Mphone is slowly but steadily spreading across the United States.

It will be released on New Year's Day at Ameriken and is expected to be available in Europe and Maple Leaf Country in the second quarter. Since the end of the first week of release, it has been available from scalpers in Maple Leaf Country. With the fermentation of word of mouth, more and more Mphones are circulating from the black market to the Maple Leaf Country.

Unlike many countries in Europe, where the passage of any bill involves the involvement of more than a dozen countries, and the implementation of electronic payment requires lengthy approval, the Maple Leaf country passed a bill called NBPSP at the end of 2000.

There is no strict regulation of electronic payment providers, and electronic payment channels can also provide services similar to banks, NewPay's license is already being applied, and with the promotion of Wall Street financial institutions, NewPay's Maple Leaf Nation license is about to be approved.

In other words, after NewPay is approved in the Maple Leaf Country, consumers in the Maple Leaf Country will be able to get a complete user experience for the Mphone they buy on the black market, rather than the emasculated experience like now.

Why is Google's Pixel series of phones difficult to use in China? Because the Google ecosystem on which it depends has been emasculated in China, it is really difficult to attract users when it is completely emasculated.

"Newman, Mphone is very creative, I love this product, it's so different from other phones." Jobs said.

Since the release of Mphone, Steve Jobs has always come to Matrix to find him when he has something to do, and Zhou Xin is a little tired of it.

Zhou Xin admired Steve Jobs and appreciated his insistence on industrial aesthetics, innovative spirit, perfectionism, and the era of mobile Internet created by himself.

But this doesn't mean that Zhou Xin likes to meet with Jobs two or three times a week.

Zhou Xin replied: "Mphone is the carrier of the application, and the importance of the application experience is higher than the hardware.

Every detail has to be perfect, from the grip of the hand to the positive feedback of typing, to the delicacy of the screen, I have high requirements for the details on the Mphone hardware.

But the more demanding software is the software, and I require them to be as concise as possible, both concise and clear, and to lower the threshold for users as much as possible. ”

Just now Jobs said that he likes this product very much, and Zhou Xin does not doubt this, because it originally borrowed the design language of the future iPhone.

And Zhou Xin is also sure that Jobs must be using Mphone. As an entrepreneur who also wants to make mobile phones, he will also experience Mphone a lot just from the perspective of understanding competing products.

It's just that Zhou Xin searched on Twitter, but he didn't find Jobs's Twitter account, he knew that the other party had a Twitter account, but he didn't do real-name authentication.

In other words, the other party doesn't want to borrow his fame from Mphone, and Zhou Xin knows Jobs' careful thinking well.

"A lot of magazines call Mphone a smartphone, Newman, what do you think of the smartphone ecosystem?

Whether to rely entirely on the enterprise itself to develop applications, or to cooperate with other enterprises to develop applications together.

Open the port to these businesses? Jobs asked.

This is because now, the number of apps is not very large, and the hardware does not support too many apps on one phone.

It's like in the 80s, when personal PCs were just popular, Macintosh computers were able to become popular in the market with only pre-loaded form processing software. In the 90s, Microsoft's Windows operating system was widely criticized for its pre-installed Internet Explorer.

No matter how powerful a person is, it is difficult to get rid of the limitations of history.

The same is true for Steve Jobs, who saw that Mphone's applications were all self-developed, and there was no open license for other Internet companies, and there was no news that he would cooperate with other Internet companies.

In Jobs' view, Mphone can work with Yahoo completely, so that there will be a larger audience.

So he asked this question to find out if there was any benefit to developing it entirely himself.

Zhou Xin thought for a while and said, "I think it's better to develop all by yourself."

This way, you'll be able to keep track of the progress of each app. Mobile phones have limited memory and storage space, and every app is precious, and each app eats up a lot of memory and storage space.

I prefer to be able to control all the details.

Taking Weibo as an example, if other Internet companies were to do Weibo, the cooperation between me and them would not be as detailed as possible, and even the number of words in each Weibo would be limited.

And if I do it myself, then I can control all the details, from the limit of 140 words per Weibo, to how to adjust the page layout, to how to plan each button more reasonably.

I'm just talking about the Mphone situation, and it's other Internet companies that make applications, so I'm honestly not at ease. ”

Zhou Xin paused for a moment and continued: "Why is 140 words on a Weibo so important?

