We all know why we’re here: to get a taste of the top stories Tech in Asia covered from across the region this week. But before we do that, let’s all take a second to breakdance in celebration of the weekend. Ready? GO! …OK, here’s the news:

Charlie’s pick: Jack Ma’s Last Speech as CEO

Although I’m sure we’ll still see him around, it’s the end of an era at Alibaba with founder Jack Ma stepping out of the CEO’s chair to take a more background role at the company. It’d be hard to understate the effect Ma and his company have had on the development of the Chinese internet over the past decade, so I think his last speech is worth reflecting on.

Steven’s pick: Confirmed: GREE Shuts Down China Branch

GREE’s big international push in the past couple of years hasn’t always gone smoothly. The Japanese social gaming behemoth has badly lost momentum with OpenFeint after acquiring it, and its game development offices haven’t produced a blockbuster in a while. But it was still a surprise when we learnt that GREE Beijing has suddenly shutting down this week.

Youshen’s pick: BBM No Longer Shackled to BlackBerry Platform: Will Indonesians Rejoice?

It seems to me that BlackBerry has adopted a new direction as a software company. With BBM (BlackBerry Messenger)’s availability on other platforms (Android and iOS), BlackBerry looks set to focus on software penetration. I would like to make reference to Volvo’s historical move to make its three-point seat belt design an open ecosystem in the interest of general safety. Could BlackBerry be repeating the same footsteps, but in the interest of BBM’s user community?

Willis’ and Andrew’s pick: SingTel Sets Aside $1.6B For Startup Acquisitions

WIllis: SingTel will be setting aside $1.6 billion for investment over the next three years. If that’s not big news, then I don’t know what is. Project Magellan could be part of the grand plan. But I’m guessing that SingTel has much more stuff under its sleeve.

Andrew: Wow! Singtel setting aside $1.6 billion for future investment. That’s quite a sum of money and we can probably expect them to go onto a shopping spree over the next three years. It’s good news I would say because exits here in Singapore are rare.

Emily’s pick: Alibaba Working on a Set-Top Box to Bring E-Commerce to Your TV?

Although it hasn’t been confirmed yet, the rumour of Alibaba coming up with their own set-top box is still juicy! It’ll definitely be interesting to see if indeed there will be a decision to bring e-commerce onto the television!

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This week we saw all kinds of interesting stuff happen in China. A king stepped off his throne, we talked about 1970s pornography, and QQ got a makeover that made everyone sad. So what are the top stories this week? They are these:

1. Jack Ma’s Last Speech as Alibaba CEO

The king of Chinese e-commerce stepped off his throne after one final oration, and while we’ll still see Jack Ma around, I think it’s definitely worth reflecting on. Also worth checking out the first speech from Alibaba’s new CEO.

2. China’s Top Chat-App Gets a WeChat-Like Makeover, But Everyone Hates It

Well, people like chatting with their friends, and people like WeChat, so making QQ Mobile more like WeChat is a great idea, right? What could go wrong?

3. GREE Shuts Down China Branch

In news that could also go in the Japan This Week list if that was something we actually did, GREE’s China office will shut its doors for good next month, bringing GREE’s China dream to an end.

4. Huawei and ZTE Face More EU Scrutiny: What Are They Doing Wrong?

It’s never good news for Huawei and ZTE, is it? Following the latest news that the EU has threatened the companies with trade duties for illegal subsidies from the Chinese government, we take a look at what has gone so wrong with their overseas ambitions.

5. How China’s Top Video Site Battles the Pirates

Chinese video sites used to be known as a haven for piracy, but these days sites like Youku take piracy very seriously. But how do you stop pirates on a site that gets tons of videos uploaded every day?

6. Netease Planning the World’s First Crowd-Designed FPS Game?

It’ll be hard to know for sure until the game comes out, but I think this post didn’t get the attention it deserved. This is really a unique approach to game design from Netease, something I’ve never seen before at any major developer, and it has the potential to pay off big time in the long term.

7. Tencent Posts Rocketing Profits, Sees 195 Million Active Users on WeChat

If Tencent is making boatloads of money for its other business, it means that it has the needed fuel to pump up WeChat, which now has over 195 million monthly active users.

That’s all for this week, folks. For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS.

Beijing’s App Annie is growing rapidly with over 80 team members located at Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, San Francisco, and London. Today it serves over 220,000 apps with 85 percent of the top 100 iOS publishers using its service.

App Annie is largely serving clients from the US, Europe, China, and Japan and hasn’t really gotten into Southeast Asia yet. But the team just might start to look at Southeast Asia as it is seeing growth in this region. Vice president of APAC at App Annie Junde Yu said in an email:

Google Play is growing very fast in terms of downloads in the region, especially in countries like Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines, where downloads are much higher than iOS.

Even though Android downloads are much higher, revenue from iOS is still higher in Southeast Asia. Junde also commented that things will get exciting when Google Play manages to establish local payment options as it has done in South Korea and Japan. He added:

Additionally, despite of the growth in downloads, most of the apps downloaded in the SEA markets are published by foreign publishers. There are local publishers, but most of them have more of an international outlook for content and distribution as opposed to local. It will be interesting to observe the rise of the local players for the local markets, as the local markets grow in downloads and revenues.

(Also read: The Story of App Annie)

A Singaporean in China

Junde takes extra interest in Southeast Asia since he was born in Singapore, which is part of the region. Having worked in China for several years now, Junde says that he still has much more to learn from both markets. But from what he has observed, he sees great connection between China and Singapore, noting that SingTel Innov8 (who also invests in China startups) and ACE Beijing Chapter have done a great job bridging the two regions. In China, he sees Innovation Works and the Great Wall Club (which runs GMIC) also having links with Southeast Asia and Singapore.

Junde says people often mistakenly think that Chinese aren’t paying customers. He notes that iOS revenue isn’t significant even with huge downloads because most iOS users in China do not own a foreign credit card to pay Apple. “It is also inconvenient to use local bank cards to top up their iOS credits,” he added.

For Android, Junde says that most revenue-making apps make their bucks from second and third-tier cities, supported by carrier billing that makes paying just an SMS away. He explains that consumers in these cities do not spend much on entertainment outlets like cinemas, pubs, and clubs and thus they are very much content to spend on mobile content.

If you are very serious about the Chinese market, you need to be physically here. If not, you can also work through a distributor/publishers; there are good options available, like iDreamsky, Yodo1, Cocoachina etc.

Coincidentally, Junde will be back in Singapore for the upcoming Casual Connect conference on May 21 to 23. He will be speaking on the topic “Global Trends in App Store Monetization” on May 22, 11.00am where he will be sharing the latest trends about the app store economy and also interesting tips about marketing mobile apps in Asia.

While his work and heart is now mainly in Beijing, Junde does plan to return to Singapore someday to start a game studio, a pub, or a chicken rice franchise.

(Image credit: Startapp.com)

Samsung (005930:KS) co-CEO Shin Jong-kyun has today hailed the company’s new Galaxy S4 phone as its fastest ever selling gadget. It’s expected to hit 10 million in sales next week, a mere three weeks after it first launched. JK Shin also told The Korea Times:

We are confident that we will pass more than 10 million sales of the S4 next week. It is selling much faster than the previous model S3.

He added that the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy S4 could ultimately reach 100 million units sold, a feat which would represent double the global sales of its predecessor, the Galaxy S3, which reached 50 million sales. Indeed, the S3 took 50 days to pass the 10 million sales mark.

The Galaxy S4 went on sale in South Korea on April 26, and promptly landed in the US, China, and India the next day ahead of a massive global roll-out backed up by major offline and online marketing. The big-screened S4 launched in Indonesia on May 3rd.

Samsung is the top smartphone brand in China, where it sold 30 million phones across various models in 2012.

(Source: Korea Times; via The Verge)

In this day and age when a lot of people are connected online through popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter, one might ask if they can utilize that connection in the offline world. Some have come up with ways to do that like using NFC and RFID, so let’s look at an Indonesian startup which is focusing on the latter feature called Wooz.in ¹.

CEO Ario Tamat tells us that the company has been around since 2011, connecting around 40,000 offline users online for its corporate clients. He explained to me that Wooz.in has three business models, the first – which is Wooz.in’s original product – is applying RFID features into clients’ offline events and projects. These projects include making a bracelet with an RFID chip installed in it (pictured below), and the bracelet need to be scanned first if users want to use certain products inside the event like photo booths or games. When the bracelet is scanned, it automatically updates the user’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. The data gathered during this event can also be beneficial for the client.

Second is applying the feature as a loyalty program for SMEs. One of the companies taking part in Wooz.in’s program is restaurant chain Holy Cow. The RFID chip for the restaurant comes in the form of a necklace, which will earn users a virtual flag for every scan on Holy Cow’s premises. A few functions like automatic updates to users’ social network accounts and data mining work similarly here too. How much would it cost for SMEs to use Wooz.in’s services? It could be as little as IDR 1 million (US$100), depending on the number of users and usage frequency.

Third is licensing Wooz.in’s service to agencies abroad. Ario says that they now have two overseas agencies using Wooz.in’s licensed services. In this way, the overseas agencies can offer Wooz.in’s RFID expertise to their clients.

Regarding competitors, Ario said that he has seen quite a few other companies replicating Wooz.in’s technology. But he believes that replicating technology alone won’t be enough to beat Wooz.in because there are other factors that need to be put into consideration such as execution and idea innovation. Ario explains that they consistently offer new approaches to clients when using RFID, so there’s definitely huge potential to be explored from using the technology. Replicating them alone won’t be enough to beat Wooz.in, he believes.

With the vision of connecting the offline and online world, the team is now working to implement NFC chips for future projects. Ario says there are other ways to connect the offline and online world too, like face recognition tech. Of all those possibilities, NFC will be the team’s first priority this year.

Indonesian consumers are brimming with confidence as high as the sky right now, the highest in the world according to the latest study by Nielsen. This extends, of course, to properties. In that sector, Indonesian property portal RumahKu (meaning “my home”) is looking to help Indonesians find their desired properties online.

RumahKu was first launched in February 2011 during the property boom in Jakarta, says co-founder Robert Adrian. Back then, the existing property portals were still deemed unsatisfactory by the founding team, and because of that they decided to partner up and build RumahKu to help other people who are also looking to buy a place.

What makes RumahKu special compared to its competitors today? Robert says that the startup is doing its best in providing top notch customer service as well as building the back-end engine so that it can bring the most relevant results to users. He details a few more unique features of RumahKu, such as a way to put old listings back up, unlimited photos for each listing, unlimited listings for property agents, sales reports that calculate commission for agents, and traffic reports.

RumahKu records 360,000 monthly visitors on average with close to 40,000 premium registered members who most of them are from property agencies. What’s impressive, according to Robert, is the growth as the site’s monthly visitors grew by a factor of three compared to the same time last year; memberships grew 85 percent. At the moment there are around 38,000 property listings on the site, with most of them located in Java and Bali. The startup has gained quite a number of Facebook fans too, with 300,000 so far. From time to time RumahKu holds offline events like expos at popular malls across Indonesia.

RumahKu earns its revenue from premium memberships and banner advertising. The startup is fully self funded and is planning to jump into the e-commerce business model too in the future. The startup is facing stiff competition from rivals Rumah123 and RumahdanProperti (both acquired by Singapore-based IPGA). People who are looking at investing but not moving in could also make use of property crowdfunding site CrowdBaron.

Since I posted an article on HaiVL on Tuesday, it has raised eyebrows for two big reasons. First, the 9gag-like HaiVL community caught wind of the post, and then many people didn’t like my statement that “content in Vietnam is a wasteland”. So let’s take a closer look at the state of online content in Vietnam.

A key issue: generating content that lasts

First, let me get something out of the way. The content in Vietnam itself is not “bad” or “good”. The issue is organizing the content. Organizing it into a way that lasts and is easy to find and digest for new users on the web.

The forum model is as outdated as Geocities and Altavista. It was slowly driven out by blogs and then into even newer more sophisticated models. We’re way passed Web 2.0 by now. Certainly, in the US, forums are still used on company websites for questions and answers that are very specific, but the majority of internet users have flocked to new sharing and linking models. People have moved onto Wikipedia, Quora, Reddit, Digg, Stack Overflow, Pinterest, Facebook, Craiglist, Tumblr, 9gag, 4chan, and more. Each site has its own unique niche and user experience idiosyncrasies, but they all excel at one thing: user generated content.

How does this work in Vietnam?

A large amount of content in Vietnam is generated on news sites and forums. Forums like Tinhte and Webtretho publish news and allow users to start their own discussions. On Alexa’s web rankings, you can see that among the top 20 sites in Vietnam, at least 10 of the websites fall into this category.

These old models lack two things:

• The initial content is generated by publishers, not by users. It’s a news-based forum.
• It is not organized in a user-friendly way. Some of the best comments are embedded deep within the discussion.

If you look at these two things, in a way, it looks like Vietnam hasn’t even entered Web 2.0 yet. Has it missed the boat? I mean, Vietnam’s Pinterest clones all haven’t gained traction (including Rocket Internet’s attempt as well). But no, there are obviously enclaves of the twenty-first century web out there, like LinkHay, Zing Me, and obviously Facebook is growing in Vietnam like crazy. But Vietnamese users outside of these spaces are mostly sifting through Web 1.0. Why?

Is it because of Vietnamese users?

It’s always a senseless comparison, but startup scenes across the world are always comparing themselves to Silicon Valley. And one of the key things we envy in the Valley is the early adopter culture. Open up a new, random over-rated social media website like App.net and people flock to it. You may not be successful but at least you got a ton of user feedback in the interim. This doesn’t exist in Vietnam. Not only is the internet population (35 percent) relatively small but it’s so fragmented that most websites don’t get critical mass. For example, Linkhay, an awesome Digg lookalike, has been sitting under 200,000 users for years.

And it’s not an anomaly. Several of my sources working in search engines across Vietnam for the past few years have found that Vietnamese content is lacking (the 13th most populous country in the world and it’s not even on the map). This is why CocCoc and NHN Naver are looking to work with content industry professionals to get more Vietnamese content online. Only in the past year or so has this improved. It’s hard to find the best doctor online, or find out where the best place to buy a specific type of cloth is. Is it because Vietnamese users are unwilling to participate?

What did HaiVL, Foody.vn and others do right?

I think Vietnamese users are still getting accustomed to generating content on their own. This is why I really do think HaiVL is a pioneer. Because they’ve out-executed lots of other Vietnamese companies in the content space. The interesting thing is, as Dave McClure would say ”it turns out all you gotta do is copy great shit 99 percent then innovate one percent every month and you can beat the crap outta most people.” To win in Vietnam, it’s not just about cloning the right model, it’s about cloning very well. It’s about adapting a model we see somewhere else and executing it really well. And what HaiVL has done is get people to freely give content. So the problem isn’t with the users, it’s with what people are building.

One of the key things that HaiVL did was to perform really well on Facebook – not everybody can do that. And Facebook has only recently hit Vietnam, so upvoting and prioritizing best responses isn’t commonplace yet. What HaiVL is basically doing is educating the masses in a new way of interacting with content, in the same way that Nhom Mua and Rocket Internet are educating people on e-commerce.

To me, the country’s users are ready now, it just takes a few startups like HaiVL to take it to the next level. After all, HaiVL has great topics and fun material, and everybody needs comedy in their life. Next, who can take the success behind HaiVL and apply it to different niches of the content market?

Note: We’ve tried our best to cover a lot of the websites in this space and key aspects of the field, but we know we may have missed many, please let us know in the comments.

App Annie is a mobile app store data provider with its headquarters in Beijing, China but it is operated with an international team and vision led by founder and CEO Bertrand Schmitt.

Not many people know but App Annie was actually first started by an offshore outsourcing development company in Beijing called Exoweb in March 2010. Unfortunately, the Exoweb team didn’t have any idea on how to monetize it. But Bertrand saw the potential, he spun-off the company from Exoweb (they remain as minor shareholders), and took over App Annie’s operations in April 2010 with around five people in the team. He told me:

The people at Exoweb are friends of mine. App Annie was a free product. They were focusing on other stuff, software products, and not working on App Annie. I was also very frustrated with the lack of market data on the stores. So I felt as a marketer, I was missing a lot of information about what are the most interesting markets, how much are others doing in terms of downloads etc.

Bertrand who has been in the internet and mobile industry for 14 years also said that the early version of App Annie, though it only had basic data, could serve as a base for premium market data in the future. It first started tracking iOS applications but it now also tracks other app stores such as Google Play and Amazon.

While other data providers provide SDKs to track what’s happening for apps in terms of usage. At App Annie, Bertrand says that things are done different because it is connecting to the backend of the stores to get the data. To put it simply, App Annie works with Apple and Google directly.

For its premium product, App Annie has developed a statistical model with 90 percent accuracy that estimates an app’s revenue opportunity, market share etc and is today used by companies such as Gameloft, Microsoft, Nokia, Google, Tencent, and more. Bertrand assures that the top ten apps are well-measured since they are used by most users.

Today, the App Annie team is made up of about 85 people across 16 nationalities. 70 of them are based in Beijing who largely focus on the product. The others are in San Francisco, Japan, and London who focus on sales (Update: SF is a secondary headquarters for App Annie’s sales, marketing, and market insights.). The App Annie team uses English across all team members and that includes its Beijing headquarters. When asked why China, Bertrand said:

We like it in China and China is a fast growing market. It is hard to get into the market so starting in Beijing is easier.

Despite being a fast growing market, the large publishers who are willing to pay for App Annie’s products are mostly still international companies. 90 percent of App Annie sales are generated outside of China with US and Japan its biggest markets.

To date, App Annie has raised $7 million of venture capital in total and is already cash flow positive. Over 220,000 apps are using App Annie with 85 percent of the top 100 iOS publishers using its service.

“At some point, we’re also interested to do digital content, not just apps,” said Bertrand.

I recently read an article titled “Date A Boy Who Travels”, which reminds me of the female version “Date A Girl Who Travels”. We have to admit, as we expose ourselves to situations during our travels that are out of our usual comfort zone, we tend to develop a deeper appreciation for the little things in life. And often such experiences will only come about when you truly immerse yourself in local experiences. Now, there’s a new startup dedicated to searching for such authentic travel: Indiescapes.

The Singapore-based startup, in essence, is a curated marketplace dedicated to wanderlusts who seek out local, authentic travel experiences. From living like a Balinese villager to embarking on a Thailand street food crawl with the country’s top local food writer, travellers will be able to find experiences that are different from what normal travel packages from travel agencies can offer.

