There’s a lot of e-commerce on this week’s list of selections from our bloggers, plus a nice mix of inspiring founders’ stories. Let’s dive in:

Youshen’s pick: Mobile Commerce Worth $4.29 Billion in Q1 in China, But One Company Dominates

Here we see iResearch’s leader-board of China’s $4.29 billion mobile commerce (“m-commerce”) market. Note that the desktop shopping experience is still largely prevalent in China. But now that mobile shopping is a bit better established in the nation, I am personally expecting a huge leap in profits later this year with China’s upcoming 4G launch.

Steven’s two picks: Rocket Internet’s Fashion E-Store Zalora Scores $100 Million in Funding and MediaCorp Invests $40 Million in VIP Fashion Site Reebonz

I’m going to be greedy and pick two this week. That’s because we simply can’t ignore two massive rounds of funding for a pair of well-established e-commerce sites in Southeast Asia. The total amount for these two is $140 million, making it a bumper week – and a big boost – for e-commerce in the region. It’s also interesting that they’re both clothing-oriented stores. Hopefully some of the VC wealth will later be spread across some smaller startup e-stores, not just centralized on the biggest names.

Minghao’s pick: 9 Indonesian E-Commerce Players: We’re All Doing Fine!

After Multiply’s demise a while back, there was general concern about whether the e-commerce industry in Indonesia is really doing ok and if the demise will cause a ripple effect of spooking investors off Indonesia e-tailers, causing other sites to go down with it. But with Zalora’s recent $100 million round of investment and all these positive growth figures in this story, it is a timely reply to quash the skepticism.

Vanessa’s pick: SpeakingMax.cn Co-Founder: Don’t Quit School For a Startup Unless It’s Worth It

We’re seeing a lot of encouraging news in the Singapore startup scene, from Reeboz receiving $40 million from Singaporean media giant Mediacorp, to Fatfish Medialab announcing its first investments and JFDI unveiling its newest graduates.

But all these are not done without the courage of individuals who have stepped out of their comfort zone to embark on the entrepreneurial route. A first in our ‘student entrepreneurship series’, we speak with SpeakingMax.cn co-founder Jason Lin, a Singaporean student who has temporarily stopped his studies to build up his web business in Beijing.

Minh’s pick: Pakistan’s Startup Ecosystem Has So Much Potential (INFOGRAPHIC)

I love to hear more about startup ecosystems west of Southeast Asia and East Asia, so it’s nice to see an infographic that gives us a better idea of the startup scene in Pakistan. For more insight into Pakistan, I recommend you also take a look at our latest articles from guest writers here and an interesting Quora post that has surfaced over the past week.

Enricko’s & Willis’ pick: Indonesia Jatis Group Co-Founder Shares His Two-Decade-Long Startup Journey

Enricko: When is it time to say that you’re ready to move on from being an entrepreneur? Izak Jenie doesn’t stop being one even after building more than ten companies in two decades – though most of them were failures, admits Izak. Now not only has he become one of the most respected guys in the tech industry, but he is still very down to earth when telling his story. Respect!

Willis: Yes, Izak Janie’s story as an entrepreneur is refreshingly humble and inspiring. If you are an entrepreneur, give it a read – especially when you’re feeling down in your startup roller-coaster ride.

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Izak Jenie (right) with other Nexian Selular Group Directors

At 43 years old, Izak Jenie is still talking about new business ideas and starting projects. He just can’t stop. This is a man who has started more than ten companies in Indonesia, beginning at age nineteen. Most of them failed, but those that survived are renowned companies in Indonesia today and are generating tens of millions of dollars in yearly revenue. Some very successful companies Izak started include Jatis Group, Jatis Mobile, and Metrotech Makmur Sejahtera (MMS).

Coming from an average income family, Izak was hungry for success. His first startup was a computer graphics company launched in 1989 during his university days. Computers were not widely available then and there was no internet. Izak was lucky enough to get a PC at home and he subsequently taught himself digital graphic design. Being one of the first few guys in Indonesia with this skill, he got lucrative projects from advertising firms. He was able to pay his tuition fees with some cash left over to treat friends for meals. However, competition grew and his margins thinned. He got out of the business in its fourth year.

The early web

After graduation, his friends were able to get high-paying corporate jobs quickly, but it took Izak nine months to get a job as a graphic designer because most companies hired based on academic results. He worked for one year but realized that he didn’t like the routine corporate job. While at the office, Izak would often work on other tech projects that interest him. One was called the Free World Dial-Up service, it would allow people to call overseas using the internet and save on overseas call charges. It’s basically exactly what Skype does today, but Izak was working on that concept in 1995.

That same year, he read a book titled Going Digital by Nicholas Negroponte and it made him realize the world was going to change. He quit his job and started an online bookstore. Concurrently, he also started a few other companies with different partners. These startups all failed. Poor timing and partnership disputes were the causes of their demise; for example, the online bookstore flopped because there weren’t many people online in the mid-nineties and almost no one did their shopping there.

Despite failing numerous times, Izak never gave up. Together with Jusuf Sjariffudin and Ishak Surjana, he co-founded Jatis Group, an IT consulting company in 1997.

One of his early employees there said:

Before joining Jatis, I asked Izak why this (Jatis) will be a success? Izak answered nonchalantly that he had failed in so many previous companies and in each failure, he learnt something from it. As such, he had already learnt how to fail. Jatis will not be a failure.

And indeed, Jatis became a hugely successful company. It provides IT solutions to banks, telcos, payment companies and other corporations. Its products include internet banking, mobile banking, and tax systems. At one point, more than 80 percent of Indonesia’s mutual funds traders were using Jatis’s trading platform. The company started with ten employees and eventually grew to over 500 by the end of the third year. In the same year, it also received $10 million from 3i, a well established VC firm from the UK, for it to expand regionally to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines.

Going mobile

In 2002, together with Erik Ridzal, Izak started Jatis Mobile, a subsidiary company under Jatis Group. Jatis Mobile deals with ringtones, location-based services and mobile content. As he already had good partnerships with local telcos through their work with Jatis Group, Jatis Mobile was able to make lucrative partnerships with telcos and was profitable from day one. Jatis’ group revenue had already hit $40 million.

In 2010, Izak started Metrotech Makmur Sejahtera (MMS). MMS’s core business is to build a messaging application on Nexian mobile devices, which are hugely popular in Indonesia. Izak brought in Nexian’s owner as a partner and together they launched Nexian Messaging. The platform attracted five million users in eight months, half of which were active users. Now, it is recording more than three billion messages sent per month and is still growing twenty percent month-on-month. In 2011, Singapore’s Si2i acquired a majority share of Nexian Group for $175 million.

Advice for young entrepreneurs

Izak says his failures are the cornerstone of the success of his latest three companies. Some key things he learned from those failures:

Getting good partners for startup is crucial. I like Warren Buffet’s investment theory for this. If you know from the outside that there may be trouble, then don’t get involved. Because once you get in, it’s difficult to get out. Similarly, in finding partners, if you foresee potential problems in working with them, then don’t get started.

I wish I had mentors in my early days. That way, I could have avoided some failures and attained success earlier. After going through so much, I can now easily think through the whole business cycle and identify potential pitfalls and opportunities. That comes from experience and it is what young entrepreneurs lack.

Managing expectations and cash-flow is important. You should always discuss with the team about the business outlook. Whether it will reach profitability in six months, one year or three years, we need to discuss it upfront. With expectations set, people are then able to plan their finances and focus on the actual work. If not, financial problems can be brought back to the family and cause tension among the team and their families. If you cannot meet your expectations and you make families suffer, then you should stop and go back to a corporate job.

When starting on something, I always like to think and work on something new. It’s a bit risky but that is what entrepreneurship is all about. If you do it right and if you are focused enough, you will get somewhere. Nobody is stupid enough to start a business to fail, if you fail you are not focused enough. Many entrepreneurs already know the plan to succeed, but along the way, they fall for distractions to make quick money. In my twenty-plus years of experience as an entrepreneur, I met all kinds of entrepreneurs: the very calm ones, the very aggressive ones, all kinds of them. Regardless of the style, those who got somewhere are those who are highly focused.

Izak is currently still the main man at MMS. Despite the success, he just doesn’t seem to stop; he co-founded a new startup, M-saku, a mobile payment system for Visa cardholders in Indonesia. The kind of resilience he has shown when times are hard, and the passion he has exhibited through his 25 years of entrepreneurship, are exemplary. This is what young entrepreneurs in Asia should learn from: to see entrepreneurship as a long-term journey rather than gunning for a quick exit. To help younger entrepreneurs, Izak dedicates some of his time to be a mentor at Founders Institute Jakarta.

Izak Jenie (third from right) with some of the Jatis team during a dinner.

This was a week dominated by big money, big user numbers, and major monetization moves. And those are the six hottest Asia tech stories that have been chosen by seven of our bloggers:

Minh’s pick: ‘China’s Silicon Valley’ Has More Startups Now Than Ever Before

What can I say? Being from Silicon Valley, I love news that compares Silicon Valley with Asia. And if any one country is going to contend with the Valley, it’s going to be China. And more specifically, the Zhongguancun district of Beijing. That’s where, as Charlie notes, a report has cited that at “the end of 2011 there were 4,243 startups in the area”. That’s huge. I did some preliminary searching and I can’t find Silicon Valley numbers, but 4,000 is well over the number of startups in my database for Vietnam, which doesn’t even break one thousand. Suffice it to say, it’s evidence of China’s bullish startup growth and a highly competitive atmosphere.

Wills’ and Charlie’s pick: Alibaba Gets More Social, Takes Stake in Sina Weibo for $586 Million

Willis: This week’s biggest news in Asia has to be Alibaba’s investment in Sina Weibo. Alibaba’s $586 million investment values Weibo at more than $3.2 billion and it is just so exciting to see how the two companies can give birth to a win-win partnership. It didn’t take too long for Sina Weibo and Alibaba to start working together, though. I look forward to see how Weibo/social commerce will flourish under Alibaba’s guidance.

Charlie: I have to agree with Willis, this is the biggest story of the week by far. Alibaba’s valuation is very generous, but there is a lot of potential there for Alibaba and the company has plenty of money to throw around anyway. Expect to see more targeted ads and more unique integrations as the companies get more time to work together on monetization of Weibo. That’s something Sina has struggled with, and Alibaba could just be its savior.

Steven’s pick: China’s Top Video Sites Reveal Hundreds of Millions of Mobile Users, Start Race to Monetize Them

Yes, that Weibo-Alibaba news was massive, but for the sake of diversity I’ll choose a different story. This week, both of China’s top two video sites revealed precisely how many mobile users they have – and it’s a lot. With state-controlled TV being so butt-achingly dull, video sites like Youku and iQiyi are great places for Chinese netizens to view things that they actually want to see – like recent movies and the latest dramas – in a legal way. Of course, a shift to mobile viewership presents new monetization challenges.

Minghao’s pick: KakaoTalk’s Growth Chart: Hitting 90 Million Users Soon

I’m a fan of the chat apps battle in Asia. Since 2012, we have seen messaging apps from China, Japan, and Korea expanding across the continent to acquire users. Now we have glimpses of how the battle is going so far. It is disclosed that Kakao has 89 million users, Line 150 million and Wechat over 300 million, 40 million of whom are overseas. These numbers are small compared to Asia’s population, and with the smartphone penetration rate still low in most Southeast Asia countries, this battle for users will continue for the next few years – and it will just get more fiery.

Andrew’s pick: Line is Growing Faster Than Ever, Now Up to 150 Million Users

It’s an amazing feat to grow from 50 million users to 100 millions users in just ten months – and then see growth accelerate even faster to this new number. What really impresses me is Line’s international influence and how fast it’s growing outside of Japan. While the rivals are still heavily dependent on each of their domestic markets, LINE’s global strategy might have just granted them a slight advantage in this chat app battle.

Youshen’s pick: Hanoi vs Saigon: Weighing Up Vietnam’s Two Biggest Startup Cities

With Vietnam’s increasingly vibrant tech scene, my teammate Minh has provided a cultural roadmap on the market nuances between Ho Chi Minh city and Hanoi. Geographies aside, it reminds me of the synergy between Jakarta and Bandung in Indonesia. Minh’s demonstration of success stories like VNG helped me understand the cities’ influence on both corporate cultures and business makeup.

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The three-day event heeds the model motto of “failing fast, succeed faster”. It will impart lean startup skills, focusing on the process and validation, such as identifying the problem, testing the prototype, and eliminating barriers to a viable business model. Some of the more specific topics that will be covered during the workshop include customer development, lean UX, landing page design, and how you can develop experiments to get your startup ideas validated. Attendees are expected to walk away with the know-how to build revolutionary products – and products that people will want.

So what sets LeanTOKYO apart from other workshops? Ariba Jahan, global coordinator for Lean Startup Machine Tokyo, tells us:

The key tool people will be using is the Validation Board, this is what makes us so unique. We don’t only educate others on lean methodology, we make sure you get to walk through the process and get your ideas validated.Then you can apply this learning towards any and every future ideas. LSM was selected to be in TechStars for this innovative Validation Board. The Validation Board allows users to test their startup ideas before exhausting time or money. It allows users to strategize their goals, develop experiments and monitor progress. Then, they can make faster decisions, improve team accountability and build not only better products, but products that will actually solve an existing problem.

The event also aims to bring some of the best practices of Silicon Valley, adapting it to the heart of Tokyo. Some of the mentors at LeanTOKYO include:

• Hiro Maeda, managing partner at Open Network Lab
• Toshihisa Wanami, founder at Lean Startup Japan
• Ian McFarland, group CTO at Digital Garage and founder and president at Neo
• Yoshi Oikawa, CTO at Salesforce.com Japan
• Yusuke Takahashi, founder at Appsocially
• Pieter Franken, co-founder at Safecast
• Chiaki Hayashi, co-founder at Loftwork

As this marks the inaugural workshop in Tokyo, tickets are expected to sell out fast. So for interested participants – as long as you’re keen to learn – you can visit their website here to find out more. Better still, for Tech in Asia readers, you can enjoy 15 percent off ticket prices if you sign up here with the discount code 15leantokyo.

Got more questions? Ariba is also reachable at ariba[at]leanstartupmachine[dot]com.

PropertyGuru announced this afternoon that it has formed a strategic partnership with Far East Organization to launch a new site called Luxury Gallery showcasing Singapore’s premiere luxury residential developments.

The Luxury Gallery boasts of being a first-of-its-kind collaboration between the two powerhouses in the Singapore real estate market which aims to specifically cater to affluent local and foreign real estate investors. The new luxury site will allow luxury property buyers to browse a delectable selection of Far East Organization developments in Singapore. More information, such as a virtual tour, the location, and floorplans will also be readily available for interested buyers on the new portal.

At present, it lists four luxury Far East Organization properties on the new site. On today’s launch PropertyGuru Group CEO and co-founder Steve Melhuish said:

The launch of the Luxury Gallery forms an integral part of PropertyGuru’s ongoing strategy of growing its core business of offering property purchase options to the property seeker. Our research shows that the demand for luxury residential properties continue to rise with keen interest from new and recurring investors.

For interested investors out there, you can now register as a Luxury Gallery member here to access the materials.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get the Zomato apps from its homepage.

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

And normally in Singapore, we can easily purchase from the shop located at most local markets, but here’s an alternative for Singaporeans who would want to purchase at the comfort of their own homes: KimZua.com.

