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

Facebook in Thailand

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

Twittery Thais

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

YouTube boom

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

Snapping up Instagram

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

Checking out of Foursquare?

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

Line up

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

Here’s the full slideshow presentation:

(Source: ZocialInc blog)

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

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

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

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

(Source: ZocialInc blog)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Source: Zing’s Blog)

This is how QQ looks as a Facebook app.

With 798 million monthly active users, Tencent’s (HKG:0700) QQ instant messenger is far and away China’s most-used social network. Some of its users are overseas, and today Tencent is hoping to boost that number by launching QQ Chat for Facebook.

In addition to letting users chat via QQ, the new QQ Chat for Facebook is available in six languages and incorporates built-in translation to/from Chinese, Spanish, and Japanese. It’s not the first overseas venture for QQ and its iconic penguin mascot, as Tencent released a business-oriented QQ International app for Windows and Mac back in 2010. But this new Facebook web app seems more focused on fun, cross-border socializing. Mel Yin, head of IM at Tencent, says that “this is the first platform-independent QQ client for English speakers” thanks to it being a web app.

According to the new QQ Chat for Facebook app, 4,400 people have already used it, which sounds like a fairly good start. With Facebook blocked in China, China’s hundreds of millions of QQ users will have to stick with their desktop or mobile apps – but at least some of their foreign friends might be more keen to jump aboard now.

In the age of mobile-only messaging apps, there’s surely not much demand for old style IM services. But Tencent has both bases covered, and has over 300 million users on its Whatsapp-esque WeChat app. A good number of those are outside of China as well, with good traction in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and Tencent is hoping that WeChat can be China’s first-ever global social media success story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In October 2012, WeAreSocial calculated that Facebook had hit 8.5 million users in Vietnam to overtake local rival Zing as the top social network. Today Facebook is at 12 million. That’s one million new users per month added in Vietnam alone. One of my sources who works closely with Facebook in Vietnam says that these numbers are actually modest, and 15 to 20 million is closer to the correct count.

If this rate of growth maintains, we’ll see over 24 million users on Facebook by the end of the year. Currently, over 30 million people are online in Vietnam, this will most likely hit 40 million by year’s end.

Currently, for social media users in Vietnam, Facebook is the de facto social network. That’s good for marketing and traction across groups. For example, if I’m an events promoter, Facebook is by far the easiest way to access people en masse. But that’s also a huge barrier to entry for different types of social media sites as they try to gain traction.

Outside of Facebook, most Vietnamese users are on forums. There’s very weak Twitter penetration. Mimo, Vietnam’s Twitter, hasn’t hit critical mass yet. Linkhay, Vietnam’s Digg, sits far below one million users. VNG, whose social media site Zing was on top until late last year, moved most of its efforts into mobile – with Zalo – and out of traditional social media. Although rumor has it, VNG will be releasing Zini.vn, a microblogging platform, by the end of this month.

But with Facebook’s consistent rise in Asia – apart from Japan and Korea, where chat apps are now stronger – it’s sucking up all the users in the country. Even if newcomers arrive into the market, it will be hard to take them away from the reigning social king. To me, this is sad because there’s less and less space for niche social media sites to build communities.

Yes, South Korea now has 19 million daily active users on KakaoTalk, and Japan has 36 million active users on rival app Line. That’s according to the compiled statistics from social media agency WeAreSocial. When we looked at the overview from the same agency back in October last year, Cyworld was leading in Korea, and Twitter was top in Japan. But not any longer. WeAreSocial’s Simon Kemp explains to us that he decided to focus on active users on the social sites to give a clearer view of what people are using. He explains:

The (previous figure of) 26 million was total registered users on CyWorld, but we’re becoming increasingly aware that this does not represent active use. Also, the figures for KakaoTalk are daily active users, so the monthly active users (i.e. the figure Facebook reports) are likely to be much higher. Given that, we’re confident that KakaoTalk is now the most active network in South Korea.

Here’s the infographic map:

Overall, Asia now has 874 million social media users, according to Simon’s calculations. Despite the recalibration to active users, that’s still an 18 percent larger figure than was seen in last October’s data.

Of course, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is still growing in Asia, despite the rise of messaging apps and its recent clean-up of fake accounts. Nonetheless, some drops in Facebook active usage have been observed in Singapore, Brunei, and Hong Kong.

Aside from Line and KakaoTalk, the China-based WeChat app is still one to look out for. As we reported last night, the makers of that app, Tencent, are planning to test a social gaming platform within WeChat this year. When that eventually launches it’ll make the app an even stronger rival to Line and KakaoTalk, which are already benefitting from gaming integration.

On the whole, social media penetration remains at an average 23 percent across Asia:

(Source: WeAreSocial Singapore)

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

Tapmee, a new Vietnam-made location-based social networking app just launched today on Android. The app, which has been in closed beta since 2011, is being developed by five people. It basically allows you to friend people nearby and chat with them on Facebook or on Tapmee’s native inbox. It’s a pretty new platform idea for Vietnam, so I grabbed an interview with the founder so you know exactly what it is. For early adopters, you may recognize similarities to Circles.

According to founder Nguyen Ngoc Hung (nicknamed Hung Zino), he wanted to create a Foursquare for Vietnam, but it wasn’t the real problem.

Because according to my needs and the needs of Vietnamese users, people want to meet each other. I found, while traveling around, that when I would travel to a new town, it was hard to meet new people.

Hung traveled outside of Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, by bike, looking to meet new people, but it was difficult. He always had to get on the laptop, open websites, etc. There are similar chat-and-flirt apps around the world, such as Skout or the China-made Momo, but they’re useless if nobody nearby is using them.

Facebook just resolves the issue of networking with friends that you already met or know. WeChat and Zalo are more focused on communication and keeping in touch with friends. So there’s still space for an app that is focused on finding new friends.

So how are you different from Foursquare?

Foursquare is focused on locations, like finding out which locations have the best food and coolest atmosphere, but Tapmee is focused on the people at those locations. So you’ll go to Tapmee to find out if there are people at this location or not, not whether or not the place is good.

In Tapmee, users will be able to chat with the people at the location through the Tapmee native inbox or on Facebook. In a way, if you don’t have the guts to go up to the cute girl in the restaurant, you can use Tapmee to meet her. That is, if she is also on Tapmee. The privacy issues are mitigated by allowing users to block people they don’t want to meet.

How will Tapmee make money?

Currently it has a virtual currency system. It’s used for various things within the app like giving other users gifts and this will evolve into a full voucher system where users can buy vouchers to redeem at locations and with merchants for products. And of course, we will also evolve the platform to accommodate marketing for brands.

For Tapmee, there might be too many barriers to entry. Users have to be on Facebook – perhaps not a big problem considering Vietnam is the fastest growing Facebook nation – and on Tapmee in order to use it. The draw will be if users are actually interested in meeting other people. With WeChat’s “Look Around” function and the large amount of dating apps, it might point to a significant need. I think Tapmee’s success will depend on how fun users will find it plus how well they manage privacy.

With Facebook already getting burdened with the onrush of new Vietnamese users, Tapmee could either be extra weight or it could serve to spice up people’s social lives. I think if they head in the direction of spontaneous dating, they might have something.

Currently, the app is only on Android and can be downloaded here. The iOS version will be out later this year.

In the process of digging up interesting startups, we come across a lot of bad ones, and that includes a fair number of uncreative copies. But it’s pretty rare to see a clone that is both as blatantly copied and as poorly executed as Ziuma, an Indonesian startup I stumbled across today while browsing through the list of startups that have submitted to us for coverage.

What initially caught my eye was that the site’s founder had submitted “Welcome to Ziuma” as the site’s one-liner description, which of course gave me no idea of what the startup actually did. But the extreme vagueness piqued my curiosity, and I clicked my way down the rabbit hole that is Ziuma.

The first thing anyone will notice about the site, if they can actually get it to load (I had trouble with this), is that its login page is pretty much the same as Facebook’s, although the folks at Ziuma have admittedly replaced the blue with green and have chosen an Asia-centric orientation for their map. But the similarities don’t end there. I signed up for the site to give it a test run, and after going through the process, ended up at my homepage. The design and layout should probably ring a bell for Facebook users. Note that many of the little logos, like the “Photos” logo on the left hand side, are actually identical to the logos on Facebook.

In my testing, I found the main difference between Ziuma and Facebook is that Ziuma doesn’t actually work. As you can see, it offers a very similar feature set to the popular social networking site, at least in theory, but most of those features don’t actually function. When I uploaded a profile picture, it uploaded successfully but kept displaying a broken image on my profile. When I tried to post to my timeline, nothing happened because the “Share” button seems to be broken. When I tried to comment on a user’s photo, Ziuma redirected me to my dashboard. When I tried to “Like” something, I got a connection error. When I tried to upload a song, it loaded for minutes, then told me “please fill in all the blanks” before redirecting me back to my submission form (with all of the blanks still filled in, because I hadn’t actually missed any). When I tried to add a friend, the server timed out. You get the idea.

Ziuma is only worth mentioning because it’s a poster child for what not to do with a tech startup. Sure, it’s a blatant copycat, which is lame and potentially illegal, and it’s executed horribly, which is also bad. But Ziuma’s main problem is actually much deeper than that: Indonesia doesn’t need its own version of Facebook because it already has Facebook. And in fact, as we pointed out just yesterday, Facebook is actually quite popular in Indonesia and Jakarta alone has more than eleven million Facebook users. Even if Ziuma were more creatively designed and better executed, it would be doomed to fail because it doesn’t solve a problem; it is attempting to provide a service that already exists elsewhere. It’s rare that any startup can get away with that at all, but if you’re going to, you’d sure as hell better have a kickass design and a smooth-as-silk user experience to get people’s attention. Ziuma has neither.

So, entrepreneurs, take note: Ziuma is doing it wrong. Learn the lessons from its failures and don’t make the same mistakes yourself!

Oftentimes, people like to compare Vietnam with China. In some ways, the similarities are pretty obvious. The Chinese dynasties ruled Vietnam for one thousand years. Vietnamese people celebrate Lunar New Year, and our names have Chinese roots. But online and in the tech industry, things look really different.

In Asia, there are four communist countries: China, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. Laos and North Korea are so small they’re not really on the tech map (even if North Korea is finally using mobile internet). That leaves China and Vietnam. In China, Baidu, Tencent, and Sina Weibo are the search and social media giants. In Vietnam, Google and Facebook are tops and Twitter isn’t blocked. What happened?

Search

China began interfering with Google’s search service in 2010, and it frequently fails to load but is not fully blocked. It’s due to China’s effort to manage the content that the majority of its population has access to; it’s also, some have argued, a big part of the protectionist success of Baidu and Sina Weibo who fill the shoes of Google and Facebook/Twitter. Today, Baidu gets an average of five billion search queries per day, and Google gets over 100 billion searches per month. But with Google partially locked out of China (it’s still the fifth most used search engine there), Baidu basically has near-exclusive access to the biggest market in the world.

In Vietnam, Google.com.vn is the number one search site and Google.com is number three. Vietnam has some new locally-made players like Wada.vn and CocCoc, but they’ll have a hard time up against Google’s dominance. In the mid 2000’s, Google was already slowly creeping into Vietnam. Youtube was and still is one of the most used and viewed websites in Vietnam and so Google was allowed to slowly creep in.

The interesting thing about Vietnam is that Google never officially opened up an office here. It still hasn’t. Google slowly entered, its value was assessed by users, and then it slowly rose to dominance. Now, if Google were blocked in Vietnam, it would leave a huge black hole in the Vietnamese cyberspace.

This is the trend in Vietnam. Let them in, assess how politically harmful they could be, and then realize it’s too late to cut them. For social media, it’s a little more complex. But the same principles apply.

from Doubleaf via Flickr

Social Media

China began blocking Facebook in 2008 and Twitter in 2009. In China, the Great Firewall has been very hard to get through, so China’s users have flocked to local social services like Sina Weibo ¹. Although many would argue that Chinese sites would still have more users even if others were not blocked. I don’t buy it. If Facebook wasn’t blocked in China, Zuckerberg would open up an office there and/or be collecting the same wealth of data that Weibo now collects on its users. Today, Sina Weibo supposedly has 500 million users. That’s more than Twitter’s 200 million and less than Facebook’s billion.

Vietnam started blocking Facebook in 2009. But the block was relatively casual. Most users still get on via DNS tweaks or using HotSpotShield with no problems. This is exactly why we’ve seen such explosive growth in Vietnam – doubling its numbers in a year. It’s currently the fastest growing Facebook country in the world, and Facebook has surpassed Zing as the nation’s top social destination.

Vietnam let Facebook in and let it grow until it was too late. Recently, I learned from an undisclosed source that Facebook supposedly has 15 to 20 million users in Vietnam already, so if authorities pull the plug it would be disastrous for users in the country. Hundreds and thousands of businesses have set up shop in Vietnam with Facebook Pages and advertisements.

And although the block has strengthened along with the political tides, that has more served to educate the population to self-censor more than deterred use of Facebook. Today, the block is as light as ever. And because of this, Vietnam has effectively avoided the need to build its own Weibo.

Oh, and as far as Twitter is concerned, in Vietnam, microblogging still hasn’t caught on. That’s probably why it’s not blocked.

from Vietnamese comic artist Thanh Phong

What this all means

Although Vietnam and China are neighboring socialist republics and Communist comrades, they’ve taken very different political stances towards the internet. China sees the internet variously as a battle field, a business goldmine, and a threat to social stability. China’s allegory is one of a large empire controlling the biggest population in the world and eventually leading the world. Information is essential to that and it must be tightly controlled and it must be Chinese. That was underlined this week by China’s tech ministry taking a dim view of Android.

Vietnam, with about 92 million people, is smaller in population than China’s most populous province, Guangdong, with its 104 million. The allegory in Vietnam is catch up and adapt. There isn’t a global agenda. That has allowed Vietnamese users to reap the rewards of the two tech giants – both Silicon Valley and China’s web companies – but that’s at the cost of not building giants of its own. Vietnamese social media and search startups struggle to compete with Facebook and Google with no government protection, financing, or encouragement.

There are two sides to this coin. In China, the result is a lot of space for startups and mega-tech companies like Baidu to build for the local population. But they sacrifice a connection to the world. In Vietnam, startups have to compete with outsiders while also getting a little more globally connected – although many would argue people here are still very isolated. The end result may be that some Chinese tech successes are inflated because they have no “real” competitors beyond their borders; and Vietnamese startups are stunted because they can’t out-execute the big guys or regional startups who expand into the country.

But the truth is, it’s a very hard comparison. Although they’re run under relatively similar governments, the scale alone puts everything out of proportion. Chinese companies immediately have access to a huge population while also competing with a host of other fellow Chinese companies. How they triumph over these odds is what really fascinates me.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, comment below at your leisure.

Cmune, a game developer with offices in Beijing and Berlin, announced today that it has secured a new round of funding from global venture firm DCM via the firm’s Android app-focused A Fund (which gets funding and support from Tencent, NHN, and GMO). The amount Cmune has raised has not been disclosed, but it’s clear that the developers — who created UberStrike, Facebook’s most popular FPS — have big plans for the future. The company’s target is to follow in the steps of Call of Duty and become the next billion-dollar FPS gaming brand.

I got in touch with Cmune’s business intelligence chief Benjamin Joffe to ask a few questions about the company and its plans for the future. First on the list: why would a China-based developer be working on Facebook games? Isn’t that a bit awkward in a country that has blocked Facebook? Not really. As Joffe pointed out, “any serious tech company in China has a VPN.” But the company is actually moving away from the social network and towards tablets, and China has been a good place to do that. Says Joffe,

We started on Facebook and it’s still growing as the platform is maturing to better games [...] but we see now a bigger opportunity on tablets. China has great expertise on free-to-play monetization, and it’s a surprisingly good place to assemble an international team.

Of course, I also wondered whether Cmune has ever considered making a game for China’s social platforms. Joffe told me:

We have been looking into it for a long time, but the market structure and expectations are quite different. In China the popular shooters are mostly military client-based games. Very heavy and very hardcore. Our positioning is more “fantasy shooter”, mid-core, in the browser or on tablets.
This market will come in time too in China, which is why we are happy Tencent is now one of our investors [via the A Fund].

Finally, I wondered about the billion-dollar-shooter target that Cmune has set for itself. UberStrike has undeniably been successful; with 1.2 million fans and over 10 million registered players, its one of the most successful social shooter games ever. But to reach the billion-dollar level is far from easy, and thus far, the only shooters to do it have been PC/console-based shooters like Activision’s Call of Duty franchise. Is a billion-dollar shooter even possible on social platforms or tablets? Joffe was optimistic:

If you look at the pure number of users, Facebook and tablets already have more gamers on them than there are consoles out there. It is just a matter of time for creating suitable games for gamers. This is the opportunity we want to grab. To have some comparables: To reach $1B on consoles, you need to sell 20 million boxes at $50, which is the Call of Duty model. To reach $1B on tablets or Facebook you need to make less than $3 million per day.