And once a guest makes a booking request, the request will be sent to the host. The guest will only be able to make payment after the host accepts the booking. To ensure both parties’ interests are being protected, Indiescapes will hold payment and transfer it after the day-one experience has been delivered. Indiescapes then takes a percentage cut from each successful transaction.

The curated travel marketplace also boasts best-quality listings for its customers, making sure that each host goes through its strict curation procedures which, for some, includes a face-to-face meeting. Co-founder and CEO Seetoh Zhi Min at Indiescapes elaborates on how the team curates content for its users:

We seek for these experiences through our local contacts and an extensive travel network of friends. We speak to the hosts, understand why they do and what they do, because we believe it is very important to find hosts who have a genuine desire to provide a unique journey for travellers. This way, we ensure customers get only the best, and help them save time crawling through the overcrowded internet.

There will be reviews, references, and social elements within the package to help users decide if the hosts can deliver a good experience for them.

As for hosts, there are also cancellation policies in place to protect them, making sure that they receive bookings only from guests who are genuinely interested in the experience. Similarly, hosts would be able to write reviews and references on the users.

Co-founders Heidi Shum and Zhi Min are currently working with a team of six members focusing on customer outreach, web development, and host community building. As to why the two ladies decided to embark on this journey, Zhi Min explains:

[...] I always had the chance to live like a local and have my friends share insights of their countries with me. Heidi too, [during] her stays and travels, also had the privilege of experiencing countries from very local perspectives.

[And] when we finally returned to Singapore after years of wandering the world independently, many of our friends started asking us for tips on authentic experiences when they travel. [We then] realized that what is easily available on the market is usually the touristy and commercialized stuff. Driven by a common desire to make more prevalent the same kind of authentic experiences that have greatly influenced our world views, Heidi and I started Indiescapes.

This definitely sounds like a good option for an alternative travel experience, especially for wanderlusts like myself. I truly believe one of the best ways to expand your horizons, to show empathy, and to understand another’s culture is to see and experience matters from a local’s perspective.

Indiescape currently focuses on countries within Southeast Asia, such as Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia. The experiences currently listed on the site range from $35 for a night life experience in Bangkok to $410 for a three day experience at Khao Sok Park. If you’re a traveler seeking out for local experiences, you might want to check out Indiescapes here.

For our upcoming Bangkok Meetup, we have Dave McClure, a venture capitalist and founding partner at 500 Startups to share with us what he sees in Southeast Asia. Join us for this event on June 9 at 5.00 p.m and you will be in for a great time of content, sharing, and networking.

Tickets for Tech in Asia Meetup are free but grab them fast while stocks last!

Agenda:

• Registration: 5.00 – 5.30pm
• Opening Speech from Launchpad & Tech in Asia: 5.30 – 5.40pm
• Keynote Opening by Oranuch Lerdsuwankij (Mimee): 5.40 – 6.00pm
• [Coffee Chat] What 500 Startups Sees in Southeast Asia? 6.00 – 6.30pm
• Networking & Dinner: 6.30 – 7.30pm

Venue: Launchpad @ 139 Thanon Pan, Bang Rak, Bangkok, Thailand 10500

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Speaker: Dave McClure

Dave McClure is a venture capitalist & founding partner at 500 Startups, an internet startup seed fund and incubator program in Mountain View, CA. He likes to hang out with entrepreneurs, and occasionally invest in startups foolish enough to let him. He has been an investor in over 250 companies including Mint.com, Twilio, Wildfire Interactive, SendGrid, TaskRabbit, SlideShare, Mashery, CreditKarma, KISSmetrics, and MakerBot, among others.

Dave has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for over twenty years, and has worked with companies such as PayPal, Founders Fund, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twilio, Mint.com, Simply Hired, O’Reilly Media, Intel, & Microsoft. Years ago he used to do real work like coding or marketing or running conferences, but these days he mostly does useless stuff like sending lots of email, blogging, and hanging out on Facebook and Twitter.

Dave also likes to play ultimate frisbee when his knees don’t hurt.

Not forgetting, a huge thank you to our awesome Sponsors:

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Venue Sponsor: Launchpad

The reason it has taken so long to raise a seed round, according to founder Ken Wong, is that it wasn’t really necessary; the company has been profitable since 2009. But with three big game launches on the horizon, the recent cash influx will be used mostly to increase the level of marketing devoted to the new games.

And of course, the investment is something of a no-brainer on Crystal Horse’s part; the company is already profitable, which makes it the easiest kind of startup to invest in. With this investment, Nexx Studio has become the company’s eight Malaysia-based portfolio startup.

That would certainly seem to be a denial. But interestingly, reporters got a somewhat vaguer text from Sogou CEO Wang Xiaochuan, who told them simply that nothing had yet been finalized. On his microblog account, Wang has denied rumors that he’s slated to join Alibaba. And Sohu CEO Zhang Chaoyang stressed earlier this week that the company has enough cash in the bank that it doesn’t need to put Sogou up for sale.

None of these statements have done much to quash the rumors, however, because it seems no one is willing to come out and directly say: “We’re not selling (or buying) Sogou, period.” Whether or not a deal is ever finalized, the lack of absolute language in all three statements suggests that there is, at the very least, some consideration of an acquisition deal going on behind the scenes. And with Qihoo hoping to pose a more serious threat to Baidu, and Baidu wanting to prevent that, it certainly makes sense that both companies would be looking at Sogou and other minor search players as potential acquisitions to bolster their search offerings.

For now, though, we’ll just have to wait and see. Perhaps someone will outright deny the rumors, or perhaps in a few weeks or months we’ll find out that there was some truth to them when Sogou announces a new investment or merger.

(Tencent Tech via TechWeb)

The fashion-loving Japanese startup Muse & Co has raised 350 million yen, about $3.4 million, in series B funding for its fledgling e-commerce business. The primary investors are Itochu Technology Ventures, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and Infinity Ventures Partners (IVP); this round comes exactly a year after a smaller first round.

Muse & Co aims itself at Japan’s savviest and most stylish shoppers – which are of course young, professional women. It’s a VIP flash sales site, something we’ve seen prove popular in the country with Luxa.jp, Monoco, Glamour Sales, and numerous others.

According to Startup-Dating, Muse & Co CEO Hirotake Kubo has revealed that the startup has 200,000 users and sees $500,000 in monthly sales, with 50 percent of that income from mobile shoppers. A whacking 70 percent of its traffic comes from mobile devices. The e-store has apps for iPhone and Android.

Started up in February 2012, the flash sales site has now grown to comprise 20 staffers. Like many such niche e-commerce services, it has a limited amount of items for sale each day – in Muse & Co’s case, just 30 – and flash sales on these last for just a week. It claims that most garments sell out before that deadline.

(Source: Startup-Dating)

Beijing may be China’s capital, but as we saw last month, it’s still not winning any races when it comes to internet speed. But the Beijing subsidiary of China Unicom may help to change that today, as it launches a new broadband connection scheme that ups speeds and makes 4 Mbp the slowest connection in the city. Given that Beijing’s average broadband speed right now is 3.5 Mbps, that’s pretty good.

So, if you have a Unicom broadband connection, here’s what’s changing for you, starting today:

• If you had a 512 kbps or 1 Mbps connection, then your connection speed is being raised to 4 Mbps.
• If you had a 2 Mbps connection, your connection speed is being raised to 10 Mbps.
• If you had a 4 or 8 Mbps connection, your speed is being raised to 20 Mbps.
• Fiber-optic customers may be able to get speeds of up to 100 Mbps.

In short, it’s good news all around, with everybody’s internet getting faster while prices stay the same (at least for now).

The move is in part a response to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s goal of having 75 percent of Chinese broadband users on 4 Mbps or higher connections this year (up from its 50 percent goal for 2012). Given that seems likely that Unicom may roll out similar plans in other cities across China, so even if you don’t live in Beijing, you can hold out some hope that someday soon, your internet speed will get kicked up a notch too.

(Tencent Tech via Techweb)

We recently ran a guest post on the blogshop phenomenon in Singapore, and as Lucas highlighted in the article, payment is the most critical step which closes the entire shopping cycle. But at times it gets rather troublesome and tedious, since bank transfers were the only option available when the idea of blogshops first came about. It takes a long time, especially with bigger blogshops, to wait for sellers to manually verify the payment. That has also been a barrier to e-commerce startups in Singapore who might want to attract overseas customers.

I agree with one of our readers’ comments that it does get inconvenient. Unfortunately, we have neither a local Taobao-like marketplace nor Alipay system in Singapore, where the transaction only goes through after the buyer has received and is satisfied with the goods purchased. With bank transfers, the safety of purchases is not guaranteed, and often buyers would opt to shop at bigger blogshops for fear of losing their money.

Yet e-commerce is booming in Singapore. From popular local online supermarket RedMart to online blog clothing stores such as Love, Bonito and Agneselle, to online beading businesses such as Manek-Manek beads, we’re seeing more and more small businesses being brought online.

Easier e-payments for going global

Now with proper payment gateways such as PayPal in place, the ease of payment is encouraging more merchants to bring their brands into international markets as well. In fact, most of the bigger blogshops have adopted credit card payments and support PayPal, which also caters to international shoppers. According to Helena Tang-Lim, founder at Manek-Manek beads, almost 90 percent of her transactions hail from outside of Singapore.

Helena also tells us that she has integrated PayPal since day one of starting her online beading business, and attributes her wider customer base to the payment platform service. She elaborates:

PayPal has helped eliminate the need for a physical presence overseas and allowed me to sell to the world. [...] Furthermore, their experience in risk management and fraud prevention enables me to provide a safer e-commerce platform to connect to my customers. PayPal’s closed loop system also allowed me to identify good consumers, and remove the bad ones to minimize fraud.

But of course, one of the biggest pull factors for Helena’s online business, she explains, is that she provides a complete experience that makes customers feel as though they are receiving a Christmas present whenever they receive a parcel from Manek-Manek beads. She also makes sure that her designs are easy to match, and has an added Asian accent to her designs which appeals to the international market.

Etsy ranked fifth in most searched online stores

She also has her designs listed on popular online marketplace Etsy, one of the more popular online handicrafts stores, which helps aid and improve in her brand visibility.

In fact, according to the recent statistics provided by PayPal, the top two spots in the e-commerce export categories from Singapore are jewelry and fashion. Just in Southeast Asia alone, there are around 1.5 million active PayPal accounts. Faraz Ahmed, general manager at PayPal Southeast Asia and India, adds:

Our primary business in Singapore is to enable more convenient and secure transactions for local merchants to sell to over 123 million active PayPal users in 190 markets worldwide. Our data and insights clearly show that Singapore SMEs have a fantastic opportunity to reach out to millions of consumers globally and aggressively expand into overseas markets through cross-border e-commerce.

In fact, around 25 percent of PayPal’s businesses globally are cross-border, which shows how local brands are taking advantage of the ease of payment to cross into other geographical regions, into international markets.

Indonesian-made photo app PicMix revealed today that it passed the 10 million user mark last month, around three months after the app reached eight million users. PicMix is now available on Blackberry 10 thanks to a new app, which is quite natural seeing that the app met its viral success on Blackberry’s legacy platform.

Founder Calvin Kizana, who is at the Blackberry Live 2013 event in Orlando, Florida, told us that they’re going to introduce physical PicMix gift cards soon (pictured right), which can be used to top up virtual money inside the PicMix app to buy things like premium frames, filters, and stickers. The gift cards will be sold at Indonesian convenience stores such as 7-11, Lawson, AlfaMart, and Carrefour. Internet cafes in big cities like Jabodetabek will also sell them.

The cards are touted to be priced at IDR 20,000 (US$2). The gift cards are made in partnership with online payment service IndoMog which also sells game vouchers at the convenience stores mentioned above. The gift cards will complement PicMix’s online sales which are already available worldwide via credit card, PayPal, and local carrier billing.

If you happen to be at the BlackBerry event, you can head over to the PicMix’s booth to find more information about the startup.

Singapore-based company, W-Locate, has successfully raised S$589,000 (US$470,000) in its pre-series A funding, led by TNF Ventures under Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF) Technology Incubation Scheme (TIS).

Co-founder and chief locationist, Stevie Ooi said that with the amount of money raised, it will aid in the team’s expansion efforts for its two core products, FIND and XimLoc, within the region, on top of tapping into TNF’s expertise and experience.

Both FIND and XimLoc are location technologies which help manage companies vehicle fleet and workforce respectively. For instance, if I own a fleet of vehicles, I can use FIND to effectively track the vehicle operational conditions, on top of accurately calculating assigned drivers’ efforts and pay. It aims to improve productivity and optimizes resources and assets. Its solution is currently adopted by a couple of vehicle fleet companies, such as Holcim and Samwoh Corporation.

As for XimLoc, it is a SIM-based cell positioning technology that is able to track all kinds of mobile devices, even when you are indoors with limited reception. It leverages information from the cellular network to detect a user’s position. According to the W-Locate, XimLoc uses a residential java applet on the SIM card to retrieve network information, and sends it to the XimLoc server. Based on its proprietary algorithm, the location engine then computes the most probable location, and has been proven to be the most viable solution to overcome the limitation of GPS.

XimLoc also comes with a full-feature web-based dashboard to manage these data, and this technology has been integrated into major SIM card manufacturers, such as Morpho Cards and Bluefish Technologies for its global customers. It also currently has two major telecommunications companies in Singapore and Thailand on board with them to provide location-based services, and will be closing some other telco deals within Asia, Africa, and Middle East.

And Shirley Wong, Managing Director at TNF Ventures has high hopes for the company:

W-locate is a very unique tracking and telematics company. They use both GPS technology and their proprietary SIM card-based, XimLoc, to deliver an all-encompassing solution to address their customers’ needs. We are starting to see where M2M, Big Data and Cloud Computing are coming together to deliver some impressive benefits across a number of industries. Their solution offering has the potential to elevate into wider and more innovative uses. With their sound business model and good partnership with major telecom players, we expect W-Locate to be the leading player in Asia’s tracking and telematics market in two to three years’ time.

It’s a fierce battlefield for chat apps in Indonesia. Today, Japan-based Line is going to roll out new ads featuring Indonesian celebrities Agnes Monica and pop group Nidji on TV in Indonesia. Those two celebrities are very prominent here as they are among the few who have represented Indonesia globally. But this latest move means a lot more in the Indonesian chat app battle, especially with regards rival KakaoTalk.

Let’s look at Line’s two newest marketing stars. The first is Agnes Monica, who has the biggest Twitter follower count for a celebrity in Indonesia. Which celebrity has the second biggest Twitter account here? None other than KakaoTalk’s TV ad star Sherina Munaf. Agnes now has over 7.5 million Twitter followers while Sherina has close to 6 million.

Indonesian pop group Nidji is also very famous here. Their hit singles have gained them huge popularity amongst teenagers and children, so much so that the band’s involvement with a cigarette campaign generated complaints from the national commission for child protection a few years ago. The band’s Facebook page has 465,000 likes.

Harnessing K-pop power

Those two stars will complement Line’s two other promo stars, Maudy Ayunda and K-pop singer Siwon. And yes, it is interesting to see a Japanese company choosing a Korean celebrity to star in its Southeast Asian ad campaign, with the latter celebrity being used to counter the K-pop fever brought by KakaoTalk’s Korean stars BigBang.

Today, Line representatives pointed out that its messaging app has gone back up to the number one spot for free apps in Indonesia on Android. But on iPhone, KakaoTalk is still ahead of Line in the country. The new TV ad starring Agnes Monica and Nidji will start airing today.

In the quest to take down Google in Vietnam, CocCoc is stepping up its game once more with the release of a new browser called Corom this week (a name, that pronounced in Vietnamese, sounds a bit like Chrome). I think this is a smart move. When I heard the news that CocCoc wanted to challenge Google in the country, I always thought that they would need to get into the browser battle. After all, most of my searching these days happens either in my Chrome default “omnibox” or search box, and in my default mobile browser. Thus, this move allows CocCoc to get onto Vietnamese users’ desktops.

Victor Lavrenko, CEO at CocCoc, says that the main purpose of building this browser is to “help Vietnamese users. That’s our strategy – do good for users.” and Corom helps to achieve that by providing some key things other more mainstream browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and – cough cough – Internet Explorer don’t have. He points out four main Corom benefits:

1. Typing in Vietnamese. Corom automatically add diacritics, so that when you type something you don’t have to use the Unikey/Vietkey
2. It gives access to Facebook, because it’s not very reliable due to being partially blocked.
3. In Vietnam, Victor says “the problem of speed is usually related to international channels etc. , so we download in several threads, and it’s much faster, up to eight times quicker”.
4. The new browser allows you to download videos from Youtube (you can do this in Firefox with an add-on, but not in Chrome).

Unfortunately for me, the browser is only for Windows. Windows is by far Vietnam’s most popular computer operating system, where Macs are only really seen sometimes used in the big cities. Victor says they do hope to come out with a Mac OS X version soon. When asked if they’d be releasing a mobile browser, an area I think has a lot of potential, Victor said:

Regarding a mobile browser, I think it’s not our target because mostly browsers are pre-installed and people rarely change them. However, probably we’ll integrate points-of-interest search into our browser and maybe this will be an advantage big enough for people to replace their mobile browser.

Youku is seeing users go mobile – but so are the web pirates.

After merging into one company last year, Youku Tudou (NYSE:YOKU) further established itself as China’s top online video business with its two sites. Combining user-generated videos and licensed movies and TV shows, Youku and Tudou collectively spent over US$100 million last year on securing the rights to an array of Chinese and overseas streaming content. It’s a significant investment (with studios like Sony Pictures and Warner Bros) in capturing the attention of China’s web users – and it’s a treasure they need to protect from web pirates.

In this battle against piracy, Youku Tudou is up against illegal downloading sites that rip licensed content from the company’s sites, and rogue video streaming sites that seek to profit from uploading these rips. And not to forget the ample number of rival Hulu-like services in the nation, like the fast-growing Tencent Video, Sohu TV, and Baidu’s iQiyi (which recently made a major acquisition to expand even further). Yes, they also pay for the rights to content – thereby pushing up the price of licensing – but I get the feeling that they all keep a keen eye on each other.

