The Influence Matters team looked into startups and tech trends making the news in China this week and selected five articles to summarize in English for our readers. This week, take away apps competition, virtual reality, a gym card for 99 RMB a month, LeTV and a new app trying to revolutionize airline ticket booking.

The strong competition among three kings of take-away Apps: Meituan, ele.me and Baidu | Sohu Business (September 6, 2015)
The take-away apps are going out of the campus in order to fight for white-collar customers with higher income and higher spending per order. Within the huge O2O take-away markets in China, Meituan, Ele.me and Baidu are competing for funds, resources, networks and markets. In order to create a large number of order records, the three platforms tried different ways to cheat in the numbers of daily orders, such as dividing one big order into two small orders, eating in but pretend to order take-away, and so on. The author analyzed the current issues and opportunities in take-away industry and predicted the status of three key players in the market would still sustain.

The military Parade: how was virtual reality technology implemented in the live telecasting? | Leiphone (September 4, 2015)

Virtual reality technology in a studio is actually a subset of augmented reality, because it also involves the overlap of virtual elements together with the real scenes in augmented reality. The key technology development focuses include: 1. Accurately locate the real scenes; 2. Rendering virtual elements; 3. Overlapping in real time the virtual elements on the real scenes, and then return to the video stream. Among these three steps, overlapping virtual elements together with the real scenes is the most difficult challenge.

Gym card for only 99 RMB /month, how long can it be sustainable? | GeekPark (August 10, 2015)

Users who buy the RMB 99/month service on the APP “Bear Run” can enjoy unlimited access to gyms. The only restriction is that the member can go to the same gym up to 3 times. Compared with the traditional gym card that requires one-year or half-year memberships (with prices usually in the thousands of RMB), the new way to charge undoubtedly reduces the threshold for fitness users. Additionally, the paid users can make appointment on the App for a gym class, which relatively reduce the idle resources for gyms. But many gyms still have doubts about a cooperation with “Bear Run” since the low price does not seem to be profitable and sustainable for the company.

How is Letv, one of the most vocal companies, “invading” our lives step by step? | GeekPark (August 6, 2015)

You might not be a fan of Letv, but one day, you might suddenly realize that you have become one of its users already, and you will find their products and users everywhere around you. The key reasons are the following: 1. Low pricing strategy, but highly cost-effective; 2. Recruiting experienced senior executives from other famous internet/tech companies; 3. Great breakthrough in product design and innovation. This article attempts to analyze Letv’s rapid development in a rational way.

What is “Must Go”? Why the former boss of an airline quit his job to start this business? | 36Kr (August 5, 2015)

“Must go” is an App for booking flight tickets. The App wishes to solve the issues of unreasonable ticket price under the layers of proxy system and poor users’ experience (such as fraud, bad customer service), etc. The aim of “Must go” is to create a platform that would directly access to the sales system of the airline companies, and provide better choices for users. At the same time, by relying on a highly experienced UX team, the App greatly improves the process and experience for users while making reservation. Although the strong competition with flight ticket agencies remain, “Must go” would insist on its missions: Direct Sales and Information Transparency.