Twitter is fun, but it’s not a very visual medium. Japan’s TwitCasting is trying to change that with its video broadcasting platform that’s tied very closely to Twitter. Today the startup has revealed that it now has US$640,000 in seed funding from East Ventures and various angel investors to help it grow. (Disclosure: East Ventures is also an investor in TechinAsia).

TwitCasting now has more than 2.4 million users, of whom 80 percent are in Japan, 10 percent in Brazil.

Yosuke Akamatsu, CEO of Moi Corporation, the startup company behind TwitCasting, says in the announcement:

TwitCasting is seeing ‘hockey stick’ growth since last summer,
and we were behind the speed of the growth in terms of human resources
and system infrastructure. This funding will enable us to rapidly deliver a good
communication platform and acquire core team members.

TwitCasting has both viewer and broadcaster apps for Android and iPhone. There’s also a web app, where you can also choose to view streams that are radio only, music only, or full video. You can view live broadcasts where available, or dig through archived videos.

The service can be used for events and other useful stuff, though most of the videos on the site seem to be just people rambling on about stuff. A lot like YouTube.

With this investment, Taiga Matsuyama, a partner at East Ventures, will take a seat at on MOI’s board of directors.

Disclosure: East Ventures is also an investor in TechinAsia. See our ethics page for more information.

Mixi has ploughed over $700,000 into CloudStudy, whose main product is StudyPlus, a social learning management platform. The other investment, explains the Startup-Dating blog, is in Reventive, a young company that has so far made three social apps. It hasn’t been revealed how much Reventive got.

StudyPlus

CloudStudy’s StudyPlus platform helps students to record their study times, subjects, and content. Students can then share this progress with contacts inside the app, or to social networks like Facebook (yes, Mixi’s main rival).

After starting up in March 2012, it has now grown to 100,000 registered users, though CloudStudy’s CEo concedes that only about 12,000 of those learners are active on the service. But those who are active do post a lot each day. It’s accessible in a web app as well as on apps for Android and iOS.

Reventive

Reventive’s main product is a Path clone called Close (see the GIF demo), which is on Android and iOS. Whereas Path lets you have over 100 buddies within the app, Close lives up to its name by restricting you to just nine close friends. So perhaps it’s somewhere between Path and so-called couples’ apps like Between.

The same startup is also working on a location-based group dating/hangout app called Gocon which is still in the works.

Mixi mixing it up

While Mixi hasn’t acquired the startups, that might happen later if one really takes off. A few months ago, Mixi acquired the startup company Kamado, which makes a host of sites and apps.

But Mixi has also shut down a lot of things that don’t work. Its subscription fashion e-commerce service Petite Jeté was launched last September, but it was killed off by January of this year.

Mixi has been hovering – a polite way of saying horribly stuck – at about 15 million active users for two whole years while Facebook has grown strongly in the same time period. Also, social media trends have moved towards social messaging apps like Line. Line now has 150 million global users, with about 45 million of those based in Japan.

(Source: Startup-Dating)

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.

Credit: TheGlobeandMail.com

Path, a social network that is only accessible through iPhone and Android devices, has been growing in popularity in Indonesia for its more-private circle of friends (unlike Facebook it limits its users to 150 friends).

Credit: InternetWorldStats.com

But what about Facebook? Indonesia is famous for its Facebook frenzy; as the statistics above show, almost all internet users in Indonesia are Facebook users too. Some people say that Indonesians like to have as many connections as possible, which explains Facebook’s popularity, but Indonesian today are increasingly getting overwhelmed by the unknown brands and ubiquitous ads and promotions on their Facebook walls.

So when Path introduced its more private social network to Indonesian consumers, it is not surprising that Indonesians responded to it. When I asked friends what features they like most on Path, most of them said they liked to post photos and add what they are listening to, as the app’s “smart journal” concept easily lets users choose one of the following moments (photo/video, people, place, music, thought, sleep/awake) to share. That really is something new and different from Facebook.

But really, what makes posting a photo on Path so different from posting a photo on Instagram? Will they stop using Instagram, Foursquare,Twitter, Line, and Facebook once they start using Path?

Not really. In my experience, avid users of social media in Indonesia on average still have four to seven social networking apps installed and used actively on their smartphones, and indeed there are four social media services among Indonesia’s 30 most popular smartphone apps. Adopting one app doesn’t mean abandoning others. With that said, it’s not uncommon for Indonesian trends to shift rapidly, and that shapes the ubiquitous usage of multiple social media apps on their smartphones. Indonesian youth simply like to enhance their interactions with friends, colleagues, even their own parents in new ways. So when an app becomes trendy, everyone installs it to see what their friends are saying there. But by the same token, if it becomes passe, that’s when it’s going to get uninstalled.

With the great number of social media users in Indonesia and the ingrained culture of Indonesian consumers installing new apps as their friends do, there is no doubt that Path can continue to grow here in the short term. The challenge for Path, and other emerging social apps, is to retain all these Indonesian users once it has got them and to prevent itself from being discarded when the next trendy social media site comes along and people’s friends start to move there.

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)

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get the Viss apps for iOS or Android.

In this day and age when a lot of people are connected online through popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter, one might ask if they can utilize that connection in the offline world. Some have come up with ways to do that like using NFC and RFID, so let’s look at an Indonesian startup which is focusing on the latter feature called Wooz.in ¹.

CEO Ario Tamat tells us that the company has been around since 2011, connecting around 40,000 offline users online for its corporate clients. He explained to me that Wooz.in has three business models, the first – which is Wooz.in’s original product – is applying RFID features into clients’ offline events and projects. These projects include making a bracelet with an RFID chip installed in it (pictured below), and the bracelet need to be scanned first if users want to use certain products inside the event like photo booths or games. When the bracelet is scanned, it automatically updates the user’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. The data gathered during this event can also be beneficial for the client.

Second is applying the feature as a loyalty program for SMEs. One of the companies taking part in Wooz.in’s program is restaurant chain Holy Cow. The RFID chip for the restaurant comes in the form of a necklace, which will earn users a virtual flag for every scan on Holy Cow’s premises. A few functions like automatic updates to users’ social network accounts and data mining work similarly here too. How much would it cost for SMEs to use Wooz.in’s services? It could be as little as IDR 1 million (US$100), depending on the number of users and usage frequency.

Third is licensing Wooz.in’s service to agencies abroad. Ario says that they now have two overseas agencies using Wooz.in’s licensed services. In this way, the overseas agencies can offer Wooz.in’s RFID expertise to their clients.

Regarding competitors, Ario said that he has seen quite a few other companies replicating Wooz.in’s technology. But he believes that replicating technology alone won’t be enough to beat Wooz.in because there are other factors that need to be put into consideration such as execution and idea innovation. Ario explains that they consistently offer new approaches to clients when using RFID, so there’s definitely huge potential to be explored from using the technology. Replicating them alone won’t be enough to beat Wooz.in, he believes.

With the vision of connecting the offline and online world, the team is now working to implement NFC chips for future projects. Ario says there are other ways to connect the offline and online world too, like face recognition tech. Of all those possibilities, NFC will be the team’s first priority this year.

Since I posted an article on HaiVL on Tuesday, it has raised eyebrows for two big reasons. First, the 9gag-like HaiVL community caught wind of the post, and then many people didn’t like my statement that “content in Vietnam is a wasteland”. So let’s take a closer look at the state of online content in Vietnam.

A key issue: generating content that lasts

First, let me get something out of the way. The content in Vietnam itself is not “bad” or “good”. The issue is organizing the content. Organizing it into a way that lasts and is easy to find and digest for new users on the web.

The forum model is as outdated as Geocities and Altavista. It was slowly driven out by blogs and then into even newer more sophisticated models. We’re way passed Web 2.0 by now. Certainly, in the US, forums are still used on company websites for questions and answers that are very specific, but the majority of internet users have flocked to new sharing and linking models. People have moved onto Wikipedia, Quora, Reddit, Digg, Stack Overflow, Pinterest, Facebook, Craiglist, Tumblr, 9gag, 4chan, and more. Each site has its own unique niche and user experience idiosyncrasies, but they all excel at one thing: user generated content.

How does this work in Vietnam?

A large amount of content in Vietnam is generated on news sites and forums. Forums like Tinhte and Webtretho publish news and allow users to start their own discussions. On Alexa’s web rankings, you can see that among the top 20 sites in Vietnam, at least 10 of the websites fall into this category.

These old models lack two things:

• The initial content is generated by publishers, not by users. It’s a news-based forum.
• It is not organized in a user-friendly way. Some of the best comments are embedded deep within the discussion.

If you look at these two things, in a way, it looks like Vietnam hasn’t even entered Web 2.0 yet. Has it missed the boat? I mean, Vietnam’s Pinterest clones all haven’t gained traction (including Rocket Internet’s attempt as well). But no, there are obviously enclaves of the twenty-first century web out there, like LinkHay, Zing Me, and obviously Facebook is growing in Vietnam like crazy. But Vietnamese users outside of these spaces are mostly sifting through Web 1.0. Why?

Is it because of Vietnamese users?

It’s always a senseless comparison, but startup scenes across the world are always comparing themselves to Silicon Valley. And one of the key things we envy in the Valley is the early adopter culture. Open up a new, random over-rated social media website like App.net and people flock to it. You may not be successful but at least you got a ton of user feedback in the interim. This doesn’t exist in Vietnam. Not only is the internet population (35 percent) relatively small but it’s so fragmented that most websites don’t get critical mass. For example, Linkhay, an awesome Digg lookalike, has been sitting under 200,000 users for years.

And it’s not an anomaly. Several of my sources working in search engines across Vietnam for the past few years have found that Vietnamese content is lacking (the 13th most populous country in the world and it’s not even on the map). This is why CocCoc and NHN Naver are looking to work with content industry professionals to get more Vietnamese content online. Only in the past year or so has this improved. It’s hard to find the best doctor online, or find out where the best place to buy a specific type of cloth is. Is it because Vietnamese users are unwilling to participate?

What did HaiVL, Foody.vn and others do right?

I think Vietnamese users are still getting accustomed to generating content on their own. This is why I really do think HaiVL is a pioneer. Because they’ve out-executed lots of other Vietnamese companies in the content space. The interesting thing is, as Dave McClure would say ”it turns out all you gotta do is copy great shit 99 percent then innovate one percent every month and you can beat the crap outta most people.” To win in Vietnam, it’s not just about cloning the right model, it’s about cloning very well. It’s about adapting a model we see somewhere else and executing it really well. And what HaiVL has done is get people to freely give content. So the problem isn’t with the users, it’s with what people are building.

One of the key things that HaiVL did was to perform really well on Facebook – not everybody can do that. And Facebook has only recently hit Vietnam, so upvoting and prioritizing best responses isn’t commonplace yet. What HaiVL is basically doing is educating the masses in a new way of interacting with content, in the same way that Nhom Mua and Rocket Internet are educating people on e-commerce.

To me, the country’s users are ready now, it just takes a few startups like HaiVL to take it to the next level. After all, HaiVL has great topics and fun material, and everybody needs comedy in their life. Next, who can take the success behind HaiVL and apply it to different niches of the content market?

Note: We’ve tried our best to cover a lot of the websites in this space and key aspects of the field, but we know we may have missed many, please let us know in the comments.

