Sino-US startup Dolphin Browser has reached 80 million installs around the world for its iOS and Android browser. Today, Dolphin is also being bumped up to version 10 on Android with a revamped interface and a couple of new features.

The MoboTap team behind Dolphin Browser told us a few weeks ago that they’re now targeting new users in Southeast Asia, and that seems to be paying off with with strong growth in Southeast Asia alongside its main user-bases in the US, China, and Japan. It comes pre-installed on KDDI phones in Japan, which is a big boost.

Dolphin Browser reached 50 million installs at the time of its v9.0 update, so it seems to be making solid progress up against a wide range of rival smartphone browsers.

So what are the new features and improvements in Dolphin Browser for Android v10? After playing around with the beta yesterday I can see that the UI is now nicely streamlined to give more viewing space. The previous bottom toolbar is gone, replaced by a semi-opaque dolphin button (pictured below) in the lower-left corner that can spring up to activate one of three things: a summary of all open tabs, a pop-up action bar, or gesture input. Also, you can now drag-and-drop your bookmarks into convenient folders that resemble a phone’s home screen folders.

But perhaps the biggest new feature in v10 is a web app store for HTML5-based site. Really these are just links to mobile-optimised sites, but it’s still useful. Web apps for Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and over 200 more sites are ready for launch. There are still the familiar add-ons which are powerful extensions that help you access functions like Xmarks bookmark syncing.

Personally, I don’t use the mobile browser much, and a year or so ago I found Dolphin to be ugly and overly fiddly when I tried it then, but the browser app looks better now; and despite all the powerful customisation options it also feels lightweight and speedy enough for occasional users like myself.

Dolphin Browser for Android should be updated by now in the Google Play store.

Some call it a miracle. Others an enigma of the culture. But the statistics surrounding the amount of high-tech startups that are conceived in Israel is astounding. A small country, with roughly 7.6 million people, has approximately 4,800 startup companies and attracts far more venture capital per person than any other country in the world. Dubbed as The Startup Nation, Israel outweighs the United States in venture capital investment per person, totaling $170 per person compared to $70 per person in the US. Not too bad for a country that was established 65 years ago.

Some examples of well-known startup companies that have originated in Israel include Waze, a mapping company that was recently acquired by Google; iOnRoad, a mobile app that warns drivers when they are getting too close to the car in front of them; and Conduit, a community toolbar that has received international attention.

A country that breeds one of the most concentrated centers of innovation also houses large, established companies like Teva, a drugmaker listed on NASDAQ with a market capitalization of $43 billion and Check Point, founded by an army intelligence group, that is now valued at $11 billion.

So what makes Israel a base to nurture the creativity, innovation, and risk that comes with starting a company?

The Military: In Israel, most citizens join the army prior to entering college. In the military, it is common to be an expert in a technology at an early age since technology is a key component in military warfare and military communications. There is also an environment and culture in the army that encourages entrepreneurship and leadership. After leaving the army, a lot of young soldiers know that they want to start a company and solve the world’s problems through technological solutions. They just have to figure out what problem to solve.

Universities: Aside from government incentive, Israel also has some of the best universities in the world that focus on technology, such as the Technion in Haifa. The universities are, in a sense, a playground for entrepreneurs to meet others with similar interests who may later go into business together.

Government Resources: The Israeli government encourages young entrepreneurs to take the risk of beginning a startup company by providing early-stage funding. The government also goes to great lengths to provide support to young entrepreneurs by introducing companies to investors, creating partnerships and programs that can provide support for young companies.

Mentors: Since the first generation of innovators are now in their retirement phase, they are offering both financial support and mentorship to the leaders of the next generation. The retiring business leaders are both acting as investors in these high-tech startups and are providing strategic counsel on how to develop a business model and go to market successfully.

One of the strengths and weaknesses of Israeli startup companies is that they often develop a startup and plan to exit early on making a nice chunk of change but never fully develop the company into a large corporation. Everyone wants to be their own boss; however, for major economic growth, employees are necessary.

Perhaps another reason disruptive technology has been emerging out of Israel is that the first settlers of the country had limited resources, pioneering a land that was primarily desert. So whether in agriculture, technology, or business, Israel is a land filled with pioneering minds and entrepreneurs.

Powered by Mapped In Israel

Call us gluttons, but we love food and foodie apps. And there’s certainly no shortage of either those things in China. One such app is AiMeiWei. Literally meaning “love delicious food” in Chinese, AiMeiWei has just revealed that it has secured $2 million in funding to fuel the growth of its Foodspotting-style social app for Android and iPhone.

While this was divulged only today to Chinese tech blog 36Kr, AiMeiWei actually pocketed the money last summer. The series A round was led by ABC Capital, with participation from Gobi Ventures and the Shanghai University Entrepreneurship Fund (EFG).

As with rival apps like Burpple and Ricebook, AiMeiWei lets users upload and prettify their food snaps and review restaurants. With all this user-generated content, the app is also useful for finding places nearby at which to eat.

With well over a million users in 2011 a short while after it launched, AiMeiWei was quickly off to a good start, but it’ll be hard to stand out against strong local competition that even includes the Groupon-meets-Yelp site Dianping.

(Source: 36Kr – article in Chinese)

Local services listings startup OneFlare revealed today that it has raised $500,000 from three Australian angel investors: Les Szekely from Grand Prix Capital, Garry Visontay of Principal Sydney Seed Fund, and Dr. Jeffrey Tobias of the Strategy Group. That same trio has also invested in DesignCrowd last year.

Headed by Singapore-born CEO Marcus Lim, Australia-based OneFlare has seen strong growth in numbers in terms of users and businesses listed.

The site now has 130,000 unique monthly visitors, this is an increase in traffic of 1,300 percent in the last 12 months. There are over 30,000 businesses registered in more than 250 service categories. OneFlare has processed a total value of $16 million in jobs requested. The plan is to expand the Yellow Pages-style online listings to Singapore in 2014 at oneflare.com.sg.

Marcus comments about this funding:

We’re now cash-flow positive so this funding is really about scaling and becoming the number one marketplace for consumers and service businesses to find each other. The experience that our investors bring to Oneflare is equally as important as their funding. We look forward to tapping into their experience, and capital, to fire a rocket under our already rapid growth.

The startup itself was first founded in January 2011 under the name ‘Pick a Quote’.

We all know that Myanmar is not only opening up, but it’s also a market that is ripe for the pickings. Currently, big brands like Coca Cola are entering the fray and telcos are finalizing bids for providing nationwide internet and connections. The country’s got some serious infrastructural and institutional catching-up to do. But Rita Nguyen, founder and CEO at homegrown social network Squar, believes strongly in the potential and the inevitable lightning speed growth we’re seeing and about to see in Myanmar.

Squar, which aims to be Myanmar’s first social network, is at the bleeding edge of social media in a country where internet penetration sits far below 10 percent, and SIM cards (because of their rarity) cost over $200. And yet, startup hack contest Barcamp Yangon hosted a record breaking 6,200 participants recently. In other words, people may be green, but they’re extremely hungry for innovation.

Rita explains:

Currently, Burmese people are hungry for consumer stuff. Big brands are entering but the only platform is Facebook. There’s nothing really helping consumers day to day, and digital closes those gaps. I mean, print publishers just got granted licenses to print.

In other words, with the telcos coming in soon and prices soon to drop like hip hop beats, digital has the potential to take off where other more traditional mediums will struggle to. Myanmar’s many setbacks are huge opportunities.

The barriers Myanmar faces

But it’s not all smooth sailing in Myanmar. Rita says that for Squar to really take off, there are a few peculiarities of the Myanmar market that have to be dealt with.

It’s predominantly mobile-oriented, with DSL and broadband almost non-existent. You won’t see the plethora of internet cafes that we see in Vietnam and China. In fact, Rita thinks there just might be 1,000 internet cafes across the whole country – that’s for a population of 50 million people. That’s why Rita anticipates Myanmar, within one year, will hit 30 percent smartphone penetration, and 80 percent mobile penetration by 2015.

Chinese Android handsets are coming into the country like water. In some cases, smartphones are cheaper than many feature phones. So once the price of SIMs inevitably drops, we’re going to see an explosion. Android dominates smartphones with anywhere from 80 to 90 percent of the smartphone market.

This is why Squar first released on Android and the web and iOS versions will be coming later.

Rita has also identified other unique aspects of the Burmese reaction to mobile. They don’t have an early adopter culture, so users won’t be so forgiving about features they want or bugs they identify. There is no standardized language input. Currently the two keyboard input methods, Zawgyi and Unicode, are the main ones, and Rita hopes the transition will be over to Unicode as that’s much better. The Google Play store also isn’t supported in Myanmar, and the Burmese language isn’t supported on popular platforms like WordPress.

Where Squar fits In Myanmar’s round pegs

Despite the foibles, Rita is confident that Myanmar may be one of the fastest digital revolutions we may ever witness. And Squar, she hopes, will be one of the epicenters of that.

Squar, as you can see in the screenshots below, focuses very much on encouraging users to share and interact in communities or forums in topics that they’re interested in. This is a big problem for Myanmar, where content is still in its infancy. Rita says that Squar is not looking to be a news portal, but rather, encourages users to generate content together. In this way, Squar does compete with Facebook, but is more focused on getting consistent and readable content that is topic-centered. The site has only been running for the past month with about a hundred beta testers, but the team is looking to conquer Myanmar fast and is hiring aggressively.

1. FoodPanda

Launched in March last year, Rocket Internet’s FoodPanda has rapidly become one of the major players in India to look out for. The startup now serves customers in 12 cities in India with 2,000 restaurant choices. Being a typical Rocket Internet portfolio company, FoodPanda recently raised a whopping $20 million to conquer the online food delivery service in eight Asian countries.

Alexa ranking: FoodPanda India sits at 1,041st locally, with 12,323th position globally.

2. JustEat

UK-based JustEat made its first move to the Indian market in 2011 by acquiring a majority stake in local startup HungryZone. Now JustEat delivers food from over 2,500 restaurants in India’s three cities of Mumbai, Bangalore, and Delhi-NCR. The company also handles online table bookings.

JustEat comes prepared with a buckload of money too. Last year the startup raised $64 million in series C funding. JustEat partners with local lifestyle search engine Burrp for its online food ordering feature.

Alexa ranking: JustEat is locally positioned at 2,617th. Its global ranking is 26,565th.

3. TastyKhana

Started as early as 2007, TastyKhana now connects users to 3,000 restaurants located in seven cities in India. The startup is backed by European-based online food delivery company DeliveryHero, which has presence in 14 countries, with early seed as well as series A round.

This cooperation with DeliveryHero has so far proven effective as TastyKhana records 400 percent in order volume growth since establishing the partnership.

Alexa ranking: TastyKhana ranks at 5,182nd in India and 51,086th globally.

4. DeliveryChef

Run by two female founders, Ankita Tandon and Aditi Talreja, DeliveryChef started delivering dishes to customers in late 2010. Today DeliveryChef is present in seven Indian cities with over 500 restaurants in its system.

Alexa ranking: In India, DeliveryChef now ranks at 10,376th and globally sits at 144,408th.

5. BigBite

BigBite seems to be consolidating its restaurant network in one city, which is Delhi-NCR. The company planned to grab as many as 2,000 restaurants from that city alone by the end of 2012, in last August the 10-men team was still at 600 restaurant mark. Today BigBite caters to a total of five cities in India.

Alexa ranking: BigBite occupies the 16,734th spot in India and 127,145th globally.

6. Titbit

Founded in 2011, not only does Titbit deliver food from more than 400 local restaurants in Mumbai and Pune, but the startup also offers other services which has an international reach. One of Titbit’s biggest products is its iPad powered digital menu ordering platform which is being used by numerous restaurants in the US, UK, Turkey, Singapore, and India.

Last year Titbit acquired food ordering service Foodkamood to strengthen its presence in the industry.

Alexa ranking: Titbit sits at 62,821st locally and 537,093rd worldwide.

I recently shared some public relations (PR) tips with a group of entrepreneurs at a Microsoft Bizspark event. Most of the tips have already been posted here, but I will address one big point I covered at the event but somehow missed in that post I just linked: understand your purpose and target audience when doing PR.

For example, if your target audience is Asia, then I reckon that getting covered on SGE, e27, Dailysocial, Startup Dating, and on this very blog you’re reading now could be more effective than going after American tech blogs. If your targeted audience is in the Western part of the world, then getting covered on TNW and TechCrunch might be more helpful. Of course, if you drill down to country specifics, then you should really look at hyper-local media in their own local languages, too.

The tech media’s audience is usually developers, entrepreneurs, and investors. So that means if your purpose is to get more users through PR (say for a food app), then the tech press can only bring you early adopters who like testing out new apps. But your core audience is likely food lovers who can be found on food blogs or culinary magazines. So it often makes more sense to go after journalists who write for your core audience.

Some folks might ask why this matters anyway because it is best to get covered on as many sites as possible. While that is true, I think knowing your targeted audience will help you formulate a better PR strategy. For example, if your target audience is business people in Japan, you might consider giving exclusives to Nikkei rather than giving them to us. You will also likely want to build good relationships with reporters from Nikkei and maybe the Japan Times.

For more tips, you can refer to the deck below. It isn’t a complete guide and I’m sure there are way more experienced PR people out there. If you have more tips to share, please do so in the comments.

Globe telecom-backed incubator Kickstart Ventures is ready to see the next entrepreneur who can address problems no one has yet dared to solve.

Recently, Kickstart Ventures gave seed funding to 10 optimal startups. We also featured Apptivate, one of the recipients of the funding. Following this, Kickstart is again calling the attention of individuals who want to be entrepreneurs. To do this, the incubator has announced it has a new partner in the form of Australian online venture builder Pollenizer, Kickstart will again give the new breed of startups an incubation period to improve their ideas, which could lead to possible funding.

So why is Pollenizer looking for Philippine-based talents? Pollenizer co-founder and CEO Phil Morle says they found an obsession with the Philippine market because of “the standard of entrepreneurship” here. He adds:

People in the Philippines think about building value, building a business, which can be important in startups.

Christian Besler of Kickstart also speaks of the importance of this strategic partnership of startup wannabes:

The whole idea of Kickstart and Pollenizer collaborating, is to bring access to local network and funds, while Pollenizer brings international network and well- proven education.

Looking for niches to disrupt

What they are looking for, is a team with specific skill sets:

1. Engineers: Experience with Ruby on Rails or CakePHP is a preference. Someone that can learn fast, especially those that have great skills in other languages and platforms.
2. Product Managers: Someone who understands the customer and expressing it as a product. It includes wireframes, pitching, and prototyping.
3. Hustlers: Someone who sells with a vision, and is comfortable to get out of the building to do it.

Christian also says that after talks with the Pollenizer team, they have agreed that real estate listings, e-commerce, remittance, Overseas Filipino Workers’ (OFW) placement, labor costs, education, and healthcare are the key areas that can be addressed by participants who want to join.Christian says that the reason is that they are looking at “interesting spaces nobody has disrupted.” He cites the OFWs as an example of a huge market today.

If we get professionals and help them with funding, we could disrupt these spaces and do something new.

Pollenizer highlights in its detailed call for applications that all it takes is “gutsy entrepreneurs with the audacity to believe that they can pull off a global business with limited resources.” Those who are up to the challenge can apply until June 30.

This is yet another promising move from startup incubators in the country. After all, great innovations don’t only come from multi-million companies. Tons of startups have already proved that something big can come from just a small idea.

(Source: ABS-CBN News | e27)

From the left: Dippak Khurana (CEO of Vserv) and Ashay Padwal (CTO of Vserv)

Today we are in a digital age where anyone, no matter how young or old they are, can start their own company and perhaps be successful. Some do this younger than others; but the two co-founders of India-based mobile ad network Vserv ¹ left it a lot later. We recently spoke to one of them, co-founder and CTO Ashay Padwal, to hear his story of founding the company.

Primarily started as a mobile ad network for feature phones, today Vserv also caters to smartphones. The Indian company now processes 31 billion ad requests per month where nearly 14 percent of its traffic comes from Southeast Asia. The company has helped 20,000 apps monetize from its AppWrapper product, with a click rate of 10 percent. Besides taking care of the Southeast Asian market, the company is now aiming to penetrate the African and Latin American countries as well.

Family comes first

Co-founders Dippak Khurana and Ashay got started in unfortunate circumstances. Both of them lost their fathers at an early age, and being first-born sons they had to shoulder the responsibility of providing for their family first, before taking on any risky moves such as starting their own companies.

Ashay worked for 12 years as a company employee, while Dippak worked for 16 years; nine of which were spent working together at the same companies. The decision to partner up came from their professional experience and understanding during that time of working together.

By the time they were ready to start a company, they had not decided what kind of company they wanted to build, just that they wanted to build it together. After looking through their backgrounds of working in digital advertising and mobile, they decided to build Vserv as a mobile ad network company. Their first primary business model was to cater to feature phone users.

Convincing VCs amid fierce competition

During the time when Ashay and Dippak started Vserv in late 2009, they found out that the space was getting more crowded with competitors trying to fill in the same mobile ad niche. To grow and scale faster than their competitors, the team looked for investors to help fund their idea. But finding a VC that wanted to back a mobile ad network business for feature phones was very tough, especially because they thought that feature phones would disappear quickly thanks to the growth of smartphones. “Before we got the first round, we had gone through two to three meetings with each of over 30 VCs,” says Ashay.

In that respect, rather than discussing about business concepts, Ashay and Dippak was able to convince the VCs through real numbers and progress. Vserv was already earning revenue from the fourth month, and the team became cash-flow positive in its second year. Ashay said that his experience in running his previous (and failed) business also taught him how to approach the VCs too. At the moment, 75 percent of Vserv’s revenue still comes from feature phone platforms, with the rest coming from smartphones.

Will the feature phone market deplete rapidly in the coming years? Ashay doesn’t think so. He predicts that even in the coming two to three years, their revenue from feature phones will not be beaten by smartphone user-ship just yet. This is because there is growth even inside the feature phone industry with the emergence of “smarter dumb phones.” These phones, says Ashay, are not traditional candybar feature phones from ages ago, but touchscreen phones like the huge-selling Nokia Asha models.

In the end, one of the keys that differentiates Vserv from its competition is the company’s technology, according to Ashay. He knew that one of his competitors was growing pretty strongly too, but after they reached a certain level, it fell apart because the technology was not able to back up the growth. In this business, the ad technology must be able to identify a user’s profile quickly and put ads on their mobile device in seconds, and Vserv’s technology was able to cater its user growth.

So why did Ashay finally leave his high salary job to start his own company? He says that his passion is to create wealth. Wealth is much more than just money, but also to empower individuals with the skills they need to develop. He believes that starting his own company gives him much more freedom and power to do so, and he hopes that one day a lot of his employees will become entrepreneurs like him.

Jiepang’s first sponsored photo filter (pictured below) is made in conjunction with skincare company Neutrogena. Rather than just slapping on a logo, the clever “sunshine” filter will pull in information for the user’s vicinity to show up the location, current temperature, and the angle of the sun. All that ties into the skincare brand’s line of sunscreen products. In addition, users of that special filter will unlock a redeemable virtual badge for special discounts on Neutrogena products at one store chain (Watsons) and on the online shop Tmall.

