The phone is, once again, rumored to be pretty powerful especially at its paltry $320 price point. In fact, if the leaked benchmarks are to be believed, the phone will once again be one of the most powerful handsets in existence. That probably won’t surprise Xiaomi fans too much, but music fans will be glad to know that the latest round of rumors also suggests a new “Mi Hi-Fi” feature. Exactly what that means or what it will do isn’t clear yet, but it’s meant to cater to music fans so if you listen to a lot of music on your phone it’s likely to be a neat new addition.

If leaked photos (like the one above) are to be believed, the new phone is also a tiny bit bigger and boxier than previous versions. But of course, all of this information should be taken with a sizeable helping of salt until we’ve heard the official word from Xiaomi about the new device.

(iMobile via TechWeb)

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

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

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

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

The secret sauce: Games inside a game

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

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

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

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

Actively managing games as a service

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

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

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

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

Parineeti Chopra and Varun Dhawan add star power to WeChat in India.

Early last month we mentioned that WeChat, the China-made messaging app, had 40 million users outside of the country. Today Tencent (HKG:0700) tells us that this global overseas number has now risen to 50 million registered users beyond China’s borders.

That 50 million figure is from a registered total WeChat user-base that will soon exceed 400 million. Of all those, the company said last week that 195 million are active on WeChat each month. It’s not clear if these overseas users are more or less likely to be active on the social messaging app.

While WeChat is growing pretty well overseas, its outside-of-mainland-China user-base of 50 million is still dwarfed by that of Whatsapp (200 million active users, most of whom are not in mainland China), and by Line’s approximate 105 million registered users outside of Japan (from a total of 150 million signed up to the Japan-made app).

Tencent indicates strong popularity in the iTunes, Android, and Windows Phone app stores in Singapore, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico and the Philippines.

WeChat is being marketed pretty aggressively across Southeast Asia by Tencent, with markets like Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, and Indonesia being targeted with the help of local pop and movie stars in each nation.

The clear market leader for mobile-based shopping in China is Taobao, the iconic consumer-to-consumer shopping mall from Alibaba that’s been rocking China for a decade. In terms of the value of mobile purchases among Chinese consumers, Taobao leads with 75.1 percent market share. Some of that is from the parent company’s B2C marketplace Tmall.

In second place in this sector is Jingdong (formally called 360Buy), which is also China’s second largest B2C e-tailer. Its share of the mobile sector is a lot lower than its share of the overall China B2C shopping market, suggesting that Jingdong – and, indeed, all other such Amazon-like brands – needs to seriously sharpen up its mobile strategy. I notice that, if we again compare mobile spending share with overall market share, it’s only two fashion e-commerce companies that are punching above their weight when it comes to mobile shoppers – own-brand clothing e-store Vancl and specialist handbag site Maibaobao.

Here’s the market share pie chart:

A fairly slow shift to m-commerce

iResearch estimates that Q1 2013 will see Chinese mobile netizens spending a total of RMB 26.6 billion ($4.29 billion) in all of these e-commerce companies. That indicates that 2013 will indeed be the biggest ever year for mobile commerce in China – possibly exceeding the research firm’s earlier estimates of $15.7 billion for the entire year:

In Q1 2013, we see that PC-based shopping still dominates the country’s e-commerce sector , but mobile is rising fast, anticipated to reach 7.6 percent of purchases in the first quarter:

If you can handle any more massive numbers you might like to know that China’s entire e-commerce industry looks set to be worth $177 billion in 2013. Keep an eye on our ‘e-commerce in China’ tag to get more news on this massive market.

(Source: iResearch)

Last Saturday and the Saturday before, Vietnam held its third ever Mobile Day in the country to throngs of people. All told, over 2,500 people attended the events with 1,500 in Hanoi and 1,000 in Saigon. To say the least, there’s a big buzz for mobile in Vietnam and the industry is only going to get more crowded. Some of the presentations were pretty cool, so I’ll give you a quick taste of a few that caught my eye.

Presentations covered some very key concerns for mobile developers in Vietnam, like memory management for Android applications; four secrets to success for app monetization; building an online community and getting to the top of the App Store and Play Store; launching a mobile game in just three months; the issue of mobile payments. We’ll embed the slideshows of three of the many informative presentations here. You can click on the links below for more.

12 things you can learn from mobile products made in Vietnam

Zalo challenges foreign chat apps

Another interesting talk came from VNG’s Dao Ngoc Thanh who covered many of the technical aspects of Zalo and its growth over the past year from just a few users to over two million:

Going mobile and embracing mobile ads

Nguyen Minh Quy, from NovaAds, also gave some interesting insights about mobile ad networks. His presentation showed some really interesting numbers on the growth of mobile and what the opportunities are:

Next year, the event is sure to be even bigger with mobile growth growing even faster than last year and more companies jumping into the Vietnamese market before it’s too late.

There were plenty of other really awesome presentations at the event from across the board, but most of them were a bit more technical, so the slides in these will give you a quick good idea of the mobile landscape in Vietnam. You can find all the links to presentations from Hanoi and Saigon on the Mobile Day homepage.

A few months ago we spotted that Tencent’s WeChat app was censoring certain ‘sensitive’ political words. That turned out to be temporary, but the company was clearly capable and ready to implement such blocking. Today it emerges that Japan-made Line app is primed and ready to censor users of its social messaging service as well.

Line app contains a string of code that looks for “bad words” and connects back to a server to cross-check those terms with a list of politically sensitive words. That directory contains a lot of inconvenient truths that Chinese authorities would like air-brushed from history, such as recent revelations about the personal wealth of Party leaders, and historical incidents such as a certain something that happened at Tian’anmen Square.

The Line censorship machine was found by Twitter user @hirakujira and detailed by TheNextWeb this morning. The word filter is currently not activated, but as with WeChat’s it seems all ready to be turned on at any moment. If it were turned on and a sensitive word were to be sent via the app, it would be blocked and the user would see an error message saying “Your message contains sensitive words, please adjust and send again.” @hirakujira was able to hack the app to replicate that scenario:

This is what the code looks like within the app (and here’s the current list of banned words):

Watching you chat

Made by NHN (KRX:035420) by teams in both Japan and South Korea, Line currently has just over 150 million users worldwide. Line launched officially in China in December last year with the Chinese name ‘Lian Wo’, but there are no statistics available for its progress in the country. On the plus side, this bit of censorship shows that NHN Line is serious about succeeding in China, because that kind of suppression is a fact of being an online or offline media business in the country.

The findings seem to suggest that Line app is monitoring all of its users around the globe despite the filter not being turned on. That’s likely the case with WeChat as well. So while WeChat and Line are not technically censored at present – not even in China – it’s clearly ready to do so. Note that in both apps it applies to Chinese text only.

For users in China who have signed up for either Line or WeChat via SMS, it means that authorities can easily piece together your full identity. That’s because purchasing a SIM card in the country can only be done (in theory) by showing your national ID card or passport, which is then recorded.

China’s most heavily censored social network is undoubtedly Sina Weibo, which is hit with directives from authorities almost daily on what it should erase from the Twitter-like service.

(Source: TheNextWeb)

Izak Jenie (right) with other Nexian Selular Group Directors

At 43 years old, Izak Jenie is still talking about new business ideas and starting projects. He just can’t stop. This is a man who has started more than ten companies in Indonesia, beginning at age nineteen. Most of them failed, but those that survived are renowned companies in Indonesia today and are generating tens of millions of dollars in yearly revenue. Some very successful companies Izak started include Jatis Group, Jatis Mobile, and Metrotech Makmur Sejahtera (MMS).

Coming from an average income family, Izak was hungry for success. His first startup was a computer graphics company launched in 1989 during his university days. Computers were not widely available then and there was no internet. Izak was lucky enough to get a PC at home and he subsequently taught himself digital graphic design. Being one of the first few guys in Indonesia with this skill, he got lucrative projects from advertising firms. He was able to pay his tuition fees with some cash left over to treat friends for meals. However, competition grew and his margins thinned. He got out of the business in its fourth year.

The early web

After graduation, his friends were able to get high-paying corporate jobs quickly, but it took Izak nine months to get a job as a graphic designer because most companies hired based on academic results. He worked for one year but realized that he didn’t like the routine corporate job. While at the office, Izak would often work on other tech projects that interest him. One was called the Free World Dial-Up service, it would allow people to call overseas using the internet and save on overseas call charges. It’s basically exactly what Skype does today, but Izak was working on that concept in 1995.

That same year, he read a book titled Going Digital by Nicholas Negroponte and it made him realize the world was going to change. He quit his job and started an online bookstore. Concurrently, he also started a few other companies with different partners. These startups all failed. Poor timing and partnership disputes were the causes of their demise; for example, the online bookstore flopped because there weren’t many people online in the mid-nineties and almost no one did their shopping there.

Despite failing numerous times, Izak never gave up. Together with Jusuf Sjariffudin and Ishak Surjana, he co-founded Jatis Group, an IT consulting company in 1997.

One of his early employees there said:

Before joining Jatis, I asked Izak why this (Jatis) will be a success? Izak answered nonchalantly that he had failed in so many previous companies and in each failure, he learnt something from it. As such, he had already learnt how to fail. Jatis will not be a failure.

And indeed, Jatis became a hugely successful company. It provides IT solutions to banks, telcos, payment companies and other corporations. Its products include internet banking, mobile banking, and tax systems. At one point, more than 80 percent of Indonesia’s mutual funds traders were using Jatis’s trading platform. The company started with ten employees and eventually grew to over 500 by the end of the third year. In the same year, it also received $10 million from 3i, a well established VC firm from the UK, for it to expand regionally to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines.

Going mobile

In 2002, together with Erik Ridzal, Izak started Jatis Mobile, a subsidiary company under Jatis Group. Jatis Mobile deals with ringtones, location-based services and mobile content. As he already had good partnerships with local telcos through their work with Jatis Group, Jatis Mobile was able to make lucrative partnerships with telcos and was profitable from day one. Jatis’ group revenue had already hit $40 million.

In 2010, Izak started Metrotech Makmur Sejahtera (MMS). MMS’s core business is to build a messaging application on Nexian mobile devices, which are hugely popular in Indonesia. Izak brought in Nexian’s owner as a partner and together they launched Nexian Messaging. The platform attracted five million users in eight months, half of which were active users. Now, it is recording more than three billion messages sent per month and is still growing twenty percent month-on-month. In 2011, Singapore’s Si2i acquired a majority share of Nexian Group for $175 million.

Advice for young entrepreneurs

Izak says his failures are the cornerstone of the success of his latest three companies. Some key things he learned from those failures:

Getting good partners for startup is crucial. I like Warren Buffet’s investment theory for this. If you know from the outside that there may be trouble, then don’t get involved. Because once you get in, it’s difficult to get out. Similarly, in finding partners, if you foresee potential problems in working with them, then don’t get started.

I wish I had mentors in my early days. That way, I could have avoided some failures and attained success earlier. After going through so much, I can now easily think through the whole business cycle and identify potential pitfalls and opportunities. That comes from experience and it is what young entrepreneurs lack.

Managing expectations and cash-flow is important. You should always discuss with the team about the business outlook. Whether it will reach profitability in six months, one year or three years, we need to discuss it upfront. With expectations set, people are then able to plan their finances and focus on the actual work. If not, financial problems can be brought back to the family and cause tension among the team and their families. If you cannot meet your expectations and you make families suffer, then you should stop and go back to a corporate job.

When starting on something, I always like to think and work on something new. It’s a bit risky but that is what entrepreneurship is all about. If you do it right and if you are focused enough, you will get somewhere. Nobody is stupid enough to start a business to fail, if you fail you are not focused enough. Many entrepreneurs already know the plan to succeed, but along the way, they fall for distractions to make quick money. In my twenty-plus years of experience as an entrepreneur, I met all kinds of entrepreneurs: the very calm ones, the very aggressive ones, all kinds of them. Regardless of the style, those who got somewhere are those who are highly focused.

Izak is currently still the main man at MMS. Despite the success, he just doesn’t seem to stop; he co-founded a new startup, M-saku, a mobile payment system for Visa cardholders in Indonesia. The kind of resilience he has shown when times are hard, and the passion he has exhibited through his 25 years of entrepreneurship, are exemplary. This is what young entrepreneurs in Asia should learn from: to see entrepreneurship as a long-term journey rather than gunning for a quick exit. To help younger entrepreneurs, Izak dedicates some of his time to be a mentor at Founders Institute Jakarta.

Izak Jenie (third from right) with some of the Jatis team during a dinner.

It’s an issue that seems to pop up for every developing social platform that doesn’t spell things out clearly at first: who owns all the content that’s posted to the platform? That’s a question that Chinese WeChat users — especially users of WeChat Open Platform — have been asking since last week, when Open Platform user Wu Hanqing posted on Sina Weibo about the following clause he’d discovered in WeChat Open Platform’s user agreement (our translation):

The intellectual property rights for the content provided by Tencent on this platform (including but not limited to websites, text, images, audio, video, charts, etc.) belong to Tencent in their entirety, but users of this platform already have an exception to [this] IP law prior to posting their content.

