mInfo(R) Inc., the leading Chinese mobile search provider,
recently discovered that its popular Guanxi (TM) Mobile City Guide
is being copied by a former business partner.? When people
think of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) violations in China,
they usually think of music, movies, software or branded
apparel.?One Beijing wireless service provider is taking this
practice to the wireless value-added services space.?
"mInfo's Guanxi Mobile City Guide is the most popular
expat-focused mobile search service in China, and has been
providing instant answers to SMS queries since 2002.? mInfo
had acquired the service from Mailman Media Group earlier this
year," said Alvin Wang Graylin, CEO, mInfo Inc. "Recently, we had
discovered that a former business partner, Beijing Taiyu Co., where
Guanxi's servers were stored, had started offering a similar
service under a similar name and SMS short-code."?
"After investigating the service, we found that the 'new' Taiyu
service delivered exactly the same answers to search queries as an
older version of Guanxi and the user experience behaved exactly the
same as well, except it required users to add a '2' in front of all
their queries," said Kirk Jobsz, CEO, Mailman Media Group. "What
made us even more suspicious of the issue was that even some unique
queries, i.e. personal friends' names, came back with the
customized messages that only Guanxi's database would have."
mInfo has delivered formal complaints to Taiyu to stop operating
their 'new' service, but have not been able to get a satisfactory
response.? In fact, Taiyu has even actively pushed out
unsolicited SMS messages to our users saying they are a "better
Guanxi."? Given this kind of blatant disregard for IPR and
violation of our cooperation agreement, mInfo and Mailman China
have no choice but to issue formal legal proceedings towards the
Taiyu company.? We are confident that justice will prevail in
this case, and it will be a great test of the maturity of the IP
rights enforcement strength of the China legal system.
"We wanted to remind our users that Guanxi's true number is
95882929, all other numbers are false.? Please only use the
real Guanxi search service, which will provide you the most
relevant and up to date results," said Alvin Wang Graylin, CEO,
mInfo Inc. "The real Guanxi service also provides the proper user
experience our loyal users have grown to expect, which doesn't
require entering any special commands or prefixes in the
queries.? Please tell your friends the 'real' Guanxi number
and don't settle for any imitations."
(China.org.cn August 13, 2007)
