I think no one likes to be censored, and that includes me. But sometimes, you can’t have total control over everything, especially when you are doing business in another country. When it was uncovered that Line is ready with filters to prevent the sending of politically sensitive words for the Chinese version of Line (branded “Lian Wo”), the natural reaction of most people was that it is a bad thing.

I thought so too. But when you cover or work in the Chinese internet industry, censorship slowly becomes the norm. It’s common practice in China, across the internet and all offline media, that you self-censor first so that you don’t even trouble the censors. If you don’t want to follow this rule, then get the hell out of China. Run far away.

Now, let me repeat that I’m not a fan of censorship. But at the same time, after complaining about why the hell China blocks certain websites and has certain restrictions, I’ve grown to understand that every country has its own rules and you have to obey them to conduct business there. Period.

So would Line be wrong if it were to really censor politically sensitive words in China? That word filter within the Line app is not yet switched on, but it’s ready to be activated. I personally don’t think Line is wrong because the company has simply followed the rules of the country and the censorship will only apply to its Chinese app. I’m sure there are people who disagree. If you are one of them, kindly share your thoughts in the comments.

China, which is crowded with numerous third-party Android app stores, isn’t generating any game revenue on Google Play since its payment system doesn’t work there. iOS game revenue in China looks healthy, though. Junde said that iOS 6, which is packed with Chinese features, has encouraged many Chinese iOS users to update its devices and in process lose their jailbreak which causes revenue on iTunes to increase.

In Japan, though, the iOS news was less impressive; game revenue from iPad isn’t great, which came to many as a surprise. In fact, only the US generates huge revenue from games on iPad.

In terms of revenue per download, no one is even near Japan’s figures which recorded $1.83 and $1.89 on iOS Games and Google Play respectively. Junde suspects that Singapore’s high iOS revenue per download figure was encouraged by the nation’s recent addiction to the game Candy Crush.

The top publishers based on game revenue on both iOS and Google Play include a number of Asian game publishers including Gungho, NHN, WeMade, GREE, and DeNA. Interestingly, Japan’s Gungho only has eight and nine applications on iOS and Android respectively, but is doing better in terms of revenue compared to GREE and DeNA, which both have hundreds of applications published on both platforms.

Gungho has done extremely well recently thanks to hit game Puzzle and Dragons which is the top revenue game for iOS and Android in March 2013. On Google Play, Asian games are also well represented, with games including Puzzle and Dragons, Anipang, Line Pop, and Blood Brothers hitting the charts.

It’s a pity that we can’t embed the entire deck into this post but we thank App Annie for the permission to include some of the slides for our readers.

Developed by Japanese gaming company DeNA, Blood Brothers is a popular mobile game that has hit number one place in 33 countries. It is also a mobile game played across most parts of the world except for China, Africa, and Japan.

Tetsuya Mori, managing director of DeNA’s Singapore office, said at today’s Casual Connect conference in Singapore that Blood Brothers is an important case study for developers because it is one of the few games that has won without special device leverage (like Nintendo had in the past) or a Japan-first success (like Rage of Bahamut). Mr. Mori added:

Blood Brothers is interesting because we didn’t even release the game in Japan. We just released the game in the global market and won the world. For that reason, it matters to us [game developers].

While most Japanese game publishers know how to make money in their local market, Mori says that not many know how to repeat the success in the global market. So what is the reason for Blood Brothers‘ success? Mori explains that in-game events have made the major difference.

The secret sauce: Games inside a game

As explained by Mori, events are “games inside a game.” They are usually set within a limited time and gives players rare items. Such in-game events usually double the average revenue per user (ARPU). Examples of an event could be a player versus player (PvP) event, boss raid, or special dungeon mission. Understanding that events are important, Mori shared five key design points on planning an event:

1. Leader-board: A way to spur gamers to climb the ranking ladder.
2. Separation into groups: To create a sense of belonging among gamers. But sometimes a group too big doesn’t provide that sense of belonging. “Divide the pyramid small enough so that players feel they have control,” says Mori. He also shared that a 10-person pyramids are what DeNA finds most effective for Blood Brothers but the team keeps evaluating and optimizing the group based on data they find.
3. Incentivizing effort: Blood Brothers gives one point for the first reward and provides increasing returns of points as users get higher.
4. One day, one match: Developers shouldn’t do events too frequently to ensure that events stay fresh and exclusive. Don’t make gamers exhausted.
5. Rewarding effort: Top players usually feel comfortable being at the top of the pyramid. To keep them working, Blood Brothers provides negative incentive from time to time to keep them on their toes.

Mori also shares the “five don’ts” when designing Blood Brothers:

• Don’t play, get lost.
• Don’t get players overwhelmed.
• Don’t get them bored.
• Don’t get them exhausted.
• Don’t let top players feel too secure and comfortable.

Actively managing games as a service

Mori says that a lot of game developers see a game as a product and leave it there once it is developed. But for DeNA, it is all about actively managing games as a service. “[A game] is art, yes, but it is more science than art,” said Mori (see slide 13).

Part of the work for Blood Brothers is done at DeNA Hanoi, the Vietnamese branch formed through the Punch Entertainment team it acquired 18 months ago. He ended his keynote saying:

Tokyo HQ studios rely more and more on the Hanoi studio. We have another
game called History Attacks. Just through this experience, we are making active transfer of our core competency to Southeast Asia. Not only in Hanoi, but we also set up a studio in Singapore.

UPDATE: To make it clear, Blood Brothers is available in China (on mobage.cn and mobage.tw) and Africa (on Mobage West Network)

Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma singing at Taobao’s 10th anniversary celebration

With founder Jack Ma stepping down from the role of CEO, skeptics will doubt whether Alibaba can continue to grow strongly without its founder’s leadership. It’s perhaps normal to have such a reaction given that the founders are usually the most important people in a company.

Ma has been an inspirational figure for folks inside and outside of the company. Alibaba without him in the CEO’s seat just doesn’t feel complete. But is it going to have a major impact on Alibaba? I don’t think so. In fact, I believe Alibaba’s future is brighter than before. Here are four reasons why that’s true:

China hasn’t reached its full potential

With over 1.3 billion in population and 564 million internet users (about 42 percent penetration) China’s internet is still considered young. Alibaba has grown with China’s internet boom and will continue to grow because there’s still so much room for growth in China. Though the annual growth rate for e-commerce market size in China is expected to slow year by year, Alibaba should experience healthy growth over the next two to three years. Emarketer forecasts that by the end of 2013, there will be 271 million Chinese spending $265.1 billion on B2C e-commerce platforms and by 2016 there will be 423 million online shoppers in China spending a total of $457.6 billion on B2C platforms. Note that this doesn’t count C2C platforms like Taobao. The Economist also wrote that “by 2020 China’s e-commerce market is forecast to be bigger than the existing markets in America, Britain, Japan, Germany and France combined.” I think you get the point; China is big now and it will only get bigger.

State-owned news agency Xinhua said recently that the growth of other e-commerce giants like eBay and Amazon has plateaued and thus implied that Alibaba could face the same problem. But both companies originate from the US, which already has a matured internet ecosystem with a 78.2 percent online penetration rate back in 2011, according to World Bank data. Even though eBay and Amazon have already expanded outside of the US, their combined sales still can’t match Alibaba’s.

Alibaba’s Taobao has only just started thinking international so the potential is surely there. Plus, the local Chinese market remains lucrative as more internet users jump on board and become more affluent. The market conditions seem great for strong growth for Alibaba.

Forward thinking, international ambition

Alibaba has invested in some high-potential companies that could fuse well with its e-commerce business. In recent months, Alibaba has invested in China’s popular microblog Sina Weibo and also mapping service company Autonavi. Surely, Alibaba must have thought about how to bring e-commerce to the next level, be it social commerce or location-based commerce. My colleague Charlie has penned his opinions here and here on why the deal makes sense and I encourage you to give them a read.

As a PC first company, Alibaba has had to adapt to mobile, and has done so fairly early and well. Taobao, for example, is extremely dominant not only on PC-based shopping but also on mobile. Plus, the company is extremely data driven and continues to invest and make decisions based on data. A lot of people perhaps don’t know that Alibaba is sort of like a combination of services of Amazon + eBay + Kakaku, which is Japan’s most popular price comparison search engine. It runs a series of e-commerce and online services including Alibaba.com (B2B), Tmall (B2B2C), Taobao (C2C), Alipay (e-payment), Aliyun (cloud computing), and eTao (price search). That covers a lot of bases, and they all translate easily to mobile.

While fighting to stay at the frontline in China e-commerce, Alibaba also has ambitions of going international. Its initial strategy to bring Taobao abroad is clear: target Chinese users outside mainland China. Naturally, Hong Kong and Taiwan are the markets that it has started to expand into without facing too much of a language barrier. Malaysia and Singapore are next with the latter serving as a testbed for how it will deal with an English audience. Many Chinese in Southeast Asia are excited to be able to buy things on Taobao.

The company mission, values, and culture

I have been following Alibaba’s progress closely for the last two years. The company mission is “To make it easy to do business anywhere.” One of its values puts the customers first. However, I was initially a little skeptical.

But watching the company long enough I came to realize that its actions reflect its message. I was mostly convinced after watching Porter Erisman’s documentary film Crocodile in the Yangtze, a movie documentary on Alibaba through Porter’s lens during his eight-year stint at the company. The mission that Jack Ma set in 1995 in his failed China Pages venture remains consistent up to today. Ma wanted to build a company to help China’s internet industry grow. Today, as internet becomes more mainstream, Alibaba wants to be the online platform to make doing business easy for people.

That culture seems to be sticking. Jonathan Lu, who took over from Ma as CEO this month, communicated the same idea in his first speech as CEO: to make customers the company’s number one priority. I have had the chance to visit the company several times myself and I’m fairly confident that without Ma, the company will still be guided by the same mission, values, and culture.

Jack Ma isn’t going anywhere, yet

Even if Alibaba were to go off course, Ma will be there to steer the course right as chairman. I’m not sure how involved Ma will be, but I’m betting that he will be very active to ensure that the company he founded is safe and sound under Lu’s leadership. At least in the short term, I suspect Ma will still be sticking around to help make strategic decisions.

Admittedly, Lu didn’t give a convincing speech during the closing part of Taobao’s 10th anniversary celebration earlier this month. I’m not sure how Alibaba’s employees felt after his speech, but I do know that people were leaving a couple of minutes into it, with many deciding to leave after Ma’s speech. Lu’s oratory skills pale in comparison to Ma’s. But then again, Ma personally picked Lu as Alibaba’s CEO. He may not be a great speaker, but he probably can lead and execute well. The future will tell.

Conclusion

All in all, I believe that the market conditions are right for growth and Alibaba has an admirable mission and set of values that has guided the company to success over the last 14 years. It should continue to do well, even without Ma as CEO.

That said, what I suspect might be poisonous to its culture is the eventual IPO that Alibaba Group is probably preparing. With Wall Street pressure on higher margins and profits, I don’t have total confidence that the company can truly stick to its values by putting its customers first.

Nonetheless, it will be great to witness Alibaba, a made-in-China internet company, publicly listed – in a massive offering that might value it as high as over $100 billion – as it marks another milestone for China and the company. It will also provide the long-awaited returns for its investors and employees who have put in so much trust and perspiration to make Alibaba the great company it is today.

Hong Kong-based social fashion and commerce platform Viss has received a round of strategic seed investment from Clive Ng and Christian Remrod via their company 8 Plus Holding.

Clive Ng is the chairman and founder of AsiaContent, MTV Japan, China Cablecom, and Fashion Networks International. While Christian Remrod is the managing director of Fairchild Fashion Media (Conde Nast Group) and the founder of Fashion Networks. No financial details of the funding were disclosed.

Founded by Ivy Wong and Leo Ku last September, Viss has recorded 2.8 million monthly unique visitors (MUV) and 18 million monthly page views to date. It also has apps for iPhone and Android (pictured below). When we last reported about the startup back in January this year, it had only 600,000 unique visitors and 3.5 million monthly page views. This means that the startup has grown by more than over 400 percent in terms of unique visitors.

Perhaps that’s due to the well-made and sleek product produced by the team which got featured on Apple App Store’s ‘New and Noteworthy’ and ‘What’s Hot’ sections in 14 Asian countries.

Ivy Wong, founder at Viss shared more of her thoughts today:

Viss aims to rewire the connection between curated user-generated content, brands engagement, and commerce. This is extremely powerful as we are hitting the sweet spots on generating brand awareness and engagement and conversion.

With the new funding and key connections, Viss plans to expand its geographic reach, work with brands for engagement and commerce partnerships, and also establish global media partnerships. “Not only we want to make it super fun and easy for fashionistas to share their looks and stories, we also want to reward them with both exposures and brand partnership opportunities,” Ivy added.

One other such social fashion app we looked at recently is Zoolook, which is made by a team split across Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Get the Viss apps for iOS or Android.

Food delivery site Foodpanda has been making headlines a lot recently. First with a $20 million financing round and then a rebrand in Vietnam. Today, Foodpanda has announced a merger with former rival Singapore Dine, though the terms of the deal haven’t been made public.

