Here’s his colourful presentation. Live blog below:

#18:30: “I networked a lot in Silicon Valley.” These are truths distilled, then, from anthropological observation.

Truth 1: Multi-billion dollar businesses need multi-trillion dollar markets.
Take this as a reality check, Cheng says. HungryGoWhere was sold at $15 million in Singapore – they would be much larger elsewhere in the world. “If you want to remain small, play small.”

2: Most starting directions and eventual destinations are different.
“Those who fail are those persisted on a single line or focus.” Pivoting can be crucial sometime. “Success is a frontier, not a point.”

#18:33:
3: 97% of online businesses fail.
“You need to try a lot, and a lot of different things.”

4: Goliaths don’t usually win.
Nimbleness is a significant factor, and there’s no reason to be afraid of big companies. InSing.com, a Singaporean “hyperlocal” portal, even with giant Singtel’s backing couldn’t take on the tiny HungryGoWhere. “David can win.”

#18:35:
5: Sexy Simplicity sells. Simple, dumb products can succeed. You don’t need to be Steve Jobs. Singtel tried to back console game streaming service OnLive, which went bust. But a simple site like Tinyprints, which made baby announcement cards, sold for $333 million. “A simple product we made called Itzme…all it does is send Facebook voice SMSes. How difficult can that be?”. 3 months, 800,000 users.

6: Most in Sandhill Road (where the VCs hang) are not interested in SEA. Go local with your funding sources. Think regional.

7: Foreign Talent: Singapore hates them, Silicon Valley loves them. Silicon Valley is a magnet for the best in the world. Singapore isn’t, not yet.

#18:40:
8: “X-factor” > ideas and experience. What does that look like?
Well, it’s:

9: PASSION x 3
Cheng narrates the story of a lone passionate baker who became supplier of muffins and cakes for half of the continental U.S for Starbucks. She told the roomful of MBA types discussing optimization matrices and business plans: “I succeeded because I love to bake.”

And finally:
“You don’t need sexy products. You don’t humongous funding. You just need fire in the belly and a glow in your eyes.”

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For all our newest Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

SocialAgent.me is an online lead generation tool to help businesses find leads in the Chinese market. Based between Shenzhen, China and Hong Kong with a mix of Americans, Chinese, Canadians, they help western companies have a better chance of success in the Chinese market through leveraging Chinese social media.

Our model is a monthly subscription plan with additional lead generation packages,” says co-founder Michael Michelini. “We’re also working on live online sales workers to boost their chances of finding quality prospects.”

“Who are the customers? Who are these prospects?” asked Nobuaki Kitagawa. Mike responded that they find customers in the Chinese market through social media profile search, depending on the client’s profile.

Andrew Collins pointed out that a “fan generation” (like helping football clubs find followers in China) approach would work on an interest graph like Weibo, rather than lead/sales generation. Mike responded they complemented the Sales department of a client, not the marketing department. Since they went live, they have around 10 paying customers.

Their eclectic clients include everything from the prosaic, such as Singaporean college recruitment agencies who want to find Chinese students to apply to singapore schools and New York-based real estate sales agencies to the esoteric, such as firms that make New Zealand milk powder QR tracking systems or Mexican seafood distributors.

Jeffrey Paine asked about the sustainability of clients: Once they found the people they needed within a few months, wouldnt they exit? The stickiness, Mike responded, was in the data management backend that helped businesses maintain relationships over time.

Their future plans include expanding to other social networks – a Wechat Agent is planned for the immediate future, followed by plans for presence on Twitter and Facebook.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For the rest of our Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

The battle between “thigh and denim” ends today, apparently.

Founder Janice Wilson’s new startup Puddding helps women find the perfect fitting pair of Jeans through what she calls “chick-sourcing.”

The e-commerce model has failed women, Janice says – even after hours of deliberation on online sites, a perfect fitting pair of jeans is only found 23% of the time.

Puddding on the other hand, starts not with inventory but with a profile. You put in, on the site, details of your shape, proportions, and pain points when shopping for jeans. Once that’s in, the site matches you with other women who share the same points and same shapes. She calls this ‘relevant discovery’. Then, you have acess to their photos and reviews and opportunities for sharing and exchange, an aspect she calls ‘Sizing Insurance’ and ‘Social Validation.’ All of that equals, she says, “Shopping Nirvana.”

