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

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

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

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

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

If you’ve got friends all over the globe, those buddies are probably scattered across not just lots of nations but also several social media services. It’s even more fragmented if you’re an overseas Chinese, working or studying far from home, as your new workmates or classmates are using stuff that’s blocked in China – like Twitter and Facebook. To bring all these sites, conversations, messages, and buddies together is a new app that launches today called MelonFriends.

Launched initially just on Android, MelonFriends brings Sina Weibo and Renren into the mix with Twitter and Facebook. You can choose to view those streams separately, or aggregate them into one.

It’s a nice idea, though it comes at a time when lots of people are using apps like Whatsapp or WeChat for more and more communication. MelonFriends designer Duan Tingliang – based with the three-man ‘Melon Sail’ startup team in Singapore – tells us that the idea of the app is to keep the group dynamic alive:

The core feature for MelonFriends is to help overseas Chinese to manage their social network connections across China (Renren, Weibo) and overseas (Facebook and Twitter). So the usage of MelonFriends is very different from WeChat and such messaging focused apps. In a nutshell, WeChat is focusing on one-to-one communication with friends (which can be in China or overseas) while MelonFriends is focusing on the sharing, interacting, and managing of one’s entire network of friends. But there are opportunities in the one-to-one messaging business that are worth exploring in future.

To keep the conversations flowing, MelonFriends will add in interest-based ‘channels’ at a later date that work across different social networks. A social shopping/gifting service is also in the works. Duan explains:

For instance one of the channels which I will definitely build and use personally would be “Food back home”. Through this channel, we can introduce users with service providers who give bulk discounts on buying food from China (maybe via Taobao) and overseas shipping solutions for group buying, etc. As such, a channel services not just information but also a viral shopping/gifting solution for overseas Chinese. Eventually, this could extend its reach to overseas Chinese’s connections in China and overseas also.

That social shopping aspect would also be a form of monetization for the app, along with upcoming in-app-purchases for customizations like themes and emoji.

MelonFriends for Android has a two-day exclusive on Chinese app store Wandoujia before launching on Google Play on Wednesday (June 5th).

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

Facebook in Thailand

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

Twittery Thais

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

YouTube boom

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

Snapping up Instagram

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

Checking out of Foursquare?

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

Line up

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

Here’s the full slideshow presentation:

(Source: ZocialInc blog)

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

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

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

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

(Source: ZocialInc blog)

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

Image source credit: berita.upi.edu

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

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

Here come the jokers

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

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

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

Outright imposters

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

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

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

Image source credit: berita.upi.edu

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

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

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

Not following porn stars

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

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

SBY vs Obama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did you come up with the idea?

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

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

What happens when a user dies?

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

But Marco emphasizes that PassedOn is not about death:

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

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

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

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

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

Check out the video for more on the service:

Original image credit: berita.upi.edu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Source: The Jakarta Globe)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VNG just released Zini.vn at midnight March 30th. It’s a new project that has been in secret stealth mode up until very recently. The project resembles Twitter since it employs hashtags but unlike Twitter, Zini also emphasizes photos. Users, like Facebook, can see photos or photo albums posted in the main newsfeed. It basically features hashtags much more prominently as the center of the user experience and encourages users to add and follow hashtags.

Interestingly, the service requires authentication via Zing Me, VNG’s long-time social network, Facebook, Twitter, G+, or Yahoo. This is all part of VNG’s strategy to get any and all users on their platform without requiring them to create a totally new account. This has been especially the case with VNG’s latest products like Zalo and Giai Dieu Vui, which can authenticate via Facebook.

I played with it a bit and clearly VNG is trying to educate users on the idea of the hashtag. Not only is the hashtag prominently featured on the Zini logo, but it’s also emphasized in the right-hand column of the interface. This is an interesting approach compared to incumbent microblogging service Mimo.vn, which has been doing microblogging since 2009. The Mimo team decided to take away hashtags later in the development and focused on content building.

With VNG getting very serious about mobile via its chat app Zalo (with over a million users), already being a strong contender in social media with Zing Me (at last count they had over 12 million users across the country), and now getting into Zini.vn with hashtag-focused microblogging, I wonder how VNG plans to unite all these disparate or arguably competing services without cannabilizing itself. Or will the company slowly phase out one service in favor of another?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the infographic map:

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

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

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

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

(Source: WeAreSocial Singapore)

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

Credit: terrapinn.com

Twitter is pretty important to Southeast Asia. With Indonesia the fifth biggest Twitter country in the world and other countries in the region quickly picking it up, it’s only a matter of time before the microblogging service reigns supreme across much of the region.

Twitter has become increasingly relevant in modern public society, from major sports events to music sensations to political movements. And they know it.

With Asia’s growth, Twitter is taking this more seriously. That’s why Twitter just hired Aliza Knox, who was the most senior Googler in Asia-Pacific. She’s now the managing director for Online Sales APAC at Twitter. Twitter’s presence in the region is seriously stepping up, and we’re happy to get a peek into this.

Aliza will be at our Startup Asia Singapore event on April 4th at 9:45am, and I’ll be interviewing her about Twitter’s plans for the region and also how startups can better use Twitter for their business. It’ll be enlightening to see what’s next for Twitter and social media in Southeast Asia. We will see you on April 4 and 5 at Startup Asia Singapore.

A picture of Ivanhoe e-book on a Chinese Samjiyon tablet in North Korea. Via instagram.

At TechInAsia, we haven’t covered much on North Korea. We’ve only gotten tidbits of the landscape. From Kim Jong Il’s grandson hiding from Facebook and Twitter to the Pyongyang Subreddit to the Google Maps view to the country’s first computer video game to North Korea via Instagram, we’ve seen quite a lot more of North Korea in the past few months that in the previous decades. Though locals are denied access to the real internet, they’re also getting more glimpses of what the outside world is really like.

So we’re especially jazzed to see that Buzzfeed has posted a really interesting piece on North Korean tech culture. They got to meet up with Jean Lee, a reporter for the Associated Press, who may be one of the first people to tweet out of Pyongyang thanks to North Korea recently opening up 3G access for foreigners. She’s currently focused on studying the small tech scene in the communist country.

Here are some of the key things you can learn from Jean Lee:

• North Koreans don’t get on the internet, they get on the intranet. And they use it to download sanctioned books, chat within walled-off forums, mostly in universities sharing songs and birthday messages. Honestly, it’s not that different from what we use Facebook for, if you add in some international news, and trolling.
• There are currently one million cellphone users. That means the population is already catching up to the rest of Asia with texting needy-ness.
• Self-censorship is common practice. Not surprising, honestly. That already occurs across online and offline media in China and Vietnam because of government restrictions and the repercussions of being too vocal.
• North Koreans can download e-books onto Chinese Samjiyon tablets to read.
• Some elite North Korean lab researchers can get online on the real “international internet”.

North Korea is an odd place. With the recent severance of the South Korean hotline coming just days after basketball legend Dennis Rodman vacationing with Kim Jong Un, I don’t know what to make of North Korea. But we can see that the North Korean web is growing already, though slowly.

So there are two now avenues whereby the general population can get glimpses of the outside world and the so-called international internet: foreigners carrying 3G enabled phones, tablets, and computers, and via the North Korean elite. Knowing the viral nature of the internet, these tiny glimpses will get bigger and allow locals broader glimpses of the rest of the world.

In Vietnam, where I’m based, a censored internet (and society) has given birth to a population that is cynical about outspokenness, but still possesses a thirst for the West and new trends. A similar trend occurs in China. China and Vietnam are the closest reference points we have to predict what will happen in North Korea next. These things made possible by an opening economy and internet that, compared to the slow pace in North Korea, split wide open very quickly. North Korea just might drift in this direction. But with a dictator involved, it’s anybody’s guess. I just hope they keep dancing ¹.

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

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

Search

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

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

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

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

from Doubleaf via Flickr

Social Media

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

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

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

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

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

from Vietnamese comic artist Thanh Phong

What this all means

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

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

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

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

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

With North Korea opening up its mobile internet to foreigners, it was only a matter of time before we would start to see tweets and photos coming out of the country. And so, Instagram it is.

David Guttenfelder, chief photographer for the Associated Press in Asia, tweeted this today from Instagram:

A North Korean guide uses a pointer at the start of a tour of an historic site. On Jan. 18, 2013, foreigners were allowed for the first time to bring mobile phones into North Korea. And this week the local service provider, Koryolink, is allowing foreigners to access the Internet on a data capable 3G connection on our mobile phones. In the past I could post geolocated phone photos to my Instagram feed by turning my online laptop into a hotspot to link my iPhone or iPod touch by wifi. But, today I’m posting this directly from my phone while riding in the back of a van in #Pyongyang. The window on to North Korea has opened another creak. Meanwhile, Koreans here who will not have access to the same service, the window remains shut.

If you’re on Instagram, you can take a quick look through a number of hashtags that will show you some fascinating imagery of a modern yet drab North Korea, including: #Pyongyang, #NKorea, #Northkorea and #Dprk. The photos provide a revealing picture of North Korea, from pictures of men playing pool to the beautiful statues, to the drab walkways. I’m mesmerized.

North Korea’s latest developments are perplexing. One moment there are people like Eric Schmidt and Denis Rodman (just yesterday) traveling into the country, and the next second, we’re getting satellite images of their concentration camps and their diplomat is threatening to obliterate South Korea. I don’t know what to make of the schizophrenia.

I’m sure everybody’s asking, will this new-found openness to foreign tourists and the internet impact the future of North Korean citizens? I think so. With foreigners tweeting and instragamming away, locals are bound to catch on that the data is going somewhere. It’s also reasonable to assume that locals are going to get their hands on some mobile devices from foreigners. I mean, if locals are already sneaking phones into the country for usage it’s only a matter of time before they get their hands on mobile internet and log on – and see a world that’s brighter and more prosperous than they’ve been led to believe.

There’s still severe poverty and Kim Jong-Un has a tight grip over information and the consciousness of the people. I mean, if they didn’t, how could they pull off things like the Mass Games and the Arirang Festival? Beautiful as they are, they could only be produced by massive subjugation of the people. Don’t believe me? Check out the BBC movie, A State of Mind, about just that.

