Janet is a 27 year-old graduate student interested in job or internship opportunities in China. Prior to pursuing her Masters degree, she worked for several years as a project manager for a small wireless start-up in Silicon Valley. She's therefore very familiar with the industry, although not particular to China. She knows China is the fastest growing market for mobile telecommunications and, thanks in part to favorable Chinese government regulations, is fast becoming the world center for wireless R&D. Janet has some familiarity with China, and has an idea of where the major cities in China are located. She's interested in finding jobs in Shanghai, which she has heard is the most international and cosmopolitan Chinese city.

She has heard about the MappingChina web site from a friend of a friend and types in the URL in her browser. She wants to find out if any wireless companies are located in Shanghai. After selecting the wireless industry and skimming general information on it, Janet looks at the geographic company distribution for the wireless industry. She's surprised to see that the software industry is actually most active in the Beijing region. But because she's still reticent about life under communist rule, she decides she's still interested only in jobs in Shanghai. She clicks the Cities link and searches for companies around Shanghai.

From the list of companies, Janet chooses Alcatel Shanghai Bell, and pulls up its company overview page. She sees on the map that ASB has several offices in Shanghai, including an R&D center that has made many news headlines recently. Janet clicks through a few more company summaries for both Chinese companies and multinationals, and even continues on to some of the company Web sites, where she applies for a few of the openings on their job pages.

Scenario #2

It has only been a day since he scheduled his interview with 3GWireless, but 30-year-old MBA graduate Young is excitedly optimistic about his prospects. To prepare for his interview with 3GW, Young wants to research as much as he can about the company and its position in China. He's applying for a position in the US headquarters, but a significant amount of 3GW's business and revenues come from Chinese affiliates. He wants to be able to discuss these issues as an informed and enthusiastic applicant.

Young has seen the standard information offered by Yahoo!Finance, Hoover's Online, and Faulkner's. He's heard that MappingChina shows some interesting data visualizations, so he goes to the MappingChina site and types "3GWireless" in the search field. This brings up a search results page, which shows the company and its industry/sector affiliations. He clicks on the company name and is taken to a company overview page. He sees on the map where the company's headquarters is located, and clicks a button to see branch locations. He then clicks on links to see the company's partnerships and competitors. Young also looks at similar pages for each of 3GW's top three competitors and for a few of 3GW's top partner companies.

Scenario #3

While sitting in his MBA class, James skims CNet’s news website on his laptop. One story grabs his attention: “Google takes ad service to China.” He learns that Google will let advertisers in China bid for keywords in traditional and simplified Chinese characters. He is curious if there are companies in China that specialize in Chinese character search technology. He hopes he can find a local partner with whom he can work together to build a search engine optimized to search in Chinese.

He first does some online research to find possible company names and comes up with one. Armed with this, James goes to the MappingChina website because he knows he can find diagrams showing company relationships, and he's interested in seeing if his company currently has a partnership with another search engine company. Because he likes rich data, he browses the industry categories rather than using the search box, selecting Computer Software and then the Enterprise Software sector to get a list of companies. He finds his target company and clicks through to the company overview page, then to the Relationships page. He sees that the company currently has no partnerships with search engines. He goes back to the overview page, skims the financial data, and then clicks to the company's website to get more information and a contact name.