From Programmer   Reported by Chang Zheng in Sep 2010

Recently, there have been a lot of reports by major Chinese IT media on “Wandoujia”, known as one of the first few projects that Innovation Works has lunched since founded. However, what is not known to them is “Umeng”, another project that was launched back in May, 2010. Umeng is a tool that helps Chinese mobile developers to gather statistical information about how app users are using their apps. Umeng has been proved to be a very useful and reliable tool. About 30 mobile developers are using Umeng at the moment with 40-50 apps and more than 600,000 end users on Android and iPhone.

According to www.umeng.com, Umeng has the following features. First, it provides real-time feedbacks about app usage to app developers, including the number of online users, the number of times the app has been run and the frequency of user activities. Second, Umeng allows the app developer to customize the contents of feedbacks for every single app he has developed. In this way, app developer can have a deep understanding of how his users are dealing with a specific app. Third, Umeng is totally free and easy to use. Developers just have to modify some of the code lines in his app and the information sent back by Umeng will provide up-to-date running logs of the app running on different devices and different operation systems. These features make Umeng highly appreciated by experienced app developers. According to Shanglang Yao (CTO of EOE), “Developers need detailed statistical data to gain an insight into his apps. Umeng is a great tool that provides such professional statistical analysis, informing the developers how their app are performing and pushing them to fix or improve their apps.”

Fan Jiang, the founder of Umeng, previously worked at Google China. According to Fan, the advantages of Umeng as compared with other similar analytics tools are two-fold. First, Umeng offers very deep and professional statistical analysis. Second, the statistical analysis is provided on the basis that the end user experience is enhanced instead of negatively impacted. “It takes us a lot of time to improve Umeng, reduce its upload data flow and minimize its influence on the original app so that the app user gets a better user experience. Good user experience is considered of great importance by app developers,” said Fan.

Fan said he realized that he prefers to be an entrepreneur to a worker after two years’ work at Google China. “I like to build something from scratch and work from the beginning through to the end. I don’t like to start from anywhere in-between.” With this in mind, Fan started to build his own team when Innovation Works was about to launch its’ “Acceleration project” for start-up teams. Fan has a clear idea about what Umeng should be like. “I am a mobile developer myself before. When developing Android apps, I realized that mobile apps are part of today’s internet. While there are a lot of tools that help developers of websites to learn about their products, i.e. websites, mobile developers cannot get information about product usage easily. I thus decided to develop a tool for mobile app developers. Umeng is our first attempt and the beta version of Umeng was released to public in May, 2010.”

Umeng’s team has got a lot of help from Innovation Works including funding, market development and recruitment just like other teams in the “Acceleration project”. “Especially in recruitment, we have earn a lot of recognition because of Kai-Fu Li and Innovation Works’ reputation’, says Fan, ‘We were therefore able to hire experienced teammates and enhance the team’s capability.” Fan also said, “Personally speaking, I have achieved a higher individual value in Innovation Works by gaining an overview of the industry. Because the projects Innovation Works funds cover almost every area of mobile internet, Innovation Works is able to provide you with a lot of information about how such projects make profit.”

Umeng is a non-profitable tool till now. Fan said he and his team believe that in the future, they can find a win-win solution between developers and them. It has been proved by internet (non-mobile) that there is a huge and profitable opportunity in providing services for developers.

Finally, Fan told the reporter that if everything goes well, Umeng will become a company running the Umeng project itself. In the future, Umeng will provide more services such as gathering users’ feedbacks and making statistical analysis of the feedbacks. There is no doubt that a few months later Umeng’s team will be facing a series of big challenges in fundraising, technology development, management and company operation. But with the help of Innovation Works, the risk they take will be sharply reduced.

From Sina on Sep 28^th 2010

Wandoujia is an Android mobile phone syncing and management tool at the PC end. The product is developed by a firm affiliated to Kai-Fu Li’s Innovation Works. Syncing the phone contacts, SMS, apps and multimedia content with your PC and even capturing the phone screen images and saving them on your PC can be as simple as a click on Wandoujia.

Download Now! Wandoujia Version 1.5

Since the launch on Aug 8^th, 2010, Wandoujia has won a lot of praise from its users. The newly released Wandoujia version 1.5 has many improved functions.

From the main user interface (as above) we observe that all major functions of Wandoujia 1.5 including phone information, contact book, SMS, apps, music, video and eBook are represented by clear and interesting icons at the top and ready for use.

Offline use has been added to Wandoujia 1.5. You can download videos, music and apps to your PC at any time and upload them to your phone when the connection between your PC and phone is available.

Some functions are still not available on Wandoujia 1.5, such as image/file management. But with the current short updating cycle of Wandoujia, we can expect that these functions will be realized in the near future. Let’s just wait and see.

From CWW.net         Reported by Zhao Yu in Sep 2010

On Sep 8^th 2010, workers of Innovation Works were decorating their new home, the 18^th floor of Disanji building, with their own hands. Lei Zhang, CEO of Dianxin (Dianxin is an Android-based China-focused Operation System) told the reporter from CWW.net that the three priorities of Dianxin are “making a good product, developing fast and flexible R&D framework and finding a sustainable commercial model.” “We take our first step into mobile internet industry from the place called operation system, which is the core of mobile internet products.”

The company that builds Dianxin OS (English name Tapas) is called FengLingChuangJing. It is the first independent operation company that Innovation Works has funded. On the name card of Lei Zhang, it prints “family member of Innovation Works”.

About “Dianxin”

“The name ‘Dianxin’ (cookies) has two meanings. First, we want our OS to be a charming operation system, giving users a feeling that they are eating a delicious cookie when using it. Second, ‘Dianxin‘ also means making people happy in Chinese.” Lei Zhang explained.

When talking about why the company is developing Dianxin OS, Lei said that Dianxin is a product that connects internet apps and smart phones. It will provide awesome user experience to users and new business opportunities to telecom operators.

Kai-Fu Li, Founder and Director of Innovation Works, made comments about Dianxin in a recent press conference of Sharp. Dianxin OS has been pre-installed in the two new products by Sharp, SH8118U and SH8128U. Kai-Fu Li said, “Currently, internet based apps cannot be smoothly planted on mobile phones. Dianxin is trying to solve exactly this problem.”

“Dianxin aims to act as a bridge between Android system and third-party applications, helping developers to develop Android apps and move them to the Android platform more easily. By doing this, Dianxin also offers a holistic solution to using mobile internet that will in turn satisfy the end users to a degree never reached before.” On the 1-year anniversary of Innovation Works, Kai-Fu said, “We have visited Honghai, Mediatek and Zhonghua telecom recently, and learned a lot from them. Learning about the hardware and combining the knowledge with our expertise in internet and software helps us see clearly what we should do in the mobile internet market.”

Before joining Dianxin, Lei Zhang was a core member of the Baidu wireless team, drawing the blueprint for Baidu’s wireless products and technology system. Before becoming a member of Baidu, Lei had eight years of working experience in telecom related jobs with Huawei which he joined in 2000. There are very few talents like Lei who have deep knowledge of both the telecom industry and the internet industry, according to independent analysts.

In the office of Innovation Works, Lei told the reporter from CWW.net that they will work on the details of Dianxin OS to make it a perfect product. Dianxin OS will eventually help mobile phone producers issue new versions of phones faster and make the installation of apps on the phones more easily.