Rebirth Tokyo 1986

Chapter 468 We've got the traffic, time to make money.

The shadow of a person, the light of a tree!
Masato Takeshita is renowned, and Xinghai Group enjoys a high reputation both domestically and internationally.

Shortly after the agreement was reached, Goldman Sachs and other investors transferred all the funds into the designated company account.

If it were another company, investors would have to keep a close eye on it, and only inject more money when one sum is spent.

There's nothing we can do; there are just too many scam companies these days.

Many company founders' first action upon receiving funding is to buy themselves a nice car and then move into a luxury mansion.

In the end, the company didn't do well, but he did enjoy a period of wealth and luxury.

Of course, there are also cases where investors proactively allocate a sum of money as living expenses for the founding team during the fundraising process.

For example, when Yahoo was receiving its second round of funding, both Starsea Ventures and Sequoia Capital offered to provide Jerry Yang and others with a better life.

The reason is simple: Yahoo has gradually gotten on the right track and looks like it has a bright future, so investors naturally want to flatter the founding team.

If we can make the founders a little more comfortable, would it improve the work efficiency of the founding team?
After all, once people enjoy a good life, they are unlikely to want to go back to eating pizza and fast food every day.

After the celebratory banquet concluded successfully, Masato Takeshita immediately convened a new round of meetings with internet companies after seeing off the investors.

"There are many problems with online payments right now. What do you all think we can do to solve this problem?"

At that time, the internet was a chaotic mess, the most frenzied era for hackers, with countless pieces of junk information and content circulating online.

It is extremely difficult for people to find any useful information.

As for online payments, those are even more troublesome, as your account can be completely wiped out in the blink of an eye.

Masato Takeshita wants to guide everyone to solve this problem as much as possible, and maybe he can even collect a large amount of patent fees from it.

"I think we can make use of the mobile phone text messaging function."

Xinghai E-commerce has been deeply affected by the internet of this era. Every time a customer buys something online, they have to call back to confirm, which is a very cumbersome process.

President Nakayama Kageaki had long been impatient and hoped that notifications could be sent via SMS to reduce this annoyance.

"I also think that SMS notifications are more convenient, the only problem is that it is difficult to verify."

Xinghai E-commerce has all the problems that online busking has, and it's even more troublesome.

Therefore, Seiichi Yamaguchi has been conducting research in this area.

Unfortunately, there have been no results to date.

Compared to the urgent need in the e-commerce industry, other companies have little need for this area and have not explored it in any way.

Faced with their president's question, they all chose to lower their heads and remain silent.

However, the quick-witted Yoshinori Shimada soon had a flash of inspiration.

"President, I think what Mr. Zhongshan and Mr. Yamaguchi said is very good. How about we use SMS for payment verification?"

"Whenever a customer places an order, we send them a verification number. We only deduct the payment and ship the goods after they enter the correct number."

The more Yoshinobu Shimada talked about it, the better he felt about the method, and he even decided in his heart that QQ should also use this technology.

However, at this time, QQ did not have any paid features, and this technology could only be applied in the future.

Of course, that day will come soon.

Since Xinghai Group's internet division has decided to go public next year, it certainly can't just have traffic; it also needs to make its monetization and revenue look good.

For example, adding the QQ Show feature and the QQ Membership feature.

This thing was a powerful tool for internet companies to make money in its past life. Not only in China, but all over the world, people were willing to spend money to embellish their online personas.

"Yes, but many netizens don't have mobile phone numbers. Even if we develop a mobile SMS verification function, it can only meet the needs of a portion of our customers."

"Therefore, we would be better off inventing a technology that can be verified on a computer."

"For example, when a customer wants to pay, they need to select the correct option from text, numbers, and letters in advance for verification. We will only make the payment after the verification is successful."

"However, the content of this verification needs to be a pattern that can be recognized by the human eye but not by a computer."

"As for the name of the verification technology, let's call it CAPTCHA."

CAPTCHA is one of the most important underlying technological inventions in the internet field.

Almost all internet companies in later generations used this technology. For example, 12306, the official railway ticket booking website, relies on verification codes to grab train tickets.

But this crucial technology was not invented until the 21st century.