Because of the limitations of the mobile phone screen, it was decided that when we were doing the word limit, we required each Weibo to be able to read it with at most one swipe. Couldn't be more.

The more a Weibo needs to be swiped, then it is not a mobile app, but a computer app that is inferiorly panned to the phone. ”

Zhou Xin said that Jobs was in his heart, as an entrepreneur with a strong desire to control, Jobs also wanted to master all the details.

This kind of doing all the apps by himself is too cool in Jobs' opinion, and this is the model he wants.

Jobs listened and nodded: "That's true, few Internet companies can understand what you mean."

Even after repeated communication, they still have a misunderstanding of the effect they want to achieve.

The tacit understanding in the development process needs to be run in for a long time, and it is indeed more appropriate to lead the development of mobile phone applications by yourself. ”

Zhou Xin said: "Yes, in my opinion, the biggest difference from the previous mobile phone to the Mphone is the driving method.

In the past, the point of attracting users of mobile phones was hardware, but now it is software, to put it bluntly, the main reason why Mphone can sell at a higher price than other mobile phones is the ecology.

Weibo and the ecology constituted jointly build an ecology that is enough to attract users.

Therefore, the importance of mobile phone software has been increased to an unprecedented level, so the more important the mobile phone software, the more you need to personally control the presentation effect of the software. ”

Jobs took out a white box and handed it to Zhou Xin: "Apple's upcoming music player has a built-in decoding chip designed by Xinxin Semiconductor.

Here's a prototype you can try.

Internally, we call it the IPod. ”

After saying that, Jobs took out another iPod, and then put it on the table with Mphone: "The silver Mphone and iPod have a feeling of being a series.

I think Mphone can do a linkage with the IPod and sell the two products together.

Provide users with the option to purchase in packages. The Mphone is priced at $599 and the iPod may be priced at $199, so you would only have to pay $699 for both. ”

Zhou Xin looked at the iPod that was very similar to his memory, and then said: "Good idea, the iPod can be put on sale in Matrix stores, and the Mphone can also be sold in Apple's offline stores."

Mphone and IPod are also available on each other's official websites. We need to make full use of our respective strengths in the target group to promote IPod and Mphone. ”

Mr. Zhou's proficiency in reading the IPod made Mr. Jobs wonder if he would carefully read every Apple board document.

"In addition, Apple is cooperating with NewPay, and we will launch a music store based on iTunes in the future, so that users can buy songs in Apple's music store, and then download them after purchasing songs." Jobs said.

Originally, Apple's music store, that is, the iTunes store function, was to be launched in 2003, and the electronic payment solution was very mature in 03.

When using the iTunes music store, users only need to have a valid credit card with an Ameriken billing address, and Apple will bind the credit card to the Apple ID, and then you can complete the payment directly through the Apple ID.

In countries where there is no Apple ID, it is the way to buy Apple point cards, such as Neon In the early days, consumers could only complete the payment by purchasing iTunes Japan point cards.

Now that there is such a mature payment tool as NewPay on the market, for Steve Jobs and Apple, there is no need for users to bind their credit cards to their Apple IDs, and they only need to add NewPay payment options to music stores.

Zhou Xin said: "No problem, NewPay has very rich experience in supporting Internet services and becoming a payment channel for Internet services, which has become a set of standardized processes within NewPay.

We are very proficient in this, and NewPay does not refuse all similar requests, NewPay has always treated each of our partners with the mentality of a service provider since its inception. ”

Because of this, other electronic payment companies are not the same enemy in front of NewPay. When your competitors are much stronger than you and have a better service attitude than you, it is difficult for you to beat the other party.

If it weren't for the kidnapping of a certain electronic payment and being coerced by NewPay, other electronic payment companies would have no room to survive.

E-commerce companies such as Amazon and eBay, or Internet service providers such as Yahoo, AOL, and MySpace, are worried that there is only one electronic payment option for NewPay, and then it will be bundled by NewPay, which will make Musk's another electronic payment channel.

Jobs looked at Zhou Xin with blazing eyes and said: "In fact, there is a deeper cooperation between IPod and Mphone.

For example, Mphone has a built-in Apple music store and music software, and users can share songs on Weibo.

Users can then buy music through the Apple Music Store on Mphone, download the songs directly through Mphone, and then transfer them to their iPod via Bluetooth. ”

After listening to Zhou Xin, he found that Jobs had realized that one of the essences of the mobile Internet - sharing, sharing between users is the main mode of advertising in the mobile Internet era.