Here are my favorite photos emerging from foreigners in Pyongyang right now (not all pictures are from Guttenfelder, check out the Instagram hashtags to find more):

One of Vietnam’s few, and certainly biggest, microblogging services, is shutting down its SMS service. Mimo, which allowed users to push updates from the web to phones via SMS, was one of the services most touted by the Mimo team. Besides being local, the SMS service was one of the key competitive advantages that Mimo had over Twitter.

The announcement was published this afternoon on the company blog and an SMS was pushed to all users. The messaging shutdown will go into effect on February 1st. The company now has apps for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Nokia Symbian S40, Nokia QT, and a new mobile site. The mobile Mimo site went up just 10 days ago.

The shutdown of the SMS service hints that Mimo is moving away from the largely rural feature phone market – a market that it has focused on since the team started out prototyping in 2009. This might also mean that pushing SMS is not a service that customers want.

The thing is, smartphone users in Vietnam are the most likely to be early adopters of services like microblogging. Most feature phone users do not have the tech savvy nor capability to get onto services like microblogging which require a higher web literacy. So a move away from SMS makes sense. Not to mention the cost to Mimo for giving users the ability to push SMS to their followers.

On the other hand, microblogging is also being heavily assaulted on two fronts in Vietnam: social media in general and messaging apps in particular. Social sites like Facebook and local rival Zing Me offer users longer status updates and easier photo sharing. While messaging apps like Whatsapp, Line, and WeChat are taking over the market by replacing SMS and putting microblogging as an add-on feature.

The HootSuite owl has been learning Korean, and now the social media dashboard is fully localized for its users in Korea. This morning, HootSuite’s blog credits two particular Korean speakers for being instrumental in the translation, among a host of volunteers who helped out.

HootSuite supports posting to Twitter, Facebook, and lots more platforms. It also lets users post to China’s Sina Weibo. The mobile apps don’t yet have a Korean UI, but that’s in the works.

The Vancouver-based company has been focusing a lot on Asia recently. Aside from integrating Chinese social sites like Sina Weibo and Renren, the HootSuite site was translated into Indonesian back in August last year.

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

from Comnico, with some translations added by me

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

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

(Via PC World)

We recently looked at some stats compiled by a Chinese netizen that showed a mere 18,164 Twitter users active in China. That bit of number-crunching inspired Jason Q. Ng, a keen analyst of social media in the country, to set out to corroborate – or disprove – last week’s figure, and thereby try to get a clearer picture of who’s on Twitter now in mainland China despite it being blocked here way back in 2009.

Another motivator for Jason was the sky-high figure of 35 million Twitter users in the nation that was last year put forward by market research firm GlobalWebIndex. That number sounded suspect to us and was crying out for a double-blast shooting-down.

For the new study, Jason opted for a different method of getting the data from the Twitter API than was used by @ooof last week. In a post last night on Jason’s Blocked on Weibo blog (also the name of an upcoming book of his, tackling censorship on the Twitter-esque Sina Weibo), he concluded:

According to the data I extracted, there are tens of thousands of Twitter users in China, not millions, a result that confirms @ooof’s finding and refutes GWI’s conclusion.

He added:

The exact numbers I and @ooof come up with may differ, and only Twitter itself would be able to best reveal how many Chinese Twitter users there are, but our independent results are likely within an order of magnitude to the actual number, unlike GWI’s result which is about 2,000 times greater than our calculations.

Ultimately, Jason will venture to say only that “the number of active Twitter users in China is almost definitely between 10,000 and 100,000.” But that’s with him being super cautious about including less frequent users of the service.

The raw sample of Twitterers who posted in Chinese during his sampling time amounted to 43,784 individuals. That had to be boiled down to a sample of 608 whose location could be inspected manually. From that sample, 110 people were in the Beijing timezone and apparently located in mainland China. The resultant pie chart of Chinese-language tweets around the globe at that moment looks like this:

Jason’s final and very conservative figure could be extrapolated to 8,000 Chinese Twitterers during his brief study period. He explains this tiny figure:

The primary reason why my number is so much lower than @ooof’s is because his data collection period appears to have lasted for a month, and thus he captured the more casual Chinese tweeter; otherwise, my percentages largely confirm his.

So China-based twitterers are indeed rare birds.

For the full methodology and even some spreadsheets, head to the link below.

(Source: Blocked on Weibo)

Things were a little slow getting back into gear after the holiday break, but there was still some interesting tech news happening over the past week. And when there wasn’t we took a moment to reflect back on the past year, and looked ahead to what the new year holds for tech in Asia. With that in mind, here are our favorite stories from the past week.

Enricko’s pick: Chinese Startup Enables iOS App Piracy Without a Jailbreak

This week saw China’s KuaiYong making headlines on a lot of tech sites, including ours. The founder is ballsy for not only operating an illegal business, but also for letting the world (including Apple’s lawyers) know exactly who is running the company.

Minh’s pick: Study: Actually Only About 20,000 Twitter Users in China [INFOGRAPHIC]

I chose this article for two reasons: I love Twitter, and I love statistics. It’s also cool to note that while Sina Weibo is still dominant in China, that at least a few mainland Chinese are managing to log on to Twitter since it got blocked in 2009. China’s Great Firewall is not to be messed with.

Rick’s Pick: Apple’s Annual Lucky Bag Sale Delivers for Japanese Fanboys

Apple’s annual grab bag sale in Japan is always fun to watch. And unfortunately most of us have no choice but to watch, because if you want to take advantage of the sale you need to line up the day before. But as we saw this year, some lucky shoppers walked away with far more than they actually paid for!

Steven’s pick: China’s Biggest Tech Trend of 2013 Will Be ‘The Wall’

Using the internet in China can often feel like banging one’s head against a brick wall, so I enjoyed this post from my colleague, Charlie. His post is not just referring to the notorious and censorious Great Firewall, but to a whole range of regulatory and regional geopolitical issues that will make the Chinese internet – and, indeed, China as a whole – even more isolated in this new year.

Willis’ pick: Vietnamese Tech News Sites, Give Us More Vietnam and Less Silicon Valley

Minh wrote a very bold post to highlight the ugly truth about the Vietnamese press. In fact, this applies not just to Vietnam, but I think most major media sites in Asia aren’t writing much about their own startup ecosystems. This also explains why blogs like TechinAsia.com exist.

Charlie’s pick: Tmall Now Lets US Food Companies Ship Directly to Chinese Consumers

Food safety is a big issue in China, and imported (safe) foods are becoming big business. Expect to see a lot more of this sort of thing if the government doesn’t get involved to some degree.

Asia dominated the tweeting activity with the time zones of UTC +9 (Tokyo and Seoul), and UTC+7 (Bangkok and Jakarta) ranking first and third among global time zones with 33,388 and 11,675 tweets sent per second respectively. In fact, the Tokyo/Seoul combo had such a high frequency of tweeting that it was actually 2.5 times more than the second highest time zone, UTC-5 (New York, Bogota) which saw 13,336 tweets per second.

This is somewhat consistent with French research group Semiocast’s report in July of last year which said that Jakarta and Tokyo were the top two tweeting cities in the world, with the US being the number one Twitter country in the world.

For more information, you can check out Twitter’s full report here.

[Via Trenologi]

The left picture is Icon Pop Quiz’s logo, the right picture is the avatar PSY’s using

Korean artist PSY, who just recently hit the one billion mark for his Gangnam Style video on YouTube, is using an Indonesian-made avatar for his Twitter account. The avatar comes from an Indonesian game app called Icon Pop Quiz.

Icon Pop Quiz’s gameplay is similar to the famous Logo Quiz Game, in which users have to guess the correct answers from the given pictures, but rather than guessing for brand names, the topic is famous shows and characters. The game was developed by Indonesian developer Alegrium, and the particular avatar that PSY uses was designed by the developer.

The Icon Pop Quiz game has been a hit in several countries. According to AppAnnie, the game hit the second spot in the games category and eighth in the overall category in Indonesia’s free iPhone app rankings six days ago. In Singapore, it was ranked ninth and 20th in the same categories. At the moment, Icon Pop Quiz is still ranked first in Word and Trivia categories in both countries.

The game is currently available for download both in Apple’s app store and Google Play.

[Source: Trenologi]

Sina Weibo is not making money. Not yet at least. But it may have found a way to do so, as we saw from last week’s Weibo social commerce test with Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. The manufacturer offered 50,000 MI2 phones to Weibo users, which they could order through tweeting. Payments are all done within Sina Weibo.

The result was staggering, with 1.3 million reservations made for those phones in just over five minutes. That was pretty shocking, and I chose it to be my pick for the top news story of last week. As I noted then, we have to give credit to Sina Weibo as a platform as it enabled Xiaomi to capitalize on such high demand. If Xiaomi could to fulfill each request, that would have meant $416 million!

I can’t help but feel that this is something that Twitter could try too. In fact Twitter has already tested something like this with its @EarlyBird experiment. That turned out to be a flop.

But the mechanism is different. @EarlyBird helped brands tweet out deals, but that’s about it. In contrast the Xiaomi-Weibo experiment last week was led and spread by Xiaomi. Folks who made a reservation also had to tweet their orders. And the result of this brand and fan push was a viral one.

Another key difference between Weibo and Twitter’s @EarlyBird is that payment is made through Weibo credits, thus providing a seamless process of ordering and paying for a Xiaomi MI2 entirely on Weibo.

I’m not sure if Sina Weibo will open this up for all brands, but given this Xiaomi success, my guess is that it probably will.

via zoota.vn

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Source: PC World VN - article in Vietnamese]

In September 2012, I stood in front of an audience of over 700 people at Barcamp Saigon and asked “Who uses facebook?” Everybody’s hands shot up. But when I asked “Who uses twitter?”, 20 percent of the room put up their hands and the rest of the people chuckled. Twitter hasn’t gained traction in Vietnam, even among the local geeks.

Just south of here, Jakarta is the number one city in the world on twitter. Nearby, the Philippines is ranked 10th in the world for using twitter. All across, Southeast Asia, where there are many young and mobile web users, twitter is loved, but not in Vietnam. The third-largest country in the region is sort of twitter-less. What’s going on?

To really get at the heart of this, I sat down with the COO of Mimo.vn, the only company that still plays a significant role in microblogging in Vietnam. With 2.6 million users across SMS, mobile and desktop web, and mobile apps (for iOS, Android, Nokia, QT, and Windows Phone) Mimo has the most expertise on what would make or break a microblogging service in Vietnam.

