Brisbane-headquartered game studio Halfbrick is nailing it in China with its Fruit Ninja game. If you think people are sick of slicing all kinds of fruit on their mobile screens, then you’re so wrong.

Speaking with Phil Larsen, chief marketing officer at Halfbrick on the sidelines of the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing today, he told me that Fruit Ninja has been downloaded 500 million times across the world. Out of which, China accounted for 200 million of these downloads with 50 million monthly active users coming from China. Phil told me:

Fruit Ninja is a very simple casual game that has a universal theme. It’s not about shooting, action, or any particular game play. It’s based on fruits and it’s all around the world… So it crosses the language barrier [since] it doesn’t need any text to play. You can understand just from the visuals alone. And that kind of simple arcade gameplay really works well in China.

The Fruit Ninja craze in China is done without having an office in China. Phil says that Halfbrick wanted to keep the company small and lean. Instead of opening an office in China, the Australian company works with iDreamSky who helps Halfbrick distribute their games in China, mainly working with telcos and local Android app marketplaces.

Despite having huge download numbers, the revenue figures from China aren’t proportionally large. In China, the Fruit Ninja Android app generates revenue through in-app purchases and ads. Phil explains that Chinese gamers in general are okay as long as they are able to enjoy 90 percent of the game without spending. If needed, Chinese gamers are willing to farm (without paying) for higher level items. So in the future, Fruit Ninja is looking to draw in paying Chinese users to try the 100 percent full gaming experience for a limited time and hope that they will buy to keep up with that level.

Besides Fruit Ninja, Halfbrick also has other games including Jetpack Joyride, Zombie Dash, and its latest title, Fish Out Of Water.

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

What was originally an idea that came out of a Tech Venture class at Sydney University is now one of Australia’s most unique startups. CloudHerd CEO and co-founder Alexander Stamp’s wanted to solve the tedious and slow process his father encountered while purchasing cows from a cattle market. The service recently came in as one of the final few brilliant startups competing at TechStars New York, on top of being one of the startups to have graduated recently from the inaugural Sydney University Incubate Program.

CloudHerd is a platform that allows farmers to manage the inventory and auctioning of their livestock. It offers an extensive list of features, which includes inventory, paddock, and property management. It has integrated Google maps, Gmail calendar, and Microsoft Outlook into its system as well. Other features for farmers include data logging, charts, email notifications, HTML5 video support, auctions system, payment management, National Livestock Identification System (NLIS) integration, and cattle genetics information.

Alexander explains:

We have a significant percentage of these features complete but [require] a bit of polishing of course. The general idea of the system is that one does one’s inventorying and management on the system and at the same time, the auction information is automatically copied in from the inventorying system.

One of the issues that farmers probably face while being out in Australia’s vast farms would be intermittent connectivity. To combat this, Alexander tells us that the team will be developing a native smartphone and desktop application to ensure that information will be automatically synced once a connection is available. Also, the mobile app will definitely come in handy during paddock inventorying as well.

For every auction that takes place on the CloudHerd platform, the Sydney-based startup collects a transaction fee of one percent. And apart from the basic inventory version, it will also be selling a premium inventory version in the future as well.

This sounds like a good solution for farmers to aid in their supply chain management. We wish the CloudHerd team the best with the upcoming pitch at Echelon Ignite: Australia 2013 organized by our friends over at e27 on May 8.

The entrepreneurship scene seems to be heating up down under, especially at the top universities in the country. Last week, we wrote about university-run Melbourne Accelerator Program (MAP) launching its second round of applications, thanks to the encouraging results from the first one. And apparently MAP isn’t the only university-run program coming out of Australia.

Incubate is a student union backed startup incubator and entrepreneur program at the University of Sydney. It was founded last year by two students, James Alexander and Mina Nada, with strong support from University of Sydney Union (USU).

First batch of startups and achievements

Recently, Incubate graduated its inaugural batch of startups (pictured right), which includes:

1. WeSit

WeSit is a suite of web and mobile applications that connects parents with trusted babysitters. It taps into a trusted network of people, and parents can schedule babysitters with ease.

It solves one of the biggest issues parents face when they have commitments to fulfill – finding someone to entrust their children in their care. It boasts over 100 pre-registered users and has received AUD$20,000 (US$20,500) from BlackBerry. The fund will be used for the development of WeSit’s BlackBerry app and it will be featured on BlackBerry World.

2. SnapDisco

SnapDisco has developed a web-based, automated image processing technology that traces a clipping path around items. Its ‘computer vision’ has the ability to differentiate background and foreground parts of the photo, and then decides on a clipping path, which eradicates the tedious manual editing process.

It makes it easy for e-commerce sellers to now remove ugly backgrounds. The computer vision technology is also currently in the process of being patented.

3. Edisse

Edisse prides itself as an innovative watch, which has automatically detects when an elderly falls. It allows caretakers to keep track of older folks in real-time, and will receive notifications should the elderly person experience a fall.

4. CloudHerd

CloudHerd is an online livestock management and sales platform aimed at farmers. It aims to be a global marketplace that accumulates the wealth of information on livestock, and allow farmers to tap into other markets.

As the name suggests, it will also take advantage of cloud technologies, which allows farmers to access information no matter where they are.

5. Muro

Muro is an elastic social networking application that enables users to share photos with others who are attending the same event. Once the event has been set up on the app, users can check in at the event, start share photos, and they will be displayed on a live interactive slideshow.

6. Weaver

Weaver is a social robot that helps children to foster logical thinking through the use of sensors and a user-friendly interface. It eventually hopes to create a community where children are able to develop ideas through their understanding and application of engineering principles.

7. Feedback

Feedback is a not-for-profit application that takes advantage of the idle time that you have while you’re on-the-go. Users will be asked to complete market surveys in exchange for a charity donation.

8. The Best Day

The Best Day recognizes the pain of organizing group outings, and positions itself as a social planning tool that churns out the best plan for a group via collection on votes on time and place. It also helps businesses to better plan for their customers with their “Plan” widget, making it easier to organize and pay for group outings.

The Best Day has also raised series A funding of AUD$1.1 million (US$1.13 million) back in December 2012. It has also seen an encouraging 5,000 plans made within 3 weeks of beta launch.

James Alexander, co-founder and program manager at Incubate, also tells us that the startups are currently working out of The Australian Technology Park (ATP) (pictured right), with the Edisse Watch, Weaver, and Muro app currently in talks with interested investors. SnapDisco has also boldly rejected seed funding, because they prefer to have a revenue before raising funds. CloudHerd was also one of the finalists in TechStars New York and is also currently in talks with interested investors.

Differences between MAP and Incubate

Coincidentally, Incubate was launched in the same year as MAP. So apart from being based in different geographical locations – MAP in Melbourne and Incubate in Sydney – what sets them apart? James elaborates:

MAP is a great program and we’re different in a couple of areas. It was completely coincidental that we launched in the same year, as I only found out about them late last year but I was extremely impressed by their 2012 Demo Day. Interestingly, MAP was also originally pushed by a student.

