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

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

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

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

For those not in the know, aside from the titles above, Gai is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, and previously was a product strategy manager at Oracle, iPhone hardware engineer and Apple TV systems engineer at Apple, implementation engineer at AMD and new business creation intern at Hewlett-Packard. Prior to founding the World Startup Report, he established mobile business card transcription service CardMunch, which would later be purchased by LinkedIn.

Gai was in town as part of his 29 country mission for the World Startup Report. The goal of course is to collect, analyze, and distribute information and statistics about startup environments and ecosystems.

Having never really considered the Philippines as a potential growth area for startups, Gai states he was encouraged to visit by a friend, though he may also have been convinced by the country receiving its first investment-grade rating from international debt watcher Fitch Ratings.

During a stay that was originally to last just a few days but ultimately stretched to a week and a half, Gai spent some time at the Makati headquarters of IdeaSpace Foundation, a business incubator, chatting it up with president Earl Valencia. It was IdeaSpace that sponsored the World Startup Report in the country recently, at the Microsoft Philippines office.

IdeaSpace is in turn sponsored primarily by Smart Communications, and also by several companies under the umbrella of First Pacific Company Ltd., Metro Pacific Investments Corp., and the Philippine Long Distance Telephone (PLDT) group. IdeaSpace announced recently that it had chosen 10 local startups to receive funding of up to PHP 5 million ($122,295), as well as six-month business incubation and mentorship with investors both locally and from Silicon Valley.

In an exclusive interview with Smart Public Affairs Group representative Cyril Bonabente, Gai stated that he was surprised by how small the local startup community was, especially given the size of the country, but that local growth was impressive, and promising. He also encouraged and lauded the efforts of IdeaSpace and Smart, stating that local startups were very lucky to have an eager incubator in place.

(Source: philSTAR.com)

Enter six young IT professionals who’ve experienced these hardships first-hand. Their solution? Codetoki, a platform to aid fellow graduates in finding employment, by specifically matching applicants to the most suitable employers, and making them visible to future employers. All this on an achievement-based, game-like platform.

It works by having interested companies involved. These IT and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies generate challenges, tests, and games, for aspiring applicants to complete. If you’re an applicant, you simply choose which companies you wish to apply for, take their challenges and tests, and earn a badge for completion. The badge makes you visible to that company as you’ve proved that you’re interested in working for them and that you’ve got what it takes to be their employee. And by taking and completing these challenges, applicants build up a portfolio that fits the requirements of potential employers.

The list of the companies is impressive as well. BPO specialist Accenture, CAI-STA Philippines, Asian Business Solutions, Inc. and the like are here. Global eGovernment specialist Crimsonlogic Philippines is represented, as well as cloud infrastructure service provider ArcusIT, and the Microsoft Philippines Academic Team.

There are four challenge categories offered by Codetoki. First is the aptitude challenge, where one can also become a Microsoft Student Partner. Then there’s Ruby, a dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity, used My NASA’s Langley Research Center for simulations, and Google SketchUp, among others. Finally, two badges can be had for basic and advanced jQuery, a multi-browser JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML, and the most popular JavaScript library in use today.

Through Codetoki, these companies can advertise the requirements in information and communication technology skills they require, which of course is based on open positions and needs they had on their respective rosters. Aspirants can then complete test problems and challenges, which are specially designed to address these required skills, and for every challenge successfully completed, a badge is added to the applicants profile, and overall portfolio. This whole process also provides the applicant with experience and an opportunity to master the technology and skills specific to their selected position, as well as building and expanding their profile in a way that companies are actually able to view their portfolio. Having been built as a game-like platform, there’s even a ranked leaderboard, which makes it easier for employers to choose the best fit for their available positions.

Run by Ademar Tutor, Honeylyn Balingcasag, Donna Limoran, Gerda Decio, Gretchen Abenoia and Arnelle Balane, Codetoki has several accolades under its belt already. Codetoki is a product of Hack2Hatch, a startup camp wherein Silicon Valley founders, specialists and investors provided mentorship to young startup hopefuls. It also won first place at the Ideas Challenge of AppBridge, a World Economic Forum initiative, as well as first at the Apps for Asia Philippines contest run by Microsoft and the Asian Development Bank. It also took third place at the first Startup Weekend in Cebu.

So it was a bit of a breath of fresh air when the Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) announced the development of what they hope will give them an edge in the burgeoning e-commerce and mobile purchasing field, the BPI mPOS, or Mobile Point of Sale.

Simply put, the mPOS is an attachment device for your smartphone or wi-fi enabled tablet, which will transform it into a mobile point-of-sale system. Currently available for iOS and Android devices, with a Blackberry version in the works, the mPOS connects via the headphone jack, allowing users to accept credit card payments, accepting both Visa and MasterCard. The device is basically a credit card scanner, and through a downloadable app, scanned transaction information is transmitted via wi-fi or mobile cellular connections to BPI’s central server.

One point of interest, though not necessarily good or bad, is that the mPOS device does not function on jailbroken devices, so it’s a no-go for users with jailbroken iPhones. No specific mention was made if this applied to rooted Android devices as well.

Officially unveiled for testing last April 28th, BPI representatives have stated that, though already highly successful in other countries like the United States with Square, this is first in the Philippines, a pioneering step in BPI’s efforts to promote e-commerce in the country.

Currently in a six month test phase, BPI chose Singapore-based Swift systems integrator for the device, emphasizing the determining and solution of such issues that future mPOS merchants might encounter. These range from issues such as cellular signal quality and strength, as well as the wireless capabilities of the mPOS device itself. After all, mobility is good and all out in the field, but what about inside buildings and other establishments? As is, the device is being tested by over 600 business and establishment owners, on a myriad selection of phones.

Another major concern, perhaps the most crucial of all, is security, and rightfully so. Credit card security and credit card fraud are of paramount concern in this day and age, and any successful online commerce endeavor must be up to this challenge if it is to succeed. In this regard, BPI has stated that the mobile app will require users to provide their signature using the phone or tablets touch-screen functionality. All transactions are credited to your BPI settlement account the very next day. The mPOS is also 100 percent paperless, so no receipts will be issued immediately, and will instead be emailed to the customer once the purchase is confirmed. BPI has also assured users that privacy is key, and that no credit card or user information will be saved within the device. This makes the mPOS compliant with both the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCIDSS) and Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS) systems.

Source: newsbytes.ph

Lenddo is a new way to obtain loans. First and foremost, Lenddo is not a bank, far from it. It is an online platform which utilizes connections, relations and reputation from multiple social media sites to build a credit rating. Finally, a practical use for the thousands of friends we all have on Facebook. And if the company web page is to be believed, it’s fast, easy, and with as little bureaucracy and red tape as possible.

Conceived with the principles of responsibility, character and altruism in hand, Lenddo was initially conceived by Jeff Stewart and Richard Eldrige in January 2009. It started its operations in the Philippines in March 2011.

Aside from the traditional banks and micro lending institutions, they’re considered first in their arena of lending through your social network connections.

At Lenddo, everything revolves around the LenddoScore. This number, ranging from 0 to 1,000, is a universal measurement of your trustworthiness, with 1,000 being the highest value. Using a proprietary and evolving algorithm, your rating is graphically plotted across categories like Social Data, Trusted Connections, and Financial Performance. This score is what helps you obtain approval for loans and services, though currently, only loans and free financial education are offered.

So utmost care must be observed: once you’re connected to another member, you can’t remove that person from your connections anymore. If their Lenddo score goes down because of unpaid obligation, it will affect your LenddoScore as well.

Loan applications

The loan application process itself is fairly simple, and free. Visit Lenddo’s website, register and upload a picture of yourself. Then connect your social networks and email accounts. From there it’s just a matter of inviting your friends, relatives, and co-workers, to generate your list of trusted connections. Finally, apply for your loan or you can just hang out there to help others to build the community.

Take note however, you should have a minimum LenddoScore of 300 to be eligible for a loan. You must also have three Trusted Companions with a minimum 300 LenddoScore as well, putting extra emphasis on just who you add as a friend.

Finally, it goes without saying that you should be a salaried employee, and that you have a bank account. The loanable amount vary between countries, as do interest rates, but one month’s salary is a common loan amount request, and can be paid from three to 12 months. Payments can be made through auto-debit, bills payment or over-the-counter bank transactions.

All in all, it’s lending via social networking. With no need to put up collateral, and not even requiring a guarantee or co-signor, Lenddo offers life changing loans and financial flexibility to a new audience, where online social interaction and relation building give you more than just bragging rights on who has the most friends.

So what if you’re a startup and you want to borrow some money? A freelancer? Well it’s only possible if you’re currently employed through other means, if you’re not, unfortunately obtaining a loan isn’t possible.

Risks

This was the first question I asked Erika Aquino, Lenddo Philippines’ director of sales and marketing, isn’t the business too risky? She explained that any kind of business can be considered risky. But with their system’s algorithms plus “human eyes” they actually make sure they only lend to trustworthy people — with only default rate of 4–4.5% of non-paying members.

Their most-served working in the industry are those who are from the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) sector, or most locally known as those are working in the call center industry.

Investors

Among Lenddo’s investors are some of the same people behind Facebook and Groupon to Kiva and Prosper, including Accel Capital, Blumberg Capital, Omidyar Network, iNovia and Metamorphic Partners. The company has offices in Manila (Philippines), Bogota (Colombia) and New York City (USA), though loans can only be provided in Colombia and the Philippines. Although they’re not actively seeking investors, they are, however, always looking for strategic partners. As they’re also looking forward to expanding to Indonesia soon.

The challenge Lenddo’s facing is not about their product itself but mostly getting their brand and product out there. Currently, they invest in Google and Facebook ads, as well as public relations.

Overall, I am amazed by Lenddo’s trust in the good in people. This is definitely a less intimidating option than borrowing from a bank. Just be sure to be a good member of the community, their scores depend on you as well.

Founded in January of 2012, by Cloudwalk Digital, My Dentist Pal is a web-based tool for dentists that aims to digitize the dental practice. It basically allows dentists to access patient records, tooth charting, and even simple accounting, to find out who’s paid and who hasn’t, from anywhere. Patients can get updated on their next dental appointment, or even find the location of the nearest dentist.

According to Cloudwalk Digital’s Marc Medina:

”The dental industry in the Philippines is being left behind by others who are going digital. We want to embrace the benefits of going digital and make their practice more productive. My Dentist Pal allows PDA (Philippine Dental Association) members to keep abreast of emerging new technology, and to find relevant information in their dental practice enabling them to maintain a competitive edge and build a strong presence in today’s business world. “

Subscription is fast and easy enough; it’s just your usual fill-in-the-blanks registration form. And at the moment it’s free too, as the site currently relies on ad placement to make money. Unfortunately, the site advertises that it’s intended to be used by both dentists and patients, subscription appears to be for dentists only. Plus, the link to the How It Works PDF appears to be broken as well.

Website management aside, the services listing is robust (for dentists at least). You’ve got your Dashboard, your homepage for appointments, messages, news, etc. You can Add Patients to your Patient List. You can fill in an Address Book as well, for home visits perhaps? There’s a Scheduler, as well as access to Blogging and Messaging. Finally, you can get access to Accounting, to find out which patients still need to pay up.

My Dentist Pal is currently available to local dentists, though the team does have plans to take their approach to foreign shores.

Again, from Marc Medina:

”Initially, our target market is the dentists from the Philippines. But when we release our mobile app this year, we want to also target dentists globally.”

Being a startup in the Philippines can be tough, no doubt about that. Being a startup built around the dental industry, which is not exactly considered a necessity in the country, has to be downright tough as nails. So can the founders of My Dentist Pal offer any words of advice to other would-be online dentists?

” If you’re a startup in the Philippines expect to self-fund for a longer than usual because of the limited funds. The number of startups is absolutely bigger than number of angels willing to seed.”

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

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

Learning Indonesian

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

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

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

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

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

25% of restaurants shut down each quarter!

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

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

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

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

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

Singapore? The US?

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

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

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

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

We’ve received news from several readers that social network turned e-commerce marketplace Multiply is shutting down.

According to an email sent to Multiply merchants (see below), the site will be online till May 6, and will discontinue all operations on May 31. With further searching, you will find announcements on its Southeast Asia/Philippines and Indonesian sites.

Multiply’s merchants are advised to move to a new e-commerce marketplace. In Indonesia, there’s no shortage of choice of marketplaces, including Tokobagus, Kaskus, and Tokopedia. The news comes as a huge surprise as many would have thought Multiply is growing pretty well.

It was just last year that Multiply said it will discontinue its blog operations, move its headquarters to Jakarta, Indonesia, and move full force into e-commerce. Back then Multiply also revealed that it had 100,000 Indonesian sellers and around 75,000 Filipino sellers.

We’ve contacted Multiply’s country managers in the Philippines and Indonesia and will update if we hear from them. Here’s the letter sent out to merchants today:

Dear Multiply Merchant,

We regret to inform you that Multiply will be closing the marketplace on May 6, 2013 and discontinuing all business operations by May 31, 2013.

Multiply will maintain normal site operations through May 6th and will wind things down through to the end of the month. We will use the rest of May to make sure that all accounts are settled and that you receive all funds you earned on the platform. We hope this provides you time needed to identify and migrate to alternative ecommerce platforms, settle all payments on items bought and delivered, and try to minimize disruption to your business.

In order to ensure that all your earnings are disbursed to you in full prior to May 31, we will cut off buying activity on May 6, 2013. This will ensure that all orders have sufficient time to be completed and delivered to your customers before the end of the month.

If you have a Trust Badge, please contact our customer support team and we will ensure that you receive a pro-rated refund for the remaining time on your subscription.

If my team can be of any assistance to you during this transition, we will do our best to help.

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.

Xend is unique. At the very least, that’s what its founder, Bjorn Pardo, would have you believe. As he says:

We are very unique. Depending on the point of view, we could be considered as a courier, e-commerce or technology company. For most, we are a courier company primarily serving the e-commerce market. Internally, we consider ourselves a hybrid of the 3 above industries.

Unique or not, Xend does offer some innovations its competitors don’t. The playing field is rife with courier services, LBC, 2GO, JRS and Air21. You can even see the occasional FedEx and DHL truck scurrying around the metro on any given day. How Xend differs itself is on e-commerce.

Founded in 2004 as Xend Business Center, as a single proprietorship by Bjorn Pardo, in Makati City, Xend initially offered only international logistic and courier services. It wasn’t until 2006 that Xend started offering domestic courier services, and later that year, a door to door tracking system. In 2007, Xend was incorporated as Xend Business Solutions Inc. and moved to it’s new headquarters in Mandaluyong City. 2008 saw the release of its revolutionary myXend Online Shipping Platform, which provided online real-time booking, online waybill printing and auto-email shipment status notifications.

By focusing primarily on online establishments and sellers, Xend has quickly amassed a database of well over 50,000 partnered e-commerce merchants. And a quick look at this list reveals it is quite formidable, with the likes of Ebay.ph, Sulit.com.ph and PisoBid to name a few. But even if you’re not into e-commerce, or just a bit old fashioned, Xend has the capability to serve any business that needs documents or parcels delivered, not just online ones.

For sole founder Bjorn Pardo, innovation came out of necessity.

I started selling online as a teenager and my biggest problem was high shipping fees and inconvenient processes. I had to waste hours in my day just to bring parcels to the post office, fill out forms and email my customers their tracking numbers. On top of that, I was losing sales because of high shipping costs which were beyond my control. I knew there had to be a better way to do this so I founded Xend.

So what is this better way? According to their site, it involves just three simple steps. First, register for a myXend account from their website, which only takes a few seconds. Second, prepare your package for shipping. With Xend, there’s no minimum purchase required, and you can ship anything from a television to a pencil. You can either print out the waybill to attach to the package, or use a handwritten one, which you can get from the courier on pickup day. Finally, schedule a pickup date, and one of their couriers will be along to take up your package for delivery.