Jeans are a $75 billion global market. Puddding’s target is women between 18-44 in the US and Singapore. Their revenue comes from affiliate marketing, second-hand sales, and helping niche brands organize pre-orders amongst a captive, specific audience.

Judge Nobuaki Kitagawa asked about how the site’s algorithm was generated. Janice outlined the process they went through with alpha testers to incorporate the site’s most important characteristics and profile features.

Their sourcing algorithm combines “intelligent matching”, “specialized sizing” and “customized browsing”, and undergoes continuous refinement. Judge Yasuhiko Yurimoto asked about the business’ key success factor in expanding. Janice says ‘traction’, and listed some of their strategies: social media presence via ‘chicksourcing’ campaigns, physical meetups and ‘chicksourcing’ parties.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For the rest of our Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

#15:45: MetroDeal projecting 24$ million in revenue this year. 200,000$ spent on Facebook and Google ads.

Ralph was born in Austria. Inspired by Austrian success stories like…Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the founder of Red Bull Dietrich Mateschitz. Started a simple e-commerce site on eBay in his teenage years. Made a smooth couple of thousand euros every month.

#15:48: “Every Filipino loves discounts.” The difference that MetroDeal bought was an overall knowledge of the industry, and an international background. Ralph was all-in-one for the first six months – sales, marketing, legal, customer service. The first sale happened 15 minutes after the site went live.

#15:50: The secret sauce for every deals website around the world is the same: Buffets for half the price. Burgers for half the price. Teeth whitening, hair rebonding, slimming. The rest is local experimentation and variety. No deal on the MetroDeal site in its first year that sold less than 100 times. Greatest hits: Buffet dinner on a ship, sold 40,000 times in two days. ’50% off burgers’ deal sold 50,000 times.

Their problems were the same ol’ as any startup – scaling, dealing with traffic. Spiky popularity.

#15:53: Currently 2000 merchants on the site. Big names among them. The secret lies in what you add to merchants in terms of value. Merchants see it as a “cash flow machine” – one ice skating rink, for instance, was unhappy at their traffic numbers. Now they have a continuous deal running on MetroDeal, and are able to stay afloat (heehee). They’re now present in Indonesia. Plans to expand in SE Asia, become a strange hybrid deals/shopping portal. They already sell hot new products like the iPhone 5 via time-limited offers.

#15:55: The Philippines is still a priority. (Pro tip from Ralph: Easier to enter to do business, for foreigners, than China) The tipping point for MetroDeal was partly the push on Google and Facebook ads: a lot of clickthroughs, incoming traffic, impressions. “We had continuous market spend, and the stamina, and we reached the top.”

Future plans: Focus on domestic tourism in the Philippines. With 7000+ islands, there’s a lot of scope there.

#16:00: Exit plans? “We’re on an exciting ride upwards, to be up there with Google, Facebook and Yahoo in the rankings.” They’ve been approached by various companies “starting with R and other characters”. The Philippines is an exciting market, Ralph says. “Have the ability to sift good advice from the mediocre”. Metrodeal was dissuaded from starting an e-commerce site because of low credit card use. That factor never came into play.

The Philippines is the only country in the region apart from Singapore with blazing-fast LTE. Mobile is exciting, Ralph says. Next steps include official Android and iPhone apps.

That’s a wrap. Onwards to Startup Arena, Day 2!

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For all our newest Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

E-Commerce growth in China has been explosive, to say the least. Taobao’s at the head of that, and it’ll be interesting to see where they see themselves outside their mainland stronghold.

#14:47: This place has the “smell of money”, says Daphne to the audience, as some sort of surreal opening remark. This should get interesting.

#14:50: They’re looking to expand the Taobao ecosystem outside China. 7 million sellers on the platform now, and they’re looking at bringing more international users in. The two countries of focus are Hong Kong and Taiwan, though a lot of registered users from Malaysia and Singapore are using the platform too.

By end of 2012, 1.4 million users from Hong Kong on Taobao. In Taiwan, 600,000. 1 million from Southeast Asia – 280,000 of those from Singapore.

#14:53: Merchants coming onboard too, from outside China. International sellers like Microsoft opening Tmall stores. “Fashionable shoes brand” Charles and Keith have one too. *evil laugh* in response to question on Rakuten Vs Tmall.