The Mimo team started in 2009 with Huy and the current CTO. They loved twitter and funded the project themselves with a few angel investors. By mid–2011 they had released a public version of the service and had shown steady linear growth. Today, Mimo is looking for its tipping point.

Not a social network

Facebook, which has experienced its own tipping point in Vietnam as it zinged past Zing, might present a problem for Huy and his team. Despite its doubling numbers, Huy isn’t phased, he doesn’t see Facebook as a competitor and sees Mimo as a content service rather than a social network. The barrier for this model in Vietnam is that users don’t have the habit of producing content. Therefore, Mimo’s content curation team actively watches user behavior and pushes relevant data to them. Mimo had to populate its service with content before users took an interest. It has been important for Mimo to develop relationships with celebrities and content producers. YanTV, for example, tops the Mimo charts with over 1.7 million followers, and Ha Anh, a Vietnamese model and singer, has over 30,000 followers.

What Huy sees is missing in Facebook is the one-on-one interaction that users can get on Mimo or Twitter. Users can interact directly with celebrities and get responses from them. Facebook pages are generally one-way content streams where celebrities post their updates and users can Like or Comment but celebrities don’t usually respond. Huy sees this as a completely different experience. Microblogging allows for considerably more intimate interactions.

The problem with this model is that it hasn’t been communicated by Mimo nor Twitter yet. When I asked a group of Vietnamese friends why they don’t use Twitter, they all replied that they already had a Facebook account. Microblogging is seen as a social network and the success of Mimo is going to depend on how it can change the perception of users or adapt to the environment. Facebook has also been more active about bringing news into users’ newsfeeds. Culturally, the concept of ‘unfollow’ as popularized by twitter may be too harsh for Vietnamese people who are reluctant to show someone they don’t like them.

A fragmented online space

Huy doesn’t see this as a key problem, there are other fish to fry:

At first, when Facebook started getting popular, users felt it was clunky coming from MySpace, but eventually they adapted.

The problem lies elsewhere, one barrier (or a potential one) that Huy sees is the fragmented nature of Vietnam’s online space. Just as the mobile OS market is distributed across 3 major platforms Vietnamese people are accessing the Internet on laptops, tablets, desktops, and mobiles. No main mode dominates. Hu adds:

You’re seeing people connecting online for the first time through mobile phone or tablet, and their experiences and expectations are much different than those of an experienced internet user. But even on those individual experiences, there is tremendous diversity.

This just might explain Vietnamese users’ reluctance to willfully generate content and thus not take up microblogging as other countries have.

Taking this into account, Mimo has been aggressive about making sure their service is multi-platform. This is certainly one of their competitive advantages in a country where more people are using feature phones rather than smartphones. SMS is one of the services that they love to tout and is certainly an advantage over their global competitor, Twitter. In fact, a person who updates on Mimo can have their updates sent directly to an individual’s SMS. But how long will this advantage last? As smartphones continue to catch on, Mimo’s advantage over twitter ends. The early adopters in Vietnam’s market are also urbanites who are keen to try out new services. This same is not so true in the countryside where most people are just using SMS to connect with each other on a day-to-day basis rather than getting news updates on their phones.

When will tweeting catch on?

Mimo’s main differentiators are its content curation and its SMS platform with over three million SMS outbound per month but its biggest difference from Twitter is the environment. Twitter grew up in an enthusiastic Silicon Valley, hungry to share and try out new platforms. According to Huy, Mimo’s success and the success of startups throughout Vietnam has been dependent upon lots of funding and building key partnerships. This is good advice for smaller startups who want to make it big in Vietnam, but the definition of a tipping point is that it is unpredictable. Huy is still watching for that tipping point to happen for Mimo while they slowly build up their base of users and partnerships to move from linear to exponential growth. 2.5 million users is a base you can’t ignore – compared to the eight million on Facebook in the nation – but how many people are active? Enough to conquer in 2013? Time will tell.

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

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

Domestic Stability

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

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

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

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

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

A Death Blow to Business

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

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

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

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

Soft Power in Chains

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

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

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

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

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

No Hope for the Future?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tiny Macau is Big on Facebook

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

Japan <3 Twitter

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

Who Loves Weibo?

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

Social Savants

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

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

Today Mumbai-based digital advertising platform Komli Media has announced that the company has signed an exclusive partnership with Twitter. Komli will now take charge of Twitter’s advertising products sales in five Southeast Asian countries – Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines.

In this partnership, Komli will be looking to engage advertising agencies across the five aforementioned countries through a series of education and training programs about what Twitter ads have to offer. These Twitter ad products – which include promoted tweets, promoted accounts, and promoted trends – were previously only available to brands in the US, UK, Japan, and Latin America, and are now available through the Komli Engage sales team in the Southeast Asia region.

Akshay Garg, the managing director for Komli Media Southeast Asia, commented on this partnership:

We are really excited to partner with Twitter. Together, we will offer marketers new and relevant opportunities to engage audiences in SEA and drive brand value. Social media growth in this region is among the highest in the world, and Twitter is one of the most recognized and utilized platforms in our region

The Komli team says that Asia is home to 50 percent of the world’s social network users, with 54 percent of Singaporeans and 44 million Indonesians being regular social network users. The team then said that the majority of these growing social network users consult various social media before making purchases. This partnership with Twitter can help advertisers to engage more effectively with these users.

Akshay then explained about Komli’s future plans:

Komli Media will continue to focus on becoming a top three digital advertising business across APAC. On the back of our success with online video and social media we will be adding more ad solutions including mobile. In the coming year, we will be introducing more data and technology platforms to support our ad solutions and help deliver more value for our clients.

This latest partnership with Twitter is great news for the Komli team, particularly for the group of investors that ploughed its money into Komli Media in June. Southeast Asia users can expect to see more localized promoted tweets, accounts, and trends on their Twitter streams with this latest partnership.

media.mapping.jp

There’s an interesting piece over on the Emergency Journalism website about Project 311, which was a sort of ‘Big Data Workshop’ organized by Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Twitter Japan back in September and October. The initiative brought together data sets about both traditional and new media from around the time of the March 11, 2011 earthquake, and made it available for people to experiment with and analyze.

One person who got involved in the workshop was Hidenori Watanabe, who we have mentioned before on this site for his impressive visualization work on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki archives projects, as well as his East Japan Earthquake archive which presented photos and victims testimonials in a Google Earth view. What he created this time, using data from companies like NHK and The Asahi Shimbun, as well as data from Twitter, is an East Japan Earthquake Media coverage map, which you can now find at media.mapping.jp.

The map provides controls to display certain data, and it’s really interesting to compare how broadcast television compares to, say, the geo-coded Tweets marked in green around the country. There’s a time element as well which spans from March 11 to the 19, which scrubs through the eight days and animates the reports as they occurred on the map. Hidonori notes that in some places there was no news coverage, but there were some important tweets found (see below).

According to the report, NHK is said to be making use of the data as well to try to understand how to improve their disaster coverage. That’s definitely encouraging, but I think that this project could be taken even further if the companies involved continued to make their data available beyond the workshop (if I understand correctly, it is no longer public), so that others could build upon the work that has already been done.

There was no news broadcasted about Kamisu, but there were some tweets that shared important information, like this one about the state of a local factory.

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

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

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

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

[Source: WeAreSocial Singapore]

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

Social media in China is huge. So huge that nobody wants to ignore it. And while lots of people think “Twitter” when they hear HootSuite, the folks at HootSuite are taking China seriously. We already know the company has recently added traditional characters and Sina Weibo support, but what else is in the cards? I got a chance to talk with Dave Olson, HootSuite’s community VP, who gave me the lowdown on the company’s China plans.

Why is HootSuite interested in China?

Since launching almost 4 years years ago, HootSuite’s goal was to make our social media management system available to as many people as possible.

With this in mind, we monitor conversations about HootSuite and reach out to markets in which we see rapid organic growth. Afterwards we work to localize these unique markets. We started with Japan, then Spanish speaking countries, around Europe and then onwards into other Asian markets like Indonesia.

We knew the Chinese market was important but wanted to make sure we avoided missteps that we observed from other companies. We also knew that HootSuite is blocked by association in China because our core product includes access to Twitter and Facebook.

HootSuite is very cognizant that Chinese social media users have different networks, different needs, habits and culture along with different language. In addition we know there is more than one Chinese market with different expectations around China’s provinces including communities in Hong Kong, Taiwan/Taipei, Singapore and the huge ex-pat community such as in our home city of Vancouver.

We also learned that despite the difference, people using Chinese social networks share some of the same needs as users in the West, which are: sharing content across networks, managing multiple online profiles, and help listening, responding to, and analyzing their online interactions.

We’ve learned a lot from localizing elsewhere, and are hoping to use these lessons in bringing HootSuite to Chinese users. We want to tread lightly, and listen attentively.

As such, we are taking a diplomatic and educational approach to build community, share knowledge and deliver on expectations. Eventually we can build a business case as well.

What are you doing to get into the China market already?

Along with adding Sina Weibo support, we translated HootSuite’s web and mobile social media dashboard into Traditional Chinese and released it on October 8th in order to start the conversation with social media enthusiasts in Hong Kong, Taiwan/Taipei, etc.

However, before starting the translation project, we held a Chinese Localization Symposium in which we invited a cross section of Chinese social media users to discuss the linguistic, cultural and logistical challenges. The event was a success and we followed it up with a fun translathon with Chinese themed decorations, music, food, tea and more!

We also built a company presence on Sina Weibo, created a Twitter account, published a variety of videos to say hello and discussed our vision of collaborating with Chinese social media users.

Now, with the Traditional Chinese version launched, we’re underway with working on the Simplified Chinese version. We’ve also started developing a Chinese specific branding as well, to share our name and culture in Chinese characters.

We aim to keep things pretty grassroots, talking with people through our @HootSuite_CN and Sina Weibo accounts to see what is working, what isn’t, and what they want to see in the future.

Building relationships with users is our biggest priority.

What comes next and what are your long term plans?

Next up is getting our Simplified Chinese translation released by the end of the year. We will also increase Sina Weibo integration features, and are exploring integrations with other Chinese social networks like Renren and other Tencent properties. A lot of our next steps will be based on what we hear from conversations with our Chinese users.

We also hope to find quality social media industry events for our CEO Ryan Holmes to speak at and share our culture and story.