With a management game, SuperCell already makes over $1m per day. Some games in Japan also make millions on mobile. Considering shooters are among the top selling genres on consoles, shooters will be successful on tablets too. Tablets are the new consoles!

As an FPS gamer myself, I am pretty skeptical about the ability of tablets to replace consoles and PCs, so I pressed a bit, and Mr. Joffe was kind enough to send me a list of reasons why he thinks Cmune could be the first company to take a tablet FPS into the billion-dollar range:

• There is a “learning curve” to get from a puzzle game to a hardcore game. The same happened on Facebook where the first games were text-based zombie games. Now you have 3D shooters, The Sims, and many more real-time hardcore genres.
• Tablets are now powerful enough to run a fast-paced multiplayer shooter (since iPad2, and getting better with each new device)
• Players want them, and many Premium games like Modern Combat by Gameloft are already making millions
• Most games are still single-player because real-time multiplayer is much harder to do (it’s the hardest for FPS due to sensitivity to lag)
• So it’s also a technology/backend/gameplay issue, that almost no company has solved yet. We are pioneers for that, like we have been on Facebook for over 2 years.
• Controls schemes are being improved to make it playable on touch screen.
• We found virtually no competitor in the classic Quake/Doom genre that was FREE and MULTIPLAYER at the same time. They will come eventually, but we plan to be the first and largest!

So there you have it! While I still maintain a little of my curmudgeonly skepticism, I thank Ben Joffe for talking this through with me, and I think it’s clear that whether or not there is really a billion dollars on the table. Cmune is poised to take advantage of a market that is likely to continue growing substantially over the next few years.

(By the way, if you’d like to try out UberStrike for yourself, you can check out its official site; the game is available on a number of different plaforms so no matter what device you’re on, there’s probably a way to play it.)

Facebook is under siege from every direction. Snapchat’s picking away at the young sexting market, Twitter dominated TV sets at the Superbowl, and Path is building a tiny fortress for close friends. That’s not all – the one-billion-user giant’s got nuclear warheads from Asia to watch out for too.

Asia is now a crucial battleground in the mobile messaging wars. Both in terms of user-base, and because so many innovating social apps are being built in the region. One third of all Viber users are in Asia, Facebook Messenger is visibly becoming more like China’s WeChat, and the originally Netherlands-based Nimbuzz moved its headquarters to India. Even Kik, the Canada-based mobile messaging app with over 30 million users in America and Europe, has started to include more multimedia content in its app, a feature the CEO admits he was observing in Asian apps first. And then there’s Line from Japan and KakaoTalk from Korea, which are both platforms for social gaming. Facebook really is under attack from every direction.

In my mobile messaging app list, I outlined most of the features that make these apps special. Stickers, broader social media integration, microblogging, mobile gaming, celebrity accounts, and monetization all seem trivial at first, but are actually hammering at Facebook’s empire.

Here’s why: Stickers replace emoticons. Microblogging embedded in chat apps replaces status updates and Instagram. Mobile games replace Zynga-like web games. Celebrity and brand messaging app accounts replace Facebook Pages. And monetization via promoted posts isn’t as compelling as mobile commerce. And there’s more.

The Asian advantage

Mobile dominates Asia, in a way that the web browser dominated the West in the early 2000’s. Just this week, China overtook the US as the biggest smartphone market. This means companies are rushing to Asian mobile markets to secure a dominant position down the line. It’s not like the US, where internet traffic is transitioning from web to mobile. In Asia, much of the internet traffic is jumping straight into mobile.

The web across Asia is still fragmented and young. Asia didn’t make a steady progression from one major technology startup to the next, littering the online landscape with useful online services along the way. Asian consumers don’t yet have the breadth of access as the many online services the Silicon Valley tailored to the American market. For example, Facebook will not step into Amazon territory without significant opportunities. The landscape is more compartmentalized.

Thus, chatting apps are becoming platforms for anything they can technically handle that doesn’t already exist as a dominant consumer web service. So Line pushes games, KakaoTalk pushes mobile commerce, and WeChat pushes brand and celebrities. Areas like gaming, e-commerce, and communication are still untapped real estate. I’m sure there’s more to come from these Asian apps – perhaps mobile payments.

And with Asia’s population, all the data these apps can collect on users, if read right, can only enhance their interfaces.

Immediate versus asynchronous communication

Chat apps record users by daily usage, and Facebook reports users by monthly usage.

Twitter and Facebook are still the dominant social media platforms in the world, but they’re characterized by asynchronous communication. Status updates stay online forever and friends or followers can respond days to months after you first posted.

Texting, on the other hand, requires an immediate response. In Vietnam, for example, friends will complain if you don’t respond to a message in these apps within 24 hours, others will get anxious if you haven’t responded after an hour. This immediacy is also baked into things like mobile games and mobile commerce.

Asian users want “now” and “live”. They also want intimate and private. And the truth is, so does everybody else. This is where chat apps crush asynchronous social media and is exactly why Mark Zuckerberg is so eager to transition Facebook onto mobile.

Predictions

To me, we’re looking at a significant assault on Zuckerberg’s empire. And the weapons in Asian chat apps’ arsenal are not something Facebook has to deal with at home. But ignoring these rivals would be fatal, as giants like WeChat and NHN’s Line start to look more at the US market. So what’s next?

Two factors that I think will spur Asian chat app innovation are the fact that there is no clearly dominant messaging app across Asia and all of the chat apps in Asia are attacking each other’s markets. KakaoTalk, Line, WeChat and others are all battling each other in their home markets of Korea, Japan, and China, but they’re also pushing into the nascent Southeast Asian markets. They will be forced to out-innovate each other to survive. This will give users plenty of options and a lot of features. Like Cubie adding Snapchat-like abilities to its app, and Zalo adding a Draw Something function, there is no reason to believe that Asian chat apps will not steal the latest in tech trends and bake them as features into their apps. This could change on a week-by-week basis. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone copied Vine’s six-second video format (oh wait…WeChat already allows sending video clips with a 2MB time limit) and put it in their messaging app.

On the other side, Facebook isn’t going to take this lying down. Not to be outdone by Asian stickers, Facebook is collaborating with a Pixar artist to redesign the emoticon set (unfortunately for them, animation is an afterthought; most chat apps already have animated stickers). It has also recently updated the Facebook Messenger app with audio notes. Plus it more recently built Facebook Poke that competes with SnapChat, to no avail. But I see no evidence that Facebook is monetizing its mobile experience with games and m-commerce yet.

Given the burgeoning Asian chat app market at present, along with Facebook’s inability to take down Snapchat in native Silicon Valley, there is no reason to believe that Asian messaging apps will leave Facebook in the dust. So the truth is, it’s Asian chat apps that are saying “Welcome Facebook, Seriously.”

It’s Valentine’s Day, so those without an object of affection might be looking for a new way to find a date. That’s why an Indian startup is today launching PairBuddy. It’s a lot like the more crudely-named Facebook dating tool Bang With Friends that’s got so much hype over the past few weeks.

PairBuddy focuses more on outing a secret crush than getting people hooked up immediately. If your Facebook friends also use the app and someone has identified you as a crush, then the prospective pair will be notified (pictured below). If there’s no mutual crush, the secret will remain inside PairBuddy and will be taken within your soul to the grave.

PairBuddy was built by Nirav Shah and a small team in under 48 hours. Nirav tells us that it has had a good response after a quiet soft launch, and a mobile app version is in the works. Though created in Mumbai, India, this little tool for finding a Facebook buddy that has the hots for you can be used worldwide. Some other new features, he explains, are being worked on too.

After a wave of apps for flirting with strangers – such as the success of China’s Momo, which went global at the end of last year – there now appears to be a series of tools for romantically connecting people who already know each other. Surely it’s only a matter of time before versions appear for Twitter or Sina Weibo.

1. Kaskus

The largest Indonesian forum site is Kaskus, which is also a major shopping hub. Although it has had its rough moments, it’s still the one to beat when it comes to C2C e-commerce platforms in Indonesia. The site has revamped its look and user interface, as well as releasing mobile apps last year.

Users can sell pretty much anything on Kaskus, and they will most definitely have buyers inside. A lot of sellers make their money browsing through Kaskus’ pages every day to post and advertise their goods on other users’ forum threads.

The site has yet to score notable success monetizing its payment method called KasPay from its huge user-base. But the upcoming Kaskus Marketplace feature might be able to rectify that as KasPay will be used as the main payment system on that feature.

Alexa Ranking: Kaskus is globally ranked 361st, and ninth in Indonesia, beaten only by news portal Detik to be the nation’s second-highest ranking Indonesian site.

2. TokoBagus

TokoBagus is another C2C marketplace which is which is confidently rising to the top in Indonesia. Users can post their ads for free there. The company itself is quite aggressive in placing their video ads everywhere.

TokoBagus had a great 2012, snatching numerous e-commerce awards in various categories like best user interface, and marketing strategy. The company also became the second most searched brand in the country according to Google Zeitgeist at that time. In the same year, the company also saw its founders leaving the business in order for them to explore new adventures.

Alexa Ranking: TokoBagus is placed at 891 globally, and it is ranked as the 15th most popular website in the country.

3. Berniaga

It seems that C2C marketplaces rule the Indonesian e-commerce scene as Berniaga is placed in third when it comes to online shopping sites. As of May last year, the company claimed to have around 15,000 new ads posted daily on its site. Berniaga is owned by Singapore Press Holding and Norway-based Schibsted Classified Media.

Alexa Ranking: Berniaga’s global rank is 1,728th. But in Indonesia, the company is sitting strong at 22nd.

Looking at the three top Indonesian e-commerce sites according to Alexa, TokoBagus seems to be the biggest spender for promotional efforts, with Berniaga having the least online exposure. When it comes to user interface, one might say that Kaskus is the least friendly because users need to click the links first if they want to view the products’ pictures. Sometimes its users don’t even post pictures of it. Kaskus might have something to say about this with its upcoming Kaskus marketplace though.

In the end, if I wanted to sell or buy products on a C2C platform, the name Kaskus and TokoBagus would come up first before Berniaga. That may be attributed to the fact that Kaskus is quite famous already and has its remarks such as “agan” (to address people) and “cekidot” (means check it out) used by many people even outside the Kaskus forum. And there’s also the fact that TokoBagus has been spending quite a lot of dough for promotions.

4. Multiply

The Multiply marketplace enables its users to set up their shops rather than just posting ads or threads of their goods online. In this way, it’s more like China’s Taobao, which was such a huge success in that country. The site also offers its users several payment options like bank transfers and credit cards, as well as free delivery promotions now and then. Multiply is readying itself to fully become an e-commerce site in 2013 by closing its blogging platform and rebranding.

Alexa Ranking: In Indonesia, Multiply is ranked 47th, and it also has quite an international presence, ranking 17th in the Philippines and 170th in India. Globally, the site is ranked at 705th.

5. Bhinneka

Bhinneka might be the biggest Indonesian online store which specializes in selling electronics. The company is one of the oldest Indonesian online stores with its website launched as early as 1999. Originally started as a B2C marketplace, it also recently started a C2C marketplace called Bursa Bhinneka.

Users can purchase goods from the site using several payment methods like cash on delivery or credit cards. Deliveries made inside Jakarta area are free of charge.

Alexa Ranking: Bhinneka has a global rank of 3,978th. But its presence in Indonesia is quite strong, ranked 54th locally.

6. Lazada Indonesia

Lazada Indonesia may be the fastest growing e-commerce company in Indonesia right now. Established just last year, Lazada Indonesia took the country by storm and has earned nationwide coverage in just a short period of time. Some of its exposure is partly thanks to its huge ammunition of money derived from endless investments gathered by parent company, Rocket Internet.

Lazada is an Amazon-like B2C store, and regularly offer discounts on its wide range of products. The company is planning to offer a one-day delivery service in the near future. Other Lazada branches across Southeast Asia are also making significant progress.

Alexa Ranking: In less than one year, Lazada Indonesia is now ranked 53rd in the country. Globally, it is ranked 4,374th.

7. Tokopedia

Launched in 2009, C2C marketplace Tokopedia (1) achieved huge growth across the years. During its third anniversary last August, the team shared with us that they have recorded around 600 percent growth compared to 2011, in terms of total value of transactions processed. I find Tokopedia’s price range feature interesting, as it sorts out the variety of prices available for the same product, making it easy for customers to find the cheapest price there.

Alexa Ranking: Currently Tokopedia ranks 68th in the country. Worldwide, it is ranked at 5,199.

8. Agoda

Agoda is a hotel booking site focused on the Asia Pacific market. Users can search a list of available hotels in a specific city, and then add filter search options like hotel name, price range, hotel facilities, and star rating. Interestingly, Agoda promises to offer the lowest price available online by either matching or beating other online prices shown by users.

.Alexa Ranking: Agoda is occupying the 78th spot in Indonesia, with an impressive ranking of 566 globally.

9. Facebook

Wait, what? Yes we are fully aware that Facebook is first and foremost a social networking site, but Indonesians are also using it to sell their goods online too. A research by online payment processor Veritrans and tech blog DailySocial shows that Facebook is among one of the most used sites in Indonesia for people to do their shopping online, it shared the number one spot, in fact, with Kaskus.

Do remember that Indonesia is the fourth largest Facebook nation with 47 million users inside it. Startups like LakuBgt and Onigi are using this opportunity to help people set up their shops on Facebook. Payments can be processed through the social networking site too.

Alexa Ranking: Well, it is Facebook we’re talking about. The site ranks second in Indonesia as well as worldwide.

Looking to 2013

There are of course other notable e-commerce sites which are looking to grab a slice of the Indonesian market. Rakuten Belanja Indonesia (pictured below, left) and BliBli (pictured below, right) are among the big names that have graced the country with discounts and ads, and rightly so, looking from the respective company owners. Rakuten is a joint venture between Japan-based Rakuten Inc. and Indonesian media conglomerate MNC Media Group. While BliBli is backed by the nation’s wealthiest conglomerate Djarum Group and one of the biggest banks in the country, BCA.

What about daily deals sites in the country? Groupon’s Disdus and LivingSocial ⁽²⁾ are staying on their feet with local rankings of 195 and 324 respectively. A few sites like AdaDiskon still have a grip on the market too, ranking 1,259 in Indonesia.

Unless you have money to burn, an outright daily deals clone sites might not be the best answer. A few Indonesian startups have the guts to be different, putting a few twists on their daily deals business models. They include Uluyu (which has fallen behind the peck), Stilomo, and Yotomo. It remains to be seen if their innovation can bring the excitement back to daily deals businesses.

I personally believe that the market is still open for vertical e-commerce sites, and we’ve seen a few of them pop up such as Fresh foods e-tailer RumahSegar (1), babycare e-commerce site Bilna (1), gift site FlowerAdvisor, and Rocket Internet’s fashion online store Zalora Indonesia. Japan-based Sukamart has also arrived as one of the first online grocery stores to offer nationwide delivery services in the country.

Indonesian online shopping infrastructure is shaping up for the better as we’ve seen local startups like Eloku and Kirim, which are aiming to solve delivery problems. A handful of promising payment gateway startups like iPayMu, Veritrans, and Indomog have emerged as well. 2013 might well be a good year to start your own e-commerce business.

With a view to the “world outside of China,” Chinese chipset maker Spreadtrum (NASDAQ:SPRD) has announced a tie-up today with Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) to embed Facebook in its Android-oriented chipset platform. Spreadtrum then hopes that these low-cost internal gizmos will be bought by Chinese handset makers to form smartphones to go on sale “in overseas markets such as Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa and India.”

One of Spreadtrum’s earlier chipsets proved popular with brands like Huawei, who stuck it into their budget Android phone, the U8110, which typically sold for just over $100.

This Spreadtrum-Facebook tie-up is clearly aimed at emerging markets where many consumers are upgrading from very basic phones to their first ever smartphone. Today’s announcement points out that Spreadtrum will work with the social network “prior to the release of new versions of Facebook software” so that the embedded features will get updates in the future.

Facebook’s VP of mobile partnerships, Vaughan Smith, commented:

We are pleased to work with Spreadtrum to deliver a high quality application experience to many of the consumers around the world who will be buying smartphones for the first time in 2013. Working with Spreadtrum will extend Facebook’s reach in emerging markets, leveraging the rapid shift from feature phones to smartphones that is now taking place globally.