The Rocket Internet-backed startup claims to be “the market leading food delivery company in Singapore” with this merger.

Kiren Tanna, CEO Asia at Foodpanda in Singapore, said about the merger:

The merge with Singapore Dine makes us by far the market leader in the Singaporean food delivery market. Customers who want to order at Singapore Dine will be redirected to Foodpanda.sg in future to access the broadest culinary variety from more than 200 restaurants delivering island-wide. We are very happy that we can offer the leading and best food delivery platform in Singapore.

Singapore Dine started up in 2010, promising to offer “the widest index of eateries in Singapore, including buffets, coffee places, hawker centers, restaurants and more.” All those delivery options now transfer over to Foodpanda.

Foodpanda operates in nine countries across Asia.

Singapore-based luxury private flash sales site Reebonz (pronounced ‘ribbons’) has completed a $40 million (S$50 million) financing round led by Singapore’s media giant MediaCorp.

Other investors in this round are Vertex Asia Investments, Granite Global Ventures GGV Capital, Intel Capital, Matrix Partners China, and Infocomm Investments, the venture arm of Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore. This financing round values Reebonz at about $200 million (S$250 million).

Reebonz offers short-duration, online private sales events, which are exclusively open to members only. Registration to Reebonz is free. Sales events are for both women’s and men’s brands and are modeled around the concept of ‘accessible luxury’ with up to 70 percent discount.

MediaCorp CEO Shaun Seow told his own network, Channel News Asia (CNA):

We see great alignment between what Reebonz does and what MediaCorp has – audiences, content targeted at the luxury market and our star power. We are confident that by collaborating closely with Reebonz, we’ll see even more breakthroughs from the retailer

Reebonz was founded in March 2009 by Samuel Lim, Daniel Lim, and Benjamin Han who haven’t been speaking much to the tech press recently. Many Singaporean entrepreneurs and investors have long thought of Reebonz as one of the most promising internet companies in the nation. Besides, Reebonz.com, the founders also run Kwerkee.com, a store for designer-created items that was started in April 2012.

Reebonz’s success is built upon layers of experience. Prior to Reebonz, Samuel founded Fusion Mobile in 2000, a mobile content business that was later acquired by a Malaysian listed company in 2007. In 2004, Samuel founded Fusion Direct, a company that did database marketing, and that was acquired by a Singapore listed company in 2010.

Samuel, who’s the CEO at Reebonz, told CNA that with this investment he wishes to “build a world-class billion-dollar Internet commerce group out from Singapore.”

Dr Lim Kuo-Yi, CEO of Infocomm Investments, echoed Samuel’s mission and told us:

We are excited to be working with Samuel, his team, and fellow investors in growing Reebonz as the top online luxury retailer in Asia. It is our mission to support our Infocomm startups to expand internationally, and we are confident Reebonz will show it is possible to build a great startup from Singapore.

Prior to this MediaCorp-led financing round, Reebonz has also received funding from Vertex Asia Investment and Intel Capital. Headquartered in Singapore, Reebonz has regional offices in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, Shanghai, and Korea.

(Source: CNA)

Imotiv (previously called NuffnangX) is the Nuffnang’s founders’ latest startup. The mobile reader app is built because the founders realized that very few people are reading blogs on mobile, stating that only about one percent of a blog’s traffic comes from mobile.

The reason why, Timothy Tiah believes, is that there isn’t an easy way to follow blogs on mobile. Thus, Imotiv was built to help more bloggers get discovered on mobile. Timothy shares with me more on his latest product:

What’s special about Imotiv is that an algorithm crawls through an entire blog and picks out the one most interesting line to the reader. While readers like Summly try to summarize content, our approach is not to summarize but just to find the line that has the most emotion in it.

The algorithm, Timothy says, is special and the team has filed patent for it. “It’s not perfect yet. Works 70 to 80 percent of the time but it will get more accurate as time goes by,” added Timothy.

Good mobile reader, worth trying out

I’ve tried Imotiv over the weekend and I generally like it a lot. Here’s why:

• One sentence summary: Most of the sentences are spot on. A handful of them are kinda meh. But in general it catches the gist of the article.

• Fast and smooth: The app loads fast. It’s quite lightweight.

• Discovery: If you don’t know what blogs to follow, you can select the category you like — for example design, technology, photography etc — and Imotiv will feed you with content you might like.

• List: When you’ve become flooded with content, you can create lists to group blogs together.

Unfortunately, not all blogs are mobile friendly so for some of them it takes a while to load. Imotiv is also missing some blogs that I’d like to add. But all these are in the works, I believe.

Imotiv is run by an independent team under Netccentric (which runs Nuffnang, Jipaban, ChurpChurp, and more) and Timothy says that monetization isn’t a priority at this point. He added:

If it really takes off in a big way and we have an opportunity to raise a big round then yeah we might spin it off after all. But for now we wanna focus on fixing all the bugs and building a product people love.

If you need a mobile reader, you can download Imotiv on your iOS or Android device (and click here to follow Tech in Asia). For bloggers, you can claim your blog here.

(Also read: The Nuffnang Founders’ Story)

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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)

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.

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!

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.

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.

E-shopping marketplace Taobao has been aggressively expanding to Hong Kong and Taiwan. With 1.4 million registered users already in Hong Kong, Taobao today announced at a media event in Hangzhou, China, that it has recently launched a Hong Kong official site at hk.taobao.com.

The official Hong Kong site is customized for a Hong Kong audience in many ways. It features products that Hong Kong users are most likely to buy and also offers a guide to educate users on payments. The design of the site is also much cleaner and neater compared to the China version of Taobao.

Taobao in Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore

Elsewhere, Taobao is also enjoying growth in Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore. By the end of 2012, there were 600,000 users in Taiwan, 210,000 in Malaysia, and 280,000 in Singapore. Daphne Lee, director of international business at Taobao, also shared that Malaysia is seeing explosive growth at the moment. In Malaysia, Taobao is experiencing 78 percent growth in monthly paying unique visitors and also 97 percent growth in daily pageviews.

The countries which are outside of mainland China that Taobao are targeting so far have a significant Chinese-speaking population. Taobao hopes to service the Chinese-speaking audience first before moving on to serve non-Chinese speaking customers. Daphne also pointed out that Singapore is an important market for Taobao since it is a country that uses both Chinese and English languages which could possibly provide Taobao with some data and experience on how to cope with an English speaking market.

A fun fact which Daphne pointed out is that Singaporean shoppers tend to buy winter clothing on Taobao. Well, as you may know, Singapore is really freaking warm all year round. So there aren’t really any offline stores to buy winter clothing for travelers – so online shops like Taobao become the go-to destination for rare items like winter clothing.

While it might seem like a piece of cake for Taobao to expand from country to country, there’s actually a lot of ground work to be done. Daphne highlighted four fundamental building blocks which her team are constantly tackling: process, logistics, payments, and customer service.

As of June 2012, Taobao has more than 800 million product listings and 500 million registered users worldwide. Today is also Taobao’s 10th anniversary and also a day that Jonathan Lu officially takes over from Jack Ma as Alibaba’s CEO.

Chester Roh (pictured) started his journey as an entrepreneur at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), a well-known engineering school in Korea. Chester got interested in the internet and hacking and spent two years honing his hacking skills. (In fact, he was doing so much hacking that he was eventually caught and prosecuted, but thankfully it didn’t do much damage to his career).

Knowing that he was good at hacking and computer science, he joined Inzen (a security solutions company serving the government and large corporations) as a co-founder and CTO at age 21. What Inzen did was to analyze the packet data in real-time to detect and prevent malicious attacks. Chester was at his dream job at 21; a place where he could use his skills to do good. He stayed at the company for five years and eventually saw it go IPO in 2002 in Korea.

Xenters was Chester’s second company, but this time around he was a founder and leader. Xenters also dealt with cyber security and was started by a group of ex-Inzen members that included Chester. The difference between Inzen and Xenters was that the latter could catch smarter hackers who tried to break into the system slowly and randomly, making it hard to track and monitor their packet data. However, the business didn’t succeed as the team couldn’t find the proper customers for their solutions. It was shut down in 2005.

Chester then took a break from being an entrepreneur to work at SK Telecom, the largest telco in Korea. At SK Telecom, Chester got his first chance to build a product for consumers. He was put in charge of building an intelligent customized service, named “Adaptive Personalization System,” that responded to each user’s need and wants, somewhat similar to Google Now. The intelligent customization system that Chester designed wasn’t ready for the market and was eventually discontinued, but Chester got his first taste of building products for consumers, which turned out to be an important point of his journey leading to his success at Tatter & Company. He said:

I really wanted to change my career and that is the reason why I went to SK Telecom. Because [in all my career] I was a security engineer, a security expert. I wanted to change my career to the consumer side. I wanted to do something outside [of my norm.]

After his stint at SK Telecom, around 2005, Chester noticed that there was a blogging trend in Korea and was hoping to import a blogging platform to Korea to ride on the trend. He told me:

My initial thought would be to import a blogging software solution into Korea. So I was writing a letter to the biggest blogging software company in the US (back then), Six Apart, who runs Movable Type.

Six Apart didn’t reply, but one of Chester’s friends, knowing that he was looking for such a solution for the Korean market, sent him a link to Tatter & Company, a blogging platform built by a Korean engineer. Chester elaborated:

It was really beautiful blogging software…so I called him and told him that I was interested in his business and I wanted to work with him.

So in 2006, they co-founded the company with Chester taking the leading role. Tatter & Company builds Tattertools, which is an open source blogging platform similar to WordPress for the Korean market which allows third party developers to collaborate and integrate their ideas into it. Competition was fierce with Daum and Naver, who had 9 million and 13 million users at the time also in the blogging platform arena. But Chester didn’t fight based on numbers. It was quality that he was after:

I have a strong conviction. At the time in Korea, blogging wasn’t new. But the quality of the content wasn’t that good. With search, we need quality content and Tatter & Company is providing all this quality content. So our strategy is clear. We are not taking care of all bloggers but we are taking care of high quality content creators.

Starting in 2006, Tattertools provided services such as allowing bloggers to have their own domain name, their own blog design, and data. While all these sound very common today, remember that they were introduced in 2006. Plus, the rest of the blogging platform in Korea only allowed bloggers to register as a sub-domain and didn’t allow much customization. The strategy worked. From 1,000 users at the start, Tatter & Company is now seeing more than 10 million unique monthly visitors.

In 2008, Google came in to acquire Tatter & Company when it had more than 200,000 bloggers using its platform. Tatter & Company was also believed to be Google’s first acquisition in Korea. Chester reflected back and told me:

All of our engineers were excited when Google contacted us. And in 2007 and 2008, Google was like the king of the web. I felt our engineers were really looking forward to this next challenge in the company so we took that opportunity.

With money and experience under his belt, Chester is now an angel investor investing in local Korean startups. He has invested 15 companies so far with the usual ticket size ranging from $50,000 to $300,000. Some of the successful portfolio companies include Ticket Monster (acquired by LivingSocial) and Dialoid (acquired by Daum). His entrepreneurial spirit hasn’t died down either as he recently founded Ablar, a mobile technology company that aims to build different mobile products to serve the world.

One of the hottest startups in China, Umeng (pronounced as “you meng” in English), is run and was founded by Fudan University graduate and ex-Googler in China Jiang Fan.

Umeng is like Google Analytics for mobile applications in China. Founded in 2010, Jiang said that the company came about because there was a need for it. Knowing that mobile will be huge in China over the next couple of years, Jiang believed that mobile developers would require tools to help them understand their users’ data and in-app behavior. He was right. Today, Umeng is 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.

Umeng’s fast-paced growth was a mixture of timing, luck, a good team, and a solid product. Jiang says that Umeng is the only mobile app analytics company that was first launched in China and for China. Even today, there are very few competitors because making money through analytics is tough. Jiang also says that Umeng started early and grew together with the ever-growing mobile industry in China.

The team at Umeng is made up of folks who used to work at big companies including Google, Microsoft, Baidu, Sohu, and Yahoo. Today, Umeng has over 100 people in the team and has raised more than $10 million from Innovation Works and Matrix Partners.

Speaking about turning points and challenges, Jiang says that there were times when Umeng was tempted to go astray to run other mobile-related businesses which have a more direct way of generating revenue (such as mobile advertising). But he is thankful that Umeng ultimately stuck to its vision to serve the Chinese developer crowd. And being in the mobile space, changes are rapid, especially for mobile games. Umeng, as a startup, has to learn how to keep up with the changing trends. He said (translation ours):

Some developers grew very big very quickly. So it’s always a challenge to keep up with their usage and tracking demands as a startup.

Despite 100 percent of its developers being local Chinese developers, Jiang reveals that 40 percent of their apps are actually targeting the global market. Expanding abroad is part of Umeng’s plan and the team is already strategizing on how to do exactly that.

Jiang told Tech in Asia that Umeng will be releasing its English version by Q3 of this year, and stresses that the service will offer value to overseas developers just as it does to Chinese ones. Since China is an unique market, he says the purpose of an English site is to help overseas developers who are targeting Chinese users track and mine user data better and with more precision. He added (translation ours):

The potential is there. In the future, China could represent half of the entire world’s mobile user population.

