Grey Singapore seems to be riding a wave of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, with part of the team launching the Lend an Eye app for the visually impaired which we wrote about earlier. Now, the digital and social media agency Yolk Singapore (a Grey Group company) has launched PawfectPets.sg, which is an interactive website that aims to increase awareness of cruelty at puppy mills in Singapore. This is in collaboration with local animal welfare groups that hope the public will gradually switch to adopting animals from shelters instead of purchasing them.

Singaporeans browsing the web will soon see advertisements that will lead them to PawfectPets.sg (screenshot above). It then brings visitors through a video illustrating the inhumane practices and unimaginable living conditions at puppy mills. For those who are unaware, puppy mills are large breeding facilities where dogs live in dire conditions (pictured right). They are often not given the necessary food, water, or veterinary care and forced to reproduce time and time again. It hopes to highlight that the cute little puppy we fancy at the window of the pet store comes from these puppy mills.

Jun Jek Low, creative director at Yolk tells us that it aims to primarily target potential and existing dog owners so as to reduce retail demand, and also hopes to raise awareness among the general public. She elaborates:

The goal of the campaign is to educate the public that buying a puppy from the pet store is indirectly fuelling the growth of a cruel industry which allows for animal abuse. There is still a good majority of the public who are unaware of the existence of puppy mills. [Through PawfectPets.sg], we would like to create awareness that adopting a pet is the better alternative. We integrated an adoption page on our site that will lead visitors to our partners’ pages, allowing them to contact them should they wish to adopt a pet.

Some of the partners in this initiative include Animal Lovers League, Save Our Street Dogs, and the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Singapore (SPCA). The campaign was launched on April 26 and will run for two months.

I’ve personally had mongrel dogs for a long time, and have adopted them from animal shelters as well. To be honest, they can be as adorable as pure-breed dogs and make really good companions. I’ve made a pinky paw promise on the site (see screenshot above) and shared on my social media channels – perhaps you could do your part by spreading the word too!

Instead of requiring someone to be next to a blind person to assist them, the app allows the user to launch Lend an Eye app and calls a volunteer via voice activation or by double tapping on the screen (screenshots below). The volunteer then picks up the call and would be able to see exactly what is around the user and guide them, as the phone would be hung around the neck, with the camera facing out.

You might be concerned that the live streaming video would be inverted since the camera is hung upside down, but there will be a button for volunteers to invert the video back. And upon accepting the video call, a map will appear along with the live streaming, making it even more effective for the volunteer to guide the user (screenshots below).

Lend an Eye empowers the blind to be able to move from one location to another and also helps them to make simple daily decisions, such as deciding which flavour of soft drink they should get from the convenience store, all without someone to be physically next to them to help them. It also makes micro-volunteering a much easier task, so people would still be able to do some good during the pockets of free time that they have, without having too much time commitment.

As mentioned, this is a CSR initiative and Grey Singapore has no plans to monetize but would like to give this product to a non-profit organization or government organization to use. As to how many volunteers it currently has on hand and how it chooses its volunteers, Deng Yingzhi, one of the core team members of this initiative tells us:

We’re just done with our testing. At the moment, we’re exploring different ways of making this a reality. [Our] immediate plan is to approach organizations like the Singapore Association of the Visually Handicapped (SAVH), and work with their volunteers. The volunteers will be screened and registered, of course.

This app has also been tested with visually impaired people and have received much positive feedback. That’s important because most of the time, as the blind would require help from strangers to perform simple tasks, some choose not to get out of the house. This app can give them the confidence to be able to step out the comfort of their own homes without much supervision and complete simple tasks they previously were unable to accomplish.

And this awesome initiative was created by a small team of six, which includes Ali Shabaz, Joseph Cheong, Deng Yingzhi, Sudhir Pasumarty, Sandeep Bhardwaj, and Karn Singh from Grey Singapore, taking time off from their normal working hours to embark on this.

If you would like to find out more, you can visit the website here.

Meituan’s T-shirts for gay couples.

Today and tomorrow is a sort of Chinese Valentine’s, so it’s an apt time for couples to be thinking of one another. That explains the timing behind China’s most surprising daily deal being offered by a Groupon-style site. The homegrown deals startup Meituan is offering a free trip to Vancouver, Canada, for one gay couple to go get legally married in that country.

The deal is being offered for free (see it here) to one Chinese gay couple. While Canada has legalized same-sex marriage, China hasn’t, so the resultant marriage certificate will be just a fancy piece of paper once the couple returns to Big Red.

Meituan’s free deal will cover travel expenses and one night of accommodation for the couple in Vancouver. Only one couple can win, with a draw to be held tomorrow to choose a winner. So far, nearly 80,000 people have entered to win.

As the site points out, same-sex couples do not need a Canadian residence permit or any such paperwork in order to get hitched there, and it can be done in a “very convenient” way on a tourist visa. Other cities and nations have been encouraging gay tripper tourism like this. I’m not sure why Meituan chose Canada over the US, but perhaps it’s because maple syrup is awesome – or because a wedding day can be rather ruined by being shot in the head.

As a sign that China’s youngsters are a lot more open than the traditionalism displayed by authorities, Meituan’s deals page hails “true love, regardless of gender” and calls on gay Chinese to “bravely get married”. Last year Meituan gave out free rainbow T-shirts for the two Chinese Valentine’s days. Today is the day for men to profess their love, while tomorrow is for women to reciprocate.

Meituan is China’s largest indie deals site right now with 13.1 percent market share in the highly fractured market. It pulls in over $150 million per month in transactions.

(Hat-tip to @bokane for spotting this)

Shaun from TechHub drops into plan9.

There is no denying the fact that Pakistan has finally arrived at a very crucial juncture in the development of its entrepreneurial base and support mechanisms. Foreign investors now view the country as a major hub for growing entrepreneurial concerns predicting that Pakistan will be one of the major technological centres of the world in the future. In fact, founders of companies such as Techhub Manchester have also shown specific interest in the area. Shaun Gibson, who along with business partner Doug Ward is thinking of establishing one of a technical co-working facilities in Punjab, was recently on a week-long tour of Lahore and Islamabad where he met with local entrepreneurs and other key members of the business community.

TechHub provides its clients with a sound foundation for establishing, running and promoting their entrepreneurial ventures. Not only does it service entrepreneurs with a co-working office environment where technology startups can build their businesses, it also helps them gain access to Techhub facilities with all its benefits and features. In order to be applicable for these services, all TechHub requires is that entrepreneurs adhere to the following terms:

• Have a technology focused company

• Have their own product (rather than a services model)

• Be a happy team

• Be willing to share and contribute to the community

If businesses meet these criteria, for a nominal fee, they will be provided with working spaces with 24 hour accessibility, they will be introduced to like-minded entrepreneurs in order to further strengthen their bonds within the business community and when the need for funding arises TechHub helps find investors. They have three membership plans for startups to choose from.

Shaun’s trip began in Lahore where he met with the Plan 9 incubatees, Monis Rehman of Rozee.pk. On the final leg of his journey he visited NUST and concluded by meeting up with entrepreneurs in Islamabad.

Entrepreneurs such as Raza Saeed of Pakwheels.com stated that the provision of TechHub’s co-working spaces would be a good addition to the startup scene in Pakistan.

Gathering ideas: A meetup in Islamabad.

TechHub for Pakistan in the works

The main objective of Shaun’s trip was to search for potential partners and sponsors and to determine the feasibility of establishing a TechHub co-working space facility in Pakistan.

I talked with Shaun and asked about his plans for this region:

Adam: How has your trip to Pakistan been so far?

Shaun: Pakistan has been an eye-opener, I never expected to see such a lively start-up community which is already quite developed. Plan9 for example is a fantastic initiative and can really help to pave the way for the startup culture in Pakistan.

So what brings you to Pakistan?

Shaun: My business partner Doug Ward and I are looking to set up our first Asian facility to twin with TechHub Manchester, and Pakistan seems to be the ideal location. Pakistan is the sixth most populous country in the world, it has a lot of talented engineers and already has some remarkable entrepreneurial success stories. We believe that in the future, Pakistan will become one of the tech centres of the world and we want to get in early and help you achieve that.

Why do you think now is the right moment though?

Shaun: Doug and I believe in getting in early. Being one of the first strong entrants offering shared working environments with all the benefits of establishing meaningful connections with the local business community, we feel we can really help Pakistani entrepreneurs.

So are you guys a non-profit?

Shaun: No, but our main purpose is not to simply go home rich and retire early. We want to bring about positive change in the any community that we are based in. Additionally Manchester has a strong Pakistani diaspora who also want to help lead the Pakistani startup scene. With their help we can act as a bridge between entrepreneurs in the UK and entrepreneurs and engineers in Pakistan.

What do you think the cost will be for an entrepreneur in this country who uses your co-working facilities?

Shaun: Generally our rates are extremely reasonable, given that we use sponsors to help subsidise a lot of the costs. For a residency membership in Lahore we would aim for a price range of PKR 7,000 to 10,000 (US$70 to $100) per month, but that is completely dependent on how much funding we can raise.

That sounds very reasonable. How can local entrepreneurs and sponsors get in touch with you at this early stage?

Shaun: They can always email me for information on how to join us in our attempt to further consolidate Pakistan’s entrepreneurial base. We are currently conducting a survey in which we are asking all Pakistani entrepreneurs to participate. We implore all members of the local business community to be part of this survey as it will help establish the requirements of their dynamic and vibrant working environment.

Earlier we announced the winner of the Seed Stage G-Startup contest at the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) here in Beijing, and now we are also delighted to know that Israel-based QR code generator, Visualead, has walked away as the winner of the G-Startup Growth Stage competition.

Interestingly, it was also one of the startups which caught my attention during the G-Startup pitches. It converts ugly QR codes into visually appealing ones, and aims to be one of the most effective and useful technologies in leading consumers from offline to online.

How the idea came about

The current Visualead that you see is actually a pivot from the original idea that the startup founders had. It first started out as an image scanning and detection application, where users can scan images and obtain more information about what’s in the picture. However, this poses two problems: First, how would users know that they are able to scan the picture? It would probably require another line which directs users to scan, which could visually ruin the picture. Second, it would require users to download another specific application to scan the product, which could be tedious for users.

They then saw an opportunity in the perfect marriage between QR codes and image scanning, since there was a rise in use of the former. Visualead was the eventual hybrid solution which takes advantage of both technology. Users would be aware (in theory) that they can scan it based on the prior knowledge of QR code scanning.

Click to enlarge.

Engaging consumers

Speaking to Uriel Peled, co-founder and CMO at Visualead, he tells us that QR codes are too ugly and often placed on the side of offline marketing materials. With Visualead, it has been proven, says Uriel, to increase the percentage of scans, which shows that the prettier image is more effective in engaging an audience.

He also reveals that consumers are more inclined to engage with brands that produce visually appealing QR codes, and it makes it more personal for consumers to connect with QR codes that are branded and more creative. In fact, within six months of operation, Visualead is experiencing an exponential growth of businesses adopting its platform, seeing more than 200,000 new business users each month. CEO and co-founder, Nevo Alva, also revealed in his pitch that one particular Austrian firm saw a 200 percent increase in signups using a Visualead generated QR code.

Nevo Alva gives his winning pitch this afternoon in Beijing.

Looking to China and Asia

At present, Visualead is free to use to replace normal and boring QR codes with sparkly new ones. It plans to collect a premium fee as it rolls out new features, such as analytics that enable companies to better understand consumer scanning habits. This would ensure businesses would be able to effectively target its consumers. It also targets advertisers and designers to adopt its platform in the designing of marketing collaterals, acting as Visualead’s ‘resellers’.

Visualead first opened with the aim of attracting business from the US and Europe, but also sees an opportunity in the Chinese market which is experiencing an exponential growth in smartphone usage and QR code scanning. Indeed, we’ve seen that QR codes are an integral part of WeChat, the hugely popular messaging app. It is looking to have some business co-operation with bigger companies, such as Baidu, Alibaba, and Sina. It is also searching for a Chinese partner.

Uriel explained that as much as copying is a concern for many startups when it comes to entering into Chinese waters, he said that its technology has several international patents, with a China patent currently pending.

Apart from China, it hopes to expand into other markets such as Singapore, Japan, and Korea. It is also currently looking to raise series A investment.

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.

China-Axlr8r – which used to be known as Chinaccelerator – is seeking startups for its summer 2013 intake. The application deadline is May 1st (Wednesday), so interested parties better hurry. There are 10 spots available in the incubator, but two will be reserved for startups building for Leap Motion, the 3D gesture controller that’s expected to launch this summer.

Why Leap Motion? That’s because, as explained to us by Todd Embley, the program manager at China’s funkiest incubator, China-Axlr8r founder Cyril Ebersweiler is an investor in Leap Motion through his role in SOS Ventures (Update: Corrected that relationship). The gesture-based controller has a full SDK for developers to build upon, and will launch with a dedicated app store called AirSpace. I guess the 2013 intake up in Dalian will get plenty of access to the Leap Motion hardware (actually just a tiny box that augments the computer or gadget you’re already using), and will be able to build any kind of app or game for that platform. It’d be fun to see some that integrate with Chinese web services.

As for the change of name (I guess “Axlr8r” is pronounced “accelerator”, so it actually sounds the same as before), Todd says:

We’ve slightly rebranded due to our growing family of accelerators backed by Cyril Ebersweiler and Sean O’Sullivan from SOS Ventures. We now have China-Axlr8r, Haxlr8r, and Selr8r, with a fourth in the works for the end of this year in the US.

That latter one hasn’t been revealed, but it’s quite likely it’ll be devoted to Leap Motion developers.

To see what has emerged from this incubator before, check out our list of its 2012 batch of startups.

China-Axlr8r’s application form is here, and it’s available in both Chinese and English. If you want to see Leap Motion in action, check out this demo video:

You’ve created a popular Mac app that has a strong cult following, but you fancy a new revenue stream. What to do? One of the less obvious answers (unless you’re Rovio) is to sell some merchandise. That’s what the Chinese creator of Mou, the writing app for OS X that supports Markdown, has done. The developer has recently launched such products as a tablet stand, beer bottle openers, badges, and stickers. All the merchandise features the distinctive “M” logo that forms Mou’s icon.

