11 ms·

China, Not Silicon Valley, Is Cutting Edge in Mobile Tech

169 points by nstj 10y ago

ausjke 10y ago
I travel often to China, yes not just Mobile Tech, but also many fronts it is taking the lead. The bottom line, East Asia has the highest average IQ on the globe, and China produces almost 4x engineer degrees each year of what US has. With globalization in a world that is flat, and the extremely hard working attitude plus education-first tradition there, the future looks great on its side. In US, we're dealing with so many social issues while other countries are catching up on many key fronts.
- jackcosgrove 10y ago
  The rule of law, private property protections, and fair courts count for a lot in the wealth game. China has lots of potential but the politics are too corrupt. Chinese growth is being suppressed, if you can believe it, by corruption. I totally agree on the education-fifth attitude in the US though. I think attitudes are changing a bit as reality bites those who screwed off in school harder and harder every year. The public schools are still a shambles.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > The rule of law, private property protections, and fair courts count for a lot in the wealth game. I think this is a more nuanced issue. For instance, for the most part, China seems like libertarian paradise, but try and fuck with food supply and you'll get sentenced to death. Which, honestly, I consider fair. In the West, we're too far on the other end of the spectrum - overregulation of honest businesses and not enough punishment for dishonest entrepreneurs. Regarding private property protections, we have this IMO absurd notion of intellectual property, which hinders innovation and progress on our side, sometimes in pretty ridiculous ways (Elsevier comes to mind). As for fair courts, I had (thankfully) zero experience with those in China so I don't know how bad it is there, but the justice system in Western countries isn't looking peachy either.
    - microcolonel 10y ago
      A libertarian paradise where your money is used to build roads and buildings which nobody uses; and where it is illegal to broadcast depictions of homosexuality, recreational drug use, or the european occult. I also encourage you to look a bit deeper at the issue of the legal system. I think your tune will change the moment you're put to death for juggling carrots you don't own while drunk.
      - saiya-jin 10y ago
        compared to US, where your taxes are used to sponsor similar type of paranoid spying state and of course also sponsoring illegal wars half around the world without any good reason, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians directly, millions indirectly. yeah, big difference...
- cft 10y ago
  Here the ideological elite is set out to prove that everybody is equally capable, and IQ is a construct. The creation of value is increasingly being replaced by value redistribution among the poorest and value transference among the upper middle classes. In corporations, professional management is replacing value creation with politics and stupid games. Yesterday I watched two people launching a professional DJI Inspire drone. The iPad app for this drone is more complicated than Airbnb or Uber apps. I am not talking about the drone itself.. DJI is a Chinese drone company with a billion dollar revenue. The consequences of these trends will be rather grim for the American economy in 30 years. I expect to get about -7 karma for this , since denial is the crucial part of the problem.
  - Hydraulix989 10y ago
    I'm not sure I follow this at all. China doesn't have politics and stupid games? What are these generalizations even?!
  - ximeng 10y ago
    "Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or announce that you expect to get downvoted." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - adventured 10y ago
    The US has nothing to fear from China, any more than they did Japan a quarter century ago. China is drowning in the greatest accumulation of debt in world history, it's going to choke off their economy for generations to come. They'll refuse - as they're doing now - to put down the zombie corporations, perfectly copying the mistakes Japan made. They'll endlessly stimulate with debt while they sink lower. The prediction about China growing old before it becomes wealthy at the median, is already in the third inning of happening. And further proof of China being a non-threat: US manufacturing has grown dramatically since China's manufacturing came onto the global scene 30 plus years ago. The US economy has grown dramatically, while China's economy boomed. US standards of living have not contracted; quite the opposite, more people have moved up out of the middle class in the US, than down out of it, over the last 30 years. The US has the world's second highest household median disposable income level, which hasn't been diminished at all by China's rise. The US has seen no significant damage to its ability to create full-time employment, or possess a low unemployment rate. The US hasn't lost its wealth position in the world in the last 30 years, still owning around 43% to 45% of all private global wealth. The US has seen no damage to the USD global reserve currency with the modest rise of the Yuan, it has mostly taken position from other second tier currencies. So, where's the evidence supporting damage - now or in the near future - exactly? There has been none. If anything the US has benefited from China and is likely to continue to do so.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- adventured 10y ago
  > East Asia has the highest average IQ on the globe I'd have to see a vast amount of unbiased supporting evidence to believe such an outlandish claim. The actual results sure don't indicate that's the case: Japan's 25 year disaster, collapsing standards of living and generally very poorly run economy. Cambodia. Laos. Philippines. Vietnam. North Korea. China's vast poverty and pollution, extremely poor system of government and hyper debt problems. Taiwan has half the standard of living of advanced Western European nations. South Korea's economy is particularly unimpressive compared to the US and much of Western Europe. And of course then there's Eastern Russia, which is a big part of East Asia, no need to elaborate on their condition. Where's the empirical evidence for such a bold IQ claim? There isn't even scientific production evidence to support it versus the US and Western Europe.
  - jackcosgrove 10y ago
    The evidence I have seen suggests a modestly higher average IQ in East Asian countries, between 104 and 106 whereas European countries can be from 98 to 102. I think cultural factors such as work ethic and valuing education matter more in real life.
    - peyton 10y ago
      Generally numbers like those coming out of the region are based on underrepresentative samples of high achievers. You may be thinking of Lynn's IQ and Global Inequality.
      - zorked 10y ago
        Is there anyone other than Americans who even believe in IQ? Where I come from talking about IQ will put you in the same category of people who believe in chemtrails.
        peyton 10y ago
        Not an expert, but there seems to be a preponderance of evidence that IQ has predictive power. It's probably less popular in places with a sordid past of Social Darwinism, such as Germany or plantation societies like the Philippines and other former Spanish colonies.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  The population is also 4x higher in China than the US.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  > The bottom line, East Asia has the highest average IQ on the globe, and China produces almost 4x engineer degrees each year of what US has. The quality of most of those degrees is lacking. If you look at high quality output, then China lags the US; many Chinese students still dream of heading to the states for grad school.
- plandis 10y ago
  So just so we're clear. You're saying that the Chinese are more intelligent than the west? Man, when did HN become racist...
Zafira 10y ago
To get anything done in China there must be some sort of state sponsorship. Just look at the crackdown on original journalism recently. This intentionally causes only a few approved firms to prosper and allows for these ecosystem apps to flourish. I find it hard pressed to take seriously the claim that being able to live in the WeChat app is an innovation. I can certainly see the appeal to companies interviewed by the New York Times like Facebook and Kik who probably look at that kind of usage model enviously, but I think it's important to note that the use of non-Chinese services is not looked upon highly by the Party and this can be seen as an expression of regional favoritism. As much as Facebook would hope you live and breathe in their ecosystem 24/7, 365, it's harder to get away with that in places outside of China.
- nstj 10y ago
  I think the "living in a WeChat ecosystem" proposition doesn't hold much appeal from a user perspective, but from the perspective of companies looking to build apps it can be quite appealing. Native development is very expensive, and being able to plug in to a platform with identity, location, payments and social network is a huge win for a company looking to get a product out quickly and cheaply.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    IMO it holds very much appeal from the user perspective - tight integration of various services is a big win, and it's something we in the west don't enjoy - with each company trying to steal your attention for themselves, instead of cooperating to build actually useful ecosystem of tools.