#14:55: Localization and payment plans: “We’re looking at providing local services.” Plans are underway to involve local service providers for logistics and payments. They’re working with international shipping providers for better end-to-end tracking information for purchases. Alipay is a part of this expansion (accepting international credit cards etc., banks in other countries, local payment providers). Several partners-in-progress. “I can only reveal one…” *drumroll* Singapore’s DBS!

Sales pitch time now. DBS cardholders get rewards for all purchases above 50 RMB! /end sales pitch. Moving on swiftly.

#15:00: No luck on sales figures for international merchants within Taobao, or international sales figures of any kind. “That’s confidential,” she laughs. Friendliest “no comment” from a corporation this blogger has heard in a while.

#15:05: Does Taobao need to be more social? “We have forum!” says Daphne. “But in Chinese…I can translate for you.” Little does she know of ace TiA editor Steven Millward‘s l33t 中文 skills.

Tmall purchases coming from outside China too…but no plans for an English website yet. Not in 2013, atleast. It’s a big challenge, getting all merchant’s contents to make the transition too. “Anything is possible,” she says enigmatically. “But we need to focus on infrastructure and service first.” There is, however, a dedicated service line with English and Cantonese speakers for foreign users.

Mum’s the word on the possible Alibaba IPO. It was worth a shot.

#15:08: The Alibaba company, as a whole, is now taking baby steps internationally, Daphne says. But that pace will accelerate. Plug for Ali Express, kind of like an English Tmall.

#15:18: Over 6,000 people have used the Taobao API to develop services on the platform. Supplementary ecosystem activities gaining steam, with people targeting Taobao merchants for customer service training, inventory management. Customer focused apps too, such as comparative shopping. Open to working with startups to develop more services of this kind. Even considering strategic investments in particularly sharp ideas.

What does the future hold? More business operations. More infrastructure base. More marketing. More international merchants. More users. More “happy” users. More Taobao partners and developers.

In summary, Taobao strategy for 2013: MOAR.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For all our newest Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

“I wanted to create a social network that was clean, crisp and fresh,” he says. Clearly many share his inclination. Since its soft launch last year, Xunta has nearly 60,000 users around mainland China.

Nobuaki Kitagawa asked how many of these users were “active”. Sense responded that all growth was organic, and driven by users rather than any marketing. 30% of the users were active as of April 2013.

Xunta also has a rich mobile app, and an “Offline Card” with a QR code you can give to someone of interest you meet at a public event, and connect with later. Each user gets to print upto 100 cards, and requesting more is a paid service.

Xunta’s user base is spreading across Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and Japan, but largely with the Chinese diaspora in those countries. Sense expects more will sign up once the English version, which is coming soon, is launched.

Xunta’s competitors include Hong Kong-based Hornet and mainland China’s Blued, though Sense says both are very niche in an already niche market.

Xunta’s revenue model allows for paid premium services, including perks similar to dating giant OKCupid’s ‘A-List.’
Jeffrey Paine asked what these premium features were. Sense responded that these included a better search algorithm, and the ability to send voice messages to other users.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For the rest of our Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

Triibe is what co-founder Chun Kiat Chua describes as a ‘smart feedback’ channel, one that helps businesses both receive real-time feedback, and act on it.

Customers at a Triibe enabled shop or restaurant share their experiences and receive reward enticements for honest feedback, while businesses receive on-the-spot customer experience data and a more ruminative private feedback channel between them and consumers (rather than dealing with an expletive-laden shouting match on public online forums)

Nobuaki Kitagawa wasn’t convinced about the level of persuasion to get customers to give rich feedback. Chun Kiat responded that the discounts being offered in return for feedback were “good”, and successful in creating a feedback cycle.

Triibe began as a broader customer intelligence platform offering all sorts of analytics for small businesses, but the three co-founders soon decided to focus on the subset of customer feedback – helping beauty boutiques, restaurants and small businesses know their customers better.

Judge Andrew Collins questioned the potential market size of the operation, pointing out that earnings potential looked very low. Triibe responded that it charges a monthly price per location for small businesses, and is scaling up towards offering enterprise plans for larger entities like chain restaurants and big hotels, which will become the main revenue sources.

