Just talked to a friend and entrepreneur in China, seem like the technical challenges for O2O services (Online to Offline services, e.g. Uber, AirBnb, 饿了么，河狸家) are totally different from that for consumer internet services (e.g. facebook, twitter, pinterest etc.) O2O seems more rely on location and its business model is mostly purchasing goods and services over internet; while for the consumer internet is more about online content and online advertisement. So I guess for the O2O service providers bottle neck for growth is hardly hard-core technical challenges (like how to deal with large volume of data, and how to scale the IT systems), but rather on business development, building trust and online service reliability/usability. The typical infrastructures I can think of that can be shared by most O2O services are: real time location sharing and commute time estimation, flexible online payment (supports price negotiation and tax related services), order & user data management, identity authentication, reputation/credit tracking, and recommendation/branding/promotion.
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 07:15:55 +0000