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.

Content in Vietnam is a wasteland. Most of the nation’s users are flocking to forums where most of the content is being generated. For the past four years or so, much of the user-generated content has been on forums like Kenh14, a general board with topics spannng lifestyle to sports to fashion, and which is owned by internet juggernaut VC Corp. It has long been one of the hottest places to get on the Vietnamese internet. I’ve heard on the grapevine that it gets anywhere from 2.5 million to four million unique visits per day. On the other side, there’s the more niche forum Web Tre Tho which has over one million users who are mostly women.

(UPDATE: It has come to my attention from VC Corp, that it is not exactly a forum in the traditional sense. But it is still a central place in which people comment and talk about modern day issues according to topic, some consider this to be a “forum”, others not. Also, I want to clarify that “Content is a wasteland” does not mean Vietnam’s content is bad, but means that it is not organized very well, especially the user-generated type.)

To me, this forum-obsessed internet (common across most of developing Asia) is holding back richer content models like could be something more like Quora, Reddit, Digg, Wikipedia, and more. This is why HaiVL is one of my absolute favorite startups in Vietnam, because they’ve cracked a content problem. In just one year, with one developer, the site has achieved two million unique visits per day, which could mean anywhere from 30 to 60 million per month. That’s impressive for a team of just 5 people.

Hai, literally means “comical”, “funny” or “hilarious”. And that’s the prime focus of the website. It’s a platform for users to throw up funny images (or videos, which make up for 1/10 of posts) that they found or created and other users can like or comment on them. Users are uploading 3,000 to 4,000 photos per day. It’s a spitting image of 9gag (which currently gets 65 million uniques per month). And HaiVL’s got serious traction. I spoke to Vo Thanh Quang, co-founder and CEO of AppVL, the small company that is totally focused on HaiVL, their main product. He said:

We didn’t expect the kind of growth that we now have. At first, I just started out alone, and after not doing Place.vn which didn’t totally take off. Then suddenly, I started to see huge growth and had to hire a team to deal with our scaling. Now, today, we’re already running a profitable business with stable revenue.

The HaiVL team has also built apps for Android and iOS which respectively both got about 50,000 views per day, and 700,000 downloads in total. The majority of the users are within the 17 to 30 age range. And HaiVL’s revenue comes from ads. The key growth has been on Facebook, where they’e got over 1.5 million ‘likes’ on their fanpage. In fact, HaiVL is very closely tied to Facebook since users can only post if they have a Facebook account, and much of their early growth can be attributed to engaging Facebook heavily. But today, of their two million unique hits, 50 percent of them come directly. That means it’s seeping steadily into the consciousness of Vietnamese netizens. In the future:

We’re looking at just staying really focused and growing our userbase to 10 million unique visits per day. We also just added an editing function so that users can edit their photos online. That’s a long way off, and getting there will take time, especially since our growth up to now has been largely linear.

Another cool thing about HaiVL, is you start to see a new face of Vietnam. Although it’s about funny images, users often post very supportive images about poverty or the environment that also get lots of upvotes. The average popular image gets about 500 upvotes. As far as censorship goes, in case you were wondering, HaiVL does have a policy to take down any content that is politically sensitive or porn/nudity. Any user who violates these rules gets booted from the site within 30 minutes, their content gets taken down, and the user is not allowed to post ever again.

I think this is a really cool startup to look out for, mainly because it’s pushing Vietnam’s content space to the next level. We’ll keep you posted when they hit their next million.

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.

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)

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)

Let’s take a look at the highlights from the infographic (the full thing is embedded at bottom) and the newest statistics for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Foursquare, and Line.

Facebook in Thailand

Zoning in on Facebook, the ZocialInc crew finds that the peak time for posting is 11pm. These are the demographics within Thailand:

Twittery Thais

There are now two million Thais on Twitter, who on average tweet 5.5 times each day. Like with Facebook, the country’s Twitterers are night owls, tending to post more between 10pm and midnight. 66.7 percent of Twitter posts in Thailand are made on mobiles.

YouTube boom

YouTube is still seeing great growth in Thailand, and is now up to 630,000 channels within the nation, adding up to 5.3 million videos uploaded by Thai users. The top video cateogry for these guys and girls is music.

Snapping up Instagram

With the most stellar growth in Thailand in the past year, Instagram is now up to 600,000 users in the country, up from 150,000 this time last year. In the first four months of 2013, they collectively posted 21.38 million photos. One of the most liked users is @aum_patchrapa, the beauty queen turned actress Pachrapa ‘Aum’ Chaichua.

Checking out of Foursquare?

Foursquare, the location-based service, saw a nine percent drop in check-ins in the past year in Thailand, but the number of venues grew. The best growth figure for Foursquare was that 55 percent more people checked in via Instagram.

Line up

There are no Thailand-specific numbers from WeChat for Thailand, so let’s focus on rival app Line, which has a pretty spectacular 15 million Thai users. It’s also an important new platform for social marketing and brands outreach, with the top Thai brand on Line having 4.6 million followers already.

Here’s the full slideshow presentation:

(Source: ZocialInc blog)

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

That number comes from a “knowledgable” but anonymous source and, as usual, it should be taken with a grain of salt. But Renren spokespeople did admit to Sina Tech that some personnel adjustment was happening, characterizing it as being part of “an attempt at an internal startup mechanism [within Renren],” whatever that means. They also suggested that some of those laid off might be re-hired internally for work on more promising projects like Nuomi and Renren Games. (On a related note, Renren denied outright reports that there were also layoffs at Nuomi, saying that the team is actually in the process of expanding and that there have been no layoffs there).

We’ve already seen Renren beginning to move away from traditional social networking and toward games and mobile apps, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that a strategic shift of that magnitude would result in a little internal upheaval and personnel turnover. It seems there have been some layoffs, but I don’t think it’s time for Renren fans to panic just yet.

(Sina Tech via TechWeb)

There’s been some buzz on the Vietnamese internet lately concerning Nhac Cua Tui, one of Vietnam’s premier music listening services. Nhac Cua Tui has two main domains, the .com domain, and the NCT.vn one. Nhac Cua Tui, which means “my music” in Vietnamese, has become famous for its almost Last.fm-like recommendation engine and music distribution channel. The service has been promising enough to receive funding from CyberAgent Ventures early last year.

But the latest controversy concerns Nhac Cua Tui’s NCT.vn domain, which is a platform for game developers and gamers to post their games online to share. It turns out that quite a few of the games posted on the site are unlicensed – meaning they’re pirated. As reported by Ictnews, Nhac Cua Tui has taken the position that they are not a game distributor, but just a platform for sharing.

This has caused a bit of a stir. In fact, licensing and legal issues have been getting more and more serious in the online space here recently, with Coke pulling its ads out of VNG’s Zing, and Bao Moi under fire from local Vietnamese newspapers for stealing content. In my opinion, it’s great. It’s forcing online and offline companies to take patents and copyrights more seriously, and the end result would of course be more support and respect for truly innovative ideas.

In light of this, I called up Nhan The Luan, CEO of Nhac Cua Tui, for more details on Nhac Cua Tui’s position. He said:

The central issue, as mentioned before, is that NCT.vn is a platform not a distribution channel. We’re involved in curation, so it’s not a central issue for us. Of course, what we will do is become more rigorous about what content goes on the platform and what doesn’t.

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.

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.

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.

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.

First of all, Ma clearly recognizes that some observers have been a little nervous about the e-commerce company’s step in to social media. After all, nobody wants to see Weibo turned into a glorified advertising platform, and Ma knows that. On the topic of how the services will be separated, he said:

If we turned Weibo into an e-commerce platform, we would be condemned by its users and also condemned by history [...] We’re now 18 percent shareholders in Sina Weibo, so if Weibo is doing well that’s good for us. We want Weibo to do well before we discuss what it can give Alibaba. Weibo is Sina’s thing, but if [Sina] needs us to do something, we will support them. That’s the only way this cooperation can continue.

Alibaba didn’t invest in Weibo for no reason. “The investment in Weibo is an important step in Alibaba’s future development,” said Ma. He didn’t name any specific reasons; we can think of a few.

But at the same time, Ma seems to suggest that the investment is also designed to help what he sees as a valuable service that might be in trouble. He says Weibo has increased transparency in Chinese society, and that Alibaba wants to help it be healthier and more successful. It’s no secret that Sina has struggled to monetize Weibo effectively, and although Ma never suggests that Alibaba is the white knight swooping in to rescue a damsel in distress, it sometimes feels a little like that’s what happened.

Everyone — Jack Ma included — agrees that Sina Weibo has really changed China’s society (mostly for the better), and everyone knows it faces a threat in WeChat. Users likely would never have guessed that a partnership with Alibaba might be the thing that really lets Weibo flourish, but that could prove to be the case. In ten years, we may well believe that Jack Ma saved Weibo with the Alibaba investment, allowing the service to continue changing Chinese society.

(via Sina Tech)

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)

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.

If you’re a fan of Sina Weibo but don’t like the idea of your posts swirling around the web for all of eternity, you might like to try out a tiny little tool called SnapWeibo. Inspired by the time-limited messages on Snapchat, SnapWeibo lets you vanish your Weibo post after a set time.

It’s really simple to use: just sign into SnapWeibo with your Weibo account details, and then any post you make (in the usual way, via any Weibo supporting app) that contains a certain time-related hashtag – #10m# would indicate 10 minutes, for example – will self-destruct after that time period.

Its flexible hashtags allow you to set times by minutes, hours, or even days. If anyone retweets your Weibo before it gets deleted, your missive will later appear blank – in the normal way that it does on Sina Weibo anyway.

You can set self-destruct hashtags in either English or Chinese: like, #2m# #5h# #1d# or #2分钟# #5小时# #1天#.

Yes, it’s a bit silly, but someone might find it useful.

Of course, there is a simpler way to make your Sina Weibo posts disappear quickly – say something controversial.

(Source: 36Kr – article in Chinese)

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)

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))

The report notes that the best newcomer, in the eyes of Chinese netizens, is Tottenham Hotspurs’ Gareth Bale. Interestingly, Spain’s La Liga players are a lot more popular than those in the English Premier League (BPL). La Liga’s top six most popular players on Weibo have eight times – yes, x8 – the number of followers compared to BPL’s top eight players.

One interesting thing to note is that Japan’s Hidetoshi Nakata – who retired a few years back – is the fourth most popular European player on China’s leading social networks. Although he’s Japanese, he’s played in a few European clubs like AS Roma and Parma in the past.

The last time the Mailman Group, which helps celebrities do social marketing in China, assessed football mania on Weibo, it noted that European football clubs have 15.6 million supporters online in China.

Here’s the infographic for you football fans:

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

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).

Far from nearing a saturation point, the messaging app Line is actually growing faster than ever. Having previously taken nearly seven months to go from the 50 million to 100 million milestones, Line then rocketed up to its current 150 million in a little over three months.

As noted by our buddies at Startup-Dating, that’s remarkable hockey stick growth. Line even made a cute graph (a line graph, naturally) to show this acceleration.