Overseeing all this for Youku Tudou is Carl Lu, the company’s legal supervisor and leader of the anti-piracy team. Carl tells us that as the site has grown to 150 million daily views from mobile devices, the pirates are going mobile as well. That’s a phenomenon we’ve also seen with Chinese authorities struggling to take down mobile-only porn sites. He explains:

Ever since the establishment of our anti-piracy team in early 2012, […] we have seen a quick expansion for anti-piracy fronts from mainly PC to include mobile devices. Additionally, the fast growth in small piracy video sites is astonishing. The team in July and August 2012 recorded around 500 to 600 such video sites, yet the latest monitoring – now we have to outsource to a third-party agency – in mid-April reported as many as 1,995 such sites, many of them not registered [in China], or with their servers overseas.

The pirates are going mobile

The company’s apps for Tudou (left) and Youku.

Carl points out that Youku Tudou’s “content cost in 2012 was $118.3 million, representing 41 percent of our consolidated net revenues.” The anti-piracy team is there to protect those assets. That team, we’re told, expands as needed, and also loops in outside agencies for added support. Exclusive licensed content is inevitably the most closely guarded:

As a standard procedure, the team will issue warning letters to our contacts, to inform them the upcoming exclusive copyrighted content we carry. Once we detect any [copyright] infringement, we will send them take-down notices. Attorney letters if no response. If we need to prepare for more serious steps, we will take notarized evidence. The last resort is an official lawsuit.

The Youku and Tudou sites have to monitor what their own users are up to because an individual uploading, say, another site’s licensed content in bite-sized chunks will cause problems. Carl says, “For that, we have an in-house fingerprinting system, and another third-party system to detect pirated content in addition to our team’s manual review.”

Despite China’s top web companies pushing forward licensed content – like Baidu’s revamped music streaming portal, and many of China’s top video streaming sites converting their movie and TV serials content into kosher copies – there’s still plenty of offline and online piracy in mainland China. From the country’s notorious DVD shops, to P2P platforms like Xunlei, to blatant direct download pirates, there are still plenty of dodgy ways of watching a new movie or an entire season of a popular TV show.

Last month, authorities took down two of China’s biggest media piracy sites, conveniently enough on World Intellectual Property Day. But one of then, YYeTs, is now back online.

Chinese TV dramas make up 60% of traffic

Despite the challenges, it’s clear that web video is now a crucial draw for major web companies in China. A total of 4.1 billion hours of online videos were watched in one month last summer, and that number has plenty of room for growth as smartphones gradually become more ubiquitous across broader swathes of China.

Of all the licensed content on Youku and Tudou right now, 60 percent of total traffic on the sites stem from Chinese TV serials. US dramas – I see that The Vampire Diaries is the hottest right now on Tudou – represent, Carl says, “one of the fast growing categories” but still only account for three percent of traffic.

While much of the streaming is free, some require a fee as part of the Youku Premium package. That service has seen two million transactions since its beta launch, but that’s a figure which hasn’t been updated by the company since last year. While the transition to mobile seems to be going well for Youku Tudou and a few other such sites, it’ll be tougher to get consumers to pay for the latest movies or TV shows. In order to capture the fast-growing mobile user-ship, Youku is launching mobile ads this month.

Youku Tudou plans to ramp up its battle with the web pirates even more this year, so we’ve not heard the last of this fight.

CEO and Founder at InMobi, Naveen Tewari, speaking at the Global Mobile Internet Conference 2013 in Beijing

Founder and CEO of mobile ad network giant, InMobi, Naveen Tewari, has come a long way. Naveen is an engineer by training, studied at Harvard Business School, and worked at consulting firm McKinsey. In between all that, Naveen also had some experience working in startups while he was in Silicon Valley.

Entrepreneurs being entrepreneurs, Naveen was very fascinated with the rapidly changing mobile internet. He wanted to build something which he could call his own. Naveen and his team started to dabble and among their first few projects was a VOIP application and also a chat application. But it was too early for the market back then. So the team started to question, “What are the things that could work? Maybe there’s a play for us if we were to build a fundamental service?”

These fundamental services range from mobile e-payments to advertising platforms. Therefore, with more interest in the advertising side of the business, mKhoj was founded in 2007. The name was later rebranded to InMobi to suit the international audience better. Naveen told me:

Over the period of years, we started to see success. We decided to go broader and into different markets and not just stick only to Asia. That’s how we expanded.

InMobi has had many turning points. Naveen pointed out three. The first was when the team decided to pivot when their chat application wasn’t gaining traction. “Pivoting really lead to the next level of growth for us,” he added.

The second one was when InMobi received funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPCB), a renowned global venture capital firm. The investment, said Naveen, gave InMobi a lot of confidence to grow and compete globally. The vote of confidence from KPCB also helped InMobi attract more talent to join the team. The third turning point was when InMobi received $200 million in funding from Softbank which really helped the company scale quickly in various markets.

We have doubled or tripled down on technology. We have built multiple platforms to go after the entire value chain of the ad business. We made acquisitions too to fill that up. We have also deepened our strengths in local markets – in the UK, Europe and launching ourselves in Korea, China, and Japan.

“We’re one of the largest mobile ad networks in China”

Today, InMobi can pat its chest and call itself a global company. Outside of India, it has offices and operations in Australia, Taiwan, the US, the UK, France, Italy, Russia, Germany, China and more. Despite launching in China only in late 2011, Naveen says that InMobi is “one of the largest mobile ad networks in China.”

An InMobi China PR representative later filled me in that the company is seeing 400 million impressions a day, serving 30,000 applications in China. Naveen believes that by the end of 2013, InMobi will be the largest mobile ad network in China.

We have aggressively invested into China. It’s a big market, we can’t just fiddle around with it. We don’t want to lose.

InMobi has offices in Beijing and Shanghai with more than 50 people running its China operations. When looking for talent, Naveen says that hunger and passion are the key things he is looking for.

Growing from a startup to a multi-national corporation, InMobi faces challenges like any fast growing young company would too. Naveen told me that as a young organization with little processes it was tough running a global operation with 25 offices while keeping one culture, one system, and communicating clearly with everyone. He also said:

As a company what we faced was to showcase and tell people that we have a great product. People expect great products coming out of Silicon Valley, innovations coming out of Silicon Valley and probably didn’t expect that innovation to come from an Indian company.

Despite the problems, InMobi has had a great reception around the world. Today, the company is close to reaching 700 million smartphone users across the world. InMobi was also recently crowned by MIT Technology Review as one of the 50 most disruptive companies in the world.

The new page asks players “How else can you play an FPS?” and then presents them with a eight this-or-that voting options, each relating to a particular element of gameplay design. The percent of votes each option has accrued is prominently displayed, and while the site doesn’t explicitly say so, it certainly implies that the higher-voted options will be implemented into the game.

If Netease really plans to abide by these votes — we’ve contacted the company for comment — then I believe this will be the world’s first FPS from a major development studio to crowd-source such huge aspects of its game design. It’s a bold move, and one that likely means we won’t be seeing this game anytime soon, as based on these questions it seems like the game must be in a very early phase of development.

So what choices are gamers being given, and what are they choosing so far? The page has only been up for a day, but it appears to have already attracted thousands of votes, resulting in these choices:

Aim-assist vs. pure skill: Here, 83.69 percent of respondents so far have voted for having some degree of aim-assist to make shooting more precise. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise as many modern shooters including Call of Duty and Battlefield have aim-assist mechanisms so that aiming is not 100 percent manual.

Progressive characters vs. static characters: Here, players are pretty torn, with 45.67 percent voting for progressive characters that can be leveled-up, specialized, and personalized, and 54.32 percent voting for static characters whose only differences are their external appearances (which makes the game fairer in multiplayer matches).

Responsive maps vs. static maps: Players overwhelmingly (89.09 percent) prefer responsive maps that may change over the course of gameplay (for example, a hole gets blown in a wall or a building collapses).

Story-based single player vs. arcade-style single player: When asked whether they preferred a single player mode with characters and a story or an arcade-style single player mode that just focuses on fun carnage, voters so far definitely prefer the game to tell a story (87.71 percent).

Large-scale battles vs. small-scale battles: Do players want Battlefield style engagements, with huge maps, vehicles, and long range engagements, or Call of Duty style smaller maps that are more focused on speed and foot battles? Voters so far prefer the former (82.74 percent).

Varied actions vs. traditional actions: Players have thus far indicated that they’d prefer playable characters to have varied actions (running, crouching, walking, creeping, assassinations, etc.), rather than have a game with fewer actions that’s more focused on pure speed and skill (83.9 percent to 16.09 percent).

Character classes vs. All-around warriors: Voters are split on whether they want different character classes with different skill sets (for example, a medic whose stats are geared towards healing, a heavy whose stats are geared towards causing maximum damage, etc.) or characters who are equally capable of doing anything so long as they have the right equipment, with the former option thus far garnering 46.98 percent of the vote and the latter 53.01 percent of it.

Upgradeable guns vs. standard weapons: Having ‘standard’ guns that can’t be upgraded ensures fairness and emphasizes the differences between each weapon, but so far gamers still prefer weapons that can be modded and upgraded, with 83.73 percent of respondents voting for that option.

As you can see, some of these options certainly indicate that not much work has yet been done on the game beyond the apparent creation of a new game engine (for example, the fact that Netease is asking if gamers prefer a story mode or an arcade mode for single player would seem to indicate developers haven’t really started work on the single player sections of the game yet).

We’re not completely certain that Netease is totally committed to abiding by these votes, and we’re hoping to hear back from the company soon with more details about how the game will be designed. If major design decisions like this really are being crowd-sourced, that would seem to be an industry first, but I wonder whether it will make for a good game. There is always the risk that when you try to please everyone you end up pleasing no one, and the crowd-sourced approach to design could certainly lead to a Frankenstein-style final product with lots of interesting bits but no cohesive whole. Either way, it’s a fascinating idea and we’re going to pry as much detail as we can out of Netease about it, so stay tuned!

Image via Reuters

I’m beginning to think we might as well just consider Huawei and ZTE, given that they seem to pop up together constantly in the news. And, unfortunately for both companies, it’s never something good. When we last checked in with the dynamic duo it was because they were (and still are) under investigation by Indian Intelligence authorities, and now there’s more bad news for the Chinese telecoms in the form of this Reuters report suggesting the European Union may levy trade duties against Huawei and ZTE over what it considers to be illegal subsidies from the Chinese government.

Needless to say, Huawei and ZTE don’t see it that way and deny any wrongdoing. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei told reporters on Wednesday:

We hope the EU can proceed from the standpoint of protecting the stable development of trade relations with China and not make promises to undertake protectionist measures or adopt restrictive measures.

I have a feeling that having an official government spokesperson step in to defend the companies is not going to help dissuade the EU or anyone else that Huawei and ZTE are entirely too closely tied with the Chinese government. And indeed, the EU is apparently as concerned about security as the US and India are:

An internal EU report last year recommended that the 27-member bloc should take action against Chinese telecoms equipment makers as their increasing dominance of mobile networks made them a threat to security as well as to home-grown companies.

The increased scrutiny bodes poorly for both Huawei and ZTE, as both companies do significant business overseas, although ZTE is probably worse off since it is already losing boatloads of money. But the concerns expressed by lawmakers in the US, India, and the E.U. should give the companies pause — if they’ve managed to scare three of the world’s biggest markets on three separate continents, perhaps there really is something wrong with the way they conduct business.

Or perhaps it’s just a PR problem. Certainly neither company could be accused of having mastered international public relations, and the occasional revelations that they’re doing things like working with the Iranian government on “big brother” domestic spy equipment haven’t helped. As I pointed out above, it also isn’t helping when the Chinese government jumps to their defense — all that does is reinforce the perception that it’s a de facto state-run company, even though that’s not the case. Obviously Huawei and ZTE can’t really control what the government says, but if China wants its tech brands to succeed abroad, it might want to consider letting them sink or swim on their own, because the current method clearly isn’t working very well.

(via Reuters)

Jimmy Rim, CEO at K Cube Ventures

Born in Korea and graduated from KAIST, a well-known engineering college in Korea, JimmyRim is the CEO of K Cube Ventures, an early stage fund founded in April 2012. At 32, Jimmy is perhaps the youngest CEO at a venture capital firm in Korea.

He first started working at NHN in 2003, seeing the company grow from 800 to 2500 people by 2005. To gain more experience, Jimmy joined Boston Consulting Group for a year from 2005 to 2006. Following that, he had a five-year stint at Softbank Ventures where Jimmy made a name for himself in Korea venture capital world. At Softbank Ventures, Jimmy made around 15 investments that resulted in three IPOs, one M&A, and some companies raising funds with much higher valuations. One of the 15 companies he picked is SundayToz, the maker of Anipang, a mobile game that was hugely popular in Korea.

Perhaps the deal that got Jimmy connected with Kakao and eventual tech luminary Brian Kim was Lotiple. Lotiple (made up of the words: location, time, and people) was a startup that did real-time coupon service and Jimmy invested $1 million even before the product was out in the market. He told me:

They are like the best engineers in Korea, top tier talents, seven of them from KAIST. Three of them competed at ACM-ICPC, a global competition for hackers, they went there and became the finalists. […] I invested right after they incorporated the company.

Lotiple was founded in 2011 May and by 2011 October, Kakao bought the company, not for the service but for the talents. Brian was surprised to learn that Jimmy invested in a company that didn’t even have a product ready. For Jimmy, it was simple: he invests in people, the team. He shared:

Team is my first priority. A lot of people say that team is first but there aren’t a lot of people doing that. […] The conventional investors invest after the product launches and see the data and even ask for revenue and business model.

Brian was impressed, set up a new $10 million venture capital fund, pulled Jimmy over and made him the CEO of K Cube Ventures. Jimmy said:

How could I imagine anyone would make me the CEO of a venture capital? Even though I have a good track record I was relatively new with five to six years of experience. Brian Kim is unique too, how could he bet on me?

But it happened, which makes Jimmy the youngest CEO running a VC firm in Korea. K Cube Ventures now follows Jimmy’s invest-in-people philosophy. Having invested in 12 companies in ten months, nine companies were invested even before they had a product. It was the team that Jimmy is looking out for. Jimmy also says that K Cube Ventures’ portfolio companies bond together like a family. Every month, the companies will gather in one place to share knowledge, network, and test each other’s services.

It’s a huge value. Because each of the portfolio companies has different expertise to share. They feel bonded as a community and we don’t invest in competing services.

In general, Jimmy is positive about Korea’s tech scene. Back in 2007, he said that big companies like NHN and Daum wouldn’t even want to meet or get involved with startups. But in last couple of years, the momentum has changed and it is looking positive as more exits start to happen in Korea.

This rumor comes to us, as many do, from Sina Tech’s “knowledgable” sources, and should be taken with a grain of salt until it has been announced by Alibaba (the company does not comment on rumors). Supposedly, the idea is, among other things, that the box could lead to TV-based e-commerce. But as Xiaomi learned last fall, offering a set-top box requires a government license that can only come through a mandatory partnership with a few state-approved media providers, so if Alibaba is serious about the project it will need to partner up with one of them.

But the bigger hurdle might be Aliyun OS itself, which despite massive investment from Alibaba hasn’t really taken off as the Android competitor the company hoped it could become. At present, it’s not really clear what consumers would get out of Alibaba’s set-top box that they couldn’t get from many of the other available offerings, and I’m skeptical that people really want to do much shopping on their TV sets. But I’ve been known to be wrong, and betting against Alibaba often proves unwise, so who knows. If Ali really is working on a set-top box, it’s definitely something to watch for.

(via Sina Tech)

Mr. Kang Hyunbin, head of business office at Line Plus Corp

Popular mobile messaging chat app Line was created by NHN Japan, with Japanese and Korean team inspired by the tragic earthquake that happened in Japan in 2011. When SMS and calls were unreliable during the disaster, data messaging became the primary mode of communication.

As Line’s popularity grew, the app was spun-off in February this year into the Line Corp subsidiary. Besides facilitating chats between users, it has truly become a mobile platform incorporating different digital content including games and manga. Growing to 150 million users in less than two years hasn’t been easy. One of the reasons why Line has been able to grow so rapidly was because it has listened closely to its users’ needs. At NHN’s headquarters in Seoul, Korea, Kang Hyunbin, who is the head of business office at Line Plus Corp, told me:

I think users in Japan and the users in the world actually provide us the reason why we develop Line and what [way] to develop Line. Our users are kinda our co-founders.

Line characters and content

Hyunbin also believes that Line’s success hinges hugely on its rich content and user interface. For example Line users can express themselves with more than just words – there are the stickers that I would call an upgraded version of emoticons, and they have been hugely popular in Asia. Line has been extremely smart in developing different personalities for each of its sticker characters.

Starting with Cony, Brown, Moon, and James, these characters, who each represent different personalities, have been a huge hit in Asia. In Japan, Line’s kawaii characters are broadcast on TV in cartoon form and can also be found for sale as plush toys, T-shirts, and other merchandise. Take the pictured screenshot as an example. Expressing our sincere goodbyes to friends using stickers can be that fun.

Line also has games to entertain its users. One of its more popular games, Line Pop, is popular not just in Japan but also Thailand and Taiwan. So much so that it even has tutorial videos on tips and tricks to get more points.

Hyunbin told me that Line’s recently released manga content has been successful in Japan and the company has plans to bring it to other parts of the world.

Line outside of Japan

Line Japan focuses on the local Japanese market while the Korean headquarters focuses on international expansion. The ambitious chat application has been aggressively expanding to China, Vietnam, and Indonesia recently using both online and offline marketing tactics.

Chatting up China

Hyunbin says that Line’s China user base has grown rapidly despite early days. He explained further:

So far, we have established the basic infrastructure that we can do some more in the mainlaind China market. For example, Google Play doesn’t work in mainland China. So we have [to work with] a lot of third-party Android market. We have to modify our ‘apk’ files to suit into these third party markets […] and attract more users to download [Line].

Besides making adjustments to its Android distribution in China, Hyunbin says that Line’s cute stickers are getting many Chinese users on board. Line even introduced customized panda stickers to suit the local tastes and has also worked with local partners like Tmall and Mogujie to set up official accounts on Line.

Line’s plan in China is to target working women who are aged 20 to 30 in ‘tier one’ cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Hyunbin explains that the characteristics of these users are very fashion sensitive. So it is only natural to work with Chinese e-commerce sites with fashion products such as Tmall and Mogujie. Hyunbin also said that Line hasn’t started to do any large scale promotion in China as the company is still trying to understand the market better such as the media structure and user requirements.