    - nstj 10y ago
      Oh yeah, I should have qualified that with "developing applications in non-native code for native platforms doesn't have much appeal from a user perspective". ie: it would be great if the Official Account apps available through WeChat were native (and users would like that) but they're not; broadly speaking, webviews are typically less appealing than native layout. I 100% agree that the tight integration of services is a big win from the perspective of a user.
paradite 10y ago
The article pretty much sums up my experience living abroad as a Chinese. A few years ago when renren.com was still the most popular social media for Chinese users, it was filled with people sharing funny pictures and videos, interesting news and discussing trending topics automatically suggested by the site. Around that time on Facebook though, people are still posting their vacation photos, text status updates and nothing more. Nobody was sharing anything on the platform. Now Facebook has became Renren No.2, while Renren lost to WeChat.
- clw8 10y ago
  Renren had already lost to QQ Space before Wechat existed. Which I find hilarious, the Myspace clone where you can annoy viewers with auto-playing music and atrocious Javascript beat out the Facebook clone.
  - paradite 10y ago
    As far as I know, QQ Space was way earlier than renren. It was renren that beat QQ Space. Many of my friends followed the migration path of QQ Space -> renren -> WeChat.
DelaneyM 10y ago
Software is a hit-based business on which winners scale very large, very fast. All other things (education, market) being equal, the biggest pool should generate the most hits, and the most advancement.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  "All other things (education, market) being equal, the biggest pool should generate the most hits, and the most advancement. reply" The problem is there are many, many, many factors. Too many to count. 'Education' - even that is hardly comparable. Rote learning/memorization, a culture of copying vs. a culture of learning in innovation. I'm not saying one is better or that one country is necessarily more of the other, just giving one small example of quite radically differentiation even in one comparable vertical. It's really hard to compare US and China tech side by side. I think it's best to just look at them independently.
halfelf 10y ago
In CHN, lacking of credit card and personal credit records make internet industry find a efficient and fast way to receive payments —— that's why alipay and other third party payment such popular. Although just some Paypal copies in the beginning, they are such behemoths now.
- rahimnathwani 10y ago
  I keep hearing this thing about lack of credit cards in China being one of the reasons Alipay and, later, WeChat payments, took off. But I don't see how credit cards are relevant here. It takes 15 minutes to open a bank account and get a bank card which can be used at ATMs, POS transactions, and online. 'No credit card' doesn't mean 'no bank card'. What am I missing?
  - zhuzhuor 10y ago
    It basically means the lacking of credit systems and mature fraud detections. If you lose your (credit) card or leak your credit card number, the bank won't probably reimburse your financial losses. Compared to credit cards, mobile payments may be more secure.
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      That may well be true but why compare them with credit cards at all? Debit cards have all those functions and a much lower fraud incidence.
  - jomamaxx 10y ago
    Credit is very different than bank accounts. For example, even in countries like Spain, buying a new car and making payments is a new concept. Without functioning consumer credit, some industries have a hard time. A functional credit system is fairly essential. Alibaba in some ways solved that problem by providing guarantees, escrow-ish stuff. More than anything 'credibility' is the value add in a region wherein there is/was little.
    - 10y ago
ting_bu_dung 10y ago
This article has a pretty shallow definition on how China is 'cutting edge' in mobile tech. Apparently cutting edge means: a.) can do things without switching apps. (?!) b.) uses QR codes (invented by Japan, popularized by Japan) c.) pay things on phone (invented by nokia, popularized in europe) and the dominance confirmed by a.) a single quote from kik founder (who is trying to convince people qr code is...good?) b.) bigger mobile user base (well of course, they have more people) c.) uber lost in china (if you're a foreign company in China and you haven't learned yet Chinese government only lets Chinese companies win, then...)
- vadym909 10y ago
  /s here's a page to go and apologize for disagreeing with the article http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/20/world/asia/china-apologise-contest.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/20/world/asia/china-apologise...
- paradite 10y ago
  > a.) can do things without switching apps. (?!) Another term for this is integration. It is not just about not switching apps, it is about ingratiating different features (chat&social&payment&voucher) and providing a natural and consistent experience for users in a single app. You don't see that quite often for SV companies. How innovative is this? I am not sure, but definitely something new and first popularized by Tencent in the era of QQ before 2008. > b.) uses QR codes (invented by Japan, popularized by Japan) Not main point of the article, there are plenty of other innovations in the areas of living streaming and drone technology, but unfortunately you missed them. > c.) pay things on phone (invented by nokia, popularized in europe) Not sure about how Nokia and Europe did it, but in China you can pay movie tickets, utilities, taxi fees, fines, etc in a single app. Maybe Europe was a pioneer in this and I wasn't aware of that.
  - jguegant 10y ago
    Check out for swish in Sweden: "According to Arvidsson, the Swedes love Swish so much, it’s already revolutionising the local banking system, with several major banks refusing to accept cash at all, and as of late last year, four out of every five purchases in the country were being made electronically." Payment by phone is already a big thing here.
mc32 10y ago
And I hope they become number one in journalism because frankly the NYT is a shell of its former self. It's more of "all the news fit for clickbait" rather than print.
- frozenport 10y ago
  I'm upvoting this post, the article reads like sponsored content is rife with factual inaccuracies. Not sure if Paul Mozur is a shill (must be hard to report the truth from Dongcheng) or just incompetent.
  - linkregister 10y ago
    I disagree with the assessment of shillage. It's just another article in the vein of "scary Orientals and their Tiger Moms are outperforming us!" Mozur's article would better be categorized as a lazy sensation article. A sliver of merit exists in the article; Chinese internet companies do match American ones when it comes to scaling their infrastructure. Many Chinese software developers, designers, and architects are similarly talented as their American counterparts. Otherwise, this department-store-esque vertical integration of different features is just an artifact of the domination of fewer players with SOE connections and not a sign of dominant innovation. Is payment provider lock-in really something the rest of the world wants to emulate? At least American consumers can choose between 3 major credit companies. Could you point out the inaccuracies? Aside from the QR code non-sequitor, nothing jumped out at me.
    - peyton 10y ago
      > Could you point out the inaccuracies? Aside from the QR code non-sequitor, nothing jumped out at me. It's an article about homegrown internet services that does not mention the Great Firewall, as you alluded to somewhat. Given the myriad reasons listed for the services' success, this could be considered by some as a lie by omission.
tim_budong 10y ago
Ugh, this US/China dichotomy makes for good headlines but I hope the good people of the actual tech industry are able to see beyond it. The supporting examples are ripe with confirmation bias: - Yes, MoMo is older than Tinder but Badoo is older than MoMo - Drones took off worldwide - "walkie-talkie" = sending audio messages are you kidding me - QR codes were tried and not adopted by consumers in EU a century ago (recall the Economist being all up in arms about how they were going to revolutionize everything back in 08), no wonder companies were reluctant to bring them back Yes, Messenger surely wants to become wx but with a user base that's infinitely more fragmented -- it's going to take infinitely longer to launch a global payments solution that partners with all banks everywhere and obeys all regulations. You know why apps start in wx? Because there is no single app store. Yes -- China has some awesome mobile stuff going on, but this whole "TIL Chinese people also use the internet and it has other stuff???" fascination is just sad.
yyyuuu 10y ago