Bloggers share their preferences for products through various forms such as short videos, graphic texts, and long videos, and then sell them to consumers.

Sharing is the essence, and the embodiment on the surface is to add a link to the song on Weibo, and users can click to buy.

Zhou Xin thought, the other party should have thought of it from receiving coupons, since it can jump to each other with the mobile phone browser, then other built-in applications can also jump to each other with Weibo.

Zhou Xin said: "I think this kind of cooperation is feasible.

There are just some problems, that is, the download speed is limited, at present, Mphone's 2G network download speed is more than ten kb, and a song is as little as a few mb, according to the record CD format, a song is 60MB, which is too slow.

After the Mphone is downloaded, it will be slower to sync to the iPod through the Bluetooth function.

It doesn't capture the efficiency benefits at all. ”

"I thought about it, for the user, he doesn't need to stare at the Mphone all the time, he can download the song while he is walking, and then Bluetooth transmission when he gets to the place," Jobs said.

The Bluetooth transmission rate is 128KB per second, and we have adopted a new encoding method, and the song files purchased in the Apple Music Store will be smaller than the traditional format of music files, about 3 to 5MB.

If it's 3 to 5 MB, the download speed is nothing more than 300 seconds to 500 seconds, which is not a long time for users.

Plus the Bluetooth transmission time will not exceed 10 minutes. ”

A large part of the reason why Jobs had such an idea was that Silicon Valley's thinking about products had changed.

To be precise, since Zhou Xin went to Silicon Valley, people's thinking about Internet products has become more and more systematic.

In the past, people systematized Internet products, but simply piled up, such as portals, email systems, search engines, blogs, etc., and there was a lack of correlation between them.

After Zhou Xin perfectly kneaded quora and NewPay together, Internet practitioners realized that there can be a connection between products.

After the launch of Mphone this year, the linkage with WeChat has further given Internet companies new ideas, and they have begun to have the concept of product matrix, which should have a positive impact on each other and enrich the experience through linkage.

Jobs's thinking about the cooperation between Mphone and iPod is also based on this trend of thought.

Jobs continued: "If it's just a price discount, you can get a $50 or $100 discount on the iPod and Mphone, and this kind of promotion effect is relatively limited in my opinion.

On the contrary, if the software correlation can be formed, just like the same, then this combination will be more attractive to users.

For Mphone, Mphone does not have a music player function, and IPod can be a good supplement to Mphone. ”

Zhou Xin thought for a moment after listening to it, this is also a path, a feasible path.

Before Apple launched the iPhone, Matrix and the iPod could be a partnership, and even if Apple launched the iPhone in the future, he himself is also Apple's major shareholder, and it can also be a partnership.

It's just that the degree of cooperation is gradually decreasing, not deepening.

Zhou Xin said: "I think it is feasible, but there is one thing, and that is that Apple's music store needs to give each song a rating system.

This means that after purchasing a song, users can rate and write reviews for the song in the Apple Music store on Mphone, similar to Riot's rating system.

In this way, it can give the user a better experience, and if he spends money on the songs he buys, if he can't satisfy him, then he can at least have the right to evaluate. ”

Jobs nodded: "Yes, I thought about it before." ”

Zhou Xin said: "The specific cooperation depends on the memory situation of Mphone, Apple needs time to develop applications, and the iPod has not yet been introduced to the market."

We need to decide when to let the Apple Music Store come to Mphone based on the user's memory and storage usage.

If the memory situation of this generation is not optimistic, then the Apple Music Store will become a built-in app on the next generation of Mphone. ”

While Steve Jobs was actively seeking to cooperate with Matrix, other electronic payment companies were wailing.

Because they find that the gap between their products and NewPay is not getting smaller and smaller with time, but getting bigger and bigger.

The electronic payment software launched by Amazon and eBay is difficult to cooperate with retailers, because the online shopping platforms themselves are competing for the offline shopping market, and as a direct competition, retailers are not very comfortable with this kind of rivalry.

Not to mention that there are not many users of Amazon Pay and eBay Pay, and they don't have the point to attract retailers at all.

And for other electronic payment companies that don't have an e-commerce company behind them, like Musk's and Square, it's also difficult for them to talk about it.

Because to talk to retailers, you need to have hardware devices, you need to have payment methods.

QR codes are just a way to pay offline, and it is a solution jointly given by Mphone and NewPay, in fact, there is more than one solution.