Masato Takeshita didn't know if his employees had the ability, but he was still willing to spend money to support them in trying.

"That's good. I think we have the ability to make it."

Shigeru Oshima, who was tired of the endless stream of spam messages, suddenly perked up after hearing the chairman's description.

He plans to lead the company's technical team to work hard to acquire this technology so that the company's market value can be further increased when it goes public.

Of the group's six major internet companies, only my own company has a low market value. This won't do; it's too embarrassing.

"Computer verification code, mobile phone verification with a six-digit number? As expected of the president, the functions he comes up with are so comprehensive."

Zhongshan Jingming was very excited and couldn't wait to go back and have the technical team start research and development.

If this technology had been available sooner, our company's revenue could have at least doubled.

Difficulty in making online payments has become a key factor hindering the development of Xinghai E-commerce.

"Yes, if we had CAPTCHAs, I think we could at least double our user base next year."

Seiichi Yamaguchi was equally enthusiastic, eager to poach several outstanding professors and students from universities with strong cryptography programs, such as the University of Tokyo and Tokyo Institute of Technology.

With the help of these people, online marketplaces might just be able to take the lead.

As for Tanaka Aoki, Ikeda Daichi, and Shimada Yoshinori, they were not in such a hurry.

The company, managed by three people, does not currently offer services to individuals, so the demand for verification code functionality is not significant.

After giving the verification code, Masato Takeshita looked at the heads of Baidu and Google.

"In the United States, pay-per-click search engines and click-based display search engines have emerged."

"You two should combine the two methods, along with pay-per-click advertising, to give the company a better revenue stream."

In 1998, various ways of making money through search engines began to emerge.

However, in the early stages, the effectiveness of any pricing model was generally mediocre.

On the contrary, Yahoo made a fortune from advertising revenue through its portal website.

This is also a major reason why nobody cares about search engines right now, and everyone is rushing to create portal websites.

Search engines don't currently generate revenue, but portal websites are different; they can basically generate decent revenue as soon as they launch.

Of course, this was a limitation of the times.

The content on the internet is not yet very rich, but portal websites are enough to capture most of the information that ordinary people like to see.

Once online content becomes richer, the inherent limitation of portal websites in displaying insufficient content will become apparent.

That time will also be the era when search engines universally suppress portal websites.

This is why, even though Masato Takeshita highly values ​​the future of search, he prioritized developing portal website businesses for Baidu and Google.

If you want to go public and have a high valuation, you're just dreaming if you don't have a portal website business.

"Yes, Chairman, we will definitely study the new technology carefully." After talking about Baidu and Google, Masato Takeshita looked at Shigeru Oshima.

"Free email services have many flaws, the most troublesome of which is the advertising problem."

"Xinghai Mail needs to offer higher-end paid membership services to attract more high-end users while making money."

Xinghai Mail has limited reach in many places, especially in high-end venues, mainly due to the spam ads that result from offering free services.

At this point, it would be appropriate to launch a membership service that is both clean and feature-rich.

It can not only attract high-end white-collar workers who used to look down on Xinghai Mail, but also allow a small number of users who enjoy the convenience of free email but feel that there is too much spam and want to switch to paid email services to upgrade.

"No problem, that's easy."

Shigeru Oshima nodded quickly. He certainly wouldn't miss out on a project that could be charged for.

As for the most common advertising revenue model in China's email industry in his previous life, Masato Takeshita rejected it long ago.

Email is inherently a low-barrier business; if you're the first to charge for ads, you'll quickly fall behind.

After discussing the Xinghai Mailbox issue, Masato Takeshita then turned his attention to Xinghai Communications, the most important company in the internet sector.

"QQ Show is mainly a way to give men and women on the Internet a chance to customize their accounts."

"Young people like to pursue individuality and hope to have their own style of dress, just like in real life."

"Our QQ Show is targeting this market segment, offering more virtual clothing that can be purchased with virtual currency, as well as virtual pets, virtual accessories, and other cosmetic items."

QQ Show, formerly known as Tencent's early money-making tool.

Penguin was able to go public thanks to this thing.

As for the QQ itself, not many people cared about it at the time.

Everyone thinks that if an internet company can't succeed in the US, it certainly can't succeed in China either.