Long term plans are based on the feedback and reaction from these initial steps. Obviously, there are challenges facing foreign companies wanting to operate in Mainland China – especially technology companies like HootSuite – so we’ll stay focused on finding ways to get HootSuite in the hands of as many users as possible, perhaps with a China-specific version.

What are you finding the differences are between your Chinese and international users? Between weibo and twitter users?

First off, Chinese users can say a lot more in 140 characters!

Social media has broad appeal, regardless of which network you are using. The desire to connect with people, to broadcast, listen, and share, spans cultures.

Social media usage patterns and attitudes for Chinese specifically – and international in general – is a topic we spend lots of time researching. Getting a finger on the pulse of those differences is something we hope conversations with our users will produce.

For example: Weibo has a focus on media-rich content like photos and videos, as well as things like emoji. Comments and ‘likes’ on posts also helps keep the conversation going.

Overall, feature differences between networks reflect and/or inform usage patterns, so there are definitely some differences between Sina Weibo and Twitter users. We’ve embraced the differences in Twitter usage between North America and countries like Japan and Indonesia, so we’ll continue listening to the Chinese users for guidance.

Mr. Olson also shared some cool extras with us, like this Chinese pronunciation guide an enthusiastic employee made and an introduction video in Chinese (embedded below). I’m sure not everyone at the company is learning Chinese, but this is still a nice, friendly touch that shows the folks at HootSuite are really working to communicate with Chinese users on their terms. Here’s hoping that HootSuite can move even further into the Chinese market (and that that pronunciation video will stop people from pronouncing weibo like “way-bow”)!

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

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

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

Some highlights in Vietnam to look out for:

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

And here is the full deck for you to browse:

[Source: WeAreSocial blog]

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

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

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

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

[Source: We Are Social’s blog]

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

Hundreds of people in the name of the Save KPK movement gathered at Bundaran Hotel Indonesia, Jakarta, yesterday. They demonstrated their support for the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) after Indonesia’s National Police raid on October 5th. This movement begun as the news broke that police had threatened to arrest the KPK investigator, Novel Baswedan, for something related to a 2004 case that was recently reopened.

Since Friday night, around 1,000 activists joined in the demonstration in front of the KPK building with various Save KPK banners. This movement is also gaining steam on Twitter with the #SaveKPK and #dimanaSBY hashtag ^[1]. At its peak, #SaveKPK became a Twitter trending topics with 39,997 tweets (as recorded by Topsy.com on October 5th).

Online petitioning

The buzz around KPK on Twitter continued to spill into the streets at the Save KPK demonstration and concert, held in the center of Jakarta on Sunday morning. As it coincided with ‘car free day,’ people on foot and with bicycles gathered around the stage and shouted, “Save KPK, save Indonesia!” Onstage was the daughter of former president Abdurrahman Wahid, Anita Wahid, and the campaign director of Change.org Indonesia, Usman Hamid.

The demonstrators demanded a number of things of Indonesia’s president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, such as stopping police intimidation of KPK investigators and their families, and removing the head of the National Police Timur Pradopo and his associates.

The Save KPK online campaign doesn’t only rely on Twitter. Anita Wahid created an online petition called “Serahkan ke KPK” (meaning: leave it to the KPK) on Change.org, while Rendi Ahmad from @simponii (Inhabitants Music Syndicate) was responsibled for the Save KPK petition. Together, online petitions on Change.org Indonesia have collected over 10,000 supporters. Usman targeted around 100,000 e-signatures for this KPK case. Usman said:

All the hashtags can be used to spread the online petition and ask people to sign it. Each signature will be sent directly to the president’s and the National Police email account. So, if there are 10,000 signatures for the petitions, 10,000 emails will be sent to the National Police and the president.

KPK investigator, Novel was accused of involvement in an assault case while serving as an official with the Bengkulu municipal police in 2004. According to KPK deputy chairman Bambang Widjojanto (speaking to the Jakarta Globe) the case was already settled in 2004 as a subordinate of Novel was found to have committed the crime. Yet it was reopened, with an arrest order letter brought by the chief detective of the Bengkulu provincial police, Sr. Comr. Dedy Rianto, on Friday night. Anti-corruption activists claim that Novel is being targeted for his continuous efforts to investigate driving simulator project corruption which is linked to former National Police traffic unit chief inspector Gen. Djoko Susilo.

The support for the KPK seems to come from both netizens and people on the streets. Save KPK demonstrations spread across cities like Bandung, Yogyakarta, Banda Aceh, and Bali. On Facebook, the Save KPK Save Indonesia fanpage has past 15,000 likes. It’s another interesting use of the web to tackle endemic corruption and raise awareness

Well this is awkward – Indonesia’s Groupon Twitter account just got hacked. Formerly at @disdus, the page has now been hijacked and had its name changed to @MusikLegal1 – stealing Groupon’s 19,000 followers in the country. It seems that the only quick solution for Groupon was to simply start an entirely new Twitter account, which is now @GrouponID. It’s not clear why they couldn’t reset the password and prevent the total hijacking.

The @MusikLegal1 tweets are now protected, so we can’t see its recent tweets unless we had followed @disdus before this incident. But a friend of mine took a snapshot of the newly hacked account:

Hi, @disdus has been hacked but we still could access it from other apps that we use before. So, Just follow our new account @grouponid

— Groupon Indonesia (@GrouponID) October 4, 2012

Groupon Indonesia has acknowledged the hack and is now asking everyone to unfollow the @MusikLegal1 account and to migrate to @GroupOnID. This is quite a big blow as Groupon Indonesia needs to reclaim its sizeable follower base – now it’s starting from zero and is currently at a mere 391 followers.

Hi, Bagi yang sudah follow akun ini, unfollow saja akun @musiklegal1. Thanks

— Groupon Indonesia (@GrouponID) October 4, 2012

[Image source: inilah.com]

Generated using Quickmeme.com

As we mentioned earlier, RIM acknowledges a wave of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) errors in Asia Pacific. Twitter in Indonesia is swarming with negative sentiments towards RIM and BlackBerry. There’s even a Twitter “rap” mocking BlackBerry users for today’s error.

The errors, however, started to die down later in the day. PR manager of RIM Indonesia Yolanda Nainggolan said to Detik.com (translation is ours):

We have finished fixing the service interruptions experienced by our users in the APAC (Asia Pacific) when sending and receiving BBMs, and full services are recovering right now. We apologize to users for any inconvenience.

According to the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology in Indonesia, BlackBerry services have faced three outages this year. There was even a conspiracy theory about RIM’s outage before, as previously mentioned on Kompas.com. In March 2012, the House of Representatives held a plenary session about the plan to increase the fuel prices, which sparked protests. At that time, BlackBerry’s email service was disrupted. The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology spokesman, Gatot S. Dewa Broto, said there was speculation that the Ministry had created a conspiracy to disrupt the spread of information (translation is ours):

Back then, there were people who accused the Ministry of being behind such scenarios. We were accused of going to impede the flow of information to the outside by turning off the BlackBerry email service. Fact: the problem came from RIM technical problems.

Today, the same day as the BBM error reached its peak, Indonesian laborers held a mass strike and demonstration against outsourcing. Gatot doesn’t want people to speculate again that the ministry is behind both of the issues.

Telecommunication analyst Sutikno Teguh mentioned to Merdeka.com that Indonesian carriers have to use this moment to insist on building a RIM server network in the country in 2012. He argued that it will be easier for the government and the operators to do forensic audits as interference occurs.

After the BBM service slowly recovered, a hoax message was spread in BBM Broadcast Message (BM) which said that BBM users who don’t spread the message will be deactivated. Yolanda denied responsibility for this on Detik.com, stating that this BM was not officially spread by RIM.

Indonesia now has 3.5 million BlackBerry users who have suffered service interruptions because of these issues. Perhaps RIM could consider some form of compensation to keep its many users loyal. BlackBerry is the most popular smartphone in Indonesia, but issues like this can only help in pushing users towards the already-growing Android platform instead. They could also make users want to switch to other chat apps such as Whatsapp and WeChat.

Source: Kompas.com, Detik.com, Merdeka.com, Okezone.com

This article was updated at 0:48 to correct several issues with the language and to clarify that the translated quotations are our own translations.

Photo: Erafone

Samsung Indonesia is now ready to open its first pre-orders for the new Samsung Galaxy Note II. Erafone, as one of the biggest phone retail stores in Indonesia, is running the pre-order scheme. Samsung is offering a big cut in the price from Rp7,499,000 (over $780) to Rp5,299,000 (over $550) – but the discount comes only by paying for it via credit card installments for 12 months at a zero percent interest rate. This price promo is valid only for credit card holders of BCA, BNI, Mandiri, and Citibank.

For carrier bundling, you can pick either Telkomsel or Indosat. If you choose Indosat, you will have to subscribe to Indosat services for 12 months for Rp200,000 (over $20) each month. Yet you can get the benefit of 4GB of 3G data per month with speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps, and voice credit lasting 1,800 minutes for calling other Indosat subscribers.

In contrast, if you opt for Telkomsel, the contract plan for 12 months will cost Rp250,000 (over $26) each month. That gives you 4GB of 3G per month, 175 minutes of free talk, 10 minutes worth of international calls, and 350 SMS.

The down payment for both carriers is Rp500,000 (over $52). The pre-order period runs to the 10th of October. The first Galaxy Note II devices in Indonesia will ship from the 12th to 21st of October. The pre-order process can be started here on the Erafone site.

Meanwhile, if you love quizzes (or free stuff), Samsung Indonesia is giving away a Galaxy Note II for free every day with different challenges. You need to create a doodle, write something, or submit a photograph in response to daily challenges set by the company on Twitter with specific hashtags. Part of the judging process has been assigned to three local creative talents: Iwet Ramadhan (fashion designer) for #Note2draw, Adib Hidayat (music journalist) for #Note2write, and Renny Fernandez (film-maker) for #Note2capture.

To join the competition, you first need to link up your Twitter account by accessing the 1 Day 1 Note website. The Samsung Galaxy Note II freebies are up for grabs until October 12th.

The “Soul of the Nation” movement finally reached its goal last night. Videos from over 2,000 people singing Indonesia’s national anthem, “Bagimu Negeri,” were broadcast by Indosat on giant screens over three different stages at the Java Soulnation Festival 2012. The videos acted as a choir for singer Raisa Andriana as she sang. “Digital Sing Along with Raisa,” part of Indosat’s Super WiFi campaign, broke the record for the biggest digital recording choir in Indonesia.

