World Economic Forum “The Global Information Technology Report 2012”  has a special focus on impact of ICT to the transformation of economy and society. All Nordic countries rank high in the list: Sweden number one, Finland number three – ahead of the US in the 8th position. From Asia, Singapore is known as a model country of information economy and gained the silver medal in the comparison. Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong are high in the list, following the UK which took the 10th position.

China takes the 51st place, still lag behind the world in ICT indices. According to the press release, China shows, “An insufficient skills base and institutional weaknesses, especially in the business environment, present a number of shortcomings that stifle entrepreneurship and innovation.”

Main indicators used in the analysis were: use of broadband and mobile phone, patents, e-education and e-government. From this perspective it is easy to understand why homogenous, developed and stable societies like Nordic countries rank well. On the other  hand, BRIC countries like China are in the middle of a transition in all of these metrics. This why metrics based on averages do not make justice to BRIC countries.

Soumitra Dutta, co-editor of the report stated: “To measure this impact effectively, we have introduced a new set of impact-oriented metrics this year that assess not just the availability of technology, but also the ways in which economies put that technology to greater use. Considering how ICT has become omnipresent, the focus has moved from access to making the best use of ICT in order to improve business innovation, governance, citizens’ political participation and social cohesion.”

Good news for our planet: China invests heavily in environmental technologies

I summarize below some highlights of the emerging technologies sector of the on-going five year plan of China. But first a short introduction.

As we know, the government of China works in five year cycles in the form of well prepared and historically well executed five-year plans. The FYP ( 中国五年规划 , for some time it is called in Chinese five year “guidelines” instead of plan) is a holistic socio-economic strategy instrument. It covers all the aspects of society and it engages all the ministries and authorities in China. We live now the early part of the 12th FYP (2011-2015), formally approved at the National People’s Congress exactly one year ago, March 14, 2011.

New airport to Beijing, R&D spending to 2.2% of GDP

Before summarizing one tiny part of the plan, I made a wikipedia search to have a look on the high level goals of the plan. Some interesting points: annual growth of GDP will be kept around 8%, 7% annual growth of per capita income, spend 2.2% of GDP on research and development by 2015, bring the population below 1.39 billion by 2015. The plan promises a new airport to Beijing and the hight-tech (or, “value-added emerging strategic industries”) sector should grow to 8% of GDP. Two more technological points: 1) foreign investment is welcome to agriculture, high-tech and environmental industries, 2) the coastal region of China is developed from the “world’s factory” to hubs of R&D, high-end manufacturing and service sector. The first point reflects a shift in the science and technology policy from the DIY (do it yourself) thinking towards more modern collaborative development mode. This is good news and opens opportunities to foreign high technology partners.

159% raise of funding to emerging technologies

And now to the emerging technologies section of the FYP. Emerging technologies is a collection of high-tech areas from advanced materials, new energy sources to biotechnology. In the broad definition we could call this as a synonym to nanotechnologies and in particular the application sectors of nanotechnologies.

All in all, the research and development strategy outlined in the FYP puts high targets to the efficient use of research results into the commercialization and industrial products. The conversion factor in China of the R&D activities into commercial products has been relatively low. Especially low it has been in nanotech area. It has been estimated that the only 5% of the research results in this sector have found commercial use.

The funding allocation to emerging technologies in the 12th FYP reflects a huge 159% growth compared to the previous 11th FYP. In total, the budget grows to $ 18 billion in the new plan.

There are seven strategic and emerging industries: environmental technology, new energy, new energy vehicles, advanced equipment, biotechnology, new material, and information technology.

Environment gets almost one half

What could be consider as a very good news for the mankind and to the future of the planet Earth, is the clear focus on environmental sector. Environmental technology and new energy are focus sectors in the plan.  Around 48% of its planned $18 billion investment on emerging technologies will go to environmental technologies, followed by 32% and 12%, respectively, for new energy and smart grid sectors.

Inside the environment segment, the focus is in water treatment. Water resources in China are scarce and especially Beijing is located in an extremely unfavorable place in respect to the water supplies. Early warning system for the water resources is a new investment area in the plan.

