Readers may recall back in January when we looked at Chinese startup Tujia, a vacation home rental service which offers hotel-like online booking for your home if you’re on holiday. And now this evening there’s word from venture capital firm Lightspeed China Partners that it has made a series A investment in Tujia, along with CDH Investments and Ctrip International.Interestingly, HomeAway, the American site which is supposedly the inspiration behind Tujia is joining those ...
May 16 2012
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Docomo Rolls Out New Phone Lineup, Heralds New ‘Docomo Cloud’
After KDDI (TYO:9433) rolled out its new summer smartphone lineup yesterday, rival carrier NTT Docomo unveiled its own repertoire of handsets today. The entire lineup includes 16 smartphones, all of which will run Android 4.0, the most notable among them being the Samsung’s Galaxy III and the flashy Sharp Evangelion phone.The company also announced that it will be supporting its new lineup with what it's calling ‘Docomo Cloud.’ Among the many services included will ...
May 16 2012
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Kaifu Lee: Why Most Internet Companies Fail at Mobile
At first glance, it might seem that PC internet and mobile internet endeavors are similar enough that they'd be almost interchangable. Not so, says Kaifu Lee, who I'm pretty sure I don't need to even bother writing an introductory blurb about at this point. This morning on his Sina Weibo account, Lee wrote that most internet companies fail at mobile. Why? He listed five reasons:The mobile and internet industries are too different, requiring different "genes" ...
May 16 2012
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Online Travel Grows in China: An Interview with Tuniu CEO Donald Yu
In the West, online travel has long since eclipsed the brick-and-mortar industry, but in China, real-world travel agencies are very much alive. Travel patterns are also very different here; Chinese tourists often prefer to travel in groups as part of meticulously crafted travel packages, not just hop a flight to a vacation destination and figure the rest out later. That means operating a travel site in China presents some unique challenges, and recently, we got ...
May 16 2012
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Food Safety Site “Throw it Out the Window” Gets Government Support
Last week, we wrote about Throw it Out the Window, the food-safety platform built by a Chinese college student that's been garnering a lot of attention and momentum of late. In the week since then, China has seen more food safety scandals (in other news, the sky remains blue), but the potentially-sensitive Throw it Out the Window also got some support in the form of an attaboy from Shanghai food safety officials.According to the ...
May 16 2012
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Dolphin Browser Strikes Deal to be Pre-installed on KDDI Phones in Japan
MoboTap, the makers of the popular Dolphin Browser for iOS and Android, has announced a partnership with Japanese carrier KDDI (TYO:9433) in which Dolphin will be pre-loaded on future Android phones. KDDI just unrolled a new lineup of handsets yesterday, and according to the folks over TechCrunch, some of those phones will come with Dolphin pre-loaded.The browser first debuted as a featured app in KDDI’s app store last month, and since then MoboTap says ...
May 16 2012
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Expanding Abroad: Risky, Scary, and Exciting
Even though our core team is made up of five different nationalities all across Asia, Tech in Asia is still legally a Singapore-based startup. Singapore is small and it seems like a mandate that all local startups have to somehow expand abroad. As a budding Singaporean entrepreneur, I have to admit that it’s tough expanding business beyond this cozy, sunny island. It’s fun too, of course. There are all sorts of issues which we have ...
May 16 2012
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CrowdStar Continues Mobile Gaming Push, with Top Girl Localizations for China and Korea
Readers may recall a couple of weeks back that we reported about social game developer CrowdStar, and its partnership to bring its Top Girl franchise to the GREE platform. And today there's more news from the company, as it is building more significant gaming alliances in the Asia region. CrowdStar will be creating localized versions of Top Girl for China via a partnership with internet giant Tencent, and one for South Korea through mobile games ...
May 15 2012
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Sina Weibo Breaks 300 Million Registered Users, Mobile Users Growing
Today, Sina published some new statistics about its microblogging service, Sina Weibo. Turns out, the inevitable has happened: the service has broken 300 million users. Yes, we all knew that announcement was coming, and here's something else you knew was coming: most of weibo's active users are now also mobile users.Of course, what Sina's release cleverly doesn't say is how many of those 300 million users are "active users." Nor does it define what it ...
May 15 2012
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Wolianxi App Helps you Organize Outings Fast
Wolianxi (loose translation: connect me) reminds me of Found, which is also an app that tries help users organize meet ups quickly. But Wolianxi is much more straightforward. The Chinese app follows common outing behaviors of Chinese users which includes karaoke, games, travel, and group buying collections. You can select one of the activities to start organizing a meetup. Each meetup can be made public or private.The end result would be a list of ...
May 15 2012
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Indonesia’s Fimela Adds E-commerce to its Services With FimelaShop.com
Launched in December 2010, Fimela.com is a web portal dedicated solely to Indonesia’s modern, tech-savvy, and mobile women who want a combo of news, fashion, and family tips. The services has launched its own e-commerce site called FimelaShop.com which will be focusing on exclusive fashion brands, kids and toys, and home. It will not only be selling them, but it is giving a 30 percent to 70 percent discount for a limited time.We can see ...
May 15 2012
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Baidu Unveils Low Cost Smartphone with Voice Recognition and 100GB of Cloud Storage
There’s an interesting battle taking shape in China, as a number of companies are setting their sights on the nation’s entry-level smartphone market. Over the past few days along we’ve seen Samsung put forth two low-cost handsets for China, and Shanda is reportedly bringing an Android-based phone to market in early June.And now today, search giant Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) announced that it too is launching its own low-cost handset, the Changhong H5018, which is manufactured ...
Chinese Vacation Home Rental Service Tujia Receives Series A Investment
May 16, 2012
Indonesia’s Fimela Adds E-commerce to its Services With FimelaShop.com
May 15, 2012
Mixi Denies Nikkei Report that CEO Wants to Sell 55% Stake
May 15, 2012
Wolianxi App Helps you Organize Outings Fast
May 15, 2012
Buffet Mania Updates, Wants to Turn You Into a Buffet Maniac
May 14, 2012
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