The interview with Bo Yang of Douban

Bo Yang earned his B.Sc. from Tsinghua University, and a Ph.D in physics from University of California. He Joined IBM (San Jose) in 1998 as an advisory scientist. From 2000 to 2004 he was the CTO and a co-founder of egistics Corporation in Beijing, a startup in supply chain management solutions. In late 2004 he started working on douban.com and in 2005 founded Douban Inc.

Bo Yang was guest speaker at the 3rd Chinese Blogger Conference, speaking on the subject of Music 2.0: Conflicts and Value. His company, Douban, launched in 2005 and compiles user-generated reviews and recommendations of books, movies, and music.

I am one of the earliest users of Douban, having formed a group called “Hong Kong Book Worms” in 2005, just after the launch. I wrote several blog posts about Douban, which brought hundreds of Hong Kong bloggers to Douban’s membership, and they generated thousands of books reviews. That impressed Bo Yang quite a bit.

Douban.com has an English version which operates in partnership with Amazon.Com for sales and data use.

To learn more about Douban and its founder, check out Bo Yang’s interview at the 3rd Chinese Blogger Conference:
http://video.sanriotown.com/flaon/us/loader.swf?key=7e6647640e10dc1c

cnbloggercon, outblaze, cbc2007, douban