It's sad to see the recurring condescending attitude of HN crowd towards China and it's recent (and well deserved) technological prowess. C'mon guys, all said and done, China is kicking ass. You've got to give credit where it's due. Cutting edge or not, the next century will be driven by China simply because the momentum that they have generated. The only thing that still remains a red flag for me is China's lack of democracy and political instability that may come due to it.
- seesomesense 10y ago
  I believe that the technical term for the HN attitude towards China is : sour grapes.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  "Cutting edge or not, the next century will be driven by China simply because the momentum that they have generated" (Almost) Nothing is led by China and (almost) nothing ever will. I remember as a boy the stories of Japan taking over the world in the 1980's. The same will come of China. The Bubble will burst, and they'll slowly find their way into the world order. Bar codes? Give me a break. They've done well with some type of commerce activities wherein the tech facilitated development given their needs (Ali Baba), but that's not really tech. Everything is copy. Tell me - what tech does anyone use that was conceived of, developed and made in China? Nothing really. And that won't change.
  - paradite 10y ago
    > Tell me - what tech does anyone use that was conceived of, developed and made in China? This? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12214675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12214675
    - jomamaxx 10y ago
      Thanks for that. Nifty invention - that nobody uses outside of China. Meanwhile, talk to any rail car maker in the world, and they'll tell you that as part of the deal they had to sell trains in China, they had to hand over 100% of the IP, research, R&D, plans, schematics. And within 1 year the government had handed over the plans to a state owned competitor who had copied the entire thing from top to bottom. When we see those nifty trains running over San Francisco, you'll have a point.
erdevs 10y ago
Traveling to major cities in China (and Korea) is like a preview of where the US will be in ~5 years from a technology-society integration perspective. Easy payments on your phone, electronic communications for official notices/correspondences, mobile-electronic interactions with government, many/most people playing games and socializing about them, non-personal-car transportation (taxis/didis, buses, bikes), hyper-dense cities as populations urbanize. It makes sense that China (and Korea) have leaped ahead. They have relatively high average IQ populations. They have cultures that celebrate education, intelligence, and hard work (not sports and broism). They have heavy governmental investment in infrastructure (eg internet, cell networks) and they heavily regulate industries so as not to stymie utilities such as the internet. Hopefully the US and Europe can create a cultural shift (particularly the US on this front) and can see more government investment in infrastructure for technology and ease of access. If so, the US/Europe will maintain/grow their competitive edges vs China at least, as they have better property rights, fairer courts, more developed financial markets, more meritocracy of opportunity, etc. Korea has the best of all worlds in many ways, but not a large enough population or enough natural resources to be a contender for one of the top few economic powers in the world.
- duaneb 10y ago
  I don't follow the link between intelligence and technology. Are you implying smarter people use more?
  - geomark 10y ago
    If "using technology" means having a smart phone on which you message, check Facebook, hail a taxi, and play games then I don't think there is any correlation. Or maybe it varies by country. I say that because where I live (Thailand) smart phone penetration is pretty high and rapidly rising, while IQ is pretty low and gradually dropping [1]. [1] http://www.chiangraitimes.com/thailands-public-health-ministry-worries-thai-childrens-iq-dropping.html http://www.chiangraitimes.com/thailands-public-health-minist...
  - erdevs 10y ago
    I meant that greater intelligence and drive mean higher likelihood to invent or incorporate technology, higher likelihood to succeed driving its adoption as a business, etc. To try to make this more concrete and tractable. Imagine this oversimplified scenario: Country A's population is 100 people and their "culture" values education, intelligence and hard work. Country A's average IQ is 107 and the two most desired professions in the country are to be an engineer or a businessperson. Country B's population is 100 people and their culture looks down on "nerds" and favors "coolness" and hanging out. Country B's average IQ is 100 and the top desired professions in the country are being a sports star or a rock star. Obviously I'm drawing at extremes here, but you see where I'm going... which country produces more citizens that contribute to technology? Country A is probably gonna produce more cool tech over time than country B, even with equal-sized populations, due to a combination of cultural values / social incentives and population intelligence.
billconan 10y ago
I grew up in China, and I'm now living in the bay area. I just went back for a month for vacation. I too saw a more living mobile ecosystem. and wechat is indeed in the center of this system. For example, a fruit stand would now accept mobile payment via wechat. those who run fruit stands are usually farmers. I think it makes a lot of sense to build mobile payment into a a social app. because any currency would require a social network. and transferring money is a key social activity. building independent mobile payment without the support from a mature social network is a bad idea, for example square and apple pay (only useable in the apple ecosystem, a partial mobile ecosystem). China never seemed to have a credit card era, it jumped directly from paying cash to paying with mobile. whereas in the U.S., credit card is so convenient, people don't want to change. for many years, wechat has been combining new features with its social network, whereas whatsapp wanted to be a pure chatting app and missed many opportunities. you can use wechat to order food at restaurants, you can log into public wifi with wechat .... This is just one example. Another thing I noticed is online shopping. At the gate of our apartment, each day, there are many deliver guys on tricycles. They have a more efficient and cheap delivering system. For example, in the yard of our apartment we have storage cabinets with password locks. The deliver guys won't deliver each package to your door, as it is inefficient, especially because apartment buildings are tall in China, you have to take elevator. Instead, they put packages into one of the cabinet doors. And you will receive a password on your phone. Put the code in, the cabinet door will open. you can then get the package. This is not a complex idea, but hard to implement in the U.S., because we don't have the same population density here. When you build an infrastructure like this, you want to serve as many people as possible.
- stephenitis 10y ago
  luxer one and amazon lockers do the same. For example, in the yard of our apartment we have storage cabinets with password locks. The deliver guys won't deliver each package to your door, as it is inefficient, especially because apartment buildings are tall in China, you have to take elevator. Instead, they put packages into one of the cabinet doors. And you will receive a password on your phone. Put the code in, the cabinet door will open. you can then get the package.
option 10y ago
mobile was the next big thing ten years ago and US was the key innovator there. Now SV has next next big things around AI and VA/AR and is certainly leading and going to lead here. So it is not surprising that SV might not be leading in mobile anymore, even though such a claim is still questionable
- duaneb 10y ago
  Baidu is no as slouch. Most of the Bay Area is much closer to mobile than ai/vr. I don't think we value mobile in the US; many with money are resistant to change. Some people still don't use email and are shocked(!) when retail stores now require one to ship to the home address. I'll admit, I've never gotten Apple Pay to work myself. The interface is confusing as hell; I prefer cash or plastic.
isuckatcoding 10y ago
Arright time to include China for my job search then. Question: how well do the jobs in China pay? Can an English speaking person survive there?
Animats 10y ago
When will Foxconn realize they don't need Apple?
- jsn117 10y ago
  when will Foxconn become too expensive to make sense to Apple?
snowwrestler 10y ago
I think most of the innovations and trends mentioned in this article are also true in Africa and India: primacy of the smartphone over computer, importance of chat apps, daily functions like payments integrated into the phone, etc. The common thread is that each area has had millions of people ascend into the middle class after cell and then smartphones were "good enough" to replace landlines and PCs.
known 10y ago
"China is now low-cost, high-quality" --Jack Ma
Steven_Bukal 10y ago