Kimzua, in Hokkien dialect when translated directly, also means gold paper. I first noticed the site when my friend told me that he ordered a paper kayak online for another friend who passed on due to cancer. He then convinced me to visit the website, which I thought would be boring and traditional with an unattractive layout, but to my surprise, I saw this:

In all honesty, I was impressed because I didn’t expect anyone to design a site with such flashy colours and a vibrant layout. After all, it’s an e-commerce site dedicated to gifts for friends in the other world (aka spirits). They sell items ranging from paper clocks and paper accessories to paper cars and paper houses. And for those busy bees or people who simply don’t know what to pack in, there are special packages available too.

Also, the team is committed to protecting the environment amidst preserving traditions. According to the site, it says:

That is why we source for alternative paper materials around the world, such as bamboo and hemp fibres, that emit less smoke during combustion. We also use recycled paper for 33% of our paper products to reduce the effect on deforestation.

It might sound bizarre to some, but hey, it’s an offline business brought online. Perhaps another noteworthy startup in the “spirit” of this post to take note of is UK-based Rent a Mourner, which supplies people to boost visitor numbers at funerals.

And for those who are interested to find out more about Kimzua.com, you can visit the site here.

Quite a few startups are trying – or have tried and failed – to crack the first-world problem of how to share and transfer images between a group of friends. You could email stuff back and forth, upload to Facebook and download some of your friends’ best snaps of you, set up a Dropbox folder, or use a wifi transfer thingy like Bump. Or a dozen other ways. Now PixBento wants to be the answer. One of our Startup Arena pitchers this afternoon, PixBento is launching into beta at this event. Users can pool and share photo albums with specific buddies across an iPhone app and a web app (pictured).

Right now, PixBento founder Kelvin Koh is pitching to our judges and explaining how it works. Before the Startup Arena pitching kicked into action, Kelvin told to me that Facebook privacy concerns – and over-complex settings – put a lot of people off sharing photos on Facebook. Plus, photos of a particular event/trip/holiday/party end up scattered and largely forgotten across the albums of numerous participants. That’s where PixBento comes in, ensuring privacy among a certain group with easy sharing and simple downloading of photos that are true keepers.

The PixBento web app – click to enlarge

As for previous failures in this genre – like the colossal cock-up of the over-funded and underwhelming Color app – Kelvin is confident of not falling into the same trap, telling me:

Well for one, apps like Color or even Albumatic – which tried to do something in similar fashion – put their money on real-time events and real-time contributions. One problem which they faced are complaints by users about strangers in the same vicinity joining their groups (due to geo-locational discovery). Apparently that is one key reason (amongst many others) that led to the downfall of Color.

One advantage we have, in relation to real-time usage, lies primarily on our web-based image collage, which we believe set our product apart from them. With a screen projection of the collage, we can see PixBento being used in public events, such as roadshows, weddings, parties, discos, etc. There are immediate engagements and gratifications from the users’ point of view.

It can also be used at any time after any event as well, whenever people get round to sharing images.

Picturing monetization

In addition to its usefulness, Kelvin explains to the judges (pictured above) that he has in mind a revenue model for both regular folks and business whereby the startup will be a platform for photo-oriented social marketing. Citing the example of how Facebook marginalizes the attempts of fans to give content to brands, he suggests PixBento as a better way for businesses and customers to push images to each other. A more positive example of social marketing is automaker Audi cleverly using fans’ photos on its Instagram feed; the idea is that this startup would make it easier for this kind of photo sharing to take place. As for monetization, brands could purchase tiered packages to allow fans to submit more photos to them.

A similar freemium model could apply to regular users, with free accounts capped at 200 uploaded photos. The startup reckons that, so long as one percent of 157 users sign up as a paying customer, it’s a model that can work – and a photo-sharing problem solved.

Once fully launched, this Singapore app is going global. Look out for the PixBento iPhone app once it launches officially. Until then, check out the brief demo video:

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

Tell My Friends recently at SXSW.

Singapore-based Tell My Friends is one of the more established young tech companies on our newest Startup Asia roster having been in beta for nearly a year. It’s a social music store for legal MP3s where users can actual earn money from referral sales of songs that you post as links to places like Facebook.

For example, if you share one of Tell My Friends’ licensed songs on Facebook, you will get S$0.21 from each purchase that results from clicking on your custom link. That could add up to a profit on the song that you yourself bought. Songs generally cost S$2, which is a bit pricier than from Apple’s iTunes Music Store, but this service brings profit-making potential for music fans. As shown in Tell My Friends’ startup pitch this afternoon, this is the revenue share:

Since my colleague looked at Tell My Friends last July, the startup has been, CEO Ben Looi tells us, focusing on content acquisition and improving its user experience ahead of a solid launch soon. Ben has also been traveling around, becoming the first Singapore Startup to get invited to pitch at Seed Forum New York last November, and more recently back in the States to exhibit as part of IDA’s Singapore Alley at the SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas.

Now Ben’s back in his native Singapore, and pitching to our knowledgable but very picky judges. We know that the startup is in talks with some labels and content providers about adding more music, but the judges will surely be wary about the significant costs involved in such a venture. Plus, as mature a market as Singapore is, some of its netizens still find that music piracy – or finding some clever way to listen to overseas services like Spotify – is more convenient for them.

As for funding, Ben explains:

We are working with Mercatus Capital to raise US$500,000, and have received a bridging amount as a convertible loan while the fund-raising is taking place.

Of that funding, they anticipate that a whopping $300,000 needs to be spent on marketing, with $50,000 for licensing content.

The panel of four judges is worried about legality as this is a sort of pyramid-like monetizing program. Ben says it’s legal in Singapore. The focus for the startup will be Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. He says there are just over 600 downloaders who’ve made use of the service so far.

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

SocialAgent.me is an online lead generation tool to help businesses find leads in the Chinese market. Based between Shenzhen, China and Hong Kong with a mix of Americans, Chinese, Canadians, they help western companies have a better chance of success in the Chinese market through leveraging Chinese social media.

Our model is a monthly subscription plan with additional lead generation packages,” says co-founder Michael Michelini. “We’re also working on live online sales workers to boost their chances of finding quality prospects.”

“Who are the customers? Who are these prospects?” asked Nobuaki Kitagawa. Mike responded that they find customers in the Chinese market through social media profile search, depending on the client’s profile.

Andrew Collins pointed out that a “fan generation” (like helping football clubs find followers in China) approach would work on an interest graph like Weibo, rather than lead/sales generation. Mike responded they complemented the Sales department of a client, not the marketing department. Since they went live, they have around 10 paying customers.

Their eclectic clients include everything from the prosaic, such as Singaporean college recruitment agencies who want to find Chinese students to apply to singapore schools and New York-based real estate sales agencies to the esoteric, such as firms that make New Zealand milk powder QR tracking systems or Mexican seafood distributors.

Jeffrey Paine asked about the sustainability of clients: Once they found the people they needed within a few months, wouldnt they exit? The stickiness, Mike responded, was in the data management backend that helped businesses maintain relationships over time.

Their future plans include expanding to other social networks – a Wechat Agent is planned for the immediate future, followed by plans for presence on Twitter and Facebook.

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

“I wanted to create a social network that was clean, crisp and fresh,” he says. Clearly many share his inclination. Since its soft launch last year, Xunta has nearly 60,000 users around mainland China.

Nobuaki Kitagawa asked how many of these users were “active”. Sense responded that all growth was organic, and driven by users rather than any marketing. 30% of the users were active as of April 2013.

Xunta also has a rich mobile app, and an “Offline Card” with a QR code you can give to someone of interest you meet at a public event, and connect with later. Each user gets to print upto 100 cards, and requesting more is a paid service.

Xunta’s user base is spreading across Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and Japan, but largely with the Chinese diaspora in those countries. Sense expects more will sign up once the English version, which is coming soon, is launched.

Xunta’s competitors include Hong Kong-based Hornet and mainland China’s Blued, though Sense says both are very niche in an already niche market.

Xunta’s revenue model allows for paid premium services, including perks similar to dating giant OKCupid’s ‘A-List.’
Jeffrey Paine asked what these premium features were. Sense responded that these included a better search algorithm, and the ability to send voice messages to other users.

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

Regular Tech In Asia readers and craft enthusiasts might already be familiar with Hong Kong based Lots of Buttons, now the world’s largest button site. It hopes to expand to other craft items in the future, starting with beads and ribbons.

Lots of Buttons doesn’t just smother you with choice. It’s also the cheapest supplier, both on and offline, and features a slick frontend to help crafters easily find the right size, colour and shape (they’re a picky bunch). Currently focused on the US crafts market, they hope to “market in English, ship cheaper than competitors and be close to China,” where these materials are manufactured.

“We do this by disintermediating the entire value chain and going straight to the factory,” says founder Ken Lee. “Wholesaling and storage adds a lot to the cost of the buttons.”

Launched in June 2012, the firm is almost cash-break even.

“Two features we would really be keen on after getting an angel round investment,” Ken told us in an earlier interview and reiterated on stage, “is to offer people who buy our buttons and crafts materials the ability to post back on our site to sell it, similar to services like Etsy.” Lots of Buttons currently occupies what Ken calls a “sweet spot” combining low prices and broad selection.

Andrew Collins asked about the sustainability of the site’s supplier networks. Ken answered that these networks were well established now, and their supplier relations strong. Nobuaki Kitagawa asked for clarification on the site’s price competitiveness, to which Ken pointed out their proximity to manufacturers in China.

“I bet a lot of you are thinking, we should do zips…we should do socks!” joked judge Jeffrey Paine.

Too late. Apparently ‘Lots of Zippers’ has already been registered as an domain name.

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

Due to unforeseen circumstances, our original speaker, Le Hong Minh is unable to attend the conference. But we’re fortunate and honored to have  Jamie Lin, founding partner of appWorks Ventures to speak on the Taiwanese startup scene.

#10:35: Jamie: On building appWorks, Jamie had this in mind: what kind of resource would I want my VCs to bring to the table?

#10:38: Jamie: appWorks has both incubator and accelerator programs. During each batch they will incubate for six months, and then do business development for them. They will then link them up with suitable investors. Think of them as early stage investors. They see themselves as VC built for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs.

#10:40: Willis: What are the interesting startups in Taiwan?

#10:41: Jamie: Gamesofa is one, and was generating US$30 million per year.

#10:43 Willis: Who are the more popular investors in Taiwan?

For the past ten years, the VC industry is not growing much. We have around 120 GPs, 200 LPs in Taiwan.

#10:44: Willis: Biggest challenge facing entrepreneurs in Taiwan

#10:45: Jamie: The government. The people are lamenting that they should be more like Singapore. For instance, it is very difficult in Taiwanese corporate structure to give shared equity.

#10:46: Jamie: Second problem is that there is no third party online payment service like PayPal.

#10:47: Jamie: Third problem is Wimax adoption VS 4G LTE.

#10:50: Willis: What are the possible trends to ride on in Taiwan?

#10:51: Jamie: Smartphone penetration. Taiwan has around 50 percent smartphone adoption rate. And the ratio of the number of iOS devices to Androids is 1:3.

With this smartphone trend, gaming becomes huge. From the growth of smartphones, gaming can ride on this trend. It is about US$1 to 2 billion market we are looking at.

#10:52: Jamie: For entrepreneurs looking at Taiwan, e-commerce in Taiwan is really good. It is a good environment and platform.

#10:54: Jamie: In Taiwan, Jiaotong University is known to produce the most entrepreneurs. If you are looking to hire good quality engineers, you can look at Tsinghua University. Taida is known for business talents.

#10:56: Jamie: Taiwan, compared to US, is a small place. 90 percent of the more successful startups are in Taipei.

#10:57: Willis: Is it normal for Taiwanese companies to expand into China?

#10:58: Jamie: China is seemingly easier for Taiwanese startups to enter. But the cost of doing business in China is increasing at 20 – 30%, increasing the barriers to entry. It is typically not a move for Taiwanese companies to move into China. Expanding into SEA is relatively easier.

#10:59: Jamie: Doing business in China is really different. What is being said could mean something else. In Taiwan, people start off with a whitelist of companies to work with, whereas the in China, it is usually assumed that companies are bad (they start with a blacklist of companies), and slowly work their way to become a whitelist of companies.

#11:02: Willis: Why would Taiwanese choose SEA market, when it is so fragmented?

#11:03: Jamie: The GDP growth for a lot of SEA countries are actually much higher than China. It presents a good deal of opportunities and challenges for Taiwanese entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are very eager to learn about the region, in fact.

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.

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A little more than two years after the colossal Japan earthquake and tsunami disaster of March 2011, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has let its Street View cars venture into the Fukushima exclusion zone town of Namie­-machi (pictured) for the first time. Its residents, however, are still not allowed to return due to the meltdown at the nearby Fukushima nuclear power plant caused by the freak wave that swept ashore.

The Google Street View cars capture eerie scenes of collapsed buildings still in a heap in the badly damaged main streets of Namie­-machi. There’s not a person in sight:

Click this or images below to enlarge

Located one kilometre inland is the fishing boat pictured below. In a blog post written by local mayor Mr. Tamotsu Baba that will soon go up on the official Google Japan blog, he points out that “nearby Ukedo harbor once proudly boasted 140 fishing boats and 500 buildings.” Few of either remain.

Near Ukedo harbor

In the vicinity is Ukedo elementary school, where Street View cameras have ventured on foot to capture the abandoned and wrecked classrooms:

Inside an abandoned classroom

It’s a painful yet poignant reminder that Namie­-machi and Fukushima are trapped in a time-warp, frozen in convulsed horror in the day of the massive natural disaster that assaulted the land and seas.

This is part of Google’s Build the Memories project that we looked at back in December 2011. At that time, the Street View cars had captured the devastation caused by the tsunami in badly-hit Miyagi prefecture. But until now, the hauntingly desolate streets around Fukushima had been off-limits. We notice that the street snaps of the whole area haven’t been refreshed for this project, so you’re limited to viewing certain areas, such as the two places we’ve linked above.

In the days and weeks after the disaster, a great many initiatives used technology to try help victims of the great Tohoku quake in some way, such as with ‘person finder’ videos on YouTube, through digital photography, and a site that connected Japanese who’d lost their homes with a host family.

Shortly after Singapore-based LoveByte announced passing the 100,000 downloads mark, the Korean-made couples messaging app Between tells us that it has 200,000 downloads across Southeast Asia and over 2.9 million downloads globally. Co-founder, Edward Keonwoo Lee, said that Between’s growth in Southeast Asia has been a surprise package for them. He told me:

Southeast Asia growth was actually very organic. We weren’t able to do any serious marketing or business development in the area yet. But, since the numbers are growing so healthy, we are actually thinking about studying the market a bit further.

VCNC, the maker of Between, recently raised $2.8 million and is expanding fast in Japan which is currently its first priority on its market expansion to-do list. If the Between team were to really come down south for Southeast Asia, that might spell trouble for the folks at LoveByte. Or maybe not, depending on how fast and well LoveByte can localize, expand, and dominate each key country in Southeast Asia. It ain’t an easy region to conquer.

Also read: 11 Hot Mobile Messaging Apps from Asia

In an e-commerce market as huge as Vietnam’s with over 30 big e-commerce players and hundreds of smaller players, logistics and collecting payments are big problems. That’s why Giao Hang Nhanh (GHN), which means “Fast Delivery”, an e-commerce delivery and logistics business, has risen out of this teeming gang of online shops. As far as e-commerce delivery goes, GHN is the first company that comes to mind for most Vietnamese e-merchants. GHN does two things really well: delivery and payment.

I interviewed GHN’s CEO Luong Duy Hoai, to get the scoop on how GHN is doing and what’s up next. The service they offer is quite complex but it solves so many problems at once that it’s worth looking really closely at the model. But first, some numbers.

