Silicon Dragon
www.silicondragonventures.com          NEWS                   November 2012

 FEATURED EVENT:

Silicon Dragon 

 Social NY 2013

  

   Celebrating

The New Year Season

with Art and Wine Plus

Some Innovative Talk

 

   Steinway  

  
wine tasting   
  
snake   

 

 As the Year of the Dragon

gets ready to morph into the Year of the Snake, it's time to celebrate another great season with a who's who in the Silicon Dragon network. 

Chinese New Year 2013,

New York City

  

By Invitation Only

 

For more info and

sponsorship opportunities, email

events@silicondragonventures.com

 

BUY

STARTUP ASIA
  Startup Asia

Write Your
 
Review

on Amazon
 

five stars 

 "Follows the money to see where we should be placing our next bets in the world of technology."

  The Economist 

 

 

  

Click to Order Startup Asia and Silicon Dragon in Vietnamese from VinaBook 

    

 

Silicon Dragon  

Buy on Amazon

 

 

 
2013 Calendar of 
SILICON DRAGON EVENTS

LONDON, February
NEW YORK, March
HONG KONG, April
BEIJING, May
SHANGHAI, Sept.
SILICON VALLEY, Oct.
HONG KONG Social, Nov.
(plus VIP dinners and receptions

For sponsorship and speaking opportunities, email
  

Thanks to our 2012 sponsors:

 

KPMG, Silicon Valley Bank,

Sidley Austin, NASDAQ,

 Morrison & Foerster, InvestHK,

Shui On Group,

Murray Hill Properties,

Shandong Province,

DLA Piper, DCM

 

Thanks to our marketing partners:

 AAMA, AngelVest, Asia Society, CCICE,  MobileMonday, DingDing.TV, IVCA, CSPA,

Bay Area Council, Startup Up Digest, SFEntrepreneur 

 

 

 

NEWS RELEASES

Send your news to us at [email protected]

 

 

CONNECT

Follow us @silicondragon @rfannin

on Twitter and Weibo
. 

Dealmaker Panelists at Silicon Dragon Sand Hill 2012 
Tencent's WeChat Speeding Past QQ
Tencent trio
Tencent's international trio Ian Chan, Poshu Yeung and Norman Tam at China Club for Silicon Dragon HK 2012

Imagine a mobile phone 'app' so appealing that it reaches 200 million users within eight months of launch without any promotion and quickly spreads to 30 countries.

That's Tencent WeChat, the highly popular text and voice messaging service from China that is becoming the 'must have' communication tool among the global technorati.

WeChat is one of the first tech services from China to tap an international customer base and to sport more users outside the home country than domestically.

Even Poshu Yeung, VP of Tencent's international group, admits he's a little surprised by how quickly WeChat took off. He notes that WeChat is surpassing QQ, its wildly popular instant messaging service in China, in its adoption rate internationally - partly because the name of the service was changed from Weixin or micro message to the easily pronounceable WeChat.

Yeung (see photo) was recently named Silicon Dragon Entrepreneur of the Pearl River Delta 2012 at our event recognizing the break-out success of WeChat.

Read how WeChat became a hit at Tencent @Forbes. 

 

Silicon Dragon HK 2012 Pix

        
Glen Browley, Iain Reed Vicky Wu  Hurst Lin, Rebecca Fannin
 Charles Ng Edge Zarrella, Poshu Yeung Thomas Chou 
Above: Glen Browley, Iain Reed, Vicky Wu, Hurst Lin, Rebecca Fannin
Charles Ng, Egidio Zarrella, Poshu Yeung, Thomas Chou
  
Thanks to our sponsors:
Morrison & Foerster, KPMG and InvestHK
    
 

Chinese Startup YY Goes For the WoW by Going Public Now

      

YY startup team
YY startup team Jenny Lee, Richard Liu, Alex Hartigan, David Li, Lei Jun and Hany Nada.

 After their "all road, no show, roadshow" during the midst of Storm Sandy, when the startup team at the just-listed Chinese startup YY decamped to a freezing Motel 6 in Cincinnati on a long drive from New York to Chicago after their flight was cancelled, the rest might go a bit more smoothly.

At least that's what the co-founders David Li and Lei Jun were hoping as stock in their Chinese startup began trading this morning on NASDAQ. So were YY's venture investors in New York today from Shanghai: Richard Liu of Morningside Ventures, Alex Hartigan of Steamboat Ventures and Jenny Lee of GGV Capital. (See Silicon Dragon photo). And the investment bankers too, here from Hong Kong: Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and Citi.

For team YY, it's a daring move to prove that Wall Street might still learn to like Chinese tech stocks again.

Read YY's debut on NASDAQ @ Forbes.

 

 

 
  FYI 
 
REBECCA RECOMMENDS
Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong
Where else can you check in on the 102nd floor, dine while overlooking the harbour, watch window washers from the sky-high gym and best of all, go straight from the Airport Express Station through the shopping mall to the lobby without ever going outside. That's Hong Kong efficiency, best in the world! 
  
TRENDING ON TWITTER 
@rfannin at the Norwest Venture Partners holiday party, folks are taking bets on how much accumulated net worth is in the room. This is the 1% of the 1% in the US. 
@ericjackson 

Study Says Alibaba's Tmall Will Overtake Amazon as the World's Biggest Ecommerce Site by 2015   

  
NEW FUNDS
FountainVest shows its muscle, raising a second fund of $1.3 billion for China in 8 months.
Hina Group goes Californian with a wine fund of $100 to invest in Napa and Sonoma wineries, most likely with Chinese money.
  
NEW DEALS
Kai-Fu Lee"s Innovation Works does another China deal, this time in LeTV, a TV operation that aims to make Smart TV akin to smartphones.
Fidelity's Asian private equity funds teams up with Lilly Asia Ventures to back Chinese biomedical startup China Innovent with $23 million.
Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan leads a $300 million round of funding for 360Buy.com, China's large business-to-consumer e-commerce website.
  
TRANSACTIONS
  
RESEARCH

Through the first nine months of 2012, venture capital investment in China totaled US$2.7 billion for 150 deals, a 44% decrease in capital and 44% fall in deals from the same period last year, according to Dow Jones VentureSource.

  
NEW BOOKS
No Ancient Wisdom, No Ancient Followers: The Challenges of Chinese Authoritarian Capitalism
by James McGregor
      
Amazon blurb: In the past three ANCIENT WISDOMdecades, China has risen from near collapse to a powerhouse -- upending nearly every convention on the world stage, whether policy or business. China is now the globe's second largest economy, second largest exporter, a manufacturing machine that has lifted 500 million of its citizens from poverty while producing more than one million US dollar millionaires.
Then why do China's leaders describe the nation's economic model as "unstable and unsustainable"? Because it is.
 

 

  
 
 KINDLE OFFER Frank Yu and Kindle edition

 

Fans of the Kindle electronic reading device can order a digital edition of

Startup Asia for only $9.99. Just click Kindle. That's Beijing entrepreneur Frank Yu displaying his Kindle edition with the author of Startup Asia.

 

     Q&A in Shanghai Talk Magazine: Rise of the Silicon Dragon     Rebecca in Shanghai 2012 

 
Contact Leading Authorities in Washington, DC
for speaking engagements and bookings