If you didn’t completely follow that, well, neither did anyone else. It sounds a bit like Tencent is saying that it owns all content posted to WeChat Open Platform, but that content creators have an exception that allows them to use the content they create, too. It’s vaguely-worded enough that even in the original Chinese, people have had trouble figuring out what it means. “Does this imply the IP rights of the things I’ve written all ultimately belong to Tencent?” asked Wu. “I naively thought the content I was working so hard to write belonged to me!”

Surprisingly, Tencent doesn’t seem able to offer a clear answer either. An IT Times reporter contacted the company for clarification, and was told (this quote is from the article, not necessarily a direct quote of what the Tencent representative said):

The clause primarily concerns the intellectual property that Tencent provides as [the operator of] the platform. As to users’ legal rights to the intellectual property of their content, Tencent protects its legal rights.

Obviously, this doesn’t really clear up the question of who ultimately owns WeChat content. We’ve contacted Tencent for clarification as well, and will update this story when we hear back, but we also thought it might be prudent to check the terms and conditions for WeChat globally. These may differ from the terms users of the app must agree to in China, but the global terms don’t seem to address the question of who owns the content users create and transmit through WeChat one way or the other. Hmm.

The one thing that is clear is that users overwhelmingly (and unsurprisingly) think they should own the rights to the content they create. In a poll conducted on TechWeb, more than 80 percent of respondents said users should own their own WeChat content, and only 6 percent feel the content should belong to Tencent.

China tech watchers may recall a similar debate about Sina Weibo unfolding after a magazine stole a writer’s weibo posts and republished them without permission. That scuffle went all the way to the courts, but ultimately led to the decision that Weibo posts are the sole property of their creator.

And ultimately, the law may decide who owns WeChat content too, at least in China. Legal experts contacted by the IT Times suggested that under Chinese law, the clause in question might well be considered unreasonable and thus unenforceable, even though users have agreed to those terms. With that said, no one has actually taken this to court yet, so there’s no way to be sure how a judge would rule.

It’s also not clear how international users fit in. Tech in Asia has its own WeChat account; does the content we post there now belong to Tencent? I’m genuinely not sure, but I can tell you for certain that if it does we’re not going to be posting there much longer, and thats why I suspect that whatever Tencent originally intended, it will soon come out and say that all content posted to WeChat by users belongs to the user who posted it. To do anything less would be to sentence its own monetization plans to an early death. After all, who the hell is going to post news or games on the platform if that means sacrificing exclusive IP ownership rights? Absolutely no one.

(IT Times via TechWeb)

With China Mobile thought to be keen to launch its 4G network nationwide later this year, the behemoth telco is prepping its biggest ever city-wide 4G trial to start soon – this time in Shanghai.

But of the metrpolis’ 23 million inhabitants, only 5,000 Shanghai citizens will be selected to take part in China Mobile’s (NYSE:CHL; HKG:0941) trial, which will begin on June 1st. The telco already has 700 outdoor TD-LTE base stations in place across the city, complemented by 300 indoor ones focused on transportation and business hubs. That should cover most of the sprawling city.

Shanghai-based testers will either make use of 4G-equipped smartphones or 4G mobile wifi dongles.

Sun Yun, the product manager of that telco’s local subsidiary, Shanghai Mobile, told Chinese tech blogs that while the company is not ready to reveal 4G tariffs for users, “4G rates will not be higher than for 3G, and they could be cheaper”.

China Mobile has been doing trials in smaller cities for the past couple of years.

Since China Mobile is using the country’s homegrown TD-LTE band, the carrier’s 4G network is not compatible with any current iPhone or iPad models. But TD-LTE will be rolled out by other carriers worldwide, so there will be more and more quality smartphones available that support the network in due course. Those include handsets from LG and Huawei, with Nokia, Samsung, and perhaps even Apple likely to support the protocol in future.

As we reported earlier this month, China Mobile will invest US$6.7 billion to build 200,000 4G base stations that will cover 344 Chinese cities this year. Though there’s no clear date from China’s tech ministry, MIIT, on a nationwide rollout, it seems that China Mobile is being given an unfair advantage and a head-start in rolling out its TD-LTE services; rivals China Unicom and China Telecom will likely not receive any permits for their FDD-LTE networks until months or possibly even a year after China Mobile.

(Source: New Business Daily – article in Chinese)

Qihoo’s new search engine emerged nearly one year ago.

China’s Qihoo (NYSE:QIHU), a software maker and web portal turned search engine, has reported its Q1 2013 financials this morning. The company hailed a record number of users across its services – a total of 457 million active users in March 2013 – but saw mixed financial numbers.

Revenues were up slightly quarter-on-quarter to $109.9 million (up 58.6 percent in the past year). Operating income fell to $6.8 million in Q1, nearly half that in the previous quarter (and down from $14.4 million a year ago). Operating expenses crept up yet again to hit $89.2 million in the first quarter, nearly double the expense of Q1 2012.

Qihoo, which launched its search engine last summer to capitalize on all the traffic from its web portal and Windows PC software, also revealed a bunch of updated numbers:

• Total monthly active users of Qihoo’s products and services reached a record 457 million in March 2013, compared to 411 million in March 2012.
• Monthly active users of Qihoo’s ‘360 Browser’ across PC and mobile reached a record 332 million in March 2013, compared to 273 million at same point last year. User penetration of these web browser apps in China hit 69.6 percent.
• Average daily unique visitors to Qihoo’s “personal start up page” (hao.360.cn) of paid links rose to 94 million. That web portal generated approximately 489 million clicks.
• Paying users of Qihoo 360’s web game platform were approximately 281,000 in Q1.

Qihoo’s report made no detailed mention of the progress of its search engine (said by CNZZ to be at 12 percent market share in China), nor made any reference to all the company’s iOS apps being banned by Apple. Those issues will surely come up in the conference call later.

Qihoo expects a stronger second quarter with revenues between $142 million and $144 million.

See the full earnings report on the Qihoo IR homepage.

Antivirus products and services have been a renewed battleground in China in the past couple of years, enveloping several of the country’s top web businesses. According to rumors in the industry heard by TechinAsia, that battle is now taking the form of these companies vying to acquire NetQin (NYSE:NQ), a China-based expert in mobile antivirus apps. Both Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) and Tencent (HKG:0700) are thought to be in the running, but the market value of NetQin is proving to be a bone of contention.

NetQin executives even addressed the rumors late last week in the earnings call after revealing their Q1 2013 financials. Directly alluding to the suitors, NetQin co-CEO Omar Sharif Khan said during the call:

Over the past several months, NetQin has been approached by both strategic and financial investors for potential investment opportunities with us, while we appreciate this interest. We remain focused on delivering shareholder value to successful execution of our strategic planning initiatives. We will not fail on delivering shareholder value.

A few minutes before saying that, Khan lamented “a significant gap that exists between the market valuation and our business results”, which could well be the sticking point in negotiations with potential major investors or acquirers. NetQin is currently at $8.25 per share with a market cap of $363 million. Khan elaborated on this pricing:

We’ve also always believed that if we continue to deliver stellar results and growth, the market valuation of the company would appropriately reflect the fundamentals of the company. As both the shareholders and executive management of NetQin, we are not at all satisfied with a significant gap that exists between the market valuation and our business results. Frankly, it’s unacceptable. I want to be crystal clear, we are absolutely committed to creating shareholder value and we will put in a relentless effort to closing the before mentioned gap.

Asked by Oppenheimer analyst Andy Yeung about a 100 percent acquisition, Khan declined to reveal more except for saying that “multiple parties” had shown interest in both financial and strategic investments.

We’ve reached out to Baidu and Tencent about these rumors.

Tencent began pushing strongly into the antivirus market in China in 2010, setting themselves up on a collision course with well-known software maker Qihoo (NYSE:QIHU). After Qihoo launched a search engine last summer, Baidu has retaliated in recent months with antivirus products for Windows PCs aimed at both Chinese and overseas consumers.

Acquiring NetQin would propel Baidu into mobile antivirus products on the Android and iOS platform (where it currently has nothing), and would boost what Tencent already has in terms of mobile antivirus offerings.

NetQin shares fell 14 percent from Wall Street seeing its Q1 financials on Wednesday night to close of trading on Friday. That’s despite revenues rising to $33.2 million in Q1, with operating income up to $2.3 million.

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

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

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

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

Good mobile reader, worth trying out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Also read: The Nuffnang Founders’ Story)

Beijing’s App Annie is growing rapidly with over 80 team members located at Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, San Francisco, and London. Today it serves over 220,000 apps with 85 percent of the top 100 iOS publishers using its service.

App Annie is largely serving clients from the US, Europe, China, and Japan and hasn’t really gotten into Southeast Asia yet. But the team just might start to look at Southeast Asia as it is seeing growth in this region. Vice president of APAC at App Annie Junde Yu said in an email:

Google Play is growing very fast in terms of downloads in the region, especially in countries like Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines, where downloads are much higher than iOS.

Even though Android downloads are much higher, revenue from iOS is still higher in Southeast Asia. Junde also commented that things will get exciting when Google Play manages to establish local payment options as it has done in South Korea and Japan. He added:

Additionally, despite of the growth in downloads, most of the apps downloaded in the SEA markets are published by foreign publishers. There are local publishers, but most of them have more of an international outlook for content and distribution as opposed to local. It will be interesting to observe the rise of the local players for the local markets, as the local markets grow in downloads and revenues.

(Also read: The Story of App Annie)

A Singaporean in China

Junde takes extra interest in Southeast Asia since he was born in Singapore, which is part of the region. Having worked in China for several years now, Junde says that he still has much more to learn from both markets. But from what he has observed, he sees great connection between China and Singapore, noting that SingTel Innov8 (who also invests in China startups) and ACE Beijing Chapter have done a great job bridging the two regions. In China, he sees Innovation Works and the Great Wall Club (which runs GMIC) also having links with Southeast Asia and Singapore.

Junde says people often mistakenly think that Chinese aren’t paying customers. He notes that iOS revenue isn’t significant even with huge downloads because most iOS users in China do not own a foreign credit card to pay Apple. “It is also inconvenient to use local bank cards to top up their iOS credits,” he added.

For Android, Junde says that most revenue-making apps make their bucks from second and third-tier cities, supported by carrier billing that makes paying just an SMS away. He explains that consumers in these cities do not spend much on entertainment outlets like cinemas, pubs, and clubs and thus they are very much content to spend on mobile content.

If you are very serious about the Chinese market, you need to be physically here. If not, you can also work through a distributor/publishers; there are good options available, like iDreamsky, Yodo1, Cocoachina etc.

Coincidentally, Junde will be back in Singapore for the upcoming Casual Connect conference on May 21 to 23. He will be speaking on the topic “Global Trends in App Store Monetization” on May 22, 11.00am where he will be sharing the latest trends about the app store economy and also interesting tips about marketing mobile apps in Asia.

While his work and heart is now mainly in Beijing, Junde does plan to return to Singapore someday to start a game studio, a pub, or a chicken rice franchise.

(Image credit: Startapp.com)

Samsung (005930:KS) co-CEO Shin Jong-kyun has today hailed the company’s new Galaxy S4 phone as its fastest ever selling gadget. It’s expected to hit 10 million in sales next week, a mere three weeks after it first launched. JK Shin also told The Korea Times:

We are confident that we will pass more than 10 million sales of the S4 next week. It is selling much faster than the previous model S3.

He added that the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy S4 could ultimately reach 100 million units sold, a feat which would represent double the global sales of its predecessor, the Galaxy S3, which reached 50 million sales. Indeed, the S3 took 50 days to pass the 10 million sales mark.

The Galaxy S4 went on sale in South Korea on April 26, and promptly landed in the US, China, and India the next day ahead of a massive global roll-out backed up by major offline and online marketing. The big-screened S4 launched in Indonesia on May 3rd.

Samsung is the top smartphone brand in China, where it sold 30 million phones across various models in 2012.

(Source: Korea Times; via The Verge)

App Annie is a mobile app store data provider with its headquarters in Beijing, China but it is operated with an international team and vision led by founder and CEO Bertrand Schmitt.

Not many people know but App Annie was actually first started by an offshore outsourcing development company in Beijing called Exoweb in March 2010. Unfortunately, the Exoweb team didn’t have any idea on how to monetize it. But Bertrand saw the potential, he spun-off the company from Exoweb (they remain as minor shareholders), and took over App Annie’s operations in April 2010 with around five people in the team. He told me:

The people at Exoweb are friends of mine. App Annie was a free product. They were focusing on other stuff, software products, and not working on App Annie. I was also very frustrated with the lack of market data on the stores. So I felt as a marketer, I was missing a lot of information about what are the most interesting markets, how much are others doing in terms of downloads etc.

Bertrand who has been in the internet and mobile industry for 14 years also said that the early version of App Annie, though it only had basic data, could serve as a base for premium market data in the future. It first started tracking iOS applications but it now also tracks other app stores such as Google Play and Amazon.

While other data providers provide SDKs to track what’s happening for apps in terms of usage. At App Annie, Bertrand says that things are done different because it is connecting to the backend of the stores to get the data. To put it simply, App Annie works with Apple and Google directly.

For its premium product, App Annie has developed a statistical model with 90 percent accuracy that estimates an app’s revenue opportunity, market share etc and is today used by companies such as Gameloft, Microsoft, Nokia, Google, Tencent, and more. Bertrand assures that the top ten apps are well-measured since they are used by most users.

