After many months of planning and countless flights to the other side of the world, our first ever international TechCrunch Disrupt event has come to a close. 15 companies have launched new products to the world for the very first time in our Startup Battlefield, an on-stage, high stress battle for riches (50 grand!), glory (press coverage!), the much coveted Disrupt Cup, and all the open doors you could ever desire.

Without further ado, the winner is… OrderWithMe!

OrderWithMe is a group buying system meant to help Western small business owners by drastically simplifying the process of acquiring Chinese-made goods in bulk. By splitting orders (and simultaneously removing a vast majority of the middle men involved), OrderWithMe allows shops to acquire any size shipment of these lower-priced goods, as opposed to the usual minimum order of 100+.

This is no Alibaba; OrderWithMe hand-picks each product that they offer through the site, going so far as to do video walkthroughs with each product to offer up insight as to why it was selected. They’ll begin with fashion and home furniture items (as those are the highest margin items made in China), expanding into other verticals as time goes on.

Disrupt Beijing is an event intended to connect two otherwise distant worlds — to bridge the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley with that of Beijing — and OrderWithMe perfectly encapsulates that idea. While deliberation on who would walk away victorious stretched across a full day, OrderWithMe was clearly a strong contender from the moment they stepped on stage. By the time they stepped off, Alexia and I were duking it out over which of us would claim it as a favorite in our Battlefield predictions video. You can find our full writeup of OrderWithMe Here.

With that said, the race was by no means clear cut. Coming in as a close runner-up is Anquanbao, a cloud-based security service for websites and the admins who run them. Not unlike CloudFlare, Anquanbao acts as a fast-caching middle layer to protect websites from hacks, denial of service attacks, and general outages. You can find our full writeup of Anquanbao here

Congratulations to all of the Disrupt Battlefield competitors for their incredible work. I’ve been to every last one of these events, and this was honestly the most remarkably sound batch of companies to date.

Watch the Closing Awards Ceremony here.

Ben Huh presented his views on Internet culture at Disrupt Beijing, bringing a bit of the funny to the stage in our last presentation. Ben started out by describing how he bought ICANHASCHEEZBURGER, a site, that I’m led to understand, features critiques on the dissertations of linguistics graduate students at Harvard. He then described the 15 minute call he made to grab his first $30 million investment.

Now the site – and it’s multiple sister and brother sites – command 20 million users a month with half a billion pageviews.

“We’re the largest humor destination on all of the web,” said Huh.

Huh continued to discuss the democratization of content, noting that weird people now ruled when it came to popular Internet culture.

“Internet culture will produce the rock stars of tomorrow,” he said. “Being weird doesn’t mean you’re alone. Now, thanks to the internet, weird is exactly the thing that will get you famous.”

He closed with an interesting point: an entrepreneur is someone who doesn’t understand the word “no.” “Be the stubborn nail that refuses to be hammered down,” he said in closing. I CAN HAS STIRRING PEP TALK?, indeed.

ShoeDazzle monetizes by subscription, with users paying $39.95 a month for shoes that have been curated by Hollywood stylists and master stylist and co-founder Kim Kardashian.

Lacy pounced on the Kardashian thing immediately (she’s apparently been in the news today), referring to the fact that Silicon Valley goes through cycles of “celebrity du-jour” – this time around everyone from Hammer, to Leonardo Di Caprio has been dipping their fingers up in the startup pot. Lacy emphasized that these partnerships usually don’t work (while she did give props to Ashton for hanging in there).

Lee explained that the problem is that many startups think that they can get the traction they’re looking for by hooking up with just any ole’ big name celebrity – the completely wrong way to do it.

“A lot people think that they can have an idea, attach a celebrity to it and it will work,” said Lee, “When you start attaching Ashton Kutcher [or any random celebrity] to a travel site, it doesn’t work,” using Kutcher’s investment in Hipmunk as a paradigm. He emphasized that a startup interest in banking on the popularity of a celeb needs to have a “true” authentic partnership, like Kim Kardashian and sexy shoes for example.

“That’s why Robert Shapiro [Kardashian's father was friends with Shapiro] worked,” Lee said, referring to his previous startup LegalZoom.

Later in the interview, Lee also brought up being inspired by another celebrity, fashion designer Valentino, in the initial idea for ShoeDazzle. Valentino’s secret to 40 year success was knowing what women want … Okay so what is it then?