After running this promo for three weeks, Jiepang tells us today that it has seen 70,000 pictures uploaded with that filter, and those have been shared over 250,000 times on various social networks like Sina Weibo.

Last summer we looked at how Tuding, an Instagram-like photo app and social network in China, was also rolling out branded photo filters for some of its partner brands like Adidas.

We also saw an amusing smart filter on the Chinese photo app Vida that tells you how bad the air quality is in the place where you took the photo. So if you’re shrouded in smog, you might want to try out Vida, but if you can actually see the sun (a rarity in Beijing), give the Foursquare-like Jiepang a try.

Just as Startup Weekend Hanoi went down over the weekend, StartMeUp’s Hackday happened last week as well. The event, which was held in the spanking new Saigon Hub, welcomed 50 hackers to code away on the theme of “something that make Saigoners more productive and happier”. Not only was the theme open, but it was also freestyle, meaning hackers could code on any platform they pleased. The hackers hacked away for a full 48 hours from June 8 to 9 (some going completely without sleep). And who were the winners?

1. An iOS and Android app that “helps people post and receive notifications of real-time traffic jam situations in Saigon”.
2. An educational color-mixing app that targets children from 3 to 6 years old.

Unfortunately, these projects are not online yet, but if they come to anything, we’ll let you know.

In addition to the two main winners, there were also some fun special awards given to teams including: five nail cutters given to code addicted hackers, a pillow for the sleep lovers, and six bars of soap for six smelly hackers. Clearly, StartMeUp organizers are trying to have some fun.

Amidst all the coding, two teams who didn’t win were nonetheless approached by investors. You can check out more with StartMeUp’s fun little infographic:

Philippine’s Cebu city proves that the startup community is growing rapidly. Only after a year from its first-ever Startup Weekend Cebu (SWC), the organizers of the event – TechTalks.ph, JCI Mandaue and DOST-ICT – were able to successfully put new breeds of startups together in the recently held SWC 3.

Pioneering SWC organizer Tina Amper of TechTalks.ph has transferred the role of organizing the event to a new set of startup-inclined individuals. She says this is part of doing “skills transfer and sharing best practices with others.”

Paul Villacorta, co-founder of Cebu Directories, and one of the new batch of organizers of SWC 3, says that they are happy to have continued the goal of building more awareness. He says this year’s winners are very promising. From the 29 pitches, here are the winners in SWC 3:

1. EdRoll - an online enrollment platform service for schools that helps eliminate long queues.
2. BloodMatch - aims to help patients who need blood donors, it’s an online service that can connect blood seekers and blood donors.
3. At Your Service Bai – an online service provider of listing of validated skilled and professional service providers.

Paul adds:

Those ideas are viable and it could be tested locally here in Cebu. I am surprised with the execution of some participants. They really had a functional prototype.

The winners in SWC 3 will now have access to sound advices from local incubators, and other tools from the sponsors that will help them kickstart their ideas. Looking forward, Paul says organizers will continue TechTalk.ph’s mission of connecting people who are passionate about becoming entrepreneurs. He is positive that Cebu-based developers have a lot of ideas waiting to be discovered, but he also looks forward to see more incubators in Cebu.

Good ideas need helping hands. So if we’ll be expecting more ideas from Cebu, and more incubators to help with it, that is something we should all watch out for.

Synacy, one of the sponsors of the event has created an infographic of the attendees at SWC 3:

(Update: corrected BloodMatch’s URL)

Rocket Internet’s web-based food delivery service Foodpanda has been expanding aggressively in Singapore recently, most notably by acquiring a rival Singaporean service last month. Today Foodpanda is trying a different strategy by buddying up with local foodie app Picky.

The new Foodpanda-Picky partnership allows Singaporeans to order dishes from restaurants from a selection inside Picky app, and then the orders will be brought to your doorstep by Foodpanda’s couriers. All that can be accessed under the “Eat-at-home” tab on Picky, which lists Foodpanda’s restaurant partners in the Lion City. It looks like this:

While it can’t all be processed inside Picky app – yes, you’ll still be shepherded over to the Foodpanda mobile site – it should still be useful for those in no mood to dine out or cook at home.

Lee Ken Ming, Picky CEO and founder, says in today’s announcement:

Our recommendation service represents a complement to foodpanda’s food delivery service and vice versa, enabling users not only to decide on where to eat, but to also order and have their meals delivered to their home or office. All customers will benefit from the synergy of this partnership.

Foodpanda – which operates in eight Asian countries – claims to be Singapore’s largest home delivery system, after its buy-out of rival Singapore Dine last month. One existing major rival is Deal.com.sg’s Dealivery site.

Foodpanda’s most recent round of funding was worth over $20 million.

We received an update regarding what is arguably Indonesia’s biggest social photo sharing app Picmix today. The app now hit the 11 million user mark and has over 150 million photos uploaded so far, which is a whopping 42 million more photos since we talked about them four months ago.

Founder Calvin Kizana tells us the app’s top six country users: Indonesia (35 percent), South Africa (13 percent), Venezuela (13 percent), Nigeria (six percent), USA and Canada (five percent). Interestingly, although the biggest userbase comes from Indonesia, most of the app’s revenue – via in-app purchases – is from Venezuela and South Africa.

Picmix will soon launch an open API platform enabling developers to build apps and even games to reach out to the growing Picmix userbase. Picmix is integrated with carrier billing in more than 75 countries, as well as Blackberry payment, PayPal, MOL, and IndoMOG. The photo sharing app will also start selling its physical gift cards by the end of August in convenient stores like 7-11, AlfaMart, IndoMaret, and internet cafes. All of those payment methods can surely entice quite a few developers to jump onboard as it eases the monetizing part of the app.

These Picmix-related apps will then be showcased under the app’s “Fun Center” section aka Picmix’s app store. The recently launched app FaceMix – available for Blackberry legacy OS, Blackberry 10, and soon on Android – is a good example of how an app can be integrated with Picmix.

Having launched in six countries across Europe, the first Asian destination for couponing site Flipit is India. The basic idea is that Flipit partners with online retailers to offer substantial e-shopping discounts. In India, Flipit has already buddied up with the likes of MakeMyTrip, Yebhi, and chains such as Dominos Pizza.

Coupon sites are an established idea on the web in India, with sites like FreeCharge.in giving coupons when buying mobile credit top-ups, or newer entrants like UK-based Cashkaro offering cashback for some e-shopping deals. And so Flipit, which originally hails from the Netherlands, enters a crowded market of startup sites keen to entice more Indians to buy stuff online.

We asked Flipit founder Jochem Vroom – a well-known e-commerce entrepreneur in the Netherlands, and co-founder of parent company Imbull – why India was chosen as its Asia-Pacific debut:

It’s a combination of many things, but most of all it’s the size of the market and the enormous popularity of couponing. The amounts of available coupons per shop is unmatched in almost every country over the world. These high volumes are a good test for our website/platform. We do plan on starting in all major Asian markets soon afterwards. The language will probably be the biggest challenge in these countries to come.

For now, Flipit is only available in English in India, but a lot of homegrown e-stores do that as well. While building up the Indian site over the past six months, Flipit now has about 10 nearly full-time people on the local team. Jochem explains that their approach to building was a bit different in India:

Normally we pick up a country through many local (exchange) students in Amsterdam. But this time working with many freelancers in India is a logical and very effective step. The high quality of the freelancers in India is surprisingly good. Actually 50 percent of the technical work of Flipit (the entire website) was outsourced to India, which was also a reason why we wanted to launch there fast.

The Indian Flipit discount portal currently has around 1,100 working coupons, with many more to be added shortly as the startup team works to “add all online stores in India” to the site.

As with rival online couponing sites, Flipit will be monetized by affiliate and performance-based marketing. For Indian e-tailers, the appeal of such sites is to expand their reach and drive in traffic and new e-shoppers. Jochem believes that the company’s broader e-commerce experience will help with that aspect:

Due to our position and experience we know what advertisers want: they want to have a large additional reach and added value from their publishers. We know how to bring this with building up huge social, email, media, and website reach. We are not interested in short-term gains, we want to build up a huge global brand.

After enjoying good success over the past two years in the UK market, the cashback and discount coupons portal Pouring Pounds has entered into the Indian market with a new site called Cashkaro.

Cashkaro is one of a new breed of kind online portals in India that offers deal coupons along with cashback that makes for a good savings proposition when shopping online. Launched as a beta version early this year, the site now has deals for over 250 e-shopping brands, including big names like Myntra, Flipkart, MakeMyTrip, and McDonalds.

“Without much in the way of marketing and promotions in India, we already have over 30,000 users on Cashkaro, since the website’s beta version launched in February. Around mid- April, we started our first Facebook marketing campaign and already have some 91,000 fans,” says Swati Bhargava, CEO and co-founder of Cashkaro.

Unlike some e-commerce and online shopping sites that offers Groupon-style daily deals, Cashkaro passes on the commission it gets from retailers and brands to the buyer in the form of cashback. For instance, if any user places an order or buys some stuff such as air tickets, clothes, or other items via Cashkaro, the user will end up paying less for the purchase compared to going directly to those retailing or ticketing portals.

Swati, a former Goldman Sach staffer who’s based in London, explains how the site monetizes:

We get commission only when the deal or transaction that happens on the site. The commission rate varies from one retailer to another. An online retailer like Snapdeal offers us a 7.5 percent flat commission, while Myntra.com offers cash Rs 180 ($3.10) over any purchase of above Rs 400 ($7) by the customer. Out of that commission, after keeping a small portion of it, the rest we pass on to the customers as cashback.

From Pounds to Rupees

Interestingly, Swati’s first-hand experience of starting doing this in the UK, under the Pouring Pounds brand, with her husband Rohan is coming in handy. The graduate couple from the London School of Economics gave up their high paying jobs to startup Pouring Pounds in 2011.

In the space of three years, Pouring Ponds has over 125,000 users and manages three websites for popular brands including the retail giant Tesco, the Daily Mail newspaper, and others loyalty rewards programs. Overall, Pouring Ponds has more than 2,500 brand partners across verticals including Marks and Spencer, Expedia, Hotels.com, Amazon, and others.

Recalling the early phase of Pouring Ponds, Swati says:

We put our own personal saving and funds at the start. However we were able to find an angel investor, Peter Radcliff, who invested around Rs. 42 lakh ($73,000) as seed funding.

Though in last year or so, India has seen many similar sites emerge – such as Cazbak.in, or the Europe-backed startup Flipit – Bhargava is highly confident that Cashkaro is now strongly rooted and will be a market leader – and she feels that the Indian market will see consolidation in this segment in the future.

There are many coupons and deal sites in India but most of them keep the commission. However we want to pass on the commission through cashback and that makes it more interesting along with coupons.

Today, Cashkaro has tied-up with around 300 retail partners and is looking to add about 1,000 more in the next four months. Beside, the startup is in final talks with some investors to raise funds to the tune of a few crore (where one crore is currently $175,000). She adds:

We definitely are looking for the next round of bigger funding. The funds will help us largely in marketing, promotions, and expanding outreach. The target given to investors is 300,000 users by April 2014.

Cashkaro has already set up two offices – one in Gurgaon that is dedicated to sales and operations, while the second in Chennai is a technology development center. Overall, the startup has 22 people to manage the business.

In terms of income, Swati explains:

On an average it is around Rs. 400-500 per user per year but with growth and opportunities here our margin levels are unlikely to go down. Moreover, in the next three to four months, the focus will be to tap the ancillary revenue by offering services like mobile top-ups, restaurant offers, advertisements and ads.

That would be an interesting diversification. The current Indian market leader for coupons in exchange for mobile top-ups is Sequoia-backed FreeCharge.in.

There will be 9 winners overall at P@sha Launchpad with a winner in each city from the following categories:

• Innovative idea for an ICT product/service
• Startup with an innovative ICT product/service
• Innovative idea which uses ICT for social impact

P@SHA, the organizer, says the purpose is to create a platform for young people with great ideas and early-stage companies with innovative products. Entrepreneurs are given the opportunity to pitch in front of a panel of judges who probe your business acumen and strategies, make suggestions, assist with market positioning, give mentoring, and possibly make an investment.

The winners of the competition are given extended mentorship after the event and a Rs 200,000 ($2,000) cash prize to help them develop their product or idea.

For more information on the contest go here. And then if you’re interested in joining this competition please register here by June 18.

A group of Philippine developers created a big idea. So big that it that will bring them to Silicon Valley. This group is the Davao and Pampanga-based developers who created PageSnapp, a web application that allows businesses to instantly create an Android mobile app using content from their Facebook pages.

Tech in Asia earlier announced the series of AngelHack competitions happening around Asia. Team PageSnapp was part of the Manila leg of the AngelHack Spring Global Challenge, and was named the winner from over 250 developers who competed. The participants were only given 24 hours to do the coding and make the software work.

AngelHack awarded Team PageSnapp with a $5,000 travel grant to Silicon Valley where AngelHack will introduce them to incubators and investors to help turn their big idea into a startup. The event is also organized with mobile telco company Smart and business incubator IdeaSpace Foundation, and the two organizations will give the startup team two Smart LTE iPad minis, an incorporation grant, and a 12-week mentorship through the help of the Smart Developer Network (Smart DevNet)

They will also get a $20,000 investment from Asia Pacific Ventures, and at least $20,000 worth of services from sponsors.

Why did they win? AngelHack founder and CEO Greg Gopman, also one of the event’s judges, says the team created an application “that would help these businesses make apps easily.”

It’s a very unique application. It’s one of those things that other people have tried to do but have not figured out how to do simply.

Another judge of the competition, Josh Constine of TechCrunch, said:

This project will help a lot of small businesses get online and get mobile, and bring their services to a bigger audience.

Other members of the panel of judges comprised leaders in the startup, developer, and venture capital communities.

Building from experience

One of the members of the group, Rolly Rulete, has already gained experience in local coding marathons. He was a part of the team that won the best use of Smart’s APIs at an HTML5 hackathon, which became the mobile app for Project NOAH, a disaster prevention and mitigation program developed by the government. He also developed the Android version of the eLeksyon2103 app, the information and learning mobile app of the Philippines’ Commission on Elections.

Meanwhile, Jim Ayson of the Smart partner management and developer relations team says that the company is “happy that the idea of hackathons is picking up steam in the local developer scene.” He added:

Smart DevNet believes every organization, from corporations to the public sector, can use hackathons as a source of product innovation, allowing ideas from independent developers to bubble up to the surface. AngelHack Manila has allowed us to bring the best practices of a California-style hackathon to Manila.

PageSnapp will join the other 31 winners of the AngelHack Spring Global Challenge conducted in various cities in Asia Pacific, North America, South America, and Europe. All the winning teams will present their startups to investors, influencers, and media during the Global Demo Day in Silicon Valley this September. Ten of them will also be given booths at the TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco on September 7 to 11.

Startup Weekend Hanoi just rocked it for the first time over the weekend. 250 people poured into the event to build new products with new teams and pitch to judges on Sunday night. A total of 11 teams participated, and three teams made it to the top. Here they are:

• 1.

  Shoppie

  - Here’s one for the shoppers and advertisers out there. Shoppie is an app that lets a customer get coupons and vouchers for certain brands at any shop or store. It can be used in fashion, food, entertainment, and healthcare sectors.
• 2.

  Mintown

  - This is a new play at an Etsy model in Vietnam. This startup already has a background in handmade goods, so Mintown was looking at the Startup Weekend Hanoi as an opportunity to launch and hack away at a new e-commerce model that they’ll be fully releasing in September. They’ve already been building their offline community for seven months with significant traction (and have consquently built up over 56,000 likes on Facebook).
• 3.

  Seconds

  - You may remember these guys as

  they competed in our Startup Arena contest

  in Singapore recently. The concept is simple; if my friends and I are both on the Seconds app, everytime I take a picture, the photo will immediately show up, within seconds, on my friends’ phones.

The other participants included everything from an Airbnb for foreigners to learn Vietnamese where teachers can post classes for prospective students to a social media platform for tennis players to find each other and play. For its first ever Startup Weekend, I’d say it was a resounding success for Hanoi. By the end of this year, the organizers plan to do yet another one, so keep your eyes peeled because Hanoi is heating up.

Credits: Chip.co.id

CyberAgent Ventures (CAV) Indonesia has seen their share of startups in the country and believes that encouraging more people to discuss entrepreneurial issues and strategies is always a good thing. In this regard, the Japanese VC firm plans to hold regular sharing sessions in Indonesia to talk about various business case studies in specific sectors. It’ll be called the CAV Salon.

In these sessions, which will be held in Jakarta, participants will also get to discuss and share about their business ideas with the other participants and the CAV Indonesia team.

Here are the seven topics that will be discussed in the upcoming events. The CAV team chose them for their market potential in Indonesia:

• Restaurant search
• Recruitment
• Social networking services
• Dating
• Vertical e-commerce
• Mobile apps
• Female-oriented media

The sessions are open to anyone who have an interest or some ideas in one of the above fields – that includes people who do not have their own startups or business plans yet. CAV will limit up to five individuals involved in each category to join the session.

If you’re game, you can shoot an email to the CAV team via vanada[at]cyberagentventures[dot]com and liauw_oswin[at]cyberagentventures[dot]com. You need to put in your basic information, background, which category you’re interested in, and what you think are the key success factors for the selected category. You can choose more than one category. The monthly event will start as early as next month.

There have been hot rumors going around recently that India’s bus booking platform RedBus is either on the verge of getting acquired by South Africa-based Naspers Group, or that it’s been acquired already. Whatever the case may be, we might be looking at one of the biggest exit stories in the Indian tech ecosystem.

RedBus has been touted as one of the most innovative young web companies in the world. It has been able to bring together the very fragmented Indian bus companies into the online world and now covers booking tickets for over 10,000 bus routes in India. If the deal is indeed done – for a reported $138 million – then this acquisition may help complement one of Naspers’ portfolio companies, Ibibo Group, in which China’s Tencent has a stake as well.

As yet, there’s no official confirmation made by either of the two companies.

(Sources: NextBigWhat and The Economic Times)

This company just exploded onto the scene today. Along with the watch and ring, these are the new Geak Eye and Geak Mars phones.

We’ve seen a lot of Chinese companies leaping on Android to make their debut as phone hardware makers in the past year. Apparently there’s still room for yet more new smartphone brands to emerge – and today China-based Geak is debuting with two brand-new smartphones and two other surprising new products. It’s as if someone at Geak said, “Hey, let’s take all those Apple rumors and just make all that shit ourselves.”

The two bits of wearable tech are the Geak Watch and the Geak Ring (pictured below). The latter is a finger ring, rather bulky, that has no external indication that it’s a smart device. Basically, the Geak Ring works with the company’s two new smartphones that were also launched today, the Geak Mars and Geak Eye.