Raisa and the Indosat team received an award for the record from MURI (Indonesian Record Museum) on Indosat Stage. According to MURI, up until 5:30 pm on Sunday, the project gathered 2,287 videos and 2,841 pledges.

On stage, Raisa expressed her concern about escalating crime among the nation’s youth, possibly aluding to a recent assault and killing of a high school student. With this project, Raisa hopes to bring some positive soul back to the country and its young people by asking people to pledge their love for Indonesia. The lyrics of the song “Bagimu Negeri” itself is about a pledge to serve the country. Raisa said on stage in front of thousands of her fans:

Nowadays, teens are often identified with something bad, like drugs and violence. Now this is the time for us to show that teens do not act like that.

The Soul of the Nation project is asking people to visit its website and connect to the Facebook to pledge. While the video submission process for Java Soulnation 2012 ended on September 29th, people can still show support by sharing the videos on Facebook or on Twitter by using the #soulofthenation hashtag.

People can also show support by calling 959 with their Indosat numbers to recorded themselves singing “Bagimu Negeri.” The Java Soulnation 2012 mobile app also has special features to support this campaign.

image: FastCompany.com

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

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

How many actually climb the wall?

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

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

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

Comparing to Sina Weibo

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

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

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

Can we measure language use?

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

A final note

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

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

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

Since April 1st, 2011, Twitter account @Triomacan2000 has frequently tweeted about a range of topics, from corruption among Indonesian government officials to the conspiracy of “oil mafia,” as he calls it. The Twitter account claimed to leak the untold stories of an Indonesian political scandal. The account has reached the status of Twitter political celebrity acting like a Twitter version of Wikileaks. A site with the same name TrioMacan2000.net reported that Syahganda Nainggolan (chairman of the board of directors for public affairs research body Sabang-Marauke Circle), Abdul Rasyid (coordinating ministry of economic affairs staff), and Raden Nuh (ex-director of privatization of state-owned enterprises PT. Berdikari) were the people behind Triomacan2000.

Abdul Rasyid objects to the allegation, and has filed a police report for defamation against the site. According to Kompas.com, Abdul said at the Metro Jaya Police Headquarters today:

There are three things that are in my report. Firstly, that I was mentioned as one of the administrators of triomacan2000.net site. Secondly, that I’ve enjoyed the proceeds of corruption. Thirdly, site said that I’ve been fired as managing director of Kemayoran area.

He denies all of these, and demanded for the site to be closed. He said that the news has disturbed his personal life and family. If the news continues to spread, he is worried that it will affect his career.

Together with his lawyer, Dedi Kurniadi, Abdul brought police evidence like print outs of Triomacan2000.net screenshots which contain his biography. Abdul insists that he wants a thorough investigation regarding this matter.

The site stated that Abdul had benefitted from dirty money and had been fired from his post as managing director of one of the regions in Kemayoran. The allegation was written on last Friday, September 21st, 2012. But Abdul just discovered it on Sunday. He wants the police to speed up the investigation.

Triomacan2000, who identified itself as Ade Ayu S. (presumably a pseudonym), has over 130,000 followers on Twitter. This is not the first lawsuit for @Triomacan2000. On June 2012, Junior Attorney General for Supervision Marwan Effendy filed a police report against Muhammad Fajriska Mirza who allegedly under the @Triomacan2000 account accused him of embezzling Rp 104 billion ($11.02 million).

The @Triomacan2000 Twitter account tweets today that it has no correlation with the site Triomacan2000.net. The pseudonym Twitter account is now busy campaigning against Jakarta’s governor and vice governor candidate, Joko Widodo and Ahok.

The post was taken down sometime this afternoon, but you can still see a cached version here.

University can be a tough time for students from all over Indonesia, living in rented rooms and missing their families. Sometimes overseas students are craving home-cooked meals. The founders of the cooking show startup, Masak.TV, had the same feelings when they were at college.

Masak.TV presents a cooking tutorial video podcast with young chefs Faisal Lanin and Tirta Pane. It also features chef Alvin Maulana – aka Mr. Ribet (meaning ‘busy’) – who shares simple tips for preparing cooking ingredients. They share the same culinary passion, and carry Masak.TV’s mission to make cooking look easy and fun. The target audience is young people overseas who might be missing simple home-cooked meals.

Alvin once worked as a head chef at the Madam Kwok restaurant, Epicentrum Kuningan mall, Jakarta. But for now, he works as an executive chef in Cabal Dining and Lounge, Manado, North Sulawesi. Alvin said that the Masak.TV concept came to life when they met head of production house Bagindo KPS, in Pulomas, Jakarta. They finally launched their cooking show on November 2010. Alvin explains:

We choose this format because online TV is more easily seen by all people no matter where they come from. We make this show look relaxed, because we are all still young. I’m only 24-years old. It’s more cool to make the show not too heavy and stiff. Our mission is to bring “easy cooking and [make it] enjoyable.”

Masak.TV collects donations to fund its website via PayPal, and it uses media spot advertising to attract sponsorship. It’s still growing with 7,528 YouTube viewers and the crew also spreads simple cooking tips on its Twitter account while reaching out to other chefs to share their knowledge. A mobile app is on the way to make content easier to enjoy anytime.

The folks at Masak.TV hope people are not afraid anymore to experiment in the kitchen. You can even bring your iPad to replace your cookbook with cooking videos. Give it a try! Bon appetit!

Alvin Yap, CEO and founder of TMG

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

Can you monetize in the feature phone industry?

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

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

What are some of the key reasons behind that?

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

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

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

Does this apply specifically to Indonesia?

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

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

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

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

How do you reach these users?

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

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

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

How do you get the visibility from that cooperation?

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

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

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

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

What do telcos want?

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

How many feature phone are online? Who are they?

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

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

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

On the future phone market

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

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

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

[Picture source: akuinginhijau.org]

This newest WeChat update also adds downloadable emoticon packs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agnes Monica (courtesy of Agnes-monica.com)

Agnes’ engagement on Twitter has landed her more than 5 million followers. Thanks to that, the #dancelikeagnes hashtag reached the number one spot among Indonesia’s Twitter trending topics shortly after the campaign began.

The winner of Dance Like Agnes will become a guest dancer at Agnes’s 20th year anniversary concert to mark her two decades as an artist. There will be 20 winners who each receive a cash prize of IDR 10 million (over $1,000), a Samsung Galaxy SIII, T-Cash balance (e-wallet) of IDR 5 million (over $500), SimPATI top-up credit worth IDR 5 million (over $500), and a 1GB per month SimPATI data package for one year. Total prizes worth IDR 1 billion (over $100,000) will be dished out to lots of winners.

To register, you will have to visit DanceLikeAgnes.com and upload a dance video featuring yourself, up to 60 seconds long. The video submission period is from today, September 5, up until October 31, 2012. Agnes and her dance team will pick 200 contestants. At the end, there will be 20 winners chosen by public voting.

With this competition, SimPATI launched a specially priced IDR 60.000 (over $6) for 2GB internet package with the speed of 7.2 Mbps. This promotion will last for 45 days.

Telkomsel is targeting 66 million mobile data users by the end of this year. This company already leads the Indonesian cellular market with 110 million users. With this campaign, they will push the use of data packages by asking people to upload their video. But actually uploading the video might be an annoying problem here, due to the poor capacity of internet connections here nowadays. Perhaps this is why they have a limit of 60 seconds.

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]

In its official blog, Hootsuite has announced that it is now available in Bahasa Indonesia. Writing in that blog, Stephanie Wiriahardja also points out that Indonesia has the third biggest user-base who sign up daily to Hootsuite. This release also comes with special addition of a “lady owl” (as pictured above), as part of Hootsuite’s media kit called the owl family.

Hootsuite linked to an article of ours from earlier this year which identifies Indonesia as the world’s chattiest Twitter nation – and that enthusiasm for tweeting is a big reason for Hootsuite’s new language option.

The Twitter dashboard Hootsuite also plans to celebrate its release by hosting a Google+ hangout on Thursday, 30th August at 9 pm local time. Partnering with @TwitalkID, an Indonesian twitter account that’s well-known for tweeting liveshows, Hootsuite will invite to the event the first 10 people to tweet to @HootSuite_ID account with the hashtag #HootIndo. The hangout will also be broadcasted live in Hootsuite’s official YouTube channel.

I tried the new Indonesian localization (as pictured in the settings pane below) and, at first, it kinda feels awkward to see my “home feed” tab changing into “sumber berita” or my “mentions” tab changing into “sebutan”. Of course many Bahasa Indonesia translations of tech terms will feel a bit awkward initially. I can think of some very peculiar instances from other sites like “unduh” for “download”, “tautan” for “link”, or even “tetikus” for “mouse”. But of course I think that it’s a good move on Hootsuite’s part – and as an Indonesian user, I appreciate this localization.

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

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

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

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

Feature Phone Users Lack of Options

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

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

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

What Feature Phone Users are Like

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

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

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

Cheap Gadgets

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

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

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

What can you do with 140 letters? A lot, reckons @InfoJakarta. The Indonesian city info specialist tweets virtually all topics and news about Jakarta, including sports, traffic, music, and even daily motivational quotes, all in 140 letters or less. We talked with the founder of @InfoJakarta, Willy Jonathan, about his reasons for using Twitter, and to discover his secrets to accumulating 260,000+ followers.

Willy, whose background goes back to his time in print media, explained that the reason he chose Twitter is not only because it is very similar to Blackberry usage (which is very popular in Indonesia), it is also a very friendly medium for mobile. Willy shared a few facts and figures about @InfoJakarta:

• 260,718 followers with a daily growth of around 400.
• The followers then are directed to the newly developed InfoJakarta website, which sees about 5,000 daily visitors.
• There are around 127,000 mentions of @InfoJakarta every month. So every 30 seconds there will be one mention aimed at @InfoJakarta.
• Follower demographics are primarily university students and young executives living in Jakarta.

Willy stressed that all those visitors came purely from Twitter, and the growth is organic. He added that Twitter is democratic, that people can follow and unfollow the account easily. He said, “Adding a follower is even harder than you might think.”