For the package itself, Xend offers 2 pouch sizes, measuring either a large 9×14 inches or an extra large 12×18 inches. The large pouch costs PHP 59 (US$ 1.43) to ship within Metro Manila and PHP 89 (US$ 2.16) to any other point in the country. For the XL pouch it’s PHP 79 (US$ 1.91) for Manila and PHP 139 (US$ 3.37) everywhere else. For either pouch, there is no limit on weight, as long as it’ll fit inside, it’s a go. Packages that can’t fit inside one of the pouches will have to be weighed though, and the pricing based on that weight. All couriers are equipped with their own weighing scales upon pick-up.

Xend offers a host of other features as well: scheduling, monitoring deliveries, waybill printing, all can be done online, no more calling customer service hotlines. Pick-ups are free, and Xend claims their service costs sixty percent less than the competition.[1] They’ll even pick up the tab for you if the delivery is late. Xend even ships abroad.

We are number one in our space now and we are the only ones who can consistently provide excellent door to door delivery. We can cut down your shipping process from 2 hours to 2 minutes. Imagine, we will pick up a pencil, if that is what you want to ship, for free and deliver it the next day within Metro Manila and within 1–2 days to anywhere else nationwide. Just schedule a pickup online before 2pm and will be there within the day. No need to call or anything, it’s all automated. It’s really that simple.

When asked if Xend has plans of expanding abroad:

Yes, that is in our plans. Initially in South East Asia but even further later on. We believe that the software we built can be applied anywhere in the region, even the world.

We recently covered GHN in Vietnam, like them, Xend has offered innovations in logistic and courier services custom tailored towards e-commerce, featuring fast and efficient deliveries, and accurate, real-time online tracking and monitoring.

The full Amazon Appstore new line-up in Asia-Pacific – it has launched already in Japan – is here, with larger nations highlighted in bold:

• American Samoa
• Australia
• Bhutan
• Cambodia
• Christmas Island
• Cocos (Keeling) Islands
• Cook Islands
• French Polynesia
• Hong Kong
• India
• Laos
• Macao
• Mariana Islands
• Marshall Islands
• Micronesia
• Mongolia
• Myanmar
• Nepal
• New Zealand
• Niue
• Norfolk Island
• Palau
• Papua New Guinea
• Philippines
• Samoa
• Solomon Islands
• South Korea
• Sri Lanka
• Taiwan
• Thailand
• Timor-Leste
• Tokelau
• Tuvalu
• Vanuatu
• Vietnam
• Wallis and Futuna

With developers and customers in those countries now having access to Amazon’s catalog of apps, it might soon lead to the company’s hardware, namely the Kindle Fire and Fire HD tablets – going on sale there at a later date. But the Amazon App Store can be used on any Android device.

By the way, there are some seriously odd places on the global list, such as Antarctica, and the Heard Island and McDonald Island (Wikipedia says: “Population: 0”).

I’ll be honest, I once looked down or ignored store discounts or reward systems. They all seemed too contrived, so tedious, so totally not worth it and too much of a hassle. And then, before I knew it, bills are popping up out of nowhere and then suddenly I’m thinking oh my, we can get 15 percent off? Sign me up! Because these discounts really do add up.

ZAPtag is one of the newest players in this burgeoning field here in the Philippines. It claims to bring an innovative approach to the table, not even requiring a smartphone or data plan. It lets customers earn instant rewards, from five to twenty percent discount, and features jackpot prizes and coupons, all from lots of dining, shopping, and lifestyle establishments. On the inside track, ZAPtag makes money by charging merchants a fee for every transaction and also charges users an annual membership fee.

Two years ago Dustin Cheng and Terence Lok, also the founders of Words.PH, created the deal site Deal Dozen. What they learned was that, though great with initial sales, the merchants in charge were unaware if any of their customers came back to make return purchases – a common problem in the daily deals industry. It meant that retailers had no way of telling if they were building up a steady chain of return customers, or how effective their business was in terms of retention. What they needed was a loyalty program, and the seeds for ZAPtag were planted. Dustin tells us:

We knew there were a lot of out-of-the-box loyalty platforms out there, but these platforms were oftentimes too hard to use, too expensive to set up and did not provide merchants with adequate data. They were also very technical, and not easy to use for managers. Also by virtue of being an in-store loyalty platform, it was only good for that single merchant.

Terence and Dustin were joined in the fouding of ZAPtag by Justin Lim, entrepeneur and former Johnson & Johnson brand manager, and Angelique Uy, previously marketing manager for Branders.com, a B2B e-commerce site out of California. ZAPtag is also one of the startups that won funding from Kickstart Ventures, a wholly owned subsidiary of Globe Telecom.

To differentiate ourselves from all this, we wanted something that users can use no matter where they were, a universal loyalty card accepted across all merchants. We wanted to remove the hassle of needing to sign up for each and every loyalty card out there, only to leave them all at home.

Our goal is to acquire users through reward offerings from thousands of merchants. We are also looking at integration into ticketing systems. Imagine never needing to hold another paper ticket again! We see the ZAPtag being deeply integrated in our daily lives getting rewards every time there is spending! As for our long term goal, since our product operates as a platform, mimicking operation in other regions will be doable.

Zapping with tags

The no-smartphone-needed approach centers around a physical device called a ZAPtag. Once signed up with the service, you don’t even need to get ZAPtag itself right away, you can start earning points by entering your mobile number at their ZAP point-of-sale terminals, located at all their partner merchants. Once points have been saved up, you can purchase a ZAPtag for PHP 100 (US$ 2.42), either from the site or again from any partner merchant. You can also get a ZAPtag free with any purchase from their partner establishments. To use your points, simply tap the ZAPtag on the POS terminal, and one point on the tag is equal to one peso.

The list of merchants partnered with ZAPtag is impressive as well. From cuisine to gadgets and electronics, sporting goods to fitness centers, ZAPtag has you well covered no matter what lifestyle you lead, even if that lifestyle has you living without a smartphone. Dustin elaborates:

The ZAPtag is independent of an app. It doesn’t even require you to own smartphone. We will eventually have an app as an alternative to the physical ZAPTag. Right now, customers check their account on our website.

There are other loyalty programs out there of course, other discount-led promotions, but the ZAPtag team hopes to edge out this competition with the innovation and ease of use they’ve incorporated into their tags. One area is multi-store partnerships. ZAPtag plays host to a much larger collection of partner merchants.

As for the competition, Dustin confidently explains, “Perxclub and Pouch recently launched their stamp-earning mobile apps in the Philippines. But then again, we’re different from them as we give customers instant gratification – no need to wait for your 10th stamp to enjoy your reward as ‘cash back points’ can be used to pay for purchases right away. Plus, since mobile internet penetration in the Philippines is less than 20 percent, the ZAPtag doesn’t even require a smartphone or a data plan.”

If two is company, and three’s a crowd, does seven make it crowdfunding? The seven-man team at The Spark Project would like to make it so. Though the idea of bringing the technology of crowdfunding to the Philippines has been around for a while, it was only last year that plans for this project were actually laid out. The Spark Project website was officially launched on February 16th, 2013.

According to co-founder Patch Dulay, “The Spark Project is a crowdfunding community where Filipinos can support and fund their creative, innovative, and passion driven projects.” Of its founding members, Patch says:

Our group is a mix of IT geeks and social entrepreneurs. We find it such a good team-up because our group can develop web technologies and at the same time bring them to market.

To date, The Spark Project has completed funding for its four pilot campaigns. Hinabi sa Pilipinas was for the production of a locally designed watch. Offbeat Pursuits aimed to produce a travel video to share the amazing experience of travelling in the country. Paint-Some-Happy wants to paint childrens walls to give hope and inspiration through art. Finally, Lagon Custom Guitars sought to revive the art of Master Fretter and Luthier Agustin Lagon’s hand-crafted bamboo guitars. All told, TSP raised a total of PHP 144,066 (US$ 3,483) for the four projects, with more on the way. Patch tells us:

We are rounding up the next batch of spark projects. This time, we’ll be launching them one after the other. The goal is to have a new project every week or two. We just received seed money on March 16 from the Project Pagsulong grant competition, a Philippine-wide search for innovative ideas that help build the nation, where we placed third. We also won best pitch at the ‘ASEANpreneur Idea Canvas’ competition on April 6th, and got additional seed money.

The Spark Project is certainly not the only crowdfunding site in the country and certainly not the first. Specifically, ArtisteConnect stands as a possible rival and competitor. However, as ArtisteConnect marketing and web manager Diego Mapa told us last year, that site is currently mostly focused on music and film, leaving the playing field wide open for a range of creative ideas for funding.

Patch Dulay doesn’t seem to mind the competition either, “It really depends on how you look at it. Any crowdfunding site can be a competitor, but we choose to see them as allies. After all, most crowdfunding sites we find today aim to give people a chance to fund their passion-driven ideas to reality. And at the end of the day, what we really want is for more people to take control, and start up their own initiatives.”

Running a funding campaign is relatively straightforward, and it won’t even cost you anything initially. That comes into play once funds are raised, as TSP deducts a minimal five to ten percent for every peso raised, on top of PayPal fees. Take heart that this goes toward maintenance and development of products and services. To begin, simply go to the site and hit the ‘Create’ button to fill out an online form with questions about your proposed project. Once the TSP team reviews your application, ensuring alignment with the project guidelines, you’ll receive feedback on your application.

Backing an existing funding campaign is even easier. Simply navigate to the desired project’s page and hit the ‘Back this Project” button. Credit card payments are through PayPal, though you can make local bank deposits through BPI.

Patch Dulay adds:

The Spark Project takes on a community approach to crowdfunding. The relationship we build with our projects start even before they launch their campaign through the site and continues even after their campaign ends. We help innovators refine their projects and do follow ups once their campaigns are done. Because what we really aim to do in the long run is to build a startup community that goes beyond the platform.

Look up the word Bayanihan on Google, and the common images you see are of a group of men carrying a grass hut across a field or open plain. This is a very old Filipino tradition in the country and mountain areas, a united community helping a neighbor move their house, with no reward sought, except maybe a thank you and a handshake. Alas, this archaic tradition has long fallen out of fashion. Perhaps The Spark Project can revive this kind of co-operation, albeit in a more modern fashion. Well, if its pilot projects are any indication, I’d say The Spark Project is off to a good start.

(UPDATE: Corrected the launch date and the fee percentage)

Great news for Apple lovers in the Philippines: today is the day! Finally premium Apple resellers are offering unlocked iPhone 5, iPhone 4, and iPhone 4s — and they’re all official.

This is a great news here in the Philippines. Before today you could buy unlocked iPhones from unauthorized resellers all of which are “grey market” items. This meant that if you found a dent on your phone after opening it, you couldn’t replace it. That’s because part of the risk of buying grey market units is basically waiving your claim to any Apple warranty. And if your choice was to buy an unlocked phone abroad, that also came with its own pains as you cannot claim Apple warranty locally.

So if we wanted to buy an iPhone with a local warranty in the Philippines, we only had two choices: either buy them from Globe or Smart, the local carriers in the country, and both are locked to their respective networks.

The prices of the new unlocked phones, according to Technoodling, are still a bit steep vs. the prices of the gray market imports. However, they’re still quite tolerable if you want peace of mind.

iPhone 5 16 GB = PHP 33,600 (US$ 816)
iPhone 5 32 GB = Php 38,790 (US$ 942)
iPhone 5 64 GB = Php 43,950 (US$ 1,067)
iPhone 4S 16 GB = Php 28,425 (US$ 690)
iPhone 4 8 GB = Php 19,415 (US$ 472)

Source: Technoodling.net

It’s rare to see people who are willing to offer inspiration and help, especially as we know sometimes the Internet is full of haters. But let’s not get into that. Let’s just talk about people who love to help genuinely.

Peter Cauton is the guy behind Juan Great Leap, aptly refered to as the Filipino Startup Movement. It is a Philippines-based innovation forum. He aims to inspire others to take that one great leap into the world of entrepreneurship.

Ever curious, I asked Peter some questions, basically to find out more where his passion for inspiring startups and hopeful entrepreneurs comes from:

What was that defining moment when you made a conscious decision that helping others is what you want to do?

Peter: In 2008, I made the biggest career decision of my life – I took the leap, kissed my corporate career goodbye and went full-time to help my struggling startup. Considering it was in the middle of the recession and I had a newborn son, it was an idiotic decision.

By God’s grace, it worked out. In 2011, not only was I making a good living running my own firm, I also founded more startups.

I just felt incredibly blessed. There was a great need in me to pay it forward. At first I thought, perhaps I could write a book! It would consist of some of the lessons I learned in leaving corporate and developing my startup. But after some months, I found that it was just a huge step to develop material from scratch into a book. So I thought of something I had never thought I do – write a blog.

I remember writing my first post. I dilly-dallied a lot, postponing pushing the ‘publish’ button for as long as I can. In many ways, starting a blog was scarier than writing a book. The exposure was instant. What if people hated what I wrote? Or thought “this guy is a hack”?

But I thought, like my startup leap, nothing worthwhile is ever accomplished without some risk. And so I clicked publish.

The blog has almost taken a life of its own now. I totally did not forecast how much it would resonate with people. Its been an amazing blessing for me.

What are your current projects? Follow up to Juan Great Leap event?

Peter: I am very busy helping out the startups I have helped found: STORM, Searchlight, Mobile Academy, Stream Engine, as well as a couple more in incubation.

For Juan Great Leap, I do a lot of advocacy work to promote startups.

The biggest things we plan are the Juan Great Leap conferences. In the last one, sponsored by Ayala, we attracted over 200 people to a learning session/panel discussion. We are planning another one on March 2nd: a mass ‘speed dating’ event with 20 awesome startup founders.

These bigger events are geared towards creating a mass learning opportunity for participants. We also hold a smaller meetup, called Open Coffee, every month with around 40 to 50 people, which is geared towards collaboration and helping one another. It is open to people from any part of the startup process from “I have an idea” to “I have just sold my startup.” The main attraction in this event is the open floor where people have two minutes to pitch anything to the group – an idea, a problem to solve, a need, a survey. It’s pretty fun!

Aside from these, I meet two to three entrepreneurs for coffee every Saturday morning. We talk about everything and anything – from startup ideas, outlining opportunities, and even the spiritual side to startups. A couple of people I’ve met at Startup Saturdays have become dear friends of mine, some also who I’ve had the privilege to mentor.

What do you think are the greatest challenges for Filipino tech startups?

Peter: There aren’t enough entrepreneurs to take on the multitude of great ideas which are available. Right now, you see the same people in startup events – this is very good of course, as we are creating a strong community, but we need more people to join in.

The biggest challenge is to inspire even more Filipinos to take that great leap!

Pedala Bike Messengers is a bicycle courier service in Manila founded and born out of the gas crisis in 2008. Founder Candy Reyes-Alipio started cycling more during that time to save money and beat the traffic – she then saw it as a way to reduce the carbon footprint of companies.

One of main problems in Manila is traffic due to road congestion and the daily commute – that’s why there are local startups aiming to solve these issues, like Commute.ph, Ridefind and MRTtrackr. There are other startups in the Philippines also working to make commute bearable and more fun in the metro.

Although not a tech startup, it’s worth noting how Pedala offers a solution to decongest Manila roads. This service will be even better if they could take orders through a mobile app or a website to make it more accessible to others who are looking to use the service. As of now, it operates only via a mobile hotline (0917–80-PEDAL) and via email.

