The real-time analytics service Clicky is going Chinese. While I think it would’ve been cooler to go Japanese simply for my own punning purposes I am noticing this trend with many web services as of late.
The Chinese market is booming and even with the web being restricted overseas the Internet is growing at a faster pace than the United States could probably imagine. Start-ups in China are sprouting every which way and if American start-ups are smart they’ll want to get their hands in it too.
Only one problem, that is translating your product into Chinese. It definitely is not the friendliest language in the world and not many people are familiar with it like Spanish. This is where crowd-sourcing and dedicated users come in great handy.
The thing that bothers me about Clicky’s implementation of crowd-sourcing is that the translations are limited to Clicky users and you can only do one language translation per account. Unless Clicky grows at a consistent rate it will be very hard to maintain such restrictions.
This also begs the question of whether or not Clicky wants to start advertising their analytics product over in China. I have yet to see an American start-up grab China by the horns and Clicky is truly a great product that could carve out a good amount of customers. Of course this would complicate business matters but it would be a smart move nonetheless.
Disclaimer: Alex, fellow blogger at Techgeist, works for Clicky. Thought we would let you know.