So how did @InfoJakarta grow to that number in only two and a half years? Willy explains it in one word: “discipline.” For the first two years, he served as the administrator, working on the Twitter account alone. He looked for news, tweeted about it, and chatted with his followers during that time. Right now @InfoJakarta tweets around 100 messages every day, and the team has grown to 6 persons.

What InfoJakarta Tweets About

Willy told us that there are mainly three activities on @InfoJakarta. The first one is traditional news which he gets not only from other online media, but also from his own followers.

On several occasions, @InfoJakarta has received and delivered news faster than any other media. This is because it receives real-time information from its followers spread all over Jakarta. When there was a bus incident involving its radiator, for example, @InfoJakarta followers who were among the bus’ passengers tweeted about it and took some pictures of the scene. Some of @InfoJakarta’s followers are so loyal that they volunteer to find news for @InfoJakarta every day, and Willy said the followers are quite responsible about their tweeted information.

The second activity it engages in is communicating with followers. More often than not, businesses use Twitter only to feed and push news, but Willy saw Twitter as a tool to interact with people. With Twitter, he can moderate, direct, give feedback, and ultimately influence people. @InfoJakarta does this by asking for people’s opinions once in a while, then retweeting interesting opinions that come from its followers. It will make the followers feel appreciated, and in return, this will strengthen their sense of belonging, and their bond, with @InfoJakarta. He adds:

If you tweet asking about people’s opinion on [the city’s public bus transportation] Transjakarta on Twitter, people will start talking. [Jakarta citizens] want to communicate, they have some kind of bond that we are all Jakarta citizens.

@InfoJakarta doesn’t only ask questions, it sometimes also retweets people’s questions so that other followers might help answer them. Sometimes, @InfoJakarta retweets people’s emergency requests, such as someone looking for a specific type of blood donor. In these situations, @InfoJakarta will contact the person immediately to check its validity, then retweet it to its 260,000 followers. Willy said that people will always come and help out.

The third one is implementing a daily Twitter theme. It’s similar with how radio shows use subjects as a talking-point, but here it’s done with hashtags. For example, on certain nights, @InfoJakarta will open up its music hashtag [1], and let people use it to talk and spread their demo music. Every five minutes, @InfoJakarta will retweet each demo with its music link to all of its users. Also, every morning @InfoJakarta will tweet a lot of motivational quotes to help cheer up the sleepy folks who are stuck in the hellish Jakarta traffic.

@InfoJakarta mainly earns money through advertised tweets. Willy said that his followers are understanding people, and they realise that he has to earn money for its administrators. I was not able to draw more information from Willy regarding the advertisement fee, but he said that it is not every day that @InfoJakarta will have an advertised tweet.

There are growing trends for other city info Twitters such as @infobandung and @infobogor. Willy explained that they are not his, but they are all working together under one big network, comprised of nine cities, and have gathered around one million followers in total. Sometimes @InfoJakarta will tweet with @infobogor back and forth regarding the weather. If there’s heavy rain in Bogor, then there’s a chance that the water will travel downward to Jakarta and become a flood there. So sometimes @infobogor tweets at Willy and tells him in Jakarta to get ready when such a situation occurs. He said that his followers found it funny reading a conversation between Jakarta and Bogor like that.

[UPDATE 17:20: News portal Detik and national education website Jardiknas are now back online. Also, Kompas cites Henri K. Soemartono, the director of IDC Indonesia, as saying there is only one UPS burned out instead of previously reported eight. Henri says the UPS is worth around IDR 566 million ($60,000).]

There was a fire at the Indonesia Data Center Duren III (IDC 3D), in Kuningan area, last night. Because of this, several Indonesian sites could not be accessed for a while. Based on a tweet from Detik, the website is still inaccessible. There has been progress in the last few hours as news portal Okezone and KapanLagi are now back online. These are a few notable sites that either went offline for a while or remain down:

• News portals Okezone (now back on), Detik, and KapanLagi (now back on)
• National airline Garuda Indonesia (now back on)
• Humor site MalesBanget
• Forums Indowebster (now back on) and IndoGamers
• File hosting website Maknyos
• National education website Jardiknas

The fire reportedly was caused by a UPS blowout at the South Jakarta office. Part of the office’s second floor along with its eight UPS were all caught up in the fire. IDC representatives said through Politik-id that the fire did not damage the server network which is connected to Indonesia’s ISPs. Johar Alam Rangkuti, the co-founder of IDC, confirmed that latter detail in this tweet:

Jaringan aman. Audit PLN dan independent sudah. Salah satu dari 8 UPS kebakar. Shutdown diperlukan karena banyak asap RT @ylbsumaryo

— Johar Alam Rangkuti (@joharalam) August 12, 2012

The latest update from Johar is that the first floor of IDC 3D is all back online since 8am local time. They are gradually trying to turn on the data center at the moment. The second floor’s spring and winter servers sections are now back on (IDC names its server sections based on the seasons). The last tweet from IDC was at 12pm local time.

According to DailySocial, the fire may prove to be a huge blow to Detik as the site is fully hosted at IDC 3D. Furthermore, the news portal site doesn’t have any other local mirrors, so the site can’t be accessed from Indonesia at the moment. At the moment, though other websites such as Garuda Indonesia and Indowebster are back online.

During these hectic times, Twitter becomes the choice of several sites, using @Okezone and @Detikcom to feed news and content directly to its users. Indonesian gaming forum IndoGamers hopes that its website will be back online in the next couple of days.

[Source: Politik-id #1, #2, and DailySocial, picture: FunnyJunk]

I’m not saying anything new, of course; people have been saying things to this effect more or less since Sina Weibo launched. Anyone who has really peeked under the hood realizes that Sina’s service is less a Twitter clone and more an evolution of it, and I’m wondering what’s stopping Twitter from following suit. Certainly at this point, it’s not like Twitter hasn’t had enough time. Is it pride? Because if so, Twitter, be aware that no one cares. Sure, people will make jokes for a few days, but then the jokes will die down and they’ll realize they enjoy Twitter more because the UX has been improved. Perhaps they’ll even spend more time on it. No one is ever going to be mad for long that you improved your service’s user experience.

So what should Twitter actually do? The first thing it needs to learn from Weibo is seamless image, video, and audio embedding. I know that Twitter can do some of those things now, but let’s face it, it’s kind of a mess. For example, viewing an image under the current system involves opening a whole new page if you want to see the image in full size. Images can be displayed in the tweet stream, but there’s no preview thumbnail and the size of the images displayed is usually too small to really see what’s going on when they’re viewed in-stream. (Or maybe I just need new glasses). There’s not even an option for uploading video or audio to embed. Sure, using a separate service to upload and then providing a link is easy enough — and it saves Twitter a ton in bandwidth costs, I’m sure — but it also directs people away from Twitter. Sina’s integrated approach means that the whole discussion, including the multimedia sources, happens within Sina Weibo, and that makes for a very smooth experience on the user end.

I also think Twitter should integrate, and even improve on, Sina Weibo’s comment system. Allowing comments on tweets means that Weibo plays host to more discussions. That, of course, makes it a great platform for trolling and petty squabbles, but it also works well for reasoned debate. You can follow a similar kind of comment thread through a maze of @ replies on Twitter, but it’s not as easy to do. I think there ought to be a way to give Twitter the clear, direct presentation of Sina’s comment system without things getting overly complex. How about it, Twitter? Have you got the guts to be called a copycat in the service of improving things for your users?

In the interest of fairness, I should also briefly mention a few things I wish Sina would copy from Twitter. My first wish is of course that Sina Weibo be uncensored, though that’s not legally possible. I do wish, however, that Sina would tone it down. When you find yourself blocking searches for “truth,” things have gone too far. Additionally, I think Sina could learn something from Twitter’s global appeal. I really like that on Twitter I can read what people are saying everywhere from Japan to the US to Egypt. On Sina Weibo, you mostly just see what people are saying in China. Granted, there are a bunch of reasons for that, and not all of them are in Sina’s control. But at present, the service only offers two language options: Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. That’s not exactly conducive to building a global discussion platform. Perhaps Sina doesn’t want a global platform, but this weakness means that on some issues, Sina Weibo becomes essentially a nationalist echo chamber. That’s not cool. As far as I see it, more perspectives is almost always a good thing. Whatever happened to the English interface you promised us, Sina?

Image: japanese.ruvr.ru

French research group Semiocast has released an interesting report showing the top countries and top cities in terms of Twitter accounts. Perhaps the most stunning figure is that the microblogging service surpassed half a billion total user accounts in June of this year [1].

The US tops all countries, way out front with over 140 million Twitter accounts, comprising over 27 percent of all user profiles, but after that things get interesting. Fast-growing Brazil has overtaken Japan for the second spot, and Asian nations Indonesia and India also rank high in fifth and sixth respectively.

While Japan loves Twitter, as we have noted before, Semiocast points at the country’s slow growth of 17 percent in six months. But at the same time, Japanese-speaking users are second only to English in terms of the most active languages.

In terms of growth, the only country that was slower than Japan was South Korea which only grew 16 percent. This makes sense as both nations have very little room to grow in comparison to up-and-coming developing regions like India and Indonesia. This is part of the reason why we’re seeing so many Japanese internet companies looking to overseas markets recently.

Looking at the top cities listed, Jakarta ranks as number one, followed by Tokyo in the second position. Indonesia is also well represented by Bandung in sixth. Incidentally, Bandung is the site when we plan to hold our Startup Asia Hackathon in October, and we encourage you to attend and Tweet as much as you want!

@Pulkam, the Twitter account in which travellers can share their pulkam or mudik experience and discover new places to eat, is making use of the social traffic app Waze to help it in tracking the holiday traffic jams. Although it’s still 29 days (or 28 days if you have a different start time) before Ramadhan is over, the Pulkam team is starting to prepare for the upcoming holiday.

The way you can use Waze’s service is to invite people to use the Waze app, join the “pulkam” group, and then whoever has joined the group will automatically be broadcasting info to the @pulkamMC Twitter account. That Twitter page will act as a data bank which can be organized and retweeted by the main @pulkam account. The best thing is how it creates a map on the web at Waze, so we can see the location of commuters. Founded in 2009, Israel-based Waze has doubled its user numbers to 20 million in the last six months, and has also raised $30 million from Kleiner Perkins and Li Ka-shing. This convinced the team over at Pulkam to make use of the app.

