Show HN: Who Groupon is Competing With in China

http://min.us/mve8Hyf I just thought this is interesting. It's in Chinese so it'd be a little hard for non-Chinese to decipher, but essentially what it is would be the Group Buy website by the Chinese Internet Giant Tencent. What's very interesting about this as opposed to Groupon is that Tencent is selling its own virtual currency on this image. So the deal is that if you purchase 1 QB, which is equivalent to about 1RMB, which converts to about 15 cents USD, you will enter a raffle deal in which for every 1QB that you purchase, you increase your chance of winning a 5 digit QQ ID. Unlike U.S. which the instant messaging world is fairly scattered, Tencent dominates the majority of the IM market share. You can have all the different alias on Tencent, but you are attributed to the QQ ID that you are randomly assigned once you registered (like ICQ). 5 Digit would be consider the shortest amount of digit you can have, and the beta users (about 15 years ago) were able to get this kind of QQ ID, and each 5 digit QQ ID can be sold on the online market today for about $3000-40,000 USD, depending on "how lucky" the # is. I just thought it's interesting because instead of just having local deals, Tencent is able to expand its network into its virtual currency world. You'd be surprised at how many games Tencent has in its portfolio, and each game is free, but the company uses virtual currency as the leverage for monetization. QB, the virtual currency of Tencent, is more liquid than cash. Some freelance merchants take QB as a form of payment. I remember recently on TechCrunch about how Groupon is going all out in China, but unless they cooperate with Tencent, it's going to be a hard task. $1 billion dollar is way too little to compete with Tencent. I just want to recommend Tech users to follow some of the Chinese internet trends, especially in the virtual world, because I personally believe they're way ahead of U.S. in that field. I mean Farmville was invented in China in 05. QQzone, the main blog tool in China, has 500million users, and it introduced QZONE apps in 04, when Facebook was just being cranked out by Zuckerberg. Tencent haven't had many innovations recently because it has just been copying many of the U.S. trends , but when it comes to social gaming, China knows its stuff. And when you tie social gaming with social deals, it's something Groupon doesn't have.