GHN currently serves over 800 online merchants, over 20 of those merchants are larger scale B2C e-commerce sites like Tiki.vn, Project Lana, MuaFast, Nha Sach Phuong Nam, and Foci, to name a few. Most of GHN’s merchant base comes out of the group buying industry. So far, GHN has delivered over 60,000 orders since its founding early last year, and has 60 staff at last count. Currently, GHN handles over 1.5 billion VND (over $70,000) of transactions per week for its clients and has over 200 million VND ($9,500) of revenue per month.

For merchants, GHN offers three things:

1. 2 to 3 day delivery for 10,000 VND ($0.50)
2. Next-day delivery for 15,000 VND ($0.70)
3. Same-day delivery for 20,000 VND ($1.00)

All these delivery times can be requested from the merchant or customer side. GHN takes orders from multiple merchants, synthesizes them into manageable routes via an internal logistical system and gets them to the specified customers on time via its own fleet of delivery men.

How can a company that serves over 800 merchants, and delivers to 600 to 700 people daily, guarantee anything under 3 days delivery? It’s GHN’s sophisticated logistical system. Currently, e-commerce sites in Vietnam who are not using GHN generally deliver their coupons and goods four days to a week from the initial purchase online.

The logistical infrastructure at work

At first, GHN hired coordinators to develop routes for their trained motorbike delivery guys. These guys would look at routes and orders and plan out the delivery routes for delivery men. But, according to Hoai:

The goal was always to optimize process through technology. We now have coordinators, but our system, now automates 60 percent of all the decisions. Coordinators are freed up to work on other problems. The system plans the route, catalogs the transactions, and keeps track of all the deliveries. In the beginning, we had 10 or 20 deliveries per day, that was easy for one person to organize. Now we have over 500, it’s impossible for one person to organize all that. Our system handles it all.

GHN’s biggest competitive advantage is this system. And there are basically three key solutions that GHN brings to the market:

1. The automated decision and route planner as described above.
2. An API and dashboard that allows any customer to upload orders and track them. Orders can currently be uploaded to GHN’s server by calling directly to customer service (ideal for low-tech small businesses), accessed via the dashboard, and uploading an excel file into the system. Basically, they’ve made it really easy for merchants to submit orders and have them delivered automatically according to their time preference.
3. A payment collection system that prevents delivery men from bamboozling the system and running off with the money or products. Delivery men must travel back to GHN’s cashier hubs (there are four in the Ho Chi Minh city) three times a day to return money received and get new delivery orders from the system. If delivery men do not return, the system locks them out, and does not issue out further routes or delivery protocols. All money collected is returned to merchants Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of every week.

In the GHN dashboard all merchants have to do is submit their orders and GHN takes care of the rest. Merchants can even set delivery times to six months ahead and track exactly when customers received their orders. The system even sends SMS texts to customers when a delivery man has received a delivery, thus letting them know that an order is on its way within hours.

This is a map of the locations of all of GHN’s merchants across Ho Chi Minh city. The GHN system will arrange routes along these locations.

The problems GHN solves

GHN gives e-commerce sites that use its service an edge – they’ll get their coupons or products into customer hands much faster than anybody else – but it also hits at a key chord in Vietnamese e-commerce. As Hoai says:

E-commerce is in a very early stage in Vietnam. Buyers and sellers don’t trust each other yet. And warehouses, sales channels, infrastructures, and delivery systems are still underdeveloped. Our goal is to build a trust-building service for e-commerce that can scale very big and bring Vietnam into the next level of e-commerce within the next five years. We do this with our sophisticated tracking system and rigorously training our delivery men in customer service.

E-commerce is the new bastion of Vietnam’s young population. Many people who don’t have a job in the trying Vietnamese economy look to e-commerce as an easy solution where you don’t need to set up a physical shop, just a website. And now with GHN around, you don’t even need an in-house delivery guy/team.

Hoai is third from the right.

What’s next?

Currently, the company is expanding its merchant-base and Hoai expects to be handling over 1,500 deliveries per day by the end of this month. Many people in the startup community have speculated that GHN will get into the e-commerce business itself because of its infrastructure but Hoai is adamant not it’s sticking to its area:

Actually, we’ve gotten a few offers to be bought by several e-commerce players in Vietnam, but we refused them. We’re focused very specifically on delivery and don’t want to get acquired by any partners. If we did, we would alienate all of our other merchants. This wouldn’t make sense from a business perspective.

Currently, Giao Hang Nhanh is not profitable yet, but the more scale the company handles, the closer it approaches profitability. And with the strong value-adding system GHN has created, that’s likely to happen this year.

TV advertisements have proven to work very well for chat apps in Indonesia. China-based WeChat and Japan’s Line have been propelled to the country’s top spots on iOS and Android app stores thanks to their ads. And now Korea-based KakaoTalk is going to make its mark on the country’s TV sets by airing a TV ad campaign in a couple of days. Will the ads be significant in disrupting the chat ecosystem here? Yes, I think so.

Let’s first agree that TV ads do work to gain nationwide visibility and users in Indonesia. The country’s internet penetration is still at a relatively low 24 percent right now, which means that to engage with the other 76 percent of the nation (which amounts to around 190 million people) you need to use more traditional media, like TV. A study by BCG Perspectives shows that “most, if not all, households throughout the country own a television, even those at the bottom of the pyramid of demographic groups, and it remains the most important source of information for consumers. Indonesians trust television commercials.” Line’s and WeChat’s current rankings in Indonesia’s app sites are a testament to that.

But with Line and WeChat airing their own TV ads ahead of the Korean messaging app, how will KakaoTalk’s advertisement beat them? The answer lies with KakaoTalk’s choice of ad stars.

First of the two is Indonesian celebrity Sherina Munaf – who has the country’s second most-followed celebrity Twitter account with five million followers. She’s joined in the ad by Korean all-boy band BigBang, whose 11,000 concert tickets in Indonesia were sold out in a mere fifteen minutes. Those two stars will be able to attract quite a number of fans to try out KakaoTalk. While Line and WeChat are targeting Indonesian teens with Maudy Ayunda and singer Giselle, a great many teens – i.e.: girls – might fancy BigBang instead.

Also, let’s not forget how Korean fever in Indonesia which has inspired a few Indonesian Korean-style pop groups like SM*SH, Cherrybelle, and 7Icons, who have quite a large number of fan base themselves. The number of Korean TV drama series still being aired in the country prove the popularity of Korean pop culture as well. If KakaoTalk’s association with Korea proves to be successful, and Indonesian remember KakaoTalk when they think of Korea, then it will be a big boost.

Of course, Line is tough competition due to its social games or because a lot of friends are already there. Same goes for the full-featured WeChat, with things like voice chatrooms and video calling, especially when those more social features are now available on Indonesia’s popular smartphone Blackberry now.

At the time of writing, KakaoTalk is ranked outside the top 50 spots in both Google Play and iTunes in Indonesia, according to AppAnnie. Let’s see how those rankings will change in the coming weeks.

Vietnamese app developer team Not A Basement Studio, whom I interviewed earlier this month, has released a new iPad app on the US App Store called KeepShot.

The basic idea is you can take photos from your photo album, throw them together into KeepShot, curate and edit the photos, and then submit the album to the KeepShot server. Then the company will print a nicely designed photo album and deliver it to your door. The concept might remind some users of Postagram, which allows iPhone users to create a postcard from their own photos and send a physical version to family and friends by making an in-app purchase. KeepShot takes this idea to the next level by adding filters and creating full photo albums with fancy designs.

Not A Basement Studio worked closely with My Publisher, one of the biggest digital printers in the world, to provide the ideal photo albums. KeepShot is a free app, but of course to print the albums it charges money via in-app purchases. Although, if you grab the app now and make an album, you’ll get a free 20-page photo book that’s worth $36 as part of their launch promo.

According to Hieu Tran, the business guy:

There was just one goal we had in mind for KeepShot: make photo books fun. We think photo books are a really great way for loved ones to share memories with each other, and we want KeepShot to be the easiest and funnest way to make photo books.

The app is all in keeping with Not A Basement Studio’s focus on photos after their success with Fuzel, which garnered more than one million users since its launch in July last year and was even featured by Apple as a top app in the photo category.

If you’d like to try out the app, it’s on the App Store here. Of course, you’ll need an iPad to try it out.

Wanchat Padungra, Founder at Pantip / Image credit: @Wanchat

Founded in 1997, Pantip.com is the largest online discussion forum in Thailand with 30 million unique visitors a month. The man who founded the popular website in Thailand is Wanchat Padungrat.

In 1995, Padungrat started a computer peripheral trading business with his friend that operated between Taiwan and Thailand. His Taiwanese suppliers told him that it was much better to use email to discuss dealings (prior to using email, he had been using fax). Padungrat recalled that his first ISP in Thailand was KSC internet which provided an email service with 120 minutes of internet usage each month. Padungrat realized that even after using email there were still a lot of minutes left. Instead of wasting them, Padungrat installed Netscape and roamed around the internet. He was very impressed with its content and thought that Netscape was actually the internet.

While feeling impressed with the world wide web, Padungrat bemoaned the lack of Thai content. That got him inspired to build a Thai-language website, Pantip.com, which started off as an online magazine in 1997. He hired some writers for two to three months, but the website unfortunately didn’t take off. Padungrat wasn’t satisfied and added in classified listings to try his luck at that. He noticed that geeks were using his classifieds site to buy and sell computer parts so he created a computer and gadget listing site which saw some traction. Thus was the so-called 1.0 Pantip kick-started as an online magazine with classified listings.

Inspired by an email

One event that inspired Padungrat was during a conversation with a doctor via email. The doctor sent him an email and suggested that his website was interesting but that he could add in sound to make it more engaging. Padungrat replied and asked how can he make that possible. The doctor then sent him two paragraphs of instructions on how he could do it.

While the idea wasn’t great on hindsight, Padungrat said that he was inspired by how the internet can empower idea sharing. He went online and started searching for a platform that could host threaded conversations (back then, the word ‘forum’ probably wasn’t too widely used on the web). Padungrat couldn’t find any solution that worked to his liking. He wanted a forum platform that was simple and could be viewed by simply scrolling up and down. With no luck finding such a platform, he created his own.

The initial boom

Internet users were scarce in the late 90s. There wasn’t SEO, SEM, or social media marketing. Many people didn’t know about or feared the internet. To convert non-internet people into internet users, Padungrat started with traditional advertising for his site, placing ads in computer magazines and giving away brochures at computer-related events. Pantip didn’t do traditional advertising for long. Once users got to know Pantip, they started to help spread the word. Back then, there weren’t many websites in Thai so naturally Pantip became one of the go-to online destinations.

While it started as a computer and geeky forum, Padungrat noticed that people were also talking about politics. People debated their differing views on Pantip, which drew in even more users. Seeing the opportunity, Padungrat created a dedicated thread for users who wanted only to read or comment on political issues. Pantip’s user-generated content became more diverse as it added in more topics like teens and automobiles. When Pantip started, it only had 200 visitors a day. Fast forward 18 months and Pantip had hit 6,000 visitors each day.

Making money through ads

While the growth was great, money was still needed to pay the bills. 15 years ago, Padungrat lamented, most media buyers weren’t looking at the internet for media placements. Whenever he called ad agencies, they usually referred him to the media buyers who knew little about the web.

Things started to change when Intel Australia decided to buy ad spots on Pantip. Padungrat said that that was one of the turning points for Pantip. Intel, as a strong brand, caught the attention of many ad agencies who started to look at the internet more closely for media placements.

In the two years after Pantip was founded, investors and buyers were knocking at Padungrat’s door hoping to invest in the fast-growing Thai internet company. Unlike most internet entrepreneurs, Padungrat didn’t take the bait. The conservative entrepreneur felt that things were okay running as it is. He told me:

Maybe I’m too conservative. I don’t believe that internet [business] needs a lot of money to run. Because we can do internet business with a very small [investment].

Today, Pantip is still 100 percent owned by Padungrat.

The new Pantip

After more than a decade sticking to the design and infrastructure first created by Wanchat Padungrat, Pantip finally changed its design earlier this year. The change took about 18 months to complete.

Padungrat said that the new design and underlying technology helps to reduce load, runs faster, and reduces server costs. Written from scratch, the new Pantip makes the site more agile and scalable. Adding in new features is now much easier; for example, its community groups feature could be implemented only thanks to the new technology. The new interface also allows users to customize their own pages. Padungrat is excited about the future of Pantip and its new infrastructure, but declined to share more on future product features.

Does Pantip have any exit plans? Not really. Padungrat’s goal is still very much building an organization to serve customers better. An IPO is unacceptable for Padungrat because it cannot be guaranteed that investors will take users’ happiness as their first priority.

From 1997 to now, Pantip grew from a one-man to a 50-man team. Pantip commands one million unique visitors each day. Besides its online discussion forum, Pantip also runs Pantipmarket.com, a classified listings marketplace, with 180,000 unique visitors per day. Pantown is a customizable online forum engine for users. BlogGang is a blog content management system (like WordPress) that competes with Exteen.

As a CEO, I try to do as little as possible. Like Pantipmarket, once the manager can do everything, I rarely touch on that. I’m too old, around 50, and I can’t catch up with the new technology and it’s time for the new generation. They understand our users better and are close to the current technology because they grow up with it.

Dr. Serkan Toto is a gaming expert and independent consultant based in Tokyo. You can follow him on Twitter and his blog. This article is republished with his permission.

The crazy Puzzle and Dragons boom in Japan continues – and it gets even crazier.

Maker GungHo (3765.OS) posted a new financial document according to which sales in February for the company reached an almost unbelievable 10 billion yen in February – up 1,280 percent year-on-year. That is US$106 million. In a month with 28 days.

In January (31 days), GungHo, which is soon to be turned into a subsidiary of carrier SoftBank, reported sales of just US$92 million.

Before you say this is impossible, remember the company isn’t private. It’s listed on the Osaka Stock Exchange – in other words, GungHo cannot make financials up.

As last month, there is no discussion in Japan’s gaming industry that Puzzle and Dragons is the main driver behind this growth. Back then I summarized a few reports in gaming media over here, estimating that the puzzle/RPG hybrid alone racked up between $54 million to $75 million in January – or between 59 percent and 81 percent of GungHo’s sales in that month. (As a side note, that would roughly be my estimated range as well).

Applying this to the $106 million the company made last month, this would mean that Puzzle and Dragons alone generated $62 million to $86 million.

As I mentioned earlier, I have seen many hard-to-believe numbers in Japan’s mobile gaming industry, but this game tops everything. That revenue is generated by nine to ten million registered users the title had in February on both iOS and Android.

Seeing that Puzzle and Dragons is still growing steadily, revenue will probably be higher in March , which has three more money-making days than February.

Yesterday, the fiasco made by Indonesian telco and handset manufacturer Smartfren made news all over Indonesia as the company’s internet connections have gone haywire over the last couple of weeks. In fact, the media blowout was big enough to get the Indonesian ICT minister Tifatul Sembiring to personally ask Smartfren about what really happened. And so finally, the company released an official statement.

The release states that a Smartfren submarine cable located between Bangka and Batam islands was cut by an oil ship anchor on March 23rd. It was Smartfren’s main cable route for global internet access. What’s worse is that a few hours after that incident, Smartfren’s two backup networks, called Trans Sumatra, got cut too as there was an avalanche in Palembang city that disrupted Trans Sumatra’s west route, and a construction process by a third party accidentally cut Trans Sumatra’s east route as well. It’s was a total disaster and that resulted in Smartfren’s internet access operating at 10 percent capacity over the last few days.