However, it's normal for most people to think this way, since the early center of the internet industry was in the United States.

Apart from the United States, most other countries have basically copied the successful experience of the United States.

For example, Yahoo! Japan, and the three early internet giants in China, Sohu, Sina, and NetEase, all followed the path of the Americans.

“That’s good. My child keeps complaining that QQ is boring and everyone does the same thing.”

"Indeed, now that you mention it, I feel like I look better online."

"That makes sense; it's likely to attract young people to buy it."

The number of older trendy dads and moms is relatively small, so the main user group of QQ Show is definitely young people.

Whether these people are able to make money or not, many of them have a strong sense of vanity and crave recognition on the internet.

They are also more willing to buy virtual clothes to dress themselves up and show their personality to others.

After discussing QQ Show, Masato Takeshita went on to talk at length about QQ Membership.

"For QQ members, we can provide some virtual QQ Show outfits so that buyers feel they are getting their money's worth."

"In addition, we can also create chat levels on QQ."

"For example, after a certain number of hours the screen is on, you get one star icon, then five stars turn into a moon, and five moons turn into a sun."

"At the same time, we can also link QQ levels with memberships."

"Users without a membership will only gain one hour of experience points for every hour they log in to QQ. Users with a membership will gain 1.5 hours of experience points for every hour they log in to QQ..."

"This thing is absolutely perfect for vain young people."

QQ membership levels are a major reason why countless netizens keep QQ running while online, and it's also the sole focus for many people who buy QQ memberships.

In its previous life, Tencent made a fortune through QQ memberships and various diamond services.

Masato Takeshita was one of them, having purchased the Black Diamond service for the DNF game.

"A hierarchy? I understand."

Although Yoshinori Shimada didn't understand what was so attractive about a certain level, since his chairman had solemnly told him that it must be very profitable.

He didn't realize it because he hadn't considered things thoroughly enough.

"Here you go, this is the QQ level icon design I came up with."

The most important thing about QQ level is that it's visible to others.

Therefore, Masato Takeshita's main focus was on how this thing could be displayed to others when users were chatting.

Like QQ Show, if it can't be shown off in public, not many people will be willing to buy it.

After discussing QQ Show, Masato Takeshita then moved on to QQ's most important aspect: gaming.

However, online games were not yet well-developed, so Masato Takeshita could only refer to his previous life's QQ and start with card and board games.

As soon as he finished speaking, Yoshinobu Shimada opened his mouth wide in excitement.

"That's great. With such a large user base, card and board games can definitely make money."

Card and board games are simple to make, yet they are very attractive to users.

Because in every country, there are a large number of card and board game users.

In Japan, for example, mahjong alone has tens of millions of users. If you also include popular games like shogi, go, and poker, it's estimated that half the Japanese population plays them.

Even if only one-fifth of these people convert, that's still tens of millions of users.

Thinking of these things, Yoshinobu Shimada became even more excited and spoke eagerly.

"President, what do you think about us creating a QQ Games membership service?"

"Sure, but we also need to provide a certain amount of free services in the QQ Games section."

"Take mahjong as an example. We'll make a realistic mahjong game available for everyone to play for free. Then we'll create a fun mahjong game."

"The probability of winning big hands in the Happy Mahjong game is increased by dozens of times, making everyone more enthusiastic about playing."

For casual players, Happy Mahjong is simply a game-changer.

After all, the thrill of winning big is far greater than earning points little by little.

Next, Masato Takeshita meticulously explained the strategies of the previous game of Happy Landlords, transforming them into a form of Happy Mahjong that Japanese people could understand.

In short, continue to learn from the successful experiences of the penguin company. Use the conventional model to attract users, and the fun model to make money.

"Well, Chairman, the user's computer may not be able to support overly complicated services."

"Forehead……"

Upon hearing Yoshinobu Shimada's quiet reminder, the young man immediately stopped.

Indeed, it seems that modern computers cannot support overly complex services.

“That makes sense. Let’s try a different approach. Users can play QQ Games for free for two hours each day, and then pay for the rest of the time.”

Attracting users for free first, and then monetizing them through heavy users, is an eternal rule in the internet industry.

Although this means we won't make money from casual users, it's the only option at this point in time.

(End of this chapter)