Today, the App Annie team is made up of about 85 people across 16 nationalities. 70 of them are based in Beijing who largely focus on the product. The others are in San Francisco, Japan, and London who focus on sales (Update: SF is a secondary headquarters for App Annie’s sales, marketing, and market insights.). The App Annie team uses English across all team members and that includes its Beijing headquarters. When asked why China, Bertrand said:

We like it in China and China is a fast growing market. It is hard to get into the market so starting in Beijing is easier.

Despite being a fast growing market, the large publishers who are willing to pay for App Annie’s products are mostly still international companies. 90 percent of App Annie sales are generated outside of China with US and Japan its biggest markets.

To date, App Annie has raised $7 million of venture capital in total and is already cash flow positive. Over 220,000 apps are using App Annie with 85 percent of the top 100 iOS publishers using its service.

“At some point, we’re also interested to do digital content, not just apps,” said Bertrand.

Indonesian-made photo app PicMix revealed today that it passed the 10 million user mark last month, around three months after the app reached eight million users. PicMix is now available on Blackberry 10 thanks to a new app, which is quite natural seeing that the app met its viral success on Blackberry’s legacy platform.

Founder Calvin Kizana, who is at the Blackberry Live 2013 event in Orlando, Florida, told us that they’re going to introduce physical PicMix gift cards soon (pictured right), which can be used to top up virtual money inside the PicMix app to buy things like premium frames, filters, and stickers. The gift cards will be sold at Indonesian convenience stores such as 7-11, Lawson, AlfaMart, and Carrefour. Internet cafes in big cities like Jabodetabek will also sell them.

The cards are touted to be priced at IDR 20,000 (US$2). The gift cards are made in partnership with online payment service IndoMog which also sells game vouchers at the convenience stores mentioned above. The gift cards will complement PicMix’s online sales which are already available worldwide via credit card, PayPal, and local carrier billing.

If you happen to be at the BlackBerry event, you can head over to the PicMix’s booth to find more information about the startup.

It’s a fierce battlefield for chat apps in Indonesia. Today, Japan-based Line is going to roll out new ads featuring Indonesian celebrities Agnes Monica and pop group Nidji on TV in Indonesia. Those two celebrities are very prominent here as they are among the few who have represented Indonesia globally. But this latest move means a lot more in the Indonesian chat app battle, especially with regards rival KakaoTalk.

Let’s look at Line’s two newest marketing stars. The first is Agnes Monica, who has the biggest Twitter follower count for a celebrity in Indonesia. Which celebrity has the second biggest Twitter account here? None other than KakaoTalk’s TV ad star Sherina Munaf. Agnes now has over 7.5 million Twitter followers while Sherina has close to 6 million.

Indonesian pop group Nidji is also very famous here. Their hit singles have gained them huge popularity amongst teenagers and children, so much so that the band’s involvement with a cigarette campaign generated complaints from the national commission for child protection a few years ago. The band’s Facebook page has 465,000 likes.

Harnessing K-pop power

Those two stars will complement Line’s two other promo stars, Maudy Ayunda and K-pop singer Siwon. And yes, it is interesting to see a Japanese company choosing a Korean celebrity to star in its Southeast Asian ad campaign, with the latter celebrity being used to counter the K-pop fever brought by KakaoTalk’s Korean stars BigBang.

Today, Line representatives pointed out that its messaging app has gone back up to the number one spot for free apps in Indonesia on Android. But on iPhone, KakaoTalk is still ahead of Line in the country. The new TV ad starring Agnes Monica and Nidji will start airing today.

Youku is seeing users go mobile – but so are the web pirates.

After merging into one company last year, Youku Tudou (NYSE:YOKU) further established itself as China’s top online video business with its two sites. Combining user-generated videos and licensed movies and TV shows, Youku and Tudou collectively spent over US$100 million last year on securing the rights to an array of Chinese and overseas streaming content. It’s a significant investment (with studios like Sony Pictures and Warner Bros) in capturing the attention of China’s web users – and it’s a treasure they need to protect from web pirates.

In this battle against piracy, Youku Tudou is up against illegal downloading sites that rip licensed content from the company’s sites, and rogue video streaming sites that seek to profit from uploading these rips. And not to forget the ample number of rival Hulu-like services in the nation, like the fast-growing Tencent Video, Sohu TV, and Baidu’s iQiyi (which recently made a major acquisition to expand even further). Yes, they also pay for the rights to content – thereby pushing up the price of licensing – but I get the feeling that they all keep a keen eye on each other.

Overseeing all this for Youku Tudou is Carl Lu, the company’s legal supervisor and leader of the anti-piracy team. Carl tells us that as the site has grown to 150 million daily views from mobile devices, the pirates are going mobile as well. That’s a phenomenon we’ve also seen with Chinese authorities struggling to take down mobile-only porn sites. He explains:

Ever since the establishment of our anti-piracy team in early 2012, […] we have seen a quick expansion for anti-piracy fronts from mainly PC to include mobile devices. Additionally, the fast growth in small piracy video sites is astonishing. The team in July and August 2012 recorded around 500 to 600 such video sites, yet the latest monitoring – now we have to outsource to a third-party agency – in mid-April reported as many as 1,995 such sites, many of them not registered [in China], or with their servers overseas.

The pirates are going mobile

The company’s apps for Tudou (left) and Youku.

Carl points out that Youku Tudou’s “content cost in 2012 was $118.3 million, representing 41 percent of our consolidated net revenues.” The anti-piracy team is there to protect those assets. That team, we’re told, expands as needed, and also loops in outside agencies for added support. Exclusive licensed content is inevitably the most closely guarded:

As a standard procedure, the team will issue warning letters to our contacts, to inform them the upcoming exclusive copyrighted content we carry. Once we detect any [copyright] infringement, we will send them take-down notices. Attorney letters if no response. If we need to prepare for more serious steps, we will take notarized evidence. The last resort is an official lawsuit.

The Youku and Tudou sites have to monitor what their own users are up to because an individual uploading, say, another site’s licensed content in bite-sized chunks will cause problems. Carl says, “For that, we have an in-house fingerprinting system, and another third-party system to detect pirated content in addition to our team’s manual review.”

Despite China’s top web companies pushing forward licensed content – like Baidu’s revamped music streaming portal, and many of China’s top video streaming sites converting their movie and TV serials content into kosher copies – there’s still plenty of offline and online piracy in mainland China. From the country’s notorious DVD shops, to P2P platforms like Xunlei, to blatant direct download pirates, there are still plenty of dodgy ways of watching a new movie or an entire season of a popular TV show.

Last month, authorities took down two of China’s biggest media piracy sites, conveniently enough on World Intellectual Property Day. But one of then, YYeTs, is now back online.

Chinese TV dramas make up 60% of traffic

Despite the challenges, it’s clear that web video is now a crucial draw for major web companies in China. A total of 4.1 billion hours of online videos were watched in one month last summer, and that number has plenty of room for growth as smartphones gradually become more ubiquitous across broader swathes of China.

Of all the licensed content on Youku and Tudou right now, 60 percent of total traffic on the sites stem from Chinese TV serials. US dramas – I see that The Vampire Diaries is the hottest right now on Tudou – represent, Carl says, “one of the fast growing categories” but still only account for three percent of traffic.

While much of the streaming is free, some require a fee as part of the Youku Premium package. That service has seen two million transactions since its beta launch, but that’s a figure which hasn’t been updated by the company since last year. While the transition to mobile seems to be going well for Youku Tudou and a few other such sites, it’ll be tougher to get consumers to pay for the latest movies or TV shows. In order to capture the fast-growing mobile user-ship, Youku is launching mobile ads this month.

Youku Tudou plans to ramp up its battle with the web pirates even more this year, so we’ve not heard the last of this fight.

CEO and Founder at InMobi, Naveen Tewari, speaking at the Global Mobile Internet Conference 2013 in Beijing

Founder and CEO of mobile ad network giant, InMobi, Naveen Tewari, has come a long way. Naveen is an engineer by training, studied at Harvard Business School, and worked at consulting firm McKinsey. In between all that, Naveen also had some experience working in startups while he was in Silicon Valley.

Entrepreneurs being entrepreneurs, Naveen was very fascinated with the rapidly changing mobile internet. He wanted to build something which he could call his own. Naveen and his team started to dabble and among their first few projects was a VOIP application and also a chat application. But it was too early for the market back then. So the team started to question, “What are the things that could work? Maybe there’s a play for us if we were to build a fundamental service?”

These fundamental services range from mobile e-payments to advertising platforms. Therefore, with more interest in the advertising side of the business, mKhoj was founded in 2007. The name was later rebranded to InMobi to suit the international audience better. Naveen told me:

Over the period of years, we started to see success. We decided to go broader and into different markets and not just stick only to Asia. That’s how we expanded.

InMobi has had many turning points. Naveen pointed out three. The first was when the team decided to pivot when their chat application wasn’t gaining traction. “Pivoting really lead to the next level of growth for us,” he added.

The second one was when InMobi received funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPCB), a renowned global venture capital firm. The investment, said Naveen, gave InMobi a lot of confidence to grow and compete globally. The vote of confidence from KPCB also helped InMobi attract more talent to join the team. The third turning point was when InMobi received $200 million in funding from Softbank which really helped the company scale quickly in various markets.

We have doubled or tripled down on technology. We have built multiple platforms to go after the entire value chain of the ad business. We made acquisitions too to fill that up. We have also deepened our strengths in local markets – in the UK, Europe and launching ourselves in Korea, China, and Japan.

“We’re one of the largest mobile ad networks in China”

Today, InMobi can pat its chest and call itself a global company. Outside of India, it has offices and operations in Australia, Taiwan, the US, the UK, France, Italy, Russia, Germany, China and more. Despite launching in China only in late 2011, Naveen says that InMobi is “one of the largest mobile ad networks in China.”

An InMobi China PR representative later filled me in that the company is seeing 400 million impressions a day, serving 30,000 applications in China. Naveen believes that by the end of 2013, InMobi will be the largest mobile ad network in China.

We have aggressively invested into China. It’s a big market, we can’t just fiddle around with it. We don’t want to lose.

InMobi has offices in Beijing and Shanghai with more than 50 people running its China operations. When looking for talent, Naveen says that hunger and passion are the key things he is looking for.

Growing from a startup to a multi-national corporation, InMobi faces challenges like any fast growing young company would too. Naveen told me that as a young organization with little processes it was tough running a global operation with 25 offices while keeping one culture, one system, and communicating clearly with everyone. He also said:

As a company what we faced was to showcase and tell people that we have a great product. People expect great products coming out of Silicon Valley, innovations coming out of Silicon Valley and probably didn’t expect that innovation to come from an Indian company.

Despite the problems, InMobi has had a great reception around the world. Today, the company is close to reaching 700 million smartphone users across the world. InMobi was also recently crowned by MIT Technology Review as one of the 50 most disruptive companies in the world.

Image via Reuters

I’m beginning to think we might as well just consider Huawei and ZTE, given that they seem to pop up together constantly in the news. And, unfortunately for both companies, it’s never something good. When we last checked in with the dynamic duo it was because they were (and still are) under investigation by Indian Intelligence authorities, and now there’s more bad news for the Chinese telecoms in the form of this Reuters report suggesting the European Union may levy trade duties against Huawei and ZTE over what it considers to be illegal subsidies from the Chinese government.

Needless to say, Huawei and ZTE don’t see it that way and deny any wrongdoing. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei told reporters on Wednesday:

We hope the EU can proceed from the standpoint of protecting the stable development of trade relations with China and not make promises to undertake protectionist measures or adopt restrictive measures.

I have a feeling that having an official government spokesperson step in to defend the companies is not going to help dissuade the EU or anyone else that Huawei and ZTE are entirely too closely tied with the Chinese government. And indeed, the EU is apparently as concerned about security as the US and India are:

An internal EU report last year recommended that the 27-member bloc should take action against Chinese telecoms equipment makers as their increasing dominance of mobile networks made them a threat to security as well as to home-grown companies.

The increased scrutiny bodes poorly for both Huawei and ZTE, as both companies do significant business overseas, although ZTE is probably worse off since it is already losing boatloads of money. But the concerns expressed by lawmakers in the US, India, and the E.U. should give the companies pause — if they’ve managed to scare three of the world’s biggest markets on three separate continents, perhaps there really is something wrong with the way they conduct business.

Or perhaps it’s just a PR problem. Certainly neither company could be accused of having mastered international public relations, and the occasional revelations that they’re doing things like working with the Iranian government on “big brother” domestic spy equipment haven’t helped. As I pointed out above, it also isn’t helping when the Chinese government jumps to their defense — all that does is reinforce the perception that it’s a de facto state-run company, even though that’s not the case. Obviously Huawei and ZTE can’t really control what the government says, but if China wants its tech brands to succeed abroad, it might want to consider letting them sink or swim on their own, because the current method clearly isn’t working very well.

(via Reuters)

Mr. Kang Hyunbin, head of business office at Line Plus Corp

Popular mobile messaging chat app Line was created by NHN Japan, with Japanese and Korean team inspired by the tragic earthquake that happened in Japan in 2011. When SMS and calls were unreliable during the disaster, data messaging became the primary mode of communication.

