Singapore-based incubator JFDI.Asia today unveils its seven startups that have graduated from its 100-day accelerator program. It is down from the original eight that was first announced last February, but it’s still a strong line-up. The seven are:

1. Scrollback: A micro-forum platform for open communities.
2. Collabspot: A sales email platform that integrates customer relationship management (CRM) with Gmail, and aims to simplify data entry, increase CRM adoption, and increase productivity.
3. Krake: This is a data harvesting engine that brings benefits of big data to individuals, helping them to compare market positioning, analyze reputation and sentiments, integrate content, and grow customer base.
4. Klinify: Cloud-based patient record management platform that fits clinics’ workflow, where patient information can be accessed anywhere and on demand.
5. Duable: Uses computational linguistics to customize learning language, allowing you to learn and read effectively according to your language capabilities.
6. OurHealthMate: Helps you book and pay for your family’s health checkup, on top of giving detailed feedback straight from doctors about your loved ones’ health conditions.
7. UserScout: This one is an end-to-end research process management tool.

The startups pitching are collectively made up of 30 percent Singapore citizens and permanent residents, with others entrepreneurs hailing from the United States, Taiwan, the Philippines, India, France, Vietnam, and New Zealand; but all startups are incorporated in Singapore.

The demo day will be held on June 3 at the Joyful Frog Innovation Campus at 71 Ayer Rajah Crescent. It is also sponsored by Japan’s Global Brain, and will see more than 100 investors attending to listen to the pitches by the seven startups. Some of the seed stage investors who will be attending include Golden Gate Ventures, Jungle Ventures, TNF Ventures, and Wavemaker Labs, on top of institutional funds that include Vertex Venture Holdings, Temasek, and Sequoia Capital.

JFDI alumni, both Fetch Plus and Startup Arena Singapore 2012 finalist Flocations will be returning to their alma mater to share their progress after a year. The presentation, sponsored by Global Brain, already has over 100 investors confirmed to attend including 500 Startups ‘Geeks On A Plane’.

See you guys at its demo day on June 3!

Here we are again with our weekly startup list! Remember, for startup tips and story suggestions, feel free to email us. Alternatively, you can send tips here and/or tell us about your startup here. Enjoy this week’s list:

1. KreditAjai | Singapore

Singapore-based Loan Garage, a startup that aims to help people get loans online, announced that it has launched its Indonesian platform KreditAja.com just two months after Loan Garage made its full launch in Singapore. The Indonesian counterpart has also secured a partnership with Indonesia’s Ministry of Economic Coordination (KUR) to distribute loans and microcredit.

2. Videogram | Japan

Developed by Sandeep Casi at Cinemacraft in Japan – before moving to Silicon Valley as part of 500 Startups – it’s about helping people discover videos by displaying them in a sort of comic-book format (think of Flipboard) where the size of the frames is determined by how important Videogram’s algorithm thinks they are.

3. Kpaper | Vietnam

Kpaper is the first of its kind in Vietnam, and it’s an iOS and Android mobile app that allows users to read local magazines online, instead of having to download them.

4. Reep | Japan

Japan’s Reep is a mobile app that remembers the photos you took a year ago. It syncs with your iPhone camera folder, Instagram, Facebook, and Flickr to help sort your images based on dates.

5. Money Lover | Vietnam

Vietnam’s Money Lover is a finances and expenses manager application for individuals that enables users to track their spending over time and manage monthly or annual budget.

6. Zoolook | Japan

Zoolook is a Japanese app that has focuses on the social and photography side of clothing, and is made up of a social network where people can share and tag their favorite looks. It also has the presence of top fashion labels who have virtual “showrooms” within the social network.

7. HaivL | Vietnam

HaivL is like the 9gag of Vietnam and is a platform for users to throw up funny content that they found or created, and other users can like or comment on them. Presently, Haivl users are uploading between 3,000 to 4,000 photos daily.

8. ChatPerf | Japan

Currently still a prototype, Japanese ChatPerf is a hardware add-on for your iPhone that can actually emit smells – such as the smell of burning rubber in a racing game, the scent of coffee to wake you up in conjunction with an alarm app, or to blast some soothing incense as you use a yoga app.

9. CocCoc | Vietnam

CocCoc is a Russian-financed Vietnamese search engine that released of a new browser called Corom this week in their bid to take on search google giant Google.

10. W-Locate | Singapore

Singapore-based startup W-Locate recently announced that it has successfully raised a pre-series A funding, led by TNF Ventures under Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF) Technology Incubation Scheme (TIS), and has two core products- FIND and XimLoc, which are both location technologies that help manage companies’ vehicle fleets and workforces respectively.

11. PicMix | Indonesia

Indonesian-made photo app PicMix revealed this week that it passed the 10 million user mark last month, around three months after the app reached eight million users.

12. Muse & Co | Japan

Launched in February 2012, Muse & Co is a VIP flash sales site targeted at Japan’s savviest and most stylish shoppers. This week, the startup announced that it has raised series B funding for its fledgling e-commerce business with primary investors from Itochu Technology Ventures, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and Infinity Ventures Partners (IVP).

13. Indiescapes | Singapore

Singapore-based Indiescapes is a curated marketplace dedicated to wanderlusts who seek out local, authentic travel experiences and to find experiences that are different from what normal travel packages from travel agencies can offer.

14. AppAnnie | China

App Annie is a mobile app store data provider with its headquarters in Beijing, China but it is operated with an international team and vision led by founder and CEO Bertrand Schmitt. Read about the story behind this startup!

15. Rumahku | Indonesia

Launched in February 2011 during the property boom in Indonesia, Rumahku is an online property portal which aims to help Indonesians find their desired properties online.

16. Wooz.in | Indonesia

Wooz.in is an Indonesian startup that incoporates NFC and RFID into its three different business models that utilizes online connection (such as Facebook and Twitter) in the offline world.

Related startup stories

• CyberAgent Gets Into the Crowdfunding Business in Japan
• Zalora Delivers 1 Millionth Order to a Customer in Singapore
• TMI Invests In 3 Taiwanese Startups: CitieSocial, Driving Curve, and Peeridea
• With Only Digital Business Growing, SingTel Sets Aside $1.6B For Startup Acquisitions
• How InMobi Grew From a Startup to a Giant Mobile Ad Network
• Jimmy Rim, The Youngest CEO Running a VC Firm in Korea
• Singapore’s Too Small? More E-Commerce Businesses Look Abroad
• Malaysian Mobile Game Dev Nexx Snags $250k from Crystal Horse Investments 

Events

Our upcoming Tech in Asia Meetup in Vietnam this 23 May 2013 (Thursday) in Ho Chi Minh City is officially sold out. However, we have another one upcoming. Join us on 9 June 2013 (Thursday) in Bangkok, as we have 500 Startups‘ Dave McClure with us to share about what he sees in Southeast Asia. Click here for event and free registration details!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. CodeToki | Philippines

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

2. Dreadout | Indonesia

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

3. Crowdbaron | Hong Kong

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

4. Camera360 | China

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

5. Foodpanda | Asia

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

6. Ticket Solutions | Indonesia

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

7. StreetDirectory | Singapore

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

8. Themis Reader | Indonesia

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

9. RocketLabs | Philippines

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

10. Mention | China

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

11. Visualead | Israel

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

12. Umeng | China

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

13. VNTIC | Vietnam

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

14. MadeiraCloud | China

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

Related startup stories

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

Events

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

• Jakarta Meetup: How To Monetize Mobile Apps

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

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

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

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

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

Congrats to MadeiraCloud for another round of funding!

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. China’s Top 3 Most Profitable Web Companies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebright Partners, a Japan-based incubator and one of the parties behind Indonesian VC firm Batavia Incubator has recently launched its new investment fund for startups in Southeast Asia. It has secured two investment deals with the first being made to online ad platform Adskom, which we talked about last week. We spoke with Rebright Partners CEO Takeshi Ebihara (pictured right) to find out more about the fund.

Ebihara first explained that there will be no conflict of interest with another VC firm Batavia Incubator. Batavia Incubator will focus on Indonesian startups with an eye on the domestic market, while Rebright Partners itself will focus on startups who are looking to target multiple countries in Southeast Asia. He explains further about the fund:

Our fund LP investors are Japanese well track recorded entrepreneurs and Corporations. So that the portfolio company can expect LPs wisdom insights and networks to grow own business. In that sense, the fund can be said Super Entrepreneurs Fund.

Regarding the kind of startups they target, Ebihara says that he wants to invest in internet startups as well as those covering the mobile space like media, e-commerce, and mobile apps. Ebihara prefers consumer internet service primarily, and that investing in the B2B business model is a rarity. He admits that Adskom is one of such rare cases. Does Ebihara consider himself as having a hands-on approach to his startup portfolios? He says yes:

In most of investment cases we take the lead position and in some cases our partners will be seated on board. Though we do not deny being in the non-lead minority sometimes.

Talking about the startup scene in Southeast Asia

Ebihara himself said that he has been watching the region closely as mentor for the Founder’s Institute in offices like Jakarta, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City, and Kuala Lumpur, and that he likes what he sees. The scene around the region is getting hotter, Bangkok’s current situation reminds him of Jakarta two years back, there are more and more startup accelerators and co-working spaces spotted in Kuala Lumpur. “It is worth trying to find young talented hackers and entrepreneurs in this region,” said Ebihara.

He ends it with an invitation: “If you are a startup or entrepreneur trying to cover large Southeast Asian Internet and mobile space, we are now accepting applications.”

Over the last six months, I’ve been talking to a lot of people across the tech and startup industries in Vietnam, and after a while, you start to hear the same things. You start to hear a signal in all the noise. And two resounding complaints I’ve heard in the last few months is that computer engineering is going down, and design sucks.

This all may come as a shock to many who view Vietnam as a rising engineering hub and an outsourcing leader, but what we see today are the seeds of a growing trend in Vietnam: bad design and lazy engineering.

Engineers in Vietnam are getting increasingly lazy

When some people compare computer engineering in Vietnam five to ten years ago to now, things have changed. And they’ve changed for the worse. But the biggest change people see is that younger engineers are lazier than the older generation. And the key problem has been that there are way more resources online than there were a decade ago. There are way more libraries, repositories of code from past engineers. This has created a generation of engineers who are more knowledgeable but are weaker coders.

In the past, engineers were forced to figure out the code themselves, and they would have to write it themselves too. This forced engineers to become better thinkers about how the code works and how the software fits together. Now, engineers can just cut and paste code whenever they need it.

This trend is even more so reflected in the products being produced by this generation. The products now aren’t as technically strong. I’ve talked to several leaders in the startup industry off the record, and they’ve said that when you look at websites these days – like e-commerce, online products, etc. – you can see that the products aren’t that deep. They’re easy to make.

All in all, this means innovation is impacted heavily. If engineers don’t know how to tinker, how can they innovate? Now, I’m not sure if this is just the usual older generation looking down on the green and fresh younger generation, but I’ve talked to a handful of companies, and this is a trend that CTOs have mentioned to me as well.

Vietnamese websites are fucking ugly

Another hurdle that faces Vietnamese online startups is design. And it’s a completely different beast from engineering because it has to do more with aesthetics and ethos than with the laziness of engineers. It’s also my personal opinion. But, I won’t point any fingers here, if you look at all of the startups that I’ve written about from Vietnam in the past six months, you’ll find that many of their sites are just plain ugly. And that doesn’t even include the big news sites that everyone frequents.

Take a quick click through Alexa’s top sites in Vietnam, and you’ll see a bunch of ugly sites. This is bad for two reasons: 1) without a strong design aesthetic it’s very difficult to compete globally where, in some cases, a beautiful design makes or breaks user acquisition, and 2) it means entrepreneurs and web developers are not thinking about user experience and user interface. It’s not good for Vietnam, and a design revolution is desperately needed.

Dealing with the two hurdles

So far, the only solution I’ve seen to this problem is education, something that Vietnam is struggling in, but something leaders in the community are working to address in workshops and events. In fact, those issues are two key reasons why people are getting so involved in doing events. But the wheels are in motion and it’s going to take a serious and widespread addressing of the problem – and that doesn’t look to be coming anytime soon. The issues are systemic.

On the other hand, this could signal a shift in focus. If libraries and code are easier to do, this means entrepreneurs can focus more on business and solving problems. The trouble with this argument is that engineering and design are inextricably connected to create an excellent product for the consumer market.

Is this happening across Asia? Or is this just specific to Vietnam? Let us know in the comments!

Beijing-based real-time behavioral analytics startup Mention charmed the judges and audience with its startup pitch at the ongoing GMIC Beijing event yesterday. This afternoon, Mention was crowned as the winner of GMIC’s Early Stage G-Startup Competition. Mention’s flagship product, Traintracks, is a real-time behavioral analytics tool made by game designers for game designers. Nils Pihl Bohlin, co-founder and behavioral engineer at Mention, took to the stage and demoed the current version of the product. It serves to empower game designers, giving them useful and powerful insights on user behavioral patterns.

How Traintracks came about

The team at Mention has been working on the marriage between behavioral psychology, game theory, and memetics to create a better predictive model of human behavior. It eventually led to dealing with many game developers, which the team thought was the perfect sweet spot to study human behavior. However, as the team started to delve deeper, it realized that the potential of big data analytics has not been fully uncovered by many game developers today. In fact, according to Nils, there is no such thing as data-driven design today, as many game designers have not been empowered to use the current tools that exist in the market right now. Nils (pictured right) highlights three issues with analytics:

1. People are unaware of the right questions that are deeper and more meaningful, which is vital to lead them to the right answers.
2. Most companies are tracking what is relatively easier to track, since it is difficult to interrogate the data. The result focuses on vanity metrics, but often does not give you deeper insights about player behavior.
3. Analytics can get very costly. It might need several departments to come together to answer a question, and a single question might take hours or days to answer.

With this approach, Nils and his team has developed Traintracks, which aims to solve the pain points that game developers face. It also boasts being an award-winning product to take on the game analytics market. Nils adds:

Traintracks has a state-of-the-art backend built on brand new technology that is up to 100 times faster than our most advanced competitors. The game analytics industry is growing into a multi-billion dollar market, and we’re entering that market with a product that is 100 times faster than the competition.

Founders’ backgrounds and upcoming plans

Mention is founded by Jeff Hsu, Nils Pihl Bohlin, and Ryan Braley, with strong backgrounds in computer science, electrical engineering, and game design. It was by circumstance that the team happened to come to Beijing. However, due to the system’s complex backend, Nils explained to us that the team will be moving its core operations to the United States for talent acquisition. It is also looking to raise an initial seed round of $1 million, mainly for talent acquisitions in the next twelve months.

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.

The observation was made by ‘valeriepieris’ on Reddit a few days ago and underlines Asia’s significance in the world, including in a much broader context:

Additional things I’ve realized: There are more Muslims in the circle than outside of it. There are more Hindus in the circle than outside of it. There are more Buddhists in the circle than outside of it… The circle pulls all of this off while being mostly water and including the most sparsely populated country on earth (Mongolia).

We could add a host more stats to this, in terms of types of governments, cultures, demographics, and so on.

But what are the implications of this for technology companies and startups? With its predominantly young population (with the exception of Japan), the region is ridiculously diverse in terms of different types of markets and consumer bases. That means very competitive. That means a company that is successful in this little circle is going to have to battle it out in various domains. Not unlike ancient tribes battling it out until one eventually dominates. The tribe that eventually dominates usually makes technological advances and has strong cultural values that make it happen. And that’s what we’re already seeing. Japanese companies are attacking Southeast Asia, Southeast Asian companies are attacking each other’s markets, Korean companies are jumping into Japan, and lots more competitive action.

Basically, cosmopolitan Asian has to be more than just ambidextrous. He/she has to be able to adapt to a host of small and large cultures and nations that very often barely resemble each other. He/she has to immediately think internationally.

Silicon Valley, although highly competitive and innovative with a long history of startups, does not face the challenges that Asia must face in order to grow and survive. And that’s the central thing. Silicon Valley is isolated. As diverse as the people in the Valley are, the environment promotes Valley thinking. And the Valley knows it, that’s why we’re starting to see Geeks On A Plane and Unreasonable At Sea, whereby Valley folks attempt to go global. But this is where Asia starts from, not what it’s looking for. And the circle proves it.

For those not in the know, aside from the titles above, Gai is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, and previously was a product strategy manager at Oracle, iPhone hardware engineer and Apple TV systems engineer at Apple, implementation engineer at AMD and new business creation intern at Hewlett-Packard. Prior to founding the World Startup Report, he established mobile business card transcription service CardMunch, which would later be purchased by LinkedIn.

Gai was in town as part of his 29 country mission for the World Startup Report. The goal of course is to collect, analyze, and distribute information and statistics about startup environments and ecosystems.

Having never really considered the Philippines as a potential growth area for startups, Gai states he was encouraged to visit by a friend, though he may also have been convinced by the country receiving its first investment-grade rating from international debt watcher Fitch Ratings.

During a stay that was originally to last just a few days but ultimately stretched to a week and a half, Gai spent some time at the Makati headquarters of IdeaSpace Foundation, a business incubator, chatting it up with president Earl Valencia. It was IdeaSpace that sponsored the World Startup Report in the country recently, at the Microsoft Philippines office.

IdeaSpace is in turn sponsored primarily by Smart Communications, and also by several companies under the umbrella of First Pacific Company Ltd., Metro Pacific Investments Corp., and the Philippine Long Distance Telephone (PLDT) group. IdeaSpace announced recently that it had chosen 10 local startups to receive funding of up to PHP 5 million ($122,295), as well as six-month business incubation and mentorship with investors both locally and from Silicon Valley.

In an exclusive interview with Smart Public Affairs Group representative Cyril Bonabente, Gai stated that he was surprised by how small the local startup community was, especially given the size of the country, but that local growth was impressive, and promising. He also encouraged and lauded the efforts of IdeaSpace and Smart, stating that local startups were very lucky to have an eager incubator in place.

(Source: philSTAR.com)

Enter six young IT professionals who’ve experienced these hardships first-hand. Their solution? Codetoki, a platform to aid fellow graduates in finding employment, by specifically matching applicants to the most suitable employers, and making them visible to future employers. All this on an achievement-based, game-like platform.

It works by having interested companies involved. These IT and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies generate challenges, tests, and games, for aspiring applicants to complete. If you’re an applicant, you simply choose which companies you wish to apply for, take their challenges and tests, and earn a badge for completion. The badge makes you visible to that company as you’ve proved that you’re interested in working for them and that you’ve got what it takes to be their employee. And by taking and completing these challenges, applicants build up a portfolio that fits the requirements of potential employers.

The list of the companies is impressive as well. BPO specialist Accenture, CAI-STA Philippines, Asian Business Solutions, Inc. and the like are here. Global eGovernment specialist Crimsonlogic Philippines is represented, as well as cloud infrastructure service provider ArcusIT, and the Microsoft Philippines Academic Team.

There are four challenge categories offered by Codetoki. First is the aptitude challenge, where one can also become a Microsoft Student Partner. Then there’s Ruby, a dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity, used My NASA’s Langley Research Center for simulations, and Google SketchUp, among others. Finally, two badges can be had for basic and advanced jQuery, a multi-browser JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML, and the most popular JavaScript library in use today.