Currently they have a pool of 150 bike messengers, with rates that start from PHP 100 (US$ 3) for a one-way trip, PHP 200 (US$ 5) for a round-trip, and I would say it’s affordable. They’re currently serving the cities of Makati, Madaluyong, Pasig, San Juan, Marikina, Manila, Taguig, and QC.

So why should you avail of their service rather than the local delivery companies such as Xend, 2GO, or Air21? The main advantage of Pedala is that it can do same day delivery, which is not available through other couriers. Also if you’re into saving the environment this is a way to do it.

When asked of their long term goals, Pedala founder Candy said, “We would like to help change attitudes towards bikes/bikers and work towards a greener city and more inclusive mobility – with bike lanes, bike parking, green spaces, pedestrian lanes, etc – and get more bikes and bikers out there!”

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

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

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

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

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

(Source: ICT News)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The submission of entries ended January this year, and out of 700 applicants from all over the Philippines. These are the ten winners that will be the first batch of IdeaSpace’s incubatees (with descriptions provided by the incubator):

• Armtech (Angeles City) – affordable water purification machine for households
• DateCola (Davao City/General Santos City) – natural, date-sweetened beverages as a healthy alternative to soft drinks
• Mirand (Metro Manila) – low-cost and high-quality surgical joint implants for the Asian market
• PGRS (Metro Manila) – produces electricity via rumble strips installed on heavily trafficked roads
• PinoyTravel (Metro Manila) – provincial bus seat reservation system on mobile
• PortfolioMNL (Metro Manila) – online marketplace for creative professionals
• Prodigo (Metro Manila) – a solution for highly targeted promotions for merchants using ‘big data’ analytics
• Tech4Health (Metro Manila) – solution for health monitoring of chronic conditions, including diabetes
• TimeFree (Zamboanga) – SMS-based automated queuing system
• WeGen (Sorsogon) – new design of wind turbine that is more efficient than current technology

Aside from funding, they will be provided technical and mentoring assistance from IdeaSpace partners such as Amazon, Freelancer, Microsoft Philippines, and several universities.

The next round of startup submissions will open around September of this year, according to Earl Martin Valencia, president of IdeaSpace, in readiness for the 2014 batch. He added, “This is a yearly thing hopefully for next the next five years.”

As to what he thinks made this first batch exceptional, he cited “the diversity of ideas and backgrounds of the innovators, from doctors and engineers to IT experts.” We’re also happy to see some civic-minded startups in action.

With two local indie artists onboard, Carlos Choi and Bamshak, RockItDub was launched in January of this year, a testament to options and choices. Everything is in the hands of the artist, including the distributed code and how much each song or album will cost. There’s even a collaboration with RedTag, wherein your codes can be printed on their Dubcards. If that’s too fancy for you, you can route the codes through SMS. Need party give­aways or freebies? How about printing your codes on coffee mugs or T­shirts?! Heck, you can even go old school and sell your digital music at gigs!

Dave Overton, one of the founders of Symph said,

“We’ve simply built the system to do so, and artists can decide how they want to package the codes and sell them. We also see an opportunity to provide a solution in a developing market since not many people can purchase digital music due to credit card requirements. Not many people are buying CDs anymore (let alone own CD players), and artists do well when they sell products at their gigs. We still like tangible products and we feel they would sell better at gigs than trying to announce from the stage “Guys, buy our latest album on iTunes.”

Pricing is storage volume based, and musicians are billed per code. The initial 50MB storage space is charged at PHP 5 ($.12) per code, and every succeeding 50MB costing another PHP 1 per code. It’s also nice to know that you’re free to upload as many tracks as your rented space allows! For example, a twenty track album of high quality, 10MB songs would run you up to 200MB, or PHP 8 ($.19) per code. Artists can opt to support try­before­you­buy codes or free trials. Note however, that RockItDub being in beta, this pricing model may change in the future.

Overton added, “All in all, we like music and we just think there should be a better way for artists to get paid doing what they love and for us to be able to support them and enjoy great music.”

When asked by TiA why they considered Facebook as their platform and not other social media sites such as Twitter, Albert Padin said, “Facebook has the page tab app functionality, which is perfect for what ease of integration to indie artist’s facebook pages. Indie Artists can set up the integration in just 3 – 5 clicks. Which starts off with them contacting us, and us giving them a link to kick-off the super easy integration. Twitter? We’ll consider it.”

Padin is also the founder of SpellDial, he’s now one of the 10-people team behind Symph. As to the goals of RockItDub, he simply stated they want “to be of service to as many artists as we can.”

It was at the tail end of 2012 when Cebu­-based Symph Studio conceptualized the idea: why not create an online platform, where other musicians could affordably and easily market their music, on the largest social venue known to man, Facebook? With many artist’s FB pages easily eclipsing their own websites, in terms of fanbase, this was a no-brainer. RockitDub was founded as a Facebook application linked to the artists’ fan page, which hosts the music and produces a voucher code that can then be redeemed for music downloads. It was an inspired touch, a lot like what MySpace evolved into.

Music has always played a large part in every facet of life in the Philippines. Now with the internet, it has empowered even the most basic and independent artists. In the last couple of years, we’ve seen quite a few music internet startups blossom, from ArtisteConnect and Twitmusic, to NDFY and the like. We’ve also seen multimedia startups like Radio Republic and New Media Factory flourish with equal success, a testament to the richness and potential this newfound avenue has to offer.

(Source: theBobbery)

Most of the TechinAsia team is already in Singapore for Startup Asia Singapore 2013 for some in-depth discussion of the world of tech and startups. But some people who aren’t devs may have a simpler question: how do you start a startup anyway?

And honestly, that kind of describes me. I’ve always been interested in the world of startups but have never really been sure how it all worked or simply, where to start. I may sound like a total newbie (which I really am), but you’re not going to learn unless you ask. So I decided to ask the members of Facebook group Startup PH for some help on, well, where to start.

Much to my delight, someone mentioned My Startup Academy. A startup for startups! My Startup Academy aims to help those who have a business idea and can’t wait to pitch it to anyone who’s willing to listen (because that’s passion; believe me, I have an idea and I can’t wait to pitch it). It provides learning tools, mentorship, community, help finding funding, and perhaps a way to turn yourself from a newbie into a startup pro. Then you’ll be off developing your next masterpiece app. Mark? Is that you?

The team is headed by Michie Ang of MRTtrackr. She’s a registered nurse by profession, but now she’s very active in the dev community. Cool! The devotion of the people who do this, looking out for others and actually helping, is just amazing.

By this point I’m sure you’re excited but it’s not time for school quite yet. My Startup Academy hasn’t launched yet, but you can register now to be the first in line when the beta goes online.

Personally, I’m going to sign up to see if they can really unnewbie me.

Commute.ph founder Jolo Balbin also gave me some very helpful tips on starting a startup:

1. Conceptualize your idea.
2. If you’re a developer, create a minimum viable product (MVP).
3. If not, try to create an MVP without touching any code.
4. If that’s not possible, try to ask your closest friend that can code.
5. Find a developer that you know, and you can get along with. You will be with this person for a long time if your idea becomes successful.
6. If all else fails, try to learn how to code. I discourage asking someone you don’t know (such as a freelancer) to code your idea. Anything might happen that is beyond your control.

Another developer Jose Palala said, “A student fresh out of college who desires to go into entrepreneurship must build his people skills and grow his network.”

How about you? Do you think you have a billion dollar idea that you just can’t wait to pitch? Remember, “ideas are just ideas, until you make them reality.” Go find your team.

Daily deals have been one of the biggest trends to hit the internet since social media. Pioneered and popularized by Groupon, the deals model swept the world by storm and the Philippines is no exception. The pole star in the Philippines is Ralph Wunsch’s MetroDeal, which gets over two million unique visitors per month and is currently the Philippines’ number one e-commerce site.

Since I’ll be chatting with Ralph on April 5th at Startup Asia, I thought it’d be nice for you to have a quick preview of what MetroDeal is all about and what kinds of insights can be gleaned from his work.

Ralph’s actually half Austrian and half Filipino. Having worked successfully in a daily deals site in Austria, he went on to found MetroDeal in the Philippines.

Ralph started MetroDeal alone in late 2010 with one laptop and working out of his apartment. Within 15 minutes of launching the website, he sold his first deal. It went on to sell over one thousand times. In the first month, he made $50,000 of sales. By his fourth month, he had already hit $1 million. This was all in a period when he was hacking away solo with one person to do customer service. By the end of 2011, he had over 20 employees and by the end of 2012, he had over 50 people.

By 2012, MetroDeal achieved over $18 million in sales and is projected to hit $20 million by the end of 2013. It’s currently profitable.

Much of MetroDeal’s success can be attributed to a local market that was still weak in understanding the market for daily deals and the enticing offers his site pushed forward. One offer that Ralph noted to me was a buffet dinner cruise that was offered at 50 percent off. This deal sold over 40,000 times in two days alone. According to Ralph:

That’s a record in all of Southeast Asia, even. And that came out when we were barely six months old. It’s deals like these that really put us on the map.

Next up for MetroDeal is the launching of a new travel portal that will leverage their market penetration where sites like Agoda are still unknown.

Swing by in the afternoon at 3:30pm on April 5th (the second day of our event) where I’ll be interviewing Ralph to get more details on MetroDeal and the key elements to his success that we can glean for our own startups.

The world’s top messaging apps might have over half a billion users between them, but plenty of startups still see room for growth – especially in Asia. That’s the case with Finland-based Jongla (pronounced “yong-ler”), which launched in December and is now seeing strong uptake in the region, particularly in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Australia.

Available for iPhone, Android, and as a HTML5 web app, Jongla CEO Riku Salminen tells us that the team is encouraged by the “involved, hardcore” users they’re seeing in Asia and plan to open an office in Asia in the second half of this year. The messaging app is aimed at users globally, but Riku reckons that the specially commissioned artwork in its animated emoticon packs is proving particularly popular in this region. The next version of the iPhone app will add language support for Vietnamese, Indonesian, Japanese, and Korean, and all that is in the newest Android iteration already.

Facing competition from the likes of WeChat, Line, KakaoTalk, Whatsapp, and newcomers like US-made MessageMe, Riku believes that they’re strong rivals but they’re mainly “good for getting users at home”. Instead, Jongla wants to be truly international and inclusive. The Finnish startup sees many ways that can happen: with quality content, a growing in-app store, and being ready to roll with HTML5 once Firefox OS hits the market.

I get the impression that the Jongla store is going to be used for a lot more than just sticker packs – such as its latest range featuring the Scandinavian classic cartoon Moomins – and that content publishing might be on the horizon as well. Though unable to reveal specific plans, Riku concedes the store will be used for “any content, including localized” stuff, and he says they’ll “sell any other content that’s relevant to users”. We’ve seen KakaoTalk do this recently with a new publishing platform that, for now, is limited to Korean content.

As chat apps evolve, it’s possible that they’ll come to be defined by their ancillary services – Line for games and as a broader social network, KakaoTalk for social gaming, Cubie for doodling and drawing, WeChat for (maybe) a mobile wallet and much more in future, and Whatsapp for… er… ummm… something.

Indeed, such accompanying feature-sets will likely be crucial to survival. So we look forward to seeing where Jongla takes its content, and how its user-base in Asia and around the world reacts to that.

Grab Jongla for iPhone or Android, and there’s a Windows Phone version coming soon.

OfferChat is a made-in-the-Philippines live chat software. And guess what? The software is free. Not even freemium, but free, forever. The startup does have plans to push out premium features, but according to this blog post, these premium features will also be available at no cost to its users.

The burning question many will have now is: how the hell is OfferChat going to make money? The answer is through offering the outsourcing of human chat agents. Many of its competitors charge based on software usage. Rather than following suit, OfferChat makes money by offering human agents to its clients. For example, its basic package costs $99 per week and helps its clients deal with up to 20 hours of live chat support (the outsourced agents will be trained to understand the company’s products). Think of it like a call center model that OfferChat is applying to online live chat. It should work perfectly in Philippines as compared to costly Singapore or the U.S.

Since being founded in August 2012, OfferChat has more than 1,000 active free users of its software. Co-founder Jonathan Kennedy said that his team runs a couple of e-commerce sites and OfferChat was created initially just for internal use before deciding to push it to the public.

Not long after expanding to Europe with restaurant listings for London, now India’s Zomato has launched for foodies in Manila, capital of the Philippines. It marks the first move into Southeast Asia for Zomato, and brings in-depth information on over 9,000 restaurants in Metro Manila.

That probably makes Zomato’s Manila listings the most comprehensive in that area, and it could be bad news for local startup rivals, such as the good-looking Looloo app. Zomato’s efforts now cover the cities of Quezon, Manila, Makati, Mandaluyong, Paranaque, Pasay, Pasig, Pateros, San Juan, and Taguig. All Zomato’s especially useful stuff – I particularly like the scanned menus – are present in its new Manila listings (pictured below).

We asked founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal why Manila was chosen above other touristy or foodie cities in Southeast Asia, such as Bangkok or Singapore, and he explained:

For us the choice to enter Southeast Asia was between Bangkok and Manila. We found Manila to be a better market to start with – given the consumer behaviour and competitive dynamics. Moreover, we are working on building multi-lingual capabilities into the product which are very essential for a market like Bangkok. Singapore is a very competitive market – and we are learning how to one-up our other global competitors with our London operation. So, once we see adequate traction in London, Singapore will definitely be on the cards.

Which makes sense, since Yelp launched in Singapore last September. But more competition would be welcome in the Singapore market, especially as Yelp’s site is not as aesthetically pleasing as Zomato’s.

Founded in July 2008 for restaurants in its native New Delhi, Zomato now gets over 10 million users every month who browse over 80,000 restaurants in 20 cities across six countries. It even launched a series of print restaurant guides last year.

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

There has been a lot of talk about Japan’s price comparison giant Kakaku coming south to Southeast Asia. Now it finally has, launching its new service Priceprice in Philippines, Thailand, and most recently in Indonesia.

The good folks at Webgeek actually wrote about Priceprice two months ago, reporting that as of November 2012, Kakaku has about 997 million users. That figure probably makes Kakaku the largest price comparison site in Asia based on user count. Other local price comparison sites in Southeast Asia include Priceza (Thailand), Telunjuk (Indonesia), PriceArea (Indonesia), and also Rocket Internet’s PricePanda (Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia).

Price comparison sites in Southeast Asia are still in a nascent stage and could be way more popular. So the winner of the Southeast Asia price comparison market is really still up for grabs. Though Kakaku’s Priceprice and Rocket’s PricePanda certainly have more cash to make more mistakes, Priceza, PriceArea, and Telunjuk have the local insights and are probably agile enough to make this a mouth-watering battle.

And the aforementioned price comparison sites probably aren’t the only ones fighting to plant their flags in Southeast Asian countries. My guess is that Alibaba Group’s eTao, a price comparison site for China, is probably watching and studying how to best enter Southeast Asia. eTao certainly has the budget to fight things out or maybe even buy one or two of the local sites to get things started in this region.

In leadership theory, they call it the ‘first follower’ effect.

Just get one other person to support what you’re doing. That’s all you need to start a movement, drive change or in the case of Ryan Cepada – become a Philippines social network’s biggest viral star.

Ryan is a 20-year old student of architecture in the remote province of Bukidnon, located on the island of Mindanao. How remote? There are no airports in the province, and both computer and internet access is patchy, at best.

But before we say anymore, it’s best if you listen to the sound of his voice:

In late 2012, armed with a Nokia C3000+ and a regular headset, he began posting snippets of self-composed songs to Bubbly, a voice message social network we’ve written about before. Think of it as Twitter with voice.

He told exactly one person, his cousin, to follow his Bubbly ID.

That was enough. Less than six months later, he now has 220,000 followers, making him the number one celebrity on Bubbly’s network (beating out local heavyweights like rapper Loonie).