Interestingly, the information Smartfren released is a bit different from the version given to – and then tweeted by – Tifatul during his inquiry. He said that Smartfren’s submarine route got cut on March 15th, not March 23rd, and it brought the company down to 60 percent capacity. The avalanche happened the following day, and Smartfren’s other backup route got disconnected on March 17th. The company then used an additional submarine cable from a third party on March 18th but unfortunately it was cut as well on March 23rd.

Smartfren hopes that they can operate at at least 50 percent capacity as of today with the restoration of one of Trans Sumatra’s network routes and the addition of a third party’s network. Smartfren apologizes for the inconvenience experienced by its customers.

Angry users

Looking over Smartfren’s apology and explanation about the situation on its Facebook post, a lot of users are still disgruntled. They lamented the fact that the explanation came only after the ICT minister took matters into his own hands and inquired about it. Indonesian media Detik backed this claim by saying that none of Smartfren’s higher-ups were even reachable before the Indonesian government intervened.

The users are also demanding compensation from the company. One user calculated that since Smartfren’s monthly data plan costs IDR 99,000 (US$10), counting based on its five million data users the company earns around IDR 16.5 billion ($1.7 million) of revenue every single day, revenue that isn’t in line with the company’s promised service. The company has responsibility to quickly give explanation whenever there is a major problem, users say.

A few users also pointed out that they had been having internet problems since two weeks ago – which supports Tifatul’s explanation and not Smartfren’s – and said that apologies do not cut it at this stage if the company wants to hold on to its customers. Smartfren still has some explaining to do regarding the one-week timeline difference that has arisen.

Compensation is possible

So what about compensation? Tifatul said that they expect to hear the full report from Smartfren and if the fiasco is found to be the telco’s fault, then it will be compulsory for the company to offer compensation to users. Guilty or not, Smartfren itself is also considering offering its users some form of compensation in the hope of appeasing its angry customers.

Following this blowout, the company has increased the capacity of its Surabaya-Jakarta internet route. Smartfren is also looking to build more of them in the next couple of years to cope with its user growth.

Back in December 2006, local telco Telkomsel had a serious issue with its communication network and was unable to cater to the increasing volume of usage at the end of the year. The telco issued an apology and gave its users compensation in the form of bonus program extensions and discounts.

The submarine cable incident actually affected another Indonesian internet service provider too: Telkom Speedy. But unlike Smartfren, Telkom Speedy’s backup routes remained undisturbed and it could still serve its users sufficiently. There were a few complaints posted to Telkom Speedy’s Facebook page during this period, but the number of complaints pales in comparison with what Smartfren has received from its customers.

Scoop, the e-reader newsstand app, continues to expand its publisher partnerships in India, Singapore, and the Philippines. Willson Cuaca, the CEO of Apps Foundry which makes the Scoop app, announced this morning that the company has partnered with India Today Group, SPH Magazine, and The Philippine Star Group of Publications to have their digital content distributed through Scoop.

Partnerships with these major publishers will bring more content to the Scoop app, which focuses on countries like India, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, China, and Hong Kong. With the diversity of new content, Scoop has also launched country-specific apps including Scoop Singapore, Malaysia, and India to better serve local audiences.

When asked if Scoop will have offices in India and the Philippines, Cuaca said that he currently has no plan to do so unless a need presents itself. He also shared that Scoop’s good ratings (4 out of 5 stars) on the app store makes it easier to partner with overseas publishers. Scoop currently has more than 500,000 downloads on iOS and Android.

Disclosure: Apps Foundry, the creator of SCOOP, is an East Ventures portfolio company. East Ventures also invested in Tech in Asia and Willson is also a good friend/mentor of mine. See our ethics page for more information.

3G access is no longer available for tourists to the DPRK. Sim cards can still be purchased to make international calls but no internet access is available.

It’s not clear why the service has been shut down so quickly after its rollout, but perhaps North Korean authorities realized that if you allow internet access, people can send photos, videos, and information out of the country instantly with no chance for authorities to police or censor it. Of course, the country could have handled that by just buying a Great Firewall from China — and we think eventually it will — but apparently someone decided that at least for the moment, it was time to pull the plug.

So if you’re headed to North Korea, don’t expect to be doing any tweeting while you’re there. Of course, that may be something of a blessing in disguise — the mobile data rates were utterly absurd anyway.

(via North Korea Tech)

Cambodia’s CheckInTonight is a mobile app that helps users find hotels and book them quickly and cheaply on the very day you need a place to rest your head.

CheckinTonight’s representative Ciaran Doyle says that the startup has partnered with more than 120 hotels so far. The rooms are cheaper, sometimes with up to a 70 percent discount, because the hotels give CheckInTonight inventory that likely can’t be filled on that very day.

Founded in November 2012 by Mark Southby, CheckInTonight currently has over 12,000 downloads and plans to open regional offices in Thailand and Singapore. The app currently offers hotel bookings — deep breath — in Cambodia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. The startup is completely self-funded for now and has the ambition to expand offices across Southeast Asia.

Readers might recall that we featured HotelQuickly recently which has a similar concept. CheckInTonight is currently available on iOS (iTunes link) with its Android version to be released soon.

Credit card adoption in Indonesia is still very slow, with only 13.4 million credit cards issued up until 2012, which makes up a 4.5 percent penetration rate with most holders having two credit cards. The advantage in having one is that there are some online stores offering installment payments if you pay via your credit card. Indonesian e-commerce site Kreditmart looks to offer similarly convenient installments for everyone, even if they don’t have a credit card. The site’s been operational since 2008 and co-founder Chintya Fransisca believes that they are the first one to offer such services in the country. How does it work?

Kreditmart sells a wide variety of expensive goods, including heavy machinery, construction vehicles, and electronics. Some of the products cost as much as IDR 20 million (US$2,056), and you can choose to buy those products via installment program.

Kreditmart cooperates with numerous leasing and multi-financing companies to take care of the company’s credit payments. They will also help Kreditmart in screening installment applicants and to remind them about payments. Customers can then get a plan for how much money they’ll need to pay every month, according to the number of months and the down-payment options available on the site. Some of the installment plans can cost you an additional 20 percent interest rate, but others have a zero percent interest rate.

Chintya explains that, just like at a bank, customers need to first submit documents about where they live, where they work (they must have a job), and about their family.

There is always a risk that customers run away with their goods, but it has been minimized thanks to the said screening process. She also believes that a lot of people who apply for credit payment online already have good financial background and are working at good companies. They also have good characters. She doesn’t imply that they are all angels, but the risk is low.

Getting back to business

Kreditmart has seen impressive sales as the company recorded an average of IDR 700 million ($72,000) sales revenue every month in the first two years with around 350 monthly credit customers. That number is achieved after the company rejected 30 percent of credit applications.

But during that time, Chintya said that they were busy with the other online shops and didn’t put too much focus on Kreditmart. The team then decided to get back to running Kreditmart again after seeing a few big companies venturing to similar e-commerce businesses, and Kreditmart just started selling its goods again last month and has recorded IDR 100 million ($10,280) month’s revenue already, which is a nice start.

In the future, Kreditmart hopes to offer its own credit facility outside its partnership with the aforementioned finance companies. They hope that by doing that, customers can get easier approval and, in return, generate greater revenue. She also hopes that this plan can lower Kreditmart’s interest rate for a few products. Chintya believes that the risk to offer their own credit services is manageable.

The team plans to build more warehouses at big cities in Indonesia so that they can lower the delivery cost for some of their large products. The focus this year is to cater to customers in Java island.

Kreditmart’s pros and cons.

This is the first time I’ve heard about Kreditmart, and it looks like the company’s credit payment system is working very well. There are still a few places on the site that look a bit messy, like its FAQ page, and some product categories that are still empty. Chintya explains to us that they are still building the website, but it looks like it is progressing very slowly.

I also compared the prices on Kreditmart with other Indonesian e-commerce sites and found that generally Kreditmart’s products are more expensive. On the other hand, Kreditmart has a few products that are difficult to find on other sites like supermarket refrigeration cabinets and construction tools. Of course, if people or small businesses are looking to purchase online goods via installments but don’t have a credit card, then Kreditmart is an attractive choice.

Besides Kreditmart, a few Indonesian online shops are starting to offer similar installment payments too. Gadget e-commerce site Bhinneka and Bintang Mandiri being the two of them. So far, Kreditmart is a self-funded project, and the team is open to potential partnerships.

This is big: Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank (TYO:9984) (the one that acquired Sprint in the US) will launch a tender offer to increase its stake in game studio GungHo Online Entertainment (3765.OS) between April 1 and 26 this year. the deal will be worth over a quarter of a billion dollars. It’s timed to coincide with GungHo conducting a 10-for-1 share split on April 1.

GungHo has produced Puzzle and Dragons, Japan’s most popular smartphone game with over 10 million users. It’s perhaps the most profitable mobile game worldwide, estimated to rack up well over US$50 million per month currently.

A few days ago, GungHo’s market cap reached a mind-blowing $5 billion – more than that of GREE or Mobage operator DeNA.

SoftBank (or SoftBank Mobile, to be more specific) will acquire 6.4 percent of GungHo’s total shares for 25 billion yen ($264 million). With that investment, the telco’s stake in the Puzzle and Dragons maker increases from 33.6 to 58.5 percent.

SoftBank explains:

With this understanding, the company recognized the importance of enhancing mobile content by combining smartphone-focused development capability and infrastructure held by the SoftBank Mobile Group and planning and creating capability in the smartphone game industry held by the target company group to further improve the efficiency in operation of the mobile communications business, profitability and competitiveness.

After the execution of the deal, GungHo will become a SoftBank subsidiary.

SoftBank acquires the shares from a company called Asian Grooves, which is owned by Taizo Son – who is the brother of SoftBank CEO and founder Masayoshi Son (Taizo Son is also chairman at GungHo).

Metaps, the Android monetization platform out of Japan that just secured $11 million in series B funding, is today teaming up with Vietnam’s Appota, an iOS and Android app monetization and distribution platform, to tackle the Vietnamese Android app market. The deal allows Appota to use Metaps’ SDK as its official monetization engine, which should make it easier for local developers to make money from their Android apps.

Metaps, which is now operating in Japan, Korea, the US, Singapore, and Hong Kong, has been aggressively expanding its reach. By bringing Vietnam into the fold, this signals Metaps has its eye on Southeast Asia where smartphones are still on the rise. In Vietnam, for example, smartphones barely make up 20 to 30 percent of the mobile market, compared to East Asia where smartphone acquisition is at 90 percent in South Korea. But with Vietnam’s rapid smartphone growth, it’s time to get in now before rivals ad platforms do so.

This is an interesting move for Vietnam’s Appota, which started in 2011 and has its own SDK that allows developers to monetize their apps. I spoke with the CEO Do Tuan Anh and he’s long had dreams to bring Appota out of Vietnam, so this deal may fall right in line with that. According to Tuan Anh:

We will have the main mobile business in advertisement, so cooperation with Metaps will be a good step for us to join in the advertisement industry.

Metaps, which garnered over 10 million downloads via its platform in 2012 will now be able to access Appota’s 7.6 million Vietnamese users.

This is all in keeping with Metaps’ goal of being the largest Android monetization platform in the world by 2013. But before it gets there, it’s probably going to have to start looking seriously at China (which is on Metaps’ to-do list) and Europe, where smartphone penetration is much higher than in Southeast Asia.

Update: Added quote from CEO.

About eight months after LoveByte was first launched, the couples’ messaging app today has more than 100,000 downloads in 96 countries. In total, its users have sent three million messages and 700,000 photos, memos, and dates thus far.

The numbers look OK considering LoveByte only had about US$80,000 of funding so far. The team consists of four founders, two developers, and one marketing intern.

Meanwhile its Korean counterpart, Between, also a couples-oriented messaging app, recently raised $2.8 million and boosts 2.35 million downloads. But very few Between uses are from Southeast Asia and it has no immediate plans to expand in that region.

Samsung (005930:KS) built its first manufacturing plant in Vietnam in 2009, pumping in US$700 million to build it. In 2012, the value of the exports from this plant exceeded $12 billion, that’s up from $7 billion the year before. That’s a return of $17 for every dollar invested. It represents a whopping ten percent of the value ($114.6 billion) of all exports out of Vietnam. To say the least, electronics manufacturing is becoming the new backbone of the Vietnamese export economy.

Following this quickly growing trend, and significant government-level support, Samsung is pumping another $3.2 billion into building another factory in Vietnam’s northern province of Thai Nguyen. Construction started yesterday. The huge project will see the building of a major handset and hi-tech electronics plant and a microchip manufacturing plant.

If this new plant performs as well as the first, it may end up producing well over $40 billion in Samsung exports per year. Samsung expects the first plant to produce $16.5 billion worth of exports by year’s end.

Although there have been rumblings of Samsung opening up plants in Nigeria and neighboring Indonesia – and many existing plants in China – it’s possible that the Samsung in your hand was made in Vietnam.

Ad tech is quite a confusing arena for most folks. There are a number of stakeholders in the game ranging from agencies, demand-side platforms (DSP), data management platforms (DMP), ad exchanges, ad networks, supply-side platforms (SSP) to publishers. And this doesn’t even take into account the many other flavors of companies who, in their own way, are adding value to the industry (dynamic creative companies, retargeting companies, various flavors of video, mobile, and tablet ad-enablers, in-game advertising companies, etc.).

Often, advertisers and media agencies will be faced with trying to understand how each of these standalone services work and how they may fit into a bigger ecosystem that helps them achieve their marketing goals. But one Singaporean company, AdzCentral, is solving the problem by connecting the dots. AdzCentral coins its service as “scientific media buying.” It provides advertisers with a one-stop shop service to buy ad spots in real-time, using techniques such as visitor profiling, targeting, optimization and differential bidding, to ensure its clients’ ad dollars are well spent.

AdzCentral simplifies all of this into one platform…

AdzCentral was founded in 2009 by Reza Behnam with the aim of simplifying the display ad buying business. It started first as a DSP to help clients manage advertising placements and budgets across various publishers and automated media-inventory-exchanges. But over time, as multiple flavors of standalone tools have emerged ad tech became more fragmented, AdzCentral has become more technology agnostic. It considers itself a solution-oriented company now, as AdzCentral has adapted over time to what the clients need for a full suite of advertising solutions.

Prior to AdzCentral, Behnam was a marketing science and management consultant for about nine years and then started working at Yahoo U.S. in 2001 in Yahoo’s Data Sciences group and subsequently in the Global Alliances team which managed large international partnerships. His journey in Singapore started at around late 2004 when he was appointed the managing director of Yahoo Southeast Asia in Singapore until mid 2007. He also had a short stint as a Venture Partner at IDG Ventures from 2007 to 2009.

Way back when Behnam was at Yahoo, he felt that buying online ads, especially display ads was an extremely complex process. “As the ad and media industry, historically we have not made it simple enough,” said Behnam. He added:

We like to blame other people (marketers) for not spending as much as their media budget online but as an industry we share the blame. We haven’t made it simple enough. Really, the idea is to simplify the display buying business.

When I looked around in Asia region, there weren’t too many ad tech players or providers that were independent, not part of Yahoo or Google. These were the two data points that I was really looking at [before I decided to start AdzCentral].

