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"Obama has BlackBerry, I have BlockBerry!" This is a very common punch line of Shanzhai BlackBerry ads. Shanzhai makers churn out lovely QWERTY clones with often brilliant shells, but with a lack of brains. That’s the saddest part of the story. Shanzhai handsets are wonderful in quality and design but they can at times lose their worth due to a lack of proper software. If coupled with smart software, Shanzhai clones can easily beat many branded manufacturers.
Shanzhai handsets manage to carry off basic storage and applications, but fall short of an efficient push mail and messaging service, like those offered by BlackBerry. They have a savior though. Nope, Research in Motion hasn’t moved to Shanzhai shores to save its BlackBerry ship from sinking. It’s the Shanzhai BlackBerry platform, Peek, which is making Shanzhai phones autonomous with its ‘Genius cloud’ platform.
Wanna take a sneak peek at what’s inside the den of Shanzhai BlackBerry services? Guess who’s our escort? The chief of the Peek cloud computing platform, Amol Sarva.
Tell us about Peek platform and cloud services.
Peek's cloud does the hard work that lets simple devices show off smarter features:
- Push mail requires servers to be constantly connected to mail while compressing and pushing messages to end users
- Same for instant messaging
- Private messenger service like BBM requires our servers to connect together many different devices and show presences
- Widgets and news on the phone homescreen come in bite sized pieces thanks to our cloud
- Social network integration for push Facebook and Twitter
- Data backup to our storage, a more-customizable web browser for Shanzhai OEMs, and other features.
At Shanzhai.com, we popularly call Peek a Shanzhai BlackBerry service. Is that true, that you are quite into the Shanzhai low cost ecosystem these days? What do you think of Shanzhai culture?
Yes, we are providing technology to many of these players. They make nice hardware -- some of it quite innovative, and always low cost. Now they need software to make the keyboards and touch screens work. You cannot have only hardware to copy Blackberry or iPhone. You need software features that make the Internet services work well, fast, easily over 2G with low memory.
Some of our partners are very big brands! MicroMax, Nexian, ZTE...these are powerful companies.
What do you think of Android on MTK chips?
Android is fragmenting very fast. Aliyun, Amazon, China Mobile, Innovation Works, etc etc.
It is just a piece of operating system software for the Shanzhai to work with. But if they rely only on Android, they will not have fast mail, they will not have cloud storage, they will not have social networking integration. By using Android, you get a nice UI and some free apps. That is all. But if you want to be a market leader you must own and customize Android and integrate to Internet platforms like mail, IM, voice chat, video chat...how can these players do that without Peek as a partner? They do not have much software heritage, and cloud is completely unknown.
What can Peek offer the Shanzhai? I read about these USD20 QWERTY phones.
Making simple hardware perform like smartphones is our specialty. With 1.6 Ghz chipset, you can make many mistakes and be lazy with your software. With a USD 20 device and only 52 MHz, you need our cloud to do compression, listener service, push alerts, using UDP instead of TCP, and so forth. We do it with zero carrier integration - you can be an open market ODM and sell a push-capable phone using Peek. Not possible for Blackberry. Even Blackberry's own platform is not so efficient.
What opportunity do you see for Peek in MediaTek-based ODMs in China? Any big partnerships?
Everyone - the bigger they are the more they need us. Customers expect Huawei, ZTE, and so on to have world class software. But the capability is not there to keep up with Apple's iCloud or Android's Google-integration. The capability IS there to pioneer new low price points with very nice gear. Add Peek and you can do the rest.
The Peek Cloud is hoping to feature phones in India, Africa and Latin America, correct? Tell us more about your future plans.
We are integrating or already live with the top players in the MTK and Spreadtrum and MorningStar ecosystems -- in each of the largest markets (India, Indonesia, Thailand, etc.) Last week we launched the MicroMax ezmail Q80 with them -- the FIRST phone in the Shanzhai universe to be branded front and center with a software feature. This should show something important -- the leaders in this space are starting to emphasize the software in their marketing too.
How can Peek Cloud cope with the demands of different regions?
Email, social, messaging, backup, widgets, sync - there are regional differences in needs. But the big theme is that most customers do not have fast processors, don't have fast data links (mostly 2G), and have little memory on their phones (these are NOT 16 GB iPhones - they are 256 MB or even 4 MB). This is where the cloud makes $20 device work like $200 device.
What are you guys up to in hardware these days?
We are just working with the top OEMs in China. No pure Peek hardware.
Peek focuses on low cost smartphones and inexpensive services, so how do you make money?
The software we plug into these devices and the cloud that powers them, these two things generate royalty revenue and ad revenue and operator revenue shares.
RIM is not doing well these days, is the situation different in Peek’s campus?
It is very overlooked that the international markets are key to keeping RIM alive right now - they have lost US/EU completely. They point to strength in other regions. However this is going to pass fast.
Peek has tripled in size since Jan 1. It is very different than at RIM (several of our staff come from RIM!). They are suffering because of what the Shanzhai crowd has achieved. As the Peek software becomes launched in EVERY market, their numbers will suffer much more.
Peek Genius cloud has evolved as a smart platform over the years. The timing of their switch from hardware to pure software services seems perfect. With the fresh partnerships with Shanzhai makers and hi-profiled clients such as ZTE and Micromax, the future seems bright for the Shanzhai/Peek power combo.
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*Shanzai.com is a news and reviews website, we do not promote specifically the purchase or sale of the products and services mentioned in our content.
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