The Geak Ring – which has a claimed stand-by battery life of 99 years – seems to have three main functions: it can optionally be used to securely unlock your Geak phone, to bump your contact details to someone with the same device, and to keep your device awake when you’re holding your Geak phone in proximity to the ring. The product page doesn’t explain which system it uses to do so (e.g.: Bluetooth?).

The Geak Watch, meanwhile, is an Android-based device with Bluetooth and wi-fi support that serves as an accessory to your phone to show details like current weather and notifications, and also serves as a fitness tracking gadget similar to the Jawbone Up or the Fitbit. Geak’s new watch comes a few months after images surfaced of an Android or Firefox OS-based smart watch from major Chinese web company Shanda.

• Geak Watch – Available July 3 for RMB 1,999 ($325)
• Geak Ring – Goes on sale August 8 for RMB 199 ($33)
• Geak Mars – Flagship phone with a large 5.8-inch screen 1080p HD screen (at 377 PPI) and powered along by a 1.7 GHz Snapdragon 600 quad-core processor. It sells on June 25 for RMB 2,999 ($487)
• Geak Eye – The more affordable of the pair of new phones still has quad-core and a 5-inch screen. Available June 25 for RMB 1,999 ($325)

Those are very lean prices, several hundred dollars less that flagship phones from Apple, Samsung, or HTC.

China’s most successful startup phone brand so far – aside from already established conglomerates like Lenovo, Huawei, ZTE – is Xiaomi, which sold over seven million smartphones in 2012 and is looking to double that number in 2013. It will likely do so despite ever stronger competition from budget-conscious new-comers like Geak.

As my colleague Charlie noted back in March, the initial unveiling of China-made Smartisan OS was accompanied by some ridiculous hype that this was China’s software saviour and it would somehow “kill off Apple eventually.” All bullshit of course, since Smartisan “OS” is just an Android skin – like Samsung’s Touchwiz, HTC’s Sense UI, or Xiaomi’s MIUI – and so it’s not some great homegrown innovation. Now Smartisan has been released over the weekend and is available to be downloaded for free to be installed onto Samsung Galaxy SIII phones in place of Samsung’s own Android overlay.

While the Smartisan ROM is available for worldwide users of the Galaxy SIII international model, all the instructions are in Chinese for now. A hands-on video of the Android skin in action has already emerged (embedded below courtesy of the Engadget China crew), showing that it does look good, but is just at an early pre-beta stage. I must say it does look a bit odd with just 12 app icons per screen and no apparent support for wallpaper backgrounds – but that’s just a matter of taste.

So what now for Smartisan? Either the startup crew will have to live up to their own hype and create some quality hardware on which to ship their Android skin – as Xiaomi has done with great success – or it’s just doomed to be one of thousands of Android ROMs out there that a tiny minority of tweakers will bother to ‘flash’ (a difficult process) to their phones.

Presumably, as with other Android ROMs, Smartisan will later be adapted for other phones.

You probably have no idea how big the construction industry is, do you? Check it out. This year, it was a $7.2 trillion industry. By 2020, it will hit $12 trillion. It currently accounts for 13 percent of the global GDP and will hit 15 percent by 2020. That’s just behind China’s GDP and way above Japan’s GDP, according to numbers from last year). So, to say the least, it’s a huge market. That’s why Builk is one of the more promising startups coming out of Thailand. It’s hitting one of the biggest industries in the world.

I talked to Patai Padungtin, co-founder and “principal evangelist” of Builk, who gave me the lowdown on the startup.

Basically, Builk is a Software As A Service (SaaS) platform that allows construction companies to manage their construction projects. This includes tracking inventory, gathering construction information, and what Patai believes to be a social network for construction companies. Currently, over 2,000 companies are using the software, with the majority of them being Thai small-to-medium sized construction enterprises that Builk locked in via word of mouth. The company started in 2009, and released its first product in 2010.

How Builk makes money from freemium

Patai strongly believes in the freemium model, because according to him, the construction industry is old fashioned.

We come from the construction industry so we know how they work, and we also know intimately what the concerns are. And we know that if we didn’t offer our service free from the start, the companies wouldn’t try it. That’s why we also don’t offer a premium model.

This underlines how difficult an industry Builk is attempting to penetrate and how important it is for Patai to have a construction background. He’s got industry credibility from over 10 years of experience in construction. And the team’s also got the the experience, having built Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software since 2005.

Promising future

With that background, Patai knows that there are a few key ways get revenue, namely from advertisements, construction market research, and licensing. In the near future, Patai’s got some cool plans:

For our next product, Builk 3.0, is ready for international users to use Builk for their construction businesses. But we still focus on the Thailand and Indonesia markets. We are exploring an opportunity in Australia now. Next month our first iOS construction site collaboration app, called Builk SiteWalk, will be launched. and it will be free to disrupt the construction industry again.

By the end of this year, you can expect to see some really cool stuff coming from Builk, including more features and building on their current platform. It really pays to be deep in a vertical.

The pair created a company that caters to the needs of those customers. Imagineers makes its own 3D-printer, which retails for $1,000 and is similar to the Makerbot‘s popular Replicator model line. But that’s just the product side of their business. The other half lies in the two main services Imagineers provides.

Low-cost prototyping

The first is low-cost rapid prototyping. Chen and Gu say this market is saturated in the US, but it still has a lot of room to grow in China. On average, if you want less than 20 of something made, they say 3D printing is more cost effective and efficient compared to casting. That’s a good solution for a design firm or R&D department on a tight budget.

(See also: 3D Printer Maker Pirate3D Now Aims for $1 Million on Kickstarter)

Their second service is system integration. For example, a company can pay Imagineers to install three of their own 3D printers, one $300,000 high-precision full-color printer, and a suite of software for scanning and 3D design. They’ll even teach you how to use all of it. Chen and Gu say it only takes about five minutes to learn how to scan an object with 123D Catch and about a day to nail down the basics of Caxa, a Chinese design program. Right now, they say software is a bottleneck for the 3D printing industry because it’s not easy to use.

Eye on Chinese schools

The market for system integration includes engineers and designers, but Imagineers also found a less obvious niche: students. They’ve already worked with two high schools in China to install the above package for kids taking design courses. They even write the curriculum. While they hope to get the technology in the hands of more students, Chen admits it would be easier if individual schools in China had more control over their own funds.

Imagineers is only one year old, but they have big plans for the long term. They say today’s leading 3D printer manufacturers, Stratasys and 3D Systems, aren’t innovating anymore. Chen and Gu say the future market will shift from rapid prototyping to manufacturing final parts. They foresee big centralized 3D printing factories, where designers can remotely design and use more advanced and precise 3D printers in the cloud, what they call “intelligent processing and control.”

The pair are based at Tsinghua University in Beijing, from which they got a one-time funding of about RMB 200,000 (about $33,000) and have access to the school’s other resources. It seems they’re getting into the market at the right time. The Chinese government is throwing money at 3D printing, possibly fearing the technology could up-end its manufacturing industry. Chen says:

The Chinese government wants to promote 3D printing, but they don’t know how to do it. All they have is money.

Today, Indonesian price comparison site Telunjuk announced that it has received seed funding from Japan-based Venture Republic. The Telunjuk team says that Venture Republic’s experience in the shopping search engine business would help the team a lot in their effort to secure the top spot among product comparison search engines in Indonesia.

It is revealed that Telunjuk co-founders Redya Febriyanto and Hanindia Narendrata Rahiesa (Drata) still have the majority stake of the company. Together with Project Eden, Venture Republic will sit on Telunjuk’s executive board and help advise the startup.

Venture Republic notes that this is the VC’s first ever investment made in an Indonesian company. President and CEO Kei Shibata says that they jumped on-board after looking through the co-founders’ profiles as well as their company’s performance with a lean budget. Venture Republic itself has a few shopping search engine businesses in its Japanese portfolio such as Coneco, Travel.co.jp, and Hotel.jp.

Telunjuk now records half a million monthly unique visitors every month. Drata says that they will use the funds to expand marketing, develop more features, and hire more people while still keeping the team small. The team is squaring off against PriceArea which is backed by Japan-based GREE Ventures and Rocket Internet’s PricePanda.

1. Pick a market you want to serve, and plan for 20 years. SoHelpful.me‘s Kevin Dewalt explains what separates happy from unhappy entrepreneurs. A “deep intrinsic empathy” for your customers and long-term thinking are the most common factors in the happy segment.
2. Know your priorities. Angel investor Steven Price advises startups to prioritize features that are simple and differentiate them from competitors, and leave complex, standard features for later.
3. Investors’ default answer is “no.” Angel investor Benjamin Joffe explained how to deal with rejection and the “show high interest then stall” (SHITS) tactic used by investors.
4. Ask for advice, get money. Joffe also says, rather than asking investors for money outright, seek their advice, first. Once they have spent time advising you, they feel more psychologically invested, which could lead to actual investment.
5. Data, not software or media, is king. Red Pagoda Resources‘ Andy Mok posits that the “content is king” mantra is no longer true.
6. No school and no incubation program can guarantee you success. Filmmaker-turned-entrepreneur Tan Siok Siok, the least conventional of all the speakers, dispels the myth that a good startup incubator is a sure-fire path to prosperity–in a room full of incubator mentors and participants.
7. Hire people who are smarter than you. This one from angel investor Philip Beck is pretty self-explanatory, but the humility required can be difficult for some entrepreneurs.
8. Ask your mentors if they have mentors. The often echoed motto, “advice is free, and you get what you pay for,” means entrepreneurs should be wary of who they solicit for wisdom. One of the best ways to vet a mentor or coach, according to Beck, is to ask them who their mentors are or were.
9. Be afraid when you get funding. Angel investor Richard Robinson says this is no time to relax. On the contrary, that’s when you should be most eager to impress.
10. Take care of yourself. It’s easy to overwork, and it’s likely not worth it. Robinson says anything beyond 50 hours per week moves into the negative side of costs versus benefits. Use that time to get ample sleep, exercise, and eat a proper diet.

And there you have it. Now that you’ve heard all their advice, here’s mine. If you’re an entrepreneur, take all advice with a grain of salt, especially investors. They want something from you, too, and they will tell you what is in their best interests. What do you think? Can all the advice here be taken at face value? I’m asking that both hypothetically and literally, so leave us a comment if you want to pitch in.

This week, we have our spotlight on a huge number of startups across the region. Remember, for startup tips and story suggestions, feel free to email us. Alternatively, you can send tips here and/or tell us about your startup here. Enjoy this week’s list!

1. Fanqie Kuaidian | China

Created earlier this year, Beijing-based startup Fanqie Kuaidian aims to ease your food ordering process by churning out a list of recommended dishes for you, along with the average price per person. All that is required of you is to indicate if the app has accurately detected your location and how many people you are dining with.

2. Tristup | Indonesia

Created by Indonesian developer Yudhi Mandey, TristUp is a social network for people to “level up” their friendship. Just like the notorious Bang With Friends, after logging in using your Facebook account, you will get to choose which friends you’d secretly like to hook up with.

3. FontPro | Indonesia

FontPro is a startup founded by Yudhis Adi Nugroho that wants to help people find and download beautiful fonts more easily.

4. Square.my | Malaysia

Malaysia-based Square.my is a free service that wants to centralize all the actions in a blogshop or Facebook store – from inventory management, to payment processes, and social marketing. Square.my’s goal is not only to help entrepreneurs setup their web stores at an affordable price, but also to solve the notorious e-payment issues that come with doing e-commerce in Southeast Asia.

5. Styleprofile.me | Singapore

Singapore-based startup Styleprofile.me positions itself as a social commerce platform that allows users to discover fashion products, make them into a collage, and share them with your friends. You can create your own outfit by selecting from over 30,000 items from over 30 online stores and dropping them onto a blank canvas. Then gather opinions on your look from the Styleprofile community and your friends.

6. TS24 | Vietnam

TS24 is a B2B2G (business to business to government model), which streamlines the taxation process for both businesses and the authorities.

7. 99designs | Australia

Founded in 2008 by Mark Harbottle and Matt Mickiewicz, Australian crowdsourcing design site 99designs has grown to become one of the go-to sites for design needs. There are 225,000 designers on the platform right now. In Asia Pacific, 99designs is up against similar sites like Australia’s DesignCrowd, Japan’s Crowdworks, and Indonesia’s Sribu.

8. Pirate3D | Singapore

Pirate3D is a Singapore-based startup that develops what it claims to be the world’s most affordable 3D printer. After day one on Kickstarter, Pirate3D’s Buccaneer saw over $300,000 raised, but funds from the crowd just kept coming in. Now, the startup has set a $1 million target on Kickstarter for its 3D printer, dubbed ‘The Buccaneer’.

9. PayrollHero | Philippines and Canada

Philippines and Canada-based Payroll Hero offers a unique service that helps companies keep track of employees using biometric facial recognition to ensure workers are at work when they should be. The startup has announced plans to expand into Southeast Asia.

10. AdNear | India

Sequoia-backed startup AdNear this week launched its location-based ad platform in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Unlike traditional mobile banner ads, AdNear helps retailers attract relevant customers based on their location. The company has also announced it has moved its global headquarters from India to Singapore.

10. Dropmysite | Singapore

DropMySite, a Singapore-based startup initially providing cloud solutions for website and email backup, now goes beyond back-ups. In an announcement this week, it says it will now offer a service for current Dropmyemail business users (a service which they also run) to analyze all emails within the company.

11. DealGuru | Singapore

DealGuru, the parent company of Deal.com.sg and Room Service Dealivery, has announced it has separated its food delivery subsidiary, which will henceforth be called “Food Runner” (logo pictured above). And with the new subsidiary, it will be expanding aggressively into other countries within Southeast Asia. It’s a move to challenge Rocket Internet’s Foodpanda.

12. Ambient Digital Indonesia | Indonesia

Ambient Digital Indonesia is a video ad network company started by Tokobagus co-founder Remco Lupker. Unlike other ad networks that mainly offer banner ads fighting for limited inventory spaces, Ambient helps publishers create a new video ad inventory slot at the bottom corner of their web pages.

13. Zank | China

Chinese mobile startup app Zank focuses on helping users find friends, dates, and fun nearby activities based on their location. Although nothing on the service’s site states it explicitly, its SEO and marketing images seem to imply the app is targeted at Chinese gay men.

14. TastyKhana | India

India-based online food delivery startup TastyKhana revealed this week that it has received a massive investment from Germany-based online food delivery company DeliveryHero.com. In addition to the early seed investment in TastyKhana last year, the German company is now putting $5 million more in funding. As with the Food Runner news (see #11), this is also in an attempt to challenge Foodpanda.

15. Locondo | Japan

Locondo.jp is an online Japanese fashion and shoes e-commerce site which received series B funding this week. The investment is led by web portal Excite Japan, and the tie-up also entails a big boost in visibility among the 50 million monthly visitors to Excite’s Japanese homepages.

16. Biitbook | Vietnam

Vietnam’s Biitbook team of three looks to build a platform for e-books that can be read on smartphones and tablets as well as web browsers. The company is also currently working on shipping desktop apps for PC and Mac. Biitbook now hosts over 20,000 e-books and has 46,000 users on the platform.

17. Doku | Indonesia

Doku is one of Indonesia’s biggest players in the country’s online payment industry. The startup can help process online payments through credit cards, a few major local banks like Mandiri and BCA, plus PayPal as well. The company revealed this week that it has recorded $1.1 billion in transactions in the past six years.

18. Interview Master | India

Bangalore-based startup Interview Master is a globally-focused service for companies to pre-screen job candidates via video interviews. On Friday it wrapped up seed funding from angel investors at the Indian VentureNursery program that it recently graduated from.

19. Apptivate | Philippines

Philippine-based startup Apptivate has a web-based application where users can top-up credits to buy iOS apps in the Philippine version of Apple’s iTunes App Store without needing a credit card. It was also one of the 10 startups to receive $30,000 seed funding from incubator Kickstart Ventures.

Related startup stories

• Asian E-Commerce Sites Net $6.9 Billion in Investment in Past 3 Years, But Exits Still Tiny [STATS]
• How Tokopedia is Building Indonesia’s Taobao
• Indosat Holds Mobile Apps Contest and Incubation Program in Indonesia with JKTFI
• Why Don’t More Chinese Internet Companies Expand Overseas?
• The Bright Side of Bureaucracy in China
• WebGeek Taps Software Devs to Answer Social Issues at Social Innovation Camp Manila
• How To Pitch Successfully to Investors for Follow-on Funding (Part 2)
• How To Pitch Successfully to Investors for Follow-on Funding (Part 3)
• How To Pitch Successfully to Investors for Follow-on Funding (Part 4)
• How To Pitch Successfully to Investors for Follow-on Funding (Part 5)
• What 500 Startups Sees In Southeast Asia: Insights From Dave McClure [VIDEO]
• China Leads Asia in VC Investments in E-Commerce; Sadly Acquisitions Are a Rare Sight [STATS]
• SI Camp Asia Now Seeking Ideas for Civic Startups, Visits 7 Countries This Summer
• Now With 8 Million Users, Cutesy Messaging App Cubie Adds Easy Mobile Payments Via Your Phone Bill

Events

Up next, we will be organising a premiere screening of Crocodile in the Yangtze, a documentary about the early days of Taobao, the e-store created by Alibaba founder and former CEO Jack Ma. It’ll be in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur on June 24 and June 26 respectively.

Check here for event and registration details of the Singapore screening. For readers in Kuala Lumpur, please head over here to register for the event. Tickets are free, so grab them while stocks last!

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

When getting apps for your iPhone or iPad, paid apps are often much better than the free ones. No distracting advertisements, and users will get the full experience of the application. But especially in the Philippines, not everyone has a credit card to buy apps for their iOS device, and they either end up getting stuck with the free app, or they borrow someone else’s credit card.

Philippine-based startup Apptivate answers this issue by creating a web-based application where users can top-up credits it calls “coins” for users to buy iOS apps in the Philippine version of Apple’s iTunes App Store without needing a credit card. It sells prepaid cards in PHP 100 ($2.33) and PHP 200 ($4.67) denominations, and uses an SMS service that lets users top up their Apptivate account through their phone credits.

How does it work?

Apptivate founder Norris Jay Perez gave me a prepaid card and walked me through the process, which is pretty simple. Users just have to login to the site and enter their iTunes username, mobile number, and the code on the prepaid card. Upon choosing the app for purchase, a confirmation will be sent via email, and the redeem button will lead to the app’s downloading state. I’d say this would take a mere three to five minutes with a good internet connection. They have already made the prepaid cards available in universities all over Metro Manila such as the University of the Philippines, De La Salle University, and the University of Santo Tomas.

Topping up Apptivate with phone credit, a new service that uses Globe Telecom’s platform, should be easier as you do not have to go to a retail store to buy a prepaid card. As long as users have a Globe Telecom SIM card (regardless if its postpaid or prepaid), they can easily text APP to 2662 and a redemption code will be sent via SMS. Available denominations are PHP 60 ($1.40) and PHP 120 ($2.80). Jay says that they are looking to make this available to other local telecom providers too.

Expanding to Android and new markets?

