Bitcoin Exchange BTC China Faces Cooldown

The buzz, speculation and volatility over bitcoin as a digital currency is nowhere stronger than in China. Ask Bobby Lee, the CEO of China’s bitcoin exchange BTC China, based in Shanghai.
Bitcoin trading has cooled off considerably in China after a peak last year, when China contributed half the global trading volume in the digital currency, Lee says.

Transactions fell from a high of 100,000 daily late last year to 10,000 by this March while bitcoin prices dropped by 80 percent from a peak of $1200, he notes. Meanwhile, at least six bitcoin exchanges disappeared over the last two years in China, says Lee. He predicts that another two bitcoin exchanges will go bust over the next years.

China still counts six bitcoin exchanges, and BTC China, formed in 2011, is the largest one, says Lee, a former Yahoo YHOO +0.84% engineer in Silicon Valley for eight years and WalMart technology manager in China. Keep reading post at Forbes.
The cooldown has come after China’s central bank ruled that bitcoin cannot be used as a currency while Alibaba determined that the digital currency can’t be used as payment on its Taobao e-commerce website.
While China has not banned the trading of bitcoin, regulations threaten to curtail its development for financial transactions. Interviewed at CoinSummit in San Francisco, Lee cited the main issues with bitcoin in China (and elsewhere) are transparency, security, solvency and false claims about trading volumes to gain market share. See Silicon Dragon video interview with Lee.
BTC China's venture capital investor Ron Cao of Lightspeed China will be a featured speaker at Silicon Dragon 2014 in Hong Kong Cyberport.

Tencent Pushes WeChat Social Messaging App In US, Watch Out Whatsapp!

Tencent is taking the expansion of its popular Wechat social messaging app into the U.S. market quite seriously, as well it should with the recent $19 billion acquisition of rival service Whatsapp by Facebook.



Victoria Wu of Tencent's WeChat at
Silicon Dragon SF 2014 forum

The Chinese social media giant has hired Victoria Wu, a 30-something, articulate Stanford MBA grad with Boston Consulting and startup smarts as its ambassador for the WeChat brand in the U.S.  So serious is Tencent about creating a separate international identity for WeChat that Tencent management doesn’t want WeChat to be uttered in the same sentence as the company name. Is this about appearing to be less of a Chinese brand for the Shenzhen-based company? Could be.

Keep reading post at Forbes.com, WeChat.

Fog City's Unique Blend of East Meets West Feeds the Startup Culture

Leading venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs are settling in San Francisco for its vibrant startup scene and capitalizing on international right from Fog City. They’re scaling companies in e-commerce, gaming, wearables, the Internet of things, and more that have funding from the likes of pros  Jerry Yang, John Sculley, Vinod Khosla, Marissa Mayer, Jack Ma, Kai-fu Lee, Vinod Khosla and Li Ka-shing.


Matt Zitzmann, Kamcord

Despite lots of would-be Silicon Valleys around the world from London to Hong Kong, the Bay Area continues to be a focal point. It’s the place that anyone interested in exploring innovation opportunities does not miss. The Bay Area is a crossroads uniting east and west.

Take for example some leading edge startups in San Francisco such as . . .

 

Keep reading this post at Forbes.com, Fog City.