Through Codetoki, these companies can advertise the requirements in information and communication technology skills they require, which of course is based on open positions and needs they had on their respective rosters. Aspirants can then complete test problems and challenges, which are specially designed to address these required skills, and for every challenge successfully completed, a badge is added to the applicants profile, and overall portfolio. This whole process also provides the applicant with experience and an opportunity to master the technology and skills specific to their selected position, as well as building and expanding their profile in a way that companies are actually able to view their portfolio. Having been built as a game-like platform, there’s even a ranked leaderboard, which makes it easier for employers to choose the best fit for their available positions.

Run by Ademar Tutor, Honeylyn Balingcasag, Donna Limoran, Gerda Decio, Gretchen Abenoia and Arnelle Balane, Codetoki has several accolades under its belt already. Codetoki is a product of Hack2Hatch, a startup camp wherein Silicon Valley founders, specialists and investors provided mentorship to young startup hopefuls. It also won first place at the Ideas Challenge of AppBridge, a World Economic Forum initiative, as well as first at the Apps for Asia Philippines contest run by Microsoft and the Asian Development Bank. It also took third place at the first Startup Weekend in Cebu.

We welcome the week of May with a round-up of startups from all across the region. Remember, for startup tips and story suggestions, feel free to email us. Alternatively, you can send tips here and/or tell us about your startup here. Enjoy this week’s list:

1. Instapps | Malaysia

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

2. Yongche | China

Beijing-based car rental startup Yongche has been diversifying recently, with its launch of a taxi finding app in the form of “DaChe Xiaomi”. This week, the startup has secured a massive new round of funding led by China Broadband Capital Partners. It previously raised series A funding in August 2011.

3. VietnamGeeks | Vietnam

VietnamGeeks is a specialist human resources site that focuses on software engineers.

4. My Dentist Pal | Philippines

Founded in January of 2012 by Cloudwalk Digital, My Dentist Pal is a web-based tool for dentists that aims to digitize the dental practice. It basically allows dentists to access patient records, tooth charting, and even simple do accounting.

5. Lenddo | Philippines

Philippines’ Lenddo utilizes connections, relations, and reputations from multiple social media sites to build a credit rating. Basically, it’s like Klout for credit ratings.

6. Hashiji | China

Hashiji is a curated directory of products (mostly clothing) that are actually sold on other e-commerce platforms in China, like Taobao. But in addition to the curation aspect, it offers users a much more pleasant shopping experience without the abundance of annoying advertisements.

7. SinglePet | Korea

SinglePet (not yet online) is a Korean startup that builds pet-care hardware which can be controlled through a mobile app. The hardware also enables owners to communicate with their pets when they are away, and even dispenses food for the pets. This startup was one of the winners of this week’s beLAUNCH 2013 Startup Battle in Seoul.

8. MessageSong | Korea

Another contender from the beLAUNCH event, MessageSong turns your messages into music.

9. STEP Journal | Korea

STEP Journal might look like just another social media application, but actually it serves as a personal private journal for users to record their daily activities. The startup was one of the ‘K-APP Global Business Project’ winners in at the beLAUNCH 2013 Startup Battle.

10. Perples | Korea

Perples enables smartphones to display relevant content upon detecting inaudible sound signals. So far, the company provides soundtag SDKs for brands, such as Dunkin Donuts, to make use of its technology to engage with customers.

11. CloudHerd | Australia

CloudHerd is a platform that allows farmers to manage the inventory and auctioning of their livestock.

12. Dokter Gratis | Indonesia

Indonesia’s Dokter Gratis is a mobile app for people in Indonesia to get a live consultation with a doctor, and the service is absolutely free of charge.

13. Tapxxi | Vietnam

Tapxxi allows folks in Vietnam to book a taxi and calculate the most effective route. It’s really useful for tourists and expats as it also brings down the language barrier.

14. LivEpicly | Indonesia

LivEpicly is looking to make your life more epic with easy and free restaurant table reservations in some Indonesian cities. It’s a bit like Singapore’s Chope.

Related startup stories

• China-Axlr8r Seeking Newest Intake, Saves 2 Spaces for Startups Building for Leap Motion

• Hanoi vs Saigon: Weighing Up Vietnam’s Two Biggest Startup Cities

• Is It Possible to Be Both a Founder and a Daddy?

• JFDI: The Frog’s Story, Secret Sauce, and Challenges

• AppsInSg Shows Off Applications Made in Singapore

• 10 Mistakes Startups Make Promoting Their Mobile Apps

• These Are the 20 Startups Doing Battle at Korea’s beLAUNCH 2013

• From Silicon Valley With Love: BootstrapAccelerator Asia Launches for Southeast Asian Startups

• NganLuong Gives Us a Deep View Into Online Payment In Vietnam

• ‘China’s Silicon Valley’ Has More Startups Now Than Ever Before

• CEO of Travelogy: Women Can Actually Have It All

• Vietnam’s Food Delivery Battle is Really Hot, Here are the Top 4 Players

Events

Join us at our upcoming Tech in Asia Meetup in Jakarta, on May 16th (Thursday):

• Jakarta Meetup: How To Monetize Mobile Apps

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

So it was a bit of a breath of fresh air when the Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) announced the development of what they hope will give them an edge in the burgeoning e-commerce and mobile purchasing field, the BPI mPOS, or Mobile Point of Sale.

Simply put, the mPOS is an attachment device for your smartphone or wi-fi enabled tablet, which will transform it into a mobile point-of-sale system. Currently available for iOS and Android devices, with a Blackberry version in the works, the mPOS connects via the headphone jack, allowing users to accept credit card payments, accepting both Visa and MasterCard. The device is basically a credit card scanner, and through a downloadable app, scanned transaction information is transmitted via wi-fi or mobile cellular connections to BPI’s central server.

One point of interest, though not necessarily good or bad, is that the mPOS device does not function on jailbroken devices, so it’s a no-go for users with jailbroken iPhones. No specific mention was made if this applied to rooted Android devices as well.

Officially unveiled for testing last April 28th, BPI representatives have stated that, though already highly successful in other countries like the United States with Square, this is first in the Philippines, a pioneering step in BPI’s efforts to promote e-commerce in the country.

Currently in a six month test phase, BPI chose Singapore-based Swift systems integrator for the device, emphasizing the determining and solution of such issues that future mPOS merchants might encounter. These range from issues such as cellular signal quality and strength, as well as the wireless capabilities of the mPOS device itself. After all, mobility is good and all out in the field, but what about inside buildings and other establishments? As is, the device is being tested by over 600 business and establishment owners, on a myriad selection of phones.

Another major concern, perhaps the most crucial of all, is security, and rightfully so. Credit card security and credit card fraud are of paramount concern in this day and age, and any successful online commerce endeavor must be up to this challenge if it is to succeed. In this regard, BPI has stated that the mobile app will require users to provide their signature using the phone or tablets touch-screen functionality. All transactions are credited to your BPI settlement account the very next day. The mPOS is also 100 percent paperless, so no receipts will be issued immediately, and will instead be emailed to the customer once the purchase is confirmed. BPI has also assured users that privacy is key, and that no credit card or user information will be saved within the device. This makes the mPOS compliant with both the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCIDSS) and Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS) systems.

Source: newsbytes.ph

In this post, we have CEO and co-founder of Travelogy, Winnie Tan (pictured), whose company runs multiple online media properties such as TripZilla, ComeSingapore, and Nearby.SG. She tells us how to take advantage of being in the minority in the tech startup scene, and explains the importance of being sincere and honest towards the people that you meet along the entrepreneurial journey.

She also mentions in our Q&A that one of the key attributes required to succeed in the technology and startup scene is knowing how to sell yourself. Amazingly I realized whilst many startup founders do know how to sell their companies, vision, and product, they don’t actually know how to sell themselves. Knowing how to sell yourself – i.e.: personal branding – is highly important. It attracts not just the money, but also team-mates who would fight alongside you even when you are struggling.

And Winnie also highlights that it is actually possible for women entrepreneurs to achieve a balance between work and family – and feels personally that she’s working towards achieving that.

Vanessa: Tell me a little about yourself.

Winnie: I am a serial entrepreneur and co-founder at Travelogy. My previous businesses included a bubble tea retail chain, a real estate company, and an art gallery. The work that I am totally loving and consuming me now is Travelogy. The little time I have outside of the company is spent with my two precious boys – Ethan who is six years old and Ean who is four years old.

What does your startup do, and what is your role?

Winnie: Travelogy runs multiple online media platforms that attract and influence travellers on their travel decisions. Our focus is in Southeast Asia (SEA) where the markets are fragmented and fast-growing, and hence has great potential for innovation. Our core product is TripZilla. TripZilla is an easy-to-use platform for users to search and book their travel plans. It aggregates travel prices, packages, itineraries, and travel promotions across all major booking channels.

As CEO of the company, I develop strategies and set goals for the business, steering the company towards these goals.

I am involved in all aspects of the business, from product development to sales to fund raising. But I’m very fortunate to have now built a strong team who is performing at each role than me, and so I can now focus on building Travelogy into the biggest online media player in the travel industry within SEA.

How and why did you get started in this industry?

Winnie: The team and I saw that the travel market in SEA is growing very quickly, with more people are shifting online for their travel needs. The rapid growth of internet, e-commerce, mobile, social media, and online marketing means that there are plenty of opportunities for innovation and disruption in this space. Technology adoption in the travel industry is seemingly lagging in Asia as compared to the west, and so we see a huge gap that needs to be filled. We are hoping to tap into the pool of early adopters and early majority to bridge this gap.

Did you face any challenges in particular?

Winnie: Finding the right talent was a major challenge. We wanted to put together a team (pictured above) with complementary skills. But skills aside, it was even essential that they share the same passion and have the right attitude. It was a tedious and often painful process. It wasn’t easy learning who are the wrong people to let go, but as with all other tasks within a startup, we picked it up quickly.

How do you seek out relevant mentors and people for help?

Winnie: It is not that difficult to get fellow entrepreneurs or startup enthusiasts to respond to an introductory email or agree to that first meeting. I think one just needs to be sincere and transparent about the reason why you are hoping to touch base, and most people will be willing to explore possible opportunities. From there, make the most out of the first meeting – share what you are doing clearly and explain what you are hoping to achieve by connecting with this person. Be honest and forthright, and the rest will depend on the personal chemistry between you and the other party. Anyway, the worst thing that can happen is just for the person to say “Sorry, I am not interested”. No big deal.

In your opinion, what are the necessary skill-sets and attitudes required to succeed in the technology and startup industry?

Winnie: Tech startup founders wear many hats and so there is a long list of essential skills. I will probably be able to write a whole article just trying to list all these skills. Let me just list the few skills/traits that I personally think are the most crucial:

1. Ability to sell. Sell your company, your vision, your product, or yourself. You must be able to sell to raise money, recruit talents, and generate revenue.
2. Management skills. With limited resource and runway, technopreneurs must be able to manage the people and funds effectively to achieve clear goals.
3. Tenacity. Persistent determination is a must have because most people will shoot down your idea in the beginning and you will meet with failures. But try, try, and try again. And repeat.

How does it feel to be the only female leader within the team?

Winnie: More than one bitch boss will probably kill my guys! Lol! Seriously, I highly recommend having at least one female in the core team. We females offer a different perspective on things, on top of giving a more balanced and complete solution to problems. I think my teammates feel the same way, and will always give me the opportunity to express my opinions. So yes, it feels great being a female leader.

Do you have any female role model(s) that you look up to?

Winnie: I had the honour of speaking to and listening to talks by many successful women in recent years. Some in the travel space, such as Jennie Chua, Claire Chiang, and Kathleen Tan; and some in the startup arena such as Virginia Cha and Shirley Wong. They are all smart and confident alpha-females, and I have many valuable takeaways from talking and listening to them all. So it is difficult to name one female role model.

But there is one common characteristic they have all have in common: While it is not easy, women can have it all – a successful career, a loving family, and a rewarding life. This is a very encouraging message and motivates me to work towards this level of self-actualization.

How do you strike a balance between work and personal life?

Winnie: I’m married with two little boys, ages four and six (pictured). It is tough and I struggle with some working mum guilt every now and then. I try to outsource the less important child-raising tasks and make sure that I never miss the important moments – milestones, birthdays, character-building lessons, and bonding time.

As much as possible, I try to be home between the hours of 7.30pm to 9.30pm on weekdays so that I will at least be able to talk to my children about their day and tuck them into bed. Work can continue after 9.30pm when they are asleep.

Do you have any advice for fellow female entrepreneurs?

Winnie: Female entrepreneurs tend to stand out for being the minority in the technology and startup scene. You almost always get the chance to ask questions during Q&A sessions, you get more media coverage, and investors will give you that minute for your elevator pitch. Make the most of this “unfair” advantage. Note though, it only helps to get your foot in the door. If you can’t dazzle and prove your worth within that few minutes, it doesn’t help even if you look like Vivian Hsu. Well. I’m sure you’ll get some love from whoever you are talking to if you look like Vivian Hsu! But you get my point.

See more interviews in our Female Entrepreneurship series:

What was originally an idea that came out of a Tech Venture class at Sydney University is now one of Australia’s most unique startups. CloudHerd CEO and co-founder Alexander Stamp’s wanted to solve the tedious and slow process his father encountered while purchasing cows from a cattle market. The service recently came in as one of the final few brilliant startups competing at TechStars New York, on top of being one of the startups to have graduated recently from the inaugural Sydney University Incubate Program.

CloudHerd is a platform that allows farmers to manage the inventory and auctioning of their livestock. It offers an extensive list of features, which includes inventory, paddock, and property management. It has integrated Google maps, Gmail calendar, and Microsoft Outlook into its system as well. Other features for farmers include data logging, charts, email notifications, HTML5 video support, auctions system, payment management, National Livestock Identification System (NLIS) integration, and cattle genetics information.

Alexander explains:

We have a significant percentage of these features complete but [require] a bit of polishing of course. The general idea of the system is that one does one’s inventorying and management on the system and at the same time, the auction information is automatically copied in from the inventorying system.

One of the issues that farmers probably face while being out in Australia’s vast farms would be intermittent connectivity. To combat this, Alexander tells us that the team will be developing a native smartphone and desktop application to ensure that information will be automatically synced once a connection is available. Also, the mobile app will definitely come in handy during paddock inventorying as well.

For every auction that takes place on the CloudHerd platform, the Sydney-based startup collects a transaction fee of one percent. And apart from the basic inventory version, it will also be selling a premium inventory version in the future as well.

This sounds like a good solution for farmers to aid in their supply chain management. We wish the CloudHerd team the best with the upcoming pitch at Echelon Ignite: Australia 2013 organized by our friends over at e27 on May 8.

STEP Journal might look like just another social media application, but on the contrary, it serves as a personal private journal for users to record their daily activities. The mobile app was developed by Korean startup WePlanet, and was one of the K-APP Global Business Project winners in Korea’s beLAUNCH 2013 Startup Battle.

One key feature of this app allows users to record their daily activities and life moments simply by clicking on a range of preset icons, instead of having to record via tedious text-based entries, which might be prevalent in other journal apps in the market. Users can also add in custom activities, events and even items to make the recording experience even more personalized.

STEP Journal also took its app one step further, adding value to the logged data by introducing a dashboard furnished with compiled information (see screenshots below) on the various activities the users have engaged in, along with the frequency level of each activity and concise descriptions.

Though it’s meant to be a personal journal, users can still share their activities on other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.

In a conversation with CEO of WePlanet Daniel Cho, I learned that a new feature would be introduced to STEP Journal soon. By analyzing the collected data, the app will be able to make suggestions to help improve the life of the user, such as encouraging them to exercise if they don’t log physical activity often enough. It can also provide an infographic of recommended places for activities based on the total accumulated data from other STEP Journal users.

Currently, STEP Journal is only available on the iOS platform. An Android version is currently in the making.

Lenddo is a new way to obtain loans. First and foremost, Lenddo is not a bank, far from it. It is an online platform which utilizes connections, relations and reputation from multiple social media sites to build a credit rating. Finally, a practical use for the thousands of friends we all have on Facebook. And if the company web page is to be believed, it’s fast, easy, and with as little bureaucracy and red tape as possible.

Conceived with the principles of responsibility, character and altruism in hand, Lenddo was initially conceived by Jeff Stewart and Richard Eldrige in January 2009. It started its operations in the Philippines in March 2011.

Aside from the traditional banks and micro lending institutions, they’re considered first in their arena of lending through your social network connections.

At Lenddo, everything revolves around the LenddoScore. This number, ranging from 0 to 1,000, is a universal measurement of your trustworthiness, with 1,000 being the highest value. Using a proprietary and evolving algorithm, your rating is graphically plotted across categories like Social Data, Trusted Connections, and Financial Performance. This score is what helps you obtain approval for loans and services, though currently, only loans and free financial education are offered.

So utmost care must be observed: once you’re connected to another member, you can’t remove that person from your connections anymore. If their Lenddo score goes down because of unpaid obligation, it will affect your LenddoScore as well.

Loan applications

The loan application process itself is fairly simple, and free. Visit Lenddo’s website, register and upload a picture of yourself. Then connect your social networks and email accounts. From there it’s just a matter of inviting your friends, relatives, and co-workers, to generate your list of trusted connections. Finally, apply for your loan or you can just hang out there to help others to build the community.

Take note however, you should have a minimum LenddoScore of 300 to be eligible for a loan. You must also have three Trusted Companions with a minimum 300 LenddoScore as well, putting extra emphasis on just who you add as a friend.

Finally, it goes without saying that you should be a salaried employee, and that you have a bank account. The loanable amount vary between countries, as do interest rates, but one month’s salary is a common loan amount request, and can be paid from three to 12 months. Payments can be made through auto-debit, bills payment or over-the-counter bank transactions.

All in all, it’s lending via social networking. With no need to put up collateral, and not even requiring a guarantee or co-signor, Lenddo offers life changing loans and financial flexibility to a new audience, where online social interaction and relation building give you more than just bragging rights on who has the most friends.

So what if you’re a startup and you want to borrow some money? A freelancer? Well it’s only possible if you’re currently employed through other means, if you’re not, unfortunately obtaining a loan isn’t possible.

Risks

This was the first question I asked Erika Aquino, Lenddo Philippines’ director of sales and marketing, isn’t the business too risky? She explained that any kind of business can be considered risky. But with their system’s algorithms plus “human eyes” they actually make sure they only lend to trustworthy people — with only default rate of 4–4.5% of non-paying members.

Their most-served working in the industry are those who are from the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) sector, or most locally known as those are working in the call center industry.

Investors

Among Lenddo’s investors are some of the same people behind Facebook and Groupon to Kiva and Prosper, including Accel Capital, Blumberg Capital, Omidyar Network, iNovia and Metamorphic Partners. The company has offices in Manila (Philippines), Bogota (Colombia) and New York City (USA), though loans can only be provided in Colombia and the Philippines. Although they’re not actively seeking investors, they are, however, always looking for strategic partners. As they’re also looking forward to expanding to Indonesia soon.

The challenge Lenddo’s facing is not about their product itself but mostly getting their brand and product out there. Currently, they invest in Google and Facebook ads, as well as public relations.

Overall, I am amazed by Lenddo’s trust in the good in people. This is definitely a less intimidating option than borrowing from a bank. Just be sure to be a good member of the community, their scores depend on you as well.