As Line’s popularity grew, the app was spun-off in February this year into the Line Corp subsidiary. Besides facilitating chats between users, it has truly become a mobile platform incorporating different digital content including games and manga. Growing to 150 million users in less than two years hasn’t been easy. One of the reasons why Line has been able to grow so rapidly was because it has listened closely to its users’ needs. At NHN’s headquarters in Seoul, Korea, Kang Hyunbin, who is the head of business office at Line Plus Corp, told me:

I think users in Japan and the users in the world actually provide us the reason why we develop Line and what [way] to develop Line. Our users are kinda our co-founders.

Line characters and content

Hyunbin also believes that Line’s success hinges hugely on its rich content and user interface. For example Line users can express themselves with more than just words – there are the stickers that I would call an upgraded version of emoticons, and they have been hugely popular in Asia. Line has been extremely smart in developing different personalities for each of its sticker characters.

Starting with Cony, Brown, Moon, and James, these characters, who each represent different personalities, have been a huge hit in Asia. In Japan, Line’s kawaii characters are broadcast on TV in cartoon form and can also be found for sale as plush toys, T-shirts, and other merchandise. Take the pictured screenshot as an example. Expressing our sincere goodbyes to friends using stickers can be that fun.

Line also has games to entertain its users. One of its more popular games, Line Pop, is popular not just in Japan but also Thailand and Taiwan. So much so that it even has tutorial videos on tips and tricks to get more points.

Hyunbin told me that Line’s recently released manga content has been successful in Japan and the company has plans to bring it to other parts of the world.

Line outside of Japan

Line Japan focuses on the local Japanese market while the Korean headquarters focuses on international expansion. The ambitious chat application has been aggressively expanding to China, Vietnam, and Indonesia recently using both online and offline marketing tactics.

Chatting up China

Hyunbin says that Line’s China user base has grown rapidly despite early days. He explained further:

So far, we have established the basic infrastructure that we can do some more in the mainlaind China market. For example, Google Play doesn’t work in mainland China. So we have [to work with] a lot of third-party Android market. We have to modify our ‘apk’ files to suit into these third party markets […] and attract more users to download [Line].

Besides making adjustments to its Android distribution in China, Hyunbin says that Line’s cute stickers are getting many Chinese users on board. Line even introduced customized panda stickers to suit the local tastes and has also worked with local partners like Tmall and Mogujie to set up official accounts on Line.

Line’s plan in China is to target working women who are aged 20 to 30 in ‘tier one’ cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Hyunbin explains that the characteristics of these users are very fashion sensitive. So it is only natural to work with Chinese e-commerce sites with fashion products such as Tmall and Mogujie. Hyunbin also said that Line hasn’t started to do any large scale promotion in China as the company is still trying to understand the market better such as the media structure and user requirements.

The user-base number isn’t big in China but we have a growth trend plus our own effort, which we are going to plan in the future. I have confidence that we do have more aggressive numbers coming soon that we can reach in the future.

Tencent’s WeChat – called Weixin in China – is the clear market leader there.

Thailand, Indonesia, Spain, and more

Unlike China, Line dominates Thailand with more than 15 million users from the country. In Thailand, Line noticed a familiar trend: Users simply love their stickers. “Again, the one big phenomenon in the Thai market is that users can express themselves really well using Line’s stickers,” said Hyunbin.

Line acknowledges that Thailand is a big market for them. In the future, it is looking to introduce Line branded merchandise in Thailand and also more localized content including Thai-language content such as news, manga, and celebrity accounts. Hyunbin is also open to work with local Thai-based game developers who are able to build games with a regional vision.

Besides China and Thailand, Line has been very active in Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, The Philippines, and also the Spanish-speaking markets. Hyunbin explains that the popularity of Line in Spain has helped Line to organically grow in South American markets which mostly communicate in Spanish. In Spain, Line already has more than 12 million users.

Hyunbin highlighted that Indonesia is a key market for Line in Southeast Asia, stating the rapid growth in smartphone usage could signify that more people will be consuming mobile applications and content in the future. Based on Line’s internal data, it claims that it is the most popular chat application by user count.

The company declined to reveal user numbers for country-specific breakdowns, but said that out of 150 million users, 45 million of them are from Japan. So 70 percent of Line’s users are outside of Japan.

“We have no time to be worried about IPO.”

As Line grows into a giant mobile platform, there is more and more content on the mobile chat application. Hyunbin acknowledges that there could be a case where Line users (just like Facebook is experiencing now) may find the service complicated and overloaded with content. The team is careful with that and is constantly trying to simplify its features. On content selection, Line picks content to suit the local market, ensuring that they are relevant for its users. Hyunbin gave me a case in point:

For example in e-commerce there are global big players. But in each market, there are also local key players. In some ways, we [would like] to partner with the local companies to bring the best experience to users in specific markets.

When I asked when Line will go public, Hyunbin says that the company has no plans for that, saying that users are still their top priority. Jin-woo Lee, head of Line’s Southeast Asia team added:

A lot of people think that Line is quite big already. But if you take a look at the growth rate, in a year or two, we can be two or three times bigger than now. It all depends on expansion first. We need to create a bigger user-base then everything will be quite natural for an IPO. We have no time to be worried about IPO.

In Line’s first quarterly financial results that came out last week, the subsidiary revealed that it recorded $58 million in revenue in Q4.

China’s biggest web company by revenue has just posted its Q1 2013 financial report. Tencent (HKG:0700) reports rocketing revenues and profits for the whole group, which covers products across social media, gaming, advertising, e-commerce, media, and more. Tencent’s quarterly revenues hit US$2.161 billion, up 11.5 percent on Q4 last year, and up 40.4 percent from the same period last year; net profits reached $649.4 million in Q1, up 17.3 percent QoQ or 37.4 percent YoY.

Tencent makes China’s biggest social export, WeChat. In today’s report, the company revealed that it now has nearly 195 million monthly active users on the social messaging app (194.4 million to be precise); that’s up 23.1 percent on the previous quarter, which is up 228.4 percent in a year. WeChat has over 300 million registered users, and is likely to exceed 400 million some time this month. As we noted last week, WeChat’s significant number of active users puts it close to surpassing Whatsapps’s 200 million actives, though about 90 percent of WeChat’s user-base is within mainland China, so it’s not that much of a global success yet.

Other social numbers:

• QQ instant messenger hit 825.4 million monthly active users, up 9.8 percent on Q1 2012. QQ’s peak simultaneous users reached 173.0 million, which was down 3.3 percent across the year.
• Qzone, the broader social network around QQ, got up to 611 million monthly actives, up 5.9 percent in a year.
• QQ Game Platform saw peak simultaneous users of 9.2 million, up 5.9 percent over the same period.

In other financial data, value-added services accounted for 78.7 percent of revenues in Q1 this year, reaching $1.72 billion. That’s up 13.6 percent from the last quarter. Online gaming revenues increased 19.3 percent over the same period to amount to $1.21 billion. That was mostly down to China-area gamers on things like Crossfire, and was boosted by increased gaming activity during Chinese New Year.

Founder, chairman, and CEO Pony Ma says in today’s report:

During the first quarter of 2013, we saw broad-based growth in user engagement and revenue across our key activities. This growth has enabled us to fund investments in longer-term opportunities such as WeChat international user acquisition, online video content aggregation, and e-commerce footprint expansion, while maintaining a healthy expansion rate in earnings and cash flow. We saw both strategic and financial benefits from our portfolio of investee companies, including a further special dividend from Mail.ru.

We will continue to invest proactively in innovation and technology, and to cultivate our open platform, in order to capture the mobile opportunities ahead and strengthen our position as the leading internet platform company in China.

WeChat hasn’t really been monetized so far, but Tencent will soon endow it with social gaming integration similar to what has been done by rival apps Line and KakaoTalk.

Find the full report on Tencent’s investor relations page.

The newest earnings report from SingTel (SGX:T48) makes for painful reading. The giant Singapore-based telco, which has over 420 million subscribers on numerous networks across Asia-Pacific, saw its first full year drop in revenues for 14 years in today’s stats for Q4 and FY 2012. The only ray of light comes from SingTel’s digital business, which saw a 156 percent rise in revenues. Perhaps inspired by this, SingTel will set aside US$1.6 billion for startup acquisitions so as to find “next-generation growth engines in the digital space”.

That $1.6 billion investment will be spread over the next three years, and will be largely ploughed into strategic acquisitions in the online space that can tie in with SingTel’s phone services across the region.

Indeed, we’ve already seen SingTel doing this over the past couple of years, having acquired the mobile ad company Amobee for $321 million, snapped up the food recommendation startup HungryGoWhere, and made investments in things like TheMobileGamer. Plus the telco has a VC arm called SingTel Innov8 that has made lots of significant investments across the region. The most recent one was in the China-based mobile game developer and publisher Yodo1.

Profits down

Getting back to SingTel’s latest numbers, net profit fell 12 percent year-on-year to s$3.51 billion ($2.83 billion) at the end of March 2013. Group revenue fell 3.4 percent to S$18.18 billion ($14.66 billion) for the full year.

SingTel wholly owns Australia’s Optus, and has significant stakes in telcos like India’s Bharti, Philippines’ Globe, and several others.

See more financial data on the SingTel IR homepage or on ZDnet.

(Hat-tip to ZDnet for spotting this)

Using a smartphone is a very sensual and immersive experience, but so far our sense of smell has been left out of the fun. Not any more. A Japanese startup has created and is looking to launch ChatPerf, a hardware add-on for your iPhone that can emit smells.

The ChatPerk gadget (see the video below) could be synced up with various apps or games to emit specific odors at a certain time – 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. I’m sure we can imagine some cruder smells that could be honked out as well.

ChatPerk is just a prototype for now, and the demo video below reveals that it looks very different to the conceptual designs on the startup’s homepage, so perhaps it’s all far from finalized. The biggest barrier to this being used extensively it that it cannot, inevitably, create scents magically from the ether, and so it requires the use of miniature plastic tanks of perfumes. That sounds a bit fiddly and troublesome.

A version of ChatPerk for Android is in the works, but there’s no indicated launch time or price yet for either that or the iPhone add-on. Check out the demo video shot by Diginfo.tv over the weekend:

(Source: Diginfo.tv)

Here are the newest rankings and China market share (where available) data from Canalys:

• 1st: Samsung, with 20 percent market share
• 2nd: Coolpad
• 3rd: Huawei
• 4th: Lenovo
• 5th: Apple, with eight percent market share

Samsung (005930:KS) and Apple are the only non-domestic brands in the top ten, continuing a trend that’s been going on for a couple of years. Canalys notes that 68 percent of all shipments within China are from domestic brands. Lenovo (HKG:0992) is aiming to outsell Samsung within China in the near future.

In contrast to the 82 million smartphones shipped in China (yes, Canalys focuses on units shipped, which admitedly doesn’t correlate with devices bought; many might be still sitting on shelves or in warehouses), the US market saw 27 million smartphones shifted.

For a rough idea of actual units sold, it’s worth noting that Samsung sold 30 million of its phones in China in 2012.

(Source: Macworld/IDG News)

We are reviewing our business to optimize our global game development operations through a process of selection and concentration, and this has led us to the difficult decision to close our China office and studio. GREE Beijing has developed several excellent games and the talented people who made up its staff have made a valuable contribution to GREE. We regret that we have had to make this closure and wish all the best to everyone affected.

Japan’s GREE has been a dominant force in mobile games on its home turf, and over the past few years has overseen an aggressive expansion overseas. But late last year the company was forced to lay off employees at its North American office, and now it has apparently shuttered its China branch completely.

We have contacted GREE for comment on this story and will update it if we hear back.

According to an internal announcement at GREE China yesterday (as reported by Sina Tech), the branch will totally cease operations on June 28th, and all of its employees will be laid off. The company has not yet announced a compensation plan for employees, but it should have plenty of time to roll something out over the next month and a half before the shutdown actually takes place.

The reason for GREE China’s demise — and the company’s declining fortunes in general — is generally believed to be its failure to recognize and commit to the global movement towards smartphones quickly enough. 60 percent of GREE’s revenue is still coming from feature phone users, but feature phone users are getting scarcer and the company has not carved out a dominant position as a smartphone gaming platform on either Android or iOS.

Of course, this is not to say the company is about to collapse. GREE is still projecting a net profit of around $300 million this quarter, but then again, if the company’s projections are correct it will be the first time since 2008 that GREE has seen its profits drop. It seems likely that given this shift, the company has decided to concentrate on its strengths on its home turf of Japan and reduce the degree to which it’s extended overseas. That’s probably a smart business move, but it’s a bummer for everyone working in the GREE China office.

Related: GREE’s founding story

(via Sina Tech)

We’ve seen all kinds of social fashion startups crop up in Asia in the past couple of years. One of the newest is Zoolook, created by a team of six people that’s split evenly between Tokyo and Hong Kong. This particular app focuses on the social and photography side of clothing, and is made up of a social network were people can share and tag their favorite looks (pictured below).

One big draw in the app, explains Zoolook founder Benoit Lavaud, is the presence of top fashion labels who have virtual “showrooms”, not dissimilar from Facebook brand pages, within the social network. This feature is being used by over 60 regional but prominent fashion companies, such as Kenzo, and… er… lots of others that I won’t pretend I know. But I’ve heard of Kenzo. For more clued-up fashionistas, the app is a way to keep up with trends, share their looks, and get inspiration from the numerous Asian fashion bloggers who also make use of the startup’s service.