In addition to analytics, Umeng also provides developers with an app network service that helps to cross-promote apps. The future of Umeng, as Jiang explains, is that it will continue to provide the services developers need. He believes that if the mobile industry in China continues to grow and mature, Umeng will eventually find a way to build a sustainable business model around its service.

And if you’re wondering about the Alibaba acquisition rumor that is spreading, Jiang confirms that both companies are speaking to each other but nothing has been finalized so far!

Brisbane-headquartered game studio Halfbrick is nailing it in China with its Fruit Ninja game. If you think people are sick of slicing all kinds of fruit on their mobile screens, then you’re so wrong.

Speaking with Phil Larsen, chief marketing officer at Halfbrick on the sidelines of the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing today, he told me that Fruit Ninja has been downloaded 500 million times across the world. Out of which, China accounted for 200 million of these downloads with 50 million monthly active users coming from China. Phil told me:

Fruit Ninja is a very simple casual game that has a universal theme. It’s not about shooting, action, or any particular game play. It’s based on fruits and it’s all around the world… So it crosses the language barrier [since] it doesn’t need any text to play. You can understand just from the visuals alone. And that kind of simple arcade gameplay really works well in China.

The Fruit Ninja craze in China is done without having an office in China. Phil says that Halfbrick wanted to keep the company small and lean. Instead of opening an office in China, the Australian company works with iDreamSky who helps Halfbrick distribute their games in China, mainly working with telcos and local Android app marketplaces.

Despite having huge download numbers, the revenue figures from China aren’t proportionally large. In China, the Fruit Ninja Android app generates revenue through in-app purchases and ads. Phil explains that Chinese gamers in general are okay as long as they are able to enjoy 90 percent of the game without spending. If needed, Chinese gamers are willing to farm (without paying) for higher level items. So in the future, Fruit Ninja is looking to draw in paying Chinese users to try the 100 percent full gaming experience for a limited time and hope that they will buy to keep up with that level.

Besides Fruit Ninja, Halfbrick also has other games including Jetpack Joyride, Zombie Dash, and its latest title, Fish Out Of Water.

This is part of our coverage of GMIC 2013 in Beijing, running yesterday and today (May 7 and 8). For other stories from this event, click here.

With over 90 million users today, KakaoTalk’s success seems like an overnight fairytale. It isn’t. The company has had its fair share of struggles. Like any startup, Kakao’s road to success was paved with blood and sweat.

In December 2003, JB Lee graduated from Seoul National University. Upon graduation, he a company that does document solutions for web and mobile. While working on that, he got to know Brian Kim, an influential figure in Korea’s tech ecosystem. Brian founded Hangame, a giant gaming company, which eventually merged with search engine Naver to form NHN.

Together with Brian, the duo founded IWILAB in 2006 and started to work on several web 2.0 projects but with only limited success. Things began to change when the first smartphone was introduced in Korea in 2009 and eventually went mainstream. It was then that some of the team saw the opportunity to build a world-class smartphone application.

Unfortunately, not everyone was convinced. The team was torn between building products for PC and mobile, and only after much discussion did Brian and JB decide that going mobile was the way to go. Not everyone was happy about that choice, but JB says the decision was a pivotal moment for the company:

The atmosphere during the discussion was very miserable and depressing. Brian came out with the idea of mobile smartphone apps. There was a lot discussion and debate. But we came to the conclusion to focus on mobile.

Having made the decision to focus on mobile, the team didn’t know exactly what to work on. There were a number of ideas. So in the end, the team formed three groups to work on different projects.

KakaoTalk was born

One of the ideas was KakaoTalk, which was launched on March 2010. With zero ad spending, KakaoTalk grew very quickly and organically while the other two applications were unfortunately getting little traction. The team made the decision to shut down the other applications to focus on KakaoTalk and IWILAB’s corporate name was eventually also changed to Kakao.

By September 2010, six months after it was launched, KakaoTalk had already recorded one million users. Three months later, in December 2010, KakaoTalk hit five million users. The growth didn’t stop and in fact, it accelerated. Today, KakaoTalk is used by over 90 million people worldwide and is expanding aggressively in Vietnam and Indonesia. I was curious as to how a young company like Kakao Corp could manage this explosive growth so well. JB was quick to credit his team. He said:

We have very experienced engineers who have worked at big companies such as NHN before. Our CTO, Young Lee, who used to work for NHN, has a very strong engineering background. He has experience dealing with huge traffic loads. Brian and our CFO, Dean Song, who used to work at CJ internet, also help KakaoTalk manage its fast growth.

JB also explained that they wanted Kakao Corp’s culture to be open and horizontal. This is especially attractive to talents who want their voices and opinions to be heard. Kakao’s culture stood out among other Korean big corporations that usually have the traditional top down approach. JB also says that great talents attract each other and he is thankful that Kakao Corp had a strong group of founding team members who attracted more talent through their network and influence.

One and half years ago, Sirgoo Lee, a reporter and lawyer turned management veteran, joined Kakao Corp as co-CEO. Prior to joining Kakao Corp, Sirgoo had experience working at IBM and NHN. Plus, recently Kakao Corp has acquired four startups to grab the engineering talents it needs to scale its business worldwide.

Kakao’s smart funding

Like any other startup, Kakao Corp needed financial resources to keep it growing fast without worrying about revenue. Brian funded the company for the first three years. In January 2011, Kakao Corp received its first external funding of $5 million from 13 top-level tech influencers in Korea, including the founders of Nexon, Hangame, and NC Soft.

But Kakao didn’t need the money. Rather, JB explained that the move was made to form close relationships with key influencers in Korea. This ensured that the top executives at various tech companies in Korea had skin in Kakao. Kakao then raised $20 million from DCM, Cyberagent Ventures, and Maverick Ventures. Its latest financing round came from Tencent and WeMade, who invested more than $80 million in total with Tencent also taking a board seat.

Users define Kakao’s Future

With a whopping 90 million people chatting on KakaoTalk, the Korean startup has truly become a platform for hosting games and other digital content. Co-CEO Sirgoo Lee explained that it is only natural for KakaoTalk to expand into a platform. JB added:

Communication shouldn’t just be limited to emoticons, images, and text. Third-party developers could be part of Kakao’s platform.

He uses SundayToz’s hit mobile game Anipang as an example, saying that Anipang showed that this hypothesis was right. In 39 days after Anipang was launched, the game received over 10 million downloads through KakaoTalk. On Kakao’s future, Sirgoo says that the company will keep innovating to be at the forefront of the mobile messaging technology. He explained further:

We pride ourselves on being innovators, trying new things and being willing to learn from others. We look to our users and keep learning from feedback. We are willing to upgrade and change our service to maintain the leadership in innovation. You can copy features and design. But you can’t copy the spirit and philosophy of the company. We are dedicated to creating a healthy ecosystem for developers, rather than doing everything ourselves. The ecosystem is the innovation source for Kakao.

As a platform, Kakao’s journey has just begun and it’ll be exciting to see how the Korean company will manage to expand overseas while fending off competition from the likes of WeChat and Line.

Tencent’s Pony Ma (sat on right) takes questions from the host and a panel of industry experts.

This afternoon at the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) event in Beijing, Tencent’s ‘Pony’ Ma Huateng was on stage speaking about his company’s strategy and future. The first question was about the struggle Tencent’s WeChat has with China’s mobile telcos, which is one of the hottest tech topics in China right now. But Ma seems confident that WeChat isn’t going to charge users.

Ma was questioned how WeChat will be monetized by Tencent (HKG:0700). There are quite a few methods – stickers and games – as the onstage panelists suggest. (Line and KakaoTalk have been doing all these so successfully). Ma agrees that these are indeed the ways to make money for WeChat. Another way to make money, he explains, is via offline to online services and also digital products, such as an artist who could share their art on mobile platforms like WeChat. That sounds a lot like digital publishing which Line and KakaoTalk recently started doing.

The next question asked was if QQ, Tencent’s traditional IM service, will cannibalize WeChat. Pony explained that their functions are different, for example push-to-talk and voice messaging never existed on QQ. QQ’s active users are double that of Wechat. Ma says that companies can’t just have a department that helps desktop products turn into mobile products. Rather, there must be a department that needs to focus entirely on building for mobile from scratch.

Ma says that mobile is a very tricky industry; despite the existence of a lot of giant web companies, many of them may not be winners in the end. Tencent is always not at the start of the wave nor at the end. It always comes in at the right time, the host states.

The onstage host commented that Tencent is winning on every front on the Chinese web, especially mobile. But Ma humbly said that search and e-commerce aren’t successful points for Tencent. Indeed, it’s Soso search engine, and its various e-stores, like Paipai and QQ Buy, have always struggled.

Learning from Facebook

Ma says that overs the years, Tencent learned that it couldn’t do everything and will be working with third-party companies closely in the future. He also confirms that WeChat will have social games and assures game developers that Tencent will not be providing their own games. Ma now sees Tencent as a platform company rather than a content company.

The founder and CEO adds that Facebook is the first successful open platform on the web, and that emerged back in 2007. Tencent only got into this kind of space in 2009. Ma says that doing an open platform is technically challenging and must be done with care. So it took Tencent two years, starting in 2011, before Tencent really pushed itself as an open platform company. If I’m not interpreting this wrongly, Tencent seems to be prepping hard for its mobile gaming platform despite seeing KakaoTalk and Line out in the market already.

Will Tencent go into hardware? Ma says he is interested but doesn’t have a clear plan on hardware. One thing’s for sure, Tencent isn’t going to work on a phone. There’s no clue about Tencent doing a Google Glass-like device either.

Pony Ma is also famous for testing the user experience of his own products. Ma explains that he will try to imagine himself as an average user or a not so savvy user to test applications. He says that besides providing a great user experience in its applications, Tencent’s success factor is to keep innovating.

Competition, innovation

WeChat went global in 2012. It now has nearly 400 million users – but most are in China.

Commenting on Alibaba’s investment in Sina Weibo last week, the Tencent CEO says he doesn’t feel threatened; rather, he feels that it is only natural. Instead of clashing, Ma suggests that the real challenge is to keep innovating and create new technologies to serve people better.

When the host asked the panelists if WeChat can help Tencent get on the global stage, all but one person raised their hands. Ma himself feels 50/50 about this opportunity, noting that there are strong competitors overseas – a reference, I believe, to Whatsapp and Line. But as Ma has always said, mobile has given Chinese companies a good chance to innovate and succeed globally.

Ma actually met the NHN Line CEO this afternoon and revealed that there might be a way to collaborate. Both of them agree that once a chat app is popular in the country, it tends to stick on unless something major crops up. Ma explains that in the future, there could be more collaboration. But for now, Line and WeChat are competitors both in China and in the international markets (also note that Tencent has invested in rival Korean-made app KakaoTalk). And Ma believes that to do well globally, localization is important. For example, some aspects of WeChat in China (where the app is called Weixin), such as the ‘drifting bottle’ with secret messages that go out to random people, have been removed from international versions of the WeChat app.

Ma concludes by saying that he is enjoying the journey now as Tencent’s WeChat expands globally. And, regardless of the result, win or lose, he will be giving his best shot to put Tencent and Chinese tech companies on the global map.

This is part of our coverage of GMIC 2013 in Beijing, running today and tomorrow (May 7 and 8). For other stories from this event, click here.

China’s UCWeb and its UC Browser app for mobiles have more than 400 million users worldwide with 100 million outside of China. Today at the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing, UCWeb announced that it will invest RMB 3 billion (more than $480 million) over the next three years. The project is codenamed/abbreviated ‘GEEK’ and will focus on four things:

• Global expansion: Focusing on Brazil, Vietnam, Russia, and Indonesia. CEO and founder, Yu Yongfu also said that UCWeb will be opening up offices in these four countries very soon.
• Open Ecosystem: UCWeb will continue to strengthen its platform and replicate local success overseas. UCWeb says that its gaming platform has more than 20 games which are generating more than $150,000 each month right now. 200 million clicks are registered every day across all versions of UC Browser.
• Evolved monetization: Searching for new revenue streams while sustaining the growth for gaming content. In 2012, more than $15 million was generated from the games platform.
• Technology Know-how: Integrate with the cloud and scale to support new extensions and services in the future through technology advancement.

UCWeb CEO Yu Yongfu talking at GMIC2013 this afternoon.

To fuel UCWeb’s GEEK plan, CEO Yu said that the company has more than RMB 1 billion ($161 million) in cash and is already profitable. UCWeb’s revenue has doubled in the last three years and is generating revenue from ads (50 percent) and games (50 percent). The profit margin for ads could be as high as 85 percent, he added. If needed, CEO Yu claims that there are a lot of investors who are hungry to invest in UCWeb.

UCWeb, as we have written before, is poised for IPO in 2013. But in the interview with CEO Yu today, he said that he would rather delay going public to avoid unnecessary pressure from investors. Yu also said that UCWeb isn’t interested to get acquired and be part of a larger company. So while Baidu may be actually interested in UCWeb, it seems like Yu isn’t willing to let go.