Having a background on software development, Jay has simply built this using a platform through Apple iTunes’ redeem functionality to answer his own dilemma of buying apps. Last year, Apptivate was one of the only four startups from over 50 pitches to join the first batch of the five-month accelerator program by Launchgarage. After this program, last February, it was also one of the 10 startups to receive $30,000 seed funding from incubator Kickstart Ventures. Through the same incubator, it also received PHP 2 million ($46,600) in mobile ad credits as well as GCash integration from Globe Telecom, plus other goodies from Amazon Web Services and ZenDesk.

Kickstart Ventures president Minette Navarette believes that startups need a “full support system” to achieve greater innovation.

By making these investments, we literally put our money where our mouth is: providing startup capital, as well as organizing training programs, regular mentorship, and business introductions to bring startups and progressive corporates together.

Apptivate plans to expand its service by making all iOS/iTunes Store apps, music, and books (even outside the Philippines store) available for purchase. Buying prepaid credit will also be available through convenience stores like 7-eleven. Jay says the startup is also looking at making this available for Android users via the Google Play store.

Expanding to markets in Southeast Asia with the same needs will be its next move for expansion. Currently, Jay says, he is talking to Thai mobile telco AIS and indonesia’s Telkomsel to provide this service.

We know that cutesy sticker/emoticon packs are critical to the success of messaging apps in Asia – and they’re also a great way to monetize. That’s why Taiwan-made messaging app Cubie has teamed up with mobile payments service Fortumo to allow people to pay for these virtual stickers via their phone bill. Cubie has eight million users right now.

Cubie – which was recently incubated at 500 Startups – has rolled out this mobile payment system in 44 countries around the world, and reckons that it’ll be particularly useful in Southeast Asia where fewer people have credit cards, or are just generally wary of using them to buy things online. After quietly adding this in a few countries last week, Cubie’s James Hill says that it’s already noticeably helping:

Anecdotally, Fortumo say that by offering this service, companies can increase their revenues ten-fold – and so far we’ve seen a massive uplift in transactions from Taiwan, Thailand, and Malaysia, where we went live last week (as in one sticker pack brought in the same revenue in a day via Fortumo that our previous top seller did in its first week on just iTunes and Google Play). We will be sending a notification today telling the rest of our user base that they can also pay via their phone bills.

The payment screen will look like this:

Fortumo has worked with big-name game studios and social platforms to make mobile payments easier, such as Rovio (makers of Angry Birds), Facebook, and Badoo.

Cubie will add more countries in due course; James says they’re eagerly “waiting for approval from authorities in Canada, Ireland, and South Korea, which is standard as they take a bit longer”.

Among Cubie’s eight million users, the fastest growing markets are the US, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and Latin America.

Cubie’s large stickers and other cute features – the app also encourages doodling and drawing – have been copied by other popular apps in the region, such as WeChat, Line, and KakaoTalk.

One of the keys to a strong e-commerce infrastructure in any country is its online payment system. One of Indonesia’s biggest players in that industry is Doku, and today the company gave us some updates about milestones since its inception in 2007.

Doku can help process online payments through credit cards, a few major local banks like Mandiri and BCA, plus PayPal as well. The company notes that the company has increased its 300 corporate merchant number count up to 400 in this year alone. How much in transactions has Doku processed so far in the last six years? IDR 11 trillion ($1.1 billion). Plus there has been year-on-year growth close to 100 percent. The majority of those transactions come from the online travel industry such as to pay for airline tickets, hotels, and tour operators.

A couple of months ago, Doku released its e-wallet product called DokuWallet which offers more payment alternatives to consumers. The company recently announced that two big Indonesian companies, Merpati Nusantara Airlines and theme park Dufan, jumped onboard to use Doku as their online payment gateway.

One of Doku’s biggest rivals in this e-payment space is Veritrans, which managed to sway online shop Rakuten Belanja Online to use its services instead of Doku’s. While Doku’s other rival, iPayMu, which offers e-wallet service, records 11,000 merchants in the month of June.

Bangalore-based startup Interview Master is a globally-focused service for companies to pre-screen job candidates via video interviews. Today the young company has wrapped up seed funding from angel investors at the Indian VentureNursery program that it recently graduated from.

Interview Master is targeted at any size of business, but perhaps works best for medium-sized companies and multi-national corporations to sift through job applicants before actually inviting some in for an old-fashioned face-to-face interview. Interview Master’s video system is automated and evaluates people on a set series of questions. It also helps businesses build up a database of quality candidates.

CEO and co-founder Sanjoe Jose reckons that “the HR industry is looking at ways to reduce the recruitment cycle without affecting the quality of candidates and InterviewMaster successful addresses this.”

Fellow co-founder and CMO Tom Jose (apparently they’re not related) believes that Interview Master’s web-based service can save a company more than $150,000 over the course of hiring 1,000 new staffers.

Interview Master already has some major corporate clients from across the globe, including robotics company ABB (who presumably love automated stuff).

The crew graduated from the VentureNursery incubator, which claims to be India’s first angel-backed startup accelerator, back in April this year.

There’s no word on how the new funding will be used, but Interview Master seems to be fairly easy to scale to new markets.

(Update: The original version of the post originally said Bangladesh; the correct location is Bangalore. My apologies!)

Step 5: Clear the decks, resolve time-consuming due diligence items in advance and prepare not only to pitch but to close.

In our experience, a properly-done $1 to 3 million round of funding takes between six and nine months in Southeast Asia, from the first pitch to settlement (this applies to investment we made – sometimes these were late A and sometimes early B – as well as the follow-on rounds into our portfolio companies by third parties). The amount of distraction related to fundraising is almost always under-appreciated – and therefore the entire process tends to cause a lot of frustration. Here are a few steps, in no particular order, that we’ve seen to be productive and help companies go through the process relatively unscathed.

(a) Regardless of how you structure your fundraising process and whether you outsource it to an advisor, rely on your early stage investor for assistance, or handle it yourself, an enormous amount of founders’ time will be consumed by fundraising. In advance of the exercise, it’s best to clear the decks and make sure the rest of the team knows not to chase you for items that do not pertain to immediate revenues or talent acquisition. That good-to-have platform upgrade, that new complex partnership, or a PR campaign will just have to be pushed back a bit, and your board will understand if you postpone the regular board meeting a few times, too (but do make sure you have a regular update call keeping your stakeholders posted of fundraising progress).

(b) A whole lot of items that would delay and introduce uncertainty to your fundraising process can and should be taken care of in advance. For example, if your financial records have to be pulled together by hand, or if key documents are to be called down from corporate secretary or a partner, you will not only earn yourself a yellow flag in due diligence but will also lose time. Get your accounting team to master Xero or Zoho, make your metrics available online through KissMetrics, RJMetrics, and good old Google Analytics, scan and upload critical documents to a dropbox folder, and finish that reorganization of your legal entity so it’s a fait accompli by the time incoming investors get to asking questions about it.

(c) Don’t ever hesitate to remind your would-be investors that you have a business to run. Your part is to be ready for due diligence – but it is theirs to make it as little of a disruption as possible.

(d) Line up your own legal advice, in-house or hired, in advance, so you don’t have to scramble and brief a legal professional on a short notice. If you rely solely on your investors, existing or incoming, to handle the paperwork, at least make time in your closest mentor’s or advisor’s schedule for a regular call to bounce ideas around and review the documents together. There will always be a 50-page must-review bundle of legalese coming your way when you least expect it!

(e) In this round of fundraising you will likely for the first time in the history of your company have a formal investor (or an experienced angel) on your side, from your previous (seed or A) round. Make extensive use of them – their network, their credibility, and their knowledge of follow-on options are all critical assets. In fact, it’s likely much easier for them to get meetings with potential follow on investors and get a strong indication of interest (or, equally important, lack of interest) from them – so do ask your backers to take introductory meetings on their own and test the water for you; this will save you tens of hours of talking to follow-on investors you shouldn’t be meeting and act as a useful filter.

(f) Negotiate your deal yourself. Sending in advisors, mentors or your existing investors is fine up to a point (and sometimes confers a lot of face in certain cultural contexts) if it helps you save time and if you’re in charge of the process and know exactly what is being said even if you’re not in the room. However, having anyone but the founders and majority shareholders negotiate the essence of the transaction raises eyebrows and might quite literally kill the deal unless it’s handled very delicately – at the end of the day, your new investors aim to build a direct relationship with the founders.

This article was contributed by Mark and Dmitry from Digital Media Partners, where they get to see 600+ pitches a year from start-up companies all across Southeast Asia and where they’ve raised $14 million of follow-on funding for DMP portfolio companies over last two years. DMP is a venture capital firm specialized in emerging digital markets of Southeast East Asia and focused on funding regional expansion opportunities. Please let them know your thoughts on DMP’s Facebook, Linkedin or AngelList pages.

In Southeast Asia, we’ve seen the compelling rise of Ookbee and Scoop, and chat app giants like Line and KakaoTalk are also getting into the digital publishing game. Of course, we’ve got a few interesting players here in Vietnam, as well. One of them is a small new company called Biitbook.

I had a quick chat with Nhat Nguyen Hung, the founder and CEO of Biitbook, who says the service hopes to:

Become a place for publishers, authors, and readers to come together. A place for people who really love reading. Where authors and publishers can take control of their copyright and publishing power.

Basically, the Biitbook team of three looks to build a platform for e-books that can be read on smartphones and tablets as well as web browsers. The company is also currently working on shipping desktop apps for PC and Mac.

After eight months of operation, Biitbook now hosts over 20,000 e-books (10,000 of which are Vietnamese), and has 46,000 users on the platform. Hung also noted that the site has over two million unique visitors. That’s a nice start for a company started with only three people.

Biitbook has been working with Vietnamese publishers to get their books online, training them with online tutorials and technical support through the process of scanning and uploading. But Biitbook is mostly targeted at authors themselves. The company can really be described as a self-publishing platform. This not only tackles Vietnam’s copyright issues, but also makes a play for the extremely nascent e-book scene. I mean, with e-books at one percent market share of digital goods in Vietnam, you can be sure it’s a hard battle that Biitbook is fighting.

As a big fan of Kindle and e-ink readers, I had to ask Hung if they’d support e-ink, but Biitbook is only looking to ship e-books to their Android and iOS platform.

As far as getting payment, Biitbook only collects money via PayPal and, interestingly, their own payment method called Bcoins. Bcoins allow users to pay by credit card as well as SMS by accumulating credit into their Bcoins account to buy e-books. Publishers will get 70 percent of the cut. The first 100 publishers (or authors) get a 75 percent cut for signing up for the first year on Biitbook’s platform. Hung notes that it’s a C2C e-book marketplace.

To say the least, Biitbook is operating under very difficult circumstances. E-books are not commonplace, books are extremely cheap, and very few people in Vietnam use Paypal. This is why I’m not surprised that Thai, Indonesian, and English are among the few languages Biitbook is offered in, aiming instead at more developed e-reading markets. But it’s really early to say, and we’ll have to wait until the end of the year to see if Biitbook really catches on.

It’s also worth mentioning that Alezaa, another Vietnamese e-book player, is also in this space.

Before we hear from organizer Andrew Tan about last year’s event and the kind of issues he wants to see startups tackling, these are the multi-country dates set for SI Camp Asia so far this summer:

• Bangkok, August 16 to 18 – with ChangeFusion and The Sync as partners
• Singapore, August 23 to2 5 – with Syinc and SWB
• Jakarta, August 30 to September 1 – with GEPI
• Manila, September 13 to 15 – with WebGeek
• Hong Kong, September 27 to 29 – with StartupHK and Bonza Pie
• Seoul, October 4 to 6 – with How2company
• Cebu and Kuala Lumpur are not yet set

As my Philippine-based colleague noted earlier today, SI Camp Asia is now taking submissions for civic startup ideas at its various city events.

Last year’s event saw six great ideas emerge from all across Asia. The eventual winner was Thatapp, which aims to help answer teens’ questions about sex. Sadly that app has not launched in the eight months since the event, something that raises the issue of civic startups who fail to tackle the issue at hand, perhaps due to a lack of funds or because it’s a side-project for those involved.

Seeking ideas across Asia

Last year the global SI Camp held only one event in Asia – and that was in Kuala Lumpur. So this year marks a big expansion for the program to eight cities in seven countries. Andrew Tan explains:

Last year was actually to set the foundation for this year. This year we wanted it to be held in different cities across Asia so that it is more accessible to people. We are still going to have a regional camp (SI Camp Asia) where we will bring the top teams from each of these local camps to Singapore.

Andrew encourages the do-good startups to think of issues seen in their particular country and to tackle those head-on:

I have always liked the saying “Think globally, act locally”. So startups should be focus on tackling issues that they either have experienced before, are affected by, or at the very least see everyday in their local environment. This is important because only by having first-hand experience of a problem can a startup have the insight to take the right first step, the drive and passion to go through the ups and down that any startup faces, and the sustaining energy to advocate for the issue that they are helping solve.

Also since a lot of the countries in Southeast Asia face similar issues mainly due to the fact that the infrastructure for things such as education, healthcare, and so on, are still under-developed. So the local solutions startups come up with will usually be adaptable to other countries.

Japanese fashion and shoes e-store Locondo.jp has today slipped into JPY 600 million ($6.2 million) in series B funding. The investment is led by web portal Excite Japan, and the tie-up also entails a big boost in visibility among the 50 million monthly visitors to Excite’s Japanese homepages.

Previous investors Lead Capital Management (LCM), and Itochu Technology Ventures (ITV) also participated in this second major round. The business has been backed by Rocket Internet.

Locondo claims to have an annual turnover of $31 million from its 300,000 users; it launched in February 2011. It marks itself out from rival e-stores with a very generous trying on policy that lets people return unworn items within 30 days. Locondo specializes in lady’s shoes but does also stock some accessories and several ranges of women’s clothing.

Locondo has had backing from Rocket Internet but is not officially one of its numerous startup ventures. Rocket’s sole e-commerce store in Japan is its pan-Asian make-up subscription service Glossybox.

(Source: Startup-Dating)

India-based online food delivery startup TastyKhana is today revealing a massive investment from Germany-based online food delivery company DeliveryHero.com. In addition to the early seed investment in TastyKhana last year, the German company is now putting $5 million more in funding.

The TastyKhana team explain that since the initial investment from DeliveryHero last year, the startup has grown to serve seven cities in India from more than 3,000 restaurants, and record a 400 percent transaction volume growth. Being in a similar industry to the German firm, TastyKhana also receives guidance from DeliveryHero to make sure the startup gets to the next level.

Besides TastyKhana, there are a few online food ordering startups who are looking to be the country’s number one. Among them is Rocket Internet’s Food Panda which has a presence in 12 cities in India.

(Source: YourStory.in)

Earlier today we looked at a report that has counted up $6.9 billion in investments among Asian e-commerce sites from 2010 to the present day. A mesmerising $4.8 billion of all that venture capital went to e-stores in China.

Despite that amazing marquee number of $4.8 billion, China’s e-commerce landscape is marred by a woeful lack of acquisitions. Basically, Chinese e-stores either exit via an IPO (where China excels), or struggle on as an independent company. Or die off.

The aforementioned report by venture capital database CB Insights points out this huge disparity. Amidst all that investment in Chinese e-commerce (way ahead of the $978 million poured into such businesses by VCs in India), China is actually dwarfed by India when it comes to deals such as acquisitions:

No deal?

So the problem is that no-one is acquiring fellow Chinese e-stores for their own advancement. It’s an issue seen throughout the entire national web and tech industries. It’s cheaper to throw people at a problem in China. Despite it being a market where an estimated $177 billion will be spent by shoppers in 2013, the nation’s e-commerce giants – like Alibaba, Jingdong (formerly 360Buy), Suning, Tencent, Dangdang – don’t like spending on acquisitions. Here’s the investment and deal volume in the country in the past three years or so:

Inevitably, that VC and buy-out money is going to the core growth areas in online shopping in China, such as clothing stores and daily deals:

Exit = IPO

Looking on the bright side, China’s e-commerce IPO exits are plentiful, with the most recent being B2B marketplace LightInTheBox hitting the New York Stock Exchange just last week. The upcoming IPO that everyone is waiting for will be the biggest tech IPO that China has ever seen – that will happen once Alibaba (which runs market-leading sites like Taobao and Tmall) sets a date. That could value Alibaba at anywhere from $40 billion (the reported valuation based on its recent Yahoo partial stake buy-back) to the fevered heights (in some rather overblown headlines) of closer to $100 billion.

Other possible IPOs include Jingdong, Vancl, and travel booking site Qunar.

But this is the more grim scene in China in terms of buy-out style exits:

Sinophile VCs

China’s top overseas VC in terms of making the most deals in e-commerce in the country is IDG, where they’ve made 11 injections of capital. IDG’s most recent was back in January when it ploughed series A funding into discount shopping aggregator Mizhe.

Click to enlarge a bit.

See the full report on the CB Insights blog.

credit to Casey Lau from SoftLayer

Last Sunday, we sat down with Dave McClure in Bangkok, along with the 500Startups team, and pick his brain on Southeast Asia.

Before getting into it, it’s worth noting that Dave’s been making the rounds across Asia very recently, with a fiery keynote at Hack Osaka in Japan, some insults and insights in Beijing, a hop over to Echelon, and finally a chat with us on Sunday. You can check out the full video below, but let me break down some cool points from Dave for you:

Dave’s pretty new to Southeast Asia, but he gave us some interesting insights into Asia proper. Dave thinks Singapore is a bit less interesting these days because of the conforming nature of the culture. Japan, on the other hand, is having trouble because of its low risk-taking culture. According to Dave, given that it’s such a strong internet culture, there’s a very low amount of startups. Whereas China, on the other hand, is very aggressive in that space, and, in a lot of ways, overvalued compared to Japan’s latent potential. And then Dave gave us some gems on Silicon Valley:

There’s a tendency to copy stuff in the US that looks sexy. Instagram exited with one billion, Pinterest currently valued at three billion, Tumblr for a billion. I don’t necessarily think fast growth social media platforms with no monetization are a great strategy outside of the US.

In other words, startups in Southeast Asia focusing on being the next Facebook or Twitter should think again. That’s exactly why Dave appreciates startups like Builk, which tackle real-world problems offline with technology solutions.

In terms of what could the Valley learn from Asia? Dave thinks gamification models from Korea and Japan were very compelling. He also mentioned the Valley is lazy toward internationalizing their apps and platforms, thus leaving a big opportunity for local startups to jump in and copy the models. People need to think globally sooner, and that’s certainly something that startups in Southeast Asia do compared to the Valley.

Dave also talked to us a bunch about advice for startups, but I’ll leave you with this:

If you’re always following the rules, then you have no advantages because everyone is following the rules…Entrepreneurship is about finding shortcuts that don’t kill you and get you in jail. Rule followers are at a disadvantage to people who are willing to take those shortcuts.”

