Lee Kai-Fu, who recently left Google China to start his own company – Innovation Works is now eyeing cloud computing, e-commerce and the mobile platform industry for some of his first investments (See interview with Reuters, Hong Kong). The fund hopes to fill a gap in China for seed capital and aims to nurture 20 business projects and bring five to first round venture capital funding each year, as it searches for the next Baidu or Alibaba.

It comes to no surprise that Lee Kai-Fu picks out cloud computing, e-commerce and the mobile platform industry for investments. A critical mass is forming as more consumers embrace the Internet channel for transactions. Lack of trust, poor delivery systems and unclear payment structures are slowly become barriers of the past. We have seen lots of development in payment platform in China from China Union Pay, AliPay, bridging the gap between offline payment and online payment.

According to Lee, “Only a third of the Chinese population as a percentage is online and those who are online spend only one-sixteenth of the American. The growth opportunity just to catch up with the U.S. is … 48 times.” Similar opportunities exist in mobile advertising and cloud computing, a business model built on providing services over the Internet.

Guess  Asia Pacific is definitely a space to watch for in the next few years for online innovations and new business model – with both China and India, presenting huge opportunity for businesses.

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