[At Incubate,] we’re supported by the USU which is an independent student governed organisation within the University of Sydney. This means, unlike MAP, we’re open to all students, alumni, and researchers of the University of Sydney.

Also, the USU is not aligned to one single faculty and we believe it’s crucial to have cross collaboration across various faculties.

I think it’s great that two of Australia’s top universities are now actively engaged in encouraging more entrepreneurs and startups. I hope more universities follow suit.

The Incubate program also provides smaller amounts of funding of AUD$5,000 (US$5,100) for each of the eight teams selected. As for MAP, it provides AUD$20,000 (US$21,000) for each of the four teams. Its incubation period is also much shorter – which takes place over 11 weeks compared to the six months provided by MAP.

James also tells us that the Incubate program was launched last year at a panel event that took place late September 2012, with applications closing in the middle of November 2012. The startups officially started on the first week of December 2012, and graduated at the end of February this year during their demo day. With strong support from USU, James and his team hope to engage more entrepreneurial and business-minded students in the future.

The mentors currently with Incubate hail from various backgrounds of having built companies or working with high-growth companies. Some of the mentors include: Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com; Michelle Deaker, managing partner at OneVentures; and our friend Kim Heras, co-founder at PushStart.

It really looks pretty promising for the entrepreneurship scene in Australia, with great initiatives from universities like Incubate and MAP to hone aspiring Australian entrepreneurs of tomorrow. If you are keen to find out more about Incubate, you can visit the website here.

Following the success of its first ever batch of startups, Melbourne Accelerator Program (MAP) has opened applications for its 2013 intake.

A total of six startups will be shortlisted to participate in this intake. They will be provided AUD$20,000 (US$21,000) and an office space, plus mentoring throughout the entire program which will be running from July to November this year.

On the kind of startups the accelerator is looking out for, MAP manager Rohan Workman tells us:

We are looking out for great teams that have demonstrated progress and we are not restricting ourselves to any particular field or industry. We expect to receive a number of digital startup applications, but also quite a few technology or IP-focused ones too.

As mentioned in our previous article, it has had an encouraging 2012, with two out of its four startups, Venuemob (team pictured above) and 121cast, raising a total of AUD$700,000 (US$730,000) seed investment from Adventure Capital and the Optus Innov8 Seed Program, along with other angel investors.

Rohan also tells us that with the funding raised, Venuemob has since expanded its team from just three to the current 12, and is aggressively establishing its services in other Australian cities. 121cast will also be launching its flagship product in the coming months, so we will keep our eyes peeled for these two promising startups in Australia.

For more information on the program, please visit the MAP website here.

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

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

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

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

Global outsourcing online marketplace Freelancer, which connects people to freelance jobs posted worldwide, is making an effort to bring in more members from Malaysia with a localized language feature that launched just last week. The company is looking to assist with the country’s eight year plan in catalysing growth and income of its SMEs with jobs offered on the site. At the moment, 97 percent all business establishments in Malaysia are SMEs.

There are around 50,000 Freelancer users in Malaysia, and regional manager for Asia, Evan Tan, told us that they plan to increase that to 300,000 by next year. The company aspires to do this by launching more features targeted towards the Malaysian market, such as the recently rolled-out Bahasa Malaysia language service.

Most of Freelancer’s jobs come from English speaking countries like the UK, the US, and Australia. As English is a widely spoken language in Malaysia, a lot of Malaysians are well able to use the site’s features effectively already. Internet penetration in Malaysia is good at about 60.7 percent, or around 17.7 million people being online. Evan adds:

We’re supporting the Malaysian government’s goal to become a high income, advanced nation by 2020, by making top talent as well as high-quality work accessible to Malaysians.

Before stepping into Malaysia, Freelancer expanded to neighboring Indonesia last year, rolling out localized language support for the country. It has seen significant growth of over 60 percent in only three months, with more than 100,000 Indonesian users currently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the most remarkable aspects of the economic boom in China has been the overseas property buying spree among some wealthier Chinese citizens. That huge demand is a great business prospect for a number of startups – such as Australia’s ACproperty. Focusing on real estate in its native Australia, ACproperty now consists of a team of ten people, with some support staff based in mainland China.

Mainland Chinese property buyers spent US$28.7 billion on residential property around the world in 2011, mostly snapping up mid-range to high-end apartments and houses as an investment – or perhaps as a home for a child while studying abroad (another huge market in itself). Australia, which has such novelties as a visible sky and safe-to-eat food, is a popular destination for Chinese property purchasers.

ACproperty’s Esther Yong explains to us that the startup also tunes into the Chinese diaspora, with 50 percent of its traffic coming locally (especially Melbourne and Sydney), and the other half, she says, “from overseas, mainly China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia.”

An apartment listed on ACproperty. Click to enlarge.

The site is up against China’s Juwai site, which we looked at last year. But while Juwai has property listings in 33 nations, ACproperty sees its strength in being both dedicated to Australia, as well as based in that country. Esther adds that overseas Chinese investors trust the startup site because “they know that they are accessing the same information as local Australian Chinese” and are not being hit with inflated prices. She adds:

Any Australian agent who’s experienced at dealing with Chinese investors will know that the majority of them will fly to the property destination to suss out the local market before committing to a contract, hence local advertisements are as important. We believe Juwai and us function on a different level: Juwai operates on a more international level, giving Chinese investors a broad range of choices initially, but ACproperty focuses on a more specialised and localised market.

ACproperty came online in 2010 for an extended period of testing and market research and then launched officially in June 2012. The website features extensive search functions for potential investors, and monetizes through advertising.

In order to reach out to prospective mainland Chinese buyers, the company has a presence on Sina Weibo and the whole site is in Chinese. The startup is planning to attend a number of overseas property shows in Shanghai and Beijing this year to further raise its profile.

(UPDATED two hours later: Corrected the section on monetization)

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

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

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

Melbourne to Sydney

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

York Butter Factory in Melbourne. Click to enlarge.

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

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

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

Crowdsourced wiki

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

View World Startup Report in a larger map

We’ve seen the subscription e-commerce (aka: subcom) model, which delivers a box of goods to your doorstep every month, proving popular in Asia recently. Today, another such startup, Bellabox, which focuses on cosmetics, announced that it has attracted AU$1.3 million (US$1.37 million) in series A funding.

Bellabox operates in Singapore and Australia and was founded in October 2011 by twin sisters Sarah and Emily Hamilton. The startup’s investors in this major round are Lance Kalish from skincare brand Yes To Carrots, and Elevation Capital partner Trevor Folsom. Those two led the round, and there was participation from “a syndicate of tech, beauty, logistics and financial investors” that includes Monash Private Capital, SquarePeg Ventures, and Apex Capital Partners.

According to SGE, the Asia-Pacific make-up and cosmetics market is valued at US$45.7B, not counting China and India. The market is surely big enough for more players to enter and build up. Other beauty box subscription services in Asia include Vanitytrove by seasoned entrepreneur Douglas Gan and also MyLuxBox in China. The same subcom model doesn’t just doesn’t apply to beauty products but also to wine, clothing, and cool Japanese toys.