The user-base number isn’t big in China but we have a growth trend plus our own effort, which we are going to plan in the future. I have confidence that we do have more aggressive numbers coming soon that we can reach in the future.

Tencent’s WeChat – called Weixin in China – is the clear market leader there.

Thailand, Indonesia, Spain, and more

Unlike China, Line dominates Thailand with more than 15 million users from the country. In Thailand, Line noticed a familiar trend: Users simply love their stickers. “Again, the one big phenomenon in the Thai market is that users can express themselves really well using Line’s stickers,” said Hyunbin.

Line acknowledges that Thailand is a big market for them. In the future, it is looking to introduce Line branded merchandise in Thailand and also more localized content including Thai-language content such as news, manga, and celebrity accounts. Hyunbin is also open to work with local Thai-based game developers who are able to build games with a regional vision.

Besides China and Thailand, Line has been very active in Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, The Philippines, and also the Spanish-speaking markets. Hyunbin explains that the popularity of Line in Spain has helped Line to organically grow in South American markets which mostly communicate in Spanish. In Spain, Line already has more than 12 million users.

Hyunbin highlighted that Indonesia is a key market for Line in Southeast Asia, stating the rapid growth in smartphone usage could signify that more people will be consuming mobile applications and content in the future. Based on Line’s internal data, it claims that it is the most popular chat application by user count.

The company declined to reveal user numbers for country-specific breakdowns, but said that out of 150 million users, 45 million of them are from Japan. So 70 percent of Line’s users are outside of Japan.

“We have no time to be worried about IPO.”

As Line grows into a giant mobile platform, there is more and more content on the mobile chat application. Hyunbin acknowledges that there could be a case where Line users (just like Facebook is experiencing now) may find the service complicated and overloaded with content. The team is careful with that and is constantly trying to simplify its features. On content selection, Line picks content to suit the local market, ensuring that they are relevant for its users. Hyunbin gave me a case in point:

For example in e-commerce there are global big players. But in each market, there are also local key players. In some ways, we [would like] to partner with the local companies to bring the best experience to users in specific markets.

When I asked when Line will go public, Hyunbin says that the company has no plans for that, saying that users are still their top priority. Jin-woo Lee, head of Line’s Southeast Asia team added:

A lot of people think that Line is quite big already. But if you take a look at the growth rate, in a year or two, we can be two or three times bigger than now. It all depends on expansion first. We need to create a bigger user-base then everything will be quite natural for an IPO. We have no time to be worried about IPO.

In Line’s first quarterly financial results that came out last week, the subsidiary revealed that it recorded $58 million in revenue in Q4.

Content in Vietnam is a wasteland. Most of the nation’s users are flocking to forums where most of the content is being generated. For the past four years or so, much of the user-generated content has been on forums like Kenh14, a general board with topics spannng lifestyle to sports to fashion, and which is owned by internet juggernaut VC Corp. It has long been one of the hottest places to get on the Vietnamese internet. I’ve heard on the grapevine that it gets anywhere from 2.5 million to four million unique visits per day. On the other side, there’s the more niche forum Web Tre Tho which has over one million users who are mostly women.

(UPDATE: It has come to my attention from VC Corp, that it is not exactly a forum in the traditional sense. But it is still a central place in which people comment and talk about modern day issues according to topic, some consider this to be a “forum”, others not. Also, I want to clarify that “Content is a wasteland” does not mean Vietnam’s content is bad, but means that it is not organized very well, especially the user-generated type.)

To me, this forum-obsessed internet (common across most of developing Asia) is holding back richer content models like could be something more like Quora, Reddit, Digg, Wikipedia, and more. This is why HaiVL is one of my absolute favorite startups in Vietnam, because they’ve cracked a content problem. In just one year, with one developer, the site has achieved two million unique visits per day, which could mean anywhere from 30 to 60 million per month. That’s impressive for a team of just 5 people.

Hai, literally means “comical”, “funny” or “hilarious”. And that’s the prime focus of the website. It’s a platform for users to throw up funny images (or videos, which make up for 1/10 of posts) that they found or created and other users can like or comment on them. Users are uploading 3,000 to 4,000 photos per day. It’s a spitting image of 9gag (which currently gets 65 million uniques per month). And HaiVL’s got serious traction. I spoke to Vo Thanh Quang, co-founder and CEO of AppVL, the small company that is totally focused on HaiVL, their main product. He said:

We didn’t expect the kind of growth that we now have. At first, I just started out alone, and after not doing Place.vn which didn’t totally take off. Then suddenly, I started to see huge growth and had to hire a team to deal with our scaling. Now, today, we’re already running a profitable business with stable revenue.

The HaiVL team has also built apps for Android and iOS which respectively both got about 50,000 views per day, and 700,000 downloads in total. The majority of the users are within the 17 to 30 age range. And HaiVL’s revenue comes from ads. The key growth has been on Facebook, where they’e got over 1.5 million ‘likes’ on their fanpage. In fact, HaiVL is very closely tied to Facebook since users can only post if they have a Facebook account, and much of their early growth can be attributed to engaging Facebook heavily. But today, of their two million unique hits, 50 percent of them come directly. That means it’s seeping steadily into the consciousness of Vietnamese netizens. In the future:

We’re looking at just staying really focused and growing our userbase to 10 million unique visits per day. We also just added an editing function so that users can edit their photos online. That’s a long way off, and getting there will take time, especially since our growth up to now has been largely linear.

Another cool thing about HaiVL, is you start to see a new face of Vietnam. Although it’s about funny images, users often post very supportive images about poverty or the environment that also get lots of upvotes. The average popular image gets about 500 upvotes. As far as censorship goes, in case you were wondering, HaiVL does have a policy to take down any content that is politically sensitive or porn/nudity. Any user who violates these rules gets booted from the site within 30 minutes, their content gets taken down, and the user is not allowed to post ever again.

I think this is a really cool startup to look out for, mainly because it’s pushing Vietnam’s content space to the next level. We’ll keep you posted when they hit their next million.

China’s biggest web company by revenue has just posted its Q1 2013 financial report. Tencent (HKG:0700) reports rocketing revenues and profits for the whole group, which covers products across social media, gaming, advertising, e-commerce, media, and more. Tencent’s quarterly revenues hit US$2.161 billion, up 11.5 percent on Q4 last year, and up 40.4 percent from the same period last year; net profits reached $649.4 million in Q1, up 17.3 percent QoQ or 37.4 percent YoY.

Tencent makes China’s biggest social export, WeChat. In today’s report, the company revealed that it now has nearly 195 million monthly active users on the social messaging app (194.4 million to be precise); that’s up 23.1 percent on the previous quarter, which is up 228.4 percent in a year. WeChat has over 300 million registered users, and is likely to exceed 400 million some time this month. As we noted last week, WeChat’s significant number of active users puts it close to surpassing Whatsapps’s 200 million actives, though about 90 percent of WeChat’s user-base is within mainland China, so it’s not that much of a global success yet.

Other social numbers:

• QQ instant messenger hit 825.4 million monthly active users, up 9.8 percent on Q1 2012. QQ’s peak simultaneous users reached 173.0 million, which was down 3.3 percent across the year.
• Qzone, the broader social network around QQ, got up to 611 million monthly actives, up 5.9 percent in a year.
• QQ Game Platform saw peak simultaneous users of 9.2 million, up 5.9 percent over the same period.

In other financial data, value-added services accounted for 78.7 percent of revenues in Q1 this year, reaching $1.72 billion. That’s up 13.6 percent from the last quarter. Online gaming revenues increased 19.3 percent over the same period to amount to $1.21 billion. That was mostly down to China-area gamers on things like Crossfire, and was boosted by increased gaming activity during Chinese New Year.

Founder, chairman, and CEO Pony Ma says in today’s report:

During the first quarter of 2013, we saw broad-based growth in user engagement and revenue across our key activities. This growth has enabled us to fund investments in longer-term opportunities such as WeChat international user acquisition, online video content aggregation, and e-commerce footprint expansion, while maintaining a healthy expansion rate in earnings and cash flow. We saw both strategic and financial benefits from our portfolio of investee companies, including a further special dividend from Mail.ru.

We will continue to invest proactively in innovation and technology, and to cultivate our open platform, in order to capture the mobile opportunities ahead and strengthen our position as the leading internet platform company in China.

WeChat hasn’t really been monetized so far, but Tencent will soon endow it with social gaming integration similar to what has been done by rival apps Line and KakaoTalk.

Find the full report on Tencent’s investor relations page.

The newest earnings report from SingTel (SGX:T48) makes for painful reading. The giant Singapore-based telco, which has over 420 million subscribers on numerous networks across Asia-Pacific, saw its first full year drop in revenues for 14 years in today’s stats for Q4 and FY 2012. The only ray of light comes from SingTel’s digital business, which saw a 156 percent rise in revenues. Perhaps inspired by this, SingTel will set aside US$1.6 billion for startup acquisitions so as to find “next-generation growth engines in the digital space”.

That $1.6 billion investment will be spread over the next three years, and will be largely ploughed into strategic acquisitions in the online space that can tie in with SingTel’s phone services across the region.

Indeed, we’ve already seen SingTel doing this over the past couple of years, having acquired the mobile ad company Amobee for $321 million, snapped up the food recommendation startup HungryGoWhere, and made investments in things like TheMobileGamer. Plus the telco has a VC arm called SingTel Innov8 that has made lots of significant investments across the region. The most recent one was in the China-based mobile game developer and publisher Yodo1.

Profits down

Getting back to SingTel’s latest numbers, net profit fell 12 percent year-on-year to s$3.51 billion ($2.83 billion) at the end of March 2013. Group revenue fell 3.4 percent to S$18.18 billion ($14.66 billion) for the full year.

SingTel wholly owns Australia’s Optus, and has significant stakes in telcos like India’s Bharti, Philippines’ Globe, and several others.

See more financial data on the SingTel IR homepage or on ZDnet.

(Hat-tip to ZDnet for spotting this)

Using a smartphone is a very sensual and immersive experience, but so far our sense of smell has been left out of the fun. Not any more. A Japanese startup has created and is looking to launch ChatPerf, a hardware add-on for your iPhone that can emit smells.

The ChatPerk gadget (see the video below) could be synced up with various apps or games to emit specific odors at a certain time – such as the smell of burning rubber in a racing game, the scent of coffee to wake you up in conjunction with an alarm app, or to blast some soothing incense as you use a yoga app. I’m sure we can imagine some cruder smells that could be honked out as well.

ChatPerk is just a prototype for now, and the demo video below reveals that it looks very different to the conceptual designs on the startup’s homepage, so perhaps it’s all far from finalized. The biggest barrier to this being used extensively it that it cannot, inevitably, create scents magically from the ether, and so it requires the use of miniature plastic tanks of perfumes. That sounds a bit fiddly and troublesome.

A version of ChatPerk for Android is in the works, but there’s no indicated launch time or price yet for either that or the iPhone add-on. Check out the demo video shot by Diginfo.tv over the weekend:

(Source: Diginfo.tv)

Here are the newest rankings and China market share (where available) data from Canalys:

• 1st: Samsung, with 20 percent market share
• 2nd: Coolpad
• 3rd: Huawei
• 4th: Lenovo
• 5th: Apple, with eight percent market share

Samsung (005930:KS) and Apple are the only non-domestic brands in the top ten, continuing a trend that’s been going on for a couple of years. Canalys notes that 68 percent of all shipments within China are from domestic brands. Lenovo (HKG:0992) is aiming to outsell Samsung within China in the near future.

In contrast to the 82 million smartphones shipped in China (yes, Canalys focuses on units shipped, which admitedly doesn’t correlate with devices bought; many might be still sitting on shelves or in warehouses), the US market saw 27 million smartphones shifted.

For a rough idea of actual units sold, it’s worth noting that Samsung sold 30 million of its phones in China in 2012.

(Source: Macworld/IDG News)

I wrote about Vietnam’s food delivery landscape earlier this month, and already there are some new developments in the space. Today, Rocket Internet is finally bringing Vietnam into the branding fold by changing the name of its own food delivery service from Hungrypanda to Foodpanda.

The rebranding just means that the previous domain, Hungrypanda.vn that Vietnamese users have been going to for their deliveries will be shooting over to Foodpanda.vn. As Don Phan, the managing director at Foodpanda says:

We are excited to be now part of the global Foodpanda movement. The rebrand and our new, big partners take us further towards becoming Vietnam’s leading food delivery service. For our customers, we want to provide the best and most convenient way of ordering food.

The rebranding also comes along with the announcement that Foodpanda.vn has now integrated Gloria Jean’s Coffees, NYDC, BreadTalk, Tokyo Deli, and Subway onto their list of deliverables.

Despite the three big factors of uniting with the international brand, getting a huge infusion of cash, and getting some new restaurants on their online menu, Foodpanda is still going to have to work hard to deal with local incumbents, Eat.vn and Vietnammm, which have been in the market since 2011. So I wouldn’t say Foodpanda is on top of the Vietnamese market yet – it still got some way to go. That being said, Rocket’s two other big, Southeast Asia-oriented e-commerce properties, Lazada and Zalora, have been outspending local e-commerce sites in Vietnam and seeing huge growth spurts. The same is true for the chat apps like KakaoTalk, Zalo, and Line, who have seen huge user increases as they’ve upped their spending on television ads and visibility in the country. With a product as simple and consumer-scalable as food delivery, is it a matter of time before Foodpanda steamrolls the local incumbents? We’ll see.

Last week we reported that Foodpanda raised over $20 million to expand across Asia. It already operates in nine Asian countries.

WeiboSuite should prove an invaluable tool for China researchers and journalists who don’t speak Chinese but still want to keep track of what’s happening on China’s most happening social network. Obviously, with billions of posts, WeiboSuite hasn’t — and cannot — translate every single post into English, but it indexes and auto-translates the 1,000 most recent deleted posts, which makes it valuable for journalists who generally only need to see recent posts anyway. For example, when I searched for “Tibet,” WeiboSuite turned up an interesting post from yesterday alleging that there was a fairly major anti-government protest in Naqu Biru County in Tibet on Sunday.

WeiboSuite also includes an image-to-text translator that should be effective in helping journalists deal with those pesky “long weibo” posts that include long sections of text uploaded as an image to circumvent Weibo’s character limit (not to mention its keyword blocks).

Finally, WeiboSuite also comes with an image splitter. Weibo users often upload multiple photos in one long image, and while that format is convenient for Weibo it’s not great for other platforms. WeiboSuite’s image splitter helpfully breaks those images down into separate image files for each photo without the need for any editing software or tiresome cropping.

In short, WeiboSuite is an awesome tool for journalists or anyone with an interest in following what’s going on on Weibo. My hat is off to the team at Hong Kong University that created these tools; they have really done something quite cool here.

(via SCMP)

Internet cafe or fight club?

Last week, an argument between some patrons at a Chinese internet cafe ended in violence when one man smashed another in the face with an empty beer bottle. The victim was hospitalized; the aggressor arrested. The sum they were arguing over? 1 RMB ($0.15).

The dispute arose when internet cafe cashier Song Na accidentally charged a Mr. Cui’s card with 1 RMB more than he had paid. Since her wages are only 30 RMB per day ($4.76) and her boss deducts any errors from her wages, she sought out Cui in the cafe to ask him to return 1 RMB. Cui was playing games with his friend Jin and Jin’s girlfriend, and he refused to return the money, saying that she hadn’t charged his card with any extra money. An argument started, Song’s husband ran in to defend her, blows were exchanged, and the parties were ultimately pulled apart relatively unscathed. Song and her husband gave up on getting the 1 RMB back, and Cui and his friends left the cafe.

But Cui’s friend Jin apparently couldn’t get over the conflict, and doubled back to the cafe, grabbing an empty beer bottle along the way. He came up behind Song’s husband as he was getting onto his bike, tapped him on the shoulder, and then smashed him in the face with the beer bottle when he turned around.

In the subsequent interrogation with police, Cui and Jin said that the initial dispute arose in part because they were right in the middle of playing a game and Song had asked them to stop, putting them in a bad mood. Jin also said that Song had cursed at his girlfriend, which pissed him off. Cui was released after a 500 RMB ($79) fine, but Jin has been detained by police. Song’s husband, meanwhile, was hospitalized and racked up a significant medical bill.

Internet cafes are a great way for people without the resources to buy their own computers to access the web, but they can also be a breeding ground for violent disputes, including murders, and they’ve also proved a good hunting ground for pedophiles and serial killers. I have argued before that China’s internet cafes are not a good place for children, and violent disputes like last week’s bottle-smashing certainly seem to support that hypothesis.

But I also wonder whether internet cafe owners might be better off investing in some security, or alternatively whether they’re something that Chinese police ought to keep a closer eye on. Granted, disputes like this happen all over the place in a country as large as China, but perhaps because of the dark, smoky atmosphere or the often-tired patrons who’ve been gaming for hours on end, internet cafes seem to be particularly fertile soil for conflict. I continue to believe China would be well-served if the government offered some better-lit, better-policed alternatives to internet cafes.

(via QQ Games)

Credit: blog.laptopmag.com

I remember a few years ago that there was this constant rumor that Blackberry was going to allow its popular Blackberry Messenger (BBM) service onto the other platforms like Android and iOS. While a lot of people really hoped that it was true, realists were arguing that Blackberry would never do something like that. Why? Because the main thing that keeps people from ditching their Blackberry phones is BBM. But last night, Blackberry dropped a bomb by announcing that BBM will be available on iOS and Android this summer. What does this mean to a lot of Blackberry users in Indonesia? Relief and utter happiness, I believe.

I took some time to ask a few of my friends about what their thoughts were about Blackberry’s latest decision, and none of them said that they’re going to appreciate the Canadian company’s gesture by buying the Blackberry 10 devices. Quite the opposite, they were all very relieved that they will no longer have a reason to shoulder the burden of carrying their Blackberry phones. (From what I can see, people over on Twitter seem to feel this way too).

While CEO Thorsten Heins said this move is a “statement of confidence,” he might need to consult a different analyst. As much as people are using Blackberry phones in Indonesia, a lot of them are hating the handset’s experience. The legacy handsets that they’re using crash and need to be restarted on a regular basis, and the OS is laggy. A lot of Indonesian users are coping by using another handset, often an Android device, at the same time. But using multiple devices every day isn’t a pleasant experience either.