With just over half of its users being outside of Japan (where Line is made by NHN), it means Line is doing enormously well on the world stage. Admitedly, it’s way behind Whatsapp’s 200 million monthly active users (as opposed to registered users), but it’s doing a lot better globally than its key Asia-made rivals. KakaoTalk’s user-base is largely in South Korea, while WeChat’s vast 300-million cohort is mostly in China, and only 40 million of them are scattered around the world.

As I’m under a self-imposed ban to not use any numbers larger than those taught to me by Sesame Street, I can’t figure out when Line will hit 200 million. But if you’re some kind of numbers wizard ¹, you could probably pin-point, based on the accelerating growth rate this year, precisely when Line will reach 200 million users. It’s plausible it’ll be just two months later.

(Source: Startup-Dating)

Brand24 then monitored the spikes in conversations that happened for local airlines Garuda Indonesia, Lion Air, and Batavia air. Garuda was mentioned a lot of times when South Korean pop groups 2PM, Sistar, and Infinite made their flights to Indonesia with the airline. But there were also spikes in terms of mentions for the wrong reasons. A Lion Air plane crashed just off Bali’s coast a few weeks back, while Batavia Air was in figurative deep waters regarding the company’s bankruptcy.

Monitoring these online conversations as well as the social sentiment among Indonesian netizens, Lion Air and Garuda Indonesia were discussed more than AirAsia Indonesia. At least in the past two months.

The same company released another infographic last month, which was about how social Jakarta folks really are.

Here is the infographic on the nation’s airlines on social media:

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

At present, the ads don’t seem to be very targeted. For example, the ads pictured above, on my own personal weibo feed, were exclusively for women’s clothing items (which, as a man, I don’t have much use for). So it certainly seems as though, at least for the moment, Alibaba probably hasn’t started thoroughly mining Weibo’s mountain of data yet. But we’re confident that it will, and Weibo users should get ready to start seeing more carefully targeted ads as time goes by.

In the meantime, it will be interesting to see if these new ad placements have any effect on Taobao’s sales numbers.

Now that we know it finally has happened, the next immediate question is why. It’s not hard to figure out why Sina went for this deal; the company has been having trouble monetizing Weibo and having an extra $586 million in the bank certainly (to put it lightly) helps. But what’s Alibaba up to here?

As my colleague Steven pointed out in his article yesterday, it’s clear that Alibaba has been interested in becoming more social for some time, as evidenced in (for example) its apparent investment in chat app Momo and its acquisition of music service Xiami. OK, so Alibaba invested in Weibo because it wants to get more social. Why?

Getting Customers Where They Spend The Most Time

The most obvious answer is that that’s where all the customers are. Weibo has over 300 million registered users, and while only around 50 million of them are daily active users, my guess is that Alibaba is less concerned with how many users there are — everyone in China who’s on the internet already knows about Taobao anyway — and more about how users are spending their time, and how much time is being spent on Weibo.

Alibaba’s e-commerce sites, after all, aren’t really fun places to “hang out.” But people hang out on Weibo all the time. It seems likely Alibaba is looking not so much to increase its userbase as it is to increase the amount of time users spend with products from Alibaba platforms in front of their faces. After all, many people go on Taobao only when they need something, but 50 million people go on Weibo every day to discuss the news, follow their friends, etc. Putting products there should help give Alibaba better access to the impulse buy than it currently has, simply because people do not generally load an Alibaba site unless they’re already planning to buy something. Alibaba, I suspect, is hoping that Weibo will help it snag users who had no plans to buy anything but fell in love with a product they ran across while browsing Weibo (or chatting or listening to music on the other platforms the company has invested in thus far).

And of course, it has already been demonstrated that people will buy things from Weibo. The Xiaomi Weibo sale, with over a million phones sold via Weibo in just five minutes, must have impressed on Alibaba’s leadership that Weibo users will fork over their cash via that platform when given a product they’re actually interested in. And if there’s one thing Alibaba has a lot of, it’s products.

Access to a Goldmine of Data

Of course, the other side of the coin is that Weibo’s massive databases can also probably provide Alibaba with tons of useful information about consumer behaviors, desires, and trends that it can use to optimize marketing and maximize sales. We know the folks at Alibaba like data, and Weibo has literally billions of public posts that can serve as useful data points on everything from sentiments about a particular brand or product to general insight into the thoughts and desires of particular demographics. And with full integration into Weibo, Alibaba platforms’ marketing could be tweaked to respond automatically and in real time to new trends as they emerged.

Think, for example, about Beijing’s “Airpocalypse” earlier this year. Now imagine that for Beijing-based users, next to every Weibo post about the pollution there’s an ad for an air filter or a mask on Taobao. That, I think, is why Alibaba is so interested in Weibo that it is willing to pay what many analysts feel is a pretty generous sum for an 18 percent stake.

Of course, there could be more to it than that. Or I could be missing the forest for the trees. We’re hoping to head more from Alibaba about its specific strategy here soon, but in the meantime, what do you think about Alibaba’s investment in Weibo?

China’s top e-commerce company has secured what could be the biggest web deal of the year in the country. Alibaba, which has been a lot more keen to venture into social media recently, has taken an 18 percent stake in Sina Weibo, the Twitter-like microblogging service run by Sina (NASDAQ:SINA).

Sina Weibo has over 500 million registered users, and has been China’s most talked about social network in the past couple of years. Despite all that enthusiasm, only 46.3 million are daily active users of Weibo, and the service has been a headache for Sina in terms of real-time censorship and great difficulty in monetizing it.

Alibaba’s stake in Sina Weibo comes with an option to increase that, notes the New York Times’ Dealbook blog, to 30 percent in the future. The deal also involves cooperation between these two Chinese web giants that will fuse social media and e-commerce. Sina and Alibaba expect such projects to bring in about $380 million in revenue from Weibo in the next three years.

What forms could such social commerce take? Last year, the startup phone-maker Xiaomi made use of Sina Weibo to sell some of its phones. This little experiment – it was not a long-term sales channel – yielded amazing results, with 1.3 million reservations for the phones made in just five minutes. We’ll likely see Sina Weibo do more like that – but on a more permanent basis, and with Alibaba’s consumer-oriented e-commerce sites, Taobao and Tmall.

Alibaba has invested in a few social media startups in the past few months, such as a funding round put into a flirting app, and the acquisition of one music streaming site.

In a statement this evening, Alibaba founder and chairman Jack Ma said:

We believe that the cooperation of our two robust platforms will bring unique and valuable services to Weibo users, as well as making the mobile internet a core part of Alibaba’s strategy.

China’s leading search engine, Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), is said to have acquired a rival social video site for $300 million to $400 million. This rumored acquisition of PPS.tv would bolster Baidu’s own Hulu-esque video-streaming site iQiyi.

The buy-out will reportedly merge PPS into Baidu’s iQiyi. PPS is an old favorite with Chinese netizens from when it used to be packed with pirated TV shows and movies – that’s before PPS cleaned up with licensed content in the past couple of years.

We reached out to Baidu this afternoon, but a Baidu spokesperson declined to comment.

The Baidu-PPS rumors have actually rumbled on for about a month, but today’s reports suggest that it’s a done deal that will be announced soon.

Interestingly – and somewhat bizarrely – the company behind China’s top social video site, Youku Tudou (NYSE:YOKU), issued a statement about the Baidu-PPS rumors. Youku president Dele Liu says:

After the success and synergy created by the Youku Tudou merger, increasing consolidation was inevitable throughout the video industry. We are happy to see this purchase go forward, we expect this acquisition will further rationalize the industry and help reduce piracy in the sector.

But Dele Liu was just responding to the rumors, not insinuating that the news is true.

However, it is true that consolidation is inevitable in this pricey and heated sector where it costs millions of dollars to secure the exclusive rights to Chinese, Korean, or western TV dramas and movies. China’s biggest web company Tencent (HKG:0700) has also been bolstering its video site in the past year.

According to ComScore, China’s netizens watch upwards of four billion hours of web videos each month, making social video portals and licensed content an increasingly important part of the Chinese web scene.

(Source: Techweb – article in Chinese)

Japanese companies seem to be doing well in terms of social marketing, with drink-maker Ichitan coming out on top in Thailand, and bike-maker Yamaha revs up the most social media fans in Indonesia. But in Malaysia and the Philippines, two homegrown brands (Air Asia and Smart, respectively) are at the top of this ranking.

This combined count can be a bit unfair in some ways, as it punishes brands who opt to, say, avoid Instagram but have good numbers on other networks. An example is BlackBerry Indonesia, which is not in the ranking despite being one of the nation’s top Facebook brand pages with 26.7 million followers.

With all that in mind, here’s the full infographic, which also has some fun snippets about user behavior on brand pages on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram:

(Source: ZocialInc blog)

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

Image source credit: berita.upi.edu

Since the Indonesian president joined Twitter as @SBYudhoyono just 11 days ago, his official account has now reached 1.56 million followers. With that number, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) now effectively becomes the number one Asian nation leader on Twitter, beating the previous most-followed in the region, Philippine president Benigno Aquino III (now 1.46 million). The Malaysian prime minister (1.49 million) has also passed Aquino to take second place.

It has been spotted that there’s a great resemblance between President Yudhoyono’s Twitter cover picture and that of the number one world leader on Twitter, US president Barack Obama. Is it a coincidence? Probably not. Check it out:

Here come the jokers

With the huge growth in SBY’s Twitter followers, now there are several fake SBY accounts popping up, perhaps trying to get a few unaware Twitter users to follow them, or perhaps just to entertain with a little satire. The biggest presidential parody accounts are @SBYudonono ¹ and @SBYudhoyno

While the first parody Twitter account tweets occasional political jokes and brands itself as “Pak Nono,” the latter account tries to make its tweets look as if they come from the president. This rogue account sometimes makes formal greetings to Indonesian citizens, and at other times jokes around, such as advising followers who are not in a relationship to not get ‘friendzoned’ by their crushes on the weekend. Those accounts have gained 28,000 and 26,000 followers respectively.

One other genuine SBY-related Twitter account worth mentioning is @PresidenSBY which was created in 2008. This account tweets about the president’s formal activities and has received over 150,000 followers.

Outright imposters

There are also accounts that look to impersonate (but not parody) the original SBY account, such as @SBYudhoyonox, @SBYudhoyono0, and @SBYudhoyono2day. These imposters all claim to be the president’s official accounts, and copy the original tweets made by SBY. @SBYudhoyonox also slips in its own tweets like asking followers if they think the national exam should be abolished. It seems the owners of the latter two accounts have given up on continuing their effort, as @SBYudhoyono0 has only made three tweets, while @SBYudhoyono2day stopped tweeting a couple of days ago. The three of them have 11,000, 7,000, and 4,500 followers respectively.

There are also other SBY-related accounts which are not active, but still gain quite a number of followers. These are @SBYudoyono which has posted zero tweets but has over 13,000 followers, and @SBYudhoyono_ which was created as early as 2011, made five tweets, and has around 5,800 followers.

Indonesia is definitely very social, especially on Twitter, but some users are proving to be a bit clueless in following these low quality, fake accounts. Remember folks, there is only one verified account for the Indonesian president, which is the one that was greeted on Twitter by porn star Vicky Vette.