Benoit explains this strategy to us:

Brands are quite lost in terms of promotion now that digital has entered their landscape. They lack resources to manage at same time in-store promotion and digital promotion. We have entered this category where they feel we do the job of connecting bloggers and influencers for both real and digital.

Zoolook is also working the floor at offline events in this sector, and was recently selected as the official app of the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Tokyo. Readers in Hong Kong might want to check out Zoolook’s ‘live fashion snap’ event on Thursday (16th) evening at 6pm at Apple’s Causeway Bay store. Benoit explains what’s going to be happening that night:

We have invited over 20 top bloggers and Hong Kong Fashion icons to come and be snapped by Stephenie Kay, a Chinese fashion photographer. We setup a photo booth and a stage in the store and gather fashionistas to watch how Stephenie master photography snapping these influencers using an iPhone and our app. Very unique to be able to organize such a gathering in an Apple Store.

The Zoolook iPhone app is here, while the Android version is still in the works.

Kakao, the maker of Korean mobile chat app, KakaoTalk, has launched KakaoHome a launcher for Android users. At first glance, it feels a little like “Facebook Home” type of application but it is not.

From what we understood so far, users can pull out KakaoHome from the left side of their Android home screen which displays notifications from KakaoTalk, KakaoStory, games and more.

Good news is that, by default, KakaoHome doesn’t invade your lock and home screen entirely. Facebook Home does that which is a little annoying. Though you can turn it off through settings.

Other than that, like any other Android launcher, KakaoHome helps users tidy their mobile apps, such as in alphabetical order, order of downloads, or in your own personalized orders. Users can also choose over 100 free design themes to decorate its Android devices’ wallpaper, app icons, widgets, and page slide effects.

Kakao’s Android Launcher is social. But it is only useful if you and your network of friends are on KakaoTalk. So launching KakaoHome in Korea is perhaps a good first move since most of its 90 million users originate there. But other than Korea, I can’t see KakaoHome thriving in other countries. Unless, of course, if KakaoTalk has proven to be successful abroad.

Kakao has been pretty aggressive pushing KakaoTalk in Indonesia and Vietnam but also faces competition from Line and WeChat who are also eyeing the same market.

(Also read: How KakaoTalk Grew From a Startup to a Giant Mobile Platform)

After traveling up to Hanoi last weekend and hunting for cool startups, a lot of the people there kept recommending me to meet Ngo Xuan Huy. He’s got a 10-person team working on an app called Money Lover (the landing page isn’t online yet, so just go straight to the app links at the bottom of the page) on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. And although it’s made in Vietnam, the app is going global. Worldwide, Money Lover’s has over 1.5 million downloads.

The app is basically a finances and expenses manager for individuals. It allows you to track your spending over time and manage your monthly or annual budget. So throughout the day, I could pull out Money Lover after I make a purchase and log it into the app. At the end of the month, I could look back at my spending and tweak according to my budget. The app Mint, from the Valley, also does a similar thing but it can be tied directly to your bank account.

Huy started out with the app by himself when he was in university and used it for his own personal needs. When Money Lover went live on the Google Play Store, he was shocked to find that a lot of people were downloading it. In the next two years, he assembled a team together to do it full time. Another cool thing about the Money Lover app is that it’s currently available in 28 languages, and Huy’s team didn’t translate any of those languages (except for English). Users created the translations themselves. The top two user bases are the US and Italy.

At first, the app started out as a freemium app, they tried out a paid version but now Huy is stick with the freemium model and that has secured the majority of downloads. Users can get a premium account, which opens up more expense management features. Huy says that:

In the latest version, we rebuilt it from the ground up to integrate cloud and web features. In the future, we’re hoping to get more into family accounting, where users can connect their accounts with their loved ones to share expenses. We’re also looking to work more with payment systems or banks just like Mint does.

I’m impressed with the simplicity and design of the app, Huy also says they’re going to continue innovating on the design and providing what users need. He’s also looking for new hires to expand the team on the mobile and web fronts, and also looking for investment for scaling, if anybody out there is interested.

We recently saw a Japanese startup do a similar thing in that nation, except that that app already connects to dozens of banks.

You can download it on iOS here and on Android here and on Windows phone here.

Check out more screenshots of the Money Lover app:

Credit: BlackberryCool.com

BlackBerry users around the world might be questioning their loyalty after another outage of the popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service happened a couple of days ago. It was widely reported that the service was down for users living in the Asia Pacific region between Sunday night to Monday morning, and today BlackBerry Indonesia finally acknowledged ¹ the downtime and offered an apology.

The most interesting part of the story, in my mind, is the statement given by the Indonesian ICT minister Tifatul Sembiring on this latest incident (as reported by another Detik article). Mr. Sembiring said he is disappointed that the company did not notify its users sooner about the setback, and he added that BlackBerry sales have decreased by 70 percent in Indonesia. There’s no source to back up the minister’s claim, however.

According to various users on the Crackberry forums, the BBM outage happened across Indonesia, Australia, Hong Kong, Thailand, India, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, and Malaysia. Customers’ trust in BlackBerry in that region must have been shaken up again. The same BBM service suffered an even longer downtime last October.

BlackBerry is up against Android, iOS, and Windows Phone as more Indonesians switch to smartphones.

(Sources: Detik #1, #2, and Kompas)

Photos become more meaningful when you look at them in relation to time. Reep is a made-in-Japan mobile app that remembers the photos you took a year ago. It syncs with your iPhone camera folder, Instagram, Facebook, and Flickr to help sort your images based on dates.

After you sync your photo accounts with Reep, you see a calendar that shows you the images taken a year ago. For example, a year ago on May 8, I was at Baidu headquarters in Beijing, China. Admittedly, Reep doesn’t solve any real life problem, but it is cool to know what was I doing in the past through the pictures I have taken. You can give Reep a download here at no cost if you have an iOS device available.

Hiromasa Yoshikane, CEO at Azit, the company behind Reep, says that his team was organized by a group of university students whose average age is just 21 years old. Despite the team’s young age, their mobile app, Reep, has won several award including the “CyberAgent × Biz Japan Business Contest 2012” and “Google for Entrepreneurs Tokyo 2012.” The young team is currently under the mentorship of Modiva Japan and Voyage Group in Japan.

I’ll say it again: if there is one mobile game out there right now that people in Japan will remember in 10 years, it’s Puzzle and Dragons.

The game, which boasts 13 million registered users in this country (10 percent of the population), has generated US$113 million in sales in April.

Since late last year, maker GungHo’s market cap at the Osaka Stock Exchange kept rising and rising – to about $10 billion – to the point that the company is worth more than Mobage operator DeNA, GREE, and Zynga combined.

The Korean version of GungHo’s money-raking game.

And today, GungHo (3765.OS) shares jumped limit-up by 300,000 yen to 1,342,000 yen (up 28.8 percent) in just a few minutes of trading, until the stock was bid-only.

As a consequence, the company’s market cap now reached 1.54 trillion yen, which translates to $15.1 billion. With this number, GungHo topped Nintendo’s market cap of US$1.53 trillion yen (or US$15.0 billion).

The US$15.1 billion market cap is also higher than that of Nikon, Fujitsu, Isuzu, Sanyo, All Nippon Airways, Sharp, or Mitsubishi Motors.

It’s a new world we live in.

Other market caps (Monday, May 13 at 11:30am JST):

• GREE: $2.8 billion
• DeNA: $3.6 billion
• Zynga at $2.6 billion
• Electronic Arts: $6.7 billion
• Activision Blizzard: $16.7 billion

GungHo’s new owner SoftBank can be very happy.

If you’re in Vietnam and you’ve got an iOS device, chances are you’re not using Apple’s Newsstand. Personally, I’m annoyed by it because I can never hide it in a folder. I also can’t get my hands on any Vietnamese-language magazines on it. Well, luckily Kpaper just released last week on iOS and Android.

I spoke with Nguyen Trung Nghia, the founder of KGP ID, which also runs projects including Sufi, Kcloud, Ktaxi, and Kprice. The really cool thing about the 17-person team is that some of there are actually in Da Nang, Vietnam’s fastest growing central city, with a nascent startup culture.

Basically, Kpaper is an app that allows you to read local magazines online. It’s the first of its kind in Vietnam and is another humble step in the direction of developing more online content in Vietnam. According to Nghia:

So far, we’re working with three main publishers, including Viettel and Soha, and we’re looking for more. We’ve already got 40 magazines online. The business model is to produce really good content and then get users onto our other platforms like Kprice, our payment system, and Ktaxi, a taxi booking system.

The interesting thing about paper is that it doesn’t actually download the magazines to your smartphone, but rather allows you to view them online with a cache. In a way, it’s like magazine streaming. So after you’re finished reading, the magazines automatically delete themselves but are always available to be “streamed” again. Currently, the magazines are all free and Nghia is working with more publishers to get distribution going. In the future, it’s possible that Kpaper will also charge for more pricey magazines, but this is just the first step right now.

You can check out the app on iOS and Android.

Tencent’s (HKG:0700) chat service QQ is used by over half a billion people and is China’s top app for iPhone and Android. When the QQ mobile apps got a radical update and make-over recently to make them look more like WeChat, Tencent probably thought it was a great idea. But the vast majority of QQ users disagree – to the point of anger, hatred, and vitriol.

The new QQ v4.0 for iPhone currently has an average user rating of one star. Of 41,482 reviews of the updated app in the iTunes App Store, an astonishing 39,298 people (that’s 94.7 percent) have given it the lowest star rating. Prior to the WeChat-inspired update for QQ, the instant messaging (IM) app had been enjoying mostly five-star feedback. This is the scene now:

The anger is mostly about the looks – with users mockingly calling it a “second hand WeChat” – as the QQ v4.0 update for iPhone (or v4.1 for Android) has taken on less of a traditional IM user interface. For example, there’s no longer an indicator light besides contacts’ names on your QQ contacts list, so you can’t see who’s online until you click their name. Also, the chat window now looks more like a new-style messaging app – ie: more like WeChat or Whatsapp – which means that there’s a lot of wasted space in between users’ words (pictured top).

It seems that Tencent has not taken into account that their two very popular apps – WeChat will soon hit 400 million users – are used quite differently. QQ tends to be activated when someone specifically wants to chat, so that necessitates clearly seeing who’s online and being easily able to view a fast-paced conversation in one window. WeChat, in contrast, is for more casual messaging, sort of like a replacement for SMS.

QQ users are certainly making their displeasure known wherever possible. On the official ‘Mobile QQ’ account on Tencent Weibo, worried iPhone users are asking how they can downgrade to the previous version; others are telling Tencent that the update is “garbage”, “disgusting”, and “dogshit”. Over on the third-party Baidu Android app store, commenters are being more polite, asking and pleading for previous IM-like features to be restored.

One very useful feature from WeChat that’s in the new version of QQ is that it now supports group chats for up to 50 people. These can be accessed by sending invites through the app, or by sharing a QR code. I’ve been at a conference where this WeChat group chat feature was used to let audience members ask questions to onstage speakers, which was fun; that could also be put to great use in QQ. That is, if QQ has any users left after this kerfuffle.

(Hat-tip to Sina Tech for spotting this – article in Chinese)

I know that India’s Just Dial has been on the verge of an IPO before, but this time it’s for real. The local search engine, which now operates in seven countries and is accessible both online and by SMS, has just filed for its IPO, which will hit stock tickers on May 20th.

Just Dial seeks to raise as much as Rs 950 crore – that’s a little under US$175 million. It will list locally on the BSE, NSE, and MCX-SX markets, thereby foregoing a long anticipated US IPO. In contrast, the travel portal MakeMyTrip raised nearly $80 million in its 2010 IPO on NASDAQ.

Sequoia Capital has been a major investor in Just Dial over the years. It started up in 1994.

After Just Dial, it’s likely that BharatMatrimony and HomeShop18 will go public soon too, giving a big boost to India’s tech sector, which has previously seen few web company IPOs. But HomeShop18’s listing might not happen until 2014.

Over the weekend, Google quietly killed off its SMS search feature, which will be a shot in the arm for Just Dial and other ‘dumbphone’-oriented search services like SMSgyan.

We’ve been following the progress of Videogram, a startup that hails from Tokyo, pretty closely in the past six months. Now that Videogram has a new iPhone app, I decided to give it a try.

Looking at the name, one might think that Videogram is the Instagram of videos – it is not, nor does it seem to aim to be. Started up by Sandeep Casi at Cinemacraft in Japan – before moving to Silicon Valley as part of 500 Startups – it’s about helping people discover videos, something that translates well in its iPhone app.

With most online video services such as YouTube, you’re only shown one still-frame to decide whether or not you’ll watch it. Videogram displays the video 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, including factors such as user-engagement. To be clear – Videogram seems to be concerned only with how users discover and engage with videos before they watch them. Apps like Vine and Cinemagram seem to be the ones vying for the title of “the Instagram of videos” – focusing more on the ability to create and share videos.

In terms of video playback itself, there’s really nothing different on Videogram than what you would find with YouTube. However, it does offer users the opportunity to comment with the video playback time also tagged, similar to what Soundcloud allows, albeit displayed in a list format instead of on the linear playback bar.

In trying out the app, I encountered some playback bugs here and there, and I felt the experience was a little clunky on the iPhone 4 I tested it on. This may be because a large part of the app isn’t native code but HTML5 (the video playback is native). Trying to provide the same experience on mobile as on the web app version offers a challenge – especially for an app that’s visual by nature. Videogram alters the number of frames that are shown depending on the display size and the Videogram algorithm.