The flagship new physical product is MouStand (pictured below), a funky and minimalist tablet stand made of magnesium alloy. The man behind the startup, Chen Luo, explains to us that this particular product is half handmade, involving a CNC cutting machine he has rented, then a whole lot of polishing and bending, followed by a bit of sandblasting to create the matte effect, then they’re anodized and colored.

Chen admits with candor that the item is not perfect due to it being largely crafted by hand – and by Chen himself. That’s a lot of elbow grease involved. You can either buy the color pack containing four of these iPad stands for US$116, or the black-and-white pack for $58:

Developing on a need-to-have basis

Chen says that he first (and unintentionally) prototyped MouStand last year as a mini comb shelf made of pure silver. It was only when he bought an iPad in January this year that he felt the need for a solid stand. That’s when the previous creation became enlarged to support anything from a smartphone to any brand of tablet.

Indeed, Chen says he often develops things on a need-to-have basis – either in terms of the skills required or a particular resource needed. That happened with this merchandise. He explains:

I’ve learned everything needed to make this happen, CAD mechanical drawing, packaging design, cutting machine operation, the necessary knowledge of kinds of metal processing techniques, woodworking, and printing. I feel lucky that I’m already skilled in photography and web coding, as they are useful for building the online store. It’s not easy, but finally, I accomplished all the stuff and brought MouStand into reality.

Prior to making Mou app, he also made apps when he encountered things he needed for his web and software development work, such as Smaller app and the Resize extension for Safari.

Mou for iPad?

Mou for Mac is a great-looking and very stable writing app considering that it’s still in beta – and therefore free. Chen says that he’s still not sure when Mou will mature to the point, as he sees it, that it’s ready to hit the Mac App Store with a price-tag. Other Markdown-oriented Mac apps like iWriter and Byword cost $2.99 in the store, though they don’t have as many features as Mou, such as the latter’s live HTML preview.

But he says that he’s now focusing on the Mac app – which is proving most popular in the US, China, and Japan – with only a little thought given to a Mou for iPad version:

Currently I don’t have the need of writing things on iPad. I use the iPad mainly for playing games, watching movies, and browsing websites. People’s needs will change. Once I feel the need of writing things on iPad someday in the future, I think I’ll try to make an iOS version of Mou – that’s possible.

He admits that iOS development is new to him, but it could be a fun, new learning challenge. And not so messy and dangerous as metalwork.

Mou app is currently free and supports OS X 10.7 and 10.8, though an older version still supports those on 10.6. Oh, and these are the beer bottle openers:

“Mom, turn right for the candy – AND HURRY!”

We’ve seen Korean supermarket chain Emart (KRX:139480) do some innovative stuff before, like its shadowy QR codes. But this time Emart is trying something more substantive – using smartphones and LED lights to guide shoppers around their stores and lead them to discounts.

Dubbed ‘Emart Sale Navigation’, the idea is a combination of car-like GPS with a location-based discounts app. But rather than actually relying on GPS (which could be unreliable indoors), the Korean supermarket is using special LED lights on the ceiling to send information to lenses attached to shopping carts. Then, so long as you have the Emart app on your Android phone and it’s attached to the shopping cart on the special plastic arm shown in the pictures, you’ll be guided around the aisles by dedicated indoor maps. If you pass an area where there’s a discount coupon available, that’ll pop up on-screen:

It’s all pretty clever and actually simpler than it sounds. For consumers it’s pretty straightforward, as all you need to do is have the app on your phone and then attach it to your cart. Emart itself sorts out the lenses and the lights, so shoppers don’t need to worry about compatibility issues. It avoids other technologies like NFC and QR codes which tend to be either fragmented across devices or just too damn confusing for most people. So one single app in this project from Emart makes it all intelligible and fairly easy.

Baidu’s Kai Yu at the new Institute of Deep Learning in Silicon Valley. (Images: Wired)

Wired has dropped in on a brand-new facility opened by Chinese search engine Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) in the heart of Silicon Valley. Dubbed Baidu’s Institute of Deep Learning (IDL), it has just hired its first researcher in Cupertino, California (yes, so now Baidu is neighbors with Apple), and plans to grow the team this year.

The Baidu IDL will research the relatively new field of ‘deep learning’ – mimicking the brain with a mix of hardware and software – and might yield some clever new products in future, such as something like Apple’s Siri or Google Now for voice-activated searches on mobile ¹, or perhaps something related to wearable computing like Google Glass. Well, we know Baidu is working on glasses-based tech already.

Baidu’s head of its speech- and image-recognition search team, Kai Yu (pictured), made the trip from Beijing to Cupertino to hire the lab’s first researcher. He explained the plan so far:

We have a really big dream of using deep learning to simulate the functionality, the power, the intelligence of the human brain. We are making progress day by day.

He added that Baidu needed to make the trans-Pacific leap to get “access to a huge talent pool of really, really top engineers and scientists” so as to compete with Google in these fledgling fields.

While Kai Yu says that they are working on Baidu Eye at the new lab, he stresses that the emphasis is on deep learning algorithms that can keep the search engine – which has 70 percent market share in China – ahead of its rivals.

This isn’t Baidu’s first overseas lab. There’s the Baidu-l2R Research Center in Singapore, which focuses on natural language processing technology for Southeast Asian languages – specifically Vietnamese and Thai. While that other facility might indicate that Baidu is keen to launch its search engine in nations like Vietnam and Thailand in the near future, the Cupertino facility is quite different, and seems motivated by a need to get closer to the best neuroscience talent emerging out of universities there.

Another motivating factor might be the growing competition in this sector after Google recently hired Geoffrey Hinton, who’s considered to be the godfather of deep learning and neural network research.

(Source: Wired)

Calvin Chin at T13 in Shanghai. Image: Ami Sanyal Photography

At Mailman Group’s T13 conference in Shanghai yesterday, one of the city’s top entrepreneurial voices, Calvin Chin, took to the stage to explain his personal approach to the concept of social innovation. He’s the CEO of Shanghai-based startup accelerator Transist Impact Labs, the founder of the now defunct P2P student loans service Qifeng, and one of Fast Company’s 100 most innovative people in the startup space in China. I decided to listen to what he’s saying, and wrote it up as he talked in the form of a sort of live-blog.

Why China?

Calvin’s speech is based around his nine-year journey in and around China, which was when he first moved to the country. As a third-generation American Chinese, his initial move to China was met with surprise – “Why China?” he was asked repeatedly by family in sunny San Francisco. That question remained in the air until the more recent economic boom made sense for people to follow the money to China. Now the Why China? question is back on people’s lips, Calvin says, for a different reason – due to so many woes like pollution and pricey housing – that leaves some people asking why someone would stay in China right now; especially when that person has kids.

For an entrepreneur, he says, it’s a very tough place to do business: “It’s not that the market is not mature, but it’s also broken.” As a hyper-fragmented market, many Chinese business environments are dominated by oligopolies, and then there are the ties of government regulations and the might of State-owned enterprises.

The next challenge in the innovation process, is to build a brand and then take it forward from there – which is tough in a rigged market. So the reason that Calvin stays is because of the opportunities – so many that they exceed the weight of the challenges. Showing a photo of crabs in a fisher’s pot on the screens around the room, he says: “The payouts for getting to the top of the crab basket are very big.” That means accessing over half a billion web users, and over a billion on mobiles.

Purpose, responsibility

So the second reason for Why China? is “purpose”. China is, he elaborates, a “proud country stumbling its way to its rightful place as a world leader.” And that’s part of the energy in this purpose. But amidst all this excitement, he acknowledges, is income inequality; yet there is also a large and hopeful Chinese youth. That’s all part of the purpose for Calvin and his commitment to China.

That leads him to the sense of responsibility that comes from the ability to make a difference. That needn’t be at the cost of making money or a profit, he says. Yet focusing just on money is the “way to end up lacking focus, rudder-less, and without money.” Many “wrong investors” and the world markets emphasize pure profit, but that’s “wrong, wrong, wrong,” notes Calvin. And that’s the basis of social innovation.

This sense of purpose has inspired Calvin in his two startups and his new role as an investor and head of Transist Labs. It’s based on customer value, stakeholder value, and building things for other people.

From giving customer value you also create stakeholder value, and get towards the right product-market fit in a startup. It’s also the right approach, Calvin says, to keep talent and fend off competitors. Purpose puts users at the center of your product development, and gets you the right talent; it also transforms the fear of failure into something more bold, to go towards innovation and iteration. “Failure with a purpose is worthy because the goal was worthy.”

“I urge you all,” he ends, “to do epic shit.”

(Event photo by Ami Sanyal)

A Mumbai-based startup is taking on the world’s top project management web apps – things like Basecamp and Trello – with its minimalist and good-looking BrightPod. Made by the team at Synage Software, BrightPod is now close to the end of its months-long private beta and will launch to the public on April 16th. (UPDATE from the startup team: TechinAsia readers can sign up for Brightpod with the code “founders” (without the quotes)).

Up against a hundred or more task management app rivals, BrightPod aims to be the best collaborative working platform for marketing teams – and that of course includes social marketing. So the idea is that the web app is the best place for marketers to run campaigns, check off tasks and milestones, and keep track of organizational messages without resorting to a mess of email threads.

Among lots of useful BrightPod features are workflows that can be cloned and automated across different projects or campaigns, a daily digest email of the previous day’s work, an intuitive card-based layout, and an area for things that need particular attention from a team member. It looks like the kind of thing that this blog could use as well, rather than our lumpen Google Docs-based editorial spreadsheet.

Keeping track of the project team in BrightPod.

Yamini, the startup’s marketing manager, tells us that Brightpod now has over 150 companies using the app with a total of 272 users making use of it prior to the public launch. The seven-man Brightpod team previously started up DeskAway, a more general project collaboration service that’s in use at some major corporations. Because DeskAway already got funding and is now profitable, that helped the Mumbai entrepreneurs to get BrightPod rolling. Yamini adds: “However, in the next few months we may look at raising money as we expand the [Brightpod] team and broaden our reach globally.”

As for the focus on marketing teams, Yamini explains:

Over the years, we were seeing DeskAway being used as a general purpose project management tool by companies across a lot of verticals. However, we also witnessed a surge in signups from marketing teams with feature requests aimed at marketing/campaign related projects – stuff that they require. They felt it was chaotic to plan and track progress of various marketing projects/campaigns (SEO, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) when working with multiple people and clients.

We know the collaboration space pretty well and hence decided to create a new product that would serve this niche market with features specifically for marketing teams.

New features will be added to the web app soon, including an editorial calendar and marketing analytics. Also, it will better integrate with social networks, which is something obviously critical to those doing social marketing.

In essence, Maskr is a privacy service that allows you to create an unlimited number of free, anonymous aliases that would be associated to a single email address that you own (see screenshots below). First, you will need to head over to the site to create an account and get verified. You will then be able to access a secure dashboard, which has features that allow you to create new aliases that will be associated to the email that you have used to sign up with. In the event a user starts to receive unsolicited emails, one can easily disable and create new ones. Ken Tan, creative director of The Bang Table Company (who are direct investors of Maskr), tells us more:

[There is] an additional protection feature allows direct blockage of senders per alias via a manageable blacklist. Maskr currently works on all platforms with seamless integration between desktop and mobile. An upcoming iOS mobile application will further enhance the mobile experience: store multiple email addresses to create aliases instantly with a single tap.

So what’s the difference between signing up for a new email account and having a Maskr account? The latter makes it extremely easy to create new email aliases. We’re drawing parallels between signing up a new account which typically takes two to five minutes of your time, a click which takes a couple of seconds.

How Maskr came about

The idea behind the Singapore-based service first came about when Ken once left his personal email with a hotel while he was travelling overseas. He then found his personal email flooded with endless honeymoon promotions (which can be annoying, really), and wondered if a service that removes such “bad points of contacts” existed.

The idea was then brought forward and conceptualized towards the end of 2011, and launched just a month back. In the interview, Ken tells us:

Maskr was built in direct response to the increasing number of solicited emails (BACN). We’re on the consumers’ side – we’ve built Maskr to protect the identities of personal email addresses around the world.
Maskr takes away the hesitation when asked to share one’s personal email address, knowing you can kill the alias anytime.

At present, Maskr is free to use, and the team promises more updates with newer features. They are also planning to look into white-labeling the Maskr technology for enterprises (which I personally think is a brilliant idea, since a significant amount of my time is actually spent on clearing unwanted emails).

The Maskr team

Another thing that caught my attention about the Maskr service is the company behind it: The Bang Table Company (TBTC). I like the company name, and thought it added a little local Singaporean flavor. Ken explains more:

We wanted something colloquial, yet that makes sense. We make noise in the [startup] scene, banging on the tables of convention. [...] TBTC is a pre-seed investment company that aids and grows business ideas from their nascent stages, providing support to accelerate the route for startups to profitability. These startups could be either external or internal staff (or both), whom we encourage to think big. We provide the funds and infrastructure for them to develop their ideas, taking them from build to beta and then to launch; after which we’ll take on a bigger stake (and role) to get to the next stage which is typically seed or series A.

And the team (pictured top right) seems pretty solid to me, having a good mix of digital professionals and aspiring entrepreneurs who understand the needs when it comes to emails.

Future plans

The team promises to release its iOS app early June 2013 (pictured above), and is looking to translate the service into Malaysian, simplified and traditional Chinese, as well as Spanish so as to cater to users in the other regions.

Plus, they’re also looking to develop an e-commerce service in the near future. In fact, Ken’s pretty excited about the journey ahead for the TBTC company:

We’ve always been innovators, and we’re obsessed with technology. The process of going from scribbles on paper to actual users embracing the product is both exhilarating and scary for us.

Most folks these days making banners find them to be either very expensive or tedious. Only big digital creative agencies can afford to make nice banners that build traction with consumers. That leaves smaller companies who don’t have an easy avenue to create banners that can attract customers. That’s why RichMediaAds is targeting this under-served group.

According to Alvin Koay, the CEO and founder:

Flash/image banners have only one point of interaction, which is click-through (CTR). The correlation between CTR and a conversion (sale, signup, download, etc) is almost negligible (0.01 percent). On the other hand, the correlation for engagement is 0.49 percent. This means advertisers need to create engaging ads that users can interact with. This can increase conversions drastically.

The whole concept is to turn the ad space into “mini websites within websites”, so that visitors don’t have to click their way out of their current websites to access the content. And the perk is that it’s for entry-level advertisers, publishers, or bloggers who can’t hire expensive agencies but still want to offer nice banners for their clients.

