My Peninsula 2007

Chapter 489 Planning
To reiterate, for An Rusong, there is not much difference between cooperating with BlackRock or DFJ. Ultimately, it's all about bringing in capital to accelerate NGN's development. This is not only a path he must take, but also a path that all emerging companies must follow.

In today's world, and more specifically in IT-related industries, there is no such thing as a steady, gradual development model based on capital accumulation. The path everyone takes is to attract venture capital with certain selling points, and then use the power of capital to attract the largest traffic in the shortest amount of time. This is where the so-called "burning money" comes from.

NGN naturally needs to follow this model; otherwise, given An Rusong's own financial strength, his NGN would be easily eliminated by others.

Putting aside other factors, if he doesn't complete the second round of financing as quickly as possible within the shortest possible period to secure sufficient funds for NGN's next stage of development, then once another similar software company fully understands NGN's model and rapidly expands its reach, NGN's potential users will be snatched away, directly impacting NGN's development prospects.

In An Rusong's previous life, every time a new internet trend emerged in China, it was accompanied by a massive money-burning war. From the shared bike war to the ride-hailing app war, and then to the food delivery platform war, the methods used by each competitor to attack their rivals were all based on burning money.

Although NGN has now established a firm foothold in the instant messaging software field and gained an advantage over a number of competitors, including MSN, this advantage is not absolute. Considering the size of these competitors, it is not impossible for them to overtake it.

Therefore, what An Rusong and his NGN need to do is to maintain vitality in terms of software function updates and iterations, and at the same time, use all means to attract as many users as possible. Both of these tasks require sufficient financial support.

Who can fund NGN? Without a doubt, it's capital groups like BlackRock. They are essential partners for NGN, and the stronger their capital and the more complex their political background, the more NGN can benefit from them.

To be honest, if An Rusong were willing to leave, BlackRock could offer him much more than just capital. To some extent, they could also help him open up markets and even help him eliminate competitors.

Partnering with BlackRock also means he will have to pay a higher price.

Therefore, under the current circumstances, although An Rusong is the largest shareholder of NGN, from a realistic point of view, he has no ability to prevent the other party from entering the game. What he can really do is to demonstrate his own value, so as to gain more and greater say in the future development of NGN - which is not much different from those corporate groups in South Korea, including Samsung.

Behind the large desk, An Rusong put down his cold coffee, lit a cigarette, and then continued working on the computer in front of him.

The document displayed on the computer screen was a development plan he had drafted for NGN for the foreseeable future. To be precise, it outlined the first tasks the company needed to undertake after completing its second round of financing.

Investors' money is not so easy to get, especially from conglomerates like BlackRock. They may be willing to invest, but they are by no means generous. Every penny you get from them must be accounted for.

Currently, An Rusong's next round of development plans for NGN mainly includes three aspects.

The first aspect remains the continuation of the localization strategy for software development, which is essentially globalization. Currently, the largest audience for NGN software is still concentrated in Asia, and the four branch offices established by NGN are also primarily located in Asia.

After completing its second round of financing and securing sufficient development funds, An Rusong plans to officially promote the entire NGN platform to the Americas and Europe, thereby achieving a global leap in software user adoption.

To achieve this goal, NGN needs to do much more than simply release more language versions. It also needs to expand server capacity, establish branch offices, build local teams, and so on. All of these actions must be done well.

Take cultural customs, for example. East Asian customs are vastly different from those of Americans. They differ in aesthetics, focus, and many other aspects. Therefore, the cultural content covered in NGN software involves more than just language translation; it requires adaptation to the cultural differences between languages. This makes establishing separate teams in different regions essential.

For this reason, NGN's localization strategy is a long-term task in the company's development process. In An Rusong's plan, after each round of financing, the company needs to allocate a large amount of funds to this work, because the completion of this work is directly related to the number of registered users of the NGN software.

The second aspect is the mobile transformation of the software, which, simply put, means shifting the NGN software from a single PC platform to a mobile platform. NGN has been working on this for some time, and NGN mobile apps based on both Apple and Android systems have already been released. However, to be realistic, mobile and PC are fundamentally different devices, and NGN's current mobile app still has many shortcomings.

One of the most obvious problems is the bloat of the entire application. In order to ensure user experience, the company naturally wanted to integrate all the functions that NGN had on the PC to the mobile device. However, this would place excessive demands on the phone's performance, leading to a series of problems.

In the past, in order to make the software adapt to the actual hardware conditions, NGN had to restrict many functions, such as offline access, many photo editing features of the photo wall, and the "one-click sharing" function that the company had always wanted to push to users.

These functional limitations make the NGN mobile app's user experience clearly unsatisfactory, which in turn greatly restricts the development of mobile users.

To address this shortcoming, the NGN project team is currently actively promoting two areas: data compression and modular design.

Data compression goes without saying, while modular design involves designing each function of the software as an independent module. Users can freely choose the core modules they need based on their preferences and the capabilities of their mobile phones, thereby improving software and hardware compatibility.

However, these tasks sound simple, but in reality, they require a lot of manpower and resources to develop. According to An Rusong's plan, after the second round of financing is completed and the company moves to its new headquarters in Enping District, he will further expand the company's R&D project team.

The small R&D teams of the past are no longer sufficient to support the company's R&D needs; it needs a medium-to-large R&D institution with four or five hundred people, or even thousands of people.

Most importantly, the third aspect of the plan is the promotion of the open platform strategy.

An Rusong plans to emulate Facebook's model by launching an open API for NGN, thereby breaking the current closed ecosystem of NGN software and allowing third-party external developers to integrate their games, tools, and even programs into the NGN platform, thus enriching the platform's functionality and attracting more users.

Facebook only launched its open platform strategy last year. In just nine months, this strategy brought it tens of millions of new registered users. However, at the same time, the policy has been heavily criticized by the public because its implementation inevitably infringes on user privacy.

The reason is simple: the third-party developers who integrate these applications are also unverified ordinary users. For ordinary Facebook users to use these third-party developers' applications, they need to go through a registration and login process, just like WeChat users use WeChat mini-games.

This means that these unidentified third-party developers can easily obtain Facebook users' private information, leading to the leakage of user privacy.

Currently, Facebook has not yet come up with a corresponding strategy to solve this problem, and therefore, it has faced considerable criticism from the public.

In An Rusong's view, this isn't even a problem. In his previous life, Facebook had already solved this issue by introducing a sandbox testing environment, mandating that third-party developers adhere to privacy agreements. Furthermore, NGN could even require every third-party developer who introduces an API to disclose their identity to the NGN platform and bear legal responsibility for privacy breaches.

Of the three aspects of work planned by An Rusong, the third aspect is the one he believes urgently needs to be promoted. He remembers clearly that in the second year after Facebook launched its open platform project, the application of "virtual gifts" suddenly appeared, bringing tens of millions of new users to Facebook in its first month.

In China, Tencent's virtual gifts, such as QQ Show, brought in a staggering 500 million RMB in revenue for the company in a single year in 2008!

Considering NGN's development on mobile devices, An Rusong did not plan to implement any membership-based paid services for the NGN software itself. Therefore, he had to find other ways to generate revenue for the company, and virtual gifts were clearly the most feasible way to do so.

(End of this chapter)