Founded in January of 2012, by Cloudwalk Digital, My Dentist Pal is a web-based tool for dentists that aims to digitize the dental practice. It basically allows dentists to access patient records, tooth charting, and even simple accounting, to find out who’s paid and who hasn’t, from anywhere. Patients can get updated on their next dental appointment, or even find the location of the nearest dentist.

According to Cloudwalk Digital’s Marc Medina:

”The dental industry in the Philippines is being left behind by others who are going digital. We want to embrace the benefits of going digital and make their practice more productive. My Dentist Pal allows PDA (Philippine Dental Association) members to keep abreast of emerging new technology, and to find relevant information in their dental practice enabling them to maintain a competitive edge and build a strong presence in today’s business world. “

Subscription is fast and easy enough; it’s just your usual fill-in-the-blanks registration form. And at the moment it’s free too, as the site currently relies on ad placement to make money. Unfortunately, the site advertises that it’s intended to be used by both dentists and patients, subscription appears to be for dentists only. Plus, the link to the How It Works PDF appears to be broken as well.

Website management aside, the services listing is robust (for dentists at least). You’ve got your Dashboard, your homepage for appointments, messages, news, etc. You can Add Patients to your Patient List. You can fill in an Address Book as well, for home visits perhaps? There’s a Scheduler, as well as access to Blogging and Messaging. Finally, you can get access to Accounting, to find out which patients still need to pay up.

My Dentist Pal is currently available to local dentists, though the team does have plans to take their approach to foreign shores.

Again, from Marc Medina:

”Initially, our target market is the dentists from the Philippines. But when we release our mobile app this year, we want to also target dentists globally.”

Being a startup in the Philippines can be tough, no doubt about that. Being a startup built around the dental industry, which is not exactly considered a necessity in the country, has to be downright tough as nails. So can the founders of My Dentist Pal offer any words of advice to other would-be online dentists?

” If you’re a startup in the Philippines expect to self-fund for a longer than usual because of the limited funds. The number of startups is absolutely bigger than number of angels willing to seed.”

Let’s sum up this week’s action with a round-up of startups from all across the region. Remember, for startup tips and story suggestions, feel free to email us. Alternatively, you can send tips here and/or tell us about your startup here. Enjoy this week’s list:

1. Dreamdays | China

Built by the Guxiu team of three in Beijing, Dreamdays helps users remember and be alerted of dates and events that matter to them most. This mobile app is available in both English and Japanese.

2. Traverik | India

Bangalore-based Traverik helps to build your itinerary for you based on the places other travelers liked. In a way, it’s like crowdsourcing your travel plans.

3. Shopby | Vietnam

Fully launched in December 2012, Shopby has a unique model that integrates both social and e-commerce to provide daily deals in Vietnam.

4. Bukalapak | Indonesia

We first mentioned Bukalapak back in 2011, so now’s a good time for an update. It’s an online C2C marketplace where people can buy or sell any goods at no cost, and also has the reputation of being the largest marketplace for bikes in Indonesia. This week, the founder also announced that he has started Netpreneur.co.id as a blog dedicated to advising people how to run a business.

5. GoRated | Philippines

GoRated is a platform that allows users to rate and give testimonials to your website, at no cost and without a steep learning curve.

6. Mou | China

The Chinese creator of Mou, a good-looking writing app for OS X, has launched interesting merchandise such as a tablet stand, beer bottle openers, and badges. It’s an unusual move for a startup to make, so we wanted to find out why.

7. Kleii | Vietnam

Kleii is an online cloud storage service from Vietnam. This week it closed its first round of seed funding with the goal of increasing brand awareness in Southeast Asia.

8. Taembe | Vietnam

Based in Vietnam and you in need of diapers? Look no further than Taembe.vn. The new e-commerce site, quietly released two weeks ago, focuses very specifically on online sales of diapers.

9. Dropmysite | Singapore

Dropmysite, a website and email cloud backup service has previously acquired a US rival and expanded into numerous countries. Just this week, the startup announced an investment from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups.

10. Gengo | Japan

Founded in 2009, Gengo is a platform for human translation of 33 languages, with over 7,500 experienced translators providing their linguistic services to small- and medium-sized business and major corporations. This week it secured a round of series B funding led by Intel Capital.

11. Triip | Vietnam

Vietnam’s Triip provides a platform to allow anybody with a tour idea to create their own travel package and sell it to interested tourists.

12. Sribu | Indonesia

Sribu is a startup marketplace from Indonesia that offers crowdsourced designs. Check out its newest growth statistics.

13. MoneyTree | Japan

MoneyTree aims to simplify the lives of users in Japan by providing them an effective way to record their finances. It’s kind of like Mint for Japan. It launched this week with a new iOS app.

14. Edisse | Australia

Sydney-based startup Edisse makes what it calls an innovative and lightweight watch that aims to minimize the risk of elderly people not being attended to when they fall.

Related startup stories

• 18 Daily Deals Websites in the Philippines: What’s to Like and Not to Like
• Startup From University of Sydney Incubate Program Raises $1.13M Before Launch
• Pakistan, the Next Frontier for Entrepreneurs and Investors
• Scoop Raises $2.4 Million from Indonesian Media Giant Kompas Gramedia
• MOL Gets 50% Stake in NganLuong to Take On Online Payments in Vietnam
• Zalora Indonesia Reaches 200,000 Daily Visitors, Partners with Telkomsel
• AngelHack Comes to Asia, Sees Potential in Singapore and South Korea, Offers Readers Free Tickets
• Taiwan’s TMI Launches Hardware Acceleration Program With Backing From Kaifu Lee

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

Taipei-based incubator, Taiwan Mobile Innovation (TMI), has launched its hardware acceleration program earlier this month. It hopes to attract mobile and internet-related hardware startups to take part in this inaugural program, and will render support required from prototype to mass production stage.

Hardware acceleration program details

The program will take approximately nine to 12 months, depending on the product development cycle. As for the funding, seed capital will be provided but according to CEO of TMI, Lucas Wang, it is a separate decision process. It will work more like an angel investment decision along with its investors, and typically the investment amount would be around US$100,000.

The incubator does not seek profit from incubating its startups. In exchange for its incubation services, TMI has the option of being entitled to “discounts” when startups raise their next round of funding. They look to seek “profit” via means of capital gain in the near future. Lucas explains more:

[If] we work with a startup by helping them to get the best fit manufacturing or design service, and they charge this whole production for US$30k, TMI will [not charge] for the extra service in managing the whole process. TMI does not charge on the manufacturing side for [the linking-up] fee and does not charge startups for service fee.

TMI is looking to incubate around six to eight startups. It will be providing guidance on how to penetrate into the Asia market, as well as issues pertaining to manufacturing and production. Startups incubated will receive knowledge on the best design for production, material and component adoption, production schedule planning, quality testing and quality control, forecasting, as well as sourcing of manufacturers and partners.

There will be senior project managers hailing from manufacturing backgrounds as well as investors from hardware design and manufacturing companies. Lucas clarifies the difference in mentorship for hardware startups versus software startups:

In hardware innovation, one of the key points is to deliver the real product that can best comply with the original/innovative design within the planned schedule. TMI converts mentorship, which is popular in software innovation, into project management in the manufacturing side. To startups, it is like Apple being served by Foxconn. TMI helps them connect with the right manufacturers for their businesses.

TMI also explains that it is different from other hardware incubator, such as Shenzhen’s HAXLR8R.

To make things clear, Lucas tells us that there are four differences between HAXLR8R and its program:

1. Stage of the startups: TMI serves startups that already have prototypes.
2. Result of incubation: TMI aims to help startups deliver mass production products.
3. Offerings: Instead of mentorship such as introductions or networking, TMI plays the role of a team member that provides guidance on manufacturing. It deals with details such as molding defects, digital board relay, planning, and quality control.
4. Strong network: TMI sits in the heart of IT ODMs, and is connected to manufacturers that used to service large hardware companies, such as Apple, HP, and Dell. Taiwan’s ODMs provides both manufacturing services as well as design support and quality insurance. Lucas highlights that when it comes to manufacturing a consumer product, it is not just about getting a factory but also about the whole manufacturing process.

TMI was founded in 2012 by US venture firm WI Harper Group, Kaifu Lee, and ITRI (pictured right). TMI also draws inspiration from Beijing-based Innovation Works, which is founded by Kaifu Lee, hoping to foster the entrepreneurship scene in Taiwan.

For Kaifu Lee’s involvement in TMI, Lucas elaborates:

[If] a startup is looking to China market [for expansion], Kaifu and the team [will be] ready for them. [There will be] weekly updates on the progress of the projects.

And yes, Kaifu’s team is looking for opportunities generated [from] this program. The investment decision is separated from it, but is made by TMI and Kaifu’s team.

The program came about due to an observation that most hardware startups take to crowdfunding platforms to raise funding, and often failing due to the lack of proof of concept and failure to scale. For more information regarding the program, you can visit the website here.

[Photo credits: Taiwan Mobile Innovation & VentureData.org]

The AngelHack competition prides itself as the biggest hackathon in the world and will kick off this weekend in Los Angeles. And for friends in Asia, this might be your chance if you are looking to Silicon Valley for expansion, as AngelHack will be travelling to your cities, too.

AngelHack will be organizing over 100 hackathons and aims to aggregate over 15,000 developers in more than 50 cities. This is its first step into Asia, which the team had originally planned for the last quarter of the year. But thanks to the kind sponsorship from Amazon Web Services, the plan has been accelerated and hence the launch this upcoming April. So web developers and entrepreneurs in APAC region such as Melbourne, Sydney, Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila, and Chennai can now have their chance to eventually become part of the inaugural AngelHack accelerator program.

Founder Greg Gopman also tells us that they would normally pick two winners from cities that have large pools of talent, such as Toronto, London, New York, and Tel Aviv. For countries in Asia, Greg sees potential in cities such as Seoul and Singapore. Of course, this is subject to a case-by-base basis once the judging has taken place.

Once the winners in each city are chosen, they will be part of the AngelHack accelerator program where they will be mentored over a period of 12 weeks before stepping into Silicon Valley to raise funds and be introduced to incubators. Winners of the previous AngelHack competition have also successfully received mentorship under Y-Combinator, AngelPad, TechStars, and 500 Startups.

And to thank you for being our loyal Tech in Asia reader, AngelHack is giving away 20 free tickets in every city that AngelHack will be going to. All you need to do, is to find your city here, enter the EventBrite page, and key in the code TechinAsia.

On his plans for Asia Pacific region, Greg adds:

[...] I’m sure we have $100,000 in seed funding to award to our Asia-Pacific teams! This investment will be divided between 5 of our 10 winning teams in the region.

If you wish to find out more, please visit the website here, or email Greg at
greg@angelhack.com.

For shopaholics and fans of Zalora, here’s a piece of news that will probably further strain your pockets. Zalora today officially launched its iOS app, and now you can shop for clothes or shoes even while on-the-go.

There are currently over 500 brands and 15,000 products listed on the new fashion e-store app. Users can receive push notifications on the new items and flash sales that Zalora has, and choose from multiple payment methods such as credit cards, PayPal, and cash-on-delivery. The user interface looks pretty and is optimized for the iPhone 5 too.

Unfortunately, the app is not available on Android yet, despite the growing number of Android users within the region. The reason for the initial push on the iOS platform, according to Zalora, is that most of its mobile shoppers are on the iOS platform. For countries with the highest mobile traffic, Zalora has twice as many shoppers on iOS than on Android.

But of course, Zalora is currently proposing to its Germany office to develop an Android app. Other platforms, such as BlackBerry or Windows, are not even in the pipeline yet.

To celebrate the launch, shoppers on the new Zalora app are entitled to a 20 percent discount using its in-app voucher code. According to Zalora, the app is currently the top lifestyle app in five countries, namely Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

If you’re keen to indulge in some shopping while waiting for that train or bus, you can give the app a try here.

Between the 16th and 18th century, at the height of the age of sailing, there were few vessels as formidable, as revered, and as valued as the galleon. Capable of both wartime and trade duties, Spain in particular designed amazing galleons, capable of traversing the then treacherous expanses of the Pacific Ocean between Mexico and Manila. These 2,000-ton vessels were appropriately named Manila Galleons, and they were the trade lifeblood of the Kingdom of Spain.

Fast forward 300 or so years, and a different kind of galleon is attempting to make its mark in a very different kind of trade. It’s an e-commerce site that provides all the most niche products you can’t find anywhere else.

Way back in December of 2011, the original concept for what would become Galleon.ph was hatched by Jeffrey Siy, founder of group buying site Awesome.ph, and by Chris Blanquera, founder of Openovate.com. Galleon.ph itself would not be launched until July of 2012.

Jeffrey explains:

Galleon.ph is an e-commerce website which sells products that are not available locally. Think of Amazon.com but just items you can’t find in malls or local marketplace. On a business perspective though, we are basically a payment gateway, logistics, and customer support built into one. We don’t maintain any inventory at the moment given we are using a dropship model. The reason we are so successful in building our database is because we have access to our supplier’s database of products which is in the millions.

Indeed, one look at the Galleon website and you can tell this isn’t your average online buying site. As I mentioned recently, many local daily deal sites seem to have the very same deals, promos and packages, reshuffled and recycled on each site.

Galleon is all about exclusivity. How exclusive you ask? How about Native American ceremonial peace pipe exclusive? Or a Panda-themed chopsticks practice kit! Or maybe you’ve been searching high and low for a Boska Holland Raclette Quattro cheese cutter?! Whether there are actually people who’ll buy these things, there’s no denying you’d be hard pressed to find these items anywhere else.

Again, from Jeffrey:

The idea started late last quarter of last year when a friend of my partner at Awesome.ph called me up to see if I was interested in doing an e-commerce website. I said it was too broad of an idea so we had to refine it in order to offer something different. We sat down and tried to understand why people [Filipinos] shop in the US. We discovered two reasons: it was cheaper, including shipping and taxes, or we don’t have it here in the Philippines. We went for the latter one because it offered a more unique selling proposition plus it won’t hurt the existing licensed distributors here.

To start, you must register using your Facebook account. With that out of the way, you’re now free to browse Galleon’s extensive selection of exclusive products. You’ll notice however, that some products are not priced. This means that the item is listed, but not held in stock. This is by no means the end of the road though, as a price can be requested for you personally.

Once your cart is full, payments can be made via direct deposit through BDO (Banco De Oro), credit card, GCash, or Smart Money. Speaking of credit card payments, Galleon strays from the usual PayPal route and instead utilizes Asiapay. And because almost all of the products on offer are sourced from the US, expect delivery in 10 to 15 days for Metro Manila, plus three more days for provincial areas.

Jeffrey adds:

The greatest challenge for us is building the brand. Customers have a difficult time understanding the concept of Galleon.ph given that it’s not a traditional e-commerce website. Equally challenging is to change the perception of customers that transacting online is safe.

One minor detail to note is in the layout of the site itself. Though all items are illustrated, the label on some of the items can be a bit confusing, since the complete name of some products are not completely displayed. For example, I came across one item in particular, advertised as the POSRUS Wacom Intuos 5 Touch. I’ve actually always wanted to get one of these, but the regular price of PHP 18,300 (US$443.57) has always been discouraging. So to find it on Galleon for only PHP 1,458 (US$35.34) immediately made my heart pump. You can imagine my dismay when I opened its description page and found it was actually the POSRUS Wacom Intuos 5 Touch ‘Medium Pen Tablet Surface Cover’. Yes, just the cover. Maybe not a huge bug on the site, but it can be a bit of a letdown.

Despite Facebook’s stringent photo policy, some things always just slip through the cracks. And this time, it’s prostitution.

The police authorities in Hanoi, Vietnam, just caught a prostitution ring leader named Do Thi Huyen (pictured right), who has been putting up her photos and photos of her “colleagues” on Facebook to get customers.

Huyen is 20 years old. After customers chose the girl they like, Huyen would let them know the price, and customers would be required to take the girls to a hotel of 3 stars or more. During the time that police were watching Huyen’s operation, they discovered that she was charging VND 4 million ($200) and pocketing VND 1 million ($50) for her advertising services.

The police had been watching her operation since early April and finally caught Huyen and one of her colleagues as they were taking two customers to a hotel. The site and Facebook profiles have since been taken down.

Currently, the fines for prostitution in this case are pretty low because the evidence on Facebook is not substantial enough for a full charge. They were charged anywhere from VND 100,000 ($5) to VND 300,000 ($15) so it’s not a heavy deterrent for social media prostitution. But this is one of the first cases for prostitution showing up on Facebook in Vietnam.

Pictures that Huyen posted onto Facebook of her “colleagues”.

The entrepreneurship scene seems to be heating up down under, especially at the top universities in the country. Last week, we wrote about university-run Melbourne Accelerator Program (MAP) launching its second round of applications, thanks to the encouraging results from the first one. And apparently MAP isn’t the only university-run program coming out of Australia.

Incubate is a student union backed startup incubator and entrepreneur program at the University of Sydney. It was founded last year by two students, James Alexander and Mina Nada, with strong support from University of Sydney Union (USU).

First batch of startups and achievements

Recently, Incubate graduated its inaugural batch of startups (pictured right), which includes:

1. WeSit

WeSit is a suite of web and mobile applications that connects parents with trusted babysitters. It taps into a trusted network of people, and parents can schedule babysitters with ease.

It solves one of the biggest issues parents face when they have commitments to fulfill – finding someone to entrust their children in their care. It boasts over 100 pre-registered users and has received AUD$20,000 (US$20,500) from BlackBerry. The fund will be used for the development of WeSit’s BlackBerry app and it will be featured on BlackBerry World.

2. SnapDisco

SnapDisco has developed a web-based, automated image processing technology that traces a clipping path around items. Its ‘computer vision’ has the ability to differentiate background and foreground parts of the photo, and then decides on a clipping path, which eradicates the tedious manual editing process.

It makes it easy for e-commerce sellers to now remove ugly backgrounds. The computer vision technology is also currently in the process of being patented.

3. Edisse

Edisse prides itself as an innovative watch, which has automatically detects when an elderly falls. It allows caretakers to keep track of older folks in real-time, and will receive notifications should the elderly person experience a fall.

4. CloudHerd

CloudHerd is an online livestock management and sales platform aimed at farmers. It aims to be a global marketplace that accumulates the wealth of information on livestock, and allow farmers to tap into other markets.

As the name suggests, it will also take advantage of cloud technologies, which allows farmers to access information no matter where they are.

5. Muro

Muro is an elastic social networking application that enables users to share photos with others who are attending the same event. Once the event has been set up on the app, users can check in at the event, start share photos, and they will be displayed on a live interactive slideshow.

6. Weaver

Weaver is a social robot that helps children to foster logical thinking through the use of sensors and a user-friendly interface. It eventually hopes to create a community where children are able to develop ideas through their understanding and application of engineering principles.

7. Feedback

Feedback is a not-for-profit application that takes advantage of the idle time that you have while you’re on-the-go. Users will be asked to complete market surveys in exchange for a charity donation.

8. The Best Day

The Best Day recognizes the pain of organizing group outings, and positions itself as a social planning tool that churns out the best plan for a group via collection on votes on time and place. It also helps businesses to better plan for their customers with their “Plan” widget, making it easier to organize and pay for group outings.

