Tencent has a big ambition for WeChat and envisioned it to be a social mobile platform.
FORBES: WeChat By Tencent: From Chat App To Social Mobile Platform
Last fall, they partnered up with WeChat, the popular Chinese mobile messenger app boasting more than 100 million users.
Apps such as WeChat, LINE, and KakaoTalk are very popular, especially in Asia.
Vietnam is also on the radar of Tencent, which last year began offering its popular WeChat app in Vietnamese.
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In China, the new kid on the block is WeChat, which launched in 2011 offering text and voice services.
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Tencent Holdings, which has its own hugely popular social media app (Weixin, or WeChat) and is trying to build up its e-commerce platform.
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In mid-January 2013, its total users has surpassed 300 million worldwide. (Other than WeChat, apps like KakaoTalk, LINE, and GREE Messenger are also thriving).
FORBES: WeChat By Tencent: From Chat App To Social Mobile Platform
Tencent is speeding up its effort to introduce the Chinese company's WeChat mobile app to developed countries, including the U.S., CEO Pony Ma said.
Message Me in the U.S. is essentially a clone of WeChat.
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WeChat already has a thriving community of users and user-generated contents.
FORBES: WeChat By Tencent: From Chat App To Social Mobile Platform
Yeung (see photo) was recently named Silicon Dragon Entrepreneur of the Pearl River Delta 2012 at an event recognizing the break-out success of WeChat.
Tencent's WeChat, meanwhile, said it crossed 300 million subscribers in January.
Media are quoting Miao as saying that WeChat, which is currently free, has the potential to start charging fees, although the fees would likely be minimal.
At the same time, it is fending off attacks from state-owned telcos that are upset that WeChat is replacing texting as a way to reach friends.
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It is a unique app with all these popular chatting and social functions, all-in-one make user very convenient in WeChat and no need to turn to others.
FORBES: WeChat By Tencent: From Chat App To Social Mobile Platform
Not only relying on the virtual economy on WeChat (i.e. mobile gaming, virtual goods), Tencent plans to creatively leverage the commercial upside of online to offline space.
FORBES: WeChat By Tencent: From Chat App To Social Mobile Platform
WeChat is one of the first tech services from China to tap an international customer base and to sport more users outside the home country than domestically.
By cleverly leveraging its mobile strategy with in-store efforts, Starbucks reported a 9% increase in WeChat followers, a rise in sales, and over 200, 000 engagements with the app.
"We thought maybe it would take six months, " he said, but in fact WeChat was out within two months and it has proved far more popular than Xiaomi's service.
WeChat of China, which claims a whopping 300 million users, is also working on building out a social platform, as are messaging apps LINE and Nimbuzz of India.
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Although the majority of WeChat users are from China, it is the number of users from outside China that is growing at accelerated rate in the past couple of years.
FORBES: WeChat By Tencent: From Chat App To Social Mobile Platform
According to Tencent, whose services include instant messaging service QQ, microblogging site Tencent Weibo - which is similar to Twitter - and online games, WeChat has close to 300 million users.
Facebook also faces mounting competition from mobile-born messaging services like WeChat, WhatsApp and Viber, which young people in particular are said to be favoring over the wider social audience of Facebook.
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WeChat's user base includes much of China's smartphone-owning middle class, a highly attractive target for advertising, but Tencent says it is still improving user experience and has no plans to make money off the service yet.
He notes that WeChat is surpassing QQ, its wildly popular instant messaging service in China, in its adoption rate internationally partly because the name of the service was changed from Weixin or micro message to the easily pronounceable WeChat.
Tencent's speedy execution of new projects like WeChat has led Chinese technology entrepreneurs to coin the phrase "life, death or Tencent" meaning the choice is between cooperating with Tencent or being crushed by it, so unlikely is the option of outcompeting it.
But the scale of the threat was highlighted earlier this week when the chairman of China Mobile - the world's largest telecom carrier - said his firm was now more concerned about the challenge posed by Microsoft's Skype and Tencent's WeChat services than it was about competition from China's rival mobile networks.
But going back to the subject of bloatware, Smartisan OS will be bundled with just a few apps that Luo considers to be the cream of the crop in the Chinese market: Momo (a local "flirting" app), WeChat (IM app, but still in discussion), Sina Weibo, Youku (video platform) and Sogu input (customized by Smartisan).
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