UCWeb currently has more than 1,500 staff across the world and is looking to add another 1,000 more people in the coming three years.

(Photo of Yu from QQ Tech)

This is part of our coverage of GMIC 2013 in Beijing, running today and tomorrow (May 7 and 8). For other stories from this event, click here.

On stage at the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing this morning, Lei Jun (pictured), CEO and founder at Xiaomi, was posed a question by the audience on his thoughts about WeChat and his company’s own social messaging offering, Miliao. Lei Jun was quick to compliment Tencent founder and CEO Pony Ma and team for a job well done with WeChat, which has nearly 400 million registered users. He said he didn’t have the intention to bootlick Pony Ma, but nonetheless thinks a good product should be given credit. He said (translation ours):

Being in the same space, it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re competitors and we don’t have to bash each other.

While saying WeChat has been doing a great job so far, Lei Jun is hoping that users can give Miliao a chance. He said Miliao (which is called MiTalk outside of China) offers different benefits to users. For example, he claims that Miliao is much more battery efficient than WeChat. He paints a picture that Miliao is like Apple’s Mac OS, which has a smaller market share but can offer great value to users. Miliao comes preinstalled on all Xiaomi’s phones.

Lei Jun said in his GMIC speech that Xiaomi uses word-of-mouth marketing, but stressed that in order to get the word spread, it’s a must that a company makes great products. While many people say that Xiaomi knows how to create demand and buzz in the market, Lei Jun disagrees that that’s the priority, saying that Xiaomi is only focused on building great products. Lei Jun is here to speak because he is a part of the Great Wall Club team that runs GMIC.

Lei Jun isn’t the first tech influencer in China who has publicly given his thumbs up to WeChat. Alibaba founder and chairman Jack Ma also recently gave his “attaboy” to Tencent’s smash-hit mobile app.

We know that Tencent is developing a social gaming platform for WeChat, its popular messaging app, but so far we’ve not heard about its mobile gaming ambitions. Now, vice-president of Tencent’s Game Division Ma Xiaoyi has explained how WeChat’s gaming features will be influenced by more than a decade of Tencent’s experience in both casual and hardcore gaming, and suggests that the platform will be integrated with QQ, the company’s ubiquitous instant messenger service that already has game and virtual currency elements and also other core mobile products including its Android store, MyApp.

Talking today at the Global Mobile Game Confederation (GMGC) event in Beijing, Ma added that WeChat will be aiming its gaming platform initially at Chinese mobile gamers who he predicted to be at 300 million by the end of this year. Basically, that’s everyone with a half-way decent smartphone. That makes the Chinese mobile gaming market, Ma reckons, worth around RMB 60 billion (about US$9.68 billion) in a year.

Ma shared more about Tencent’s unified platform (translation ours):

In the future, Tencent will release a unified mobile gaming platform. This platform will comprise of Tencent’s main mobile applications. Through this unified platform, we can create an excellent platform for our developers to bring the best games to our users.

Echoing CEO and founder Pony Ma’s view, Ma believes that mobile has provided a great platform for Chinese companies to rise. He says in his speech today that China was 30 years late on video gaming compared to Japan and US, 15 years late on PC gaming compared to US and Europe, and five years late on web gaming compared to Korea. But for mobile gaming he believes that China is finally on the same starting line as other nations. With Tencent’s loyal gamers, reach, proven business model, and resources, Ma is hopeful to work with China’s most talented mobile game developers to bring the best games to users on both WeChat and mobile QQ.

WeChat’s social gaming elements will rival similar platforms from Line, KakaoTalk, Apple, GREE, and DeNA. Tencent is already China’s top gaming and internet company, posting company-wide revenues of $7 billion for full-year 2012.

(Source: Techweb – article in Chinese)

Korea’s dominant mobile messaging app, KakaoTalk, is enjoying remarkably high user growth. The KakaoTalk team clued us in to some interesting data that journals the app’s growth over the last two years. Using the data, we plotted the graph below which shows a hockey stick growth curve that many startups will be looking at with envious eyes. KakaoTalk currently has 89 million users and is closing in onto 90 million. On a related note, KakaoTalk’s competitor Line recently crossed the 150 million user mark while WeChat reportedly has over 300 million users in total with 40 million users outside of China.

While many chat apps have found it hard to monetize their services during the early days, KakaoTalk was the first to introduce games onto its platform. The results were excellent and other chat apps followed suit after seeing KakaoTalk’s success. At our Startup Asia Singapore conference last month, co-CEO Sirgoo Lee shared that Kakao Corp generated $45 million in revenue with $7 million in profits last year.

In our recent trip to Korea, we visited Kakao Corp’s office and also did an interview with co-founder JB Lee to find out more about KakaoTalk’s founding story. So stay tuned!

Perples is a Korean mobile technology startup that enables smartphones to display relevant content upon detecting inaudible sound signals. So far, the company provides soundtag SDKs for brands to make use of its technology to engage with customers.

When I spoke to the team at beLaunch conference, the company said that it is beta testing its sound tagging tech with Dunkin’ Donuts in Korea. Powered by Perples, Dunkin’ Donuts’ “Morning Startup” App is able to leverage sound tagging technology to improve its breakfast sales.

Here’s how: The app acts like an alarm clock, but once the alarm triggers, users can choose breakfast items they want from Dunkin’ Donuts and then the app will start to count down. Users are expected to arrive at a Dunkin Donuts store within three hours. Once at the store, the app will detect Dunkin Donuts’ inaudible sound signal to trigger a “mission complete” message and create a coupon that gives them a discount on the items they want.

Perples says that its clients are able to customize messages through its content management system. There’s no special hardware involved as long as there’s an iPod or any other music player that is able to broadcast the ultrasound within the store. For full case study, you can watch the video below to learn about Perples’ beta test with Dunkin Donuts:

Talking about O2O, Perples may have just found a way to drive foot traffic to stores. Even though this may be just one positive case study, it does offer quite some value for both customers and stores to give Perples a try at least.

Images, memes, and videos are great ways to communicate digitally. But MessageSong has a new proposition to add color to digital communication by customizing songs to suit your communication needs. TGENS, the company behind MessageSong, is pitching and exhibiting at beLaunch and its product does exactly that.

To send a customized song, users can simply pick a song from their list, type in their customization, and digitally send it to friends through social networks, KakaoTalk, email, and more. You can see a “Happy Birthday” sample here.

The app is available both on iOS and Android but is only in Korean language. Songs listed on MessageSong are also only in Korean as the team wanted to focus its efforts on the Korean market before moving abroad. MessageSong has over 500,000 downloads so far. TGENS also offers Vocalina which is the desktop version of MessageSong.

SinglePet is a Korean startup that builds pet-care hardware (pictured) which can be controlled through a mobile app. The gadget has cameras installed so pet owners are able to see and talk to their pets on their smartphones. Pet owners are also able to feed their pets, dispensing food from the hardware, via their smartphones.

We spotted the startup at the ongoing beLAUNCH 2013 conference here in Seoul, and saw the demo in action this morning. Pet owners can also purchase pet food within the SinglePet app, a convenience that could be a further revenue stream for the company. The startup hasn’t yet launched and doesn’t have a website we can link to. For more information, you can visit their new site here or watch their product demo video below.

SinglePet claims that the Korean pet industry is worth $1.8 billion and is expected to reach $5.4 billion in 2016. Its gadget will fit in at the high end of that market, but no price has yet been set. It has raised $300,000 of angel funding so far. Plus, it’s one of 20 startups competing for the prize in the beLAUNCH 2013 Startup Battle.

Looking for applications made by Singaporeans? AppsInSg.com has it all. Created by Ryan Tan, the site showcases only made-in-Singapore apps. In a blog post, Ryan explained why he created the site:

I realized people outside of development and entrepreneur circles are often unaware that there are many talented app designers and developers in Singapore. And when I try to show them examples, there isn’t a list of made in Singapore apps. You either know that Autumn Dynasty is one of the top selling games made locally, or you don’t.

So AppsInSg was founded, with the aim to list all made-in-Singapore applications. There are some familiar applications including Burpple, Qlubbr, HungryGoWhere, Viddsee, and more. Currently the apps listed are mostly mobile apps but Ryan noted that he hope to see more web and desktops apps in the future. If your app is made in Singapore and you wish to be listed on AppsinSg, submit it here. There’s no harm in getting listed with a link back, I think.

Besides running AppsInSg as a pet project, Ryan also runs Red Airship, a consultancy that covers a wide range of services from branding, gaming, to UX.

• 21.7% of all data used by Opera Mini’s Android users is for Facebook

• Each of the top-10 Android devices cost less than Rs. 10,000 ($185)

• The typical Android Opera Mini users are male, between 18 to 24 years of age and live in urban areas

• Top 10 Android phones in India are a Samsung. Exception: the HTC Explorer which ranks at number eight

• Most Opera Mini Android users consume news (28 percent) followed by surfing e-commerce sites (17 percent)

In case you’re interested, the full report can be found on Opera’s report page.

JFDI, which stands for the Joyful Frog Digital Incubator, is an accelerator program in Singapore that helps entrepreneurs turn their ideas to investable businesses in a hundred days. Founded by Hugh Mason and Meng Weng Wong in 2009, the accelerator has turned out to be one of the more successful accelerators in Southeast Asia. It is also the first Southeast Asian member of the Global Accelerator Network.

In exchange of a small percentage of equity, JFDI offers founders S$25,000 (About US$20,000), mentorship, and facilities to build their startups in 100-days. Its first round of incubatees, which “graduated” last year, was quite a success. Out of 11 teams of entrepreneurs, six were funded with an average funding size of S$650,000 (About US$520,000) per team: Kark, Fetch Fan, Flocations, ShopSpot, Tradegecko, and TribeHired.

Starting JFDI

JFDI actually stands for “just fucking do it.” Or rather, it was supposed to stand for that, but for some people, especially government officials, find it hard to say the f-word publicly. So JFDI is now more commonly known as the Joyful Frog Digital Incubator. It’s an easier sell to a wide range of people and the frog mascot sticks in people’s minds. It works, although Hugh and Meng get asked “why frogs!?” so often that the duo has a page to explain all the awesome goodness of frogs.

In 2010, Hugh and Meng wondered if it was possible to bring world-class mentors to Southeast Asia to help entrepreneurs here grow. Both found the answer to be a yes. In 2011, they wondered if they could get the quality raw startups in Southeast Asia they needed to make the accelerator work. JFDI ran Startup Weekends at six different cities in Asia and found that they could source good entrepreneurs for their program. In 2012, Hugh and Meng kickstarted the actual 100-day accelerator program to test if it would work. Again, the answer was a yes, with both believing that an accelerator program would work well in Southeast Asia.

Bring your company to us and we will either make or break your company in a hundred days. If we make it, that’s cool. If we break it that’s cool because you can move on to do something else. You give your best shot in the 100-days.

Our goals at JFDI are:
1. We help individual people explore who they are quicker
2. We help companies reach their potential quicker
3. We are also about building an ecosystem

Secret Sauce

There are numerous accelerators or incubators in this region that haven’t quite reached the returns of JFDI. When asked, Meng said that there isn’t any secret sauce to making an accelerator work. It’s all about execution. Meng explained further:

What we mean is taking advantage of what the state of the art is in helping startups. We’re taking advantage of agile development, we’re taking advantage of lean startup methodology. We’re doing customer development as taught by Steve Blank. We are looking at all the best practices and we’re executing. And this makes us a bit different [compared to those] who aren’t aware of these practices.

JFDI probably has one of the most well-thought-out programs in Southeast Asia that I have seen. Apart from the constant mentorships and product development in the day, every evening, is packed with courses to provide that extra nutrients for startups to grow stronger. For example, JFDI offers core curriculum such as:

• Investor Psychology, Early Stage Fundraising Term Sheets and Legals
• Key Metrics, Traction, Crossing the Chasm
• Solution, No Funding Needed, Agile Development

While it sounds easy to run an accelerator, Hugh says it is more than what it seems. Just as many people underestimate how to run a really good restaurant, people tend to think that building an accelerator is easy. Hugh shared more:

People walked into an accelerator and they [see] a bunch of desks and chairs and call themselves an accelerator. They got this cute little frog. It’s not that stuff. Anyone can get a cute frog. Anyone can get desks and chairs. Anyone can get space. That’s the easy part. The thing is really pulling everything together like a really good restaurant.

Challenges

Despite enjoying early success, Hugh and Meng understood the challenge of running an accelerator, a problem that many accelerators in the world face: Sustainability. Hugh explains that a lot of accelerators are investing huge amount of capital to keep things running. Hugh explained:

An accelerator costs quite a lot of money to run and in the US most of the accelerators cost about $500,000 to $600,000 to run. It is slightly more expensive to do it here in Southeast Asia because you have to fly in the mentors and in places like Singapore, accommodation is expensive.

Despite seeing many of its investments grow in value, these assets remain paper assets until an exit happens, which Hugh believes it will take about five to eight years. Meanwhile, cash is needed to keep the incubator running, mentoring and helping current portfolio companies, while also sourcing for new ones to join JFDI. Hugh explains that there are several approaches to keeping an accelerator alive.