As it comes to renewable energy sources, solar energy gets a special boost. According to the plan, the installed base of solar energy will raise from today’s 0.8 GW to 15 GW by the end of 2015. The wind energy volume will get three-fold from the current 30 GW to 100 GW.

In the mobility side of the society, the plan envisages one million electric cars by the end of 2015. Last year, there were only around 1 % of that volume. Equally, the infrastructure for electric cars like charging stations and poles will get a major investment.

In the advanced materials technology, there are two areas with a special focus: superconductors (since they are needed in cost-efficient wind generators) and high-performance membranes because of their need in efficient water treatment. Membrane research gets a funding of $ 360 million.

As a summary, the 12th FYP of China is very ambitious strategy and address those areas of society where the need for sustainable development is the greatest. Let us all hope that the plan will be executed well. So far, the track record of Chinese leaders to execute the FYPs has clearly exceeded the capabilities of western democratic governments to execute their plans.

References:

Lux Research: webcast on March 12, 2012

ObservatoryNano.org: report on Public Funding to nanotechnologies

Play Monopoly with Chinese Web sites

Blogsite Mailman has created a fun version of the legendary board game Monopoly using the real-life cases from the Chinese Internet scene. Be careful with the  blocked website zone!

Mobile Internet in China: business doubled in one year, 388 million customers

Internet and especially mobile internet is booming in China. The market size was around 100 billion RMB (equals around €10 billion or $12 billion), double as much as one year earlier. Three main growth engines: value-add services, mobile e-commerce and mobile advertisement ( 2billion RMB last year). Mobisights.com published interesting statistics about the structure of this huge market. Here some highlights:

• they are young: more than 80% of the mobile internet users are below 30 years old
• WAP dominates, 3G still in early stage: over 86% of usage time took place through the lousy old WAP! 3G networks, the real mobile internet back-end, had only 7% share. The lack of decent service level of 3G (China Unicom the only carrier) motivates people to use WiFi : 22% share of usage time. This means that although the current figures are already astonishing, we have not even seen the tip of the iceberg of mobile internet in China. As soon as the local operators get the 3G infrastructure in place, the real boom is about to start.
• The biggest mobile internet province is GuangDong (around 16%)
• The classical Nokia 6120 was the most popular device among mobile internet users. Not a smartphone, no touch-screen!
• Two leading operating systems: not iOS, not Android! Mediatek (the low-budget OS running many Chinese low-cost devices) made 39% and good-old Nokia’s Symbian 33%. The world’s biggest smartphone operating systems Android and Apple’s iOS made together (!) only 7% of the whole mobile internet usage. The most widely used mobile browsers were UCWeb and Tencent, together more than half of the usage. These both are domestic software products.

Hard life of foreign entrepreneur in China

I wrote some months ago a post about the tough experience foreign entrepreneurs have faced after establishing a business or after entered China with their product. The lessons seem to be well known. There was a good article on Penn Olsen’s blog about this: Why foreign companies fail, and how to succeed in China

1. Government policies

Sometimes (and very knowingly by Chinese authorities) the laws and rules in China make is very difficult or impossible the entry. In strategic industries China has applied this practice for years. In the Internet are, the entry of western players is restricted with the Internet Content Provider license.

2. IPR protection

The scrupulous infringement of intellectual rights is a common place in industries where copying is easy and hard protection is difficult. We see this in the internet and mobile services where the idea cannot be protected and the reproduction is relatively cheap. In China, there is plenty of skillful and cheap labor to produce a copy of any service idea. And this has happened in a big way as I have written on this blog. Copying takes place in western world as well and in  a way is an accepted practice. In China however, the initial owner of the idea is not let in to compete for customers (see point one) as is the case in the rest of the world.

3. Wrong friends

Restriction in market entry (and common sense) drive western business to partnership with local companies. In China there are hundreds if not thousands potential friends to strike partnership with you. The chances to pick the right one is not great…

4. Global-local

A western company entering China most probably faces the fact that the product does not fit as-is to Chinese customers. Getting this accepted in the global organisations tend to be difficult. Isaw this struggle while working at Nokia China. The same is still true.