Artie Lopez, the country manager for Bubbly who managed to track Ryan down to his hometown, says: “Several people started texting him, calling him, and sending their likes and comments on Bubbly. He was so surprised, people from all over the country were sending in their praises and inspirational messages.” He adds:

Messages like “I love your songs and voice!”, and “I listen to your songs every night before I go to sleep”, and “Your songs inspire me to follow my dreams”. He literally got a SMS every second his phone was turned on.

What started as a distraction, a way to background the chronic financial troubles of his six-member family, was now the centrepiece of his creative life (Ryan also sketches and designs stickers, occasionally posting them to his Facebook page).

Ryan wasn’t always a singer. Initially, he’d used the Bubbly network for a rather curious phenomenon that Artie Lopez calls a ‘text clan’. Texting is a political tool in Mindanao, a province that has seen violent internal clashes and separatist movements. “[Ryan] was part of a “war clan” where people would bash and battle with each other on SMS, posting ‘battle’ voice messages – making fun of people, swearing at them, and just basically trying to stir up trouble.” The switch to music came after his disillusionment with the clan, and an acknowledgement that this constant confrontation was making him irritable and rude.

The songs were also the perfect medium for his busy schedule. Ryan juggles two jobs, a daily three-hour commute and various shopping errands around his hometown. He composes early in the morning and between jobs, taking a quick break to tap out tunes with spoons and table-tops in his family-owned eatery for percussion. Most of his output seems to converge on the sappy love song genre, as he explains in an interview to a local magazine:

My favorite and my inspiration is Westlife. I love a lot of bands, but they are my favorite. I also like Bruno Mars as a solo artist.

Ryan’s story is a heart-warming counterpoint to the slickly produced, almost mainstream business of producing viral hits today – a reminder that the gear doesn’t really matter. All it takes is heart, sincerity and that all-important first follower.

Philippines and Canada-based PayrollHero, a startup that aims to optimize work productivity and happiness, has concluded a $1 million CAD (approximately US$1 million) seed round of funding from — deep breath — 500 Startups, LX Ventures, The Futura Corporation, 8capita Partners, Ryan Holmes (CEO of Hootsuite), Dan Martell (CEO of Clarity), Benjamin Joffe (aka Mr. Asia), Christian Cotichini (Founder of MAKE Technologies), and other angel investors.

Specifically, PayrollHero, the IT startup of the year in the Philippines, provides payroll, attendance, and scheduling services for companies. Basically, it’s software to ensure people actually work. It uses the employee’s face for biometric authentication to avoid problems like buddy punching. The startup was created when founders Michael Stephenson and Stephen Jagger couldn’t find a good solution on the market for payroll and attendance at their outsourcing company. The solution was to build one. It turned out that it is also a product that other companies are willing to pay for. (Which reminds me of the story of V-Cube.)

With $1 million in the bank, PayrollHero plans to expand across Southeast Asia. For now, it has customers mainly from the Philippines and also Canada, the USA, Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India.

It also plans to hire more people for its “Adventure Engineering” team. What the heck is that, you ask? Stephen explained that it’s a term his team coined:

Ad-ven-ture En-gi-neer-ing
Noun: An unusual and exciting experience or activity built around a flexible work schedule.

The PayrollHero team is split between six in Manila, Philippines and six in Whistler, Canada. There are six adventure engineers, one business development person, one CEO, one product manager, two customer service staffers, and one finance person. From the statement, we understand that The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf Philippines is one of PayrollHero’s customers. But Stephen declined to disclose more clients when asked.

PayrollHero actually took part in ourStartup Arena competition last year in Jakarta (where they won second place!). Coincidentally, one of the Arena judges, Ben Joffe, also ended up being one of the investors in this round for PayrollHero.

(P.S: Startup Asia Singapore 2013 will be held on April 4 and 5, register early. Applications for the Startup Arena competition are still open but we have received more than a hundred submissions already so don’t delay!)

I love the feature-length documentary Revenge of the Electric Car, which centers around the return of electric cars, as seen with Tesla. So when I met Shingo Hayashi, I was delighted. He’s the general director in Vietnam for Terra Motors.

Terra Motors manufactures luxury and mainstream electric motorbikes for Asian markets. Mostly centered in Japan, the Philippines, and recently Vietnam.

The company was started in April 2010 by Toru Tokushige. After working in Silicon Valley, he returned to Japan with the dream of building a startup that would go global, as happened to major technology manufacturing companies like Sony and Yamaha. Armed with $8 million to start, he hired young energetic members like Hayashi, and experienced engineers from Honda, Suzuki, and Yamaha. He also gathered around him major shareholders like a former Apple VP, a Sony CEO, a Google Japan CEO, and a McKinsey partner. With these men around him, how could Terra Motors fail?

But it’s passion that really lead to success. When showing off his tiny Tokyo office packed with the only 15 employees in the company, Tokushige says:

We do not pay for a large office, instead we spend money on bike development.

Terra Motors’ tiny office.

Hayashi says he used to sleep on the floor in that same office, and the team worked really hard on sales. Well, it’s paid off. By 2011, Terra Motors was already the market leader in the e-bike market in Japan and by 2012, it held 40 percent of the market. Those 15 employees? They’re in a company that manufactures 1,000 e-bikes per month.

By mid-2012, Tokushige sent two of his staff into the Philippines and Vietnam.

In the Philippines, Terra Motors is working with the Philippines government to produce 100,000 units in the next five years. Five years ago, Filipino authorities were jazzed about a new cheap Chinese electric tricycle that would replace their smoky tuk-tuks. Within months, the e-trikes broke down. Terra Motors is now coming in to manufacture quality tricycles for the Filipino government. Hayashi draws parallels with Vietnam, where the company plans to open a factory in Vietnam in September this year:

In Vietnam, a similar situation occurred with Chinese e-bikes. In 2006, e-bikes experienced a huge jump in sales. They were cheap, $300 to $500. But customers, mostly students, quickly realized that the batteries got old and you couldn’t safely fit two people on the e-bikes. Effectively, after a few months, the e-bikes would become bicycles as consumers kept using them with their dead batteries.

Thus, Terra Motors’ first strategy is to enter the luxury motorbike market, avoiding the cheaper market.

We entered Vietnam because Vietnamese people are motorbike crazy. China is too risky, Indonesia is too big, and Thailand is migrating to cars. Vietnamese people also pay a lot for their scooters and motorbikes. In Italy, home of the Vespa, our Italian colleagues were shocked to hear that Vietnamese people pay $3,000 to $5,000 for a motorbike. Here, nice motorbikes are a status symbol. So when we enter the market, we will enter with expensive luxury e-motorbikes around the $5,000 price point focusing on the rich and celebrities. We need to change the perception of the consumer around e-motorbikes.

Hayashi is confident that this will not deter Vietnamese customers. After all, as he says:

Gas is going up, and Vietnamese people are fascinated by new technologies. Despite the poor economy, we still think we can capture a significant market share.

And I can see why, the first e-bike can drive up to 60 kilometers without a charge, is beautifully designed, can plug into any outlet to charge, and allows drivers to plug in their smartphone to the motorbike’s dashboard to track speed, battery usage, and other relevant data.

Terra Motors’ next, cheaper model, will be around $1,500 to $3,000 and will be able to run 40 kilometers without a charge. Both of these models are geared towards city people who don’t have to go on roadtrips. When I asked, what if I want to take a longer trip? Hayashi replied:

Well, we’re always working on improving battery technology. Also, we’re looking at building hybrid motorbikes that can go over 100 kilometers, and cost about $1,500 to $2,000. This way, you can drive in the city on battery and drive to the countryside on gas. No company currently has hybrid motorbikes.

Tokushige’s dream is to leverage Japanese high tech to build a big global business, and at the same time to change the world. He wants to become the “iPhone of e-motorbikes” or, perhaps more aptly, the “Tesla for e-motorbikes”. And I’m all for it. I don’t want to live in a smoky city anymore – it’s bad for my health. And with the US Department of Energy pumping $120 million into creating batteries that have five times the current power, this future just might be possible.

My friend who visited Guangzhou, China, said there’s a city somewhere in the country that only has electric motorbikes. It has nice clean air. Only problem was, you can’t hear the motorbikes as they’re heading towards you. I’d say that’s not a major problem.

Full disclosure: I’m a big fan of Tesla, and religiously follow the work of Al Gore and environmentalists the world over. So forgive me if I’m a tad enthusiastic.

Bowei on the first ‘World Startup Report’ stop in India.

American entrepreneur Bowei Gai is in Australia right now. That’s not too remarkable in itself, but his visit to Melbourne right now is one of 36 city stops in 29 countries that Bowei will make this year as he travels the globe for his World Startup Report project. He tells us that it’s a self-funded effort to create 29 startup ecosystem reports for each nation he visits. On the way, Bowei will rely on the kindness and assistance of fellow entrepreneurs as he takes part in events at each stop so as to drum up enthusiasm for the crowdsourced data that will ultimately shape his reports.

Started in India on the first day of the year, Bowei’s adventure runs through to the final stop in Singapore in September. He explained to TechinAsia today that this all started as a hobby. When he made a China startup report in 2011 just for colleagues to check out, that infographic slideshow went viral and eventually proved to be the seed of the idea for the global expedition. “I felt a need for these kinds of reports,” he says, to provide both insights and overviews of startup ecosystems around the world – things that could be used by new startups and general tech enthusiasts alike.

Melbourne to Sydney

Bowei’s Melbourne stop is a good example of how the World Startup Report works. At each city there’ll be a series of talks and panel discussions hosted by local startup luminaries, and Bowei will get assistance in setting up meetings that will help him gauge the players from the newest startups to the most notable VCs in that area. Then he puts a Google Document online where those with local startup knowledge can help crowdsource all the needed details and data. The Australian document is here.

York Butter Factory in Melbourne. Click to enlarge.

In Melbourne, Bowei is being hosted and helped out by Stuart B. Richardson, a managing partner at Adventure Capital and founder of the York Butter Factory, an impressive repurposed industrial building that’s now, as my colleague Vanessa said when she visited last summer, a really awesome co-working space.

The World Startup Report’s previous stop, India, was the longest that there’ll be, clocking in at three weeks in length. On that occasion Bowei got backup from Benjamin Joffe, whom readers might recognize as one of our Startup Arena judges. The filled-in Gdoc for India gives a good sense of how much crowdsourced input that people will have – and just how much of a task it will be to turn all that into a coherent report.

He’s arriving in Sydney tomorrow, and there’ll be an event at Fishburners on February 4th for which there are still some free tickets available.

Crowdsourced wiki

Bowei admits that it’s all harder than he thought, and that, three weeks into the vast World Startup Report project, he sees that it can be tough to “squeeze out time to write reports” in between all the events, meetings, and flying. He’s writing them as he goes along, and we can expect to see the first report published “near the middle of the trip.”

Aside from the reports, the project will also yield a community wiki which can be updated by nominated country “ambassadors”, with a wiki for each country. This sounds like a particularly nice way to create something long-lasting and easily updatable from the whole trip.

Bowei, whose own startup CardMunch was sold to LinkedIn, says that no country’s startup ecosystem is harder to tackle than another, no matter how mature or unformed the entrepreneurial landscape is there. He tells us that he’s keen to explore the relatively new startup scene in Myanmar, which recently showed its enthusiasm by holding what might be the world’s largest ever Barcamp event.

The next stop for Bowei, who was born in China and moved as a child to the US, is Colombia, which will come after a much-needed break for Chinese New Year that he’ll spend in Hong Kong. After that, the stops in Asia to look out for are:

• April 3 – 13 in Manila, Philippines
• April 13 – 19 in Yangon, Myanmar
• April 19 – 26 in Bangkok, Thailand
• April 26 – May 3 in Kathmandu, Nepal
• August 10 – 17 in Seoul, Korea
• August 17 – 26 in Tokyo, Japan
• August 26 – 31 in Taipei, Taiwan
• August 31 – September 4 in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam
• September 4 – 11 in KL, Malaysia
• September 11 – 17 in Jakarta, Indonesia
• September 17 – 24 in Singapore

Yes, China is not on the list, but his startup report for that country will get an update.

You can catch @bowei on the move on his personal Twitter or follow updates on @worldstartuprpt. Here’s the full World Startup Report itinerary in map form:

View World Startup Report in a larger map

Plurk has been around since 2008 as a social network that works like Twitter. It has proved popular in Asia – so much so that the team moved from Toronto, Canada to set up shop in Taiwan. Today Plurk is revealing that it has secured series A funding from WI Harper, but the investment amount hasn’t been disclosed. It will be used to expand its reach into more countries.

Currently, its users are posting three million ‘plurks’ every day, and the company reckons that active users are posting 15 times each day. Plurk emphasizes anonymity, going so far as to describe itself as “a pseudonym-based social network.” Indeed, the funding will partly go towards the launch of something called Anonymous Plurking, which will “allow users to post anonymous content to their friends’ timeline.” That sounds like an odd feature, and we’ve reached out to the Plurk team to find out more about it. Ultimately, Plurk positions itself as “a highly sticky social network that values user privacy over friend discovery.”

When we last chatted with Plurk co-founder Alvin Woon, he remarked on the site’s popularity in Southeast Asia by saying: “We are not focusing on any specific part of the world per se. It just so happens that we have more users here, so we care a lot about the feedback that we get from them.”

Though the user interface is not the best (pictured below) and will look very cluttered and awkward to some people, it was clearly good enough for Microsoft China to copy, as happened in one notorious incident way back in 2009.

The painfully cluttered Plurk UI. This is a random user’s profile page featuring the horizontal timeline up top.

Aside from focusing on anonymity and privacy, Plurk is working on packaging the hive-mind content curation that its users do in the form of links, photos, and opinions. A bit like Reddit. In today’s announcement, Alvin says:

We want to build not only a great community, but also a new kind of social destination that approaches human connection differently. Our users value privacy more than users of other social networks. We don’t use real names. We talk funny. We are easily amused and at times, easily offended. I have given up hope trying to figure this community out. But we will always strive to provide the environment needed for the community to grow and sustain itself.

WI Harper partner Edward Liu doesn’t give any clue about monetization, but he stresses content curation and says that Plurk “has enjoyed strong growth in countries like Taiwan, Japan and Southeast Asia” recently.

Manila has a lot more brightly-colored sofas and foosball tables today with the opening of Google’s Philippines office. Narciso Reyes has been appointed country manager. He commented this morning that Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) newest office will help the company provide “better services to our Filipino users” as well as help local “businesses, large and small, grow locally and globally.”

The Manila Google base should also be good news for startups in the country, allowing them to get easier access to advice from the search company. Google is still hiring for this new office.

Julian Persaud, managing director of Google in Southeast Asia, said in today’s announcement:

The Philippines is a key country in Southeast Asia in terms of its digital economy and tech-savvy population. This new office will allow us better engage with our local users, partners and advertisers. Over 33 million Filipinos access the internet regularly to study, shop, search for ideas, opportunities, create news businesses, and connect to each other. And internet use in the Philippines is set to grow exponentially. Research indicates that the number of Filipinos online will have nearly doubled by 2016.

Narciso Reyes, Google Philippines’ new country manager.

Google is already well established in the country. The Philippines was the first large country where Chrome became the most popular web browser, and it was also the first nation where the search giant teamed up with a telco to launch free access to Google products for mobile users. Filipino netizens also made good use of lots of Google stuff to help coordinate after devastation from the recent typhoon Pablo.

Google has some social catching up to do in the nation, where most of its web users are signed up for Facebook – a whopping 27 million of them.

We have features as many startups from the Philippines as we should have over the past year, but there are certainly some remarkable ones in that group. Startup Asia alum Payroll Hero immediately springs to mind, having recently been awarded ‘Startup of the Year’ in the country.

