A New Review Website Takes Care of a Niche: the Chinese Outside of China
When I look at the restaurant reviews, I scratch my head and can’t map the English dishes names to the Chinese dish names I am familiar with, because a lot of meanings got lost in the translations.
(PRWEB) October 23, 2013
huavote.com, based in the Silicon Valley, announced today the launch of the largest business review website for overseas Chinese. The website offers a business review platform like yelp.com, targeting the ethnic Chinese outside of China.
The website is created to solve a problem for overseas Chinese: they often can’t find the business reviews they need. For some businesses, there are non-Chinese language reviews but due to various reasons the overseas Chinese don’t relate to them well; for others, there are simply very few reviews.
According to Wikipedia, there are over 50 million overseas Chinese around the world, and there are also tens of thousands of overseas Chinese businesses, such as restaurants, hair salons, and grocery stores. The overseas Chinese communities are known for their distinguished culture in their host countries.
There are about 100,000 business listings in huavote.com’s database. Those businesses include Chinese businesses and other type of businesses overseas Chinese often do business with. Many of the listings have both Chinese name and English name. The website is offered in both simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese to cater for Chinese users of different backgrounds.
“This solves a big problem for me. I need this kind of service all the time,” says Ron Du, a California resident who came to the United States from China when he was 15. “It has been a constant struggle for me to find an authentic Chinese restaurant everywhere I go. I grew up eating Chinese food. I have no problem reading English reviews on yelp, but often times when I look at the English reviews, I scratch my head and can’t map the English dishes names to the Chinese dish names I am familiar with, because a lot of meanings got lost in the translations.”
Like other free review sites, huavote.com enables users to give reviews to businesses, but it has other unique features, such as allowing users to comment on each other’s reviews. “This feature increases interactions among our users, and offers a forum like look and feel which the Chinese are accustomed to,” says huavote.com founder Stan Zhou, who has a software engineering background with more than 15 years of industrial experience.
According to Zhou, he created this website to solve his own problems. “When I look for a plumber, a moving company, or a nanny, I often look for a Chinese provider, because not everybody in my family speaks fluent English. But it’s very hard. I simply can’t find a lot of reviews for those small Chinese businesses. This needs to change, and I can help with that,” says Stan Zhou.
About huavote.com: http://www.huavote.com is the largest business review website for overseas Chinese. The website currently includes most of the Chinese businesses in the United States, and supports input and search in simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and English. For more information, please go to http://www.huavote.com.
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