For example, 500startups raised enough money in order to find a hit before the money runs out. Meanwhile it is also running other stuff to stay sustainable. “If you’re lucky like YCombinator, you will get a Heroku or Dropbox to make everything work,” added Hugh. Another approach is to do something more immediate and keep the operation sustainable. JFDI is taking on both approaches, renting out work spaces, running educational courses while looking to raise $10 million more. But Hugh admits that the problem with this approach is that it takes away energy from them doing what it really matters, which is the acceleration itself. He added:

Now we can say that we know how to do quality startups. We know how to do innovation. We know how to teach entrepreneurship. What we don’t know yet is how to make an accelerator sustainable!

A blogger like me can’t say for sure how to run an accelerator. But I do know that JFDI’s first round of success has raised quite a few of eyebrows. Perhaps, it has also increased the pressure on Hugh and Meng’s shoulders to perform even better with their upcoming second batch of startups. If JFDI can keep up with the good results I’m pretty sure investment will follow suit. But as far as we all can see, Hugh, Meng, and the JFDI crew are doing good work for entrepreneurs in the Southeast Asia region.

120 million users ain’t enough for Line. Together with Takaratomy, the popular mobile chat application is targeting kids with its upcoming Line toy smartphone. Rick from Startup Dating reports that the phone is not a functional smartphone but will have NFC to allow kids to exchange stamps and messages when two toy Line phones are in contact. The toy is scheduled to launch on August 8 and will cost around $70.

It’s an interesting strategy from Line and probably the first of its kind among mobile chat apps. Japan-based Line Corp also recently launched its own cartoon series which probably has the same target group in mind. It’s perhaps fair to speculate that manga or kids-only games will be developed along the way to serve this audience if it proves to be profitable.

[Source: SD Japan via Impress]

The largest local map provider in India, MapmyIndia has added lots of new places with version 8.0 of its online maps today. It comes with more driver assistance features such as live traffic and lane guidance. More interestingly, the digital map provider shared that it now covers 10.33 million places, 1.9 million kilometers of roads, 600,000 villages, and 4,787 cities at street-level in India.

Last year, when Apple’s new maps app imploded, MapmyIndia cheekily offered its own iOS maps app to help Indians and travelers navigate in India.

MapmyIndia’s investors include Qualcomm Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, and most recently Zenrin, a Japanese mapping giant. Besides online map service, MapmyIndia also offers offers printed products and hardware, such as its in-car GPS tablet and the CarPad. All of today’s new locations and features will also be updated within MapmyIndia’s navigation products.

Tokobagus founders Arnold Sebastian Egg and Remco Lupker left the company back in August last year. But Arnold and Remco will be happy to hear that their online classified listings site continues to grow under the management of Michal Klar.

Each month, Michal says that “well over 10 million Indonesians” are recorded visiting Tokobagus with a total of 1.8 million ads now active on the site. Tokobagus continues to grow but Michal remains tight-lipped about Tokobagus’ key stats. Tokobagus continues to spend heavily on both online and offline advertising. If you are in Indonesia, it’s likely that you will see a Tokobagus commercial on TV (see an example below), and even in places like elevators.

Most online business people will be skeptical about the conversion rate of offline ads to online users. Since Tokobagus has been doing it consistently for such a long time, the efforts much have somehow paid off. Michal confirmed that traditional advertising proved to be effective and measuring its impact is highly complicated. When asked how much Tokobagus is spending on advertising, Michal says it will be the last number that he will ever share.

With MIH as its latest backer, the site isn’t at all focused on being a profitable venture yet. When talking about revenue, Michal is confident that ads and premium listings for sellers are the right paths to generate revenue. Case in point: Craigslist, the world’s largest online classifieds site, makes more than $100 million each year. A fast growing Russian classified site, Avito, recorded 40 million monthly unique visitors generating over $30 million revenue in 2012.

Tokobagus currently has just over 100 employees in its newly furnished office, with one-third each working on IT, marketing, and quality control.

Made in Malaysia, Instapps helps merchants to set up an online storefront within their Facebook page. Instapps allows merchants to easily manage their product listings and sales.

Once published, the Instapps store appears as a tab on the Facebook page and merchants are able to manage their inventories all within the Instapps management system. The service remains free for merchants for up to eight products. Anything above that, Instapps charges from $9 per month. The idea is very similar to Indonesia’s Onigi which has had more than 14,000 users since June last year.

Instapps was started within Tribeup, a digital marketing agency based in Penang, Malaysia. The first version of Instapps helps users build Facebook landing pages, like Pagemodo does. But the team scrapped the idea after two weeks and it eventually became a Facebook commerce (sometimes dubbed f-commerce) solution application. The team has received angel investment to help Instapps get started.

Despite so much expectation that social commerce will take off, it doesn’t seem to be a widespread reality yet. I think this GigaOM article does a good job of explaining why it hasn’t been a success – and also why it could be a success in the future.

Inside Foxconn’s factory. (Image credit: qz.com)

After some delays, it looks like Taiwanese company Hon Hai – commonly known as Foxconn – is set to build a plant in Indonesia. According to Reuters, Foxconn is looking to seal the deal with the Indonesian government next month. It was also reported that Foxcon “has no plan to export phones from Indonesia and will not make Apple products there.” Rather, it is the Indonesian domestic market that Foxconn is interested in, which a spokesperson claims is a $2.4 billion market for phones.

There’s no news on where the plant will be, but the government is willing to provide tax incentives if it were to be built outside of Java island, presumably to take jobs to less developed regions. With Foxconn coming into the country, it could create one million jobs in the nation, which certainly could be good news.

For folks who are interested to take a look at what’s inside an average Foxconn factory, check out this video.

(Source: Reuters)

We’ve received news from several readers that social network turned e-commerce marketplace Multiply is shutting down.

According to an email sent to Multiply merchants (see below), the site will be online till May 6, and will discontinue all operations on May 31. With further searching, you will find announcements on its Southeast Asia/Philippines and Indonesian sites.

Multiply’s merchants are advised to move to a new e-commerce marketplace. In Indonesia, there’s no shortage of choice of marketplaces, including Tokobagus, Kaskus, and Tokopedia. The news comes as a huge surprise as many would have thought Multiply is growing pretty well.

It was just last year that Multiply said it will discontinue its blog operations, move its headquarters to Jakarta, Indonesia, and move full force into e-commerce. Back then Multiply also revealed that it had 100,000 Indonesian sellers and around 75,000 Filipino sellers.

We’ve contacted Multiply’s country managers in the Philippines and Indonesia and will update if we hear from them. Here’s the letter sent out to merchants today:

Dear Multiply Merchant,

We regret to inform you that Multiply will be closing the marketplace on May 6, 2013 and discontinuing all business operations by May 31, 2013.

Multiply will maintain normal site operations through May 6th and will wind things down through to the end of the month. We will use the rest of May to make sure that all accounts are settled and that you receive all funds you earned on the platform. We hope this provides you time needed to identify and migrate to alternative ecommerce platforms, settle all payments on items bought and delivered, and try to minimize disruption to your business.

In order to ensure that all your earnings are disbursed to you in full prior to May 31, we will cut off buying activity on May 6, 2013. This will ensure that all orders have sufficient time to be completed and delivered to your customers before the end of the month.

If you have a Trust Badge, please contact our customer support team and we will ensure that you receive a pro-rated refund for the remaining time on your subscription.

If my team can be of any assistance to you during this transition, we will do our best to help.

The Rakuten Indonesia site.

Nikkei first broke the news last month that the joint venture between MNC and Rakuten (JSD:4755) is over in Indonesia. We reached out to both MNC and Rakuten but no one wanted to speak about the situation on the record. The e-commerce site Rakuten Belanja Online is still running, though who knows what’s going on behind the scenes with MNC and Rakuten. This morning Rakuten finally broke the silence, sending us an official statement from Toru Shimada, senior executive officer and head of Asia HQ, who said:

Two years ago, Rakuten launched Rakuten Belanja Online in Indonesia with our JV partner MNC Group. We are very pleased with the growth of the business, where today we offer the widest range of products from Indonesia’s top merchants, as well as the tremendous response we have seen from Indonesian merchants and consumers alike.

From the beginning, we recognized Indonesia’s potential to become one of the biggest e-commerce markets in Asia, and our confidence in the market has only increased in the last two years. With the launch of Rakuten’s regional headquarters in Singapore last year, we are now able to accelerate the growth of our businesses around the region and will be increasing our investment in this exciting market.

We believe that through deepened focus and investment, we’ll be well positioned to not only accelerate the value that our B2B2C model and e-commerce platform brings to both empowering merchants and consumers, but also help spur the evolution of the Indonesian e-commerce landscape.

It’s a pity it doesn’t explain exactly what happened between MNC and Rakuten. But at least we now know Rakuten will still continue to be in Indonesia.

Rakuten told the media that it will not be commenting further on this issue. But the company did say that more of its APAC plans will be shared at its Q2 2013 earnings conference call on May 9.

Mr. Tanaka, founder of GREE at work.

Japanese gaming company GREE (TYO:3632) is one of the most admired companies from Asia. But few companies can defy the gravity of economics. What goes up must come down and that unfortunately is happening to GREE. (UPDATED: Corrected headline, which mistakenly gave impression we were talking about GREE’s total market cap).

Bloomberg writes:

In five years, Yoshikazu Tanaka became Japan’s youngest billionaire as investors piled into GREE, valuing his controlling stake in the early maker of phone-based games at $4 billion. Just 18 months later, that has shriveled to about $1.4 billion.

The report also says that GREE is facing increasing pressure from Apple’s App Store and also Google Play where new-age smartphone users are downloading their games. It says that “GREE relies on the generation of handsets that preceded smartphones for 60 percent of revenue.” So more Japanese switching over to smartphones further shrinks GREE’s paying user-base.

In all fairness, GREE’s games are available on iOS and Android platforms as well. But it has to give part of its revenue to Apple and Google, like any app developer or publisher in those stores. GREE was also perhaps slow to ride the smartphone gaming wave with an unsatisfactory rollout of its English gaming platform. To make up for its smartphone game shortcomings, GREE has acquired Funzio ($210 million), Pokelabo ($173 million), and App Ant in the past year. Still, its US expansion isn’t going as smoothly as planned and profit dipped in the last quarter.

New competitors like Line and KakaoTalk are making the competition even more intense as these mobile messaging apps are proving to be good social platforms to host mobile games. While games on mobile chat applications still run on iOS and Android (thus still needing to offer part of their revenue to Apple and Google), the profits still look healthy. GREE’s reaction to the mobile war is Tellit, built by GREE-invested eBuddy. It’s growing well but still falls way short of Line (120 million), WeChat (300 million), and KakaoTalk’s (80 million) immense user-bases.

With all the above said, I trust that GREE’s founder Tanaka has what it takes to overcome these challenges. GREE’s success didn’t just happen overnight. It overcame a lot of challenges to reach today’s height.

Magazine and e-book reader app Scoop has raised S$3 million ($2.4 million) from PT Gramedia Digital, a subsidiary of Indonesian media giant Kompas Gramedia. Prior to this Series B funding round, Scoop previously announced its exclusive content partnership with Kompas Gramedia.

Developed by Apps Foundry, Scoop now has 650,000 downloads, 90 percent of them from Indonesia. It has 210,000 monthly active users and delivers over 1.8 million pieces of digital content annually, including 50 daily newspapers and 90 percent of magazine publishers in Indonesia. Scoop also revealed in the press release that 80 percent of its revenue comes from iOS devices.

With the new war chest, founder and CEO Willson Cuaca (1) says that his company will be focusing on talent retention, talent acquisition, new products, and also regional expansion, specifically in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and India. When asked on for his thoughts about the investment, he told us:

It is quite encouraging that this is the first time Kompas puts investment in a startup. They normally build themselves or acquire. Kompas is taking a non-controlling stake which is quite rare for their organization.

Edi Taslim, Kompas Gramedia Digital Group’s Director said in the statement that “Kompas Gramedia has to invest in companies that demonstrate multinational competitiveness and/or expansion in the future.” If I’m not interpreting it wrongly, Kompas Gramedia may be in the mood to explore even more investment and acquisition opportunities to realize its regional ambition. Taslim shared more in the statement:

While building on our own traditional strengths, we want to minimize risk by staying on top of current trends. We can also take advantage of our parent company’s extensive network of offices and affiliates to support companies such as Apps Foundry with cross-border expansion in the desired countries or markets in the region.

Prior to Kompas Gramedia’s investment, Apps Foundry was invested by East Ventures, Gobi Singapore, and Mitsui Global.

(1) Disclaimer: Apps Foundry, the creator of SCOOP, is an East Ventures portfolio company. East Ventures also invested in TechInAsia and Willson is also a good friend/mentor of mine. See our ethics page for more information.

Jack Ma, chairman of Alibaba, at today’s anti-piracy event.

