Since they are reborn, they must be supported by the school beauties.

Chapter 179 QQ Show and Renren Show
When Lin Zhenbang rushed back to Jiangcheng late Saturday night, the price of a taxi license plate for that day had already skyrocketed to 90,000 yuan.

The first goal for Wenzhou residents is to raise the price to over 100,000 by Monday morning.

Upon arriving in Jiangcheng, Lin Zhenbang, without taking a break, immediately began to ponder how to find Chen Cheng. He only knew Chen Cheng's name, place of origin, and ID number, but did not know what he did or where he lived in Jiangcheng.

Moreover, he didn't dare to go to Fancheng according to the registered address on Chen Cheng's ID card.

Even a powerful dragon can't suppress a local snake. Besides, he knew he was in the wrong. The only reason he dared to consider finding Chen Cheng was because he thought the other party was young and might be easy to bully. He figured he could try to salvage some of his losses, or at the very least, get him to give him some more money.

But he didn't have the guts to really make a big fuss about it.

The only clue he could glean about Chen Cheng was that on the evening of September 30th, after finishing his work, Chen Cheng and the girl accompanying him took a taxi away from Yujiahu.

At that time, she even offered to give them her newly bought Accord, but Chen Cheng refused and left by taxi.

Taking a taxi...

Lin Zhenbang's eyes suddenly lit up.

If we could find the driver who took Chen Cheng that night, wouldn't we know where Chen Cheng went?

So he made up his mind to ask his friends in the industry to use a walkie-talkie to shout and inquire, hoping to find out if he could find the driver.

His wife, Liu Li, was so upset that she couldn't sleep, so she pulled him aside in the living room to discuss solutions.

Liu Li asked him, "If we find that guy surnamed Chen, how do you plan to talk to him?"

Lin Zhenbang said, "What else can we negotiate? We can only offer him more money and ask him to sell the company to me."

Liu Li asked, "What if he doesn't agree?"

Lin Zhenbang shook his head: "At most, I'll say a few harsh words to scare him. If he doesn't fall for it, I have no other choice. The company has been transferred to someone else's name. No matter how capable I am, I can't take it back. I can't force him to sell, can I? If he calls 110, I'll be in jail."

Liu Li hesitated for a moment and asked him, "Do you think we should ask Xiao Hu to help? That kid has been hanging around in society for so many years, always idling around and never doing anything productive. He only recently got a stable job. Why don't we give him some money and ask him to come up with a solution?"

Lin Zhenbang asked somewhat nervously, "You mean you want Xiaohu to threaten him?"

"Correct."

Liu Li stopped hiding her intentions and said through gritted teeth, "After all, it's a profit of over two million. Giving him two hundred thousand should be enough, right?"

Lin Zhenbang said nervously, "You really dare to say that! You're giving him 200,000 yuan, aren't you afraid that he'll get carried away and stab or kill someone for 200,000 yuan? If the company can't be recovered, your brother will be executed, and you'll also be executed for hiring someone to kill someone. I might be better off, and I might get a suspended death sentence or life imprisonment."

Liu Li turned pale with fright and stammered, "Is it that serious?"

Lin Zhenbang drove a taxi in his early years. Although he stopped driving it later, he never left the industry. Taxi drivers may not have high levels of education, but their knowledge is definitely broader than that of the average person. After all, they come into contact with all sorts of people and are always spreading all kinds of rumors.

Lin Zhenbang could recite the names of all the people executed in Jiangcheng over the years, and the reasons for their executions, as easily as reciting a menu.

So Lin Zhenbang said in a serious tone: "In the past few years, in every case I've heard of where someone was hired to commit murder for money, as long as the person died, the murderer and the person who hired the murderer were all executed."

Liu Li said in a panic, "That's not what I meant. We're just trying to make a living, how could we hire someone to kill someone? I just wanted to scare him a little. If he's scared into agreeing, wouldn't that help us salvage some of our losses?"

Lin Zhenbang said, "At most, you can give Xiaohu some money and let him use his words to threaten you."

"That's okay too!"

Liu Li said, "Xiao Hu has dragon and tiger tattoos on his body, so he'll definitely be more intimidating than the two of us."

Lin Zhenbang nodded: "Let's find the person first!"

Sunday.

Lin Zhenbang got up early and inquired everywhere. Finally, before dark, he found the taxi driver who had picked up Chen Cheng and Lu Youyou from Yujiahu that day.

Lured by a 1,000 yuan red envelope, the other party told Lin Zhenbang about Chen Cheng's specific itinerary that night.

Upon learning that Chen Cheng first sent his girlfriend to Renji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and then to Jiangcheng University, Lin Zhenbang basically concluded that Chen Cheng must be a student at Jiangcheng University.

The couple immediately drove to Jiangda University, but when they arrived, they were stunned.

Jiangda University has tens of thousands of students, and it was nighttime, making the search extremely difficult.

They immediately stopped many people to inquire about Chen Cheng's name, but Chen Cheng was just a freshman at Jiang University who had only been enrolled for a little over a month and had virtually no social life. At most, only a few dozen people knew him. The couple spent the whole night asking around the campus without any success, so they had to give up for the time being and try again tomorrow.

On the way back, Lin Zhenbang felt increasingly distressed.

