Shockingly, a counterfeit factory has produced a 3-nanometer chip.

Chapter 74 The First Internet War in Africa

"The African social media market is a blue ocean right now, but it's too small to accommodate more than two giants."

Moreover, their progress is too slow.

After this round of financing, AfriLink, konnectA, and fro Chat should start their fierce competition, burning money to grab users, and the one that survives will become the true hegemon.

And we are their major shareholders.

He paused briefly at this point: "No matter who it is, the real winner in the end is Huaxin."

…………

With the money in hand, Qidi immediately began a new round of expansion.

First, he launched a referral program: for every new user invited, both parties would receive 50MB of data. This program spread virally among S1 users, since in Africa, data is money.

A week later, Afro Chat saw its user base grow by over 80, bringing its total registered users close to 600 million.

However, AfriLink reacted faster. After receiving the funding, they didn't start promoting the service. Instead, they had the UI updated again and launched a free video chat feature (beta version).

Video calls are very expensive in Africa, so this feature immediately attracted a large number of users.

Meanwhile, AfriLink purchased a featured spot on the homepage of the Transsion Store, causing downloads to surge again.

Originally ranked third for years, it immediately surpassed Konnect to become the second-ranked social media app.

This also made Qidi a little scared, as he had been too focused on protecting his second child.

Unexpectedly, the third son turned out to be the real dark horse.

So he gritted his teeth and launched the voice message to text function.

This was a feature he originally reserved for the final battle.

After all, this is not your average speech-to-text function. This feature utilizes the offline translation capabilities of TaiShan OS, allowing you to convert speech into text and send it even without a network connection.

That's right, it can send messages, which is a godsend in Africa where the signal is poor.

Konnect didn't give up either, directly copying the ideas of the two companies. They modified the UI page and offered free registration traffic, plus referral traffic, all in an effort to grab every user.

The first internet war among the three companies has officially begun.

Users keep downloading software, inviting new users, and getting free data and various subsidies.

As the planner behind the scenes, Transsion also benefited greatly, with many users directly purchasing the Transsion S1 phone for a better experience.

But the battlefield extends far beyond the online arena.

Soon, on the streets of Las Vegas, Afro Chat's orange GG signs, Konnect's red GG signs, and AfriLink's blue GG signs were almost all plastered together.

All three parties used a large number of ground promotion personnel to attract new customers at Transsion stores, markets, and university gates.

Register for Afro Chat and receive a free Transsion S1 official phone case.

Download Konnect and get a free phone case and free phone cleaning.

Register for AfriLink and get free charging...and free voice messages.

Sometimes the ground sales teams of the three companies would meet in the same place. At first, they would shout at each other to recruit people, but later it turned into a very simple and straightforward business battle.

They started tearing each other's "GG" cards off, and eventually a physical altercation broke out.

The original ground promotion team instantly became disposable, but fortunately this was the African market... In the end, Zidi still bought a small insurance policy for all the ground promotion personnel, after all, medical expenses had to be covered.

……

Lacks, Afro Chat headquarters.

"Boss, this is burning through cash way too fast," the CFO reported. "Five million US dollars, at the current rate, it can only last for another three months at most. If there's still no winner after three months..."

"Then we'll raise funds," Qidi said through gritted teeth. "As long as we maintain our number one market share, we won't have to worry about finding investors."

This would also dilute their shares.

He glanced at the report on the table again. The cumulative number of registered users had exceeded 900 million. Although this online war had cost a lot of money, the number of registered users had indeed nearly doubled.

Qidi knew that he owed his success to telepathy.

The launch of S1 made Afro Chat an instant hit, the deep integration of TaiShan OS gave them a technological advantage, and HuaXin Investment provided them with the necessary resources.

But he didn't want to be a subordinate of the telepathic messenger.

He wants Afro Chat to become an independent giant, the QQ of Africa, the Facebook of Africa.

The first step is to survive in this game of raising venomous insects.

At this moment, the head of the intelligence department walked over again with a dark face, even though he was already quite dark-skinned.

"Boss, I just received news that Konnect and AfriLink have been deeply integrated with TaiShan OS, and they can now access the system's underlying functions."

He now fully understood that their money-burning war had been launched with the permission of Huaxin Investment.

However, Huaxin Investment, or rather Huang Tianya, was still not satisfied with this result and once again pressed the accelerator button.

He took a deep breath, suppressing his urgency, and then called over the technical director: "When will our multilingual real-time translation feature be launched?"

"Next Wednesday. However, there might be a slight technical issue."

"Move it forward to next Monday," Qidi said. "Also, contact Transsion's technical team. We need to use their latest image recognition API. We want to be the first to support the 'scan to add friends' function, and at the same time, prepare to enable payment."

"This requires addressing the underlying rights and interests, and also involves discussions with major banks."

"Make an appointment with Adebayo for me; I'll go talk to him in person."

"Also, help me find other investors; we need to start our Series B funding round."

…………

Meanwhile, in Kyoto in September, the evenings were already a bit chilly.

But at this time, the internet cafe was still filled with smoke, and the sound of keyboards being pounded was still deafening.

A group of internet-addicted teenagers chose to stay up all night playing games there.

A young man wearing black-rimmed glasses stood out somewhat from the background in the corner. He was frowning at the computer screen, and not because of the game…

Wang Tao, a graduate student majoring in Communication Engineering at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, is very interested in digital products, so he became the moderator of the digital forum "GizmoChina".

He is currently writing a new long post.

The Tragedy of Android: Why Do Android Smartphones Always Lag?

"After using this TCL smartphone for three months, the system has been optimized to some extent, but the sluggishness of the underlying Android system is still obvious."

Opening apps takes several seconds, switching between apps is laggy, and games overheat and throttle after prolonged use… In contrast, the iPhone 3G's system is extremely smooth. This is the difference between a custom-designed system and a modified one.

Wang Tao sighed as he wrote this.

He is a supporter of domestically produced mobile phones, but reality is harsh.

In 2009, apart from a few companies like HTC, most domestic smartphone brands in China were still using Windows Mobile or knock-off Android phones.

User experience? It's good enough if it works.

"Moderator, are you there? I've got something good." A private message flashed in the forum chat...