Bellabox has monthly boxes of cosmetics for both women and men, with annual membership costing AUS$165. The twin sisters started the e-commerce site as they both have a “passion for luxury and discovering ‘the undiscovered’ online.” Emily is the managing director in Singapore, while Sarah runs the Australian side.

For folks who are interested to find out more about beauty box subcom industry in Asia-pacific, you might consider purchasing this report written by the good folks at SGE.

Note: Co-authored with Willis Wee

Kompas reported over the weekend that Indonesia’s biggest telco Telkom is looking to expand its business to seven more countries in the future through its subsidiary company Telin. This is all part of Telkom’s vision to become a global player.

At the moment, Telin is operating in three countries, namely Singapore, Hong Kong, and most recently launching in Timor Leste (also known as East Timor). The company is now conducting assessments in Australia and Myanmar for potential expansion programs. The other five countries being eyed by Telin have not been named.

Telin’s cellular product Telkomcel officially launched in Timor Leste on January 17th. The telco has prepared a $50 million investment to be used until 2015 in order to build further 2G and 3G infrastructure in Timor. Telkomcel is targeting 60 percent market share among mobile telcos in the country by 2018.

Telkom’s ambitious expansion plans should be well received by startups in Indonesia. This could mean further business opportunities for Indonesian companies wanting to expand their business reach together with Telkom in other countries. Think how SingTel has helped – or acquired – Singaporean startups. We’ve already seen some web companies expanding via Telkom’s subsidiary company Telkomsel, such as with Ngomik and Kotagames.

(Sources: Kompas #1 and #2)

Similar to US-based Stanford’s StartX program, MAP invests around AUD$20,000 (US$21,000) in each startup without taking any equity stake, on top of providing mentoring and office space for them. The program first started in June 2012 and lasted for six months. As stated in our earlier report, Venuemob (team pictured top) and 121cast have successfully raised AUD$450,000 (US$475,000) and AUD$250,000 (US$264,000) respectively from SingTel Innov8, with the latter having a co-investment from Adventure Capital too.

This certainly helps to promote and encourage a startup culture in Australia. David Wei, CEO of Venuemob explains:

In Australia, there is basically no startup culture at university level. The initiative by The University of Melbourne will play a tremendous part in building the startup scene among young students in Australia.

Edward Hooper, former Stanford student and co-founder at 121cast (team pictured right), attributes part of the team’s success to MAP:

In the Melbourne Accelerator Program, we’ve got amazing support from various alumni. We hope more educational institutions realise that they have so much capacity to develop the next generation of business leaders.

Surely, it also validates Stanford’s StartX model. The Dean of The University of Melbourne’s School of Engineering, Professor Iven Mareels, says that it empowers students at university level, which helps support and nurture aspiring entrepreneurs in Australia.

The next round of applications for MAP will open mid March. For more information regarding the program, you can visit the MAP website here.

Indonesian made game Infectonator 2 won online gaming platform Armor Games’ Game of the Year award on Saturday, beating Australian-made The Last Stand – Dead Zone in the final head-to-head contest. Interestingly, the two best games were both about zombie apocalypses.

The competition was held from December 26th to January 3rd, and users voted for the best game from each category. For Game of the Year, the nominees were paired up with other nominees in which users choose the best out of the two games in a tournament head-to-head style (pictured below).

Infectonator 2 was built by Indonesian game developers Toge Productions. CEO Kris Antoni said that they too were surprised about this achievement as they had to compete with many other high quality games worldwide. He believes that one the factors that helped them clinch the title was the fact that Infectonator had a wide audience, as both males and females enjoy the game. Another factor is Infectonator’s unique and addictive gameplay which sets it apart from the rest.

Kris also shared that to date, the Infectonator mobile version has been downloaded more than 260,000 times on the Android and iOS platforms. Its web version had been played more than seven million times from numerous online game portals worldwide. The team plans to keep building more unique and creative games, and hopefully win more awards in the process.

Infectonator 2 also won best game in the Action category, and its mobile version was runner-up in the Mobile section. Toge Productions’ other game, Relic of War, came third in the Strategy category.

Another Indonesian-made game, Evilgeddon Spooky Max, was nominated in the Shooting category at the competition, but unfortunatey didn’t win.

In celebration of the achievement, Toge Productions is making its Infectonator mobile game free for a limited time. You can download it on Google Play or over on the app store. You can also play the Flash-based web version here.

(Via Trenologi)

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

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

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

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

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

‘Pushstart Mentor Live’ is a speed networking event that connects startups with tech industry mentors. Each startup team was able to meet with three mentors for 15 minutes each. The event was held on Wednesday night at the Fishburners co-working space in Sydney, Australia.

The value for startups is being able to meet people that have done it before and can provide an experienced perspective. For the mentors, it is a way for them to give back to the industry and to meet up-and-coming startups.

The room was abuzz with noise as startups pitched to the mentors their visions, their problems, and where they needed help. There were 80 people representing 60 startups in attendance on the night. 25 mentors were available, and 150 mentor sessions were held.

Kim Heras, the co-founder of Pushstart told us:

This is our fourth event – three in Sydney and one in Melbourne. Between all of them we’ve done over 500 mentoring sessions. Add to that the mentoring sessions through Mentor Connect and in total PushStart has helped facilitate over 1,200 mentoring sessions between mentors and startup founders since launch 18 months ago.

From my own personal perspective, it is a rare opportunity to be able to sit down with three experts in their respective fields on one night. I attended the event personally and each mentor was able to provide valuable advice to my own startup, Native Tongue.

1. Luke Carruthers, founder of mobile startup, Closebuys, and previously a director of Game Developers Association
2. Rick Baker, investment director for Blackbird Ventures
3. Patrick Crooks, mobile payments industry expert

Many other startup communities could learn from the Mentor Live events to connect their ecosystems. 
Here are my five tips to get the most out of PushStart Mentor Live events:

• Do research beforehand on the mentors.
• Select the mentors who would be a good fit based on their past experiences.
• Choose different types of mentors to get various perspectives.
• Prepare your questions prior to the event.
• After the event, followup with a short email and add them on LinkedIn.

While I’ve never ventured into the business of buying and flipping domain names or websites myself, it seems like an intriguing business. Ponder creative .com name, buy, flip, profit! Typically the process is not quite as simple, although an Australian company is aspiring to make it so. In fact, Flippa.com lets users sell not just domains, but entire websites, putting them up for auction to the highest bidder.

This week the Melbourne-based company launched a new listing system which it hopes will simplify the process of buying and selling even further. I gave it a quick run through to see how difficult it would be to create a sales listing (in my case a domain), and the survey-like process was indeed very easy [1]. Sellers can add a descriptive title, or opt to specify a buy-it-now price, which is a newly added feature.

If you’d like to see a more detailed overview of the process, you can check out Flippa’s video demo below. I’m told that the number of clicks needed to post has been reduced by 50 percent over the previous system.