Surround App is free and allows one-click machine translation of any Weibo post from someone you follow. In addition, it gives you a full English UI for the most common Weibo functions, like making retweets and comments. The Hong Kong startup admits that many features are omitted in this beta, with things like translation of comments, slang translation, image uploading, and paid-for human translations all coming at a later date. Here’s the current beta that I’ve been playing with:

There are a few confusing aspects to the new beta. What looks like the retweet/repost button (pictured above) is actually for comments, and what’s apparently a refresh icon actually serves to repost the content. It’s not made very clear how to activate the translation – it turns out you need to hit that arrow button in the bottom-left of the app. Hopefully the icons will be rethought. If it sounds like I’m being too tough on a free app, that’s just because I’m keen for it to be good as it could prove so useful for many people.

Surround App is now in Google Play for Android users, but the iPhone version hasn’t yet shown up in iTunes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once hailed as “China’s Facebook”, Renren (NYSE:RENN) has had a rough few years. First overtaken by microblogging (with new rivals Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo) and then by group messaging (like WeChat), Renren hasn’t been able to grow its user-base that much. But it is diversifying. The latest spin-off for Renren is a messaging app to challenge the mighty WeChat, and it’s called TongXueShuo – literally meaning “classmates say”.

But it’s not restricted to campus buddies – and it’s not just confined to messaging. Renren’s TongXueShuo seems to throw in a lot of things in the hope that the mix will attract new users. There are elements of Path, Google+, regular social messaging apps, plus the find-and-flirt capabilities of apps like Momo.

The mobile-only TongXueShuo – with apps for iPhone and Android – came out quietly last month. Perhaps too quietly, as there has been no buzz surrounding it yet.

TongXueShuo is not only up against the 300 million users on WeChat, but also incoming rivals like NHN Japan’s Line, which launched in China in December.

Last month, Renren also had a go at making a Snapchat-like app where the messages and images vanish after 10 seconds.

Renren’s main social network remains China’s seventh largest social network with about 170 million registered users.

(Thanks to reader Ken for pointing this out)

Last month, there was a considerable amount of online chatter about Vietnam’s prime minister planning to throw down $200 million to build a social network for the youth of Vietnam. Yeah, that’s more than the amount Coc Coc plans to pump into beating Google in Vietnam in the next decade.

It still remains unclear where the $200 million will come from and how the Vietnamese government plans to allocate that money to building such a huge and possibly bloated product. It’s also unsettled what the goal of such a project would be. Either way, we do know that it’s been allocated to the Ministry of Information and Communication.

In the midst of the rumors, some people have speculated that the as yet unlaunched Thanh Nien Vietnam, which literally means Vietnam’s Youth and appears to be a website for the government-sponsored national youth organization, was actually the $200 million project. But ICTnews.vn just debunked this. It’s not the $200 million project.

According to the Thanh Nien Vietnam website, the project won’t launch for another 253 days. Who knows what they’re doing for over a year when it took Zuckerberg one month to code the first version of Facebook. But I guess they want to be careful. It’s also not clear yet what the features for this website will be beyond what the CEO Le Quang Tu Do says is to bring the youth together in meaningful ways.

But there’s still no official word on the $200 million project and if it’s really starting up.

The Vietnamese government has made some significant steps in getting more involved in social media, like with Go.vn, which previously required Vietnamese citizens to enter their national identity numbers in order to get an account, but has since slowly spun off into a super platform that includes music, e-commerce, video, news, and education. Zing Me from VNG, on the other hand, still remains the biggest teen social network.

The TV commercial (video above)  will feature WeChat’s so-called Super-Duo Ambassadors, Alan Luo Zhi-Xiang and Rainie Yang (pictured right), who are renowned artistes from Taiwan. The ad will include the duo acting as a couple while introducing the functions of WeChat to the audience. For our readers in Singapore, you will be able to catch the TV ad on Channel 8, Channel U, W drama, and E-City starting this week. It seems that the same video used for promotional purposes in Taiwan will be used in Singapore too.

Speaking about this launch, Louis Song, country manager of Tencent’s International Business Group (Malaysia and Singapore), said the Chinese web giant hopes to strengthen its market position and increase its user adoption within Asia:

Singapore is a very strong market like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Thailand – we are witnessing a sturdy growth in mobile application platforms.

As we mentioned recently, WeChat currently boasts 300 million users worldwide, with 40 million overseas users.

Zorpia, it turns out, is a startup founded and run by Jeffrey Ng and based in Hong Kong. Launched all the way back in the early days of MySpace, Zorpia began as a social network that would facilitate unlimited photo sharing. Over time, Ng says, it has evolved into a service that’s more focused on helping people make new friends (he likens it to a digital bar or a town hall). It has also built up a very substantial base of registered users, growing from just 1.5 million users in 2005 to around 28 million users today, although just one million are monthly active users. Most of those users are in Asia, Ng tells me, and the service is especially popular in India, with over ten million registered users.

When I asked about user acquisition, Ng told me the site used a variety of techniques, mostly based around people inviting their friends. I explained about the emails I had gotten from my friend and my wife and asked Ng to explain why I was getting messages from people suggesting they had left me private messages on Zorpia when they clearly hadn’t. He told me he’d look into it, and but was never able to satisfactorily explain how that had happened.

To get to the bottom of things, it was clear that I needed to sign up for a Zorpia account myself. And so I did. As with all test accounts that I create for work, though, I used none of my real information, opened the account via a browser I don’t normally use, and registered using a unique email address created specifically for that test account.

Things looked bad pretty much immediately. On the account activation page, I noticed that three hyperlinks users might expect would lead to help pages or a “resend email” prompt actually redirect users to sketchy free-survey sites that seem an awful lot like scams.

(Ng confirmed that the links are there intentionally as advertising, but said that Zorpia has no control over what the links lead to as it varies based on the user’s geographical location UPDATE: Ng says that he was referring to the site’s banner ads, and that there should not be text-linked ads on the authentication page. “We simply do not understand how those links could appear on the screenshot you provided unless there was tampering,” he says. However, as evidenced by the screenshot above, they did appear when I activated my account.)

Once I logged in to my new account, I found another surprise: Zorpia was worried about my password security. A banner across the top of the screen blared that my password was “more than six months old.” Given that the password is one I’d never used before and had created only moments before, I was not expecting this. (Ng told me the message appeared to be a bug; however, as of this writing it has not been fixed UPDATE: Ng says the bug is now fixed.). But I ignored it because as you can see in the screenshots below, I had two new messages.

When I opened my messages, one of them was the boilerplate welcome greeting you’d expect from the Zorpia team. The other was an absolute shock. There sitting in my inbox just a minute after I first opened this account, was a message from my real life friend “Mike”:

That’s when I started getting goosebumps. That’s also when I double-checked with “Mike” to be sure he hadn’t somehow sent me a message — he hadn’t — but frankly, even if he had wanted to, it should have been impossible. I didn’t use my real name, my real email, my usual browser, or any real information about myself when setting up either the Zorpia account or the email account it is attached it. I also hadn’t told “Mike” I was planning to set up a test account of my own, and we live thousands of miles apart. It would have been nearly impossible for him to find my account even if he had wanted to in a sea of more than 28 million registered accounts. And of course, when that message was sent, he wasn’t using Zorpia anyway. He says he has never used Zorpia.

Zorpia CEO Jeffrey Ng told me that this was “very odd,” and that he’d have his tech team look into it. While I waited, I was thinking about Occam’s razor. How likely was it that some convoluted bug could randomly link two people who actually know each other from among the site’s nearly 30 million members? How likely was it that “Mike” could have found my account in the first place even if it was really him sending the message? The simplest explanation seemed to be that somehow (possibly through my IP address, which I foolishly forgot to obscure), Zorpia had linked my test account to my real identity, and then confirmed that I knew “Mike” through the access it apparently has to his email contacts list.

When Ng got back to me, he confirmed that that was indeed what had happened. Although I was using a separate browser to do everything related to Zorpia, I did load the “confirm account” page with my default browser once by accident because it is what opened when I clicked the account activation link. Previously, I had used the same browser only to unsubscribe from Zorpia emails — I have no Zorpia account — but nevertheless Zorpia apparently used the cookies from that interaction to connect my real identity (and thus my friendship with “Mike”) to my new test account.

Ng told me that when a friend joins, the system automatically sends them a private message from their friends already on Zorpia welcoming them. So, even though my new email couldn’t possibly have been listed in “Mike’s” contacts, his account automatically sent me a private message without his knowledge simply because I happened to once use a browser that once previously had been associated with unsubscribing from the spam emails Zorpia was sending me on his behalf.

After he explained this, even Ng admitted that this was a bit beyond the pale:

We do realize this comes off as creepy and poses a potential security threat to the user. Therefore we have disabled Zorpia from using cookie to store friend relationships already.

But he still wasn’t able to explain how Mike’s contacts — and my wife’s — got into Zorpia in the first place. Both deny having intentionally provided them to the service, and while Ng stops short of calling either of them a liar, he doesn’t seem to be able to explain how it could have happened otherwise:

From your friends’ experience, it seems like they simply do not recall they have added any friends on Zorpia. We will review our process and address this issue.

UPDATE: Ng says: “Zorpia is not a spam social network that auto-enrolls accounts,” and maintains that my wife and friend proactively invited their friends to join the service, pointing to server logs that apparently reflect this. Both my wife and “Mike” continue to deny having intentionally invited anyone.

My friends are not the only ones having a similar experience though. Although PandoDaily covered the startup last year and didn’t mention the problems it seems to have with emailing people who aren’t signed up for it, there are complaints about this dating back to 2009 at least. Each of the words in the previous sentence links to a different person complaining about being auto-enrolled in Zorpia or having their contacts list spammed by the service, and I found all of these quite easily and quickly via Google (where there are plenty more to be found if you want to go hunting). It seems like an awful lot of people have the same apparent amnesia Ng is suggesting my friends have when it comes to handing their contact list over to Zorpia.

UPDATE: Zorpia responds: “With 28 million registered users on Zorpia, we do not think a few hundred complaints online is statistically significant to merit an overall conclusion that Zorpia is a spam social network which auto-enroll accounts. Even if we assume there were 500 complaints, that represents a complaint to user ratio of only 0.0018%.”

Ultimately, though, the only way to be sure was to do another, more complicated test. After deleting all the cookies in both my browsers, I connected to my VPN (to obscure my IP) and opened up two new gmail and Facebook accounts, called ‘Zorpia Test1′ and ‘Zorpia Test2′. I made sure that the two were friends, and had a history of emailing back and forth. Then, I signed Zorpia Test1 up for a Zorpia account. I authenticated this account using both the Zorpia Test1 Facebook and Zorpia Test1 gmail accounts, but I never invited any friends (Ng had told me that all non-user friends needed to be invited manually by the user). I loaded the Zorpia “Add Friends” section once to be sure that the social network saw my connection with the ‘Zorpia Test2′ account, but I unchecked the name and backed out of the “add friends” dialog. I did not invite the Zorpia Test2 account as a friend or sign it up for a Zorpia account. Then, I waited.

And sure enough, within a couple days, the Zorpia Test2 account was getting messages from Zorpia. In fact, the Zorpia Test2 account somehow acquired its own Zorpia account! In the email below, you can see the welcome message I received about an account I never signed up for, using a username that defied the naming conventions I had set up for this test.

UPDATE: Zorpia says its server logs prove that I did accidentally sign up Zorpia Test2 for an account, and since I didn’t record video of my testing process, I cannot prove that I didn’t.