This deal mirrors what we’ve seen happening with basic feature phones for quite some time, like Indonesia’s Telkomsel pre-installing a tiny version of the Facebook app – just 128kb in size, which is roughly the size of a single photo on this blog – on its feature phones.

Spreadtrum expects to ship 80 to 100 million of its 2G/3G smartphone chipsets in 2013.

Chat Nhom allows users to explore eight main group categories, including:

• location
• age
• games
• music
• sports
• books (and comic books)
• movies
• technology

I tried it myself, chose the manga discussion, and I was immediately immersed in a conversation about manga with other Vietnamese users. After chatting with them, I could click on their profiles and friend them or engage in a personal chat.

A big advantage for ZingMe’s Chat Nhom is that it allows anyone from Yahoo, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter to use the service without a ZingMe account. Anybody can join the chat.

The service is an interesting departure from Facebook, ZingMe’s biggest competitor in Vietnam. Unlike Facebook Groups, which utilizes asynchronous posts, Group Chat is real-time chatting. ZingMe, commonly known as a teen social network, is eager to reclaim its top spot as the number one social network in Vietnam. Chat Nhom is reminiscent of early IRC channels, in some ways.

Facebook, which started out in universities in the USA, now has an average user age of 40.5 years old. So I don’t think it’s impossible for ZingMe to also access an older crowd or to maintain the loyalty of its current user base as they age. The question is, is group chatting also a service that only teens would use? And is an older userbase important to ZingMe’s social network strategy?

ZingMe is owned and managed under VNG, formerly VinaGaming, one of Vietnam’s largest technology companies. On a related note, my colleague Willis published an interview with VNG’s CEO last week.

This one was conducted by Comnico, Nifty, and Lifemedia, who polled 776 young adults, specifically those in the 19 to 20 demographic. When asked which social service they use most, 42.5 percent of respondents said it was Twitter. The answer skews even more towards Twitter among females in the polling group, with 51.5 percent voting for the popular microblog. Among both men and women, Line came second and Facebook third.

from Comnico, with some translations added by me

But as we have said before on this blog, Facebook’s momentum in Japan shouldn’t be underestimated. For the survey in question, 41.3 percent of respondents said that Facebook (NASDAQ:FB ) is the network which they would most like to try in the future, citing its usefulness for job hunting and for connecting with people around the world. SocialBakers currently has Japan’s Facebook population at about 16.9 million, which is about 13 percent of the population.

As with all surveys we can’t really place too much weight in any single poll. But I thought we’d share this one, in the interests of getting a little bit closer to an accurate understanding of the big picture.

(Via PC World)

via zoota.vn

Social networks are a growing battlefield in Vietnam. As noted by Nguyen Huy of Mimo.vn in a recent chat with us, the platforms are fragmented. This is a salient observation as social sites in the country have yet to see a clear leader in any space. But this is the scene that Mobifone, one of Vietnam’s leading state-owned telecoms, wants to squeeze into.

The company has recently started promoting a new social network called Zoota. The new multi-platform social network includes social sharing, chat rooms, games apps, and allows access to MSN, Gtalk, and Facebook. The service is also offered on Java, Symbian, Blackberry, Android, and iPhone. Zoota is trying to appeal to customers first through games, a model that essentially put VNG, Vietnam’s biggest consumer IT startup, on the map. On top of all this, it is an extremely cheap offering. The cost would be 15,000 VND (US$0.75) for 30 days of service and that includes a promotion of five free SMS per day. With this extremely low fee, users can access all their main social networks. In the first month, the service already has 100,000 users. With support from a major telco, it’s just a matter of time before Zoota reaches one million users.

Zoota’s cheap multi-platform entrance, along with the Twitter-like Mimo, indicate that major Vietnamese companies are becoming more cognizant of tailoring such models to the fragmented market. But Vietnam’s current largest social networks, Facebook and Zing, were launched first on the web and gained their base there. I think it’s still not clear yet if a mobile-oriented model will necessarily give an edge over these big incumbents.

How choppy is Vietnam’s social scene right now? Here’s what it looks like:

• It was only a few months ago when Facebook surpassed local competitor Zing.
• Mimo is already at 2.6 million users just more than a year after going live.
• Twitter is rumored to have around 3 million registered users, although I hear there’s no evidence that there are anywhere near this amount of users.
• Mobile messaging apps in Vietnam still haven’t seen any clear leader emerge, but they are increasingly used by the majority of smartphone users.
• VinaGaming’s social gaming empire is under siege from smaller, more agile gaming companies like Colorbox.
• Dating sites are competing fiercely with one another, including players like Noi.vn, Vietnamcupid.com, and global competitors like Tagged.
• Skype is gaining traction over the leader, Yahoo Messenger. We would also have to include Facebook Messenger in the chat battle as well. With 8.6 million users on Facebook in the country, it’s hard to ignore one of its key features.

The interesting thing about the social incumbents in Vietnam is we can hardly call them incumbents. Facebook is struggling to integrate chat and mobile with its late entrance to native mobile apps – a mistake that Mark Zuckerberg even admitted to. In Vietnam, where chat apps are becoming increasingly popular, it’s clear that Facebook alone is not satisfying all of the users’ social needs.

[Source: PC World VN - article in Vietnamese]

For Singapore, Facebook has identified some of the most popular songs among its users, with Gotye’s ‘Somebody that I used to know’ ranking as the most popular song. Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’ and Maroon 5’s ‘Payphone’ are second and third respectively. As for hot locations, Universal Studios was the most popular check-in location, followed by Marina Bay Sands, and Woodlands checkpoint.

For Australia, Facebook points out some of the most talked-about topics, of which European pop group One Direction was ranked the highest. It’s followed by Big Brother and The Voice in second and third. For check-ins, Melbourne Cricket Ground was the most popular spot down under in 2012.

For India, the soundtrack from the film Cocktail was popular, with three songs in the top five, including Tumhi Ho Bandhu at number one [1]. For check-ins, Select Citywalk, Saket was most popular.

Facebook also has trends for Korea, although I’ll refrain from jumping into that too deeply, as I can’t read Korean. Google Translate tells me that Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ was popular in the music section, as you would expect.

And of course, if you’d like to see your own year in review on Facebook, you can always check out facebook.com/yearinreview.

giftee Christmas chicken campaign

Last year you may recall that we featured Japanese startup Giftee, a service that lets you send real gifts to your friends via Twitter or Facebook. That same company is running a fun Christmas campaign today where it is giving away 50,000 pieces of chicken, which you can gift to some of your friends.

Naturally, me and my wife jumped on Giftee to try to send chicken to each other. Because we’re romantic like that. The Giftee site was crawling at a pretty slow speed, so I imagine they have drummed up a lot of traffic with this promotion. But eventually I was prompted to pick a card which would determine how many chicken pieces I could give to friends.

I think I lucked out, because I was awarded five pieces. On the next page, I could then select the five Facebook friends to whom I would send them. Interestingly, the friends I interact with most were not present, which makes me think Giftee has taken steps to prevent people like me from scamming their chicken.

So while five of my friends (see below) have received coupons for 5 pieces of chicken at their nearest Family Mart convenience store, I’m left to go search the fridge for lunch. I think I have a potato or something in there somewhere…

If you’re in Japan and you’d like to give it a try, head on over to the giftee.co website to give it a try. It will be interesting to see how much of a boost in users the site gets from this campaign. Family Mart chicken isn’t particularly expensive, this could be a pretty clever way of acquiring new users just before the Christmas rush.

[Thanks to Steve Nagata for pointing this out. I tried to 'chicken' you, but I couldn't find you on my list!]

This past week, even as net users across the country were discovering that China’s Great Firewall has been upgraded and that many VPNs no longer work, China’s state-run Xinhua wire service was busy using Twitter. It’s the kind of frustrating irony that Chinese web users are used to by now; the nation embracing popular foreign web platforms to try to get its own message out while simultaneously working tirelessly to ensure that its citizens cannot access those same platforms.

When it comes to the web, China has continually struggled to choose between its impulse to control things as tightly as possible and its recognition of web platforms as a powerful way to broadcast its propaganda both at home and abroad. In the past few years, its apparent strategy has been to attempt to have its cake and eat it too: to broadcast its own message using all the Western web channels at its disposal while blocking those channels for domestic web users. Unfortunately for the government, having your cake and eating it is impossible, and this policy — if it is continued — will prove to be an utter failure.

Domestic Stability

China’s censorship of Western web platforms like Facebook and Twitter is predicated on the idea that those platforms, because they are uncensored, threaten China’s domestic stability. In the wake of the 2009 Urumqi riots, numerous Western social media sites (including the aforementioned Twitter and Facebook) were blamed for facilitating the organization of protests and the spread of “harmful information,” and were subsequently blocked.

Blocking websites does increase stability in the short term, because people with dissenting messages have fewer ways to spread them. In the long-term, though, this kind of stability is unsustainable. Censorship, after all, does not eliminate dissent; it merely silences it, or more often pushes it into different channels. And while China’s Great Firewall (GFW) makes organizing dissent more difficult, it also foments dissent by frustrating people who are trying to do normal internet things but can’t because of the blockages.

Moreover, it encourages creative ways to circumvent the blocks both technologically and ideologically (China’s net users may be the world’s most creative when it comes to using puns and homophones to discuss sensitive issues without setting off keyword blocks). The Great Firewall also effectively moves many dissenters from foreign sites (where most of the audience can’t understand them) onto domestic services like Sina Weibo. And while Sina Weibo and other Chinese social services are monitored and censored, they’re often not monitored and censored quickly and efficiently enough to stop so-called “harmful information” from spreading.

The harder China cracks down on VPNs and other GFW-circumventing technology, the worse this is going to get. If Ai Weiwei and his followers (for example) are prevented from using Twitter, does the government really think they’re just going to stop expressing themselves and give up? No, they will turn to domestic sites, and while domestic censors will block their accounts and delete their messages, some of those messages will get through. And in a country where strident dissent is often illegal, its impact and its spread are intensified.

To put it another way, if the Chinese internet was uncensored, the dramatic statements of Ai Weiwei and other dissidents probably wouldn’t be considered remarkable. And if everyone had the freedom to express themselves without fear of censorship and reprisals, Ai Weiwei’s fearlessness wouldn’t be particularly important. Honestly, if the government really wants to effectively silence Ai Weiwei, they should dismantle the Great Firewall tomorrow.

A Death Blow to Business

China: Taking the “inter” out of the internet.

What’s effective in fostering stability is, I’ll admit, debatable, but it’s less debatable that China’s internet policies have had a strong negative impact on businesses. If the recent blocking of foreign VPNs proves to be the new normal — and we have every sign that that is the case — I expect numerous foreign businesses to move some or all of their operations out of China. In addition to the fact that many businesses use blocked web services for communication and marketing, VPNs provide a crucial layer of security to corporate communications by encrypting the connection of those using the service. Without that layer of security, companies worried about cyber attacks, IP theft, and corporate espionage are going to be pretty exposed, and some of them will inevitably decide that the advantages of doing business in China are outweighed by the potential costs of having products or plans stolen by competitors.

(True, many businesses use their own VPNs rather than the commercially-available ones that are currently blocked. But the Chinese government has said that all foreign-run VPNs are illegal unless they register with and are approved by MIIT, which none of them have.)

But the Great Firewall doesn’t just damage foreign companies in China, it is also crippling to Chinese companies that are looking to expand globally. Without access to social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, Chinese web companies are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to everything from market research to actual marketing. And although companies can establish overseas offices or find other ways to circumvent censorship and access these platforms, with all of them so widely blocked in China, there’s little impetus for Chinese developers to try to work with them. Chinese startups are focused on developing products that work with Chinese social platforms like Weibo, and that’s great, but it ultimately limits the scalability and global relevance of their products. At present, China’s regulatory environment might encourage the development of some truly remarkable domestic services, but it is difficult to imagine a globally dominant web startup from China because the Chinese internet is so thoroughly walled off from the rest of the world.

Soft Power in Chains

Of course, the Great Firewall does more than just prevent Chinese web services from going global; it is also a huge hindrance for Chinese cultural exports. I was reminded of this just recently while writing about the award Korea’s Ministry of Culture gave to Google because Youtube has been such an effective platform to spread Korean culture. In China, the success of Korean pop star PSY’s Gangnam Style video prompted a lot of discussion about whether China could ever produce its own PSY. I’m not sure what the answer to that question is, but it is irrelevant, because even if China could produce its own PSY, it could never export it. PSY’s song exploded in large part because his video went viral on Youtube which — surprise, surprise — is blocked in China.

Now granted, even if VPNs were totally blocked, a Chinese PSY could just fly out of China with a USB stick and upload his video to Youtube from abroad. But I highly doubt the global response would be the same, because whether we’re aware of it or not, a big part of enjoying any cultural experience is interaction. Gangnam Style was catchy and weird — certainly China can produce something like that — but it ultimately also got the Western media to interact with Korea and Korean culture, and we all learned a little something about the Gangnam district and Korean satire along the way.

That is the part of Gangnam Style that China could never produce, because the government actively discourages that sort of interaction. While it wants to promote Chinese culture, it does not believe that pop music — and certainly not politically satirical pop music — has any place in that promotional effort. Instead, the government pushes Confucius and other valuable-but-unappealing-and-mostly-irrelevant aspects of Chinese culture to Westerners while keeping its citizens and whatever culture they create quiet. Chinese and foreign net users are carefully segregated, and while China is happy to use foreign platforms to promote the party line through official channels like Xinhua, it is unwilling to trust its own people with access to almost any foreign social communication platforms.

The problem (for China’s government) is that culture doesn’t work that way. Great cultural works are rarely produced by the state; they are produced by artists, creatives, academics, entrepreneurs and other regular people. Chinese artists have produced many great works, but China’s government is generally not willing to let these people communicate directly with the outside world. In an age where global communication and cultural broadcasting is simpler and more direct than ever before, China has shackled its own soft power by ensuring that its cultural producers have access to almost none of these new platforms.

True soft power — in fact, true culture — cannot come without discussion and interchange. When was the last time you saw a really powerful movie or read a really powerful book and then discussed it with no one? Culture is by definition a discussion, an exchange, and a kind of ongoing communication. But China’s government has for the past several years been attempting to shove its own message into the global internet’s cultural exchange while doing what it can to keep the West out of China’s culture and keep Chinese people from easily interacting with the outside world. That is why Xinhua has a Twitter account but the average Zhou cannot. It’s also why Xinhua’s Twitter account isn’t actually following anyone. China is interested in using social media services only to broadcast itself; it has no interest in interacting with the outside world in a meaningful way.

No Hope for the Future?

It is a terrible sign that China’s crackdown on VPNs does not seem to have lessened after the conclusion of the 18th Party Congress. And at the same time, despite a couple years of massive expenditures in return for almost nothing in the way of results, China has shown no signs of wanting to adjust its shut-up-and-let-me-talk-dammit approach to soft power.

China’s state media frequently complains that the West doesn’t understand China, but China has steadfastly refused to use internet platforms like Twitter and Facebook to attempt to increase that understanding in any meaningful way. And although the government remains dedicated to improving Chinese soft power, I have seen no signs that it is inclined to attempt a shift in strategy anytime soon.

In the long term, I suspect the Great Firewall will prove to be domestically unsustainable. But until the wall comes down, China’s attempts at soft power are little more than a pipe dream, and its economic growth, especially in the tech arena, is ultimately going to be limited by the severe barriers it has erected between itself and the world at large.

Vikas Saxena, the CEO of Nimbuzz

Chat app Nimbuzz, which has been around since 2006, recently won two categories in Opera Software’s 2012 Top Apps Awards – the communication category for Android, and the overall winner for Symbian OS. Vikas Saxena, the CEO of Nimbuzz (pictured right), shared the company’s plans for competing in the hot messaging apps market in Asia.

Similar to the other emerging chat apps like Line, KakaoTalk, and WeChat, Nimbuzz features messaging, voice, and video calling. The chat app is also an open platform which third party developers can utilize to build more apps such as games for Nimbuzz’s users. Nimbuzz however, also has integration with other online chat platforms such as Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Facebook, and Windows Live Messenger.

Vikas pointed out that Nimbuzz was originally a Dutch company. He shifted its headquarters to India in mid-2011 to focus more on Asian markets. The company is funded by investment firm Mangrove Capital Partners and media group MIH. We asked Vikas about his future plans for Nimbuzz:

1. Do you have any particular plans for Asia?

Vikas: Since our inception, we have recognized that for Nimbuzz to be successful, we have to compete in the Asian markets. We currently have over 60 million users in Asia and it is our most rapidly growing region. Many of these users are in India and the Middle East region, and we will be aggressively pursuing market share in the far eastern Asian region in 2013. We currently allow our users to purchase avatars and gifts in our virtual store. We plan to continue and expand these services so our users can express themselves as creatively and freely as possible.

