Some crazy things happen in the world of Chinese gaming. Rather than giving each its own article, from now on we’ll be trying to do a semi-weekly roundup of the craziest stories so that you can find all the madness in one place. Here’s what went down this week.

Chinese Model Battles Japanese Porn Star Sola Aoi for the Hearts of Chinese Nerds

How do you win the hearts of China’s otaku community? Step 1: Be super hot. Step 2: Pose naked with a giant rubber duck. That’s the approach Chinese model/actress Gong Yuefei took for the photo shoot pictured above, which she said in an interview is part of her campaign to eclipse porn star Sola Aoi in the, ahem, hearts and minds of China’s gaming community. Gong says that as a homegrown “Calabash Baby” she should easily be able to defeat foreign “Ultraman” Sola Aoi.

Unfortunately for Gong, her ploy to play to the hometown crowd seems to be a bit too on the nose, and in the comments on QQ games several readers point out that it was porn videos, not sexy photo shoots, that originally won Sola Aoi the adoration of Chinese gamers. And while Gong’s photo shoot is pretty damn porny (so much so that the link below is probably NSFW), she can’t go so far as to do actual porn because that’s illegal in China.

(via QQ Games)

Gamer Attacks Owner, Police After Being Told He Can’t Live in Internet Cafe

Mr. Wang was on a gaming binge, and after three or four days straight in an internet cafe in Shanghai, taking naps by putting his head on the desk, he apparently figured why not just cut to the chase and set up shop permanently? He left and came back a few hours later with a pillow, comforter, and some daily necessities in hand, intending to become a more permanent fixture in the cafe. The manager, concerned that this would drive away other customers, immediately stopped him and asked him to take his sleep breaks in a local motel rather than on his keyboard.

Wang wasn’t into that idea, and immediately began arguing with the manager. The argument escalated to a shouting match, and then a physical fight as Wang began to hit the manager in the head with his fists. The manager fled to call the police and Wang went back to his game, but when the police arrived, they too suggested that Wang couldn’t live in the internet cafe, starting another argument. Wang refused to cooperate, and when an officer told him that if necessary, they could bring him by force to the local police station for questioning, Wang grabbed the man’s scrotum (seriously, you can’t make this stuff up) and pinched it, causing a minor injury.

Needless to say, the police subdued Wang and brought him back to the station for questioning. Ultimately, a judge decided that due to the injury he had caused during his attack on the police, Wang should be formally arrested. Luckily for Wang, he won’t need to carry around his pillow and comforter anymore — I’m pretty sure the prison will provide that free of charge.

(JusticeNet via QQ Games)

Gamer Fakes Kidnapping to Cover Up Card Overdraft

Earlier this month, Chongqing police were utterly baffled by a kidnapping case they just couldn’t seem to figure out. Over the course of a ten-day kidnapping that apparently involved taking the victim to an ATM and forcing him to withdraw cash, the kidnappers somehow managed to completely avoid appearing in any surveillance camera footage.

Ultimately, it turned out that this was because they actually didn’t exist. 23-year-old gamer Liu — the supposed victim of this kidnapping — had gone on a binge playing an online game called Shen Wu, and after charging 6000 RMB ($952) in the game and withdrawing another 6000 RMB for life expenses, Liu discovered to his horror that he now had an overdraft of nearly $2,000. He didn’t have the money to repay this on his own — he’d been skipping work to play the game — so he knew his only option was to go to his parents. But he also knew they wouldn’t be pleased to learn he’d blown so much on a computer game, so he invented the kidnapping story.

He didn’t expect that his mother would drag him to the police station and force him to report it, but that’s exactly what she did. And Liu’s rather specific story, which implicated a classmate named “Li Hongwei” in the crime and ended with Liu’s daring nighttime escape on May 12, fell apart under the scrutiny of a sustained police investigation. Needless to say, Liu is now in police custody.

(Chongqing Morning Post via QQ Games)

Qihoo (NYSE:QIHU) already has a search engine and Alibaba already has a product search engine, so it makes sense for the two to work together. And that’s what they’re doing.

The tie-up between the two Chinese web giants effectively gives Qihoo a new shopping search option on its 360 Search site, which exploded onto the scene in China last summer. Thanks to Qihoo’s huge traffic from its established web browsers and web portal, Qihoo’s 360 Search instantly became China’s second largest search engine last year.

Basically, it looks to be just Alibaba’s existing eTao shopping search ported over to Qihoo’s site. That’s even evident in the URL 360.etao.com. So it’s not fundamentally new. But it means that Qihoo’s originally spartan search offerings (initially it had just ‘news’, ‘web’ and ‘video’) have now expanded to 11 options.

This partnership gives Qihoo access to everything on eTao, which is perhaps China’s most comprehensive product search engine. Though Alibaba itself has numerous e-commerce companies, eTao indexes content from nearly all of China’s e-stores, not just Alibaba’s own properties. It also gives Qihoo a big boost relative to its nemesis Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), which arrived alarmingly late to to this shopping search battle, only launching its own dedicated portal in February this year. ETao and other such sites have been running for years.

For Alibaba, this should be a big shot in the arm for eTao’s traffic and visibility.

Price comparison and shopping search sites are a big battleground in China, covering numerous startups and some other major web portal companies as well. Last year the startup site B5M raised over $7 million in series A funding to grow its own product.

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

But among other things, the company seems to be troubled by the apparent personal problems of its CEO. Sohu head honcho Charles Zhang only this year returned from a yearlong sabbatical taken for personal reasons. In an interview published by Bloomberg last week, Zhang said of the sabbatical:

I missed out on some things, but that’s life. My goals in life have changed, and work is very important now.

But investors could be forgiven for wondering how focused Zhang really is on work when just a couple months ago (well after he returned from his sabbatical) he told an interviewer:

I think there’s something wrong with me. I truly have everything, and yet I am so miserable. Happiness is totally unrelated to how much money you have.

He also spoke about how success had changed him into a perfectionist and maybe even made him a little crazy — he says he thought he could live to age 150. One has to wonder, then, what exactly happened between March, when he gave that interview, and this month when he talked to Bloomberg. Has he really gone from being totally miserable and worried about success to being focused completely on the business and success again? It seems hard to believe, and it also makes you wonder what Zhang will be saying a couple months from now.

You also have to wonder where Sohu and Sogou are going to be in a couple of months, if the latter even still exists. Bloomberg’s report suggests that Sogou is looking for strategic investment to challenge Baidu more strongly in the search and advertising markets, but the Chinese press has been full of rumors that the company is on the verge of being bought out by Baidu or Qihoo (something that no one seems willing to directly deny).

So is Sogou about to use the $500 million it has in cash to take a shot at grabbing a larger slice of the search market, or is it about to get absorbed by competitors? Is Charles Zhang back and ready for action again or is he still fighting whatever personal demons led to his sabbatical and his more recent admission to being “so miserable”? I have no idea.

I do know, however, that it would be foolish to write off the company given that it came up with what’s probably the most unique search product I’ve seen in the past year. Unfortunately, it seems search input hasn’t yet caught on the way I think it could — and perhaps should — but nevertheless it’s a revolutionary idea and a company that can produce this kind of innovation may have a good shot at grabbing a bigger slice of the search engine market over the long run. I’m not sure what the heck is going on behind closed doors at Sohu, but even so, I wouldn’t bet against it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See the full earnings report on the Qihoo IR homepage.

We all know why we’re here: to get a taste of the top stories Tech in Asia covered from across the region this week. But before we do that, let’s all take a second to breakdance in celebration of the weekend. Ready? GO! …OK, here’s the news:

Charlie’s pick: Jack Ma’s Last Speech as CEO

Although I’m sure we’ll still see him around, it’s the end of an era at Alibaba with founder Jack Ma stepping out of the CEO’s chair to take a more background role at the company. It’d be hard to understate the effect Ma and his company have had on the development of the Chinese internet over the past decade, so I think his last speech is worth reflecting on.

Steven’s pick: Confirmed: GREE Shuts Down China Branch

GREE’s big international push in the past couple of years hasn’t always gone smoothly. The Japanese social gaming behemoth has badly lost momentum with OpenFeint after acquiring it, and its game development offices haven’t produced a blockbuster in a while. But it was still a surprise when we learnt that GREE Beijing has suddenly shutting down this week.

Youshen’s pick: BBM No Longer Shackled to BlackBerry Platform: Will Indonesians Rejoice?

It seems to me that BlackBerry has adopted a new direction as a software company. With BBM (BlackBerry Messenger)’s availability on other platforms (Android and iOS), BlackBerry looks set to focus on software penetration. I would like to make reference to Volvo’s historical move to make its three-point seat belt design an open ecosystem in the interest of general safety. Could BlackBerry be repeating the same footsteps, but in the interest of BBM’s user community?

Willis’ and Andrew’s pick: SingTel Sets Aside $1.6B For Startup Acquisitions

WIllis: SingTel will be setting aside $1.6 billion for investment over the next three years. If that’s not big news, then I don’t know what is. Project Magellan could be part of the grand plan. But I’m guessing that SingTel has much more stuff under its sleeve.

Andrew: Wow! Singtel setting aside $1.6 billion for future investment. That’s quite a sum of money and we can probably expect them to go onto a shopping spree over the next three years. It’s good news I would say because exits here in Singapore are rare.

Emily’s pick: Alibaba Working on a Set-Top Box to Bring E-Commerce to Your TV?

Although it hasn’t been confirmed yet, the rumour of Alibaba coming up with their own set-top box is still juicy! It’ll definitely be interesting to see if indeed there will be a decision to bring e-commerce onto the television!

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

This week we saw all kinds of interesting stuff happen in China. A king stepped off his throne, we talked about 1970s pornography, and QQ got a makeover that made everyone sad. So what are the top stories this week? They are these:

1. Jack Ma’s Last Speech as Alibaba CEO

The king of Chinese e-commerce stepped off his throne after one final oration, and while we’ll still see Jack Ma around, I think it’s definitely worth reflecting on. Also worth checking out the first speech from Alibaba’s new CEO.

2. China’s Top Chat-App Gets a WeChat-Like Makeover, But Everyone Hates It

Well, people like chatting with their friends, and people like WeChat, so making QQ Mobile more like WeChat is a great idea, right? What could go wrong?

3. GREE Shuts Down China Branch

In news that could also go in the Japan This Week list if that was something we actually did, GREE’s China office will shut its doors for good next month, bringing GREE’s China dream to an end.

4. Huawei and ZTE Face More EU Scrutiny: What Are They Doing Wrong?

It’s never good news for Huawei and ZTE, is it? Following the latest news that the EU has threatened the companies with trade duties for illegal subsidies from the Chinese government, we take a look at what has gone so wrong with their overseas ambitions.

5. How China’s Top Video Site Battles the Pirates

Chinese video sites used to be known as a haven for piracy, but these days sites like Youku take piracy very seriously. But how do you stop pirates on a site that gets tons of videos uploaded every day?

6. Netease Planning the World’s First Crowd-Designed FPS Game?

It’ll be hard to know for sure until the game comes out, but I think this post didn’t get the attention it deserved. This is really a unique approach to game design from Netease, something I’ve never seen before at any major developer, and it has the potential to pay off big time in the long term.

7. Tencent Posts Rocketing Profits, Sees 195 Million Active Users on WeChat

If Tencent is making boatloads of money for its other business, it means that it has the needed fuel to pump up WeChat, which now has over 195 million monthly active users.

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

That would certainly seem to be a denial. But interestingly, reporters got a somewhat vaguer text from Sogou CEO Wang Xiaochuan, who told them simply that nothing had yet been finalized. On his microblog account, Wang has denied rumors that he’s slated to join Alibaba. And Sohu CEO Zhang Chaoyang stressed earlier this week that the company has enough cash in the bank that it doesn’t need to put Sogou up for sale.

None of these statements have done much to quash the rumors, however, because it seems no one is willing to come out and directly say: “We’re not selling (or buying) Sogou, period.” Whether or not a deal is ever finalized, the lack of absolute language in all three statements suggests that there is, at the very least, some consideration of an acquisition deal going on behind the scenes. And with Qihoo hoping to pose a more serious threat to Baidu, and Baidu wanting to prevent that, it certainly makes sense that both companies would be looking at Sogou and other minor search players as potential acquisitions to bolster their search offerings.

For now, though, we’ll just have to wait and see. Perhaps someone will outright deny the rumors, or perhaps in a few weeks or months we’ll find out that there was some truth to them when Sogou announces a new investment or merger.

(Tencent Tech via TechWeb)

Beijing may be China’s capital, but as we saw last month, it’s still not winning any races when it comes to internet speed. But the Beijing subsidiary of China Unicom may help to change that today, as it launches a new broadband connection scheme that ups speeds and makes 4 Mbp the slowest connection in the city. Given that Beijing’s average broadband speed right now is 3.5 Mbps, that’s pretty good.

So, if you have a Unicom broadband connection, here’s what’s changing for you, starting today:

• If you had a 512 kbps or 1 Mbps connection, then your connection speed is being raised to 4 Mbps.
• If you had a 2 Mbps connection, your connection speed is being raised to 10 Mbps.
• If you had a 4 or 8 Mbps connection, your speed is being raised to 20 Mbps.
• Fiber-optic customers may be able to get speeds of up to 100 Mbps.

In short, it’s good news all around, with everybody’s internet getting faster while prices stay the same (at least for now).

The move is in part a response to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s goal of having 75 percent of Chinese broadband users on 4 Mbps or higher connections this year (up from its 50 percent goal for 2012). Given that seems likely that Unicom may roll out similar plans in other cities across China, so even if you don’t live in Beijing, you can hold out some hope that someday soon, your internet speed will get kicked up a notch too.

(Tencent Tech via Techweb)

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

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

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

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

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

The pirates are going mobile

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chinese TV dramas make up 60% of traffic

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

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

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

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

WeiboSuite should prove an invaluable tool for China researchers and journalists who don’t speak Chinese but still want to keep track of what’s happening on China’s most happening social network. Obviously, with billions of posts, WeiboSuite hasn’t — and cannot — translate every single post into English, but it indexes and auto-translates the 1,000 most recent deleted posts, which makes it valuable for journalists who generally only need to see recent posts anyway. For example, when I searched for “Tibet,” WeiboSuite turned up an interesting post from yesterday alleging that there was a fairly major anti-government protest in Naqu Biru County in Tibet on Sunday.