For me, the question of whether Zorpia is a real social network has been more or less put to bed. For a ten-year-old social network, there are simply way too many “bugs” here, and almost all of these “bugs” seem to result in non-users getting messages aimed at tricking them into joining the network. If years of online complaints haven’t changed the company’s ways, it’s unlikely this article will be any different.

So, unfortunately, I’ve got to say this: if you’re getting messages from Zorpia, your best bet is to click “mark as spam” and move on with your life. Zorpia, from what I can tell, is less a social network and more a mirage, an illusion designed to cajole and trick you into visiting so it can earn a few cents more from its ubiquitous advertisements. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. This is social networking hell.

For startups that are hoping to build products for everybody, here’s a case study that proves the power of focusing on niche, under-served markets.

In Ho Chi Minh city, there are only about 10,000 Japanese expats living here full-time. Across the country, there’s probably no more than 20,000. For the past two years, the Japanese population has seen a spike with Japanese offshoring companies, factories, and tourists taking a bigger interest in Vietnam. Out of this influx, has come PosteVn, a Craigslist-esque site for Japanese expats living and coming to Vietnam.

The site went online in Vietnam in February 2012, and was immediately profitable via its online ads. Taka, the founder and CEO of PosteVn, told me the story:

I used to work in the biggest Japanese magazine in Los Angeles, so when I moved to Vietnam, I knew that there was this real need for Japanese people living abroad. But the market here is saturated with paper magazines. That’s difficult for advertisers who want to do advertising and also paper is one-way interactions. For people living here, they want two-way, they want to communicate.

That’s exactly why PosteVN could experience immediate success in Vietnam. An under-served Japanese community needed to connect. For example, many Japanese businessmen only come to live in Vietnam for three years at a time and they have to get rid of their furniture and they don’t know who to sell or give it to, PosteVN addresses unique problems like these.

Before we even had a website, I just had a small PowerPoint and an idea in my head, and I came to the CEO of Japan Airlines in Vietnam, and I pitched PosteVN. He immediately understood and saw the potential, and gave me two tickets to fly to Japan for our raffle.

PosteVN is a lesson in identifying a problem and solving it. Today, PosteVN has 9,000 users and 50,000 pageviews per month. And it focuses on three main things for the Japanese community: a directory of stores and restaurants, original articles from the PosteVN team like interviews and Japanese recipes made with local ingredients, and a Craigslist clone whose most used features include, motorbikes, furniture, jobs, and community.

In July this year, PosteVN is expanding into Malaysia, and also opening up a new e-commerce website where Vietnamese and Japanese customers can buy exclusive luxury Japanese products. So we’re going to see yet another interesting e-commerce player here in Vietnam’s market from Japan.

Taka says that for Vietnam it’s just the right time:

Starting something like PosteVN in Japan is difficult because of cost, and starting it in countries like Thailand is difficult because of incumbent companies already in this space. Engineers are also cheap and good here. So Vietnam is really ripe.

With Taka’s recent success, he’s able to leverage his success and spin off into other tech prospects. The success of PosteVN is a lesson in identifying very specific problems and solving them. And consequently, making money.

We saw the India-made messaging app Hike launch last summer and then go global in December. In the fast-moving world of social media, that means it’s time for another update. This week, the New Delhi-based startup has rolled out Hike v2.0 – across iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, and Symbian – that aims to connect you more directly with what your friends are feeling.

The updated Hike app now has status updates and moods, so you can tell your buddies how you’re feeling with a fairly big emoticon. We’ve seen virtual sticker packs and large emoticons to be an integral part of the success of rival Asia-made messaging apps, like Line and KakaoTalk, so they’re clearly popular. Hike emoticons can also serve to reflect your status update, and you can even view your circle of friends by their mood within the app:

That latter feature is also a new one, dubbed ‘circle of friends’. Other useful new additions include a mute option for notifications. Plus, the new status updates now show up in WP8 homescreen tiles and on iOS they’ll appear as a number in the counter; Android users will have to wait for a further update to see how status updates get pushed to them.

It’s a pretty fun update while still keeping the app simple. Kavin Bharti Mittal says of this new aspect, “Now you can share what you’re thinking about or what you’re up to in real-time with your close friends. You can still message anyone on your address book, yet at the same time share those intimate and personal moments with your close friends.”

Just the other day, Whatsapp revealed that it has 200 million active users – yes, active – which is mightily impressive for a service that we often mock on this blog for being dull and not very innovative. But that huge number shows that not everyone wants social games and all the bells and whistles of some newer messaging apps, so Hike still has a chance to win over such users to its elegant and fairly minimal app. And the market is far from saturated yet.

Get the app download links via the Hike homepage.

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

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

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

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

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

Oh great, another messaging app. But now that these are clearly ubiquitous social tools, we’ll have to get used to seeing new ones launching that aim to evolve the genre and twist the narrative. That’s the case with Just.me, which launches out of private beta this morning with an iPhone app now available for download. Based in California and created by Keith Teare, former co-founder of TechCrunch, Just.me claims to be both more open and more expansive than other group messaging apps. In the process, it aims to make some of its rivals, like WeChat, Line, and Whatsapp, look dated, and perhaps even kill off the likes of Path and Facebook.

The app’s mantra is that it wants to be more open, and so it allows you to send messages to your contacts via email and SMS, even if they do not use Just.me. As for how it’s different from other smash-hit messaging apps, the startup explains:

There is a collection of messaging apps that do a great job providing a chat-centric user experience that excels at supporting quick, transient communications. Just.me is capable of supporting this type of messaging, but in addition supports more complicated interactions in a way that captures memories as a by-product of natural human interaction. Additionally, these messaging products require that each user has installed the app; Just.me enables you to message anyone in your address book – or if you know their phone number or email address – whether they have installed Just.me or not.

Not fun enough

The Just.me team is keen for this to succeed in Asia, and so the app launches in 32 languages across 155 countries. With Asia-made apps WeChat, Line, and KakaoTalk having half a billion collective registered users, Just.me will need to make the case that it’s the next stage in the evolution of this kind of social media. But those rivals are building strong, broad social platforms – encompassing things like e-publishing, social gaming, and eventually even mobile wallet payments – so this new Californian app will have a tough time persuading people in Asia that its app is both useful and fun. Indeed, though Just.me looks great, it doesn’t look fun enough. Yes, animated emoticon stickers packs are silly and very chat-centric, but they’re still a big draw for lots of people.

With no Android app yet available, I’ve not yet tested the app, so I’ll have to reserve judgement for now. There’s a specific China launch happening on Friday morning on Skype (since the startup’s preferred G+ Hangouts are blocked here), so I’ll take a look at the app then.

But from all the screenshots (see more below), it looks like a clever amalgam of messaging and a Facebook/Path-esque social network, replete with simple privacy controls. While I personally wouldn’t ditch WeChat for this – I use WeChat video calls quite a lot, and that’s a feature missing from this new challenger – I’d consider using Just.me instead of Facebook or Path (I have a one-in-and-one-out policy with signing up for new social services), and also as a replacement SMS app as well. The app also serves as a really neat personal diary.

What do you make of Just.me? Let us know in the comments.

Qian’s post, which was retweeted over a thousand times and attracted hundreds of comments, says that Weibo is overvalued because Weibo users are fleeing the service because of real-name controls, because their private social interactions have moved elsewhere (i.e., to WeChat), and because they’re very sensitive to advertising (which makes monetization difficult). Kaifu Lee disagrees:

Sina Weibo activity has gone down, but the gloomy predictions are greatly exaggerated: 1) the fact that Weibo is being so tightly controlled shows that it has vitality; 2) with regard to private interactions moving elsewhere, Sina Weibo was never really the place for that in the first place, so that’s not much of a loss; 3) to deal with user opposition to advertising, Sina can try user behavioral analysis along with targeted ads and e-commerce integration. Of course whether or not that will work depends on how it’s implemented.

Lee’s first point is something that had never occurred to me as a reason to hold out hope for Weibo, but it does make sense. Censors wouldn’t bother keeping such a tight grip on Weibo if it wasn’t considered an important and influential service anymore. Lee doesn’t mention this, but it’s also hard for me to see the real-name system as much of a problem for Weibo users (as Qian suggests it is) because the real-name system has been so poorly implemented. I have been a weibo user for years and at no point during any of these real name campaigns have I actually had to provide Sina with my real name or ID information. Users who want to get around that “requirement” definitely can.

Lee’s second point is also quite salient, as Weibo and WeChat are very different services. The rise of WeChat has undoubtedly made Weibo less active, but from a user’s point of view, I wonder how much of that lost activity was meaningful for the broader userbase and how much of it was private chatting between friends that has since moved to chat apps like WeChat. My guess is that it’s mostly the latter that was lost, and while that make’s Weibo less active, it probably doesn’t make it any less interesting.

Of course, that’s not likely to be much consolation for Sina, and the question of Sina’s value and its monetization efforts is still very much an open one. If Lee thinks ads on Weibo are a viable monetization option, I’m inclined to believe him — after all, he spends an awful lot of time on Weibo and knows the service very well — but as he says, ultimately it’s all going to come down to the execution.

Headlines in the China chat app scene have recently been overtaken by WeChat. Only two years old, the mobile chat app has already accumulated a user-base of over 300 million users with a large majority of them in China. Understandably, WeChat is huge in terms of users, but before we think it has become the single dominant force in social/communication, it’s worthwhile to remind ourselves of the other apps that the Chinese use to connect with each other.

Leveraging TNS’s Mobile Behave (1) panel, we can measure the time smartphone users spend with any one particular app as a proportion of total time spent facing their smartphone screens. This enables us to get a handle on the relative time spent on different social/communication apps.

Looking first at Android – the top five mobile apps account for 34 percent of time spent on a smartphones. Predictably, the top five is dominated by the usual suspects such as UCWeb mobile browser (#1). However, it is followed closely by Mobile QQ and WeChat which account for nine percent and seven percent of time respectively. Sina Weibo comes in at four percent.

With iOS, users gravitate most towards Mobile QQ, which has 15 percent of the total time spent on iOS devices. This is followed by Weibo (13 percent) and WeChat (10 percent). Finally, as one would expect with Apple users, entertainment is an important aspect of their lives – in line with this, PPS (a peer to peer streaming video network) is next in the top five and accounts for three percent of users’ time.

Clearly, people spend a large proportion of their mobile device time on apps like Weibo, WeChat and Mobile QQ. Be it Android or iOS, these three apps have secured a place in the top five and together account for a substantial amount of activity on the smartphone. Connectivity in the form of enhanced instant messaging is a key need in Chinese smartphone users’ lives.

While WeChat is garnering lots of attention, it’s useful to note that both Mobile QQ and Weibo are also apps that the Chinese are using extensively to connect with one another. Not surprisingly, Mobile QQ gets more use than WeChat given that it has a longer history (it has roots as a desktop IM app before coming up with a mobile app for smartphone users). But regardless of whether WeChat or Mobile QQ leads the pack, it’s a win-win situation for Tencent, since it owns both platforms.

However, given the rapid pace at which the mobile app scene is developing, it’s anybody’s guess what the chat app scene will look like several more months down the line. Who would have known that WeChat, which only had 100 million users a year ago, would enjoy a growth trajectory that would rival the likes of Whatsapp on the international scene?