2. Can you share some data with us?

Vikas: [...] Today, approximately 60 percent of our over 100 million users are in Asia, 10 percent in Europe, 13 percent in Africa, and 7 percent in North America. In total, we have users in more than 200 countries. Our platform breakdown is as follows:

3. Do you have any plans for making the free call feature available to other OSes such as Blackberry and Windows Phone?

Vikas: We would love to integrate our free calling feature onto BlackBerry phones. However, RIM (the maker of BlackBerry devices) has not opened its API for app developers like us to provide call functionality. The free calling feature will be available for Windows Phone 8 soon. Currently these features are available on all other mobile operating systems.

4. What do you think makes Nimbuzz unique compared to other chat apps?

Vikas: What makes Nimbuzz unique is its versatility. Whereas other apps specialize in one service, Nimbuzz offers VoIP calling, messaging, video calling, chatting and a lot more. In addition, users can connect to another user’s unique Nimbuzz ID or to a phone number from their contact list on their desktop. Unlike other messaging only apps, with Nimbuzz you won’t lose your contacts if you lose your phone.

Additionally, in many regions that we focus on, Nimbuzz Credits for voice calls allow you to connect to anybody in the world, even those friends who are not on Nimbuzz.

The chat app earns revenue from ads, the virtual store, and international calling via its Skype-like “NimbuzzOut.” The company seems to be very proud of its customer behavior insight on mobile handsets, which can be used extensively to help make companies’ advertisements more effective on Nimbuzz. The virtual store lets users purchase avatars and virtual gifts. 30 percent of Nimbuzz customers, it claims, are making purchases there.

Nimbuzz is available on Android, iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Symbian, J2ME, as well as Windows and Mac desktop computers. So, pretty much everywhere. Vikas mentioned that Nimbuzz is pre-installed on most Nokia Lumia and Nokia Asha mobile phones at the moment as well.

The company is doing very well on feature phone platforms like Symbian and Java, but Nimbuzz is still crawling its way up on smartphone platforms. With other emerging chat apps relying on its cute stickers and addictive games, Nimbuzz might need to come up with a strategy to recreate that fun [1] inside its app to convince more smartphone users to switch, or at least to start using Nimbuzz’s aforementioned online chat integration.

NoLimit, an Indonesian startup that specializes in analyzing social media through conversation analysis, launched its IndSight project a couple of days ago. The team describes it as a portal where users can monitor the latest social media trends in Indonesia.

There are four main channels analyzed on IndSight: brands, public figures, organizations, and media. Each of those have their own sub channels like ‘motorcycle’ for brand, or ‘politician’ for public figure. All channels are analyzed based on activity on Facebook and Twitter. We can easily see the visualized data about things like fans or followers, total posts made, and engagement rate [1] of monitored accounts there. IndSight also allows people to compare the top social media accounts from each sub channel.

IndSight will earn revenue from premium research services for clients who need deeper, more detailed insight. The fee for the this particular service is based on the quantity and complexity of the requested research.

The target market for IndSight is digital media or advertising agencies, enterprises, and social media managers or digital strategist. The team believes that IndSight can be used to keep users updated on hot topics, or to analyze conversation or patterns in a social media campaign.

The company has two other products, in addition to IndSight, in its social media dashboard and SocialMeter. The team is looking to upgrade and harmonize all three products to provide an all round social media campaign solution for clients.

IndSight can be accessed for free at IndSight.me. You can also email NoLimit if you’re interested to to know more.

People don’t tend to think of Facebook as a major playing in the instant messaging market, but the company has just announced an update to its Facebook Messenger IM app that will make it easier for users in India, Indonesia, Australia, Venezuela, and South Africa using just their names and a phone number.

Previously, Facebook messenger sign-ups have required an email address. And while that’s a fair expectation for Facebook to have for American users, internet penetration is lower in countries like India and Indonesia, and user habits are also different. Many users don’t have regular email accounts, and instead communicate via text messages, IM apps, and VoIP phone calls (among other things). By removing the email account requirement in these countries, Facebook has made it very quick and easy for users to sign-up, and it’s likely that the move will lead to increased use of Facebook Messenger. Facebook hopes that increased use of Messenger will make users more interested in signing up for a full Facebook account, too.

That said, the app still faces tough competition from players that already have a firm grip on the instant messaging market. In Indonesia, for example, Facebook will have to take on BlackBerry Messenger as well as newcomers like WeChat that have been gaining ground fast. The move to make Facebook Messenger easier to sign up for is a savvy one, but it may prove to have been too little too late in some or all of the countries Facebook is targeting with this change. (Interestingly, there are rumors afoot that Facebook is interested in buying Whatsapp, and if that did happen, it would put the company in a much stronger competitive positon. But since Whatsapp has denied the rumor, that seems to be strictly a hypothetical scenario for now).

If you don’t live in India, Indonesia, Australia, Venezuela, or South Africa, it looks like for now you’re stuck with the old sign-up process. But if this current initiative works out and Facebook user numbers rise in some of those countries, it’s very possible Facebook could choose to expand the new sign-up rules to other countries, too.

[Via Facebook and the LA Times]

Opera has revealed a report today regarding the browsing habits of its 194 million Opera Mini users in October. The data is particularly interesting for top social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Here are some of the key stats about Asia-based users of the mobile web browser:

Tiny Macau is Big on Facebook

With 90.59 percent of all Opera Mini users in Macau visiting Facebook at least once a month, Macau has become the number one country in the world in terms of unique users percentage for Facebook. The only other Asian country making it into the top ten is Brunei, in 10th place with 82.23 percent.

Japan <3 Twitter

When it comes to Twitter, Japan, Indonesia, and Brunei are amongst the top ten countries for the number of unique users percentage. Japan is second with 14.94 percent, Indonesia is sixth with 12.96 percent, and Brunei is eighth with 12.40 percent.

Who Loves Weibo?

Unsurprisingly, using the same criteria for Weibo, China tops the chart, with Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Indonesia in various spots in the top ten. Though the result says that only six percent of Chinese users visit Weibo at least once a month. That doesn’t sound right to us – but perhaps they’re all using the Weibo app, and not accessing the service from Opera’s web browser.

Social Savants

In terms of unique total users for Facebook and Twitter, Indonesia and India take the first and second spots respectively for both social media websites.

To read the full report, you can see it here.

With the advent of the internet and social media, local travel agencies are losing business due to the “more perfect” knowledge that is readily available at the click of the mouse. These traditional businesses are sometimes run by the older generation, with a huge inertia to adopt new and innovative methods and customer acquisition channels. On the other hand, with more information available, travelers are no longer keen on following packaged and guided tours, in which offline stores often specialized. With these two factors combined, travel agencies realize that they are slowly losing market share – and sales.

But those who prevail are the ones who embrace and use technology to their advantage. One such Singaporean travel agency, Maple Aviation, is an example. It has been around since 1988, and prides itself as the first local travel agency to adopt social media as its primary platform to reach out to its customers. It is also the TransAsia Airways Singapore’s general sales agent (GSA), and so it takes charge of all TransAsia Airways bookings in Singapore.

More recently in May, Maple Travel launched a “Book My Flight” tab on TransAsia Airways’ Facebook page that allows users to book Singapore to Taipei air tickets direct without having to leave Facebook. It has also integrated PayPal as its payment solution, which streamlines and simplifies the purchasing process for customers, thus enhancing the purchasing experience. It has since seen over 200 return flights sold through Facebook in the first three months.

Tan Meng Aun, director for Maple Aviation, also shared with us that 20 percent of its customers are between 18 and 24 years old and 50 percent are aged between 25 to 34 years old. It is mainly made up of students, couples, young working adults, and newlyweds. Unsurprisingly, these customers are also the ones who are constantly on the popular social network, adopters of PayPal payment services, and look to blogs as well as online guides to prepare for their next holiday destination.

Meng Aun also adds that with Facebook, it brings the brand closer to its customers:

They are able to answer their questions and solve their problems on a platform that the customers are already very comfortable with. This is in contrast to a static website where customers are unable to ask any questions or have to call in and hold before being able to speak to a company representative. With Facebook, they can simply leave their question as a message and later check the answer on their mobile phone while on commute. In addition, having PayPal integrated seamlessly together makes it easy to streamline the purchase process and improves the customer service experience when businesses merge these two platforms.

This also means that local travel agencies are able to coexist with the internet, when technology is embraced. Meng Aun adds:

While the internet is certainly muscling its way in to be a dominant sales channel in the travel industry, the local travel agencies are still able to find their niche, especially in the form of the customer service they provide. Airline ticketing and hotel bookings are no longer a major value proposition for travel agents to pitch to customers, as these customers are able to do that themselves on the internet. However, the nature of travel is always complicated. [For instance,] if a flight is cancelled or if the passenger’s travel plans change, and this is where the immediate service a travel agent can provide, will prove to be of value to customers. Hence, while the internet will continue to grow its dominance in the travel industry and the roles of the local travel agencies continue to evolve, the local travel agencies will never become redundant.

But really, how many local travel agencies, especially the smaller ones, would have the resources and money to integrate a platform like this? Not many. Perhaps the bigger ones will survive, but it’s still a tough task for the smaller players to take their business online.

It’s the same story in lots of other areas. India added 37 million internet users in the past 12 months, but – at 137 million in total – that’s still just 11 percent penetration, three times below the global average. One fundamental reason behind this might be that 69 percent of Indians live in rural areas, and are often totally off the grid. And so, at present, 72 percent of the country’s web users live in urban areas.

All these updated stats for India have been compiled by Singapore social media agency WeAreSocial in its latest infographic report. This is the updated overview for the country:

India’s young web users – 75 percent of its netizens are below the age of 35 – mean that the social media boom is only just starting. That’s great news for Facebook, which saw 14.8 million new users in India in the past six months. India – in the absence of China, which blocks Facebook – could become the biggest Facebook user-base in the world, but for now it’s the third-largest:

Here’s the full infographic report in the form of a slideshow:

[Source: WeAreSocial Singapore]

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

Since we last looked at Cambodia’s web scene late last year, it has seen mobile subscribers nearly double so that there’s now 131 percent mobile penetration. As for 3G, a very encouraging 3.25 million are signed up to the quickest mobile data on offer, which is a pretty solid 16.5 percent of all mobile subscriptions. The number of internet users has leapt up by an even more extraordinary 548 percent, so that there are now 2.47 million connected online. This is likely due to seven new ISPs coming online in 2011 as Cambodia’s infrastructure slowly modernizes.

With 64 percent of the population being under 30 years of age, it’s no surprise that social media are a core online passtime. The Facebook Ad Planner suggests there are 690,520 social media users in Cambodia this month – not an enticingly huge draw for brands doing social marketing (compared to the 8.53 million social users in Vietnam this year), but it’s still a young and receptive audience. It’s surely also a country where Facebook is looking forward to seeing millions of new users. Here’s the full report in slideshow form:

[Source: WeAreSocial blog]

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

In yet another sign of Facebook’s momentum in Japan, the country’s most popular price comparison website Kakaku.com (TYO:2371) has announced that it will allow for tighter integration with the social network, including the capability for new users to register and login with their Facebook accounts.

And perhaps even more interesting, at least from a consumer point of view, is that Kakaku has added some new Facebook pages for different categories of products. They seem to have focused on more geeky products especially, like cameras, mobile phones, personal computers, and audio/video equipment. Those Facebook pages are very photo heavy, and are already attracting lots of likes, it seems. So for Japanese consumers who just want to follow cameras, they can just ‘like’ that particular Kakaku page, and only receive camera updates.

This granular approach is one that I think more companies should employ, especially e-commerce sites. Breaking their content (in this case product pages) into consumable streams which the public can choose from in an à la carte manner is very smart, and shows they have the consumer in mind [1].

Kakaku currently boasts over 35 million active users a month. Back in May, advertising giant Dentsu announced that it had acquired a 15 percent stake in the company.

If you’d like some background on the service, you can check out our screencast walking you through some of the features.

After last week’s Asia-wide report on the state of the web, mobile, and social media, comes the infographic from digital agency WeAreSocial that focuses on Vietnam. The big news is that Facebook has overtaken Zing as Vietnam’s social network of choice – now Facebook has 8.5 million Vietnamese users, surpassing Zing’s 8.2 million in the country.

The WeAreSocial team notes that Facebook had a mere 2.9 million Facebook users in Vietnam last summer, so it’s seeing stellar growth among Vietnam’s very young and mobile netizens. But a note of caution: Zing’s self-reported figures are a little older than Facebook’s, so there’s still a chance for the homegrown service to regain its crown. After all, Zing is still growing from its 6.8 million figure last year.

Here’s the key slide from the infographic presentation showing Vietnam’s web scene:

Some highlights in Vietnam to look out for:

• Social media penetration of nine percent shows there’s massive room for growth
• 127.3 million mobile subscribers in total, which is above the population figure of 91.5 million
• 19 million mobile internet users, which works out at penetration of around 21 percent
• 35 percent of those user their phones to access social media
• 28 percent of Vietnamese netizens now have a Facebook account

And here is the full deck for you to browse:

[Source: WeAreSocial blog]

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

Tokyo Game Show 2012

Zynga’s (NASDAQ:ZNGA) recent reversal of fortunes brought up several questions about the social gaming and virtual goods model. The company’s growth is so closely linked to Facebook (NASQAQ:FB) that it is often indistinguishable which of the two was riding on the other’s growth. In any case, Zynga was the first application to leverage Facebook as a marketing platform at such a large scale and with such success. In doing so, it also heralded a wave of social gaming that shook traditional gaming companies into rethinking their offerings.

Zynga’s recent fall has simultaneously exposed the chinks in its strategy (which was leveraged by other players) and highlighted a growing trend among similar players in the social gaming space who are running into similar problems.

Over-reliance on a foreign user acquisition engine

Social gaming is a great example of user acquisition based not on relevance to target users, but on repeated incentives to current users to send invites to new users. There are two interesting points about social gaming in its current state:

1. Viral acquisition: Social games rely heavily on virality. This is often baked into the game mechanics. Users can acquire time (faster leveling up) or resources in the game by inviting their friends. The entire game is built around users calling other users in. This virality is NOT word of mouth; it has nothing to do with a positive experience that users may have had on the game.

2. Cross-promotion: Social games rely heavily on hits and cross-sell. Whenever Zynga puts out a new game out, it acquires users from existing games (cross-sell). However, this has a lot to do with momentum. If a game falls through in between, the audience carry-over suffers. In general, social gaming companies maximize revenues by making users play more games, thereby creating more monetization opportunities.

The two factors above imply that social gaming, unlike every other form of gaming, can scale well only on an underlying user-acquisition platform. Facebook, of course, was perfect as a user acquisition platform. The problem, though, was that this made Zynga and others over-reliant on the Facebook, and hence, over-exposed their business to any policy changes that limited the use of the platform.

Piggybacking on another network

Zynga and Facebook, not best friends anymore

Zynga’s growth strategy was piggybacking on Facebook’s growth. Networked businesses often ride the success of another network. Paypal rode eBay’s growth and YouTube was helped by MySpace’s growth early on. The key driver for success in piggybacking on another network’s growth is the ability of the overlying network to add value to users of the underlying network. Paypal provided eBay users a method for instant payment. Youtube provided Myspace (and later Facebook) users a way to easily share videos.

The problem with some of the social gaming companies piggybacking on Facebook, though, was that the many invites sent to users actually depleted value for users on Facebook rather than enhance it.

They did add value to a certain group of users otherwise we would never have had this segment of 50-something women petting puppies on the internet. But in doing so, they spammed another whole set of users, repeatedly sending irrelevant invites.

Facebook itself, over time, has taken progressively greater measures to curb the level of spam on its network. Zynga obviously gained a lot of traction because it was among the first to show up at the party. The restrictions started coming into play only later. And with the restrictions, Facebook has become sub-optimal for user acquisition of this sort.

Facebook was never optimized for social gaming

The viral invite mechanic on which this model of social gaming works fails because of two reasons:

1. Not every user on Facebook is genuinely interested in playing or trying a social game. That’s not the primary use case of the network, since Facebook is first a publishing platform and then a marketing platform. Good content goes viral on the platform because it adds value to the users, who are largely out there looking for good content. Facebook is optimized for good content, not for game invites.

2. The underlying network is based on real identities. As a result, users are more sensitive about spamming their friends and creating poor experiences for them. As with any other technology experience, users don’t necessarily differentiate negative behavior (spam) from day one and gradually acquire the sophistication to avoid spamming.