BIG BONUS: Mimee from Thumbs Up, also gave us a 20-minute presentation on the Thai ecosystem, which will be really informative for folks interested in Thailand:

Not forgetting, a huge thank you to our awesome sponsors:

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When I took Zank for a spin, the app hit all the right notes. Registration for the service was very friendly and remarkably quick. The app itself is clear and well-designed, so much so that even though it’s in Chinese, a non-Chinese speaker could probably figure out how to do almost everything the app lets you do (for example, adding an event, viewing someone else’s, liking an event, etc.). It even has a chat function so that you can talk to other people involved if you’re interested in an event. Honestly, aside from the fact that it isn’t a very original concept, I really having nothing bad to say about the app.

I’m not sure how many users the service has now, and have gotten in touch with the Zank team to see if they’ll tell me; I’ll update this post if I hear back. Based on my own experience, I’d say there have to be at least a few hundred users and probably more just in the Beijing area, and the service has more than 20,000 followers on Weibo. But other areas have far fewer; in Harbin, for example, there are currently only four events posted, and two of them are global events that appear for every city. It’s clear the team still has quite a bit of promotional work to do.

Update: This article was updated significantly to reflect the fact that the app seems to be being subtly marketed to gays, something we hadn’t noticed at first.

Step 4: Calibrate your presentation materials and how you deliver your story depending on the mindset of the investors you’re approaching.

Here are a couple of examples of common investor mindsets:

Trust- or passion-driven investors

When approaching funds like these, assume that decisions are made by investors who either: like your industry (due to personal passion or corporate strategy); or like you and your team personally. So, prepare a pitch with heavy focus on team credibility, space attractiveness, total addressable market, landmark deals – most of the information that likely got you your previous round.

Prepare your team for in-person meetings, and steel yourself for background check calls made to your friends and colleagues present and past. In the midst of all of this, your story should still come across very clearly – even the most passion / trust driven investors will be alarmed by a heavy mismatch between objectives you seek and the company’s present state.

Risk/return driven investors

Almost by definition, the majority of the investments these investors make are neither in spaces they know well enough to dearly love, nor with teams that they know well enough to fully trust. To cope with this, they normally come up with a way to measure and manage risks that are referred to as an “investment strategy”, or “thesis”. Sometimes it is relatively generic (for example, “are you profitable yet?”) and sometimes it is painfully specific (for example, “does your LTV exceed CPFTB by at least a factor of 3 with 95% probability?”). In either case, it helps when in a meeting with risk/return driven investors if you present not only your story, but what risks it already carries and what you’ve done to minimize them.

A sensible way to approach this is to do a deep dive into significant metrics related to your business as soon as the initial trust building with the investor is over. Exactly which metrics these are deserves a separate article, but let’s just say they have to:

• Be relevant to your business and vertical (e.g. number of paying users doesn’t matter as much for a payment system as it does for a game publisher).

• Address the risks your business faces (e.g. number of impressions an ad network has access to is not an entirely relevant metric to counter the risk of not being able to sell)

Metrics should be credible. A best practice is to provide your investor with observer access to whatever system you use for sales, conversions, clicks, and downloads tracking (please don’t make the mistake of asking for an NDA for this – plenty has been written on the topic and there are several schools of thought on VCs and NDAs – but in practice, most VCs act following their lawyer’s recommendations and step away from anything that requires an NDA).

They should also click with your story; if you claim you’ve established a way to monetize your audience of 30,000 and do it on the basis of 15 purchases since company’s launch a year ago, there’s a good chance you’ll lose a bit of credibility for engaging in a game of smoke and mirrors with statistically insignificant observations.

Some of the best pitches we’ve seen at DMP involve a live business model demonstration, which for this stage of investment is almost as important as the product demo in earlier stages of company’s development. An example would be an e-commerce company opening its Google Analytics (KissMetrics, RJMetrics, etc) on the screen, together with a feed showing buyers traveling through funnels and payments being collected. Show your investors how during the meeting, 50 visitors showed up, 4 filled the order form and 2 actually checked out. This is very powerful, in particular with investors who are relatively new to your vertical.

To be continued. Stay tuned for Part 5 of this series, “How To Pitch Successfully to Investors for Follow-on Funding.”

This article was contributed by Mark and Dmitry from Digital Media Partners, where they get to see 600+ pitches a year from start-up companies all across Southeast Asia and where they’ve raised $14 million of follow-on funding for DMP portfolio companies over last two years. DMP is a venture capital firm specialized in emerging digital markets of Southeast East Asia and focused on funding regional expansion opportunities. Please let them know your thoughts on DMP’s Facebook, Linkedin or AngelList pages.

Tokobagus founders Arnold Sebastian Egg (left) and Remco Lupker (right) at our last year’s Startup Asia Jakarta conference.

Leaving Tokobagus, Indonesia’s largest online classified site, didn’t come easy for co-founder Remco Lupker. It was a tough decision for him. He adores the company like his own baby. He told Tech in Asia that he had a lot of fun ramping up Tokobagus from zero to the hero it is today. When MIH’s investment came in, he believed it was the perfect time for him to hand over Tokobagus to someone with much more experience operating a big company. That person is Michal Klar, who continues to run Tokobagus well.

Remco, for his part, moved on to other ventures. “Tokobagus can hardly be considered a startup anymore,” Remco said. “As [it] developed, it slowly required other management skills which were not so much in my field of interest.”

He added:

Tokobagus brought me everything I could have hoped for and so much more, I had a great ride with a great team, which I will cherish forever. Also, the Tokobagus experience taught me so much and allowed me to meet a lot of interesting people and do interesting stuff. I mean, how often do you get the opportunity to do multiple big nationwide TV campaigns?

The first thing Remco did after he exited was to go back home to Holland with his Indonesian wife to see his friends and family. The entire holiday lasted eight months. Afterwards, Remco started a new venture in Indonesia. This time, he is running a video ad network company, Ambient Digital Indonesia.

Ambient Indonesia is a joint-venture between Ambient Digital Group (headquartered in Vietnam) and Remco, himself. It’s established as a local entity. Unlike other ad networks that mainly offer banner ads fighting for limited inventory spaces, Ambient helps publishers create a new video ad inventory slot at the bottom corner of their web pages.

During his time in Vietnam, Remco came to understand more about Ambient Digital Group and its fast growth in the country. The company also did well in the Philippines. So he was convinced that Ambient’s advertising approach could work well in Indonesia. “Ambient did a superb job in Vietnam and the Philippines so imagine what we can do in a market with the size and growth potential of Indonesia,” he remarked.

Remco believes the product is unique and is already a proven business model. Plus, in a market like Indonesia, where TV advertising still commands a huge budget, Remco believes Ambient could bring TV advertisers to the internet, thus capturing a slice of that budget.

In the short term, Remco’s personal target is to make Ambient Indonesia the local market leader within six to twelve months. Despite being first in Indonesia, he expects copycats to emerge very soon. For the long term, Ambient will look more into product development, banking on the fact that there could be more room for innovation in Indonesia’s digital advertising space.

Besides running Ambient Digital Indonesia, Remco also made an investment in a local fashion brand that designs, manufactures, and sells shoes. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to disclose the name of the brand yet. He also said that he might make one or two more investments in other startups but will leave it to fate to see what good opportunities cross his path. For his take on the Indonesian startup scene, he said that Indonesia needs sustainable companies who aren’t looking for a quick exit: “A sustainable market needs sustainable companies.”

But it’s not all good news for Asia’s e-commerce businesses. India and China take much of the money, and both deals and funding rounds are way down from a peak in mid-2011. Furthermore, Asian startups – even in this vital e-shopping space – see tiny exits. Indeed, CB Insights calls the exit environment “flaccid”. Most of these web buy-outs in Asia are really small – usually under $50 million. Forget the blockbuster hundreds of millions or billions of dollars being thrown around in Silicon Valley. Here’s the overview graph:

India rings in the deals

In terms of buy-out deals (which includes IPO exits as well), Indian e-commerce ventures lead the way in this region. India has seen 154 e-store deals since 2010, with 25 deals coming in 2013 already. These 154 business transactions are worth $978 million from 2010 to this point in 2013.

Just two weeks ago, India’s second largest homegrown online store, Snapdeal, acquired a smaller rival. Snapdeal is also well funded with $50 million from eBay in its pockets. The larger Flipkart site also helps make India a red hot web shopping market – and one that’s ripe for lots of consolidation this year.

China leads in terms of investments – but we’ll look into China in more depth in a separate post later today (Update: China’s here!).

Here’s how this sector in India leads in terms of deal value:

And this is the remarkable uptick in this category in India so far this year:

MakeMyTrip (NASDAQ:MMYT) was India’s biggest ever tech IPO exit so far, worth $447 million in 2010.

E-shopping in fashion

So, what kind of web store is proving the hottest for business deals? Inevitably it’s clothing sites. Just look at the huge amount of money being thrown at Rocket Internet’s fashion store Zalora, which netted $100 million last month. But thankfully the nature of these e-commerce acquisitions is changing, as shown by the growth of multitudinous web stores that fit into the ‘other’ category in this graph:

Interestingly, clothing leads in India’s e-commerce sector (accounting for involvement in 44 percent of business deals), while the travel sector is second (15 percent).

Exit, pursued by a bear

Most of Asia’s e-commerce exits have been small – 60 percent of them valued at less than $50 million. Only major ones like China’s VIPshop (NYSE:VIPS) and India’s MakeMyTrip have bucked the trend as they IPO’d.

2012 saw an upturn in such exits, with a peak of 29. But there have been 14 so far this year, so 2013 might be even better. Here are charts for exit valuations and their share by geographic location:

Tiger economy

You could say that Asia’s online shopping sector is a tiger economy because the leading venture capital firm in the past three years is Tiger Global Management. It has been involved in 25 deals in 18 companies in the past three years – most of them in India. Accel Partners is second and Intel Capital is third:

Click to enlarge a bit.

See the full report on the CB Insights blog.

Step 3: Align all stakeholders around follow-on round economics and – critically – around a future capital raising plan.

The follow-on investment you’re considering is likely going to be the first time in the history of your company when founders and friends are not the only stakeholders influencing the decisions, and when the interests of your many stakeholders are starting to diverge. Have you perhaps got an early angel who wants to cash out already? A loan or a repayable grant from an implacable government agency that has way more lawyers than you do? A couple of potential investors that would join the round if someone were to lead and if the terms were structured just so? Perhaps a respected and influential advisor who knows exactly how your round should be organized?

Whatever the combinatorics of any particular situation are, it is always a good practice to align all these disparate voices before you go out to raise funds, so that everyone internally knows what the objectives and acceptable parameters of the investment round are and there’s no internal dissent once you’re locked in complex negotiations with investors.

In Southeast Asia, this step is particularly tricky for a number of reasons. First of all, valuation disparities between Southeast Asian start-ups and companies in the US or China are massive and signals from other markets tend to wreak havoc in valuation discussions in SEA (a typical symptom of such confusion would be a voice at the table saying “but a company so-and-so in the US got a multiple on (accounting parameter du jour) of x 10 – we should not accept anything less!”).

Secondly, there are a lot of disparities between local investors focused on SEA and each particular country – some are family groups and governments with multi-decade investment horizons, some are corporates with HQ agendas to follow, some are venture investment teams determined to kill it in their very first fund, and some are angels with altruistic investment economics – so depending on who you talk to and which growth story you propose, the very same company could be valued at US$5 million and US$15 million (real example) – and that’s before we introduce financial engineering and complex term sheets.

Finally and perhaps most importantly, it is still an open question as to what Southeast Asia would look like in a few years – will it be a single digital media market with multi-100 million revenue companies in each vertical? Will we see Southeast Asia’s first US$ 1B IPO in 2 years or in 4 years? Or will the growth be relatively slow and steady, like in a number of other emerging markets that haven’t yet followed the glittering trajectory of China?

In practice, what happens as the follow-on round is being planned is that the founders have to face multiple contradictory signals internally and from the market and are under enormous pressure to promise a very high next round valuation to all of their stakeholders. This sets the company up for a number of disappointments and even dangers – be it an extended fundraising period to find the investor willing to value the company sufficiently highly, loss of confidence in founders by their erstwhile investors if such an investor is not found, stakeholders interfering with fundraising process, conflicts between stakeholders, loss of team morale and such.

This is easily one of the most controversial topics in the ecosystem to date, we don’t have much of a silver bullet to recommend – but from experience, one exercise that tends to help founders caught in such situations is to bring all the internal stakeholders together to come up with a long-range capital raising plan that describes not just the pending follow-on round but, critically, future one or two rounds of funding and perhaps even an approximate parameters of an exit event.

Here’s an imaginary scenario. Let’s say we have a company with $5 million annual turnover (“external revenue” in e-commerce parlance, “sales” in the case of a game publisher, sometimes a “throughput” in case of an ad tech company) and $1 million gross annual margin (“internal revenue” for ecommerce folks, “commission” in the case of a game publisher or ad tech company). Leaving profitability out of the scope of this exercise for the moment, let’s further assume that the company is looking for $3 million in fresh funding and a chorus of internal stakeholder voices demands from the founders the following valuation points: at least $5 million (says the angel who aims for x10 their initial investment), at least $10 million (says the co-founder, because similar companies in the US are valued x10 on gross margin), and at least $15 million (says the latest investor on board who aims for x5 their initial investment).

In our example, the founders would find themselves under pressure to raise funds at $15 million pre-money valuation. It is at this stage, before fundraising has kicked off, that we’d recommend to sit down with all the stakeholders and to jointly work out exactly how much this combination of team, product, geography, and model would need to raise in the next round of funding, after the current follow-on raise is done. While it’s not something very obvious to worry about at this stage, it will be of immense use for internal alignment if the stakeholders agreed that (for the purposes of our example) this company will require $5 million in its next round in two years and the market-appropriate valuation point at that time would be $20 million (based on conversations with Series C investors or a corporate would-be acquirer perhaps).

Based on such insight, it will become obvious that raising $3 million+ today on a pre-money valuation of $15 million would leave a very small gap between $18 million post-money of this round and ideal $20 million pre-money of next round that the company will be stuck in for two years – and that this proposition most likely will cause a range of issues with the existing fundraising (as the incoming follow-on investor is looking at company appreciation from $18 million to $20 million over the course of two years, which is not something most venture investors would look for).

This example, of course, is yet another major simplification for the sake of relatively quick overview of risks of misalignment at the time of follow-on investment – but hopefully it goes to show how important it is to manage such risk in advance. To provide a necessary disclaimer, this example is entirely fictitious and all resemblances with real-life situations would be purely coincidental. For an all-time classic write-up on the use of investment terms to align stakeholders, we’d highly recommend this article .

To be continued. Stay tuned for Part 4 of this series, “How To Pitch Successfully to Investors for Follow-on Funding.”

This article was contributed by Mark and Dmitry from Digital Media Partners (www.digitalmedia.vc), where they get to see 600+ pitches a year from start-up companies all across Southeast Asia and where they’ve raised $14 million of follow-on funding for DMP portfolio companies over last two years. DMP is a venture capital firm specialized in emerging digital markets of Southeast East Asia and focused on funding regional expansion opportunities. Please let them know your thoughts on DMP’s Facebook, Linkedin or AngelList pages.

Indonesia is home to more Muslims than any other country in the world. By jointly hosting the contest, Tencent hopes to appeal to at least nine of out of ten Indonesians. Tencent is pushing WeChat hard in the Southeast Asian market, which includes Indonesia’s mobile data users. Right now, WeChat is up against local telcos making their own messaging apps as well as major competitors like Line and KakaoTalk.

Local Indonesian startup Kreavi gives local visual creative talent an online platform to post portfolios, network with the community, and sell their services. The company often hosts visual creative contests.

The contest has already started and runs until July 10, so there’s still time if you want to join. Ramadan starts on July 9 and ends August 7 this year.

Thailand’s social media monitoring tool Zocial Inc today just announced its plan to expand to Indonesia through a joint venture partnership with media conglomerate MNC. The cooperation will see the Zocial team learning the Indonesian market through the guidance of MNC, as well as opening sales and service channels in the country.

Zocial Inc chose Indonesia as the first country to expand to. Naturally, because the country has excellent social media activities. Starting next month, the team will roll out its two social media monitoring tools ZocialEye and ZocialRank to Indonesian users. Furthermore, MNC plans to hold social media awards for individuals called the Zocial Award in the future.

The team explains their first priority would be to improve their own system like how they track customer behavior on social media sites. And afterwards, to localize their language system to the Indonesian language so that they can identify positive and negative sentiments more accurately.

It is interesting to note that the Indonesia expansion is just the company’s first step toward preparation for the upcoming ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). Zocial plans to expand to other countries within the ASEAN region in the coming years. MNC, on the other hand, looks to be very welcoming to foreign startups with other joint ventures with China-based WeChat and the partnership with Japan-based e-commerce site Rakuten Belanja Online.

The ones who will be welcoming Zocial’s arrival in Indonesia are startups venturing in the same space here like NoLimit, MediaWave, and Brand24, to name a few. It’ll be interesting to see who will come out on top when it comes to understanding the Indonesian language. A few would argue that locals should know better, but the MNC partnership can definitely tilt the advantage to the Thai startup.

In April this year, Zocial was also part of our Startup Arena pitching battle at Startup Asia Singapore 2013.

DealGuru Holdings, the parent company of Deal.com.sg and Room Service Dealivery, has announced it has separated its food delivery subsidiary, which will henceforth be called “Food Runner” (logo pictured above). And with the new subsidiary, it will be expanding aggressively into other countries within SEA, such as Thailand, Philippines, and Vietnam.

Operations in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia will be under Room Service Dealivery’s brand, which dishes a couple of million dollars’ worth of food deliveries to over 50,000 registered users. Food Runner will have an independent management board on its own, but DealGuru will still be active in Road Runner’s operations since the finances will come from its parent company. It will also take advantage of DealGuru’s strengths in online marketing, but ultimately DealGuru will not dictate what the delivery man does.

[Read also: Singapore Startup Deal.com.sg Records $50 million Yearly Revenue; Founder Shares His Starting Up Story]

On the decision for the spin-off, former DealGuru CFO and now Food Runner CEO Lance Frey explains:

The business has been growing strongly. We felt it had reached a point where it made sense to operate with the greater flexibility and focus that a separate business provides. While we will continue to improve our position in Singapore and Malaysia, the next big opportunity is expansion into other Southeast Asian markets, adding millions of consumers to our reach.

The company will be looking to either build or buy food delivery companies to strengthen its position within SEA. Lance is pretty tight-lipped about what’s exactly happening; but apparently the team is already in talks with some local delivery companies.

Founder and CEO of Rebate Networks Michael Brehm, an investor at DealGuru, predicts the food delivery market in SEA will be valued at $390 million by 2015. This figure is “driven by consumer demand, rising incomes, and continued urbanization”, says Michael. Also, the value is a replication of the success seen in other players within the food delivery markets, where they are generating revenues in the millions. Some noteworthy ones include Just Eat and Seamless/Grubhub from United States, Delivery Hero from Europe, Yemeksepeti from Turkey, and Delivery Club and Foodik from Russia.

Singapore-based startup Dropmysite now goes beyond back-ups. In an announcement today, it says it will now offer a service for current Dropmyemail business users (a service which they also run) to analyze all e-mails within the company.