The Best Day has also raised series A funding of AUD$1.1 million (US$1.13 million) back in December 2012. It has also seen an encouraging 5,000 plans made within 3 weeks of beta launch.

James Alexander, co-founder and program manager at Incubate, also tells us that the startups are currently working out of The Australian Technology Park (ATP) (pictured right), with the Edisse Watch, Weaver, and Muro app currently in talks with interested investors. SnapDisco has also boldly rejected seed funding, because they prefer to have a revenue before raising funds. CloudHerd was also one of the finalists in TechStars New York and is also currently in talks with interested investors.

Differences between MAP and Incubate

Coincidentally, Incubate was launched in the same year as MAP. So apart from being based in different geographical locations – MAP in Melbourne and Incubate in Sydney – what sets them apart? James elaborates:

MAP is a great program and we’re different in a couple of areas. It was completely coincidental that we launched in the same year, as I only found out about them late last year but I was extremely impressed by their 2012 Demo Day. Interestingly, MAP was also originally pushed by a student.

[At Incubate,] we’re supported by the USU which is an independent student governed organisation within the University of Sydney. This means, unlike MAP, we’re open to all students, alumni, and researchers of the University of Sydney.

Also, the USU is not aligned to one single faculty and we believe it’s crucial to have cross collaboration across various faculties.

I think it’s great that two of Australia’s top universities are now actively engaged in encouraging more entrepreneurs and startups. I hope more universities follow suit.

The Incubate program also provides smaller amounts of funding of AUD$5,000 (US$5,100) for each of the eight teams selected. As for MAP, it provides AUD$20,000 (US$21,000) for each of the four teams. Its incubation period is also much shorter – which takes place over 11 weeks compared to the six months provided by MAP.

James also tells us that the Incubate program was launched last year at a panel event that took place late September 2012, with applications closing in the middle of November 2012. The startups officially started on the first week of December 2012, and graduated at the end of February this year during their demo day. With strong support from USU, James and his team hope to engage more entrepreneurial and business-minded students in the future.

The mentors currently with Incubate hail from various backgrounds of having built companies or working with high-growth companies. Some of the mentors include: Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com; Michelle Deaker, managing partner at OneVentures; and our friend Kim Heras, co-founder at PushStart.

It really looks pretty promising for the entrepreneurship scene in Australia, with great initiatives from universities like Incubate and MAP to hone aspiring Australian entrepreneurs of tomorrow. If you are keen to find out more about Incubate, you can visit the website here.

Here’s another lengthy round-up of startups this week from all across the region. Remember, for startup tips and story suggestions, feel free to email us. Alternatively, you can send tips here and/or tell us about your startup here. Enjoy this week’s list:

1. 5945 | Taiwan

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

2. Wish.vn | Vietnam

Wish.vn is a healthcare social network community in Vietnam. It is basically a combination of electronic health records, a social network to allow patients to rate health care, healthcare information, promotions connecting with partners, and tools to help you keep up your health.

3. Zipdial | India

ZipDial is a unique company from Bangalore, India, that monetizes from missed calls. Its business model has caught the attention of Singapore-based Jungle Ventures who invested in the startup this week. Plus, ZipDial unveiled some expansion plans.

4. The Spark Project | Philippines

Officially launched in February 2012, The Spark Project is a crowdfunding community where Filipinos can support and fund creative, innovative, and passion driven projects.

5. Sieu Web | Vietnam

Sieu Web, which means Super Web in Vietnamese, is a new website-building platform that’s designed to make website creation very easy, with responsive designs and an easy-to-use dashboard for the user backend. It’s specifically designed for small businesses, e-commerce sites, and individuals – many of whom won’t be familiar with HTML or CSS.

6. Gotcha | Indonesia

Gotcha.in, which will fully launch next month, has created its own version of captcha which doesn’t require site visitors to type given words. Plus it gives website owners a way to make money while blocking spammers.

7. ZAPTag | Philippines

ZAPTag is a loyalty rewards platform from the Philippines with an impressive list of partnering merchants. It also claims to bring an innovative approach to the table, not even requiring a smartphone or a data plan.

8. Thehallyu | Indonesia

With the Korean cultural wave taking Indonesia by storm, Korean fashion e-store Thehallyu has rolled out an Indonesian language version of the site and is one of the latest vertical e-commerce sites popping up in Indonesia.

9. Nitrous.IO | Singapore

Singapore’s Nitrous.IO, Action.IO’s software development platform and key product, aims to help developers create a development environment in the cloud in a matter of seconds. It has also received a round of seed funding from a handful of VC firms in Silicon Valley.

10. Terrabook | Vietnam

Terrabook is a startup that develops educational mobile apps and platforms for Vietnamese kids. Terrabook has been a side project that the founders are hoping to grow into a fully-fledged app-making studio.

11. Xend | Philippines

Xend is a courier service provider that provides online real-time booking, online waybill printing, and auto-email shipment status notifications. It focuses primarily on online establishments and sellers, and has over 50,000 partnering e-commerce merchants.

12. Yodo1 | China

Yodo1 is a Beijing-based game development studio and publisher that helps overseas developers to publish and distribute their games in mainland China. It announced this week a major round of series A funding.

13. Burpple | Singapore

This week, social food app Burpple rolled out a user-submitted restaurant listings and reviews site in Singapore called Burpple Find. It’s an interesting challenge to Yelp from this local startup.

14. Hike | India

The New Delhi-based startup has rolled out Hike v2.0, a major update to its messaging app that aims to connect you more directly with what your friends are feeling.

15. Piktochart | Malyasia

Piktochart is a simple, fast online infographic builder for both designers and non-designers. Check out our interview with the co-founder, which is part of our female entrepreneurship series – she believes that women in startups are less stuck in the mud when the going gets tough.

16. Touchten | Indonesia

Indonesian game developer Touchten announced this week that the company has made a soft launch of its mobile game publishing platform and has secured its first publishing deal is with Indonesian game developer Tinker Games.

17. WeFuel | Singapore

Singapore-based non-profit organization One Cent Movement has launched a food delivery project called WeFuel, which strives to deliver quality food to office workers. It’s starting out by selling only soup dumplings.

18. PosteVN | Vietnam

Launched in February 2012, PosteVn is a Craigslist-esque site for Japanese expats living in Vietnam. It was immediately profitable via its online ads.

19. Shutterpair | Singapore

Singapore’s photo app Shutterpair is an instant and easy way for users to share photos taken on their mobile photos and digital cameras via collaborative albums.

20. Kay | Vietnam

If you’ve been following e-commerce and daily deals in Vietnam, you know that Nhom Mua fell hard late last year due to internal issues. And in the midst of that, Nhom Mua’s original founder, Tom Tran, got ousted. Well, Tom is back, with a new daily deals site to take on Nhom Mua, and it’s called Kay.

21 and 22. Lolabox, BeautyTreats | Indonesia

‘Beauty box’ startups – sites that offer monthly subscriptions for boxes of beauty products – seem to be taking off in Indonesia. These two rivals both launched recently – BeautyTreats last month, and Lolabox a few days ago. So we talked to both founders about their plans.

Related startup stories

• Studied Abroad And Returned To Vietnam: Startups that Defy the Brain Drain
• CyberAgent Ventures to Increase Fund to US$20M With Strong Interest in Thailand
• PropertyGuru Launches ‘Luxury Gallery’ for Classy Condos and Pricey Penthouses
• Just.me Launches as a Messaging App to Kill Off Facebook, Looks to Asia for Big Boost
• Startup Asia Singapore 2013 In An Infographic
• Jeffrey Paine: The 3 Types of Startup Founders Investors are Looking For
• Xiaomi Founder Lei Jun on the Pressures and Perils of Doing a Startup
• Tech Entrepreneurship is Brewing Up in Kathmandu, Nepal
• Melbourne Accelerator Program Set to Build Startup Scene in Australia, Opens Applications for 2013

Events

It’s happening this week! Join us at our upcoming Tech in Asia Meetup in Singapore, which is on Thursday (25th):

• Singapore Meetup: How Memebox Bootstrapped to $1 Million Annual Revenue

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

This week’s been pretty eventful for China, especially as far as money goes. It’s been lots of funding and lots of recorded revenue. That’s good news for the big market.

1. China’s LightInTheBox Files for $86 Million US IPO to Expand its E-Commerce Business

One of the many IPO’s that will come this year in China, LightInTheBox is a platform for Chinese manufacturers (of many kinds of items) to sell to overseas shoppers or small businesses.

2. Baidu Takes a Dig at Qihoo With Launch of Antivirus Apps in China

The war rages on as Baidu attacks Qihoo’s key market. Qihoo released a search engine late last year, so it’s getting heated between the two.

3. Yodo1 Gets $5 Million in Funding From Singtel Innov8, Helps Games Crack the China Market

The interesting Yodo1, which focuses on building games-as-a-service, just got a bunch of funding from Singtel Innov8. Games, of course, are a lucrative market across Asia, and China especially.

4. China Names Porn Offenders That Should be Shut Down, Apple’s App Store Included

This is a bit of odd news as Apple has had a long time reputation of banning porn from its platforms. This puts even more pressure on Apple in China, which is already facing a branding issue in China.

5. CNNIC: Chinese E-commerce Market Exceeded $190 Billion in 2012

Well, that’s just a big number, and within a few years, it will soon exceed the American market. I’m willing to bet that it’ll even beat the American market next year!

6. Kaifu Lee: Rumors of Weibo’s Death Are Exaggerated

This is good news for Weibo, which some thought would be taken down by WeChat and the chat app wave. As Charlie has remarked in the past, Weibo’s demise wouldn’t be a good thing for China.

7. China’s Ten Most Popular PC Games (March 2013)

Pretty straightforward, here’s a roundup of the top most popular PC games in China.

8. What Games Are Chinese Government Officials Playing at Work?

On another note, Chinese officials are also getting into gaming, it seems there’s no avoiding it. Games are hot in China.

9. Baidu-Backed Travel Site Qunar Reportedly Gets $57 Million Funding Round

Here’s another funding story, Qunar, which is a travel startup has just grabbed another huge round of funding. Looks like this market is about to blow up if it hasn’t already.

10. Amazon Rumored to be Starting Kindle Pre-Orders in China Tomorrow

As a big fan of Amazon (I recently bought a new Kindle Paperwhite), this is cool news and indicates that Amazon is looking more at Asia, if the rumors are true, of course.

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

It’s currently the Hung King holidays here in Vietnam so people are taking a few days days off. But all around the rest of the region the news has been packed, so let’s take a look at what our bloggers selected as the top stories:

Steven’s pick: Chinese State Media: 60% of Consumers Are Starting To Think Apple Sucks

There’s a rather ugly element of Chinese state media patting themselves on the back for a smear campaign well implemented, and this is definitely not a fair piece of market research. But what it does show is that, regardless of the veracity of the numbers, Apple’s rough ride in China this year is far from over.

Charlie’s pick: China Names Porn Offenders tha Should Be Shut Down, Including Apple’s App Store

Chinese state media’s war on Apple continues, and as Steven’s pick above indicates, it seems to be working. But the charges seem to be getting increasingly odd. Porn? On the app store? Not the last time we checked.

Enricko’s pick: Studied Abroad and Returned to Vietnam: Startups That Defy the Brain Drain

Minh wrote a very interesting article about the people who came back to their motherland and seized opportunities there. These people have the advantage of understanding the local culture as well as having educational advantages from studying abroad. Developing countries, or Asia in general, need more of them to grow even faster. Come back and help develop your nation, folks!

Minh’s pick: CNNIC: Chinese E-commerce Market Exceeded $190 Billion in 2012

Almost hitting $200 billion is a huge number. Does that mean by 2015, the e-commerce market in China will be exceeding the USA and Europe? Last year, the US e-commerce market exceeded $200 billion, so China is catching up fast.

Willis’ pick: Tech Entrepreneurship is Brewing Up in Kathmandu, Nepal

We hear so much about tech and startups in Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, and China etc. This guest post on Nepal’s startup scene is refreshing and a good read. Although one of the Nepali companies I would recommend is Grespr, which seems missing in the article.

Minghao’s pick: Xiaomi Founder Lei Jun on the Pressures and Perils of Doing a Startup

I like Lei Jun’s sharing about his concerns when he started Xiaomi and how fear of failure propelled him towards success. For those who don’t know, Lei Jun is already a successful individual and investor prior to starting phone-maker Xiaomi. Xiaomi has since achieved more than one billion sales revenue in just the first half of 2012 and is recognized as one of the best startups in China.

Youshen and Emily’s pick: Beijing Startup Makes Invisible Masks To Protect You From Air Pollution

Youshen: I am a major fan of when business and technology aim to solve a problem. In this case, I am referring to the respiratory health risks of inhaling the PM2.5 pollution in the air in Beijing, China. With the toxic airborne particulate, Beijing residents are forced to don face masks to protect themselves against the risks of lung cancer, asthma and heart disease. Infipure had gone one step further by designing the mask for both functionality and the user. The “invisible” masks will help make users look good too. Given the documented effects of smog on babies, I am looking forward to Infipure’s upcoming sets for children.

Emily: I personally feel that it might be a revolutionary innovation that could change the way pollution masked are produced from now on. And as Youshen has mentioned, this startup has really made an effort to solve a problem, and in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Vanessa’s pick: It’s Official: Spotify Launches in Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong

When I first received news and told my friends that Spotify was launching in Singapore – all of them rejoiced. It has been a much awaited move for many music fans here in Asia. And as I write this, I’m listening to my favorite Les Misérables soundtrack on Spotify too!

(UPDATED to fix a number of typos throughout the post. Sorry about those).

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

I admit I take a lot of photos. I truly believe in the saying “a picture speaks a thousand words” and that photos are the best way to capture the finest moments that will never be replicated again. So apps like Burpple and Instagram are my personal favourites, and here’s another new photo app that I might possibly fall in love with – Shutterpair.

Shutterpair is an instant and easy way for users to share photos taken on their mobile photos and digital cameras via shared albums. So why would you want to have a Shutterpair account when you already have an Instagram account? The idea behind Shutterpair albums is that it is collaborative, where users can collectively upload photos from their Android or iOS devices directly to the selected photo album. So now with Shutterpair, my friends won’t be complaining that I’m slow uploading my photos again. Ever.

As for photos taken using digital cameras, users can also add them to the albums via Shutterpair’s web platform. You can also choose to share your albums privately with selective groups of people, or even share them via social media platforms. And the team has big dreams, and hopes to be as successful as the hugely popular Instagram. Co-founder Ritesh Angural elaborates:

Instagram is a place for individuals to showcase beautiful photos. [Our team members are] all Instagram fans ourselves but we feel taking photos on Instagram – and every other platform currently – is a solitary activity. They do not capture the aspect of taking photos in groups. Our belief is that photos taken together belong together; right from the moment you take them. That said, we aim to become the next Instagram, in a way that we view them as a role model.

Shutterpair pivots from travel idea

The idea of Shutterpair is in fact a pivot from being a travel app, named Rovoria, that the team was originally working on. Rovoria was a self-serve platform aimed at companies operating tourist attractions to build a mobile app to provide more information to tourists and feature a and simple drag-and-drop interface. Ritesh explains the reason for the pivot:

In a nutshell, that didn’t work out for us because most attractions didn’t care for a self-serve platform and the tourists we surveyed did not see a need for an app for every attraction they visited. That prompted us to go back to the drawing board. We recalled all the tourists we had spoken to and discovered four different problems they faced.

One, organizing a group trip was difficult. Two, there is a language barrier for some. Three, without internet, it was difficult to get around. Four, it was difficult to collect all the photographs taken together in one place. For the last problem, that was how Shutterpair started.

Shutterpair beta launched a week ago, and has already seen an encouraging 1,500 photo uploads. Ritesh also said that the team is seeing signs of organic growth, since Shutterpair can only be used in a group setting.

Future focus

The team comprises three National University of Singapore (NUS) graduates, James Dam, Joshua Newman, and Ritesh Angural with backgrounds in computer engineering. The friendship among the trio goes a long way back, with Joshua and Ritesh attending the NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) and scrubbing toilets together while serving their National Service. They are bootstrapped in this new venture at the moment.

On upcoming plans, Ritesh tells us:

One area of the app that we can do better is getting our users to take more photos from within the app. Majority of the photos till now have been uploaded via the camera roll on mobile or via the web platform. We’re working on features to make it more fun for users to take photos within Shutterpair but we’re unable to disclose more on that at this point.

Having played around the app, I realized that the upload feature from the camera roll is not obvious enough. And apparently I’m not the only one who has given such feedback. The team is also quick to adapt and has made changes to make it more easily discoverable. The latest version on the app store will also include the ability to invite people to your album via SMS, and opening the link within the SMS will automatically prompt you to download the app, or bring you straight to the album if you already have it on your phone.

The Shutterpair app is currently available for download on both the iTunes store and Google Play. Users can also expect the team to ship Windows Phone and Blackberry versions in the near future.

In order to fund and sustain itself, Singapore-based non-profit organization One Cent Movement has launched a food delivery project called WeFuel, which strives to deliver quality food for employees.

For a start, the team will be delivering soup dumplings (“xiǎo lóng bāo” in Chinese) within the Singapore central business district (CBD) area in the morning from 8.00 am to 12.00 noon. Each box of soup dumplings costs S$3 (US$2.43) and contains five of the steaming hot confections. To allow the law of economies of scale to work, WeFuel currently caters only to companies that place 60 or more orders at one time.

As a foodie myself, it sounds like a tough task delivering soup dumplings, having to pay particular attention that the skin is thick enough so that the stock does not leak – and also ensure it doesn’t harden as it cools down during delivery. According to Sean, who heads up this project, they will be finalizing certain sustainable packaging which allows the food to be kept warm for a 45-minute window period. All orders will be delivered via a private car initially, but that could change later.

The model pretty much works on volume, and Sean revealed that the project makes around S$20 (US$16.20) for a minimum order of 60 boxes. The team will also look into having other famous Singaporean delights such as chicken rice, char kway teow, carrot cake, wanton mee, and rojak in the future.

So now employees need not step out of their offices, and will be able to enjoy quality food at their own desks, which translates to more time at work. To be honest, I would think an occasional walk out of the office is good for employees, since sitting for long periods, especially when you do not maintain a good posture, might pose as a health risk.

If you are keen to find out more about WeFuel and its food delivery service, you can visit its website here.

I met Ai Ching (pictured right), co-founder at Piktochart two years back when I visited the Chinaccelerator space in Dalian and watched her pitch at its demo day in Beijing. For some loyal readers and supporters at Tech in Asia would also know that Piktochart was one of the Startup Arena finalists at our Startup Asia Singapore 2012 event as well.

And it’s also encouraging to know that Piktochart has since acquired more than 170,000 users, is currently profitable, and has an upgraded infographic builder. For today’s post, we wanted to know about Ai Ching and the Piktochart team a little more, and fire some questions about her philosophy as a female entrepreneur.

Tell us a little about yourself

Ai Ching: I love hardware although I am not an engineer and lately, my number one shopping site is Kickstarter. I did experimental psychology at university, and prior to starting up, I spent 15 months at Procter & Gamble (P&G).

What does your startup do, and what is your role?

Ai Ching: Piktochart is a web app that helps non-designers create beautiful infographics. We’re envisioning that text-based blogs would slowly morph into number-based infographics someday, and our vision is to present information in the most beautiful way possible.

