China's Instagram and Other Tech Startups Look West

Instagram, the photo-sharing app bought by Facebook last year, offers special effects that can give pictures a weathered black-and-white cast or retro tints. In Beijing, Xu Chaojun’s PaPa app does that, too. But it also lets users add voice messages that can sound like robots or cats. PaPa notched 10 million downloads in five months from iPhone and Android users; the company released an English-language version, Wave, on iTunes on March 10.

Many Chinese Internet companies have been dismissed as mere imitators of successful U.S. enterprises, such as YouTube clone Youku, and they’re often content to profit from their vast home market. But Xu’s firm and others aim to compete globally. Kai-Fu Lee, the former head of Google China and founder of venture capital fund Innovation Works, says many Chinese entrepreneurs are improving on the Western products that inspired them. “Innovation, if it’s defined as inventing the light bulb, might still be a stretch for China,” says Lee, who helped fund PaPa. “To be the first to conceive of the next iPhone may be still a little difficult, but the prospect of making a Facebook, a Twitter, or an Instagram, I think that is now, for the first time ever, within reach for the Chinese startup.”