Their competitors in the small business space include the JFDI-backed Jungle Ventures-backed Mobikon – Chua claims Triibe is more device agnostic than the iPad-centric Mobikon (UPDATE: A Jungle Ventures representative points out that it actually invested in Mobikon, and that the service is platform agnostic) – and countless other market research firms and platforms like Survey Monkey at the enterprise level.

Jeffrey Paine asked what the conversion rates for feeedback was. The team admitted that it didn’t have precise data on that, but detailed a case study involving Singapore-based bar chain Timbre.

Yasuhiko Yurimoto pointed out that the product fit nicely with Japanese business culture, and asked them if they’d considered the market. They hadn’t…until now.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For the rest of our Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

Regular Tech In Asia readers and craft enthusiasts might already be familiar with Hong Kong based Lots of Buttons, now the world’s largest button site. It hopes to expand to other craft items in the future, starting with beads and ribbons.

Lots of Buttons doesn’t just smother you with choice. It’s also the cheapest supplier, both on and offline, and features a slick frontend to help crafters easily find the right size, colour and shape (they’re a picky bunch). Currently focused on the US crafts market, they hope to “market in English, ship cheaper than competitors and be close to China,” where these materials are manufactured.

“We do this by disintermediating the entire value chain and going straight to the factory,” says founder Ken Lee. “Wholesaling and storage adds a lot to the cost of the buttons.”

Launched in June 2012, the firm is almost cash-break even.

“Two features we would really be keen on after getting an angel round investment,” Ken told us in an earlier interview and reiterated on stage, “is to offer people who buy our buttons and crafts materials the ability to post back on our site to sell it, similar to services like Etsy.” Lots of Buttons currently occupies what Ken calls a “sweet spot” combining low prices and broad selection.

Andrew Collins asked about the sustainability of the site’s supplier networks. Ken answered that these networks were well established now, and their supplier relations strong. Nobuaki Kitagawa asked for clarification on the site’s price competitiveness, to which Ken pointed out their proximity to manufacturers in China.

“I bet a lot of you are thinking, we should do zips…we should do socks!” joked judge Jeffrey Paine.

Too late. Apparently ‘Lots of Zippers’ has already been registered as an domain name.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For the rest of our Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

#14:45:
Moo started an outsourcing company right after college, doing application development for overseas companies. One of the apps they worked on was a digital magazine for the then newly-launched iPad. So he pulled 5 people from the existing company and started Ookbee. 7 months later, they were profitable.

#14:50: In Ookbee’s first month after launch, their revenue was as low as several hundred USD. But the improvements accrued. Moo attributes part of the success to the business model – Ookbee’s revenue sharing deals with publishers brings good content in (publishers get to keep 70%, with little to no extra cost). In Thailand, that got all the big media hosues on board. The magazines themselves, then, gave the company free advertising…creating a snowball effect. Ookbee is now 40 people, 3 million users, about 10% of them paying. Last year, they made $3 million, with a slim $3-400,000 profit.

#14:56: Ookbee raised $2 million last year to focus on growth. Being one of the first Thai companies in this space, revenue had to be found right away to convince investors that this was worth doing. They’re now trying to expand outside of the country – with small offices in Malaysia, Vietnam and Singapore (NOTE: They’re still looking for partners in Indonesia). Right now, they want to build “local knowledge” and lay low, before expanding aggressively.

#15:00: Thai entrepreneurs are “good, technical folks” but inexperienced. The problem is thinking out of the box to generate revenue streams – too many have the ideas, Moo says, but just talk vaguely about an “advertising model” when pressed on revenue generation. “Outsourcing is the easiest way to make money in this region,” he says. “But without your own projects you can never take off.”

Ookbee is looking for other products to sell to the same audience they’ve captured through Ookbee. Audio Books are in the pipeline (they’ve just finished constructing a recording room). “There are several more projects like that,” he says enigmatically.

#15:03: Buyers are interested in Ookbee, but Moo is isn’t telling us more. “Around 4″, he says in response to a question on just how many companies are interested in Ookbee. Moo says the exit option is there, but the chance to “take our service to the next level” takes priority.

“Bangkok’s Most Eligible Bachelor” then exits to applause, stage-left.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For all our newest Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

That’s from just over 80 million users of KakaoTalk.

While he declined to go into further detail, he did reveal that the app’s gaming platform contributed a “significant” chunk of that figure. Kakao’s undoubtedly had an interesting year. They’ve expanded aggressively into Southeast Asia and Japan, and held their own against competitors like Japan’s Line and China’s Wechat.

