Real-Time eXchange, or better known as RTX , is one of the best tools Tencent has for the business/corporate market, though largely unknown, especially in the West. RTX is a IM chat program that is based on the company level. At Tencent's officices everybody uses RTX to communicate with their colleagues. It works just like QQ or MSN or AOL, but with some cool features that make it very suitable for large organizations where lots of people use computers.

• RTX organizes all your colleagues in the company according to the company structure. For example if there is a team working on a particular product, a group will be automatically created for them.
• You can also form  your own groups, for example when you are working on a joint project.
• Screenshot feature of RTX is extremely convenient, as it allows you to quickly copy part of your screen to your colleagues. For example to help debugging or just to share some interesting news.
• Directly lookup seat-number, phone-number and other personal information
• Directly call colleagues just by pressing a button in RTX or send SMS messages!
  
• Get popup notices about important announcements. 

1. Instant Communication: quickly and easily send and receive instant messages. You can change the text fonts in different colors for a personalized display.
2. Status display: Show contact information: online, busy, offline etc
   
3. Organizational structure: directory tree of the multi-level organizational structure of enterprises provides clear understanding of the organization. It is updated when the structure of the organization changes.
4. Contact Group: contacts can be grouped. For example the most frequent contacts or contacts from in the same division.
5. Contacts: Contact information outside the company management, can be a division, send text messages, make a call.
6. Quick Search field: quickly look up someone by name or other criteria
   
7. Notify: to provide broadcasting news and information system to inform users of important information.
8. Historical information:Chatlog etc.

Language 

Although the  main website from RTX is in Chinese and the newest version is also in Chinese, they actually have an English version of RTX. I use this version at a daily basis and it works great! I know Tencent has sold RTX to several other companies, but I think they should also sell this product outside China. It's simply a great product which works good in English and can easily be deployed.

QQMail is Tencent's free email service in the style of Gmail. By default your email adress is just your qqnumber, for example This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it but you can bind any name you like to it such as This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Besides the spacious inbox (1GB), SMTP and POP3 support and other features, QQMail also offers some unique features. For example you can pick a skin for the website, there is integration with QQ (a popup when you get mail), sending email to all of your QQ friends and so on. QQMail also has a mobile website mail.3g.qq.com . Another advantage of QQMail is that it is very fast in China, certainly rivaling GMail and faster than Hotmail.

Language:

Chinese only, but the basic features like sending and receiving mail are quite easy to use.  I find GMail easier to use though (obviously because of the language, but also the UI seems a bit more clean) and it's fast enough. Perhaps if they make an English version someday, I will try it again.

QQLabs is a site to inform users about upcoming products from the Tencent laboratories, as well as an opportunity for users to offer feedback about Tencent products. It was launched late 2006 and since then the labs page has seen a series of product announcements. It offers users the opportunity to respond to these announcements (although all comments first have to be approved). So far Qbar, QQVideo, Taotao, Shuqian and many other products have used the site. 

Language:

Chinese articles, with the exception of one article written by me. It is well worth to read through the product announcements though to stay up-to-date on what Tencent is doing. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed, so you don't have to check the site manually everytime.

QQ Games for AIM is a site that allows you to play some cool casual games with your AIM. It is targetted at the North American market and as such is available only in English. QQGames is produced in part by programmers in America and was launched in 2007. The website serves as a platform to download the AIM plugin and to see other players. At the moment it offers six games and more games are added periodically.

Future:

Although there has been an English version of QQ for a long time, QQ Games for AIM could be seen as  the first serious attempt to enter the American market for Tencent. I am sure the developments of this site and the experience obtained with it's operation will be important for the future strategy of Tencent. I imagine it is very difficult to enter the already saturated IM markets overseas, so starting with this games site makes sense. It will make people more aware of the QQ brand.

Language:

English only. There is also a Chinese QQ Games in China, which uses the games.qq.com domain, but is not related to QQ Games for AIM. If you are using AIM, I suggest you try QQ Games for AIM. In China QQ already has several successful casual games and I hope they can bring those games to a wider audience. 

QBar (Q吧) is a site that I have personally not used often, mainly because it is purely in Chinese. From what I understand, it allows users to start their own forums and topics. Compared to traditional forums, there is more freedom for the user. I think the main competition for QBar would be other forums and in particular Tianya. The website seems quite popular in China. Navigation is for me personally a big challenge because it uses several different UI styles.

Language:

Only in Chinese. Since it is sort of a forum, most of the content also consists of Chinese text. This makes it practically impossible for non-Chinese to use and there is also no real need. There are enough English forums available.

Shuqian (QQBookmark) is a social bookmaring site similar to Del.icio.us. It allows you to save your bookmarks online and then access them from anywhere in the world. This can be very convenient if you want to access your bookmarks from both at work and at home. I use this a lot to keep track of new developments. Sometimes you just dont have time to read all the news and it is very convenient to bookmark them so you can read the sites later at home. The site was launched in early 2007 and is early 2008 still in (public) beta and undergoing active development.

Future:

Shuqian is supported by Tencent via several plugins and also the Tencent Toolbar offers a convenient way to save bookmarks to Shuqian. There are not many other big bookmarking sites and it appears that Shuqian is the biggest (or one of the biggest) in China. Main competitor would be Delicious, but that site lacks the amount of Chinese content to be a direct competitor.

Language:

By default the language is Chinese (Simplified), but via the setting menu on the top, you can also select English language! Even when you use the Chinese UI, it is still easy to use; especially when you use one of the browser plugins. 

Taotao is a product from Tencent that uses its own website taotao.com . Taotao could be described as a micro-blogging site, just like Twitter. Contrary to Twitter, Taotao does not seem to suffer from the downtime that Twitter has become famous for. There also seems to be little competition in China in this field and taotao is therefore turning into a very popular product of Tencent. For example during the snow storms in the beginning of 2008, several people used Taotao to send reports.

Future

Taotao was launched in 2007 and is actively developing new features all the time. They added flash export, taotao cards, JavaScript export to your blog or Qzone.

Language

Only available in Chinese, but posting messages is very easy. Just type a message and you are done. Taotao is as much about reading others messages as it is about writing your own messages though. To read messages from other people, which can be very interesting, you of course need to learn Chinese.

QQVideo is a video sharing site, similar to Youtube, but with many unique features. People can use their QQ account to signin and then start sharing videos, either by uploading or by recording via their webcam.  Users can share videos with their QQ friends, post videos to their blog (for example QZone) and invite people via QQ IM to view videos (your IM contacts are loaded into the website). When you upload a video, you have to select a category and you can enter a short description and some tags. This helps other people find your video easier.

Future 

QQVideo contain s many videos (sorry, I dont know how many) and seems to grow at a healthy rate. It's main competitors are Youtube, Tudou and Youku. Tencent has many ways to integrate QQVideo with other products, which should give QQVideo enough momentum to become number 1 in China.

Language 

Only available in Chinese, but the UI is pretty straightforward so you can just use this site without any major problems. Simply click on a video and enjoy! 

Technical information

QQVideo was first released in 2006 and has since been under active development. Most obvious is that the previous Ajax-only design has been abandoned in favour of an XHTML and JS based design. I feel that they made the right decision to use less JavaScript. This greatly simplifies development and improves SEO. QQVideo requires Flash 9 to operate and supports more video formats (as input) than most other sites. The new UI looks great and the backend has been very well designed to scale to many more videos. The team is also experienced and always thinking of new features to add to QQVideo.