I currently take charge of recruitment, a little finance, analytics, partnerships, UX, customer relationships, and ensure that the Piktochart’s team keeps shipping new code (or removing code bloat). My main focus for 2013 is on growth – both at company and personal level. I hope to have more partnerships with other companies and ensure that each and every one in the team takes away something valuable for the year.

How and why did you get started in this industry?

Ai Ching: When my co-founder, Andrea Zaggia, and I quit our day jobs, I was very fascinated with tech startups but had no business ideas in mind. Andrea and I both loved design and had great designers. And when we saw that the idea of infographics was going to become a permanent trend and there was no infographic editor out there, we wanted to create one that people could use.

Did you face any challenges in particular?

Ai Ching: Similar challenges that any startup would face – Hiring, growing, expanding, and looking for investors who would be like mentors to us

I understand that you stayed in China for a while to develop Piktochart. Care to share more? How did you seek help from relevant mentors, especially when you are in a foreign land?

Ai Ching: We were quite fortunate to find Chinaccelerator as they had a huge network of mentors who were mainly expatriates based in China. Finding a mentor who is experienced in our sector, be it data or presentation, and with the passion to really help us, is not easy. Regardless, we managed to get a couple of them.

You used to work for P&G. What was fundamentally different being in a corporate career as compared to a startup?

Ai Ching: The main reason why I left P&G was because the bureaucracy was always making things move slower. Once you spot a trend, it is so difficult to go through with it with the large amount of meetings and red tapes that comes with it.

On the other hand, a startup has much greater flexibility. That is why Jason Fried of 37signals recommends the strategy of having little or no meetings at all in a startup environment. I agree on that. Keeping lean, keeping agile, and staying hungry were all very attractive to me.

Do you think your gender has played a role in helping you gain an advantage over your male counterparts? (soft skills, personal touch, attention to detail, etc.) Has it been a disadvantage in any way?

Ai Ching: Females definitely bring a different “energy” to the organization. I find that they are generally less stuck in the mud when the going gets tough. Having the ability to multitask and having a super eye for detail would also complement the “Charge, Spartans” philosophy that most males have.

I don’t know about gaining an advantage. When I read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, I knew what she meant when she said that successful women attribute their success to “luck” and “help I got”, while men attribute their success to “my skills” and “my personality”. I have never felt anything that was truly discriminating towards females because the media, public, and investors these days are getting more well-versed with female co-founders. I know for sure that when we were in a networking event in Southeast Asia, women still tend to stand out because the ratio of men is to women is around 80 to 20. In the Silicon Valley, I do not recall a great disparity either.

In your opinion, what are the necessary skill-sets and attitudes required to succeed in the technology and startup industry?

Ai Ching: There are three:

1. Be humble enough to receive feedback and re-iterate/pivot. Quite a lot of people stick to their own ideas and are unable to kill their own baby. This happens with us too. We have to constantly find ways to challenge ourselves to break the rules.
2. Establishing a great company culture from the beginning. A lot of success is attributed to agile and lean environments which I do not disagree with, i.e. “fail faster”. Any startup is only going to survive if the team sticks around, constantly be motivated, and strives to learn new stuff every day.
3. Find joy in everything you do. Do you know what’s the difference between a person who is working versus a person who has actually found THE CALLING in their lives? The working person tries to finish up the codes from 9.00am to 5.00pm, praying that there will not be any bugs or coding issues. The person who finds it as a calling, derives joy in even the most mundane and annoying of tasks. Building a great product is only possible if the team is 100 percent into it, which includes emotional feelings too.

Do you have any female role models that you look up to?

Ai Ching: I am a big fan of Julia Hartz, co-founder and president at Eventbrite. I’ve heard Julia speak in an event and her energy is just contagious! And despite her roaring success, she still speaks with humility. I also love the culture she has established in her company.

I also look up to Danielle Morill, CEO and co-founder of Refer.ly. She’s extremely down-to-earth, not running blind into any trend without thinking it through (it took her 3 years to start Refer.ly). Andrea, my co-founder, has met her in Mountain View and we love what they are doing with its product and direction.

Perhaps another interesting fact that draws me to Danielle is both Refer.ly and Piktochart actually have husbands on the teams as CTO!

Do you have any advice for fellow female entrepreneurs?

Ai Ching: Just go and do it! Find what your strengths are, validate the market over and over again, and have the courage to take the first step.

On a more practical note: You could learn coding if you feel that you have the talent and passion for it. I would definitely recommend at least a bit of a HTML background so that you can edit the copy and website on your own, without bothering the programmers with really simple issues. I have met other female founders who got really frustrated because they felt that the codes were not rolled out fast enough. While at times that might be true, the coders sometimes have a reason for not shipping.

Are you married? How do you strike a balance between work and personal life?

Ai Ching: As mentioned, I am married to my CTO. Piktochart has been all-a-hustling for at least one and a half years now. The funny thing is when the husband and wife are both involved in the exact same business, it is not really like we need to find time to spend time together. When I am travelling, the last email gets shot out at around 2.00 to 3.00 am. When I am at home, the last email gets shot out around latest 9.00 to 10.00 pm.

I find it important to be really focused and keeping up a good fight on the business with joy. When necessary, long hour are not a problem because for one, the business requires me doing so and two, I am totally happy to do so. Otherwise, what is the point?

Was it difficult being on a husband and wife team? How do you both manage to separate personal life from work?

Ai Ching: Initially yes, I was impatient and really pushing all the buttons to get the product out faster. But after some time of understanding the business, I cannot be more grateful for a husband who can get things done. We barely need to discuss to get agreement because it usually comes as a mutual yes/no now.

Anything else you would like to add?

Ai Ching: I would love to get in touch with anyone who would like to visit us in Penang! We are attempting to start a makerspace and a space to invite international speakers to grow talents in Penang.

(Disclosure: Andrea frequently works on the coding of our site)

Xend is unique. At the very least, that’s what its founder, Bjorn Pardo, would have you believe. As he says:

We are very unique. Depending on the point of view, we could be considered as a courier, e-commerce or technology company. For most, we are a courier company primarily serving the e-commerce market. Internally, we consider ourselves a hybrid of the 3 above industries.

Unique or not, Xend does offer some innovations its competitors don’t. The playing field is rife with courier services, LBC, 2GO, JRS and Air21. You can even see the occasional FedEx and DHL truck scurrying around the metro on any given day. How Xend differs itself is on e-commerce.

Founded in 2004 as Xend Business Center, as a single proprietorship by Bjorn Pardo, in Makati City, Xend initially offered only international logistic and courier services. It wasn’t until 2006 that Xend started offering domestic courier services, and later that year, a door to door tracking system. In 2007, Xend was incorporated as Xend Business Solutions Inc. and moved to it’s new headquarters in Mandaluyong City. 2008 saw the release of its revolutionary myXend Online Shipping Platform, which provided online real-time booking, online waybill printing and auto-email shipment status notifications.

By focusing primarily on online establishments and sellers, Xend has quickly amassed a database of well over 50,000 partnered e-commerce merchants. And a quick look at this list reveals it is quite formidable, with the likes of Ebay.ph, Sulit.com.ph and PisoBid to name a few. But even if you’re not into e-commerce, or just a bit old fashioned, Xend has the capability to serve any business that needs documents or parcels delivered, not just online ones.

For sole founder Bjorn Pardo, innovation came out of necessity.

I started selling online as a teenager and my biggest problem was high shipping fees and inconvenient processes. I had to waste hours in my day just to bring parcels to the post office, fill out forms and email my customers their tracking numbers. On top of that, I was losing sales because of high shipping costs which were beyond my control. I knew there had to be a better way to do this so I founded Xend.

So what is this better way? According to their site, it involves just three simple steps. First, register for a myXend account from their website, which only takes a few seconds. Second, prepare your package for shipping. With Xend, there’s no minimum purchase required, and you can ship anything from a television to a pencil. You can either print out the waybill to attach to the package, or use a handwritten one, which you can get from the courier on pickup day. Finally, schedule a pickup date, and one of their couriers will be along to take up your package for delivery.

For the package itself, Xend offers 2 pouch sizes, measuring either a large 9×14 inches or an extra large 12×18 inches. The large pouch costs PHP 59 (US$ 1.43) to ship within Metro Manila and PHP 89 (US$ 2.16) to any other point in the country. For the XL pouch it’s PHP 79 (US$ 1.91) for Manila and PHP 139 (US$ 3.37) everywhere else. For either pouch, there is no limit on weight, as long as it’ll fit inside, it’s a go. Packages that can’t fit inside one of the pouches will have to be weighed though, and the pricing based on that weight. All couriers are equipped with their own weighing scales upon pick-up.

Xend offers a host of other features as well: scheduling, monitoring deliveries, waybill printing, all can be done online, no more calling customer service hotlines. Pick-ups are free, and Xend claims their service costs sixty percent less than the competition.[1] They’ll even pick up the tab for you if the delivery is late. Xend even ships abroad.

We are number one in our space now and we are the only ones who can consistently provide excellent door to door delivery. We can cut down your shipping process from 2 hours to 2 minutes. Imagine, we will pick up a pencil, if that is what you want to ship, for free and deliver it the next day within Metro Manila and within 1–2 days to anywhere else nationwide. Just schedule a pickup online before 2pm and will be there within the day. No need to call or anything, it’s all automated. It’s really that simple.

When asked if Xend has plans of expanding abroad:

Yes, that is in our plans. Initially in South East Asia but even further later on. We believe that the software we built can be applied anywhere in the region, even the world.

We recently covered GHN in Vietnam, like them, Xend has offered innovations in logistic and courier services custom tailored towards e-commerce, featuring fast and efficient deliveries, and accurate, real-time online tracking and monitoring.

From the left: UKP4 head Kuntoro Mangkusubroto and DKI Jakarta vice governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama

Lapor, the newest technology product made for Indonesian citizens to report wrongdoings in public services, including those dodgy extra administration ‘fees’ incurred here and there, is doing a fine job. Earlier today, the DKI Jakarta provincial government has signed an agreement to jump onboard the Lapor service. At today’s event in the capital, I got to discuss the service a bit deeper with the ones who built it: the President’s Delivery Unit of Development Monitoring and Oversight (UKP4) ¹.

Since November, the Lapor website has received about 60,000 visitors and over 222,000 pageviews. In average, the service receives 376 reports of corruption or misdeeds every day, with 27 of them having passed the validation process for further follow up. There are 749 comments made by regular folks who made 1,578 back-up of the claims submitted to the site. Lapor is now cooperating with 61 Indonesian government ministries and units, as well as today’s show of support from the Jakarta provincial government.

Jakarta authorities have actually cooperated with Lapor since January, and today’s agreement signage was just a formality. Vice governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama said that as the capital city of Indonesia, Jakarta must be the national example for other provinces to follow – and that includes being integrated with the Lapor system. The Lapor team will be looking to add Ambon municipal and the Indragiri Hulu district in the near future.

What happens when there’s a report made to a non-cooperating provincial government? The Lapor team will still conduct a follow-up with the user, but they can only give advice about the normal bureaucratic procedure. Each province has its own autonomy, so the Lapor team cannot intervene unless the provincial government has agreed to cooperate with this system.

How does Lapor work?

So how does Lapor work exactly? After a report is filed, Lapor will verify it in the space of three days. If the report is valid, then the team will make a follow-up and solve it in 10 days’ time. The valid report itself will be handled by the related government agencies. If the report is deemed invalid, but you still want to make your case, then the public discussion feature inside the Lapor website can help support your cause. You can see the overall back-end process here:

Those stated processing days are, of course, the ideal situation. UKP4 head Kuntoro Mangkusubroto said that the Lapor team will make a follow-up to a related government agency about each valid report. If the agency doesn’t respond in one month, then the Lapor team will report this to the president’s office.

Most of the reports are made via SMS. People can do so by texting it to 1708 ². The system will automatically convert the SMS report to a website report format, where people can support and comment on it. If the user doesn’t have an internet connection, they can still view their thread’s progress by texting “TL (space) report number” to 1708. Reports made via the website or apps will receive a follow-up via email, whereas reports made by SMS will receive follow up via SMS. Which makes good sense.

Inaccurate reports?

There are concerns that perhaps Lapor can be misused to report the wrong person or to victimize someone. The team said that they will first validate all of the reports and the respective related agencies will make a thorough follow-up on each of the valid ones. So they won’t blindly trust all the given reports that come to the system. Furthermore, there is this social feature whereby other people can help verify if the report if valid or not by looking through the comments made on it.

It’s not every day that you see the Indonesian government building such a well thought out product and system. I am quite impressed with the details the UKP4 team pays attention to, including the service’s overall design.

I have stated my concern about the government’s ugly website designs in the past, but Lapor is in a different league. A UKP4 representative told me that it may be because most of the team members are still quite young, just 25 to 33 years old. Most of the team also has working experience in a private sector before joining the UKP4.

Whatever the reason, UKP4’s Lapor system looks really good. Almost everyone now can report any wrongdoings via SMS. Even better, harnessing the very social nature of Indonesians, they can also help the government verify the reports via the website’s social features.

Now if only the Lapor app comes pre-installed within the country’s handsets, and perhaps also come bundled with popular internet packages, then I can see no reason why Lapor cannot become a powerful weapon to fight injustice. The presidential’s own working unit is the driving force behind its creation, so they can definitely make that happen.

The full Amazon Appstore new line-up in Asia-Pacific – it has launched already in Japan – is here, with larger nations highlighted in bold:

• American Samoa
• Australia
• Bhutan
• Cambodia
• Christmas Island
• Cocos (Keeling) Islands
• Cook Islands
• French Polynesia
• Hong Kong
• India
• Laos
• Macao
• Mariana Islands
• Marshall Islands
• Micronesia
• Mongolia
• Myanmar
• Nepal
• New Zealand
• Niue
• Norfolk Island
• Palau
• Papua New Guinea
• Philippines
• Samoa
• Solomon Islands
• South Korea
• Sri Lanka
• Taiwan
• Thailand
• Timor-Leste
• Tokelau
• Tuvalu
• Vanuatu
• Vietnam
• Wallis and Futuna

With developers and customers in those countries now having access to Amazon’s catalog of apps, it might soon lead to the company’s hardware, namely the Kindle Fire and Fire HD tablets – going on sale there at a later date. But the Amazon App Store can be used on any Android device.

By the way, there are some seriously odd places on the global list, such as Antarctica, and the Heard Island and McDonald Island (Wikipedia says: “Population: 0”).

I’ll be honest, I once looked down or ignored store discounts or reward systems. They all seemed too contrived, so tedious, so totally not worth it and too much of a hassle. And then, before I knew it, bills are popping up out of nowhere and then suddenly I’m thinking oh my, we can get 15 percent off? Sign me up! Because these discounts really do add up.

ZAPtag is one of the newest players in this burgeoning field here in the Philippines. It claims to bring an innovative approach to the table, not even requiring a smartphone or data plan. It lets customers earn instant rewards, from five to twenty percent discount, and features jackpot prizes and coupons, all from lots of dining, shopping, and lifestyle establishments. On the inside track, ZAPtag makes money by charging merchants a fee for every transaction and also charges users an annual membership fee.

Two years ago Dustin Cheng and Terence Lok, also the founders of Words.PH, created the deal site Deal Dozen. What they learned was that, though great with initial sales, the merchants in charge were unaware if any of their customers came back to make return purchases – a common problem in the daily deals industry. It meant that retailers had no way of telling if they were building up a steady chain of return customers, or how effective their business was in terms of retention. What they needed was a loyalty program, and the seeds for ZAPtag were planted. Dustin tells us:

We knew there were a lot of out-of-the-box loyalty platforms out there, but these platforms were oftentimes too hard to use, too expensive to set up and did not provide merchants with adequate data. They were also very technical, and not easy to use for managers. Also by virtue of being an in-store loyalty platform, it was only good for that single merchant.

Terence and Dustin were joined in the fouding of ZAPtag by Justin Lim, entrepeneur and former Johnson & Johnson brand manager, and Angelique Uy, previously marketing manager for Branders.com, a B2B e-commerce site out of California. ZAPtag is also one of the startups that won funding from Kickstart Ventures, a wholly owned subsidiary of Globe Telecom.

To differentiate ourselves from all this, we wanted something that users can use no matter where they were, a universal loyalty card accepted across all merchants. We wanted to remove the hassle of needing to sign up for each and every loyalty card out there, only to leave them all at home.

Our goal is to acquire users through reward offerings from thousands of merchants. We are also looking at integration into ticketing systems. Imagine never needing to hold another paper ticket again! We see the ZAPtag being deeply integrated in our daily lives getting rewards every time there is spending! As for our long term goal, since our product operates as a platform, mimicking operation in other regions will be doable.

Zapping with tags

The no-smartphone-needed approach centers around a physical device called a ZAPtag. Once signed up with the service, you don’t even need to get ZAPtag itself right away, you can start earning points by entering your mobile number at their ZAP point-of-sale terminals, located at all their partner merchants. Once points have been saved up, you can purchase a ZAPtag for PHP 100 (US$ 2.42), either from the site or again from any partner merchant. You can also get a ZAPtag free with any purchase from their partner establishments. To use your points, simply tap the ZAPtag on the POS terminal, and one point on the tag is equal to one peso.

The list of merchants partnered with ZAPtag is impressive as well. From cuisine to gadgets and electronics, sporting goods to fitness centers, ZAPtag has you well covered no matter what lifestyle you lead, even if that lifestyle has you living without a smartphone. Dustin elaborates:

The ZAPtag is independent of an app. It doesn’t even require you to own smartphone. We will eventually have an app as an alternative to the physical ZAPTag. Right now, customers check their account on our website.

There are other loyalty programs out there of course, other discount-led promotions, but the ZAPtag team hopes to edge out this competition with the innovation and ease of use they’ve incorporated into their tags. One area is multi-store partnerships. ZAPtag plays host to a much larger collection of partner merchants.

As for the competition, Dustin confidently explains, “Perxclub and Pouch recently launched their stamp-earning mobile apps in the Philippines. But then again, we’re different from them as we give customers instant gratification – no need to wait for your 10th stamp to enjoy your reward as ‘cash back points’ can be used to pay for purchases right away. Plus, since mobile internet penetration in the Philippines is less than 20 percent, the ZAPtag doesn’t even require a smartphone or a data plan.”

The three-day event heeds the model motto of “failing fast, succeed faster”. It will impart lean startup skills, focusing on the process and validation, such as identifying the problem, testing the prototype, and eliminating barriers to a viable business model. Some of the more specific topics that will be covered during the workshop include customer development, lean UX, landing page design, and how you can develop experiments to get your startup ideas validated. Attendees are expected to walk away with the know-how to build revolutionary products – and products that people will want.

So what sets LeanTOKYO apart from other workshops? Ariba Jahan, global coordinator for Lean Startup Machine Tokyo, tells us:

The key tool people will be using is the Validation Board, this is what makes us so unique. We don’t only educate others on lean methodology, we make sure you get to walk through the process and get your ideas validated.Then you can apply this learning towards any and every future ideas. LSM was selected to be in TechStars for this innovative Validation Board. The Validation Board allows users to test their startup ideas before exhausting time or money. It allows users to strategize their goals, develop experiments and monitor progress. Then, they can make faster decisions, improve team accountability and build not only better products, but products that will actually solve an existing problem.