Follow further updates on Startup Asia here, or on twitter at @techinasia.

#11:55: Sirgoo is a lawyer by training, in charge of all the “outside stuff” – legal, PR, marketing – at Kakao. They’re a very horizontal organization. Kakao was founded 6 years ago, and did a lot of web 2.0 services in the early days and “failed miserably”. In mid 2009, with smartphones ascendant, they came up with 3 different services – two of which have been left on the wayside after Kakao’s surge in popularity. Last year, in April, they received a total of 90 million in funding, including interest from China’s Tencent.

#12:00: Kakao’s success is “50% dumb luck”, and 50% “listening to our users”. 3 years of failure taught them that the hard way, he says. “We’ve slowly built a loyal following and brand image.” In hindsight, he wishes Kakao had focused on global expansion a bit more aggresively.

#12:03: On global plans: “We wont advertise agressively in China (and Tencent, likewise, won’t in Korea), but other markets we are in competition. South East Asia is a particular focus.

#12:06: “Games traditionally have a business model that really works online.” Early last year, they spoke to several game companies to discuss outsourcing the games platform to one of them. In 2012, they did about $45 million in revenue, and $7 million in profit. Games are a huge revenue driver. In 2-3 years, he expects this trend to continue. Kakao’s “gifting” platform, started 2 years ago with the ability to purchase Starbucks coffee coupons through the service, is now selling things like 200$ Swarovski necklaces, 1000$ jewelery sets.

#12:10: Kakao in Southeast Asia: Using K-pop celebrities like Big Bang to drive expansion in the region. Hitting 100,000 downloads a day today. Users aren’t “hugely different” from the Korean core, but focusing on getting more customized content for users in the region. Overseas revenue is expected to rise significantly in the long run. A game platform, currently live in Korea and Japan, will be replicated soon in southeast Asia.

Final word: “We’d like to IPO one day, but it’s too early to talk about exiting. We’d rather talk about growing and expanding right now.”

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For all our newest Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

#10:12: Aliza is Twitter’s first employee in Asia outside Japan. She has loads of experience in the region, having lived and worked in Australia and Singapore for most of her adult life. The Singapore Twitter office, she says, is “currently in her apartment.”

#10:15: Twitter’s all about the birds, she says. You don’t join a team, you join the “flock”. 70% of Twitter’s users are outside the US, and around 25% are in Asia.

#10:16: Twitter’s 140 character limit came from the SMS limit of 160 characters (plus an allowance for long usernames). It was designed from the ground up to work great on everything from feature phones to tablets.

Twitter is used very simlarly around the world, Alica says. it’s like a “town hall”. A common public space to share local news and happenings. It’s also become a lifeline, particularly in Asia, for disaster response – to find people, organize rescues or share updates.

#10:17: Two things that are different in Asia: extensive use of Twitter on non-smartphones. In places like Japan, the character base is different – 140 characters in China or Japan is much longer than an update, almost a short story.

#10:18: Alica’s advice to startups: Learn to use Twitter organically first. Twitter is an “interest graph”, not a “social graph”. That makes it more interesting.

#10:20: Advice #2: Talk to people the way you would have a conversation. Tweet whatever you want, but think about what people are interested in. Would the TechInAsia readership, for instance, be interested in what we had for breakfast? (Readers: would you? I had Kopi-O and a curry puff!)

#10:23: Aliza is taking the floor solo now. Twitter thinks of itself as a tech company in the media space, she says. Multilayered, complex interactions are the now norm on Twitter. Here’s some fun trivia: How long did it take Twitter to reach their first billion tweets? 3 years, 2 months 1 day. How long does it take now? 2.5 days.

#10:27: A tour of Twitter’s interface now: The only thing companies can buy is the top space on a mobile interface. It can be purchased for a day, and is usually used for launch announcements.
“We throttle the amount of promotions anyone sees per day,” she says. Twitter will never be a “spammy ad platform.”

#10:35: Twitter launched at the end of January 2013 in Singapore, and is currently selling in 5 countries in SE Asia through Komli Media. It’s very early days. Local success stories so far: Singtel.

#10:37: Aliza’s final message: We’re happy to be here just as a platform to help startups connect with customers. Round of applause. Onwards and upwards!