"in China, its three major internet companies — Alibaba, Baidu and the WeChat parent Tencent — compete to create a single app with as many functions as they can stuff into it" It's not obvious to me that this is a good thing. Doesn't this just pass the buck down from the phone's operating system and app ecosystem to the do-everything-app's ecosystem? I'd sooner see mobile OS and app software improve their inter-app communication and APIs so that the do-everything app isn't necessary.
chj 10y ago
Wechat/Alipay change China a lot. Now I rarely use credit card. Not all gas stations accept credit card, but every one of them happily takes wechat. In many restaurants you can order in wechat and pay with it. Not that I love the idea of a monolithic app controlling everything in our life, but the next big thing to take its place need to live up to its level of convenience.
pipio21 10y ago
I have lived in China for some time and I am kind of tired of refuting nytimes, washingtonpost propaganda about China. Everything you read on those newspapers is about propaganda, propaganda to influence most small investors(what they call dumb money)on one of the financial centers of the world New York, or propaganda to influence politicians on the US political center of US, Washington. The elite financial industry that rules USA really admires China authoritarianism. China is an enormous country with lots of great things, but innovation is not one of their "fortes". There is a big bubble there that is going to do bang and is not going to be pretty. Not so good important things about China( that of course the propaganda omits): -Their internet is shit, capped by Government and closed to the outside world. -There is an army of spies(more than a million) working for the State, everything you do is controlled. - There is way less women than men because the Government let people basically kill girls with selective abortion or after being born. -They are communist, the interest of the individual is always subordinated to the community. If you have a girl with a Chinese woman outside China when you visit China they can refuse to let the girl go out. China needs girls.
- nstj 10y ago
  > There is way less women than men because the Government let people basically kill girls with selective abortion or after being born. To put in in to perspective, there are 1.06 males per female in China [0] which though high, isn't materially different to other large developing countries such as India and Pakistan. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio
  - learc83 10y ago
    Those numbers get a lot worse when you look at sex ratio among children under 5. I've seen estimates as high as 1.25, with some provinces above 1.3. Anything above 1.07 at birth is proof of selectively aborting girls.
  - Nothorized 10y ago
    Your link does not seems to work for me, but after a small Wikipedia research : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio On another note, the ratio for Arabic countries in the peninsula are quite fucked up. If you see the TV show "Generation Kill" from HBO, the character played by James Ranson has a theory, which is quite interesting watching the numbers : there would not be a single war if there was enough women in the Arabic Peninsula.
Asetsuna 10y ago
I don't think China's mobile tech is leading the world rather than Silicon Valley. Most cutting edge of mobile tech is still sourced from US or EU. But you have to admit China's big companies and Alibaba and Tencent or some unicorns really integrate techs, business and people's life better and faster.
alvarosm 10y ago
the censorship brigade killed this post from someone else so, reposting (he's mostly right): Ugh, this US/China dichotomy makes for good headlines but I hope the good people of the actual tech industry are able to see beyond it. The supporting examples are ripe with confirmation bias: - Yes, MoMo is older than Tinder but Badoo is older than MoMo - Drones took off worldwide - "walkie-talkie" = sending audio messages are you kidding me - QR codes were tried and not adopted by consumers in EU a century ago (recall the Economist being all up in arms about how they were going to revolutionize everything back in 08), no wonder companies were reluctant to bring them back Yes, Messenger surely wants to become wx but with a user base that's infinitely more fragmented -- it's going to take infinitely longer to launch a global payments solution that partners with all banks everywhere and obeys all regulations. You know why apps start in wx? Because there is no single app store. Yes -- China has some awesome mobile stuff going on, but this whole "TIL Chinese people also use the internet and it has other stuff???" fascination is just sad.
jaxondu 10y ago
China has the advantage of adoption en mass of mobile tech due mainly majority people has access to the net via mobile. Mobile payment is common. And they have a whole money making industry build on top of live tv apps (like vine, periscope). Scale and speed of adoption are keys. China has less tech people who're fixate to certain "ideology" such as JavaScript everywhere, HTML5 for everything, functional all the way etc. They just choose the tech that makes money. China is cutting edge in making use of tech to make money.
daemonk 10y ago
Sounds like the greatest advantage China has is a non-segmented software eco-system where a few companies dominate the market with apps that can do many things. In contrast to the US where companies focus on just a few key features and users have multiple apps doing various tasks. There are definitely pros and cons of both ecosystems. But from the common everyday user's perspective, I can see how China's ecosystem is more user friendly. Perhaps that's also why they have traditionally non-tech savvy adopters (farmers, fruit stand owners) using these apps.
bogomipz 10y ago
I feel that this is a typical NY Times tech puff piece: "Already in China, more people use their mobile devices to pay their bills, order services, watch videos and find dates than anywhere else in the world. Mobile payments in the country last year surpassed those in the United States." Yes this tends to happen when you have a population of 1.2 billion people compared to 330 million. Also seeing how outside of the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong you need a VPN(and even this is a constant game of whack-a-mole) to access Facebook and Google, it's hardly a level playing field. Economic nationalism in China has been discussed pretty extensively at this point. "But China’s tech industry — particularly its mobile businesses — has in some ways pulled ahead of the United States. Some Western tech companies, even the behemoths, are turning to Chinese firms for ideas." Nowhere in the article does it go on to substantiate how they have "pulled ahead." Have they pulled ahead by using QR codes? By using dating apps? Have they pulled ahead because of in app purchasing? (Hello, Uber Eats?) Different cultures respond differently to different services, this is evidenced by US/European music streaming apps that have had a real difficult time getting traction in the Asian market. Does this mean they have "pulled ahead" and are now setting the pace? Perhaps ocal entrepreneurs understand their local market and culture better?
hokkos 10y ago
Sorry but this article is not honest. All the example here have counter-examples of USA first apps. lot of apps used QR code since the iPhone had apps, Uber hail ride is present in several apps since long, Google Maps, CityMapper, ... There are apps to order pizza. Live streaming video app like justin.tv, ustream or livestream Tinder is not the first dating app, it just popularized a new model to begin a conversation : the double validation model, Badoo or Grindr existed long before. The WeChat model is NOT great, it means a monopoly on apps, they can remove you from their micro app store if they want like they did with Uber and remove you from the country. We are far better with an equalitarian app store like Play Store or (in lesser ways) the App Store. I think WeChat is the result of the pseudo banning of the Play Store in China, and it should NOT be a thing of desire.
- guelo 10y ago
  I had not heard about Wechat removing Uber. Do you have a link on that topic?
  - AJ007 10y ago
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/dougyoung/2015/07/20/tencent-snuffs-out-uber-on-wechat/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/dougyoung/2015/07/20/tencent-snu...
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mark_l_watson 10y ago
A little off topic, but non-tech people in the USA seem to have unrealistically negative views of China's tech abilities. Yesterday morning 4 non-tech friends and I were getting our exercise working in our community garden and all 4 of them were going on about how far advanced the USA was compared to China. I pointed out that at least in my field, a good fraction of new research papers are from Chinese researchers and I also gave them the example of WeChat pay.
HemanHeartYou 10y ago
Oh look another "China is innovating where westerners aren't" article.
pinaceae 10y ago
WeChat is the old AOL/Compuserve concept on mobile, nothing more,nothing less. An abstraction layer on the Internet, needed for China due to the langauge barrier of the Western/English-language Internet/WWW. Most of the stuff the West uses on the Internet is utterly useless for Chinese (also due to blockage by the Great Firewall), hence a walled garden makes perfect sense.