WeiboSuite also includes an image-to-text translator that should be effective in helping journalists deal with those pesky “long weibo” posts that include long sections of text uploaded as an image to circumvent Weibo’s character limit (not to mention its keyword blocks).

Finally, WeiboSuite also comes with an image splitter. Weibo users often upload multiple photos in one long image, and while that format is convenient for Weibo it’s not great for other platforms. WeiboSuite’s image splitter helpfully breaks those images down into separate image files for each photo without the need for any editing software or tiresome cropping.

In short, WeiboSuite is an awesome tool for journalists or anyone with an interest in following what’s going on on Weibo. My hat is off to the team at Hong Kong University that created these tools; they have really done something quite cool here.

(via SCMP)

Internet cafe or fight club?

Last week, an argument between some patrons at a Chinese internet cafe ended in violence when one man smashed another in the face with an empty beer bottle. The victim was hospitalized; the aggressor arrested. The sum they were arguing over? 1 RMB ($0.15).

The dispute arose when internet cafe cashier Song Na accidentally charged a Mr. Cui’s card with 1 RMB more than he had paid. Since her wages are only 30 RMB per day ($4.76) and her boss deducts any errors from her wages, she sought out Cui in the cafe to ask him to return 1 RMB. Cui was playing games with his friend Jin and Jin’s girlfriend, and he refused to return the money, saying that she hadn’t charged his card with any extra money. An argument started, Song’s husband ran in to defend her, blows were exchanged, and the parties were ultimately pulled apart relatively unscathed. Song and her husband gave up on getting the 1 RMB back, and Cui and his friends left the cafe.

But Cui’s friend Jin apparently couldn’t get over the conflict, and doubled back to the cafe, grabbing an empty beer bottle along the way. He came up behind Song’s husband as he was getting onto his bike, tapped him on the shoulder, and then smashed him in the face with the beer bottle when he turned around.

In the subsequent interrogation with police, Cui and Jin said that the initial dispute arose in part because they were right in the middle of playing a game and Song had asked them to stop, putting them in a bad mood. Jin also said that Song had cursed at his girlfriend, which pissed him off. Cui was released after a 500 RMB ($79) fine, but Jin has been detained by police. Song’s husband, meanwhile, was hospitalized and racked up a significant medical bill.

Internet cafes are a great way for people without the resources to buy their own computers to access the web, but they can also be a breeding ground for violent disputes, including murders, and they’ve also proved a good hunting ground for pedophiles and serial killers. I have argued before that China’s internet cafes are not a good place for children, and violent disputes like last week’s bottle-smashing certainly seem to support that hypothesis.

But I also wonder whether internet cafe owners might be better off investing in some security, or alternatively whether they’re something that Chinese police ought to keep a closer eye on. Granted, disputes like this happen all over the place in a country as large as China, but perhaps because of the dark, smoky atmosphere or the often-tired patrons who’ve been gaming for hours on end, internet cafes seem to be particularly fertile soil for conflict. I continue to believe China would be well-served if the government offered some better-lit, better-policed alternatives to internet cafes.

(via QQ Games)

Japan’s CyberAgent (TYO:4751) has burst onto Japan’s crowdfunding scene with the launch of its new CyberAgent Crowd Funding platform. Actually, it will launch fully this summer, by which time it’ll be ready to match startup companies and neat ideas with people who want to fund them. The new site aims to be raising $1 million per month for its listed projects.

The new service will be a spin-off from the CyberAgent parent company, who’s investing 40 million yen (US$400,000) to kickstart it. Ryotaro Nakayama will be the new CEO. It’s also separate from CyberAgent Ventures, the company’s investment arm.

CyberAgent Crowd Funding promises to fully investigate all projects before adding them to the site, and will also back them up with media and promotional support.

Japan already has several funding platforms, such as Campfire and Ready For.

CyberAgent Ventures itself might be interested in some of the social and e-commerce projects that come up on the site, as those are the areas where the Tokyo-based fund makes its investments across Southeast Asia. Most recently, CyberAgent Ventures invested in a Taiwan-based fashion social network.

(Updated: Changed headline and some phrases to reflect that this is created by CyberAgent, not the CyberAgent Ventures subsidiary).

A new report in the Beijing Times quotes police as saying that in their investigation of Silu HD following its takedown, they found not only 22,296 instances of IP violation, but also that the site was hosting what the article calls “obscene pornographic films.” We’re not sure whether those are any worse than regular pornographic films, but since any kind of porn is illegal in China, the folks behind the site are likely in a lot more trouble for this than the piracy aspect.

Interestingly, it seems the site was mostly hosting quasi-historical-themed pornography from the 1970s, as the two titles mentioned specifically in the article are The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976) and Caligula (1979). These films and a few others were deemed to be pornographic “after police appraisal,” and we imagine that police are currently combing through the rest of Silu HD’s catalogue in search of other films to, ahem, appraise.

Double-entendres aside, the news that Silu HD was hosting pornography ensures that “China’s first HD video portal” (as the site billed itself) is dead for good. YYeTs may have survived the crackdown, but apparently Silu HD’s apparent affinity for 1970s pornography has ensured the site will definitely not be coming back online.

(Beijing Times via Sina Tech)

Today I received an SMS which claimed to be from Rocket Internet owned online shop Lazada. The SMS talks about “crazy discounts” that you can check out on a Lazada Blogspot page (pictured above).

Yes, it’s very easy for you tech savvy readers to discern that the SMS is a scam, but there are numerous other people in Indonesia who fall prey to these simple tricks. When I accessed the site, the hit counter had already reached 89,000 page-views.

Let me break down a few characteristics of the worst online scams in the country, specifically ones related to e-commerce that seem to be targetting unwary people these days. Here goes:

1. Super good offers which are too good to be true

The SMS I received told me that Lazada was selling several gadgets at crazy discounts. An iPhone 5, which is normally priced at IDR 7 million (US$723), is being sold at half the price, it claimed. There are other offers too, like a simple “You’ve won a brand new car! Check our website for more information about how to claim it.”

If you think that those offers look too good to be true, then it most probably is a scam. If you think you’ve never entered into a contest but have supposedly won something big, then it could well be a scam too.

2. “Please check our blogspot for more information”

The other simple way to tell if something is a scam or not is to look at the website they invite you to see. The one I got linked to was Lazada04.blogspot.com.

Popular online brands like Lazada don’t use free Blogspot addresses like that, so it is definitely a fake. The “Lazada04” name is also an easy tell.

Besides Google-owned Blogspot, there are other free blogging platforms that are commonly used for scams, such as Jimdo and Webs.com. Note that there are reports that the scams have gone up an ante by using paid websites as well, which is similar to phishing scams that lure people to log into fake banking or social media pages.

Genuine offers and prizes will only be announced through the company’s site, or perhaps its official Facebook brand page.

3. “Please call our handphone number”

This is also another obvious tell-tale sign. Big brands do not have mobile numbers, let alone BBM pins. If the contact number is given in such a way, then it ‘s a scam for sure.

These last few months have seen quite a few scams made under the name of Indonesia’s biggest telco, Telkomsel. The best way to know if it’s a telco-related scam is by looking at the contact number. If the message is sent by the telco, then the sender info automatically says that it is from that company, even if you’ve never saved it to your contacts. Or sometimes telcos will use short numbers like 777 in sending those SMSes. If you receive an SMS from a conventional mobile number but it claims to be a telco, then it’s a trick.

This Telkomsel scam site – under the domain name Hadiah-Telkomsel.blogspot.com – is another good example of the worst scam websites in the country. It gives out a handphone number for people to contact, and for God knows why, the site puts pictures of Jakarta governor Joko Widodo alongside former president director of Telkomsel and the national police chief at the bottom of the homepage.

4. “Please claim your prize ASAP or we’ll give it to someone else”

These scammers are pretty good when it comes to manipulating people and making them panic. Very often such offers, especially lottery wins, are only valid for the next couple of days. So ‘winners’ must act fast. Quite a few of these ‘lucky winners’ though, don’t have internet access, and so they will simply call the given number to ask for information. And that is when the scam happens.

Never panic – you need to be fully rational in handling these situations. If you do make the call and the person on the other end asks you to transfer some amount of money first for “administration” or “tax” purposes, you should either hang up the phone immediately or at least swear at that scammer first.

I remember one TV show that explained how a former con man scammed people out of their money. The idea is always the same: promise victims big amounts of cash in an easy way. Be careful when you’re being promised such an offer/prize.

Let’s help report those scammy sites

Those are the common tricks circulating around Indonesia’s booming e-shopping industry right now. Quite a few people always fall for these, so much so that it’s one of the reasons why the government will require Indonesian e-commerce sites to use local data centers and domains.

People do get scammed online. It is quite understandable though because only 30 percent of Indonesians have internet access. Having a lucky break by winning a brand new car is also something that doesn’t happen every day. Curiosity kicks in, combined with lack of internet knowledge (and access), and so there are definitely people getting screwed every day.

We can do a few things to help make the web a safer place for all. First is to help spread the word about the scammy websites and their tricks. Second is to report them to Google with the link here.

Let’s give those scammers a good lesson in how they can’t ruin the web.

(Updated on May 16th: The email address cybercrime[at]polri[dot]go[dot]id is not a valid email address of the Indonesian cyber crime police unit. You will need to directly report to the police station for now. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.)

(Featured image source: unsuckdcmetro)

I’m not sure how people in general think of Business Software Alliance (BSA), especially those living in developing countries and are cramming their computers with illegal softwares. Washington-based BSA is in a group whose activity is centered around getting people to use legal software products. Yesterday Detik reported that BSA, together with the Indonesian police, is getting its hands dirty by raiding a few companies in Indonesia. And, boy, a lot of them got busted.

The raid, which happened in the industrial sectors of Subang, Bogor, and Cikarang two months ago, busted as many as 20 companies. There were more than 400 computers running illegal softwares of Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft, and Symantec worth around US$177,000.

BSA is also stepping up its effort to gain people’s participation as the company promises bigger prize money, as high as $10,000 for people who can snitch on companies that are using illegal software. A BSA representative told me that the company people can report on must have at least 50 computers running on at least two illegal softwares. Normally, the reward promises cash as high as $5,000, but it doubled to $10,000 until June 15th.

One of the reasons a lot of people use pirated software here is simply because of the overwhelming price of the genuine product. People living in developed countries can earn $100 in a few days, while capital city Jakarta’s minimum salary in 2013 is $220. How about the minimum salary in the other regions? It can be as small as $100.

With that huge financial gulf, it is normal that companies choose to save their budget by using pirated software. A lot of people understand and share this same problem, and that’s why it’s normal for people to look the other way too.

Can the increase in prize money for ratting out companies help convince a few people to tell on their employers? Perhaps. Especially the disgruntled employees I presume. I’m not really sure if it’s possible, but I guess a better way to convince people to start using legal softwares are by making them more affordable. But oh well.

(Sources: Detik #1 and #2)

In university, I majored in history of religion and visual culture, so how can I resist writing about a story where a meditating monk took pictures with a naked woman and now she’s asking Google to take her photos down? It’s just too juicy. It combines a host of controversial elements with a seasoning of technology on top.

NSFW Warning: all links have nude photos concerning this issue, so beware before clicking, especially if you are at work.

The photos are part of an exhibit that was released early last year along with a book titled Thoát, which can mean escape, liberate, or exit in Vietnamese. The exhibit, which was shown in the popular beach city of Vung Tau, was meant to be a commentary on feng shui and the relationship between image and story. In the 12 photos, Hue Phong, the feng shui expert and mastermind behind the project, dresses up in monk’s robes and Thai Nha Van, a model and actresses, poses nude behind him in various poses. The story starts out with Van walking up to a temple, meditating in the temple, and eventually learning from a monk there. But it all finishes with pictures of Thue Phong, dressed as a monk, meditating, with Van posing in the background nude.

Thue Phong’s whole idea was to shock the public and art industry to rethink lust, and oddly, to take a closer look at the teachings of Buddhism. Several Buddhist masters in the area have already denounced the exhibit as sacrilegious, and now Van is asking Google to help take down the photos off the internet. She’s also proposing to the photographer to give her licensing power over the photos, but I’d say it’s too late for that. They’re all across the Internet already.

If I know anything about the internet, Van’s attempt to take the photos down is just going to get her more attention, like this article. And the more attention she’s got, the more computers have got her photos. All in all, I think Hue Phong’s been successful in provoking the public into some kind of discourse, even if it wasn’t as he planned.

My favorite irony of this whole affair is that ancient Buddhist art always featured nudity, and no one protests that, it seems time has made Buddhist more conservative?

Image via Reuters

On Monday, the US Department of Defense released a report that once again points the finger at China for hacking and other forms of digital data theft that pose a threat to American public and military interests. And although the report doesn’t mention Chinese telecom companies Huawei and ZTE by name, it apparently spooked Indian intelligence authorities enough that Indian intelligence agencies are now undertaking a thorough investigation of the Chinese companies.

According to the Hindustan Times, Indian intelligence has set up a testing facility in Bangalore and plans to run Huawei and ZTE equipment through the ringer.

This isn’t the first time Huawei and ZTE have found themselves in the sights of Indian authorities. Last year, India considered investigations into the telecoms, and earlier this year both were denied ‘domestic telecom’ status in the country over lingering security concerns.

Concerns about Huawei and ZTE stem from their apparent ties with the Chinese government and military. Huawei, for example, was founded by a former military officer and maintains a Chinese Communist Party office within its corporate headquarters.

(Hindustan Times via Sina Tech)

Sina’s report cites a “knowledgable” source in “investment circles” as saying that Sogou is looking for a buyout, and the three aforementioned internet giants have jumped at the chance. According to the source, Qihoo has offered a $140 million deal that includes cash and stock options, Baidu is offering more in cash (he doesn’t cite a specific sum), and Tencent is mostly in the mix because it wants to be sure Sogou doesn’t go to Qihoo.

Furthermore, the report suggests a difference of opinion high in Sogou’s ranks, with CEO Wang Xiaochuan wanting to take the Qihoo 360 deal while board chair Zhang Chaoyang would prefer to sell to Baidu. But as Zhang has reportedly been taking more personal time of late, Wang has been taking the front seat in the proceedings, and Sina’s source says, “it’s a bit more likely that [Qihoo] 360 will win.”

Of course, this is still just a rumor, even if these kinds of rumors do seem to be coming true a bit lately. We’ve contacted Baidu, Qihoo 360, and Tencent for comment, and will update this story if we hear back, but we don’t expect much as most companies have a general policy of not commenting on rumors. All three of them declined to comment for the Sina Tech story (although apparently none of them denied it outright, which is interesting). Sogou CEO Wang Xiaoquan has called the rumor “unreliable” on his Weibo account.

