Happy Birthday to BlogBus
Yet one more interview from my visit to the 3rd Chinese Blogger Conference in Beijing November 3-4, 2007. BlogBus launched in late 2002 and was one of the first blog service providers (BSP) in China. BlogBus offers free blog hosting and charges premium service fees of less than $15 a year. According to the Baidu Blog Development Report China has 52,300,000 blogs and 1460 BSPs. BlogBus is one of the top 20 BSPs in China. The interesting thing is that the company is only a couple dozen people, but competes against organizations with hundreds of employees.
Heng Ge, also known as Dou Yi, is the CEO of BlogBus. In early 2005, the Chinese venture fund UCI took a 20 percent stake in BlogBus, but Mr. Heng led a founder buyback of that stake in October 2006 and set out to raise a new round. They raised USD 3 million from JAIC, which is the third or fourth largest VC in Japan, and Cyber Agent (the biggest blog service provider in Japan).
BlogBus will have its 5th Birthday this December. The event will last for 2 days, and members and special guest are welcome to join the celebration. Happy Birthday to BlogBus!
Heng Ge is one of the first China bloggers I met. I like to read his blog very much, because he doesn’t just write like a CEO, blogging about the development of BlogBus, but also shares his personal feelings and points of view on a variety of subjects. For example, I learned from his blog that this executive from Shanghai likes Hong Kong popular music, in particular Sam Hui. And at the 3rd Chinese Blogger Conference he told me he will go to Hong Kong to see the Sam Hui in concert this December. I will offer to be his tourist guide, and invite him to visit our company at the Cyberport.
In this video interview Heng Ge introduces BlogBus and tells us his goals for the coming year:
http://video.sanriotown.com/flaon/us/loader.swf?key=b979f18058bff391
cnbloggercon