The positioning of the Bedouin

Wen/Liu Mingjun Murong is driving from Shanghai to Suzhou home for dinner. At this time, Murong's family is watching his trip live through the Bedouin mobile community in the home of Suzhou, 100 kilometres away. In the Community chat list, Murong's avatar is showing a car image at this time, and in the next hour the image slowly turns into a bicycle and villain. When he saw the image turned into a villain, the family began to warm his food.　　5 minutes later Murong into the house, greeted him is the food fragrance. Location • Community Suzhou Bedouin Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter called "the Bedouin") was founded by Murong, the first domestic mobile community to provide location-sharing and location-based social mobility, and was awarded the venture capital of Qualcomm in October 2009. The mobile community incorporates functions such as games, instant messaging, dating, location queries, and positioning. In the community, the villain represents 2 kilometers within the friend, the bike is 20 kilometers of friends, the car is 20 kilometers ~500 kilometers within the range of friends, aircraft means distance in 500 kilometers ~5,000 kilometers of friends.　　Murong is not a typical user, and more than 1,200 million 18~28岁 young Chinese are frantically using the Bedouin community's location service. Mobile positioning is a typical application of the Bedouin. The latest popular new application of the Bedouin is the anti-theft service for laptops.　　When the position of the notebook is different from the original line, the Bedouin positioning system prompts the current user to enter the password, and after 3 password errors, the computer will call the camera to record the information of the thief, along with the location information sent to the owner, "You just to catch people, you can find your own computer." The Bedouin combines micro-blogging, happy net, games and many other forms. In this hodgepodge, in addition to the Bedouin accumulation of years of database, a single technology product seems to have no development difficulties.　　Murong that the use of an effective superposition of various applications, is the innovation of the place. More than just Murong see the trend of the mobile community. Headquartered in the Netherlands, GYPSII, the same provider of mobile community services to provide positioning of the company in 2009 to set up a branch in the country. "A lot of exciting data inspire us to come to China and China has the most aggressive market in the world," said Shane Lennon, vice president of strategy for the company, in an interview with "Entrepreneurial State". "The Shane was excited by the fact that 155 million of China's 687 million mobile users currently use their mobile phones to surf the internet."　　In contrast, the highly developed telecommunications industry in the Netherlands is only more than 1,600 million people. The research structure emarketer estimates that by 2013, the proportion of mobile communities used by global mobile users will be as high as 43%, and the number will exceed 600 million, and the application of mobile communities has entered a period of rapid growth. The view from industry also confirms this. Nokia and Stratemerge published a report in January 2009 on consumer and technology trends in mobile social networks, which showed:In surveys conducted in the US and western Europe, 87% of the respondents said that social networks and phone books were very attractive, and 79% thought they were willing to share their instant messages with social groups. Although the business model positioning is to provide users with accurate and effective positioning services, the effective business model of the Bedouin is in fact "not located" in the pending state. Internet in the field of charging users and charging advertisers two direction, but also the vast majority of mobile internet companies in the discussion of revenue channels.　　In the business model, the Bedouin remain in good form, and there is not much breakthrough. Buying community game props and giving away virtual gifts are the main ways for Bedouin to gain revenue from users.　　Some friends of the positioning of value-added services also contribute to the income, such as the user set their own type of friends preferences, when it is within a certain range of people meet the requirements, the Bedouin positioning software will remind the "target" appears, that is, matching services. In location-based services, location-related business advertisements are another revenue channel for the Bedouin. However, as the main profit model of many internet companies, and the proven effectiveness of the network advertising translation to the mobile community, there is no expected performance effect. Murong predicts that the cost of Bedouin users will continue to be higher than advertising revenues over the next 1-2 years. The mobile community with low age, low education, low-income as the main characteristics of the user groups, to advertisers brought the quality of advertising dissemination of great concern.　　And in the mobile network, consumers how to brand interaction and many other issues remain to be resolved. These problems also plague Gypsii company, its vice president Shane Lennon told The Economist, Gypsii is also the use of customers and users charge "one before" mode.　　Now, the company is also exploring new models, gypsii in November 2009 as China Unicom's partner, the company's positioning services software will be built into the Unicom's iphone, the business model is to share the proceeds. Murong has also been looking for new business models. In August 2009, he decided to open the underlying positioning data platform and named it Dr. Donkey. However, the idea, which was raised, blew up controversy inside, with most employees worried that this would lead to the loss of the company's core competitive edge, since "Dr. Donkey" and the Bedouin community were actually the front and rear links. Murong has a deeper perspective, and he thinks the open platform will drive more location-based service applications.　　For a new field, it is obviously more important to gain popularity when you don't see competitors. In this open API interface "Dr. Donkey" positioning platform, due to lower the threshold of positioning and development, third-party companies can develop a location-based application within two weeks, will shorten the previous operator-led positioning of the industry chain. In order to quickly promote the "Dr. Donkey", Murong to free as a gimmick, and adopted a segmented pricing strategy. Partners use the "Dr. Donkey" daily positioning of less than 5,000 times can be free to use, exceeding the limit is required to pay the data use fee orAdvertising flow is divided. For now, many third parties, including mobile search clients and social networking sites, are using the "Dr. Donkey", which currently maintains the speed of 1 subscribers every 3 days. "Training some competitors, but also promote the development of network positioning services, in fact, is greater than lost."　　"However, in Murong's view, Tencent's QQ will be a role model for the Bedouin and other mobile communities," he said. In the planning of major carriers in China, the development priority of mobile community is not high, mostly in the future planning, compared with the new application of mobile games and so on. Compared to mobile gaming applications, mobile communities have yet to find an effective profit model, and the value of Apru to operators is also low.　　Operators are hesitant to find ways to convert the big traffic generated by community users into more revenue. EMarketer's latest report mentions some of the key issues in the mobile community, in which the low return on investment and positioning accuracy is a key issue, in addition to limited advertising. For example, the accuracy of the Bedouin WiFi positioning is within 100 meters, and such errors seem to mean that moving communities closer to the real prosperity of users will take time.