Zing Chat prepares to sword Yahoo Chat
VinaGame is final testing its Zing Chat IM for an official launch in early November. In fact they bought the popular QQ IM from Tencent and localized it for the Vietnamese market.
VinaGame is more known in Vietnam for its online game. Some PR work in Vietnamese media stated the company’s revenues at $40 million (amazing!). Their games are mostly licensed from Chinese supplier. Now the company is hoping it can become Vietnam’s Tencent and its coming IPO next year would make it laugh all the way to the bank, at least similar to the story of Mr. Ma’s Tencent in Hong Kong. Tencent is worth $8b, so why Vietnam with 17 million Internet users, a tenth of China’s Interent population, should not be worth north of $800m?
VinaGame is dreaming big before with the launch of social networking Yobanbe and music search engine Zing MP3. They’ve just launched their Zing portal. Now came in the IM sword. It seems VinaGing is very serious.
Zing Chat has a bundle of strong points. It offer many cool and cute avatars, very 3D polished indeed. This might be welcomed by Vietnamese teenagers, who are using Chat services like there’s no tomorrow. It can webcam chat with 5 persons at the same time. Sending file is a click at ease. It is integrated with Zing MP3 so that you can listen to popular Vietnamese songs. VinaGame plans to develop more entertainment apps for their QQ pet, so expect more to come.
However, it seems Zing Duck will find it difficult to sword at elephant Yahoo IM’s back. Vietnamese users has so attached to Yahoo that leaving Yahoo IM for Zing QQ seems unbelievable to most. Zing Chat is heading to become the multifunctional Swiss knife with a strong confidence than ever. However I very suspect the effectiveness of this approach.
You can listen to Vietnamese music song with Zing Chat. Ha! Teen should be more comfortable using another online music services like Baamboo, 7Sac, Uizaa, NhacVui, and even Zing MP3 itself. Or for a very smart teen, why should not download the songs she likes from these services and play it from her desktop with Microsoft’s zurassic Music Player? How about sending multi GB file? You can use yousendit, or megaupload, or FPT’s xiklo. Cool and polished avatars cannot help here. The only thing that I like is webcam chat with 5 persons. Might be VinaGame has just found out that Vietnamese teenagers love video conferencing, as many of them love to become future business executives some time? Even that way, can you chat with 5 people and looking at 5 screens at the same time and find it’s a worthy Internet experience?
I like Zing’s ideas and their ambition, but feel anxious if they are going to battle Yahoo this way. You cannot overcome the market leader by becoming better.
Or maybe you can, and you make the history.
Of course I have enough time to wait and see.
Khaivq 6:32 am on October 30, 2007 Permalink |
Really like your analysis. Hope to have a chance to meet you in Hanoi.
Blog Công Nghệ » Blog Archive » Zing Chat prepares to sword Yahoo Chat 7:13 pm on November 10, 2007 Permalink |
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Truyen 8:42 am on March 7, 2008 Permalink |
Interesting. Of course beating Yahoo! is possible with something like Google version 2.
Something must not be right here. QQ to Chinese is just the Internet, as people say. Same to YIM to many Vietnamese. I know some people don’t even use email or read VnExpress, but they jump directly to YIM and chat.
QQ may have been following ICQ, but that time the Internet was almost nothing to people, and there were virtually no other competitors in China. For Vietnamese right now, kicking people out of YIM is almost impossible because of the network effect: every friend is there, so why must I leave for a new chat service with no one talking to me?
Can it be any new experience for Vietnamese chatters?
Lai Tung Lam 4:35 pm on March 10, 2008 Permalink |
“Tencent is worth $8b, so why Vietnam with 17 million Internet users, a tenth of China’s Interent population, should not be worth north of $800m?”
I think before you do any analysis of this kind you’d better check your mathematic skills.
How come to you 17 millions = a tenth of 1 billion (1000 millions) ?
I give you a WOAAAH for that.
Youngsters in VN are becoming more ‘internationalised’. That means a considerable portion of them are ready to get rid of Yahoo and start to use MSN, Windows Live Messenger .. Zing Chat also allows conversation between MSN and Yahoo, so, why not give it a try ?
I’m sure Vietnamese teenagers are always open to the new, the improved ones. Yahoo are getting a bit off the way (when i was in VN the Yahoo servers ‘dies’ quite regularly, and Yahoo 9 can’t even connect to them).
About the music, I agree with you that to some people it seems unnecessary. But, according to you, while some Vietnamese can’t even surf the web to get news, how can they get access to those music sites ? Isn’t it better to listen to music directly in the chat windows ?
Last of all, I want to tell you that your sarcastic skills really deserve sarcasm. Next time do a better research and I might drop off to see how far you will have progressed on the skills. =B
HarryD 4:21 am on March 11, 2008 Permalink |
I would like to warn Lam that my blog is for a well grown up readership that deserve you kid’s respect, so be tamed when you write down something and if not please keep shy away from my blog. This blog might be more suitable for kinda old people with lower IQ and mathematic skills than you, and you well deserve to be recognized somewhere better.
BTW, if you are a little bit more tamed, you would certainly see the blinking difference between the Chinese population or the “Chinese Internet population” addressed in the article.