With audio and video bloggers in the mainland now numbering up to a million, venture capitalists and international media are in hot pursuit
Two years ago, Irishman Ken Carroll reached a conclusion every professional dreads. The product of four years' graft - a series of textbooks to teach English to Chinese students - had fallen below expectations, and the long-term veteran of the language-training industry in China was looking for new ideas.
Typical flaws, such as pre-meditated lessons and arbitrary grammar points, had resulted in out-of-touch, linear textbooks that locked users into a step-by-step rigmarole, Mr Carroll said.
'You cannot progress to Lesson Three, for example, until you master Lesson Two.'
But even so-called interactive web-based applications such as Englishtown and GlobalEnglish fell short of Mr Carroll's requirement of a more interactive, natural form of learning.
The so-called Web 1.0 era simply sought to replace human activity with software.