(* Source: Luyi Chen *) 

Xplus is the online publishing platform of Nu Channel, a company established in 2003. Its shareholders include ID Tech Ventures, Legend Capital, China Merchants & Fortune Venture Investment Group, etc. Originally its main business is online emagazine. Although it has launched a platform for users to upload DIY magazines, but the whole UGC market in China still not matures enough for any serious business to rely on.

What caught our eyes is its new online newspaper publishing platform. It launched by the end of last year. It provides a new navigation style that combines traditional and online newspaper.

The advantage of traditional newspaper is how things are organized on one page, big headlines, fonts, images, etc. You can recognize important stuffs at a glance. Xplus epaper shows you an image of the hardcopy of the newspaper. Users can click the pixel area of any particular article and read it on the right side. Also it provides search, headline view of all the articles on one page and navigation to others pages, etc. In one word, it provides a way just like reading real newspaper and its content is more discoverable. What technology it uses? Seems Flash.

It also has some social features too. Such as people read this newspaper also read the following ones. People can leave comments on the newspaper, although not to each article, but the whole volume of one day. On its about page, they have an image which shows their business model. By showing newspapers in this way, they can track how users find interesting stuffs on a page and this data can be used by publishers to tweak their printing style, advertisers can adjust their strategy accordingly.

As the company said on a 5G seminar, newspapers will never die, and its evolution will last. The other big news about newspaper today is Usatoday’s relaunch with a bunch of social features.