Flippa claims to be the world’s top marketplace for buying and websites, with over $2 million in websites and domains traded every month. Among the more prominent properties to be sold on Flippa have been Facemash.com, and news site Inquisitr.com.

How is Flippa’s business in the Asia region so far? The company tells me that India is its third largest market, and they have lots of visitors from Indonesia as well, its sixth largest market.

1. Two of the three founders of Crowdmass, a group-buying site in Australia later acquired by Groupon’s StarDeals in Australia in April 2011, are behind Venuemob.
2. The venue search site is from the inaugural batch of the Melbourne Accelerator Program and from the Optus Innov8 Seed Program, where the team was one of the first two Australian startups to receive A$450,000 (US$468,000) in funding.
3. The brains behind Venuemob have been blazing an entrepreneurial path since they were students, showing that it is possible to work on a startup while being in school.

Venuemob has a directory that lists venue information in Melbourne, allowing you to compare them and view booking availability. It aims to gradually add more features, enhancing the entire user experience for both venue owners and those searching for venues.

Events planners will appreciate that the entire venue search process is streamlined for your own convenience. It cuts down on the time spent gathering information about the venue, from the venue availability to the menu. There are also 360 degree tours on the website, which save you the hassle of scouting the site yourself.

Co-founder Ying Wang tells us more:

[T]he comparisons aspect is a pretty important part of what we do, and we are ultimately looking to make it as easy for people to find venues for functions. How we allow people to compare is to standardize the information for all the venues, including 360 interactive tours inside each of the venues. We provide these awesome tools to help users find relevant results.

With Venuemob, you would be able to explore venues you may not have considered. Venuemob also has a concierge service for busy bees who would prefer to have everything arranged.

So what inspired them to start Venuemob in the first place? Ying elaborates:

I think it was a combination of our previous local e-commerce and marketing experience while at Groupon, [along with] our personal [affinity] for exploring new exciting venues. Initially we actually worked with a lot of venue owners and we personally introduced a few functions to venue owners in Melbourne and Sydney.

The venues ended up loving it because it drove a lot of revenue to their business, and our friends were really well looked after because we knew these venue owners. [Conversely,] we were confident that they would be able to look after our friends.

The site currently boasts around 300 venue spaces in Melbourne, including bars, restaurants, hotels, and function spaces. And they are pretty selective in the venues they choose, says Ying, noting that this ensures that venues have a great reputation and are able to deliver quality service to its users.

This points back to the startup’s bottom line of ensuring top-notch customer service on its site, and that is why they have been getting frequent inquiries and more listings. In order to meet this demand, the startup has expanded from just a mere three-man team in July to 10 people at present.

The team is an impressive one in my opinion. First, they managed to pull off an exit while still in school. Second, they were able to obtain funding in a bleak investment scene like Australia.

If you happen to be in Melbourne and are looking for a venue to hold Christmas or year-end parties, you can check out Venuemob here.

When we last heard from Australian startup 99designs, it had acquired European rival 12designer and followed that up by launching 99designs.de in Germany. And now there’s word from the company that it is launching a French-language version of its site at 99designs.fr, as well as opening its second European office in Paris.

The new French website will certainly make it easier for customers in that country to run contests, and help designers in their quest to find more gigs. For its push in France, 99designs has enlisted the help of Sihan Belouadheh, who will be its new country manager for that market.

99designs boasts that it is the largest online graphic design marketplace in the world, with designers from 192 countries in total. It says that Europe accounts for 15 percent of the design contests on its site, making the region an important market for the startup.

When we spoke to the company’s CEO, Patrick Llewellen back in August, he also indicated that their services are popular in Asian countries as well, with over 55,000 designers signed up among their top five countries in the region.

So far its doing well in countries like Singapore, Hong Kong, and India where English is widely spoken, although for other big markets like Japan, Korea, or even China, it would need to roll out localized versions as it has for Germany and France in the European market.

A few months back we wrote about Australia-based Tweaky.com, an online marketplace that connects web designers and clients, which at that time had just raised a seed round of $468,000. The service helps small businesses make small changes (or tweaks) to their webite, and after they specify their request, a designer or developer can take up the task in exchange for the specified fee.

So what is Tweaky up to these days? The former Startup Weekend Melbourne winner tells us that over the past month or so, they’ve seen a 65 percent increase in new projects, amounting to a 46 percent revenue increase for the startup. The company is also planning to grow its client base in the Asia region in the first quarter of 2013, and then hopes to follow with a push into American and European markets later in the year.

Another initiative that Tweaky has undertaken recently is dubbed ‘The $500 Dollar Startup,’ which aims to help a few select small businesses develop their ideas and their respective web presences. Here are the ideas that made the grade for Tweaky’s first batch:

• Furniture designer Paul Eterovich and his flat pack standing desk design
• Pharmacist Natalie Collard and her electronic peer review website to help increase compliance rates across hospitals and pharmacies in Australia
• Sarah Moran and her company to help people rollover their superannuation into a single account
• Jess Genevieve Brown and her lifecasting / goal setting platform
• Athan Didaskalou and his subscription coffee business.

It’s interesting to see the possibilities that are available these days to small and medium businesses thanks to creative new web services. Earlier this week we featured Fivepager, a service in the Philippines that is trying to make simple web development available for small businesses. Similarly, even web giants like Google and China’s Baidu recognize that there’s a demand out there for initiatives that can help businesses come online.

It all happened when the team was speaking with its new advisor from New York City back in late September. They received a call from Dave McClure that the startup was selected for 500 Startups. I can imagine the level of excitement in the office when they were also offered another US$50,000 from PalGenesis, thanks to the advisor, within that very same day.

Some readers might recall that we covered Kickfolio before. Since then, the team has made two significant improvements to its product. Co-founder Chris Nolet tells us:

[First] is that we’ve refocused the product on a new, incredibly strong pain point. [...] We now help developers distribute ‘test builds’ (or beta releases) to their clients via a web page, with the Kickfolio technology providing an interactive experience, right there on the page. People can test the app, live in their browser. There’s no mucking around with UDIDs or downloading the app. Testers or clients can leave comments. We also record the last 30 seconds of their usage so developers can see how people are using their app. That’s our first strong use-case, and we’ll shortly branch back to marketing once we’re established and bootstrapped.

[Two,] we’ve rebuilt the technology stack from the ground up and it flies. This is easily the smoothest experience we’ve created to date and we’re especially proud of it. We really looking forward to showing it off.

I absolutely adore the Kickfolio team, not only because it’s got a great product, but because it has adopted a “Think Bigger” mindset during its pursuit of great mentorship and opportunities in the United States. The startup’s decision to move to the US was propelled by their visit back in September. In Chris words:

As Australians, we tend to downplay our abilities and successes, and we generally aim lower than American entrepreneurs.