Personally, I think the Cinemacraft team is onto something interesting for video discoverability, and I think some tweaking is needed in making the experience just right. For example: I like the idea of its playlists, but didn’t like how the playlists are channel-specific – meaning I couldn’t mix and match videos from different content providers.

Cinemacraft’s impressive initial list of content providers and innovative approach to displaying videos is certainly a welcome change and a benefit for video content providers and consumers alike, and I’m looking forward to seeing the future of Videogram as it evolves both on PC and mobile.

Check out an embedded Videogram video in our first story on the startup. The Videogram iOS app is here.

This is what Alibaba wants: Autonavi’s mobile maps know-how and market reach.

You can wait years for a big deal to hit the Chinese web, but recently the blockbuster moves are coming in thick and fast. The latest sees e-commerce company Alibaba taking an approximate 28 percent stake in Autonavi (NASDAQ:AMAP), makers of online maps and navigation. This comes just two weeks after Alibaba got more social by taking a 18 percent stake in Sina Weibo, the country’s hottest social network right now.

Autonavi is China’s top independent online mapping company, with over 100 million users on its mobile apps, constituting just over 25 percent market share among mobile maps in China. Search giant Baidu is second in this sector, while Google Maps continues to lose market share. This evening’s announcement points out:

The parties plan to share certain data, including AutoNavi’s map data and location-related information of the merchants on Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms, including Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com. AutoNavi and Alibaba will also cooperate in the areas of map engine, location search, navigation and cloud computing services and will cross-promote their respective products and services, with a goal of developing new location-based business models.

Joseph C. Tsai, executive vice chairman of Alibaba, and Eddie Wu, president of Alibaba’s mobile products division, will join AutoNavi’s board of directors upon the closing of the transaction. The transaction is expected to close in the near future, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

Alibaba, which is today celebrating 10 years of Taobao, its eBay-beating C2C shopping site, has been diversifying in the past year. Aside from acquiring the social music service Xiami last year and today’s significant stake in Autonavi, there’s lots of talk that the e-shopping behemoth is planning to do a lot of shopping of its own, with rumors of acquisitions/stakes in Umeng (mobile ads and analytics for app developers) and UCWeb, makers of the hugely popular mobile browser UC Browser. It’s no coincidence that these all relate to mobile.

On the eve of Mobile Day in Hanoi tomorrow, I think it’s worth taking a closer look at mobile growth in Vietnam. It’s increasingly becoming a buzzword that I hear among tech circles that are looking at the consumer market. Especially with foreign companies like Hungrypanda entering the market with a mobile app and big internet companies like VNG going mobile first, and even e-commerce companies like Project Lana getting more serious about fostering communication over mobile, mobile is a clear and present future. The companies are all readying the battlefield for the mobile growth factor.

Mobile growth in Vietnam is bullish as hell

One of the key reasons we’re seeing such powerful growth in mobile in Vietnam is because of the monetization potentials. In Vietnam’s web space, monetization has mainly been lead by advertising and now e-commerce. But online marketing is sparse at best, only accounting for less than 5 percent of total marketing spending in the country.

Mobile, on the other hand, although not exactly an easy space to monetize, given that telecoms take more than 30 percent of the cut on purchases made via SMS, is still a significant space. It’s significant because the market is about to expand very fast. And that market comprises of users who may have never been online before. As of late 2012, according to my sources, Vietnam has over 27 million smartphones (much of that is not on iOS and Android). And as I reported before, 6 million new smartphones will be shipped into the hands of consumers by the end of this year. That’s a 150 percent growth over the year before. And this figure is just 1.5 million under the total amount of users currently reported on the leading chat apps in Vietnam. (1)

Okay, so there are macro-economic issues

Now, lately I’ve been seeing lots of sensationalist gripes from international economists about how Vietnam’s economy is in a crisis and that it’s Asia’s weakest link, and granted, these warning signs have been seen for a long time. There is no doubt that Vietnam is in a quagmire in dealing with banking systems, corruption issues, and infrastructural issues like education.

But these macro-economic sweeping statements miss some key things about Vietnam. One of them is, small and medium sized businesses in Vietnam, according to some of my sources, are still not impacted. They’re still growing. And they account for a lot of the new businesses and growth in the country. The technology industry is also robust as ever, especially being lead by the outsourcing juggernauts in the country.

And mobile growth underlines some very key factors

Where is this mobile growth occurring? Why are so many companies set on attacking the mobile space despite the macroeconomic factors? Well, over 70 percent of the Vietnamese population is under 35, and many of them are in or entering the employment market. What’s the average monthly salary of this group of people? VND 3.2 million ($150). That may seem small, but not so small when weighed against the buying power of families that pool their salaries together living in one household. And even more so when weighed up against the dropping prices of smartphones and the already severely low 3G rates. This population is going mobile very fast, and whoever comes to dominate is sure to make tons of money. So don’t be surprised when the mobile market is one of the support beams that lifts Vietnam out of its current economic woes.

Oh, and mobile designers in Vietnam, seem to be much better than web designers.

Disclosure: Now, granted, I’m no economy major. But the impact of mobile is still a huge factor worth looking at when assessing an anomaly of an economy like Vietnam, which has been repeatedly thought to be in a “crisis” but defied analysts again and again.

(1) The math goes like this: 3.5 million from Viber + 2 million from Zalo + 1 million from KakaoTalk + 1 million from Line = 7.5 million. This does not account for obvious overlaps. Suffice it to say, if 27 million (total from 2012) + 6 million (total shipped in 2013) = 33 million smartphones in Vietnam. Thus 7.5 million only accounts for 22 percent of the smartphone market. And that assumes there’s no overlap. If overlap is accounted for, that percentage would be much smaller. This also does not factor in WhatsApp’s unknown numbers.

The move reflects mobile developer Quan Inc’s desire to expand into Southeast Asia. The partnership with AIS may also give Quan an opportunity to develop future apps for SingTel customers, as SingTel is a stakeholder in AIS.

The news is also a reflection of the growing popularity of chat apps like Line, KakaoTalk, and WeChat in Southeast Asia, and the ecosystems that are cropping up around them as they move away from being standalone chat apps and towards being full-fledged platforms.

Disclosure: East Ventures, one of Quan Inc.’s investors, is also an investor of Tech in Asia. Read our ethics page for more information.

For the first time since NHN debuted its popular chat app, Line is publicly announcing its quarterly earnings – and it’s a whopper.

Line’s earnings climbed 92 percent from the last quarter to hit JPY 5.82 billion (US$58 million). And a breakdown of where those revenues come from, you ask? Well, 50 percent is from in-app purchases across its 24 different social games, and 30 percent from the 191 stickers that are sold in the chat app. 80 percent of that $58 million came from Japan. That underlines Line’s strength in Japan – but also its reliance on the Japanese market.

Worldwide, Line has over 150 million registered users right now. Most of those users, despite the revenues, are not in Japan. Line has recently been making aggressive moves in Southeast Asia, South Korea, Taiwan, and even the US. But given the numbers, Line will need to work hard on monetizing outside of Japan.

Line’s financial numbers are interesting when compared to its key competitor up in South Korea, KakaoTalk, which reported $45 million in revenue and $7 million profit for 2012 at out Startup Asia event earlier this year. Although the startup KakaoTalk is still catching up to Line, those numbers are hard to ignore. WhatsApp, as tight-lipped as ever, has never revealed its revenue numbers but that hasn’t stopped users on Quora from speculating that its revenue figure must be around $45 million. Over in China, Tencent has been in no hurry to make money from WeChat, and will only start to monetize it later this year with a new social gaming platform.

Japan-based social gaming platform DeNA (TYO:2432) has just rolled out its Q4 and full-year 2012 financials. After an expensive previous quarter in which profits dipped, the same thing happened again for DeNA in Q4 (up to March 31st 2013) with an operating profit of $184 million, which is down from $216 million in Q3, but up three percent on the previous year.

Quarterly revenue was $528 million (up 22 percent from same time last year), but below Q3’s record-breaking figure.

Things are rosier for the whole of the 2102 fiscal year, in which DeNA brought in a record $2.04 billion in revenues and $775 million in profit. Here’s the key table:

DeNA chose its quarterly highlights as:

• MobaCoin consumption in Japan was 58.3 billion yen ($588 million), 2.5 percent lower than the previous quarter.
• Overseas MobaCoin consumption showed strong and steady quarter-to-quarter increase, approaching $70 million.
• Increased user engagement drove monetization growth. As a result, Mobage titles occupied top ranks in US Google Play’s top-grossing chart.
• DeNA and Nexon formed a global business alliance to bring new Nexon-developed games to Mobage networks.
• Groovy, DeNA’s new music player app was launched in Japan.

For the current Q1 2013, DeNA expects to make $175 million in operating profit (UPDATE: Corrected that figure. It’s for Q1 only, not FY13).

See the full stats on DeNA’s IR homepage.

With 190 million monthly active users on WeChat, that means the fast-growing app is poised to pass Whatsapp, which has 200 million monthly actives in new data revealed in April.

But Whatsapp enjoys far more international success. Tencent recently revealed that WeChat has 40 million users overseas, meaning that its reach beyond China is far smaller than Whatsapp’s – and behind Japan-made Line app as well.

Hou Xiaonan’s number, spotted by Marbridge Daily, was revealed yesterday at the final day of the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing. The day before that, we saw Tencent CEO Ma Huateng explaining some of the company’s strategies and visions for more mobile success.

This is part of our coverage of GMIC 2013 in Beijing, which was on May 7 and 8. For other stories from this event, click here.

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

Umeng is like Google Analytics for mobile applications in China. Founded in 2010, Jiang said that the company came about because there was a need for it. Knowing that mobile will be huge in China over the next couple of years, Jiang believed that mobile developers would require tools to help them understand their users’ data and in-app behavior. He was right. Today, Umeng is serving over 100,000 mobile applications across all major mobile platforms — iOS, Android, and Windows Phone — with more than 50 percent of all Chinese developers using the service.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The source, who works at an unnamed telecom, says that among other reasons, China Mobile is not currently prepared to launch the network commercially, and is on pace to be ready for launch in October if nothing goes wrong. But the roll-out could come as late as early 2014, depending on how things develop over the summer and into the fall.

And those who’re waiting for FDD-LTE rather than China Mobile’s TD-LTE are likely to be waiting even longer. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is reportedly unlikely to issue any permits for FDD-LTE networks until months or possibly even a year after China Mobile’s TD-LTE network is launched, as it favors the home-grown TD-LTE technology.

While Southern Metropolis Daily is a pretty reliable paper, this is still just another anonymously-sourced rumor and should be taken with a grain of salt. Rumors about the launch of 4G in China have been flying for more than a year now, and at this point the most prudent response seems to be simply: we’ll believe it when we see it. That said, all signs do seem to point to 4G coming to China at some point before the end of this year if all goes smoothly.

(Southern Metropolis Daily via Sina Tech)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the idea came about

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

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

Click to enlarge.

Engaging consumers

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

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

Nevo Alva gives his winning pitch this afternoon in Beijing.

Looking to China and Asia

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

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

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

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

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

A few months ago we reported that the Indonesian telcos were planning to build a chat app platform together to battle the aggresively expanding foreign chat apps like WeChat, Line, and KakaoTalk. We questioned how the various telcos could actually work together to build it without it being a management nightmare.

Well, a couple of days ago Indonesian telco Indosat revealed (via Detik) that the company is readying itself – alone – to launch its WhatsApp-inspired service in the third quarter of this year at the earliest. The app will convert the chats from a smartphone device into SMS when being sent to a feature phone. In that way, the company will get to keep some revenue from the SMS industry.

The telco is going to build the application with a local third-party developer. The company is still in the process of choosing the developers now. The Indosat representative said that they are doing this to help the local developers too.

If the plan comes to fruition, then Indosat would definitely prioritize its own app, including possibly giving more affordable pricing for its own messaging app. It still remains to be seen if the telco will be able to develop something better than WhatsApp, Line, and KakaoTalk in such a short time. Chinese telco China Mobile built its own messaging platform a few years ago called Fetion; after initial success, it soon started to it lose out to rivals like WeChat in the chat app battleground.

(Source: Detik)

Whereas the Jawbone Up costs a whopping $130, Codoon’s little clone – which will launch soon, though no date is set – will cost only RMB 299, which is $48. There is some demand for imported Jawbone Up devices in the country, but they sell for RMB 1,100, which is a staggering $177. Here are the two gadgets side by side:

The new gadget will work with Codoon’s existing tracking apps for iPhone and Android to give you analytics about your exercising, movements, and sleep patterns. The Codoon homepage has had a nice, slidey revamp to welcome its new product – and that’s reminiscent of Jawbone’s homepage as well.

The new Codoon Sports Bracelet and its fitness data app.

Codoon was founded in October 2009 and received over $1 million in investment in April 2011.

Aside from sending data to Codoon’s mobile apps, the new Codoon Sports Bracelet will also zap your data to a Baidu Cloud account.

In the past, Codoon’s wearable hardware was optional, as its smartphone app can do a lot of data tracking. But with its new Codoon Sports Bracelet, there’s much more emphasis put on its hardware, which will surely help with the startup’s revenue stream.

