Our friends at Innovation Works (www.innovation-works.com) are celebrating their first birthday these days. They will mark the event by going public with their first batch of interesting and creative ventures – primarily entering the Chinese consumer and mobile internet space, currently dominated by Baidu (search), Tencent (social), Taobao (eCommerce) and China Mobile (mobile internet).

Some may be surprised by the primarily domestic focus of Chinese technology innovation, but remember that China is by far the largest consumer and mobile internet market in the world (in # of users). Why engage in tough fights away when your home turf is more attractive? Obviously also linguistic and competitive barriers help homegrown ventures in China, as they do in other sizable, non-native English speaking markets.

Innovation Works will also launch their new incubator program (http://www.programmer.com.cn/3980/), headed by our own Chris Evdemon (Ethos angel investor and former colleague).Interestingly, their first ventures are platform plays – i.e. network models that provide business opportunities for 3rd parties. So as an incubator, Innovation Works can offer budding entrepreneurs not only start-up money and advice, but also a business model and a distribution network. All it takes is a great product idea.

I think this is a brilliant incubator model –beating hands down anything I’ve seen coming out of Silicon Valley lately. Wish them luck!

We’re happy to see that our own innovation in the enterprise space is starting to produce results as well. Especially in China, we are increasingly being recognized as thought leaders on enterprise cloud software. We have been invited to speak as key partner at Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Partner Summit in Shanghai September 15. We are also speaking about the changing role of CRM at CRM 2010 in Oslo the same day (http://www.dataforeningen.no/). So if you happen to be in the area, please join us at these events and learn more!