Personal Blog of Carl Pei

A week ago, during the world’s largest electronics fair, CeBIT in Hannover Germany, Charbax interviewed the Meizu representatives. Charbax is a great video blogger covering many events and fairs, he can be found at www.cebitvideo.com. The best thing is, when Charbax asked if their chief designer had heard of my site Meizu Me, he said that he knows Meizu Me very well and visits every day! It made my day - no, it made my week/month/year! See the interview below, the best part comes when there’s 2:18 minutes left of the video.

History

Meizu is a Chinese manufacturer of digital audio players. In 2006, they released a product called the Meizu Mini Player which caused a storm of interest on the internet. Around Q3 2006, I got myself two of these players on a trip to China and quickly fell in love. They were different from other Chinese products, actually using name brand components from Samsung, Toshiba and Phillips. This difference was reflected in the price too.

I quickly noticed international interest, the very small amount of people outside China who had managed to get their hands on these players started noticing problems. Meizu has an English support forum, but it was very slow for international traffic. Also, when I saw titles such as “Hey guy! MEIZU M6 mini player is coming!!” I had to do something. There was clearly demand for something better.

Not long after, I borrowed some web space from a friend, got a free redirected domain and installed the free phpBB forums and called the website Meizu Me. After a while things went pretty well and I purchased the domain “meizume.com”. Not long after, the friend got banned from his web host and my site was down. We had just hit the 1000-member mark. I didn’t have any backup, that night I didn’t sleep well. The next day, I excused myself from school, bought a hosting package from the same web host that banned him, Host Monster and got the site online again. I had no backup. Starting from scratch, many members left or lost interest and stopped visiting.

Sometime here, Meizu made a deal with French memory giant Dane-Elec to distribute their products in Europe and North America. Shortly after, Meizu products were showing up in large European chains such as Media Markt. Needless to say, things went up from there on.

Today, Meizu Me receives around 2200 unique hits daily, around 30% of them from France. It has become more or less the definite source for Meizu information and discussion.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 5:00 am and is filed under Money, Products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.