This afternoon, the cash purchase price for the quota has reached 100,000. While the whole market is going crazy, many people, like Lin Zhenbang, are regretting that they sold too early.

Lin Zhenbang hasn't slept much these past two days. Every time the price index rises, he has to mentally recalculate how much money he has lost, and this emotional state causes him great torment.
-
This weekend, Renren.com swept through the entire college student population, and even many young people who have already entered the workforce, thanks to its nationwide user acquisition campaign and the launch of its flagship product, Fishpond.

A phenomenal product generates phenomenal dissemination. In just one weekend, Renren.com's registered users exceeded one million, becoming the most popular online product among college students, bar none. On Monday morning, this product, which had become a sensation online over the weekend, also attracted the attention of several major companies in the industry.

Young employees at NetEase and Tencent reported the sudden rise of Xiaonei.com to their superiors, as both companies saw it as a potential threat.

Most NetEase Mail users don't use it for real business purposes. It's an open secret within NetEase that many people use their email to store photos. Renren's photo albums are a direct threat to these email users. Once they all switch to the more convenient Renren, NetEase Mail's daily active users will drop significantly.

After an emergency meeting, NetEase decided to launch the NetEase Photo Album project to avoid losing email users.

Moreover, NetEase plans to directly overwhelm Renren.com in terms of storage space, giving each user 128MB of photo album space, which can store at least dozens of high-definition photos.

Compared to NetEase, Tencent has more concerns.

Its core business is social networking. Apart from that, QQ doesn't have many value-added services. It's just a membership program. Their next money-making product, QQ Show, has just been launched and won't be available until early next year.

At an internal Tencent meeting, their core team analyzed the product positioning and basic logic of Xiaonei.com. For the rest of the morning, everyone in the meeting room looked serious.

To be fair, what Tencent has, Renren already has, and what Renren has, Tencent mostly doesn't have.

Tencent's foundation is social networking, namely its friend system and instant messaging system. Renren also has its own friend system and instant messaging function, but it is relatively weak. It still uses the BBS internal messaging system. Although it is not as user-friendly as QQ, it has the necessary functions.

The school's photo album is something Tencent doesn't have, nor are the personal homepages or the "fishpond" system.

After a rational and objective analysis, everyone believes that if Xiaonei continues to develop in this way, while it may not be able to replace Tencent, it will certainly stifle many of Tencent's opportunities.

As a result, the entire team's development strategy was subtly transformed by the sudden emergence of Renren.com.

First up is QQ Show.

At the meeting, Mr. Ma said, "Personally, I think QQ Show is a nice-to-have feature. We originally wanted to design paid cartoon characters for users, but whether these cartoon characters will be popular has not yet been proven. So we might as well suspend the development of QQ Show for now and focus on developing a product that can compete with Renren.com."

No one had any objections to this.

QQ Show was originally developed as a consumer product solely to generate more revenue. Its success hinges on the appeal of the QQ product itself to users.

If QQ's foundation is affected, then the future of QQ Show will also be impacted.

Instead of developing such icing-on-the-cake products, it would be better to focus on what's truly important and first create a replica of QQ's own Renren (校内网).

Just like developing OICQ based on ICQ, this approach is something everyone is very familiar with.

Therefore, the core team unanimously approved the suspension of QQ Show development, and focused all their efforts on developing a product that would rival Renren.com.

As for what to call this product, Mr. Ma had a flash of inspiration: "Let's just call it QQ Alumni Network!"

On campus, alumni.

No one knew that the Tencent team had somehow managed to bring forward a failed product that was originally scheduled to launch six years later to the present.

Moreover, the team gave the alumni network the highest priority, and everyone focused their efforts to ensure it went live within two weeks.

As for the functions, Jack Ma instructed that everything that Renren.com has should also be included on the alumni network.

Chen Cheng's ideas were exactly the opposite of Mr. Ma's.

He listed out the requirements of the merchant backend and handed them over to Xiao Peng. Then he started to consider whether he should start a cryptocurrency business.

Selling virtual services and issuing virtual currency are two completely different approaches.

If you're selling memberships, then you can only sell memberships. Users' consumption habits are that they pay money to buy your membership services, and they buy for as long as they need.

If you want to sell other services tomorrow, users' consumption habits won't adapt in a short time.

However, if a cryptocurrency is added as a turning point, the situation changes.

In other words, it's the same gameplay as QQ coins.

In the early days, QQ directly sold memberships. Later, QQ coins were introduced, meaning that all value-added services had to be purchased with QQ coins. Users were used to converting money into QQ coins first, and then using QQ coins to buy memberships, QQ Show items, red diamonds, yellow diamonds, and even Happy Beans.

The use of QQ coins as a virtual payment currency has gradually made users accustomed to this payment system, and their awareness and trust in QQ coins have also increased significantly. As a result, many users will deliberately keep some QQ coins in their account when making purchases, so that they can buy some new products at any time.

Especially QQ Show, this product is very similar to the skins and props in later games, with all kinds of categories and prices ranging from a few QQ coins to tens or hundreds of QQ coins.

Entering the QQ Show store feels like entering a department store; no matter how much or how little money you have, you can buy something.

Therefore, as long as the logic of virtual currency is established and products like QQ Show are introduced, consumer enthusiasm can be rapidly increased.

Then I might as well put on an in-school showcase myself!

(End of this chapter)