169 points by nstj 10y ago

I travel often to China, yes not just Mobile Tech, but also many fronts it is taking the lead. The bottom line, East Asia has the highest average IQ on the globe, and China produces almost 4x engineer degrees each year of what US has. With globalization in a world that is flat, and the extremely hard working attitude plus education-first tradition there, the future looks great on its side. In US, we're dealing with so many social issues while other countries are catching up on many key fronts.

jackcosgrove 10y ago
The rule of law, private property protections, and fair courts count for a lot in the wealth game. China has lots of potential but the politics are too corrupt. Chinese growth is being suppressed, if you can believe it, by corruption. I totally agree on the education-fifth attitude in the US though. I think attitudes are changing a bit as reality bites those who screwed off in school harder and harder every year. The public schools are still a shambles.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > The rule of law, private property protections, and fair courts count for a lot in the wealth game. I think this is a more nuanced issue. For instance, for the most part, China seems like libertarian paradise, but try and fuck with food supply and you'll get sentenced to death. Which, honestly, I consider fair. In the West, we're too far on the other end of the spectrum - overregulation of honest businesses and not enough punishment for dishonest entrepreneurs. Regarding private property protections, we have this IMO absurd notion of intellectual property, which hinders innovation and progress on our side, sometimes in pretty ridiculous ways (Elsevier comes to mind). As for fair courts, I had (thankfully) zero experience with those in China so I don't know how bad it is there, but the justice system in Western countries isn't looking peachy either.
  - microcolonel 10y ago
    A libertarian paradise where your money is used to build roads and buildings which nobody uses; and where it is illegal to broadcast depictions of homosexuality, recreational drug use, or the european occult. I also encourage you to look a bit deeper at the issue of the legal system. I think your tune will change the moment you're put to death for juggling carrots you don't own while drunk.
    - saiya-jin 10y ago
      compared to US, where your taxes are used to sponsor similar type of paranoid spying state and of course also sponsoring illegal wars half around the world without any good reason, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians directly, millions indirectly. yeah, big difference...
cft 10y ago
Here the ideological elite is set out to prove that everybody is equally capable, and IQ is a construct. The creation of value is increasingly being replaced by value redistribution among the poorest and value transference among the upper middle classes. In corporations, professional management is replacing value creation with politics and stupid games. Yesterday I watched two people launching a professional DJI Inspire drone. The iPad app for this drone is more complicated than Airbnb or Uber apps. I am not talking about the drone itself.. DJI is a Chinese drone company with a billion dollar revenue. The consequences of these trends will be rather grim for the American economy in 30 years. I expect to get about -7 karma for this , since denial is the crucial part of the problem.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  I'm not sure I follow this at all. China doesn't have politics and stupid games? What are these generalizations even?!
- ximeng 10y ago
  "Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or announce that you expect to get downvoted." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- adventured 10y ago
  The US has nothing to fear from China, any more than they did Japan a quarter century ago. China is drowning in the greatest accumulation of debt in world history, it's going to choke off their economy for generations to come. They'll refuse - as they're doing now - to put down the zombie corporations, perfectly copying the mistakes Japan made. They'll endlessly stimulate with debt while they sink lower. The prediction about China growing old before it becomes wealthy at the median, is already in the third inning of happening. And further proof of China being a non-threat: US manufacturing has grown dramatically since China's manufacturing came onto the global scene 30 plus years ago. The US economy has grown dramatically, while China's economy boomed. US standards of living have not contracted; quite the opposite, more people have moved up out of the middle class in the US, than down out of it, over the last 30 years. The US has the world's second highest household median disposable income level, which hasn't been diminished at all by China's rise. The US has seen no significant damage to its ability to create full-time employment, or possess a low unemployment rate. The US hasn't lost its wealth position in the world in the last 30 years, still owning around 43% to 45% of all private global wealth. The US has seen no damage to the USD global reserve currency with the modest rise of the Yuan, it has mostly taken position from other second tier currencies. So, where's the evidence supporting damage - now or in the near future - exactly? There has been none. If anything the US has benefited from China and is likely to continue to do so.
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adventured 10y ago
> East Asia has the highest average IQ on the globe I'd have to see a vast amount of unbiased supporting evidence to believe such an outlandish claim. The actual results sure don't indicate that's the case: Japan's 25 year disaster, collapsing standards of living and generally very poorly run economy. Cambodia. Laos. Philippines. Vietnam. North Korea. China's vast poverty and pollution, extremely poor system of government and hyper debt problems. Taiwan has half the standard of living of advanced Western European nations. South Korea's economy is particularly unimpressive compared to the US and much of Western Europe. And of course then there's Eastern Russia, which is a big part of East Asia, no need to elaborate on their condition. Where's the empirical evidence for such a bold IQ claim? There isn't even scientific production evidence to support it versus the US and Western Europe.
- jackcosgrove 10y ago
  The evidence I have seen suggests a modestly higher average IQ in East Asian countries, between 104 and 106 whereas European countries can be from 98 to 102. I think cultural factors such as work ethic and valuing education matter more in real life.
  - peyton 10y ago
    Generally numbers like those coming out of the region are based on underrepresentative samples of high achievers. You may be thinking of Lynn's IQ and Global Inequality.
    - zorked 10y ago
      Is there anyone other than Americans who even believe in IQ? Where I come from talking about IQ will put you in the same category of people who believe in chemtrails.
      - peyton 10y ago
        Not an expert, but there seems to be a preponderance of evidence that IQ has predictive power. It's probably less popular in places with a sordid past of Social Darwinism, such as Germany or plantation societies like the Philippines and other former Spanish colonies.
Hydraulix989 10y ago
The population is also 4x higher in China than the US.
seanmcdirmid 10y ago
> The bottom line, East Asia has the highest average IQ on the globe, and China produces almost 4x engineer degrees each year of what US has. The quality of most of those degrees is lacking. If you look at high quality output, then China lags the US; many Chinese students still dream of heading to the states for grad school.
plandis 10y ago
So just so we're clear. You're saying that the Chinese are more intelligent than the west? Man, when did HN become racist...

Zafira 10y ago

To get anything done in China there must be some sort of state sponsorship. Just look at the crackdown on original journalism recently. This intentionally causes only a few approved firms to prosper and allows for these ecosystem apps to flourish. I find it hard pressed to take seriously the claim that being able to live in the WeChat app is an innovation. I can certainly see the appeal to companies interviewed by the New York Times like Facebook and Kik who probably look at that kind of usage model enviously, but I think it's important to note that the use of non-Chinese services is not looked upon highly by the Party and this can be seen as an expression of regional favoritism. As much as Facebook would hope you live and breathe in their ecosystem 24/7, 365, it's harder to get away with that in places outside of China.

nstj 10y ago
I think the "living in a WeChat ecosystem" proposition doesn't hold much appeal from a user perspective, but from the perspective of companies looking to build apps it can be quite appealing. Native development is very expensive, and being able to plug in to a platform with identity, location, payments and social network is a huge win for a company looking to get a product out quickly and cheaply.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  IMO it holds very much appeal from the user perspective - tight integration of various services is a big win, and it's something we in the west don't enjoy - with each company trying to steal your attention for themselves, instead of cooperating to build actually useful ecosystem of tools.
  - nstj 10y ago
    Oh yeah, I should have qualified that with "developing applications in non-native code for native platforms doesn't have much appeal from a user perspective". ie: it would be great if the Official Account apps available through WeChat were native (and users would like that) but they're not; broadly speaking, webviews are typically less appealing than native layout. I 100% agree that the tight integration of services is a big win from the perspective of a user.