Regardless of the derivative design, the price is right on this new fitness-tracking gizmo. RMB 299 is definitely the kind of price-point where a lot of Chinese smartphone owners could think Well, I’ll give it a shot. Perhaps this kind of wearable tech, after a sluggish start in China, will finally pick up pace.

(Hat-tip to QQ Tech for spotting this)

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

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

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

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

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

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

KakaoTalk was born

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

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

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

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

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

Kakao’s smart funding

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

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

Users define Kakao’s Future

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

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

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

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

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

(Updated: We tinkered with the headline a little bit).

While we occasionally see apps being put at optimistically premium prices, a few developers dare sell their app above the US$100 mark. 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. How much is the app? $300.

Themis Reader offers close to 10,000 legal documents and regulations made by the Indonesian government. Of course, those who use the app are people making their living in the legal profession, and Mahoni’s Santoso Suratso argues that these people, whether they be judges, attorneys, or law makers, are making huge money. $300 is nothing to them.

The inspiration behind this expensive app came when the team was dealing with a law-related issue. At that time, their lawyer had to use lots of law books and there was this problem when an associate had gone home with one of the needed books. Santoso thought that there must be a better way for them to look up those regulations.

The journey to build Themis Reader is also a grueling one; Santoso explained that it involved 10 Macs, 10 full time staffers, and two years to get the app into what it is today. In between, the team also had lawyers overseeing and advising them on the app development. So the effort and capital required to build the app itself were quite significant.

The team updates Themis Reader every week. It has every regulation made by the Indonesian central government, but Themis Reader still doesn’t have regulations made by each district. Santoso is happy to say that they’ve achieved profit from its Themis Reader app.

Room for more newsstand apps in Asia

Besides Themis Reader app, Mahoni also creates e-book apps for businesses. They have had quite a few Indonesian celebrities onboard like religious leader Aa Gym and motivator Andrie Wongso commission Mahoni to build their apps. The team has built its own e-bookstore apps too for segments like religion and children.

Santoso tells me that the e-bookstore apps will continue to be developed seriously by the team. Regarding rival Scoop’s investment by publishing giant Kompas Gramedia recently, Santoso said that so far there is no different treatment given by Kompas Gramedia when publishing their books on Mahoni’s apps. Whenever possible, writers and publishers would want to make sure that their books are available on as many platforms as possible. So there still be room for Mahoni here.

Mahoni will look to revamp its newsstand apps with more features later this year to help stand out from the competition. Santoso then teased that the app won’t only act as a store in the future, but also as an entertainment platform.

Cooking up a new app

One interesting thing Santoso told me is about the company’s line of cooking recipe apps. One of its many recipe apps, the fried rice recipe app once reached the second spot on iTunes’ overall app ranking in Indonesia. It all started when the team wanted to help a lady share her cooking recipes with the world, and help her earn money out of it. Mahoni helped with the app development – including taking pictures of the dishes – and marketing.

Santoso said that they are now compiling all their recipe apps into one big Asian recipe app, and are targeting it at the international market. All of the profits are of course shared with the cooks. Santoso likes to see this side of the business as doing social good for housewives.

Mahoni records 2,000 daily downloads across its 50-plus apps. They are on course to achieve the target of 500,000 downloads for this year.

Yesterday, in an interview with Sina Tech at GMIC, Kingsoft CEO Fu Sheng made an announcement: soon, the company plans to release a mobile version of its popular “Cheetah” web browser. Although he didn’t reveal a precise release date, Fu told reporters that the browser would be available on both iOS and Android in about a month.

Of course, it’s not a huge surprise that a company operating a PC browser would choose to launch a mobile one, but it’s worth pointing out that Kingsoft faces some strong domestic challengers in this space. In fact, as we saw recently in this list of China’s top 10 smartphone apps, UC Mobile Browser and QQ Mobile Browser are among the ten most installed and most used apps on both iOS and Android.

Numerous other Chinese internet companies also offer mobile browsers but have struggled to match the success of these frontrunners, and Kingsoft has come especially late to the party. Fu says that the mobile browser will work to fully support HTML5, and although he didn’t say as much, perhaps Kingsoft hopes that can be one factor that differentiates the Cheetah mobile browser from some of its competition.

But the challenge of launching a new mobile browser clearly hasn’t affected Fu’s good humor. At GMIC yesterday he reportedly joked with condom brand Durex’s Asia director Aditya Sehgal that what Kingsoft and Durex do is actually similar, as Kingsoft works to “make mobile phones last longer.” In a follow-up weibo post, he cheekily added that the similarities don’t end there: Kingsoft also offers a “pleasurable” user experience and noted that its software prevents you from getting viruses.

(image via this awesome cover of 东方企业家)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning from Facebook

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

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

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

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

Competition, innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today we received word from Indonesian startup Ticket Solutions that the company is now generating revenue of over IDR 4 billion ($400,000) every month using ticket booking platform Tiket’s API. This is definitely a great feat for a startup that only launched its first app last August.

Ticket Solutions’ Marcella Einsteins tells us that half of the revenue comes from the company’s flight ticket sales from Indonesia Flight, while the other half mostly comes from ticket sales for train and hotels. Ticket Solutions now has close to 500,000 users.

Marcella explains that the reason for the company’s fast growth is because they were able to help people book various on-demand tickets. She gives the example that a lot of people ordered tickets for a Super Junior concert with their Indonesia Events app; and then the startup’s app for booking train tickets also gained a huge boost because it was released before the annual Muslim holiday Lebaran where a lot of people travel back to their home.

Today the startup also revealed its iOS app for Indonesia Flight. Based on user demographic, Ticket Solutions believes that the potential income from iOS users can become even bigger than that from current users who are mostly on Android. Ticket Solutions is now developing Indonesia Flight for other platforms as well, like Windows Phone and S40.

Tiket’s open API has definitely brought some nice cash for its merchants. We understand that the company is targeting to achieve a break even point in October. Here are the screenshots of the new iOS app:

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

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

UCWeb CEO Yu Yongfu talking at GMIC2013 this afternoon.

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

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

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

(Photo of Yu from QQ Tech)

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

One of the most popular Chinese-made apps around the world is Camera360, the photo filter app made by a startup team in Sichuan province. Today the crew has revealed that Camera360 has 100 million global users across its three versions for iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone. Of that number, the startup tells us that 30 million of them are active monthly users.

The major milestone comes almost exactly a year after Pinguo, the makers of Camera360, received nearly $10 million in funding. At that time, it had 30 million users across its three mobile apps, Camera360, Photo360, and Movie360.

In the intervening year, Camera360 – which doesn’t have an Instagram-like social element – added its Cloud Albums feature to allow easy photo back-ups. While optional, the team has already seen more than 240 million photos uploaded into Cloud Albums.

Camera360 has also built a platform on its popular photo filters in the past few months, and that SDK is now available for free to other developers. The SDK has been used to put filters into apps made by major web companies like Tencent, Renren, and Kaixin. Camera360 is now in talks with a number of smartphone manufacturers to have its filters preinstalled in some new phones.

Of course, Camera360 is up against a lot of competition in this niche. We recently rounded up 25 Asia-made photo apps, which is a list worth seeing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Source: Techweb – article in Chinese)

Here are a few stats for you to ponder: 24 percent of Vietnam’s search traffic happens on mobile and Vietnam has over 140 million mobile phones in operation (in a country of 90 million). The amount of smartphones shipped in 2012? Four million. And in 2013? An anticipated six million. The mobile market in Vietnam is nascent but growing fiendishly fast. So it’s no wonder that Mobile Day is one of the biggest technology events in the country.

The first Mobile Day was in 2011 and hosted 800 people. In 2012, Mobile Day had over 1,200. This year, Quang Anh, the main organizer who also sets up events like PHP Day and Mobile Monday, expects over 1,800 to 2,000 people in Hanoi and over 1,000 in Ho Chi Minh city. This will be the first year it has ever happened in Ho Chi Minh city. It will be huge, to say the least, with about 3,000 people in total.

The whole point of the event is for the growing mobile community to come together, share experiences and research over the year in the mobile field, and give workshops that push the community forward.

I asked Quang Anh why he thought Mobile Day was so popular, and he said:

One, I think it’s because mobile is a really hot space. Two, the community is very close. And three, in terms of organization, we focus on quality and bringing in content that the audience needs or appreciates. We’re not about promoting or marketing. We invite sponsors but the point is not to advertise their product. Every speech has to be about sharing experience and knowledge. Only about 10 to 15 percent of the talks will touch upon products.

So if you’ve got a free few days, come and check out Mobile Day in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh city. In Hanoi, it’ll be on the 11th of May and in Ho Chi Minh city on 15th of May. If you can’t make it, please do check out the plethora of presentations that Quang Anh’s put up on slideshare.

Despite a lack of regulatory approval yet, the world’s biggest mobile telco by user-base, China Mobile (NYSE:CHL; HKG:0941) is said to be ready to make a massive final push to get the infrastructure in place to launch China’s first national 4G network later this year. According to informed sources cited by QQ Tech, China Mobile will invest RMB 41.7 billion (US$6.7 billion) to build 200,000 base stations that will cover 344 Chinese cities this year.

Regulatory approval is said to be announced on May 17th, with China Mobile hoping to switch on its nationwide 4G network this August.

China Mobile has been conducting extensive city-area 4G trials for over a year, most recently in the cities of Hangzhou and Wenzhou on the outskirts of Shanghai.

Whereas China Mobile will use the TD-LTE system for 4G (also known as TDD-LTE), rivals China Unicom and China Telecom will have FDD-LTE networks. But that means China Mobile’s network doesn’t work with any of Apple’s mobile devices, initially leaving the new service – as with the company’s homegrown TD-SCDMA 3G variant – devoid of support for iPhones or iPads (except basic calling, texting, and 2G of course).

China Mobile is rumored to have already selected eight companies to serve as initial network equipment partners, including Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson, and Nokia Siemens (Update: Corrected that they’re not providing handsets).

With relatively small numbers coming from 4G networks in nations like Japan and Singapore, one research group estimates there’ll only be about 72 million people on LTE networks in Asia by the end of this year. But China, pushing ahead faster than the previously anticipated 2014 launch, could bring a big bump to that number.

Across China’s three telcos, there are over 230 million subscribers on 3G (Update: Corrected this figure).

(Source: QQ Tech – article in Chinese)

I’ve been doing a lot of chat app news in Vietnam lately – the reason is mobile is in a very important growth stage and a lot of foreign and domestic companies want to get in. Just to refresh your memory, let’s go over the latest numbers that I’ve announced so far: KakaoTalk and Line both have one million users in Vietnam, first-mover Viber has 3.5 millions users, WeChat is functionally out of the game, and Whatsapp is unknown.

Now Zalo, the homegrown contender, has hit two million users. It’s a huge coup for VNG and one of the fastest growing periods for a domestic mobile app in Vietnam. According to Vuong Quang Khai, who manages web and mobile at VNG:

Two million users is an important milestone for Zalo. Of course, the mobile internet in Vietnam is just starting and the opportunities are still fresh for mobile services. Our next goal is five million users, which would account for 50 percent of the smartphone market.

Zalo’s breakneck pace can be strongly attributed local support and more significantly, advertising. This has allowed chat apps like Zalo to puncture the market and access smartphone users that may not even be accustomed to using apps on their phones. In many ways, VNG is doing the hard work of educating the smartphone market, a market where many smartphone owners buy smartphones for the novelty more than for the apps and services.

The interesting thing you’ll find in the infographic is Zalo is also getting users abroad, this in part can be attributed to the large population of overseas Vietnamese and, strangely enough, Vietnamese wives of Korean husbands. The app will come out with an English version in the next few months, which will position Zalo in a more global setting. The app is also now in a closed beta testing a calling function.

For more insights on Zalo’s growth, check out the infographic, which has some interesting insights into mobile growth in Vietnam.

China’s Top 10 iOS Apps

1. QQ
2. WeChat
3. Sina Weibo
4. Taobao
5. UC Mobile Browser
6. Alipay
7. QQ Spaces
8. QQ Mobile Browser
9. QQ Mobile Music
10. Kingsoft Battery Doctor

China’s Top 10 Android Apps

1. QQ
2. UC Mobile Browser
3. WeChat
4. 360 Mobile Guardian
5. Sina Weibo
6. Taobao
7. Alipay
8. QQ Mobile Browser
9. 360 Mobile Helper
10. QQ Spaces

The biggest difference between the two lists is the rather conspicuous absence of Qihoo products from the iOS list. In fact, Qihoo has four products on the Android top 20 list, but not a single Qihoo product made the top 40 on iResearch’s iOS list. Apple has a history of not being particularly fond of Qihoo’s apps, and it banned them from its App Store back in early 2012. That time, they were quickly reinstated, but they were banned again in late January of this year and are apparently under special investigation and still haven’t been re-approved months later.

It’s also worth pointing out that not a single foreign-developed app is featured on either list.

Of course, a more interesting way to measure app popularity is to monitor apps’ time usage; luckily, iResearch has a list for that too (combining both Android and iOS):

Looking at all these lists, if you had to pick a winner the pretty obvious one is Tencent, given that its products (QQ IM, QQ Browser, WeChat, etc) hold the top spot — and a bunch of other spots to boot — on every list. But since most of the apps listed offer free services, we might well call Alibaba another winner, given that its Taobao and Alipay apps exist almost exclusively to help users spend money and yet still made the top ten.

