Kik+Talkbox applications are hot in China. We said that one of the reasons people love to copy this idea is to beat Tencent (potentially). Leijun’s Miliao sounds promising, so Tencent fights back with its own Weixin. But, the fact is that you can not never under-estimate Tencent’s ability. Yesterday, Tencent announced Weishi, a Video messaging application.
Weishi is still at limited public test stage yet. But according to its official site, it comes with a few very interesting features:
1. Weishi is functioning like Kik and Talkbox, i.e. the social connection built on Weishi users is based their phone contacts. But besides text (not clear yet if it supports voice-only messaging), Weishi upgrade the idea to Video. It actually reminds of Seesmic at its early launch, Loic called it Video Twitter. Seesmic did not work out in the end, but with the Kik model, smart phone and 3G environment, the video chat sounds much more promising.
2. support both iOS and Android – Weishi is now available for iPhone, Android and Android Pad, the iPad version is coming soon. It is like Facetime, but will be cross-platform.
3. High-quality video chat – we could not test it out yet, but the official site says the high-quality video chat is guaranteed.
I would thumb up to Tencent this time. At least, it rarely to see Tencent market its product with the words the First-ever in China. Just can’t wait to try out Weishi.