Granted, a lot of my friends haven’t used the Blackberry 10 device. Of those who have, quite a few of them are very happy with it. But now that BBM will no longer be exclusive to Blackberry handsets, why would anyone want to purchase a Z10 over a Samsung Galaxy S4 or an iPhone 5? The three handsets are in the same price range, and when it comes to customers’ confidence, the latter two brands have a better track record for customer satisfaction.

Looking over to see what the rest of Indonesians feel about Blackberry’s latest decision on Twitter, I found a tweet which summarizes an interesting irony quite well. It is written in Indonesian, translated to English it says:

It’s BBM news, but the trending topic [in Indonesia] is iOS and Android.

Multi-platform BBM won’t arrive for a few months, but after hearing this news, many Indonesians will be happier than ever to purchase other devices even before the upcoming Blackberry Q10 and Q5 will be released, because they know that they can soon bring their BBM contacts onto any device.

I have to give credit to Blackberry though for having the guts to go through with this move. I predict that the platform will still be the king when it comes to physical QWERTY keypad devices. But if people are looking to get their hands on phones with big screens, then Blackberry will definitely have a tough time competing.

• AppSocially (Japan) – Make your app’s Viral Loop awesome with an API that lets you track activity and conversion – allowing you to take action using customer data.
• Binpress (Israel) – We increase adoption of open-source in SMBs and Enterprises.
• Credii (India) – We arm businesses with all the intelligence they need to make smart software and service choices.
• Dakwak (Jordan) – Effortless website translation technology.
• GreenGar (Vietnam) – Seamless real-time collaboration on mobile devices. We’re building a platform that enables apps to intuitively connect people together. (We have covered GreenGar a couple times before here on Tech in Asia)
• PopApp (Taiwan) – App to fast sketch app prototypes.
• PriceBaba (India) – PriceBaba is a product (re)search engine that lets you shop in your vicinity. (Frequent readers may recall we had a rundown of PriceBaba here on Tech in Asia back in January)
• School Admissions (India) – Making school admissions and education tension-free. Disrupting the process of choosing the right school for your child and parents.
• Seat 14a (India) – A complete and affordable ensemble for the discerning man every week.
• Tamatem (Jordan) – Tamatem is a mobile gaming development studio and publisher focused on creating culturally relevant games for the huge unaddressed Arabic gaming market.
• Tushky (India) – Self-service online platform to monetize free time by offering interesting activities.
• WHILL (Japan) – Next generation of personal mobility for wheelchair users and the elderly.

Phew, that’s a lot of Asia (and yes, Jordan and Israel are both in Asia). I’m sure after reading through a list like that you’re ready for some relaxation, so check out this somewhat awkward “Thrift Shop” parody video the latest batch of 500 Startups companies has put together (includes some NSFW language):

(via 500 Startups)

We are reviewing our business to optimize our global game development operations through a process of selection and concentration, and this has led us to the difficult decision to close our China office and studio. GREE Beijing has developed several excellent games and the talented people who made up its staff have made a valuable contribution to GREE. We regret that we have had to make this closure and wish all the best to everyone affected.

Japan’s GREE has been a dominant force in mobile games on its home turf, and over the past few years has overseen an aggressive expansion overseas. But late last year the company was forced to lay off employees at its North American office, and now it has apparently shuttered its China branch completely.

We have contacted GREE for comment on this story and will update it if we hear back.

According to an internal announcement at GREE China yesterday (as reported by Sina Tech), the branch will totally cease operations on June 28th, and all of its employees will be laid off. The company has not yet announced a compensation plan for employees, but it should have plenty of time to roll something out over the next month and a half before the shutdown actually takes place.

The reason for GREE China’s demise — and the company’s declining fortunes in general — is generally believed to be its failure to recognize and commit to the global movement towards smartphones quickly enough. 60 percent of GREE’s revenue is still coming from feature phone users, but feature phone users are getting scarcer and the company has not carved out a dominant position as a smartphone gaming platform on either Android or iOS.

Of course, this is not to say the company is about to collapse. GREE is still projecting a net profit of around $300 million this quarter, but then again, if the company’s projections are correct it will be the first time since 2008 that GREE has seen its profits drop. It seems likely that given this shift, the company has decided to concentrate on its strengths on its home turf of Japan and reduce the degree to which it’s extended overseas. That’s probably a smart business move, but it’s a bummer for everyone working in the GREE China office.

Related: GREE’s founding story

(via Sina Tech)

Malaysia’s media giant Catcha Media Berhad and social news network Says.com have today shaken hands and agreed on a $20 million merger to form a digital advertising business under their combined wing.

The merger will see Says.com and Catch Media subsidiaries enjoy a combined reach of 9.78 million Malaysians each month, which represents about 30 percent of Malaysia’s population. Catcha Media’s publishing business includes 15 magazine titles while Says.com serves over 80 brands including Nike and Coca-Cola which highlight both companies’ media dominance in the country.

Patrick Grove, CEO of Catcha Media Berhad explained more about the merger:

This new company offers a tremendous opportunity to dominate the future of digital marketing in Malaysia by pairing two clear leaders in the space in a manner that creates a holistic and complete solution for any brand looking to ride the crest of the new media wave. We intend to expand this business regionally and the expected profitability of this merged entity should make us able to consider an IPO within the coming 12 months.”

Says.com was co-founded by entrepreneur Khailee Ng who previously founded Groupsmore, a Malaysia-based deals site that was acquired by Groupon in 2011.

(Image credit)

We’ve seen all kinds of social fashion startups crop up in Asia in the past couple of years. One of the newest is Zoolook, created by a team of six people that’s split evenly between Tokyo and Hong Kong. This particular app focuses on the social and photography side of clothing, and is made up of a social network were people can share and tag their favorite looks (pictured below).

One big draw in the app, explains Zoolook founder Benoit Lavaud, is the presence of top fashion labels who have virtual “showrooms”, not dissimilar from Facebook brand pages, within the social network. This feature is being used by over 60 regional but prominent fashion companies, such as Kenzo, and… er… lots of others that I won’t pretend I know. But I’ve heard of Kenzo. For more clued-up fashionistas, the app is a way to keep up with trends, share their looks, and get inspiration from the numerous Asian fashion bloggers who also make use of the startup’s service.

Benoit explains this strategy to us:

Brands are quite lost in terms of promotion now that digital has entered their landscape. They lack resources to manage at same time in-store promotion and digital promotion. We have entered this category where they feel we do the job of connecting bloggers and influencers for both real and digital.

Zoolook is also working the floor at offline events in this sector, and was recently selected as the official app of the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Tokyo. Readers in Hong Kong might want to check out Zoolook’s ‘live fashion snap’ event on Thursday (16th) evening at 6pm at Apple’s Causeway Bay store. Benoit explains what’s going to be happening that night:

We have invited over 20 top bloggers and Hong Kong Fashion icons to come and be snapped by Stephenie Kay, a Chinese fashion photographer. We setup a photo booth and a stage in the store and gather fashionistas to watch how Stephenie master photography snapping these influencers using an iPhone and our app. Very unique to be able to organize such a gathering in an Apple Store.

The Zoolook iPhone app is here, while the Android version is still in the works.

Kakao, the maker of Korean mobile chat app, KakaoTalk, has launched KakaoHome a launcher for Android users. At first glance, it feels a little like “Facebook Home” type of application but it is not.

From what we understood so far, users can pull out KakaoHome from the left side of their Android home screen which displays notifications from KakaoTalk, KakaoStory, games and more.

Good news is that, by default, KakaoHome doesn’t invade your lock and home screen entirely. Facebook Home does that which is a little annoying. Though you can turn it off through settings.

Other than that, like any other Android launcher, KakaoHome helps users tidy their mobile apps, such as in alphabetical order, order of downloads, or in your own personalized orders. Users can also choose over 100 free design themes to decorate its Android devices’ wallpaper, app icons, widgets, and page slide effects.

Kakao’s Android Launcher is social. But it is only useful if you and your network of friends are on KakaoTalk. So launching KakaoHome in Korea is perhaps a good first move since most of its 90 million users originate there. But other than Korea, I can’t see KakaoHome thriving in other countries. Unless, of course, if KakaoTalk has proven to be successful abroad.

Kakao has been pretty aggressive pushing KakaoTalk in Indonesia and Vietnam but also faces competition from Line and WeChat who are also eyeing the same market.

(Also read: How KakaoTalk Grew From a Startup to a Giant Mobile Platform)

Today payment service MOL announced its partnership with Indonesian mini-mart retailer Alfamart, Alfamidi, and Lawson. Starting today, gamers can purchase MOLPoints’ game vouchers at those markets, which in total have over one thousand branches spread all over Indonesia.

In Indonesia, MOLPoints is considered a payment gateway for purchasing Facebook game credits. In fact, the payment service company claims that it sells the cheapest Facebook credits compared to the other Facebook credit sellers in the country. It is still cheaper to purchase the credits directly with credit card, but if you don’t have one in Indonesia, then MOL should be at the top of your mind.

MOL has also partnered with several entities in selling its game vouchers including online payment store partners like i-Pay and Gudang Voucher, as well as telcos Indosat and Telkom Indonesia.

Talking about MOL’s Southeast Asian market

As MOL CEO Ganesh told us that Indonesia is the company’s top priority this year, I dug deeper into the reason by speaking with MOL representatives Rivai Adidharma and Jaka Kristandi. They confirmed that Indonesia will be the most important market for the company, alongside Brazil. Both countries have a huge population as well as a lot of gamers. Rivai explained that India, though it has larger population, doesn’t have many gamers.

In terms of revenue in Southeast Asia, MOL’s biggest revenues come from Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia. Particularly for Malaysia, the ones generating the highest ARPU there are the Chinese gamers playing Chinese language games. While Indonesia hasn’t generated that much ARPU, its number of users is quite impressive. Though it was not revealed how many of MOL’s users are Indonesian, Rivai and Jaka said that out of its 700,000 global Facebook fans, around 400,000 of them are Indonesians. The Indonesian fan page is also picking up growth with 79,000 likes.

Interestingly, MOL consistently earns its biggest revenue in Indonesia from Facebook credit sales. But there are times when voucher sales from just one game can beat even the rest of the other MOL games. That game is Crystal Legacy. One other game which sells a lot alongside Crystal Legacy is Voomga’s Mythic Saga. MOL’s highest ARPU in Indonesia is derived from the MMORPG users.

Rivai also revealed that MOL has around 2.7 million users in all of its 12 country markets. And out of all of them, a staggering 2.1 million people are active monthly users of MOL. The payment service company has been very aggressive in building its regional presence recently. Last month, MOL acquired 50 percent stake at Vietnamese online payment gateway NganLuong, and acquired another payment service company in Indonesia called AyoPay the previous month. Its movement has been felt in countries such as Turkey, Australia, and New Zealand too. This is all geared toward bringing the company closer to a better IPO next year.

After traveling up to Hanoi last weekend and hunting for cool startups, a lot of the people there kept recommending me to meet Ngo Xuan Huy. He’s got a 10-person team working on an app called Money Lover (the landing page isn’t online yet, so just go straight to the app links at the bottom of the page) on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. And although it’s made in Vietnam, the app is going global. Worldwide, Money Lover’s has over 1.5 million downloads.

The app is basically a finances and expenses manager for individuals. It allows you to track your spending over time and manage your monthly or annual budget. So throughout the day, I could pull out Money Lover after I make a purchase and log it into the app. At the end of the month, I could look back at my spending and tweak according to my budget. The app Mint, from the Valley, also does a similar thing but it can be tied directly to your bank account.

Huy started out with the app by himself when he was in university and used it for his own personal needs. When Money Lover went live on the Google Play Store, he was shocked to find that a lot of people were downloading it. In the next two years, he assembled a team together to do it full time. Another cool thing about the Money Lover app is that it’s currently available in 28 languages, and Huy’s team didn’t translate any of those languages (except for English). Users created the translations themselves. The top two user bases are the US and Italy.

At first, the app started out as a freemium app, they tried out a paid version but now Huy is stick with the freemium model and that has secured the majority of downloads. Users can get a premium account, which opens up more expense management features. Huy says that:

In the latest version, we rebuilt it from the ground up to integrate cloud and web features. In the future, we’re hoping to get more into family accounting, where users can connect their accounts with their loved ones to share expenses. We’re also looking to work more with payment systems or banks just like Mint does.

I’m impressed with the simplicity and design of the app, Huy also says they’re going to continue innovating on the design and providing what users need. He’s also looking for new hires to expand the team on the mobile and web fronts, and also looking for investment for scaling, if anybody out there is interested.

We recently saw a Japanese startup do a similar thing in that nation, except that that app already connects to dozens of banks.

You can download it on iOS here and on Android here and on Windows phone here.

Check out more screenshots of the Money Lover app:

TMI, a Taiwan-based early stage investment firm founded in 2012 by US venture firm WI Harper Group, Kaifu Lee, and ITRI, has just invested in three different startups.

• CitieSocial: It’s a hip social discovery site in Taiwan that mostly features designer items and gourmet food.
• Driving Curve: An iOS app that basically collects data on a user’s speed and fuel efficiency when driving, thus presumably improving their driving skills. Also, this startup is from Taiwan.
• PeerIdea: It’s currently not clear yet what this startup does.

I took a look at CitieSocial, and it’s pretty cool. I already found a pencil sharpener I really want to buy. The idea is pretty niche in that it’s all luxury and novelty products so it’ll entice users to come through and check out products that they wouldn’t find elsewhere in more obvious e-commerce sites that feature normal branded products. It currently has over 100,000 members, and more than 100 brand partners. It’s a bit like Fab.com and other so-called designer-to-consumer sites.

So far, Driving Curve has had humble beginnings with only 20,000+ downloads and is gaining popularity on the other side of the world in France. According to Lucas Wang, CEO of TMI:

TMI has had a keen interest in apps related to the auto sector. Driving Curve has an exceptional product and stylish UI design. Most importantly, the team is top-notch: focused, passionate and ambitious. We believe our cooperation has unlimited potential.”

Lastly, PeerIdea hasn’t revealed much about what the company does. We just know that it’s started by Weiting Liu, who was also behind SocialPicks, a social finance startup founded in 2009, and he also designed an app on the Facebook platform that got more than 10 million downloads. TMI’s clearly investing in the potential of the founder in this case.

We reached out to TMI for details on the numbers, but with seed capital for these nascent startups, you can be sure it’s under a million dollars, just enough for the companies to scale.

For more info on TMI, which was founded last year, check out our recent feature.

The one millionth customer was Singaporean mum-to-be Kelly Nguyen, who was surprised by the Zalora team at her workplace, who handed over her order (a maternity dress) free of charge.

The Zalora crew also concocted a little infographic (below) to show some of its other stats. For example, the e-commerce service has shipped to 16,853 towns in the region so far, and over 23,000 new products are added to the site each week. To hold all that stock, the company has over 20,000 square meters of warehouse space, which is the equivalent of five football fields.

Zalora released its iPhone app last month, and attracted a further $26 million in funding back in March.

1. League of Legends
2. Sudden Attack
3. FIFA Online 3
4. Aion Online
5. Blade & Soul
6. Starcraft
7. Lineage
8. Warcraft 3
9. Cyphers (Apologies, this one doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry in English)
10. Diablo 3

More interesting than the list itself are the statistics Gametrics tracked on what percent of the internet cafe gaming market these games hold, which show that League of Legends is utterly dominating everything else with a whopping 39.99 percent of the market. By contrast, second-place Sudden Attack has less than 10 percent, and third-place FIFA Online 3 barely has 5 percent.

It’s also worth noting that when comparing this to a similar recent list for China, League of Legends is the only point of overlap. The lesson there: Asian gamers love League of Legends (not that that’s a surprise). It’s also worth pointing out that some pretty old games feature on both China’s and South Korea’s top games lists; clearly Asian gamers are less picky about having the latest graphics and physics than their pixel-peeping counterparts in the West.

(Gametrics via 17173)

Japan’s CyberAgent (TYO:4751) has burst onto Japan’s crowdfunding scene with the launch of its new CyberAgent Crowd Funding platform. Actually, it will launch fully this summer, by which time it’ll be ready to match startup companies and neat ideas with people who want to fund them. The new site aims to be raising $1 million per month for its listed projects.

The new service will be a spin-off from the CyberAgent parent company, who’s investing 40 million yen (US$400,000) to kickstart it. Ryotaro Nakayama will be the new CEO. It’s also separate from CyberAgent Ventures, the company’s investment arm.

CyberAgent Crowd Funding promises to fully investigate all projects before adding them to the site, and will also back them up with media and promotional support.

Japan already has several funding platforms, such as Campfire and Ready For.

CyberAgent Ventures itself might be interested in some of the social and e-commerce projects that come up on the site, as those are the areas where the Tokyo-based fund makes its investments across Southeast Asia. Most recently, CyberAgent Ventures invested in a Taiwan-based fashion social network.

(Updated: Changed headline and some phrases to reflect that this is created by CyberAgent, not the CyberAgent Ventures subsidiary).

Credit: BlackberryCool.com

BlackBerry users around the world might be questioning their loyalty after another outage of the popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service happened a couple of days ago. It was widely reported that the service was down for users living in the Asia Pacific region between Sunday night to Monday morning, and today BlackBerry Indonesia finally acknowledged ¹ the downtime and offered an apology.

The most interesting part of the story, in my mind, is the statement given by the Indonesian ICT minister Tifatul Sembiring on this latest incident (as reported by another Detik article). Mr. Sembiring said he is disappointed that the company did not notify its users sooner about the setback, and he added that BlackBerry sales have decreased by 70 percent in Indonesia. There’s no source to back up the minister’s claim, however.

According to various users on the Crackberry forums, the BBM outage happened across Indonesia, Australia, Hong Kong, Thailand, India, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, and Malaysia. Customers’ trust in BlackBerry in that region must have been shaken up again. The same BBM service suffered an even longer downtime last October.

BlackBerry is up against Android, iOS, and Windows Phone as more Indonesians switch to smartphones.

(Sources: Detik #1, #2, and Kompas)

In Vietnam, one of the most popular models for internet companies and startups to make money in the consumer space is online marketing. It’s only natural, after all, since Vietnamese consumers are still warming up to newer payment methods. That makes selling ads are an easy way to make money. Now, Google is opening up Google Adsense with Vietnamese language support.