China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba is working with five Chinese government agencies to fight piracy in China. Founder and chairman Jack Ma was on hand at today’s event, warning Chinese brands that it’s in their long-term interest to respect intellectual property laws. Ma said:

This is a long-term effort … we want the indigenous brands to work together to protect IPR, because if you do not participate today, tomorrow you are the victims. Hopefully in 10 years, the Chinese internet economy will be a much better place because of the efforts we have started here today.

Polo Shao, chief risk officer at Alibaba Group, said today that “big data” technology and traditional law enforcement resources will make investigation and enforcement of China’s intellectual property laws more effective. Shao added:

On e-commerce platforms, every single transaction creates a record, and every piece of information about sellers of counterfeit products is traceable. Internet technology … when paired with offline efforts can be used to create targeted initiatives to drive intellectual property protection as well as cut off the head of the snake in an attempt to purge society of counterfeit goods.

Of Alibaba’s web properties, its C2C marketplace Taobao has been especially plagued with pirated goods. Former CEO Jack Ma even joked in a previous speaking appearance that piracy somewhat added a surprise element to shopping at Taobao. Putting jokes aside, Ma is serious about cracking down on pirated items in its marketplace with this partnership with the Chinese government. The company will even set up an in-house anti-piracy task-force to be headed by Polo Shao. Ma calls China’s common counterfeit branding a “cancer” and a “tumor in society.”

According to Alizila, Alibaba’s corporate blog, “more than allegedly 94 million infringing listings were removed from Alibaba Group platforms” last year and about “5.5 million of them were taken down as a result of complaints from rights owners.”

Taobao was removed from the US Trade Representative’s notorious pirate watch-list a few months ago, with the organization citing major IPR improvements on Alibaba’s various web properties. But the situation is far from solved – least of all on the company’s own e-commerce platforms.

Tackling piracy – both online and offline – should greatly help China repair her tainted reputation on the global stage.

Foodpanda co-founder Kiren Tanna

Rocket Internet’s online food delivery website, Foodpanda, was launched last year in April and has since undergone rapid expansion. Today, Rocket Internet’s FoodPanda is in eight Asian countries supported by 150 staff. Foodpanda, combined with Hellofood which is a food delivery site targeted at non-Asian markets, is serving over 10,000 restaurants. Foodpanda alone has around 5,000 restaurants.

Foodpanda co-founder Kiren Tanna (pictured), claims that all nine markets are growing and growth has been especially great for Pakistan, India, and Indonesia. In India, Foodpanda is working with over 2,000 restaurants. Interestingly, Kiren shared that India has a lot of orders from iPads over the weekend. For Pakistan, around 60 to 70 percent of the orders come from mobile. Singapore is a big dinner market while Indonesia and Taiwan prefer to order during lunch time.

Foodpanda works like this: customers go to the website and place orders online, then the restaurants will receive an order slip from Foodpanda’s GPRS box (or through SMS/email/fax), prepare the orders, and deliver them to the customers’ doorstep.

Foodpanda GPRS box

In places like Indonesia where food orders can be done by text or phone without the need of such a platform, I asked how Foodpanda differentiates itself. Kiren explained that the experience ordering food through the phone isn’t ideal. There’s a higher rate of errors when communicating information on the phone. Plus, expats who don’t speak the local language wouldn’t be able to place an order. With Foodpanda, it remembers customers’ delivery information when they next place an order, minimizes errors in communication since information is digitized, and ensures the most updated menus and prices available.

Although food orders are mostly done online, Foodpanda occasionally accepts phone orders to help new users get started. In such cases, the login details are sent to first time users together with discount perks to encourage them to order online in the future.

When asked about how Foodpanda selects restaurants to work with, Kiren told me:

We find the [restaurant] leads based on what we see [online], for example, HungryGoWhere. When we signed up a restaurant, we asked them questions like how many deliveries do you do? Are you ready for weekend peak capacity?

Foodpanda also orders from new restaurants to ensure that the food delivery experience is good and the food is in a good state when they are delivered. Orders from Foodpanda, though great, can be stressful for restaurants. Kiren shared that there are cases whereby a company flooded one store by ordering 200 sandwiches and another ordered 120 lunch boxes!

Moving forward, Foodpanda is looking to integrate with the big restaurants’ points-of-sale (POS) to make the process from ordering to billing smoother. Foodpanda is also investing heavily in mobile as it sees “very good traction” and growing number of orders from mobile devices. Kiren added:

We’re looking at city expansion […] and we want to be the number one in emerging markets for delivery services.

In Asia, Foodpanda competes with Dealguru’s Room Service Deliveries which operates in Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia. There’s no way to investigate who is bigger since both sides aren’t willing to share any data.

Built by the Guxiu team of three in Beijing, China, Dreamdays helps users remember and be alerted of dates and events that matter to them most. Such as your girlfriend’s birthday, a family dinner, and important life events.

The app sort of provides what Google Calendar also serves but it does more by providing features such as voice memos and a countdown. Dreamdays is smartly crafted to help users remember non-work related dates. So with your Google Calendar remembering all your work-related meetings, Dreamdays helps you remember anniversaries, birthdays, and holidays. What I like is that it neatly separates your work and life events.

The app is priced at $0.99 now on iTunes and has 150,000 users so far, receiving above four star ratings from its users. Dreamdays was launched mid-December last year and is available in English and Japanese. If you’re interested, you can download Dreamdays here.

Enjoy the “fresh” air. (Image credit: Duke University)

If you’ve been to Beijing, you know the air sucks. Many folks wear masks to protect themselves from the poisonous air. But often, these face masks are just pieces of cloth pulled over to cover your nose and mouth. Face masks don’t necessarily work – plus they’re ugly and inconvenient. Understanding the problem, Infipure is a company that set out to solve it through its technology-enhanced “invisible masks” to protect people from all that PM2.5 air pollution.

The problem

The founders sought out different ways to build that perfect mask, thinking about issues like sizing, efficiency, and appearance. Francis Law, partner at Infipure, tells us:

We wanted to be in China, but at what cost? Our health and livelihoods were at risk. Recognizing this, we channeled together our entrepreneurial spirit and sought out ways to defend against air pollution and promote healthy living for not only ourselves, but also our friends, families and the general public.

After much research, the Infipure team learned that most people actually breathe in through their nose. Most people only breathe in through their mouth when they are exercising or when they’ve got a cold. Francis adds:

Based on this finding, we set out to design a new type of face mask. One that can be used in the nose and that addresses the effectiveness, comfort, convenience, and aesthetic issues found in normal facemasks.

The solution

The solution turns out to be pretty innovative. As pictured above, the Infipure “mask” works like a small filter inserted into the nose. It’s patented and trademarked ‘NoPM’ filter technology claims to be able to filter out up to 99 percent of PM2.5 air pollution particles. PM2.5 particles are about 1/30th the width of a human hair.

Infipure nostril filters are also designed to look good. Well, at least better than face masks. The only visible part is the bridge which is hardly visible unless someone takes a close look at your nose.

Infipure is founded by Richard Law and Tiffany Tian who started working on the idea while they were at MIT for graduate school. Francis was already in China and joined them on this venture when Richard and Tiffany came back to Beijing. The product is designed in partnership with one of the founders’ MIT professor. Francis shares more:

With the Infipure Invisible Air Mask, we felt we finally found a product that could protect you from air pollution while being comfortable and allow you to look great!

Infipure has been a self-funded company so far, including financing help from family and friends. The team of eight is headquartered in Beijing.

On the market, up your nose

Infipure is currently out on the market, and has been selling on Taobao for just about two weeks. A box, which contains eight pieces of filters, costs just RMB 21.60 (US$3.50). Each filter only costs about $0.44 which I think is really worth it for the benefits it brings to our health. The filters come in small, medium, and large sizes suitable for adults. The team is currently working towards producing filters suitable for children.

Infipure is rolling out in China first before expanding to other countries, including Japan, India, and Brazil. Besides selling it on Taobao, Infipure is also distributing its products in large pharmacy chains and convenience stores within the coming weeks. Apparently, the Chinese government has been pretty supportive so far, as Francis explains:

While we didn’t have formal help from the government, we found the government bodies such as tax authorities, patent offices, product standards to be very helpful in helping and guiding us. Going forward, we have plans to work with the government on supplying to staff that need it most, such as the police force.

Singapore-made food app Burpple was featured on the front page across 14 countries in Apple’s App Store in recent weeks. The 14 countries include Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Sri Lanka. We asked but the folks at Burrple didn’t even know how they got featured. But I think we all can agree that the Burpple app is beautifully crafted. So it didn’t come as much of a surprise that the App Store editors would like it. If you haven’t played with Burpple yet, you better download it here now.

This isn’t the first time Burrple got featured on the app store though. Co-founder Elisha Ong says that Burpple was featured last year on an iTunes mini-banner in the US and Europe. Though this is the first time the app was actually featured on the App Store homepage. Since the beginning of this year, Burpple has added more than 25,000 new users. The startup declined to reveal its total number of users.

Of course, downloads don’t equate to money since the app is free to use. Burrple is currently exploring how it could generate revenue first by communicating with restauranteurs. Elisha told us:

We are working closely with restaurants and merchants to develop products and services that adds real value and benefit to them. Burpple Pages is one such offering that helps them grow their online and mobile presence, giving potential customers just what they’d need to know and decide where to dine.

Just yesterday, Burpple also made a move into the web, launching a Yelp-like food search site which I think could potentially turn into a restaurant reservation service. Elisha added that Burpple is looking to “change the landscape of restauranteurs, hawkers, and business owners” but didn’t elaborate exactly how. So keep waiting and burpping, folks.

So what kind of data have we collected over the past couple weeks? Besides the usual attendee breakdown, we surveyed participants to find out what they thought about the conference. Out of a possible five, participants at Startup Asia Singapore 2013 rated:

• 4.12 on average when asked how much they agreed with the statement: “The choice of speakers at Startup Asia Singapore is great”

• 4.00 on average when asked how much they agreed with the statement: “I’m overall happy with Startup Asia Singapore 2013”

Last year, participants were complaining about WiFi issues and I think our team overcame the problem this year. There were no major complaints as far as we have heard. Even so, we will be seriously studying all the feedback to serve our participants better at our upcoming Startup Asia Jakarta on November 21 and 22.

Videos of every coffee chat, panel, sharing session, and Arena pitch will be out soon. Our videographer is working hard on it so we seek your kind patience on that front. Meanwhile, you can catch all of our articles about the conference here.

Last but definitely not least, we would like to thank our sponsors and partners for making Startup Asia Singapore 2013 possible. Only with their support can our team continue to do what we love doing: covering entrepreneurs, startups, and technology in Asia.

Japanese mobile gaming giant, GREE, has been secretly pushing its mobile messaging app, Tellit (Tell it). It was first launched as GREE Messenger late last year but has apparently since rebranded as Tellit in the middle of last month. When asked, a GREE representative declined to reveal user figures but said that Tellit has achieved number one under the free downloads section in Apple app store in Malaysia, Italy, and Germany. Tellit is available both on iOS and Android.

Tellit is built by GREE-invested eBuddy, an Amsterdam-based startup with over 100 staff who specializes in messaging products. Jonie Oostveen, director of strategic partnerships at eBuddy, tells me that although eBuddy built Tellit for GREE, it doesn’t help to market or chart the future of the chat app. It seems that eBuddy is in an odd position as it runs eBuddy XMS which is also a mobile messaging app. Tellit, as I understand, runs on the eBuddy backend too.

eBuddy XMS has more than two million monthly active users. That rises to 16 million monthly active users in total including the eBuddy IM chat aggregator. Oostveen describes XMS as having a more “European look and feel” compared to GREE’s Tellit. XMS doesn’t have stickers packs.

Tellit, on the other hand, fits with the general Asian culture better with a cuter overall design coupled with stickers similar to KakaoTalk, Line, and WeChat. I’m guessing that GREE has plans to make Tellit a mobile gaming platform once it gains steam. But a GREE representative said that the company has no plans to turn it into a mobile gaming platform just yet.

Whatever it is, GREE has two mobile messaging apps at its disposal. I guess it could tap into eBuddy XMS for the Western market and Tellit for the Asian market. But first it probably has to buy the rest of eBuddy to make that possible.

We mistakenly leaked last week that Spotify is set to launch in Singapore. So today’s launch by the Swedish music streaming giant into Singapore isn’t too much of a surprise. But, wait! There are a few more countries included in today’s launch — Hong Kong and Malaysia. This marks Spotify’s first big push into Asia.

At the launch event this morning, Spotify’s Sriram Krishnan, who takes charge of new markets, demoed how simple to Spotify is to use. In a nutshell, simple to search for songs, create playlists, use Spotify radio, and one-click sharing to Facebook with your friends. The premium package allows users to listen to Spotify across all their devices for SGD$9.90 or you can give a try for free on your PC only. Krishnan said:

Asia has always been on the roadmap for us. We always have an eye for Asia. We take as long as we want to create that perfect [service]… for this part of the world.

To date, Spotify has over $500 million paid to music rights holders since it launched. Spotify is available in over 23 markets with one billion playlists created. It has 24 million active users and six million paying subscribers. An average user spends about 107 minutes per day on Spotify with over two billion music objects posted to Facebook last month. 30 million playlists are created monthly by Spotify users.

