Wharton Tech Blog

The Wharton Technology Club is proud to co-host “Successes & Challenges of Yahoo! in China”

Allan Kwan, Regional VP & Managing Director, Yahoo! Asia

When:  5-6:30PM  - Wednesday, 1/26/05

Where:  Lauder-Fisher Hall - Auditorium

The Wharton Technology Club is pleased to co-host a discussion presented by Allan Kwan on the challenges that Yahoo! has faced in the Chinese market as well as some of the successes that they have enjoyed.  Mr. Kwan is currently the Regional VP & Managing Director of Yahoo! Asia and a former Wharton & Lauder grad.

Profile on Allan Kwan

With more than 22 years of information technology, telecommunications, and general management experience, Mr. Allan Kwan is responsible for Yahoo!’s overall business operations in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.  In the past year, Mr. Kwan has been instrumental in reshaping the China operation following the acquisition of 3721 Network Software Company Limited and the set up of 1Pai.com, an ecommerce joint venture with Sina. 

Prior to joining Yahoo! in July 2001, Mr. Kwan was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Asia.com Inc., responsible for local content, web services, and mobile commerce.  Prior to Asia.com, Kwan served as Vice President of Motorola Inc., and General Manager of the Asia Personal Networks Group.  At Motorola his focus included new product development and the integration of information, data communications, software, Internet and telephony for the emerging wireless internet industry.  From 1994-99, Kwan led the growth of Motorola’s paging business in Greater China, and held the position of Vice President and General Manager of the Paging Subscriber Division, where he managed over 2500 employees and built one of the most profitable operations in the company with annual revenues exceeding US$1 billion.  For over a decade, Kwan also worked at Nortel Networks managing functional areas in Manufacturing Engineering, Operations, Telco Marketing, International Business Development, and Wireless Systems Sales.

Kwan holds a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of British Columbia in Canada, as well as a Master of Business Administration (Distinction) degree from the Wharton School, and a Master of Arts degree in International Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. With more than 22 years of information technology, telecommunications, and general management experience, Mr. Allan Kwan is responsible for Yahoo!’s overall business operations in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.  In the past year, Mr. Kwan has been instrumental in reshaping the China operation following the acquisition of 3721 Network Software Company Limited and the set up of 1Pai.com, an ecommerce joint venture with Sina. 

P2P filesharing has been under assult since the days of Napster, but has rarely been embraced for good by a major company. Most recently, the sheer and massive popularity of sharing files based on the Bittorrent file protocol has garnered a lot of legal attention from the folks at the MPAA and RIAA. But now we are seeing two emerging trends, an ISP is harnessing the power of bittorrent for legitimate delivery of files, and a new bittorrent adaptation that removes the trackers that proved to be the Achilles heel of bittorrent usage which the MPAA exploited so successfully. These trends are pointing towards possible embrace by mainstream companies for this very useful technology. And at the same time, we are hoping that a band of "technophobe piracy freaks" doesn’t squash such technologies in their infancy. For more on the power of Bittorrent and it’s huge impact on video downloads, read a great article (pdf) from none other than Kevin Werbach, a professor at The Wharton School. What’s Bittorrent? Read below…

Bittorrent shoots down the arguments that today’s broadband connections are too slow for downloading movies and that it’s a painful experience for most broadband users, hence, we (the movie studios & content owners) shouldn’t think about offering a on-demand movie service via the web for the next dozen years. Bittorrent basically creates an instant peer2peer network among people who have a particular file and those who are in the process of downloading it. Then, the file is split into chunks and shared instantly among the peers. This has several advantages over typical linear download networks. First, the files don’t need to be completed to be shared, this increases propagation rapidly and also increases bandwidth for downloads. Second, bandwidth is shared by all peers and not just the original poster of the files; this saves costs to companies with large distros (linux, microsoft patches, movies, etc). Third, the files are protected with a hash check preventing insertion of dummy data (like the RIAA used to do on Kazaa) and bad chunks are re-downloaded. Since everyone is downloading and uploading at the same time, you can be technically accused of distributing pirated content if this happens. All bittorrent downloads rely on a small torrent file that describes the content to be downloaded and a tracking website that keeps an eye on available copies among current or available downloaders. So, if you thought downloading movies, linux or personal videos is a pain with huge costs, then you are stuck in the 90s.