Most of the DSPs and ad networks track data through cookies placed on consumers’ browsers. So imagine a client who uses DSP platforms A, B, and C to buy display inventory. The cookie identifiers, which are used to track and decipher cookies, are kept on a platform that is used to drop the cookies. However, once a clients uses a particular DSP platform the identifiers are usually “trapped” in that DSP platform and that prevents marketers from applying what they learned on one platform (say platform A) on another platform (say platform B). AdzCentral is providing data portability by allowing clients to own and manage their own customer profiles so that markers’ learnings can be applied across all touch-points and toolsets. He added:

A lot of data is in silos in the providers’ system. How do you really bring this [data] together and develop a 360 view no matter where the touch points happen to be. This is what we’re trying to do at AdzCentral.

In a fragmented world of ad-technology, a typical client will face many recommendations regarding the various technology options they have. So AdzCentral ensures that clients have the proper information and guidance on choosing the appropriate technology tools to achieve their higher level marketing objectives. AdzCentral further ensures that the clients have the support and assistance they need to build and maintain their customer profiles so that they can target the right message to the right customer and achieve efficient media buys.

There’s a major change in display advertising. The majority of advertisers still book online media spaces in weeks advance (“upfront” or “reservation” buying). But more and more advertisers are starting to understand the beauty of automated buying as it optimizes their media expenditure in real time. In the last two to three years, in APAC, Behnam says that automated buying has shifted from almost nothing to three percent of all digital media buys and is projected to hit 20 percent by 2015. The total digital media spend for APAC is $25 billion in 2011 and is growing 30 to 40 percent each year.

As ad budgets shift, the rise of automated buying has triggered a lot of ad tech companies to be founded. “In the next 10 to 15 years, most [digital media buys] will be done through automated buying,” said Behnam.

In Asia, Behnam says that AdzCentral is the only company he knows of that is piecing the ad tech ecosystem together using a solution-oriented approach as opposed to a tool-oriented approach. “We are not in the business of technology-for-technology’s sake, we’re in the business of technology-for-performance’s sake. We will assemble the suite of tools that makes sense to deliver a solution for the client,” he said. In the other parts of the world, similar companies include Rocketfuel and Acceleration which was acquired by WPP.

Having raised $3.2 million recently, AdzCentral is looking at Southeast Asia, Australia, Middle East and India in the next two to three years and with China part of its longer-term plan. To date, AdzCentral has already served over 100 clients including SingTel, American Express, 3M, Unilever, Standard Chartered, MasterCard, Citibank, and Hyundai.

For entrepreneurs trying to raise a series A round in Singapore, Behnam (pictured) has this piece of advice:

Focus on [series A] investors who are specialists in your space, or at least those who have a passion for your space.

Indonesian telco and handset manufacturer Smartfren is in hot water right now as there are a huge number of complaints being thrown onto the company’s Facebook page about the prolonged internet connection errors hitting users for the past couple of weeks. How big is the problem? There were about 3,200 complaints posted on the Smartfren’s Facebook post on Friday alone. Plus there are around 300 comments for each Smartfren post in the last week which mostly are complaints about the company’s sporadic mobile modem and CDMA internet services.

The customers seem pretty pissed off as they are suggesting the company to change its name from Smartfren to Smartpret (a combination of “Smartfren” and Indonesian word “kampret” which means “schucks”), and to change the company’s tagline from “I hate slow” to “I hate fast.” A lot of the customers complain that they haven’t been able to use their topped up internet credits for quite some time, and some of them they can’t even open Google with their crippled connections.

This problem is being faced by a lot of Indonesians. During the Smarfren Andromax-u handset launch in February, deputy CEO Djoko Tata Ibrahim said that 65 percent of the company’s revenue comes from its data sales. He said that they had around 11 million customers at the end of 2012.

In Smartfren’s defense, a few customers mentioned how the provider’s internet service was very reliable in the past, but it hasn’t been as stable and fast as it used to be. A lot of them suggest the company should focus on improving its infrastructure rather than spending so much on marketing. At this time, I was not able to get hold of any Smartfren’s customer service via phone.

A Smartfren representative told me via email that they are now fixing the connection problems, but they still can’t estimate when exactly they’ll be solved. The company is also adding more bandwidth to its infrastructure to cope with customer growth.

Compensation?

It’s not clear if Smartfren will offer compensation to its customers because of this prolonged issue. These days, Smartfren and other local telcos must be more wary about their services and advertisements because the Indonesian ICT ministry is now taking a closer look at what exactly they are promising – and actually delivering. Smartfren’s current predicament totally doesn’t match with its “I hate slow” motto, and many are feeling ripped off for not getting a reliable internet connection for two straight weeks, and possibly longer.

The last time Blackberry’s BBM service went haywire, the Indonesian government could only give the Canada-based company a warning. Smartfren’s problem could potentially go for over half a month. Will the government do something about it?

(See also: Angry Smartfren Users Still Mad Due to Company’s Very Late Explanation)

At Startup Asia, Mike Tran will swing by to give us all an introduction to the Vietnamese startup and technology scene. So I thought I’d take a chance to sit down with him so you can find out who he is before he grabs the mic.

Today, he’s the founder and CEO of Keewi, a company which, according to Mike, “wants to make it as easy as possible for anybody to create an event in Saigon”. Currently, the startup is evolving into an Eventbrite-like service for the Vietnamese market and two weeks ago launched its new ticketing service to help event organizers sell, promote, and manage their events online.

Keewi’s genesis

Mike is among a new generation of entrepreneurs in Vietnam who were educated abroad, like with the founders of Greengar, Not A Basement Studio, and even VNG. Mike studied civil planning and project management in Canada for seven years before coming back to Vietnam to work in one of Ho Chi Minh city’s largest corporations, Saigon Trading Group. In his own words:

In 2009, I helped set up a supermarket chain, and then moved onto a real estate project. In 2011, this project slowed to a crawl, which allowed me time to work on some ideas I had of my own: a website that helped curate online coupons. It was a time when Groupon clones were rising in Vietnam. But that idea died. I invited all my friends, and they would go to the site, but they found no reason to use the service.

So Mike closed that site down. It was when he went to a friend’s wedding that the first inklings of Keewi began. He went not knowing anybody and realized that there was no service to let him know if any other friends were at the wedding. That was the first version of Keewi, finding out if your friends were attending the same event. Mike adds:

Our small team of five took this idea and pitched it at Startup Weekend in 2011. We got to meet successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and really got into the idea of a startup.

After Startup Weekend, only two guys were still interested. – Mike and the developer. The first prototype was showcased at Demo Asia, which gave them another chance to examine user behavior. They learned that users wanted to use the mobile HTML5 site for networking. By April 2012, the second prototype was out, emphasizing networking.

Everytime Keewi shifted, it was always in response to user behavior. That’s part of their adherence to ‘lean startup’ and developing market-fit. This eventually lead them into the ticketing service it is today:

We realized that event organizers actually don’t really care so much that people can network. The biggest problem for event organizers is about getting people to attend events. We haven’t given up on networking, but ticketing is the more powerful need. So in a way, you could look at us as an Eventbrite. But our competitive advantage is payment, logistics, and building direct relationships with event organizers.

The startup scene In Vietnam

This last point about relationships is a particularly strong concern for B2B startups working in Vietnam. Mike elaborates:

Trust is a big issue in Vietnam. Vietnamese technology companies have a history of selling client data, so bigger companies would rather trust a foreign business.

So what’s the trick for Keewi? Mike explains:

There a few particular cultural loopholes. You have to appear big to your customers. Big companies won’t trust the small guys. You have to build a client list and testimonials. And even better if you get a testimonial from a company. You have to figure out what the foreign companies cannot do, and do that. And even get a foreigner in your team. It’s a key way to get around the trust problem.

Elaborating on that, Mike identifies the big obstacles that most Vietnamese startups face:

There’s a lot of startups here and it can be very competitive. This make it very hard to find good talent. Not only that, engineers just don’t believe in equity. In the Valley, engineers are willing to work and take equity because they believe in building something. But this is a very status-driven society. A startup needs to have cashflow right out the door or people won’t join. An engineering student right out of university believes that in two years he/she will be making 10 million VND (US$500) a month and in four to five years will be a manager. That’s a completely different skillset. So ultimately, it comes down to mindset.

Given all these troubles, we asked Mike why he stuck with startup life, and we got a familiar response among entrepreneurs:

If I had to choose between a big corporation with lots of money or a startup. I would choose startup. Corporations think about squeezing every penny they can out of their marketing, sales, product, and even their customers. But startups, they have to think about their customers. They have to create new value in order to survive. They have to think long-term.

‘Start Me Up’

For the future at Keewi, Mike is looking to grow his ticketing service and building relationships with more event organizers. Today, the team is eight people and they’ve got six clients, and are still expanding.

He also organizes an event called Start Me Up that invites Vietnamese and foreign speakers to come and talk to fellow young entrepreneurs about the secrets to building successful startup. They also show movies and documentaries like The Startup Kids, which had never been aired in Asia before. The whole point is to get Vietnam on the startup map.

If you’re coming to StartupAsia you can look forward to seeing Mike talk on these points and more at 3pm on day 1 of the event, April 4th.

The China-made messaging app WeChat launched on BlackBerry late last year, taking aim at potential users in Southeast Asia and other BB-loving areas. But WeChat for BB OS 5/6/7 lacked quite a few key features, including the popular ‘look around’ for finding people nearby with whom to chat or flirt. Now that has been rectified with WeChat v2.0 for BlackBerry, which rolls out today.

Along with ‘look around’, the updated version for BlackBerry (NASDAQ:BBRY) brings the ability to add friends by scanning QR codes, and also animated emoticon/sticker packs. This brings the app a bit closer to feature parity with the other versions for iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone.

But, BlackBerry’s ancient OS will likely never be able to support video or voice calling on older hardware. To get that, early adopters of BlackBerry’s newest Z10 phone will have to wait for WeChat for BB10, which Tencent has promised is under development.

Those who want a specialized find-and-flirt app could try Tencent’s made-for-Indonesia Qute app, which is available for all major mobile platforms. There’s quite a lot of overlap between Qute and WeChat’s location-based searching in terms of their abilities, though WeChat is limited to a range of two kilometers.

The update comes as the app’s makers, Tencent (HKG:0700), are heavily promoting it via TV ads, which has helped WeChat hit the top spots on both the iOS and Android store charts. Judging by WeChat’s growth figures, we reckon that WeChat has at least one million users in Indonesia; of course, it’s locked in a tense battle against the likes of Whatsapp, Line, and KakaoTalk, for the affection of young mobile users in the country.

WeChat v2.0 is now on BlackBerry World here, but has not yet arrived on the WeChat homepage.

The FPT IV smartphone running Android 4.1.2
Image: tinhte.vn

There are 1.4 mobiles for every person in Vietnam, so there’s obviously a thirst for mobile. And in the status-hungry country, the smartphone market is growing strongly. So it makes sense that one of the country’s biggest technology companies, FPT, has set the goal of manufacturing and selling 600,000 smartphones in Vietnam in 2013.

This will be a shift from what FPT was shipping last year, which was centered on feature phones. It will mean that smartphones make up 70 percent of its mobile output.

The newest phone in FPT’s own-brand lineup is the FPT IV, a smartphone that costs 4.45 million VND (US$212), ships with Android 4.1, and is directed at the lower end of the price spectrum, targeting customers that can’t afford iPhones and big-screen Samsungs. Interestingly, it’s Vietnam’s first-ever homegrown quad-core phone.

FPT is also a telco, and does software outsourcing, education, hardware manufacturing, and more. It’s also closely affiliated with the government. It’s a clear indication that the government views the growth of smartphones as essential to Vietnamese economic growth. Also, given the aggressive nature of Vietnamese telecoms into global markets, it’s foreseeable that this could transition into smartphones built for the global market in 2014.

In other news, in addition to the FPT IV and its homegrown Android smartphones, the company is also planning to sell the premium Vertu TI smartphone, which runs Android 4.0. The phone costs 200 million VND – that’s over $9,500. Why anyone would pay that much for a phone with an outdated mobile operating system beats me. Oh wait, it’s Vietnam, where people buy $1.4 million cars just because they can.

(Sources: Vietnam Investment Review and Tinh Te)

Fourleaf is a Thailand-based startup that helps hotels to create beautiful looking menus on iPads. So, instead of browsing through the usual paper menu, Fourleaf is able to put all these menus — for room services, food menus, TV programs, etc. — on the iPad. Having recently raised THB 1 million ($34,000) angel funding, co-founder Nattapon Nimakul told me that his company is now testing its solution with two hotels in Krabi and Phuket.

For every iPad menu issued (every hotel room will have one), Fourleaf charges the hotel $100 to $170 per month. That’s quite costly, so Fourleaf is only going after four- or five-star hotels. On the surface, Fourleaf’s iPad menus are just another pretty way to impress customers. But there are actually several benefits in using its service.

By digitizing menu content and order processes, it allows the hotel to collect and analyze data to improve revenue from room service. Fourleaf also provides a real-time dashboard for hotel clients to make sense out of the data collected. If any changes need to be made in the menu, it can be done immediately across all hotels by changing content hosted in the cloud.

Last week, Chang, the largest beverage producer in Thailand (most famous for its beer) joined Tencent’s WeChat with an official account. While most folks think that official accounts (sort of like a brand page on Facebook) are just a way for companies to push messages and communicate with consumers/fans, it is actually more than that.

Chang takes the name “WeChang” on Wechat. Once you follow WeChang within the WeChat messaging app, you will receive a welcome message with simple instructions on how to use WeChang to order home deliveries of its drinking water via WeChat.

To order water refills, reply ‘2’ with the following text: ‘waterrefill#customer name#your number’. A customer service representative will confirm the order before delivering the water to your doorstep. Or customers can reply ‘3’ to download a set of cutesy Chang stickers (pictured above).

It’s hard not to like such conveniences. In China, the China Merchant’s Bank allows its followers to check their bank balance through WeChat. More can be done in future, I think. For example, it will be great to be able to order food home deliveries, pay utility bills, or book restaurant or movie tickets on WeChat while on the move.

If WeChat or any other chat apps can bring more utility functions to users on mobile, it will create yet another compelling reason for people to sign up – even if users download the app just to access those utility features and not to chat with friends.

Social recruitment startup TribeHired has concluded a US$560,000 seed funding round led by TNF Ventures through the Technology Incubation Scheme (TIS). Angel investors Ben Ball and Ben Chew also participated in the round.

In short, TribeHired taps into its users’ Facebook connections to spread job recommendations. So the more friends you have on TribeHired, the more job recommendations you are likely to receive. Using it is simple. You log on using your Facebook account and select interests to view related jobs that are posted on TribeHired. The site creates resumés as well, with a user’s CV based on his/her Facebook information and customizable on TribeHired.

Posting a job is simple and seems to be free for now. (I posted one in just a minute). You fill in the job description and upload a picture either through your Facebook or computer. Japan’s Wantedly is another startup working on social recruitment.

Prior to today’s funding, TribeHired received funding from Cradle Fund, a government agency under the ministry of finance, Malaysia. TribeHired was also part of JFDI’s accelerator program in 2012.

JFDI CEO Hugh Mason tells us that TribeHired’s news means that it’s the seventh of JFDI’s eleven graduates from the 2012 batch to have secured backing (including the likes of ShopSpot and Fetch Plus). He adds:

Our startups have now raised S$3.9m between them, going from idea to investment in 100 days and creating around 40 jobs along the way.