In Asia, Spotify faces challenges from Taiwan’s KKBOX, which has a presence in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and Malaysia. KKBOX claims to have over 10 million songs from 500 international labels. But most of its music, it seems, are Chinese-language songs. Spotify, in contrast, is stronger for English-language songs. More on that as I wait for my Q&A session with Krishnan…

Softbank (TYO:9984) offered $20 billion for mobile telco Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S) last year, but the deal is not yet done as it goes through regulatory inspection. While the acquisition is under scrutiny, today the satellite-TV provider Dish Network (NASDAQ:DISH) hijacked the deal by offering a $25.5 billion bid, part cash and stocks, for Sprint.

“We think we’ve made an offer that’s much more compelling than the Softbank transaction,” said Dish chairman Charles Ergen today in New York. Dish reckons that its proposal is worth 13 percent more to Sprint shareholders than the offer made by Softbank.

Softbank CEO and founder Masayoshi Son has huge aspirations in this Sprint deal. Even before the deal was sealed, Son proclaimed that Sprint and Softbank combined will make Softbank Group the third largest telco in the world in terms of revenue. Son said back in October:

This transaction provides an excellent opportunity for Softbank to leverage its expertise in smartphones and next-generation high-speed networks, including LTE, to drive the mobile Internet revolution in the world’s largest market. As we have proven in Japan, we have achieved a V-shaped earnings recovery in the acquired mobile business and grown dramatically by introducing differentiated products and innovative services to an incumbent-led market. Our track record of innovation, combined with Sprint’s strong brand and local leadership, provides a constructive beginning toward creating a more competitive American mobile market.

This is apparently a huge blow to Softbank’s overseas expansion and American dream. But given Son’s ambition and winning mentality, you can be assured that Softbank will not give up without a fight.

(Source: Wall Street Journal)

DailyCost is an iOS app that helps you track your daily expenses. It’s beautifully crafted by founder Goupeng Liang who is based in Hangzhou, China. It was first introduced into Apple’s App Store in October 2012 for $1.99 and has so far attracted over 240,000 users worldwide, supporting 10 languages and over 40 currencies.

I gave the app a try and really like it. It’s intuitive to use and upholds Liang’s claim that any cost can be inputted into DailyCost within three seconds. To key in a personal expense, simply select a type and an amount. DailyCost also allows users to export data to CSV so they can do extra analysis if needed. The DailyCost app also provides a chart to visualize your expenses broken down by what you have spent on.

DailyCost is somewhat similar to Mint but doesn’t connect to users’ bank accounts – which may be a good or bad thing depending on your need. Liang claims that Mint’s service is very region-restricted, and only connects to bank accounts in the US or Canada. I guess for someone who just wants to keep track of their spending on mobile, DailyCost will be a better choice over Mint.

With so much debate over the merits of HTML5 versus native apps, Liang says that DailyCost is a hybrid app developed using HTML5 technology and Phonegap. For users, the app does indeed achieve a smooth user experience that is identical to a native app – yet the app is actually just a HTML5 wrapper. So far, DailyCost is only available on iOS with an Android version in the works.

ZipDial is a unique company from Bangalore, India that monetizes from missed calls. In India (perhaps also similar to many developing nations), people use missed calls to notify the other party at zero cost. Say for example, if someone is home safely, she will notify her boyfriend by giving a missed call so no one gets charged by the telcos.

What ZipDial does is it provide brands with a toll-free number which allows them to leverage on the “missed call” culture. If a user missed calls a brand’s number, it will send them the latest promotions at no cost. From the looks of it, Zipdial is the only service out there in India which monetizes from missed calls. More use cases can be found in the picture below.

ZipDial’s unique business model has caught the attention of Singapore-based Jungle Ventures who invested in the Bangalore-based startup (Hat tip: NextBigWhat). Amit Anand, managing partner at Jungle Venture told us:

Valerie and her co-founder Amiya have taken a very simple concept and turned it into a very powerful customer engagement platform. Zipdial acts as a great bridge between traditional media like print and television and the mobile screen which has already proven to be the preferred mode for interaction for millions of consumers in these markets.

Prior to today’s financing round, ZipDial has also received funding from other investors including Mumbai Angels (about $800,000) and 500Startups.

Click to enlarge

Co-founder Valerie Rozycki Wagoner said that Jungle Ventures, which is made up of experienced entrepreneurs, has been brought on to help ZipDial expand into Asia. Coupled with today’s news of getting funded by Jungle Ventures, ZipDial also announced that it has expanded to Sri Lanka, marking its first overseas expansion. ZipDial has extended its relationship with Unilever India to Sri Lanka by spearheading a Sinhalese New Year campaign for Unilever’s Laojee tea brand in the country.

ZipDial was founded three years ago by Valerie Rozycki Wagoner, Sanjay Swamy, and Amiya Pathak. To date, the startup has worked with over 400 clients including The Times of India, Oreo, P&G, Kingfisher, and Unilever, serving over 410 million consumer engagements. ZipDial claims that by adding ZipDial call-to-action into ads, it increases ad responses up to 50 times. ZipDial is a concept that our team here likes a lot. When asked what inspired Valerie and his team to start ZipDial, she told us:

We recognized two problems in the market. First, in such a diverse market, advertisers need more granular data on consumer preferences, and they cannot get this from internet (only 8 percent penetration), smartphones (only 4 percent penetration) or payment data (only 3 percent purchases on cards). Second, users get nothing personalized and advertising messages are predominantly cricket, Bollywood, and spam. ZipDial took the typical mobile VAS model, flipped it upside down, and made the user experience simple and free for 100 percent of consumers (based on “missed calls”).

We have also included an interesting interview with Valerie by Young Turks below:

5945 is Taiwan’s up and coming online home repairs marketplace startup. The model is similar to America’s Redbeacon, which was acquired by Home Depot last year.

The name “5945” makes no sense to most folks. But it’s named to be hyper-localized for the Taiwan market. The pronunciation of 5945 sounds like the phrase “calling masters” in Taiwanese Hokkien, a dialect most people in Taiwan can speak or at least understand. In Taiwan, professionals like plumbers, electricians, and carpenters are called shifu – meaning “masters” in English.

The startup was founded in 2010 by computer science graduates Michael Chang and Brian Fang who are high school classmates. Both of them believe that repairmen wouldn’t know how to provide their services on the internet. Therefore, the duo created 5945 as a home services marketplace for people who don’t want to DIY to find them easily on the web. The Taiwanese startup was incubated by AppWorks in 2010 and was subsequently invested in 2012.

5945 has over 300 handymen who cover the majority of Taiwan, including Taipei, New Taipei, Taoyuan, Taichung, and Kaohsiung. To date, 5945 has received over 3,300 user requests for repairmen and generates over $67,000 worth of service sales for these professionals.

For 2013, the Taiwanese startup aims to launch mCall, a mobile application that will help connect these service people and users directly through mobile devices. 5945 claims that 60 percent of all home repair professionals are using smartphones. 5945 is also looking to break even this year.

LongPlay is a mobile app that allows your peers to listen to your music on the move. The idea is pretty straightforward. You upload your library of music to LongPlay and send an authentication code to your peers who will log on to enjoy listening to your music. To prevent piracy, friends can’t download the music from peers.

LongPlay is a product that was launched in influential Chinese tech blog 36kr’s developers’ day. The founder, KJ, told me that he was inspired to create an application to allow easy music sharing in real-time because he saw couples and friends listening from the same earphone. LongPlay started as a web service before having its shiny new iOS app. KJ is originally from Shanghai but moved to Singapore for work. He told me:

LongPlay first comes with a web version, with a real time engine, which can play your own music in your Dropbox, then became an iOS app now.

LongPlay is a pretty cool app which can’t really be felt by reading this article. Give it a try on the web or download its iOS app to starting listening and sharing music with your friends in real-time.

Back in February, we wrote that the Korean messaging app KakaoTalk had launched KakaoPage, a tool for individuals and brands to create and distribute content on the popular social app. But Sonia Im from Kakao clarified that that was actually just the content editor.

The actual KakaoPage marketplace was launched just two days ago with over 500 individual and corporate publishers who provide about 8,000 pieces of digital content. KakaoPage is only available on Android for now with the iOS version in progress. To clear the air, Sonia explained to me what KakaoPage is all about:

KakaoPage is an open market where any individual can upload and sell their own content. An aspiring author can write a novel and sell it directly on KakaoPage without having to seek out a publishing company. Likewise, big publishing companies or record labels can also distribute their content through KakaoPage.

For now, some of the more prominent publishers include Jong-shin Yoon, a popular singer-songwriter in Korea, Young-man Heo, a renowned manhwa (Korean cartoons, similar to Japanese manga) artist, Hong Cha, a well known hair stylist, and Yi-hyeon Chung, a popular novelist.

While most of the digital content is text-based, KakaoPage also has music and images to offer. For example, 2AM, a popular boy band in Korea, is offering their ‘One Summer Day’ album through KakaoPage, bundled with their photos and commentaries for KRW 5000 (US$4.40). For all content sold, the revenue is shared between Google Play (30 percent), Kakao (20 percent), and the publisher (50 percent).

On a related note, Line also recently launched Line Manga, an app that sells only manga; KakaoPage, in contrast, is open to a greater variety of digital content – and to anybody as a content producer. Line Manga currently only deals with manga publishers but I’m sure it will start to venture into other digital content if manga ends up selling like hot cakes.

Couple of hours ago, WeChat sent an official update to all of its users in China that the mobile messaging app will remain free for users. In recent weeks, rumors have it saying that users might have to pay to stay on the mobile chat service. So this official note (see below, in Chinese) sent via WeChat to its users does help put the matter to rest for now.

But still, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Tencent will not be paying the telcos to keep WeChat up and running. The Chinese government and telcos are putting pressure on Tencent’s WeChat stating that someone has to pay the bill, which is of course ridiculous, in my opinion.

While WeChat has lifted Tencent onto the international stage, pressure from the local government and telcos has caused unnecessary distraction for CEO Pony Ma and team.

In recent news, WeChat looks to be prepping up its mobile gaming platform with some of its leaked games looking similar to KakaoTalk’s game. Tencent also recently announced that out of its 300 million users, 40 million are international users.

(Via: QQ tech)

Singapore’s VIP membership online luxury travel site ImpulseFlyer has launched its iOS app, available to download for free on the app store now. The app looks neat, making it even easier to visit ImpulseFlyer on iOS devices. There isn’t any Android app planned since ImpulseFlyer believes that most of its members are iOS users.

ImpulseFlyer has so far signed up over 100 luxury and boutique hotels in Asia. The travel startup remains mum when asked about membership numbers and nights filled. Competitors in the region include Luxe Nomad in Singapore and Privepass in Thailand. Privepass last claimed that it has 40,000 members and is working with 150 hotels and lifestyle providers.

ImpulseFlyer was founded by Andy Croll (CTO) and Steven Gong (CEO) and its investors include Neoteny Labs and angel investor John Tan. Gong remains secretive when asked about ImpulseFlyer’s future plans. We hope something good is brewing, though.

India’s Eventifier, the startup that archives your events has concluded a financing round for an undisclosed sum from KAE Capital and Chennai-based incubator The Startup Centre.

The startup tracks the content of events by collecting posts using the events’ official hashtags across major social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. So far, event organizers using Eventifier are ranging everywhere from Boston, London, Berlin, Bangalore to Manila. The startup charges from $19 onwards depending on the event’s archiving requirements.

Founded by Jazeel Ferry, Nazim Zeeshan, and Saud Mohammed, Eventifier has so far archived over 1,000 events, attracting 17,000 unique visitors each month. The startup has spent most of its time incubating and building its product at The Startup Centre. Startup Centre founder Vijay Anand said:

All of this was built out of India, without stepping into the US. Bottom line: You can build global companies from anywhere. Sure, they would travel to their markets to expand, but we are glad we could help this startup get off the ground, in the time period we spent with them.

We also understand that Eventifier is gaining interest from advisors and investors who are keen to bring the startup to the next level. If you’re keen to archive your events effortlessly, give Eventifier a try.

Vistaprint has launched Vistamobi, a tool that helps small businesses build responsive design mobile sites. The mobile site builder is free to use and is built for speed for low bandwidth environments to serve emerging markets in South Asia and Southeast Asia – including Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and India.

Some of the key features include contact forms, tap-to-call, maps, photo galleries, and a simple SEO tool to help sites built by Vistamobi to be easily discovered. Vistamobi has so far launched in Indonesia for about a month and has gained early traction mainly from spas, restaurants, and furniture shops in Jakarta.

The only drawback is that users can’t use their own domain name yet. Right now, users are stuck with Vistamobi.com (like doctor.vistamobi.com) but that should be solved soon. Other than that, Vistamobi looks like a sweet deal for businesses to get a free mobile site. It will remain free to use while churning out new and improved features since the company’s current priority is gaining users.