(1) TNS has actual behavioral metrics captured via an app installed on our smartphone user panels.

There aren’t too many startups in Vietnam that are making a foray into medicine. In fact, I only know two: Wish.vn and Yton.vn. Let’s focus on Wish.vn, which is an attempt at creating a healthcare social network.

I spoke with Nguyen Quoc Tuan, CEO at Wish.vn, for the lowdown on the fledgling startup. He is also business development director for HiPT. HiPT has been around for 18 years doing software development in the domestic market and only in the last 10 months did it start incubating startups like Wish.vn. It’s got two more startups in the pipeline, but Tuan declined to say what they are. But he was happy to introduce Wish.vn:

It’s basically a social network for healthcare. In the beginning, we wanted to build a system where people could save their examination results online. But then we realized that we needed to build a social aspect to help the health of the community.

Tuan explains that simply, you could look at it as a combination of electronic health records, a social network to allow patients to rate health care, healthcare information, promotions connecting with partners, and tools to help you keep up your health. Yeah, it’s a lot.

Basically, users can log into the site via Facebook, they can post their personal health records, ask questions about their health and doctors will respond, and talk to other people interested in health issues.

Tuan hopes to make money in three ways: advertising, bringing partners like hardware providers in touch with hospitals, and annual fees from users for extra services like consultations, emergency medical services, and healthcare data. Users will be able to post what sickness they have and Wish.vn will recommend which hospital to go to, and what kind of medicine to check out. It’s a pretty ambitious project that seems to be going all over the place at the moment. But currently users are most attracted to the social network aspect (sharing their health problems) and pregnancy advice section.

To date, Wish.vn with its team of 15, has 20,000 users with 3,000 unique visits per month. That’s since they came out of beta in December 2012. Wish.vn is also working on building a healthcare app store that allows users to download apps that can help with their health, like for monitoring heartrate. The startup already has its own iPhone app that you can check out here.

Image source credit: berita.upi.edu

Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono – also known as SBY – has finally made his first tweet on his brand-new Twitter handle, @SBYudhoyono. Since that first presidential tweet a couple of days ago, he has gained over 700,000 followers already, and has made 27 tweets so far. Can SBY gain enough followers to become a top ten Twitter account among world leaders?

Just like US president Barack Obama, Yudhoyono puts his own initials on the end of tweets that come personally from him. So far, the president has put his newly-minted Twitter account to good use, assuring travelers that he has already made contact with the transportation minister to investigate the recent Lion Air crash in Bali. Another topical tweet assures his followers that he has discussed with the education and culture minister about the lateness of national exams in 11 Indonesian provinces.

SBY has also used his Twitter account to greet other Indonesian public figures on the service, such as former vice president Yusuf Kalla @JK_Kita, religious leader Yusuf Mansur @Yusuf_Mansur, and Indonesian ambassador to the US, Dino Patti Djalal @dinopattidjalal. The president also responded to a few Indonesian citizens who asked about the government’s dedication to developing the country’s poorest region, Papua. So far so good.

Not following porn stars

The response to the president’s new venture into the Twittersphere is mostly positive. Amusingly, one of many greetings to SBY came from porn star Vicky Vette, who tweeted at the Indonesian president (it has since been retweeted over 700 times):

At the time of writing, the president’s Twitter account seems to grow by the tens of thousands per hour. Attracting 700,000 followers is no small feat, and already the president has beaten the follower count of ICT minister Tifatul Sembiring in just the two days since joining. A few Indonesians now wonder if SBY can beat Indonesian celebrity Agnes Monica to become the biggest Twitter account in the country. SBY will need to gain 6.5 million more followers to do that.

SBY vs Obama

In comparison to other world leaders who have a Twitter, SBY may well already be in the top twenty, beating the likes of Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh and Australian prime minister Julia Gillard. So far, SBY is ranked third on Twitter among Asian world leaders, just behind Filipino president Benigno Aquino III, and Malaysian prime minister Najib bin Tun Haji Abdul Razak. If SBY is gunning for the top then it will be very challenging to get close to Barack Obama’s 30 million followers.

While I believe it’s just a matter of time until SBY becomes the biggest Asian nation leader on Twitter account, he won’t be able to beat Barack Obama. That’s because SBY’s presidential period will be over by next year, and he’s not eligible to go up for re-election again.

It is great to see how technology is being used more and more by important figures. It allows them to interact with people better and even send out important news and messages in real time. I hope this can set the trend for future Indonesian leaders to do the same – to listen to and speak with citizens online.

With spring now in full flow here in China, new tech news developments bloomed as quickly as plum blossoms. Let’s start off with social media:

1. Out of 300 Million Total, Tencent’s WeChat Has 40 Million Overseas Users

Tencent president Martin Lau revealed to delegates at the Boao Forum For Asia that WeChat now has 40 million users outside of China. We’ve been waiting for a statistic like this for a whole year as we tried to gauge the progress of WeChat relative to rival apps like Line and KakaoTalk.

2. A Sneak Peek at Some Games on WeChat’s Social Gaming Platform

Speaking of WeChat, the app will soon get a social gaming platform, much like its afore-mentioned Asia-made competitors.

3. Sina Weibo in Thailand: Way Too Little, Way Too Late

Sticking with the theme of Chinese social media venturing overseas, the Twitter-like Sina Weibo is finally making a push into Southeast Asia. But with the aim of generating more than $1 million in revenue in its first year in Thailand, we don’t see how that’s possible up against both G+ and Twitter.

4. ‘Danger Maps’ Invites You to Map China’s Polluted Areas via New Open-Platform Maps

This nonprofit group has created an open platform for its crowdsourced maps of pollution and environmental hazards in China. These guys sure have taken on a huge workload.

5. New Chinese E-Store Caters to Expats in China, Supports Payments in Bitcoin

This China-based startup has raised eyebrows by accepting payment in Bitcoin. Though it also takes e-payments via more conventional channels, the startup founder explained to us why Bitcoin is a perfect fit for this unique e-store.

6. Chinese Law Proposes Real Name Requirements for All Phone and Mobile Network Connections

You won’t be able to lurk around the interwebs for much longer if China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) gets its way. Its plan is for citizens to have to go through real name registration to set up any kind of phone line or mobile connection in China.

7. Scammers in China Exploit Apple to Turn Fake iPhones into Real Ones

Apple’s returns policy has been under attack in China of late for allegedly being unfair, but this scam seems to suggest that Apple’s program is too lenient. So much so that scammers are getting Apple’s official stores to swap fake parts for genuine ones.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you might like to subscribe to our China RSS feed.

Money, murder, manga, and several other things that regrettably do not begin with “m” dominated this week’s Asia tech news. Plus, with hundreds of millions in the continent devoted to their social messaging apps, it’s no surprise that we also saw major developments from Line, KakaoTalk, and WeChat.

Willis’ pick: CocCoc: Russian-Financed Search Engine To Spend $100 Million to Beat Google in Vietnam

To invest $100 million in a local search engine is kinda bold. That’s what the Russians did for Vietnam’s CocCoc this week. It’s big news because this sort of investment hardly ever happens at the local level in Southeast Asia. That said, I don’t think it’s a silly investment either. Vietnam’s internet penetration is on the rise and from what I understood from Minh, our American-Vietnamese correspondent, CocCoc does serve Vietnamese users much better than Google. Plus, online search ads in Vietnam is probably worth more than $100 million.

Vanessa’s pick: Taiwanese Gamer Witnesses Murder in Internet Cafe, Keeps Playing Games in Bloodstained Clothes

I felt the need to share this piece of news on all my social networks due to the prevalence of Genovese syndrome in our society these days. How can anyone, especially in such close proximity, not give assistance or seek help when someone is being stabbed to death? It gets creepy when your gameplay takes precedence over someone’s life and it shows how screwed up her values are, doesn’t it?

Minh’s pick: VietnamWorks, Vietnam’s Top Online Recruitment Site, Gets Acquired By En-Japan

This is probably the biggest news in Vietnam for the week, especially considering that CareerBuilder bought VON in February in a similarly expansionist move. This means that the job recruitment scene in Vietnam is accelerating and it’s really nice to see some exits for companies in Vietnam. This will be inspiring for startups who want to make it big in the country and it’s confirmation that the Vietnamese market does have meat to it.

Emily’s pick: Line Enters E-Book Business With Line Manga

It’s really great to see messaging apps, like Line, venturing into new services. First it was games, and now it’s manga! I won’t say that it is exactly innovative, but it might be advantageous to tap into the pretty huge market of manga readers. It is also interesting to note that KakaoTalk also launched its new KakaoPage publishing platform which allows anyone to create and distribute content.

Enricko’s pick: No Funding, No Rich Daddy, Founder of M-Stars in Indonesia Started Up His Way

Another inspiring story written by Minghao about an Indonesian startup that made its exit, albeit a forced one. One big thing that everyone needs to remind themselves of is the dedication and hard work these founders must put in to get to the state they are in. M-Stars Group’s Joseph Edi Lumban Gaol had to borrow money from family to pay his employees in the early days and spent a lot of sleepless nights fretting over how to keep the company afloat. I have nothing but respect for the guy.

Charlie’s and Steven’s pick: Out of 300 Million Total, Tencent’s WeChat Has 40 Million Overseas Users

Charlie: I’ve been wondering for a while how many of WeChat’s 300 million users were overseas users, and now we know. Just getting to 40 million is an impressive accomplishment, but if Tencent can maintain this growth, I’ll be even more impressed – and, honestly, a little surprised.

Steven: I’ve also been waiting for this kind of official stat. While it’s a fairly good figure, it shows that the global reach of Whatsapp and Line is actually far greater than WeChat’s. But it’s still early days as Tencent WeChat has only had an English name and an overseas audience for a little under 12 months.

Andrew’s pick: WeChat Squashes Rumor: We’re Free to Use

This piece of news indeed put millions of WeChat users at ease. I can’t help but to agree that users shouldn’t pay just to enjoy the service of the biggest mobile chat app in China. However, from the telcos’ perspective, someone has to foot the bill for all that extra data usage on its networks. This battle is not over yet.

Minghao’s pick: KakaoTalk Hits Number 1 Spot in Indonesia’s App Stores and is Looking for Local Partners

Last year, we see strong initiatives from NHN’s Line and Tencent’s WeChat in Indonesia. Now we have a new challenger heading into the world’s fourth most populated country. Looks like an intense fight for market share is about to erupt – or has it already started?

Youshen’s pick: Google Apps for Education to Reach 10 Million Malaysians in New Education Program

It is astonishing to have 10 million Malaysian students, teachers and parents to be deployed on the web-based collaboration suite, Google Apps for Education. I would have expected this move myself given that Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore and India have already “Gone Google”. Worldwide, we see similar adoption by universities such as Stanford, Brown, and UC Berkeley. Targeted at students across 10,000 Malaysian schools, I will also agree that Chromebooks are a great way to learn on and easily access Google Apps for Education.

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

Last Friday, Sina Weibo quietly announced that it would be entering Thailand thanks to a partnership with Thai company Jiaranai Entertainment. Weibo Thailand is aiming to break even within six months and generate more than $1 million in revenue in its first year. It aims to have 1.6 million active users in Thailand by the end of the year.