Startups in the Philippines have something special to look forward to next month, as Startup Labs, a global co-investment program focusing on emerging markets, has just announced that it is coming to Manila next month with the intention to invest.

They hope to find the most promising tech startups in the region, and partner with local investors to pursue standout growth opportunities. Local investment partners will include Ideaspace, Siemer & Associates, and ICCP Venture partners.

For startups in the Philippines who want to apply, the deadline is January 20th, with pitching sessions scheduled for the first week in February. You can head over to the Startup Labs website if you’d like to throw your hat in the ring.

As for Vietnam, Startup Labs has what looks like a similar plan in store, with partner investors include DFJVina Capital, CyberAgent Ventures, Savvi Angel Group, and PVNI Angel Group. For Vietnamese startups who want to apply, you can do so here.

For the year 2013, Startup Labs aspires to make 25 such visits in cities around the world, with the aim of funding more than 125 startups in partnership with local investors. The group says that it typically will do about five deals in a city, although it doesn’t have any minimum or maximum number set. The full list of cities is here, and as you can see, India is on tap for February too, and Malaysia is coming after that in March. Previously Startup Labs also dropped in on Taiwan as well.

We have previously seen Japanese companies eyeing Indonesia in particular (see GREE Ventures and CyberAgent Ventures), but we haven’t seen them explore the Philippines or Vietnam as much. So it’s certainly encouraging to see investors turn their eyes towards both the Philippines and Vietnam.

Southeast Asian startup 8villages, a mobile social network for smallhold farmers, started in Indonesia in January 2012 as a new way for farmers to buy and sell using a mobile device. Since then it has pivoted into an information and experience-sharing platform for these farmers. 8villages CEO Mathieu Le Bras recently told us a little about the startup’s progress, and its upcoming plans in 2013 which involve working together with telcos in Southeast Asia.

Growing up among farmers in the countryside of France, he noticed that in contrast to his own country, the agricultural sector in developing countries still doesn’t have any efficient information flow between farmers and other agriculture stakeholders. This includes things like changes in food prices, weather forecast, crop demands, and other valuable information that could help the farmers to have better decision making tools when growing their crops. The hope is that the farmers can thereby earn more money if they are armed with this kind of information.

8villages’ product comes in the form of a mobile phone subscription service called LISA (Farmers’ Information Service). By subscribing to LISA, users will be put into corresponding community groups based on their crops and location. Inside that group, users will get daily SMS tips from 8villages and trending local user-generated content. Users will also be able to ask their own questions and get them answered either by other farmers, or by agricultural experts from 8villages’ partners. This all works without the need for an internet connection.

The startup also has a partnership with Bogor’s Farming Institute (IPB), international organizations, and the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture. Basically, the three partners help provide the aforementioned experts as well as the practice of sustainable agriculture.

The team chose Indonesia for this pilot project because they saw that the country’s farming ecosystem is homogenous, meaning that the diverse regions have similar plantations of rice, fruits, and vegetables. Mathieu points out that India in the other hand, is very different. The farming ecosystems in the country’s north and south differ when it comes to the crops planted there. Furthermore Indonesians are highly social, including people outside its cities. Indonesians in the rural areas love to talk to their neighbors, discuss their crops, compare their achievements, and even brag about stuff. Those are great traits to support 8villages’ user-generated community groups.

From sewonartspace.org

At the moment, the startup charges a weekly fee of IDR 2,000 (21 cents) for every community group to which the user subscribes. There are around 1,000 users with 62 community group types so far. Mathieu said that they are going to change the business model into a freemium one in the near future. That will enable farmers to receive more information for free and would charge those who would want to share certain information to the community, such as commercial interests. He sees that there are around 44 million farmers in Indonesia, all of whom are potential users of LISA. The number can grow up to 80 million in the country if other family members in this sector are also counted.

A bridge to business

8villages has two models to earn revenue. The first one is from the subscription fee, while the second one involves providing services to agricultural businesses. 8villages will become a communication bridge between farmers and larger agricultural companies in the latter model. This can help businesses strengthen their brands’ image. 8villages could also sell its users’ insights to those businesses. Mathieu said that they now have one multinational agriculture company which has already signed up to 8villages’ service.

There aren’t a lot of competitors in this area, but one of the biggest might be the Nokia Life tools. This Nokia feature enables people living in emerging markets to receive a wide range of information – including information about the agriculture sector. Mathieu explained that LISA has two differences compared with Nokia Life. First, LISA is mostly user-generated, where people not only receive information, but can also ask things; while Nokia Life implements only company-generated information. Secondly, LISA’s usage isn’t restricted to a particular device. Also, while there are NGOs and public projects that run in India and Kenya, there aren’t other players yet in Indonesia.

In the year ahead

Sanny Gaddafi, the CTO of 8villages

Andy Zain, one of the advisors of 8vilages

2012 was the year in which 8villages built its product and team. Mathieu noted that it was particularly challenging for him to find and gather the right people with suitable skill sets to address agricultural issues using technology. But finally he achieved just that and formed a lean nine-person team. Well-known local startup players like Sanny Gaddafi (pictured above, left), whose startups consist of several social networks like Fupei.com and SixReps.com, became the CTO; and Andy Zain (pictured above, right), the director of Jakarta Founders Institute and founder of the Mobile Monday Indonesia, became one of the advisors. We know that Andy is a big believer in feature phones in emerging markets, so it’s not a big surprise to see him involved here.

In the coming months, Mathieu plans to strike a deal with telecommunication operators in Indonesia, and he will also discuss with operators in the Philippines and Vietnam about similar possible partnerships. He’s going to start the expansion plans to the Philippines this year, while Vietnam’s expansion plans might need to wait until 2014. At the moment he has a Java-based feature phone app being developed jointly with two handset manufacturers in Indonesia.

8villages has completed its seed funding round with angel investors from the mobile technology space and agriculture in Indonesia, Singapore, and the US. The startup plans to raise a larger round in the second half of this year. The team strives to continue learning and understanding its users’ needs, which include both farmers and agricultural companies.

Earlier this month, Malaysian based social-network-turned-social–gaming-website Friendster.com launched new dating features, allowing people to browse and hook up with potential partners online. Used widely as a dating website in the past, the new dating features of Friendster could be welcomed by many of its former users across Southeast Asia.

There are three dating-related features on the website: My Crushes, My Admirers, and My Matches. In the Crush game, users get to choose whether the pictures of potential partners are hot or not. If users say that the picture is hot, then they become an admirer of that person, and that person becomes a crush of the user in return. If both parties say that the other person is hot, then we have ourselves a match. Users can view these three features from the social dashboard.

Another big change is that Friendster is being far more choosy with users’ profile pictures. There is a requirement to add profile pictures with an emphasis on your face, and the pictures will then need to be approved from the Friendster team. When I tried using a picture with my face a little far away from the camera, the picture got rejected by the team. Other profile information is required as well, such as users’ sexual orientation.

There are on-site purchases that can be made using Friendster coins, including features to make profiles more easily discovered through search or through banner spaces. These coins can be bought online using several payment methods, including PayPal and Indonesian banks BCA and Mandiri.

Around two months ago, Friendster CEO COO Nikolai Galicia said that more than 50 percent of the site’s users come from Asia. Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines were the site’s top four countries, which is where Friendster had its social gaming platform. So you might find more search results when looking for potential partners from those countries.

By combining social gaming and dating features, Friendster could potentially make a huge comeback as one of the biggest dating social networks — at least in the Southeast Asia region. That alone would certainly be a good step.

[Source: Lowyat via Trenologi]

Chinese culture dazzles Vietnam only for so long. | via congnghe.nld.com.vn

Island disputes have been a rumbling problem for China in the past few years. The latest tiff with Japan, and ongoing disputes with the Philippines and Vietnam have involved world powers like the USA and India. So it’s no surprise that the issue has made its foray into video games.

Last week, Ho Chi Minh city’s Department of Information and Communications asked VNG Corporation, one of Vietnam’s largest technology companies whose empire was built on video games, shut down a game it just released because the game’s map displayed the Paracel Islands – land claimed by the two neighboring countries. In the now-banned game, the islands in the East Sea appeared to be under Chinese sovereignty.

The multiplayer online RPG game, Chinh Do 2.0 (ZT Online 2, in English), made by China’s Giant Interactive (NYSE:GA), has been distributed by VNG since 2008. Over the years, the game was updated many times – but the latest update on December 16th revealed an update that irked many users, which eventually lead to the game being taken down. VNG has since discontinued the game and cut ties with Giant Interactive. The website that once hosted Chinh Do 2.0 now has an announcement from VNG about the discontinuation and a statement that VNG, as a Vietnamese company, will faithfully uphold Vietnamese sovereignty.

Vietnamese players have since urged Vietnamese companies to re-check games they distribute from China. With Vietnamese users becoming more wary of China, will this spill over to distrust of other major Chinese web companies entering Vietnam, such as search engine Baidu, e-tailer, Vancl, or the WeChat messaging app?

Vietnamese users, although quite nationalistic about the disputed islands, are still great appreciators of Chinese culture. Every year Vietnamese children sit transfixed in front of their televisions watching Journey to the West and numerous Chinese games remain popular.

[Source: Saigon GP Daily]

Payroll Hero team on its team retreat

If you attended our Startup Asia Jakarta event this past year, you no doubt remember Philippines-based startup Payroll Hero which was the runner-up for our Startup Arena competition. Today we received an update from co-founder Stephen Jagger who tells us that the company is ending 2013 on a high note, having been selected as ‘IT Startup of the Year’ in the Philippines.

Payroll Hero offers a unique service that helps companies keep track of employees using biometric facial recognition to ensure workers are at work when they should be. As we heard in their pitch earlier this year (see video), this solution targets time wasters and buddy punchers, and “optimizes work productivity with happiness.”

Payroll Hero

Stephen tells us this evening that Payroll Hero is still chugging along, and is looking forward to an even better year in 2013. So be sure to keep tabs on them (on Twitter, Facebook) to see what they have in store.

The award was handed out by the IT Journalists Association of the Philippines (also known as Cyberpress) [1]. The evening also saw Samsung Philippines selected as company of the year, and Project Noah – a data-rich weather mapping site that we mentioned during the August floods – was chosen as product of the year.

We noted earlier that US-based holiday home rentals platform Airbnb had expanded into three countries in Southeast Asia – and now the site has rounded out its venture into the region by launching for the Philippines. Of course, the rental site has been open to travelers to the Philippines, or those already based there, for some time, but this marks “the beginning of focused efforts in the Philippines.”

In today’s announcement, CTO Nathan Blecharczyk, says:

Manila is a growing travel destination, and people from the Philippines are traveling abroad at increasing rates, so we believe it will be a crucial market for us as we continue to grow.

Some screwed up search results! Click to enlarge.

The San Francisco startup already has plenty of interest in the Philippines, as well as some local users going overseas. Today’s announcement gives these stats:

• Guests have come from 67 different countries around the world to travel in the Philippines on Airbnb.
• The number of guest nights booked on Airbnb in the Philippines has increased 345 percent in 2012 alone.
• The number of Airbnb guest nights booked by people from the Philippines traveling elsewhere has increased 263 percent in 2012, with the most popular destinations being Hong Kong, New York, Paris, Singapore, Manila, Rome, Seoul, Barcelona, Florence, and London.
• Airbnb has over 975 listings in the Philippines, including 530 in Manila.

But Airbnb might need to work on its search engine, as tapping in “Philippines” returns lots of places in Hong Kong when I tried it.

The new Philippines focus comes under the management of Ole Ruch as the new head of Southeast Asia operations.

After the dismal launch of the Apple Maps app, I knew I needed an alternative. I had been using Google Maps prior to the roll-out of iOS 6 and decided to try something new – a mapping service that I had known about since high school, nearly a decade ago.

Street Directory is a twelve-year-old company and now has more than 300 employees across Asia. Its core business, as the name suggests, is producing digital street maps and providing users with navigation services in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, and Hong Kong. The maps are accurate, which is always good, but beyond that, there are three additional features that I find very useful:

1. Informative

Street Directory’s map app is more informative than many apps on the market. For its map of Singapore, the company has smartly included the bus arrival times at each bus stop. People are able to see availability and arrival times of the buses by tapping on a bus stop. The app has also included businesses operating in a given building, so people can tap on a specific building and see what’s inside.

2. Suggestion of routes and transportation

The app also gives good suggestions for the best route and transportation to take whenever you’re going somewhere. By tapping on their destination and their current location, users can see various ways of going to destination; car, taxi, bus, or a mix of bus and train. If you choose a cab, it even gives you the approximate cab fare!

3. Offline maps

Street Directory has an offline version of its maps for major cities in the countries it serves. This is especially useful when you are traveling and going to places where 3G services are not reliable.

So far, I am still happy with the Street Directory map to help me navigate my way around Singapore and Indonesia. But in other countries which aren’t covered, such as Vietnam and Thailand, Google Maps is still the default map app for me. However, both apps are missing the map scale on their mobile apps, which would come in handy for users who want to know how far away a destination is.

Both the app and its offline versions are free on iOS, and Android versions are still in development. For people who wish to try it out, you can download the maps at the following links: Singapore Maps, Malaysia Maps, Indonesia Maps.

Screen shots of Street Directory app

A while back we previewed the Foursquare Hack Day Philippines event, which has since taken place with some interesting ideas emerging. Software developers got together earlier this month in Makati City to see what they could create on top of the Foursquare API.

The theme for the event was “It’s more fun in the Philippines,” the country’s official tourism slogan, and so projects would need to center around that spirit. Of the 26 participating teams, the one that emerged to take the first place prize was Team AAA, with a clever application called PicXplorer. Even though the team had to change up its plans once they discovered what the theme would be, they came together in the end as team leader Angela Felicia Cartagena explained:

When the theme was announced, none of the app designs we prepared fit. […] The first thing that popped into our minds was the “It’s More Fun in the Philippines” advertisement so we thought of creating an app that would automatically create such ad.

As I understand it, the concept the team created would focus on helping a tourist in unfamiliar surroundings. The PicXplorer app would show the current location (or another, if desired) as well as aggregated photos from nearby venues. In this way, the user can browse their surroundings in a more visual manner, rather than having to read through a lot of text.

Angela further adds:

When a user selects a photo, the next view would present the larger image and also the name of the location. We then added the meme creator feature. Instead of just the larger image, a generated image would appear with the “More Fun in the Philippines” text overlayed on the image, along with the place’s section or category (e.g.. Asian Restaurant, Coffee Shops).

As you can see in the screenshot below, the resultant image is really nice – indeed almost like a promotional poster. Users can then add that location to their Foursquare to-do list too. I’m told that the app should be coming early next year for iOS.

For more highlights from Foursquare Hack Day Philippines, and even more great implementations of the Foursquare API, check out the event summary over on WebGeek.ph.

Earlier this year, we wrote about Philippines-based startup TrafficDito, which provides updates on traffic in Manila. Nine months later, the same team has a new project: Looloo app. It allows people to discover the best dining, entertainment, and travel destinations within Metro Manila.

The Looloo app for iPhone has three core features: Explore, review, and recommend to friends. With the explore feature, there are eight different filters such as the ‘nearby’ filter, where you can find out the places around you. There are ‘trending’ and ‘latest’ filters, where you can find popular and recently reviewed places. In this way, the app aims to be a local pocket guide for people in the area.

Looloo app prides itself as the only friends-powered place discovery app that is focused on Metro Manila at the moment. In fact, the development of the app was fuelled by Odell, the founder, and his enjoyment of discovering new places, particularly new eateries. When he first moved from the United States to Manila, he had trouble searching for new places given the lack of websites and mobile apps with information about the city. He then realized that there were also people out there who shared similar frustrations, and so the app was created.