Perhaps another reason driving the move was due the lack of funds available in Australia. Chris elaborates:

We have, for example, noticed the incredible focus here on traction and growth as opposed to revenue and profitability in Australia. Silicon Valley is much more prepared to have a runaway success with millions of users, which then gets acquired – as opposed to VCs in Australia who look at ‘money in, money out’ to judge a company’s viability. We’re lucky enough to be able to switch between those points of view on a whim now and we think we have a wonderful mix of both.

Now that the team is in Silicon Valley, it is not letting any chance of succeeding slip by. Chris tells us:

We want the Kickfolio brand to [be] pervasive at the end of 500 Startups, and synonymous with cutting-edge technology, practically applied to make mobile developers’ lives easier. We intend to be bootstrapped by the end of the program (or close to) and we want to meet more great people with new ideas about how we can our apply our tech.

And no, the team isn’t just stopping there. The boys are intending to sponge as much knowledge as possible from the Silicon Valley startup culture, and contribute back to the Australia startup scene. Chris adds:

The scene in Melbourne is young and emerging and we hope many more people will hit California, learn from people like Dave McClure and Paul Singh, and bring that knowledge back to Australia to feed the next round of Aussie startups.

This is certainly encouraging for the Australia startup scene, especially since most students choose to pursue the comfortable corporate route upon graduation. It definitely takes time to build an ecosystem, but undeniably, there’s a lot of potential in Australian startups with their mindset of “thinking bigger”.

Aside from Kickfolio, another two teams from Asia which have made it into 500 Startups include Japan-based Cinemacraft and Taiwan-based Cubie App.

[Kickfolio team photo from diesellaws.com]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Similar to other incubators Y Combinator and Startmate, MAP draws inspiration from how these incubators are run and leverages on the strong brand name the University of Melbourne has. The new program also taps on its extensive alumni networks, providing mentors who are entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, digital agencies, patent attorneys, financial advisors, and senior executives of large corporations. Since its launch, it has received immense support from the startup community and alumni networks.

But unlike other private incubators, MAP invests around AUD$20,000 (US$20,500) per startup and does not take an equity stake in them. This is similar to what is being offered at StartX, a US-based Stanford Student Startup Accelerator.

So what kind of startups does MAP look to invest in? Rohan Workman, community manager at MAP, tells us it invests in a varied range, and does not restrict applications based on the type of startups. In its inaugural batch, MAP has three internet-based startups, namely Venuemob, 121Cast, and UniSquare. It has also invested in Remote Area Power System, a new power supply system that claims to be more efficient than existing products in the market.

Rohan explained more about MAP’s goals:

Our objective with MAP is to raise the profile of entrepreneurship at the University of Melbourne and become thought leaders in this area. We want the university to become as known for entrepreneurship as Harvard or Stanford and the university for entrepreneurship in the Asia/Pacific region. This is obviously a lofty goal but one we feel is achievable.

No institution in Australia has the influence and network of the University of Melbourne. We have a phenomenally intelligent academic community, powerful alumni network and a world-renowned brand. We want to use this to assist staff, students and alumni take their ideas to market.

With more outstanding startups coming from the land down under, a program like this one will certainly encourage and instill more confidence in the startup ecosystem in Australia, particularly in Melbourne.

Last Thursday, I was catching up over the phone with a friend, Ben Hamey, a mobile app developer from Melbourne. He told me about a new project he was working on, a smart light bulb that could be controlled via your mobile phone. He mentioned that it was under review by Kickstarter and would hopefully be launching soon.

I was very excited about the idea as my parents had run an electronics store in the Sydney CBD for about 20 years. I was very familiar with light bulbs as it was one of the popular product lines that we sold. From a consumer perspective, other than the emergence of energy efficient light bulbs, I had not seen a lot of innovation in this area.

The smart light bulb known as “LIFX” (pronounced LIFE-X), is a wifi-enabled, energy efficient, multi-colored LED light bulb that you control with your iPhone or Android. LIFX also has an SDK (software development kit) to allow developers to have full control over the light bulb and the software. See the video below for a visual overview of how it works.

We both thought it could do well on Kickstarter given the target audience and the previous success of another Australian Kickstarter project, Ninja Blocks, a platform that enabled its hardware devices to be connected to web apps such as Twitter and Evernote. Ninja Blocks had previously raised US$102,000 on Kickstarter and later $1 million dollars in seed funding.

In less than a week after our conversation, LIFX has raised more than $1 million dollars on Kickstarter – that was in just four days. Based on this Kickstarter blog post, LIFX may be the fifth-fastest Kickstarter project to raise $1 million dollars.

The LIFX team is comprised of Phil Bosua, Andrew Birt, Andy Gelme, John Bosua, Ben Hamey, Dave Evans and Guy King. It has been designed and prototyped in Melbourne, Australia, and San Francisco, USA. Manufacturing will occur in Melbourne and in Shenzen, China. The expected project delivery date is March 2013.

In a recent interview with The Age, Phil Bosua, the inventor behind LIFX revealed his inspiration:

Basically a friend of mine was sort of saying that they wished that they could have a wireless [light bulb] switch in their home because they were renovating and didn’t want to cut up their brick wall to run a wire down it. And he basically asked me [what I could do about it], because he sort of knew that I was the inventive type. I said, ‘Well, actually, I think there’s something in that. I think it would be possible to connect your smartphone to your lights. [And] it really just grew from that.”

LIFX is not the first smart light bulb. There is also the Insteon and the Switch light bulb. Nor is LIFX without criticism. Reuters has also raised concerns about the product.

What is certain is that there is consumer demand for this. LIFX has pre-sold $1 million worth of orders before production has taken place. Kickstarter has played a vital role as it has enabled LIFX to get off the ground. The LIFX team has also been overwhelmed with the response from Kickstarter and has set up a technical blog to answer the stream of questions coming in.

The LIFX project has a challenge ahead of it and heightened public expectations. Let’s hope that the LIFX team can reinvent the light bulb and take us into the future!

A thousand entrepreneurs, wannapreneurs, programmers, students, and corporate executives recently gathered together for the SydStart conference, an annual event in its fourth year showcasing Australian startups.

The conference provided talks from the bigger names in the industry including Matt Barrie (from Freelancer), Mitch Harper and Eddie Machaalani (Bigcommerce), Alec Lynch (Design Crowd), Mick Liubinskas (Pollenizer), and US investor Bill Tai (CRV).

It was a fantastic event, giving access to more experienced founders that have done it before – raising money, building businesses, and exiting. There were some excellent fireside discussions and people from the audience were able to ask questions.

One of the highlights was the chat between Pete Cooper (Sydstart), Mike Cannon-Brookes (Atlassian), and Dominic O’Hanlon (ex-MYOB). They collectively stressed the importance of focus, that an organization had to clearly recognize its one strength and be world class at it.

Some of the founders that spoke have successfully raised large rounds of venture capital such as Bigcommerce (US$35 million) and Atlassian (US$60 million). However, the founders implored that the best place to raise money was from customers. It was a theme that resonated throughout the conference, that the mentality of Australian startups to “bootstrap” (i.e. self-fund their businesses) was a strength. In order to bootstrap, it meant that Australian startups were forced to adopt a mentality to find customers and to think global from day one.