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For all our newest Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

On March 26, two Singapore startups will mark their appearance at YCombinator’s Demo Day. That’s when the influential seed accelerator’s annual batch of 47 startups presents to investors. Representing Singapore at the big event are Padlet and Semantics3.

For the uninitiated, Ycombinator is an American seed accelerator that has, in the past, funded and incubated such contemporary heavyweights as Dropbox, Reddit and Airbnb. It’s a big annual event that gets enormous attention, and therefore a significant push onto the global stage for these teams.

Padlet

Padlet is an online content creation service that’s like a cross between Pinterest and a chaotic sticky board. It gives you an empty wall, like “a blank piece of paper”, that you can then fill by simply drag-and-dropping files where you want them, or typing text wherever you double click.

You can choose to go freeform (like doodles on paper or that chaotic sticky board) or choose templates and ‘streams’ (to give it that Pinterest look), then embed your efforts into a blog or microsite.

Apart from creating cool portfolio pages or streams for specific projects (Padlet has been used by organizations as diverse as the Baltimore Zoo and The Public Advocate for the City of New York), its also a powerful tool for teachers and collaborative team projects.

Padlet is already generating revenue via private use by small organizations and businesses, and co-founders Nitesh Goel and Pranav Piyush (both National University of Singapore alums) say over one million padlets have already been created by users.

Check out Padlet’s demo here, and gaze upon the prettiness that is their gallery of examples here.

Semantics3

Semantics3 is a curated online database of products and prices (current count: 50 million prices, 20 million products), tricked-out with a sprinkling of fancy APIs. Say you run an e-commerce site, or a price-comparison app. Semantics3’s flagship Products Data API can churn the analytics underneath, providing you with a robust platform to run price and competitor analysis, or keep track of best-selling products.

Semantics3’s five-member founding team is supported by NUS Enterprise, and their business model revolves around monthly subscriptions to their database and APIs.

We’ll let you know how they did once D-Day rolls around. Stay tuned.

In leadership theory, they call it the ‘first follower’ effect.

Just get one other person to support what you’re doing. That’s all you need to start a movement, drive change or in the case of Ryan Cepada – become a Philippines social network’s biggest viral star.

Ryan is a 20-year old student of architecture in the remote province of Bukidnon, located on the island of Mindanao. How remote? There are no airports in the province, and both computer and internet access is patchy, at best.

But before we say anymore, it’s best if you listen to the sound of his voice:

In late 2012, armed with a Nokia C3000+ and a regular headset, he began posting snippets of self-composed songs to Bubbly, a voice message social network we’ve written about before. Think of it as Twitter with voice.

He told exactly one person, his cousin, to follow his Bubbly ID.

That was enough. Less than six months later, he now has 220,000 followers, making him the number one celebrity on Bubbly’s network (beating out local heavyweights like rapper Loonie).

Artie Lopez, the country manager for Bubbly who managed to track Ryan down to his hometown, says: “Several people started texting him, calling him, and sending their likes and comments on Bubbly. He was so surprised, people from all over the country were sending in their praises and inspirational messages.” He adds:

Messages like “I love your songs and voice!”, and “I listen to your songs every night before I go to sleep”, and “Your songs inspire me to follow my dreams”. He literally got a SMS every second his phone was turned on.

What started as a distraction, a way to background the chronic financial troubles of his six-member family, was now the centrepiece of his creative life (Ryan also sketches and designs stickers, occasionally posting them to his Facebook page).

Ryan wasn’t always a singer. Initially, he’d used the Bubbly network for a rather curious phenomenon that Artie Lopez calls a ‘text clan’. Texting is a political tool in Mindanao, a province that has seen violent internal clashes and separatist movements. “[Ryan] was part of a “war clan” where people would bash and battle with each other on SMS, posting ‘battle’ voice messages – making fun of people, swearing at them, and just basically trying to stir up trouble.” The switch to music came after his disillusionment with the clan, and an acknowledgement that this constant confrontation was making him irritable and rude.

The songs were also the perfect medium for his busy schedule. Ryan juggles two jobs, a daily three-hour commute and various shopping errands around his hometown. He composes early in the morning and between jobs, taking a quick break to tap out tunes with spoons and table-tops in his family-owned eatery for percussion. Most of his output seems to converge on the sappy love song genre, as he explains in an interview to a local magazine:

My favorite and my inspiration is Westlife. I love a lot of bands, but they are my favorite. I also like Bruno Mars as a solo artist.

