Shared Computers in China

8/18/2009 -  Part of TCBN's Geeks on a Plane Event Series
Jerry Wang is CEO of Goyoo, an content provider, manager, and distributer to shared computers in internet cafes in China. This is an excerpt of his presentation at Beijing Startonomics, part of the Geeks on a Plane tour. Video provided by Netease 163.com.


 Goyoo CEO Jerry Wang presented how his company takes advantage of the shared computers in China by managing a content distribution network.  The majority of internet-capable computers are shared computers founder in internet cafes.  Wang contracts with the individual service providers, the internet cafes, to aggregate data and store it on a server.  His plans for expansion include working with more internet cafes and using the server capabilities to reach home internet users.

Video Transcription

So here why public internet access? Why we share computers in China? Why not everybody own a computer, laptop in their home, just like everybody here? Actually we have 1.3 billion population there, and internet user we have 300 million internet user. But we do only have 18 million internet-enabled PCs in China. So compared with our population and our internet population, there’s a big gap between that, so we have to share the computers. From the past dates, you can see from the year 2003 to the year 2008, the net café users from the internet users access from net café increased a lot. [Presently], 42% internet user come from net café. So, we predict in the [next] three years we’ll have more internet market grown up, more internet user coming, more normal people become internet user. We have to use net café to, you know, to start our internet using. Actually in China the net café is something like the first step for the most internet users. The first step, the first location they access to the internet. And this market is 120 million users, unique net café users. 

Today we exclusive manage content over the 0.8 million PCs. It’s something like 10,000 net café shops. And by the end of this year we trying to increase 30,000 net café shops to using our portal platform. So basically the … our solution is a one-stop portal solution. You can see here we have a national central server and we aggregate all the content on a server using the Push-And-Pull model to the net café media server. In each net café there is a media server to storage all the different kind of games, all the media file, video, music, things. They use our software to do the PC and user management for the client PC. So we have a kind of virtual desktop in each client PC. And whatever the users see in the client PC we can adjust it directly easily pay cash to the front desk, and the front desk can use our e-value server to finish all the transactions. Actually this part is very important to solve the macro-payment issues in China, because we don’t have the credit card advantage, all that kind of stuff. 

So here I’d like to introduce server size. We have a national-wide P-to-P network. We call it CSDN – Content Service Distribution Networks, which is very important because all net café servers running our media application. So basically, each day they download all the latest game or cache from our central server. Actually, each day we push down about two giga to each net café shop. Every day, of those data. And we can manage what kind of content they push to the client desktop. So, today so far we only run in the net café environment, but we trying to launch a kind of club technology end of this year. We can elaborate those servers’ cabability to serve the home users.

Q – Are you serving video on any of this?
A – No, our partner does that. We don’t do that because of parent solutions (legacy).
Q – Which company are you partnering with?
A – That depends of what net café buys, like NetMovie, or those things. So think about when you have the 100,000 servers over China, and all have the full storage with the most popular games or other video things and you can use that as a club. It’s very strong platform to do that.