The social invite mechanic should be native to the underlying platform

This is where Asian gaming platforms are fundamentally different. A characteristic that differentiates some Asian gaming networks like GREE (TYO:3632) and DeNA (TYO:2432) from other social gaming companies is the fact that their user acquisition and cross-promotion is built on a native gaming platform. Users often have an avatar-based gaming identity rather than their real identity. With gaming being the core function of the platform, the risk of spam gets mitigated. And since people aren’t their real selves on the platform, the propensity to mass-invite will be that much higher.

The current breed of social gaming companies that have optimized and perfected the art of acquiring users on Facebook and other non-native viral platforms are now faced with an additional challenge (since Facebook’s policy tightening) with which they have no experience: Building a user acquisition platform where they own the users across games. Companies which have already built a user acquisition engine on a native platform have a headstart here.

The smaller screen problem and ‘unbundling’

Every web-first company seems to be up against this challenge. Mobile gaming comes with three unique problems:

1. The small on-screen real estate limits monetization options.

2. Mobile has a history of unbundling horizontal platforms into vertical services. Facebook.com is a single web destination for multiple use cases (communication, hosting pictures, sharing stuff, playing games etc.). But Facebook itself has multiple mobile apps for communication, photos, etc., and faces stiff competition from services like Instagram (pre-acquisition) which would not have been a direct competitor in a desktop/web-only world. This unbundling could also raise challenges for social games which depend heavily on cross-promotion and could come in the way of porting users from one game to another.

3. Mobile brings a different game dynamic with it as well. Mobile games tend to have high engagement per session. Social games on Facebook, on the other hand, have lower per-session engagement and are often played more in maintenance mode where a user logs in, completes a few tasks and then finishes up.

Being mobile-first, Asian gaming giants again have a headstart, especially in the region’s more mature mobile markets. GREE’s acquisition of OpenFeint clearly marked their intentions towards investing in a cross-platform mobile gaming experience.

It’s ultimately the money, honey!

Social gaming ARPUs globally are still not at the level that they are in Japan. Despite the fact that Zynga had 10X the number of users that GREE had in late 2011 (Zynga was still on a roll), GREE had higher quarterly revenues and both GREE and DeNA had more than 10X the profitability of Zynga. Of course, this all works very well when you’re targeting the affluent Japanese market. But two significant reasons for Zynga’s low profitability have been it’s high customer acquisition spend and the 30 percent revenue share with Facebook. Acquisitions spends are controlled to a much greater extent on an owned, native platform, which contributes to DeNA’s high profitability.

Of course, there’s always the off-chance that the rest of the world may be different. Social gaming, mobile gaming, and virtual goods were all first implemented on a commercial scale in Asian markets, particularly in two two markets (South Korea and Japan) characterized by high disposable income, technologically-advanced consumers and high average online spends. Both markets, however, have historically been very insular. Korea’s Cyworld hasn’t really broken much ground in its global expansion quest. And Japanese consumer tech products continue to be very inward focused.

The challenge for these companies lies in their ability to execute in foreign, especially non-Asian, markets with different customer tastes. Can they figure out the global consumer? If they do, they might just ring in a new phase of international success for Japanese internet companies.

All those stats are compiled by the folks at the Singapore branch of the WeAreSocial digital agency, who have just released their 2012 infographic report – see it here, or embedded below – that updates the series that we enjoyed so much last year.

Before you browse the whole set of infographic slides at the bottom of this post, here are a few key points on social media in Asia:

Yes, Facebook is still the region-wide king – not counting the massive weight of Chinese socal networks which tend to be used only in China. But Facebook’s throne is far from safe, we reckon, with more group messaging apps – like Whatsapp, KakaoTalk, Line, WeChat – ready to take away much of the activity that Facebook is used for. After all, the Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps are not as good as many of its rivals in terms of facilitating simple and fun chatting with friends. OK, here’s the full slideshow:

[Source: We Are Social’s blog]

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

There has been a lot of buzz around Japan-based Tokyo Otaku Mode recently. The startup aims to curate content (mostly photos so far) focusing on the ‘Otaku’ community surrounding Japanese anime, manga, and cosplay. Founded in March of 2011, it has already raised a round of angel funding from investors. I recently spoke with its co-founder, Nao Kodaka to find out more about TOM and their plans for the future.

Interestingly, much of the buzz surrounding Tokyo Otaku Mode so far is a mixed reaction of surprise and confusion regarding its massive Facebook footprint. To date, it has 6.8 million Facebook fans. Let’s put that in perspective for a moment, and compare it to some other Facebook pages out there:

I couldn’t help but ask Nao about this right off the bat. Their Facebook page is certainly well managed, with lots of attractive photo content that’s sure to win over tens of thousands of fans. But millions? Considering the figures above, I asked Nao how much of this was organic and how much was due to advertising. He explains:

[We] have been asked this question sometimes, we have never bought any fans from agencies or companies before (such as one million fans for $100,000). We have only just tried a few ads.

He declined to disclose any specific ad spend figures, but added a few points on why their Facebook page has excelled:

We think TOM attracts fans because of continuity and quality content. We curate twice per day on a 365-day basis including Christmas. We are full time media and we don’t take any vacation! Regarding quality, we received all content and approval from IP holders, or we go to an event and take photos by ourselves […] so we can get original and differentiated content.

Sample of rich photo content on TOM's Facebook page

This is certainly a great Facebook strategy, but I don’t think such fan numbers would have surpassed a million without a significant ad spend. In comparison, the startups’s Twitter account has just 4,862 followers to date, even though it looks to be equally active. So for those out there wondering about the lofty fan count, this doesn’t answer the question by any stretch, but it may shed some light [2].

But perhaps the more important question is this: Can that fan base be successfully monetized? I asked Nao to explain a little about their planned revenue model.

We haven’t built any revenue source at this moment. It is basically not ok to make revenue on Facebook page, based on the regulations. We plan to monetize on our own web site, otakumode.com, through ads and e-commerce in the future.

[W]e would make our own web site as the destination site, as the first place to come to look for Otaku related content, from all over the world. In order to do that, we would transit all the traffic from our Facebook page and capture from smart terminals into there. The Facebook page is just the beginning.

While the Otakumode.com website is still in a closed alpha, they plan to move to beta this month, allowing current users to invite their friends. There are also plans for an iOS app that will be used as a viewer to bring in traffic from mobile devices.

This sort of Facebook strategy is a fascinating one for a media startup. The Facebook fan count will lend it credibility early on, because irregardless of how it was obtained, it can be a major selling point for the company to highlight in its business moving forward. I expect the advertising and e-commerce initiatives that Nao mentioned will move along pretty smoothly as a result.

The startup has an impressive team and an all-star list of investors, and I expect we will hear a lot more from them as their online Otaku community continues to grow around the world.

Today laborers across Indonesia are on strike to fight for their working rights. On the same day, Freelancer.com has opened an opportunity for the workforce in Indonesia to create their own workspace online. Freelancer.com is an outsourcing and crowdsourcing platform for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Here, SMEs could meet freelancers to do jobs that they need. Now Freelancer.co.id is launched with Indonesian language features and support for the local currency, the Rupiah. It hopes to empower entrepreneurship in Indonesia, making it easier, for example, for startups to find designers or coders.

Why is Freelancer targeting Indonesia? This country only contributes 1.5 percent of its four million total users. But the workforce in Indonesia has great potential – because, around 22 percent of the Indonesian population uses the internet.

The vice president of growth for Freelancer.com, Willis Halim, who was born and raised in Indonesia, believes Indonesia is a land where SMEs can grow. The internet should not only be used for Facebook, he says, but also to raise the nation’s economic status. Willis added:

We provide a global labor exchange. We provide the productivity to assist those with a spark of an idea to turn into reality. E-commerce is not just for goods, but it can also be for services. In emerging economies, we empower entrepreneurs to start service organizations.

For its Indonesian version, Freelancer supports Indonesian on its site and for its customer service. It has also established a local team with a regional manager. As for payments, freelancers can bid on projects starting from Rp300,000, which is around the same amount as on the global site: $30.

Before the launch, Freelancer collected success stories from its Indonesian users. One of them is Daniel Pratidya from Jakarta, who has used the international version of Freelancer.com since September, 2011. He worked for additional income for his family as he raised four children. He tried using Freelancer and started off with the low payment of $2 to bid a project. It was only to raise his reputation and reviews for his profile. At first, he says it was hard to win a bid for a project. Now he frequently earns money via Freelancer. He also managed to pay his debts. Daniel said:

There is a lot of opportunity for businessmen in this site. Through Freelancer.com, I changed from a freelancer to an entrepreneur to solve my financial problems.

As for a payment solution, Freelancer is now working to build partnerships with local banks. For now, it’s just HSBC which supports wire transfers for Freelancer in Indonesia. Other methods are still the same as the global site, like Paypal and credit cards. Freelancer is also considering local payment methods such as KasPay from Kaskus.

image: FastCompany.com

A number of publications have been citing Global Web Index research that claims Facebook and Twitter have 63 million and 35 million users respectively. We thought those figures smelled funny, so we stayed clear. But those numbers are being widely reported by big name publications, and I think that’s regrettable [1].

I’ve exchanged a few emails with the folks at Global Web Index regarding the Twitter user count [2], just to question their methodology, and to their credit they were very receptive and made a few good points [3]. They tell me their results are survey-based from a sample of 8,000 total respondents [4], with surveys conducted in Chinese. The following is parts of my email correspondences, adjusted and supplemented to be posted.

How many actually climb the wall?

Like many, my main concern was that Twitter is blocked in China and that circumvention tools were not used widely enough to support such high user counts. The Berkman Center published research back in 2010 about the use of circumvention tools in China, and a the time they gave a generous estimate of no more than three percent, qualifying that the “actual number is likely far less.”

So perhaps considering that this is now two years later, we could be generous again that say that “far less than three percent" has now reached three percent [5]. And if we are again generous and assume that all of those users are using those circumvention tools to use nothing but Twitter, that would mean about 16 million Twitter users. Again, still far less – and that’s being generous.

Notice how many times we had to be generous there, and we still didn’t reach half of GWI’s 35 million figure.

Comparing to Sina Weibo

Sina Weibo had about 300 million registered users as of last May. Those figures came from Sina itself, with no mention of what portion were active. But…

• If we are generous and say that 100 percent of them are active, it would mean that there is about one active Twitter user for every 10 active Sina Weibo users in China (35 million to 350+ million).
• If we are conservative and say that 50 percent of those 300+ million are active, it would mean almost one active Twitter users for every four active Sina Weibo users (35 million to 150+ million).

Neither of those two estimates seems realistic to me. Twitter doesn’t have the same visibility in China that it has in the West. It is not a part of mainstream vocabulary (Weibo is), it is not plastered all over the Chinese internet in the form of share buttons (Weibo is), and it is blocked. If it could reach 10 percent of Sina Weibo’s user total despite all that, it would be a miraculous feat indeed.

Can we measure language use?

We could also consider examining the languages used on Twitter, which has been done to some extent by Eric Fischer in this visualization from late 2011. In the graphic, you’ll notice that China is not very active, especially when compared to neighboring Japan. But Italy for example (which GWI estimated to have 3.1 million active Twitter users) is far more ‘visible’/active. There are numerous other examples too. This is hardly conclusive, but again, another indication that China’s Twitter count is very low.

A final note

It’s entirely possible that the use of circumvention tools is much higher than we think, and that more and more people in China are accessing Facebook and Twitter. But I think we have to call bullshit that the numbers are anywhere near the level that GWI claims [6]. While none of the facts listed above disprove their data, collectively they certainly support the case that the figures from this extrapolated survey are off-base.

But perhaps the biggest argument to be made against GWI’s figures, and what should throw huge red flags to anyone even remotely familiar with China’s internet, is that the average Chinese user does not really give a fuck about internet censorship, nor about getting on Twitter or Facebook.

Admittedly, we’ve cited survey-based research in the past too, and while I don’t think any of it was off base like this GWI research, I expect we might be even more careful moving forward. We still have a lot to learn about which information we can trust. But I’m glad to say that our team makes a good effort to be consistently accurate over just being quick to publish.

It’s official, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is now the highest trafficked website on planet Earth, at least according to web ranking site Alexa.com According to Alexa’s data, Facebook overtook Google last Friday, September 21st. That may or may not be accurate, depending on whether you believe in Alexa’s measurement methodology. But without both Facebook and Google revealing their own data, no third-party measurement can claim to be perfect. So as always, take Alexa’s data with a grain of salt.

Nonetheless, one thing is for sure. Facebook has gained a lot of users in Asia lately, particularly in Indonesia and India. Facebook is also the number one website in terms of web traffic for several Asian countries, including Malaysia, Philippines, Pakistan, Thailand, and Indonesia. And it is fair to assume that Asia has been Facebook’s growth engine to help the social networking site snatch Alexa’s top spot away from Google.

TNW previously reported that Asia has recently overtaken Europe as the largest continent with the most Facebook users – at a whopping 250 million users. Out of which, Indonesia and India have both contributed a huge amount: 54 million and 44 million, respectively. Elsewhere in Asia, SocialBakers also recorded huge growth from countries such as Japan and Vietnam at over 90 percent monthly user growth rate. But to really reach world domination, Mark Zuckerberg and his crew would have to crack the China market.

We are back with a new issue of our Thai tech round-up, brought to you by thumbsup. This time let’s focus on digital advertising, and the Facebook-backed hack contest.

First real-time bid advertising in Thailand

Click to enlarge!

MCFiVA, a digital agency in Thailand, has launched its latest product to digital marketers, providing a service to buy and sell online advertising in real-time – claimed to be the first of its kind in Thailand. It uses the familiar real-time bidding (RTB) system, and is called “FIVIAD”, says Dr. Supachai Parchariyanon, managing director of MCFiVA Thailand.

This new service has a buy and sell system similar in concept to the one used in stock market trading. Also, advertisers can reach their target groups directly without specifying particular websites. Advertisers get direct control of their ad budget, and better optimization; consumers should see more relevant ads.

FIVIAD has opened only for existing customers at the moment, giving them early access whilst also gathering useful feedback. The agency has set a target for FIVIAD of bringing in 100 million baht (US$3.25 million) in revenue within this year.

Thai team wins Facebook Dev World Hack in Jakarta

A big event for developers, the Facebook Developers World Hack, dropped in on Jakarta, Indonesia, on September 13th (one of ten city-stops). The winning team here was actually from Thailand, named Computerlogy (pictured right).

Computerlogy is a startup based in Chonburi province which develops web apps for banking and enterprise, as well as some social media apps and tools. The company’s main social product is SocialEnable, which is a solution for monitoring social media.

Computerlogy has been familiar with Facebook and its APIs for some tine, being the only company in Thailand that’s a Facebook ‘preferred marketing developer’.

This Facebook-sponsored World Hack competition runs through to October 1st, and still has lots more cities to visits. The three main topics at this year’s event are mobile, gaming, and open graph.

Renren, China’s largest Facebook-ish social network, has a long and complex history which probably not more than a handful of people have heard about in detail. I was lucky enough to have the chance to meet Zany Zeng, the co-founder of NYSE-listed Renren.com and current co-founder of Youlu, to dig deep and document the story behind Renren.

To understand the full journey, the story goes way back to May 1999 when Chinaren.com was founded – arguably the first college-focused online social network in China, way before even Facebook and Friendster started. Chinaren was founded by Joseph Chen (Renren’s current CEO) along with Yunfan Zhou and Nick Yang (who both eventually co-founded NASDAQ-listed KongZhong). Their first task was to hire someone to build the technical backbone of Chinaren; so they went to Tsinghua university and they found Zany, who was still an undergraduate.

Zany ended up hiring more than 60 fellow Tsinghua students to build out the tech team. Just three months away from obtaining his bachelor degree, Zany chose to drop out of college. His stint at Chinaren was short because the startup got acquired for approximately $30 million by Sohu after less than two years of operations. Zany said that Chinaren was fast growing but they didn’t have money to run further, so getting acquired was the only sensible route out. Back then, there were few investors anyway.

His belief that online social networks would one day be a big thing in China saw him join the first Renren as CTO. That’s no typo – and this is the part where it gets confusing. So read on:

Renren 1.0 was founded by Anthony Cheng and Michael Robinson in early 1999. They raised US$37 million in funding, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, reached a market cap exceeding US$1 billion and then, after the dotcom bubble burst just a few weeks later, Renren 1.0 was acquired by a Hong Kong holding company. Renren 1.0 was where Zany met Richard Robinson where they became close friends and allies (they later co-founded and now run Youlu together focusing on creating mobile apps for business professionals.

After his stint at Renren 1.0, Zany, together with Joseph Chen, joined forces again and co-founded Oak Pacific Interactive (OPI) in the spring of 2002. Zany pointed out that the name was chosen because it’s ‘IPO’ spelled backwards. At OPI, Joseph and Zany raised in total US$460 million from big names including Softbank, DCM, and General Atlantic. OPI’s initial business included a number of web sites including one somewhat like Xunlei, a sort of Bit-torrent service. But that didn’t turn out well.