The event also aims to bring some of the best practices of Silicon Valley, adapting it to the heart of Tokyo. Some of the mentors at LeanTOKYO include:

• Hiro Maeda, managing partner at Open Network Lab
• Toshihisa Wanami, founder at Lean Startup Japan
• Ian McFarland, group CTO at Digital Garage and founder and president at Neo
• Yoshi Oikawa, CTO at Salesforce.com Japan
• Yusuke Takahashi, founder at Appsocially
• Pieter Franken, co-founder at Safecast
• Chiaki Hayashi, co-founder at Loftwork

As this marks the inaugural workshop in Tokyo, tickets are expected to sell out fast. So for interested participants – as long as you’re keen to learn – you can visit their website here to find out more. Better still, for Tech in Asia readers, you can enjoy 15 percent off ticket prices if you sign up here with the discount code 15leantokyo.

Got more questions? Ariba is also reachable at ariba[at]leanstartupmachine[dot]com.

If two is company, and three’s a crowd, does seven make it crowdfunding? The seven-man team at The Spark Project would like to make it so. Though the idea of bringing the technology of crowdfunding to the Philippines has been around for a while, it was only last year that plans for this project were actually laid out. The Spark Project website was officially launched on February 16th, 2013.

According to co-founder Patch Dulay, “The Spark Project is a crowdfunding community where Filipinos can support and fund their creative, innovative, and passion driven projects.” Of its founding members, Patch says:

Our group is a mix of IT geeks and social entrepreneurs. We find it such a good team-up because our group can develop web technologies and at the same time bring them to market.

To date, The Spark Project has completed funding for its four pilot campaigns. Hinabi sa Pilipinas was for the production of a locally designed watch. Offbeat Pursuits aimed to produce a travel video to share the amazing experience of travelling in the country. Paint-Some-Happy wants to paint childrens walls to give hope and inspiration through art. Finally, Lagon Custom Guitars sought to revive the art of Master Fretter and Luthier Agustin Lagon’s hand-crafted bamboo guitars. All told, TSP raised a total of PHP 144,066 (US$ 3,483) for the four projects, with more on the way. Patch tells us:

We are rounding up the next batch of spark projects. This time, we’ll be launching them one after the other. The goal is to have a new project every week or two. We just received seed money on March 16 from the Project Pagsulong grant competition, a Philippine-wide search for innovative ideas that help build the nation, where we placed third. We also won best pitch at the ‘ASEANpreneur Idea Canvas’ competition on April 6th, and got additional seed money.

The Spark Project is certainly not the only crowdfunding site in the country and certainly not the first. Specifically, ArtisteConnect stands as a possible rival and competitor. However, as ArtisteConnect marketing and web manager Diego Mapa told us last year, that site is currently mostly focused on music and film, leaving the playing field wide open for a range of creative ideas for funding.

Patch Dulay doesn’t seem to mind the competition either, “It really depends on how you look at it. Any crowdfunding site can be a competitor, but we choose to see them as allies. After all, most crowdfunding sites we find today aim to give people a chance to fund their passion-driven ideas to reality. And at the end of the day, what we really want is for more people to take control, and start up their own initiatives.”

Running a funding campaign is relatively straightforward, and it won’t even cost you anything initially. That comes into play once funds are raised, as TSP deducts a minimal five to ten percent for every peso raised, on top of PayPal fees. Take heart that this goes toward maintenance and development of products and services. To begin, simply go to the site and hit the ‘Create’ button to fill out an online form with questions about your proposed project. Once the TSP team reviews your application, ensuring alignment with the project guidelines, you’ll receive feedback on your application.

Backing an existing funding campaign is even easier. Simply navigate to the desired project’s page and hit the ‘Back this Project” button. Credit card payments are through PayPal, though you can make local bank deposits through BPI.

Patch Dulay adds:

The Spark Project takes on a community approach to crowdfunding. The relationship we build with our projects start even before they launch their campaign through the site and continues even after their campaign ends. We help innovators refine their projects and do follow ups once their campaigns are done. Because what we really aim to do in the long run is to build a startup community that goes beyond the platform.

Look up the word Bayanihan on Google, and the common images you see are of a group of men carrying a grass hut across a field or open plain. This is a very old Filipino tradition in the country and mountain areas, a united community helping a neighbor move their house, with no reward sought, except maybe a thank you and a handshake. Alas, this archaic tradition has long fallen out of fashion. Perhaps The Spark Project can revive this kind of co-operation, albeit in a more modern fashion. Well, if its pilot projects are any indication, I’d say The Spark Project is off to a good start.

(UPDATE: Corrected the launch date and the fee percentage)

At the sidelines of the Startup Asia Singapore conference, I had the opportunity to meet Nobuaki Kitagawa (pictured above), CEO of CyberAgent Ventures China. He revealed that there are plans to increase the US$15 million fund targeted at the Southeast Asia (SEA) region to $20 million by the end of the year.

Nobuaki also said that CyberAgent Ventures has a keen eye on the Thailand market and started looking into it just three to four months ago. The current situation of the Thai market seemed favorable to them, and he is seeing more accelerators and seed investors popping up in the scene, in addition to the strong support that is provided by the ecosystem. He also noted that there are not many venture capital funds in Thailand. With CyberAgent Ventures focusing on series A and B funding, Nobuaki sees Thailand as a timely opportunity for them.

With presence already in countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam, Nobuaki is sure that they will be establishing an office in Thailand in order to be close to the market. Unfortunately there are no startups who have grabbed their attention yet, and they are still in the midst of meeting more in order to find the right fit. When asked about the kind of startups they are looking at, he tells us that they are looking at sectors involving B2C consumer internet and advertising, which pretty much follows the line of businesses that CyberAgent (TYO:4751) operates in Japan.

A new fund for South Korea this year?

Apart from Thailand, he also said that the CyberAgent company has entered South Korea, and has adopted a slightly different strategy as compared to China and SEA. The latter regions are developing markets and have much growth potential. Hence, most startups they look out for would be in consumer internet and online advertisement services.

On the other hand, as South Korea is a slightly more mature market, CyberAgent has a more specific approach, focusing on smartphone applications. With smartphone apps being a global platform, coupled with a large pool of talented Korean developers with a global vision, all factors seem favorable for them to establish a presence in the Asia Pacific region. In fact, CyberAgent Ventures made an investment in KakaoTalk back in 2011, and opened a Seoul office back in October 2012.

With this, they are very eager to set up an individual fund for the Korean market. Nobuaki explains that it is still in its preliminary stages, but could be established late this year.

He also added that the flow of money is currently all over the place, with both Chinese and South Korean startups looking to enter SEA and Japan, and Japan looking to China and SEA. In his opinion, the Southeast Asian internet community seems immature, but CyberAgent Ventures will be able to lead good exit plans if CyberAgent effectively expands into the region. It also hopes to help enhance the startup ecosystem with its networks.

When asked about its investments in Indonesia, Nobuaki also reveals that it will be soon making an investment in two startups within the gaming and e-commerce sectors pretty soon. Each investment will be under US$1 million. We’ll keep our eyes peeled for those.

PropertyGuru announced this afternoon that it has formed a strategic partnership with Far East Organization to launch a new site called Luxury Gallery showcasing Singapore’s premiere luxury residential developments.

The Luxury Gallery boasts of being a first-of-its-kind collaboration between the two powerhouses in the Singapore real estate market which aims to specifically cater to affluent local and foreign real estate investors. The new luxury site will allow luxury property buyers to browse a delectable selection of Far East Organization developments in Singapore. More information, such as a virtual tour, the location, and floorplans will also be readily available for interested buyers on the new portal.

At present, it lists four luxury Far East Organization properties on the new site. On today’s launch PropertyGuru Group CEO and co-founder Steve Melhuish said:

The launch of the Luxury Gallery forms an integral part of PropertyGuru’s ongoing strategy of growing its core business of offering property purchase options to the property seeker. Our research shows that the demand for luxury residential properties continue to rise with keen interest from new and recurring investors.

For interested investors out there, you can now register as a Luxury Gallery member here to access the materials.

Another really long list of startups this week from all across the region. Remember, for startup tips and story suggestions, feel free to email us. Alternatively, you can send tips here and/or tell us about your startup here. Enjoy this week’s list:

1. Qlubbr | Singapore

Singapore’s Qlubbr is a brand new social nightlife app that focuses on gigs, festivals, and clubs. It helps people discover nightlife events in Singapore, and this startup has plans to expand in the region.

2. Lavandera | Philippines

Lavandera aims to streamline the laundry service industry in the Philippines and is designed to be used by both owners and customers of laundromats.

3. LongPlay | Singapore

LongPlay is a very fun iPhone app that allows your friends to listen to your music. It originally started as a web service before launching its shiny new mobile app.

4. Coconuts | Thailand

Founded by journalist and entrepreneur Byron Perry in September 2011, Coconuts Media is a local review and news media company that now covers news in Bangkok and Manila – with a Singapore site scheduled to launch soon. The startup has also recently received funding from angel investors in Silicon Valley

5. FunSpot | Singapore

FunSpot is a Singapore-based mobile social gaming company that recently announced a partnership with Indonesia’s largest telco, Telkomsel, to bring FunSpot’s services into neighboring Indonesia.

6. Geeky.vn | Vietnam

Geeky.vn is an interesting startup that ranks developers after putting them through a series of tests. It’s to help companies identify talented developers to recruit.

7. Wantedly | Japan

Wantedly is a Japan-based social recruiting site that was built on the belief that good hires usually happen through social recommendations. Read the startup founding story here.

8. KimZua | Singapore

Instead of heading to brick-and-mortar shops to purchase paper gifts and joss sticks for departed loved ones, Singaporeans now have the alternative to purchase them online at KimZua. Yes, it’s an e-commerce site dedicated to gifts for dead friends.

9. Pedala Bike Messengers | Philippines

Pedala Bike Messengers is a bicycle courier service in Manila founded and born out of the gas crisis in 2008 which aims to help companies save money and beat the traffic. It’s also a method to reduce the carbon footprint of companies.

10. Batdongsan | Vietnam

Launched in 2008, Batdongsan is one of Vietnam’s top real estate listings sites which has shown impressive growth statistics.

11. Maskr | Singapore

Maskr is a privacy service that allows you to create an unlimited number of free, anonymous aliases that can be tied to a single email address that you own.

12. Eventifier | India

Eventifier archives your events by collecting posts using the events’ official hashtags across major social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. The startup has recently concluded a financing round for an undisclosed sum from KAE Capital and Chennai-based incubator The Startup Centre.

13. ImpulseFlyer | Singapore

ImpulseFlyer is a Singapore members-only online luxury travel site. It has just launched an iOS app, but has no plans to develop one for the Android platform as they believe that most of its members are iPhone users.

14. BrightPod | India

Mumbai-based startup Synage Software is taking on the world’s top project management web apps – things like Basecamp and Trello – with its minimalist and good-looking BrightPod. This will launch to the public next week, but TechinAsia readers can get early access right now.

15. Kuaidi Dache | China

Chinese startup Kuaidi Dache (meaning “fast taxis”) is a taxi-finding app that has flagged down seed funding this week. It currently operates in Shanghai and nearby Hangzhou.

16. CocCoc | Vietnam

CocCoc is a Russian-financed Vietnamese search engine that plans on pumping another $100 million into its business in the next decade to battle it out with Google.

17. Soccer Ticker | Indonesia

Soccer Ticker is a mobile application for BB10 that provides users with live soccer updates and scores and supports major European leagues. This application was also the overall winner of the Blackberry JamHack Asia competition.

18. VietnamWorks | Vietnam

VietnamWorks, Vietnam’s biggest recruitment firm, announced the other day that it has been acquired by En-Japan, one of Japan’s top online HR firms.

19. Iwannabuy | China

Iwannabuy is an e-commerce startup from China that caters to expats living in China. Uniquely, it supports payments in Bitcoin.

Related Startup Stories

• No Funding, No Rich Daddy, Founder of M-Stars in Indonesia Started Up His Way
• IdeaSpace Gives Seed Funding to 10 Civic-Minded Startups from the Philippines
• Kabam Launches $50 Million Fund to Bring Japanese Games to the West
• For the Future of Chinese Startups, Tencent’s WeChat Must Not Subsidize the Telcos
• Peter Cauton: Inspiring Techpreneurs to Take One Great Leap
• 15 Startups Awarded $4.85 Million Worth of Grants from SPRING Singapore
• 25 of Asia’s Top Photo Apps to Take On Instagram

Events

Join us at our upcoming Tech in Asia Meetup in Singapore, happening on April 25th:

• Singapore Meetup: How Memebox Bootstrapped to $1 Million Annual Revenue

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

Corruption is quite big in Indonesia. It’s very much normal – and even a habit – just to look the other way when we are dealing with government officials here. We have to follow their orders, and if not, we won’t be able to get anything done by a public service. This includes paying more “fees” for a lot of things, like unauthorized administration fees, or simply just to “motivate” the officials to deal with our matters more quickly.

Thankfully now we can do something about it and report them quickly using the government’s latest online reporting system called Lapor (meaning report in Indonesian). Basically if people want to report improper conduct done by any public service, they can do so with this online service. The service is launched by Open Government Indonesia, an initiative to promote transparency, public participation, and innovation across government departments, and is coordinated by government unit UKP4.

I gave the service a try and so far it looks very promising. The website has a clean and simple look. Users can register themselves easily with Facebook or Twitter, and they can then use the service.

Filing a report on the site is very easy and effective. You only need to choose one of the public service categories, then fill in your report and send it. There is an option for you to upload any supporting files too, like pictures or videos of the reported misconduct or act of corruption. Users can then opt to make the report discreetly, and also remain anonymous.

Users can also file a report without going online by sending the report via SMS to 1708. In fact, about 50 percent of the reports made come from handphone messages. And just to make sure Indonesians have all the access they need to participate on Lapor, there are apps for Android, and Blackberry, with an iOS version to come soon.

Indonesia is very social, and Lapor also has social features. Users can look up reports made by other people (there’s also a “hot reports” section shown on the right side of the website), comment on them, share, and even support them. But sadly you can’t “unsupport” a report after you clicked the support button.

So far there have been some success stories derived from the service. One guy reported that he had to wait two months to change his ownership certificate details, while the correct procedure states that the process only takes about five days. Only 50 minutes after he made the report on Lapor, the user received a follow-up from the online service that he can already get his certificate back – in line with the promised procedure. You can see a few more success stories from Lapor here.

I am personally very excited with this new service. Now at least Indonesian citizens have some power in their hands to fight against injustice happening in our public service system. If this goes well, I can imagine our public service getting a lot better because the officials would be afraid of being reported by users.

Satu Layanan launches officially too

Open Government Indonesia project also fully launched its government information portal service called “Satu Layanan.” The only notable difference the portal has compared to its beta version is the number of government information services within it, which has grown to 111 from the previous 50. But I find the site’s implementation isn’t exactly totally up to par. When I tried to access information about business licenses, it prompted me back to the homepage instead. So far the site says that there are around 72,000 visitors that have accessed it.

All in all, the government’s effort to cater to more Indonesian citizens using technology is getting better by the day. If the implementation is as good as the idea, then I can definitely see these two services being used routinely by many Indonesians.

(Source: DailySocial)

Credit: Googleblog.blogspot.ca

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) announced yesterday that that its Google Apps will be used for educational purposes by 10 million Malaysian students, teachers, and parents. Furthermore, the government will also ‘deploy’ Chromebooks to be used in the country’s primary and secondary schools. VentureBeat believes that the government chose Chromebooks because of their relative affordability. All of this is to support Malaysia’s 12-year education blueprint.

The government plans to provide 4G internet access, a virtual learning platform, and a minimum 10:1 ratio of students to computers to all 10,000 schools in Malaysia. Those Chromebooks will definitely help the students get more familiar with computers, and of course will also make sure Google is very much central to people’s lives starting in the early school years.

Google Apps for Education has gained quite a few partners across the Asia Pacific region in the past few years. Among them are Thailand’s Khon Kaen University, Indonesia’s Petra University, the Philippines’ Commission for Higher Education, Singapore’s Ministry of Education, and India’s University of New Delhi faculty of management. There are currently 3,000 schools worldwide that are using Chromebooks for educational purposes.

(Source: Google via VentureBeat)

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.

It’s rare to see people who are willing to offer inspiration and help, especially as we know sometimes the Internet is full of haters. But let’s not get into that. Let’s just talk about people who love to help genuinely.

Peter Cauton is the guy behind Juan Great Leap, aptly refered to as the Filipino Startup Movement. It is a Philippines-based innovation forum. He aims to inspire others to take that one great leap into the world of entrepreneurship.

Ever curious, I asked Peter some questions, basically to find out more where his passion for inspiring startups and hopeful entrepreneurs comes from:

What was that defining moment when you made a conscious decision that helping others is what you want to do?

Peter: In 2008, I made the biggest career decision of my life – I took the leap, kissed my corporate career goodbye and went full-time to help my struggling startup. Considering it was in the middle of the recession and I had a newborn son, it was an idiotic decision.

By God’s grace, it worked out. In 2011, not only was I making a good living running my own firm, I also founded more startups.

I just felt incredibly blessed. There was a great need in me to pay it forward. At first I thought, perhaps I could write a book! It would consist of some of the lessons I learned in leaving corporate and developing my startup. But after some months, I found that it was just a huge step to develop material from scratch into a book. So I thought of something I had never thought I do – write a blog.

I remember writing my first post. I dilly-dallied a lot, postponing pushing the ‘publish’ button for as long as I can. In many ways, starting a blog was scarier than writing a book. The exposure was instant. What if people hated what I wrote? Or thought “this guy is a hack”?

But I thought, like my startup leap, nothing worthwhile is ever accomplished without some risk. And so I clicked publish.

The blog has almost taken a life of its own now. I totally did not forecast how much it would resonate with people. Its been an amazing blessing for me.

What are your current projects? Follow up to Juan Great Leap event?

Peter: I am very busy helping out the startups I have helped found: STORM, Searchlight, Mobile Academy, Stream Engine, as well as a couple more in incubation.

For Juan Great Leap, I do a lot of advocacy work to promote startups.

The biggest things we plan are the Juan Great Leap conferences. In the last one, sponsored by Ayala, we attracted over 200 people to a learning session/panel discussion. We are planning another one on March 2nd: a mass ‘speed dating’ event with 20 awesome startup founders.

These bigger events are geared towards creating a mass learning opportunity for participants. We also hold a smaller meetup, called Open Coffee, every month with around 40 to 50 people, which is geared towards collaboration and helping one another. It is open to people from any part of the startup process from “I have an idea” to “I have just sold my startup.” The main attraction in this event is the open floor where people have two minutes to pitch anything to the group – an idea, a problem to solve, a need, a survey. It’s pretty fun!

Aside from these, I meet two to three entrepreneurs for coffee every Saturday morning. We talk about everything and anything – from startup ideas, outlining opportunities, and even the spiritual side to startups. A couple of people I’ve met at Startup Saturdays have become dear friends of mine, some also who I’ve had the privilege to mentor.

What do you think are the greatest challenges for Filipino tech startups?

Peter: There aren’t enough entrepreneurs to take on the multitude of great ideas which are available. Right now, you see the same people in startup events – this is very good of course, as we are creating a strong community, but we need more people to join in.