The team has been working on Looloo since the start of the year, and is also looking to grow beyond Metro Manila to other areas in the Philippines.

For those based in the metropolis who are keen to give it a try, the app is currently available in the App Store.

Google’s Crisis Response map for Typhoon Pablo

Folks in the Philippines have been hit by another typhoon over the past few days, as Typhoon Pablo hit on Monday. More than 40,000 people were reportedly evacuated and dozens killed [1], and just as with the floods that occurred earlier this summer, efforts were being made online to circulate critical information about where to find shelter, which areas were at most at risk, as well as other storm-related alerts.

Amid the crisis, the government stepped up its game this time by providing a mobile-friendly, text-based disaster information page that could be easily read on most mobile devices. It includes important announcements like the location of the storm and which areas were in danger of or experiencing flooding [2].

I can’t help but wonder if there might be a need for a dedicated open source CMS for crisis response, to help countries in getting disaster information out in a hurry. Recovers.org is a promising initiative in the US (see Staten Island Recovers for an example of how it works), but it may take some time before Asia jumps on board with this, or something like it.

Typhoon Pablo alert, Free Zone

As usual, the folks at Google were quite active as well with a crisis map in place displaying shelter locations, predicted storm surge levels, flood hazard areas, and other information. As usual, the public has chipped in to help with information sharing as well, with another Google Map created to show shelter locations too [3]. And as we saw last summer, conversation on Twitter is extremely active as well around the #PabloPH hashtag.

Google also took advantage of its recent partnership with Globe Telecom to link to the afore-mentioned government site from its Free Zone sign in page. You can see how that looks on mobile in the screenshot to the right. Since the Philippines still has just 30 percent of the population using smartphones, this effort to get information to feature phone users who may not have active data plans is certainly worthwhile. For more information on Google’s role, you can check out the video interview below with Philippines’ ANC News.

Given that Asian regions are generally more prone to natural disasters, hopefully we can see governments, organizations, and citizens come together to create better ways to prepare for them. Sharing critical information is only one aspect of this, but it’s something everyone should keep in mind, especially civic/social entrepreneurs who want to contribute to their communities.

From the left – Stefan Magdalinski and Daniel Tumiwa

Earlier this year Multiply made the big decision to transform and dedicate the site entirely to e-commerce. In the process, the company announced this month its decision to shut down the site’s social networking and content sharing functions. We recently talked to Multiply’s CEO Stefan Magdalinski and Indonesia country manager Daniel Tumiwa (pictured above) about the decision to take down the blog platform, and about the company’s plans for 2013.

Daniel said that they will be taking down the blogs soon, and have given its members around two months to download and migrate their content to other blogging services. They are still giving an additional one month grace period to make sure members have enough time to settle their affairs. But starting this month, users are no longer able to post anything new on their Multiply-hosted blogs, but we can still view and read the blogs for several months. Then they’ll vanish for good.

Stefan added that competition among social networking sites is unique, as there’s often a dominant entity, making it more difficult to be successful. But e-commerce is a bit different, because there are a lot of successful e-commerce businesses, even if they only get a smaller market slice.

Before this decision to cease blogging services was made, Multiply’s team frequently held sessions with its members for about a year to get feedback on the company’s plans. Daniel said that the decision was a difficult one, especially when there has been a lot of stories and memories invested in numerous Multiply blogs, including people who met their spouses via their own blog.

Looking to E-Commerce

Nevertheless, 2012 has been a great year for Multiply. Up until November, the site’s fledgling e-commerce transaction count has increased two-fold, with its corresponding value increasing by a factor of 13. Multiply’s customer count has also gone up by a factor of eight. The online shopping platform now has 100,000 Indonesian sellers and around 75,000 Filipino sellers. Indonesia has overtaken the Philippines in terms of sales in November, and Stefan forecasts that Indonesia will continue to grow strongly.

The Multiply team is now looking forward to new challenges in 2013, where the company will be rebranding and relaunching itself as a 100 percent e-commerce site, complete with a new logo. Besides moving its headquarters from Florida to Jakarta this year, now the company’s developer team is located in Jakarta, and online payments are being processed locally, with its data hosted fully in Asia. Now they are looking to move sellers to the new platform as seamlessly as possible.

Stefan speculates that 2013 will be the year where Indonesia’s online shopping sector takes off, and the team is preparing to ride that wave. Next year, Multiply will focus on introducing better delivery services and more payment methods, including cash on delivery. In the next two to three months, Multiply will also be relaunching its website with a better and cleaner user interface better suited to shopping.

Mike Fernandez is making web design and development costs more affordable for small businesses in the Philippines. While web development services don’t usually fall within our scope of coverage here, the pricing model does make sense. Mike calls this package Fivepager.

Starting from $50 a month, a user can get three web pages with a custom design, email service, domain, and hosting.

Mike says that he got inspired to make web development affordable because he found that most local business owners could not afford to pay a huge chunk of cash upfront. In addition to an attractive price, the package makes it easier to communicate with folks who don’t know anything about the web. So far, ten local brands signed up which is a good start after it launched today.

Fivepager is run by PixelHub Creative in the Philippines.

Indonesian ticket booking platform Tiket has made some interesting progress since we last talked with them in August. Tiket has bagged a hat trick of first prize awards (pictured above) over the last couple of months. The company won at Sparxup in the e-commerce category, and at the Telkom Indigo Fellowship Awards in the travel and retail category. The latest award the startup has won was at the ASEAN ICT Awards (AICTA) held in Seibu, Philippines, a couple of weeks ago.

We caught up with the team again to talk about the company’s adventure in startup competitions and about its progress in general. Tiket.com seems to enjoy competing in these kinds of contests, and the team is looking to join more of them as early as next month. In December, Tiket will be competing in two events, the Asia Pacific ICT Awards (APICTA) and the GIST-Initiative, the latter of which was initiated by the US Department of State.

Tiket’s Stats

Tiket also shared its latest statistics with us. The company said that it has seen stable growth of 20 to 50 percent every month. So far, Tiket has partnered with 1,000 hotels, six airlines, 30 concert events, and 300 travel agents for its ticketing sales. The startup’s total user-base has reached the 100,000 mark, with more than 50 percent of them being repeat customers.

The team has also handled some amazingly quick concert sell-outs – the site sold 5,000 1,000 concert tickets for Japanese rock band L’arc~en~Ciel in only two minutes in January this year. And its allotment of 5,000 6,000 concert tickets for Korean pop group Big Bang were sold in the space of 15 minutes, with 46,000 users simultaneously hunting for the tickets on Tiket.

Currently, Tiket supports various online payment methods, such as credit cards, KlikBCA, BCA KlikPay, and bank transfers. The team is looking to add another payment option in the near future, which is cash-on-delivery (COD), to open up the service to people who don’t have cards, or those who think that doing a cash transfer at an ATM is a pain.

According to GFK Asia, the markets for laptops and tablets in Southeast Asian regions is seeing a surge in demand and growth. Its figures for the first three quarters of 2012 say that across the key markets of Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore, nearly 8.8 million laptops and tablets were sold, which was up 26 percent on the same period the year before.

That accounts for a total dollar spend of $4.72 billion, which is up 12 percent on the previous year. GFK Asia’s account director for digital technology, Gerard Tan, further explains:

Our findings show that Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia are the three biggest markets for such gadgets and collectively consume over 70 percent of the region’s sales volume while contributing 67 percent to the overall dollar value.

Given that many Southeast markets are still in early stages of development – especially when it comes to internet adoption – there’s certainly still enormous room for growth in Indonesia in particular. Likewise with more people coming online in Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam in the coming years, those markets will be key as well.

[Data from Internet World Stats]

Social Innovations Camp Asia was recently held in Kuala Lumpur, and a while back we previewed the six great ideas with positive social impact that teams would work on during the event. One of those was Blood Donors Network, a non-profit initiative to create a database of regular blood donors in Asia.

I got in touch with Joel Barquez to find out more about how the idea for this project came about. He tells me that he recognized that in the Philippines, as in many countries, there ought to be a system in place to ensure that those in need of blood have an adequate supply in blood banks and hospitals. He has himself been a blood donor for ten years and has advocated regular donations in the country as well.

His motivations run even deeper than that, however, as back in 1997 he was hospitalized with Dengue fever and was in need of a blood transfusion. Unfortunately blood supply was low and the doctor told his relatives to call as many people as they could to donate blood. And they did.

But that experience led Joel to realize that this sort of thing happens to people every day. And given the breakthroughs in mobile communications and web technologies these days, it’s good to see him making an effort to transition a recipient’s call for help to the web. Overall, Blood Donors Network will be focusing on three things to try to help address this problem:

1. Increase the acquisition of new blood donors
2. Increase the retention rate of existing blood donors
3. Establish comprehensive data about donors

Though web and mobile apps, people can register as part of a community of donors. And on the recipients side, they post the geo-specific blood type request to the network, and can also share it to Facebook and Twitter.

It was a humbling experience at the Social Innovation Camp Asia. I got goosebumps myself meeting these brilliant people from across Asia unselfishly contributing their time and talent to support a worthy cause. […] I deeply appreciate the support and efforts that my team poured into, to make the idea happen in just one weekend, from the outlining of the business model up to the execution of both the web and mobile app prototypes. I was also amazed with the organizers of the Social Innovation Camp Asia that they were able to pull the event off with such a very lean team.

Besides Joel, the Blood Donors team at SI Camp Asia — which was a true pan-Asia effort — included members from China, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Singapore, and Malaysia. They were awarded second place at Social Innovations Camp Asia, and Joel says that in the Philippines, they plan to meet with possible partners to help beta test their prototype over the next six months, and expand the idea in Asia with the help of its diverse team.

If you’re in Asia and you’d like to join the network as a donor, do check out their website as well as their Facebook page. It’s a great idea and deserving of support.

Rocket Internet’s e-commerce site Lazada has received more investment today, this time from Swedish investment firm Kinnevik for a sum of $40 million. Lazada, which was just launched in March this year, operates in five Southeast Asian countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand. Maximilian Bittner, the regional CEO of Lazada, noted:

Kinnevik has a proven track-record of investing in emerging markets and we are very excited to have such a knowledgeable and experienced investor on board. In addition to capital they will provide us with invaluable strategic insight of operating in such markets. It is also a strong testament to what we have accomplished so far and verifies that we are on the right track to achieve our aggressive strategic goals

TechCrunch rightly pointed out that it is interesting to see Lazada disclose the amount of its investment to the public. Previously, the Amazon clone has been quite vague when publishing any numbers. Magnus Ekbom, Lazada Indonesia’s managing director told me during our recent talk that they were unable to speak about any numbers in detail due to a number of reasons.

Kinnevik acquired a quarter ownership from Rocket Internet during the first quarter of this year. This latest investment move might be part of the bigger financial deal agreed between the Swedish and German companies. This is also the second investment Lazada has received recently, as you may recall that J.P. Morgan also invested in the company a couple of months ago.

[Source: TechCrunch]

Two Swedish entrepreneurs, Peder Wahlberg and Gustav Evertsson, are hoping to bring back the Jukebox era with Jukeboxsms.com. The startup, which was launched yesterday, provides a modern jukebox experience by using a HD screen and computer. The owner can then earn money from paying customers who request a song through their handsets via PayPal or SMS.

The service is available in 70 countries worldwide, complete with localized languages and payment methods. Here in Asia, music fans in China, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, and Malaysia will be first to have access to Jukebox SMS. You can check here to see the full country coverage.

To set the jukebox, you need the afore-mentioned HD flat screen or projector, and a PC with an internet connection. Then sign up an account at music cloud service Audiobox.fm, organize your songs, and you should be okay. Peder said that owners can freely decide the price for each song ordered by the customer via PayPal, but they may have some freedom taken away as SMS payment provider Fortumo (which handles SMS payment outside of Sweden) might have fixed prices for the service. This fixed price policy is different from country to country.

When I tried the Indonesian SMS payment service on Jukebox SMS’ demo page, Fortumo charges IDR 8,800 (90 cents) for each song. I think that’s quite a steep price for a country that is accustomed to getting CDs for as cheap as IDR 5,000 (50 cents). Though I agree with Peder when he said that there will always be a market for Jukeboxes in the world.

The customers can browse and order songs through their phones and can even set the music volume if they want to. Peder said that he got the Jukebox SMS idea first when he and Gustav needed an online jukebox where people can order the songs through their phones for an event. But since they were not able to find one, they created this service instead.

The team will continuously update the jukebox with new features and payment solutions. He promises that any new updates will be simultaneously available to all countries worldwide since the startup’s service is cloud based.

While the smartphone revolution is well established in most mature mobile markets, there’s still a long way to go in some countries, particularly in some Asian regions where the transition from feature phones is not moving as quickly.

But a new partnership between Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Globe Telecom in the Philippines promises to bring a number of Google’s internet services – namely Gmail, Google search, and Google Plus – to feature phone users in that country. ‘Free Zone powered by Google’ is a mobile internet bundle now offered by Globe that does not come with any data charges.

Users can access the service by visiting libre.ph on internet-enabled phones, or by texting ‘LIBRE’ to 8888. The offer will be available until March 31 of 2012 2013.

The Philippines still just has about 30 percent of the population using smartphones, so there’s still a big opportunity here for anyone who wants to tap into that market. If this initiative is well received, you can probably expect to see Google offer this product in other markets as well. My guess for likely candidates would be India and Indonesia.

As we heard from Alvin Yap (of TMG and Kotagames) recently, there is indeed money to be made by going after the feature phone market. He appears to be doing just that in the gaming space in Indonesia.

Similarly, earlier in the year we also featured Fonetwish, a service that allows users to access Facebook without a data plan. Its users are primarily based in India and Indonesia.

A little while back we previewed SI Camp Asia, a social innovations event that is to be held in Kuala Lumpur on November 9th and 10th [1]. At the time, the organizers were calling for ideas of how social problems might be solved through the creative use of technology.

140 ideas were submitted from all across Asia, but only six were selected for the Social Innovation Camp weekend, where the teams will work towards making them a reality. Here’s a quick run down:

1. Blood Donors Network – “[An] immediate access to database of people who are regular blood donors as well as those who are able and willing to donate blood affiliated with the hospitals nearby.”
2. LabRat – “LabRat empowers patient communities to accelerate research by helping fund and create personalized research projects for individuals with rare diseases.”
3. Sex Education in Mobile Apps – “[Aims] to tackle teenage pregnancy issue by providing sex education in webpage and mobile apps. The reason being is that […] teenagers may feel shy to openly ask for advice on pertaining matters; and parents as well as educators may feel embarrassed to talk about it too owing to culture influence.”
4. Bookat – “This is a website that encourages students and schools to help out less fortunate students in deprived areas in the country (e.g. Philippines). Through the website, people will be able to coordinate, volunteer, and donate books & materials (e.g. used books) to less fortunate students in other schools.”
5. Civic Ticket – “CivicTicket is issue-reporting mobile end-point for Citizens to report physical civic issues, such as potholes, lifted manholes, uncollected trash in local community.”
6. Find Art – “Find Art is a mobile app to find all forms of art in a location – hidden gems such as installation art, community art and private art collections as well as conventional art galleries, museums, events and festivals. Art lovers and artists share the ‘what’ and ‘where’ – the app gets you there.”

From here, SI Camp Asia needs to enlist folks who are eager to bring these ideas to life. And currently they are inviting developers, designers, and others to join the upcoming 48-hour event in November. So if you think you might be one of those people, you can apply here.

It’s great to see an event organized around such ideas, because society as a whole can certainly benefit from these kinds of solutions. While none of them are have the goal of to be big money-makers, they do have the potential to solve real problems that affect lots of people.