Running through all employee e-mails won’t be easy. E-mail Insights, its new feature, allows companies to interpret their corporate e-mails and convert them to valuable insights for the business.

What insights, and how can they be valuable, you ask? Companies can now ensure complete transparency in their e-mails. Managers will have the ability to track all official communications that go in and out of their company. This will help managers assess employee performance through the volume of e-mail correspondence versus performance, identify employees’ contacts (like sales leads that are valuable to the business), and search for specific conversations. It also provides graphs for an easier understanding of the company’s data.

John Fearon, CEO and Founder of Dropmysite is positive that E-mail Insights will be “a new value-added service” to companies.

We expect this to eventually be a billion-dollar opportunity that will interest top Fortune 500 companies in all industries.

But the company also underscores that this will be beneficial to companies that value data privacy, like financial institutions, government agencies, and educational organizations. Businesses can already try Email Insights and its corporate email backup service free for 30 days.

Just two months ago, Dropmysite has received funding from 500 startups. In the deal, they not only received cash, but are also now in the loop of 500Startups mentors and entrepreneurs.

Dropmysite also announced that they will roll out more features soon. In their pipeline are algorithms that will help administrators predict fraud, data leakage, employee quitting and dissatisfaction, and unauthorized access.

Step 2: Based on the story you want to tell, work your network and identify the list of investors you’re after.

As a thousand articles on the web advise, do your research on potential investors before approaching them. The single most useful thing you can do is talk to the founders of companies your target investor funded – and, if you can find them, a couple of companies the investor passed on. Obvious as this may be, it is quite amazing how many startups still don’t find time to do this.

What is it you’re looking for? Apart from red flags on credibility and reputation, personal fit and such (always good to check!), you’re looking for a risk-return profile that fits the story you decided to pitch. A fund with financial engineering chops, large pool of deployable capital, and a few experienced investment bankers on board would fit the “Last Stop” scenario, but is unlikely to sit down with you for a detailed, multi-hour review of your conversion metrics or business processes necessary to assess a “Vitamin / Painkiller” or “Layered Cake” scenarios.

Conversely, smaller and higher-return oriented funds who would be able to support you in “More of the Same” and “Bump on the Road” scenarios might balk at higher investment quantum and non-business model specific risks involved in situations such as “Last Stop” or “Kill or be Killed” (see my first post for the definition of these terms). As most of the investors like to see as many deals as possible, it wouldn’t be straightforward to guess what it is they’re looking to fund from their web sites and public appearances. Strategies and levels of risk tolerance shift over time, so even portfolio data is sometimes misleading. But talking to portfolio companies and, in certain cases, to more junior members of the investment team (in the case of large institutional funds) tends to be rather revealing.

Once you have identified five or six names to talk to, see if you can apply a bit of fuzzy search methodology and don’t narrow down the list of people you engage too much. The digital space in Southeast Asia is sparsely populated on both sides – investors miss deal-flow in sectors they like, startups miss investors perceptive to their specific risks – so reaching out to a few investors who are an approximate match might produce interesting new results and angles. However, a roadshow one hundred meetings long is unlikely to be more effective than 10-15 meetings that are well-chosen.

A rule of thumb applied a lot by startups appears to be “Investor X is not investing at my stage; in my vertical; in my geography, but they have money so let’s pay them a visit”. While this is, yet again, understandable, we’d recommend a different approach, which is “will I actually learn something useful when Investor X says no to me?”, e.g. A snippet of market information? Some learning from investments in another market? A good introduction? Feedback on the story of my company? Will this be a “No” that might become “Yes” once there’s another “Yes” in my round?

To be continued. Stay tuned for Part 3 of this series, “How To Pitch Successfully to Investors for Follow-on Funding.”

This article was contributed by Mark and Dmitry from Digital Media Partners, where they get to see 600+ pitches a year from start-up companies all across Southeast Asia and where they’ve raised $14 million of follow-on funding for DMP portfolio companies over last two years. DMP is a venture capital firm specializing in emerging digital markets of Southeast East Asia and focused on funding regional expansion opportunities. Please let them know your thoughts on DMP’s Facebook, Linkedin or AngelList pages.

• 2010: AdNear extends footprint to Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand.

• 2013: AdNear launches in Malaysia and Indonesia. At the same time, it moves its global HQ to Singapore.

Sequoia-backed startup AdNear today launched its location-based ad platform in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The company has also announced it moved its global headquarters from India to Singapore.

Anil Mathews, CEO, AdNear, said:

As an established business hub, Singapore is the perfect launch pad for AdNear’s expansion into SEA markets. With Singapore as our home, we are able to better serve our regional customers and partners, and have a direct pulse into one of the most mobile-connected cities globally.

Unlike traditional mobile banner ads, AdNear helps retailers attract relevant customers based on their location. You can watch how AdNear works in this video:

Some companies that use AdNear include Samsung, Nokia, Toyota, Intel, Microsoft, Ford, Optus, Pizza Hut, Sony, and KFC. The company recently received $6.5 million from Sequoia Capital and Canaan Partners in November 2012.

Janna Lam is the founder of IP Mirror, a Singapore company which was established in 2000. After speaking with her, I’m impressed with her nonchalant attitude toward getting her hands dirty, doing the real work, and how she started up and grew IP Mirror into what it is today. All of which with no funding. Since Janna was a child, she showed an innate interest in knowing how things work. That continued during high school, where she was the kind of girl who would buy parts to assemble her own computer. Later she studied finance.

IP Mirror helps businesses with online domain registration and brand protection. In short, it is similar to GoDaddy in the US. On top of all that, IP Mirror also offers domain protection and can even help retrieve lost domains due to hijackings, lapsed renewals, or brand infringement issues. It has received 121 accreditations across the world and been appointed as an official registrar by many countries for country code domains. To date, it has more than 50,000 clients and manages over 100,000 domains. IP Mirror currently employs more than 40 staff, mostly in Asia where IP Mirror specializes. Janna tells me:

Our staff are mostly based in Asia. The main reason is that we want to be strong in Asia. We branded ourselves as the Asia online brand expert as we can help overcome languages barriers such as Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Bahasa Indonesia. We have all kind of staff in our office. Sometimes, people call us a United Nation.

How it all started

Janna started IP Mirror with her sister, Tessa, after they graduated from university. Coming from a poor Chinese family, Janna and Tessa were instilled with valuable principles of being highly independent, hard-working, humble, and keeping a keen eye on finances.

I studied university in Japan. As my family was very poor then, I had to self-finance for the tuition fees and the living costs. I would study very hard to get scholarships so that I need to pay less tuition fees. And on weekends I would work to pay the bills.

We started in 2000. At that time, we were working with overseas customers who want to register domain names in Asia. We help these customers to do it as during that time, Asia is like a mystical region; no one knows how to get things done here. So naturally, when you can speak English and they can understand you, it’s an advantage. Initially, we were doing a lot of domains in China, Malaysia and Singapore. The domains that we handled are the very local ones where the US and Europeans were issues getting them. We came into the limelight in 2002 when Singapore appointed an official registrar. IP Mirror was one of the first to be accredited as a registrar. That’s how people started to know us.

In 2005, IP Mirror was accredited by ICANN, the highest level of recognition for registrars. Janna remembered this accreditation fondly. IP Mirror is the first in Singapore to be accredited by ICANN. The team toiled more than nine months to fulfill all its stringent criteria.

Difficult moments

Janna’s success in the domain registrar industry did not come easy. She mentioned in her early days she slept just three to four hours per day-many times on the couch she worked on. Besides the toil, she was under the pressure to perform. The starting capital of $150,000 was borrowed from close relatives, and expectations were high.

But among the many problems Janna faced, she says disagreements within the team are the toughest:

The other hardest moment we had was when the team has disagreements among partners. It happens in business. It is the hardest part because we put trust and faith when we work with people. And when the partners fail you and did not do their part, it strains the partnership and spoils friendships. This is a sad thing.

For me, I won’t let the finance issue affect the business. Being finance trained, I’m very cautious with cash-flow. When we decide on doing something, we will have allocated a budget and make sure we have the money before we move in. We don’t want to be too ambitious to do too many things at one time. I’m very cautious in this aspect as we are still self-financed, without big investors backing us. So far, we have not asked for such an injection. In future, if we want to do something big, we will. Money is not everything, we value relationships more than money.

Janna concludes with her advice for young entrepreneurs:

Be honest, sincere, and hardworking. When you are honest and sincere, people can feel it. It’s not a bed of roses when you run your own business. You always have a lot of problems but there’s always some principles you need to keep to in order to be successful. After thirteen years, I’m still as hardworking as before. I work more than my staff. I want to lead by example as this will motivate the others to do likewise.

It looks like the Philippines and Canada-based payroll solutions provider PayrollHero, is gaining momentum and slowly positioning itself in the market. At least in the Philippines, for now.

Just for a quick recap, last year was a year of recognition for them. They won second place in our Startup Arena competition in Jakarta, and they were also awarded IT Startup of the Year by CyberPress. This year, along with the recent news that it has raised $1 million in seed funding from 500 startups, comes the ramping up of the company.

Increasing Philippine Interest

Stephen Jagger of PayrollHero says, in the Philippines, more than a thousand companies to date already request access to the system. For a company that just went live in January, it’s getting a good turnout from these local companies. This reflects a need in the market for a more technological payroll platform. Early last year, we shared PayrollHero’s pitch on providing web and mobile based payroll solutions to companies still using manual payroll records. Through their solution, employees can now clock-in through face biometrics using their iPads and iPhones.

But for PayrollHero, its not as simple as inviting companies to join the bandwagon. They are currently “picking and choosing the right types of companies that fit” their current set of solutions.

Our focus is not necessarily on adding tons and tons of random companies but more like making sure that the system works for the different companies.

PayrollHero welcomes companies who calculate their employees’ payroll on an hourly basis. The biggest industries they have tapped in the Philippines that match these requirements are food and beverage, retail, and small-to-medium sized outsourcing companies. He also names Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and online buying site MetroDeal as two of the many companies already using the platform.

Banking on A Flexible Platform for Expansion

Stephen highlights too that “the system is built in a very flexible way.” Evidence of this is their continuous rollout of new features. The PayrollHero team is now working on allowing companies to deal with the different daily rates in the Philippines. Their SEA expansion also has other new features including new languages and tax codes in their system.

The company’s next step is their targeted rollout of payroll services in Singapore within the year. This too, will be followed by other targeted countries like Indonesia and Malaysia (no specific time frame, yet). Stephen says they want to be careful with their expansion to make sure their rollout for each country is done without any issues.

For this year we’re focused on continuing to roll out our products in the Philippines, and add another country and start rolling out there, so we can make sure we know what we are doing.

Because of this seemingly fast growth, PayrollHero has also added five adventure engineers to their team, who will be based in Whistler, Canada. New roles such as customer service representatives, content creators, and book keepers (those who help customers with their books, and understanding the intricacies of payroll) are also now on the team.

PayrollHero couldn’t give us their current percentage of growth. But Stephen says their goal is definitely “to be the market leader in payroll and attendance scheduling in SEA.”

After day one on Kickstarter, Pirate3D’s Buccaneer saw over $300,000 raised, but funds from the crowd just kept coming in. In a blog post and email updates to backers, Pirate3D, Singapore’s first 3D printer company, has set a $1 million target on Kickstarter for its 3D Printer — The Buccaneer.

If the target is met, the startup says it will offer official acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) support as requested by folks at Kickstarter. Like most of you, I don’t know what ABS is, but Wikipedia offers quite a bit of an explanation. What I understand is that ABS is impact resistant, tough, and recyclable.

At it currently stands, over $830,000 has been raised so far with 18 days to go on Kickstarter. It looks very likely that Pirate3D will hit its seven-digit target. Pirate3D is arguably one of the most talked about startups in Singapore with many fellow countrymen rooting for their success.

Founded in 2008 by Mark Harbottle and Matt Mickiewicz, Australian crowdsourcing design site 99designs has grown to become the go-to site for design needs. Whether you want a new website, graphics, or logo, 99designs’ 225,000 designers are able to provide you with a variety of design choices for you to choose from. One design is uploaded every four seconds and 23 million designs have been uploaded thus far.

The beauty of 99designs is more than just the crowdsourced designs it provides for business owners or any users. It also provides an opportunity for many indie designers to put their talents to good use, allowing many of them, even those who live outside major cities, to make a living just by doing great designs. To date, 99designs has paid out more than $54 million to its designers. Out of that, $10 million has been paid out to designers in Indonesia and the Philippines. Jason Sew Hoy, chief operating officer and Asia-Pacific general manager at 99designs shared with me more:

There’s raw talent [in Indonesia and the Philippines]. The thing about 99designs as a platform is that it doesn’t matter were you come from or which design school you come from, who you are or what your language is. If you can come out with the best design […] then you deserve to be the winner.

99designs is available in multiple languages including English, French, German, Dutch, and Italian. In recent months, it has also taken a closer look at Asia, having launched its Hong Kong and Singapore sites with a local domain and currency. Despite Indonesia and Philippines being hot spots for 99designs, it still doesn’t yet have a localized site for each country.

99designs’ first round of funding was $35 million from Accel Partners in 2011 and claims to be already profitable venture with 95 employees spread across globally.

In Asia Pacific, 99designs are up against similar sites like Australia’s DesignCrowd, Japan’s Crowdworks, and Indonesia’s Sribu.

In Vietnam, there are hundreds of startups. But most of them are in the consumer space. Big and small companies are always jumping into gaming, some attempting social media, and others doing B2B or B2C e-commerce. But what we very rarely see in terms of e-tailing is B2G. In other words, business to government. And that’s exactly what makes TS24 so unique.

TS24 is a company that started up in 2003, but officially manifested in its current form in 2009. And its strongest area of expertise for the past four years and prior? Taxes.

Taxing work

I sat down with founder and CEO Nguyen Phan Viet Thuy to talk about his company, which is currently the market leader in tax processing software. Thuy is unique among local entrepreneurs in that his background is actually in a state-owned enterprise. From that time he has strong connections and relationships with the tax departments of Vietnam.

Thuy was also in the unique position to help push forward the legislation that allows tax software to operate. In other words, not only is he a first mover, but he’s also a ‘first legislator’. This legislation paved the way for TS24 (and its future competitors) to operate in two unique ways:

• Handling income tax for businesses for the government
• Handling import tax for businesses for the government

Thus, more aptly, TS24 is a B2B2G (business to business to government model), which streamlines the taxation process for both businesses and the government. According to Thuy:

While working in the tax department, we identified that there was a need to make filing taxes easier. For example, the tax laws change quite frequently and people who are using paper to file must always check back with the new paperwork and tax departments to file. At TS24, we automatically update new tax laws into our system and they’re accounted for every time a company files taxes.

In other words, TS24 optimizes the complicated process of filing taxes while also accounting for Vietnam’s continuous legal changes. This process is also carried over to Vietnam’s import taxes. With Vietnam’s many international sea ports as well as border crossings, international and domestic companies are constantly shipping in and out of the country. Each type of products has got its own case-by-case basis tax, and TS24’s software also handles this.

Over $2 million in investment

In 2010, DFJ VinaCapital pumped a whopping $2 million into TS24. Today, the company has over 40,000 customers. More than 50 percent of those customers are paying, and the other half are on a six-month freemium trial. By upgrading, customers get access to more features. Today, with these numbers, TS24 is already profiting as of 2012. Technically, TS24 is quite sophisticated. With 30 of the 100 staff on its technical team, they’re not only able to build and implement hardware for digital signatures, but also to build a sophisticated platform that can operate on any operating system. Something, Thuy claims, his competitors are unable to do.

In the next few months, we’ll be releasing iOS and Android apps. These apps, just like the computers that are running our software, can plug in a digital signature dongle into the audio jack of the PC or Mac, and they can file their taxes with the government. Digital signatures are born out of a world where companies use more than one operating license.

All of these technologies have been not only supported but also pioneered by the Vietnamese government.

Working with the government and educating the people

Thuy says that Vietnam is unique because the complicated taxation process has bred the need for innovative technologies like digital signatures and taxation software platforms. This is something Thuy says is not even possible in the US.

The really cool thing about TS24 is that the government has even stepped up to publicize and run training sessions with TS24’s software. At events that number anywhere from 300 to 1,000 people, TS24’s staff train companies and individuals in how to use the software. Thuy wants TS24 to become synonymous with tax software.

Let me explain this from a personal point of view being a female in my twenties who likes to keep up with fashion trends yet has no time for visits to the mall. I resort to online shopping where I can browse and shop at unholy hours in the comfort of my own home, with ASOS and Taobao bookmarked as my top shopping sites. But often there’s just too much information on the web and I appreciate platforms that aggregate and facilitate fashion discovery. So while being based in Beijing, Melishuo and Mogujie are fantastic tools for fashion discovery. And here’s a startup when Pinterest meets Pic Collage for fashion built for the Asian audience: Styleprofile.me.

The Singapore-based startup positions itself as a social commerce platform that allows users to discover fashion products, make into a collage, and share them with your friends. So you can create your own outfit by selecting from over 30,000 items from over 30 online stores and dropping them onto a blank canvas. Then gather opinions from the Styleprofile community as well as your friends on your look. Running out of ideas to wear for that hot date this weekend? You can follow your friends or like-minded fashionistas and get inspired by their styles. In essence, the beauty of the Styleprofile platform lies in the “interactive nature” it provides, which is a “perfect foundation for users to discuss fashion, collaborate, and build their ideal style profile”, says co-founder Liling Ong.

Four months and nine heavyweight online fashion merchants already in partnership with Styleprofile. How?

Styleprofile was developed in February, but is already in partnership with nine heavyweight online fashion merchants such as ASOS, Shopbob, Free People, Revolve Clothing, Fashionesta, Eves Apple, Shoptiques, Forever 21, and Singer22. Upon logging in, users will be able to select any product they fancy from the online stores and create an outfit. There are also filters in place that allows users to search via product category, brand, color, and price.

To be honest, for a Singapore-based startup in its infant stages having the ability to attract online shopping sites such as UK-based ASOS and US-based Forever 21 to be on board as partners is pretty impressive. How did Liling and her team manage to do that?

We were fortunate in that most of them had signed up in [our] ‘Partnership Programs’ with us before launch. To be honest, there was not much convincing done on our part – they saw and liked our product, the design and value that we create for our users. Also we are the first website in Asia presenting fashion products to consumers in this social manner, and this was [the main reason why it] attracted the shops to partner with us as many of them have set their sights on the Asian market.

How different is Styleprofile from other sites, such as Mogujie, Melishuo, and Pinterest?

The idea of social commerce isn’t new. We have Melishuo and Mogujie from China, as well as Pinterest and Polyvore from the United States.

But the difference between the Chinese sites and Styleprofile is that the latter allows users to interact with products to create outfits on their own, says Liling.

Styleprofile allows you create looks online via our outfit builder, on top of saving products and outfits of others. You can even ‘remix’ someone else’s outfit too, if you feel you have a better way of piecing the matching the products. [More importantly,] everything you see on our website can be purchased online.

