BlueFocus Animation App Team Newbility Attends San Diego Comic Con

Beijing — The San Diego Comic Con (SDCC), with a history of 40 years, took a major step forward this year, and was expected to attract more than 130 thousand fans. There were several beaming Chinese faces among the crowd, mostly members of “Newbility” — an emerging Chinese animation culture platform, popular especially among post-90 even post-95 people. This was the first time they were invited to SDCC. At the Opening Ceremony, they met San Diego Mayor Kevin L Faulconer, an auspicious start to their stay.

According to Sammi, one of the group leaders and an avid Lego collector with special love for the Star Wars Series, there are some 650 million netizens in China, and nearly 60% are under 30 years of age. In recent years, the life of the younger generation has increasingly focused on the cyber cultural world. Statistics show that there are at least 100 million fans of animation, films, models and other forms of animation culture in China, showing unprecedented passion and vitality. Their choices determine the future direction of Chinese entertainment culture and even the whole Internet industry.

The Chinese animation industry generated an output value close to 100 billion yuan in 2014, demonstrating the enormous market potential. Sammi and her team came from BlueFocus Communication Group, China’s largest communications group, which started investing in developing the Newbility App in early 2015. Sammi and her fellow workers shoulder the task of setting up a sharing platform based on public animation interests. Their goal is very simple: providing services to those with the same interests while helping businesses and clients solve asymmetry problems between demand and information. Thus, they need to do a good job firstly in terms of “content”, and then in acting as an “intermediary agency”. With contents being shared by an increasing number of people through the platform, Sammi and her team can figure out client needs through data gathered from the platform. The current “virtual currency” system available on the platform is exactly a trial to this idea.

Gill, a co-worker of Sammi, is a young girl who has grown up in a typical subcultural environment. She showed her App demo which, however, is still in the public beta stage. Gill said the core work of the first version is to do a good job of “content”, bringing together “UGC, KGC and PGC” for the formation of a platform with better readability for young people, especially those post-90 and post-95 youngsters. “The mission requires bringing together all available content, which is our advantage as the largest communication group in China,” she explained. This “calls for more interested people and parties to participate, both ordinary users and KOL.” In May, the public beta version of the Newbility’s App made a debut in the Xiaomi App Store which ranks first in smart phone applications in China, and quickly gained fame as the No. 1 new App of social networking on www.apk.cool.

The subculture shows its vigor and vitality in China, with the original animation and IP demos gaining increasing public favor. Compared to those in the United States and Japan, however, the Chinese subculture has not yet established a solid cultural ownership and it is only in the budding stage with regard to the surrounding environment and supporting services. Newbility is committed to serving users. Therefore, it needs to learn from others and introduce the experiences and resources of more mature systems. The team is actively looking for proper opportunities to link the dimensional culture in Asia with the subculture in the United States, so as to help young people around the world to enjoy cultural pursuits, and meanwhile, to provide Chinese and American people who have the same interests with a communication platform of high quality and a strong sense of belonging.