CHINESE SELFIE APP LEADER SEEKS TO ‘BEAUTIFY THE WORLD’
Photo-editing craze highlights how lives are increasingly lived online
Strolling a tree-lined Shanghai street with friends, Hu Dongyuan pulls out her smartphone and does what millions of Chinese women do daily: take a selfie, digitally “beautify” their faces, and pop it on social media. Such virtual makeovers, typically involving lightening skin, smoothing out complexions and rounding the eyes, have propelled selfie-editing app Meitu to the top ranks of China downloads.
With more than 450 million active China users, Meitu is now also gaining traction abroad, using its more advanced features to challenge Instagram and Snapchat, which depend largely on filters and stickers.
China has a world-leading 700 million mobile internet users, vast numbers of whom use such apps to fuss over their digital appearance.
“It’s the same as with clothing and makeup. They are all ways for people to better present themselves,” said Ms Hu, a travel agency employee, who likens Meitu to a cheap, non-permanent form of cosmetic surgery. “Everyone uses it as a kind of personal advertisement.”
Meitu, which means “pretty picture”, launched a Hong Kong initial public offering in December that valued the company at US$4.6 billion at the time despite consistently posting losses. It was Hong Kong’s biggest tech IPO in nearly a decade.
Analysts call Meitu a potential test case of the global potential of Chinese apps, particularly those aimed at women, a powerful consumer force.
“[Meitu] has really appealed to the beauty concept of China’s post-95s,” said William Chou, an internet analyst for Deloitte China, referring to those born after that year.
“Photo-sharing is a global phenomenon but China has climbed to the top of the world in this,” he added.
The selfie-editing craze highlights how Chinese lives are increasingly lived online, making a person’s virtual appearance as important as their real one, said psychology professor Yu Feng of Xi’an Jiaotong University.
“Modern society has turned face-to-face communication into mostly internet communication,” Mr Yu said, and Chinese millennials are seizing the chance “to control themselves and their world”.
Meitu and domestic competitors like Camera 360 and Poco shrewdly cater to Chinese beauty preferences for lighter skin and rounder eyes — key features allow easy modification of such attributes on screen.
Founded in the eastern city of Xiamen, Meitu initially provided photo-editing software for PCs, introducing its first selfie app in 2013.
Its IPO prospectus said Meitu apps process half of the pictures posted on Chinese social media and were used to alter around 6 billion photos last October.
Its half-dozen applications, including one for altering video, are regularly among the top photo-app downloads in countries as diverse as China, Russia, Japan, India and Malaysia.
Chinese internet giants like Tencent and Alibaba have struggled to replicate their domestic dominance overseas.
But Meitu said it had 430 million overseas users as of October last year, compared to around 500 million claimed by Instagram.
Yet profits remain elusive. Meitu lost 2.2 billion yuan (11.2 billion baht) in the first half of last year.
“Meitu’s big problem has always been that it came up with this killer app — and the usage is unbelievable. It’s crazy. But they never had a clear business model underneath it,” said Jeffrey Towson, professor of investment at Peking University.
Hungry for revenue, Meitu launched its own phones designed for selfie-taking in 2013. It sold just 646,446 in the first 10 months of last year.
“Our mission is to make the world more beautiful. Our wish is to build a beauty ecosystem,” Meitu’s IPO prospectus said.
Estonian robots head to US
A knee-high, black-and-white buggy rolls down a snowy pavement in Estonia’s capital Tallinn and stops obediently at the red traffic light of a large road junction.
The six-wheeled robot, on its way to deliver lunch to a client, knows to cross only when the pedestrian light is green, but, armless, it cannot press the traffic light button.
Inventors Starship Technologies have taught their robots to avoid traffic lights with buttons and are now giving them speakers and microphones to help them navigate pedestrian crossings.
Starship robots will be able to communicate with humans. “We’ll have predefined sentences that are used in certain situations,” Mikk Martmaa, the 26-year-old head of Starship’s testing programme in Estonia, told AFP.
A prototype of the robot was first designed for a Nasa competition seeking bots able to collect rock samples on Mars or the Moon. While it did not win, the Tallinn-based engineers behind the model thought it was perfect for food deliveries.
To explore the idea, lead engineer Estonian Ahti Heinla and Denmark’s Janus Friis, co-founders of the online call service Skype, created Starship Technologies in London in 2014.
The startup’s bots are being developed and tested in the Baltic state of Estonia.
On a cold February day, 27-year-old TV producer Liisi Molder does not feel like going out but fancies a €12 (440 baht) portion of squid and celeriac with herring roe and rocket in shellfish sauce from the busy nearby Umami restaurant.
With a few clicks, Molder places her order on an application on her mobile phone and 20 minutes later the robot arrives with her lunch.
It had no trouble climbing a paving stone in front of Ms Molder’s block of flats, but unable to press the entry buzzer, it sends a message to her phone.
“Knock-knock! Your Wolt delivery is arriving, please come outside and unlock the robot,” reads the message with an access code to open the robot’s container.
The robots’ top speed is around 6kph but they are far less expensive to build and operate than delivery drones now being tested by online retail giant Amazon and others.