Rumor has it that Google makes more money here in Vietnam, a country of about 90 million, than in Indonesia, a country of almost 250 million people. Vietnamese companies are obviously eager for business and growth, and Vietnamese consumers are eager to shop. So Google Adsense coming into the country makes sense, especially as smartphone usage booms in the country. In the announcement, Google also posted Vietnam’s hockey stick growth for internet penetration. Google can no longer ignore Vietnam:

And they especially cannot ignore Vietnam if new search players like Wada and CocCoc are getting really aggressive about attacking Google’s market share in the 13th biggest country in the world.

The announcement, which came on May 10th, has already got major sites like HaiVL signing up, and we’re sure to see bigger sites like Zing Me, and the major Vietnamese newspapers sporting Google Adsense. It’s simply much easier to go through Adsense than to go direct to companies for display banners. With this, we’re sure to see more money pouring into the online space as internet penetration grows and content (hopefully) gets better.

Yesterday, Sina Tech sub-site Startup Stories posted an interesting op-ed from T.H. Capital CEO Hou Xiaotian entitled “Why is Sina’s Stock Undervalued on Wall Street?” In it, Hou argues that given that Alibaba valued Sina Weibo at $32.56/share for its big Weibo investment, when you add in the value of Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) other services, the company’s stock ought to be up around $73, yet it continues to languish in the $50-$60 range instead.

Of course, some have argued that Alibaba gave Sina a pretty sweet deal in terms of Weibo’s valuation, but Hou asserts that the Alibaba number is actually quite reasonable, and lays out five reasons why this is the case:

1. “Weibo has a monopoly on the market.” Hou says that 85% percent of all time spent microblogging in China is spent on Sina Weibo, and it has more than 500 million registered users. Tencent Weibo has big numbers too, of course, but Hou says that it’s much less actively used.
2. “Weibo is a real-life platform.” Hou argues that beyond real-name registration, users actually build real “micro-lives” on Weibo complete with their own social circles, entertainment, news, and a lot of voluntary sharing about their real lives. It’s almost like an online journal in some ways.
3. “Weibo creates web 2.0 content.” To explain this, Hou compares Weibo search — where users can find the answers to questions (because the hottest posts on any given topic tend to be what most people are looking for) — to traditional search where users find “a pile of indexed links” that can be hard to sort through”. Weibo, Hou argues, produces a ton of content that sorts itself more or less automatically, and it’s always timely and based on what users want.
4. “Weibo is an entrance point for the mobile web.” Hou says Weibo’s daily traffic exceeds 1 billion pageviews per day, and that 75% of it comes via mobile clients.
5. “Weibo is a kind of self-run media.” Hou points out that Weibo has been exceedingly valuable as a way of spreading information and has arguably increased transparency in Chinese society, even if the information it spreads is sometimes of dubious veracity.

I’m not an investor, or an expert in how companies are valued, so I won’t dispute any of Hou’s specific numbers. But I do think that she’s viewing Weibo with a particularly rosy set of glasses — perhaps it’s not a coincidence this article was published on Sina Tech — and there do seem to be some legitimate reasons to think Alibaba’s Weibo valuation was a bit over the top.

To begin with, some of Hou’s numbers are pretty shocking. She doesn’t cite sources for any of them but I’m guessing most of them come from T.H. Capital’s own research, but even so a few jump out as questionable. For instance: Sina Weibo gets more daily traffic and pageviews than Baidu? That would be pretty surprising. And while yes, Weibo does have 500 million registered users, only a small fraction of them are active (a study published in March found that only 200 million or so users had ever posted, and only 30 million users wrote unique posts in a given week).

Hou’s point about Weibo’s search being more valuable than Baidu’s is interesting but, I think, misleading in some ways. Weibo search is extremely effective at helping users find certain kinds of information. If you want the latest trends, to see what people are saying about a particular actress, or to hear the latest about a political scandal, for example, Weibo search is probably better than Baidu. But at the same time, if you’re looking for biographical information about a historical figure, a link to a popular e-commerce site, or information about the lineup of an NBA team (for example), Baidu is going to be far more effective than Sina. At one point in her article, Hou asserts that Sina’s Weibo search should be valued at double what Baidu’s search is worth per capita because it is more effective, but that is only true for a specific sort of search. Personally, I do a fair amount of searching for my job, and while sometimes Weibo search is the right tool, most of the time my search begins and ends with Baidu.

Finally, I think Hou is understating the threat that Weibo faces from WeChat. Granted, WeChat doesn’t offer the quasi-journal-like features Weibo has, but frankly Weibo isn’t that great for journaling either. Both platforms are best at communicating the here and now, what’s happening within your circles of contacts, and while there are significant differences between the services, WeChat’s growth should still be pretty alarming to Sina — even CEO Charles Chao has said WeChat poses a threat — and it’s no surprise it’s also affecting Sina’s stock price. Users, after all, only have so much time in the day, and the more time they spend on WeChat, the less time they’re spending on Weibo.

There are other reasons to be bearish on Sina — Weibo faces regulatory threat constantly, Sina has had a really tough time monetizing it — but generally speaking, I do think Weibo is a very valuable service. Is it as valuable as the $32.56 per share that Aliababa paid for it? Right now, I’d argue it’s definitely not, but then again, Alibaba didn’t invest just to make a quick buck, and over the long term if it can help Sina make Weibo profitable, the service certainly could be worth that, and a great deal more.

(image via Sina Tech)

A new report in the Beijing Times quotes police as saying that in their investigation of Silu HD following its takedown, they found not only 22,296 instances of IP violation, but also that the site was hosting what the article calls “obscene pornographic films.” We’re not sure whether those are any worse than regular pornographic films, but since any kind of porn is illegal in China, the folks behind the site are likely in a lot more trouble for this than the piracy aspect.

Interestingly, it seems the site was mostly hosting quasi-historical-themed pornography from the 1970s, as the two titles mentioned specifically in the article are The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976) and Caligula (1979). These films and a few others were deemed to be pornographic “after police appraisal,” and we imagine that police are currently combing through the rest of Silu HD’s catalogue in search of other films to, ahem, appraise.

Double-entendres aside, the news that Silu HD was hosting pornography ensures that “China’s first HD video portal” (as the site billed itself) is dead for good. YYeTs may have survived the crackdown, but apparently Silu HD’s apparent affinity for 1970s pornography has ensured the site will definitely not be coming back online.

(Beijing Times via Sina Tech)

Photos become more meaningful when you look at them in relation to time. Reep is a made-in-Japan mobile app that remembers the photos you took a year ago. It syncs with your iPhone camera folder, Instagram, Facebook, and Flickr to help sort your images based on dates.

After you sync your photo accounts with Reep, you see a calendar that shows you the images taken a year ago. For example, a year ago on May 8, I was at Baidu headquarters in Beijing, China. Admittedly, Reep doesn’t solve any real life problem, but it is cool to know what was I doing in the past through the pictures I have taken. You can give Reep a download here at no cost if you have an iOS device available.

Hiromasa Yoshikane, CEO at Azit, the company behind Reep, says that his team was organized by a group of university students whose average age is just 21 years old. Despite the team’s young age, their mobile app, Reep, has won several award including the “CyberAgent × Biz Japan Business Contest 2012” and “Google for Entrepreneurs Tokyo 2012.” The young team is currently under the mentorship of Modiva Japan and Voyage Group in Japan.

I’ll say it again: if there is one mobile game out there right now that people in Japan will remember in 10 years, it’s Puzzle and Dragons.

The game, which boasts 13 million registered users in this country (10 percent of the population), has generated US$113 million in sales in April.

Since late last year, maker GungHo’s market cap at the Osaka Stock Exchange kept rising and rising – to about $10 billion – to the point that the company is worth more than Mobage operator DeNA, GREE, and Zynga combined.

The Korean version of GungHo’s money-raking game.

And today, GungHo (3765.OS) shares jumped limit-up by 300,000 yen to 1,342,000 yen (up 28.8 percent) in just a few minutes of trading, until the stock was bid-only.

As a consequence, the company’s market cap now reached 1.54 trillion yen, which translates to $15.1 billion. With this number, GungHo topped Nintendo’s market cap of US$1.53 trillion yen (or US$15.0 billion).

The US$15.1 billion market cap is also higher than that of Nikon, Fujitsu, Isuzu, Sanyo, All Nippon Airways, Sharp, or Mitsubishi Motors.

It’s a new world we live in.

Other market caps (Monday, May 13 at 11:30am JST):

• GREE: $2.8 billion
• DeNA: $3.6 billion
• Zynga at $2.6 billion
• Electronic Arts: $6.7 billion
• Activision Blizzard: $16.7 billion

GungHo’s new owner SoftBank can be very happy.

If you’re in Vietnam and you’ve got an iOS device, chances are you’re not using Apple’s Newsstand. Personally, I’m annoyed by it because I can never hide it in a folder. I also can’t get my hands on any Vietnamese-language magazines on it. Well, luckily Kpaper just released last week on iOS and Android.

I spoke with Nguyen Trung Nghia, the founder of KGP ID, which also runs projects including Sufi, Kcloud, Ktaxi, and Kprice. The really cool thing about the 17-person team is that some of there are actually in Da Nang, Vietnam’s fastest growing central city, with a nascent startup culture.

Basically, Kpaper is an app that allows you to read local magazines online. It’s the first of its kind in Vietnam and is another humble step in the direction of developing more online content in Vietnam. According to Nghia:

So far, we’re working with three main publishers, including Viettel and Soha, and we’re looking for more. We’ve already got 40 magazines online. The business model is to produce really good content and then get users onto our other platforms like Kprice, our payment system, and Ktaxi, a taxi booking system.

The interesting thing about paper is that it doesn’t actually download the magazines to your smartphone, but rather allows you to view them online with a cache. In a way, it’s like magazine streaming. So after you’re finished reading, the magazines automatically delete themselves but are always available to be “streamed” again. Currently, the magazines are all free and Nghia is working with more publishers to get distribution going. In the future, it’s possible that Kpaper will also charge for more pricey magazines, but this is just the first step right now.

You can check out the app on iOS and Android.

Tencent’s (HKG:0700) chat service QQ is used by over half a billion people and is China’s top app for iPhone and Android. When the QQ mobile apps got a radical update and make-over recently to make them look more like WeChat, Tencent probably thought it was a great idea. But the vast majority of QQ users disagree – to the point of anger, hatred, and vitriol.

The new QQ v4.0 for iPhone currently has an average user rating of one star. Of 41,482 reviews of the updated app in the iTunes App Store, an astonishing 39,298 people (that’s 94.7 percent) have given it the lowest star rating. Prior to the WeChat-inspired update for QQ, the instant messaging (IM) app had been enjoying mostly five-star feedback. This is the scene now:

The anger is mostly about the looks – with users mockingly calling it a “second hand WeChat” – as the QQ v4.0 update for iPhone (or v4.1 for Android) has taken on less of a traditional IM user interface. For example, there’s no longer an indicator light besides contacts’ names on your QQ contacts list, so you can’t see who’s online until you click their name. Also, the chat window now looks more like a new-style messaging app – ie: more like WeChat or Whatsapp – which means that there’s a lot of wasted space in between users’ words (pictured top).

It seems that Tencent has not taken into account that their two very popular apps – WeChat will soon hit 400 million users – are used quite differently. QQ tends to be activated when someone specifically wants to chat, so that necessitates clearly seeing who’s online and being easily able to view a fast-paced conversation in one window. WeChat, in contrast, is for more casual messaging, sort of like a replacement for SMS.

QQ users are certainly making their displeasure known wherever possible. On the official ‘Mobile QQ’ account on Tencent Weibo, worried iPhone users are asking how they can downgrade to the previous version; others are telling Tencent that the update is “garbage”, “disgusting”, and “dogshit”. Over on the third-party Baidu Android app store, commenters are being more polite, asking and pleading for previous IM-like features to be restored.

One very useful feature from WeChat that’s in the new version of QQ is that it now supports group chats for up to 50 people. These can be accessed by sending invites through the app, or by sharing a QR code. I’ve been at a conference where this WeChat group chat feature was used to let audience members ask questions to onstage speakers, which was fun; that could also be put to great use in QQ. That is, if QQ has any users left after this kerfuffle.

(Hat-tip to Sina Tech for spotting this – article in Chinese)

I know that India’s Just Dial has been on the verge of an IPO before, but this time it’s for real. The local search engine, which now operates in seven countries and is accessible both online and by SMS, has just filed for its IPO, which will hit stock tickers on May 20th.

Just Dial seeks to raise as much as Rs 950 crore – that’s a little under US$175 million. It will list locally on the BSE, NSE, and MCX-SX markets, thereby foregoing a long anticipated US IPO. In contrast, the travel portal MakeMyTrip raised nearly $80 million in its 2010 IPO on NASDAQ.

Sequoia Capital has been a major investor in Just Dial over the years. It started up in 1994.

After Just Dial, it’s likely that BharatMatrimony and HomeShop18 will go public soon too, giving a big boost to India’s tech sector, which has previously seen few web company IPOs. But HomeShop18’s listing might not happen until 2014.

Over the weekend, Google quietly killed off its SMS search feature, which will be a shot in the arm for Just Dial and other ‘dumbphone’-oriented search services like SMSgyan.

Today I received an SMS which claimed to be from Rocket Internet owned online shop Lazada. The SMS talks about “crazy discounts” that you can check out on a Lazada Blogspot page (pictured above).

Yes, it’s very easy for you tech savvy readers to discern that the SMS is a scam, but there are numerous other people in Indonesia who fall prey to these simple tricks. When I accessed the site, the hit counter had already reached 89,000 page-views.

Let me break down a few characteristics of the worst online scams in the country, specifically ones related to e-commerce that seem to be targetting unwary people these days. Here goes:

1. Super good offers which are too good to be true

The SMS I received told me that Lazada was selling several gadgets at crazy discounts. An iPhone 5, which is normally priced at IDR 7 million (US$723), is being sold at half the price, it claimed. There are other offers too, like a simple “You’ve won a brand new car! Check our website for more information about how to claim it.”

If you think that those offers look too good to be true, then it most probably is a scam. If you think you’ve never entered into a contest but have supposedly won something big, then it could well be a scam too.

2. “Please check our blogspot for more information”

The other simple way to tell if something is a scam or not is to look at the website they invite you to see. The one I got linked to was Lazada04.blogspot.com.

Popular online brands like Lazada don’t use free Blogspot addresses like that, so it is definitely a fake. The “Lazada04” name is also an easy tell.

Besides Google-owned Blogspot, there are other free blogging platforms that are commonly used for scams, such as Jimdo and Webs.com. Note that there are reports that the scams have gone up an ante by using paid websites as well, which is similar to phishing scams that lure people to log into fake banking or social media pages.

Genuine offers and prizes will only be announced through the company’s site, or perhaps its official Facebook brand page.

3. “Please call our handphone number”

This is also another obvious tell-tale sign. Big brands do not have mobile numbers, let alone BBM pins. If the contact number is given in such a way, then it ‘s a scam for sure.

These last few months have seen quite a few scams made under the name of Indonesia’s biggest telco, Telkomsel. The best way to know if it’s a telco-related scam is by looking at the contact number. If the message is sent by the telco, then the sender info automatically says that it is from that company, even if you’ve never saved it to your contacts. Or sometimes telcos will use short numbers like 777 in sending those SMSes. If you receive an SMS from a conventional mobile number but it claims to be a telco, then it’s a trick.

This Telkomsel scam site – under the domain name Hadiah-Telkomsel.blogspot.com – is another good example of the worst scam websites in the country. It gives out a handphone number for people to contact, and for God knows why, the site puts pictures of Jakarta governor Joko Widodo alongside former president director of Telkomsel and the national police chief at the bottom of the homepage.

4. “Please claim your prize ASAP or we’ll give it to someone else”

These scammers are pretty good when it comes to manipulating people and making them panic. Very often such offers, especially lottery wins, are only valid for the next couple of days. So ‘winners’ must act fast. Quite a few of these ‘lucky winners’ though, don’t have internet access, and so they will simply call the given number to ask for information. And that is when the scam happens.

Never panic – you need to be fully rational in handling these situations. If you do make the call and the person on the other end asks you to transfer some amount of money first for “administration” or “tax” purposes, you should either hang up the phone immediately or at least swear at that scammer first.

I remember one TV show that explained how a former con man scammed people out of their money. The idea is always the same: promise victims big amounts of cash in an easy way. Be careful when you’re being promised such an offer/prize.

Let’s help report those scammy sites

Those are the common tricks circulating around Indonesia’s booming e-shopping industry right now. Quite a few people always fall for these, so much so that it’s one of the reasons why the government will require Indonesian e-commerce sites to use local data centers and domains.

People do get scammed online. It is quite understandable though because only 30 percent of Indonesians have internet access. Having a lucky break by winning a brand new car is also something that doesn’t happen every day. Curiosity kicks in, combined with lack of internet knowledge (and access), and so there are definitely people getting screwed every day.

We can do a few things to help make the web a safer place for all. First is to help spread the word about the scammy websites and their tricks. Second is to report them to Google with the link here.

Let’s give those scammers a good lesson in how they can’t ruin the web.

(Updated on May 16th: The email address cybercrime[at]polri[dot]go[dot]id is not a valid email address of the Indonesian cyber crime police unit. You will need to directly report to the police station for now. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.)

(Featured image source: unsuckdcmetro)

Alibaba CEO, Jonanthan Lu and his management team

Now that we’ve heard Jack Ma’s final speech as Alibaba’s CEO, we can focus on his successor, Jonathan Lu. Compared to Ma, fewer people will have heard of Lu. But Ma’s last big decision at Alibaba as CEO was perhaps to appoint Lu as CEO.

In his first speech as Alibaba CEO last Friday, Jonathan Lu thanked Ma for giving the one-time waiter at a hotel a chance to shine under Alibaba’s wings. Lu’s leadership quality and great execution has seen him in several leadership positions within Alibaba. 13 years in Alibaba made him one of the early team members to have followed Ma’s journey, seeing the e-commerce firm grow from a David to a Goliath.

I have translated most (like 90+ percent) of his speech. If anything, his speech somewhat echoed Ma’s thoughts which centered around Alibaba’s mission, values, responsibilities, and customers.

“If not me, who? If not now, when?”

Jonathan Lu: Hi family and friends. Today marks my 13th anniversary working with Alibaba. I’m very thankful, as Mr. Jack Ma says, “We are lucky.” But for me, I think that I’m extremely lucky. Because from tomorrow onwards, I’m taking over Alibaba’s mission, our values, responsibility. Taking over our vision of having an open and responsible internet spirit.