So hopefully as a result of the upcoming SI Camp Asia, perhaps we might see some support for these initiatives from government, organizations, or businesses with similar interests.

There’s a lot of talent crowdsourcing going on in Asia this year, and now Australia’s DesignCrowd.com is joining the fray, taking what it calls its “first step into Asian markets” by launching today in Singapore, India, and the Philippines. The online marketplace for design work says it wants to target both the huge number of small businesses in the region, and the large pool of freelance design talent in Asia.

[UPDATED: The new country sites are at DesignCrowd.com.sg, and also .com.ph and .in].

From DesignCrowd’s Sydney HQ, CEO and founder Alec Lynch tells us that it picked these three markets as a lot of great designers from those nations have already jumped onboard the international version of the site. Indeed, Asia is DesignCrowd’s fastest-growing region these days. Alec adds:

These three countries have the greatest appetite for crowdsourcing and have adopted design crowdsourcing the fastest. We’ve seen strong organic uptake from these three countries on our US website DesignCrowd.com – about half of our top 20 designers come from India, the Philippines, or Singapore. These countries also have large English speaking populations – 80 percent of the Philippines and Singapore speak English while 125 million people in India speak English.

In terms of goals for its Asian expansion, Alec says:

We believe there are more than one million designers in the region – and we’d love to have them all on DesignCrowd, but in the short term we’ll settle for 100,000.

For those freelancers, DesignCrowd supports either PayPal or Skrill (formerly called Moneybookers) which “covers most designers in India, the Philippines, and Singapore.”

Of course, crowdsourcing works in every direction, and DesignCrowd is also keen to see Asian businesses source web/print/graphic/logo designs and ideas from designers in Australia, the US, and anywhere else.

Earlier this month, the rival site Freelancer.com launched formally in Indonesia, targeting 100,000 users in the country by the end of this year. Plus there’s Indonesia’s own Sribu, which recently went global. I asked Alec if Indonesia is on DesignCrowd’s radar:

Indonesia is an exciting market and next on our hit list in Asia. We already have over 5,000 designers from Indonesia using our US website.

After securing $3 million in funding last year, an Asia rollout seems like a no-brainer. The Australian startup, which was founded in 2008, is also “assessing opportunities in South America and Europe.”

The folks at WebGeek Philippines and Smart DevNet have announced that they’ll be running a mobile app hackathon on December 1 in Manila. Foursquare Hack Day Philippines will invite teams of developers to build mobile applications using the Foursquare API.

At this hackathon developers can create new ways to check in, or somehow use data created by the Foursquare community to generate something entirely new. The latter option especially sounds like a lot of fun, with the potential of informative location-based applications built around the many points of interest on Foursquare. I’m told that there will be a Foursquare engineer coming to Manila for the event as well.

The ticket price for the all-day event will be PHP1,000 (or about $24), but discount early bird tickets will be available on October 29. It will be held at Smart Tower, Ayala, Makati City.

You may recall that back in August we mentioned the WebGeek Dev Cup, which was a hackathon that encouraged teams of developers to “solve a Filipino problem.” A number of interesting and practical solutions emerged from that event, and it will be interesting to see if more clever ideas are spawned at the upcoming event in December.

The Gangnam Style video by Psy has been viewed more than 359 million times and has inspired thousands of people across the world to remake the iconic dance by performing their own version of Gangnam Style.

Here’s a collection of the neatest Gangnam Style-inspired tribute/parody videos from around Asia to help kick start the weekend ahead of you:

1. Philippines

Here is a very well organized flash mob dance performed by around one thousand inmates of a Philippines jail. Yes, this is the same bunch of Cebu cellmates who hit global headlines back in 2010 with their Michael Jackson dance performances. I wonder if they get reduced sentences for these flash mob dances?

Plus, this video nicely showcases just how viral and influential the Gangnam Style song/dance is, as the prisoners’ video has been viewed close to 2.6 million times since it was uploaded just over one week ago.

2. Indonesia

This is a daring attempt by 1,000 Indonesians performing an illegal Gangnam Style flash mob at an Indonesian landmark called Bundaran HI. They did a pretty convincing job and even encouraged passers-by to join the mass dance. This video has been viewed around 1.9 million times so far.

3. Malaysia

Malaysians do not lose out when making their own Gangnam-themed music videos. This funny video is called “Orang Sabah Style.” Orang Sabah means Sahabans, and is made both to promote tourism on the Malaysian state of Sabah and to celebrate Malaysian Independence Day. Though the lyrics are in Mandarin Chinese, they provide English subtitles for more people to understand. The video has garnered around 3.6 million views so far.

4. Thailand

This is Thailand’s version of the Gangnam Style video – though it keeps the original’s Korean lyrics and just focuses on changing the visuals. Nonetheless, they’ve done a great job of keeping the humor of Psy’s video. Impressively, this video has close to 4.6 million views.

5. South Korea

This Korean-made video is called “Hongdae Style.” I don’t understand Korean but I think that is the only word changed from the original Gangnam Style lyrics. The cinematography of Hongdae Style closely resembles the original video. This one has an impressive 4.8 million views to date.

6. Singapore

Here’s a quirky video titled “Singaporean Style.” The music’s lyrics satirize aspects of life in the city state – but ultimately it’s about how they’re proud to be Singaporeans. This video has around 2.1 million views so far. Though we notice it is also getting quite a few dislikes, even from Singaporean commenters, perhaps because the performers have riskily changed the lyrics.

Bonus

This hilarious “Pyeonyang Style” video appears to be made by a Canadian, and is pretty hilarious. Although I’m not sure what Kim Jong Un would make of this particular Gangnam Style reboot. This video has 4.1 million views with lots of commenters joking that this video might instigate a nuclear war.

[Image source: HollywoodReporter.com]

Generated from Quickmeme.com

This week a group of Indonesian bloggers calling themselves “Suara Blogger Indonesia” (meaning: Indonesian bloggers’ voice) is promoting the need for more freedom on the internet in Southeast Asia. Their net freedom declaration supports the idea of transparent internet governance, and looks to protect five key values: expression, access, openness, innovation, and privacy.

Looking over the bloggers’ website, they talk about how Indonesian internet freedom is already at risk of further internet abuse. The site explains that the country’s government, ISPs, and operators have the freedom to choose which sites they want to block, and that the reasons for these choices are not made transparent. Furthermore, the country’s online defamation regulation is also a threat to freedom of speech on the web.

Worsening Net Freedom in Vietnam, Philippines

The online movement also looks to support the release of the Vietnamese bloggers who were arrested for criticizing the government recently. This is one of several worrying developments in curtailing net freedom to have rocked the Southeast Asia region lately. Earlier this week, the Philippines passed into law a controversial new cybercrime Act, which is deemed too vague, and may be vulnerable to abuse by authorities.

So far the Suara Blogger Indonesia group has garnered support from 17 local institutions, including Indonesian ICT volunteers ICT Watch, and the Indonesian Alliance of Journalists, AJI. They are looking for more support in the region.

We recently talked about on online protest in Malaysia over the 114A amendment that makes publishers responsible for content that anyone posts on their site. Other countries in the region, perhaps most notably Vietnam and the Philippines, have been in the spotlight as well for aggressive internet restrictions. And let’s not forget the ever-worsening situation in China.

[Via Kompas]

The event, which is intended to be a kick-starter for the 2012 PhilDev Economic Forum to be held in the capital of Manila, has already sold out. The 21 startup teams chosen for this once in a lifetime opportunity are:

Regular readers might notice we’ve covered a few of those before: RideFind, Unli FM, MRTtracker, Familyko, and SpellDial.

The brainchild of Winston Damarillo, CEO of Morphlabs and DevCon founder, Hack2Hatch (H2H) is a series of pitching sessions wherein various startup groups get the opportunity to present their products and ideas to some of the industry’s biggest players and luminaries, with the pot at the end of the rainbow being instant seed fund amounting to PHP 100,000.00 (USD 2,400) for the top six teams.

They will also receive one-on-one mentoring from some of the leading global entrepreneurs, as well as learn how to present to VCs.

According to Alvin Gendrano, H2H co-chair and the director for developers and platforms at Microsoft Philippines, aside from the mentoring onsite and P100K grant, their intention is to provide continued mentoring, software and cloud hosting, and the facilitation of introductions to investors, with the hope of establishing a new angel network for Philippine startups.

Once narrowed down to the top six, the startups will be flown to Manila for the 2012 PhilDev Economic Forum, to meet up with top tech entrepreneurs from around the globe.

With the requirement that only operational startups would be accepted, and not startup “ideas,” the 17 finalists, comprised of no more than 5 members each, will be given two opportunities to pitch their young businesses, first on October 5th for the elevator pitch taht’s limited to three minutes, and then on October 7th for the final pitch where they will be allotted 15 to 20 minutes of stage time.

Finalist groups are also asked to bring business cards, laptops, and Wi-Fi dongles (for emergencies), and of course, their product presentations and prototypes, if available. And as all work with no play tends to take the “start” out of the startup, they are also asked to bring Hawaiian attire for the party to held at the Mactan Shangri-La Hotel on October 6.

Fashion e-commerce site Zalora has officially confirmed today that JP Morgan has invested in the site. JP Morgan seems to love Rocket Internet products, and has also made investments in some of Rocket’s other sites. It comes just two weeks after JP Morgan backed Lazada, the Asia-oriented Amazon clone. The bankers have become the latest addition to Zalora’s current list of investors – Rocket Internet, Invus, and Summit Partners. The investment sum for Zalora has not been disclosed.

Zalora operates in six countries – Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam – and started up at the beginning of this year.

Despite this funding, everything might not be so rosy at Zalora. Back in April this year we heard that Rocket’s Oliver Samwer flew in to motivate the team, and that Zalora was being hit by floods of user complaints in some nations – especially from users in Singapore and Malaysia who were waiting a week or more for items to arrive.

Catherine Sutjahyo, the co-founder of Zalora Indonesia, said in today’s announcement that she felt honored to welcome JP Morgan into Zalora’s group of investors. Catherine believes that this investment shows that Zalora’s strategy to position itself in the Asian e-commerce fashion market is working very well.

Looking at one country in particular, Zalora Indonesia also shared some recent statistics:

• There are more than 400 local and international brands that are working with Zalora. The e-commerce company offers more than 20,000 products to its Indonesian customers.
• Zalora Indonesia employs 200 people with a 5,000 square-meter distribution center located in east Jakarta.
• Zalora has over 70,000 newsletter subscribers in Indonesia with 100,000 Facebook fans.

Recently, Magnus Ekbom from Lazada told us that there are no changes being made to its operations after JP Morgan’s major investment in the company. Will the same thing apply for Zalora? Let’s wait and see.

Ukraine-based online plagiarism checker Plagtracker.com is gunning for an Asian expansion. The site offers free online plagiarism checks without the need to download anything – you can simply put in the text and let the site check it for you. Interestingly, Plagtracker already has a good online presence (according to Alexa) in Asian countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Philippines, India, Pakistan, and others. We talked with Emilia, a Plagtracker representative about the startup’s Asian exploits and plans.

Emilia shared some of Plagtracker’s traffic statistics. Since its founding in July 2011, the website sees 20 percent of visitors coming from Asia out of its 5,000 daily visitors. The US is the number one biggest user of the site, with India in second place. Other heavy users are Malaysia, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Singapore, all in the top 10.

The site also shows live daily stats where visitors can see the number of papers checked everyday, the percentage of plagiarism observed, and feedback received from users. Today’s traffic counter shows that there are around 2,400 papers checked with a current rate of 36 percent plagiarism detected. Most of the users are teachers, professors, students, bloggers, and webmasters [Ed: And editors too!]. The site offers premium services for stronger plagiarism checking and professional editing assistance. The site’s premium users are mostly professional writers, science journals, and several universities and publishers.

I tried using the website to check a few online articles in both English and Indonesian languages, and Plagtracker worked fine on both. The results conveniently show which lines come from which online sources. But I guess that compiling and checking sources from academic papers would be the key challenge for the team. At the moment, the site boasts that it checks content from 14 billion web pages and from five million academic papers.

The Asian Plans

Emilia tells us that the team is looking to establish partnerships in Asian countries. Their first target is nations with highly developed IT industries such as India, China, and the Philippines. At the moment, the company hopes to kick-start the Asian expansion starting with India, saying mainly because the English language is common there and that the country teaches to a lot of IT experts and engineers. Plagtracker already has several partnerships with Indian science journals, and is looking for more partnerships with educational institutions in the region.

Regarding language localization, Emilia concedes that they are still unfamiliar with Asian languages. Plagtracker is now searching for specialists in the Asian languages, and only then will Plagtracker launch its services in, say, Hindi or Chinese in the future.

Emilia names TurnItIn, CopyScape, and DustBall as Plagtracker’s main competitors. She claims that Plagtracker’s main advantage up against its competitors are its free services and easy user interface. Plagtracker doesn’t have any investors at the moment, but they are looking for one now.

The youth unemployment rate in Asia is an important matter for all generations. The International Labor Organization has released a study entitled “Global Employment Outlook: Bleak Labour Market Prospects for Youth” and it details this increasingly serious problem. It’s predicted that the number of unemployed youths in the Southeast Asia and Pacific region will climb from 13.1 percent in 2012 to 14.2 percent in 2017. To remedy this problem, the ASEAN Foundation sees information and communication technology (or ICT) as a solution. On May 18, 2012, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) came on board with a $300,000 grant to fund ICT-related activities covering four ASEAN countries, namely Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam until mid 2014.

Today, the ASEAN Foundation announced the implementation of the fund with ICT training programs for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This program is aimed at young entrepreneurs, aged 16 to 25, who will receive training focused on the latest ICT skill-sets that may be used for their business development. This pilot project will run for two years, hoping to reach more than 20,000 young entrepreneurs.

This program is aimed at helping youth develop a knowledge of e-commerce and web business, and provide business and technical skills to raise their potential. The ASEAN Foundation developed a specific ICT curriculum for this training. To spread the training to targeted regions, it will conduct a ‘Training of Trainers.’

Young and talented entrepreneurs will be chosen to join its e-business incubation program. West Sumatra, west Java (Bandung), north Sulawesi, and west Nusa Tenggara are the provinces selected for the program in Indonesia with help from SOS Children Villages Indonesia. In other nations, Bangkok and Chiang Mai will host the program in Thailand; Manila for the Philippines; and Hanoi for Vietnam.

The executive director of the ASEAN Foundation, Dr. Makarim Wibisono, stated that the vision of the ICT training program is not only to promote growth and competition among micro-entrepreneurs in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, but its success will impact the region as a whole. Dr. Wibisono added:

Through our collaboration with Microsoft, the ASEAN Foundation will be able to help communities throughout the region to realize greater opportunities through improved access to information technology.

The ASEAN Foundation partnership with Microsoft begun in 2005 in order to develop an ICT curriculum for farmers training in villages. It also provided ICT training for SMEs and reached more than 50,000 people in Indonesia. The president of Microsoft Asia Pacific, Tracey Fellows explained in today’s announcement that this year’s ICT training for SMEs is the first for Microsoft in the region:

SMEs are the backbone of most countries in the region. Through this partnership, we want to empower young people to start their own businesses or creating their own opportunities. This assistance reflects our confidence in the ability of technology to improve the standard of living as well as social and economic development in each country.

Microsoft Indonesia first provided a $39,500 grant for an ICT training program back in August 2005 as it begun its partnership with ASEAN Foundation. Now the amount has grown to $300,000 with Microsoft’s local involvement, and expanded it to four ASEAN countries. With this fund, let’s hope more local startups will blossom with this kind of sustainable funding.

Thankfully, in the Philippines there’s a site called ArtisteConnect.com, a crowdfunding service that can help artists and creatives to launch their projects. Diego Mapa and Jason Torres, the brains behind this awesome site, shared a few tidbits about their startup.