RichMediaAds’ revenue model will grab a small percentage of the ad impressions per impression. The new startup hopes to open up a whole new advertising landscape for the little guys.

If you’re a business that’s looking to break into online advertising, RichMediaAds makes that really easy for you. Alvin Koay just presented his new startup onstage at our Startup Arena event in Singapore. The company, founded in Malaysia, allows users to design their own hip interactive banners to be posted across the web.

The project is already underway with business partners in Latin America, Europe, Japan, the US, and Southeast Asia.

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

Whether you’re a student, an individual, or a business owner, at some point you’ll probably need to create presentations that aim to impress. Second to pitch at our Startup Arena stage today is Hong Kong-based Mmixr which positions itself as the all-in-one presentation management tool with three main features: creation, management, and distribution.

So with Mmixr, you can organize all your presentation and media assets, such as a PowerPoint presentation, videos, flash, and images, in one place. You will be able to create your own slides using your own presentation tools or choose from Mmixr’s template library while just simply dragging and dropping the assets you wish to include in the presentation. Users can also manage users, groups, and obtain analytics from the admin dashboard. Mmixr is hosted on the Amazon S3 app engine, which allows you to store unlimited presentations, which can be easily accessed online from a computer or on a mobile device.

How is it different from the normal SlideShare experience? Mmixr’s David describes SlideShare as the YouTube of presentation, and Mmxir, as the iTunes of presentations. While the former allows you to share stuff publicly, the latter allows you to share selectively with people whom you choose to share with.

Mmixr targets larger corporations with a large sales force. For users in such companies, Mmixr offers a package at US$22.99 per user per month, which allows you to have access to the full feature-set which includes a dedicated account manager for support and training.

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

Most of the TechinAsia team is already in Singapore for Startup Asia Singapore 2013 for some in-depth discussion of the world of tech and startups. But some people who aren’t devs may have a simpler question: how do you start a startup anyway?

And honestly, that kind of describes me. I’ve always been interested in the world of startups but have never really been sure how it all worked or simply, where to start. I may sound like a total newbie (which I really am), but you’re not going to learn unless you ask. So I decided to ask the members of Facebook group Startup PH for some help on, well, where to start.

Much to my delight, someone mentioned My Startup Academy. A startup for startups! My Startup Academy aims to help those who have a business idea and can’t wait to pitch it to anyone who’s willing to listen (because that’s passion; believe me, I have an idea and I can’t wait to pitch it). It provides learning tools, mentorship, community, help finding funding, and perhaps a way to turn yourself from a newbie into a startup pro. Then you’ll be off developing your next masterpiece app. Mark? Is that you?

The team is headed by Michie Ang of MRTtrackr. She’s a registered nurse by profession, but now she’s very active in the dev community. Cool! The devotion of the people who do this, looking out for others and actually helping, is just amazing.

By this point I’m sure you’re excited but it’s not time for school quite yet. My Startup Academy hasn’t launched yet, but you can register now to be the first in line when the beta goes online.

Personally, I’m going to sign up to see if they can really unnewbie me.

Commute.ph founder Jolo Balbin also gave me some very helpful tips on starting a startup:

1. Conceptualize your idea.
2. If you’re a developer, create a minimum viable product (MVP).
3. If not, try to create an MVP without touching any code.
4. If that’s not possible, try to ask your closest friend that can code.
5. Find a developer that you know, and you can get along with. You will be with this person for a long time if your idea becomes successful.
6. If all else fails, try to learn how to code. I discourage asking someone you don’t know (such as a freelancer) to code your idea. Anything might happen that is beyond your control.

Another developer Jose Palala said, “A student fresh out of college who desires to go into entrepreneurship must build his people skills and grow his network.”

How about you? Do you think you have a billion dollar idea that you just can’t wait to pitch? Remember, “ideas are just ideas, until you make them reality.” Go find your team.

A little more than two years after the colossal Japan earthquake and tsunami disaster of March 2011, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has let its Street View cars venture into the Fukushima exclusion zone town of Namie­-machi (pictured) for the first time. Its residents, however, are still not allowed to return due to the meltdown at the nearby Fukushima nuclear power plant caused by the freak wave that swept ashore.

The Google Street View cars capture eerie scenes of collapsed buildings still in a heap in the badly damaged main streets of Namie­-machi. There’s not a person in sight:

Click this or images below to enlarge

Located one kilometre inland is the fishing boat pictured below. In a blog post written by local mayor Mr. Tamotsu Baba that will soon go up on the official Google Japan blog, he points out that “nearby Ukedo harbor once proudly boasted 140 fishing boats and 500 buildings.” Few of either remain.

Near Ukedo harbor

In the vicinity is Ukedo elementary school, where Street View cameras have ventured on foot to capture the abandoned and wrecked classrooms:

Inside an abandoned classroom

It’s a painful yet poignant reminder that Namie­-machi and Fukushima are trapped in a time-warp, frozen in convulsed horror in the day of the massive natural disaster that assaulted the land and seas.

This is part of Google’s Build the Memories project that we looked at back in December 2011. At that time, the Street View cars had captured the devastation caused by the tsunami in badly-hit Miyagi prefecture. But until now, the hauntingly desolate streets around Fukushima had been off-limits. We notice that the street snaps of the whole area haven’t been refreshed for this project, so you’re limited to viewing certain areas, such as the two places we’ve linked above.

In the days and weeks after the disaster, a great many initiatives used technology to try help victims of the great Tohoku quake in some way, such as with ‘person finder’ videos on YouTube, through digital photography, and a site that connected Japanese who’d lost their homes with a host family.

Google Art Project took off in 2011 with the aim to make the world’s great cultural artifacts viewable online. But mainland China has always been a sizable omission from its digital archives. That has finally changed with the first-ever Chinese museum now cataloged by Google.

50 priceless pieces from the Hunan Provincial Museum in central China can now be seen here. The museum specializes in items excavated from local Han-era tombs, plus bronzeware from the Shang and Zhou dynasties dating back to 1600BC. One of the oldest – and most adorable – of the ancient relics is this boar-shaped bronze wine vessel which is at least 3,000 years old:

Click to enlarge

Hopefully this is the first of many Chinese museums to put their finest pieces on Google Art Project. But with many museums in China charging stiff admission fees (due to a lack of general tax-funded support), it’s far from guaranteed to happen. Also, Google is far from being the favorite web company of authorities in Beijing.

This time last year, Indonesia’s Museum Nasional made over 100 relics available for global virtual visitors.

Tomorrow, as 8:30pm rolls around the globe, lots of landmark buildings will turn off their lights to observe Earth Hour and remind the world to not waste our vital resources. Many households will likely join in. And so will six Chinese social media sites, who have vowed to turn off the lights on Saturday evening. As pictured above on Renren, the sites will illuminate their pages only with a single virtual light (1) that follows a user’s cursor.

According to CampaignAsia, the six sites backing this environmental movement, alongside Renren, are Youku, QQ, Ushi, 139, and Kaixin. It’ll probably be seen by most people on Youku, which is the nation’s top YouTube-like site; overall, this support could be seen by as many as 200 million Chinese netizens. Unless everyone’s out eating dinner.

The annual campaign is run by the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), and the theme this year is challenging people to do positive things in return for some karmic reward. For example, these two mischief-making Singaporeans will run down Orchard Road in lingerie if 5,000 people will use reusable shopping bags (2).

Of course, to engage Chinese netizens, the WWF has also taken to Chinese social media rather than YouTube, and there’s a localized Earth Hour page as well.

The seventh annual Earth Hour is 8:30 to 9:30pm and will likely be observed by lots of global sites as well. Of course, in terms of pure technicalities, most gadget displays do not actually use less power to show darker hues than lighter ones – AMOLED with its pure blacks might be an exception – so there won’t be a net saving in global electricity usage from the ‘lights off’ websites. Instead, it’s more about raising awareness of real-world savings that can be made in our communities.

(Source: CampaignAsia)

China’s Shanda has made e-readers for years, and launched an Android-based smartphone last year. Its next hardware venture will be much smaller and actually wearable – a smart watch. According to Chinese media reports this week, it’ll be called the Bambook Smart Watch and will run the open source Firefox OS.

The leaked picture above, spotted via Technode, is said to be the actual Bambook Smart Watch, and it’ll launch in June. Running Mozilla’s Firefox OS – which will also be adopted by a number of Chinese smartphone makers, like Huawei and ZTE – the wearable device will run HTML5 web apps, negating any dependence on things like Android native apps. Though reports suggest the device will also support Android will be available as a separate version for Android (and thanks to Engadget’s Richard Lai for pointing out that detail).

As well as using the Bambook name that’s so familiar to Chinese gadget buyers, Shanda’s smart watch will use the kind of color e-ink display (1) that has been put into service on its e-readers, but there are no hardware specs available yet.

The Bambook Smart Watch looks to be arriving at an opportune time when no other major Chinese hardware makers have entered the space. Shanda, as one of China’s largest software, hardware, and gaming companies, already has the distribution channels to promote and sell this well. Plus, it’ll benefit from the perpetual and very dubious hype surrounding “rumors” (2) of an Apple iWatch. There are other such watches from Sony and Pebble, but they’ll likely never properly support Chinese web services and so will not catch on in China.

Speaking of web services, Shanda has plenty of its own that could make the Bambook Smart Watch a compelling buy – imagine if the watch could read aloud your Bambook-purchased e-books, sync your Shanda MKnote reminders, whilst giving you updates on how your gaming buddies are performing on your favorite Shanda MMO game. We’ll have to wait until June to see just how smart the watch will be.

(Source: Techweb – article in Chinese; hat-tip to Technode for spotting this)

American mobile chat app MessageMe has been generating a lot of buzz since its launch just a couple of weeks ago, and with good reason. TechCrunch reports the app has already garnered more than a million users and sent more than ten million doodles. Why? TechCrunch writes the app is setting itself apart in the crowded mobile chat market with its features:

While the messaging space is incredibly competitive with apps from Facebook, Apple’s iMessages plus the big Asian clients like Tencent’s WeChat and NHN’s Line, MessageMe thinks it can carve out a space because of the way it quickly pulls in rich media like doodles and videos [...] Basically, they think it’s a lot more expressive than standard messaging and silly as it seems, those doodles will differentiate them from the very large field of competition.

And in MessageMe’s own press release, the company compares the way its app changes communication to “[the] way email revolutionized old school mail.”

But is MessageMe really all that revolutionary? Does it really offer features that set it apart from the pack? After checking it out, our answer is a resounding “no.” Yes, it’s a very well-made app, and it deserves the success it’s getting. But it really isn’t innovative at all; nearly every feature MessageMe offers was already available in Asian mobile chat apps that have been around much longer than the American app. Here’s a quick breakdown of the feature list for MessageMe and four popular Asian chat apps; pay special attention to the launch dates:

As you can see from the chart above, music integration is the only area where MessageMe really really sets itself apart, and even that has been available in Weixin (the Chinese version of WeChat) since last fall, albeit via a third-party plugin. Most of the other features TechCrunch says MessageMe is hoping to set itself apart with have been available for years on other apps; I was sending doodles to my wife using Xiaomi’s Miliao mobile chat app all the way back in 2010. Plus, many of the Asian apps also offer features MessageMe doesn’t have yet, like WeChat’s ability to exchange digital business cards, Cubie’s “secret” disappearing messages, or Vietnamese chat app Zalo’s pictionary-style doodle game. MessageMe isn’t blazing a new frontier, it is playing catch-up.

None of this is to say that MessageMe isn’t good; it is. Personally, I found it to be a better user experience than some of these Asian apps, and if my friends adopt it, I’ll probably start using it in addition to WeChat. But let’s not kid ourselves. If the geography was reversed so that Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat, and Cubie were Western apps and MessageMe was an Asian app, MessageMe would be getting called a copycat and you’d see phrasing like “Asia’s WeChat” in the headlines on tech news sites.

Of course, none of these Asian apps invented the concept of mobile messaging either, but they did pioneer and popularize the multimedia-based vision of mobile messaging with things like stickers and doodles that MessageMe is now following. That’s a big part of why all of these apps have been so successful. WeChat boasts more than 300 million users, Line has more than 100 million, and KakaoTalk has more than 70 million.

It would be great if Asian apps like Line and WeChat got some recognition for their innovation, at the very least, the folks at MessageMe stopped pretending their app is revolutionary. By creating such a smooth and lightweight app, the MessageMe team has definitely given us one of the most evolved versions of the mobile chat app we’ve yet seen, and that’s great. But for anyone familiar with Asia’s popular chat apps, there’s definitely no revolution here.

To try it yourself, just head to Baidu.com and search for π and watch the numbers chew up your browser.

Surprisingly, rival search engine giant Google doesn’t have a pi doodle up on its homepage.

(Hat-tip to Baidu international communications director Kaiser Kuo who pointed this out on Facebook)

Former Tudou CEO Gary Wang.

Tudou founder and former CEO Gary Wang cashed out of China’s biggest ever internet business deal last summer and then announced his retirement from the YouTube-like video company to chase “the next interesting dream.” It turns out that his next startup project will be quite different – an animation studio.

Aiming to be China’s Pixar, Wang told the WSJ, “I wouldn’t have done this five years ago, but now the time is right.” With improved copyright protection and a domestic movie market worth $2.74 billion last year, it seems the opportune moment for a Beijing-based animation studio to take on both Pixar and Dreamworks. China’s animation industry is fairly sizeable, but has yet to have a contemporary, big-name success either at home or overseas, and it’s mostly American and Japanese cartoon characters that catch the imagination of Chinese kids.

Wang’s new animation studio will open on April 1st, and reportedly has tens of millions of dollars in funding from a group of unnamed international investors. It’s not clear if his new venture will have an online business aspect, or will operate more like a conventional studio.

Whatever animated blockbusters he helps produce will find a big market in China – and one which is biased in favor of local production companies. Only a handful of foreign movies are permitted access to China’s growing (but still small) network of big-screen cinemas each year.

After managing Tudou – which is now part of the Youku Tudou company, running two of China’s top video-streaming sites – for seven years, Wang will know that licensing big-screen content to the country’s numerous video sites will be a big part of the success and profitability of the new studio.