Styleprofile allows you to showcase your favorite products and outfits, acting as your own online style journal. Liling elaborates:

Users can save any product on our platform onto their profile, mix and match it with other products they like. We enable our users to share their fashion picks with their friends through various features of the platform, such as sharing, tagging a friend, and sending their outfits to Pinterest or Facebook.

We also have on board five personalities in Singapore to be our ‘Style Advisors’. Each ‘Style Advisor’ has her own unique flare and appeal to our target demographic (women aged between 16 to 35). It is a unique way where we can provide our users with first hand style advice from experts.

First mover advantage and agility as a young startup

Liling says the team is definitely mindful of existing competition, especially when Pinterest is one of the leading sites in social commerce. But Styleprofile prides itself as the only website in Asia boasting features that allows you to create looks. Over time with more traction and user acquisitions, the team hopes “to evolve into a platform which has an Asian flavour and style.” And being a small team allows them to act fast. In the next two months, Liling reveals, that the platform would be launching a new feature that enables users to send any product they fancy to their personal Styleprofile page:

This essentially allows our user to create an online wish list and promotes product discovery. The outfit builder enables each user to combine all the products that they like and create an ‘outfit’ or ‘style’ with them. This adds that extra personal touch to their profile.

Furthermore, users tend to enjoy window shopping online first, taking some time to think of a purchase and then heading back to seal the deal. By allowing our users to interact with products that they like, we are helping our users [reaffirm their purchase decisions]. All items purchased through Styleprofile are also stored in each user’s profile, so you will have a record of all your online purchases.

The site aims to be user’s “online fashion and style journal.”

How Styleprofile puts the bucks into its pockets

How the site puts money into its pretty little pocket – one method – is pretty obvious. A percentage cut between five to 15 percent (depending on the partnering store) will be collected for each transaction. Another is through special brand campaigns and the team will be exploring other revenue streams in the upcoming months.

At present the site redirects you to the online store when you want to make a purchase. But personally as an avid online shopper, it would be great if the platform does offer a one-stop checkout, where I can make all the purchases I fancy on the same platform instead of being redirected to the different shopping sites. Liling says this is something the team is aware of, and will be addressing it in future.

Filling the gap in Asia’s online fashion arena

Liling tells us that the minimum viable product (MVP) was ready around mid April, and has been going through iterations since. The idea struck them when they saw a gap in Asia’s online fashion arena, and have been doing in-depth research and understanding the users’ needs and wants.

We realized that women love communicating with their friends about their style and purchases. They also enjoy seeing how other women style themselves and this planted the seed of building a product that has a strong social element in it. We also are strongly motivated by trends in social commerce and believe that the future of e-commerce integrates a strong social element.

It is these fundamental beliefs that have molded the product into what it is today.

So, from a woman’s point of view, I have to agree with this. I find a lot of female friends on my Instagram taking selfies (self-taken shots) and including hashtags such as #ootd (outfit of the day) and #wiwt (what I wore today). Admittedly, we all have that little bit of exhibitionistic nature in us to want to share and fish for praises, which is further fueled by voyeuristic curious nature in the audience. And being on mobile platform allows us to easily take screenshots of these Instagram pictures, to send them to group chat messages, and then to discuss about it.

Besides, being in the attention age where we experience an overdose of information with merchants constantly vying for consumers’ attention, such social commerce platforms would definitely prosper, because it better facilitates fashion discovery. But eventually eventually the who survives till the very end, depends on how well you understand your users, from facilitating the discovery, to paying attention to the minor details that enhances the shopping experience, and eventually making sure it is easy to get consumers to take money out of their wallets.

The brains behind the platform: Driven by passion for building a fashion startup and network

The team comprises of three co-founders, which includes Liling Ong, Roland Felber, and Manuel Gruber. Liling hails from a clinical psychology and law background and co-founded Jasmine & Lilac, an e-commerce platform selling fashion accessories. As for Roland, he worked as a management consultant and co-founded and ran a student-run business consultancy prior. And Manuel was previously the head of mobile at DailyDeal GmbH (which was acquired by Google in 2011). The three co-founders are all bonded by a common passion: To build a fashion startup and network for users.

While Facebook stores haven’t worked out so well for major retailers, so-called f-commerce is still a force to be reckoned with for smaller merchants, businesses, and fashion labels. It’s also a great niche for Asian startups to serve as Facebook shop creation platforms. One such offering is Malaysia-based Square.my which has been in private beta for a year and is now running in public beta since March this year.

Quite a few Malaysian celebrities are using this startup’s f-commerce platform for their indie fashion collections, such as Mizz Nina’s Mizz Demeanor label.

The startup wants to centralize all the actions in a blogshop or Facebook store – from inventory management, to payment processes and social marketing. Square.my promises that it’s a lot more efficient, and its service is free to use.

Square.my’s goal is not only to help entrepreneurs setup their web stores at an affordable price, but also to solve the notorious e-payment issues that come with doing e-commerce in Southeast Asia. To that end, Square.my lets shoppers on its merchant partner stores use either Paypal or MOLPay. But there’s also the choice of cash transfers. That’s because, explains Square.my co-founder Luqman Adris, Malaysian online shoppers still prefer manual payments over web-based credit card purchases, so the cash transfer option enables them to pay manually through a bank/ATM deposit and upload the payment receipt to the store. So the e-payment issues are far from solved, but the choices are in place.

Indian expansion

The bootstrapping team of five at Square.my is about to expand its social commerce business to India with the aid of a local Indian partner. That will be likely wrapped up and revealed soon.

In terms of other features for merchants, Square.my offers automatic product image uploads to Facebook albums, Blogspot, and the merchant’s own website – that’s so “sellers can have multiple sales channels in addition to their Facebook shop,” explains Luqman.

We’ve seen quite a few Asian startups in this Facebook shopping niche, such as MySellr and Malaysian-made Instapps.

While a lot of startups pay attention to more general problems to be solved with mobile apps or vertical e-commerce sites, this particular Indonesian startup tries to solve a more niche set of problems that few delve into: typography, or font types. Everybody uses fonts, and the right font can make a real difference on your site or comic. FontPro wants to help people find and download beautiful fonts more easily. Founder Yudhis Adi Nugroho tells us about how they plan to do that.

For starters, the site claims over 20,000 free fonts are available for people to browse and download. I found the site’s clean look easy on the eyes. Browsing and downloading the available fonts is also quite easy in many formats like HTML and CSS.

What’s nice is how FontPro lets users preview the selected fonts in many layouts, like in different sizes or in a paragraph. Users can also compare how the fonts look side by side using the typeface testing tool (pictured below).

Solving two problems

FontPro is founded by Surabaya-based developer Yudhis. He says they do not produce any of the fonts, but collect them from available sources. The idea is to help people find and download them easily. A few demo fonts on the site don’t have complete character sets yet. They require the user to donate money to the designer for the complete set.

What specific problem is he looking to solve? Yudhis says there are two. The first is about making font searches easier. The classic way for people to search for fonts is done in four steps: browsing, downloading, installing, and trying the font mockup on their computer. If the font isn’t suitable, users repeat that process all over again, which is quite tiring. FontPro helps eliminate a step, allowing people to see and compare the mockup before the download.

The second problem he solves is how even the biggest font source, DaFont.com, doesn’t offer its fonts in web formats. With FontPro, you can get all the font formats in just one click, claims Yudhis. All of this can definitely save web designers a lot of time in their work.

Monetizing from typography

So how do you earn money from this business? Yudhis explains two business models to us. First is premium membership. Premium members will be able to use more advanced features on the typeface testing tool in the future. Second is through a fonts marketplace. The way the team plans to do this is by building an extension tool for Adobe CS and plugin for Office programs. With those tools, users can download and purchase fonts directly from the programs. It can help people focus on their work without the need to open the FontPro site again, says Yudhis.

Are there a lot of people who want to sell fonts professionally? Yes, it seems like it. And they are quite expensive as well. Some fonts can cost you between $29 to $2,000. Although this is quite a niche market, professional designers are among those who Yudhis hopes will purchase these premium fonts.

I have to say that this line of business is definitely not a common one for Indonesian tech startups. The execution looks to be good so far, and the benefits it offers are quite nice too. But what do you think? Does FontPro have what it takes to succeed in this industry? Tell us what you think about it in the comment section below.

Bang With Friends, a social network for people to hook up with their Facebook friends, has gained both notoriety and popularity this year. It’s inevitable that format will be reworked – and in this case, Indonesian developer Yudhi Mandey has come up with TristUp.

TristUp is a social network for people to “level up” their friendship. Just like Bang With Friends, after logging in using your Facebook account, you will get to choose which friends you’d secretly like to hook up with. To get a match, both parties need to choose “date or shag” (yes, those are the actual options). If not, they will be notified that there’s a “misfire” and there are no possible connections.

The friend selection screen is similar to Bang With Friends’ Pinterest-like layout. Too bad the TristUp friend selection is simply arranged alphabetically as I think randomized is better. You can filter the selection based on some preferences like religion and interests. But it didn’t work when I tried. Maybe that’s because none of my buddies have signed up for TristUp.

Going viral in Indonesia and Australia

Does TristUp have what it takes to go viral just like its inspiration site? It seems like it so far. Launched just last month, Yudhi says it has 500 registered users (pretty much among friends and friends of friends) in its first three days of operation. But after one and a half weeks, the site reached almost 3,000 users with zero marketing. While the team’s primary targets are Indonesian, almost 70 percent of TristUp’s registered users come from Australia – more specifically from three colleges in Queensland and some from Brisbane.

Yudhi is still confident that TristUp is suitable for more conservative Indonesians. He did a bit of research that found most Indonesian singles aged 16 to 28 are too shy to reveal their intention to get out of the so-called friendzone. He believes that TristUp can help them fill that need anonymously, and will start pushing Indonesian targeted ads within the month. He also added that anything that smells of sex and controversy can sell in Indonesia.

More dating features

To set the startup apart from Bang With Friends, Yudhi will add a video chat speed dating feature to TristUp in the next three months. The new TristUp feature will choose 10 women and guys based on things like location, interests, and age. Users will then have a limited time to introduce themselves and chat with their potential mates.

During that timeline, TristUp will also add a chat-like platform and smartphone apps, which have app-specific features like looking for a date nearby. At the end of the year, TristUp will also hold an offline meetup in Bali. Ambitiously, Yudhi hopes to have one million users by the end of this year.

Monetizing on the dancefloor

I don’t think Bang With Friends is monetizing its product yet. How would the Indonesian version be different? By using a freemium model. First will be a premium user category on TristUp. Free users will get limited feature usage, like a maximum number of video chat speed dating instances per month. Yudhi plans to charge users $2 a month. The app’s “find the nearest user” feature will also be premium. Users need to buy TristUp’s tokens to access the location-based flirting.

Interestingly, the team is also in talks with nightclubs in Jakarta, Bandung, and Bali for possible cooperation. The idea is to use TristUp’s apps as free entry to the club for premium subscribers. Using TristUp, users can detect other users who are inside that same club and maybe use the app to get a dancefloor partner. So far, two clubs have jumped onboard.

Yudhi is also in talks with local VCs to get the startup energized further in its attempt to get one million users by the end of this year. Before TristUp, Yudhi previously built babycare information site BibTalk and medical info startup TipsDokter.

So what do you think, folks? Do you think TristUp is one to look out for in the coming years?

Created earlier this year, the Beijing-based startup aims to ease your ordering process by churning out a list of recommended dishes for you, along with the average price per pax within 10 seconds. All that is required of you is to indicate if the app has accurately detected your location and how many people you are dining with. Don’t like the combination given? Just shake your phone and a new list will be generated until you’re satisfied.

And if you prefer to have some control over what is on the list and would like to remove a particular dish from the list, all you need to do is to swipe to the right and that is done (pictured right). Still prefer to have full control over what goes into your stomach? Fanqie Kuaidian also boasts full menus for most restaurants in the four cities listed above, and also indicates which dishes are most popular, so now you will know which dishes are “must-order” according to patrons who have visited the restaurant.

You can also take tantalizing photographs of the dishes and upload according to what you have ordered. It also works as a food journal (pictured right) where you can reminisce on how that piece of peking duck was roasted to perfection and melts in your mouth without having to chew. You can also contribute to the dish’s ranking by giving it a thumbs up or down.

Aside from recommending what dishes you should order, the app also includes little pockets of information to educate the diner. For instance, if you are dining at a Korean restaurant, it explains why Korean chopsticks are flat and made of metal; it also tells you what would be good to consume for the current season, as well as its nutritional value. And the app is designed in such a way that the more you use it, the more it understands your eating habits. So it will be able to recommend better dishes every single time you whip out the app to aid in your order.

The startup also claims that its creation has become one of the top recommended apps by Apple within just one month of launch, and it has been featured on third-party Android app store WanDouJia as one of the best designed apps.

So if you happen to be in those four cities in China and are spoiled for choice (provided if you read Chinese, of course) when it comes to ordering food, do give the app a go on your iPhone or your Android device.

This picture was taken on William (left) and Leon’s (right) first year building Tokopedia.com

Tokopedia has grown over the years to become one of the favorite C2C marketplace destinations for Indonesians to buy and sell.

Founded in 2009 by William Tanuwijaya and Leontinus Alpha Edison, the company is one of the top 50 most visited sites in Indonesia according to Alexa and claims to be the number one online marketplace site in Indonesia. It has over 770,000 active listings and its gross merchandise value (GMV) in 2012 grew by 686 percent compared to the year before. Tokopedia also claims to have at least 53 percent repeat buyers each month.

Some might see Tokopedia as the eBay of Indonesia but co-founder William would like to think that Tokopedia is more like China’s Taobao. William looks up to Taobao’s creator, Alibaba founder Jack Ma, as a role model, often researching into Taobao history and Ma’s speeches for inspiration. In many ways, Tokopedia and William do resemble Taobao and Ma. For example, Tokopedia insists in not charging merchants for utilizing its marketplace which is what Taobao did in its early days – that’s one key way that Taobao beat eBay in China. William told me more:

We learned from Jack Ma that small is beautiful and we also believe in the power of individuals and small medium enterprises (SMEs) in Indonesia. We learned that Taobao really focuses on solving problems – which are trust and efficiency in the Chinese market.

When we started our company, the e-commerce ecosystem was non-existent [in Indonesia], and we thought if no one starts to build a proper e-commerce ecosystem, then it will never improve.

Jack Ma isn’t William’s only idol. “When we started our company, we admire the Google founders so much,” he said. William insists that Tokopedia isn’t only an e-commerce company but it is more of an internet company which wants to make an impact and change people’s lives. Both Google and Alibaba, he says, have such vision. It turns out to be Tokopedia’s vision too but on a more local level. “Our company vision is to better shape Indonesia through the internet,” he told me.

Facing the big boys

Tokopedia’s journey hasn’t been easy as it faces multiple giants along its way. In its first year, Tokopedia faced Telkom-eBay’s Plasa.com which looks to be hanging on by a thread. In the second year, it faced Rakuten Belanja Online, a joint venture online marketplace between Rakuten and MNC which looks to be doing well. In Tokopedia’s third year, Multiply came onto the scene, transforming itself from a social/blogging platform into an online marketplace which we now know is sadly in the deadpool.

“With very limited resources, we have no choice other than work harder than everyone else to survive the competition,” said William. Of course, there are other giant competitors like Facebook with the ‘f-commerce’ phenomenon, discussion forum site Kaskus where a lot of C2C selling happens, and online classifieds site Tokobagus where consumers can also buy goods online. But William argues that forums and classifieds sites works perfectly if people only plan to sell just one item like renting out an apartment, or selling one old motorbike or some used mobile phones – but that’s not the right kind of platform for small businesses.

On Tokopedia, William explains that merchants that come on board usually have many different models and units. He highlights several pain points as to why social networks, forums, and classifieds sites aren’t suitable for serious online merchants to do business. For example, most forums and classified sites do not have a shopping cart, inventory management system, and payment processing services. For logistics, Tokopedia helps buyers to track the products by partnering with several shipping partners. William shared more:

In many ways, the Taobao model works very well in Indonesia. Taobao has the escrow function. If you don’t receive the product, Taobao will not release the payment. Tokopedia works the same.

Tokopedia has proven to work well for some of its merchants. In the process of building Tokopedia, William has witnessed several of its merchants, some of whom are housewives, generating over billions of rupiah (more than $100,000) in sales each month. “The beauty of an entrepreneur is that we can help people. As an internet company we want to build a platform to help others do e-commerce,” he said.

Despite speaking highly of Jack Ma and Taobao, William does not plan to give face if the Chinese e-commerce giant decides to enter Indonesia. If that happens, William says confidently that Alibaba will be the shark in the ocean while Tokopedia will be the crocodile in the river.

We’re back with our weekly list and this week, and we have quite a number of startups featured from China. Remember, for startup tips and story suggestions, feel free to email us. Alternatively, you can send tips here and/or tell us about your startup here. Enjoy this week’s list!

1. Dolphin Browser | China

China’s Dolphin Browser is a mobile browser that aims to be smart enough to learn each user’s needs and adapt to them to give users the best browsing experience they can have on their own mobile phones. Learn about their success story and Southeast Asia expansion plans in our coverage here!

2. Shopdeca | Indonesia

Shopdeca is a brand new clothing e-commerce site that launched in Indonesia this week, with over 30 local and international brands on board and it seems to be aiming for the higher end of the market. The startup has also revealed that it has received seed funding from early-stage VC firm East Ventures. (Disclosure: East Ventures is also an investor in TechinAsia).

3. RI1.tv | Indonesia

In light of the upcoming Indonesian presidential election, RI1.tv aims to connect Indonesian citizens with the country’s president and the general election process. The site offers users the ability to ‘vote’ for the candidate they hope can be elected as president, and lets people issue challenges to those same candidates about dire problems that need to be tackled by the next president. Furthermore, RI1 users can also read about the presidential candidates and find related news about them.

4. BitFash | China & Australia

Bitfash is a fashion e-commerce site that transacts its payments in Bitcoins instead of real money and was created by a startup team of three people spread across Australia and China. Currently, Bitfash stocks men’s and women’s clothing from three affordable to mid-range fashion brands: Zara, Forever 21, and Net-a-Porter’s ‘Mr. Porter’.

5. Penta | Thailand

Thailand’s Penta is a cool company that combines hardware and software into their product, Pentabox. The $150 Pentabox is a set top box that runs on Penta’s own operating system (built on top of Linux) that can be plugged into any screen. Thus, Penta works closely with companies to design new ways that it can be used in commercial, educational, and other undiscovered settings.

6. iMoney | Malaysia

Founded last April, iMoney is a free service that helps regular people make comparisons between banks for loans, credit cards, savings, and other banking services. It has data for over 200 credit cards, 500 loan packages, and thousands of investment products. This week, the founder released that they have raised $500,000 in seed funding from Asia Venture Group (AVG) and will use the cash for its expansion across Southeast Asia.