Here’s our newest weekly list featuring a bunch of hot startups from all over Asia. For tips and stories suggestions, feel free to email us. Alternatively, you can send tips here and/or tell us about your startup here. Enjoy this week’s list:

1. Cubie | Taiwan

Launched in March 2012, Taiwan’s Cubie is a mobile messenging app that has almost 8 million users, and is run with a bootstrap team of 12. It’s up against giant messaging apps like Line and KakaoTalk. Cubie received a round of investment late last year, and was recently featured on the front page of the Google Play store for a good nine days. Learn how the team got their app featured in this report.

2. Nonstop Games | Singapore

Nonstop Games is a Singapore-based tablet and mobile game development startup with Finnish roots. This week it raised a big round of funding that will help boost its popular Heroes of Honor title.

3. Alegrium | Indonesia

Alegrium is a self-funded startup based in Indonesia that is the brain behind the Icon Pop Quiz[a] game that received props from Korean singer PSY back in December. Now the developers launched a sequel called Icon Pop Brand. The new game is proving so popular in Indonesia that it even knocked a very popular messaging app from the first position on the country’s iOS free app chart.

4. Tapmee | Vietnam

Tapmee is a Vietnam-made location-based chat and dating app just launched this week on Android. The app is being developed by five people and looks really good.

5. Veritrans | Indonesia

Veritrans is an Indonesian payment gateway for credit cards which promises to deliver online transactions that are easy, cheap, and quick. It has recently relocated to a brand new office and has also released news about its plans for the next few months

6. IG9 | Vietnam

Officially launched this week, IG9 is Vietnam’s first homegrown crowdfunding platform. It is founded by Nam Do, the current CEO of Emotiv, along with a full-time team of seven from a motley crew of startups based out of Hanoi

7. Kleii | Vietnam

Kleii is a Vietnam online cloud storage service, similar to Dropbox, which was covered by us earlier this year. Recently, it has amassed significant growth in the number of users, despite suffering a week-long downtime outage.

8. Adzcentral | Singapore

Singapore-based AdzCentral provides clients with a one-stop platform for convenient automated digital ads-buying, covering social ads, search, mobile, email, and video. The startup concluded a financing round with Electric Sheep Capital and Digital Media Partners (DMP) this week.

9. Brand24 | Indonesia

Brand24.co.id, an Indonesian company that specializes in monitoring online social marketing, opened its doors last week. It analyzes conversations across Indonesia’s social media, identifies people’s sentiment, and points out the current trends. The service can also help make reports and infographics for brands. (It’s the same team us this fun graphic about social Jakartans!)

10. HotelQuickly | Thailand

Launched just this week at Webmob’s Bangkok Meetup, HotelQuickly is a convenient mobile-only service that helps users book hotels really quickly. It’s available in six Asian countries now. Four out of five of HotelQuickly’s founders are based in Bangkok, Thailand.

11. Zomato | India

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

12. Luxa | Japan

Luxa.jp is a luxury-oriented e-commerce site where items, (from pricey sake to expensive skincare products), are sold at useful discounts during flash sales. Just this week, Luxa announced major series B funding.

13. Perx | Singapore

Singapore-based mobile loyalty app Perx has been showing steady growth over the past year. Besides helping merchants to manage their loyalty cards digitally, the app now incorporates a new Net Promoter Score (NPS) Loyalty Task feature for merchants.

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• Samwer Brothers Kickstart $193 Million Global Founders Capital
• How to Stop Chinese Copycats from Stealing Your App
• World Startup Report: Your 15-Minute Guide to India’s Startup Scene and Culture
• Learn to Design and Code at Startup Academy
• HomeAway Makes Third Asian Deal in Tie-Up With Singapore’s Travelmob
• Kompas Group’s Gramediana Hints at Emulating Amazon’s Kindle Business Model?

Events

TechinAsia’s Startup Asia Singapore 2013 Conference is now less than two weeks away and we are really excited! Here are two more previews of the great speakers we’ll have onstage:

• KakaoTalk: From Startup to a Giant Mobile Platform (Startup Asia Preview)
• How E-Commerce King Taobao Is Expanding Out of China (Startup Asia Preview)

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

A lot of things went down this week; so many, in fact, that we’ve compiled them into a list. Granted, that’s something we do every week, but in our defense, lots of interesting stuff happens every week. In any event, here’s all the latest:

Steven’s pick: Tencent: Mobile Gaming Platform For WeChat to Begin Testing Soon

Tencent is both China’s biggest gaming and social company, so the addition of a social gaming platform within WeChat was always a matter of “when” not “if”. Now we have a close answer for when it’s going to be happening. It’ll likely bring WeChat on par with Line and KakaoTalk, both of which have benefitted enormously from their social gaming integration – especially in Asia.

Minh’s pick: IG9, Vietnam’s First Crowdfunding Platform, Launches Today

This is big news for Vietnam’s creative communities, so much so that I already got several emails from readers asking to be introduced to IG9. I do hope that someone else in Vietnam comes along and copies them so we’ll be getting some interesting innovation in this space. Either way, it’s looking like 2013 will be the year for Vietnam to start releasing lots of new startups as the scene is maturing considerably.

Minghao’s pick: MNC and Rakuten: Why the Sudden Break Up?

The breakup of Japan’s e-commerce giant Rakuten and Indonesia’s media giant, MNC Group is big news. Both companies have yet to officially announce this, but it has garnered a lot of interest and speculation already. Will Rakuten shut down its Indonesia operation completely? Are there underlying problems with Rakuten itself or did they see something about Indonesia that many others did not? I mirror Enricko’s perspective. Rakuten is a highly data driven company; they run the company based on real hard numbers. As such, they might have concluded that they are not performing up to their expectations and pulled the plug.

Charlie’s pick: Xiaomi to Stat Selling Smart Shoes

I don’t think smart shoes are likely to become a huge trend, but wearable tech in general is, and Xiaomi’s smart shoes may be China’s first real taste of the future if the company can get them out soon enough. This is definitely one to watch.

Youshen’s pick: 6 Chinese Social Sites Will Turn Off the Lights Tomorrow for ‘Earth Hour’

Earth Hour is about taking action and making a difference towards a more sustainable future. Personally, I will agree that it is a strong message for Earth Hour 2013 to have Renren, Youku, QQ, Ushi, 139, and Kaixin to go dark on their interfaces. Last week, Steven covered an infographic overview of social media prevalence across China. With 600 million social media users and 91% penetration amongst netizens, I am certain that China will help contribute significant involvement alongside the millions of global Earth Hour 2013 participants.

Fini’s pick: MNC and Rakuten: Why The Sudden Break Up?

Seems like MNC not serious about running an e-commerce business, and it may be because of their lack of experience in the B2C segment. I don’t think its a money issue since MNC’s owner is famous for throwing money on whatever he likes. Rakuten don’t have enough back up from MNC especially in marketing and advertising. MNC is a media giant, but I never saw any advertisement of RBO.

Andrew’s pick: Hailing WeChat and Mobile Progress, Tencent Posts $7 Billion in Revenues

$7 billion is huge. This is even without monetizing WeChat. As they look forward to possibly monetizing WeChat with applications, games, and location-based activities, I can’t imagine what the figures will be next year. Let’s see.

Willis’ pick: Tencent: Mobile Gaming Platform For WeChat to Begin Testing Soon

WeChat’s upcoming mobile game platform is definitely interesting news but I thought Tencent could have waited for a little longer. It could have focused more on getting more international users rather than spending time working on its game platform. Tencent is extremely cash rich so there’s no real hurry to make money.

Emily’s pick: Google Launches Search Engine in Myanmar as Schmidt Warns Against Web Censorship

Google has finally launched its search engine in Myanmar just this week, which is quite a significant event following the liberalization of the country. Though Internet penetration rates and mobile ownership are still quite low in Myanmar coupled with risks of the government controlling the Internet- we certainly hope to witness a bigger trend of other major players coming in too!

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Image source credit: imgix.8tracks.com

Last night’s news of Rakuten (JSD:4755) breaking up its joint venture with MNC in Indonesia sent shockwaves through the entire tech ecosystem. It could spell the end of Rakuten’s e-commerce business in Indonesia. But why the sudden break?

So far there’s no clarification from either Rakuten or MNC – and no response to our queries to Rakuten Asia – so we can only speculate as to what happened to its dismantled joint-venture. But there is surely only one explanation that makes sense: that its e-commerce project, Rakuten Belanja Online (RBO) isn’t meeting its expectations and goals in Indonesia. We’ve seen it before with Rakuten’s joint venture with search engine Baidu in China, which was shut last year.

Back in November, Ryota Inaba said that RBO’s growth was “good and promising.” The company managed to surpass its first-year expectations, and when it comes to sales, RBO was recording double-digit sales growth from month to month and triple-digit annual growth. It all looked good, right?

Victory for Blibli and Lazada Indonesia

But according to Alexa’s web rankings, RBO is sitting at 599th in terms of visitors in Indonesia – that might be a clue to the online shop’s struggle here. As we’ve seen with the popular online stores in the country, a lot of Rakuten’s rivals are already ranked higher than 100 in terms of local web visitors. One of its biggest competitors, Blibli – which was launched around the same time as RBO – is ranked 231st, and newcomer Lazada Indonesia rocketed its way up to 41st position in less than one year. RBO’s one-and-a-half year impact here seems weak in comparison to those sites.

We can also take a look at its marketing. Back when we interviewed RBO head of marketing in 2011, they said that through the company’s partnership with MNC Media, they would go all out on advertising. The same strategy was put into action by its rivals like TokoBagus, Blibli, and Rocket Internet’s Lazada Indonesia, and it looks like RBO can’t beat them on that front. And even if the Japanese company can, it doesn’t look like its back-end operations are keeping pace.

Rakuten’s problematic services

We also need to take a look at RBO’s execution. A few customers are a bit upset about the company’s services and made their complaints on RBO’s Facebook. A few said that they weren’t receiving their refunds or that there isn’t any confirmation made after they’ve wired in the money.

A particular Facebook conversation last week between a disgruntled customer who had trouble ordering products and RBO is a good example about the company’s problems from the back-end. The customer only learned that the product he ordered was out of stock after the merchant – not RBO – contacted him directly. In fact, the merchant said they were never given confirmation by RBO about the sale. The customer then explained that RBO never replied to his emails and his repeated calls to customer services didn’t solve the problem.

In fact, there are quite a number of complaints being thrown on RBO’s Facebook page, with other customers joining in on the conversation and sharing their frustration too. Rakuten’s Japanese expertise in the e-commerce industry shouldn’t be facing these common problems, but it does. So the question is how much of a team did Rakuten dedicate to the indonesian venture?

This isn’t Rakuten’s only venture into Southeast Asia. In 2009, Rakuten acquired Tarad.com, Thailand’s leading e-commerce platform, and it’s been quite successful. But the difference between Thailand and Indonesia can be attributed to Tarad’s pre-existing foundation of back-end operations and customer services prior to Rakuten’s acquisition. Something MNC didn’t have.

The road forward for Rakuten

There could be other reasons behind this split. Perhaps there was an internal dispute at PT Rakuten-MNC, or because MNC couldn’t plough in any more extra cash as the company is now committed with Chinese company Tencent to promote the China-made WeChat app in Indonesia through another joint venture.

Whatever the case may be, there is one big question that’s being asked by a lot of people today. “Will RBO be closed?” Rakuten and Baidu’s joint venture e-commerce Lekutian was closed after the two companies announced the break-up. The same could happen here too, but for the moment the e-commerce store is still alive.

It’s going to be interesting to hear the thoughts from Rakuten Asia’s director and assistant chief marketing officer Shin Hasegawa about the company’s efforts to stake its claims in Asia when we interview him during our Startup Asia Singapore event this April 4th. The team is eyeing growth and expansion in Southeast Asia, but will Indonesia remain on the Japanese company’s radar? We’ll have to wait and see.

Hit the comments with your theories on RBO’s fate and performance in the market.

(File image: Google’s Eric Schmidt)

Google’s search engine launched in Myanmar yesterday on the Google.com.mm domain. It’s nothing special to look at, and it’s just in English at the moment, but it’s another big step as the 21st century greets the citizens of the newly opened up and quasi-democratic Myanmar. Today, Google chairman Eric Schmidt is in the capital Yangon where, according to TheNextWeb, he gave a speech warning of the dangers for the nation’s fledgling internet:

He added:

Indeed, Myanmar is likely to skip the PC era and jump straight to mobile, as has been seen in some other late-emerging Southeast Asian nations. To that end, Google has also partially opened up its Android app store, Google Play, to people with Myanmar SIM cards in their phones.

Google is one of many tech companies keen to jump into Myanmar, which has a population of 48 million. Right now, according to Radio Free Asia, only 6.7 percent of Myanmar’s population has landline and wireless internet capable subscriptions, and the mobile ownership/penetration rate is at just nine percent.

Schmidt’s tone is more strident in Myanmar than it was in North Korea, where only a select group of government officials have access to a limited national intranet. However, tourists and businesspeople heading to North Korea can now purchase mobile internet hotspots from which they can freely access the full internet.

Schmidt, who seems to have transformed into a Hillary Clinton-esque ‘Google Secretary of State’, will meet with Thein Sein, Myanmar’s president, this afternoon.

(Source: TheNextWeb)

Indonesian game publisher Prodigy Infinitech launched a new game a couple of days ago called Anime Pirates. The game is basically a Facebook-based game that’s based on popular Japanese manga One Piece. After giving the turn-based battle RPG title a try, I find the game somewhat dull and monotonous. On the positive side, it has good graphics and quite a lot of One Piece elements and characters that will make a few die-hard manga fans happy.

But first, let me tell you that I’m not an avid RPG nor One Piece fan, but I do enjoy casual games from time to time. At the start of the Anime Pirates game, there are six character types for you to choose from – from a sword lady to a magician. Then you start to play, and the game’s storyline follows the manga itself. You will also get to participate in elite battles between One Piece main characters, which I think is cool.

After the prologue, you will get your own ship and do your own adventure to become the ultimate pirate king. You will be able to upgrade your ship, and sail from place to place all the while completing given tasks, like fighting off invading pirates. Here comes the boring part – you won’t be able to do anything during the turn-based battles. It’s fully automatic. You get to manage your equipment, and crew before the battle, but that’s it. The nice battle animation can keep you amused for a bit, but after fighting – well, watching – your hero fight all the enemies for a while, it becomes a drag.

I’ve beaten my share of enemies there by just clicking and skipping the story part. There are other parts that might be able to glue a few gamers to Anime Pirates that I haven’t yet tried. Those include fighting against fellow players, building alliances with them, and fighting daily bosses for special prizes. The game developer earns money from players making in-app purchases for gold top-ups.

My colleague Minh, who follows the One Piece story, gave the game a try too. His initial reaction was that it’s potentially disappointing that you don’t get to play as one of the main characters. In his own words, he explains further:

Well, I couldn’t learn anything beyond that you don’t play as One Piece characters, which is potentially disappointing. Especially if you can’t choose a “Devil’s Fruit” character, I’d imagine that’s what most fans would prefer.

Luffy, the main character, ate a Devil’s fruit, which changed his body into rubber. Other people eat different fruits…Some turn into lightning, others can be super slippery. It’s all very comical. Anyway, that’s a central point of the story.

Although the main characters aren’t part of the said “Devil’s Fruit” group, Let’s hope that we can recruit those characters during the game.

You can give the game a go here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image source credit: wired.co.uk

Indonesian publishing giant Kompas Group launched its digital publishing service Gramediana in beta last month. With the amount of capital and connections that Kompas Group has, Gramediana can well be the one to beat in terms of Indonesian publishing services. Plus, it’s planning to launch its own tablet. To find out more, we talked with Gramediana manager Rio Eka Putra about its ambitions and upcoming plans.