“Women just want to feel beautiful,” Lee said (note: TRUE). “So if you can make women feel beautiful every month for 39,” he went on, “You’re going to win.”

Watch the entire discussion here.

The VC market is still strong in China, despite indications to the contrary. The old saying goes, here, that 99% of the returns come from 5% of the firms. This means big bucks for the winners – and some interesting investment opportunities for VCs in Asia and the US.

Sarah Lacy sat down with Steve Ji of Sequoia Capital, Rocky Lee of Cadwalader, Hugo Shong of Accel – IDG, and Hans Tung of Qiming Ventures.

“I feel bad for VCs in New York and California,” said Hans Tung. He explained that it was almost impossible to perform due diligence on a Chinese company by comparing it to an already existing company. The panel also agreed that most Chinese companies – when successful – are hard to displace.

“It’s a winner takes all environment,” said Rocky Lee. Chinese companies also are facing a different market. “They’re looking at content because of censorship, they’re looking at permits,” said Lee.

Sarah also discussed the notion that VCs in China will only handle copycats. The response? Yes… and no. The investors agreed that a few years ago that many sites were true copycats funded by folks who wanted China to have copies of Western sites. Now, however, VCs are interested in mobile Internet companies and ideas that are unique to the Chinese market.

Watch the full discussion here.

I’ll admit it right off the bat: Phil Libin (CEO of Evernote) is one of my favorite entrepreneurs. I consider myself an actual “fan” of very few living business men, but he’s one of them.

Phil joined Sarah Lacy on stage today at Disrupt Beijing for a quick fireside chat, and, along with explaining why he plans to stay with Evernote for the long haul, offered up a bit of sage advice for the budding entrepreneurs of the world.

First: design for yourself, and love what you do. While Phil openly admitted that this wasn’t the most original advice, he dived a bit deeper into his logic:

“I’ve had three companies, and it took until the third to figure out some really basic things… My first company [Engine 5] did systems for retailers; we weren’t retailers. My second company [Core Street] built infrastructure for the government sector. With Evernote, we are the end-user. It feels like cheating. If I had to do it all over again, Evernote would be my first company.”

It wouldn’t just be his first company — it’d be his only company. Libin thinks of Evernote as a 100 year company, joking that he guesses he “has to be comfortable with the idea that [he] may not be the CEO in 100 years.” As for why he’s so open about this (and most things, really; Libin is often recognized for his transparency): “Evernote is asking you to trust us. If we’re going to do that, we have to tell you what we plan to do, how the numbers work, and how the technology works. If we didn’t do that, we wouldn’t get the trust we do.”

Next: don’t use crazy bidders to inflate valuations.

“Valuations in private companies are a really strange thing. In the public market, valuations are kind of the average of lows and highs across all sales. With a private company, you really only have one seller: the company. You base your valuation on the highest bidder. You can chase up your valuation by getting some crazy person to bid some insane amount — but then you have a crazy person as your boss.”

Finally: if you’re building a freemium product — as is all the rage these days — focus on the “free”, not the “emium”.

“People tend to highlight the ‘emium’ part. We value the ‘free’ part. The free version of Evernote IS the full product — but as long as you keep using it, the perceived value just keeps going higher and higher.”

In other words: make people fall in love with the free product, and they’ll be all the more willing to give your their money without you even having to ask.

The conversation, which you’ll find a recording of above, focused largely on the issues facing Western companies as they try to make their way into China.

The issue, Demopoulos says, is that companies can’t simply look at China as an important market. CEOs and other executives have to be looking at China as a commitment, both from an organizational and financial perspective. Many companies, he says, scoff at the idea of putting several years or more into building a sustainable presence in China (in part, in some cases, because they’re public). But they need to be willing to do this.

Asked about the lack of acquisitions in China, Demopoulos said he’s hearing that more bankers and lawyers are actually working on M&A style transactions, so it looks like they’re picking up. He added that the shortage of M&A historically may step from a Romance of the Three Kingdoms scenario, where “everyone hates each other”.

Finally, the talk turned to what it takes to start a successful company in China. There’s a widely held perception that you need to ‘know someone’ with connections to the Chinese government to make it there, which Demopoulos addressed. To succeed, he says, you need to do one of four things:

* The first, is to be a broker or middle-man
* The second is to participate in the china information industry, or PR
* The third is to take advantage of government related opportunities
* And finally, the fourth is the find new markets or create great products

As for the government connections? Demopoulos didn’t dismiss that entirely (there are some times when they can help), but he said that when you think about it, there are probably tens of thousands of people with various connections. In some ways, it’s sort of a buyer’s market for those who need them.