According to Diego Mapa, the site’s marketing and web manager:

Artisteconnect.com is a crowdfunding site based in Manila open mainly to artists who need funds for their creative ideas or projects. However it is also open to all artisans that can use the tool to their advantage. So most of the projects in the site are now in the areas of music and film, but also we are open to events, product testing – it could be any creative idea.

Can you explain to us how this works?

DM: You sign up with site, put up a project. Let’s say I am going to make a music album and print 300 CDs. Set the target pledge or money. For example, I could be need P50,000 ($1,176). Set the target date: March 2013. Then create your Pledge Options, this is where you can earn money pledges, from the products or services you offer, e.g. Click 500 and get a CD, click 1000 and get a CD and shirt, and finally click 1500 get a CD, T-shirt, and your name in the thank you notes of the CD.

After you’ve completed all fields, now you can share your page’s URL on your social network sites. And the more you share it, the higher the chances you will earn pledges from your friends, relatives, and fans.

Why and when was Artiste Connect founded?

DM: It was founded around May 2012 by attorney Lezyl Ponce; Proudcloud partner and programmer, Jason Torres; and marketing head, Mark Laccay.

It was founded mainly to provide a tool to artists to raise funds for their projects. And also the difference between Artiste Connect and other crowd funding sites is that the site is designed to address the needs of our local artists. There are easier ways to pay for your pledges, to sign contracts for legalities, etc.

Who are your clients?

DM: In our back end we have more than a hundred projects. But those active are around 50 and steadily growing. Our past clients have ranged from directors, bands, solo artists, chefs, events teams etc. To name a few:

• Film makers– Vincent Moon, Marie Jamora, Sigfried Sanchez, Dan Gil, Emmanuel Cruz
• Music– Color It Red, Tarsius, Outerhope, Taken By Cars, Jensen Gomez
• Others– Mark Salvatus, Dayang Yroala, and Lisandro Claudio

Can you share a little about your revenue model?

JT: Since we started, our model is basically takes 10 percent of the amount a project has raised. That share is actually not that big, it only keeps the site afloat, it goes to tech, legal, accounting, customer support, and marketing.

Do you currently have investors?

JT: Given the benefit that the founders have their own day jobs. Artisteconnect has been bootstrapped and supported by the founders and we’re proud of that. However, we recognise the need for capital and connections to expand our operations so we are already in talks with a couple of local and foreign investors that supports our vision and are willing to join us on our advocacy.

DM: The artists also have their own discovered patrons who just suddenly pop up when they like the project.

Who are you competitors and what makes you different?

JT: Currently in Manila, as far as we know we’re the only crowdfunding site in the country, I maybe wrong there but… we’re hearing some rumors of other crowdfunding sites coming up.

Personally, I am so excited to know that a site like this exists, one that can help creatives reach their full potential by giving them a platform to start reaching their dreams and goals.

The disputed islands as they appear now on baodiao.baidu.com, a special Baidu page for pinning a flag on the rocky outposts.

Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), China’s biggest search engine, has engaged in a surprising bit of digital activism and patriotism, declaring that the islands disputed by both China and Japan (aka: Diaoyu/Senkaku) belong to China. To back this up, as spotted by Shanghaiist (via TNW), Baidu has three things: a Diaoyu Islands doodle on its Baidu.com homepage, a special portal for planting virtual Chinese flags on the rocky outpost (pictured above), and a giant flag atop the claimed territory within Baidu Maps.

But we can’t help but thinking that this is corporate suicide when it comes to Baidu’s overseas expansion plans – especially in Southeast Asia. Baidu already has operations in Japan, and unsurprisingly its Baidu.jp homepage [1] lacks a special doodle of this kind. But Baidu has even bigger ambitions for the Southeast Asia region, and today’s acts of patriotism and partisanship will have likely damaged massively the company’s chances – particularly for its recent ventures into Vietnam. Indeed, those tentative steps into Vietnam have already met with a backlash, since Vietnam and China have a separate territorial dispute over some different islands.

Baidu’s patriotism might play very well at home [2], but surely the search giant is now utterly toxic in the rest of the region. We’ve questioned Baidu HQ in Beijing on this specific issue, and will update if they can respond.

Baidu set up a research lab in Singapore this summer that’ll be a R&D base for research into Thai and Vietnamese languages and their application in semantic search. It’s a bold and very methodical expansion plan, showing that Baidu wants to do it right, and give Asia a credible challenger to Google. But all that investment risks being thrown away if Baidu’s actions at home make it a pariah among other nation’s web users.

Market research company GFK Asia reported today that Southeast Asia’s mobile phone sector has grown exponentially over the last year. Feature phones and smartphones sales grew by 12 percent and 78 percent respectively in the SEA region, with a total of 118 million mobile units sold during that period.

Looking at specific countries, GFK found that both Indonesia and the Philippines had the biggest mobile phone growth. Indonesia’s feature phone and smartphone sales grew by 19 and 56 percent respectively. But the company noted that feature phones are still the champion of mobile phones representing 78 percent of all units sold.

The Philippines’ smartphone sales growth was the biggest in Southeast Asia, at a lofty 326 percent! The country’s smartphone marketshare also had the highest increase in the region over the last 12 months, going from 9 percent to 24 percent. In Thailand and Vietnam, smartphone growth still left a lot of room for improvement, with only 19 and 11 percent respectively.

Smartphones dominating the region are priced between the range of $100 to $200, which is still deemed affordable by the people in Southeast Asia’s emerging markets. In the next two years, GFK predicts a surge of smartphone sales due to the wide availability of low-end smartphones priced under $100 sold by major manufacturers in the region. There are other similar reports on smartphone adoption rate in the Asian region, and you can check them out here and here.

[Source: GFK Asia, picture source: Deccan Chronicle]

A few weeks back Opera released its ‘State of the Mobile Web’ report, with insights on regional mobile market based on trends from Opera Mini web browser usage. As you can see from the company’s chart on the right, the proportion of Opera Mini usage on smartphones versus feature phones has increased significantly this year over last year.

We got in touch with Opera to see a breakdown of Opera Mini usage according to country, which we have plotted on a map below, with data coming from July 2011 and 2012 [1]. Opera Mini usage on smartphones (vs feature phones) has increased in a number of Asian regions, perhaps most noticeably in China where it jumped from 10 percent in July 2011 to 52 percent in July 2012. Similarly, Hong Kong rose from 24 percent to 52 percent.

Other regions with a modest proportion of smartphone Opera Mini users but showing strong growth are Malaysia (from 11 percent up to 20 percent), the Philippines (from 3 percent up to 15 percent), and even Indonesia to an extent (from 1 percent to 5 percent).

Among the other trends that Opera reported is the fact that Facebook is the top domain observed, ranking as the top web property in 16 of 25 countries. This does not include China where Baidu is tops, or Japan where Google wins out.

A startup based in Cebu, the Philippines, it’s spearheaded by founder Jossy Onwude and co-founder Briton Rabe, Unli FM is, they say, “an online platform for streaming and discovering popular music but also acting as a gateway to discovering new Asian and world acts.”

Unli FM wants to make a new approach on how people use music streaming and eliminate record labels – that in turn will make promotion of local music to the world easier.

The startup wants to offer rewards to fans and users by offering free tickets to events, as well as let them connect, hangout, get autographs and possibly have their photos with their favorite artists.

How about a platform that would allow livestreaming concerts on their computer, tablets, or mobile devices? Yes, please! That’s something Unli FM plans to offer in the future.

According to Onwude, there are some investors who are already currently eyeing Unli FM development progress. Once they launch, monetization of their startup will come from platform advertising, promotion of live shows, gigs, programs and music-related events, and on-site purchasing and record licensing.

Unli FM is different from their competitors as their focus is on local artists from the Philippines, and “provide a solution to the regional barrier on platforms like Pandora and Spotify.”

[Screeshot from webgeek.ph]

The latest quarterly report from global market intelligence firm IDC shows that the second quarter of 2012 isn’t the happiest one for the PC market in both the Philippines and particularly Indonesia. The PC market in the Philippines saw a little growth of only 1.5 percent (total shipments of 551,000 units); but the country didn’t record any decline on the previous quarter.

The report showed that the growth in the Philippines’ market can be mainly attributed to the smaller PC vendors’ growth in the country. They were able to take advantage of in-demand mini notebooks not yet fully fulfilled by the top two vendors, Acer and Samsung. The trend is predicted to continue with the top two vendors facing stiff competition for the rest of the year.

What to expect in the third quarter? The launch of Windows 8 soon will affect the Philippines market quite significantly. Vendors would want to hold their old stock because of that. But modest growth could still be recorded, IDC reckons, as a result of projected government and enterprise spending.

In Indonesia

The same can’t be said for Indonesia as the country suffered a decline of 6.5 percent (total shipments of 1,300,000 units), as there was a fall in demand in the market, as much as 22 percent. IT project delays by the government in the education sector and the volatile currency also did not help much during Q2. Deddie Sionader, the client devices market analyst at IDC Indonesia, said that consumers’ attention was also distracted by the mobile phone and tablet markets.

Acer and Asus are still the number one and two PC vendors in Indonesia. HP was able to take the third position from Toshiba, which now drops to fourth place.

[Source: IDC #1 and #2 via Kompas, Original picture source]

Launchgarage, a joint partnership between Kickstart Ventures and Proudcloud, is a new startup accelerator program in the Philippines.

It is looking for participants for its six month program which includes seed funding, a workspace, mentorship and advice, ‘rockstar’ networking, exclusive lectures, pitch days, and strategic partnerships with leading technology players.”

A seed fund of $30,000 for 15 percent equity will be offered to the selected startups, which in turn will be used as their “operational capital during the accelerator program.”

Launchgarage will also expose the teams to different mentors from a wide variety of industries both from the Philippines and other regions around the world. If you’d like to apply, you can do so here.

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]

Rollings Stones concert, Rio, 2006

In 2016, if you gather everyone working at a BPO company in the Philippines and put them all on a beach front, it might look a little like the picture on the right.

This was the scene of the 2006 Rolling Stones concert in Rio de Janerio. It was one of the most attended concerts of all time with reports of up to 1.5 million people present.

According to the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP), the BPO industry currently employs 650,000 people with total revenues expected to be US$12.7 billion by the end of 2012. By 2016, it’s projected to generate $25 billion and provide jobs to as many as 1.3 million Filipinos.

The problem is, just because you want to be one of the 1.3 million people with BPO jobs, doesn’t mean you’ll get it.

The president and chief executive of the BPAP, Benedict Hernandez, says, “While many Filipinos apply for work in IT-BPO companies, at present, the hiring rate is just five to 10 percent.” If 100 people applied for a call center position in a day, only five to 10 of them will get hired.

Without solid education or good English skills, you can have the perfect attitude and still be either underemployed, or worse, unemployed.

Enter Kalibrr, the Philippine startup that created an online learning platform to teach Filipinos the skills they need to snag that BPO job. If you complete their curriculum, they’ll also help you find the right company to work for.

And they do it all for free. At least, forever free for students. But eventually, BPOs will have to pay Kalibrr a one-time fee every time they hire a Kalibrr graduate.

“The saddest thing for me was to reject someone who had a college degree, who had all the right attitudes but just didn’t have the right skills,” says Paul Rivera, founder of Kalibrr. With four and half years of experience running a BPO, Paul understands the industry he’s getting into.

Kalibrr teaches English grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, idioms, math, and even tech lessons like browser tricks that will prove to be indispensable when working for a BPO. One can go through the entire course in an average of 15 to 30 hours with some students taking up to four weeks to complete the course.

Kalibrr screenshot

Paul and his team have already started testing the Kalibrr platform by partnering up with an internet cafe in Cavite. Through this partnership, they’re able to allow anyone who’s interested to take the course for free, without having to pay for computer rental and internet usage. They currently have over 700 users studying different lessons.

Paul says a couple of students have already graduated. One of them is a 31-year old single mother. Now working at a BPO, her monthly salary is currently three times as much as the Php 8,000 ($190) she was making as a front desk receptionist.

This is the kind of transformation that Paul wants to see happening over and over again.

With the help of his team in the Philippines, a couple of Stanford interns, and investors (they’ve already received their first round of seed funding this May), Kalibrr is on track to fulfill its mission: economic transformation through education and employment.

The Kalibrr team

WebGeek DevCup organizers John Arce and Michael Marin

On August 26, the WebGeek DevCup was held in Ortigas, Pasig City in the Philippines. It was a six-hour hackathon that challenged over 38 teams to create an app with the theme “Build an App to Solve a Filipino Problem.”

The first hackathon by WebGeek.ph which was spearheaded by John Arce and Michael Marin, the event drew more than 200 developers and attendees.

Out of all the participating teams, only 24 made it through and made a presentation of their app after the deadline.

Nikko Bautista’s Team APPNimbus took first place with an app Bukas Palad. This app seeks to “help relief/donation centers handle donations given by people and managing resources used to repackage, assign and transport donation packs to areas that need them.”

Second place was awarded to Fund3Lives by Ken-Lauren Daganio’s and Nino Malasan’s Team TKO. The app was aptly termed as ‘Social Funding for Ill Children’ which aims to help by creating a funding campaign for the kids who can’t afford to pay for their medical expenses.

Participants waiting to start hacking

Finally, Sagip App was awarded the third place. Developed by Team TBD with Kimson Wong, Jess Chin, and Carlos Gavino as members, this app aims to help the dissemination of information during disasters by providing the public a way to search and track of evacuees, as well as evacuation centers.

The ‘Most Popular App’ award was awarded to Team Audrey with team members Stanley Semilla, Rod Xavier Bondoc, and Audrey Manzano for their app iTeks. This app “seeks to increase the awareness of Filipinos of different events and forecasts by providing different government agencies the means to disseminate information through mobile messaging.”

WebGeek DevCup 2012 App Gallery can be found here.

Shoe addicts, celebrate! Or shall we say, get Shoephoric?

Shoephoric: [Shoo-for-ik]; adjective: Immensely happy because of shoes.

To Ann Jacobe, the “founder-in-killer-heels” of Shoephoric.com, an online community solely for shoe junkies in the Philippines from all over the world, the fascination with shoes started at a young age.

A few years later she found herself with a vast collection of footwear. Despite all those shoes, she tells me that she invariably “ended up using the shoes that came into view first.” Armed with her IT background, she created a database of her personal shoe collection.

After she was featured in a local Philippine fashion magazine, she started receiving emails from friends and readers to help them with their shoe organizing dilemmas. She used this opportunity to build an online application, MyShoephoria, as an answer. It was launched on April 28, 2011, and was later renamed Shoephoric.

Since then the site has received the People’s Choice Award in the “Lifestyle and Leisure” category in the 12th Philippine Web Awards, and launched a mobile app. She has even showcased the startup‘s product at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

To date the site already has more than 100,000 members, as well as followers on different networking sites — from shoe designers to fashion bloggers, and just about anyone else who is fond of shoes.

If the shoe fits

Currently based in Salcedo village, Makati City, Shoephoric HQ houses the other members of the team as well, with their rather unique titles. Lyndon Cruz is the “Shoeporic Rockstar Programmer,” Ray Piedra is the “Graphkiks Designer” and Jo Irene Hilario is the “Shoecial Media Marketer.”

Shoephoric is currently bootstrapped (no pun intended that time!), but makes some revenue from featuring shoe brands and related products. Targeted ads can be seen on every member’s page, and they also generate revenue through promotions and sponsorships.

Shoephoric is looking forward to launch “Shoephoric Shops” in the future, which will allow shoe retailers to set up their own online shops. A virtual storefront, an online payment solution, an inventory system, email, and social and mobile marketing tools are just some of the features that will be provided to these retailers.