Baidu´s smartbike is coming to you - Kaiser Kuo

+Kaiser Kuo 

Baidu is about to release a new feature into the internet of things: a smartbike. Baidu director communication Kaiser Kuo explains the features in investors.com. First release will be in China, but "there's no reason necessarily we would leave it only in China."

Investors.com:

The Baidu Maps navigation system is built into a display on the handlebars to give bikers a visual readout of where to turn during a ride. 

The bike's smarts also contain social networking features. "It will locate other people using our DuBike operating system so you can meet up with other people and share good routes with other people. You'll be able to see other people using DuBike on your map if you want to find other riders," said Baidu spokesman Kaiser Kuo. 

The bike doesn't need charging, either. "You've got a power drum that converts your kinetic energy to charge the electric system," Kuo said. "The electrical system is powered when you pedal." 

In case anyone else tries to abscond with the DuBike, there's an anti-theft system in the form of a built-in GPS so owners can locate their bike using their smartphones. Baidu's Institute for Deep Learning research group developed the smart bike prototype, along with China's Tsinghua University's Academy of Arts & Design. 

The product is "more about the software ... rather than the actual hardware," said Kuo. "We're making the operating system open and available to all different bicycle manufacturers. The idea is that bicycle manufacturers can take this, get the specs on how to make the sensors talk to each other, how to make the operating system talk to your phone and put that all into a bicycle. The idea is that smart bikes become a part of your life." 

Kuo said there's been "considerable interest" from bike manufacturers in the system. The company would only say the first prototypes are scheduled for release soon and has not given a price for the smart bikes. Baidu also declined to say how many will be initally be produced or name the company that manufacturing them. 

The release of the prototype will happen only in China, said Kuo, who added: "there's no reason necessarily we would leave it only in China. We don't have maps for cities and countries outside of China yet, so that's a limiting factor - for now, at least."

Baidu´s prototype smartbike

More in investors.com

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´request form.

Are you interested in more innovation experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check our updated list here.   

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• China´s internet users are different - Kaiser Kuo

China´s internet users are different - Kaiser Kuo

+Kaiser Kuo 

Western tech companies often make wrong assumptions about what Chinese internet users want, tells Baidu´s director of communication Kaiser Kuo in the Korea JoongAng Daily. "They are not as fragmented as the US users."

The  Korea JoongAng Daily:

A. In the West, especially in the tech industry, there is little understanding of how specific cultural and linguistic spheres have a tremendous hold on the ways people use the Internet. One of the aspects I find very interesting is that even though there is a huge number of net users [in China], they are not as fragmented as U.S. users. When there is an interesting post on news or some kind of Internet persona emerging, people all start talking about it. No matter where you are, it reverberates very quickly. So two days after major posts, many Chinese already have read the same post through different media channels. There is a very dense weave of social media. 

Q. Korean net users also are known for favoring homegrown portal sites. What do you make of Koreans’ use of the Internet? 

A.I think Korea has something in common with China, because the Chinese also developed a quirky and idiosyncratic way of using the Internet. Koreans also rarely go to search engines created by other countries. I think the personalities of these two countries are very similar in this regard. Korea’s popular websites have different designs and settings than American websites. 

Q.What other kind of technology has attracted the Chinese, and how do they use it? 

A.Recently, a mobile instant messenger took off in China. People often use group messaging in China, but it often causes some trouble between people, because you don’t know somebody has invited someone. I am not a heavy user of the instant messenger. But I think people use mobile instant messenger specifically because it offers more privacy control than a microblog. Also, it is not heavily commercialized. We saw people move away from Weibo, a popular microblog site [because of the commercial issue].

More in the  Korea JoongAng Daily.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´ request form. 

Are you interested in more internet experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check our recent list. 

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The dangers of social media hypes - Kaiser Kuo

+Kaiser Kuo

Corporations jump too easy on the latest social media hype, without knowing what they are talking about, argues Baidu´s director international communication Kaiser Kuo in the Holmes report.

The Holmes Report:

Baidu international communications director Kaiser Kuo thinks that brands should display more caution where social media is concerned, noting that their prolific efforts are rarely exciting enough to create genuine interest on Twitter or Weibo.  In this, Kuo also believes that brands underplay the community management aspect of the equation, which he thinks calls for a much more sophisticated understanding of brand, context and audience than is often currently demonstrated by many companies’ real time war rooms. “People often rush blindly onto the latest thing without a clear idea of what they expect to get out of it or what the risks are,” said Kuo. “They forget what actually motivates people to get on these social media sites. Nobody goes onto social media to heap or lavish praise on a brand.