By some counts, Sogou has the third-largest market share in Chinese search, so acquiring it would be a big boost for Qihoo, which has been struggling to close in on Baidu after its initial grab of more than 10% of the market shortly following its launch. But Sogou’s real value may lie in its widely-used Chinese input method software. The company has already begun to integrate search into its input method in a way that I think is potentially very significant. New applications of that concept could be a nice — and very valuable — bonus that comes along with the boost in market share of buying Sogou.

(via Sina Tech, image deleted)

While we were doing our usual browsing of the web we stumbled on something very interesting: a new site by China’s Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) that’s an Indonesian version of its web links portal Hao123. Just like Baidu’s other Hao123 sites outside of China, the new portal for Indonesia uses Google’s search engine rather than Baidu’s. Baidu declined to comment about this stealthy launch.

Baidu also runs its Hao123 portal – which is a sort of web directory like AOL or Excite – in other Asian and Mid-East countries in their local languages, like Vietnamese, Japanese, Thai, and Arabic. Plus it operates in Portuguese for Brazilian netizens.

Like all such web directory sites, Baidu’s Hao123 monetizes from advertising and paid links. The Indonesian site has links to local web favorites such as Kaskus and Tokobagus, plus lots of other local and global media and social sites. It’s not clear if those are all paid link. Of the five search options on the Baidu Hao123 site, three lead to Google searches, while ‘video’ leads to Youtube, and ‘music’ goes to the notorious piracy site 4Shared.

Earlier this year, another Chinese company made a move into Indonesia when Tencent president Martin Lau was cautious in saying that it’s in talks with local company MNC Media about the possibility of launching a search engine in the country.

While it’s not guaranteed that Indonesia will see the launch of Baidu’s search engine any time soon, Baidu is doing research into Southeast Asian languages at its new Singapore R&D lab, so it’s core search engine could finally expand to somewhere other than China and Japan.

Baidu, which is China’s top search engine, has been looking overseas a lot more in the past year; aside from that lab, it has launched antivirus products for Southeast Asian markets, and zoned in on north Africa and the Mid-East with its mobile browser app.

RocketLabs, which was a finalist at the 2013 Echelon Philippines Satellite recently, wants to change at least some of those aspects. Designed as an educational software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, RocketLabs aims to integrate virtual labs, course media, and one-on-one instruction for enterprise-grade tech training. This concept hopes to eliminate some of the problems inherent to traditional education systems in the country, namely a lack of access to up-to-date tech courses, as well as a lack of tech infrastructure and facilities necessary for hands-on experience and learning.

Founded six months ago by Dann Angelo De Guzman and Paul Harris, with help from AngelList, RocketLabs’ main focus is on fields like IT infrastructure, software engineering, business intelligence, digital marketing, and business and engineering applications. At the moment, RocketLabs has up-to-date partnerships in courses with subject matter experts from Microsoft MVP, and is in negotiations with several well known companies to include courses on various key technologies. They also have a memorandum of understanding to focus on cutting edge technologies with several high-level training centers for Cisco technologies. Finally, the development team is planning on a pilot test run in the next few months, with several of their partner companies.

With RocketLabs, consumers get the hands-on time they often lack in traditional education systems, which more often than not is composed mostly of lecture sessions, or at the most, video lectures. The idea is that performing and applying what you’ve learned in a hands-on environment allows for better retention of knowledge, better understanding, and a more competent skill set.

Though still in beta, the startup touted its business model as “flexible and unique”, and the team is confident that its industry-focused approach is polished. The startup promises that accessibility and ease of use will not be an issue, and that continuous learning is guaranteed. The product is set to be monetized, with paid courses, later this year.

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

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

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

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

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

Last time we got some China numbers from Evernote, makers of the notes syncing service, it had hit 1.1 million users in the country in July 2012, a mere two months after launching its Chinese operations. At today’s Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing, Evernote CEO Phil Libin gave some updated figures, revealing that his company now has four million Chinese users.

Earlier today, the Evernote China team in Beijing flipped the switch on the Chinese version of its Evernote Business service (see here). That team has now grown to 17 people.

Aside from the stats and that launch, Phil talked about how China is an integral part of Evernote’s strategy of being a long-term startup that can survive up against the world’s top web giants. Speaking of China’s own web ecosystem, he said that the next decade will see Chinese tech companies going global, and the nation will, as it shifts away from manufacturing and towards a knowledge-based economy, become a creative melting pot. Startups in China will fit into that melting pot, Phil added, by being an innovation furnace.

Evernote still has two rivals larger than it in China: Shanda’s Mknote (five million users last year), and Netease’s Cloud Notes, which reached eight million users in December.

(Source: 36Kr – article in Chinese; Photo by @chadcat)

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

During Startup Asia Singapore a month ago, I met Streetdirectory‘s founder, Firdhaus Akber and learned about his entrepreneurial journey. From my perspective, it was one hell of a roller coaster ride: one that involved the excitement of seeing exponential growth in traffic, the promise of an IPO and him being courted by flocks of investors; and the low times of being forced out of his own company before scraping his way back in, and getting sued by a Singapore government agency in a lawsuit that lasted more than a year.

StreetDirectory is a Singapore startup that was founded back in 2000. It is a portfolio company of Hong Kong’s JDB Holdings, whose portfolio also includes JobsDB, 88DB, Openrice, Cozycot, FlowerAdvisor and SgCarmart (which was recently acquired by SPH). Streetdirectory has a team of around 200 staff across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Hong Kong and boasts more than 1.2 million registered users and 1.3 million apps downloads.

Connecting the Dots

Firdhaus started his first full time job before starting university. He worked as an instructor at a fitness club and did enough to convince his boss to entrust him with managing the club. He deferred school to focus on the job. Then he moved to join an event company as a salesperson. He also worked at an IT company at a job that involved him handling brands, building relationships and making sales. Reflecting on his entrepreneurial journey, he attributes what he has achieved at Streetdirectory to the many skills he picked up in these previous jobs. He has found that despite the diverse industries he has worked in, it all connects.

Unknowingly, the different exposures in my previous jobs helped me greatly in running Streetdirectory. When I became a boss, all these pieces came together. I got the experience of managing a team in the fitness club; I got the skills of doing sales from the events company and the skills of developing relationships with important clients through my work at the IT company.”

Photo credit to The Titan Times Daily

The Roller Coaster Ride

Firdhaus started Streetdirectory with three other co-founders in 2000. Previously, they had approached him on numerous occasions about the idea of building an online map. But he rejected them every time as he was skeptical that people needed an online map and he didn’t see how it could be monetized. But they were persistent and eventually he decided to give it a shot.

In the beginning, the founders funded the startup themselves. In 2000, there was no other online map company in Singapore. The idea was to get maps from a government agency, Singapore Land Authority (SLA), and put them online. The business took off almost immediately.

After operating for a while, people started knocking on my door. These people were venture capitalists. Suddenly, I realized Streetdirectory is actually in the dot com arena. I didn’t realize that. I started researching and understood more about it. Shortly after the VCs’ visit, HSBC bank also came and offered to bring us to IPO. During this period, something was happening to our site. On a daily basis, our traffic jumped without us doing anything. If today’s traffic is 3,000, next day will be 6,000 and 12,000 day after next. This 100% daily growth rate continued for a while and there was never a day traffic didn’t grow.

Being traditional business people and not the typical dot com founders (who value traffic more than dollars), the founders saw this phenomenon growth as a liability because the server cost is expensive. Cash was the main problem for their business then. They started to do consulting projects for governments, schools and get SMEs to advertise on their sites. The consulting projects involved helping government agencies and schools to map out their campuses and also listing them on the street directory maps. Through these projects, they were able to bring in revenue to balance their books. They also raised a million Singapore dollars from angel investors at that time.

During the third year of operations, things got dramatic. Firdhaus was voted out of Streetdirectory as the board felt that he wasn’t contributing enough to the company. At this point in time, Streetdirectory had already grown to become the leading online map portal for Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia and sales were doing well. Firdhaus went off to do consulting work on his own. He re-joined the company only a year later, when one of the co-founders wanted to cash out and move on; Firdhaus bought back his shares and came back.

Firdhaus’s roller coaster ride did not stop there. Due to copyrights issues, the SLA sued Streetdirectory and wanted it to take down the maps. This would effectively put Streetdirectory out of business, as maps are fundamental to its business. Firdhaus took on the lawsuit and fought it for over a year, incurring huge legal fees. During that time, shareholders and directors pulled out of the business, leaving Firdhaus as the remaining shareholder.

Surprisingly, during these troubled times, a Hong Kong investment group still choose to put faith in his team and backed them. The group advised them to develop their own maps and not fight a losing lawsuit against the state-owned agency. Adversity brought out the best in his team and the remaining members of the team fervently re-created their own map. Interestingly, despite having its service suspended for three months, the traffic for the re-vamped site (with the new in-house maps) did not show any decline.

Looking back at his own experiences, Firdhaus advises entrepreneurs to be resilient.

Entrepreneurs need to understand that they may not be successful on the first time, most aren’t. One needs to learn to pick themselves up and try again when they fail. What I learned from my Hong Kong investors was their nonchalant attitude towards failure. Why be so concerned about failure? If you fall down, pick yourself up and try again. Just keep trying, there’s no one who will fail forever.

We’ve seen crowdfunding been put to use for zany gadgets and enacting positive social change, but we’ve not yet seen it being used for investment purposes. But Crowdbaron wants to change that. It’s a Hong Kong-based startup that wants to make investing in real estate as simple as booking a hotel online. Aimed at folks who want to bolster their personal investment portfolio, the idea is that buying a small stake in one or numerous properties lets you take advantage of surging property prices in several countries.

While you are buying a share in a property, this is not a sort of timeshare for the 21st century and so you won’t be staying in the apartment or villa in which you have a stake. This is purely for the profit. So you can spread the risk, Crowdbaron lets you take as little as a one percent stake.

Crowdbaron is aiming its platform at users across Asia, with an initial focus on customers based in Hong Kong, China, and Indonesia. Founder and CEO Saeed Hassan explains to us that the startup is “targeting a less wealthy target group” than would normally take a 100 percent stake in properties – a phenomenon seen recently with wealthy Chinese snapping up properties (and potential escape routes) in Australia, the UK, the US, and many other nations. Instead, Saeed says the site is good for “middle income families who are saving for the future, and who have been burned by the stock market and are frustrated by low interest rates”. He adds:

For these individuals, there is little chance they can purchase in Hong Kong or elsewhere. This group is very large and are willing to enter shared purchase arrangements – because it opens the door to potentially higher and stable returns they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford. It’s about lowering the entry barriers and getting more people involved.

Aside from making a profit from rising property prices, Crowdbaron investors can also earn revenues from renting out their properties, which will be unfurnished to save hassle for the crowdfunded landlords. Saeed points out that these properties will remain managed by Crowdbaron through its network of property agents, and is also responsible for finding tenants. In the event of a property being empty, Crowdbaron promises to pay investors their share of rental revenue anyway.

Crowdbaron is split between a team of four in Hong Kong, and a further four in Jakarta, Indonesia. More sales staffers are being added this month, and a Madrid office is being prepared. While its investors are mostly in this region, it’s open to global investors aside from, for tax reasons, the UK and the US. Crowdbaron’s properties are currently spread across London and Jakarta, with more in Madrid and perhaps some US cities being added soon.

Real estate crowdfunding could turn out to be one of 2013’s hottest startup – and investment – trends. I notice that US-based RealtyMogul also looks promising, and recently won a bunch of awards and plaudits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Late last week, Qihoo 360 CEO Zhou Hongyi spoke to the press about a number of things. Among them was his ultimate aspirations for the company in the long term:

[Qihoo] 360′s free security software has already become the biggest in China, and made-in-China products are sold in every corner of the world. China’s unique free web security business model must also go out into the world [...] Just like made-in-China, we must go out and promote China’s uniquely-innovated free antivirus business model to the world, and make [Qihoo 360] the biggest web security company in the world.

It’s a lofty goal, but is it an attainable one? That depends in part on the proposed timeline, but anytime in the near future I think Qihoo is going to face huge obstacles in any attempt to expand beyond China and perhaps the overseas Chinese diaspora. Among them:

Consumer perceptions: Qihoo doesn’t have the best reputation even within China, and many Chinese technology companies have found expanding beyond China’s borders to be incredibly difficult because of the general distrust many people have (whether that’s fair or not) towards Chinese software. Companies like Huawei and ZTE have been learning this the hard way over the past few years, and Qihoo’s product is, if anything, more likely to cause even more consternation given that security software tends to have access to large swaths of the user’s computer and communicates frequently with the company’s servers.

Whether or not Qihoo is actually using this access to do anything malicious will not matter. If there are any doubts, most people simply aren’t going to install the software. And with Chinese companies, there are always doubts. Perhaps in the long run, that could change. But I don’t see it likely to change much in the immediate future, and if the frequent stories about hacking and spyware coming from China in the Western press are any indication, it could get even worse.

Entrenched competition: Like most of China’s first-generation internet startups, Qihoo has grown and developed in parallel with China’s internet industry. But to become the biggest web security company in the world, it would have to enter — and ultimately dominate — fully developed industries with deeply entrenched competition. There are already plenty of free security suites out there, and Qihoo would face tough battles in many markets to even gain a foothold, let alone become the dominant player.

And in fact, Qihoo even lags behind its biggest domestic competitor in this regard. Baidu launched a free PC security suite aimed at Southeast Asia (starting with Thailand) earlier this year. While Qihoo has been focused on trying to take some of Baidu’s search market share in China, Baidu has been quietly laying the groundwork to beat Qihoo at its own game overseas. There are huge potential markets that are still developing in Southeast Asia where Qihoo might gain itself a foothold from which it could more easily target other international markets. But as far as I’m aware, it has thus far focused completely on China. And while it dominates the security market there, its competitors are becoming more and more entrenched overseas.

PR and legal problems: Qihoo CEO Zhong Hongyi is, to put it mildly, an opinionated guy. Working for him is apparently a nightmare. In the press, he’s been more than willing to take on competitors and stoke “wars” like the famous ‘3Q War‘. I feel quite certain that Qihoo would argue that and its other battles are its competitors’ fault, but China’s courts seem to disagree. Qihoo has lost two separate court cases in the past couple weeks. Now imagine a Qihoo that’s fighting in these “wars” on five different continents, and constantly engaged in dozens of legal battles in various court systems around the world. It would be a nightmare.