The biggest challenge is to inspire even more Filipinos to take that great leap!

And normally in Singapore, we can easily purchase from the shop located at most local markets, but here’s an alternative for Singaporeans who would want to purchase at the comfort of their own homes: KimZua.com.

Kimzua, in Hokkien dialect when translated directly, also means gold paper. I first noticed the site when my friend told me that he ordered a paper kayak online for another friend who passed on due to cancer. He then convinced me to visit the website, which I thought would be boring and traditional with an unattractive layout, but to my surprise, I saw this:

In all honesty, I was impressed because I didn’t expect anyone to design a site with such flashy colours and a vibrant layout. After all, it’s an e-commerce site dedicated to gifts for friends in the other world (aka spirits). They sell items ranging from paper clocks and paper accessories to paper cars and paper houses. And for those busy bees or people who simply don’t know what to pack in, there are special packages available too.

Also, the team is committed to protecting the environment amidst preserving traditions. According to the site, it says:

That is why we source for alternative paper materials around the world, such as bamboo and hemp fibres, that emit less smoke during combustion. We also use recycled paper for 33% of our paper products to reduce the effect on deforestation.

It might sound bizarre to some, but hey, it’s an offline business brought online. Perhaps another noteworthy startup in the “spirit” of this post to take note of is UK-based Rent a Mourner, which supplies people to boost visitor numbers at funerals.

And for those who are interested to find out more about Kimzua.com, you can visit the site here.

Vietnam just might be the first Asian nation to legalize gay marriage later this year. The upper echelons have been discussing legalizing since mid-2012 and the gay community has been waiting with bated breath with gay pride demonstrations and literature.

And the internet has been heating up with support for the LGBT movement in Vietnam too. My Best Gay Friends, a series of nine Youtube videos made in Ho Chi Minh city, has gone viral in Vietnam – the eighth episode garnering over 1.4 million views so far. The number may seem small in contrast to PSY’s Gangnam Style, but to put it in context, Vietnam’s top music videos rarely break three million views. So, it’s a huge step in the direction of getting the mainstream Vietnamese population on board with gay rights.

My Best Gay Friends – a hit-tip to the Bangkok Post for spotting this – humorously follows the lives of various people in the LGBT community as they celebrate birthdays, hanging out with each other in the city, and go through the trials of life in Ho Chi Minh city. The issues range from mundane topics to serious things like marriage and perception in modern society. Bonus, it’s absolutely hilarious. The channel that’s been posting the series has been doing videos in support of gay pride since 2007. My Best Gay Friends started last year and the most recent episode came out three weeks ago, and the popularity hasn’t abated. Each episode has broken a million views.

Last year, Vietnam had its first ever Gay Pride parade in Hanoi, the country’s capital, where parents came out in support of their children who had come out of the closet. This is particularly inspiring in a country where being gay is generally laughed at and scorned. Families have been known to disown their children upon discovering their sexuality, and the words “bị bi đê”, from the French, literally implies that being LGBT is a disease. So the video going viral underlines growing support for the Vietnamese LGBT community and a possible counter to common misconceptions.

You can check out the first episode here and then you might get into the whole series as well:

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

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

1. DecoAlbum | Japan

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

2. Hipvan | Singapore

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

3. Wooplr | India

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

4. SgCarMart | Singapore

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

5. Perk | Singapore

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

6. MailBird | Indonesia

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

7. Roomorama | Singapore

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

8. Billpin | Singapore

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

9. EyeFly3D | Singapore

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

10. My Savvy Kid | India

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

11. Burufly | Indonesia

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

12. RockItDub | The Philippines

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

13. Luxola | Singapore

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

From Startup Arena

14. NetizenTesting | Malaysia

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

15. Mmixr | Hong Kong

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

16. DodoHub | Singapore

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

17. Framebench | India

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

18. RichMediaAds | Malaysia

RichMediaAds helps users to create gorgeous, engaging HTML5 ads.

19. Cinnamon | Singapore

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

20. Zocial | Thailand

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

21. Lots of Buttons | Hong Kong

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

22. Triibe | Singapore

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

23. Xunta | China

Xunta is an online dating site for gays in China.

24. Puddding | Cambodia

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

25. SocialAgent | China

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

26. Tell My Friends | Singapore

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

27. SocialHappen | Thailand

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

28. DealPOS | Indonesia

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

29. Pixbento | Singapore

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

30. Pombai | Thailand

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

31. 8Villages | Indonesia

8Villages links businesses and public partners to rural populations.

32. Hoozin | Israel

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

33. ShopBust | Singapore

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

Related Startup Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In summary, Taobao strategy for 2013: MOAR.

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

#14:26: MingShen says that they have about 7 million unique visitors a day currently. Nuffnang is a Singapore startup company with operations worldwide.

#14:25: In 2010, they were making $10million revenue. Presently, they have about double digit growth in revenue.

#14:28: Regarding the success of Nuffnang, he said it is contributed mainly due to luck and flawless execution as well.

#14:29: SPH has approached them regarding acquisition years ago. SPH offered a valuation of S$2 million initially.

#14:31: He makes more than enough to fly business class!

#14:32: Ming Shen says that as a small company, being quick and decisive has competitive advantage compared to bigger organisations.

#14:34: He finds that rejecting offers from potential investors and acquisitions is not challenging at all. To him, the most challenging problem so far was when one of his developers deleted the entire database!

#14:35: Nuffnang has just opened an office in UK.

#14:36: The key to expand out of Singapore- one can do it alone, or enter into a good partnership. He mentioned that Malaysia is the most profitable, firstly because of the productivity of the workers.

#14:37: Besides Nuffnang, they founded a social media seeding community called Churp Churp which helps spread brand messages, an online shopping mall called Jipaban and an online video producing company.

#14:39: Regarding the current entrepreneur system right now, Ming Shen says that the focus is just to make money (at least for sustainability) instead on just focusing on getting funding. Start lean at the beginning, and find a strategy to cover the bases as soon as possible.

#14:40: Ming Shen believes in investing in a person- a true entrepreneur. In his words, a true entrepreneur is someone who is willing to takes risks in time, money and even life.

#14:43: That’s all for the the live coverage!

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

Onto the next sharing session, we have Indonesia’s Andy Zain to share about his country’s startup ecosystem. Andy is the founder of Mobile Monday Indonesia and the director of Jakarta Founder’s Institute. Here’s what he got to say:

#12:51: Titled “Looking for startup worthy for Indonesian market.” Andy kicks things off by sharing a few Indonesian data. With a population of 240 million people, Indonesia is an interesting and pretty much connected market. With 280 million mobile phone connections in the country – more SIM cards than the human number, Andy joked – 30 million of them subscribe to 3G connection.

#12:52: Andy carries more than one phones at a time, and there are about 80 percent mobile phone ownership in Indonesia. The PC or laptop ownership is at a really low five percent.

#12:54: Indonesia is very passionate, they don’t only follow trend, but they also help create trend. Like Blackberry, Indonesians also help to shape the usage. Back in America, it is used by corporates, but in young Indonesians use it to socialize and have fun. That’s why Blackberry in Indonesia isn’t in boring black color, but on “bling-bling” fun color.

#12:56: Indonesia is a trend creator as the citizens are really fast in adopting technology. Indonesia conquered the UK and France when it comes to Facebook users. What drives them? The reason people use data on their phone because it’s very cheap, said Andy. It costs US#2.5 to get 1GB data. Singapore has two or three times the price.

#12:58: 50 percent phones sold in Indonesia cost below $50. In average, mobile phones are priced at $90. You need to understand what device that they are using to approach them. 30 percent of the phones used in the country comes from local brands. The ads coming out in Indonesia mostly come from local brands.

#13:00: Only 25 percent of people have access to bank accounts, with only 16 million credit cards are around. The latter number is going down, not up, because the government is regulating the requirements for people to own credit cards.

#13:02: A few banks are trying to be creative, offering people to have a bank account without needing to have a bank account. People can now send fund to anyone as long as they have a phone number. They would only need to have a bank account if they want to withdraw the money. Another solution offered is Blackberry Money.

#13:04: 55 percent of Indonesians are below 30 years old. The next ten years is going to be very interesting. Looking at the population pyramid, a lot of people are going to grow into middle class, even bigger to other markets in Southeast Asia. Talking further details about devices, inside the next three years, feature phones are still going to be big. Nobody cares about feature phone markets, nobody are coming in and understand those area.

#13:06: A lot of Indonesian startups fail. Why? Because they don’t focus on mobile market. A few of them focus on only 10 million Blackberry users, a few of them focus only on smartphone markets.

#13:08: Andy Zain shares survival tips when building your business in Indonesia. You need to create everything works on mobile phones. A lot of Indonesians are first time internet users, so you need to make the steps very simple. Most assumptions are wrong, like Blackberry is big. No, only half of them are using data connection, and only half of them are using full data packages. 95 percent Blackberry users are only using it for chat.

#13:09: ARPU is very low, selling things above 30 cents will be very difficult. Indonesians are quite price sensitive. You also need to have access to different distribution centers, particularly local ones. Don’t just count on being available on one big portal.

This is his slide if you’re curious:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This evening, we are pleased to have a panel of distinguished guests from Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam to give us an insight on Singapore’s neighbouring markets. Held at Biopolis, tonight’s sharing and networking session is a prelude to tomorrow’s Startup Asia Singapore conference involving speakers:

• Reza, FOWAB in Bandung, representing Indonesia startup scene

• Mimee, Thumbsup, representing Thailand startup scene

• Mike Tran, Keewi, representing Vietnam startup scene

(The liveblog will auto-update below)

Students are using internet in the van. Image courtesy of Kompas.com

Though being the third largest democratic country in the world, corruption is still quite big in Indonesia. And now Detik yesterday reported that the ICT ministry’s effort to push internet penetration to the country’s rural areas is being called into question following allegations that the IDR 2.4 trillion (US$246 million) budget is being misused.

The people’s representative (DPR) Commission 1 is proposing to put the ICT ministry’s program on hold until it is thoroughly audited by the supreme audit agency (BPK). The commission argues that the program isn’t meeting its targets and expectations. For example, the equipment used by the “internet vans” – mobile internet cafes that are driven to remote areas – called the District Mobile Internet Service Center (M-PLIK) are not meeting its standards. And some of the vans are not being used properly, with a few of them becoming electricity billing collection vehicles instead.

With the target of building and spreading 1,907 M-PLIK vehicles, 1,061 of them haven’t been realized yet. The progress to build 5,748 District Internet Service Centers (PLIK) is a lot better, with only 418 more to be developed. ¹ This government program started back in March 2010. So it is normal to ask a few questions about the slow progress given the huge budget the ministry has.

In another effort to push internet into rural areas, starting May 1st, the Management of Indonesian Internet Domain Names (PANDI) will launch ‘.desa.id’ web domains to be used by the smallest government unit, villages. PANDI hopes that this will help push more distinctly rural Indonesian content rather than more urban-oriented dominated content.

(Sources: Detik #1 and #2)

As mentioned in Willis’ new year post, we will be largely focusing on the Southeast Asian region in our newest event, particularly Thailand, Vietnam, and Philippines. To kick-start the entire conference, we’ll have entrepreneur and angel investor Darius Cheung (pictured right) to reveal the trends, findings, and opportunities that he has discovered regarding the opportunities available in Southeast Asia.

And for those who are unfamiliar with the Singapore startup scene, Darius is currently embarking on his second startup, BillPin. Prior to this, he was the co-founder of TenCube, which was acquired by McAfee back in 2010.

So what kind of opportunities does Darius see from an entrepreneur’s point of view? How should entrepreneurs effectively exploit the region, especially when you are dealing with different cultures, languages, and habits? More importantly, how should entrepreneurs go about tapping into the pool of users, such as those in rural areas?

And from an investor’s point of view, what kind of investment opportunities does Darius see in the Southeast Asian region? Will we be able to see the next Facebook emerging out of this region?

Darius’ coffee chat session is scheduled on April 4th, 9.15 to 9.45am, where we will understand from the second-time entrepreneur the trends, views, and the investment opportunities that he sees within this exciting region.

It’s the last day to grab your tickets, so do so now and join us in this exciting conference! See you tomorrow!

And of course, don’t miss any of the other speakers at Startup Asia Singapore 2013 either. That list includes:

• Kee Lock Chua (Group President and CEO at Vertex Venture Holdings)
• Ole Ruch (Managing director APAC at Airbnb)
• Steve Melhuish (Co-founder at PropertyGuru)
• Stefan Jung (Co-Founder and Managing Director SEA, Rocket Internet)
• Nobuaki Kitagawa (Managing Director at CyberAgent Ventures)
• Daphne Lee (International business director at Taobao)
• Tetsuya Mori (Managing Director at DeNA Asia Pacific Holdings)
• Evan Spytma (Regional Director at Popcap Games)

Across the region, telcos are in a quandary as to how to deal with chat apps like Line, Whatsapp, and KakaoTalk. These messaging apps offer a free and fast alternative to SMS and have the potential to obliterate SMS returns for telcos. Especially with smartphones on the rise, this trend is inevitable. And telcos are feeling the burn.

Effective on April 1st, Vietnamese telcos Mobifone and Vinafone hiked up the prices of mobile 3G internet for their customers. Data packages went from VND 10,000 ($0.50) per month to VND 40,000 ($1.90), and student packages went from VND 15,000 ($.72) per month to VND 35,000 ($1.67). They also cut their data plan speeds from 7.3 Mbps for users back to 256 Kbps after they’ve exceeded their data plan by 100MB.

Vietnam had one of the cheapest 3G rates in the world, but these new price hikes will be a blow to that record.

All of this makes a lot of sense from a business perspective as most Vietnamese telcos are either owned by the government or closely associated with it. So they have a strong agenda to get as many users on board as they can since that’s the government’s vision. But such low prices can’t be sustainable – telcos can’t offer such rates and still grow, and chat apps have especially underlined this.

With the number of smartphones in Vietnam set to go over 30 million by the end of this year, it’s a real concern. The more people buy smartphones, the more likely they’ll use messaging apps, and the more likely SMS profits will plummet. So of course, the telcos are panicking and hiking prices. On the other hand, I think this is a much better response than Indonesian or Chinese telcos, who decided to build their own chat app competitors.

(Source: VNExpress)

VNG just released Zini.vn at midnight March 30th. It’s a new project that has been in secret stealth mode up until very recently. The project resembles Twitter since it employs hashtags but unlike Twitter, Zini also emphasizes photos. Users, like Facebook, can see photos or photo albums posted in the main newsfeed. It basically features hashtags much more prominently as the center of the user experience and encourages users to add and follow hashtags.

Interestingly, the service requires authentication via Zing Me, VNG’s long-time social network, Facebook, Twitter, G+, or Yahoo. This is all part of VNG’s strategy to get any and all users on their platform without requiring them to create a totally new account. This has been especially the case with VNG’s latest products like Zalo and Giai Dieu Vui, which can authenticate via Facebook.

I played with it a bit and clearly VNG is trying to educate users on the idea of the hashtag. Not only is the hashtag prominently featured on the Zini logo, but it’s also emphasized in the right-hand column of the interface. This is an interesting approach compared to incumbent microblogging service Mimo.vn, which has been doing microblogging since 2009. The Mimo team decided to take away hashtags later in the development and focused on content building.

With VNG getting very serious about mobile via its chat app Zalo (with over a million users), already being a strong contender in social media with Zing Me (at last count they had over 12 million users across the country), and now getting into Zini.vn with hashtag-focused microblogging, I wonder how VNG plans to unite all these disparate or arguably competing services without cannabilizing itself. Or will the company slowly phase out one service in favor of another?

We hope you’re loving our new site makeover! As always, here’s our weekly list featuring a bunch of hot startups from all over Asia. For tips and stories suggestions, feel free to email us. Alternatively, you can send tips here and/or tell us about your startup here. Enjoy this week’s list:

1. Tribehired | Singapore

Tribehired is a social recruitment startup based in Singapore, and taps into its users’ Facebook connections to spread job recommendations. The startup wrapped up a round of funding led by TNF Ventures this week.

2. Fourleaf | Thailand

Thai startup Fourleaf helps hotels to create beautiful looking menus on that can be given to guests on iPads. So, instead of browsing through the usual paper menu, Fourleaf conveniently digitizes menu content and order processes on the device.

3. Adzcentral | Singapore

Founded in 2009, Singaporean startup AdzCentral coins its service as “scientific media buying”. It provides advertisers with a one-stop shop to buy ad spots in real-time, using techniques such as visitor profiling, targeting, optimization and differential bidding.

4. Kreditmart | Indonesia

Started in 2008, Kreditmart sells a range of large, business-oriented goods, from heavy machines to electronics, and offers payment in installments to consumers even if they do not own any credit cards.

5. CheckInTonight | Cambodia

Founded in late 2012, CheckInTonight is a Cambodia-made mobile app that helps users find hotels and book them quickly and cheaply on the very day you need a place to rest your head.

6. Not A Basement Studio | Vietnam

Not A Basement Studio is an mobile app developer startup based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It has recently released a brand new app, KeepShot, on the US app store. Do also check out our previous interview with them here.

7. Scoop | Indonesia

Scoop is an Indonesian e-reader startup and book webstore that announced this week a range of major partnerships with publishers across India, Singapore, and the Philippines. Those will bring a lot more magazines into the Scoop store.

8. Giao Hang Nhanh | Vietnam

Vietnam’s Giao Hang Nhanh (GHN), which means “Fast Delivery”, is an e-commerce delivery and logistics business, aiming to solve the payments and deliveries issues in Vietnam’s growing online shopping industry. Read our exclusive interview the the founder.

9. OfferChat | Philippines

Founded in August 2012, Philippines’ OfferChat is a live chat software that is available for use at absolutely no cost for users. So, how do they monetize? Read our story to find out!

10. Stilomo | Indonesia

Stilomo, one of the first graduates from the Jakarta Founders Institute, is a mobile app that allows users to get promotions/deals by sharing them to social media accounts. It launched its mobile site for daily deals last month and now also lists current deals from nearby venues and companies like malls and banks.

11. TradeHero | Singapore

TradeHero is a mobile app for trading virtual money based on real-world stock market data. We checked out the startup’s growth statistics since its launch in late 2012.

12. KT Care | Myanmmar

The Myanmar-based NGO is fighting to improve education in Myanmar through increasing computer and internet literacy in the region. KT Care is currently running a crowdfunding campaign (you can donate here) that, if successful, will allow it to open a print shop where all proceeds will be funneled directly into computer and IT training classes that will be provided at minimal cost to students.