Zany purchased the then defunct Renren.com domain name and used it to create Renren 2.0, a Craigslist-like service, in 2006 but that also did not fare well too. The turning point for Renren happened in 2006 when OPI acquired Xiaonei.com for a song. Xiaonei.com back then was a popular Facebook clone with a large user-base of college students.

In 2009, the Renren of today was born when the company consolidated Xiaonei with Kaixin.com (who bought the domain earlier) under the Renren.com domain to form a unified social network for China. Around the same period, Kaixin001.com (Kaixin means “happy” in Chinese) was also a competing social network. And a lot of people, even local friends, get confused between Kaixin.com (which now redirects to Renren) and Kaixin001, which is the proper name for the rival.

Kaixin001 actually had the chance to buy the Kaixin.com domain but they somehow, maybe for cost saving reasons, decided not to. So, in the end, Renren bought the domain instead. Of course, Kaixin001 wasn’t too happy about it as it got left behind eventually.

After helping grow OPI to over a 1,000 staff and tens of millions of users, COO Zany left the company in 2009 at the stage where the company was China’s largest social network. In 2011, Renren.com went public in the US – NYSE:RENN – and has now 45 million monthly active users users according to its most recent announcement.

On starting a company, Zany has a word of advice for budding entrepreneurs:

Find the right market, don’t give up and iterate your way to product/market fit.

Alvin Yap, CEO and founder of TMG

Readers may recall when we discussed feature phone business opportunities in Indonesia with Andy Zain. Continuing that discussion, we spoke with Alvin Yap, the founder and CEO of mobile gaming developer TMG and KotaGames, about the monetizing strategy and opportunity from the feature phone market in Indonesia. Here’s what he had to say.

Can you monetize in the feature phone industry?

We found out that we monetize better than [social games provider] Zynga. Zynga monetizes about 1.2 percent of its monthly active users (MAU). Over the last thirty days, if we look at the monetizable users, we [monetize] anything from 20 to 25 percent. So that’s about 20 times higher than what Zynga does.

Of course in our market, users have less money to spend compared to Zynga’s market. Zynga’s average revenue per daily active users (ARPDAU) is about 0.046, ours is about 0.038. So we’re about 22 percent lower than Zynga. But because we monetize 20 [times] more people, we are actually higher in terms of revenue potential compared to Zynga. For more information you can refer to our online [data] (pictured below). So can we monetize? Hell yeah we can monetize.

What are some of the key reasons behind that?

With feature phone users, they have less money to spend, but they are more willing to spend. But why?

Number one, unlike you and I, they have no access to TVs, and to regular internet services. For you and I, when we see a game that we have to pay for, we immediately stop playing it. Why? Because we have a lot of other options. Instead of Warcraft, we can play Starcraft. Instead of Cooking Mama, we can play Diner Dash. We can play anything we want, we have so many options. Instead of paying for songs, we can download them for free, instead of watching a movie of $2, we can stream it online. But for regular feature phone users, where majority of the market does not have this privilege. That is why they are more willing to pay.

Number two is because it’s cultural. They are not internet service users, they don’t have the notion that everything is free on the mobile web, they don’t have that notion. So they’ve been so accustomed over the last couple of years paying for content, paying for SMS subscription, paying for horoscope, paying for everything. So this is a common thing for them, they need to pay for content. There are people like us who are used to getting things for free, why should we need to pay for this? I will never pay anything online before because I know that if I look hard enough, I will find these things.

Does this apply specifically to Indonesia?

[This applies] in all new markets, in all emerging markets, where there’s a big income divide. Where you have the elite, and the majority of the market. In majority of the market where they don’t have regular internet access. Where they’re not educated in terms of internet access, you will see the same situation. I would say that this is a common denominator in all emerging markets: Indonesia, Thailand, India.

How much money are feature phone users usually willing to spend?

For us, we sell virtual credits for anywhere from five cents (IDR 500) all the way up to a dollar (IDR 10,000). You will never see Zynga doing these types of things, for them the starting price maybe is from $5 (IDR 50,000). So we are pricing our group at a denomination that users can actually afford. But if you go to many services, they’ll think that this [the pricing scheme] is too small.

For regular mobile users, at any one point at a time, their total credit is less than 80 cents (IDR 8,000). So if you charge anything more than a dollar, then good luck.

How do you reach these users?

We work a lot with telcos. Telcos serve the biggest paying service for first time internet mobile users. By working with [telcos], we get visibility and users get to know who you are. There’s a fair amount of word of mouth as well. That’s why we’re not active on online blogs, we’re not so active on email marketing, or online media because it doesn’t work for us. Our target doesn’t live there.

We work together with handset manufacturers like OEM, Nexian, Nokia, Opera Mini. We work with stakeholders from the mass marketplace, but we don’t work so much with Apple because our target market doesn’t use Apple.

If we had to pick a handset manufacturer to work with, who would it be? Nokia for sure. It still commands the biggest market share for mobile feature phone. If we have to work with browsers, we don’t work with Mozilla, because our users don’t know about Firefox, but they know what Opera Mini is, that is why we work with Opera.

How do you get the visibility from that cooperation?

It can be anything, maybe when working with telco, then naturally if they go to the telco website or when they try to find services they will see KotaGames. Or if you work with a browser, then they will see you from the speed dial. So that’s how we get user visibility, that’s how you know about our service. Sometimes we do SMS marketing, sometimes for example on certain Nexian devices, you will see us on its bookmark whenever you go to its apps section.

What should a company do if they want to partner with telcos too?

Everybody’s open to partnership. I think the challenge is how you can derive value. They are not easy to work with, because many people I think don’t understand how telcos achieve their needs. Because so many people want to work with telco, so naturally it is very competitive. Not everybody will get [to] work with telco, but you just have to know how to position yourself and how to be different than the other guy.

It also helps to have a personal and long lasting business relationship with them, we’ve been in the industry [for] about two or three years, so we know several people, and it helps when getting in touch with the telco. For fresh companies, it could be difficult because you will not understand the internal dynamic.

What do telcos want?

Everybody wants revenue, so you need to have a service that can monetize. Every telco wants reduced churn. If you have a service that helps a user stay with a particular telco, then you will be very valuable, and they will want you because a telco earn money by the number of subscribers.

How many feature phone are online? Who are they?

There are around 180 million mobile users in the market with maybe 30 to 40 million mobile internet users because it is still so new to the users. And this is a good thing because the 30 million can grow to 80, 90, 100 million as we go on.

If you look at Singapore’s emerging market, most users were early internet mobile users. While in Indonesia it’s still in an educational process. One fundamental point is that [Indonesian] users do not want mobile internet, but they want services. They don’t give a shit about what the mobile internet is, but they want Facebook and they play games. But they don’t know that that it’s all mobile internet. That is why telcos have been very intelligent in selling Facebook packages, Twitter packages, Kotagames packages. Because users don’t understand the mobile internet, but they understand services.

I don’t know the exact mobile internet demographic, I know that [the majority] are definitely between 15 to 29, and they are 70 percent male. Why? The early adopters of technology, they are males. How many technology magazines do you see catering to female? What is the probability of you seeing a hot girl on a cover of tech magazine compared to a hot guy? Almost exclusively you see more of a hot girl, because the target market is men. So technology early adopters are almost [all] men. Beyond 29, they are more difficult to change, because they are not open to new stuff.

On the future phone market

Regarding the future of phone industry, Alvin said that in three to five years, he believes that Android will start to take over, but even when that time arrives, feature phones would still be in the market to the tune of 30 to 40 percent. Feature phones will get smarter until one day there will be a blur on the distinction between smartphones and so called dumb phones — we eventually will just have phones.

Alvin explained that just because Android devices will get cheaper, it doesn’t mean that people will automatically have $20 (IDR 200,000) to spend on apps. Their usual income will still be the same. This will then cause the smartphone users’ ARPU (average revenue per user) to balance out. So there will still be a divide between the elite and the majority in the future smartphone market.

By the way, TMG is now hiring. For more details you can take a look at the slides below.

[Picture source: akuinginhijau.org]

This newest WeChat update also adds downloadable emoticon packs.

The Chinese-made messaging app WeChat – which boasts over 100 million registered users – has seen an update to its iPhone app today that adds some useful features for its international users.

Now at v4.3, today’s bump brings support for some Facebook and Twitter syncing, as well as a new way to zap images from your computer browser over to your phone. That’s called Shake Down, and is intended to make it easier to share cool stuff you find on the web, and include it in a WeChat message to some buddies. Those with the updated iOS app can try it at shake.wechatapp.com.

As for the new social aspects, you can now sync your WeChat ‘Moments’ directly to Twitter; on the Facebook side, the new version enables you to download photos from your Facebook albums and share them as WeChat Moments.

Another new thing is the option to download new emoticon packs. We get the feeling that Tencent (HKG:0700), makers of WeChat (or “Weixin” as it’s called in China), has realised the monetization and social marketing potential of emoticons, as pioneered by rival apps Line and Kakaotalk. But for the moment, WeChat’s newly downloadable emoticon stickers packs are free and limited in number.

Earlier this summer, WeChat got video and voice calling in the major v4.0 update, and more recently allowed people to follow brands and media within the app – emulating Twitter or Sina Weibo.

See all the new update features on this WeChat page. It’s likely the Android app will get them in a few weeks’ time too.

WeChat app now integrates with Facebook (above), and Twitter (below):

Made by the folks at Thailand-based social analytics firm ZocialInc, it’s concocted using data from its ZocialRank system. The infographic shows that Thailand has the greatest number of high-ranking brands on social media (86 brands), and that the most liked/followed brand in the region is the Bali-based clothing retailer Surfer Girl, which is apparently living up to its claim of being a fun brand. It’s also got some killer social skills. Global brands in the top 10 include motorbike-maker Yamaha, AirAsia, BlackBerry, Nescafé, and Starbucks.

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

[Source: ZocialInc blog]

A new report from the folks over at Distimo looks at which mobile social networks are doing well around the world, and specifically which networks are winning out in Apple’s App Store for the biggest global markets.

While Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is still the world’s dominant social network app on mobile, some changes over the past year in Asia now mean that it “its dominance is not as apparent” as the year before, says Distimo.

We have watched the rise of Line, NHN Japan’s popular chat application, and Distimo says that it was the most popular mobile social network app for iOS in Japan, Taiwan and Singapore. NHN Japan now claims about 55 million users in total (across multiple platforms) and has its eyes on China, although that market is sure to prove difficult.

Speaking of the Middle Kingdom, in China the top social app was WeChat, which is also coming on very strong (it was tops in Hong Kong too). Korea also has a strong mobile social challenger in KakaoTalk, which was the most popular in Korea.

Distimo also looked at which countries has the biggest appetites for social applications. Surprisingly the Asian nations were less social than the average. In the United States, the download volume for the social category in the App Store accounts for 20 percent of the ‘Top Overall’ download volume (see chart below). In contrast, Asian countries affinity for the social apps category is far less. In Singapore the figure was 14 percent, and it was far less in Japan and Korea (10 percent each), and lesser still in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (nine, eight, and seven percent respectively).

[Lead image: Daily Mail (modified)]

Inspired by the viral article about China’s two internets – with a divide between the elite and the grassroots – we talked to our friend Andy Zain about Indonesia’s own so-called grassroots internet scene: the feature phone industry. Andy is the founder of Mobile Monday Indonesia and the director of Jakarta Founder’s Institute [1]; he explained to us that he believes the local feature phone market is the way in Indonesia, at least for the next three years, but that not a lot of people are tapping into it yet.

“I believe Indonesia is a mobile industry,” said Andy. From the 240 million people in Indonesia, 200 million of them use mobile phones, while only 18 to 19 million people have personal computers (PC). Most people first accessed the internet with their mobile phones, mostly due to Facebook and Twitter usage. He added that 80 percent of the Indonesian population use feature phones, which amounts to around 190 million people. One of the reasons for this is the low, low price of feature phones, which mostly cost below IDR 1 million ($105). He believes because the market is so big, then it should be the norm for people to provide services for it. But, on the contrary, Andy doesn’t see a lot of people tapping into the feature phone industry.

Asked if entrepreneurs should choose people with more money (by implication: smartphone owners) as their market, Andy offers a different opinion:

It’s not about who has the money, but who is willing to pay.

Feature Phone Users Lack of Options

Andy went on to explain that smartphone and PC users (himself included) are in the minority in Indonesia, and that they do not spend money over the internet – that people like him are stingy. Not only that, this minority group also has good access to alternatives, like downloading illegal music rather than purchasing it from, say, Nokia’s Ovi Store. Smartphone users love to have fun, as long as it is free of charge. That’s why they like using WhatsApp so much.

Research by Yahoo and TNS Net Index has revealed that Indonesians mostly access the internet for music and entertainment. But do we have services for those two interests? No, we don’t. People such as Andy’s maid are the ones who buy music, and they have to go to a store to buy them every month or two. No one provide these kinds of services to them, and they don’t have free music access (streaming, or piracy) like smartphone users.

Andy then said that it is not that hard to satisfy the mobile phone users in the country. He took the example of his own video project where he indexed all videos on YouTube, MetaCafe, and other sources, and made it available by converting them for feature phones. Though the picture quality wasn’t that good, it is affordable – and feature phone users are quite okay with it. Because at least now they can watch something. Who uses that service? A lot of people – Indonesia’s majority of basic mobile web users – like the night guards during their watch.

What Feature Phone Users are Like

Andy then identified that the current Indonesian feature phone users are still categorized as the first internet users in their community. For example, he helped the feature phone-based social gaming platform Mig33 increase its user-base from four million to 20 million in one and a half years back in 2008. He said that the Facebook mechanism, the one where we need to add someone first to start chatting, might not work well for feature phone users because these people don’t have any friends on the internet yet. To handle this, Mig33 opened room channels where people can just come to the room and start chatting right away and make new friends, similar to the basic mIRC method.

Typical feature phone users, Andy says, connect to the internet as an escape from their daily life, to have fun. That would explain the quirky and corny virtual identities that they want to use, with nicknames like “cutegirl19.” These people also want to look good online, and this is one of the reasons why they will want to buy premium good-looking avatars. Andy joked that the uglier the people are, the better looking avatars that they want to use.

Andy also noted that we need to understand the users’ culture. In Asian countries such as China, Japan, and Korea, virtual gifts are quite popular. In those countries, new-comers to an office might sometimes give out chocolates to the new colleagues as a way to create a good first impression. The same thing happens in virtual worlds inhabited by many feature phone users in Indonesia, where users like to give out virtual chocolates to people, even if they have to pay for it. Westerners might not understand this. He points out: “Small money, but with big benefits.”

Cheap Gadgets

Regarding the kind of phones these people buy, Andy reckons they don’t care about Google Store, synchronized data, or things like that because they don’t use all that stuff. What do they use? Facebook. As long as the phone has it, the users are happy. Some of them don’t even consider Facebook as being on internet, because they don’t consider pre-installed apps as ‘the internet.’

As for payment systems, make sure that the feature phone service payment system is very simple. Do not use credit cards, and do not charge high fees such as IDR 10,000 ($1) for unlimited usage – it will scare users off. Start with IDR 500 (5 US cents) for each game play, for example; it works better for them. You can charge using the phone credit.

Andy closed our chat by asking people to look at the Indonesian market, to aim for the masses, not the minority market such as Andy himself and most of Tech in Asia’s English readership. We might not like the services provided for the feature phone market now, but that is normal, because the target users are not us. But the feature phone users are okay with basic stuff so long as it works for them. We need to encourage people such as developers and other tech entrepreneurs to do it. Sure, Android is on the rise, and Andy reckons that maybe in three years it’ll be more of a force in the country. But before then, the Indonesian market is still the feature phone market, the grassroots internet world.

Now some of you guys might be wondering if recruiting on Facebook is effective. HireRabbit is going all out to convince you with a gorgeous looking infographic (see below). According to HireRabbit, 84 percent of job seekers have a Facebook profile and 16 percent of all job seekers received a job referral from a Facebook friend. The infographic also provides some tips on how to be successful in recruiting via Facebook.

HireRabbit is founded by Prafull Sharma and Pipalayan Nayak, who both have background in SaaS and recruitment. Sharma told me:

Social media has changed how people consume information. We believe that social media is going to transform the way companies go about attracting and hiring talent.

Facebook and Twitter, with over 1-billion potential candidates and candidate’s friend network as potential referrals, is a goldmine of untapped recruiting opportunities. With Hirerabbit we want to help companies realize the potential of social media.