Moreover, Zhou’s blustery style of PR isn’t likely to win the company many supporters overseas. Last week Zhou spoke about Steve Jobs as a role model, but Jobs was the exception, not the rule, and even Jobs tended to keep his famously sharp tongue out of the public eye as much as possible. Zhou’s personal vendettas, sharp rhetoric, and microblog battles are going to turn people off in international markets where consumers are not used to seeing CEOs slinging mud in public so frequently.

And, without getting too personal, in my own experience Qihoo handles people questioning it less well than any company in China I have ever dealt with. But the sort of scrutiny an occasional Tech in Asia article puts on the company is nothing compared to the suspicion, doubt, and speculation that will be targeted at it from all corners of the globe if it attempts to expand internationally. Recently, the company has apparently hired a PR firm that has been helping arrange interviews in the Western press, but from what I’ve seen of how Qihoo’s executives respond to criticism, even a skilled PR firm isn’t going to be capable of holding them back (or undoing the damage) when the company is facing Huawei-like levels of scrutiny internationally.

Zhou talks about overseas expansion and domination in the context of it being his dream, a driving force that keeps him and the team motivated to push the company forward. In that sense, it’s certainly quite valuable, but I think this is the sort of dream that’s destined to stay in Zhou’s head, at least for the foreseeable future.

(Incidentally, Zhou also talked a bit last week about the things he doesn’t plan to do, which include e-commerce and mobile phones, although Qihoo does plan to keep making mobiles with hardware partners. Previously, Zhou has also promised Qihoo won’t get into instant messaging.)

All of China was on holiday for half the week, yet it still managed to be a particularly eventful few days in terms of tech news.

1. Alibaba Gets More Social, Takes Stake in Sina Weibo for $586 Million

The week started with a bang as China’s top e-commerce company took a sizable stake in the nation’s hottest social network.

2. Why Did Alibaba Invest $586 Million in Sina Weibo?

Now that the long-rumored deal was a reality, we also pondered some of the social commerce strategies behind the Alibaba-Weibo tie-up.

3. Amazon Appstore Opens in China, Leaps Final Hurdle Before Kindle Fire Launch

The week ended with some big news as well, with Amazon launching its Android-oriented Appstore in China yesterday. In theory, everything’s now in place for all of Amazon’s hardware to hit the Chinese market.

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

Beijing’s tech district is still growing fast – both in terms of the number of startups and the scope of angel funding available in the capital.

5. China’s Top Video Sites Reveal Hundreds of Millions of Mobile Users, Start Race to Monetize Them

The top two video sites in the country revealed some very interesting mobile viewership stats this week. Inevitably, the numbers are huge – and so is the urgency to monetize these mobile users.

6. Sina Weibo Has Already Added Taobao Ads in Wake of Alibaba Investment

Getting back to the subject of the Sina Weibo and Alibaba deal, the social network already has some e-commerce adverts. Perhaps this is the start of targeted ads on Weibo.

7. SnapWeibo: This Weibo Post Will Self-Destruct in 10 Seconds

One last Weibo story this week. This one’s on a much lighter and more ephemeral note.

8. Get Lost, GPS: China Invests $810 Million to Create Products for Homegrown Navigation System

China’s self-developed navigation system has been in development since 2000, but this week’s major investment will lead to Beidou-equipped devices finally getting into the hands of consumers.

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

Delhi-based Zomato seems to be expanding its restaurant reviews platform at a fair speed. After launching in London in January, the startup then went to Manila in March and most recently down to Johannesburg earlier this month. At that kind of pace, it’s probably time for the startup to be thinking about its next move. Speaking over the phone with CEO and co-founder Deepinder Goyal, he confirms that there’s already a target in sight – Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia.

Zomato plans to launch its Jakarta restaurant listings in late July. There are already two staffers in the city of 10 million people and the plan is to hire a mostly local team, oriented around content and sales. Having already done their homework, Deepinder reckons that Jakarta has about 18,000 eateries of all kinds – including the city’s many excellent coffee shops. Of course, Zomato wants them all to be listed, but it’s not yet clear how many will be on the site by the time of launch.

Learning Indonesian

With such a large base to cover, Deepinder says that Jakarta is Zomato’s biggest ever single city to tackle. Another new challenge to face is that it’ll be Zomato’s first ever launch in a language other than English. While the company is internally testing Hindi for the 13 cities it covers in its home nation of India, the Jakarta launch will be the first public unveiling of a new language on the site. That means getting Bahasa Indonesia right (linguistically and culturally), and that puts even more of an emphasis on finding the right local staff.

As nice as Jakarta is, why choose that place? After all, there are a lot of world-renowned foodie cities in the region that make more obvious choices for a listings and review service. Deepinder tells us:

We love going into markets where there’s not much smartphone penetration or web usage so we can build the market around us – and help build up the market.

That’s how Zomato grew to a claimed 70 to 80 percent of the eatery online listings market in India – and why its first two targets in Asia (outside of native India) were Colombo (Sri Lanka) and Manila. It’s no coincidence that they’re also markets with little in the way of solid competition. Deepinder freely admits this too; apart from London, he says, the competition has been “fairly simple and easy.”

In addition, Zomato’s CEO guides the startup to new cities where he feels restauranteurs or corporations are most willing to pay for ads, which is the main monetization channel. Thus the Zomato team doesn’t fret over the rate of smartphone usage in a particular area, and instead follows the money into a relatively immature metropolis where the lifestyle food sector is lacking in online resources.

25% of restaurants shut down each quarter!

Check out the menu before even arriving – click to enlarge.

After a month in Manila, how’s Zomato faring there? Deepinder says that the Metro Manila site now gets 10,000 pageviews per day, and that’s rising 25 percent per week. “It’s the fastest growing market for us,” he observes. After launching with 9,000 listings, the site now has 10,000 establishments on file.

Interestingly, about 25 percent of all restaurants on the site shut down each quarter – but more are opening up, resulting in a net gain. “It’s a lot of effort,” Deepinder admits, “But we have processes in place to deal with it.” Indeed, he concedes it can be a scaling issue for the Indian startup, as the content side of the business is labor intensive, and the ad sales are mostly done offline.

But the Manila team seems to be on top of things: it’s able to add 60 to 80 new locations each day, and processes 1,000 menus (scanned menus are a particularly useful feature on the site) per week, which are a mix of brand-new menus or updates.

Right now, the Manila team is made up of 12 people, though it’s not the final country team, as five of those are Indian staffers, and most of them will inevitably want to return home. So the goal, we’re told, is for Manila to have a fully-fledged local team there, and that takes about six to 12 months to form. “We’re building a pipeline of country managers,” Deepinder points out, but that takes years of personal growth and experience within the company, and then final training for each new country manager takes three months. That’s the same process that’ll happen in Jakarta.

Singapore? The US?

With Zomato preferring emerging markets, it doesn’t seem very likely that Singapore will be added to its roster anytime soon. There’s already Yelp in the Lion City, and local startup Burpple made an interesting move into this area earlier this month.

But one very mature market is being eyed up by Deepinder and the Delhi crew: the US. While not a definite green light, the co-founder says that, in the event of venturing into the States, they’ll use their experience in London to help shape their approach to another western market. One deciding factor is the success of the London site. After launching that at the very start of this year, it already has 250,000 visits per month. If that can rise to be the top foodie reviews site in that city, it could well signal that they’re ready for a push into the US. “We’ll know in four to six months time.”

Zomato has 260 employees around the world right now, with just over 200 of those being in India. A further 200 will be added in that nation this summer in an apparent push to speed up the processing of both its content and ad sales teams.

So, Jakarta readers, are you keen for the launch of Zomato in the city this summer?

The largest local map provider in India, MapmyIndia has added lots of new places with version 8.0 of its online maps today. It comes with more driver assistance features such as live traffic and lane guidance. More interestingly, the digital map provider shared that it now covers 10.33 million places, 1.9 million kilometers of roads, 600,000 villages, and 4,787 cities at street-level in India.

Last year, when Apple’s new maps app imploded, MapmyIndia cheekily offered its own iOS maps app to help Indians and travelers navigate in India.

MapmyIndia’s investors include Qualcomm Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, and most recently Zenrin, a Japanese mapping giant. Besides online map service, MapmyIndia also offers offers printed products and hardware, such as its in-car GPS tablet and the CarPad. All of today’s new locations and features will also be updated within MapmyIndia’s navigation products.

This week we saw lots of interesting reports, and more than a few interesting rumors to boot. But everyone has their favorites, so rather than delaying you further with some tired introduction, let’s just jump right into it. Here we go!

Charlie’s pick: Report: Baidu Acquires Social Video Rival PPS For Up to $400 Million

The rumors were flying this week about Baidu’s acquisition of PPS, and while it’s not yet officially confirmed, the move makes a lot of sense. If it is true, it could really shake up the video marketplace in China, and help Baidu pose a bigger threat to Youku-Tudou.

Steven’s pick: Qihoo Loses Tencent Lawsuit (Again), Must Pay Fine and Show Frontpage Apology (Again)

Chinese web company Qihoo was back in court this week, doing what it does best in this situation: losing. Twice in one week.

Willis’ pick: Japan’s GungHo Hits $10 Billion Market Cap

Puzzle and Dragons (almost) single-handedly turned Japan’s GungHo into a $10 billion company, surpassing DeNA and GREE along the way. It’s shockingly great but also worrying. The ride of a game company is roller coaster-like and GungHo is apparently enjoying its peak period. But it will experience a downfall as soon as gamers are bored of Puzzle and Dragons and the hype dries up.

Minghao’s pick: Agate Studio Enters Feature Phone Gaming Battle in Indonesia With New Social Platform

Besides e-commerce store Multiply closing down, I think this is another news worth noting. Chat apps and e-commerce sites are competing intensely in this market, another battle is looming ahead; the feature phone gaming platform battle. Kotagames is the earliest entrant, with FunSpot coming in this month, and now, one of Indonesia’s biggest game studios Agate Studio is joining the fight.

Emily’s and Enricko’s pick: An E-Commerce Giant in Indonesia Bites the Dust. What Happened to Multiply?

Emily: I suppose that this is going to impact adversely those who have stuck with Multiply throughout its evolution. Late in December 2012, it announced a total transformation to a 100 percent e-commerce site – and just less than three months later, it decided to just cease operations. This is a good investigation of why that happened.

Enricko: This is a shocker. Just two months ago everything looked rosy for Multiply. The site was ranked 47th in Indonesia and 17th in the Philippines, and the company was looking forward to its rebranding effort. A lot of people grew up with Multiply, from the social network days up until the end. Quite a few of them showed their support on the company’s Indonesian Facebook page, they still love Multiply, and hope the company can still bounce back. This is a sad day for everyone involved.

Youshen’s pick: Google, Baidu and Many Web Companies Set Up ‘People Finder’ Boards After Chinese Quake

It is heartening to see continual relief efforts by tech companies after last Saturday’s unfortunate Sichuan earthquake in China. With China’s active Internet population, Google, Baidu, Qihoo and Sohu are well-positioned to leverage on real-time web data and innovative cultures to help families and friends find their lost ones. I look forward to similar innovation and speed for humanitarian relief worldwide.

Andrew’s pick: Japan’s GungHo Hits $10 Billion Market Cap

It’s really amazing to see how a game can generate $62 million to $86 million monthly. With the new spin-off series and how the game rockets up the company’s market cap, this smartphone game could really become a potential billion dollar franchise. Let’s see.

Vanessa’s pick: Singapore’s Dropmysite Drops a Bomb, Now Funded By 500 Startups

The team at DropMySite is closely watched by many in the Singapore startup scene. This great news shows that startups in Asia can potentially do the same and look to the United States for funding and expansion.

Speaking of expansion efforts to Silicon Valley, the world’s largest hackathon competition, AngelHack, will be coming down to Asia. Previous winners of the competition have also gone on to incubate at Y-combinator, 500 startups, and AngelPad. For you lucky Tech in Asia readers out there, AngelHack is giving out free tickets using the code TechinAsia. This could also be your chance to be part of the inaugural AngelHack accelerator program, so sign up in your respective cities now!

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

Chinese web company Qihoo has lost its second lawsuit and legal tussle this week. This time, Qihoo (NYSE:QIHU) was up against search engine rival Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) in the Beijing High People’s Court, where a judge ruled in favor of Baidu’s unfair competition suit and ordered Qihoo to pay a fine and publish an apology.

Just two days earlier, another court ruled that Qihoo should pay damages to Tencent in a separate case – and say it’s very sorry.

The Baidu lawsuit against Qihoo dates back to the events of last fall, shortly after Qihoo – initially a web portal and software maker – launched its own search engine. While the Beijing court only imposed a fine of RMB 450,000 (US$72,000), smaller than the damages that must be paid to Tencent, Baidu’s legal claims were quite significant, accusing Qihoo of things like violating industry practices by circumventing Baidu’s block on Qihoo indexing Baidu’s content on sites such as Baike, which is a sort of Wikipedia clone. The court ruling today also accused Qihoo of utilizing Baidu’s search results in its own new search engine.

The leading search engine had earlier accused the newcomer of illegal seizure of Baidu’s intellectual property, and was seeking RMB 100 million ($15 million) in damages. Clearly the judges had a different idea of the value of that content.

Qihoo’s apology to Baidu must be displayed for 15 days [1] – coincidentally the same period of time as its apology to Tencent. But, as noted by Rihanna, I’m guessing that the perpetrator is not very sorry.

(Source: NBD – article in Chinese)

(Source: NBD – article in Chinese)

Oh hi, I didn’t see you there! I’m Charlie Custer, and on today’s episode of China This Week, we’re going to be looking at some tech stories from around China that are definitely going to interest you. We’ve got everything from legal losses to vulgar billboards to government subsidies. What’s not to like? Stay tuned!

1. Apple and Samsung Make Donations, Offer Practical Support, in Chinese Quake Aftermath

In the wake of another devastating earthquake in China’s Sichuan province, tech companies like Apple and Samsung stepped up and did the right thing by making donations to help the victims. Is this a surprise? No. But it’s a good thing to do and they deserve to be recognized for it.

2. Apple: “Best Quarter Ever” in China with $8.8 Billion Revenue

Speaking of Apple, the company most definitely has money to burn following its best-ever quarter in China with nearly $10 billion in revenue. Get a lot of the size of those numbers.