Parent company Vistaprint (NASDAQ:VPRT) helps small and medium businesses (SMBs) with their marketing needs (business cards, web design, brochures, etc). It should have the relevant database of users to help put business owners online. With a high mobile penetration rate in emerging markets, Vistamobi believes that a mobile-first tool serving SMBs will be of great help in this region.

Line Corporation popular messaging app, Line, has launched Line Manga yesterday (h/t: SD Japan). Line Manga is an extended service and a separate app from Line messaging app which allows users to read manga while on the move available both on iOS and Android. The launch brings 30,000 comics to Line’s 120 million users with popular titles such as One Piece and Dragonball available for downloads.

Users can choose to share comics on their timeline to receive 10 Line Coins per day. As far as I know, Line Manga is only available in Japan. So English manga reader apps like Manga Storm and Viz Manga are safe for now. If manga works well, I’m pretty sure Line will be going after general books and magazines which will officially eat into Kobo and Amazon’s pie. And if Line can sell books, I’m sure music should do fairly well too.

On a related note, KakaoTalk has also recently launched Kakao Page a new digital publishing platform which helps companies create a magazine/book looking content on mobile. Though KakaoTalk’s platform isn’t directly working with major publishers, the idea is similar to Line Manga whereby it sells digital content through its network and splits the revenue with the content creator.

As messaging apps slowly become our defacto mobile social network, we can expect more extended services and content to be part of the network too.

(Source: SD Japan)

Founded by journalist and entrepreneur Byron Perry in September 2011, Coconuts Media, a local review and news media company, started with the domain name CoconutsBangkok.com. Today, Perry’s site uses the sweet sounding domain name Coconuts.co. Coupled with the new URL, Coconuts Media also presents a newly baked responsive web design.

Perry also shared that Coconuts Media has recently received funding from angel investors in Silicon Valley but declined to disclose the funding amount or names. From my understanding, a significant chunk of the investment was invested on the Coconuts.co domain name and also on its new design. “We wanted to combine the sites under one URL because it’s much more scalable,” says Perry.

With a team of ten, split between seven in Bangkok and three in Manila, Coconuts Media currently covers stories in Bangkok and Manila. Its Singapore site is scheduled to launch within the next two months. On Coconuts.co, you will find stories ranging from local news, commentaries, tech, to food reviews. He told me, “We want to launch in several other cities in Southeast Asia before the end of the year.”

Inspired by Buzzfeed and Vice, Coconuts Media plans to monetize solely from advertising but focusing more on advertorial/sponsored content rather than banner ads. To date, Coconuts Media has a total of 79,000 unique visitors generating 206,000 pageviews each month. In the near future, Coconuts Media is exploring more ways to inspire its users to produce more user-generated content to keep the site as locally centric as possible.

Taiwanese mobile messaging app Cubie recently rolled out four additional languages — Indonesian, German, Italian, and Portuguese — making it available in a total of nine languages. Cubie says that growth in Asia is strong but it is also experiencing traction in Europe and South America. Besides Taiwan, Thailand and Malaysia rank second and third in terms of popularity based on country. Saudi Arabia is fourth followed by the US.

The company currently has 6.5 million downloads and is monetizing by selling cutesy stickers to users. Cubie’s international messenger, James Hill, said that some of its premium stickers are selling quite well and the startup is currently also exploring other revenue streams.

For now, Cubie has no intention of becoming a platform like Line, KakaoTalk, or WeChat and is focusing its efforts within the chat room. Cubie differentiates from competing messaging apps with its SnapChat-like messaging feature for disappearing texts. The Taiwanese startup first struck me as a mobile messaging app that’s aimed at women, but as time passes it’s apparent that the app is proving popular with both genders.

Last month, we looked into how Cubie got featured on Google Play which helped drive 50,000 downloads each day. Cubie last raised $1.1 million from a group of investors, including B Dash Ventures, NTT Investment Partners, Gumi Ventures, and 500 Startups.

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) is pressuring Tencent to subsidize telcos in China for supporting the huge data demands of WeChat’s user base. There are a total of 300 million WeChat users globally and 260 million residing in China. According to Chinese authorities, either Tencent or its users has to foot the bill. But Tencent president, Martin Lau, confirmed over the weekend that WeChat will remain free to users. Good news for users, at least for now.

I find this whole subsidizing the telcos fiasco ridiculous simply because users have actually paid or will be paying for their data packages when using any mobile service. Whether the app is used frequently or not, users shouldn’t be footing an extra bill for data just because the app is popular or uses more data in relative terms than other apps.

While it is assuring to hear from Tencent that it will not be charging users, the Shenzhen-based company can’t stop telecoms firms from jacking up their data packages (which is okay in a free market). Sure, there are other telcos in China that users can switch to. But make no mistake that they are equally unhappy with their shrinking revenue from SMS – and heavy data traffic – because of WeChat. So it is possible that the telcos may gang up to fight against WeChat. Of course, telcos have vested interests and run their own similar messaging apps – China Mobile has Fetion, for example – so there’s an element of preserving their own OTT offerings.

If Tencent is forced to subsidize the telcos to keep WeChat running, then Sina Weibo and other popular social apps out there will be pressured to do the same. If the big boys are facing such crap in China, imagine it happening to a startup whose app got really big but couldn’t grow because the mobile telcos demand a subsidy to keep it running. Tencent, as China’s biggest web company, is probably big enough to get through this. But a bootstrappy startup is likely to be crushed by the demands. It will be tragic for startups in China if that ever happened. And that is why I’m rooting for Tencent to win this battle against MIIT and the telcos – just so WeChat will not be used as a case study of how it is OK for a popular app to subsidize the mobile networks.

E-commerce marketplace site Qoo10 revealed that in 2012, its Singapore operations transacted US$73 million in sales. In Singapore, Qoo10 has a total of more than 900,000 members and 53,000 sellers.

The online marketplace charges commission from about six to twelve percent commission on sellers and makes about three to six percent off each transaction after footing peripheral costs. Based on its margin, we can deduce that Qoo10 Singapore’s commission revenue is anywhere from two to four million. Qoo10 also generates revenue by offering premium listings.

Qoo10 is the rebranded version of Gmarket which originated from South Korea and has a total of 450 employees with 40 in Singapore. Besides Singapore, Qoo10 is also operating in Hong Kong, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia and China. It is also celebrating its third anniversary on 23 April 2013.

Yesterday at Boao Forum For Asia 2013, Tencent president Martin Lau revealed on stage that WeChat has over 40 million overseas users. That’s out of a total user-base of just over 300 million.

Echoing the thoughts of Tencent founder and CEO’s Pony Ma thoughts, Lau believes that mobile internet growth has given a chance for Chinese and Asian technology companies to put themselves onto the global stage. That also includes WeChat competitors, such as NHN Japan’s Line and Korean-made KakaoTalk which has 120 million and over 70 million worldwide users, respectively. Lau also claims that WeChat has topped the app store in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. For Malaysia and Indonesia, Lau said that WeChat has become the favorite smartphone application in the country.

Including China, WeChat has over 300 million users in total and has dedicated offices across the world, including Indonesia (a joint venture with MNC), the US and Thailand (via Sanook) to grow its user-base. Last year, Tencent generated $7 billion in revenue with an operating profit of $2.46 billion.

(Also read: Heatmap of WeChat Users Around the World)

(Source: iFeng)

NHN Japan’s Line mobile messaging app has hit over 120 million users so far. You may or may not agree but I do think its cutesy characters played a huge role to get people downloading the app.

Asiajin reports that its characters, featuring Moon, Coney, Brown, James, Jessica, and Sally, now feature in an animated TV series titled Line Town. Aired on Tokyo TV Channel 6, the first cartoon was broadcast last week on April 3 from 6.30 to 7.00pm. Though I can’t find any publicly available complete video of Line Town, I did find a snippet recently uploaded on YouTube which I embedded below.

Besides now being social media and TV stars, Line’s mascots are also found on mobile games and merchandise. To me, Line has done brilliant marketing of its chat app with its kawaii culture which, if I may generalize, works well in Japan and most parts of Asia.

Line has been very aggressive with its expansion across Asia. It has reached over a million users in Vietnam, is wildly popular in Thailand and Taiwan, and has made the messaging app available on Nokia Asha phones to target emerging markets such as Indonesia, the Philippines, and Cambodia. Late last year, Line also launched its Chinese brand, Lianwo, in mainland China in hope of breaking WeChat’s stranglehold in the middle kingdom.

(Source: Asiajin)

We have a whole lot of startups this week, bumped up by our 20 Startup Arena participants. Despite this busy Startup Asia Singapore 2013 week, we also featured about 13 additional startups. Among them are SgCarMart which got acquired by SPH for a whopping $48 million and also Luxola which received its Series A funding from GREE Ventures.

For tips and stories suggestions, feel free to email us. Alternatively, you can also send your tips and pitches at the left sidebar.

1. DecoAlbum | Japan

DecoAlbum raised $100,000 in seed funding from East Ventures. (Disclosure: East Ventures is also an investor in Tech in Asia).

2. Hipvan | Singapore

Founded by Shobhit Datta, Kevin Vo, Deborah Wee, and Danny Tan, HipVan is a design-focused e-commerce site in Singapore that went live this week.

3. Wooplr | India

Social shopping app Wooplr wants to bring together local and friend-based guidance – for food, clothing, decor, and lots more.

4. SgCarMart | Singapore

Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) announced this week that it has acquired SgCarMart.com, a popular online classified site for cars in Singapore for SGD 60 million (US$48 million).

5. Perk | Singapore

Perk by Kate is Singapore’s representative lingerie e-commerce site.

6. MailBird | Indonesia

Developed by a team based in Bali, email app MailBird launched its public beta this week.

7. Roomorama | Singapore

Online platform for short-term room rentals Roomorama has launched a new instant booking service this week.

8. Billpin | Singapore

The Singapore team behind BillPin, the app that helps friends split bills and keep track of group expenses and friendly lending, has acquired its more established competitor BillMonk.

9. EyeFly3D | Singapore

EyeFly3D is a simple plastic filter, similar to a regular mobile device screen protector, which allows distortion-free viewing of 3D content in both portrait and landscape mode.

10. My Savvy Kid | India

My Savvy Kid hopes to help other youths, and their parents, avoid those kind of pitfalls through specialized instruction, at an earlier age than average.

11. Burufly | Indonesia

Indonesian social travel site Burufly has concluded a financing round from Walden International and Batavia Incubator on Friday.

12. RockItDub | The Philippines

RockItDub makes it easy to be a musician in the Philippines.

13. Luxola | Singapore

Singapore-based cosmetic and skincare e-commerce startup Luxola announced that it has received series A funding from GREE Ventures.

From Startup Arena

14. NetizenTesting | Malaysia

Malaysian-based startup NetizenTesting is an online usability testing service that taps into a crowdsourced pool of online citizens to test applications.

15. Mmixr | Hong Kong

Mmixr is the all-in-one presentation management tool with three main features: creation, management, and distribution.

16. DodoHub | Singapore

DodoHub is a startup that encourages you to develop good habits through repetition.

17. Framebench | India

Framebench is the “google docs” for the creative and design industries.

18. RichMediaAds | Malaysia

RichMediaAds helps users to create gorgeous, engaging HTML5 ads.

19. Cinnamon | Singapore

Cinnamon helps users to share photos using their mobile phones instantaneously.

20. Zocial | Thailand

Zocial helps brands to track and analyze social media conversations in Thai and local languages in Southeast Asia.

21. Lots of Buttons | Hong Kong

Lots of Buttons is an e-commerce site that specializes in selling buttons. Apparently, its high margin (as high as 70 percent) and light inventory were enough to convince our judges to crown it Startup Arena champion in Singapore for 2013.

22. Triibe | Singapore

Trii.be describes itself as a ‘smart feedback’ channel, one that helps businesses both receive real-time feedback, and act on it.

23. Xunta | China

Xunta is an online dating site for gays in China.

24. Puddding | Cambodia

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

25. SocialAgent | China

SocialAgent.me is an online lead generation tool to help businesses find leads in the Chinese market.

26. Tell My Friends | Singapore

Tell My Friends aims to help music fans profit from sharing legal MP3s.

27. SocialHappen | Thailand

The SocialHappen app lets users find nearby discounts and promotions at participating retailers.

28. DealPOS | Indonesia

Indonesian startup DealPOS wants to push point-of-sales systems onto the web – and the interface onto any PC, tablet or iPad.

29. Pixbento | Singapore

Pixbento allows users to pool and share photo albums with specific buddies across an iPhone app and a web app.

30. Pombai | Thailand

Pombai, a Bangkok-based startup that provides transport companies with an online ticketing system.

31. 8Villages | Indonesia

8Villages links businesses and public partners to rural populations.

32. Hoozin | Israel

Hoozin is an Israeli-made chatting app that hopes to fill in the gap in capturing the sensation of real-life group conversation in its messaging app.

33. ShopBust | Singapore

ShopBust offers an interesting way for shoppers to earn money by doing what they love the most, which is by shopping. How? Click to read more.

Related Startup Stories

• All Startup Asia Singapore 2013 coverage
• Paul Srivorakul’s Admax and Ensogo Story
• The Future of Sanook