While LinkedIn has managed to carve out a good niche as a professional social network in the West, Ushi (which means outstanding professional in Mandarin) wants to do the same for China. The site’s invitation-only private beta started in March 2010 and has grown to over 60,000 members, using just user invites.
Roughly 70 percent of Ushi’s users are active every month and 80 percent of visitors are located in mainland China. While the Shanghai-based service is much smaller than LinkedIn’s 80 million users, it recently secured $1.5 million in investment and can be used in both English and Chinese. Ushi also allows users to microblog, like on Twitter and users pay money to send messages outside of their network.
“We plan to test various revenue streams to find out what really resonates well with our users,” said Ushi founder Dominic Penaloza. “We see huge opportunities in e-commerce and recruiting/jobs. Business magazines have already dubbed us China’s Linkedin, and that s a convenient short description, but we are planning some exciting innovations that we believe make Ushi not a so-called clone but instead something even better.”
Source: VentureBeat