3. China Won’t Force WeChat to Subsidize Telecoms, Says MIIT Spokesman

It was good news for Tencent and bad news for telecoms this week as MIIT announced that contrary to what an official had previously said, the government does not plan to force Tencent to subsidize telecoms for the bandwidth and business WeChat eats up.

4. Qihoo Loses Tencent Lawsuit (Again), Must Pay Fine and Show Frontpage Apology (Again)

Is the definition of insanity really doing the same thing over and over again? Qihoo has lost a big court case to Tencent for the third time in as many years. Its executive team may be defiant, but regardless of how they feel, they’re still going to have to post an apology and fork over another big wad of cash.

5. Why a $2B Chinese Gaming Company Put “Dick Strings” on a Billboard in Times Square

Controversial advertising sometimes pays off, and Giant Interactive came up with a very clever — if, some would say, vulgar — way of advertising its latest game.

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

Chinese authorities have shut down two notorious movie pirating websites today in a strengthening clampdown on both online and offline piracy. YYeTs.com suddenly closed itself down at 12 noon today, but a notice on the site’s official Sina Weibo account says that it’s only temporary. The other site, Siluhd.com (Silu HD) suffered a harsher blow, with the site forcibly taken down and CEO Zhou Mou and eight other employees reportedly arrested.

Silu HD is said to be China’s biggest piracy site of high-definition movies, and has been online in plain sight for a decade. It claims to have 1.4 million registered users (Update: Corrected that number), making it larger than some social networks in the country, like dating website Jiayuan (73 million registered members). Chinese media reports today that the Silu HD site was very subtle, hiding its movies behind a paywall.

But “subtle” certainly isn’t a word that could be used to decribe YYeTs (pictured below), which has also been online for quite a while. A blatant movie download site, the service hasn’t gone down without a fight, and its semi-deactivated homepage today directs users towards some other, fully working URLs where they can download pirated content.

Click to enlarge

YYeTs’ Weibo page, I notice, also continues to link to pirated movies and TV shows, and just posted a link to the newest episode of The Vampire Diaries which it has uploaded to Baidu’s Dropbox-like cloud storage service.

Today is World Intellectual Property Day, so there might be an element of authorities wanting to be seen doing something. Given YYeTs’ claim of being down temporarily, there’s a chance it will be back soon. And it has its other URLs anyway.

A reader tells me that Beijing authorities also held an anti-piracy roadshow on the streets of the capital earlier today, starting in the Zhongguancun tech district. Plus, earlier this week, the country’s biggest e-commerce company, Alibaba, was called upon to use its ‘big data’ abilities to help law enforcement crack down on both online and offline piracy.

It’s relatively easy for Chinese web users to view legal and licensed movies and TV shows online, using sites like Youku, iQiyi (owned by Baidu), Tencent Video, Sohu TV, and many more. In fact, it’s easier to do so legally and for free in China than it is in countries like the US.

(Sources: Techweb (1) and (2) – articles in Chinese)

Earlier this week, the Guangdong Higher People’s Court ruled in favor of Tencent and against Qihoo in a lawsuit filed over the “3Q War” between the two companies that kicked off in 2010. Qihoo was ordered by the court to pay $800,000 to Tencent and to display a prominent apology to the company on its websites.

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because Qihoo has made something of a habit of losing lawsuits to Tencent, having done so previously twice before. But Qihoo’s executive team remains unbowed, and in the wake of the decision, the 21st Century Business Herald is reporting that several executives including blustery CEO Zhou Hongyi have criticized the ruling.

Their beef revolves around the court’s justification for the decision, namely that Tencent’s QQ instant messaging service isn’t a monopoly because it has strong domestic (Sina Weibo) and international (Facebook, MSN, etc.) competitors. Zhou’s argument is essentially that Sina Weibo is too different to be considered a competitor, and that the international competitors shouldn’t count because they are either too different or too unstable or inaccessible in China to count as competitors.

Qihoo vice-chair Qu Xiaodong added that if QQ and Sina Weibo were similar products, Tencent would not have felt compelled to release its own weibo microblogging platform. Chairmain Ji Xiangdong also shed some new light on the cause of Qihoo’s complaints for the first time, apparently telling reporters that when Tencent forced users to choose between QQ and Qihoo’s 360 Safeguard antivirus software, 20 percent of Qihoo’s users uninstalled the software in a single day. Given Qihoo’s user numbers at the time, that would mean that Qihoo lost 40 million users literally overnight. Damn.

Anyway, it’s hard to imagine what Zhou and company hope to accomplish by criticizing the court’s decision publicly, but if the past is any indication, we can look forward to both companies being embroiled in ugly legal battles for the foreseeable future.

(21st Century Business Herald via Sina Tech)

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has released the latest official numbers for broadband penetration in the country. According to the Ministry, China now has more than 180 million broadband subscribers, and that number continues to grow.

While the growth of broadband internet is impressive, it’s worth pointing out that in some respects, China has actually skipped broadband and moved straight on to mobile. The country already has more than 1.1 billion mobile subscribers, and well over 200 million of them are already on 3G. In fact, the country broke 200 million 3G subscribers last October and by the latest counts, has probably already cracked 250 million. And with the number of smartphone users also climbing steadily and already over 300 million by some counts, it’s clearly the mobile market that’s going to be making the biggest waves for the immediate future.

(image source)

A web-based battle between two Chinese internet giants that dates back to 2010 is finally being put to rest today. Sort of. The Guangdong Higher People’s Court has this afternoon ruled partially in favor of Tencent (HKG:0700), and against Qihoo (NYSE:QIHU), in a legal wrangle over desktop antivirus software. While the judge dismissed Tencent’s claim to RMB 125 million (US$20 million) in compensation for supposed economic loss, Qihoo is now ordered to pay RMB 5 million ($800,000).

In addition, Qihoo must display a prominent apology to Tencent on one of its portal homepages for a period of 15 days. We’ve reached out to Qihoo for comment, and also to find out where the apology will be placed.

Tencent’s lawsuit alleged anti-competitive practices by Qihoo in the heat of a very ugly and public spat in late 2010 between the two companies over antivirus software. It centered around Qihoo’s ‘360 Safe’ antivirus software for Windows PCs and Tencent’s newer QQ antivirus product. The tit-for-tat battle at that time astonished Chinese web users as the rival companies used their software to launch pop-up notifications accusing the other of misdeeds such as blocking their rival app from operating on the computers of people who had rival software installed. At one point, Tencent accused Qihoo of configuring its antivirus software to prevent people from using Tencent’s QQ instant messaging app – and that was a central point of this lawsuit. China’s long-suffering netizens dubbed it the “3Q War” (as in: QQ vs Qihoo).

Back in 2010: Qihoo’s Privacy Protector app accuses the Tencent QQ free antivirus app of scanning and reading sensitive computer files.

Qihoo, for its part, maintained that it was preventing Tencent’s software from accessing excessive personal information.

Qihoo’s own lawsuit against Tencent was rejected last month by the same court, resulting in Qihoo being ordered to pay RMB 790,000 ($125,000) in legal damages. Qihoo lost another verdict in a Beijing court in 2011 over the same affair, and was fined $62,530 for “slander and unfair competition.”

We’ll update when/if we hear back from Qihoo. Perhaps the 3Q War is finally over. The biggest losers in the whole thing, however, are the Chinese software users who got screwed over by both companies.

(Source: Donews – article in Chinese)

The Tokyo-based startup that makes Gengo, the enterprise-oriented crowdsourced translation service, has wrapped up $12 million in series B funding, led by Intel Capital. Aptly for such a globally-minded business, other investors in this newest round are from all across the globe: Infocomm Investments (Singapore), STCV (Saudi Arabia), NTT-IP (Japan), Iris Capital (France), and previous investor Atomico (UK).

Gengo is a platform for human translation for 33 languages, with over 7,500 experienced translators providing their linguistic services to small- and medium-sized business and major corporations alike. The idea is that machine translation – using things like Google Translate – is not reliable or accurate enough for doing business.

Founded in 2009, Gengo got series A funding worth $5.25 million in 2011 to help with its initial expansion.

The new financing will be used to accelerate global expansion and speed up its translation process (see the demo video below). Gengo already has a deal with YouTube to improve its multi-lingual video captioning feature.

Hiro Tamura, a partner at Atomico, points out in today’s announcement that since their original investment, “Gengo has proven it can scale its business across the world whilst growing its revenue four-fold.” Meanwhile, Kuo-Yi Lim, CEO of Infocomm Investments, says that Singapore’s “multicultural and multilingual environment, and diverse talent pool” make for an ideal “base for Gengo’s growth into the rest of Asia.”

Quite a few startups are trying the crowdsourced human translation niche, such as Japan’s Conyac or the new project by the guy who created Captchas.

See how Gengo works in this short demo video:

Image source credit: berita.upi.edu

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

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

Here come the jokers

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

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

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

Outright imposters

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

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

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

China Mobile is China’s biggest telecom and has been one of the country’s fastest-growing state-owned enterprises. But the numbers coming out of the company over the past few months have made it clear that it and China’s other major telecoms face a grave threat from new mobile apps like WeChat. We already knew that Chinese people were texting less than they used to, and now it seems they’re calling less as well. With barely any profit growth over the past quarter and uses of its traditional services falling, China Mobile will likely have to up what it charges for internet services like 3G just to keep from posting losses. (That is, unless its own version of WeChat somehow takes off).

Interestingly, the company is still growing steadily by other measures; it picked up more than 26 million new 3G subscribers this quarter, for example. The problem is that it doesn’t make as much money from 3G subscribers using web services for calls and messaging as it would if those users were using traditional calling and texting. And as wifi becomes more common both in public places and in people’s homes, more and more 3G subscribers are actually using wifi to do a lot of their mobile chatting, which means that telecoms make no money off them at all.

So far, none of China’s telecoms have a good answer for how they can continue to flourish in a China where wifi is widespread and WeChat and services like it have taken the place of texting and calling.

(via Sina Tech, Image source)

Unfortunately, in this day and age, having an online presence alone isn’t enough to guarantee sales. Online competition can be even more rabid than traditional businesses, so customer trust has to be built. You could go the old fashioned way, email a couple of customers, ask for a flattering testimonial, and apic, which you can post on your site for all the world to see. But this can take some time, waiting for a reply, to format the testimonial, and load it onto your site.

To put it simply, their product is a small widget that appears on your website allowing your users to rate and give testimonial to your website, it’s simple and free. GoRated.Ph, which recently won in Echelon 2013 Philippines Satellite, aims to make this process easier, near instantaneous, and hassle free.

Back in June of 2012, founders Ragde Falcis and Manly Candelaria first came up with the idea of creating a rating platform, very much like Yelp.com. Though the duo attempted to push new features left and right, like interacting with users on how to improve the service, and simple marketing via social networks. By February of this year however, things were not proceeding as expected, and the pair decided to try other ideas. One option they did not attempt however, was throwing cash at the problem, by sponsoring posts on Facebook and Google Ads. What they finally settled on was a widget, specifically a rating widget.

According to Ragde:

GoRated.Ph is a call-to-action for our target customers and our URL at the same time. What we do is we provide rating widget for websites that helps them collect customer testimonials.

Any site, be it e-commerce, blog or forum, can sign up for the widget, all you need is a Facebook account. You create an account with your FB login, specify your business category, name and URL. From your GoRated account page, you can copy your widget’s code for embedding. Embedding itself can be done from several platforms, Blogger, tumblr, intuit, WordPress, yola, WiX, Jimdo and webs. Embed your code, and presto, instant GoRated widget on your site. Customers can then instantly post a rating, from 1 to 5 stars, as well as a testimonial, which is automatically linked to their FB account, complete with profile pic.

And you’re not even limited to one widget per account! You can create as many as you want, for as many sites as you want, all accessible from your account. Note however, that GoRated is currently finalizing rates and payments methods for the use of their widget.

Ragde Falcis elaborates:

For the local market, we will charge Php 99/month (US$ 2.39) for premium version of the rating widget. We are in the process of finalizing the details on our payment gateway, once we get our payment gateway ID then we are good to go.

There are already several popular websites using the GoRated widget, amongst them Galleon, Philmusic, The Technoclast, Devcon, and Stream Engine Studios.com. GoRated also counts Philmusic and Xend as its distribution partners.

But is GoRated the way to go for your business? After all, there are other rating services on the net. The aforementioned Yelp and RateLobby offer similar services, and have the benefit of experience on their side as well. But Falcis still thinks they’ve got the right model:

There are a couple of startups that help websites in collecting testimonials from their customers but all of them are based from Australia, the UK and the US. Here at GoRated we use our own Social-Reputation algorithm that makes the testimonials social-proof and it identifies who are the fake raters. To monitor rating widget engagement, we have analysts that will tell website owners on how engaging the rating widget is.

Having only been active for a few months, it’s probably too early to tell if GoRated is really all it’s cracked up to be. A quick peek at their recently rated page shows a huge list of establishments, 99.9 percent of which appear to have gotten 5 star ratings. I’d like to think that these places are really fine establishments, but I expect to find an average or bad rating every now and then too. I even tried creating my own account, for my personal site, and giving myself a rating. Of course, I gave myself five stars. Nice concept and implementation, let’s just hope it doesn’t turn into just another local Facebook fad.

One of my favorite local Vietnamese tech sites, Pandora.vn, just came out with an interesting report saying that in Vietnam e-books haven’t even hit one percent of the market.

Frankly, I’m not surprised. I had to go to Singapore to get my Kindle Paperwhite. Kindles in Vietnam are either sold out or nobody’s heard of them. For e-readers like Nook, they’re even harder to find. This is despite e-commerce companies like Tiki.vn promoting the sale of Kindles and companies like Alezaa promoting the use of e-books.

From 2010 to 2012, there have been some minor efforts from the Ministry of Education in digitizing textbooks and training materials. But companies like VTC and Go.vn, the government’s social network, have also created initiatives, but maintaining copyrights have been a big hurdle.

This is all in stark contrast to e-books in the US, where last year e-books took 22 percent of the total book spending. I think Vietnam specifically struggles with two things as far as e-books are concerned:

• There are just no e-readers around. In all the local electronics stores, they’re ridiculously hard to find. Merchants don’t think customers don’t want e-readers and customers aren’t buying them. Not to mention, tablets aren’t showing as much aggressive growth as smartphones are.
• Alezaa is one of the only platforms to distribute e-books – but it’s experiencing copyright issues, as are the other platforms. But the real issue is just like iTunes over Napster, this platform needs to be easier for people to buy, because some customers are always willing to pay.