Ryan’s story is a heart-warming counterpoint to the slickly produced, almost mainstream business of producing viral hits today – a reminder that the gear doesn’t really matter. All it takes is heart, sincerity and that all-important first follower.

Researcher Patrick Ainslie calls it ‘handshakes over hetongs’ (the Mandarin word for ‘contract’). It’s an opportunity, an open challenge even, to reach 250 million people in China and potentially transform their lives.

Ainslie is part of a team of researchers at New York-based social enterprise Reboot, which recently published a study, based on extensive field interviews, on designing financial services for China’s marginalized groups. The project was commissioned by the Institute of Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at the University of California in Irvine, and will soon be released as a book titled “Embracing Informality: Designing Financial Services for China’s Marginalized.”

64 percent of China’s rural and migrant population does not have access to formal banking services. Market pressures and risk aversion have driven the country’s “Big Four” banks to close more than 30,000 branches in just the last five years. The researchers at Reboot set out to explore the needs of marginalized groups (migrant workers, rural villagers and ethnic minorities), and to see how enterprises and entrepreneurs could deploy relevant financial services to this potentially gigantic customer base.

The most fascinating part of the report is the hypothetical mobile phone service Ainslie and his team describe – called M-Fu, its a remittance service that draws on the fieldwork to show how their recommendations can be put into practice.

“With this research, we’re looking to curate a conversation among service providers , big donors, and startups,” Ainslie told me over a Skype interview. “Basically to say that if you’re going to build apps and services in China today, pay attention to these special cultural characteristics.” He adds:

“We want to put this out there as a current snapshot of what life is like for rural and disenfranchised – to try to humanize the system by talking about individual stories and the people we met.

Adapting international models

The obvious point of comparison for any form of mobile-based finance is M-PESA, first deployed successfully in Kenya and then imitated across the world with varying levels of success.

“You have to adapt systems to local contexts,” Ainslie says, “ specifically within China, there are current factors that we think make it prime for this market.”

China has high levels of mobile phone use (users can therefore “leapfrog infrastructure such as ATMs”, the report states, while still accessing services), an intensive reliance on informal remittance payments (mirroring success stories such as Tigo Cash in Paraguay and GCash in the Philippines), a more-or-less robust national ID card system (the shenfenzheng) and a government open to innovative private-public partnerships.

“The sheer amount of money moving around the country informally, based both off of data from our respondent pool and other reports on remittances across China,” Ainslie says, is an open invitation to design and provide a safe platform, which the team attempted with their hypothetical M-Fu prototype. “For anyone attempting this, you have to deal with the chicken-and-egg problem of building a user base and building an agent base within your areas of operation. He adds:

Our advice is: start a pilot small, and build your pilot into the current urban-rural remittance corridors, which is a frequently moving target.

What role can startups play?

Even though China’s large telcos are taking an active interest in mobile banking – China Mobile is partnering with China UnionPay to launch NFC-enabled phones – Ainslie still envisions a key role for startups and entrepreneurs.

“There have been some very interesting examples of startups entering this space,” he says, “Some have operated in regulatory loopholes, and tried to fill the gap where a traditional brick-and-mortar bank cannot offer services that people want, or at a price that they can afford.”

He points to the recent explosion of peer-to-peer microlending platforms in China, starting from the popular Qifang (now defunct) to current heavyweights like Pandai. He says:

These are interesting not only because they provide financial access, but also an opportunity to build a credit score, to build a future financial profile.

One drawback, however, is that these web-based platforms inherently cut out a large part of the population which doesn’t have regular access to the Internet or the tech literacy required to use them efficiently. They are, in the report’s words, “good for innovation but not necessarily inclusion.”

“This is where the importance of agent networks and the embrace of informal networks comes in,” Ainslie says. “The trust you would build with a laoban (boss) working for several years over multiple cities supercedes the anonymous relationship you would have with a bank.”

While these informal relationships lack a paper trail, and could put users at risk by hiding structures of coercion and patronage, the laoban’s role as a financial agent is crucial. They have a legitimate financial profile rather than transient workers who may slip in and out of these networks, and could be the linchpins to anchor a sustainable mobile banking system on.

