Chinese touch key to the success of English product

While some Chinese companies are keen on acquiring technologies from developed countries, Wang Jialiang's high-tech startup survived by providing innovative products for the developed markets.

"China should export more intellectual property and technology innovations," said Wang, CEO of TouchPal, a mobile software developer.

"If China would have tens of thousands of small and medium-sized companies that are based on high-tech, then technology innovation would definitely drive China's economic development to a higher level."

Founded in 2008, TouchPal targeted English text-messaging markets since the very beginning. Its primary product TouchPal Keyboard has over 600 million users in 157 countries and regions overseas. About 42 percent of the users are from Europe and the United States, and TouchPal takes up about 20 percent of the North American markets.

Wang, 37, said that he was able to get familiar with computer at a young age, as his father was among the first generation of computer programmers in China. In 2005, he graduated with a master's degree in electrical engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and joined Microsoft China as a projects manager.

But starting his own business has been his dream. When smartphones became increasingly popular worldwide in 2008, but their default clumsy keyboards still limited users' experiences, he sensed a niche market.

That same year, he co-founded TouchPal with a friend in Shanghai. They developed an innovative virtual keyboard that offers many enhancements and shortcuts.

"We saw the trend of globalization when we started our business," he said. "As a high-tech company, we think TouchPal could fit in well with the English text-messing markets."

In two weeks after TouchPal Keyboard was introduced to the market, it was downloaded more than 100,000 times.

The next year, it won the award of mobile innovation at the Mobile World Congress, the largest annual gathering of the industry in Barcelona, Spain.

Wang recalled that as the company targeted overseas markets, many Chinese even thought TouchPal was a foreign outfit. Some also wrote to them, asking them to develop a Chinese version of TouchPal Keyboard.

"They wrote to me in English, explaining in detail what is Chinese pinyin and strokes," he said.

TouchPal's business expanded quickly. Now, most well-known brands such as Samsung, Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo, HTC and Sony preload TouchPal as the default keyboard of their smartphones.

But there are also obstacles. In 2012, Nuance Communications Inc, then the largest smartphone keyboard service provider in the US, claimed that TouchPal infringed its intellectual property.

Wang responded to the lawsuit and finally won the case after more than one year's painstaking efforts. This experience also made Wang realize the importance of intellectual property protection and continual technology innovation.

Chen Qiqing, a senior research fellow of the International Monetary Institute of Renmin University of China, said that Chinese government has put technology innovation high on its agenda and will continue to give incentives to technology innovation, which means good opportunities for technology companies.

But TouchPal chose to make a new product for the Chinese market based on the analysis of domestic markets and consumers, rather than introducing TouchPal Keyboard in the country.

"After years of development, we understand better the differences between Chinese and overseas markets, so we won't bring the overseas business model and products back to China," he said.

TouchPal's innovative product for the domestic market is Touchpal Contacts, which aimed to provide safer communication environment for Chinese users.

"We did a survey, of all the phone calls that Chinese people get, about 28.7 percent are from strangers," he said. "Of which, some are from real estate agents, some are from salespeople, some are phone scams..."

TouchPal Contacts is designed to help users distinguish these calls, so that they won't miss important calls, but won't take nuisance calls either. It has more than 500 million users in China now and active users number 56 million.

But this is still not enough, Wang said, and he has already targeted the big data industry and expects more innovations from this area.

TouchPal set up a big data R&D center in Silicon Valley, in which technicians from China and overseas work together to push forward its prospects in the big data industry.

Wang Jialiang, CEO of TouchPal, a mobile software developer