Pinot, one of the Pulkam team members, explains to TiA:

Basically at Pulkam […] we always love to experiment with new online technology that can help people to commute faster and safer. As in previous years, Pulkam will be a community hub that helps commuters and then helps to share any Ramadan activities in their hometown. Three main things that we do is traffic info, travel info, and culinary info.

Social media has been changing our daily activities, and this is just another great example of a neat use of social media – especially in Indonesia. It not only helps commuters during Ramadhan, the busiest time of year for travelling, but also this account helps people to explore local travel destinations and culinary treats. Tech in Asia sends out our best wishes to all of you who celebrate the holy month!

Get the Waze app for BlackBerry, iOS, Android, or Symbian from its homepage.

Jakarta-based MM Cab is hoping to replicate the success of Uber, the private taxi/limo service from San Francisco. But MM Cab is bringing a lot more speed and glamour to its business by using Ferraris and Porsches. And so the yellow-liveried Ferrari model pictured here – the 360 Modena, which is not the very latest breed of Ferrari’s mid-engined V8s – could be taking you home. Albeit quite slowly through Jakarta’s notoriously awful traffic.

MM Cab soft-launched yesterday. The map on the company’s homepage suggests that it has four supercar taxis so far. The Porsches are Boxster S (2011) models. You can also interact with the firm on Twitter. MM Cab promises well-trained drivers who really know the city, and uses a normal taxi rate so it will be affordable for most middle-income people. It aims to expand to other big cities in the near future.

To promote the service, MM Cab is giving out free rides to anyone who can “catch” the taxi from now until July 18th. That’s where its afore-mentioned map comes in handy. And the effort has been paying off so far, with the hype around the Ferrari and Porsche cabs making people curious, talking about it a lot on Twitter. After the promotion, the service will be launched officially.

I believe since folks in Indonesia, especially Jakartans, tend to be relatively early adopters then the service will be fully booked before you know it. MM Cabs are not as technologically equipped as Uber, however, in areas like mobile payment. I believe with time – and greater smartphone adoption in the city – that will improve.

The results have been prettified and portrayed in the infographic below. Some of the social highlights out of Thailand include:

• Spain got about double the amount of Twitter mentions by Thai footie fans before, during, and after the match. Clearly they know how to pick a winner!

• The most mentioned player was Spain’s Torres, who scored [UPDATE: Oops!] three the third of the nation’s four goals in the final.

• The major brands backing UEFA’s Euro cup this year didn’t fare too well, with only three percent of Thai football viewers mentioning any of the major brands involved, such as Honda or McDonald’s.

• Instead, Euro 2012 viewers in Thailand were too busy discussing the practicalities of seeing the game via “หนวดกุ้ง” (traditional antenna TV) or via GMMZ.

• The social peak of Euro 2012 among the Thai viewers came as the first goal hit the net at 2:01am local time.

Here’s Zocialrank’s Euro 2012 finale graphic in full:

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

[Source: Zocial Inc blog]

Japanese mobile marketing and ad company D2C announced the launch of its new Android Twitter client yesterday. Named ‘Decotter,’ the application lets users send Tweets that include emoji as it is integrated with the Dcloud service that was announced two weeks ago.

Upon installing the Decotter app, if you don’t have the Dcloud base app installed, you’ll be prompted to download that as well. After that, you can use the Decotter app to add emoji to your Tweets. But from what I can see, your emoji can only be seen by other users of the Decotter app. Regular users will see a m.decotter.net [1] link as well as a #decotter hashtag.

It seems to me that D2C might have found a more efficient short URL to save some space here, because this means each emoji they Tweet is going to use up 33 characters of the total 140 character Twitter limit. But admittedly, the Tweets do look pretty fun, and if you have a small group of friends using the app, then it might be worth a try.

With the aim of bringing emoji where they dared not go before, the company also has DecoMessage, putting emoji in SMS; and Decora, for putting them in email.

If you’d like to try our Decotter, you can get it over on Google Play right now. You can check out some screenshots of the app below.

I Tawt I Taw A Guberment!

Readers may recall Google’s recent transparency report just a couple of weeks ago, which raised important questions on which nations censor and inquire about user information. Now Twitter, noting inspiration from Google’s work, has released its own transparency report. Like Google’s this holds some surprises as well.

The first alarming point is that Twitter has received more government requests for user information in the first half of 2012 than it has in all of 2011. Secondly, out of 849 user information requests, a whopping 679 (almost 80 percent) of them were from the US. The number two nation in user information requests was surprisingly Japan, with 98 user information requests (almost 12 percent). No other nation has more than 11 user information requests.

Like Google, Twitter didn’t elaborate on the data very much, with no judgements passed on either the US or Japan. But the phrasing in the blog post announcement, as well as the date the company chose to release it, indicates to me that Twitter seems many of these requests as unfounded:

Wednesday marks Independence Day here in the United States. Beyond the fireworks and barbecue, July 4th serves as an important reminder of the need to hold governments accountable, especially on behalf of those who may not have a chance to do so themselves.

I’ve reached out to Twitter representatives for more information regarding Japan specifically, and I’ll update you if I receive further information. The complete country data released by Twitter can be viewed below. Twitter says that in the future it will be publishing updates on this report twice a year.

[h/t to Rich]

‘Feel On!‘ was introduced as an iPhone app last year, and it allows you to see someone’s tweet with an emotion by using a cartoon illustration according to the context of the tweet (some readers may recall that we’ve previously wrote about the app back in April). There has been no version so far for tweets in a non-Japanese language, but finally the English version of the app for Android was introduced last week, and it is available for download on Google Play. The English supported iOS version will be coming up very soon.

The app was created by Tokyo-based startup L is B Corporation, whose name stands for ‘Life is Beautiful.’  The startup’s CEO/founder Taisuke Yokoi was previously working with Just Systems which is known for having developed one of the most used pronunciation-based Chinese character input systems for the Japanese language. His experience at that company contributes a lot to developing the SEE (social emotion engine) which makes it possible for the app to understand what kind of emotion a user has by analyzing the words in his or her tweet.

The engine previously could only handle Japanese tweets, but to tackle the English language, the startup set up a new lab in Montreal, Canada, a city that sits on two language communities in English and French.  With the English version, they are planning to expand their business in the South East Asia region, and I’ve heard that Mr. Yokoi would like to set up another local office in Singapore to develop a Chinese version which may attract the large number of Twitter users in the region.

Last year in June, Feel On was given the first prize at SF New Tech Japan Night, which is a one-night pitch event in San Francisco for Japanese startups who want to be more global.

Note: Mr. Yokoi’s father passed away last week. Our thoughts are with him and his family.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re pretty happy that our blog has grown so much over the past year, now capable of publishing more often about a diverse range of topics and regions. But surprisingly some folks find it annoying because we tweet so frequently from our official Twitter account.

Of course, it’s natural that our flow of news cannot possibly suit everyone’s preference. For some it’s too much; for others, perhaps too little. For those who find it too heavy, we’d like to invoke the wise Clay Shirky here, who once noted that “there is no information overload, there is only filter failure.” So for our blog, we have made an effort provide RSS feeds [1] for every author, tag, and category just so readers can pick and choose what they want to read and follow. You can check it out on our subscriptions page.

Our blog is small, but we’d like try to give readers the best experience that is achievable, but still within our resources. We also know that it isn’t possible to please everyone, but we’d still like to hear from you about how we can make our distribution process easier for you to consume.

We write about tech and startups in Asia. Our website domain name says it all. If this is an area that you’re interested in, then follow and learn with us. We’re having a lot of fun writing about it, and we hope you’re enjoying the ride thus far too! But do let us know if you have suggestions on how we might improve.

Does this look like fog to you? Taken in Beijing in Spring, 2012

The AP is reporting this afternoon that a senior Chinese environmental official has told foreign embassies in Beijing to stop reporting on the capital’s pollution levels. The message is a very clear reference to the US Embassy’s @BeijingAir Twitter feed, which reports real-time pollution levels for PM2.5 (the smallest and most dangerous particles) and Ozone every hour.

The Twitter account has been an annoyance to China more or less since its advent, especially given that Beijing does not publish its own PM 2.5 pollution data, although the government has agreed to begin next year. This newest admonishment is probably the result of Beijing being afraid that the US Twitter feed will provide data and health assessments that differ from China’s own, which is almost certain to be true. Beijing’s pollution standards differ vastly from standards in the US and Europe, and PM 2.5 levels considered quite unhealthy overseas are acceptable under China’s standards. In fact, Chinese officials said as much in their overtures to embassies to stop reporting pollution data:

Wu [a senior environmental official] said it isn’t fair to judge Chinese air by American standards because China is a developing country. He noted that the U.S. has gradually made its environmental guidelines more stringent over time.

The standard China uses “takes into account the level of our current stage of development,” Wu said.

The US Embassy is not likely to care about this or to shut down its Twitter feed. Nor are lung cancer or any of the other deadly diseases associated with long-term PM 2.5 particle exposure likely to care much what “stage of development” China is at. Indeed, lung cancer rates in Beijing have risen by a terrifying 60 percent over the past decade even while smoking rates remained the same.

But the real issue Beijing is likely concerned about is the degree to which this data may become accessible to the Chinese public in the era of mobile internet. We’ve written already about one Chinese app that takes data from the US Twitter feed and makes it accessible — and easier to understand — for Chinese audiences on Android. That’s bad enough on its own (it’s clear the government doesn’t want to publicize any PM 2.5 data and the general feeling is that it agreed to only as a result of growing public pressure this fall), but it will be even more embarrassing next year when the government begins publishing its own data.

Imagine this: a Chinese user reads the daily pollution levels in a Chinese paper (“healthy”), but then flips on his or her smartphone and checks an app connected to the US feed that tells a different story (“hazardous”). That makes the government look bad, and it’s probably why environmental officials are whining that the US’s Twitter feed is unfair.

Despite the obviousness of the truth — Beijing’s toxic haze is there for everyone to see — the government prefers to deflect discussion of the problem, and in fact the haze is often called “fog” rather than “smog” or “pollution” in Chinese media. But increasingly, a plethora of apps that feed off the US Twitter feed give Chinese smartphone users access to the same grim information expats have been sighing (and then coughing) about for years.