Panel: Mike Cannon-Brookes, Dominic O'Hanlon, Pete Cooper

Big crowd at Sydstart

Niki Scevak (Startmate) dared the crowd to “dream bigger.” Startups cannot offer the same compensation to prospective employees as a larger corporate company. However, their competitive advantage is that they can have a larger vision to change the world and this made it easier to attract and keep staff.

Later in the afternoon, emerging startups took to the stage to pitch. There were a mixture of live pitches and pre-prepared video pitches. The winner was Process Go, which enables companies to compare their business process outsourcing [1]. The runner-up was Watt Cost, a cloud energy monitoring system; followed by Evolvex, a design-your-own-furniture IKEA alternative; and StartSomeGood, a sort of Kickstarter for social good [2].

Overall, the quality of the speakers was outstanding, and it was offered at an extremely affordable price to entrepreneurs at $34 AUD (US$36). The conference showed that Australia is gaining a reputation as a country with great startups and entrepreneurial talent. SydStart has energized the Australian startup system which I think will only continue to flourish.

Psoda is five year old startup from New Zealand that offers online management tools that help you manage projects. It is an interesting startup because, well, it basically covers the entire tedious project management all the way from idea generation, to planning, to execution, to testing, and roll-out. The company’s founder, Bruce Aylward explains:

Psoda also includes tools to help project teams to collaborate including comment streams, document sharing (with version control) and electronic whiteboards that can be used from multiple devices/locations at the same time.

Aylward has worked in the telecom industry for over 20 years got inspired during his corporate life. He was involved in the many different project lifecycle and experienced difficulties first hand. He adds:

I saw how difficult it is to manage a project with documents living on network servers, being emailed around, only one person can update a document at a time, etc. Then if you want any reports somebody has to manually collate the required information across multiple projects or even program of work. So I thought there has to be a better way to do this.

And with that, Psoda was founded. It was started with seed funding and went on to eventually become profitable. To date it has over 2,600 users across 550 clients in 25 countries. Every client pays on a per user or per module basis, or on a monthly subscription. As for Psoda’s future plan, Aylward told me that he is looking for more channel partners across Asia and is also looking for someone to translate his products into Japanese. (Maybe OneSky or Conyac could come in handy!)

Bruce tells us that the company has some exciting new products coming up in the next few months, but he can’t say too much about those just yet. Psoda currently has five team members based in New Zealand and another four in Australia. Watch the video below to see Psode in action:

Sydney-based startup, Tinybeans, is an online family journal for busy parents to create and record moments of their children’s lives in calender format. There will be profiles created for each child, so when family pictures are being added, users can tag each child individually. Users can also share the account, inviting family and friends to browse through the album on the Tinybeans website. It removes clutter from popular social networking sites, only sharing really significant moments which are Facebook-worthy.

Tinybeans was initially a hobby started by CEO and co-founder Stephen O’Young three years back, but only in the recent nine months the team was assembled to develop the website and iPhone app. The online journal was created out of Stephen’s experience of having children with speech delays and being too busy to create a journal for his eldest two sons. Sarah-Jane Kurtini, CMO and co-founder, tells us more:

When Stephen’s eldest son had speech delays in his early years, Stephen struggled to find information about speech development and a way to get a holistic view of his son’s progress. It became hard to know what to do help so Stephen created Tinybeans as a simple and easy guide for parents relating to young children’s development.

Around the same time, his third son was born. Stephen had always been jealous of the blog that Dave (our CTO) and his wife kept for their two daughters and resolved to find a easy way to capture his new baby’s life. He created an app to store the daily pictures he took of his children with his camera phone and shared it with friends and family.

These two ideas together evolved into the Tinybeans you see today: an engaging and fun way to record and share children’s lives and development.

When I first met the Tinybeans team at Pushstart demo day, it also placed emphasis on Asian countries for its expansion plans during its pitch. On this, Sarah-Jane elaborates:

We are actively looking for partners that can take Tinybeans into the Asian countries. The Asian market is much bigger than Australia so it’s naturally more attractive. Add to that their culture of placing heavy emphasis on their children’s development and we believe Tinybeans will be valuable to Asian parents.

Tinybeans is free to use at the moment, and is created by a team of three parents for parents. The trio is looking at working on new features which include bulk photo and video upload, and an easier solution to track children’s milestones and development.

Tinybeans reminds me a little of the Remember app, a graduate from the inaugural JFDI Innov8 2012 bootcamp, which we wrote about two months back. Interestingly, Tinybeans is an inaugural Pushstart graduate which has recently been shortlisted in the Optus Innov8 seed fund program. If you’re keen to give Tinybeans a try, you can visit its website here or download the iPhone app here.

Tweaky.com, an online marketplace for people to connect with web designers, has recently raised a seed round of AUS$450,000 (US$468,000) from Australian investors Mark Harbottle (founder of 99designs), Leni Mayo (Learnable CEO), and the Sitepoint group. The startup based in Australia is founded by Ned Dwyer and Pete Murray; it won Startup Weekend Melbourne in November 2011.

Tweaky’s vision is to be a marketplace for customizing websites. It is intended to make it easier for small businesses to make minor changes to their website. An example for a change would be updating a picture, removing some whitespace, or adding social media sharing links. These changes are known as “tweaks” – hence the name.

Regarding the investment, CEO & co-founder Ned told us:

(Click to enlarge)

The main motivation behind the investment was to allow us to launch and grow Tweaky.com. We decided to partner with Mark Harbottle (99designs.com and Flippa.com founder) and Leni Mayo (Learnable Founder) because they have deep industry expertise in the web development and design space, specifically around two-sided marketplaces. They’re seasoned entrepreneurs and investors who have built multiple global leading businesses.

In theory, Tweaky operates similarly to marketplaces such as Fiverr, Freelancer, and Odesk. Tweaky has several key differences to other crowdsourcing websites to enable small businesses to use it for website customization.

Tweaky provides a concierge service which acts as a virtual project manager. The concierge service will break down the project into a series of tasks and manage the project by allocating it to pre-qualified developers. Each task will cost AUS$25 ($26), which is equivalent to 30 minutes of work. Tweaky takes 50 percent commission on each project for providing the concierge service, website credentials, and the assets to the developer.

The concierge service is currently performed manually. The challenge is whether this service can be scaled and automated so that this process can be more efficient. Dwyer, co-founder & CEO is confident that it can:

We have ways of automating it, which we’re already starting to do, including asking common questions to the client in advance through the briefing form, etc. We’re benefiting from the experience of Mark Harbottle in building 99designs in this regard where they have a significant customer support team which has scaled well with their business.

Clients provide their website credentials via a fully encrypted service to the developer along with the required assets. The client then has two options, as Tweaky can setup a staging server for their website or work directly on their live site. Tweaky provides a full backup of the website and a 100 percent money back guarantee.