(Source: Wall Street Journal; Image: Guardian)

Yesterday, Minh wrote about Happy Ending, an e-commerce flower shop in Vietnam that has captured a lot of attention on Facebook and Twitter. While some folks blast Happy Ending’s advertising or approach for being stupid and sexist, other folks have applauded it for its provocative communication style. I don’t claim to be a marketing expert (though I was a marketing major in college), but I can tell you that’s exactly why this kind of campaign is called provocative or shock advertising.

Whatever the strategy is called, the point is that it gets the message across to people that Happy Ending is selling flowers through its provocative and humorous messaging. Do people like it? I do think there are people who appreciate that kind of humor. But there will also be a group of people who think this is just low-class advertising.

But people that think the company is low class may not be a bad thing, because it helps Happy Ending to define and target its customers. Its customers are the folks who are laid back enough to take this as a joke, appreciate it, and maybe, perhaps, really think that flowers do give happy endings (come one guys, there’s some truth in this). That’s not going to be everyone, of course. Such provocative messaging works even better (or worse) in Asia, where the culture is generally more conservative.

Lessons Learned?

So what can we learn from Happy Ending’s controversial ad campaign?

1. Fuck it, be bold: If you admire their guts, remember that you can do the same thing. This kind of marketing pisses people off, but you’ll get the publicity you want for sure. Hopefully you’ll make money out of it too.

2. Cutting through the clutter: There are so many florist e-stores available on the web. If you can’t compete on ad spending or SEO then do it with some witty or eye-catching marketing and pitch it to the media. We picked up Happy Ending on our own end because we thought it was a fun story that would command clicks and generate discussion. It sure did, and all that gets translated to publicity and traffic for Happy Ending.

3. Culture and targeting: Through its marketing, the company’s culture attracts a certain group of people. The choice of name – Happy Ending – has already set the culture in stone. The people who follow them are their target audience and it naturally filters out those who are not with them. It’s very much like some of American Apparel’s marketing. Some think it’s cool, other’s think it’s vulgar. You can quote them, disagree, glorify, or vilify them but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.

When faced with a problem or annoyance, it’s sometimes nice (if annoying for others) to vent about it online. For Indian urbanites, their gripes about pollution, potholes, and other street-level hazards will soon actually flow from Twitter and Facebook directly to the relevant authorities – and cause some positive action to be taken. That’s the goal of SocialCops, which describes itself as a platform to bring together community stakeholders: NGOs, local governments, and the citizens who encounters these issues every day.

SocialCops is aiming to launch soon in India, explains Prukalpa Sankar, a student at Sinagpore’s Nanyang Technological University and a co-founder of this civic-minded startup. There are citizen-side apps in the works, and the Android version and main website will launch in May in New Delhi, India, for the SocialCops pilot.

For this to work, local authorities need to be involved as well, and so SocialCops is also building a council-side web platform so that all the street-level hazards and annoyances can be filtered from social media, through SocialCops, and straight to the men and women who can sort things out. The Singapore-based startup – with a team of three, who are all NTU final-year students – is also looking beyond India in the future, as Prukalpa explains:

We’re building the product for developing countries – We’re looking to launch in India. We have a collaboration with a local council that services about 100,000 people and we’ll be reiterating the council dashboard with their support. Once the council side of the platform is ready, it will be ready to be launched on a global level – but we’re mainly targeting Asian countries. In Singapore, we’ll be looking to launch sometime in 2014 if we manage to get council support. The business model and monetization strategy will be different for developing and developed countries but the product will essentially be the same.

Click to enlarge

The SocialCops team has lined up a couple of revenue streams already. One of these is for local small businesses to advertise on the platform and also offer rewards, perhaps in the form of discounts or promotions, to people who contribute positively to the site. The other monetization channel is more traditional: taking sponsoprship from large brands and retailers who’ll participate as part of corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs.

[A common] scenario is: The local council outsources civic duties to third-party service providers and are finding it difficult to monitor the ground reality of the performance of these companies. We ran a low-tech pilot in India which invited SMS complaints from citizens on one hand and SMS reports of third-party service providers and created a common newsfeed for the council – which created a check-and-balance in the system and increased efficiency.

Perhaps SocialCops would fair better in India by continuing to accept SMS entries, as smartphone and cellular data adoption in the country is pretty slow. That’s why we’ve seen some neat feature phone-oriented startups emerge, like the messaging-based search engine SMSGyan.

But SocialCops looks promising, and we await its full launch in May to see how it manages to help good citizens take care of their neighborhoods. The startup has already been given a boost by winning a Global ICT Prize in the Global Social Entrepreneurship competition, where the team walked away with a check for $10,000 from Microsoft.

A group of Singaporean seniors with their donated phones from the Silverline project.

“Why build new hardware when the world is full of amazing iPhones and Android devices?” With that idea, one civic-minded startup in Singapore is building specialist apps for senior citizens that will then be given to elderly folks on donated phones. Called Project Silverline, it’s launching a crowdfunding campaign today on Indiegogo that’s aiming to raise US$50,000.

Essentially, Silverline is a suite of healthcare and personal safety apps (pictured below) that are made with seniors in mind, with large icons and clear, simple text. Among the five current apps are ‘Connect’, which is a replacement for the phone’s contacts app; ‘Well Being’ provides alarms for things like taking medicine; and the ‘Emergency’ app gives one-tap access to Singapore‘s police or ambulance hotlines. The apps are initially available for iOS and can run on older handsets, such as an iPhone 3GS, so that they work fine on the kind of repurposed devices they hope youngsters will donate in a charitable fashion.

Silverline is being backed by local telco SingTel, which has been accepting old handset donations at stores for several months already, collecting any iPhone 3GS, 4, or 4S that can be given a new lease of life as a communication lifeline for a senior citizen in Singapore with these apps.

Senior safety

The ‘Well Being’ part of the Silverline apps for seniors. Click to enlarge.

With SingTel already on board, and the apps already developed for iOS, I asked Ciaran Lyons from NewtonCircus, the startup running this project, why it’s now taking the crowdfunding route:

Part of the crowdfunding budget will be used to work with some neat external devices – such as battery-powered accelerometers – which provide additional functionality. But so far everything can be installed on your factory-fresh smartphone – though we’d prefer it were second-hand.

Ciaran adds that Silverline has so far clocked up “18 months of research, prototyping and user feedback to make sure that seniors love and benefit from our apps.” In addition to what the suite of apps do already, they’re working on bringing them to Android in future and getting the Silverline apps into the iTunes App Store so that anyone can make use of them. Plus, the startup is testing a personal security app that can detect falls, and has started building games that can detect cognitive decline.

To keep the elderly connected once they’ve received the donated handsets, SingTel is giving 1,000 voice and data plans, good for a whole year, to the phone beneficiaries free of charge. Ciaran says that “the need, even just in Singapore, is far greater than that and it’s growing every year. So we have a lot to do.” But the SingTel site suggests that only 27 old iPhones have been donated so far, so the project is in need of a hardware boost so that some of Singapore’s neediest citizens can have these apps at their disposal.

We’re told that Newton Circus is a startup of 11 people. Though they have received funding from different sources for various initiatives, there’s been no venture capital input as of yet. The team is working with registered charities in the US, UK, Hong Kong, and Australia to create similar phone donation programs there.

Get more info on donating your old iPhones (3GS, 4, 4S only) here, or throw some cash at their new crowdfunding page (which runs for 45 more days). Or do both.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making a T-shirt in the SnapTee app. Click to enlarge.

SnapTee focuses on its iPhone app as the place where users can customize and create their own T-shirts – then get the finished garment delivered to their door anywhere in the world. The main website is where anyone can browse lots of user-crafted T-shirt designs and order the ones that are up for sale (not all are).

Today’s SnapTee seed funding comes courtesy of a group of Hong Kong and Singapore investors, including Yat Siu from game developers Outblaze and Animoca, Chris Lee from 6waves, Mikaal Abdulla from 8 Securities (the online stock trading platform), Singapore-based angel investor Emanuel R. Breiter, and Hong Kong-based investor Tytus Michalski of Fresco Capital.

Co-founder and CEO Wai Lun Hong tells us that SnapTee is now a five-person team which will be expanding to 10 in the coming months. The T-shirt store has seen 10,000 designs to date and claims to be doubling in growth each month. The team is seeing most users in the US and Europe right now. Its next major project, Wai Lun explains, is to explore Japan – which would presumably require the startup’s first attempt at translating its service.

Across the rest of Asia, we’ve seen other young companies take slightly different approaches to selling unique T-shirts, such as the designer-to-consumer platform OuterEdit in Singapore, or the one-a-day e-commerce store Buyitee from China.

Snap up the SnapTee app for iPhone in the App Store.

Indonesian self-publishing service NulisBuku has been making steady progress since we covered the company in 2011. Co-founder (Ollie) Aulia Halimatussadiah spoke with us and shared some details of the company’s progress both offline and online. She also talked about her thoughts on Indonesia’s biggest publishing company Gramedia and its plans to open a self-publishing service in the near future.

In December, NulisBuku held a writing competition called “Tulis Nusantara 2012.” The competition partnered with the Indonesian ministry of tourism and creative economy and generated more than 3,000 entries in three weeks. The team also went to 12 cities in Indonesia to give writing workshops about writing and self-publishing. As an author herself, Ollie is glad that the team can help a handful of new, aspiring writers realize their dream to get books published and made available in bookstores.

At the moment, NulisBuku has more than 27,000 members with more than 2,000 books self-published. The company’s social pages now have almost 11,000 Facebook fans and 50,000 Twitter followers. On Twitter, Ollie says that they regularly hold tweeting activities like a poetry at night with the hashtag #PuisiMalam and also creating ‘flash fiction’ in only one hour using the hashtag #FF2in1.

A couple of weeks ago, publishing giant Gramedia launched its newest website, Gramediana to become a major, new rival to the startup. Although Gramediana is still in its beta version, included inside the site’s future offerings is a self-publishing service similar to NulisBuku. Ollie commented:

Nulisbuku started the self-publishing service in October 2010, and at that time only a few were interested in the self-publishing business. We built our ‘Nulis Buku Club’ (NBC) community all over Indonesia and grew the number of self-published books in our website. With Gramedia’s decision to enter the self-publishing business, it assured us that we’re on the right track, that the self-publishing business will grow massively in the future. We still have room to grow and a lot of potential in the young Indonesian market. We’re happy that there are more people and support involved in this ecosystem to create bigger awareness in self-publishing.

Ollie is now preparing a new look as well as new features and services for the NulisBuku website. The team is going to focus on distribution this year to accommodate further exposure of its writers’ self-published books. NulisBuku is also brewing up a few strategic partnerships this year.

Now that everyone is over a certain horse-riding dance, the next music meme all over the internet is the Harlem Shake. It’s already taking off in China in terms of both being shared over social networks like Weibo, as well as some recreations of the easy-to-replicate, freak-out dance.

Dubbed “Ha Lin yao” in Chinese, we’ve found three versions of the Harlem Shake made by Chinese netizens. As you can see: it’s the same simple formula the world over: one lone dancer gyrates to the building intro, and when the bass drops that’s when everyone else gets down and dirty. Masks or helmets are encouraged, but optional. Unlike a certain Korean pop sensation, there’s no set dance routine, making this the perfect meme for the reality TV attitude-is-more-important-than-talent generation.

[UPDATED two days later with video from Oppo]. There are not yet many Chinese reworkings of the Harlem Shake, but these three four stand out:

Startup shakin’

The perfect place for us to start is with the Shanghai-based startup NeoNan, a sort of GQ-like portal for men, which got its office pumping to the Harlem Shake. Look out for some nice horse-ridin’ meme-mixing going on in here:

Oppo Harlem style

We’ve updated the post with this one from phone-maker Oppo:

Gyrating grans

Next, some rocking grandmothers, one of whom throws some renegade nose-picking into the mix:

On drugs

Lastly, what looks to be a pharmacy is turned into a dancefloor by these Chinese students. Also, who left students to run a drugs store?

The new Asia Pop channel has only four videos so far, but that will soon expand once it adds livestreams of special events. The first Hangout will kick off on March 8th with Korean pop star SHINee.

Also useful are the playlists within the new Asia Pop area – there are five so far – that give you a rundown of the most popular music of the past week.

Google tells us that the new channel will focus on Korean, Japanese, and Chinese pop music. Hopefully that might also expand to cover other nations with vibrant pop music scenes that have cross-border appeal – and perhaps some alternative music too. But that’s just our wishful thinking.

There are seven Hangouts planned for early March. This is the line-up so far:

March 8 – Shinee (K-Pop)

March 9 – Wang Lee Hom (C-Pop)

March 10 – Super Junior (K-Pop)

March 11 – Kyary Pamyu Pamyu (J-Pop)

March 12 – Flumpool (J-Pop)

March 13 – 2PM (K-Pop)

March 14 – Mayday (C-Pop)

Only five lucky fans, Google explains, will be allowed into each Hangout, so you better start thinking of a good question if you want to get in.

As you’ll likely know already, PSY’s Gangnam Style is the most-viewed YouTube video of all time, so it seems like a fitting time for the region’s pop music to get more attention from YouTube itself.

Just last week, YouTube announced the opening of Asia’s first YouTube Space in Tokyo to give content creators a professional space to craft their videos.

Today is Chinese New Year’s eve. So kids, including myself, are “forced” to do spring cleaning. It’s part of the entire Chinese New Year celebration process of shopping, cleaning, eating, gambling (just for fun), and visiting relatives. And fireworks. Of course, younger people will also be busy collecting red envelopers (stuffed with cash) from senior family members.

My friends from Taiwan texted me to try Google’s snake game doodle. It’s snake themed because this is the year of the snake in the Chinese calendar, replacing the outgoing year of the dragon. The Google doodle snake game plays a bit like the old Nokia snake game: you control the snake’s direction while grabbing items. Avoid grabbing the festive fire crackers though. You have 60 seconds to play but I don’t think you will get any rewards regardless of how many points you score. The game also comes with a traditional Chinese New Year tune, adding to the festive mood. You can try the game on Google’s Hong Kong and Taiwan homepages right now.

We’d also like to take this chance to wish all readers a very happy and prosperous Chinese New Year.