“We have no wish to make or monetize our product idea,” Ainslie concludes. “Our experience is in social research, and understanding local contexts. But we’d be thrilled to see how you can get something like this off the ground.”

Duable Chinese, a US/Taiwan based startup, doesn’t want to send you into the labyrinth alone. It’s a web app, a Chinese reading interface that feeds you selected reading material synced to your proficiency level. Now accepting pre-orders for monthly subscriptions, they hope to release their first prototype in April 2013. Co-founder Nikolaas Van Der Ploeg, speaking to me in Singapore, says:

We’re selecting interesting blog posts, news reports, even some playful fan-fiction, so you get both a fun and relevant reading experience.

Users take an initial test to determine their proficiency levels, and the app then sends you articles based on your subjects of interest (music, technology, fiction among others). “Our main focus right now is on users with intermediate proficiency,” Van der Ploeg says. “We’ll monitor words that people click on or phrases they’re having trouble with, and we can track progress that way.”

Think of it as a cross between TheChineseReader and the Zhongwen plugin for Chrome, with analytics churning underneath and a personalized recommendation engine on top.

Started in October 2012, Duable’s co-founders Van Der Ploeg, an American computer programmer based in Taiwan, and Victor Chen, an American-born Taiwanese, have been trawling for sources and churning our prototypes. They’ve just received S$ 25,000 in seed funding from Singapore’s Jungle Frog Digital Incubator, and are part of JFDI’s 2013 accelerator program.

Duable’s revenue model is centered on monthly subscriptions, but Chen and Van der Ploeg are also reaching out to schools and teachers, who can then integrate their curriculum into the Duable interface. Van der Ploeg says:

We’re focused on our initial release now but in the future, we could even consider multiple languages.

They have a limited pre-release sale on till the end of February, with monthly subscriptions starting at US$14.99.

Read any news report out of China today, and chances are it’ll include a smarmy comment or two from a netizen on Sina Weibo. The 400 million-strong microblogging site is almost synonymous with the voice of the country’s young urbanites – so much so that there’s an online cottage industry (Tea Leaf Nation, Ministry of Tofu and China Digital Times among others) dedicated to translating cross-sections of it for an English audience.

But without fluency in Chinese (and a street-smart awareness of online slang), most of Weibo is near incomprehensible. That’s where Hong Kong-based startup Surround App comes in. It’s an upcoming English mobile client for Sina Weibo, with its first release planned for April 2013, offering a mix of machine and human translation to help you make sense of the content on China’s vast social networks. From trenchant social commentary to…um…Brad Pitt.

“It was inspired basically by my own frustration,” says co-founder Jeffrey Broer over my Skype interview with him, admitting that he can only speak about five sentences in Mandarin. “I’ve been in and out of mainland China for over 10 years, and there are all these fascinating people online that I want to follow, but I can’t. It was a whole world that I couldn’t grasp.”

Broer, the founder of another Hong-Kong based startup, Grayscale, put together a team of four late in 2012, and Surround App received about US$15,000 in seed funding (plus office space and technical guidance) from HK Accelerator.

Targeted at “language students, bloggers, micro-celebrities and managers in China”, Surround App plans to follow a freemium model – the free app will allow awkward machine translations (like copy-pasting a block of text into Google Translate) of all Sina Weibo content, helped partly by a slang database that the team is planning to build into future releases. Broer adds:

We’re still playing around with the specifics. But we’ll have monthly subscriptions that will feature human translations of specific accounts, a ‘curated’ human-translated daily news section, and packages for corporate clients.

Even with translation, the two challenges in engaging with Sina Weibo are figuring out who to follow:

We’re developing our own strong search databases for that, and we’ll present users with recommendations based on keywords.

Users will be able to make sense of the dense web of punning and wordplay that the network is famous for, and understanding those images people keep swapping. For that, Broer says:

We have a few ideas, such as optical character recognition (OCR) that we could use for images, but not planning to address that in our first release.

Built as a hybrid HTML5 app, Surround App will be available on all major mobile platforms. The UI will let you switch back and forth between the original Chinese posts and the English translations – a potentially interesting feature for language learners.

Surround eventually hopes to support multiple Chinese social networks – Broer mentions RenRen and QQ – though dealing with Sina Weibo’s 34,977 posts per second might keep the team occupied for a while yet.