If Tweaky can optimize these processes to ensure quality and ease of use, there could be a significant opportunity for a website customisation market for small business owners. The Sitepoint group of websites (99designs, Sitepoint, Learnable, Flippa) could be used to help drive traffic to the website to provide supply and demand. Potentially, the Sitepoint group could provide multiple services in the life cycle of a small business: have your new logo done on 99designs, use Tweaky to make changes to your website using pre-qualified developers from Sitepoint, and then sell it on Flippa.

This recent news continues Australia’s development as a global leader for marketplaces. In addition to the Sitepoint group, there is also Freelancer, DesignCrowd, and Envato. It is increasingly becoming a country where you can find world-class talent to build marketplaces, and where new ones can emerge and be funded by local investors.

According to an announcement from MOL, we’re looking at a whopping $1 billion online game industry in Australia by 2014. Here’s what Craig White, President of MOL Global, has to say on the investment:

Our growth in the region with the establishment of MOL Australia and the strategic investment in Ocash is a further step of our initiative to provide a premium payment eco-system that is highly efficient in terms of convenience, security and cost. With the support of ocash’s experienced team, we are able to offer more valued-added services and products to our customers in Australia and New Zealand. At the same time, this alliance will also provide more business opportunities for our region’s game developers and publishers as they will be able to extend their reach via MOL to consumers outside the Asian region.

And just some background information about Ocash: It is a payment service provider specializing in online game credits for Australia and New Zealand. More recently, it has also acquired OnlineGamez Australia, an online game credit distributor, to aid in the sales and distribution channels.

Looks like things are looking really sunny bright for entrepreneurs in Australia these days, especially with the announcement of new funds that would help in the bleak absence of capital in the startup scene. With tools like MOL, more game developers in Australia can now rejoice and tap into such resources to help them monetize better.

When I first got to the space, the thought that came to mind was, wow. Apart from being conveniently located in the city, it stands out being one of the few beautifully designed low-rises with vintage decor in the midst of 50-storey skyscrapers. In fact, the building used to be a real butter factory back in the day, and I thought I got the address wrong when I first stood in front of the 158 year old heritage-listed building, because it wrote “Butter Manufacturers Dairy Produce Merchants Exporters Since 1855.”

The co-working space first opened its doors to aspiring entrepreneurs last October, and is co-founded by partners of Adventure Capital. It is also home to over 40 high-potential seed stage companies, in excess of 100 individuals in Melbourne. Stuart B. Richardson (pictured right), co-founder of YBF and managing partner at Adventure Capital, tells us what defines the culture at YBF:

[#GSD] .. We Get Shit Done! We live by this and expect it from those who choose to be part of the YBF community – its really important to see resilient and sustainable businesses built to give them the best shot at global success.

When Darcy Naunton, co-founder of YBF and general partner at Adventure Capital, took me on a tour around the two-storey YBF building, I was impressed at how deeply engaged the entrepreneurs were, on top of working late into the night. They are also the ones behind numerous Startup Weekends and hackathons, Silicon Beach Drinks in Melbourne, and Australia’s Angel Investment Network, Aurelius Digital. Stuart elaborates:

There is a constant flow of new and interesting people and events happening in YBF all the time – including demo-days for the local incubators and accelerators and a veritable plethora of meet-ups, such as AWS, Big Data, Clojure, Google, WordPress and ESRI Users.

We are really proud of the rich collaboration between the diverse community we support which incorporates our current residents, alumni and the wider corporate and technology community – this along with the ‘supercharged ecosystem’ which we’ve created that supports the entrepreneur from curiosity and the genesis of their idea through to funding and value realisation – and most importantly we have heaps of fun in-between.

It feels really cosy with its open plan co-working space with sofas and an informal collaborative area (pictured right) which has a really awesome coffee machine and industrial fridge. And oh, how can I forget the beer? The permanent desks are $600 per month, inclusive of all services. Part-time ‘hot-desks’ are also available at $100 per month for a day per week. Being a resident at YBF also provides reciprocal access to a global network of similar spaces, such as StartupHQ in San Francisco.

For you folks out there who are interested in checking out the space, here’s the address and some pictures below:

62-66 King St
Melbourne, VIC 3000
Australia

The idea of Vinspi struck Ivan Lim, a Bruneian based in Melbourne, one night as he was considering an outfit for the evening. He wanted to suit up, but at the same time, also wondered why most men do not tailor their suits since it would fit better and boost confidence. Ivan elaborates:

[It] was expensive to tailor a suit in Australia. It was tedious and troublesome with multiple fittings [and the need] to find a local tailor. I realised that there might be an opportunity to provide custom tailored clothing for men online helping them look much sharper with far less effort, no shopping mall journeys and endless dressing room fittings.

Vinspi comes from combining two words that describe what we’re about. The first is ‘vintage;’ suits and all the essential clothing elements of every man’s wardrobe are timeless, almost enduring in style. The second word is ‘inspiration;’ It describes the creative process that customers can engage with to design clothes that fit what they like to wear.

At present, Vinspi targets only Australia, and aims to win the customers by providing a personal touch along with great customer service. Ivan tells us more:

I wanted to focus on giving great customer service to customers with a dedicated phone number, a local return address and 24-hour turnarounds on customer emails. Starting on a focused single geographic location allows us to do that.

Quite a few companies make the mistake of trying to sell to the whole world but what inevitably happens is that they struggle with giving a great level of customer service that is mandatory, especially for something like the tailored clothing experience. Vinspi wants to bring the tailored experience online and excellent service and personal touch is a big part of that.

Ivan also points out that Vinspi’s greatest differentiating point from other competing companies is that they are set on establishing a dedicated local presence for customers in different geographic locations, meaning they are looking to have a dedicated local number in their time zone, local return addresses, and fast response times.

It reminds me a little of Chinaccelerator startup graduate, Made To Fit Me, but catered to men.

Vinspi looks pretty promising, especially since the price of tailoring can get really steep in Australia.

Ivan, the only founder of the startup, has also received secondary education in Singapore prior to moving over to Australia. He has also accumulated his e-commerce experience by being one of the first few team members of OZHut, one of the largest e-commerce site in Australia. He eventually left OZHut in the pursuit of his wanting his own startup, and hence the birth of Vinspi.

One of the few Australian startups hoping for expansion to Asia these days is “Math with Springbird.” It is developed by Broccol-E-Games, a mobile game development firm based in Melbourne. The mobile game’s aim is to help young kids solve basic mathematical problems.

The AngelCube incubatee was born out of the Startup Weekend Melbourne last November, founded by David Truong, an Australian-born Vietnamese. On his decision to make educational games, David tells us:

I’ve been in the education industry for more than six years, have worked in schools helping with technology integration, and previously founded a company that helped to bring disengaged students back into the school system. From these experiences, I realised there was a huge need for engaging learning tools to take advantage of the powerful hardware that children were already interacting with. One of the most effective ways to engage children is through gaming, especially on mobile devices, so they can learn and play anywhere, and at anytime.