This week I noticed that the Chinese photo-sharing app Vida had joined in the national discussion about China’s polluted skies by adding a PM2.5 photo filter. When the filter is applied to your image, it make the photo slightly grey-yellow tinged, as if the air is as much chemical-y particulates as oxygen. Or if you live in Beijing or the parts of China worst affected by PM2.5 pollution and you then apply this new Vida filter, your original photo will surely be totally obscured. Thankfully I don’t live in Beijing, so when I tested out the filter, the visual results were not so bad as Beijing actually is much of the time.

Once posted, the app tells you your location’s PM2.5 pollution data. Any number under 50 is good. Beijing’s pollution often hits 500, and has even gone off the scale once this year. (Click to enlarge)

The startup team behind Vida explained to me via Sina Weibo that the photo filter has another clever use. Aside from giving your friends a laugh, it’ll also use your location to display the PM2.5 pollution reading for your area in the form of text (pictured right) on the photo. The Vida team points out that their data feed is “delayed by one or two hours,” so it might not be hugely accurate. But still fun. In my test today, a PM2.5 result of just 31 shows that the air is clean (though gloomy) after being freshened up by yesterday’s snow and wind.

For the most up-to-date pollution read-outs, Chinese urbanites already have some neat dedicated apps, such as another startup’s perhaps sarcastically-named Fresh Air app. There’s also the official Beijing Air Quality app created by the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center, which gives PM2.5 data. That’s at least some progress after years of authorities trying to ignore and cover-up PM2.5 data, instead preferring to use read-outs for larger particulate pollution which didn’t make for such horrific reading.

Vida is one of many Instagram-like photo-sharing apps in the country, combining funky filters with a mini social network. Perhaps the largest of these is Tuding, which already had over four million users back in December 2011. Vida says it has four million right now.

Both Vida and Tuding recently incorporated voice comments to accompany photos that you post, which seems to be a new trend among local photo apps. Plus, both apps have been very nimble and clever in adding more fun filters – in contrast to the glacial evolution of Instagram – and have even added branded frames/filters as part of companies’ social marketing campaigns. Imagine the pained cries and agonized goatee-pulling that would occur if Instagram tried that.

The Vida app supports English and Chinese and is available for iPhone and Android.

Two filmmakers have launched a new site today that aims to be a hub for Southeast Asian short films. Called Viddsee, it will showcase the best indie directors in the region for a worldwide audience whilst also letting users rate the films for the quality of the story, acting, camera, and sound.

Co-founded by filmmaker-engineers Ho Jia Jian and Derek Tan, they hope that Viddsee, as a socially-equipped site with a light touch of curation, can help these short films become more accessible. They also believe that “short films are the new movies of the social web age.” Ho adds:

While content is readily available over the internet today, it’s still hard to find culturally contextual content from Singapore and around Southeast Asia. We hope to showcase a variety of uniques stories shot by Southeast Asian filmmakers, and to empower the audience to discover new content from their very own countries.

The Singapore-based duo are, Ho tells us, the only Viddsee employees right now. It’s also, he admits, “our first time building a startup from the ground up,” though both he and Derek “have been involved in building an internet TV platform, TV applications, and a mobile app while at a local pay TV operator previously.”

Viddsee is being supported by Action Community for Entrepreneurship (ACE), and has received funding through the ACE Startups Grant program. As we noted last year, Singapore’s ACE generally gives S$50,000 (US$40,000) in each grant, and aims to support 500 startups as part of its scheme.

For now, Ho explains, Viddsee is concentrating solely on short films rather than feature-length movies, but it’s a possible area for expansion “in the future as our community grows.”

The site looks great and is definitely one I’ll bookmark and return to. Most of the videos are hosted on Vimeo, so you can also enjoy fast-streaming and full HD.

One other regional filmmaker, Ray Pang, is already a fan of the site, saying in today’s announcement that his profession is about storytelling, and so “every audience counts.” Three of his award-winning shorts are being showcased on the site right now, including Break.

InstaWaves is an interesting website submitted to us from Sri Lanka. It’s created by Sapumal Ahangama, who wants to track trends on Instagram with hashtags. Ahangama said that even though Instagram has a popular pages feature, the page doesn’t necessarily show trends.

So Sapumal decided to built one focused on trends and InstaWaves came into being. Users are able to track a particular event based on hashtags, which get fresh updates on the site every ten minutes. For example, you can follow #VSFashionShow to find out what images people are sharing about the latest Victoria’s Secrets fashion show. You can also share, like, and comment just like it was on Instagram.

I don’t think InstaWaves’ design is as good as it could be. But I do think that it provides a pictorial storytelling approach for users to consume content, like the way you can use Storify to contextualize Twitter posts about a certain event. By following a hashtag on Instagram, users understand the story in pictures. It’s a clever use of user-generated content, so I thought that was pretty cool as soon as I saw it. But if only InstaWaves could look sharper and feel more like a pictorial storybook – that would be even more awesome, wouldn’t it?

3D printing promises a world of amazing possibilities, bringing small-scale manufacturing onto your desktop. But hardware costs are holding back its adoption. Singapore-based startup Pirate3DP is aiming to combat that, and is “developing the most affordable and user-friendly 3D printer for the mass-consumer market.” Today, Pirate3DP announced that it has attracted S$589,000 (US$482,000) in seed investment from Red Dot Ventures, which is one of the Singapore government-supported incubators.

Pirate3DP hasn’t even launched yet, and the countdown on its homepage indicates that the startup is 72 days away from revealing its own 3D printer, dubbed the Buccaneer, which is currently in the prototyping phase. The startup says that its creation will “provide consumers with an affordable and easy-to-use 3D printing solution, but it will also become the playground for artists to create, monetize and share ideas with others.”

The Pirate3DP founders are childhood buddies Roger Chang, Brendan Goh, and Tsang You Jun (pictured), along with experienced entrepreneur Neo Kok Beng of the National University of Singapore. In today’s announcement, Brendan explains that the product grew from their frustration with existing, costly 3D printers:

The Pirate3DP team.

After six months of losing hair over jammed printers, and nine failed prints out of 10 arising from 674 different problems, we decided that we could probably do better than all of this. Hence Pirate3DP was born and so was our dream.

Red Dot Ventures’ managing director Leslie Goh reckons that “3D printing is going to make a dent in the universe” and he wants to be part of a local startup contributing to that huge disruption. We’ll be sure to keep an eye out for the device’s launch in April.

Back in December we saw Red Dot put a similar sum into Singapore’s The Stakeholder Company which makes some pretty neat influence-mapping solutions.

Bowei on the first ‘World Startup Report’ stop in India.

American entrepreneur Bowei Gai is in Australia right now. That’s not too remarkable in itself, but his visit to Melbourne right now is one of 36 city stops in 29 countries that Bowei will make this year as he travels the globe for his World Startup Report project. He tells us that it’s a self-funded effort to create 29 startup ecosystem reports for each nation he visits. On the way, Bowei will rely on the kindness and assistance of fellow entrepreneurs as he takes part in events at each stop so as to drum up enthusiasm for the crowdsourced data that will ultimately shape his reports.

Started in India on the first day of the year, Bowei’s adventure runs through to the final stop in Singapore in September. He explained to TechinAsia today that this all started as a hobby. When he made a China startup report in 2011 just for colleagues to check out, that infographic slideshow went viral and eventually proved to be the seed of the idea for the global expedition. “I felt a need for these kinds of reports,” he says, to provide both insights and overviews of startup ecosystems around the world – things that could be used by new startups and general tech enthusiasts alike.

Melbourne to Sydney

Bowei’s Melbourne stop is a good example of how the World Startup Report works. At each city there’ll be a series of talks and panel discussions hosted by local startup luminaries, and Bowei will get assistance in setting up meetings that will help him gauge the players from the newest startups to the most notable VCs in that area. Then he puts a Google Document online where those with local startup knowledge can help crowdsource all the needed details and data. The Australian document is here.

York Butter Factory in Melbourne. Click to enlarge.

In Melbourne, Bowei is being hosted and helped out by Stuart B. Richardson, a managing partner at Adventure Capital and founder of the York Butter Factory, an impressive repurposed industrial building that’s now, as my colleague Vanessa said when she visited last summer, a really awesome co-working space.

The World Startup Report’s previous stop, India, was the longest that there’ll be, clocking in at three weeks in length. On that occasion Bowei got backup from Benjamin Joffe, whom readers might recognize as one of our Startup Arena judges. The filled-in Gdoc for India gives a good sense of how much crowdsourced input that people will have – and just how much of a task it will be to turn all that into a coherent report.

He’s arriving in Sydney tomorrow, and there’ll be an event at Fishburners on February 4th for which there are still some free tickets available.

Crowdsourced wiki

Bowei admits that it’s all harder than he thought, and that, three weeks into the vast World Startup Report project, he sees that it can be tough to “squeeze out time to write reports” in between all the events, meetings, and flying. He’s writing them as he goes along, and we can expect to see the first report published “near the middle of the trip.”

Aside from the reports, the project will also yield a community wiki which can be updated by nominated country “ambassadors”, with a wiki for each country. This sounds like a particularly nice way to create something long-lasting and easily updatable from the whole trip.

Bowei, whose own startup CardMunch was sold to LinkedIn, says that no country’s startup ecosystem is harder to tackle than another, no matter how mature or unformed the entrepreneurial landscape is there. He tells us that he’s keen to explore the relatively new startup scene in Myanmar, which recently showed its enthusiasm by holding what might be the world’s largest ever Barcamp event.

The next stop for Bowei, who was born in China and moved as a child to the US, is Colombia, which will come after a much-needed break for Chinese New Year that he’ll spend in Hong Kong. After that, the stops in Asia to look out for are:

• April 3 – 13 in Manila, Philippines
• April 13 – 19 in Yangon, Myanmar
• April 19 – 26 in Bangkok, Thailand
• April 26 – May 3 in Kathmandu, Nepal
• August 10 – 17 in Seoul, Korea
• August 17 – 26 in Tokyo, Japan
• August 26 – 31 in Taipei, Taiwan
• August 31 – September 4 in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam
• September 4 – 11 in KL, Malaysia
• September 11 – 17 in Jakarta, Indonesia
• September 17 – 24 in Singapore

Yes, China is not on the list, but his startup report for that country will get an update.

You can catch @bowei on the move on his personal Twitter or follow updates on @worldstartuprpt. Here’s the full World Startup Report itinerary in map form:

View World Startup Report in a larger map

From facebook.com/barcampyangon.

Myanmar has made some stunning changes in the past two years. And this is the backdrop to BarcampYangon’s explosive growth into one of Asia’s largest tech conferences and by far the biggest Barcamp in the world. At over 6,400 participants on January 19 and 20 this year, BarcampYangon not only dwarfs every barcamp in the region but even exceeds last year’s number by over one thousand attendees. Myanmar is now the envy of every barcamper in Asia.

Barcamps are free-to-attend locally organized “unconferences” where participants are allowed to present about anything they want. Speakers and presenters can be anyone. Organizers are only required to take care of promotion, logistics, and infrastructure for the event while attendees proactively present and choose their own content.

I spoke to Nang Nyi, one of the 32 main organizers of BarcampYangon who gave me the growth numbers starting with the first one in 2010.

In 2012, BarcampYangon was already the biggest barcamp in the world. Even Myanmar’s national hero, Aung San Suu Kyi, attended. The Myanmarese government’s Ministry of Communication gave full support and provided internet for the whole two days.

This year, with a 2,400 jump in the numbers, BarcampYangon’s biggest partners include Dell and the local AGB Bank. Nang broke down the key numbers for us:

This year, just as every year, we had about 100 volunteers managing all the participants. We had 13 rooms for speakers with 59 topics presented on the first day and 70 topics presented on the second day. The most popular topics this year were Unicode and Ubuntu.

The most popular topics, Unicode and Ubuntu, indicate a strong interest in bringing the Burmese language into software and a penchant for open source software. IT institutions are very supportive of such developments as Nang explains:

BarcampYangon’s scale and size has been supported by the Myanmar ICT (MICT) park, a compound and training center for IT companies similar to the IT Zone in Yangon, since the start. MICT houses the Myanmar Computer Professional Association (MCPA) whose executive members are also in the Barcamp organizing team.

As of late 2012, internet penetration in Myanmar has floated just above two percent (roughly 1.2 million), with less than one million people on Facebook. This means the online community is particularly intimate and close-knit. There are also few tech-related events in Myanmar, so BarcampYangon is one of its kind in the country.

Finally, I had to ask Nang what motivated her team to organize Barcamp? She answers:

Well, the average age of the participants is 20 to 35 years old. It is a young crowd. I want to open the eyes of the Myanmar youth to give them the habit of sharing. I also want to improve their soft skills like presentation, networking, and social skills.

I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely going next year. For those of you who might want to attend but don’t speak Burmese, don’t worry, the organizing team even has a translation team for English speakers.

You can support BarcampYangon by liking it on Facebook here.

The Google Developer Group (GDG) Singapore and the IEEE Computer Society Singapore will be holding their inaugural PlugFest International Programming Competition (IPC) for tertiary students and individuals (postgraduates or working professionals) to develop web applications using datasets from the Singapore government. The focus of this year’s competition is on cloud and mobile technologies.

Inspired by “The Voice”, a reality TV series, PlugFest competition participants will be coached by experienced mentors to guide them through their development process. Dr. Krishnan SPT, the co-founder of GDC Singapore, explained:

The rationale behind the competition is to motivate both budding and established software developers to build scalable web apps that work on mobile devices. With access to data from the Singapore government, we look forward to the interesting apps and projects that come up.

Here’s an overview of the competition timeline:

• Mentoring process: February 15 to March 15
• Submission of apps to judging panel: by March 15
• Presentation and Awards Ceremony: April 3

The top three winners of the Institute of Higher Learning (IHL) category for undergraduate students and the Open category for postgraduates and working professionals will each receive a mobile device. According to Dr. Yap Chern Nam of IEEE Computer Chapter Society Singapore, the date of the presentation and awards ceremony was specially chosen as it coincides with the 40th anniversary of when the first cell phone was made, April 3, 1972.

To better assist participants in their web app development process, the organizers have also planned several free workshops over the weekend between January and early February. The details for the next upcoming workshop, ‘Haptics on Android and Blackberry 10 Runtimes’ are as follows:

• Date: January 26
• Venue: Plugin @ Blk 71
• Time: 0930 to 1630

To register for the workshop and competition, you can see this site for more details.

