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.

 

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.

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.