There are three main parts to Gramediana’s services, explains Rio. First is to sell e-books and printed books (via print on demand). Second is a place for writing and publishing independent books. Third is a community for authors, publishers, and readers. At the moment, Gramediana offers the first feature, while the second and third aspects will be released in April.

(Related: NulisBuku Responds to new Rivalry from Gramediana)

The team aims to collect 15,000 titles, 5,000 Twitter followers, and 1,000 Facebook fans, and hit the top 5,000 local rankings on Alexa. Though there is no mention about profits yet, the targets look feasible when you consider who’s backing the company. Gramediana’s name alone can attract a lot of people and authors to jump onboard.

Interestingly, Gramediana plans to launch a cheap tablet where people can access its books. There are no further details given about this, but it sounds like the company wants to emulate Amazon’s Kindle business model: offering free books on those tablets, and then encourage people to purchase more books within the gadget. This is in-line with Gramediana’s vision, which is, as Rio puts it, “Gramediana is built to transform the book industry in Indonesia from printed to digital editions.”

Last night at Tech in Asia’s Bangkok Meetup, Evernote’s Tiang Lim Foo, Asia Pacific Market Development, took the hot seat for more than 40 minutes for an interview followed by a lively discussion with the audience. During the interview, Tiang revealed several interesting things. In Southeast Asia, Evernote has close to two million users and the Thailand user base is growing fast, now at 400,000 users. Last month, we noted that Evernote has 350,000 users in Indonesia, too.

An Evernote PR representative told us that Evernote is noticing sharp growth in Southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. The growth in Thailand has been pretty impressive. Compared to its Thailand user count two years ago, Evernote has increased its users by 1,200 percent. In the last three months, Thailand has added 21,500 new users on average per month.

Globally, Evernote has 50 million users with about two-third of its users outside of the United States. In Asia Pacific, which includes Australia, Japan, and China, Evernote has over 15 million users and is growing at 225 percent in the region in the past year.

In China, Evernote operates as a standalone service with a different name (Yinxiang Biji), a local team, and new data centers. It is, however, not the dominant cloud note service in China, with local competitors like Netease and Shanda all trying to grab a piece of that market.

Fyi, Tiang Lim is the only Evernote person in Southeast Asia so far.

Singapore-based mobile loyalty app, Perx, has been growing steadily over the past year. In my last email exchange with co-founder Andrew Roth he revealed that Perx now has over 130,000 downloads who generate 650,000 chops so far.

Besides helping merchants to manage their loyalty chop cards digitally, Perx now also has the new Net Promoter Score (NPS) Loyalty Task feature for merchants. In short, the NPS Loyalty Task helps merchants measure how likely it is that customers are going to recommend the merchant to others. Users will get to input the NPS survey after they receive their chops after making a purchase (see image).

From the beginning, [Perx’s] goal was to help the merchant unlock the value of their customers. Tracking NPS for a merchant is just one component of our ‘customer experience’ methodology.

As a service, we help our clients build a community of advocates by discovering ‘promoters’ and closing the loop with ‘detractors’. In other words, we don’t just collect data, we help our clients take action and measure results with specific goals.

So far, Perx’s Loyalty Tasks module is active with 46 clients right now, with 81 percent of its users actually completing surveys. The conversion rate of the survey looks impressive and seems to open a new path for Perx to provide even more value to merchants.

From the looks of it, Perx is an even more compelling service since merchants are more likely to pay for an end-to-end digital customer loyalty and feedback solution. Perx charges its merchants anywhere from $1 to $2 per active customer per month for its Loyalty Task module. If you’re interested, you can find out more about Perx here.

Singapore’s Startup Academy teaches folks to design and code.

Powered by Subhransu Behera (SAP), Joyce Huang (Microsoft), Jaryl Sim (Tinkerbox Studios), Adrian Chua (DivZero Consultancy), and Jeffrey Paine (Battle Ventures), the Startup Academy now has three courses for you to choose from: HTML & CSS, iOS Development, and Ruby on Rails. More courses will be added in the future.

Jeffrey explains that the key purpose of Startup Academy is to help business founders understand the basics of front end, web, and mobile application programming so that they are better equipped to navigate the world of tech startups.

Startup Academy’s courses will be held at co-working space Hub Singapore at 113 Somerset Rd. Check out the video below to understand why it’s good and cool to know how to code.

Feeling inspired? Now, click here!

Japan’s Nikkei is reporting that Rakuten’s (JSD:4755) e-commerce efforts in Indonesia are now in doubt with the dissolution of its joint-venture company with Indonesian media company MNC Group. The paper says the MNC split has been confirmed to it by Rakuten. It could well mean the end of the localized Rakuten Belanja Online store that launched in Indonesia in June 2011. We’ve contacted Rakuten Asia for more details and will update if we hear back.

The joint-venture for Indonesia, PT Rakuten-MNC, is split 51-49 in favor of the Japanese e-commerce giant. It’s one of 13 nations where Rakuten operates. In November last year, the site reported having 400 merchants with 300,000 products offered, representing 500 percent growth since it launched.

Shortly after launching in Indonesia, the head of marketing at Rakuten Belanja Online, Doddy B Ekaputra, told us that Rakuten is “striving to be number one in Indonesia” with its open marketplace for merchants. He added that MNC was chosen as a partner because it’s a media company, and “we are aware of how important advertising is, so yes we are going to go all out in advertising.”

Nikkei states that Rakuten and MNC agreed the spilt in February.

This isn’t the first major failure for Rakuten’s overseas ambitions. Its China store was shuttered in April 2012. It was run in partnership with Chinese search engine Baidu, but the store found it tough to compete in China’s mature and intense e-shopping market.

With Rakuten Indonesia out of the picture for now, it leaves Rakuten Ichiba Taiwan the only joint venture effort that’s still alive.

(Thanks to @Hotta for translation help; Source: Nikkei Japanese)

Selling everything from pricey sake to quality skincare products, Luxa.jp, as its name might suggest, is a luxury-oriented e-commerce site. Its main draw is that its items are sold at useful discounts during flash sales. Today Luxa is announcing 500 million yen (US$5.25 million) in series B funding from the JAFCO Super V3 Series Fund. Its first major round was worth the same amount.

Luxa’s new funding will be used to strengthen its sales force, accelerate customer acquisition, and “launch various vertical sites targeting specific categories.” That will likely see Luxa expand some of its specialist areas, like home decor or foodstuffs.

Most of Luxa’s flash sales start at noon each day and run for 72 hours. The site has over 350,000 members so far, with its largest user-base being fairly prosperous Japanese consumers aged 30 to 40. It aims to use the newest investment to reach one million users soon, and to hit an annual sales revenue of $1 billion by 2016.

In its home market, Luxa is up against the likes of Glamour Sales, which has a similarly broad variety of products.

We’ve seen such luxury flash sales sites do well elsewhere in Asia. Perhaps the best success of its kind in the region is China’s VIPShop (NYSE:VIPS), whose stock value has kept rising since its US IPO last year where it raised over $70 million.

The last time we saw the JAFCO fund in action, it pumped $5 million into the voice messaging social network Bubble Motion.

Taobao is a household name in China, being the online marketplace that first got the country going nuts for e-commerce. But Alibaba-owned Taobao is not necessarily confined to mainland China, and it’s definitely an area we want to explore more.

That’s why our upcoming Startup Asia Singapore 2013 will feature a coffee chat session on the topic ‘How E-Commerce King Taobao Is Expanding Out of China’. Shedding light on Taobao’s moves across Southeast Asia will be Daphne Lee, who’s responsible for managing Taobao’s business development and marketing strategies outside of home turf. That covers significant expansion into Hong Kong, Taiwan, and even Singapore.

Indeed, Daphne tells us that, as of the end of 2012, Taobao has 1.2 million registered members in Hong Kong and 600,000 in Taiwan. That’s a fairly good start – as well as cause for concern for other C2C marketplaces in the region. Could the Chinese e-commerce giant be heading into new areas, like taking on Kaskus in Indonesia? I’ll be sure to ask Daphne when she’s onstage for our chat at 2:30 to 3pm on April 5.

With lots of online shopping startups at the event, and Rakuten’s Asia-wide marketing officer onstage the day before, we’ll be firing hot-button e-commerce questions from all angles.

If you haven’t grabbed your tickets, do so today. Check out all the superb participants and guest speakers who’ll be there as well. See you at Startup Asia Singapore on April 4 and 5.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: theodoresworld.net

With the latest report that South Korean banks and news broadcasters’ servers were possibly hacked by North Korea – and the North earlier accusing the US of cyber attacks – it raises questions of North Korea’s actual cyber ability.

The IP addresses connected to the latest hack attack on South Korea – and ones from 2009 and 2011 – are coming out of China. Of course, hackers can fake a Chinese IP address or re-route their web connections, but we have to consider the environment where these attacks came from.

Last time I checked, the only people who had access to the international internet in North Korea were sanctioned lab computer scientists and foreigners. So I’d have to agree fully with Michael Sutton from Zscaler, an internet security provider, when he remarked today:

(North Koreans) simply don’t have access to the same technology due to sanctions, and a large portion of their population does not have ready access to the Internet, so they don’t have that natural pool of talent to recruit from.

Considering the timing of the latest attacks in sync with North Korean computers being hacked, it might make sense that North Korea is behind the attacks. But how? If North Korea doesn’t have the technical ability to take on US or South Korean systems, I’d wager that North Korea is hiring Chinese hackers to do their dirty work.

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.

Having already buddied up with China’s TuJia and Singapore-based Wego last year, today HomeAway (NASDAQ:AWAY) has agreed another Asian tie-up – this time with Travelmob. As regular readers will recall, Travelmob is from Singapore and aims to be Asia’s Airbnb.

HomeAway’s Victor Wang – from HQ in Austin, Texas – explains that this is part of the site’s strategy of increasing “the inventory and awareness of vacation rentals in the Asian market.” For holiday-makers, it means that Travelmob’s Asia-Pacific listings will be made available within the HomeAway site.

Travelmob founder Turochas “T” Fuad, who was the managing director of Skype Asia before his new startup venture, said in today’s announcement:

Travelmob is honored to partner with the global leader in vacation rentals. This partnership enables us to significantly expand our global reach and provide our property owners and managers with the opportunity to market their properties to more travelers worldwide. It is also a testament of Travelmob’s mission to enable global travelers to experience Asia Pacific like a local.

Home vacation rentals have been very disruptive in the online travel booking sector, proving to be a huge growth area for companies like HomeAway and Airbnb. The latter has been pushing into Asia as well, especially into Southeast Asia.

HotelQuickly is a mobile-only service that helps users book hotels really quickly. It’s available in six countries: Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. It provides four to six hotels for fast picking and booking. These three stars or above hotels are handpicked by the team with up to a 70 percent discount in pricing. HotelQuickly is available both on iOS and Android.

HotelQuickly was founded by five co-founders: Tomas Laboutka (CEO), Christian Mischler (COO), Michal Juhas (CTO), Mario Peng (CFO), Raphael Cohen (CSO). Interestingly, both Christian and Raphael are actually ex-Rocket Internet Asia members. Christian is the former COO of FoodPanda while Raphael was the Managing Director of FoodPanda Vietnam and DropGifts Singapore.

HotelQuickly was officially launched at WebMob’s Thailand Meetup yesterday in Bangkok. From my understanding, it has also raised $500,000 from a group of undisclosed European and Asian angel investors.

What inspired the founders to start HotelQuickly was simple. CEO Tomas Laboutka said that it was a pain to book hotels quickly while on the go, saying “The big boys realized there’s a problem but they are stuck in their old system.”

The startup now has hired 24 people across Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. Interestingly, 34 percent of the team are ex-Rocket Internet folks. Four out of five of HotelQuickly’s founders are based in Bangkok, Thailand.

Laboutka said that there are many reasons why Bangkok is a great place to build a company. He feels the startup community is quickly building up with the help of Hubba and Launchpad, which has attracted more attention from investors. People in Thailand are also eager to work and are great designers, though he lamented that there aren’t enough tech-capable graduates for hire. Last but not least definitely, comparing to Singapore, Bangkok is surely a more affordable place to bootstrap.

Sweden-based crowdsourcing phone directory app Truecaller announced today that the company now processes around 500 million name and number lookups each month, a 70 percent increase since we talked about the company just last month. Userbase numbers have grown by two million since then as well, with half of the new users coming from India. Marketing manager Kim Fai Kok shared some data with us that shows how well the app is doing in Asia.

India is still the number one Asian country user for Truecaller. The country ranks first when it comes to the number of searches made every month. In the past month alone, there has been an increase of over one million users from India. Now basically one of every seven smartphone users in India uses Truecaller.

Asia is definitely loving Truecaller, with almost 50 percent of contact requests now coming from the continent (not counting Truecaller’s Middle Eastern users, who are technically also in Asia). The company is now eyeing potential Asian markets to expand into, and Japan and Indonesia are high on the list “due to smartphone penetration rate and maturity,” as Kim explained. I personally believe that their choice to expand to Indonesia is a good one, as the country is definitely one to look out for in the coming decades.

Recording 200 million additional searches in one month is no small feat, and it seems like the company is on a roll. We look forward to hearing more about it when Truecaller dips its feet deeper into Japan and Indonesia.

Brand24.co.id, an Indonesian company that specializes in monitoring online social marketing – and the company which brought us Jakarta’s social infographic – has opened its doors last week. Brand24 is actually an Indonesian branch of its Poland headquarters, and most of the expertise comes from that end.

Brand24 analyzes conversations from Indonesia’s social media, identifies people’s sentiment, and points out the current trends. The service can also help make reports and infographics for you. I gave the service a try using the keyword “Tech in Asia,” and it was quite effective in doing all the stuff mentioned. There are still a few Polish words lying around the generated report and the Brand24 admin panel, but it does not disturb the whole experience that much.

One thing I realized is that the service can’t help you analyze past social media trends. And that the service monitors data from Indonesian social media only. A Brand24 representative explains that these Indonesia-based monitoring results are the best thing about the company’s system.

There are a few sites offering similar services like, NoLimit and Katapedia. Brand24 believes that what sets it apart from the rest is its high frequency updates which happen in minutes, and its more intuitive design experience.

Brand24’s key differentiator, I think, is its impressive global clientele which includes Intel, Panasonic, and AirFrance.

Indonesia’s digital and social marketing is now shifting towards social media sites. Besides the growing services offered by companies like Brand24, there will also be a company called IdBuzzNetwork that aims to use social media influencers to help promote companies’ brands and products in the near future. With companies paying attention to these social sites even more closely, being logged into social networking sites has become as important for brands as it is for you and me.

Singapore-based AdzCentral has concluded a SG$4 million (US$3.2 million) financing round with Electric Sheep Capital and Digital Media Partners (DMP).

AdzCentral in a nutshell provides clients with a one-stop platform for convenient automated digital ads buying including social ads, search, mobile, email, and video. The AdzCentral platform integrates with DSP and trading desk technology to run real-time ad bidding.

AdzCentral platform doesn’t just stop at automated digital ad buy but also includes other ad tech point solutions such as campaign measurement, analytics, visitor profiling, targeting, and optimization to ensure its clients’ ad dollars are well spent, achieving optimal CPM, CPC, and CPA based on real-time data. The entire suite is coined “scientific media buying” by AdzCentral.