Founded just eight months ago, HireRabbit is now in private beta and claims to have over 100 companies from the U.S., Europe, and Asia signed up for its beta run. It was also recently selected for a Microsoft Accelerator program in India. The startup plans to follow a ‘Pay-as-you-go’ model but didn’t hasn’t revealed many details on that. Readers who are interested can check out the HireRabbit demo page here on Facebook.

First Line app stickers from a Thai cartoonist

Line is the popular, Japanese-made chat app, which makes a lot of money from emoticon sticker packs sold as in-app purchases. In our first Thai round-up, we mentioned the exclusive stickers from one Thailand mobile telco in the Android version of the app. And now, “Mamuang” (meaning “mango” in Thai) is the first sticker pack from a Thai cartoonist, available now in the in-app Sticker Shop. Wisut Ponnimit, Mamuang‘s creator, is a famous cartoonist in the country, and draws cartoons in numerous Thai and Japanese magazines.

Mamuang is a very popular cartoon character in Japan, and so it made sense for Line’s creator, NHN, to bring it into the app. There are three main characters included in the sticker set: Mamuang, the cute doggy Manow (meaning “lemon”) and Loong Lin Yai (Thai for “big tongue uncle”). You can get all 40 virtual stickers for $1.99 within the app.

New social radio app launches

The first Thai-based digital radio streaming Facebook app – called “BandOn Radio” – has launched. Worapot Nimwijitra, a former executive at RS (a major Thai entertainment company), is the owner of this project.

BandOn Radio is a music streaming service similar to Spotify, Pandora, and Deezer (a startup already operating in Thailand). Bandon Radio programming will be arranged by various DJs who might be familiar to some local music lovers.

As for the business model, Bandon Radio’s income will come from advertising. So audiences have no need to pay for listening to the streams. One advantage of this service is that the DJs can interact with the audience directly on Facebook, and people will be able to listen to music-set re-runs. BandOn is on-air now.

Two Thai gaming companies prepare for battle against China’s Tencent

Two big players in the gaming industry in Thailand, Asiasoft and ThaiCyberGames, have announced a partnership to establish a new online game company. A big part of the reason for this is so as to better face up to Tencent, the biggest tech company from China, which is pushing into Southeast Asian markets these days.

Asiasoft runs some popular social gaming titles from South Korea and China. And it is now trying to expand into other local markers before it’s too late – specifically into Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia. ThaiCyberGames is the official operator of Warcraft III in Thailand.

The plan for the partnership company is to build a strong online gaming presence in the region.

Agate Studio, a mobile gaming startup from Indonesia, has launched Football Saga 2 on Facebook. The sequel has a really important message for the players and for football fans in general, which is to unite support behind the currently sad state of the Indonesian National Team. Within two weeks, the game has garnered 8,500 registered players and is growing.

The company has dedicated almost half of its resources (30 out of 70 employees) to build the sequel to Football Saga. It took around six months in total to develop the Flash-based game.

Football Saga 2 gameplay is also different from the first one in that its interface is more user-friendly. It comes with new and exciting features such as the Gacha-inspired fortune box, regeneration, a skill card, and an improved club system. Dian Ara, from Agate Games, explained a little more about Football Saga 2:

We decided to develop this game to help [...] Timnas (Tim Garuda Indonesia), our national football team. We want to see Indonesian football unlock international achievements such as the Asian Cup or even the World Cup. Once, Japan’s football was as bad as our own, but they could improve thanks to the popular manga Captain Tsubasa. Inspired by the epic tale of Captain Tsubasa and Japan’s football, we want to emulate such a phenomenon in Indonesia. Since we are an independent game developer, surely we can do something for them through our creative work, Football Saga 2, and the video campaign Garuda Bersatu.

To monetize the game, the startup will offer the in-app purchase of “stars” for users to get power-ups, which can be purchased via various payment gateway companies that are working together with Agate Games. It’ll include payment methods like via SMS. Dian promises that you can still have fun whether you buy the stars or not. They are also providing in-game promotional slots for brands willing to cooperate.

It’s just in time for national Independence Day today, and hopefully the game will inspire Indonesians to support their national team no matter what! If you’re logged into Facebook, the game is at this link.

Cafe Life is currently the hottest game on Facebook by Tencent... er, I mean, by Icebreak Games.

The fact that Facebook is inaccessible in China is not stopping the nation’s biggest web company, Tencent (HKG:0700), from getting onboard the US social network. Under the “Icebreak Games” moniker, Tencent has been putting its casual gaming skills to use, making four Facebook games so far. Stats from AppData reveal that Tencent… er, I mean Icebreak Games , has 1.1 million monthly active users (MAU) across its four games.

All this gaming goodness comes out of Tencent’s long-established US offices. Richard Chang, a former platform director at Tencent, confirms the Chinese giant’s history in the States via an answer on Quora:

Tencent US office has been [in Silicon Valley] for a long time, first in Santa Clara, then Redwood City in 2005 and Palo Alto in 2010.

That Palo Alto space has changed recently, and Tencent has gone from the afore-mentioned office space to fill this very neat converted church that’s at the intersection of Bryant Street and Forest Avenue:

The Icebreak Games titles on Facebook are all pretty similar, biz-management kind of affairs. They are:

• Fashion Avenue
• Café Life
• Paradise Life
• Ranch Life

The latter game, however, is tanking, and is now at a meagre 16 daily active users (DAU), way down from the 25,000 it was hitting when it launched in March 2010.

None are new, but it’s interesting to see what Tencent is up to in the US. It’s just a bit baffling why the Chinese company is so coy about this? Anyway, apart from its early and brave move into the US, it’s more recently tackling South and Southeast Asia, pushing its group messaging app WeChat into Thailand and India as well. It has even made a fun, location-based chat app aimed at Indonesia, called Qute.

[Hat-tip to Techrice for the Quora link; Tencent Palo Alto photo by @serioustong]

In its Q2 numbers, the Chinese SNS posted a loss of more than $20 million. The company has seen strong user growth over the past year, with monthly log-in users growing 31 percent to a total of 45 million. But, much like Facebook, it seems to be having trouble converting those users into profit. As you might expect, this has not been great news for Renren’s stock, which took a sharp drop following Tuesday’s Q2 results announcement.

Facebook and Renren now find themselves in a similar quandary, but how will they attempt to escape it? It’s clear that there are at least few kinks to work out of the massive social network model both sites use. Given that they both had strong revenue streams, these Q2 results aren’t apocalyptic — don’t expect either company to disappear overnight. But the fact that they’re both losing millions of dollars means that something needs to change.

This is especially interesting given that newer microblogging social networking sites like Twitter and Sina Weibo are also having problems with monetization. Is it possible to build a really big and really profitable social network? Probably. But it seems like no one has actually figured out just how quite yet.

Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) will travel to 10 cities all around the world for its World Hack competition starting from August 23 to October 1. The ten cities on tour are Austin, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Berlin, Taipei, Jakarta, Bangalore, Barcelona, Vancouver, Warsaw, and Moscow. The World Hack days in Taipei, Jakarta, and Bangalore will start on September 11th, 13th, and 17th respectively.

According to the World Hack website (spotted by The Next Web), each city-stop is a day-long coding event where developers are given time to work on new social apps – solo or in groups – with Facebook engineers on hand to support and answer questions. The topics that will be covered at the event include Facebook APIs, mobile SDKs, and Open Graph.

Facebook didn’t mention what the prizes are, but it is the biggest social networking website in the world, so developers needn’t worry about a lack of goodies. You can learn about the previous Facebook hack event here.

The competition is also a great opportunity for developers to meet up and connect with more like-minded people. Should you pass the registration process, the price for each ticket is around $25 for each city event. Facebook will be filtering the participants, so no-one is guaranteed access [1].

Of course, if you’re interested in hackathons, we have our own coming up in October in Bandung, Indonesia. We hope to see you there!

Head to the official World Hack homepage to register or learn more.

[Via: The Next Web]

But more recently the startup has introduced a new iPhone app called Cake the Reader, which is a Facebook reader app that allows you to browse and comment on your Facebook newsfeed (pictured below). Featuring impressive smoothness when you flick over posts and switch Facebook groups, the app has hit third spot in the social networking category of the Apple App Store in Japan only two days since its launch on August 3rd. Currently it is only outranked by NHN Japan’s Line and Facebook’s native smartphone app.

The Facebook smartphone app is widely reviled and mocked for its poor responsiveness. While this new Cake app limits its features only to browsing/commenting/liking your newsfeeds and participating groups, it does all that very smoothly. The theory in its limited feature-set being that these functions are good enough to cover nearly all of what you want to do with Facebook.

According to the Wondershake’s CEO, Satoshi Suzuki, the app was developed thanks to a sudden inspiration they had back at a hackathon event at Open Network Lab last February. The startup team had been trying to develop another app but shifted its efforts to improving the communication tool that everyone was using 24/7 but still consistently complained about.

In addition to this project, just last April the startup also launched a casual kind of portal for event organizing and ticketing called Tsudoi (web/iOS app).

Sugo Toys Japan is a new service that allows users to buy a new toy from Japan each month. It capitalizes on the popularity of Japanese manga, anime, and video games which are popular with fans overseas. The site, located at sugotoysjapan.com, is scheduled to launch in August (currently just a teaser page).

The company that runs the service, SugoLog, is made up of four staff members: Masaru Nakajima is the CEO, and there is another cofounder, a Dominican web designer, and a Vietnamese system engineer. Masaru tells us that they were inspired by Candy Japan’s subscription model. Our readers may remember we featured that very impressive service a few months back.

So far the company has not set a monthly subscription price but they hope to make it affordable for all users. This seems like it will be a little bit difficult, since the Japanese yen is so high and selling to overseas users at current exchange rates may be tricky.

But the company is keen on spreading ‘Cool Japan’ culture all over the world. Sugolog is normally a social media marketing company and it has been using Facebook actively to build a fan base by pushing out Japan-related news over the past few months. I’m told that the 25,000+ fans that they currently have were accumulated both through organic growth as well as advertising. They will then use this fan base as a way to help monetize its toys subscription service.

Masaru tells me that they have done some market research and they are confident that demand for these sort of toys are high. They plan to cater to English-speaking consumers first with accommodation for other languages coming in the second phase of their plan. With regards to the Chinese market, there isn’t any specific plan yet since they cannot use Facebook, Twitter, or Google as marketing tools in that country.

The company has negotiated an agreement with a toys distributor and are in talks with a toy maker, which is promising. It will be interesting to see how this service is received by fans and whether or not this can be another successful example of a subscription model business.

The Singapore-based dating application helps you find your ideal partner through friends and the influence of your social networks. Singles are able to find love through Facebook connections and recommendations by friends, lowering the risk of encountering people with hyperpersonal or fake profiles, a problem prevalent in many online dating sites.

Alexander Wallestam, CEO and founder of Go Break The Ice, tells us that it aims to transform a regular social network into a place to find love.

I gave the Facebook app a shot, where I was asked to fill in my requirements on it (pictures below), along with my interests, and the city that I’m based. And then comes the top recommendation by the app:

The intro (click to enlarge)!

The match (click to enlarge)!

Should you find the other party interesting, you can hit the “Go Break The Ice” button and start chatting. You can also become a matchmaker on this app, recommending friends whom you think are good candidates.

So if you’re either single or interested to become a matchmaker, you might want to give this app a try. And if you manage to hook up with someone and get married down the road, don’t forget to write in to tell us that the app works.

Mark your calendars: China’s social media giant has surpassed America’s leader in terms of the total value of their shares. Yes, Tencent’s (HKG:0700) market cap is greater than Facebook’s (NASDAQ:FB) right now, with Tencent’s market capitalization currently at HK$419.84 billion – that’s US$66.6 billion – compared to Facebook’s $62.24 billion.

[UPDATE July 20th: Thanks to a reader for pointing out that I hit the wrong currency conversion option, using Chinese RMB rather than Hong Kong dollars. So, doing the correct conversion, the Tencent market cap was actually $55 billion yesterday, still somewhat short of Facebook's level. Sorry for the false alarm. But it's going to happen soon!].

Tencent listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in June 2004 priced at HK$3.70 per share. It’s trading right now at HK$228. It’s a significant moment for Tencent, which runs a number of social services in the country that are the biggest in their field: the biggest in social gaming; the biggest in group messaging apps with WeChat; the biggest in instant messaging with QQ, the biggest in online profiles with QZone; and the biggest in microblogging with Tencent Weibo [1].

If we look at the country’s top social services – in this excerpt from an infographic on China’s rising social media – you’ll see that three of them are Tencent’s:

But Tencent is not invincible. It has struggled in a number of crucial areas as well. One of the biggest failures has been in e-commerce where its own efforts – with Paipai for C2C selling, and QQ Buy for B2C and online storefronts – have come to little, and been out-gunned by Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall sites. In mobile, too, it hasn’t co-ordinated quite the same coherent mobile strategy of some of its rivals, like Baidu and Alibaba, which have gone so far as to create their own mobile platforms and smartphones.

Nonetheless, Tencent is a force to be reckoned with both at home and abroad, and its rise in value and continued diversification should serve as a lesson to Facebook. Remember when Facebook bought that group messaging startup called Beluga? Well, nothing came of it. It was just an acquisition for talent. But when Tencent saw the potential of group messaging apps for smartphones, it went ahead and created its own – WeChat, or “Weixin” in Chinese – and it’s now the most used app of its kind in the world with over 100 million users. And it did that pretty organically, without forcing its QQ users into it. Facebook, as Zuckerberg surely knows in private, is a bit of a one-trick pony, and is very vulnerable to, say, social gaming companies pulling out, or to the rise of Google+. But there’s no-one that could take Tencent down in one fell swoop.

[Hat-tip to Asia-based startup luminary Benjamin Joffe - and judge at our Startup Arena contests! - for communicating about this in a tweet. He’s @benjaminjoffe on Twitter]

For some reason, it appears our friends at SocialBakers left out Japan (even though they clearly know it’s in Asia)! Wondering if perhaps they knew something I didn’t, I double-checked with our correspondent in Japan, who confirmed the island nation was both still in existence and still located in Asia. That being the case, I took the liberty of adding Japan and its ten million Facebook users to the top of the infographic. Later on, however, Japan’s numbers aren’t represented in their charts. It’s also worth noting that the infographic sometimes uses the word “Asia” when what they actually mean is “Asia-Pacific.” Anyway, here’s the graphic!

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

[via SocialBakers]

"Oh, you silly cat. That's not how you spell 'cheeseburger'!"

Asia now has more than one billion internet users – or 1.016 billion, to be precise – who amount to 46 percent of the world’s total number of web users. More than half of those are in China. In addition, 623 million access the web via mobile phones. That’s the overview of the Asia-Pacific web scene depicted in a new report by the Asia Digital Marketing Association (ADMA), a non-profit organisation backed by corporate donors such as Google, Microsoft, and CNN.

For that fast-growing regional audience, ADMA cautions brands to think carefully before engaging in social marketing – “Although 60 percent of social networkers say that social networks are a good place to learn about brands, 50 percent also say they don’t want to be bothered by brands” – and to take care to note the “fragmentation of online activities” between different nations. Here are five eye-watering biz and marketing stats from ADMA’s David Ketchum:

• Online advertising spend in Asia-Pacific reached US$24.8 billion in 2011, making the region second only to the US, with $34.5 billion.
• Every marketing dollar spent online returns $1.78, exceeding the returns of all other marketing media including TV, print, out of home and trade (according to Nielsen).
• By 2015, Asia Pacific is expected to account for a third of all global mobile ad spend, reaching $6.92 billion.
• India, China, Australia and Japan are expected to generate $258 billion in commerce sales in 2012 between them, and mobile commerce is on the rise with 34 percent of mobile internet users in China and Korea transacting via handheld devices.
• Mobile app downloads reached five billion in 2011, generating $871 million.

Here are some of the key demographic tables from desktop internet users in Asia as a whole. It focuses on who’s online, Asia’s most trafficked sites (note Chinese web giants Tencent and Baidu), and where folks go for social media, online gaming, and e-commerce:

And here are three of the demographical highlights of mobile web users in Asia in the ADMA report. It’s interesting to note just how much more likely Asian mobile users are to do serious, practical stuff on their smartphones or feature-phones:

If you’re more into the consumer attitudes and marketing aspect of this and want to see ADMA’s report in full, grab it at the source link below.

[Source: ADMA’s Digital Marketing Yearbook report for 2012 (requires sign-in)]

Facebook is looking to boost the internet speed in Asia-Pacific countries by investing in the Asia Pacific Gateway. That’s a 6,214-mile underwater internet cable from Malaysia to Japan, with cables branching off to other countries in the region. It is scheduled to begin operating by June 2014 with a 54.8 terabit-per-second capability. A Facebook spokesperson commented:

Our investment in this cable will help support our growth in south Asia, making it possible for us to provide a better user experience for a greater number of Facebook users in countries like India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Asia is definitely a growing market for Facebook. It has made much progress in big Asian markets such as Japan, Korea, and Thailand.