5. You must play the local game

In China, a successful business must be built with patience, nurturing the good Guanxi to the society – including to all level of authorities. Chinese people appreciate commitment and willingness to play along the local habits. When I came to Nokia China in 1998, Nokia had been in the country for 10-15 years. However, it was eye-opening to see an advertisement of Ericsson on a local magazine. There was a very old photo of a young noble man, PuYi – the last Emperor of China. The text said: “we sold the first telecommunication equipment to him”.

 

What happens in China Internet every 60 seconds

Amazing numbers in China Internet, see the illustration by Penn Olsen. For example, The Chinese microblogging service Sina Weibo transmits 227 000 posts every minuted. Twitter is clearly a small player with 98 000 tweets/minute in that comparison !

And similar figures worldwide:

Not to mention the 98 tons of waste generated every minute on the globe 😦

Visit to the start-up community in Shanghai

I visited recently Shanghai and had a pleasure to meet several people in the internet startup community.

Bob Zheng, PeopleSquared

Bob Zheng is the founder and director of PeopleSquared, a community working place located in Jing An. Bob is one of the returning Chinese talents: he moved back from Canada where he worked for 8 years for Accentura. Bob explained that the community working space concept is pretty new in Shanghai. In addition for PeopleSquared the other is  XinDanWei ( literally “new working unit”)  westward from Jing’An. PeopleSquared is a cozy working environment where internet entrepreneurs, freelancers and other professionals in the ecosystem can rent working space in a flexible manner. One day of working spot costs 70 RMB (less than 10 €). Bob said that the whole space is currently occupied by seven teams.

Bob is a visible person in the local startup community as he acts as the curator of Shanghai Startup Digest. If you want to be updated about the activities in the Shanghai startup circles, you should subscribe to this email list.

I met Lucas Englehardt in his office, not far from People Squared. Lucas is a good example of a foreigner who has ended up being a startup entrepreneur in China. Lucas estimates that in Shanghai there are probably few hundred foreigners in the community. After studying at Fudan university in Shanghai back in 2004, he worked some time in the USA. Returning back to China, he worked in a M&A consult company. The first company he started was bloggerinside, a community site for “demogratizing guanxi”, as Lucas put it. Aimifan is the second startup and he succeeded to get external funding for his new venture. His funding partner is from Europe and he plans to import the aimifan concept to Europe some day. Aimifan (literally “love food”) is an online meal ordering service. Lucas has secured already hundreds of local restaurants into the Aimifan network. Lucas explained the complexity and burden to establish a business in China. In his venture, he applied the VIE ( or “Sina” ) model that most of the foreign-owned companies do. It consists of several levels of companies in mainland China, HongKong and abroad. The reasons for this complexity are in Chinese legislation. More about the model later in Asiapivot…

Lucas from Aimifan

We discussed about the differences in running an internet venture in China compared to the situation in the Western world. As most of the local services, Lucas is hosting his Aimifan locally. Global platforms like Amazon cloud is available – in principle – in China but the service level is not something you can trust on. The same applies to other network services we are used rely on in the West. Google service do work relatively well- occasionally. But due to this uncertainty, service providers can not trust them. Gmail, Youtube and Google docs are those you may be able access but you never know when 🙂 I noticed however that many local services use Google maps in China and it seems to be relatively reliable. According to Lucas, the only other foreign online map provider is Nokia.

Discussing about online offering in China, Lucas pointed out that online shopping is the number one trend in China. Chinese people love to buy stuff online. One key factor behind the success of e-commerce is the cheap and available logistic solutions in China. Online shop can afford a door to door delivery of even a few dollar purchase as the delivery cost is only around one Euro or USD. Indeed, this is a big difference to the cost structure in Europe!

