SubscribeInterview Alex Mou of BBqun
BBqun.com is a MSN Messenger-based online chatroom service, we recently interviewed Alex Mou, founder of BBqun, to discuss the service, history and future plan of BBQun. Thanks Alex for this email interview.
China Web2.0 Review: Tell us about BBqun.com, what’s your service about?
Alex: BBQun is an IM community platform. (Qun means Group in Chinese). BBQun provides chat group services, much like mailing lists (email groups). Each group is persistent, i.e., and the group members are all related. A group can be open or closed. To join a closed group, one needs permission from the group owner.
Our users have created groups for classmates, fans clubs, trading groups, project teams, industry associations, gays & lesbians, social support groups, dating clubs, countrymen, sports and arts, etc. The categories are a reflexion of our social mosaic.
IM and Email are both messaging media. While an email group (mailing list) is a community made of email users, BBQun’s chat group is a community of IM users. Currently our service is on MSN Messenger, the largest IM in the world and the second largest in China.
The BBQun service is widely used in various business and social circles. Here is an example of using BBqun for Bosstown fans group(MSN: bosstown@bbqun.com), Bosstown is a famous TV show, interviewing CEOs in China. Fans of the show can use this group to chat with the show directors and commentators.
CWR:Why did you start this business?
Alex: We are inspired by two things: QQ qun and email groups. Email groups are very popular communities built on top of the email network. QQ qun is a popular community platform on top of QQ instant messenger. MSN doesn’t have such a service. So we think we can provide it.
CWR:Did you make any partnership with MSN?
Alex: We are an MSN developer. Besides MSN groups, we have developed various applications on MSN, for example, MSN eBay Assistant Bot.
MSN welcomes everyone to develop on their platform. Microsoft is good at providing platforms.
CWR: What’s your background?
Alex: I am a software professional, worked on products in the area of video/imaging, IC, Internet and mobile. Spent 13 years in Silicon Valley.
CWR: When was the company established?
Alex: We established the company in late 2005.
CWR: What’s the biggest problem during the development of BBqun?
Alex: Build a system that’s stable, fast and scalable.
CWR: Do you have any competitor in China?
Alex: Yes, you will be lonely if you don’t have any. For example, Xiaoi, IMqun, 365groups are our competitors.
CWR: Would you like to share some statistics of your service?
Alex: The real time data is on our home page. As of Nov 28, 2006, we have 12,421 groups and 263,557 users. The service is launched on May 2006. Over 10 millions of messages have been sent by our users.
CWR: Is BBqun backed by VC, angels or self-funding?
Alex: By angels.
CWR: What’s your future plan for expanding the service?
Alex: We’ll expand the services to international markets and support major IMs such as Yahoo Messenger, QQ, GTalk, Skype, AIM/ICQ etc.
CWR: What’s the greatest challenge to you in coming future?
Alex: Design a platform that is scalable to serve hundreds of millions users in the world, and can send messages quickly. We also need adequate resources to sustain the expansion.
CWR: What’s your business model?
Alex: Advertisement and value-added services. We place ads inside the chat window, on the display messages and in group spaces. Each chat group has a group space which consists of group blogs, chat archive, group album and group forum.
Regarding value-added services, we will learn from Tencent. They build their community first for free. Then they make money from the value added services. We can provide appropriate services to our users. We will mostly work with our partners to provide them. No specifics here. We don’t have resources to do everything ourselves. Currently our focus is on building a solid platform.
CWR: What’s your favorite Chinese web2.0 services?
Alex: QQ. You may laugh at me. But QQ is the best.
CWR: What do you think are the most important features of web2.0?
Alex: A platform that help users to express themselves.
Group Chat for real-time chatting
Group Space for sharing static content
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One question just hit my head is what if Live Messenger provides Skype style group chat feature in future version. Group reflects relationship between users. While Microsoft has been adding social features into Live Space service, there’s no reason they would commit this handy data between users.
My take of chance left for BBqun is to provide user group among different IM services. Is it cool to have group members from QQ, Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and Gtalk? Actually service like Meebo almost likely to provide similar feature in near future.
Good comments. I touched this issue in the interview. We will support more IMs down the road.
I think the point was not just about supporting more IM services, but actually using the BBQun technology to create a group that contains users on multiple different networks (thus providing interoperability) …
I’m curious to know what you see as the competitive advantage that BBQun has if any of the big IM operators (MSN, yahoo, google etc) decide to step into the market?
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