Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Kai Fu Lee and doing web business in China

Last week Google China VP Dr. Kai Fu Lee left Google to start his own venture capital firm to back China based high tech innovation. Last year as a student at Carnegie Mellon University, I had a chance to listen to his interesting lecture on Google's China strategy. I highly recommend watching his full lecture to anyone who is interested in understanding China's technology landscape, and how it is different. He shared some very interesting observations like -

In China - people do not have access to Wikipedia!
It is belied that to be successful in China one needs to take long term view, Google fully understands this -
"We will take long term view in China, China has 5000 years of history and Google has 5000 years of patience in China" - Google CEO, Eric Schmidt



Finally, the way Chinese users view a search page is far different than the way americans do - here are the results of an eye tracking study of a Goole search page!

Here is the full lecture -

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I am very surprised with the hot spots on the search results page, in areas where there is no text at all!

Ameya said...

@Ashwin -

My guess is - study is not particular to 'a' search result - but perhaps over multiple search result pages. But just to show this in perspective they are super imposing some image.
However, you can argure that -
A. Chinese Google search results are not as good as English Goolge results.
And/ Or - B. Chinese behavior is fundamentally different than American users. I guess thats what Kai Fu Lee argues in that lecture.

Unknown said...

I guessed I overlooked it.