ZhenFund/Sequoia China-Backed Peak Labs Launches Three New Products
Do you still remember what were you doing at the age of 18? Playing video games? Watching TV plays? Or hanging out with friends? Some apparently weren’t able to position themselves in a life like that. Ji Yichao, also known as PeakJi online, developed the first version of a full-fledged iPhone browser dubbed Mammoth in 2010, when he was 18, all on his own hands.
That was two years ago.
And yesterday at a special event held in a cinema in the northern part of Beijing, Ji with his team launched three new products, including the latest Mammoth 5, JigSaw (a multidimensional data visualization toolset) and Zine (news aggregator).
Born in 1992, educated in both U.S. and China, Ji’s talented programming skill attracted many Chinese Internet celebrities’ attention. It’s no surprise that ZhenFund partnering with Sequoia China invested into him, which led to the founding of the Peak Labs, an technological innovator that aspires to look up to Bell Labs and Xerox Labs.
Mammoth 5
Mammoth 5, equipped with a flurry of features like signature multi-Tabs System, built-in Rasgueado keyboard (copying, editing texts without moving fingers out of virtual keyboard), page predicting and preloading, is – just like it claims on its website – really a playground for geeks.
The browser provides more than 100 configuration options, to common users it might be a little overwhelming in figuring out a browser suit themselves. So the new behemoth now supports importing and exporting personal configuration. You can download presets from its website if you don’t bother to customize it.
You can check out the video for more details:
JigSaw
JigSaw was originated from the works of PKU (Peking University) Visualization and Visual Analytic Group. In today’s business environment, it’s a no brainer for businesses to accumulate huge amount of data over everyday operation. Analyzing these data to improve operating efficiency, a trend called “mining big data”, is gaining traction among businesses.
However, traditional data analyzing tools are complicated to master and tedious to use, with JigSaw, a HTML5-enabled web toolset, what you need to do is to import and upload your data to JigSaw website, and then drag, yes just drag and drop preset tools to visualize your data. “It’s as easy as using Windows Painter”. Jumei, a Chinese cosmetics-centric group buying site has already applied JigSaw to daily use.
You can try it online here http://jigsaw.peak-labs.com/sketch
Zine
Zine is the third and last but not least product launched in the event.
With tons of information spread across the web, people now are actually drowned in tons of information. Zine is crafted with a simple aim to streamline people’s online reading experience.
It all starts with a search box. For example, after the latest Apple Special Event, you might want to check out more news and reviews about iPad, and probably where you can buy it online. Then you can shoot “iPad Mini” into Zine, and it will present you with all filtered information about the latest addition to the iPad family, including media reports, descriptions about iPad Mini from Baidu Baike, the Chinese Wikipedia and B2C sites where you can/are likely to buy it from.
Zine is still in beta testing, will be officially released by the end of this year.
Shen Nanpeng, also known as Neil Shen, founding managing partner of Sequoia Capital China gave a speech before the event. He noted that many great Internet companies, like Youtube, started their business in Sequoia U.S. office. And in China, Sequoia is also looking for startups with disruptive technology and star quality.
Peak Labs, obviously fits into that criteria. The founder himself, Peak Ji, is a legend in China’s C2C-powered Internet industry, while the other two members were both students from Peking University, one of the most prestigious Chinese Universities. Currently they’re looking for new blood to join the team. Give them a shout if you think you’re the one they are looking for.