I went to a "captical cafe" held by 365ju.com (聚网) last week. It's the first time I participate in this kind event. The host brought 8 invest companies and around 8 projects (including us, chinesetime.cn) who are seeking for investment. Everything seemed interesting to me. We knew looking for investment was a tricky thing, didn't expect it could be funny as well.

The first one we met was a young pretty woman from a japanese vc company, apparently she didn't know anything about us even we sent ouor BP in advance. That's ok, my partner introduced our project from the beginning, and I was trying to set up the laptop to show her our online school. But the internet connection sucked and we had to gave up. After a few quick symbolic questions, she left. We were just sitting there by ourselves for about half an hour. 

The second vc we were introduced to did a good research as he personally is interested in education industry. He was very nice and showed great interest. He did give us reaonable advices. Then told us we were at the early stage and should do more thing to prove our businss modle is sucessful and easy to expand. In the middle of the conversation, the host took me to meet another vc who invested in education industry before. It was a young big girl, she looked so junior that the way she talked is like a child pretend to be an adult. We exchanged the namecards then she continued to talk with somebody else. After that we repeated explaining our project to other vcs. They all asked us very smart questions, but no answers. 

By the time everybody was about to leave, a guy looked like a tipical new money jumped into the converstaion and gave us a long speech, the idea was the same --- try to make money first, "survive first, then try to live better" in his word, then vcs will kiss your ass. At the end, I fell into a catch 22:

1. I need to make money to get investment

2. I need investment to make money 

Which comes first?

Not sure if those vcs are happy, not sure if people came to look up opportunities are happy, I bet 365ju.com must be happy. 

ChineseTime (http://www.chinesetime.cn) is the project I've been working on for about one and half years. Our goal is to build a website contains abundant Chinese language learning resources including self-study, teacher-led classes, and student community. Of course all these should be based on a nice, easy-to-use interface. Unfortunately the UI is not what we are proud of  - it's still a tradditional website where you won't see ajax or fancy javascript techs. But we did invest a lot of resource to develop handy tools for Chinese language learning.

1. self-study content: to distinguish our platform from other self-study learning materials, we built a sophisticated tracking system that helps students to know how they spend their time with chinesetime. You may use it with progress report to evaluate if chinesetime is really helping.

2. teacher led skype private lesson: this is the key part of our service 'coz it makes totally different to study with a well trained mandarin teacher directly from China (teachers majored in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language, and speak mandarin almost the whole time). We guarantee 24 hour response and teacher will be 24X7 available.

3. character movies: instead of animation or flash, we use real teacher to shoot every movie for every single character. we uploaded to youtube to share with everybody.

4. flashcard: it's a simple character lookup tool at the moment. you can search by pinyin, radical or the character directly.  It awill be a dict supports expression lookup as well.

5. pronunciation lab: text description and movies to give out clear tips on how to say finals and initials correctly. A nice tool for beginners and students wants to fix their pronuciation.

Of course this is just the beginning, we are developing more content and also improving the teacher-led class system like white board supporting, etc. And in terms of technology, we are looking forward to a more friendly interface.