To date, AdzCentral has already served quite an impressive list of brands onboard including SingTel, American Express, 3M, Unilever, Standard Chartered, MasterCard, Citibank, and Hyundai. Founder and CEO at AdzCentral, Reza Behnam, told me that AdzCentral has delivered over 1,000 campaigns serving across 100 clients. Behnam commented on APAC’s digital ad market in today’s statement:

APAC and especially Southeast Asia represent an extraordinary opportunity for AdzCentral, where (according to ADMA) digital advertising was worth US$25 billion in 2011.

Prior to AdzCentral, Reza Behnam was the managing director of Yahoo Southeast Asia and also a venture partner at IDG Ventures in Southeast Asia. Juggling his role at AdzCentral, Behnam is also the co-chairman at IAB Singapore, a director at e-payments platform MOL Global, and co-chairman at H2 Singapore Chapter.

AdzCentral first received seed investment from Joichi Ito’s Neoteny Labs, Toivo Annus (founding engineer of Skype), Jayesh Parekh (co-founder of Sony Television Network India), the Chinese Founders Fund, and other undisclosed angel investors. Amid the Series A crunch in Southeast Asia, AdzCentral managed to pull things together, which certainly deserves two thumbs up.

At the start of this year we talked to American entrepreneur Bowei Gai as he kicked off his worldwide, nine-month odyssey for his World Startup Report project. Amid of all the globe-trotting and networking, Bowei is also producing slideshows that detail the startup scene in each country he visits – and now we have the first report covering India.

(UPDATE: For the sake of balance, you might like to see the rebuttal by the folks at NextBigWhat who reckon that the report is too anecdotal and even inaccurate in places).

The Indian report first highlights some startup success stories in the country – ones that have grown to be key web players, like Flipkart for e-commerce (valued at US$800 million), the ad platform InMobi (worth $1 billion), and the fashion e-tailer Myntra ($100 million). There are also some notable mobile-first successes, such as the JustDial search engine. To get to that stage, Bowei’s report – whose content was crowdsourced to those with knowledge of the local scene – points out important angel investors and incubators and accelerators in the country, such as The Hatch and The Startup Centre.

Aside from local innovations and useful facts, the new report also gives a guide to Indian business culture, which could prove useful to new entrants to the market. One eye-opening example is “India time”, whereby poor infrastructure and chronic traffic issues mean that meetings and events often start an hour or more late. Also, a tendency towards “culture by committee” can make business progress “slower in India by a factor of two-times to ten-times in comparison to Silicon Valley.”

With many looking to India recently – such as the recent commitments made by Dave McClure’s 500 Startups – this could be a great reference. Here’s the full 42-slide report:

By the way, the World Startup Report’s next stop is on April 3 to 13 in Manila, the Philippines, where there’ll be events and meet-ups. Check the site for more details.

Malaysia’s leading payment service giant, MOL, has acquired Indonesia’s AyoPay for an undisclosed sum. AyoPay is a 20-man team business-to-business payment distributor who has been working hand-in-hand with MOL in Indonesia for the last two to three years ever since incorporation.

Specifically, AyoPay helps to distribute MOLPoints, MOL’s online micropayment system for games, to over 40,000 channels — like cybercafes and convenience retailers — in Indonesia. Globally, MOLPoints’s distribution spans over 600,000 channels across over 80 countries worldwide.

Ganesh Kumar Bangah, the founder of MOL, told me on the phone:

We picked AyoPay because they are strong locally and have good networks. We worked with them for the last two to three years as one of our commercial partners and they are distributing our products quite well. The acquisition deepens our relationship and strengthens our manpower in Indonesia.

The entire deal took about six months to complete.

With the acquisition set in stone, AyoPay will keep its brand name and continue to market MOL in Indonesia. Ganesh also confirmed that Indonesia is MOL’s top priority in 2013. While MOL has its eyes set on Indonesia, it is also constantly looking at other lucrative markets, such as Turkey and the Middle East, where it acquired Game Sultan and PaytoGo earlier this month.

(Also read: The Founding Story of MOL)

American mobile chat app MessageMe has been generating a lot of buzz since its launch just a couple of weeks ago, and with good reason. TechCrunch reports the app has already garnered more than a million users and sent more than ten million doodles. Why? TechCrunch writes the app is setting itself apart in the crowded mobile chat market with its features:

While the messaging space is incredibly competitive with apps from Facebook, Apple’s iMessages plus the big Asian clients like Tencent’s WeChat and NHN’s Line, MessageMe thinks it can carve out a space because of the way it quickly pulls in rich media like doodles and videos [...] Basically, they think it’s a lot more expressive than standard messaging and silly as it seems, those doodles will differentiate them from the very large field of competition.

And in MessageMe’s own press release, the company compares the way its app changes communication to “[the] way email revolutionized old school mail.”

But is MessageMe really all that revolutionary? Does it really offer features that set it apart from the pack? After checking it out, our answer is a resounding “no.” Yes, it’s a very well-made app, and it deserves the success it’s getting. But it really isn’t innovative at all; nearly every feature MessageMe offers was already available in Asian mobile chat apps that have been around much longer than the American app. Here’s a quick breakdown of the feature list for MessageMe and four popular Asian chat apps; pay special attention to the launch dates:

As you can see from the chart above, music integration is the only area where MessageMe really really sets itself apart, and even that has been available in Weixin (the Chinese version of WeChat) since last fall, albeit via a third-party plugin. Most of the other features TechCrunch says MessageMe is hoping to set itself apart with have been available for years on other apps; I was sending doodles to my wife using Xiaomi’s Miliao mobile chat app all the way back in 2010. Plus, many of the Asian apps also offer features MessageMe doesn’t have yet, like WeChat’s ability to exchange digital business cards, Cubie’s “secret” disappearing messages, or Vietnamese chat app Zalo’s pictionary-style doodle game. MessageMe isn’t blazing a new frontier, it is playing catch-up.

None of this is to say that MessageMe isn’t good; it is. Personally, I found it to be a better user experience than some of these Asian apps, and if my friends adopt it, I’ll probably start using it in addition to WeChat. But let’s not kid ourselves. If the geography was reversed so that Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat, and Cubie were Western apps and MessageMe was an Asian app, MessageMe would be getting called a copycat and you’d see phrasing like “Asia’s WeChat” in the headlines on tech news sites.

Of course, none of these Asian apps invented the concept of mobile messaging either, but they did pioneer and popularize the multimedia-based vision of mobile messaging with things like stickers and doodles that MessageMe is now following. That’s a big part of why all of these apps have been so successful. WeChat boasts more than 300 million users, Line has more than 100 million, and KakaoTalk has more than 70 million.

It would be great if Asian apps like Line and WeChat got some recognition for their innovation, at the very least, the folks at MessageMe stopped pretending their app is revolutionary. By creating such a smooth and lightweight app, the MessageMe team has definitely given us one of the most evolved versions of the mobile chat app we’ve yet seen, and that’s great. But for anyone familiar with Asia’s popular chat apps, there’s definitely no revolution here.

Kleii, the Vietnamese Dropbox I wrote about in January just had one week of downtime where users were unable to access their files. It left some users scratching their heads and some pissed off. Well, it is still technically in beta.

Kleii is Vietnam’s only significant global competitor in consumer cloud services.

According to the company blog, the outage was initiated by Kleii to fix a potentially dangerous security breach in the software that the testing team found. According to Nguyen Tuan Son, CEO of Kleii, there was no hack attempt but he wanted to close up this hole before anything happened. With the product due out of beta in six months’ time, the team is clearly attempting to seal up any potential pitfalls before going fully live.

Today, the Kleii site and service is back online again and offering users who signed up before March 10th a whopping 100GB of free space for a year. Users already get 50GB space on a normal free account which is a big jump over Dropbox’s usual 2GB or potential 10GB of free stoage.

When I last checked in, Kleii had just over 300,000 users. Two months later, there are more than 700,000 users. At this growth rate, the user base is set to hit one million by the end of next month. For perspective, Dropbox, Kleii’s prime global competitor, is sitting at a cozy 100 million.

Today, Vietnam’s finally got a crowdfunding platform. The full-time team of seven come from a motley crew of startups based out of Hanoi including Dynabyte and The Missing Corner. The company is founded by Nam Do, the current CEO of Emotiv, a US company now based in the Silicon Valley, which produces a piece of headgear that allows users to control objects on a screen with their brains. IG9, a cheeky version of the english word “ignite”, will be the first crowdfunding platform of its type in Vietnam – operating in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city.

Crowdfunding is not a new concept to Asia, there’s at least nine across the region from Japan to Indonesia. The IG9 team hopes to be at the forefront of this in Vietnam, so I talked to Lew Yin How, CEO of the project, to get the lowdown.

In a largely cash economy like Vietnam, how are you actually going to get projects funded online?

Since this is the first type of project of its kind, we want to open up the payment options as much as possible, so that payment won’t be a limiting factor. This includes the usual online payment, bank transfers, and also COD. We also allow people to pay at our office and designated partner.

Of course, COD would most likely be the biggest payment method for IG9, as this is how many of Vietnam’s e-commerce giants get payment.

In a nascent market like Vietnam where crowdfunding is alien, how are you going to get your name out?

Our strategy is working with projects that already have a huge community. One of our first projects is a dance group called St. 319, who easily has hundreds of thousands of FB likes and a lot more views on Youtube. When these projects work with us, it’s our mutual agreement that both sides will leverage on their existing community to promote it.

At today’s launch, IG9 will already have four projects to go and twenty more projects in the project pipeline to be launched over the coming weeks. How well it fares with these known projects will be a real test for the model in Vietnam and a big teaching moment for the currently non-existent user base.

How are you different from Kickstarter?

Kickstarter’s focus is mainly on creative projects; but for us, we see this model as very versatile – it really depends on the market response. There are two ways this can turn out: the first is similar to Kickstarter, with the main focus on creative projects; the second is more towards crowdfunding for startups (which takes some time for the market to develop). So our initial focus would be on the creative projects.

Currently, IG9 accepts projects under 14 Categories: Art, Comics, Dance, Design, Fashion, Film & Video, Food, Games, Music, Photography, Publishing, Technology, Theatre, and Community.

Will you be managing projects just like Kickstarter?

There are 3 main phases: pre-campaign, during-campaign, post-campaign. Pre-campaign, our team will work closely with project creators to package a campaign that provides great value and of great interest to potential supporters. From our experience, most project creators have no experience with fundraising, so, we guide them more than Kickstarter does – Kickstarter’s attitude is pretty much just screening, and then hands off. During-campaign, we make it easy for you to communicate and update supporters, sharing them milestones, or if there’s new rewards. Post-campaign, we make it easy for creators to contact and communicate with supporters, giving them updates, following-up on fulfilling the rewards.

Of course, the cool thing about crowdfunding platforms is they disrupt top-down big investors and publishers who are the content deciders. It allows the people to decide what they want to see in the market. This is potentially very disruptive to a place like Vietnam where content is largely top-down and monitored. A place where creative and content projects are largely regulated by the Ministry of Culture, and often vetoed when even slightly controversial.

Our current approach is to just start more conservative first, running with projects that are more within the boundary of their regulation. We will solve that problem as we go along.

We’ll see if this dichotomy will actually play out on the platform or if project posters self-censor before their projects go up. It may be alright, because as Yin How says, “the projects we have are things that are gonna happen anyway.”

Either way, I welcome more consumer participation in product and service development. The good folks at SGE has a neat list of crowdsourcing sites in Asia here. And if you’re looking to crowdfund, make sure you’re armed with a kickass crowdfunding plan before kick starting your campaign.

Indonesian payment gateway for credit cards, Veritrans, just held a get together yesterday to celebrate its relocation to a new office space. During that get-together, we talked with CEO Ryu Kawano about the company’s latest progress and upcoming plans.

Ryu shared that although the transaction volume is still small, the company is recording monthly growth of 100 percent, and is enthusiastic he can achieve more. Veritrans’ current customers now include quite a few startups like Berrybenka, Loket, Tees.co.id, and JajalIndo.com. The service is on course to bring 20 more merchants by the end of May, and is targeting 200 merchants by the end of year.

Ryu said that so far, the leader of Indonesia’s e-payment gateway for credit cards is still DokuPay. So how are they planning to beat the competition? Muhammad Fauzan Ahsan, the senior software developer of Veritrans, who has been there since the company’s inception believes that Veritrans’ easy integration through its step-by-step integration map and upcoming features would be the key to that.

New products and office

Applying to offer credit card payment systems requires a lot of steps, and the applicant needs some coding skills like PHP or .NET to do just that. Regarding these many steps, Veritrans has built a step-to-step integration map and documentation which makes it easy for people to follow, and the team is quite proud of that map. Over the next few months, Veritrans will launch easier integration method for merchants who do not know how to code by offering a WordPress plugin and a product called VT-Link. VT-Link enables merchants to just put in some basic info like the product name, description, and price, and VT-Link will generate a link which redirects customers to the credit card payment page.

Fauzan also shared that Veritrans offers a fraud detection system without any additional costs, unlike its competitors. The team is now connected with CIMB and BNI banks for credit card payment system, and will be connecting with several internet banking services in Indonesia like Mandiri ClickPay in the upcoming months.

One upcoming feature that Ryu is particularly pleased in is a no-redirection payment method called VT-Direct. He added:

We are most excited about VT-direct because this will help merchants process credit cards on their own payment page, such that they can control their UI. Also, our Merchant Administration Portal has been revamped to make it even easier for the merchant to monitor their payments.

One thing to note is that Veritrans is a company focused on servicing the merchants. We are NOT an e-wallet that is more consumer oriented. We are a company that help merchants accept a variety of payment methods (CC, internet banking, etc.), but we are NOT a payment method. You can’t pay with Veritrans.

Veritrans’ office is still located in Mid Plaza 2 building in Jakarta, but instead of borrowing a place at Qeon Interactive’s office on 24th floor, the Veritrans team is now located at their own office at the 25th floor to accommodate the team’s growth. The team grew to 27 now from just three last year, 80 percent of them are developers.

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

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

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

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

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

So how are you different from Foursquare?

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

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

How will Tapmee make money?

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

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

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

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

Do you guys remember the Indonesian game Icon Pop Quiz which received props from Korean singer PSY in December? Well, its developer, Alegrium, launched a sequel to its popular Icon Pop game called Icon Pop Brand earlier this month. The new game is proving so popular in Indonesia that it even knocked WeChat from the first position on the country’s iOS free app chart for a few days.

We talked with Stefan Damasena, the CEO of Alegrium, about its latest game and the studio itself. Icon Pop Brand uses similar gameplay to Icon Pop Quiz in which users have to guess the described brands using Alegrium’s catchy visual hints.

One hilarious moment I had when playing Icon Pop Quiz with my friends was discovering that Indonesian dangdut legend Rhoma Irama is featured in one of the game’s questions. Stefan explained that the team intended to insert and promote Indonesian things in the game, and he promises that there is an Indonesian brand inside the Icon Pop Brand game too.

Millions of guesses

Stefan tells us that Icon Pop Quiz has been downloaded over 14 million times, and the new Icon Pop Brand has seen over one million downloads already. The reason they built this sequel, Stefan said, is because they’ve had a lot of requests from users.

Alegrium is a self-funded startup. Besides Icon Pop titles, the developer team has built other game titles that showcase its characteristic great visuals, like Rob n Roll and Snowball Run. The team hopes to build more game titles this year, all the while maintaining its Icon Pop series.

Stefan points out that they are hiring. Anyone passionate about mobile gaming and would like to create great projects can send a CV to jobs(at)alegrium(dot)com. Vacancies include designer/illustrator, social media and content manager, programmer for web (PHP and HTML), iOS, and Android.

Icon Pop Brand is available on iOS here. And like its previous title, it should be available for Android in the future.