I worked at Alibaba’s B2B website for more than three years […] and Taobao for about four years and then back to B2B (Alibaba.com), and then on to big data and also managed our mobile operating system, Yun OS. Through this journey, I learned a lot. But I feel more gratitude. It is because of all of you, that’s why I’m able to learn and grow. It is because of our customers who have helped us grow. I’m very thankful to everyone and Jack Ma. Before Alibaba, I was working in a hotel as a waiter.

Jonathan Lu and Jack Ma saying their thanks with a hug

But today, I have this chance to take over Alibaba’s culture, fight for our dream. This is really an honor. Alibaba been through a lot and our mission and values are what we need to uphold. We insist that customers are our number one priority. In the future, we will continue to uphold and pass on our values and mission. […]

Today, because we have so many customers and so much data, we have a chance to let every customer be on the platform and have their own space and growth opportunities. Alibaba and Taobao are built for the customers. I hope our team can achieve our mission and let Alibaba’s customers enjoy the best experience when they are onboard our platforms.

Another thing we need to uphold is innovation. For the last 13 years, from Alibaba B2B, Taobao, Alipay [online payment solution], Juhuasuan [deals site], Aliyun [cloud computing], to AliFinance [micro-financing service], we have been innovating from the very start and will continue to do so in the future. My team and I will push harder for innovation. […]

For the last 13 years, Alibaba has done very well in upholding its belief and executing our plans. […] Everyone has this signature at the end of their emails: “If not me, who? If not now, when?”

This is a responsibility, a task […] A big dream and vision requires good execution to complete it. Because of our great execution, customers trust us better. […] Thanks to our customers, partners, and competitors who allow us to continue fighting. Our customers give us warmth. Taobao went through seven non-profitable years, but it has grown thanks to customers’ trust. In the future, the thing that pushes us forward is our dream and family.

Moving forward, I hope we can continue to gain the support of our customers, friends, partners, and family. And I hope everyone at Alibaba and Taobao can stay happy and lead a fruitful life. Thank you, everyone!

Let’s take a look at the highlights from the infographic (the full thing is embedded at bottom) and the newest statistics for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Foursquare, and Line.

Facebook in Thailand

Zoning in on Facebook, the ZocialInc crew finds that the peak time for posting is 11pm. These are the demographics within Thailand:

Twittery Thais

There are now two million Thais on Twitter, who on average tweet 5.5 times each day. Like with Facebook, the country’s Twitterers are night owls, tending to post more between 10pm and midnight. 66.7 percent of Twitter posts in Thailand are made on mobiles.

YouTube boom

YouTube is still seeing great growth in Thailand, and is now up to 630,000 channels within the nation, adding up to 5.3 million videos uploaded by Thai users. The top video cateogry for these guys and girls is music.

Snapping up Instagram

With the most stellar growth in Thailand in the past year, Instagram is now up to 600,000 users in the country, up from 150,000 this time last year. In the first four months of 2013, they collectively posted 21.38 million photos. One of the most liked users is @aum_patchrapa, the beauty queen turned actress Pachrapa ‘Aum’ Chaichua.

Checking out of Foursquare?

Foursquare, the location-based service, saw a nine percent drop in check-ins in the past year in Thailand, but the number of venues grew. The best growth figure for Foursquare was that 55 percent more people checked in via Instagram.

Line up

There are no Thailand-specific numbers from WeChat for Thailand, so let’s focus on rival app Line, which has a pretty spectacular 15 million Thai users. It’s also an important new platform for social marketing and brands outreach, with the top Thai brand on Line having 4.6 million followers already.

Here’s the full slideshow presentation:

(Source: ZocialInc blog)

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

We’ve been following the progress of Videogram, a startup that hails from Tokyo, pretty closely in the past six months. Now that Videogram has a new iPhone app, I decided to give it a try.

Looking at the name, one might think that Videogram is the Instagram of videos – it is not, nor does it seem to aim to be. Started up by Sandeep Casi at Cinemacraft in Japan – before moving to Silicon Valley as part of 500 Startups – it’s about helping people discover videos, something that translates well in its iPhone app.

With most online video services such as YouTube, you’re only shown one still-frame to decide whether or not you’ll watch it. Videogram displays the video in a sort of comic-book format (think of Flipboard) where the size of the frames is determined by how important Videogram’s algorithm thinks they are, including factors such as user-engagement. To be clear – Videogram seems to be concerned only with how users discover and engage with videos before they watch them. Apps like Vine and Cinemagram seem to be the ones vying for the title of “the Instagram of videos” – focusing more on the ability to create and share videos.

In terms of video playback itself, there’s really nothing different on Videogram than what you would find with YouTube. However, it does offer users the opportunity to comment with the video playback time also tagged, similar to what Soundcloud allows, albeit displayed in a list format instead of on the linear playback bar.

In trying out the app, I encountered some playback bugs here and there, and I felt the experience was a little clunky on the iPhone 4 I tested it on. This may be because a large part of the app isn’t native code but HTML5 (the video playback is native). Trying to provide the same experience on mobile as on the web app version offers a challenge – especially for an app that’s visual by nature. Videogram alters the number of frames that are shown depending on the display size and the Videogram algorithm.

Personally, I think the Cinemacraft team is onto something interesting for video discoverability, and I think some tweaking is needed in making the experience just right. For example: I like the idea of its playlists, but didn’t like how the playlists are channel-specific – meaning I couldn’t mix and match videos from different content providers.

Cinemacraft’s impressive initial list of content providers and innovative approach to displaying videos is certainly a welcome change and a benefit for video content providers and consumers alike, and I’m looking forward to seeing the future of Videogram as it evolves both on PC and mobile.

Check out an embedded Videogram video in our first story on the startup. The Videogram iOS app is here.

Jack Ma, Chairman at Alibaba

Last Friday in Hangzhou, China, Alibaba celebrated Taobao’s tenth anniversary (pictures below). But it didn’t feel like it was really entirely a celebration for Taobao. I’m sure that while enjoying the songs and dances at this concert-style event, at the back of the mind of everyone at the stadium was that it was Jack Ma’s last day as CEO.

True enough, Jack Ma’s speech reflected that. It felt a little more like a goodbye speech from the founder as he moves on to become chairman. It was a speech that paved the way for Jonathan Lu to take over his position as Alibaba’s CEO.

“Small businesses are where most of the Chinese dreams live”

After a couple of hours of music and extravaganza – including Ma himself singing – he gave his speech to the roaring stadium audience of over 20,000 employees, merchants, and guests. Below is our unofficial translation of Jack’s speech. I do hope it captured a large part of what he communicated:

Jack Ma: In the last ten years, there are many people who have paid a big price to live this dream. For our dream, we have walked ten years. I have been thinking, even if someone had removed 99 percent of Alibaba’s assets, we are still worthy. We have no regrets. We have our team, our partners, and friends. What is the thing that has made Alibaba what it is today? What is the thing that has made me what I am today? I have no reasons to succeed. Alibaba and Taobao have no reasons to succeed either. But today, we have walked so far and for so many years with so many aspirations for the future. I believe, it is trust that has made us walk this far.

When no one believes in the future, we chose to believe… we chose to trust.. that 10 years later, China will be better. We chose to believe that our colleagues will do better than myself. I believe, the younger generation of Chinese will do better than us. I’m very thankful that my colleagues have trusted me. It’s tough to be a CEO but being a CEO’s employee is even tougher. At times when trust was doubted, people actually bought things online, even when they haven’t even seen the items before. Over thousands of kilometers, through an unknown person, the goods fall safely into your hands. Today’s China has trust and belief. Everyday, there are 24 million transactions on Taobao signifying China’s trust.

I’m proud to be everyone’s colleague and working partner. Even after life, we will still be colleagues. Because of you, it allows this generation to see hope. All of you are building a new kind of trust. This trust helps to make the world more open, more transparent, and more responsible. I feel proud of you. Today’s world is ever-changing. 30 years ago, we didn’t expect what would have happened today. We didn’t expect China to be a manufacturing giant. We didn’t expect computers to be part of everyone’s life. We didn’t expect the internet in China could grow so rapidly. We didn’t expect Taobao can rise. We didn’t expect Yahoo could become what it is today. We’re in a rapidly changing world. We didn’t expect we can all sit together today to celebrate and look forward to the future.

Computers are fast, the internet is even faster. When we haven’t really understood what is mobile internet, big data comes along. Times of change are for the younger generation. Today, a lot of young people think that big companies like Google, Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba took all of your chances to succeed. Ten years ago, when we saw numerous giant companies, we were also once lost and worried. Do we have a chance? But ten years of determination, we have walked to today. If it wasn’t a time of change, the younger generation would not have a chance. We don’t need a rich father to succeed. What we have is determination and a vision. A lot of people hate change, but because we have embraced this change that’s why we have a future. The next 30 years, this world and China, will have even more change. This change is an opportunity for everyone. Grab this chance.

A lot of people complain about yesterday. We have no power to change yesterday. But this very day, 30 years later, is what we can control and decide. Change yourself, take baby steps, and stay determined for ten years. I thank the times of change and everyone’s complaints. Because when everyone is complaining, that is your chance, an opportunity. It’s only in times of change that someone can be clear of what he has and wants, and what he needs to give up.

Building Alibaba for 14 years, I’m honored that I’m a businessman. As we enter the modern age, it’s a pity that business people don’t get the respect they deserve. Business people in this age aren’t just doing business for profits. I think, we are the same as any artist, educator, and politician who’s doing our best to make this society complete. 14 years in business made me understand life, hardship, determination, and responsibility. It also made me understand that when other people succeed it means we have succeeded as well. What we look forward to most is the smile on our employees’ faces.

After today, I will no longer be a CEO. From tomorrow onwards, business will not be my sole focus. 14 years into business, I feel proud. In this world, no one can say that they will not age – make no mistakes, and be undefeatable. To make sure a company doesn’t age and make no mistakes, I chose to believe the younger generation. By believing in them, you also believe in the future. So I will not return to Alibaba as CEO. There’s no use for me to return because all of you will do better.

Building a company to this size, I feel humbled and proud. But what we have contributed to society is only just a start for Alibaba. What we achieved today, has greatly surpassed the efforts we have put in. This society, at this time, for Alibaba to continue to prosper, we have to solve problems in society. There are so many problems in society and these are opportunities for everyone. If there isn’t any problem, then there’s no need for all of you. All people of Alibaba, please continue to serve small businesses. Because small businesses are where most of the Chinese dreams live. 14 years ago, we set a mission that there will be no business too hard to do, helping small enterprises to grow. Today, this mission lies in your hands. People say e-commerce and the internet created an unfair advantage. But my understanding is that the internet created a truly fair platform.

Moving forward, I will be doing things that I’m interested in, such as working on education and the environment. Besides work, let’s work hard together to improve China. Let the water be clear, the sky be blue, and the food be safe. Everyone, please! (Jack Ma kneels down to the audience).

I’m very honored to introduce you to Alibaba’s future leader and team. They have worked with me for many years and understood me better than myself. Jonathan Lu worked for 13 years at Alibaba and has been through multiple positions and hardships. I should say both tears and smiles are equally the same. Taking over Ma Yun’s (Jack Ma’s) position is very difficult. I can walk till today all thanks to everyone’s trust. Because of trust, it has made the journey easy. I believe and I also urge everyone to support and trust Jonathan Lu and the team as you have always supported and trusted me.

Thank you everyone! From tomorrow onwards, I will live my own life of choice. From tomorrow onwards, life will be my work.

Today Singapore-based Loan Garage, a startup that aims to help people get loans online, announced that it has launched its Indonesian platform KreditAja.com. It’s interesting to note that the expansion arrives only two months after Loan Garage made its full launch in Singapore. The Indonesian version looks to be off to a great start as Loan Garage has secured a partnership with Indonesia’s Ministry of Economic Coordination (KUR) to distribute loans and microcredit worth $3.7 billion in Indonesia.

The KreditAja website looks identical to the Singapore version. Its video tutorial is still just in English, but the Indonesian version will be made available within two weeks time. Just like the Singapore version, KreditAja is an online platform for both borrowers and licensed lenders to conduct transactions. Details such as the interest rate of the loans can also be seen and compared within the site.

Although launched today, Kredit Aja will start its operational phase tomorrow with three banks as lenders. Three months after that, the platform will bring in the rest of the KUR bank partners onboard. Loan Garage CEO Aidil Zulkifli said that they earn money from commissions made from successful loan applications, premium subscription listings, and later on, advertising as well. The team will also introduce value-added services after they have amassed data on consumer financial behavior.

Led by country manager Emir Yamin, six out of nine of the Loan Garage team are stationed in Indonesia. Loan Garage is backed by private investors from various backgrounds like investment bankers and cloud computing specialists. Talking of the personal finance market and the team’s plans, Aidil ¹ added:

The personal finance market in emerging markets is ripe for disruption and there are many inefficiencies in the market for us to take advantage of and arbitrage. It is not as sexy or cool but it is easy for us to monetize. At the same time, all of us come to work excited with the prospect of building a product that could help in the financial inclusion process in emerging markets and help the average person on the street make a better life for him/herself through financial and credit empowerment.

We don’t want to say much, but one thing that is for sure is that we won’t just be in the personal loans vertical.

KUR itself distributed $3.5 billion of loans to Indonesian individuals and SMEs through banks in 2012. And since the beta launch in December, Loan Garage has processed over $500,000 of personal loans.

There have been other startups doing business in similar fields across Asia like Lenddo in the Philippines. Loan Garage itself is one of the startups that competed at Startup Asia Jakarta last year.

1. The quote came from Aidil, not Emir.

Swedish music streaming company Spotify recently stepped into Asia; specifically Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. Spotify’s Sriram Krishnan, head of new markets and Asia-pacific at Spotify, explained to us that Asia was picked because piracy is high in this part of the world.

Sad but true, Singapore is one of the leading nations for digital pirates. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), about half of Singaporeans visit unlicensed sites for music and movies. The report also says that Singapore has an average of about 300,000 incidences of illegal downloading a month. Citing a 2011 report by the Malaysia International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), Spotify pointed out that Malaysia is ranked 26th in the world in terms of the amount of connections to unauthorized peer-to-peer file sharing. Sriram added:

Spotify was set up as a better, simpler, faster alternative to piracy […] With the high level of piracy in this part of the world, it made sense for us to enter the Asia market through these markets. According to IFPI, 95 percent of all digital music was illegally downloaded, so combating piracy is by far our, and in turn the industry’s, most serious challenge.

I know it might sound like some corporate bullshit that Spotify was built to fight piracy. But thinking deeper, it actually makes sense. Spotify gets content from labels who in turn make money when people buy their music. But folks who download music from illegal sources – and at no cost – hurt the labels’ bottom line. So this makes piracy a common enemy for music labels and Spotify. The more people use Spotify, the higher the chance to convert them to paying users, thus driving revenue for music labels and also Spotify.

To date, Spotify has 24 million users with about 25 percent of them paying monthly. I guess if you can’t get 100 percent to pay for music, then it’s perhaps good enough to have 25 percent of them paying. But we’ll have to wait and see if that conversion rate from free to paid users also applies to the startup’s new venture in Asia.

In Asia, Spotify faces major competition from Taiwan’s KKBOX which claims to be the largest Chinese music library in the world with 10 million songs from 500 international labels.

AutoNavi is China’s top online mapping company, so the most obvious benefits for Alibaba are mapping-related. If the company is interested in moving into location-based services and commerce — and it obviously is — there’s no better partner in China than Autonavi, as no one has better maps or more location data than the company. And if Alibaba and AutoNavi can integrate their systems effectively, Alibaba will be able to quickly amass a remarkably precise database of things like purchases and consumer behavior based on location.

This data could be used in all kinds of ways. For example, Alibaba could monitor public pollution data and then automatically market air filters and masks to people who are located in the most polluted areas. Its system could analyze trends and notice that people in your neighborhood tend to buy more of one type of product than the general public, and then market that product more heavily to anyone from the neighborhood. It could even analyze AutoNavi’s data to determine which areas lack easy access to which brick-and-mortar businesses and then push those products more heavily online. ‘We see you live six miles from the nearest store that sells maternity clothing; why not buy it online instead?’

But another more easily overlooked aspect of AutoNavi’s appeal may be its userbase. The company has more than 100 million users on its mobile apps alone, and Alibaba certainly recognizes that China’s internet is getting increasingly mobile, so any access the company can get to large groups of mobile users is certainly valuable. And there are certainly ways to integrate location-based marketing like I’ve described above into AutoNavi’s existing apps, should the company choose to do so.

Still, with all these investments it’s starting to feel like Alibaba has some very specific course laid out for itself, the details of which aren’t yet clear to the public. The company has obviously embraced Big Data with both arms (it apparently wants to know what you’re saying, where you’re going, and even what music you’re listening to) but the ultimate endgame remains something of a mystery. Uber-targeted marketing? A groundbreaking new social commerce mobile app? Major changes to its web platforms to make them more social and localized? All of the above? We’ll have to wait and see.

This week, we have a bunch of inspiring founder stories from Singapore and South Korea, as well as investment news from a number of startups! Remember, for startup tips and story suggestions, feel free to email us. Alternatively, you can send tips here and/or tell us about your startup here. Enjoy this week’s list:

1. CodeToki | Philippines

Codetoki is an achievement-based and game-like platform that aids fellow graduates in finding employment, by specifically matching applicants to the most suitable employers, and making them visible to future employers.

2. Dreadout | Indonesia

Developed by Badung-based Digital Happiness, Dreadout is a horror PC game that is receiving quite a bit of publicity both in Indonesia and globally.

3. Crowdbaron | Hong Kong

Crowdbaron wants to help make investing in real estate as simple as booking a hotel online. Folks who want to bolster their personal investment portfolio, the idea is that buying a small stake in one or numerous properties lets you take advantage of surging property prices in several countries.

4. Camera360 | China

Sichuan-based popular photo filter app Camera360 has announced this week that it accumulated 100 million global users across its three versions for iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone. Camera360 is now in talks with a number of smartphone manufacturers to have its filters pre installed in some new phones.

5. Foodpanda | Asia

Launched in April 2012, Rocket Internet’s Foodpanda is an Asia-based food delivery startup that takes orders online from over 5,000 partner restaurants in nine Asian countries and employs 150 staff. It announced this week that it has grabbed another major round of funding from Sweden’s AB Kinnevik, Russia’s Phenomen Ventures, and several other unnamed investors.