paradite 10y ago

The article pretty much sums up my experience living abroad as a Chinese. A few years ago when renren.com was still the most popular social media for Chinese users, it was filled with people sharing funny pictures and videos, interesting news and discussing trending topics automatically suggested by the site. Around that time on Facebook though, people are still posting their vacation photos, text status updates and nothing more. Nobody was sharing anything on the platform. Now Facebook has became Renren No.2, while Renren lost to WeChat.

clw8 10y ago
Renren had already lost to QQ Space before Wechat existed. Which I find hilarious, the Myspace clone where you can annoy viewers with auto-playing music and atrocious Javascript beat out the Facebook clone.
- paradite 10y ago
  As far as I know, QQ Space was way earlier than renren. It was renren that beat QQ Space. Many of my friends followed the migration path of QQ Space -> renren -> WeChat.

DelaneyM 10y ago

Software is a hit-based business on which winners scale very large, very fast. All other things (education, market) being equal, the biggest pool should generate the most hits, and the most advancement.

jomamaxx 10y ago
"All other things (education, market) being equal, the biggest pool should generate the most hits, and the most advancement. reply" The problem is there are many, many, many factors. Too many to count. 'Education' - even that is hardly comparable. Rote learning/memorization, a culture of copying vs. a culture of learning in innovation. I'm not saying one is better or that one country is necessarily more of the other, just giving one small example of quite radically differentiation even in one comparable vertical. It's really hard to compare US and China tech side by side. I think it's best to just look at them independently.

halfelf 10y ago

In CHN, lacking of credit card and personal credit records make internet industry find a efficient and fast way to receive payments —— that's why alipay and other third party payment such popular. Although just some Paypal copies in the beginning, they are such behemoths now.

rahimnathwani 10y ago
I keep hearing this thing about lack of credit cards in China being one of the reasons Alipay and, later, WeChat payments, took off. But I don't see how credit cards are relevant here. It takes 15 minutes to open a bank account and get a bank card which can be used at ATMs, POS transactions, and online. 'No credit card' doesn't mean 'no bank card'. What am I missing?
- zhuzhuor 10y ago
  It basically means the lacking of credit systems and mature fraud detections. If you lose your (credit) card or leak your credit card number, the bank won't probably reimburse your financial losses. Compared to credit cards, mobile payments may be more secure.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    That may well be true but why compare them with credit cards at all? Debit cards have all those functions and a much lower fraud incidence.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  Credit is very different than bank accounts. For example, even in countries like Spain, buying a new car and making payments is a new concept. Without functioning consumer credit, some industries have a hard time. A functional credit system is fairly essential. Alibaba in some ways solved that problem by providing guarantees, escrow-ish stuff. More than anything 'credibility' is the value add in a region wherein there is/was little.
  - 10y ago

ting_bu_dung 10y ago

This article has a pretty shallow definition on how China is 'cutting edge' in mobile tech. Apparently cutting edge means: a.) can do things without switching apps. (?!) b.) uses QR codes (invented by Japan, popularized by Japan) c.) pay things on phone (invented by nokia, popularized in europe) and the dominance confirmed by a.) a single quote from kik founder (who is trying to convince people qr code is...good?) b.) bigger mobile user base (well of course, they have more people) c.) uber lost in china (if you're a foreign company in China and you haven't learned yet Chinese government only lets Chinese companies win, then...)

vadym909 10y ago
/s here's a page to go and apologize for disagreeing with the article http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/20/world/asia/china-apologise-contest.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/20/world/asia/china-apologise...
paradite 10y ago
> a.) can do things without switching apps. (?!) Another term for this is integration. It is not just about not switching apps, it is about ingratiating different features (chat&social&payment&voucher) and providing a natural and consistent experience for users in a single app. You don't see that quite often for SV companies. How innovative is this? I am not sure, but definitely something new and first popularized by Tencent in the era of QQ before 2008. > b.) uses QR codes (invented by Japan, popularized by Japan) Not main point of the article, there are plenty of other innovations in the areas of living streaming and drone technology, but unfortunately you missed them. > c.) pay things on phone (invented by nokia, popularized in europe) Not sure about how Nokia and Europe did it, but in China you can pay movie tickets, utilities, taxi fees, fines, etc in a single app. Maybe Europe was a pioneer in this and I wasn't aware of that.
- jguegant 10y ago
  Check out for swish in Sweden: "According to Arvidsson, the Swedes love Swish so much, it’s already revolutionising the local banking system, with several major banks refusing to accept cash at all, and as of late last year, four out of every five purchases in the country were being made electronically." Payment by phone is already a big thing here.

mc32 10y ago

And I hope they become number one in journalism because frankly the NYT is a shell of its former self. It's more of "all the news fit for clickbait" rather than print.

frozenport 10y ago
I'm upvoting this post, the article reads like sponsored content is rife with factual inaccuracies. Not sure if Paul Mozur is a shill (must be hard to report the truth from Dongcheng) or just incompetent.
- linkregister 10y ago
  I disagree with the assessment of shillage. It's just another article in the vein of "scary Orientals and their Tiger Moms are outperforming us!" Mozur's article would better be categorized as a lazy sensation article. A sliver of merit exists in the article; Chinese internet companies do match American ones when it comes to scaling their infrastructure. Many Chinese software developers, designers, and architects are similarly talented as their American counterparts. Otherwise, this department-store-esque vertical integration of different features is just an artifact of the domination of fewer players with SOE connections and not a sign of dominant innovation. Is payment provider lock-in really something the rest of the world wants to emulate? At least American consumers can choose between 3 major credit companies. Could you point out the inaccuracies? Aside from the QR code non-sequitor, nothing jumped out at me.
  - peyton 10y ago
    > Could you point out the inaccuracies? Aside from the QR code non-sequitor, nothing jumped out at me. It's an article about homegrown internet services that does not mention the Great Firewall, as you alluded to somewhat. Given the myriad reasons listed for the services' success, this could be considered by some as a lie by omission.

tim_budong 10y ago

Ugh, this US/China dichotomy makes for good headlines but I hope the good people of the actual tech industry are able to see beyond it. The supporting examples are ripe with confirmation bias: - Yes, MoMo is older than Tinder but Badoo is older than MoMo - Drones took off worldwide - "walkie-talkie" = sending audio messages are you kidding me - QR codes were tried and not adopted by consumers in EU a century ago (recall the Economist being all up in arms about how they were going to revolutionize everything back in 08), no wonder companies were reluctant to bring them back Yes, Messenger surely wants to become wx but with a user base that's infinitely more fragmented -- it's going to take infinitely longer to launch a global payments solution that partners with all banks everywhere and obeys all regulations. You know why apps start in wx? Because there is no single app store. Yes -- China has some awesome mobile stuff going on, but this whole "TIL Chinese people also use the internet and it has other stuff???" fascination is just sad.

