China’s Four New Great Inventions in the Mobile Era
When it comes to four great Chinese inventions shaping the world’s progress, the unanimous response would be compass, papermaking, gunpowder and printing from ancient China. But perhaps few people realize that in the rise of the mobile era, China brings the world “Four New Great Inventions.”
China today certainly isn’t short of local inventions with a global impact. In fact, the most popular apps in China now are local creations that are not only popular in the Chinese market but are also being emulated by Silicon Valley giants.
Apart from QQ which is predominantly used by young people, WeChat has become an app for all age groups in China. Since its launch in 2011, WeChat has nearly 1 billion monthly active users. Most people who have access to internet connection would be using WeChat.
WeChat is the world’s first social network with media attributes that provide a self-media ecosystem that makes the Chinese media industry stronger and more objective.
In a short time, WeChat’s self-media has disrupted the established traditional media in China.
On the publishing end, everyone can now become a journalist, sharing his or her opinions and knowledge with the mass audience through an online publication and digital distribution platform. Aside from the straight-forward online publication process, WeChat self-media rewards writers financially for original content sharing.
Many media practitioners have resigned from major media companies, to become self-media writers, with full control of their careers and lives. Professionals from other industries took self-media as their second career, and transformed their identities – from doctors, lawyers or businessmen to key opinion leaders. People who enjoy sharing content makes self-media writing as a full-time job, often expanding from an original one-man band to small teams to manage the growth of their self-media accounts.
On the consumer end, this new publishing way in turn provide readers with more diverse and substantial content; people are switching from reading or watching news, to making WeChat self-media as their main source for information. Beyond making the Chinese media industry more prosperous and decentralized, WeChat’s self-media has also influenced global tech progress.
In the past two years, Facebook Messenger has observably been emulating WeChat to establish a mobile ecology. At the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016, Facebook Messenger executive director David Marcus shared Facebook’s ambition to create a mobile ecology platform. Added features on Facebook Messenger like auto-reply for brands, and in-app payment mimic WeChat’s self-media features. The introduction of Facebook for Business in 2015 also drew stark similarities to WeChat’s official account, a fundamental component of self-media concept. New Great Invention 2: WiFi Master Key (WiFi Sharing for Universal Free Internet Access)
WiFi Master Key is the world’s groundbreaking platform that brings sharing economy to universal internet access. Since its launch in 2013, it has made free internet access more accessible and convenient. To date, it has 900 million users worldwide, making it the world’s largest peer-to-peer Wi-Fi sharing platform.
In China, WiFi Master Key has become synonyms for Wi-Fi connection in people’s daily lives. More and more people are no longer asking merchants how to connect to the Wi-Fi hotspot. Instead, off the top of their mind, they would use WiFi Master Key to find and connect to the nearest WiFi hotspot. It’s not hard to understand why the app finds traction so quickly – it provides a fuss-free solution for both users and merchants. For the users, they simply open the app, and tap on any available Wi-Fi hotspots listed with a Blue Key to connect to the Internet without the hassle of keying in the login details. For the merchants who are already providing free Wi-Fi, sharing their Wi-Fi on the popular platform in turn helps to bring in a steady stream of footfall traffic. By providing a more convenient way for free internet access, WiFi Master Key has added a new user capacity for the entire internet industry.
Additionally, WiFi Master Key has immensely increased the average time users spent online, creating a new commercial value for the internet industry. Tech giants seem to have started to realize the significance and potential of Wi-Fi sharing. In 2017, Facebook added the “Find WiFi” feature which echoes WiFi Master Key’s WiFi map feature to help people locate the nearest Wi-Fi hotspots. Google also introduced an inexpensive wireless plan named Project Fi to enable users to shift between mobile networks & Wi-Fi, and a public Wi-Fi program called Google Station to provide Wi-Fi connections in emerging markets.
While the world is fascinated by the new ridesharing model and caught in coming up with various ridesharing solutions, Mobike from China, the former “bicycle nation,” introduced a revolutionary dockless bike sharing model, and opened a new chapter for sustainable transportation.
Since the introduction of Mobike, it only took a year for this dockless bike sharing service to gain over 100 million daily active users. Today, China has become the world’s largest transport sharing market with 67 percent of the global market share. Governments around the world including United States of America, and Singapore etc. are welcoming China’s dockless bike sharing start-ups, like Mobike and ofo, to launch their operations in their countries.
This incredible growth of the dockless bike sharing model lies in the overcoming key challenge for sustainable transportation with a profitable and effective solution. The dockless bike sharing model solved the key issue of limited bicycle docks by leveraging on the mobile payment and mobile unlocking system to make bicycles available everywhere. In addition, with the deposit deduction payment model and an inexpensive fee per ride, this model proves profitable to support continuous operation; a triumph for sustainable transportation. This dockless bike sharing model from China continues to scale and has started a new wave of startups beyond China, including Australia, United States of America and India.
American investors have dubbed Alibaba, one of China’s tech giant trio “BAT”, as the “Amazon of China.” While Alibaba is known for its early success by imitating successful tech companies in the West – for instance, Taobao imitating Amazon, Alipay imitating Paypal, Alibaba Cloud imitating Amazon’s cloud computing services – the launch of Alipay’s mobile QR code payment is an original innovative cashless society solution from China.
While, for instance, the credit card system in the United States took several decades to turn mainstream, the mobile QR code payment by Alipay only took several years to become a nationwide payment norm. In perspective, according to Financial Times, the scale of Chinese mobile payment market was nearly 50 times of the American market in 2016.
Today, people living in China can leave their house without cash or credit card as all merchants – supermarkets, hotels, restaurants, shopping malls, small grocery stalls, and even street vendors – accepts mobile QR code payment. One would only need to scan the QR code on the mobile phone to make payment. This phenomenon of using mobile QR code payment is also taking place beyond China as a massive influx of Alipay’s user travels to all parts of the world. Particularly, Alipay has extended its service to Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and many countries in Europe and America. With Alipay, Chinese tourists now do not need to carry excessive cash and be exposed to the high risk of being robbed during their travels.
Given the rise of mobile-only users, this mobile QR code payment provides a convenient and an instrumental solution for a cashless society. It is no surprise for mobile payment systems imitating Alipay such as Hellopay, Paytm, 2C2P are sprouting out in Southeast Asia.