(All data via iResearch)

In a surprise move, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has opened its Android-oriented Appstore in China today. That’s despite the fact that China wasn’t listed on Amazon’s Appstore expansion roadmap last month, in which the company took its service into 200 new countries, including over a dozen major Asian markets.

The Amazon Appstore launch in China means that the American e-tailer has leapt the final hurdle in its long pursuit of selling its own hardware in China. Though the Amazon Appstore can be used with any Android device (and is now available in Chinese here), it features as the main store on Amazon’s own Kindle Fire tablets. It’s now likely that these tablets will launch in China soon, perhaps accompanied by the Kindle e-reader.

Amazon is promising Chinese users that there’ll be a host of locally made and overseas gaming titles on the store, including ones from Tencent (HKG:0700) and Sina (NASDAQ:SINA).

This comes just a few weeks after Amazon rolled out its Cloud Drive storage service in China, and over four months after its e-bookstore launched in the nation. In theory, everything’s in place for all of Amazon’s hardware to hit the Chinese market.

While Amazon’s Appstore isn’t the first third-party Android app store to accept payments in China, it should boost revenues for app developers by placing a stronger emphasis on paying for digital content. The Google Play store only supports free apps in China.

(Hat-tip to 36Kr for spotting this)

This was a week dominated by big money, big user numbers, and major monetization moves. And those are the six hottest Asia tech stories that have been chosen by seven of our bloggers:

Minh’s pick: ‘China’s Silicon Valley’ Has More Startups Now Than Ever Before

What can I say? Being from Silicon Valley, I love news that compares Silicon Valley with Asia. And if any one country is going to contend with the Valley, it’s going to be China. And more specifically, the Zhongguancun district of Beijing. That’s where, as Charlie notes, a report has cited that at “the end of 2011 there were 4,243 startups in the area”. That’s huge. I did some preliminary searching and I can’t find Silicon Valley numbers, but 4,000 is well over the number of startups in my database for Vietnam, which doesn’t even break one thousand. Suffice it to say, it’s evidence of China’s bullish startup growth and a highly competitive atmosphere.

Wills’ and Charlie’s pick: Alibaba Gets More Social, Takes Stake in Sina Weibo for $586 Million

Willis: This week’s biggest news in Asia has to be Alibaba’s investment in Sina Weibo. Alibaba’s $586 million investment values Weibo at more than $3.2 billion and it is just so exciting to see how the two companies can give birth to a win-win partnership. It didn’t take too long for Sina Weibo and Alibaba to start working together, though. I look forward to see how Weibo/social commerce will flourish under Alibaba’s guidance.

Charlie: I have to agree with Willis, this is the biggest story of the week by far. Alibaba’s valuation is very generous, but there is a lot of potential there for Alibaba and the company has plenty of money to throw around anyway. Expect to see more targeted ads and more unique integrations as the companies get more time to work together on monetization of Weibo. That’s something Sina has struggled with, and Alibaba could just be its savior.

Steven’s pick: China’s Top Video Sites Reveal Hundreds of Millions of Mobile Users, Start Race to Monetize Them

Yes, that Weibo-Alibaba news was massive, but for the sake of diversity I’ll choose a different story. This week, both of China’s top two video sites revealed precisely how many mobile users they have – and it’s a lot. With state-controlled TV being so butt-achingly dull, video sites like Youku and iQiyi are great places for Chinese netizens to view things that they actually want to see – like recent movies and the latest dramas – in a legal way. Of course, a shift to mobile viewership presents new monetization challenges.

Minghao’s pick: KakaoTalk’s Growth Chart: Hitting 90 Million Users Soon

I’m a fan of the chat apps battle in Asia. Since 2012, we have seen messaging apps from China, Japan, and Korea expanding across the continent to acquire users. Now we have glimpses of how the battle is going so far. It is disclosed that Kakao has 89 million users, Line 150 million and Wechat over 300 million, 40 million of whom are overseas. These numbers are small compared to Asia’s population, and with the smartphone penetration rate still low in most Southeast Asia countries, this battle for users will continue for the next few years – and it will just get more fiery.

Andrew’s pick: Line is Growing Faster Than Ever, Now Up to 150 Million Users

It’s an amazing feat to grow from 50 million users to 100 millions users in just ten months – and then see growth accelerate even faster to this new number. What really impresses me is Line’s international influence and how fast it’s growing outside of Japan. While the rivals are still heavily dependent on each of their domestic markets, LINE’s global strategy might have just granted them a slight advantage in this chat app battle.

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

With Vietnam’s increasingly vibrant tech scene, my teammate Minh has provided a cultural roadmap on the market nuances between Ho Chi Minh city and Hanoi. Geographies aside, it reminds me of the synergy between Jakarta and Bandung in Indonesia. Minh’s demonstration of success stories like VNG helped me understand the cities’ influence on both corporate cultures and business makeup.

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

We know that Tencent (HKG:0700) is working on a social gaming platform for WeChat, its popular social messaging app, but what else is in the pipeline? According to industry analyst Guan Peng, the next major version of WeChat app, which will be v5.0 for iPhone and Android, will come with support for three major new features.

Anticipating that WeChat v5.0 will appear later this month, he reckons we’ll see:

• Paid publishing or subscriptions for accounts on the WeChat public platform – ie: those run by celebrities, media outlets, and brands.

• Mobile payments with users able to scan QR codes to make payments within WeChat.

• Social gaming integration will arrive as promised.

In addition to all that, Guan Peng expects the WeChat brand/celebrity accounts to be given more emphasis and prominence.

Of course, none of that is officially coming in WeChat v5.0. We know there is a social gaming platform coming for sure – similar to those from rival apps Line and Kakaotalk – but it might not be ready to go live this month. E-payments are far from a certainty as well; indeed, when we listened in on Tencent’s most recent earnings call in March – revealing $7 billion in revenue in 2012 – Tencent president Marin Lau had this to say of mobile payments:

We take a long-term view – there are so many hurdles and a lack of standardization [for payments]. So it’s an experiment that we take a lot of interest in, but it takes a long time to see what needs to be done to build a business model on it.

As for paid publishing or subscriptions for content, that’s also an area covered by Line and KakaoTalk. Just a few weeks ago, KakaoTalk rolled out its KakaoPage platform for selling digital content, while Line recently started selling e-books. Neither of those will impact WeChat in China, we suspect, where most of its users actually are, but it’s interesting to see these similar patterns.

It’s conceivable that WeChat will pursue many other channels in the future as well, such as a rumored mobile wallet capability.

My own feature request for WeChat is a badly needed makeover – especially for its slow and clunky Android app with its dated, pre-Android 4.0 stylings.

(Source: Techweb – article in Chinese)

In Vietnam, taxis are everywhere. Step off the airplane, and that’s one of the most accessible forms of transportation. But that doesn’t make it a comforting or a secure place. All the street smart Vietnamese folk know: only take Mai Linh and Vinasun. They’re the trustworthy taxis; everyone else will take you for a spin around the city, charge you the extra dollar, and send you on your way. It’s a common thing in Vietnam.

Of course, locals don’t get taken advantage of because they know the streets, but foreigners and expats are easy marks. This is exactly where Tappxi wants to help.

It’s an Android app that allows you to book taxis and also, according to Iris Ancares, one of the members of the seven person Spanish and Vietnamese team:

With the help of the application, foreigners can avoid common language misunderstandings with local taxi drivers when asking for the destination address. The application also calculates the most effective route and computes the average fare in order to detect rogue taxi drivers and scams in the route pricing, which is a big problem in Vietnam.

So, basically, if a taxi driver is taking me for a spin onto unknown streets, I can pull out Tappxi and say “Hey, this is the wrong way, don’t gyp me. I know the route and the real price.”

Currently, Tappxi doesn’t have any agreement with any taxi companies but features MaiLinh and Vinasun because they are currently the most trusted companies. The team also hopes to add more companies it deems to be trustworthy.

I played around with the app a bit and it’s really simple to use and useful, especially for estimating the real cost of a fare. It also had the text in Vietnamese for telling the taxi driver where to go. In other words, this is super useful for tourists and expats who aren’t good in Vietnamese and don’t want to get gypped by dishonest taxi drivers.

If you want to check out the Android app, you can check it out here. The iOS version is coming soon.

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

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

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

Specifically, a source told the paper that Li was taken from his home by police on the evening of April 27. While it’s not known what Li is being questioned about, it’s likely related to the apparent corruption case police have been pursuing since former China Mobile chairman Zhang Chunjiang was indicted back in 2010.

While Li has served as Guangzhou Mobile’s CEO since 2009, it is also possible that he’s being investigated for wrongdoing that predates his appointment to that position (he was the company’s marketing director from 2003 to 2009).

Of course no charges have been made public yet, and while China Business News is generally a reliable publication, one should always take anonymously-sourced stories with a few grains of salt. If China Mobile executives are guilty of corruption, it will be announced officially sooner or later. But the news of such high-profile detentions certainly doesn’t help the company, and I suspectit’s making other China Mobile executives who might have skeletons in their closets very nervous.

(China Business News via Sina Tech)

We know that Chinese netizens watch billions of hours worth of online videos each month, but how many of them are doing so from a mobile device? Now we have the answer. China’s top two mobile sites (in terms of time spent viewing) have recently revealed their mobile user-base. The leading company, Youku Tudou (NYSE:YOKU) says it has 150 million million daily mobile users, while Baidu’s (NASDAQ:BIDU) iQiyi has 200 million monthly mobile viewers.

Youku Tudou, whose data covers both of its standalone sites after the corporate merger last year, says it sees 50 percent quarter-to-quarter growth in mobile users. iQiyi, meanwhile, explains that mobile traffic now accounts for 37 percent of its total.

With such fast-growing mobile engagement, both companies are rushing to implement mobile-based ads so as to monetize all those views. To that end, iQiyi has a new cross-platform ad service that was launched last week, covering its website and apps for Windows, iOS, and Android. Youku Tudou is also offering mobile ads starting from this month.

Though the figures don’t give a perfectly analogous picture – daily views vs monthly, etc. – it stresses that these companies need to translate their desktop advertising prowess to smaller screens without ruining the viewing experience – especially for the big draw, which is their licensed (but mostly free) TV series and movies.

Baidu is rumored to be acquiring another video site, PPS, for a substantial sum so as to bolster its Hulu-like iQiyi site even further.

IDC says that smartphones represent 73.2 percent of all mobiles sold in China right now, but feature phones are still more numerous in the country as a whole. So mobile viewership of video-streaming sites has a lot more growth to come.

(Source: Technode (1) and (2))

After months of testing it out in South Korea and Japan, the messaging app KakaoTalk is today launching its social gaming platform for users in Indonesia and Vietnam. Along with this, a number of third-party game developers have created Indonesian and Vietnamese language versions of their social gaming titles that integrate with KakaoTalk.

Five games are ready today for the messaging app’s users in Indonesia and Vietnam: HotDogStudio’s Everyone’s Game for Kakao, Com2uS’s Tiny Pang for Kakao, LIVEZEN’s Astrowings for Kakao, GameZen’s BirdPang for Kakao, and CraveMob’s Hunter Cat for Kakao (pictured).

KakaoTalk has been pushing hard into both those Southeast Asian markets in the past few months, even spending on a big budget TV ad campaign for Indonesians that fused K-pop with one Indo pop star.

Korea-based KakaoTalk has just over 80 million users, and the startup made $7 million in profit last year, despite being up against web giant rivals like NHN (makers of Line), Tencent (WeChat), and Facebook Messenger.

The KakaoTalk Game Platform launched in its home market last August and soon showed its worth by propelling a number of its supported games to the top of Korea’s gaming charts. It then rolled out in February in Japan (Update: Also in the US since last November).

There are times when you might not be feeling well and have some medical questions, but you’re not sure that those questions are even worth the trip and perhaps money to go to the doctor. There are also times when distance becomes an issue. This is where Dokter Gratis (meaning “free doctors”) comes in.

Dokter Gratis is an app for people in Indonesia to get a live consultation with a doctor. I gave the app a try and I was able to text-chat with a doctor after being put on hold for just a bit. The doctor I talked to answered a few basic health questions. There are a few chatroom topics for people to choose from, like general health, diabetes, women’s health, and baby’s health.

The service so far looks good as a first step before making a decision to go to a hospital. I have confirmed with the team behind it that Dokter Gratis is 100 percent free, this is despite the written explanation on the terms and conditions page that only the first week of use is free.

500 health tips a day from your friendly doctors

There are two teams who helped produce the app. The first is Warung Kreasi which develops the app. Second is Medika Consulting which takes care of the chat function and social media operations. Dokter Gratis is also a partner of Singapore-based medical social platform Blabla Doctor.

At the moment there are 12 general practitioners to respond to all the chats every day. Working in shifts, it’s claimed that a doctor has the capacity to handle about 1,000 chats per day. The app has so far been downloaded 130,000 times with around 500 chats happening each day.

Another medical-related app developed for Indonesians is Dokita, which was created by Jakarta Founders Institute graduate Aibilities. There is also a medical website created by a group of Indonesian doctors called TanyaDok. All in all, there are more online health solutions being made available here, which must be good news.

Dokter Gratis is available on iOS, Android, and Blackberry. Or you can also do a live chat via its website here.