More on the Holmes Report.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´ request form.

Are you looking for more internet experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out our latest list.

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Technology moves away from the geeks to the masses - Kaiser Kuo

+Kaiser Kuo 

Disruptive new technologies of the coming decade will not focus on a small number of geeks, but on the billions of users, Baidu´s director of international communication Kaiser Kuo, according to the Holmes Report. "And PR people are not prepared for that change."

The Holmes Report:

Kaiser Kuo, director of international communications, for Chinese internet giant Baidu and Dan Wong, vice president of Samsung’s media solutions center, discussed some the new technologies in development by their companies and others at an In2 Summit session on Tomorrow’s Tech moderated by Zaheer Nooruddin, vice president of Waggener Edstrom’s Studio D digital and social media unit in Asia, who suggested that “technology is empowering interactions with our key audiences.” 

Kuo suggested that many of the most interesting developments of the next decade will not be new gadgets for tech-savvy consumers in the west, but products “for the next billion. Things like speech and visual recognition don’t require high levels of tech literacy but they will have a huge impact on how we communicate.” 

And, he suggested, PR people may not be ready for the changes that are about to occur. “As an industry we are way behind. We are not ready for this. We don’t have industry standards; we don’t have a strategy.”

More in the Holmes Report. Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´request form.

Are you interested in more experts on the internet at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check our latest list. 

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20 Years of Internet: China´s profound transformation – Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

Twenty years ago the internet in China became available for the public, and no other change has made such an impact on the Chinese society, says Kaiser Kuo, director international communication at China´s largest search engine Baidu at CNN.

CNN:

This year marks the 20th anniversary of China's first connection with the Internet -- a technological breakthrough that has had a particularly massive impact on the world's most populous country.

"It's been utterly transformational," said Kaiser Kuo, director of international communications at Baidu, China's largest search engine. "The advent of the Internet has been a great leveler in terms of access to knowledge, to education materials, to goods and services.

"A school teacher in a rural mountain village with just an Internet connection has access to the same teaching material as her counterpart teaching in the best school in Beijing. A consumer in a hinterland country town can buy the very latest in consumer electronics, or books or fashion just the same as someone in Shanghai. And practically anyone anywhere can set up a virtual store to reach a nationwide market."

More at CNN.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill or speakers´ request form.

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Why P2P lending might cause trouble - Sara Hsu

Sara Hsu

With large companies like Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu entering the financial industry, P2P lending has become a major issue in China, as common bank loans are hard to get. But there are huge risks involved, writes financial analyst Sara Hsu in The Diplomat, as the new ventures lack essential transparency.

Sara Hsu:

A large risk has been presented by the business model that some P2P firms follow. Businesses that use the model set forth by Yixin Company in 2006 apply a type of lending called debt assignment, in which the platform itself lends money to borrowers before finding investors to channel their funds into these loans. Under this model, the investors may end up lending to several borrowers, or several investors may lend to one borrower. In some cases, loans are pooled and the debt is transferred to investors. 

This type of model is not clearly legal and may make it easier to commit financial fraud, since the use of the funds is very opaque. Since the original relationship between borrower and lender is obscured by this mode, there is additional responsibility on the shoulders of the P2P lending company to ensure that the borrower is creditworthy. Credit risk is compounded in cases where the principal has been guaranteed, and P2P lenders may rapidly face a crisis of liquidity or solvency when borrowers become delinquent. 

Although not all P2P lending platforms are Ponzi schemes, attracting funds to cover liquidity shortages may be an all-too attractive option for some of these companies. Under the current system of regulation, P2P companies do not face the same restrictions that banks face, since they are not a registered financial firm type. This, coupled with a lack of sufficient financial information and lending expertise has created a weak institutional structure in these firms that, if not doomed to failure, will certainly constitute a challenge to success going forward. Regulatory measures that have aimed to curb worst practices of P2P lending companies, including requiring such firms to deposit client funds in third party accounts, are insufficient. Further regulations are expected this year. 

While the P2P lending model works well when there is sufficient information, in China’s financial environment this model faces real barriers to healthy expansion. The alternative to P2P lending platforms, until there is improvement in loan expansion by banks to smaller borrowers, is to return to traditional informal financial methods in which parties know each other and both have “skin” in the game.

More in The Diplomat.

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Baidu tracks migration during CNY - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

China´s leading search engine Baidu launched just before Chinese New Year a heatmap, showing how the millions of Chinese make their way home and back. Director international communication Kaiser Kuo shows some of the findings and patterns Baidu discovered to the Wall Street Journal.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´request form.

Are you a media representative and do you want to talk to one of our speakers? Drop us a line.

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