[AP via Asian Correspondent]

Photo: euronews.com

Indonesia’s Twitter timeline in May was filled with various topics and themes. But the National Education Day on May 2nd as well as Lady Gaga were the top trends last month. Indonesians were tweeting about their hopes, suggestions, and criticisms for Indonesia’s education system, and its always promising to see the public involved in such an important discussion.

Meanwhile Lady Gaga also filled the timeline last month because of her concert fiasco which at the end was cancelled which disappointed all her ‘Little Monsters’ in Indonesia.

As her concert neared its scheduled date, more Islamic hardliners groups in Indonesia rallied against her. After much negotiation and lengthy process, the Lady Gaga management team decided to cancel the concert which was going to be held today. This made a lot of Indonesians disappointed and angry with the government because of how powerless they are compared to the hardline groups.

Accoring to SalingSilang, other popular keywords in May also included Indonesian Idol participant Dera who was eliminated, another participant called Deon was also frequently mentioned. People were also actively discussing the much-anticipated, The Avengers movie. The movie picked up more steam on Twitter as Indonesia opened its first IMAX studio at Gandaria City Mall, Jakarta.

[Source: SalingSilang]

The website is quite simple. You can enter the name and email address of a person with signs of depression. The person with symptoms of depression will be notified by email that a friend is concerned. The email comes with a general survey about depression and tips about how to get better. By answering the survey the individual finds out whether they really are depressed or not.

Utsuppo was created by U2plus, a medical community for battling depression. The founder went through depression himself in the past, leading to his current efforts to help and support people with similar problems. He sees it as essential that as a society, we not miss the first signs of depression in those around us. And this is exactly what Utsuppo aims to do.

The website was created in just a week with help of Liverty, a group of people with a mission to develop as many creative web service and projects as possible. The group is lead by a serial entrepreneur in Tokyo, Kazuma Ieiri. The whole project of Utsuppo started when the founder of U2plus pitched his idea to Mr. Ieiri, who is now an investor as well.

A fresh snapshot of Asia’s social media landscape reveals which service dominates in each country – and it’s especially good news for Facebook, which has added more than 20 million users across Asia in the past six months.

The infographic and its stats were put together by the Singapore-based branding and PR agency WeAreSocial. It points out that Facebook now has more than 192 million users across the 24 main Asian wired nations.

The only countries that prefer a different social network are China (where Tencent’s (HKG:0700) QZone dominates), Vietnam (Zing), South Korea (CyWorld), and Japan (Twitter). In the latter country, Japanese social network Mixi has been struggling and is now getting swamped by both Facebook and Twitter.

In China, Tencent’s Qzone looks monstrously huge, but its user numbers have dropped by five million since we last checked on the Asian social media scene last year. That squeeze will have been caused by increasingly popular microblogs (weibo), such as those from Sina and Tencent itself.

Here’s the current view across the region, with the newest site-reported stats that are available for each country (click to enlarge):

Check out which social networks are the most popular in each nation in Asia (May 2012) - Click to enlarge.

[Source: WeAreSocial blog]

Before we go any further, I should tell you that this solution probably isn’t for everyone. It involves a lot of compromises, and the end result is far from perfect. It is also going to be a little difficult if you can’t read at least a little Chinese. But if you really want to be able to post to Twitter from anywhere, so long as you get mobile phone reception, here’s a roundabout way to do it. (Note that you could also use a similar workflow to update other blocked social media sites, like Facebook).

Step 1: Register a new Sina Weibo Account

You can use any Sina Weibo account, of course, but I wanted to keep my personal account separate and create an account that was used only as a channel to feed posts to Twitter. Also, for this to work, you’ll need to bind your phone to the weibo account, and you may not want your phone number and ID info associated with your “real” weibo account. So I set up a whole new Weibo account, and I recommend you do too. Make a few quick test posts to help with the next step. Then click on your account name, which is on the upper right side of the screen in the top nav bar. When that page loads, there will be a number right after “weibo.com/” in the URL bar. Copy that number. (In the illustration below I’ve blurred my personal details, but you get the idea.)

Step 2: Find your RSS feed link

For some reason, Sina makes it very difficult to find the RSS feed for your weibo account. Luckily, someone else has created a tool to help us do just that. Click on this link. On that page, fill in the number you copied in step one, and then hit the submit button as illustrated below.

If you’ve done that correctly, you should get something that looks like the image below. See that link I highlighted in red? That’s your RSS feed, so copy that link. Click on it to double-check it’s working properly. It will look like a mess of code, but somewhere in there you should see the text of the test messages you posted to your Weibo in Step 1.

Step 3: Set up an Ifttt Task Using Your RSS link and Twitter account

Now, head over to Ifttt with the RSS link you copied in Step 2. I already have an Ifttt account set up and it’s connected to my Twitter account, but if you haven’t done that, you’ll need to set up an account. (It’s easy and in English, so you shouldn’t need my help with that). Once you’ve got your account set up, create a new task. For the “this” section of the task, choose “RSS Feed” and then paste in the link you copied in step 2. For the “that” section of the task, choose Twitter and ‘post a new tweet’ (you may have to take a second to connect your Twitter account to ifttt if you haven’t done so already). All you need it to post is the content of each Weibo update, so in the “What’s happening?” field you can delete {{EntryTitle}}{{EntryURL}} and replace them with {{EntryContent}}.

Once you’re finished, save the task, and then back on the main page click on the arrow to inspect the task you’ve just created. If you’ve done it right, it should look like this:

If it does, congratulations, you’re on to Step 4!

Step 4: Bind Your Phone to Your Weibo Account

Now, go back to weibo and click in the top right corner to access your account settings menu. If you’re not sure how to do that, see the image below:

Once you’re into your settings, you need to click on the “bind phone” option along the navigation column on the left. It’s the one with the little image of a phone next to it:

That then takes you to the page where you actually connect your phone to your Weibo account. Fill your mobile phone number into the text box as shown below, and then click the green button to proceed.

The next page will give you a confirmation code, and a number to text that code to. Text the first green number to the second green number, as illustrated below. You may also want to store that second number in your contacts list as it is the number you will send text all future posts to.

You should get a couple reply texts more or less immediately, confirming that your phone is now bound to the weibo account (see below). These texts also tell you that in the future, texts sent to that number will be posted to your weibo. Give it a try by sending a couple test texts. Here’s what it should look like:

If everything is set up right, you should get a confirmation message saying your weibo has been posted relatively immediately, and if you look online on weibo, you should see it there. It will be slower to appear on Twitter, with a delay of between 10-30 minutes in my experience so far, but keep an eye on your twitter and be sure your tweet finally appears there. Here’s my test message, which has gone all the way through this circuitous system and arrived on Twitter:

This is a test of the emergency tweet system. SMS to Weibo to Ifttt to Twitter

— Charlie Custer (@ChinaGeeks) April 27, 2012

Bonus Steps

That’s all you need to do, however, if you want to be extra secure, it’s a good idea to keep your new Weibo account a secret. Since Weibo is censored, it’s possible your message could be deleted before Ifttt picks up on it, especially if your Weibo account is high-profile or if you mention any “sensitive” keywords. So keep your new account a secret, and if you need to talk sensitive stuff (keeping in mind that Sina has access to whatever information is connected to your phone) do what Chinese net users do, and use mispellings or code. That should keep your post up long enough to be noticed by Ifttt and posted to Twitter. If you want to be really thorough, you can always go back into your weibo account and delete posts after they’ve gone up on Twitter.

This post was updated at 5:36 pm on April 27, see the text marked “Update” for details.

I’m not into politics but I know social media has played a huge part in Singapore’s last election. It looks like Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, has joined the Facebook party — just an hour ago. The move to Facebook and Twitter is refreshing, but not quite a surprise, given that a number of key national leaders across the world have already put themselves on social media, including Taiwan’s president, Japan’s Prime Minister Office, Malaysia’s Prime Minister, and uh… Yam Ah Mee. Lee Hsien Loong’s page is quite empty so far, with just a lighthearted welcome post that reads:

Hello Everybody,

Welcome to my Facebook page!

The social media have changed the way we live, work and play, especially the way we connect with one another. Societies, communities and governments all over the world will not be the same again.

Many of my colleagues have been using social media, including Facebook. They have encouraged me to start my own Facebook page. Having watched them, I have decided to join the fun.

I hope you will find my Facebook page interesting. I will use it to talk about some of the things I am doing, and thinking about, but I would also like to hear from you. Let’s use this page to help shape ideas and understanding of what we can do together to improve our lives.

As a Facebook newbie, I would appreciate your advice, suggestions and, most of all, your patience. My staff will help me maintain this page, but I will try to post as often as I can myself. I will sign off my own posts with the initials “LHL”. If you wish to write in Malay, Chinese or Tamil, please feel free to do so.

I hope you like (and Like) what you read. Thank you very much for your support.

LHL

Nice move with the emoticons and short name, PM LHL. We welcome you to Facebook and Twitter. Oh and if you can, give us a like on our Facebook page, LHL, here. I will follow you on Twitter too.

Hat tip and thanks: Gerald Ho

Photo: communication-solutions.tmcnet.com

Twitter announced today that it has rolled out brand pages for companies in Japan, following up on the feature’s initial launch in the US last December. The first companies to get branded pages in Japan will be mobile carrier NTT Docomo (@docomo), Lawson’s convenience stores (@akiko_lawson), and Warner Entertainment Japan (@warnerjp).

Branded pages include wide header images, as well as custom stylings like logos and taglines. You can also promote a selected tweet to the top of your timeline, and many brands have used this real estate to pin promotional videos. There are more details about this over at fly.twitter.com.

Now, branded Twitter pages aren’t quite like branded Facebook pages. Given the amount of third party interfaces there are for Twitter, it’s uncertain how many people actually see these fancy branded pages. I know I very rarely browse Twitter using its web interface, and I’d imagine that many other users are the same.

According to The Next Web, the branded pages require that you have $25,000 already in Twitter’s ad ecosystem. I’m not certain if that stipulation applies to Japan as well or not.

Figures from Semiotics claimed that Twitter had about nearly 30 million Twitter accounts at the beginning of this year. That’s just behind Brazil at number two. As you might expect, the US is listed as having the most Twitter accounts online with 107 million as of last January.

Who’s next in line to get branded Twitter pages? Brazil seems like the most logical choice, but both Indonesia and India are big Twitter nations as well, and might also be among the next countries to get the feature, assuming it doesn’t soon get a global roll out.

[Via the always excellent @Akky over on Asiajin]