Watch the entire chat here.

Ecommerce in China is ready to take off and, more important, it’s ready to reach great heights on its own terms. Lu Dong of La Mui, Haifeng Ye of Mbaobao, and Fangfang Wu of Greenbox are three ecommerce pioneers who are, as we speak, redefining online sales in China.

“China is ready for ecommerce,” said Lu Dong. “People are moving to buying almost anything online.”

Haifeng Ye agreed. “We have a greater opportunity here in the Chinese market to make something new. In america the ecommerce market is quite established,” he said. “We can use ecommerce to build a new retail format.” He calls online sales a huge opportunity.

The three agreed that the biggest fish in the China ecommerce sea was Taobao and the importance of Taobao as a sales platform in China cannot be ignored. The company helps with settlement, logistics, and service and all three agreed that Taobao is “great.”

These entrepreneurs see things improving over the next few years and noted that ad rates have risen 30-50% while outside investment is down slightly but not enough to make these panelists worry.

Lu Dong said it best: “It’s important to raise money but it’s more important to make money.”

At this point, it’s no secret: Gaopeng (Groupon’s nascent effort in China) is a train wreck. By September of this year, the seven-month old endeavor had already accumulated $46.4 million in net losses with just $2.1 million in revenue. Meanwhile, a number of competitors in the region are predicting profitability within months.

In today’s “Attack Of The Clones” panel at Disrupt Beijing, a few of Groupon’s fiercest Chinese competitors took the opportunity to, well, attack. While obviously a bit subjective, their words do provide some insight on how a company so massive in the US could tank so dramatically on the other side of the world.

Panel guests Yinan Du (CEO of 24Quan) and Xing Wang (CEO of Meituan) agreed on at least two points: Groupon rushed their entry into China, and failed to embrace the culture (or hire people who could). According to Yinan Du, “Groupon didn’t have a chance from the beginning”.

“For any startup to be successful, there has to be a magic team behind it. They hired magic, but no one who understands both worlds. You have to be bi-cultural, you have to have someone who really understands how things work in America and how it differs in China.” Amongst the noted differences: margins. While Groupon happily pulls somewhere around 40% margins on deals in the US, no competitor in China is seeing anything above 14%.

Both panelists also harped on Groupon for their partnership with Tencent, calling it shortsighted and clearly not properly thought out. “They were focusing on PR rather than the business itself.”

Alas, Groupon was unable to send a representative as they’ve recently entered their quiet period in preparation for their impending IPO. Had they been on stage, however, there may not have been much they could have said to dampen the onslaught.

Memo to Chinese startups: You made for a late night of deliberations. We typically pick five finalists. There were a few companies that were clear picks, captivating everyone– from the judges to the staff to people we talked to in the hallways. Then there was another group that each had passionate advocates on staff, making for some tough decisions.

Ultimately, the staff got down to six we liked and couldn’t agree on which one to eliminate. So in the spirit of rule breaking, we decided to pick six finalists. Here they are in alphabetical order:

Anquanbao
Anquanbao’s presentation

8 Securities
8 Securities’ presentation

Moglue
Moglue’s presentation

OrderWithMe
OrderWithMe’s presentation

TouchPal Contacts
TouchPal’s presentation

UnitedStyles
UnitedStyles’ presentation

These companies will duke it out in front of our finalist judges just before lunch. You won’t want to miss the drama!

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom took the stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing to talk about the photosharing startup’s international efforts and how it plans to deal with the onslaught of clones, including over ten Chinese copycats.

During the talk Systrom revealed that the startup has now hit the 12 million user milestone, with 100K weekly downloads coming just from China, impressively. The app sees around one download per second worldwide, with that rate increasing on the weekends. “The amount of interest people have [in Asia] is huge,” Systrom said, “Japan is our second largest market.”

It seems like the international appeal of Instagram wasn’t that unexpected; The app was translated into 10 different languages four weeks after its launch, with two of those languages being simplified versions of Chinese.

Systrom also confirmed that the company was in contact with Chinese companies like Weibo, in order to better tailor the social app to the uniqueness of a market that has little access to Twitter and Facebook.

Again, these user engagement numbers are made even more poignant by the fact that Instagram still only available on iOS, with a promised Android version still in the works.

Watch the full interview here.