We should also note that Social Bakers, a prominent source for Facebook metrics, has recently announced that Asia has overtaken North America to be the second-largest continent in terms of Facebook users, and that’s despite only having an online penetration rate of 6 percent.

[Sources: AllFacebook; cable map image from DailyWireless]

Made in Japan, FriendPix is an Android app that pulls all your friends’ Facebook photos for easy browsing in one single app. Sure, we can browse photos on the Facebook app and on the website. But browsing on FriendPix makes stalking a little easier.

It allows you to check for friends’ photos just via a simple contact search. The resultant photo stream can then be viewed by gender. The app is fast to load, although it requires about an hour to sync it with your Facebook account when first launched. Photo tags can still be viewed in FriendPix which makes life easier if you ever want to know the name of some special lady in a particular photo.

FriendPix resembles Fotobook, an app I reviewed last year, which I think has since disappeared. FriendPix is free to download only on Google Play for now. An iOS version is in the pipeline.

The app was launched just two days ago but founder Taisuke Oe says that he is seeing very active usage so far. FriendPix was developed by Hemplant, an app development firm, and Taisuke revealed that it is currently raising funds. You can give FriendPix a try here. Happy stalking, folks!

It’s important to note, however, that as impressive as this growth is, the report estimates that Facebook’s reach among the general population is still only about 29 percent. When you compare that to other nations like Brazil (77.9 percent) or America (67.2 percent), then there’s still a long way to go.

I should point out that this report does not include individuals who access Facebook via mobile devices. Most likely, Japan’s newfound love for Facebook would be even more apparent if smartphones were factored into this equation.

The report also has some interesting insights into Facebook’s success in Korea. Currently, the popular social network is still behind the domestic incumbent Cyworld, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. But Facebook’s trajectory sees it steadily growing, and it could overpass Cyworld in visitors the next year or so.

It should be noted that Social Bakers, another prominent source for Facebook metrics, puts Japan and Korea at about 10 million and 7 million users respectively.

“Product first, money later.” This is one of the many lessons highlighted in the book Facebook Effect. I still believe in that saying, although each startup has to act according to its own situation. But in Asia this tends to be less of a truth. Because the truth is, we don’t have that much opportunity to raise funding and thus little resources to focus solely just on user growth.

Even if user growth is huge, few are paying, with the exception of perhaps gaming and enterprise products. And that makes startups in Asia naturally more inclined to start pondering early where will the real money come from.

Maybe some startups wouldn’t want to face this reality, hoping to enjoy the user growth honeymoon. The recent $1 billion acquisition of Instagram by Facebook makes the future look more colorful than ever for some. It gives many entrepreneurs a good case study on why making money isn’t so urgent. It has been coined as the “Instragram business model” – having million of users with zero revenue.

Several startup founders who I met recently were saying that they are seeing Instagram as its role model. They use it as a means to defend and answer feedback when others question their business model. That’s fine and I understand it is hard to answer questions relating to business models, especially when it comes to photo apps or social network apps. But I do hope that there are indeed plans for them to make money in the future. There should be a clear model.

Some argue that there isn’t any point to think about money when they have so few users. That’s very true and many startups are facing user growth problems. That is why I thought enterprise products following a B2B model would work better in Asia. They acquire customers, not just users.

Startups following the “Instagram business model” have multiple headaches. If a startup takes on this approach, the end goal is perhaps to build and sell the company fast. Or to keep raising money to sustain growth, which is not quite likely to happen in Asia. Now let’s see… How many potential acquirers do we have out there? Not that many really, and this is a common concern among investors and founders in Asia.

Even if there were lots of acquirers, things may not be as rosy as compared to the west. Instagram had a huge user base and there were reports suggesting that Twitter was competing to buy it. That perhaps drove up Instagram’s valuation to a whopping $1 billion.

But with few possibilities for acquisition in Asia, driving up valuation is unlikely. And if you are not in India, Indonesia, or China – countries with lots of potential users – a hockey stick user growth would be really tough. A lot of people see Southeast Asia as one big market. But it really isn’t. It is a region with a great diversity in culture and language. It’s a tough region which requires you to localize for each country. Many services and products we use here originate from the U.S. anyway – think Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, and Apple. So that makes it a challenge for consumer web and mobile products to gain users in Southeast Asia. China, with its love of home-grown web products, is an exception of course.

Asia isn’t Silicon Valley and things that are happening there aren’t likely to happen here in Asia yet. I will be happy for any founders in Asia who have their startups getting acquired even before they have any revenue. But that’s not likely to happen, I think. So another train of thought is to build a company with sustainability. One that makes money and doesn’t have to pressure to be acquired.

Wanna be happy? There’s an app for that. Well not exactly, but an app with the ambitious goal of making the world a happier place has just launched: Freehap.

The app, developed in Bangkok by two college buddies from the Faculty of Economics at Thailand’s prestigious Chulalongkorn University, allows users to update their happiness level on a 5-point scale (very happy, happy, so-so, sad, very sad) and broadcast that to other users in their area.

Users can then add “special ones” and be alerted when those people are sad (so they can give them a pick-me-up call or message) and also check the entire country’s happiness level collated with data from Freehap. Right now I see that “Thailand’s happiness level is 58 percent today, up 3 percent from yesterday.”

Besides their happiness levels, users can post citizen news reports with the “I Report” button; make recommendations of books, movies, music, and more with the “I Recommend” feature; and put stuff for sale with the “Selling” button. They can also call for help (whatever the problem may be) with the “Help Me!” icon, and an aspiring Clark Kent in the locality can make himself or herself available by hitting “I Help” within the app. Plus, users must submit their blood types upon registration because there is a function of the app that allows a user to put out a call for blood donations in the event of an emergency.

The app is completely integrated with Facebook – better than nearly any app around, say founders Natee Jarayabhand and Khanit Aramkitpota. You must sign in with Facebook, so all your friends in the social network become your friends on the app, and when, for example, someone likes your happiness update through Freehap, that “like” will show up on a Facebook post.

Natee and Khanit hatched the idea while they were doing unfulfilling office jobs after university and read a study about low happiness levels in developed countries. “We wanted to try to make a platform for people to live a happier life. There’s no other app with the mission of making the world happier,” Natee claims.

The pair took their idea to the Global Social Ventures Competition at UC Berkeley in California in 2010. They didn’t win the contest but they say they got a lot of good feedback, especially from judge Paul Herman, founder of socially responsible Silicon Valley investment firm HIP Investor. “He said that in the future he thinks that the trend will move towards reporting happiness indexes, rather than stock market indexes,” says Natee.

So they came back to Thailand, raised some money from their friends and family, and put a team together to fully develop Freehap. The app finally went live – on Google Play for Android, and in iTunes for iPhone – last week and is currently only available in Thailand, Singapore, and Hong Kong. They plan on testing and tweaking the product with user feedback from these markets before trying to launch it globally. They’re also looking for new funding. In future versions they’d like to launch a real-time map of people’s happiness status updates, amongst other improvements.

Refreshingly for the Asian tech ecosystem where entrepreneurs seem to be too focused on monetization too early, the Freehap team is focusing only on improving the app (and people’s happiness, in theory) for the foreseeable future. They do have some ideas about how to monetize when the time is right, including sponsored “happiness campaigns,” premium emoticons, and advertising. But ultimately, says Natee, “We believe that if we can improve happiness for people, then money will follow.”

Here’s a demo video made by the startup:

[Direct video link for mobile readers]

The Hubblr dashboard now support's China's Renren (pictured) as well as Sina Weibo.

Last winter we looked at Hubblr, a dashboard for global social marketing that includes support for China’s Sina Weibo as well as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Back then it was in private beta. But now the startup’s founder, Michael Lam, informs us that it’s launching officially this week with lots of refinements and also brings support for brands to engage consumers on Renren, the Facebook-esque social network. Now that it’s fully open, Michael says that the Australian startup’s “target market is brands or organizations who engage with their customers in both Western and Chinese social networks.”

The main web app at Hubblr.com is where all the posting and analytics (pictured below) action happens, and the slick service is reminiscent of HootSuite – except that Hubblr includes China’s two hottest social media that have the kind of moneyed, blue collar workers that brands chase after. The startup has given us some stats from its beta testing period: over 200 organizations signed-up to make use of it; those beta users were managing over 2,200 social profiles with an average of 11 social profiles per organization that participated; and, users came from 15 countries, including China itself, Hong Kong, the U.S., Canada, Vietnam, and beyond.

The Hubblr team has also made some technical changes, such as fine-tuning its pricing system, which has three tiered packages that offer access to a greater number of profile pages. Also, Michael says:

We added representation in Hong Kong [and] migrated our solution across to Amazon Web Services to make it scalable.

Whether you’re a fellow startup that needs to reach out to Chinese consumers on Weibo or Renren, or a major brand with multiple campaigns to run, check out the Hubblr tour, and share your social marketing thoughts in the comments below.

One element of the social media analytics in Hubblr (Click to enlarge); Below is the new Renren login.

Readers may recall a few months back when we featured Fonetwish, a mobile solution that allows users to interact with Facebook without a mobile data plan. In areas where the service is supported by local carriers, it allows users to dial *325#, prompting a menu to appear where they can log in to Facebook. From there they can then see familiar Facebook menu options, as you can see below.

The service was developed by Singapore-based U2opia Mobile, who recently announced that it now handles an astounding billion user interactions per month. The company, which was funded by Matrix Parters India, says it is seeing ‘healthy user growth,’ though the actual numbers have not been announced, although when last we heard it was 300+ million users.

So far Fonetwish is popular in areas like India, Indonesia, and Africa, with mobile operator partnerships in those regions. It has expansion to the Philippines, Malaysia and other markets on the horizon.

Needless to say, we really like the idea of empowering users in emerging mobile markets to use the social web without using any data plan. As we saw in our recent Startup Asia Jakarta conference, in markets like Indonesia where low-cost handsets are the norm, there are no shortage of customers who would love this kind of capability.

A court in West Sumatra, Indonesia, recently sentenced 30-year-old Alexander Aan to two and a half years in prison and a fine of $10,600 for his atheist-sounding status on Facebook. What did he write? “God does not exist” – that was all. It also caused a mob to descend on his workplace and beat him, prior to his arrest. Now online and offline support is growing for Alexander, both in Indonesia and around the globe.

Support has come from the likes of Amnesty International, US-based Atheist Alliance International, and the Council of ex-Muslims of Britain, rallying to Aan’s defence. On June 18, a group called Center for Inquiry held a protest outside the Indonesian Embassy in Washington D.C. calling for Aan’s release. There are also groups on Facebook such as “Support Alexander Aan” which has 1,690 likes at the time of writing, and also this Indonesian-language Facebook page that supports free speech from religious extremism.

Human Rights lawyer Todung Mulya Lubis said to Jakarta Post on this issue,

Religion and faith are personal issues. There shouldn’t be any law that regulates what we believe in. Our constitution recognizes our freedom of religion and our rights to express our opinion. His [Aan’s] rights must be protected even if he stated that he was an atheist.

Alexander’s is not the first religious controversy over a Facebook post in Indonesia. Back in 2010, Ibnu Rachal Farhansyah posted on Facebook something likening Nyepi, the Hindu Day of Silence, to feces. There was uproar over this incident as well, but no charges were pressed at that time. I think what Ibnu did was worse than Alexander if you ask me – but it’s hard to draw lines on such subjective issues as belief and religion.

Rest assured, religious harmony is still there in Indonesia, which has a mix of six acknowledged religions such as Islam and Christianity. Religious intolerance on the other hand, is on rise, I’m afraid, as you might recall the Lady Gaga incident last month as one of the prime examples.

It’s awesome for us to post whatever we feel and believe on the internet – well, it’s supposed to be legal last time I checked – but let’s err on the side of caution the next time we want to post something that might sound offensive to some groups the next time you’re in Indonesia.

[Image adapted from one by AFP, via Dailymail.co.uk]

The Tokyo Dome was Tokyo's most popular check-in location on Facebook

Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) has just released some interesting information about the most popular check-in locations around the world on the social network. It finds that the most popular places tend to be common tourist attractions, as well as big sporting venues, or popular shopping areas.

If you check out the infographic below by Facebook, you’ll see the major check-in spots around the world. You can see both Seoul and Tokyo near the bottom, with theme park Lotte World and the baseball stadium the Tokyo Dome being those cities biggest attractions, respectively.

For Singapore, the top check in location was Universal Studios amusement park, while for India it was the Sikh house of worship, the Gurudwara Bangla Sahib.

Facebook first rolled out its check-in feature back in 2010, and was initially met with some privacy concerns. I’m curious to hear if our readers are active users of this function, or if you’re more annoyed by it. Personally, I’m always a little taken by surprise when a friend discloses my location. I think I need to tweak my privacy settings some more…

Weixin, which recently adopted the English name, WeChat, is marketing strongly on Facebook. I’m seeing ads on every other refresh on my Facebook page and that’s not all. For new users of WeChat you can even claim free Facebook credits if you sign up for an official ID — either through your phone number or by connecting it with Facebook. You will then receive a pin to claim up to 1,000 free Facebook credits. More details can be found here.

We also last reported that WeChat, according to Tencent’s CEO Pony Ma, has hit more than 100 million users. WeChat’s step to move into English clearly shows its ambition to scoop up international users. The move appears to be working as I find more and more of my non-Chinese friends hopping on to WeChat. Most, if not all, find that the app is pretty awesome. It is actually, and it comes with more emoticons which does make text conversation fun. Emoticons work very well in Asia.

WeChat isn’t just in English and Chinese but it is also available in Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, Portuguese, and Vietnamese. Its Facebook campaign looks pretty gung ho with localized pages set up for India, Thailand, and Malaysia. While Western companies find it hard to break into China, I’m sure Chinese company will find it tough to internationalize a product too. But WeChat looks to be executing things pretty well so far. So watch out, team Whatsapp.

Facebook listed, and social network stock prices dropped. I can think of two possible reasons for this. (1) Investors who were excited about social media in the past couldn’t buy Facebook shares, so they bought shares in Zynga, LinkedIn, Yelp, and RenRen instead. When the “real thing” appeared [i.e. when Facebook itself listed], they traded in their other social network stocks for Facebook shares. (2) Facebook’s first day of trading didn’t meet most people’s expectations, and [Facebook's underwhelming performance] has brought disaster to similar stock offerings [because it affects the way investors are looking at social media in general].

I don’t know enough about the stock market to tell you whether Mr. Lee is right or not. But he’s a smart guy with an impressive background in the tech industry, so it’s always worth listening to what he has to say.

[via Sohu IT, Image Source]

Bangkok-based gaming company Sandbox Global is in the process of launching an English language version of their Facebook fashion game Stylista for markets in Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

The game, similar to Mall World or It Girl, is currently featured in Thai language. Sandbox Global is studying the game’s usage in Thailand, where it currently has 56,000 monthly active users, and is compiling data to support expansion.

As I mentioned over on Pando Daily, Sandbox is shooting for one million users by Q3 2012 – when they also plan on releasing the game in Bahasa Indonesia for Indonesia and in Vietnamese for Vietnam. The plans are ambitious, but Sandbox has solid investment backing from Jeff Lapin, former CEO of Atari and Grand Theft Auto developer Take Two, and IDM Venture Capital.

Sandbox Global founder Ferdinand Gutierrez, a Filipino-American raised in New York City, moved to Southeast Asia over a decade ago to work in the region’s nascent digital scene. His major positions included group managing director at pioneering digital advertising agency New Media and then managing director at Neo @ Ogilvy in Singapore, where he specialized in digital media. Gutierrez oversees Sandbox with Peter Theisen, whose role is leading technology and product development. Theisen is well-known for his experience in management training for C-level executives. The third member of the founding group is Jonathan Lor, whose experience includes leading regional digital initiatives with clients including IBM and Yahoo. Gutierrez explains:

The management team has extensive regional experience so we have working knowledge of all of these different markets in Southeast Asia. We were inspired to build this company to create homegrown social games in this region, supplemented by talent from more developed markets in North America and Europe.

In Stylista, users create an avatar, style it out with designer clothes, and shop for shoes and attend cocktail parties in the neighborhoods of Soho in New York, Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, and Bond Street in London. Sandbox Global has plans to expand the game to Siam Square in Bangkok, Ometasando in Tokyo, and Champs-Élysées in Paris soon.

They’re also in talks with a company in Taipei about distributing the Mandarin version of Stylista for distribution inside and outside of Facebook in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China.