About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

Being an UpTake (formerly a Kango) for more than 400 days, I am proud to share with you that UpTake officially opens its Beta doors to everyone TODAY! Uptake is ”

a new vacation search site that has amassed the travel industry’s largest database of hotels and attractions (more than 400,000 in US) and analyzed more than 20 million online opinions from other travelers.

In the age that the “wisdom of crowds” are generated faster than ever, Uptake offers to collect and filter word-of-mouth from the web to make vacation planning easier. UpTake also got press at ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, SemanticWeb, SearchEngineLand, Les Explorers and the UpTake blog itself. It is only for United States for now. But Winser Zhao of SinoHotelReservation also wrote about us.
To describe the Uptake services using the geek’s vocabulary, it: uses a travel ontology and natural language analysis to extract meta-tags from the collective intelligence it has collected and returns unbiased, personalized recommendations based on travelers’ facts and feelings.” So how much do you understand from this description? Uptake is a global company with an R&D team in Beijing and Moscow. Based in Shanghai, I have been focusing on web marketing and analytics, and work closely with a web developer in Indonesia. Here are some learning from working in for a global company in China.

Beijing vs. Shanghai?

There are many theories and researches on infrastructure, culture, cost structure etc. to decide where to build an offshore R&D center. But I like the way a Shanghai-based Rob McCormick of Mustang Ventures says to “go back to your hometown” (to build your team if you have to outsource). You see, two core technical team members in UpTake are originally from Beijing. In reality, Shanghai doesn’t have a “Silicon Valley” while Beijing has Zhongguanchun. And people (around me) all agree that Shanghai doesn’t have as good as Beijing of an “academic environment” for research & development. So Beijing is better.

But don’t people in “Silicon Valley” Zhongguanchun “jump trough” (跳槽, job-hopping) a lot?

Recruitment site (zhaopin.com) paid two celebrities Xu Jinglei (徐静蕾) and Huang Jianxiang (黄健翔) to “advocate” people to “jump trough” on TV, subway and newspaper. And with the new Labor Contract Law, it is more costly for a company to lose employees especially after getting them trained. An ongoing trend is that a company would try to “dig” (挖) talents from competitors by offering 1.x salary. So, people in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing are all as equally likely to engage in job-hopping.

I have heard executives in China saying Chinese employees would leave the jobs for very small increasing of salary. But from my observation, more and more people are thinking from a “career path” standpoint rather than “cash”. So the trick to keep employees is to understand what they value most in their career plan. For example, international training, travel and working experience are very important to my peers.

RMB (China Yuan) is appreciating v.s. US dollar, will it still be cost efficient?

Elliott has been watching this issue (see his posts on RMB appreciation) for a while. RMB has appreciated around 9% since May 2007. China is facing possible inflation in 2008 or 2009. April 2008 CPI increased 8.5% (near decade-high level). Shanghai Labor Protection Office (上海劳动保障局) issued a guide on “increasing employees salary” saying “enterprise can increase employees’ salaries 11% in 2008″ in late April. I don’t know how this guideline will affect the salary. But people are expecting to “get a raise” if the price of rices, vegetable oil and pork are keep going up like this.

In addition, Dan Harris from China Law Blog said that “Increased enforcement by Chinese regulators of means that compliance is more important than before”. One major compliance is employee social insurance and allowance. It is important to count these ”hidden” operations costs when budgeting. The regulation on this varies from city to city. In Shanghai, an enterprise pays less for a people who don’t have Shanghai Hukou (户口), but in Beijing, the Hukou doesn’t effect the cost. Be prepared to pay 40% of 5k monthly salary, or 20% -15% of monthly salary 10k- 50k (percentages are rough estimations). I guest I don’t have an answer for this question.

Culture Difference?

In a professional working environment, culture differences highlighted in David’s Mind the Gap posts are less influential than in daily life. Another difference I learned from Shanghai expat Kai Pan is that Chinese like to hang out with friends in a small KTV room (Elliott has very valuable advice on KTV team building), but westerners like to hang out and meet random people in a big room (such as a bar). But if the offshore team are engaging with oversea customers or consumer-oriental products, they need to get trained on the customers’ culture. For example, Uptakers in China are probably the top 99.5% people who are familiar with US geography in this country.

That’s my humble takes on working in an offshore team of a global company in China. What’s your learning of working in China?

Again. welcome to Uptake to plan your next vacation! (Sorry, U.S. hotels and attractions only.)