For example, Peter Thiel and Max Levchen's Confiniti supports transfer payments between handheld computers, which is also a solution, but this solution is not very friendly.

Because there are few businesses with handheld computers.

For other small electronic payment manufacturers who do not have a big tree behind them, it is too difficult for them to expand offline electronic payment channels, and it is almost impossible.

With the launch of Mphone, NewPay has also shown a trend of sweeping Liuhe and dominating the world on the electronic payment track.

Musk specifically invited Peter Thiel to dinner with him, hoping to hear his advice.

Musk and Peter Thiel know each other, and if they don't know the original space-time Confiniti will not merge into PayPal.

"Peter, congratulations, when I was having dinner with a vice president of Goldman Sachs recently, I heard him tell me that Wall Street has valued NewPay at more than $50 billion.

If it had been before the Nasdaq bubble burst, NewPay would have been valued at more than $100 billion.

At that time, Confiniti chose to be acquired by NewPay, which was the right choice. Musk said.

Peter Thiel is secretly proud because his stake in NewPay is close to 1%, and according to the valuation of $50 billion, it means that his NewPay stake is worth $500 million.

And he knows that if he is willing to make a move, there are companies that are willing to buy NewPay shares at a higher premium.

The shareholder representatives behind NewPay alone have expressed this willingness to him more than once.

Peter Thiel replied, "Mainly because Newman has a far more than ordinary insight into products.

When we didn't know how to promote electronic payments, Newman had found a large number of payment scenarios to drive NewPay's promotion.

Compared to Newman, I only need to manage the business well, which is the least difficult thing in the process of starting a business. ”

After Peter Thiel finished speaking, Musk smiled bitterly in his heart, it was precisely because the competitor he was facing was not Peter Thiel, but Newman, that he had no confidence at all.

If NewPay is Peter Thiel's business, then Musk is confident that he will wrestle with him, even if NewPay takes the initiative on the scene.

As for Newman, Musk is rarely self-confident, to be precise, he was full of confidence at the beginning, and as two years passed, he became less and less confident.

When you are in the market, you have more than a million users. When you have 1 million users, the other side has already exceeded 20 million users.

By the time you go to the Internet companies that have cooperated with the other party to discuss cooperation one by one, and want to get a piece of the pie one by one, the other party has already opened up offline payment channels, and even made a special hardware to promote electronic payment.

In Musk's view, a large part of Mphone's purpose is to promote NewPay.

The dynamics of things are the key to Musk's loss of confidence.

"Yes, Newman is the number one person in the product field and has an imagination that is difficult for us to understand." Musk said.

Now Silicon Valley no longer says that Zhou Xin has insight, because insight alone can't do this, they think it's imagination, imagination that can be perfectly landed.

No matter how insightful you are, you can't imagine that instant messengers send coupons and then use them through mobile electronic payment.

Peter Thiel says, "I sometimes think back to when Newman and I first met.

At that time, Confiniti was just being founded, and NewPay was just an electronic payment software for Riot Games. I think at that time, Newman should already have a complete blueprint, a complete blueprint for how electronic payments will develop in the future.

From online to offline, from computer payment to mobile phone payment, Newman did not hesitate at all, he told us directly, just do it.

He never discussed with us whether we should choose method A or method B, and he always told us with confidence that it was the right thing to do.

Before I started at Confiniti, teaching at Yale gave me the opportunity to talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, most of whom were Yale students.

The common problem they respond to is that entrepreneurship is like walking in a fog, and it's hard to know which direction to go, and you won't step on a trap or encounter a wild beast, but you will be able to pick sweet fruits.

In the more than two years I have been working at NewPay, I have never felt like I am in a fog, Newman is our compass. ”

After listening to this, Musk showed envious eyes, and then said helplessly, "With NewPay in front, there is no foggy feeling in the process of development."

Because we just have to follow the path that NewPay came out of.

The problem is that NewPay has picked all the fruits, leaving only leaves and branches, and has not enjoyed the slightest late-mover advantage in the field of electronic payment.

This is both fortunate and unfortunate. ”

Peter Thiel said: "If you think about it from another angle, it is already the second largest electronic payment company in terms of market share.

This shows that you are doing a good job. ”

Musk shook his head: "No, NewPay is valued at more than $50 billion, and the valuation is not even $500 million." ”

It's still 6k today, and it's not easy to be more 6k part-time, please call me a diligent crow!

(End of chapter)