Chinabites

Posted: Jun. 27, 2008

Here's a compliment to Mobile Native: I didn't remember that they were a Beijing-based site until I returned to their site after a quick browse a week or so ago. That is to say, it is obvious at a glance that this brand has ambitions beyond Beijing, beyond the personal computer, beyond an English-speaking market, and it shows at many levels of their product design.

The site is optimized for browsing on mobile devices. They have even gone so far as to grab a shortened URL for their mobile-only site: mobnat.com. There is an SMS interface to the Mobile Native database, so you can sms "rumi" to their number and get back the contact info for Rumi restaurant in Beijing. Add a "c" to the front: "c Rumi" and get back the same record, this time in Chinese. A bonus point has got to go to these folks for also doing text-to-image rendering of Chinese characters on their mobile site, just in case the mobile browser doesn't support Chinese text display.

The domain name and brand is global and evokes the sort of resource that a traveler to an unfamiliar place might want to reference when they need local advice. Certain aspects of their technology (notably their SMS service) seem a bit tied to China, so their immediate portability to other markets depends on how they have things set up on their back end. From the "front" it looks like expansion beyond Beijing was their intention from the get-go.

Finally, their site actually has 3 different versions, English, Chinese, and Korean. This is not simply a translation of the interface, the actual content of the site is flagged by language. English reviews are posted on the English website only, Korean reviews on the Korean site only, etc. This is a technical feat that, while not extraordinarily difficult, does require some up front planning. English, Chinese, and Korean are the three languages to select if your location is Beijing, but it also signals that they should technically have the ability add or subtract other languages for any location.

On essentials, Mobile Native has emphasized search at the top of every page, and below search has tagged different slices of its restaurant database, which is a relatively impressive list including a list of locations that have wireless internet and those that have vegan options. I have three complaints about this listing that I would like improve upon at chinabites. I would like to see the urls for these slices to be better designed - right now they're a bit crufty (this is a minor complaint). Second, I'd like to see an interface to control the order that search results are returned in, or at least to filter results down by. Finally, I'd like to see the results displayed on a map, or at the very least, have some geo-spatial querying to return the results that were nearest to me. These are all also goals I have for chinabites.

Individual reviews on the site are much like those at the largest Chinese local review site, dianping.com. Separate star rankings are given for service, environment, and food. The reviewer is asked to enter an average cost per person. This is a bit of a barrier to the reviewer, but it does produce interesting data if you can convince folks to enter it.

The images for the restaurant detail entries have a unique thumbnail browsing interface that I haven't seen before but is extremely clean. It is, of course, coupled with the ubiquitous lightbox script.

The maps on the site are very well done. They've used 3 different providers. A tabbed interface allows the user to choose between a vector based English map with data sourced from Weller Cartographic, a Google satellite map, and a vector based Chinese map. Again, the only extra thing I would like to see on the map is multiple points of interest displayed on the same single map.

One question about Mobile Native that I haven't figured out quite yet is why they have not put meta tags in their templates. So much effort has obviously gone into their core service offering that it's hard to believe they overlooked a detail like that.

In summary, Mobile Native has one of the strongest, most focused web based POI (points of interest) directories I've seen in the Beijing local market. I've never used their mobile service and am not currently in Beijing, so I can't verify how well it works. That being said, it seems like they have very few active users providing reviews. My opinion is that the next logical step for them would be marketing - which is almost certainly why they left a comment on an earlier blog post asking for their site to be reviewed on this blog.