yyyuuu 10y ago

It's sad to see the recurring condescending attitude of HN crowd towards China and it's recent (and well deserved) technological prowess. C'mon guys, all said and done, China is kicking ass. You've got to give credit where it's due. Cutting edge or not, the next century will be driven by China simply because the momentum that they have generated. The only thing that still remains a red flag for me is China's lack of democracy and political instability that may come due to it.

seesomesense 10y ago
I believe that the technical term for the HN attitude towards China is : sour grapes.
jomamaxx 10y ago
"Cutting edge or not, the next century will be driven by China simply because the momentum that they have generated" (Almost) Nothing is led by China and (almost) nothing ever will. I remember as a boy the stories of Japan taking over the world in the 1980's. The same will come of China. The Bubble will burst, and they'll slowly find their way into the world order. Bar codes? Give me a break. They've done well with some type of commerce activities wherein the tech facilitated development given their needs (Ali Baba), but that's not really tech. Everything is copy. Tell me - what tech does anyone use that was conceived of, developed and made in China? Nothing really. And that won't change.
- paradite 10y ago
  > Tell me - what tech does anyone use that was conceived of, developed and made in China? This? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12214675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12214675
  - jomamaxx 10y ago
    Thanks for that. Nifty invention - that nobody uses outside of China. Meanwhile, talk to any rail car maker in the world, and they'll tell you that as part of the deal they had to sell trains in China, they had to hand over 100% of the IP, research, R&D, plans, schematics. And within 1 year the government had handed over the plans to a state owned competitor who had copied the entire thing from top to bottom. When we see those nifty trains running over San Francisco, you'll have a point.

erdevs 10y ago

Traveling to major cities in China (and Korea) is like a preview of where the US will be in ~5 years from a technology-society integration perspective. Easy payments on your phone, electronic communications for official notices/correspondences, mobile-electronic interactions with government, many/most people playing games and socializing about them, non-personal-car transportation (taxis/didis, buses, bikes), hyper-dense cities as populations urbanize. It makes sense that China (and Korea) have leaped ahead. They have relatively high average IQ populations. They have cultures that celebrate education, intelligence, and hard work (not sports and broism). They have heavy governmental investment in infrastructure (eg internet, cell networks) and they heavily regulate industries so as not to stymie utilities such as the internet. Hopefully the US and Europe can create a cultural shift (particularly the US on this front) and can see more government investment in infrastructure for technology and ease of access. If so, the US/Europe will maintain/grow their competitive edges vs China at least, as they have better property rights, fairer courts, more developed financial markets, more meritocracy of opportunity, etc. Korea has the best of all worlds in many ways, but not a large enough population or enough natural resources to be a contender for one of the top few economic powers in the world.

duaneb 10y ago
I don't follow the link between intelligence and technology. Are you implying smarter people use more?
- geomark 10y ago
  If "using technology" means having a smart phone on which you message, check Facebook, hail a taxi, and play games then I don't think there is any correlation. Or maybe it varies by country. I say that because where I live (Thailand) smart phone penetration is pretty high and rapidly rising, while IQ is pretty low and gradually dropping [1]. [1] http://www.chiangraitimes.com/thailands-public-health-ministry-worries-thai-childrens-iq-dropping.html http://www.chiangraitimes.com/thailands-public-health-minist...
- erdevs 10y ago
  I meant that greater intelligence and drive mean higher likelihood to invent or incorporate technology, higher likelihood to succeed driving its adoption as a business, etc. To try to make this more concrete and tractable. Imagine this oversimplified scenario: Country A's population is 100 people and their "culture" values education, intelligence and hard work. Country A's average IQ is 107 and the two most desired professions in the country are to be an engineer or a businessperson. Country B's population is 100 people and their culture looks down on "nerds" and favors "coolness" and hanging out. Country B's average IQ is 100 and the top desired professions in the country are being a sports star or a rock star. Obviously I'm drawing at extremes here, but you see where I'm going... which country produces more citizens that contribute to technology? Country A is probably gonna produce more cool tech over time than country B, even with equal-sized populations, due to a combination of cultural values / social incentives and population intelligence.

billconan 10y ago

I grew up in China, and I'm now living in the bay area. I just went back for a month for vacation. I too saw a more living mobile ecosystem. and wechat is indeed in the center of this system. For example, a fruit stand would now accept mobile payment via wechat. those who run fruit stands are usually farmers. I think it makes a lot of sense to build mobile payment into a a social app. because any currency would require a social network. and transferring money is a key social activity. building independent mobile payment without the support from a mature social network is a bad idea, for example square and apple pay (only useable in the apple ecosystem, a partial mobile ecosystem). China never seemed to have a credit card era, it jumped directly from paying cash to paying with mobile. whereas in the U.S., credit card is so convenient, people don't want to change. for many years, wechat has been combining new features with its social network, whereas whatsapp wanted to be a pure chatting app and missed many opportunities. you can use wechat to order food at restaurants, you can log into public wifi with wechat .... This is just one example. Another thing I noticed is online shopping. At the gate of our apartment, each day, there are many deliver guys on tricycles. They have a more efficient and cheap delivering system. For example, in the yard of our apartment we have storage cabinets with password locks. The deliver guys won't deliver each package to your door, as it is inefficient, especially because apartment buildings are tall in China, you have to take elevator. Instead, they put packages into one of the cabinet doors. And you will receive a password on your phone. Put the code in, the cabinet door will open. you can then get the package. This is not a complex idea, but hard to implement in the U.S., because we don't have the same population density here. When you build an infrastructure like this, you want to serve as many people as possible.

stephenitis 10y ago
luxer one and amazon lockers do the same. For example, in the yard of our apartment we have storage cabinets with password locks. The deliver guys won't deliver each package to your door, as it is inefficient, especially because apartment buildings are tall in China, you have to take elevator. Instead, they put packages into one of the cabinet doors. And you will receive a password on your phone. Put the code in, the cabinet door will open. you can then get the package.

option 10y ago

mobile was the next big thing ten years ago and US was the key innovator there. Now SV has next next big things around AI and VA/AR and is certainly leading and going to lead here. So it is not surprising that SV might not be leading in mobile anymore, even though such a claim is still questionable

duaneb 10y ago
Baidu is no as slouch. Most of the Bay Area is much closer to mobile than ai/vr. I don't think we value mobile in the US; many with money are resistant to change. Some people still don't use email and are shocked(!) when retail stores now require one to ship to the home address. I'll admit, I've never gotten Apple Pay to work myself. The interface is confusing as hell; I prefer cash or plastic.

isuckatcoding 10y ago

Arright time to include China for my job search then. Question: how well do the jobs in China pay? Can an English speaking person survive there?