Admittedly, I am not all that familiar with the Thai market, but this sounds like an absolute pipe dream. Generating some revenue is one thing — Thailand is a popular destination for Chinese tourists and I’m sure some Thai businesses will appreciate the chance to get in closer contact with their customers — but 1.6 million active users in a year seems like a stretch, especially for a service that (as of this moment) doesn’t even have a Thai language option. (In fact, the service didn’t even have English until earlier this year).

Twitter, which has been in Thailand for years, currently has between 1.5 million and 2 million users in the country by most counts, and I don’t see any reason why Sina Weibo is likely to be any more popular or pick up users any faster. That is especially true given that Jiaranai’s strategy seems very focused on picking up corporate accounts that want to interact with Chinese users, not on getting regular people to use the service. Are there really 1.6 million Thai businesses that are aching to microblog with potential customers in Chinese?

More broadly, I have to wonder what the hell took Sina so long. Baidu has been expanding into Southeast Asia and researching there since last year. Tencent’s WeChat is all over the world map and has already racked up 40 million overseas users. If Sina wanted Weibo to go international, they should have made this move years ago while the concept was still trendy. I still believe that aside from the censorship, Weibo actually offers a superior service to Twitter. But why give Twitter years to get entrenched in Southeast Asia before finally dipping a toe into the Thai market at a time when microblogging seems threatened by the rising popularity of mobile chat apps?

If Sina was going to go global, the company should have moved much faster and much more decisively, especially into Southeast Asia. This is not to say that there is no opportunity at all for Weibo outside China, of course, but Sina has taken so long to take the market outside of China seriously that its hard to imagine the company having much success there at this point even if it did throw its weight behind a global push. (And since Jiaranai is only looking to spend about $300,000 marketing Weibo Thailand, it certainly doesn’t seem like Sina’s full weight is even behind this Thai push).

China’s market is huge, of course, and it’s possible to make a lot of money without ever stepping outside it (although historically Sina Weibo has struggled to make the kind of money one might expect from a platform with so many users). But I have a feeling that a year from now, Sina’s executives are going to be looking at a less-than-ideal situation with Weibo Thailand, and perhaps wondering how things might have gone differently if the company had taken Southeast Asia more seriously earlier in the game.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Needless to say, users were not pleased, and there was some speculation that the outage was the result of China’s telecoms exacting revenge on WeChat in the ongoing kerfuffle over whether or not WeChat should have to pay for its access to China’s telecom networks. But with a few hours, Tencent responded with a post on WeChat’s official weibo account, saying that the outage was actually the result of a hardware malfunction, but that the result had already been corrected. The issue, according to the weibo post, affected only “a minority” of WeChat users and lasted for just ten minutes.

Though it might not seem that way, this incident is probably a good sign for WeChat. Obviously no one likes service outages, but the fact that WeChat going down for just ten minutes resulted in so many users complaining and posting on Weibo about it is an indication that WeChat has already become a must-have service for many of its users. When your service goes down for ten minutes and that makes the front page of China’s biggest tech news sites, you know you’ve clearly captured the hearts and minds (or at least the attention) of China’s smartphone users and its tech industry.

(via Sina Tech)

The real estate market in Vietnam is a bubble. It’s long been known to be among the top 20 most expensive real estate markets in the world despite still being a developing nation. But that also means there are lots of opportunities.

Currently, the number one real estate listings site in Vietnam is Batdongsan. It’s getting anywhere from 4,000 to 5,000 new listings per day, which is a huge step over rival site Muabannhadat, which gets 1,000 new additions per day, and Dicoconline, which has about 500 to 600 per day. As of 2011, Batdongsan has listed over 650,000 properties, and by 2012, was well over 870,000.

Batdongsan is also the only one of the three that is self-financed. It started in 2008 in Hanoi, Vietnam.

The business is simple. Users create accounts, post their listings and manage them. Batdongsan checks the info. Batdongsan charges a fee for listing depending on the time period it’s online and where it’s displayed on the site. There are different service offerings from normal to VIP. The value the company adds for users is giving them data and analysis on the market and giving them a dashboard where they can manage all their data from views to effectiveness.

In the beginning, according to Dung Nguyen, in charge of business development and strategic projects, “The company started out as a property company, but upon realizing that there was a wide open space in online real estate, we pivoted into online listings.” The market size is palpable, Dung goes on:

Annually, the demand for listings in real estate is upwards of 2.5 million. That’s the number of listings users want to see. And all over Vietnam, there are about 50,000 real estate intermediaries including both individuals and organizations.

Batdongsan basically makes it easier for these intermediaries to reach out to customers and the transactions all happen offline without Batdongsan’s involvement.

Dung says the secret to their success has simply been good SEO so as to be discovered by potential users. Despite other companies like Muabannhadat getting funding from the likes of IDG, the startup’s success has come down to great SEO.

As the real estate and macro-economy slowly recovers, Batdongsan’s CEO Le Xuan Truong told me that he’s looking forward to the future:

At present, Batdongsan is among top 100 websites of Vietnam and regarded as the most effective real estate portal in the market. We aim at being in the top 20 and accounting for more than 80 percent of total market share in field of property classifieds. Currently, Vietnamese realtors have a habit of posting listings on a variety of property portals. However, in the near future, we are headed to be the first and the only website that users think of whenever they have a demand to list their properties online.

Finding good and great engineers for your company is a tedious and unsure process. Google and Microsoft are both well known for asking questions like: “How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?” or “How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?” Questions like these stump would-be geniuses and allow Google recruiters to see how applicants think. This rigorous process has clearly given Google some great results as they remain one of the most dominant technology companies of the decade. But there’s still space to innovate on engineering recruitment and that’s what Nguyen Tuan Anh is set on doing with his new site, Geeky.vn, which launched just this week.

When you go to the website, you’ll see the usual website introductions, but at the bottom of the screen, you’ll see what appears to be a command line function. For those of you non-engineers, think MS-DOS back before the days when the graphical user interface was introduced to the masses. Any user can type “help” and access the entire command line interface.

The concept is simple: engineers have to code their way through the website by passing levels. The website is organized into seven levels. After three months, the engineer that can pass all the levels will receive a total of VND 50 million ($2,400) in cash. You can only pass on to the next level by writing code that solves a particular set of problems which tests the engineers’ true coding ability. All of the code is logged into the Geeky.vn logs and recruiters and the Geeky.vn team can see every line of code and when they coded it.

Tuan Anh, Geeky.vn’s founder shared with me more:

The thing about engineers is, a resume, degree, and interview is never a good indication of how good an engineer is. You have to see it in how they code, how they deal with problems, and their willingness to outsmart and solve problems. For example, with one of our Geeky prototypes, one engineer solved a coding puzzle over the course of four hours from late 1am until 5am in the morning. And I could see how many times he had attempted to solve the puzzle. It shows that he tried really hard and he’s a good engineer. This guy actually went on to be a CTO.

So far, after a week, the site has 150 users and no one has passed level one yet. Next week, the team will be rolling out level two. In June, Geeky.vn will hold its final offline event where the team will roll out its final seventh and hardest level where only the top engineers will be invited to solve the hardest puzzles.

The idea came to Tuan Anh when he was working on HR solutions for companies who need good developers. He said, “it was really hard to look for good engineers without wasting time and money, so I tried this method and it worked really well, so I thought others may benefit from that.”

The cool thing about the project is that it’s getting local support from big companies like VNG, 2359 Media, TGM Tech, Siri Nova, and Misfit Wearables. The project is built by a team of engineers, so they understand what it takes to suss out what all the good engineers. In the future, Tuan Anh is looking to grow this into a viable recruitment business.

In 2011, we covered a similar site from India called Interviewstreet.

We will keep you posted on Geeky.vn. Stay tuned.

(UPDATE: Tencent responds by saying: “Tencent is in the process of building a mobile games open platform, which is positioned to increase engagement with mobile Internet users — both wireless QQ and Weixin/WeChat. To facilitate the testing of our new open platform, we are developing some games internally and also sourcing from third-party game developers. We are in the early stage of preparation, and have not released any screenshots or images of these games. As the largest game platform in China, we have deep respect for intellectual property and will work with related parties to enforce intellectual property protection on our game platforms.”).

As with platforms like Apple’s Game Center, or the gaming elements of rival chat apps KakaoTalk and Line, the titles will require gamers to sign in – this time with a WeChat (or a Tencent QQ) username – so that you can challenge buddies within the game. The leaked photos, as seen on iFanr, show three similarly named casual games. They’re called WePang (seems like a bit of a rip-off of Anipang, which in turn is basically just Popcap’s Bejeweled), WeLink, and a parkour game called WeRunner:

Tencent is already China’s top gaming company by revenue, with a range of both casual and hardcore games across numerous platforms. But its QQ-based social gaming, which is hugely important to the company’s revenue, is reliant on desktop gaming and its old-style QQ IM service, so Tencent needs to brings its game face to mobile with its popular WeChat app.

WeChat has over 300 million users in total, of which about 40 million are outside of China.

(Source: iFanr – article in Chinese)

Here’s an app definitely not designed for me: a new social nightlife app called Qlubbr. Made by a Singapore startup who launched the app last week, it focuses on gigs, festivals, and clubs. It helps users discover nightlife events in Singapore, and should prove to be useful for barflies and clubbers in the country. Yes, Facebook has events and Foursquare has listings, but this is the kind of dedicated app that you’d turn to when it’s time to go out for the night.

Qlubbr co-founder Sherizan Sheikh tells us that the app was inspired by the success of Swedish-made Vamos. All the events within Qlubbr are approved and curated by the team, and they’re keen to connect with more event organizers and club owners so as to build up the database.

Right now, the app is for iPhone only, but an Android version is on track to be launched in June.

In a city with such great nightlife, it’s inevitable that Qlubbr is not the first to do this, and I notice that another local startup has created the GoinOut app, and New York-based Buy Me a Drink has expanded to Singapore (not that I’ve used either). So there’s plenty of competition for this newcomer.

Sherizan says that, aside from Singapore, the app has been generating early interest in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and some parts of Thailand. Those are possible areas of expansion for the Qlubbr team.

The social clubbing app is free, so the big idea for the startup going forward lies in promotions and even e-commerce. Sherizan explains:

We have plans to focus on event organizers to create and promote their events within Qlubbr platform which leads to us to handling ticket sales. But that’s in the future.

Try out the Qlubbr iPhone app in the App Store.

On the Alexa traffic rank, Zing Video is the fifth highest ranked site in Vietnam. But that number piggybacks on the strength of Zing Me, VNG’s flagship Facebook-like site. They’ll be allowing users to download individual videos they want to keep starting on April 9th; and from April 19th to June 1st, users can download their own videos en masse. It’ll all be over officially on the June 2nd when the service goes completely offline.

Taking down the service falls in line with two main factors for VNG, a general shift in strategy and a disinclination to compete head on with Youtube. In terms of strategy, VNG has been going heavy into mobile with new products like mobile chat app Zalo and mobile social games like Giai Dieu Vui while maintaining its strong strategic advantage with web real estate like Zing MP3, Zing News, Laban (a web and mobile browser), Zing TV (which allows users to broadcast Vietnamese television onto their web browser or mobile), Zini (a new Weibo or Twitter-like service released earlier this month), and Baomoi (the leading news portal that VNG acquired). In terms of foreign competition, Youtube currently holds the number four Alexa traffic ranking in Vietnam just behind Google and Facebook.