Until these two things are solved, a kind of chicken and egg problem is occuring, e-books will continue to fail to gain traction. The Vietnamese e-book market needs to take a page out of the playbook of Ookbee, the startup e-bookstore from Thailand, and build a model that works for an increasingly mobile-oriented population.

The following is a compilation of just a few of the many daily deals sites that have popped up in the Philippines in recent years. As a metric, I’ve included the number of Facebook likes each site has tallied to date. Some are veterans in the e-commerce wars, others are relative newbies. Most are homegrown ventures, while a couple can trace their roots overseas.

Several of these sites are also categorized as group buying or collective buying sites, where a minimum number of buyers must buy into a deal or promo before it can be claimed. If this minimum number, or tipping point, is not met by the promo’s deadline period, it is cancelled and no charges are made. The rest are your standard daily deals sites.

MetroDeal Manila

Facebook likes: 628K

Recently covered here at Tech In Asia, MetroDeal as the number one shouldn’t come as a surprise. With 299 deals available (as of this writing) it’s a destination for bargain-hunters. This site gets over two million unique visitors per month.

Living Social (Ensogo)

Facebook Likes: 468,412

Originally created in Thailand in 2009, LivingSocial came to Manila in July of 2010. Featured products range from simple snacks at well known restaurants to fully packaged vacation deals. Registration is free and simple, and buying a deal nets you a voucher, which you can print and present to the featured merchant. You can also earn Ensogo credit by inviting friends to be members. These credits, which cost 1 peso for 1 credit, can then be used as good as cash to buy deals of your choice.

CashCashPinoy

Facebook Likes 342,183

Founded in 2010 after first-hand frustration in bargain hunting in the malls of Metro Manila, Cash Cash Pinoy features a lot of fashion products, gadgets, and travel packages. Delivery is free nationwide, and the site promotes fast, priority shipping, with hassle free returns. Payments can be made, as with most e-commerce sites, via credit card, PayPal, GCash, bank deposits, or even over the counter at a 7–11.

DealDozen

Facebook Likes: 129,621

At first glance, Deal Dozen (DD) appears to be a very high-class e-commerce site. Further browsing proves this, as DD clearly advertises itself as a lifestyle website as opposed to general e-commerce. You can tell a lot of attention to detail was placed on website design, perhaps in the hope that pleasing visuals would entice visitors to buy more. Aside from beauty and luxury products, there is also an abundance of enrollment programs for advanced education for younger children. DD also offers ‘buy and share’ deals wherein you get special incentives if you share certain deals with friends on Facebook.

Groupon Philippines

Facebook Likes: 105,120

Launched in November 2008 in the US and officially arriving in the Philippines in February 2011, Groupon is advertised as the fastest growing internet company in history, reaching US$1 billion in sales in only 17 months. It has also been featured on the cover of Forbes and TIME as one of the top 50 websites in 2010. The catch is that for every deal, a minimum number of people must sign up before 12 noon, otherwise the deal is cancelled. No charges are made at this point, though the deal is lost.

DealGrocer

Facebook Likes: 87,736

Similar to DealDozen, Deal Grocer (DG) aims for a more luxurious and lifestyle-oriented approach to daily deals. Fine dining, exotic vacation packages, beauty products, and treatment offers – these are plentiful at DG. Purchasing a deal nets you either an electronic coupon delivered to your email, or an actual gift voucher delivered to your address. Also, DG claims that its featured deals are exclusive to its site, not available elsewhere, not even directly from the merchant. One thing of note is that all prices are in US dollars, and are charged thus, so even payments over the counter at banks are at US$ rates.

Gupo

Facebook Likes: 76,438

The name Gupo is derived from the Filipino word ‘grupo’ for ‘group’, and that’s how they advertise their deals. Gupo is again a lifestyle-oriented site, with lots of special offers for vacation packages for groups, salon and spa packages for couples, eat-all-you-can offers from well-known fine dining establishments, even group packages for pet check-ups and consultations. Of note however, is that though the site is rich and vibrant, there is no FAQ anywhere to be found, no information about payment methods, redemption and deliveries, not even word of special deals or promos.

DealsDiBa

Facebook Likes: 45,741

DealsDiBa (DDB) is obviously based heavily on Groupon. Unlike Groupon, which deals in pretty much anything and everything under the sun, DDB again takes the high society route, offering an unbelievably large selection of beauty products, treatment plans, luxurious fine dining, and exotic destination vacation packages. But, take a look at the category list on the side and hit the gadget link: No Deal Available. Payments can be made through the usual channels, credit card, PayPal, over-the-counter. And like Groupon, each deal needs to meet a minimum number of buyers otherwise it’s cancelled and no charge is made.

LocalRoam

Facebook Likes: 27,887

Also recently covered by Tech In Asia, LocalRoam (LR) is a rather specific e-commerce site, or as they bill themselves, a Buying Co-op. Off the bat, LR states that they focus exclusively on four types of services: travel, wellness, basic lifestyle stuff, and education/events. One question though, where exactly are the offers? Though we featured LR recently, one look at their site can leave you scratching your head. There is one deal for travel, one deal for a spa treatment, and five for restaurant offers. That’s it. When your competition can field hundreds if not thousands of travel deals to varied locations, having just one on your site is a fail, no matter how great your deal may be.

DealAmigos

Facebook Likes: 27,166

DealAmigos (DA) comes off as a pretty standard e-commerce site. Free registration, the usual payment methods, the same voucher redemption format shared with other sites. Product deals are varied enough, from vacation plans to self-defence stun gun flashlights – but there just aren’t enough deals. Though they offer more than Local Roam, they don’t come anywhere near the amount of deals offered by sites like MetroDeal and LivingSocial.

DealsTent

Facebook Likes: 26,043

DealsTent appears to be another lifestyle e-commerce site, though on a smaller scale than previous ones, and it shows. DealsTent shares the now common credit card/voucher for payment/redemption model, and offers mostly beauty products & treatments and vacation packages, with a few lifestyle gadgets thrown in for good measure. Ultimately however, there are very few, if any, exclusive deals in place, and definitely not enough deals as a whole, especially when compared to other lifestyle oriented e-commerce sites.

DealSpot

Facebook Likes: 25,084

DealSpot is based in Greenhills, San Juan City – arguably ‘deal Mecca’ in Metro Manila. It’s also a group buying site, like Groupon and DealsDiBa. The format is similar as well, buy a deal, get a voucher for later redemption, wait for the deals timer to expire. If enough buyers have taken the bite, the deal is on, just wait for the products to be delivered. If the tipping point was not reached though, the deal is cancelled and no charge is made. DS has a roughly similar list of deals as DealsDiBa – almost exclusively lifestyle products.

A-Deals

Facebook Likes: 6,343

A-Deals oozes exclusivity. How exclusive? Exclusive to the Ayala Group of malls, that’s how. For those not in the know, the Ayala Group of companies is one of the predominant business entities in the Philippines. Malls, real estate, banking, you name it. As such, expect a higher quality of deals here, though expect a slightly higher price tag as well. You’ll find designer labels, fine dining, beauty products and treatment, even deals for the popular Ayala Cinema movie line. What you won’t find of are the travel packages you see on every other e-commerce site. And there aren’t as many deals as a whole, but given that the site draws exclusively from Ayala malls, that’s understandable. Credit card, PayPal and over the counter at BPI payment modes are available, and you get a coupon for redemption once payment is made.

OkayOkay

Facebook Likes: 3,341

OkayOkay is a take on the Filipino word Ukay-Ukay, which has come to mean thrift or discount store, often selling second hand items. OkayOkay is a relatively standard e-commerce site, with a fair amount of deals, though none are truly exclusive, and you don’t get the massive volume of deals from more prominent sites. There aren’t any revolutionary innovations either, as you still get the standard printable voucher once a purchase is made. And these purchases are again payable with credit cards, PayPal, and your run of the mill over-the-counter bank payments. OkayOkay does have a cash back feature though, in the form of the OKash program. Since you can register an OkayOkay account through Facebook, you can also share a link from the site on your facebook page, and every time anyone clicks that link, you get three percent of its value in ‘OKash’. That OKash can be spent on other deals on OkayOkay.

Pinoy Great Deals

Facebook Likes: 3,295

Finally, an e-commerce site not centred in Metro Manila. Pinoy Great Deals (PGD) is actually a Cebu-based site, and is still the only such venture out of the Queen City of the South. PGD doesn’t make any daring changes in terms of operating platform. You still get a voucher once you pay with your credit card using PayPal, and registration is still free. The site features a complete list of all its partner merchants though, something you seldom see in other e-commerce sites. And aside from your standard gadgets, beauty products and tour packages, PGD is one of the few sites that offer specialised services like immigration consultation and English language proficiency tests. You can also get PHP 100 (US$2.43) referral for recommending friends to join up.

Pick Perfect

Facebook Likes: 2,496

Founded in August and launched in October of 2012 by Dottie Libiran and Tintin Agapito, Pick Perfect (PP) is relatively new to the scene. This is clearly obvious by the lack of variety in items for sale, and by the overall quality of deals available. Not that the quality is low or bad, just not high profile, and there is an abundance of local products as well. Payment options are the norm: credit cards, PayPal, etc. And you have your standard voucher or coupon for redeeming your purchase as well. All in all, PP seems like an e-commerce version of your small-town family-operated business.

Pinoy Vouchers

Facebook Likes: 1,900

Pinoy Vouchers (PV) is another group buying site, and shares a lot in common with others of its kind. You get the standard voucher system, a coupon you can print after purchasing so you can redeem your purchased deal. You can pay via credit card, PayPal, or over the counter at banks. The deals offered by PV are somewhat standard as well. There are vacation tour packages, beauty products, and other lifestyle products. One thing seldom seen at other sites, though, are deals for discounted ballet lessons for adults and kids, as well as violin group lessons.

My Deluxe City

Facebook Likes: 1,670

The last site on this list is My Deluxe City (MDC). It offers a fair range of deals, mostly lifestyle products like beauty and grooming products, spa and salon treatments, though they do offer some gadgets and clothing items. Forget about vacation packages here, they’re nowhere to be found. And MDC has a section called ‘private sale’, which is supposedly exclusive to MDC-VIP members, but after creating a quick trial account, these VIP deals appear to be accessible to all.

(Photo: Associated Press)

Shortly after this weekend’s earthquake near the Chinese city of Ya’an in Sichuan province, which has so far claimed nearly 200 lives with many more still missing, a number of leading web companies rushed to help with the disaster response by setting up online ‘people finder’ message boards.

Here are the five main online resources:

Google’s Person Finder

This is a well-known site in such an emergency, with buttons for “I’m looking for someone” and “I have information about someone”. Google’s dedicated Sichuan quake boards currently have 1,100 records, though it’s not clear how many of those are made up of people looking for missing folks, or actual bits of information about a lost/found individual. The Google site is also nice enough to link to several resources from other web companies, such as the ones listed here.

Baidu Zhidao for Ya’an

Baidu’s Wikipedia-esque Zhidao site now has a dedicated messaging board for the quake-hit area. In contrast to Google’s more closed-off (privacy-oriented?) Person Finder, the Baidu boards are open to anyone to read through.

360 Search for Ya’an

Qihoo’s board emphasizes the names of missing folks in very large type, making it easy to browse through.

Sohu Public Service for Ya’an

Major web portal Sohu has a Google Person Finder-like site (pictured above) split into “want to find” and “want to help” buttons. It also features an open board with Pinterest-style notes for each person being sought. So far, over 7,600 ‘missing’ posts have been made, but many could be duplicate names.

Panguso Post-Quake People Finder

State-run search engine Panguso has had the sense to make this site mobile-friendly, as many people will be turning to their smartphones or feature phones and using 2G or 3G in an area where many buildings and internet lines have been destroyed, or where electricity has not yet been restored.

Earlier today we saw smartphone rivals Apple and Samsung both make sizable donations to post-quake relief efforts. Social sites like Sina Weibo and the messaging app WeChat (known as Weixin in China) are also playing a part as people in the affected area use lots of web and mobile resources to communicate or find information.

Follow the updates on the China Daily live blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Vietnam, the chat app battle is fearsome. Western competitors Whatsapp and Viber face serious opposition from Asian rivals like Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat, and domestic apps like Zalo and soon to be released Wala. Arguably, there’s no real leader right now.

Line, probably one of the sleekest apps in the space is headed and designed by NHN. I sat down with JB Park, the CEO of NHN Vietnam, to talk about where NHN is headed next in Vietnam and was surprised to learn some interesting moves for the coming year and facts about NHN in Vietnam.

Currently in Vietnam, NHN has 70 staff, mainly engineers, and over 250 servers in the country dedicated to Vietnam. The Line chat app has had over 1.5 million downloads so far, although Park did not reveal monthly active users. But what is really interesting is that the 70 staff that NHN has up in Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital, are not working on features for the chat app (that innovation happens back in Japan and Korea where Park says there are teams of Korean, Japanese, Russian, and American engineers working together), but they’re actually working on bringing a new search engine into the Vietnamese market, one of NHN’s other fortes.

That means in Vietnam, NHN is going to be competing in two very significant spaces: chat apps and search.

A quick look at the history of search in Vietnam

If you’ll remember, I recently reported that Coc Coc, a Russian-backed search engine, is looking to pump $100 million into defeating Google in Vietnam, and there’s also another Russian-backed search engine called Wada, who hasn’t gotten as much traction in the market yet. Historically, Vietnam has seen its fair share of search engines that want to be Google:

• In 2006, DFJ VinaCapital invested $2 million on timnhanh.com, which has now shifted into newspaper content crawling.
• In 2007, the Nguyen Hoang Group invested $500,000 in monava.vn, but has since closed down.
• In 2008, Tinh Van company invested $2 million into Xalo.vn, but hasn’t made much headway.
• In 2008, Socbay.com also debuted to great fanfare but also hasn’t gained much traction.

It’s been difficult. Since 2008, no significant players except perhaps Coc Coc have really stepped up to face Google, and Google remains the dominant search engine with over 80 to 90 percent of the search engine market share – and it’s by far the top website in Vietnam. So it’s interesting that NHN is jumping into the Vietnam search war as well. According to Park:

In South Korea, Naver has long been the king of search, soundly dominating Google, which has only had around five percent of market share. So in the next few months, we’ll be releasing our own search engine on the market.

In order for NHN to succeed on the search front, it will have to be proactive in building up its own content. That means coordinating with local companies and organizations that produce information.