Animats 10y ago

When will Foxconn realize they don't need Apple?

jsn117 10y ago
when will Foxconn become too expensive to make sense to Apple?

snowwrestler 10y ago

I think most of the innovations and trends mentioned in this article are also true in Africa and India: primacy of the smartphone over computer, importance of chat apps, daily functions like payments integrated into the phone, etc. The common thread is that each area has had millions of people ascend into the middle class after cell and then smartphones were "good enough" to replace landlines and PCs.

known 10y ago

"China is now low-cost, high-quality" --Jack Ma

Steven_Bukal 10y ago

"in China, its three major internet companies — Alibaba, Baidu and the WeChat parent Tencent — compete to create a single app with as many functions as they can stuff into it" It's not obvious to me that this is a good thing. Doesn't this just pass the buck down from the phone's operating system and app ecosystem to the do-everything-app's ecosystem? I'd sooner see mobile OS and app software improve their inter-app communication and APIs so that the do-everything app isn't necessary.

chj 10y ago

Wechat/Alipay change China a lot. Now I rarely use credit card. Not all gas stations accept credit card, but every one of them happily takes wechat. In many restaurants you can order in wechat and pay with it. Not that I love the idea of a monolithic app controlling everything in our life, but the next big thing to take its place need to live up to its level of convenience.

pipio21 10y ago

I have lived in China for some time and I am kind of tired of refuting nytimes, washingtonpost propaganda about China. Everything you read on those newspapers is about propaganda, propaganda to influence most small investors(what they call dumb money)on one of the financial centers of the world New York, or propaganda to influence politicians on the US political center of US, Washington. The elite financial industry that rules USA really admires China authoritarianism. China is an enormous country with lots of great things, but innovation is not one of their "fortes". There is a big bubble there that is going to do bang and is not going to be pretty. Not so good important things about China( that of course the propaganda omits): -Their internet is shit, capped by Government and closed to the outside world. -There is an army of spies(more than a million) working for the State, everything you do is controlled. - There is way less women than men because the Government let people basically kill girls with selective abortion or after being born. -They are communist, the interest of the individual is always subordinated to the community. If you have a girl with a Chinese woman outside China when you visit China they can refuse to let the girl go out. China needs girls.

nstj 10y ago
> There is way less women than men because the Government let people basically kill girls with selective abortion or after being born. To put in in to perspective, there are 1.06 males per female in China [0] which though high, isn't materially different to other large developing countries such as India and Pakistan. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio
- learc83 10y ago
  Those numbers get a lot worse when you look at sex ratio among children under 5. I've seen estimates as high as 1.25, with some provinces above 1.3. Anything above 1.07 at birth is proof of selectively aborting girls.
- Nothorized 10y ago
  Your link does not seems to work for me, but after a small Wikipedia research : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio On another note, the ratio for Arabic countries in the peninsula are quite fucked up. If you see the TV show "Generation Kill" from HBO, the character played by James Ranson has a theory, which is quite interesting watching the numbers : there would not be a single war if there was enough women in the Arabic Peninsula.

Asetsuna 10y ago

I don't think China's mobile tech is leading the world rather than Silicon Valley. Most cutting edge of mobile tech is still sourced from US or EU. But you have to admit China's big companies and Alibaba and Tencent or some unicorns really integrate techs, business and people's life better and faster.

alvarosm 10y ago

the censorship brigade killed this post from someone else so, reposting (he's mostly right): Ugh, this US/China dichotomy makes for good headlines but I hope the good people of the actual tech industry are able to see beyond it. The supporting examples are ripe with confirmation bias: - Yes, MoMo is older than Tinder but Badoo is older than MoMo - Drones took off worldwide - "walkie-talkie" = sending audio messages are you kidding me - QR codes were tried and not adopted by consumers in EU a century ago (recall the Economist being all up in arms about how they were going to revolutionize everything back in 08), no wonder companies were reluctant to bring them back Yes, Messenger surely wants to become wx but with a user base that's infinitely more fragmented -- it's going to take infinitely longer to launch a global payments solution that partners with all banks everywhere and obeys all regulations. You know why apps start in wx? Because there is no single app store. Yes -- China has some awesome mobile stuff going on, but this whole "TIL Chinese people also use the internet and it has other stuff???" fascination is just sad.

jaxondu 10y ago

China has the advantage of adoption en mass of mobile tech due mainly majority people has access to the net via mobile. Mobile payment is common. And they have a whole money making industry build on top of live tv apps (like vine, periscope). Scale and speed of adoption are keys. China has less tech people who're fixate to certain "ideology" such as JavaScript everywhere, HTML5 for everything, functional all the way etc. They just choose the tech that makes money. China is cutting edge in making use of tech to make money.

daemonk 10y ago

Sounds like the greatest advantage China has is a non-segmented software eco-system where a few companies dominate the market with apps that can do many things. In contrast to the US where companies focus on just a few key features and users have multiple apps doing various tasks. There are definitely pros and cons of both ecosystems. But from the common everyday user's perspective, I can see how China's ecosystem is more user friendly. Perhaps that's also why they have traditionally non-tech savvy adopters (farmers, fruit stand owners) using these apps.

bogomipz 10y ago

I feel that this is a typical NY Times tech puff piece: "Already in China, more people use their mobile devices to pay their bills, order services, watch videos and find dates than anywhere else in the world. Mobile payments in the country last year surpassed those in the United States." Yes this tends to happen when you have a population of 1.2 billion people compared to 330 million. Also seeing how outside of the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong you need a VPN(and even this is a constant game of whack-a-mole) to access Facebook and Google, it's hardly a level playing field. Economic nationalism in China has been discussed pretty extensively at this point. "But China’s tech industry — particularly its mobile businesses — has in some ways pulled ahead of the United States. Some Western tech companies, even the behemoths, are turning to Chinese firms for ideas." Nowhere in the article does it go on to substantiate how they have "pulled ahead." Have they pulled ahead by using QR codes? By using dating apps? Have they pulled ahead because of in app purchasing? (Hello, Uber Eats?) Different cultures respond differently to different services, this is evidenced by US/European music streaming apps that have had a real difficult time getting traction in the Asian market. Does this mean they have "pulled ahead" and are now setting the pace? Perhaps ocal entrepreneurs understand their local market and culture better?

hokkos 10y ago

Sorry but this article is not honest. All the example here have counter-examples of USA first apps. lot of apps used QR code since the iPhone had apps, Uber hail ride is present in several apps since long, Google Maps, CityMapper, ... There are apps to order pizza. Live streaming video app like justin.tv, ustream or livestream Tinder is not the first dating app, it just popularized a new model to begin a conversation : the double validation model, Badoo or Grindr existed long before. The WeChat model is NOT great, it means a monopoly on apps, they can remove you from their micro app store if they want like they did with Uber and remove you from the country. We are far better with an equalitarian app store like Play Store or (in lesser ways) the App Store. I think WeChat is the result of the pseudo banning of the Play Store in China, and it should NOT be a thing of desire.

guelo 10y ago
I had not heard about Wechat removing Uber. Do you have a link on that topic?
- AJ007 10y ago
  http://www.forbes.com/sites/dougyoung/2015/07/20/tencent-snuffs-out-uber-on-wechat/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/dougyoung/2015/07/20/tencent-snu...

deleted 10y ago

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mark_l_watson 10y ago

A little off topic, but non-tech people in the USA seem to have unrealistically negative views of China's tech abilities. Yesterday morning 4 non-tech friends and I were getting our exercise working in our community garden and all 4 of them were going on about how far advanced the USA was compared to China. I pointed out that at least in my field, a good fraction of new research papers are from Chinese researchers and I also gave them the example of WeChat pay.

HemanHeartYou 10y ago

Oh look another "China is innovating where westerners aren't" article.

pinaceae 10y ago

WeChat is the old AOL/Compuserve concept on mobile, nothing more,nothing less. An abstraction layer on the Internet, needed for China due to the langauge barrier of the Western/English-language Internet/WWW. Most of the stuff the West uses on the Internet is utterly useless for Chinese (also due to blockage by the Great Firewall), hence a walled garden makes perfect sense.