7. UrbanIndo | Indonesia

Founded in November 2011, Indonesian online real estate marketplace UrbanIndo claims to be “the most innovative real estate search in Indonesia.” It simplifies the search process by allowing its users to query directly on a map, complete with features like neighborhood reports, similar properties, and price distribution analysis of a neighborhood within a specific listing. The startup has concluded a series A financing round led by Japan-based GREE Ventures and IMJ Fenox this week.

8. PiktoChart | Malaysia

Malaysia’s Piktochart is a simple, fast online infographic builder for both designers and non-designers. Just recently,it has officially hit 300,000 users and co-founder Ai Ching shared how the startup pulled it off in a blog post.

9. Alo7 | China

With a claimed 10 million registered users right now, Chinese online education company Alo7, which was started in 2010, has wrapped up a third major round of funding with the lead investor being American chipmaker Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM), with participation from UMC Capital and Vickers Venture.

10. Apricot Forest | China

Beijing-based Apricot Forest publicly launched its iPhone app last month and according the the founder is an “Evernote for physicians” with the goal of providing the best mobile apps for physicians to make their work easier and more efficient.

10. WanPai | China

China’s WanPai is basically a Vine clone, specifically created to cater to Chinese users and bring the video-sharing fun to Chinese social networks Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, and Renren.

Startups in incubators/contests

11 – 17. JFDI’s Demo Day: Over 100 Investors, One Dave McClure, and 7 Startup Pitches | Singapore

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• New Startup Event in Beijing Deflowers Hackathon Virgins
• How Thailand’s Big Three Telcos are Powering the Startup Ecosystem
• GEPI Sets Up Angel Investor Network in Indonesia with Female Entrepreneurs in Mind
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• Adi Kusma Shares Founding Story of Biznet and Urges Startups to be Their Own Chefs
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Events

We are bringing our Tech in Asia Meetup next to Bandung, Indonesia! Specially for this session, representatives from Samsung and Vserv will be there to share about how developers can better monetize and distribute their mobile apps.

Check here for event and registration details. Tickets are free, so grab them while stocks last!

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

Last week we wrote about online grocery store BenLai.com, and how it aims to be the top provider of quality groceries delivered right to your doorstep. So what’s next after you’ve bought all the grocery from there? Here’s what we’ve found: XiaChuFang (下厨房).

XiaChuFang, which means “to cook”, is available on both mobile and web platforms. It carries a wide selection of recipes, from what you can cook for both breakfast and supper to dishes for vegetarians and weight watchers. When you have decided on what you would like to make, it shows a picture of the end product, along with the ratings and the number of people that have made the dish before. Like any other typical recipe platform, it also tells you the ingredients required as well as the step-by-step instructions (pictured above).

But here’s a little detail that I really like about the iPhone app: When you tilt it horizontally, each individual step goes full screen (pictured right), and a swipe across brings you to the next step. I find it really helpful especially when your hands are all greasy and you don’t have to squint your eyes just to make out what the exact instructions are. I’m sure many who do cook would appreciate this.

There are also little tips that guide you to achieving better results. You can also leave comments, suggestions, complaints, and upload pictures of your completed product too. And it also recommends what other dishes you can cook to go with the ones you’ve picked, along with other related recipes they think you might like. And if you like a particular user’s dishes, there’s an option to follow them too.

You can also choose to “collect recipes”, making them into a collection so you can look back and give it a try while standing in front of the fridge racking your brains over what to cook. Another feature that I find really useful is that you can add the ingredients to the “shopping list”. Once you’re done shopping for that particular ingredient, you can cancel it off with just one tap (pictured below).

However it is still a little buggy and at present does not allow you to upload your own step-by-step instructions via the app itself yet. You can do it on the website, but I would think it would actually be more convenient if it supports mobile upload. There is definitely still room for improvement, but I think the app is pretty clean and easy to navigate, and is especially useful for when it gets really messy in the kitchen.

And yes, the best way to know what’s really going through that digestive system of yours is to take control of what is being added during the cooking process. If you do cook often and would like to give the app a try, you can visit its website here, or download on your mobile device, which is available on both iOS and Android platforms.

The Indonesian startup scene is definitely one to follow in the coming years. Besides taking a look into the various startups popping up here and there, we should also be looking into the ones who have made it to the top. To that end, I talked with one Adi Kusma (pictured above) about his story of building his company Biznet Networks. He also has plenty of advice startups should heed.

Biznet offers a huge range of services which include being an internet service provider (ISP), data center, and TV cable networks. It all started with just one product, which was its ISP service back in 2000. Realizing that there’s huge market potential in the then burgeoning ISP business in Indonesia, Adi gathered $5 million of family money as capital to build Biznet.

Startup advice

This is where he shares his first bit of advice to startups: “The value proposition of your product must be clear, whether it is better pricing or it is more convenient for people to use your product.” After seven months of development, Biznet was launched in October 2000. By that time, the company already had a few clients. Back then, Biznet was able to offer both more convenience and keener pricing to customers. Users could get the same service as from competitors but for half the price at Biznet, Adi says, as well as a faster installation process which would only take about three days. The other players at that time needed three months for first-time installation.

It is like selling fried rice, if you open your stall today, there will definitely be customers buying your food right away. If you have the right product, and the demand is there, then you will have buyers.

Credit: Observer.com

The second advice I got from Adi is this: you must be the chef of your product. Rewinding back to the days when Adi was working as a programmer in the US, he was taking extra courses from Microsoft as well as consulting with American ISP players to learn about industry know-how. Besides working as a full-time programmer, Adi was also tinkering with his own “ISP lab” in his house. Only after he was sure that he could emulate the technology back in Indonesia did he come back here and do another seven months of rigorous learning and development here. The same way a chef would work and rework his or her next new dish.

He recalls the days where he stayed up late to learn about DNS server. Again using an example and metaphor from cookery, he explained that his friend’s restaurant business went haywire because the chef quit. The business owners weren’t able to replicate the kind of dishes that the chef cooked. Yes you can hire other chefs, but it’s going to be very expensive, something that a startup can’t afford. Successful restaurant chains like Bakmi GM or KFC have chefs as owners.

Adi’s third slice of advice is about timing. You should not be too late or too early to grab the opportunity. He gave the example of the tablet-like Apple Newton in 1993. The product wasn’t ready because the internet infrastructure wasn’t there yet. As a mobile device, it couldn’t do too much at the time ¹. Being too late to arrive to the market is also not good, how do you compete with the other players if they already have millions of users already? It’s going to be hard. Adi noted that there were only 13 buildings that used Biznet’s service in 2006. But after that time, the business was able to grow very fast. Now there are 560 buildings that are connected to Biznet’s service. The team also grew from less than 10 personnels in 2000 to 800 employees now.

When launching your startup, you definitely need to understand yourself and your competitors. Whether you have the capacity to compete with them, and how you plan to do that. Three things that a startup should have are integration of money, brain, and guts. Adi also mentioned that startups should have an understanding of finance management. He didn’t use up all of the $5 million capital he prepared, but he spent it across a few years time.

Biznet’s current startup project: AniMarsh

During the chat, Adi shared that their current project Animarsh can be defined as a startup. Animarsh is a seven-minute kids show which has been in the development stage for the past two years. Adi argues that while Japan has Doraemon and other countries have their own famous intellectual property and characters, Indonesia doesn’t yet have this kind of world-famous IP character. He wants to change that with Animarsh.

Sticking true to his words, Adi explained that the first year of Animarsh development was a failure. But that time was needed for them to learn the know-how behind 3D animation development, they were being their own chef in creating the product. He also admitted that they had to undergo that process because he wasn’t able to find a good Indonesian company to outsource the project to.

Animarsh will be launched later this year, and it will first be played on Biznet’s cable TV kids channel Max3 Kids. Adi hopes to sell the TV show to other countries, and make the characters famous. At the end of the show’s credits, Adi was proud to note that he put the phrase “proudly made in Indonesia” there.

You can check out Animarsh’s trailer below:

via Reddit

Every entrepreneur in Asia is looking enviously at Singapore and its government as they pump millions and millions of dollars into new tech startups . It’s natural to be jealous. But across the region, we’re slowly seeing new influences in investment across the cities of the world. And as you should know already, Asia’s got more billionaires than North America.

The money is there, but creating a tech startup is really only a trend that has taken off in the past decade or so, whereas Silicon Valley has been the center of technological innovation since the early 1960s when Gates and Jobs were still green. Investors like the PayPal mafia have grown out of a culture of risk. They’re primed for risk. But in Asia, investors come from a hodgepodge of sources disconnected across the region.

For Vietnam, the effect of this has been that investors don’t take as many risks. Some of the previously biggest investors in technology in Vietnam are slowly moving away from technology startups and back into more traditional investments like brick-and-mortar industries with more visible income streams. For some, it’s brought up a worrying question: are tech and web startups not lucrative enough or are investors not risking enough?

For some entrepreneurs I’ve spoken to (who wish to remain anonymous) the trend is obvious. “E-commerce sites get more funding these days because investors have short-term thinking. They want to see the money now, and they’re not willing to invest in startups that are playing for a longer term strategy,” says one founder of a startup in Vietnam. There’s certainly no denying that e-commerce is currently the most crowded space in startups in Vietnam these days. Many think it’s the result of investors having no guts to invest in the long-term.

This line of reasoning becomes even more compelling when you look at the amount of startups that are largely subsidized by an outsourcing model. Ubox, Terrabook, Vietnam Maps Puzzle, Silo.vn, and a lot more, are all doing product development now but their main source of income remains outsourcing. One reason is because there’s no money out there to support independent startups that do it on their own. On the other side, investors here are also struggling to find startups that they find worthy to invest in. It’s a catch-22.

And yet, there are plenty of startups in Vietnam nowadays that are getting investment from investors outside of Vietnam. Is that because investors in Vietnam have lost their risk capability? Have they become cynical after investing in Vietnam for too long? What’s it like in your country?

Patrick Linden is the co-founder of Dealguru Holdings, whose services include a daily deals site Deal.com.sg, an online food delivery service Room Service Dealivery as well as a recently launched curated marketplace for fashion, beauty products and electronics that operates mainly in Singapore and Malaysia. Patrick grew up in Germany and came over to Singapore six years ago. Patrick is very knowledgeable in the e-commerce industry and knows Southeast Asia well. While sharing his startup journey with us, he also gave us his perspective about the industry and urged entrepreneurs to stay firm in what they believe in and not be easily swayed by antagonists. So what has he been through on his voyage?

During his stay in Singapore in 2007, Patrick co-founded iHIPO, a startup that functions like a Linkedin for students and undergraduates who are looking for overseas internship and graduate opportunities. He grew the platform for two and a half years to 50,000 monthly active members before selling it off to Potentialpark AB in early 2010 – and it is still active today.

Right after the exit from his first startup, Patrick and his co-founder, Jan Croeni, noticed a trend that’s blazing in the US and Europe. He explains:

We had the intention to take a sabbatical for a while but we saw that group buying was developing into a megatrend in the States and Europe. It was one of those intuitive feelings that this concept would definitely work in Asia. Even though market research data basically stated that consumer ecommerce, apart from ticketing and hotels, was virtually non existent at the time in most of the SEA countries we decided to go ahead.

We were absolutely convinced that the combination of attractive deals, high discounts, time sensitivity would present a very exciting online shopping experience for Singaporeans. When you go to a website, sometimes, you don’t really know what to get, then you see something cool, you buy it.

Building Deal.com.sg, quickly

With the strong gut feel of the opportunities present, Patrick and Jan put together a few developers and set up the website in the span of four weeks.

I think the importance for us was that we were the first (deal site in Singapore) in the market to go live. In the first two weeks, Jan and I went on a crazy schedule. In the morning, we went to businesses to prospect for fresh deals, and in the afternoon till late night we are back to work alongside the developers and also helped with customer service. There wasn’t much time for sleep during that period.

Deal.com.sg went live in May 2010 and what happened in the next half a year was crazy and something every entrepreneur desires. Firstly, investors flocked to them. Among all those, the team decided to go with Rebates Networks, a Germany-based A-list VC whose specialty is in e-commerce, to be their seed investors. When the investment was wrapped up, the site was barely two months old and it was operating with just three full timers: the two co-founders and one developer.

Next, the online deals buying craze enveloped Singapore. This caused exponential growth at Dealguru. Traffic and revenue were doubling month on month. In its first month, it attracted just 20,000 unique visitors and $7,000 in revenue. By end of its first year, its monthly unique visits exceeded a million and it was generating more than two million dollars in monthly revenue.

When acquirers come calling…

The third crazy thing came at the end of 2010. Just half a year after starting up, Dealguru was facing the prospect of an exit when leading international acquirers expanded into this region and spoke to the top three players. Patrick indicated that it was a testing moment for the team as there was this fear of missing out on this exit which would mean them fighting against resource-rich global companies rather than the local competitors. However, after discussion with investors and other founding members, the team felt that there so much more to accomplish before gunning for a quick and relatively unattractive exit. Eventually exits did happen with some of the other leading deal sites such as Groupon acquired Beeconomic as well as Bigdeal to NTUC.

Another defining moment for Patrick and the team was to gear the company to achieve sustainable growth rather than investment-fueled growth. At that point, Dealguru had raised just around $3 million dollars funding, had a team of 126 employees’ wages to support and – as is the nature of a deals site – saw cash-flow fluctuating wildly; so any wrong move in pivoting could cause negative cash-flow and the company could be in trouble. Fortunately, everything went well and Dealguru is now a profitable company with revenues of $50 million last financial year and now employs over 250 staff.

This startup’s climb to the top wouldn’t have happened had Patrick listened to erroneous advice during his founding days. He spoke to many people to get advice before starting up, from entrepreneurs to corporate climbers and established local VCs. Looking back, he felt that the best advice and understanding of opportunities came from experienced entrepreneurs; others were often less positive and more skeptical. Here’s his advice for young entrepreneurs:

It is important for entrepreneurs to stay firm to what they believe in. And if you need advice, go to the right people who have been there and done that rather than those who don’t fully grasp the reality of entrepreneurship.

YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are no stranger to the Chinese market having launched a localized version of social bookmarking site Delicious after their company, AVOS, bought Delicious from Yahoo. But the newest app from Hurley and Chen is on shakier moral ground as it’s basically a clone of six-second video app Vine for the China market. But that’s fine. Vine’s Chinese doppelgänger is called Wanpai, and it brings the video-sharing fun to Chinese social networks Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, and Renren.

Twitter-made Vine app doesn’t support those Chinese services, and probably never will. So Wanpai is nicely adapted to the local market. And adaptation is survival, as anyone with a basic grasp of anthropology – or logic – must realise.

Not only is Wanpai app (which was spotted by TechCrunch) pretty good, it actually works better for me than Vine. Whereas Vine is buggy on Android and its video recording feature is totally broken on my phone – which is not very good in a, you know, video app – Wanpai works fine on my device. Wanpai is available for both iOS and Android. Here’s my first Wanpai video:

In fact, I wish Wanpai would support Twitter so that I can delete the buggy Vine app.

Video-sharing apps have mostly failed in China due to a combination of limited 3G data plans in he country, and a universal lack of incentive to sit through an entire video that will, 99 percent of the time, be disappointingly lame. I’ll admit that I thought they’d be a huge hit in China in 2012, but it didn’t happen. But Vine – I mean Wanpai – might actually make it happen.

I’ll be honest, I was skeptical of this game at first. Cambodia, with a population of under 15 million and with internet penetration sitting well under 10 percent, is a small market with not much competition to foster growth. But one look at Asva The Monkey, and I was immediately impressed by the graphics, so I had to try it out.

The basic idea is that Asva, the little monkey pictured above, has to jump across an assortment of tiles to get to a little gem. The crux is, Asva has to jump on every single tile in order to pass each level. And each level is more complex than the last. Luckily, the game allows you a few lifelines where you can skip levels and/or choose to get some hints to hit certain tiles. Suffice it to say, I only got to level five.

The game, which currently ships on both Android and iOS, has only been downloaded 130,000 times, but it’s only been out since the beginning of the year. The Osja team plans to roll out more games with Asva, so we’ll keep you up to date.

You can download the Android version here and the iOS one here.

Apricot Forest

The medical field is a haven for red tape, especially in China. Between patients, pharmacies, insurance companies, and doctors stands a mountain of paperwork that costs all parties an immense amount of time and money. As you can imagine, any means to cut through some of that bureaucracy could turn out to be very lucrative, so long as it isn’t shut down by the government.

It seems Zhang Yusheng, founder of Apricot Forest (杏树林), might have struck gold. The Beijing-based company publicly launched its iPhone app last month, what he calls an “Evernote for physicians”. Zhang says more than ten thousand users upload hundreds of medical cases into the cloud every day. Now he and his team of 20 developers and physicians are working on Android and iPad versions to be released this month, and looking to go beyond China’s borders, as well. Zhang says, “Our goal is to provide the best mobile apps for physicians to make their work easier and more efficient.”

MedChart (病历夹) is specialized for examination purposes. Replacing a burdensome physical notebook and separate camera, doctors can use their device to take notes and pictures of a patient. That information is then uploaded to the cloud, so the doctors can access it anywhere, including desktop browsers. Once a doctor verifies his professional status and agrees to never share the identity of any patient, he or she can share the data with other physicians using the app, creating a crowd-sourced community of experts.

“Some physicians even have over 100 cases recorded in their phone,” Zhang says. That statement is both encouraging and disconcerting. Even though doctor’s have access to all their patients’ info anyway, they don’t typically walk around with it in their pocket. Zhang trained as a physician in China, but he got his MBA in the US, where he also worked for a big health insurance company. As a result, he understands the security and privacy issues involved with such an endeavor. That’s why he plans to first target Asian countries, where laws about patient confidentiality aren’t quite so strict. He described the United States’ HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) as an obstacle, for example: “To use patient information, there’s very strict rules and regulations, which is not true in other countries.”

Still, there’s still a huge market in Asia for Apricot Forest to thrive in. And even though the laws might be more lax, that doesn’t mean it’s a free-for-all. Zhang says his team takes special care to help doctors protect patient confidentiality, including a built-in editing tool used to redact a patient’s identity should it appear in a photo, such as a name on an X-ray.

He says the response from physicians has been very positive so far. However, they aren’t the folks Apricot Forest makes money off of. The app monetizes via targeted marketing, mainly pharmaceutical companies. “The users are doctors,” Zhang says, “but the clients are pharmacists.”

The company is a year and a half old, and is now in round A funding. Their other two apps are also healthcare-related: one for personalized medical literature and the other a reference for medical work that’s often difficult for doctors to memorize.

“There are so many problems in the Chinese healthcare system that need to be solved,” says Zhang. “So I might keep doing that for another 20 years, then retire, maybe find a college, and start teaching.”

Possible privacy and security issues aside, Zhang seems to have his heart in the right place. In any case, I’ll be happy to sacrifice whatever shred of privacy I haven’t already handed over to Google and Facebook if it means I get quicker, better quality healthcare. As Zhang says, “I think we need more serious apps which can really change the lives of people, or save people’s lives.”

You can download the MedChart iOS app here.