We’ve had a few fun 3D printing stories over the past few weeks. You may recall this 3D printing photo studio from Xi’an, China which prints a miniature bust of the customer in just a few hours after the initial photo is snapped. But just across the water in Japan, the folks at Fab Cafe Tokyo are cooking up some 3D printing goodness that is just a little bit sweeter, and just in time for Valentine’s day.

In early February, Fab Cafe will hold a workshop for women where they can make 3D chocolates modeled from their own face using a 3D printer and scanner. The workshop will be held on consecutive Saturdays, February 2nd and 9th, and participants will be able to learn about 3D modeling. You’ll also have a chance to create a mould, from which you can later make your own chocolate replicas.

This particular event is targeting women, since the Valentine’s Day custom in Japan is for women to give chocolate to men. Fab Cafe notes that they are considering a similar event for men later, so there might be one leading up to ‘White Day,’ which is when men reciprocate by giving ladies something in return.

The workshop will cost 6000 yen (about $68), but for the information you’ll take away, not to mention the chocolate, it looks to be a pretty awesome deal. For our female readers in Japan, you can find out more details over on the Fab Cafe website.

(Via Chiho Komoriya on Japanese VW)

It was just two days ago that my colleague reported on how the social coding site Github had become blocked in China. But today we notice that it is accessible again within the country on two different ISPs, and for many others across China.

I noticed this thanks to Kaifu Lee, the former Google China country manager – now the founder of Innovation Works – who says he has reports of Github being accessible once more in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and lots of other places. This post of Lee’s on his Sina Weibo page comes a full day after another angrier missive in which he slammed the apparent blocking of Github by authorities as “unjustifiable”, saying (in our translation):

GitHub has three million members and China ranks fourth in terms of member base. Github is the place for developers to learn, share, and connect with others developers in the world. It doesn’t have any sensitive content so blocking Github is unjustifiable. Blocking Github will only hurt domestic programmers and cause them to be less competitive and competent.

But with the coder’s favorite site being accessible now, Lee instead encourages his 26.6 million followers to flush their (probably Linux) laptop’s DNS cache so as to eradicate the previous DNS blockage of Github.

It’s not clear why Github got the ban-hammer for a couple of days. [UPDATED: The GreatFire blog has some interesting and plausible theories]. It might have been accidental, or some ‘sensitive’ keywords could have attracted the attention of authorities among all the repositories on the site. The site is recently capable of publishing web pages via its Github Pages feature, as my colleage Rick pointed out, but its’s unlikely that that low profile feature would have attracted the attention of censors. Though all other such services – WordPress, Blogspot, Posterous – have long since been blocked in China.

Anyway, it’s back. So get your commits in shape and get back to work, code monkeys.

So now we’ve figured out that the internet won’t bring universal freedoms to China and got all that disappointment out of our systems, perhaps it can at least bring some lulz. A startup site called Xinci.so wants to help people figure out all the Chinese slang and faddish humor that pervades the web, which often resembles some sort of hyperconnected playground of childish insider gags.

Xinci – which could be translated as “new dictionary” – is basically a version of UrbanDictionary, packed full of user-submitted Chinese slang terms. So far it has 4,000 entries, which is a bit short of UD’s seven million English terms, but it’s a start.

Click to enlarge.

If Xinci can gather a devoted clique of regular uploaders, then the site should become the go-to place for the web’s wisecracks. For those baffled by all the slang, Xinci can inform you that “3Q” is a jokey way of saying “thank you” in Chinese (say it “san q”), or that “cai niao” is a “noob”, especially referring to a newcomer on the web. Though if that needs explaining to you, then you’re the noob, obviously.

With UrbanDictionary getting such huge traffic – 15 million visits a month – it might not be a bonehead move to make such a silly site. Xinci’s founder is Jason Gui from mainland China, who’s a graduate of Penn, an Ivy League school, so he’ll have a business plan in mind. Indeed, he told Chinese tech blog 36Kr yesterday that it’s a serious project for him, and he’ll soon start to monetize it. For now, Xinci has no ads and is available in both simplified and traditional Chinese versions, with an English iteration promised.

(Source: 36Kr – article in Chinese)

When you think of Vietnam, usually robots are the last thing that springs to mind. But, thanks to a little creation called mRobot, robots are exactly what Vietnam is becoming known for this week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) currently taking place in Las Vegas.

TOSY – which stands for Technology, Originality, Satisfaction, and Yearning – is the first Vietnamese robotics company, making giant robots, personal robots, industrial robots, and high-tech toys. The company is based in the capital, Hanoi, and it has an impressive record already:

• The TOSY AFO, an illuminated toy boomerang, was featured on David Letterman’s Late Show.
• The same AFO topped the chart as the ‘Top Tech Toy of 2011’ at the Toy Fair in New York
• TOSY’s TOOP holds a Guinness World Record for the world’s longest spinning top (yes, it’s motorized), which spun for a full 24 hours.

The little mRobo has quite a few skills of its own – it was spotted this week at CES dancing Gangnam Style, shaking hands with Justin Bieber, and generally being awesome all over CES.

Basically, mRobo moves its shiny metal butt along with any music. It weighs 1.5kg and transforms from a small speaker that’s just 20cm tall into a dancing robo-man measuring nearly half a metre tall. With 2GB of memory, it can hold up to 500 songs. mRobo’s software analyzes the beats and rhythms of the music and syncs its dance moves accordingly. It can bust moves (see the video below) to any beats that it hears, like music it’s playing or music streamed via Bluetooth. The mRobo costs $200.

TOSY’s two upcoming projects are full-sized humanoid robots that are considerably bigger. One can play ping pong and the other is a waiter/bartender.

[UPDATED: Reader Thang Le points out that this is a much better vide of the robot]:

Check out mRobo as he dances with the Bieb:

Videos are triggered on screens above when you take a hanger from the rack

The folks at Japan’s TeamLab are a pretty creative bunch. I first met up with them at a Tokyo Maker fair a few years back, where they had cleverly hacked a Wii balance board to convert it into a diet chair. But I was surprised to see that they were also the brains behind a very creative shopping display that has been turning a few heads in Japan recently.

The group has an installation of its teamLabHanger product currently in operation at a Vanquish store in Ikebukuro. When an item of clothing on a hanger is removed from the rack, it triggers video and audio on a screen overhead. Improving on its interactive hangers system from last year which showed how clothes would look when worn, this latest installation is more entertaining, and… well… stimulating.

According to Diginfo News (who have a great video demo of the system below), the current system is running a campaign that features some female artists and celebrities. I’m not sure who they are exactly, but I hope they aren’t cold…

It’s an interesting innovation, although I’m curious to know if something like this would increase sales enough to warrant the cost of installation.

Related readings:

• Two New Virtual Shops Open in Japan Using Panoplaza
• Korea’s Emart Creates QR Codes With Shadows in Midday Sun

As a startup founder, what do you know about building a good user experience? We all know how important our customers are, but before we can attract customers we need to know how to identify who they are, how to cater our features to their needs, how to track metrics to be sure they’re interested, etc.

The inaugural Lean UX Singapore 2013 is a workshop you might wish to attend if you are keen these topics. Jointly organized by local design firm Minitheory, National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore Geek Girls, and Girls in Tech Singapore, the event hopes to educate startup founders in Singapore on the best practices of Silicon Valley, in particular in the area of user experience design.

Janice Fraser, co-founder of LUXr, will be speaking at the workshop. Janice is also the founder of Adaptive Path, an experience design consultancy which sold one of its products to Google.

According to the Michael Chen, the executive producer of Lean UX Week Singapore 2013, each day of the workshop is different and will be targeted to a different audience. The first day is a closed-door event, only open to aspiring student entrepreneurs and focused on educating them about starting a business. The next two days will be open to the public and targeted at both mentors and geeks.

The event will be taking place January 25 to 27. For startup founders who are keen to attend the workshop and would like to find out more information about the schedule, you can check out the website here or purchase your tickets here.

We don’t find hardware startups in China as often as we’d like – but we’ve stumbled across what looks like the coolest we’ve ever seen. The team of tinkerers and ‘makers’ behind AngelEyes is prepping crowdfunding for its upcoming HeX Air Robot, a smartphone-controlled drone that looks like some sinister stealth helicopter (pictured above).

Team member George Liu tells us that the HeX Air Robot (see it in flight in the video below) will soon drone its way onto Kickstarter to raise funds to evolve and then manufacture the flying machine. Until that launches, the globally-minded Chinese startup has a couple of software platforms to sell, as well as a huge fascination with 3D printing to keep everyone occupied. To find out more, we fired him a few questions:

How did AngelEyes come to life, and how many products do you have right now?

George: AngelEyes came to life from the vision to propel the democratization of technological innovation. Before AngelEyes existed, we did some projects purely on software and they failed eventually. But now the tide is turning, and it is becoming easier and affordable for individuals to manufacture things on their desktops, which means hardware can be as easily iterated as software, and the cost of going through several lifecycles of hardware manufacturing decreases dramatically.

Plus, crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter unfolded a new way to finance tech startups. That’s pretty much the context how we plunge into projects that can integrate software and hardware. So far, besides HeX, we’ve got two other cloud services: ‘AR Generating‘ and ‘Pattern Recognition’.

When will your HeX Air Robot be for sale, and how could it be used?

George: Actually there are several stages in the development of HeX. The first stage, which we are on now, [means we’ve] finished the first prototype of it and we’re improving it. We plan to sell it on Kickstarter.com, which we estimate might happen at the end of January, to raise funds for the next stages of evolution. With the money we could raise, we’re going to add some sensors and an airborne computer on HeX to make it able to avoid obstacles automatically. Ultimately, we plan to mount a camera on it (pictured below) and make it able to track a moving target and film it so that extreme-sports fans can use it as an aerial filming kit.

The HeX app in testing.

Click to enlarge both images.

You seem to be interested in 3D printing. Is that just an experiment right now, or can you sell printed products at good prices?

George: Yes, we find 3D printing fascinating. It’s not just an experiment. Actually, we make some components and parts needed on HeX by 3D printing and all of the design files will be shared on the website Thingiverse so that hobbyists can download them to make and customize a HeX for themselves. Also, we’ll sell HeX and its parts via Shapeways, which we think is a new way to sell hardware.

Your hardware website is all in English – which markets are you aiming at?

George: We’re aiming at foreign markets, particularly North America that is a huge and mature market for things like HeX.

Does your startup have any funding, and how large is it right now?

George: We haven’t drawn any funding yet. That’s why we’re planning to get funded on Kickstarter.com and we hope to draw some seed funding as well. Right now we have six employees and two interns.

We’ll let you know when HeX hits Kickstarter. In the meantime, check out this two-minute video of the drone in flight:

In addition to whatever fun presents Santa brought you this year, there are more than a few mobile app goodies to be had this season as well. There’s Apple’s 12 Days of Christmas app which gives you a freebie each day during the holidays [1]. But one of my favorite app giveaways so far this Christmas has been Fotomecha, a very handy photo application from Japan.

Previously priced at $1.99, Fotomecha has been made available for free from December 20th to 28th. And while Camera+ has been my photo app of choice for iOS, a few more days with Fotomecha might change that. The app has seven different lens modes, including a handy vertical 4-shot rapid-fire function (pictured below) which works great for moving subjects. I did find, however, that the 6- and 9-shot functions crashed the application, although to be honest I don’t ever expect to want to take anything more than a 4-shot.

You can even make animated gifs as well, which can then be uploaded to TwitPic or sent via email. I didn’t run into any problems with that function, and managed to create a simple animated gif just fine.

I don’t mess about with photo filters too much, but the Black & White, Cyano and Russian Blue filters that come with Fotomecha look really nice. There’s an option for vignetting to be turned on or off, focus and flash options, and a zoom of up to 4x.

The app has been around for quite a while now, but thanks to this recent price cut, it is now sitting pretty in second in the ‘photo and video’ category over on the Japanese App Store. For anyone with kids or pets, I definitely recommend picking this up and giving it a try. You can download it here.

NHN Japan’s animated rendition of Gangnam Style

Korean pop star PSY, who recently hit a billion views on YouTube, is being featured by Japanese chat application ‘Line’ in a fun promotional video. The clip only runs for about a minute in length, but it’s really well done, and features all Line characters that you’re likely familiar with if you use the up-and-coming application. Check it out below:

While PSY long-surpassed the status of global phenomenon, NHN Japan’s Line application has been a phenomenon in its own right in Japan and around Asia — but clearly its intention is to become something bigger. It has about 89 million users right now, and is pushing pretty hard to grab more. Hooking its wagon to PSY’s infectious Gangnam Style is certainly not a bad idea [1].

Meanwhile in Taiwan, the company has gone so far as to advertise on a local train. And by that, I mean that NHN has literally plastered an entire train green and covered it with Line characters (pictured below). On the inside of the train, passengers can use their smartphones to scan QR codes and read/receive events from the application.

Meanwhile, More Games

NHN Japan has also continued to roll out more games via its chat platform, with three new titles including the new Line Bubble (iOS/Android). That title is currently ranked as the number one free iOS app here in Japan, and on Google Play, it’s ranked fourth. The games are all casual titles like previously released Line games, and all will likely do very well thanks to quick and easy distribution via the Line chat application.

[NHN Japan via Techwave]

While the holiday season has arrived for many of us, one Indonesian startup decided to tap into the holiday spirit by doing a charity campaign. That startup is Indonesian creative network Kreavi.com. Co-founder Benny Fajarai said that social projects such as this can help connect Indonesian creative talents and show the public that good designs can also have a significant impact on people’s lives.

Kreavi is selling New Year’s greeting cards (pictured right and below) designed by its members in a special Kreavi Challenge. Each greeting card is sold for IDR 20,000 ($2) and all of the profit will be donated to three schools in Jakarta. The 24 card designs were selected by experienced creative professionals acting as judges. The greeting cards are printed by Indonesian greeting card printing service Kartumuu.com.

In the Kreavi project video below, we can get a glimpse of the students’ lifestyle at the Tanah Abang kindergarten, one of the three to be helped by this campaign. The students live in a slum area, just next to a railroad. 35 students in that school are living below the poverty line, forcing their parents to make their children prioritize working as street beggars rather than studying at school. The teachers there are all volunteers as well, with little support from the government yet. The money collected will be used according to each school’s needs.

