Second Life vs HiPiHi, Interview with founder and CEO, Hui Xu
Hui Xu, Founder and CEO of HiPiHi
Find out more about the growing industry of the new 3-D virtual world online experience. As the founder of HiPiHi, Hui Xu gives us an inside look at the purpose of virtual worlds and how they are the future of the online world. See how virtual interaction change the landscape for companies, brands, and real life communities.
Interview Transcript:
Thank you for your wonderful presentation, I feel we all learned a lot from it, can you talk about your background as well as your company, HiPiHi?
Our company HiPiHi has been in China since 2005, we are a global virtual world for business. I was one of the earliest IT entrepreneurs that started out in 1998. Then in 2000, I left the industry and took a break for three to four years. I came back to the industry in 2005 to give direction to a new 3-D virtual world.
How did you come up with this concept to create this type of company?
Even as far as back as 2000, I always thought to myself “why don’t we have real life simulations?” This idea for a virtual 3D world came to me when I was brainstorming with my friend. We were thinking of new ideas and concepts while enjoying a beautiful view. While we were both looking at the view and talking about the ideas, we realized the view is also looking back at you. This was something the virtual world couldn’t do at the time. When you are looking on the internet at sina.com or yahoo.com, no one knows you are looking at them and it is one-directional relationship. But when you enter the virtual world, then you become part of it, just like the scenery; it can see you too. And we thought if we can have a model based on this concept, we could make a world that’s created by our own users. We started our concept with this platform and set a goal to create a world where people can study, work, and be entertained. We want to give this tool to ordinary people and allow them to create their own world. As this world becomes more developed, its appeal will attract more users to join in.
We learn that your development has been tremendous as HiPiHi has already started to focus in on the smaller details in this “virtual world”. In this virtual world, whether people are in a company or at home, they can all come and create a world in your company’s site?
Yes, even companies can have interactive activities and training centers for their own employees to learn and have great teacher and student interactions in this virtual world classroom community.
How do you plan to promote this concept of your company to the rest of the world?
We are simply creating a platform, the real marketing and promotional work will be done by our users. We have a few different groups of users: one is the ordinary consumer, the other is the community manager running their own communities. The communit managers will be the ones helping us promote our platform as they increase their network and attract other people to join their communities.. These managers will be responsible for setting up their special clubs and virtual spaces and host everything such as parties, putting up photos, watching films, etc. The work of the community manager will allow us to be promoted through their work and gaining members for their own virtual worlds in a very organic process. I just used that as an example, these are just some of the possibilities. I also used the term of “user value” in my presentation which refers to, let’s say a virtual school, to make the school successful, this school has to recruit for students. Think of this way, suppose I’m a designer and I’ve done a lot of different decorations, I will want to promote my virtual world to my friends so they can come and see my work. HiPiHi simply creates a platform for users to create their own content and develop so the world can see the world of our users who create them for recreational and entertainment purposes.
Your company was established in 2005, only 3 years, how has your company grown so fast in such short time?
We are still in the early stages in development, but our influence on the market and IT industry along with this new trend on people following this “virtual revolution” has helped us garner recognition since we are headlining this new movement. We started in 2005, and had a demo out by 2006 that grabbed a lot of attention both within China and abroad. At the same time, we got a lot of support from partners and users, so we consider ourselves to be very lucky where we are today. We just so happen to catch the wave including the “Second Life” gaining special attention at the same time. Even though we are only a there year company at HiPiHi, our main core team members all have at least 10 years of experience. The founding team of HiPiHi is all experts of this field and arena. Within the past 2-3 years, we’ve been focusing so much on the basics and building up the foundation for the company that we haven’t put any energy into how to promote and expand our business. We believe in slowly building and making this platform nice and steady.
When you mentioned attracting international talents from different countries, does that mean you’ve already entered the global market?
HiPiHi from the beginning was meant to be a global platform. It differs from 2-D, and 15% of our customers come from overseas. Even though they don’t speak Chinese, they can still have fun and meet people inside our virtual world. When they speak English, they are usually understood by the non-English speakers as well. Our basic concept model was to make our model international even though our main focus is building around the Chinese population. From the start, we handled everything with the intention of going global within our companies from our company structure, the board, staff recruitment, are all focused on. We have contacts in Japan, Singapore, USA; we may have offices abroad in a few years and produce international teams in different countries to spread out product worldwide.