On one side, VNG is obviously shifting its resources into new projects like Zalo and Zini, but it also brings up a scary thought: can Vietnamese companies handle competition from mega companies like Google and Facebook? Certainly, VNG’s Zing Me has maintained a strong domestic growth rate of 12 million users compared to Facebook’s 12 million – though Facebook’s aggressive one million new users per month growth rate in Vietnam makes it look like it’ll win in the end. But can this growth be maintained for long as Facebook gets more aggressive about how users can access its platform with apps like Facebook Home?

In China, Youtube has been blocked since 2007 effectively allowing local competitors to dominate the space without resistance. In Japan, Youtube has faced an innovative competitor in Niconico-douga which in addition to streaming videos, allows users to comment on top of the video. Up until now, VNG’s Zing Video was the only one that could take on Youtube in Vietnam.

This underlines a current of unease in the Vietnamese consumer domestic market. Effectively, VNG is competing with Google and Facebook on multiple fronts, and it’s having to pick its battles more wisely in order to stake out a secure market advantage. Zalo makes a lot of sense because both Google and Facebook are weak in chat apps. But with Google rumored to acquire Whatsapp soon (and Google Talk rebranding as Google Babel to be more like a new-style group messaging app), how will Vietnam’s Zalo fare if Google puts all of its engineering weight behind one chat app competitor that is already incumbent in the space? And how will Zing Me do up against a Facebook that is even more aggressive about innovating its interface. On the other hand, Zing MP3 is bound to remain untouchable with the American music industry holding back services like Spotify and Pandora from going global.

All of this, although fascinating and telling of VNG’s prowess in the consumer space, does not bear much weight on VNG’s central business: gaming.

(Source: Zing’s Blog)

WeChat will definitely have to pay fees, but specifically how those fees will be collected is still being considered and researched.

Tencent hasn’t responded officially (most of China is still on vacation for Tomb Sweeping Day), but separately the company did deny several rumors about specific payment strategies through its official WeChat microblog account on Sina Weibo. The message, which was posted after the release of the Securities Market Weekly report, does not explicitly state that WeChat doesn’t plan to start charging a fee, it merely debunks three specific rumors about fee structures that had been making the rounds online.

Assuming that WeChat does start charging users a fee, Tencent’s baby could be in big trouble. A Xinhua online poll found that around ninety percent of WeChat users say they’d ditch the service if it started costing money. But the MIIT official’s wording doesn’t preclude the possibility that Tencent might pick up the bill without passing the costs along to its customers. And since passing the costs to customers seems likely to sink the app altogether, it seems likely that Tencent will try its hardest to keep the app free and instead cover the fees through online-to-offline e-commerce, added-value services, and games. (For more on Tencent’s three-pronged WeChat monetization strategy, check out this report).

(Securities Market Weekly via Sina Tech)

Quite a few startups are trying – or have tried and failed – to crack the first-world problem of how to share and transfer images between a group of friends. You could email stuff back and forth, upload to Facebook and download some of your friends’ best snaps of you, set up a Dropbox folder, or use a wifi transfer thingy like Bump. Or a dozen other ways. Now PixBento wants to be the answer. One of our Startup Arena pitchers this afternoon, PixBento is launching into beta at this event. Users can pool and share photo albums with specific buddies across an iPhone app and a web app (pictured).

Right now, PixBento founder Kelvin Koh is pitching to our judges and explaining how it works. Before the Startup Arena pitching kicked into action, Kelvin told to me that Facebook privacy concerns – and over-complex settings – put a lot of people off sharing photos on Facebook. Plus, photos of a particular event/trip/holiday/party end up scattered and largely forgotten across the albums of numerous participants. That’s where PixBento comes in, ensuring privacy among a certain group with easy sharing and simple downloading of photos that are true keepers.

The PixBento web app – click to enlarge

As for previous failures in this genre – like the colossal cock-up of the over-funded and underwhelming Color app – Kelvin is confident of not falling into the same trap, telling me:

Well for one, apps like Color or even Albumatic – which tried to do something in similar fashion – put their money on real-time events and real-time contributions. One problem which they faced are complaints by users about strangers in the same vicinity joining their groups (due to geo-locational discovery). Apparently that is one key reason (amongst many others) that led to the downfall of Color.

One advantage we have, in relation to real-time usage, lies primarily on our web-based image collage, which we believe set our product apart from them. With a screen projection of the collage, we can see PixBento being used in public events, such as roadshows, weddings, parties, discos, etc. There are immediate engagements and gratifications from the users’ point of view.

It can also be used at any time after any event as well, whenever people get round to sharing images.

Picturing monetization

In addition to its usefulness, Kelvin explains to the judges (pictured above) that he has in mind a revenue model for both regular folks and business whereby the startup will be a platform for photo-oriented social marketing. Citing the example of how Facebook marginalizes the attempts of fans to give content to brands, he suggests PixBento as a better way for businesses and customers to push images to each other. A more positive example of social marketing is automaker Audi cleverly using fans’ photos on its Instagram feed; the idea is that this startup would make it easier for this kind of photo sharing to take place. As for monetization, brands could purchase tiered packages to allow fans to submit more photos to them.

A similar freemium model could apply to regular users, with free accounts capped at 200 uploaded photos. The startup reckons that, so long as one percent of 157 users sign up as a paying customer, it’s a model that can work – and a photo-sharing problem solved.

Once fully launched, this Singapore app is going global. Look out for the PixBento iPhone app once it launches officially. Until then, check out the brief demo video:

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

Tell My Friends recently at SXSW.

Singapore-based Tell My Friends is one of the more established young tech companies on our newest Startup Asia roster having been in beta for nearly a year. It’s a social music store for legal MP3s where users can actual earn money from referral sales of songs that you post as links to places like Facebook.

For example, if you share one of Tell My Friends’ licensed songs on Facebook, you will get S$0.21 from each purchase that results from clicking on your custom link. That could add up to a profit on the song that you yourself bought. Songs generally cost S$2, which is a bit pricier than from Apple’s iTunes Music Store, but this service brings profit-making potential for music fans. As shown in Tell My Friends’ startup pitch this afternoon, this is the revenue share:

Since my colleague looked at Tell My Friends last July, the startup has been, CEO Ben Looi tells us, focusing on content acquisition and improving its user experience ahead of a solid launch soon. Ben has also been traveling around, becoming the first Singapore Startup to get invited to pitch at Seed Forum New York last November, and more recently back in the States to exhibit as part of IDA’s Singapore Alley at the SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas.

Now Ben’s back in his native Singapore, and pitching to our knowledgable but very picky judges. We know that the startup is in talks with some labels and content providers about adding more music, but the judges will surely be wary about the significant costs involved in such a venture. Plus, as mature a market as Singapore is, some of its netizens still find that music piracy – or finding some clever way to listen to overseas services like Spotify – is more convenient for them.

As for funding, Ben explains:

We are working with Mercatus Capital to raise US$500,000, and have received a bridging amount as a convertible loan while the fund-raising is taking place.

Of that funding, they anticipate that a whopping $300,000 needs to be spent on marketing, with $50,000 for licensing content.

The panel of four judges is worried about legality as this is a sort of pyramid-like monetizing program. Ben says it’s legal in Singapore. The focus for the startup will be Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. He says there are just over 600 downloaders who’ve made use of the service so far.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Since China is on holiday break right now and as a result there’s not much going on in the tech industry, we hopped onto Sina Weibo to see what the digital consensus was about North Korea.

A lot of what we found was jokes. In fact, one of the most widely-retweeted comments on North Korea was this one, which links to a Chinese-subtitled clip from American comedy news show The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It’s pretty funny (which is why we’ve embedded it below), and Weibo users clearly agree as almost all the comments on that weibo post are positive. Chinese users are also enjoying the North Korean propaganda film about the terrible lives of Americans (who can only eat birds and drink coffee made from snow) that has gone viral in the West (this popular weibo post has the video subtitled in Chinese).

Another popular post expressed the hope (somewhat sarcastically I believe) that Kim ratchet up the tension even more so that he can “either let the Juche Ideology shine upon all of humanity or join Gaddafi and Saddam’s party [i.e., die] as quickly as possible.” Still another points out that in the event of the war, China might be obligated to fight itself, as its treaty with North Korea requires it to support the Hermit Kingdom, but its position on the UN Security Council could obligate it to provide troops if the UN resolved to send peacekeepers to North Korea to stifle Kim’s agression.

All in all, China’s new users don’t seem to be taking North Korea’s threats all that seriously. Kim Jong Un, known as “Fatty Kim” among many Chinese commenters, remains the butt of jokes and scorn, and by and large people don’t seem to worried about an actual war breaking out. Perhaps Lil’ Kim will take this as a sign — when even your closest allies are laughing at you, perhaps it’s time to change strategies.

(image via The Daily Show with Jon Stewart)

Warat Wongmaneekit just pitched his new Zocial here at our Startup Arena contest. It’s an advanced social media tracking and analyzing tool, which allows marketers and companies to track the hottest trends and and see what’s being said about their own brands. It currently collects data in Southeast Asian countries only.

So far, ZocialInc has already shipped two major products. Zocial Rank, which basically lists the top social media rankings across five different platforms including Facebook, Twitter Foursquare, Youtube, and Instagram. So if I want to know what are the top Facebook pages in Vietnam, I would just go here and immediately see who’s hot. Then there’s ZocialEye, which allows real time social media monitoring, which is currently being used to monitor Bangkok governor elections. If I’m a candidate, I can see who likes me, who doesn’t, and see immediately how the social media public is responding to my public persona.

ZocialInc comes out of Thailand under the guidance of Pawoot (Pom) Pongvitayapanu with his 10-person team, who built up Tarad.com, Thailand’s biggest e-commerce site, to its eventual acquisition by Rakuten. According to Warat Wongmaneekit, product development manager and co-founder:

We started to rank brands on social networks first and our clients needed to deeply understand the voice and behavior of people in social networks. After that we created a platform and research solution to client and almost client like it so much.

Last week, I spent a good few hours getting lost in all the social media rankings. A really cool peek into Southeast Asia’s social media frontiers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Tencent customer service representative explained the process to Sohu IT:

[When setting up an Open Platform account], please fill out the personal information truthfully, and after you submit it this information will be verified by the relevant employees. Before the verification has been completed, you can log into Open Platform, but if the information can’t be verified you will get a notice within around one hour to resubmit your personal information. If you do not do this within 24 hours, you will no longer be able to use your Open Platform account.

Although there seem to be a few bugs in the system — the Sohu IT reporter claims to have signed up with real information but his account was still shut down — a real-name system for Open Platform isn’t likely to ruffle feathers the way Sina Weibo’s service wide real-name requirements did last year around this time. Most companies will likely be thankful for such a system, which should prevent malicious companies from posing as competitors on WeChat in order to hurt their PR efforts.

It’s not clear yet whether this applies just to Open Platform users within China or whether it is the rule for everyone. But at the moment, Open Platform is mostly targeted at Chinese users anyway; there doesn’t’ even seem to be an English-language version of its official site.

(Sohu IT via TechWeb)