Benny said that Kreavi will hold more social events like this whenever possible in 2013. The money generated so far has totaled IDR 7.5 million ($781). Companies and individuals can also help donate over on berbagi.kreavi.com. The deadline for greeting card purchases is Sunday, December 30th.

Readers may recall back in October when we featured new media artist Eric Siu and his amazing human camera prototype called ‘Touchy’. The concept involves Eric wearing a helmet-like camera, but with eye-holes that function as shutters which activate when he’s touched.

Eric, along with his partner Asia Skubisz and some other friends, have put together a fun Christmas video that I thought would be nice to share with you guys as the holidays are upon us.

It comes complete with all the things that make Christmas merry, including blond pole-dancers and homoerotic elves. Wait, did I say Christmas? I totally meant bachelor parties. In any case, you can check out the festive video in its entirety below. There’s a special guest appearance from Touchy advisor and Japanese gadget Nobumichi Tosa (Maywa Denki), who chimes in on his Otamatone, a very unique instrument of his own creation.

Stay tuned for more fun adventures from the very creative Touchy and friends in the new year!

Last year this Digital IQ report ranked three global companies as having “genius”-level marketing chops: Audi, Burberry, and BMW. This time around, four luxury brands get this accolade, led by cosmetics firm Estée Lauder (see the top ten table below).

So how is this calculated? To make the grade, brands need to do a lot of optimization, social outreach, and clever online marketing. For this report, the grading structure is 30 percent each for doing social media and localizing your site, and 20 percent each for digital marketing and mobile compatibility:

With all that factored in, here’s the top ten. Note that Audi once again appears as a “genius” brand when it comes to its online work in China:

As for the winner, the L2 Think Tank team notes that Estée Lauder has a web “presence on six social platforms [which] yields a social universe of more than 1.6 million fans.” Not the biggest number among these global companies, but the report states that its strategy is very social and well integrated.

Being social in China

Aside from things like search engine optimization for Baidu, luxury brands in China need to get themselves on the right social platforms. The report finds that social media adoption is up on every site, with Twitter-esque Sina Weibo still number one. A big winner this year is the video site Youku (NYSE:YOKU) where 60 percent of the analyzed brands in this report now have a social media presence:

That sure has been a long time building up, as we reported on brands like Cartier and Burberry opening brand video channels on Youku way back in the summer of 2011. Once again we see luxury automakers doing especially well, this time exploding their number of channel video views on Youku in 2012:

Of course, there are new platforms emerging, and brands need to be aware of reaching out via the messaging app WeChat (as we’ve seen Starbucks do so well this year), or on the Pinterest-like Meilishuo. Plus, the Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) owned video site iQiyi is aiming to challenge Youku for classy brand video channels, so that outlet needs to be considered as well.

Keeping the conversation flowing on Sina Weibo

Car makers again make a strong showing on China’s most important social service – Sina Weibo. Cadillac is top in terms of fans/followers on Weibo in this luxury segment, and fashion labels Dior and Coach are playing catch-up this year:

For more information about these brands and their strategies, catch the full report here. Plus, L2 has made a nice video overview that runs to three minutes:

(Mobile readers: Digital IQ Index®: China 2012 from L2 Think Tank, on Vimeo).

I must admit that I really love apps that do something enormously useful, thereby taking the strain off of my slowly vegetating brain. The less I have to strain the synapses, the better. And so I jumped upon Waigo as soon as I heard about it, a clever translation app for iPhones that uses the camera to recognize and translate Chinese menus. Yes, that’s quite a niche app, but Waigo makes up for it by doing its task with aplomb, translating and demystifying even the most obscure and idiomatic of Chinese dishes.

A good example might be the dish zi jiang ji. Most apps or dictionaries would just tell you the basic components of this dish – “young ginger” and “chicken” – while Waigo will give you a proper culinary overview by telling you what it really is: chicken with ginger shoots. That sounds good enough to order.

The team behind Waigo has caught the attention of 500 Startups’ Dave McClure who seems to have a thing for specialist language apps that break down borders.

Before hearing from the startup that made the app, I’ll defer to friend-of-the-blog and occasional contributor Matthew Ho for a review of Waigo app, since Matthew is also in this business with a linguistic-minded startup of his own [1].

Much of the Waigo magic is done by optical character recognition (OCR) so that the app can understand Chinese characters that would otherwise leave you baffled. Weighing up Waigo against similar opposition, such as pricey-but-powerful Pleco, or the free-but-limited Soso Huiyan, he explains:

I have also used Pleco and Soso for the same purpose – to try to read menus and Chinese text generally. These are more general tools, not specifically for menus. That’s why I was excited to use Waigo and downloaded it immediately. I’m continually looking to improve my Chinese and practice using menus, and order my food in Chinese. Waigo is a lot easier to use than Pleco and Soso – and actually Soso is in [and designed for] Chinese only.

I like the idea of a menu-specific app, because it probably uses a set of menu words and can do more accurate translations. It’s easier to do it if it’s from a set of food words rather than all kinds of Chinese words. There are still issues with translating phrases and blocks of Chinese text, even with Pleco and Soso. I imagine it’s not easy to do with machines and OCR but it will get better over time as the technology improves [2].

Matthew admits that Waigo sometimes hits a wall with text on certain cans, packages, or printed words, but unclear images will confound any app of this type. And don’t even get us started on family-run restaurants that have hand-written menus. But clearly, Waigo is an impressive app from a very young startup.

A new pair of eyes

Behind Waigo app is TranslateAboard. The team, explains director of business operations, Rob Sanchez, has been taken on as part of the 500 Startups Batch 5 Accelerator program. Rob explains:

We received investment from Dave McClure and his team and moved the company to Mountain View, California. The accelerator consists of 35 international-focused teams with plenty of great mentors and investors to help us build a really great company.

Now, he adds, the team is “currently in the process of raising a round of seed funding and is 50 percent of the way there.” That’ll help them expand the scope of the app, and will also assist them in building apps for translating Japanese and Korean to English, plus English to Chinese – those are due in Q2 2013.

The Waigo concept came from TranslateAbroard CEO, Ryan Rogowski, when working on mobile games in China. Rob goes on:

At first the idea was somewhat educational. Eventually it grew in Ryan’s head that this could be used for any traveler in any country. We decided to focus on China and the East Asian market first because that’s where our team had the most experience and it was also the most difficult batch of languages to solve and we wanted a challenge.

The clever OCR algorithms that make the app a replacement for your brain and eyes were developed in-house, and took a year and a half to get right. New features will come for Waigo in an update next month, along with the first monetization plan:

The app is currently free and there will be continue to be a free version so that anyone can try it out. In version 2, expected early January, we are adding many cool features such as an improved interface, sharing on social networks, and multi-line translation. All of those features will be included in the free version but you will have to pay for extended use of the application. You will get a small number (less than 100) of translations upfront for free plus another small number (less than 20) per day so you can continue to use it occasionally. The app will then request that you upgrade to a weekly package (for travelers) or an unlimited version (for expats or frequent travelers).

Waigo app is here in the iTunes App Store.

An example of a GIF created with Motiongraph

Earlier in the year I wrote about Sony’s Million Moments, an app that sort of struck me by surprise with its smart design. The same Sony subsidiary which developed that application, SDNA may have just topped its previous effort with one of the more clever photo apps I’ve seen in a while.

Released just last week, its new Motiongraph application lets you capture moving scenes and create animated gif files with your Android phone. It could be a subtle hand movement, or some water pouring into a glass. The idea is that most of the image is static, but a portion of it is moving.

So how exactly does it work? The folks at SDNA showed me a demo, whereby you capture a few seconds of video which includes motion in a restricted area of the scene. The app simply requires you to indicate which area it is to animate by filling it in with your finger. Ideally the motion you are capturing should be ‘loopable,’ and the app does have some capacity for detecting looped motion. Check out the demo video below to see exactly how the process works.

Motiongraph is a paid application, currently priced at 104 yen on Google Play (99 cents for those in the US), but if you spend any time sharing images on Reddit, it might be a good investment!

So far the app looks to be doing well on the charts, breaking into the top ten of top grossing Android apps in Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Italy. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

A fun panorama of the Sydney event posted to Twitter by @davemcclure himself.

Last night I attended an event in Sydney, Australia, to see Dave McClure, the founding partner of 500 Startups. McClure was visiting New Zealand as part of his Geeks On A Plane (GOAP) tour and made a brief stopover in Sydney. He was interviewed by Rick Baker, partner at BlackBird Ventures, in a fireside chat. More than 100 people attended to hear the talk from one of Silicon Valley’s most colorful characters. These are some of the key points from my perspective of the talk.

500 Startups has invested in 10 Australian startups, including Bugherd, Happy Inspector, Kickfolio, and SwitchCam. The best way to reach McClure is through his extensive network, which includes 700 founders of the companies he has invested in and the 100 mentors in his 500 Startups network. They also have relationships with overseas organizations such as Seedcamp in London and Startmate in Australia.

There was a discussion on “what is traction for mobile apps?”. For free apps, you need to have several hundred thousand downloads. McClure insisted that downloads are “such a fucking vanity metric.” You also need to consider, Dave said, DAU (daily active users), MAU (monthly active users), and revenues. In terms of revenues, several thousand dollars would be interesting. He also discussed how startups could use their local markets. If your startup is in a country with a population of 20 to 50 million, you can use this to test the market, then bridge to larger overseas markets. This is advice that many Australian startups can appreciate, as the local Australian population is 23 million and we need to bridge to bigger markets in Asia or the US in order to grow.

Click to enlarge. Image: Matthew Ho.

With McClure’s investing thesis, his aim is to be as objective as possible. For example, when discussing investments in startups in overseas markets, he uses frameworks such as looking at mobile/PC penetration. However, he said that “investing is a personal and subjective business.” He has a group of 500 Startups partners with diversity in gender, age, business experience, and ethnicity to try to balance any bias. He also mentioned that we tend to “focus too much on valuation, rather than equity dilution.”

I am interested in languages, so I asked him about the trends and opportunities in the language industry, as 500 Startups has invested in Gengo, Babelverse and Mindsnacks. He described the Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish-speaking populations as large markets and rapidly growing. There were opportunities in the translation market, particularly in areas such as niche translations (e.g. Chinese to Czech), e-commerce, and Chinese outbound tourism. McClure also revealed that he has recently invested in TranslateAbroad, which has an interesting app called Waigo (which a TechinAsia colleague will look at in-depth soon) to translate Chinese menus into English. Language, Dave said, is also an area that he is personally interested in.

Overall, I found the discussion with McClure to be very refreshing, honest, and insightful. I believe that the Sydney startup community grew a little bit more savvy and smarter with McClure’s visit. He couldn’t commit to bringing GOAP to Australia next year, but the local community will do our best to pull out all the stops to bring him back!

[UPDATED: Added in a clarification about the 'niche translations'].

Images courtesy of @hypercasey on Instagram.

Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) third official Hong Kong store opens tomorrow morning and already the covers are off, giving everyone a great view of the three-floor, glass-fronted shop. The newest Apple Store is over in the Causeway Bay area, and takes up a huge corner of the luxury-oriented Hysan Mall.

Hong Kong-based Apple enthusiast and sometime NeonPunch blogger Casey Lau has been in the store already and has been generously sharing out photos to his Instagram and Google+ pages.

The street view shows how the spectacular new Apple Store appears to have no walls, throwing as much natural light inside as can possibly be found on ground level amidst Hong Kong’s cluttered skyline:

The third floor is mainly a Genius Bar, while the second floor seems to be devoted to Macs:

Click to see the 2nd floor close up.

And there’s a customary glass staircase:

There’ll be special T-shirts for some early birds at the Causeway Bay store tomorrow for its grand opening at 9am. Its normal opening time is 11am to 11pm.

Check out our report on Apple’s most recent earnings to see just how crucial the whole China area is to the company.

[Sources: Casey Lau on Instagram and Google+]

In browsing the top app charts for Japan, I stumbled across an unusual application called ‘Big or Small.’ Currently the eighth most popular free app, it’s is a quiz game which tests your ability to guess whether a ladies… um… assets are… well, big or small — just by looking at their face. So in the interests of science, I took the app for a test run.

The application features photos of over 400 women, grouped into different categories like celebrity, cosplay, gyaru, and others. I have no idea how the application’s publisher collected these photos, but I’m willing to bet that most of these girls didn’t sign up for this. There isn’t any nudity involved here, but be warned that some of the banner ads are a little risqué.

In any case, my brief experience with the app didn’t do much but prove that I’m really not very good at this type of classification exercise (scoring only 5/10 correct, see below) — although it isn’t for lack of paying attention back during my school days.

I’m not certain that such an app will have a very long life in the app store, so if you’d like to test it out, download it while you can (note: it’s in Japanese). The idea of such a game will likely be offensive to many outside Japan I expect. But I’ll leave that to you to decide. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Coffee chain Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX) is keeping its relationship with Jiepang, China’s top Foursquare-esque check-in service, brewing for yet another year. This year’s Starbucks-Jiepang social marketing campaign for the holiday season is now in full flow, offering four virtual Christmas badges for coffee drinkers who also make social check-ins within Jiepang’s cross-platform mobile apps. There are also Christmas-themed e-cards and some unlockable buy-one-get-one free drinks rewards.

Once again, the coffee chain’s tie-up with Jiepang is geographically limited to eastern China – namely Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang provinces – but that’s still enough to cover over 300 Starbucks stores.

To ensure all this is even more social – and to give it viral potential – the e-cards are designed to be gifted to your buddies on Sina Weibo, China’s biggest Twitter-like service, from right within the Jiepang app. Here’s the check-in and the e-card before you send it out:

As for Jiepang itself, the social startup says it now has four million users, mainly in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, which is pretty good growth from three million this spring. But check-in apps are not exactly mainstream stuff, so the company is always aiming to connect more and more with its demographic of smartphone-toting young urbanites with a huge desire to go out and try fancy new places. In terms of brand partners engaging in this kind of social marketing, Jiepang tells us it has buddied up with “over 300 local and international brands, including Starbucks, Starwood, Louis Vuitton, [and] H&M.” This is the third Christmas tie-up with the coffee chain.

Last year the duo focused more on NFC check-ins to get social promotions. I’m not sure how that went down, but there are likely not enough people with NFC-equipped phones to make that work again.