The only way that we could be better than Google in South Korea was in working with content distributors and publishers locally, so that’s what we’ll be doing here. The problem in Vietnam is that content is very weak. So we have to look at helping to produce it and get it online.

It’s going to be an interesting journey for NHN’s search in Vietnam. Park didn’t say if the name of the engine would be Naver like in South Korea, but he did say they’re look at building a search app in addition to a website. The challenge moving forward will be if the team of Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese engineers can crack Vietnamese search better than the Russian-Vietnamese teams at Coc Coc.

Yahoo China has announced today that its email service in the country will be shut next month. The Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) email homepage has already ceased new registrations and is now informing current users that, from now to August 19, they’ll be transferred over to Alibaba’s ‘Aliyun’ email service instead.

Yahoo owns a 20 percent stake in Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce titan that was first handed behind-the-scenes control of all Yahoo China operations backs in 2005, covering things like Yahoo email, search, and the news portal.

This Yahoo Mail shutdown could well signal the start of a total withdrawal from the country. While that hasn’t been confirmed, new CEO Marissa Mayer looks to be shaking up the (very many) failing parts of Yahoo, so the lackluster performance in China could well put the entire operation up for the chop.

Yahoo is China’s seventh largest search engine, with 0.28 percent market share of pageviews at the end of February of this year. That’s a fraction behind Microsoft’s struggling Bing, which has only 0.52 percent share. Baidu is the clear market leader. Aside from its woes in the search sector, Yahoo is also struggling up against the weight of local news and entertainment portals like Netease, Sina, Tencent, and even MSN.

Last December, Yahoo shut its rather dodgy music service in China, and also closed its blogging platform in Vietnam.

A few months before all that, Alibaba paid $7.6 billion to buy back about half of Yahoo’s previous stake in the e-commerce company.

UPDATE: The official statement from Yahoo! China:

As part of the agreement to buy back the Yahoo! stake, technological support for China Yahoo! Mail service will be suspended and we will begin the China Yahoo! Mail account migration process beginning April 18 (April 17 PST), 2013; we will offer several options to our users to make this transition as smooth as possible, and China Yahoo! users will have four months time to migrate their accounts to the Aliyun mail service, the Yahoo! Mail service in the United States, or another 3rd party e-mail provider of the user’s choice.

(Hat-tip to WantChinaTimes for spotting this)

So it turns out that Amazon’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Kindle hardware didn’t launch in China on the 16th as rumors said it would. But there is a concrete development today with the rollout to Chinese consumers of Amazon’s Cloud Drive feature.

Amazon’s personal cloud storage service launched last year in many countries, and was finally imbued with file syncing capabilities earlier this month. The Amazon Cloud Drive apps for Windows and Mac are also now available in Chinese from the Amazon China site.

The business-oriented Amazon Web Services launched in China last December.

The availability of Amazon’s Cloud Drive in China might suggest that Kindle hardware is a step closer. Or not. Amazon’s Kindle e-bookstore opened in China a few months ago, but readers must view the purchased e-books within the company’s smartphone apps. But with China not getting the Amazon Appstore anytime soon – no love for Indonesia or Singapore either – it’s safe to say that the Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD tablets won’t be going on sale here for a long time.

Amazon Cloud Drive is up against a lot of local rivals, such as Baidu’s Netdrive, a Dropbox clone that the search engine giant says has over 30 million users in the country. There are also startup cloud services like Kanbox.

(Kudos to @foxmachia for spotting this)

The very minimal UI of the new Baidu Antivirus app for PC users in China.

After months of testing it in on users in Southeast Asia and then around the world, Chinese search engine Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) has now launched its antivirus PC software in China.

It’s a major challenge to arch-rival Qihoo (NYSE:QIHU), which muscled into China’s search engine market last summer but is perhaps best known for its antivirus software.

The Baidu Antivirus app is co-produced with security experts Kapersky. It’s not clear if it’s essentially the same as the earlier Windows app that was marketed overseas as “Baidu PC Faster”. But Baidu’s newest product for its home audience is labeled v1.0 beta 1, and is currently only taking on a limited number of beta testers. Currently, it can’t be downloaded from the new Baidu Antivirus Chinese homepage until it opens up to a new batch of early adopters.

Qihoo’s security credentials have been in the spotlight a lot this year, with numerous allegations of improper data collection and exploitation of users of its PC apps, like its antivirus offerings and its popular 360 Browser for Windows. Not only has a respected Chinese newspaper blasted Qihoo as a “cancer” of the internet, but Apple has banned all of Qihoo’s iOS apps with no explanation. Baidu might be privately seeing this as a good opportunity to win over users to its new app.

To fully challenge Qihoo, Baidu will surely need to create antivirus apps for Android as well.

(Sources: ZOL and Marbridge Daily)

Of course, at just an average of 4.7 Mbps, even Shanghai’s internet isn’t very fast. Still, it dwarfs the average connection speed in last-place-finisher Inner Mongolia, which clocks in at just 2.3 Mbps.

(Qihoo via China Daily)

After making fast progress from first launching its foodie-oriented photo app in May 2012, now Burpple has rolled out a user-submitted restaurant listings and reviews site in Singapore. It’s an interesting challenge to Yelp – which launched in the nation in September – by this local startup, covering “5,000 popular places and hidden gems” all across Singapore, replete with maps and plenty of excellent pictures.

The new web app is called Burpple Find. It lets you search by area, food type, or jump to a specific eatery. With Burpple users having posted over 150,000 food moments around the world, plenty of those took place in Singapore and are now laid out in Burpple Find. The listings give lots of useful info, such as a price range, tags, and dishes recommended by users (pictured below). The new feature looks great, too – way better than Yelp, and nicer even than the aesthetically pleasing Zomato. Interestingly, India-based Zomato is pondering Singapore as its next launch, so the local startup will likely have more competition later this year.

(UPDATED: Elisha from Burpple says: “While ‘Burpple Find’ is currently in beta in Singapore, we’re looking for local foodies who simply love to travel and recommend good eats in the region. If you have readers from Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines who might be interested, they can write to us at community (at) burpple.com with the title BURP & TRAVEL.”)

Burpple has users in over 3,300 cities on its iPhone and Android apps, so the Burpple Find site will likely expand in the near future. For now, here are a couple more photos of the new site:

1. DNF (also called Dungeon & Fighter, Dungeon Fighter Online, etc.). A Korean-developed beat-’em-up game that’s pretty old (released back in 2005) but still very popular in China.
2. CrossFire*. China’s version of Counter-Strike (a tactical first-person shooter), another oldie-but-goodie that was actually developed by Korean devs SmileGate and released in 2007.
3. League of Legends. The DOTA-based competitive online game that has been immensely popular worldwide.
4. QQ Speed. A 2008 racer developed and released by — no big surprise here — Tencent Games.
5. QQ X5* (QQ炫舞). A casual dance game also first released by Tencent in 2008.
6. Dream of the Three Kingdoms (梦三国). A fantasy battle game developed by Hangzhou-based Electric Soul and released in 2009.
7. AgainstWar (逆战). A Tencent-developed online first-person shooter first released in 2011.
8. Fantasy Journey to the West. A fantasy RPG developed by Netease and first released all the way back in 2003.
9. Counter-Strike Online. The original tactical first-person shooter, popular around the world and still played in China too. Developed by Valve and Nexon, originally released in 2008.
10. NBA2KOL. As you can probably guess, this is an online basketball game developed by 2K Sports.

If you’re wondering why most of the games on this list seem really old, it’s because most of these games are frequently updated. Many of them now look totally different and have completely different content when compared to their original beta releases, so even if you’ve been playing the same title for years, the content stays fresh enough to keep gamers from getting bored.

(Info about the games comes from their Baidu Baike entries, image via this BusinessWeek article which incidentally happens to quote your humble correspondent.)

*Both of these games had alternate versions that also made the top ten list on QQ Games’s site, but since they’re just two different versions of the same game, I’ve left the alternate versions out of my own list.

In my opinion, most websites in Vietnam are crap. They’re ugly, poorly designed, horribly colored, and the font choice is atrocious. So I’m seriously thankful I ran into Sieu Web, which means Super Web, hence the logo. It’s a new website-building platform that’s designed to make website creation very easy, with responsive designs and an easy-to-use dashboard for the user backend.

To Truong Manh Quan, the CEO of Sieu Web, it’s a departure from services like WordPress and Tumblr, which are more geared towards blogging. Sieu Web is specifically designed for small businesses, e-commerce sites, and individuals – many of whom won’t be familiar with HTML or CSS. The cool thing is, the website themes are all responsive.

If you’ve been following Tech In Asia closely, you’ll remember that Enricko wrote about a similar website in Indonesia called Pixtem, which also aims at getting lower tech users online.

According to Quan:

Our strength is creating a website that is to create the most easy way to make a website for folks who don’t know IT, like an individual who wants to start a company or website for their company but doesn’t know any coding. We want it to be free and high quality. After two weeks in operation, we’ve already got 1,500 users on board.

These are the choices that Sieu Web offers so far, including: small business, e-commerce, musical artist, individual, and other.

At first, Sieu Web will go with the freemium model to get users, and after that it will open up two more packages with more features including more user support and plugins. In the future, Quan says:

First, we’ll be working on iPad and Android tablet apps so that users can manage, keep up with stats, and create their websites via iPad. Second, we’ll be opening up a platform for designers to be able to design their own themes and upload them to the site. After this, we’ll be looking at the global market.

All in all, I’m hoping Sieu Web and other websites in this vein become successful so that we can see an end to the crappy websites users have been subjected to for the past decade.

KuaiYong has just launched this web store for pirated iOS apps.

Far from being shut down by Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), the Chinese team behind KuaiYong seems to be thriving. Last year it made a no-jailbreak-needed alternative to iTunes that not only pirates iOS apps, but also helps sync them to your iPhone or iPad. This week, the same team has launched a web version of its pirate iOS app store at 7659.com.

The 7659 “store” is full of pirated iOS apps and games available for free. While the content is nothing new – it was previously embedded in the Kuaiyong PC app – it makes the renegade startup more accessible to potential new users who can browse the available apps in their web browser. If you choose to download one of the iOS apps or games from the 7659 site, it actually downloads the Kuaiyong PC app if you don’t have it already.

Interestingly, the 7659.com site uses geolocation detection to hide itself from those outside of China. So, only readers within China will see the store as pictured in my screenshots. For those outside of the nation, you’ll either see an error message or it’ll just redirect to the KuaiYong homepage.

Aside from this new web store, KuaiYong is planning to launch its piracy-pimped iTunes alternative app internationally, but the English version of that is still not ready.

After the demise of the iOS jailbreak app Installous, which enabled an iPhone or iPad to use pirated apps, many will be looking for Installous alternatives – and KuaiYong is clearly hoping to fill that niche, with the added benefit of not requiring a jailbreak. And there’s clearly nothing Apple can do about it.

A game page on the new pirate store. Click to enlarge.

We mistakenly leaked last week that Spotify is set to launch in Singapore. So today’s launch by the Swedish music streaming giant into Singapore isn’t too much of a surprise. But, wait! There are a few more countries included in today’s launch — Hong Kong and Malaysia. This marks Spotify’s first big push into Asia.

At the launch event this morning, Spotify’s Sriram Krishnan, who takes charge of new markets, demoed how simple to Spotify is to use. In a nutshell, simple to search for songs, create playlists, use Spotify radio, and one-click sharing to Facebook with your friends. The premium package allows users to listen to Spotify across all their devices for SGD$9.90 or you can give a try for free on your PC only. Krishnan said:

Asia has always been on the roadmap for us. We always have an eye for Asia. We take as long as we want to create that perfect [service]… for this part of the world.

To date, Spotify has over $500 million paid to music rights holders since it launched. Spotify is available in over 23 markets with one billion playlists created. It has 24 million active users and six million paying subscribers. An average user spends about 107 minutes per day on Spotify with over two billion music objects posted to Facebook last month. 30 million playlists are created monthly by Spotify users.

In Asia, Spotify faces challenges from Taiwan’s KKBOX, which has a presence in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and Malaysia. KKBOX claims to have over 10 million songs from 500 international labels. But most of its music, it seems, are Chinese-language songs. Spotify, in contrast, is stronger for English-language songs. More on that as I wait for my Q&A session with Krishnan…

Spotify is now available in Singapore ahead of a launch event later today. Some basic fiddling with the music streaming service’s geo-specific URLs reveals that spotify.com/sg-en is now live.

Interestingly, Singaporean music fans only get the choice of two accounts: free (with ads) or “premium” across all devices for S$9.90 per month. In contrast, other markets like the US also have a middling “unlimited” plan (US$4.99) that’s actually limited to desktop/laptop usage only. Perhaps the Spotify team felt that smartphone-mad Singaporeans didn’t want to be tied to PC/Mac-only music streaming.

My colleague is at the Spotify event in Singapore later, so we’ll hear what the Swedish startup has in mind for its first ever yet another Asian launch. (UPDATE: A reader points out it is launching in Hong Kong and Malaysia today too – more on this later).

Image source credit: berita.upi.edu

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

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

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

Not following porn stars

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

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

SBY vs Obama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Source: Wired)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re inundated with social media these days. I consider my friends who aren’t on Facebook lucky, they don’t have to deal with the onslaught of senseless status updates and the latent narcissism that it entails. Facebook has slowly but surely blurred the lines between friends and acquaintances and strangers, but hasn’t put much emphasis on close friends and family. This is where PassedOn comes in.

The startup, based here in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam, focuses on creating an online diary of experiences with your loved ones for the English-speaking global market. And as the name implies, creating an album of videos, photos, soundbytes, and thoughts with them before you or they pass on.

The project has been online since November 2012 and already has over 100,000 users with “some more active than others”. Marco Oparq, CEO of PassedOn, has his sights set on working with companies like Dropbox to add value by personalizing their services instead of working with big companies like Facebook and Google. All of the data on PassedOn is encrypted so not even Marco knows how users are using the service.

I chatted with Marco for some insight into what he terms intimedia and the story behing PassedOn:

Intimedia is a new generation of websites that are more private and intimate than the jungle of social media that is currently offered. The WWW has an overload of information sharing and too few places that you can consider for yourself and your direct loved ones.

Marco goes on to say that Facebook is for friends, Twitter for business and friends, LinkedIn for business, dating sites for new lovers, but for your mother, daughter, and best friend, there isn’t a website that takes care of people you currently care about.

How did you come up with the idea?

