Online Tango provides video call services based on acquaintances ' social relationships

The 09 online tango is based on the social connections of acquaintances to provide video call services, but it is now developing more and more like micro-letter, in addition to supporting text and voice communication, users can complete the purchase expression, consumer music, discovery applications, play games and other operations. Just one months ago, Tango announced the completion of 280 million dollars in D-round financing, of which 215 million dollars came from Alibaba. Tango currently supports 14 languages, a total of more than 200 million registered users, monthly live users up to 70 million, users in 224 countries around the world, mainly in North America, the Middle East, Taiwan and Singapore.

At today's 2014GMIC conference, the Great Wall CMO Butler dialogue Tango CEO Yuri Laz (Uri Raz), chatted about "the next stop for mobile voice socializing".

Rhett: Tango 2009 on the line, its voice social function was FaceTime and Skype. Later you decided to transform from pure video voice chat into a platform for communication and entertainment, which is very different from WhatsApp's focus on doing communication. What is your transformation based on?

Uri: We've seen the development of mobile-end social apps, which is that "communication", while important, is just one of the features of a mobile social platform. Today's mobile social platforms emphasize two things: one is "Content distribution platform", the introduction of content providers or developers in various fields to enrich the content categories on the platform, and the other is "social discovery", which helps to spread content through social relationships. You can build an ecosystem around users and content only if you have both. This is what line is doing, and WeChat doing it, we agree with this direction.

Rhett: Now many social apps are backed by technology giants, such as Tencent behind WeChat, Facebook Messenger behind Facebook, and you are an independent company that does mobile socializing, what are the pros and cons of your independence?

Uri: The advantage is that we can respond quickly to market demand, which is very important in the mobile domain. Indeed, as an independent company, we are likely to be less than WeChat and Facebook Messenger in terms of promotion channels and financial support, which is one of the reasons we accept Ali's funding.

There are two main reasons for accepting Ali's capital: one, although Alibaba is a large company, but its investment and financing of the action let me think it is the pace of growth in the start-up company, so we decided to "talk about a love with Ali"; second, from a global perspective, Asia's pace of innovation is catching up with Western countries, The levers of innovation seem to be tilting towards Asia.

Now we have an office in Beijing and we are recruiting engineers.

Rhett: Like the App Store, Google play and so on, Tango has to share revenue with developers. What do you think is the reason that developers choose Tango instead of other application distribution platforms?

There are social maps on the Uri:tango platform. Based on this, developers can have more interaction with the user, which is useful for product iteration and distribution promotion, in addition, based on the social networking, the realization of the way there can be many kinds of efficiency than the simple application distribution platform is much higher. At present, our platform is not only the game developers (now online 40 games), there are other types of app developers; We also collaborated with Spotify to introduce 25 million songs on the platform, and the mobile electric business is one of the ways we try. By introducing a third-party developer, we can enrich the social elements on the platform, and these social elements can be used by developers.

Rhett: What strategies do you have for the Chinese market? Besides China, what other markets are strategically important to tango?

Uri: In the Chinese market, micro-trust is a product we respect, we do not intend to defeat it, but we hope that Chinese users have more mobile social platforms to choose from. So far, we've just translated the product UI, we have not yet officially implemented localization, and in the next few months we will work with local content providers to introduce them into the tango Chinese platform; In addition, we have a small team that specializes in the westernization of Chinese games or other types of apps, Help them go to sea.

We are actually a very good engineer thinking team, focus on product development, marketing, business promotion, basically did not devote any resources and energy. But in addition to China, the Philippines, Thailand and other countries are also good markets.

Rhett: Facebook190 billion buys WhatsApp, making the field of mobile social very popular. In your opinion, in the next 3-5 years, what will be the development trend in this field, will there be more integration, or more diversity?

Uri: There are a number of social tools for communication with voice, text, and so on, but there are not many platform-like products in the mobile social arena. I expect there will be 5 of these platform-level products around the world, and will be geographically distributed.