Related Startup Stories

• The Founding Story of Wanchat Padungrat’s Pantip
• Japan’s Metaps Teams Up With Appota To Monetize Apps in Vietnam
• 9 Startup Pitches at Ideosource’s Demo Day
• Vietnam’s 3 Separate Tech Worlds Need to Get Together: Electronics, Outsourcing, Startups
• Startup Lessons from Evernote (VIDEO)
• Finland’s Jongla Pushes into Asia, Focuses on Content in Messaging App Battle

Events

It’s just four days until we return with TechinAsia’s Startup Asia Singapore 2013 Conference. Here’s the almost-complete compilation of all the previews of the awesome speakers that will be onstage:

• Keewi’s Story and and Some Tips on How To Run a Startup in Vietnam
• The PropertyGuru Story
• Nuffnang Founders’ Story and Their Lessons Learned
• Airbnb’s Voyage Into Asia
• Rakuten Branches Out to Asia (Startup Asia Preview)
• Why Revenue Matters: The Ookbee Story (Startup Asia Preview)
• Startup Management: Prioritizing and Scaling (Startup Asia Preview)
• What Rakuten Taught Me After We Got Acquired (Startup Asia Preview)
• Twitter Is Taking Southeast Asia Much More Seriously (Startup Asia Preview)
• KakaoTalk: From Startup to a Giant Mobile Platform (Startup Asia Preview)
• How E-Commerce King Taobao Is Expanding Out of China (Startup Asia Preview)

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

In Silicon Valley, techcooperation is everywhere. Hardware firms, software companies, and startups of all sizes work with each other to build products and services, APIs are shared and built on top of each other. Granted, there’s also conflict – like with Twitter locking Instagram out of embedded images – but the environment is still one that encourages collaborative innovation. Headquarter doors are arms length apart. Intel is just miles away from Apple, Google, and Facebook.

That’s not the case in Vietnam. The technology industry is split in three: electronics manufacturing, outsourcing, and the domestic startup market. Vastly different industries each deeply isolated.

But each industry is huge. Electronics exports in Vietnam are now worth over US$16 billion. The outsourcing industry in 2007, by some estimates, brought in well over $180 million in revenue and possibly reached $3 billion in 2012 (I’ll get deeper into outsourcing numbers below). And VNG, one of the anchors of the domestic tech and startup industry in Vietnam, pulled in $90 million in revenue last year alone. Trouble is, there’s no desire for the three entities to work together.

Quang Trung Software city, a software park sanctioned by the Vietnamese government.

The two biggest tech industries in Vietnam

Frankly, the electronics and software outsourcing industries are ones that exist because they can squeeze higher value out of lower margins. In electronics manufacturing, companies like Samsung and Intel pump in millions of dollars to build factories and train workers. The management is top-down and the revenues are high. Although it allows Vietnam to partake in high level electronics production, it will take at least another three to five years before a Vietnamese company can take on the level of scale of the foreign firms. Therefore, they may remain isolated for another decade here. They’re plants, not headquarters based in a campus.

With software outsourcing, it’s a fast growing industry. The software and IT service industry in Vietnam, in total, pulled in $2.3 billion in revenue in 2011. And if the 25 to 35 percent growth rate is solid, it may have pushed into $3 billion last year. By some estimates, the outsourcing share of this number could be at least a quarter or half of this revenue.

Software outsourcing is especially appealing to software engineers who are graduating from Vietnam’s engineering schools. It’s higher pay – excellent engineers sometimes expect up to $3,000 or more per month – and they get to work on deeper technical problems from companies hailing from places like the US and Japan. For a family-conscious engineer, this is the way to go: big problems, status and money.

Tech startups, a nascent frontier that outsourcing needs to mentor

Software startups, on the other hand, are small by comparison. Although VNG has posted $90 million in sales revenue last year, it’s one of the only big stars that is successfully competing in the domestic consumer space. The bulk of this revenue is likely still in gaming, an area that is still hot and VNG’s core competency. Gaming is an industry that new, smaller studios such as Like.vn and Colorbox have just started getting into. E-commerce is still young and largely unprofitable, with Rocket Internet’s Zalora and Lazada taking the majority of market share and still spending like crazy.

Startups in Vietnam are still a relatively new concept, and they’ve arguably only been around for the last five to seven years. In my personal database of startups I’ve recorded about 250 currently running startups in fields from education to mobile games to social media. Until now, the domestic market was so unprofitable that it made way more sense to go into outsourcing, where you can get more bang for your buck. But the shift is coming this year and next year, as the smartphone market awakens and the domestic market becomes more accustomed to spending on things like software games, products, and services. Things are heating up.

This is why I think it will be really important for outsourcing companies to start getting in bed with startups. Currently, the startup community lacks governmental support, money, technical skills, product management, and experience. Things the outsourcing industry has a lot of. As Vietnam’s domestic market accelerates, growth will be exponential, and it’s no wonder that foreign messaging apps and e-commerce startups are jumping into the market last year and this year. So if the outsourcing industries don’t start getting involved domestically, it will be a huge missed opportunity. I don’t know how this will manifest: in networks, in workshops, in government initiatives, or what; I just know it needs to happen. The teenage startups need their uncle outsourcers to lend them a hand.

Ideosource, a venture capital firm in Indonesia, organized a demo day yesterday to showcase five graduates from its incubation program, and also four of its portfolio startups, totaling nine pitches. Ideosource was founded by Andi S Boediman, Andrias Ekoyuono, and Edward Ismawan.

Ideosource’s incubation program, announced on September 2012, received more than 120 submissions from across five cities in Indonesia. The team met 50 of the startups that submitted and hand picked six for investment and incubation. Investments for these companies fell between $50,000 to $100,000.

Below is a summary of all the startups who pitched:

Five incubated startups

Ever is a service company that enables Indonesian merchants to do e-commerce globally. Many of the small or medium-sized companies in Indonesia still do not understand how to use internet and some do not know English. There are also other issues such as expensive shipping and logistics issues that hinder these companies from selling online. This startup looks for these companies in Indonesia and helps them sell their goods on global platforms such as eBay and Amazon.

Wear Fable is a fashion e-commerce site for men and women. They aim to build a community of fashion lovers especially for students and yuppies who are more internet savvy.

Moodoo is a daily mood stimulant app that aims to help stimulate your mood through unique ambient sounds. The team prides themselves on a brainwave technology that is also being used by reputable institutes around the world such as US Army, Harvard, MIT, etc.

Pasarminggu is an e-commerce service that combines fresh grocery orders and delivery. Customers can order through the website, phone, sms, and email before Pasarminggu delivers it to their doorstep. It currently only serves East Jakarta region.

Kelir TV is a video platform that enables media publishers to deliver an optimal and smooth video experience across desktop and mobile devices.

Ideosource’s portfolio companies

Kark uses QR codes on physical items to produce augmented reality graphics on devices. It aims to be a media promotion tool that connects physical products to digital media. At the moment, it is working on Kark Mobile Education that uses it technology to show digital graphic representations of words or characters to help children learn.

Touchten is aguably one of the more successful game studios in Indonesia. Some of its games include Sushi Chain, which has more than three million downloads; Infinity Sky, which has more than two million downloads; and their latest, Train Legend, which has recorded 200,000 daily downloads on Google Play. With this formula of building successful games, the company aims to develop a platform that can help other game developers to acquire, retain and monetize users more effectively.

Gimmie provides white label loyalty programs to companies. Using its platform, companies get to create their own loyalty programs and give rewards. Gimmie has established a partnership with SingTel in Singapore, MOL and Berjaya Group in Malaysia, and Smart in Philippines.

At Startup Asia, Mike Tran will swing by to give us all an introduction to the Vietnamese startup and technology scene. So I thought I’d take a chance to sit down with him so you can find out who he is before he grabs the mic.

Today, he’s the founder and CEO of Keewi, a company which, according to Mike, “wants to make it as easy as possible for anybody to create an event in Saigon”. Currently, the startup is evolving into an Eventbrite-like service for the Vietnamese market and two weeks ago launched its new ticketing service to help event organizers sell, promote, and manage their events online.

Keewi’s genesis

Mike is among a new generation of entrepreneurs in Vietnam who were educated abroad, like with the founders of Greengar, Not A Basement Studio, and even VNG. Mike studied civil planning and project management in Canada for seven years before coming back to Vietnam to work in one of Ho Chi Minh city’s largest corporations, Saigon Trading Group. In his own words:

In 2009, I helped set up a supermarket chain, and then moved onto a real estate project. In 2011, this project slowed to a crawl, which allowed me time to work on some ideas I had of my own: a website that helped curate online coupons. It was a time when Groupon clones were rising in Vietnam. But that idea died. I invited all my friends, and they would go to the site, but they found no reason to use the service.

So Mike closed that site down. It was when he went to a friend’s wedding that the first inklings of Keewi began. He went not knowing anybody and realized that there was no service to let him know if any other friends were at the wedding. That was the first version of Keewi, finding out if your friends were attending the same event. Mike adds:

Our small team of five took this idea and pitched it at Startup Weekend in 2011. We got to meet successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and really got into the idea of a startup.

After Startup Weekend, only two guys were still interested. – Mike and the developer. The first prototype was showcased at Demo Asia, which gave them another chance to examine user behavior. They learned that users wanted to use the mobile HTML5 site for networking. By April 2012, the second prototype was out, emphasizing networking.

Everytime Keewi shifted, it was always in response to user behavior. That’s part of their adherence to ‘lean startup’ and developing market-fit. This eventually lead them into the ticketing service it is today:

We realized that event organizers actually don’t really care so much that people can network. The biggest problem for event organizers is about getting people to attend events. We haven’t given up on networking, but ticketing is the more powerful need. So in a way, you could look at us as an Eventbrite. But our competitive advantage is payment, logistics, and building direct relationships with event organizers.

The startup scene In Vietnam

This last point about relationships is a particularly strong concern for B2B startups working in Vietnam. Mike elaborates:

Trust is a big issue in Vietnam. Vietnamese technology companies have a history of selling client data, so bigger companies would rather trust a foreign business.

So what’s the trick for Keewi? Mike explains:

There a few particular cultural loopholes. You have to appear big to your customers. Big companies won’t trust the small guys. You have to build a client list and testimonials. And even better if you get a testimonial from a company. You have to figure out what the foreign companies cannot do, and do that. And even get a foreigner in your team. It’s a key way to get around the trust problem.

Elaborating on that, Mike identifies the big obstacles that most Vietnamese startups face:

There’s a lot of startups here and it can be very competitive. This make it very hard to find good talent. Not only that, engineers just don’t believe in equity. In the Valley, engineers are willing to work and take equity because they believe in building something. But this is a very status-driven society. A startup needs to have cashflow right out the door or people won’t join. An engineering student right out of university believes that in two years he/she will be making 10 million VND (US$500) a month and in four to five years will be a manager. That’s a completely different skillset. So ultimately, it comes down to mindset.

Given all these troubles, we asked Mike why he stuck with startup life, and we got a familiar response among entrepreneurs:

If I had to choose between a big corporation with lots of money or a startup. I would choose startup. Corporations think about squeezing every penny they can out of their marketing, sales, product, and even their customers. But startups, they have to think about their customers. They have to create new value in order to survive. They have to think long-term.

‘Start Me Up’

For the future at Keewi, Mike is looking to grow his ticketing service and building relationships with more event organizers. Today, the team is eight people and they’ve got six clients, and are still expanding.

He also organizes an event called Start Me Up that invites Vietnamese and foreign speakers to come and talk to fellow young entrepreneurs about the secrets to building successful startup. They also show movies and documentaries like The Startup Kids, which had never been aired in Asia before. The whole point is to get Vietnam on the startup map.

If you’re coming to StartupAsia you can look forward to seeing Mike talk on these points and more at 3pm on day 1 of the event, April 4th.

The FPT IV smartphone running Android 4.1.2
Image: tinhte.vn

There are 1.4 mobiles for every person in Vietnam, so there’s obviously a thirst for mobile. And in the status-hungry country, the smartphone market is growing strongly. So it makes sense that one of the country’s biggest technology companies, FPT, has set the goal of manufacturing and selling 600,000 smartphones in Vietnam in 2013.

This will be a shift from what FPT was shipping last year, which was centered on feature phones. It will mean that smartphones make up 70 percent of its mobile output.

The newest phone in FPT’s own-brand lineup is the FPT IV, a smartphone that costs 4.45 million VND (US$212), ships with Android 4.1, and is directed at the lower end of the price spectrum, targeting customers that can’t afford iPhones and big-screen Samsungs. Interestingly, it’s Vietnam’s first-ever homegrown quad-core phone.

FPT is also a telco, and does software outsourcing, education, hardware manufacturing, and more. It’s also closely affiliated with the government. It’s a clear indication that the government views the growth of smartphones as essential to Vietnamese economic growth. Also, given the aggressive nature of Vietnamese telecoms into global markets, it’s foreseeable that this could transition into smartphones built for the global market in 2014.

In other news, in addition to the FPT IV and its homegrown Android smartphones, the company is also planning to sell the premium Vertu TI smartphone, which runs Android 4.0. The phone costs 200 million VND – that’s over $9,500. Why anyone would pay that much for a phone with an outdated mobile operating system beats me. Oh wait, it’s Vietnam, where people buy $1.4 million cars just because they can.

(Sources: Vietnam Investment Review and Tinh Te)

Here’s our newest weekly list featuring a bunch of hot startups from all over Asia. For tips and stories suggestions, feel free to email us. Alternatively, you can send tips here and/or tell us about your startup here. Enjoy this week’s list:

1. Cubie | Taiwan

Launched in March 2012, Taiwan’s Cubie is a mobile messenging app that has almost 8 million users, and is run with a bootstrap team of 12. It’s up against giant messaging apps like Line and KakaoTalk. Cubie received a round of investment late last year, and was recently featured on the front page of the Google Play store for a good nine days. Learn how the team got their app featured in this report.

2. Nonstop Games | Singapore

Nonstop Games is a Singapore-based tablet and mobile game development startup with Finnish roots. This week it raised a big round of funding that will help boost its popular Heroes of Honor title.

3. Alegrium | Indonesia

Alegrium is a self-funded startup based in Indonesia that is the brain behind the Icon Pop Quiz[a] game that received props from Korean singer PSY back in December. Now the developers launched a sequel called Icon Pop Brand. The new game is proving so popular in Indonesia that it even knocked a very popular messaging app from the first position on the country’s iOS free app chart.

4. Tapmee | Vietnam

Tapmee is a Vietnam-made location-based chat and dating app just launched this week on Android. The app is being developed by five people and looks really good.

5. Veritrans | Indonesia

Veritrans is an Indonesian payment gateway for credit cards which promises to deliver online transactions that are easy, cheap, and quick. It has recently relocated to a brand new office and has also released news about its plans for the next few months

6. IG9 | Vietnam

Officially launched this week, IG9 is Vietnam’s first homegrown crowdfunding platform. It is founded by Nam Do, the current CEO of Emotiv, along with a full-time team of seven from a motley crew of startups based out of Hanoi

7. Kleii | Vietnam

Kleii is a Vietnam online cloud storage service, similar to Dropbox, which was covered by us earlier this year. Recently, it has amassed significant growth in the number of users, despite suffering a week-long downtime outage.

8. Adzcentral | Singapore

Singapore-based AdzCentral provides clients with a one-stop platform for convenient automated digital ads-buying, covering social ads, search, mobile, email, and video. The startup concluded a financing round with Electric Sheep Capital and Digital Media Partners (DMP) this week.

9. Brand24 | Indonesia

Brand24.co.id, an Indonesian company that specializes in monitoring online social marketing, opened its doors last week. It analyzes conversations across Indonesia’s social media, identifies people’s sentiment, and points out the current trends. The service can also help make reports and infographics for brands. (It’s the same team us this fun graphic about social Jakartans!)

10. HotelQuickly | Thailand

Launched just this week at Webmob’s Bangkok Meetup, HotelQuickly is a convenient mobile-only service that helps users book hotels really quickly. It’s available in six Asian countries now. Four out of five of HotelQuickly’s founders are based in Bangkok, Thailand.

11. Zomato | India

Not long after expanding to Europe with restaurant listings for London, now India’s Zomato has launched for foodies in Manila, capital of the Philippines. It marks the first move into Southeast Asia for Zomato, and brings in-depth information on over 9,000 restaurants in Metro Manila.

12. Luxa | Japan

Luxa.jp is a luxury-oriented e-commerce site where items, (from pricey sake to expensive skincare products), are sold at useful discounts during flash sales. Just this week, Luxa announced major series B funding.

13. Perx | Singapore

Singapore-based mobile loyalty app Perx has been showing steady growth over the past year. Besides helping merchants to manage their loyalty cards digitally, the app now incorporates a new Net Promoter Score (NPS) Loyalty Task feature for merchants.

Related Startup Stories

• Samwer Brothers Kickstart $193 Million Global Founders Capital
• How to Stop Chinese Copycats from Stealing Your App
• World Startup Report: Your 15-Minute Guide to India’s Startup Scene and Culture
• Learn to Design and Code at Startup Academy
• HomeAway Makes Third Asian Deal in Tie-Up With Singapore’s Travelmob

• Kompas Group’s Gramediana Hints at Emulating Amazon’s Kindle Business Model?

Events

TechinAsia’s Startup Asia Singapore 2013 Conference is now less than two weeks away and we are really excited! Here are two more previews of the great speakers we’ll have onstage:

• KakaoTalk: From Startup to a Giant Mobile Platform (Startup Asia Preview)
• How E-Commerce King Taobao Is Expanding Out of China (Startup Asia Preview)

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

As Facebook has increased its reach in Vietnam, the types of uses for the social network has diversified – and, sadly, sometimes it’s tragic.

On Wednesday, Vietnamese citizens spotted a pair of sandals and a cellphone beside a lake in Dong Ha city, Quang Tri province, out in the countryside. From the cellphone, Vietnamese police identified Vo Dinh Toan, a student at a local community college. This morning the police found his body at the bottom of the lake. Before jumping in, his friends reported that Toan had posted on Facebook, “There are many things I could not achieve.”

Earlier this month, a middle school girl from Ha Tinh province also posted to Facebook before she took her own life. She posted her update just before jumping from a bridge, telling her friends that “if death can solve all problems and lighten the burden on my mother then that is what I will choose.”

Worldwide, this is not new. There have been cases of people posting suicide notes on Facebook in the past. As Facebook has grown in Vietnam, it has become the main way for people to publicly update their friends and family en masse. Unfortunately, this also extends to tragic cases as these.

There is not much information on suicide rates in Vietnam, as doing sociological research in the country is difficult, but some academics have estimated that about 48.7 percent of suicides are among people aged 15 to 24 – which is also a prime demographic for online social media.

These heartbreaking incidents are a reminder to us to get closer to our loved ones, treasure the time we have with them, and maybe take our interactions on Facebook a little more seriously.

Last night at Tech in Asia’s Bangkok Meetup, Evernote’s Tiang Lim Foo, Asia Pacific Market Development, took the hot seat for more than 40 minutes for an interview followed by a lively discussion with the audience. During the interview, Tiang revealed several interesting things. In Southeast Asia, Evernote has close to two million users and the Thailand user base is growing fast, now at 400,000 users. Last month, we noted that Evernote has 350,000 users in Indonesia, too.

An Evernote PR representative told us that Evernote is noticing sharp growth in Southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. The growth in Thailand has been pretty impressive. Compared to its Thailand user count two years ago, Evernote has increased its users by 1,200 percent. In the last three months, Thailand has added 21,500 new users on average per month.

Globally, Evernote has 50 million users with about two-third of its users outside of the United States. In Asia Pacific, which includes Australia, Japan, and China, Evernote has over 15 million users and is growing at 225 percent in the region in the past year.

In China, Evernote operates as a standalone service with a different name (Yinxiang Biji), a local team, and new data centers. It is, however, not the dominant cloud note service in China, with local competitors like Netease and Shanda all trying to grab a piece of that market.

Fyi, Tiang Lim is the only Evernote person in Southeast Asia so far.