Jiepang currently has 100 employees scattered across its Beijing HQ and offices in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Taipei, and Hong Kong.

We have featured more than a few awesome news animations from from the folks at Taiwan-based NMA. Many of the company’s short CG clips have attained viral video status, and the world edition of its YouTube channel now boasts more than 70 million views in total.

But I was a little surprised to find out about the its latest endeavor, which is not a video animation at all, but rather a browser-based game. It centers upon the upcoming Japanese elections, and pits the current prime minister Yoshihiko Noda against former prime minister and challenger Shinzo Abe. You can play the game over at NodaVSAbe.com, and I have to confess it gets a little bit crazy. For Japanese users it should be a lot of fun, with some poop attacks from the challenger (warning, that’s not a metaphor) and strange exclamations relating to their respective campaign platforms. The visual style is sort of consistent with what you’d expect from NMA, and overall it looks like a fun little game.

www.nodavsabe.com

I spoke to NMA’s Michael Logan, who explained that the company hopes to do sort of the same thing with games as it does with video animations, aspiring to create news-based games that are a reflection of hot conversation topics in society. The games are to be developed by NxTomo, which is the brand Next Media has developed for its animation and game offerings.

So why is NMA producing games these days? Michael explains that while there is some advertising on the the game’s page, the primary goal is to build more exposure for its content – and in this case, more exposure in Japan. NMA has a shiny new YouTube channel with Japanese content, and ideally its new election game can help build some awareness of that. You’ll notice in the game that the ring girl holds a promotional banner encouraging players to check out the YouTube channel (pictured). NMA plans to follow up with more animated satire about the Japanese elections later in the week, so stay tuned for that. (Update: See its new video below)

Interestingly, this is not the first time that we have seen politicians face off in a web-based game. Readers may recall that earlier this year we wrote about Jakarta gubernatorial candidates Fauzi Bowo and Joko Widodo who both were featured in online games leading up to a local election.

Now that animated GIFs are all over the place – even in news articles – it should be no surprise that one early GIF-making app is doing well. The Chinese startup behind FotoRus app (called WanTu in Chinese) tells us that it has so far seen 20 million downloads worldwide across its iPhone and Android app – that’s since it first came out on iOS back in September of last year.

FotoRus, which supports English and Chinese, now has 10 million monthly users (and 1.5 million daily), who have created a total of 400 million GIFs and photos. The startup explains that it’s mainly seeing traction in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, the US, and Japan.

Weibo user @PangziLiu的马甲 makes use of FotoRus app.

The app has matured beyond just GIFs, and now also features things like Instagram-style photo filters, and templates for a photo-within-a-photo (pictured below). The newest FotoRus thing is the animegram, which is a way to animate a single photo by drawing on it or distorting it in some fun way; the end result is a short video, not a GIF file [1]. So far that’s available only on the updated iPhone version, but we’re told that the Android FotoRus app will get animegram support by the end of December. But with 80 percent of the app’s users on iPhone, it’s understandable that they want to roll it out first for Apple’s platform.

As for the startup itself, FotoRus’ Hua Xue explains that they’ve had some seed funding, but are generating “very little revenue from mobile advertising.” They’re currently contemplating in-app purchases for some extra items – like additional pic-in-pic templates – but have not yet rolled that out. They make other apps too, like Fotoable, which costs $1.99 and is a neat way to better organize your photos than Apple’s own albums app.

The startup can perhaps learn some lessons from the young team behind the Chinese-made Camera360, which has also seen huge global success with its photo and video apps. Indeed, FotoRus has recently added things like cloud backups for your images, so it’s branching out into a broader platform as well.

In a blow to India’s supposedly homegrown budget tablet, the Aakash, it has been revealed that the gadget is partially made in China. This applies only to the newer Aakash 2 (pictured above), which launched earlier this month for just $21, and is designed for use in schools.

The tablet’s makers, Datawind, have admitted that much of the new Aakash is made in China and then imported into India by Datawind itself. The Daily Telegraph says today:

[T]he company had imported 10,000 units of the [new] Aakash from four Chinese suppliers between October 26th and November 7th and transported to India ‘duty-free’ under an exemption for government educational materials.

Datawind’s Sunit Singh Tuli denies the full extent of the claim, and explains the manufacturing process to the paper:

For expediency’s sake we had the motherboards and kits manufactured in our Chinese subcontractor’s facilities, and then the units have been ‘kitted’ in China at various manufacturers for expediency, whereas the final assembly and programming has happened in India. This was well discussed and we got approval prior to shipping. The initial devices were assembled and programmed at our facilities in New Delhi and Amritsar.

So, it’s perhaps up to Indian educational institutes and local governments to decide if Aakash 2 makes the grade as a local product for local students. Sunit’s argument is that his company does more of the assembly work than the likes of Apple, whose products are made entirely in Chinese factories. Let us know in the comments if you think the program has been damaged by opting to outsource so much of the work.

[Source: Daily Telegraph; Image via Engadget]

Most companies, large or small, are taking their businesses online these days. So it is important that they educate themselves about various online and digital marketing campaigns in order to increase their ROI.. HelpLearn.Asia is a all-new seminar series that helps attendees to better understand these fundamentals.

The series aims to educate small medium enterprises, startups, and of course, marketers on how to create campaigns professionally through the thorough step-by-step guidance, live demonstrations, and case studies. The first seminar will kick off next January 28 and 29 in Singapore at the Genexis Theatre. Speakers will be exploring key topics like maximizing social media campaigns and analyzing marketing campaigns.

Heading this seminar series is CEO and founder of Girls in Tech, Adriana Gascoigne, who will speak on online marketing. Other presenters will also be sharing their success secrets along with localized online marketing knowledge with participants.

Those looking to understand online marketing fundamentals will also be pleased to know that HelpLearn.Asia will also be held in other cities within the Asia region. We also learned that that Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Phillipines are in the pipeline for this event as well.

For more information about the event, you can visit the HelpLearn.Asia website. Tickets are also available, and you can grab yours here. There is also a discount for registrations before December 28. See you guys there!

Mike Fernandez is making web design and development costs more affordable for small businesses in the Philippines. While web development services don’t usually fall within our scope of coverage here, the pricing model does make sense. Mike calls this package Fivepager.

Starting from $50 a month, a user can get three web pages with a custom design, email service, domain, and hosting.

Mike says that he got inspired to make web development affordable because he found that most local business owners could not afford to pay a huge chunk of cash upfront. In addition to an attractive price, the package makes it easier to communicate with folks who don’t know anything about the web. So far, ten local brands signed up which is a good start after it launched today.

Fivepager is run by PixelHub Creative in the Philippines.

Today, Indonesia’s ministry of tourism announced its partnership with Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) StreetView program for Google Maps. As of today, Indonesians might come across a fleet of Google cars (pictured above) fitted with the famed cameras and ministry’s ‘Wonderful Indonesia’ logo driving and taking street-level photographs. This is happening, says Google, in “Jakarta and other major regional cities around the country” – so there’s no official list of StreetView destinations just yet.

Dr. Mari E. Pangestu, the minister of tourism, explains the partnership strategy:

We believe this mapping technology will have many different uses – allowing tourists to check out hotels before arriving, make travel plans, and arrange meeting points. And with these available digital tools, hotels, tourism sites and businesses can be more creative in making it easier for visitors to find their stores, location and websites.

Andrew McGlinchey, the product manager of Google, said that the pictures will be made available for users in the coming months. He also said that the company will ask Indonesian citizens to help choose where to drive in the near future.

Google notes that the company goes to great lengths in safeguarding users’ privacy with StreetView. This is done by blurring human faces and number plates of vehicles using Google’s technology. The company is also responsive to users’ request to blur any images that feature them.

This announcement was made during the Indonesian Creative Products Week which runs from November 21st to 25th. The event’s exhibition also features works from 15 sub-sectors of creative industries, which include digital games in the country. Japanese game publisher DeNA is present at the event to further help facilitate the knowledge transfer and possible cooperations with the local game developers and publishers.

We recently told you about Blood Donors Network, one of the six great ideas from Social Innovation Camp Asia which tool place earlier this month in Kuala Lumpur. Blood Donors Network was awarded second place at the event, finishing behind one other team.

The winning team is the makers of ThatApp, a mobile application that aims to help to answer teens’ questions about sex. It aspires to help young people make smart, informed decisions about their sexual health. The name of the app is intentionally subtle, in order to make sure users don’t feel shy or embarrassed.

When I asked about the SI Camp experience, ThatApp representative Wong Chee Yan spoke of it very highly:

I got to know so many people that shared the same passion and vision, which is really very motivating to keep me going down this tough road of fighting for social causes. […] There were so many people I could learn with in term of business development, tech-related stuff, presentation, etc.

I’m told as things stand now they have a working app, and they plan to continue development. If you’d like to stay up to date on their progress or get early access to the app, you can register for updates over at thatapp.sh, or follow them via their Facebook page.

This is a big day for Singaporean game developers Red Hare Studios as the team will release a Playstation 3 game called Page Chronica today. It was scheduled to hit the stores on November 1st, but due to unforeseen technical issues with the Playstation Network, the release date was delayed until today. The game is touted to be the first ever original concept game made in Singapore, while Straits Times reported that Page Chronica as Singapore’s first Playstation 3 game title to hit the stores.

Wee Lit Koh, the producer of Red Hare Studios, described the Page Chronica’s gameplay as a mix between Scrabble and Mario Bros. You will play as a librarian, Topez, who accidentally released an evil entity called The Big Bad that corrupted the world. The game plot then centers on Topez cleansing the world from the evil menace.

Interestingly, Page Chronica’s side-scrolling gameplay allows players to create words from the letters spread across the game to make various kinds of attacks. The longer or more complex the word is, the attacks become more powerful and can allow players to use more skill sets. Wee explained that the game uses a “word tree” which was constructed by collecting common words in British and American English with length of between two to seven letters. He estimated that there are around 10,000 words which are available to be used on the game.

Page Chronica targets several types of players: core gamers, platform gamers, and word puzzle gamers. The team’s main target is primary and secondary schools kids, emphasizing that children with such exposure to English vocabulary will help reinforce their command of the language. He explains his reason for including a local two-player mode:

With this feature, we hope that it will be kids who first introduce this game into the living room. Once this critical breakthrough is achieved, we will expect more people including [more mature] word puzzle lovers to embrace the game.

The team had great fun developing Page Chronica for the PSN platform, and they are looking to build more titles on the console moving forwards. Wee adds:

Engaging the media and the gaming community is our top priority, so that we can develop even better games in the future.

Page Chronica is available now for Asia, while gamers from the US need to wait until December 4th to get their hands on the game. For more information about Page Chronica, you can check out pagechronica.com.

This morning the winners of the competition were announced. The team from Raffles Institution came in first, followed by teams from Crescent Girls’ School and Victoria Junior College. As students, you can imagine how excited the Raffles Institution team was when they were told they will be visiting Google HQ in Mountain View, California, for a total of four days.

Speaking to the winning team at Google Singapore’s office this morning, Christabella Irwanto, one of the members of the team, told us that the idea came about when they were on a bus. The resulting animation which they subsequently created (see below), shows a man showering in public, subjected to public scrutiny. It highlights that the man is exposed to the world, a metaphor for sharing everything about himself publicly.

I thought the video was really brilliant, given that it took the seventeen-year-olds a mere two weeks to complete. With the win, the computer science team hopes to convey a message to peers to be careful of what they post online.

As for the Victoria Junior College team, team members Jerome Wong and Shawn Hoo felt the competition was a fantastic attempt by MDA and Google to reach out to fellow peers on cyber-wellness. When such messages come from the government or schools, they do not hold as much appeal. In fact, they usually find it pretty boring.

This is part of what Google set out to achieve with this competition. Deborah Nga, the youth literary lead for Google APAC tells us that this competition aims to get youths into thinking about good online practices. Often young adults hold a certain level of skepticism hearing messages from older folks, and videos are best way to convey messages.

This competition attracted over 200 student participants, and more than 60 group project submissions from 30 schools. Google is also looking to have another collaboration launching similar competitions with MDA early next year.

You can view the other two videos by the Crescent Girls’ School and Victoria Junior College team below:

Social Innovations Camp Asia was recently held in Kuala Lumpur, and a while back we previewed the six great ideas with positive social impact that teams would work on during the event. One of those was Blood Donors Network, a non-profit initiative to create a database of regular blood donors in Asia.

I got in touch with Joel Barquez to find out more about how the idea for this project came about. He tells me that he recognized that in the Philippines, as in many countries, there ought to be a system in place to ensure that those in need of blood have an adequate supply in blood banks and hospitals. He has himself been a blood donor for ten years and has advocated regular donations in the country as well.

His motivations run even deeper than that, however, as back in 1997 he was hospitalized with Dengue fever and was in need of a blood transfusion. Unfortunately blood supply was low and the doctor told his relatives to call as many people as they could to donate blood. And they did.

But that experience led Joel to realize that this sort of thing happens to people every day. And given the breakthroughs in mobile communications and web technologies these days, it’s good to see him making an effort to transition a recipient’s call for help to the web. Overall, Blood Donors Network will be focusing on three things to try to help address this problem:

1. Increase the acquisition of new blood donors
2. Increase the retention rate of existing blood donors
3. Establish comprehensive data about donors

Though web and mobile apps, people can register as part of a community of donors. And on the recipients side, they post the geo-specific blood type request to the network, and can also share it to Facebook and Twitter.

It was a humbling experience at the Social Innovation Camp Asia. I got goosebumps myself meeting these brilliant people from across Asia unselfishly contributing their time and talent to support a worthy cause. […] I deeply appreciate the support and efforts that my team poured into, to make the idea happen in just one weekend, from the outlining of the business model up to the execution of both the web and mobile app prototypes. I was also amazed with the organizers of the Social Innovation Camp Asia that they were able to pull the event off with such a very lean team.

Besides Joel, the Blood Donors team at SI Camp Asia — which was a true pan-Asia effort — included members from China, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Singapore, and Malaysia. They were awarded second place at Social Innovations Camp Asia, and Joel says that in the Philippines, they plan to meet with possible partners to help beta test their prototype over the next six months, and expand the idea in Asia with the help of its diverse team.

If you’re in Asia and you’d like to join the network as a donor, do check out their website as well as their Facebook page. It’s a great idea and deserving of support.