Jiepang, the leading Chinese location-based service, just baked its offering into the Weixin open platform with tight integration, part of the company’s broader plan of leveraging on general social networking services to further curate LBS market.
Other than linking QQ account with Jiepang, which give the LBS service access to a vast 700 million user pool, Jiepang users now could also sync their check-ins into all Tencent’s social networking offerings, like QZone, Tencent Weibo, Pengyou and of course Weixin.
Weixin debuted its open platform earlier this year, 3rd party developers can plug their service into the platform and then share all kinds of contents – messages, audio, video, URL, pictures and check-ins – among a user’s connections.
Leveraging on Weixin is a decent step forward for Jiepang, as the former has turned itself into the No.1 of its kind in China. Weixin to date has more than 100 million registered users and more than 50 million active users. A rich land waiting to be tapped by 3rd party apps like Jiepang.
After the heated year of LBS in 2010, the sector now gradually calms down with few players survived while many others either failed to weather the winter or pivoted itself to other service, for instance, Digu just found itself a new life in the form of Pinterest.
Jiepang which just celebrated its two-year anniversary has long explored in the realm of O2O with creative thinking and initiatives like virtual loyalty card and a system to help local merchant gain more customer insights. The company is also an early-adopter of new technologies like NFC. It teamed up with Nokia to promote NFC last year, where users can check in by scanning NFC stickers in local merchant’s window with Nokia’s NFC enabled phone. It makes check-in easier and more fun, one doesn’t have to open the app and then search for the location, it’s all done at just one touch.