Marco: I was on a holiday to Cuba with my wife, and the airplane had turbulence. At that moment, I realized that if the airplane would have crashed, basically we had nothing arranged. My kids were with my parents in law in Colombia, and they don’t know my parents, they don’t even have the contact number. Nobody in Vietnam knew where I was, and actually my parents in Holland, didn’t even know I was on a holiday.

Then I thought, I’m surely not the only one who hasn’t taken care of the basics (bank details, crucial information, etc.). Then a couple of months, I started to talk with people and see if it would be a nice idea to have an online portal to arrange these necessities in case something unexpected happens. Throughout these months, I realized that in fact it is more important to leave behind your thoughts and emotions than the actual administrative parts.

What happens when a user dies?

Marco: When a user dies, the “eWills” will be released to their loved ones and added to their profile. Later, we will add functions like being able to receive a printed version of the eWill in a nice book and allowing the people to “Leave a message to the World”.

But Marco emphasizes that PassedOn is not about death:

Marco: In general, I think it is good to mention that PassedOn is not about Death it is about realizing who and what is important for you and get a certain peace of mind that you have collected these thoughts and moments in a special place so you can share it with those you care most about.

What about older generations who are not accustomed to services like this?

Marco: First: the UI will be more visual. Second: we use the first wave of members (young mothers) to teach them. They are surely a target group.

I asked what Marco thinks of other competitors in this space like Deadsocial, LivesOn and Legacy Locker, but he says that these services don’t focus on the emotional ties between loved ones. PassedOn is decidedly about preparing “for only the few people before you are not here anymore, and only they can see it at that time.” Google has also entered this space with its Death Manager today.

The project plans to do a UI refresh this month, release a new app in the beginning of May, and start a new service that allows people to email their pictures and data directly into the service.

Check out the video for more on the service:

(Update: Changed Malaysian to Malay since we’re talking about the language, not the nationality!)

Dropbox reckons that it has 161 percent more Chinese-speaking users now than it had last year. So that makes it a good time for the American cloud storage service to roll out language support for Chinese – as well as Malay and Indonesian.

As announced on the Dropbox blog today, the updated Asian languages (along with new support for Polish and Russian) can be found on the Mac, PC, Linux, Android, and web apps from today, and will reach iOS soon.

With Dropbox being blocked in mainland China [1], the support for both simplified and traditional Chinese text is clearly aimed at the Chinese diaspora worldwide, be they in San Francisco, Sydney, or Singapore.

In terms of Malaysia, the Dropbox team says it’s seeing 274 percent growth there, and an even more stellar 537 percent annual growth in users in Indonesia. Though it’s not clear precisely how many users that entails. But Malaysians are saving 7.5 million files per day, while users in Indonesia are committing five million files to the cloud each day.

Dropbox is having a busy day, and also just announced Dropbox for Business as an expansion of its enterprise-oriented Dropbox for Teams cloud service.

Last May, Dropbox ventured into the Korean market, and began its push into Japan way back in 2011.

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

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

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

Keeping track of the project team in BrightPod.

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

As for the focus on marketing teams, Yamini explains:

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

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

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

Now, after months of work, the team has finally achieved this reality and created a series of open-platform maps that any private user or NGO can set up an account on and use to post very detailed reports that can include photos, GPS coordinates, and lots of other information about the pollution or environmental hazard that’s being reported. At present, these maps are separate from the old Danger Maps that use officially reported data only, and not all of China is covered yet in the open-platform maps. On the open platform maps’ official site, two cities currently have open platform maps (Shanghai and Shaoxing), although ITEPA is obviously planning to expand this as time goes on.

At present, a lot of what’s been reported in those cities is water and air pollution. That shouldn’t come as a surprise given the recent focus on water pollution on Chinese social media sites sparked by Deng Fei’s river photo campaign on Weibo, not to mention the high-profile air quality problems all over the country. Neither city has more than a couple dozen listings at the moment, but over time as more users become aware of the site and as more city maps are added to the open platform, these maps might become an even more valuable resource than the Danger Maps that launched last fall.

And of course, for those who are addicted to China’s latest social media craze, the ITEPA team has also set up an official WeChat account for Danger Maps. Users who are interested can scan the QR code on the Danger Maps open platform page to start following it.

The answer, it turns out, isn’t all that clear. As you can see in the graph from CNZZ below (we’ve translated it), Qihoo has gained a little bit of ground since last October. CNZZ has Qihoo with 14.87 percent of the search market, which certainly isn’t bad.

Of course, not everyone agrees with those numbers. Hitwise’s latest data (which comes from March) has Qihoo’s market share at only 11.97 percent, and while that still represents growth, Baidu’s market share is also up and at 78.55 percent according to Hitwise. And Guosen researcher Qiu Lin told Sina Tech that their data shows Qihoo having started with around a 10 percent share, then dropping to 8 percent before slowly climbing to its present position at around 12 percent of the market. No matter whose data you’re looking at, though, the message seems pretty clear. Qihoo is growing slowly, but Baidu may be too, and either way Baidu continues to serve the vast majority of China’s search traffic.

Interestingly though, the proportion of Baidu users to 360 Search users can vary a bit depending on what sort of thing users are searching for. Baidu users are always a strong majority of course, but even so, check out the variation in this CNZZ chart of what search engine incoming users used to access some of China’s most popular websites:

Qihoo’s stated goal for its search engine is to reach 40 percent of the market share in 2015, which seems perhaps overly optimistic given the slow growth it has seen over the past six months. Even so, 12 to 15 percent of such a huge market is nothing to sneeze at, and JG Capital reportedly estimates that search could bring in as much as $95 million for the company by the end of this year. And Qiu Lin says his most optimistic estimate for the company’s yearly search revenue for this year is more like $300 million.

Thankfully, since Qihoo is a publicly-traded company (NYSE:QIHU), at some point next year we’ll get to see the real, official numbers instead of just speculation. But there’s likely to be an awful lot of war to be waged between Baidu and Qihoo between now and then, and of course that’s not even mentioning the question of mobile search, which is a much more open market given that many of Chinese mobile users aren’t on smartphones yet and thus haven’t formed their mobile search habits.

(via Sina Tech)

Original image credit: berita.upi.edu

The Jakarta Globe reports today that the Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), will launch his own personal Twitter account soon. It is still undisclosed what Twitter account name the president will use, or when it is going to be launched. Presidential spokesperson, Julian Aldrin Pasha, explained to the paper how the Twitter account will be managed:

The tweets will be directly from him. There will be a team who helps manage the account but every time the tweet comes from the president, there will be a special code to let people know it is from him.

This special code might simply be the president’s initial, which is also used by Twitter’s most powerful user, US president Barack Obama, to let his followers know which tweets come directly from him. It is going to be interesting to see how the upcoming presidential Twitter account deals with the surge of tweets created by the 29 million strong Indonesian Twitterers every day – and specifically how SBY will handle online criticism and protests.

The spokesperson added that SBY fully understands about the criticism he will face in real-time on Twitter. The president is apparently willing to respond on Twitter if there is misleading information going round on the net. One current controversy surround the president is about his questionable tax returns. That will definitely have a place on the president’s upcoming tweeting agenda.

SBY will find a number of government officials recommended to him upon signing up for Twitter. There’s incumbent Jakarta vice governor Basuki Purnama and ICT minister Tifatul Sembiring – the former now has 181,000 followers and the latter has 540,000.

Another Twitter account for the presidential palace @istanarakyat (meaning “the people’s palace”) was launched two days ago. It tweets about the president’s informal activities as well as news about the palace itself. It has already attracted more than 4,000 followers.

With this, SBY will add the tally of world leaders who have a Twitter account.

(Source: The Jakarta Globe)

Popular video sharing site Vimeo was blocked by Indonesia’s largest telco Telkomsel for a short while. And while it was still being blocked, the only reasonable answer that the company’s customer service and staff had was that Vimeo was somehow associated with the only thing that is being widely censored in Indonesia: porn.

As the third largest democratic country in the world, the news media here can still talk about anything that they want (albeit with a few ‘discouragements’), even when it is related to the first family’s dodgy tax returns. One of the reporters of the above article tweeted about his experience being contacted time and time again by the president’s staff. And The Jakarta Post office was heavily discouraged from publishing the article. But still, the government couldn’t do anything other than that, and the article was published, putting the president in the spotlight.

But as the second largest Muslim populated country in the world, it is still very sensitive about pornographic material. The ICT minister Tifatul Sembiring (being also a representative of an Islamic-oriented political party, the PKS) has vowed to curb porn in Indonesia. This is the same minister who has blocked more than one million porn sites, and was even able to force RIM (now known as Blackberry) to filter porn on its Blackberry handsets two years ago.

Just last week Tifatul also made a request to Twitter to see if the US-based company can censor porn-related tweets to protect Indonesian children from accessing those sites. Twitter’s new country-by-country censorship policy might be able to grant that request, but so far there is no update about the enquiry.

Getting past the censorship?

While porn sites are definitely being blocked by the Indonesian government, interestingly porn site Xvideos is sitting securely at the 48th spot in Indonesia according to Alexa’s rankings. There are indeed ways to overcome the censorship like changing the DNS address, using proxy servers, or using VPN services. And you could do those on your mobile phones too.

Though sometimes the government and telcos get it right concerning which sites should indeed be blocked under the nation’s anti-porn laws, there are times when they get it wrong. Vimeo is one such example – it’s an artistic site crucial for young filmmakers in the country to get global, creative exposure.

Indonesia is still a democratic country which respects your freedom of speech – but with a religious twist. But when an unfair block happens, young web users know that there are ways to still access whatever is being censored.

Just a few weeks after expanding to the Philippines to shake up the restaurant listings market there, India’s Zomato has now launched in Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa. The site already has 2,000 restaurants listed in Johannesburg – also nicknamed Jozi – replete with addresses, photos, and scanned menus. Next, it’s up to users to add user-generated reviews of all those dining establishments.

This marks Zomato’s first move into Africa. It seems to be the strategy of the New Delhi-based startup: to edge into a new region in just one spot, and then look to expand outwards from there. The same happened in Southeast Asia with the Manila listings, and in Europe with the London foodie guides.

All the new Johannesburg content is available in the Zomato apps for BlackBerry, iOS, and Android, with other platforms being updated later. CEO and co-founder Deepinder Goyal explained the move in today’s announcement:

We’ve been growing aggressively over the past few months, and South Africa was always on our minds. The market has great potential, with lots of restaurants, and a high internet and smartphone penetration. Moreover, it’s a vibrant country where people are passionate about food. We’ll also be launching in Cape Town soon, and look forward to South Africa becoming a key business hub for us.

The only site that was doing a decent job of restaurant listings before Zomato’s entry was the homegrown Dining-Out site – but that doesn’t have any apps.

Get the Zomato apps from its homepage.

Started in 2008, Zomato now has over 11 million users on the site per month.

Just last week, two Chinese nationals were arrested in Vietnam. They were found with a total of 7,200 SIM cards that they were using to scam people via an elaborate telephone fraud. At first, I didn’t think this was interesting news, until I did a little hunting and found out that there’s an entire international ring of these guys operating across Asia. And they’re constantly getting arrested.

In the past few months, hundreds of these scammers have been arrested who are mainly Chinese or Taiwanese. In January, 80 were arrested in Cambodia. Last August, 350 were arrested in the Philippines, and in December, 100 were arrested in Sri Lanka. 19 were also apprehended in Thailand and Myanmar and ZDNet estimates that a total of 482 people have been arrested as of last month. That doesn’t include the suspects that were just captured in Vietnam.

To say the least, it’s either a huge network of scammers or a relatively easy scam that can be replicated across nations.

So basically, the scam is this: the scammer calls someone responsible for a company’s finances claiming to be the police and asks them to transfer money into a “safe” account for holding and/or inspection. New SIMs are used each time so that they can’t be tracked and the scammers also seem to use a two-step process in which they use SIMs to make a VOIP call over the internet, thus making it even less trackable. After the money is transferred, it disappears, and the scammer is never heard from again.

It’s interesting that all of this has gone down in just the last few months, I wonder if we’ll start to see more of these arrests in the coming months as the network gets broken down.

(Source: ICT News)

Spotify is set to launch in Singapore, perhaps as soon as next week. The Swedish music streaming startup has just sent out invites for an event soon in Singapore, but no further details are available at present. (Updated 30 minutes after publishing: Removed one detail at Spotify’s request).

This Singapore launch will mark Spotify’s debut in Asia. The premium music service has only opened up to music fans in 20 countries so far, no doubt held back by Luddite music labels. The only areas in the broader Asia-Pacific region where Spotify is available is Australia and New Zealand.

Spotify has over 20 million tracks available for legal streaming and downloading, and features some neat apps and playlist functions. The premium service costs US$5 per month for laptop/desktop-only access, or $10 for both mobile and laptop usage in the US, so it’s likely to cost the same kind of amount for Singaporeans.

The Spotify rollout might be bad news for local startup TellMyFriends, which wants to help Singaporeans make a profit from legally sharing MP3s with buddies over social media.

So it is with a sigh of relief that Lavandera.ph crossed my screen.

Lavandera – which is a Spanish word for laundress or washerwoman – aims to streamline the laundry service industry in the Philippines. Made by a startup called Third Row, this app is designed to be used by both owners and customers of laundry shops. Right now it’s just a mobile site, but native apps are in the works.

In a nutshell, Lavandera helps you track, record, and verify the pile of clothes that you submit to any laundromat or laundry service. It works at hotels to dormitories, hospitals to salons, and even at catering services.

Lavandera CEO Jose Capistrano, along with COO Cyd Magtalas and CMO Hans Felerino, have experienced anguish and frustration over various laundry-related mishaps. From missing clothes to colors mixed in with the whites, it is from these experiences that the idea for this app was born.

The search function is the backbone of the app for customers, providing a handy list of laundromats near your location, which includes addresses and contact numbers. Search results include both laundromats registered with Lavandera and those who are not. Everything is free for users with no fees involved.

For laundromat operators, the startup offers both basic and premium services. For the basic account, it allows operators to accept and manage laundry via the Lavandera site, receive notifications, and register a single shop on the in-app map. The premium account costs PHP 1500 (US$36.34) and includes all the features of the basic account, plus you can add multiple shops to the map, and add multiple users. Premium accounts also allow stores to remove ads and give access to tools for laundry progress notification.

All in all, this may seem like a trivial concern for people in more developed countries who don’t rely on laundromats. But, who knows, Lavandera may be just the thing to clean up the laundry business in the Philippines.