Lucas explained that the internet business in China is dominated by the few big players like Alibaba or Sina. Those companies represent the first generation of internet business and compared to the counterparts in the USA, are very conservative and arrogant in the internet ecosystem. These giants tend to dominate the business with their power and muscles instead of cooperation with the startup community. The giants prefer to kill the innovative startups with their market power instead of partnering or acquisition activity as is the industry practice in the USA and Europe.

The third startup I visited is Mobile Now, a mobile application developer located  at Dream Wharf, on the riverside of Pu-river  not far from the World Exhibition site. Mobile Now is owned and managed by Jerry Lin and Thomas Meyer. Jerry is a veteran in Chinese internet business since early 2000’s when he moved back to China from the USA where he graduated from MIT and worked for some years. He was working at Netease – one of the big internet players in China. Later, he was one of the senior executives at Qunar, one of the late generation internet success stories. Thomas is Canadian and studied in Europe

and worked for years as mobile strategist in Asia. Together they have established Mobile Now which is today a 25 head mobile application developer. Mobile Now works mainly for their customers but they do have their own game products, as well. Their games have huge download figures counting in millions. The conversion rate to buying customers is unfortunate low, as they said. They have already some local customers, among them China Daily, the leading English newspaper in China. Jerry and Thomas envision a huge boom in  the mobile app business in the coming years when the big masses are turning to smart phones and tablet devices.

Nanotechnology in Suzhou

Suzhou old town, ShanTang Street

Some weeks ago I paid a visit to Suzhou, an important industrial center less than 100km to North-West from Shanghai. The rapid train takes only less than 30 minutes time from Suzhou to Shanghai main railway station – and costs only 40 RMB (around 5€). Suzhou has 4 million inhabitants, or 10 million if we count the surroundings. Historically, Suzhou is known as the garden city of China, or the “Venice of Asia”. There are still few remainders left of its historical heritage. It used to be the center of silk industry in China.  In GDP of 15000 USD,  Suzhou is ranked as nr 5 in China. Forbes ranked in 2010 Suzhou in top 3 of China’s innovation centers.

The reason for my visit was CHInano 2011 conference and exhibition organized in Suzhou industrial zone. Suzhou Industrial  Park (SIP) is an excellent demonstration of China’s desire and power to raise its technological and industrial assets. Fifteen years ago, there was nothing more than rise pads in place. With the political will and money of Beijing and especially that of Jiangsu province, there is today a modern industrial town spanning over an area of 288 square kilometers! According to SIP, there are today 20000 national and international companies in Suzhou.

Suzhou Industrial Park, SIP

Nanotechnology is one of the focus areas in SIP. They count now  2700 experts working in nanotech in Suzhou. It is a big number although nano is known to be a very flexible word as it comes to its definition. SIP is investing a huge amount of  1.5 billion USD in five years in building a dedicated nanotechnology hub. Today there are quite a number (17 was mentioned) of research laboratories established in the zone. Typically they are remote labs or centers of Chinese universities and organizations like CAS (China Academy of Sciences).

Few domestic industrial operations are up and running and we can expect to see plenty of them to arise in the coming years. We visited one of the show-cases, SVG Optonics. The company has remarkable technologies skills in nano litography. We saw demonstration of nanoimprint litography (NIL) applied to flat luminicent plastic surfaces (used e.g. as back light in displays of mobile phones and tablets) and securty devices (e.g. the holographic print used on the 1.3 billion Chinese ID cards).

The application areas of nanotechnology can be divided in:

1. micro / nano manufacturing: MEMS and other microstrucures used in sensors and actuators, nano carbon

2. energy and cleantech: photovoltaic, batteries, membranes used in water purification

3. nanomedicine

I learned in the conference that China actually is very well positioned already in the terms of scientific and innovation metrics: in number of scientific publications China passed over USA last year to the second position in the world. Japan holds the first place. In qualitative indication like quotations, the ranking is not that good.

上 有 天 堂 下 有 蘇 杭 “Heaven above, Suzhou and Hangzhou below.” – Chinese saying

生在苏州，住在杭州，吃在广州，死在柳州。 “Born in Suzhou, live in Hangzhou, eat in Guangzhou, and die in Liuzhou.” – Chinese saying.