6. Ticket Solutions | Indonesia

Launched in August 2012, Ticket Solutions’s Android app ‘Indonesia Flight’ enables its users to compare and book domestic flights in real time. The company revealed that it is now generating revenue of over IDR 4 billion ($400,000) every month using the ticket booking platform Tiket’s API, and has also released an iOS version of ‘Indonesia Flight’ this week.

7. StreetDirectory | Singapore

Founded back in 2000, StreetDirectory is a portfolio company of Hong Kong’s JDB Holdings, whose portfolio also includes JobsDB, 88DB, Openrice, Cozycot, FlowerAdvisor and SgCarmart (which was recently acquired by SPH). We recently had a chance to meet the founder during Startup Asia Singapore 2013. Read his inspiring startup story here!

8. Themis Reader | Indonesia

Meet Indonesian developer team Mahoni and its flagship iOS app Themis Reader The team claims that the app is the most expensive one made in Southeast Asia, and that it is actually selling. Guess how much does that app cost?

9. RocketLabs | Philippines

Designed as an educational software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform and currently still in beta, RocketLabs aims to integrate virtual labs, course media, and one-on-one instruction for enterprise-grade tech training. The startup was a finalist at the recent 2013 Echelon Philippines Satellite.

10. Mention | China

Beijing-based startup Mention recently walked away with the GMIC Seed Stage Award with its flagship product, Traintracks, a real-time behavioral analytics tool made by game designers for game designers to give them useful and powerful insights on user behavioral patterns.

11. Visualead | Israel

Israel-based startup Visualead is a QR code generator that converts ugly QR codes into visually appealing ones, and aims to be one of the most effective and useful technologies in leading consumers from offline to online. The startup walked away as the winner of the GMIC G-Startup Growth Stage competition.

12. Umeng | China

Founded in 2010, Umeng is like the Google Analytics for mobile applications in China and its currently serving over 100,000 mobile applications across all major mobile platforms — iOS, Android, and Windows Phone — with more than 50 percent of all Chinese developers using the service.

13. VNTIC | Vietnam

VNTIC is an online platform for buying and selling tickets for entertainment events and is connected to the ticket networks of other countries such as Singapore’s Sistic, Malaysia’s Ticketcharge, and Indonesia’s Kiostix, thus they are able to offer Vietnamese audiences access to events on these platforms.

14. MadeiraCloud | China

Beijing-based MadeiraCloud is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) venture that has the great concept of managing your cloud architecture the way you design it – diagrammatically. This week, the startup announced that it raised a round of series A funding from Sequoia Capital.

Related startup stories

• How Memebox Bootstrapped to Become a $1 Million Company (VIDEO)
• If More Than Half the Population of the World Lives in This Circle, Asia is the Future of Startups
• How KakaoTalk Grew From a Startup to a Giant Mobile Platform (INTERVIEW)
• Two Serious Problems That Plague Tech Companies in Vietnam
• New Shanghai Incubator Seeks Startups With Big Ideas For the Global Supply Chain
• Nhac Cua Tui’s Game Sharing Debacle Underlines Vietnam’s New Piracy Obsession
• Is the Indonesian Government Hurting Or Helping the E-Commerce Industry?
• Techhub Manchester’s Co-Founder Visits Pakistan, Plans New Co-Working Space
• Chester Roh: The Story of a Hacker-Turned-Entrepreneur Who Sold His Company to Google
• Rebright Partners: Our New Fund Can Grow the Southeast Asian Market
  

Events

Join us at our upcoming Tech in Asia Meetup in Jakarta this 16 May 2013 (Thursday) at 6.30pm. We look forward to seeing you there!

• Jakarta Meetup: How To Monetize Mobile Apps

Like RSS? There’s always our Asia startups RSS feed!

The team has been hard at work this week collecting all the top stories in China, so let’s take a look.

1. Report: More Layoffs at Renren, Signs of a Strategic Shift?

China’s Facebook, Renren, just might be looking at some serious changes to its internet strategy. Charlie speculates that this might be a shift into games and mobile apps.

2. China’s MadeiraCloud Gets $1.5 Million Funding, Opens US Office

Congrats to MadeiraCloud for another round of funding!

3. Alibaba Explores Online Mapping, Takes Stake in Autonavi For $294 Million

There’s rumors of Facebook acquiring Waze back in the Valley but Alibaba has already stepped up to the plate with the acquisition of Autonavi.

4. WeChat Now Has 190 Million Active Users, Close to Passing Whatsapp

Watch out WhatsApp, WeChat is after your spotlight. This chat app battle is happening on so many fronts it’s hard to keep up. There are so many battlefields here in Asia and across the world.

5. Umeng Dominates Chinese Mobile App Analytics, Plots Overseas Expansion

Thus continues the trend of Chinese internet companies increasingly looking global.

6. China’s Top 3 Most Profitable Web Companies

TL;DR: The top three are Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. They basically rule over the Chinese internet, but it’s telling to know what business models work in Vietnam.

7. After 1 Year in China, Evernote Reaches 4 Million Chinese Users

Evernote is getting more and more aggressive in Asia and 4 million in a year is quite a lot for the note taking service.

8. Tencent CEO Pony Ma Talks WeChat, Competition, Going Mobile and Global

Click here to get more notes on where Tencent is headed next. It’s fascinating to see the moves this innovative company makes.

9. Not Only on WeChat: Tencent Hints at Integrated Mobile Gaming Platform

And to follow up the last article, let’s look in more detail at where Tencent is really headed.

10. China’s Top 10 Smartphone Apps for Android and iOS

A really nice break down from Charlie on the top apps in China. Of course, QQ dominates both charts.

That’s all for this week, folks. For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS.

I’m up visiting Hanoi, Vietnam this weekend to check out the startup scene, where there’s clearly a very strong community looking at mobile. But, without further ado, let’s get into the top news of the week.

Steven’s pick: Alibaba Explores Online Mapping, Takes Stake in Autonavi For $294 Million

Yesterday was the final day for Alibaba founder Jack Ma in his role as CEO. He want out with a bang with this major new stake in Autonavi, which comes just two weeks after taking a sizable interest in Sina Weibo.

Charlie’s pick: Baidu Acquires PPS for $370 Million, Claims It’s Now China’s Biggest Video Platform

This one’s kind of a no-brainer. A new acquisition for Baidu that could reshape the streaming video market in China. They don’t get much bigger than this.

Youshen’s pick: How Alibaba Saved Weibo and Chinese Society (Maybe)

The man who stands for the Alibaba brand – Jack Ma – has earned my respect. With reference to Alibaba’s recent investment in Sina Weibo, Ma was able to acknowledge Weibo’s existing user community and had wanted to avoid being “condemned by its users and…history”. He clearly recognized the important balance between user appeal and commercial gains. My teammate C. Custer also highlighted Ma’s possible interest in maintaining Weibo’s transparency for Chinese society. If this is true, I take my hats off to the man himself.

Emily’s pick: Line’s Revenue for Q4 2012 Was $58 Million

It’s certainly some impressive revenue growth for LINE from last quarter of 2012 to the first quarter of 2013! And with the recent introduction of more services to the mobile messaging platform, such as the e-book service Line Manga, a Japanese animated series, and even a toy smartphone, we can probably see bigger growth later this year – especially in Japan!

Minghao’s pick: If More Than Half the Population of the World Lives in This Circle, Asia is the Future of Startups

There is certainly a rise in entrepreneurial activities in Asia. Therefore, in my opinion, many disruptive and highly profitable startups will come out of this region within the next decade. Why so? Besides Asia being most populated, the other factor is the many problems that clouds this region. Though Asia is one continent, the cultures and languages are so diverse; each country has its own language, and even within the same country there might be hundreds of different languages being used. The region also has other issues related to infrastructure, logistics, payment problems. With these many barriers, there are so many opportunities for entrepreneurs to work on.

Enricko’s and Minh’s pick: Two Serious Problems That Plague Tech Companies in Vietnam

Enricko: This is a thought-provoking article by Minh, and some might argue that the two problems he addressed also exist in other Asian countries as well. The other thing I loved from the article is about the level of discussion people dedicated inside the comments section. What I’m curious now after reading it is to see examples of good Vietnamese startups that entrepreneurs should look up to. Now we know the problems, who has managed to overcome them?

Minh: I never pick my own stuff, but I gotta say, the comments on my article are really thought-provoking and fun to go through. Props to the startup community in Vietnam for giving their own thoughts on two issues that clearly many Vietnamese entrepreneurs care about. I’m hoping to write more on this in the coming months, with more depth.

Vanessa’s pick: China’s MadeiraCloud Gets $1.5 Million Funding, Opens US Office

Aside from all the buzz happening in China such as this week’s Global Mobile Internet Conference, and Alibaba Group celebrating the 10-year anniversary of its Taobao marketplace yesterday, we’re really thrilled to know that our friends over at Beijing-based startup MadeiraCloud have successfully raised series A funding of $1.5 million.

I remember how CEO and co-founder Daniel O’Prey would tell me about the ups and downs of his startup journey, the effort put in to gather user feedback; and so we’re really ecstatic to learn that apart from successfully raising funds, it will also be opening a San Francisco office for its expansion efforts. Great job done for the folks over at MadeiraCloud! Looking forward to more updates from you guys!

For other ways of reading us, perhaps try our tailored RSS feeds, or find us within Flipboard.

That number comes from a “knowledgable” but anonymous source and, as usual, it should be taken with a grain of salt. But Renren spokespeople did admit to Sina Tech that some personnel adjustment was happening, characterizing it as being part of “an attempt at an internal startup mechanism [within Renren],” whatever that means. They also suggested that some of those laid off might be re-hired internally for work on more promising projects like Nuomi and Renren Games. (On a related note, Renren denied outright reports that there were also layoffs at Nuomi, saying that the team is actually in the process of expanding and that there have been no layoffs there).

We’ve already seen Renren beginning to move away from traditional social networking and toward games and mobile apps, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that a strategic shift of that magnitude would result in a little internal upheaval and personnel turnover. It seems there have been some layoffs, but I don’t think it’s time for Renren fans to panic just yet.

(Sina Tech via TechWeb)

Image credit: www.agneselle.com

It is not known who first created the word blogshop or started the first ever blogshop in Singapore, but blogshops have become a huge phenomenon in Singapore, with four of the country’s ten most-searched stores being blogshops. A blogshop is an online fashion store that uses a blog such as Livejournal to conduct business online. Blogshops usually sell women’s clothing and accessories for affordable prices ranging from $12 to $30.

Origins of Blogshops

Blogshops – Love Bonito, Agneselle, Hollyhoque, Dressabelle

In the early years of the blogshop industry (2006-2008), the owners were young females aged between 16 and 20. Most of them were still in school and didn’t start out with the aim of being entrepreneurs. Many thought it was a fun and easy way of selling off their secondhand apparel online, and the money earned from these sales would go towards funding their future fashion purchases.

After a few months, some realized the potential of fashion e-commerce and the huge market of customers who were willing to spend between $15 to $40 for a piece of clothing online without needing a physical fitting. Looking to fulfill the demand of their customers, these owners went to source from apparel importers at City Plaza in Singapore and some even went on frequent sourcing trips to Bangkok to bring back large supplies of cheap clothing.

How do they sell clothing on blogs?

It seemed questionable to start a business using Livejournal blogs with the lack of a proper web framework, inventory control, checkout and payment processing systems. But these young female entrepreneurs were not deterred and came up with various unique hacks. The four points below were crucial factors that contributed to the success and popularity of blogshops in the competitive e-commerce industry:

1. Weekly time-specified launches

As a small business starting out, it would be difficult to stock up clothing in hundreds of different designs without incurring large expenses of warehouse storage cost and labour costs. Instead, blogshops introduced a series of five to ten different designs with limited availability in the form of a themed collection format. The collection would launch weekly at night between 7pm and 10pm, and customers were informed through email newsletter a few days before the actual launch.

2. Backorders

Backorders were available a few days after a successful selling out of a collection launch; it also gave those customers who missed out on the launch an opportunity to purchase sold out designs. It was guaranteed income for the owners, as customers would need to pay upfront to purchase sold out designs that were on backorder. Backorders would take two to six weeks to arrive before they were shipped to customers. The amount of designs available on a backorder was an indicator of the popularity of a blogshop.

3. Gmail

Gmail was a must-have tool of any blogshop owner. Firstly, It was used to issue order invoices manually to customers after they commented on the items they wanted on Livejournal. Secondly, blogshops sent mailers in bulk to inform customers of pending launches and the arrival of backorders. Thirdly, Gmail labels were used as a tool to keep track of those who had made payment by tallying the payment details of buyers’ bank accounts against the owners’ bank accounts. Popular blogshops often exceeded Gmail’s 500 daily messages sending limit during the launch of a new fashion collection.

4. Trust

Payment is an important mechanism to close the purchase loop in e-commerce. However when shopping at blogshops, buyers had no choice but to trust sellers with upfront payments to sellers’ accounts. POSB/DBS internet banking was the primary choice of payment accepted by sellers, but buyers often had to wait up to 48 hours for their payment to be manually verified by sellers through email.

There was no payment protection for sellers in the case of non-fulfilled orders, thus buyers preferred shopping at the more popular blogshops to avoid getting scammed. While it was slow and inefficient for owners to verify every single payment email, there were no transaction costs involved and most customers had an active POSB or DBS account.

Stay tuned for part two of my look at the blogshop phenomenon where I will talk about the golden age of blogshops and the top blogshops in Singapore.

This is what Alibaba wants: Autonavi’s mobile maps know-how and market reach.

You can wait years for a big deal to hit the Chinese web, but recently the blockbuster moves are coming in thick and fast. The latest sees e-commerce company Alibaba taking an approximate 28 percent stake in Autonavi (NASDAQ:AMAP), makers of online maps and navigation. This comes just two weeks after Alibaba got more social by taking a 18 percent stake in Sina Weibo, the country’s hottest social network right now.

Autonavi is China’s top independent online mapping company, with over 100 million users on its mobile apps, constituting just over 25 percent market share among mobile maps in China. Search giant Baidu is second in this sector, while Google Maps continues to lose market share. This evening’s announcement points out:

The parties plan to share certain data, including AutoNavi’s map data and location-related information of the merchants on Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms, including Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com. AutoNavi and Alibaba will also cooperate in the areas of map engine, location search, navigation and cloud computing services and will cross-promote their respective products and services, with a goal of developing new location-based business models.

Joseph C. Tsai, executive vice chairman of Alibaba, and Eddie Wu, president of Alibaba’s mobile products division, will join AutoNavi’s board of directors upon the closing of the transaction. The transaction is expected to close in the near future, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

Alibaba, which is today celebrating 10 years of Taobao, its eBay-beating C2C shopping site, has been diversifying in the past year. Aside from acquiring the social music service Xiami last year and today’s significant stake in Autonavi, there’s lots of talk that the e-shopping behemoth is planning to do a lot of shopping of its own, with rumors of acquisitions/stakes in Umeng (mobile ads and analytics for app developers) and UCWeb, makers of the hugely popular mobile browser UC Browser. It’s no coincidence that these all relate to mobile.

On the eve of Mobile Day in Hanoi tomorrow, I think it’s worth taking a closer look at mobile growth in Vietnam. It’s increasingly becoming a buzzword that I hear among tech circles that are looking at the consumer market. Especially with foreign companies like Hungrypanda entering the market with a mobile app and big internet companies like VNG going mobile first, and even e-commerce companies like Project Lana getting more serious about fostering communication over mobile, mobile is a clear and present future. The companies are all readying the battlefield for the mobile growth factor.

Mobile growth in Vietnam is bullish as hell

One of the key reasons we’re seeing such powerful growth in mobile in Vietnam is because of the monetization potentials. In Vietnam’s web space, monetization has mainly been lead by advertising and now e-commerce. But online marketing is sparse at best, only accounting for less than 5 percent of total marketing spending in the country.

Mobile, on the other hand, although not exactly an easy space to monetize, given that telecoms take more than 30 percent of the cut on purchases made via SMS, is still a significant space. It’s significant because the market is about to expand very fast. And that market comprises of users who may have never been online before. As of late 2012, according to my sources, Vietnam has over 27 million smartphones (much of that is not on iOS and Android). And as I reported before, 6 million new smartphones will be shipped into the hands of consumers by the end of this year. That’s a 150 percent growth over the year before. And this figure is just 1.5 million under the total amount of users currently reported on the leading chat apps in Vietnam. (1)

Okay, so there are macro-economic issues

Now, lately I’ve been seeing lots of sensationalist gripes from international economists about how Vietnam’s economy is in a crisis and that it’s Asia’s weakest link, and granted, these warning signs have been seen for a long time. There is no doubt that Vietnam is in a quagmire in dealing with banking systems, corruption issues, and infrastructural issues like education.

But these macro-economic sweeping statements miss some key things about Vietnam. One of them is, small and medium sized businesses in Vietnam, according to some of my sources, are still not impacted. They’re still growing. And they account for a lot of the new businesses and growth in the country. The technology industry is also robust as ever, especially being lead by the outsourcing juggernauts in the country.

And mobile growth underlines some very key factors

Where is this mobile growth occurring? Why are so many companies set on attacking the mobile space despite the macroeconomic factors? Well, over 70 percent of the Vietnamese population is under 35, and many of them are in or entering the employment market. What’s the average monthly salary of this group of people? VND 3.2 million ($150). That may seem small, but not so small when weighed against the buying power of families that pool their salaries together living in one household. And even more so when weighed up against the dropping prices of smartphones and the already severely low 3G rates. This population is going mobile very fast, and whoever comes to dominate is sure to make tons of money. So don’t be surprised when the mobile market is one of the support beams that lifts Vietnam out of its current economic woes.

Oh, and mobile designers in Vietnam, seem to be much better than web designers.

Disclosure: Now, granted, I’m no economy major. But the impact of mobile is still a huge factor worth looking at when assessing an anomaly of an economy like Vietnam, which has been repeatedly thought to be in a “crisis” but defied analysts again and again.

(1) The math goes like this: 3.5 million from Viber + 2 million from Zalo + 1 million from KakaoTalk + 1 million from Line = 7.5 million. This does not account for obvious overlaps. Suffice it to say, if 27 million (total from 2012) + 6 million (total shipped in 2013) = 33 million smartphones in Vietnam. Thus 7.5 million only accounts for 22 percent of the smartphone market. And that assumes there’s no overlap. If overlap is accounted for, that percentage would be much smaller. This also does not factor in WhatsApp’s unknown numbers.