So long, GDS (google desktop search). It was short but it’s now over. I’ve been trying out Yahoo’s desktop search beta over the past few days. It’s based on X1’s software, which I have never tried before, and it simply leaves GDS in the dust. It indexes more files formats than you care to remember. It has a relatively fast and reasonably sized indexer. It has advanced search built in and seems to work seamlessly just like MSN or GDS does. I’ve also had MSN Desktop Search installed over the past month, and I’m a happy camper with this one as well. If you like Yahoo!’s Desktop Search, be sure to stop by our Wharton Technology Conference and give Jeff Weiner a big applause. He’s one of our keynotes.

Both apps are quite good and simply leave Google’s unworthy piece of software in the dust. I like Yahoo! because it has so much options to offer and pops up like a real app, very quickly, search shows up instantly, you can quickly re-sort and narrow things down based on a few attributes (from/to, date, subject, format, etc) and you have a preview pane on the right. So, even media files, emails and docs appear on the right to ensure you have the relevant result. Wow!

Delays by Yahoo! and MSN in both cases were worth it. Switching costs: about 1 hour or who cares! Yes, that’s how easy it is to dethrone google, at least on the desktop. I’m still testing and I think both have a preference issues among users, but my main usage for now is MSN, because of the toolbar and Yahoo! on my home desktop because of the search results and speed. Competition is just plain good. I encourage everyone to try both of these and find some preferences.

Here are a few pro/con that I found. GDS has the most stealthy process with real-time indexing and under 10MB RAM usage. MSN has also real-time indexing but its memory baloons heading to the 70-90MB range. This isn’t huge because some of it gets cached on the drive, but it’s an indication of the architecture. Yahoo is somewhere in the middle. It uses about 20-40MB and works almost real-time. Some items are indexed real-time and some you have to specify a time interval. Generally, I hate intervals, but so far so good. Both MSN and Yahoo! vastly outindex GDS in file format. MSN is built around the iFilter method and the more iFilter add-ons you have installed, more files will get indexed. This means, new apps just need to install an iFilter for their files and MSN will get you covered. I’ll make another post on this later.

Yes, that’s me beggin’ JotSpot to give me a beta. I’ve asked for it in the Fall and again recently, but I’m still waiting. Joe Kraus, it’s CEO, sent me a direct email reach out, apologizing for the delays and promising a beta soon. Now, that’s balls! Yes, you need to do that sometimes, reach down to your customers, and I liked the fact that I wasn’t treat like "oh, just another beta vulture." But time will tell. For now, I give JotSpot one more try, and please, please give me a beta.

In case, you’re wondering what’s JotSpot, it’s a new startup in the wiki space providing web-based apps for collaboration and content creation. What’s a wiki? Oh, you’re just so uncool now. Just kidding, wikis are webpages that can be edited by anyone. Here’s a brief link on wikis. Why do I need one? Is that even a question?! I’ll pretend I didn’t hear it.

But seriously, we MBAs have to manage and create a deluge of digital content flows throughout our classes, extracurriculars and career searches. Soon even in our jobs. Take a class team project. We have a webcafe from Documentum at Wharton but it has long outlived its purpose and the the WCIT (wharton techies) is in the process of some upgrades. Take the Wharton Tech Conference 2005 where I manage content with 3 other colleagues and have to coordinate with marketing, sponsorship and logistics. We have email traffic, we have files, we have snippets of info that need storing and organizing and we have final deliverables. If you don’t have online storage for easy retrieval, email traffic baloons, versioning and syncing becomes more complex and you soon give up on any order. I’ll write more on educational technologies from the Wharton experience, but suffice it to say I’m not alone when I need new apps. I wish Wharton had SharePoint Portal Server, but a JotSpot wiki beta could really suffice for now. So, please Joe, where’s my beta?

Marcus is a second-year MBA student majoring in finance and marketing.  He is a Wharton Technology Club Co-President.

Before Wharton, Marcus co-founded a software company (www.reflexion.net) that has developed an innovative non-filter approach to stopping spam.   Other experiences include investment banking M&A, competing for the Swedish national rowing team.  This past summer Marcus interned at Nokia in Helsinki.

Interests include e-mail security, prediction markets and cycling.