On his expansion plans to Asia, David (pictured right) also adds that Asia has always been in the pipeline, because he believes it will eventually overtake Silicon Valley one day. There are certainly a lot of activities happening and more government support for the Asia tech startup scene, which are resources that would be tapped for the startup’s expansion.

He also shared his last Vietnam trip experience, where he was amazed at the jaw-dropping rate of change happening in Southeast Asia, noting:

When I was in the rural areas of Vietnam and Cambodia, my phone had better reception than in the city areas of Australia. It’s amazing to see the prevalence of mobile technologies, which is why I’m focused on mobile learning games, and not web-based ones. [Most Southeast Asian nations have] better reception and services, [because they have mobile towers everywhere], and they are innovating so quickly in the mobile space. [In fact], I hear a lot of vietnamese produced mobile games are infiltrating the chinese market.

Perhaps David, or any of you folks out there with gaming startups, might consider Shanghai if you’re looking to China for expansion. Just last week, my Tech in Asia colleague Charlie reported that the city’s gaming industry value grew to about $2.3 billion in 2011, which accounts for 30 percent of China’s game industry – a figure that is difficult to overlook.

For more on Math with Springbird, you can check out the video demo below:

The AngelCube incubatee is catered to app developers. And more recently, it has announced that you can also embed Kickfolio demos and screenshots as an iframe on any webpage around the web, working pretty similar to a YouTube video. This makes it really convenient especially when users and investors wish to find out more, as all these can be done in one single webpage.

Kickfolio co-founders entered the AngelCube program without an idea, but was selected based on the strength of their experience and the promise that they would build something really awesome. The idea of building Kickfolio struck Ed Dowling (pictured right, the dude on the left), co-founder, on the train to work one day. Chris Nolet (pictured right, the dude on the right), co-founder tells us:

We went through dozens of ideas when we arrived – from hardware products to ideas for iPad apps. At the end of a pretty exciting and tumultuous week of brainstorming, Ed was on the train on the way in, and wrote down [five] ‘last ditch’ ideas to try and find something that we would truly love to work on and that would solve a real-world pain point. He started focusing more on problems that we had personally – and one of those was keeping our app portfolios up to date. He came up with the idea to automate app portfolios and integrate live, interactive demos. He pitched it to me, I loved it, and we ran with it!

The app was developed over a period of 11 weeks by both Ed and Chris, and they humbly contribute their achievements thus far to having “committed ourselves to building something cool and we stuck at it”. Kickfolio was also recently on Hacker News, and has received feedback which aids in its further development.

So if you’re an app developer and keen to find out how Kickfolio would work for your business, you can give it a try here Alternatively, you might also check out Limelight, a similar service which we featured last year.

After the announcement of the Asia-oriented Optus-Innov8 fund, I guess many, myself included, were pretty curious about the Australian tech startup scene. Just last week, while on a personal trip to Melbourne, I was very kindly hosted by the folks at Inspire9, who introduced me to the community over there.

Inspire9 is a co-working space located in Richmond, a suburb of Melbourne. I was pleasantly surprised when Rocket (pictured right, she’s the girl on the left), one of the community managers, told me during my visit that part of the co-working space, given that rental costs in Melbourne are exorbitantly high, is let out for free for entrepreneurs who occasionally work out of the Inspire9 space. In fact, I was also invited by them to work from there myself. Nathan Sampimon (pictured on the right), tells us more:

[W]e’ve got a model that community orientated because thats what’s most important to us. We’ve been running the coworking space for nearly [four] years now and we’ve learnt that providing a free resource is great to start with, but after a while members based in the space want to give back. So to help them do this we’ve created a payment structure which helps us pay for the space and helps them contribute.

There are [two] plans. The ‘casual residency’ is two days a week, costs AUS$230, exclusive of GST per month, and is designed for freelancers and startups who enjoy working from home, cafes or libraries and just need some time each week to escape their usual work environment. A ‘permanent residency’ is $400, exclusive of GST, per month and is designed for people that thrive in the co-working environment.

They do have customized deals for bigger teams who are interested to work out of the space.

I thought this was great because letting it out for free would mean startups can cut down on rental costs, and being in a community like Inspire9 would allow them to interact and bounce ideas off other like-minded individuals. There are over twenty startups residing in Inspire9, which makes it really easy to look for people to validate – or tear to shreds – your idea and product, or to even seek help on matters you’re unsure about. In fact, AngelCube, one of Australia’s incubators, is also based there.

So apart from providing the space, Inspire9 runs community events and meetups, including Ruby Melbourne, Python Melbourne, WordPress Melbourne, and Girl Geek Dinners. Just the weekend before, they held the Social Media Melbourne Unconference in conjunction with the Mashable Social Media Day.

Apart from these, they do have other events such as Inspire9 Running Sessions where a group of residents head out for a run, 5x5s where a community member shares what they’re working on for 5 minutes and receives 5 minutes of feedback from the group, and Inspire9 Blood Donation Drive where they organise a bus to pick them up and take a group of them to donate blood. For more information, you can check out their website here.

So why the name Inspire9? Nathan elaborates:

Here is an excerpt from our branding outline: You know the feeling you get when you see something truly incredible, when you are floored in its honesty, complexity or sheer brilliance?

We call that inspiration.

From the projects we collectively work on to the people behind the ideas, we take inspiration from it all, it’s what drives us to come to work everyday.

We don’t tell people what to be, ask people to rethink their ideas or position ourselves as untouchable. We aim to inspire each other; inspire change, inspire ideas, inspire evolution.

This inspiration is the seed of all things great.

I loved Inspire9, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself while interacting with the startups there. I didn’t feel at all awkward stepping into the space, I felt like I was back home talking to everyone. A big shoutout to Nathan, Rocket, and Lucas – Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. I’m looking forward to visiting you guys again!

If you folks are interested in checking out the space, here’s the address and some more pictures:

Level 1
41 Stewart St
Richmond, Victoria
Australia 3121

Sydney-based incubator, PushStart, has recently graduated its first batch of eight startups. I was honoured to have attended the inaugural demo day held at beautifully designed York Butter Factory space in Melbourne, and just last night, it also concluded its demo day in Sydney.

I was thoroughly impressed and very pleasantly surprised when some startups included Asia (including China) as part of their long term expansion plans.

Here’s an overview of the startups presented:

1. Adbay (formerly known as Rezon8): Adbay aims to revolutionize the style of advertising on billboards. It has a audience measurement technology in place that allows you to track and identify demographics you wish to target, so you can put up advertisements based on who the audience is. In essence, you can create your advertisement, choose the demographic, location, and budget, and it only charges you when the advertisement connects with people whom they want to connect with.
2. Bleeply: Bleeply is a beautifully simply social tool that allows you to manage your Twitter accounts. It has a collaboration platform in place which aims to stop social media disasters. Team members are able to easily edit and improve on tweets before sending them out, and posts can be discussed internally via a commenting system that Bleeply has in place. Now it allows you to interact confidently on Twitter, anytime and anywhere. Especially when it is web and mobile friendly.
3. GimmeQuotes: Started by two brothers, GimmeQuotes is a hassle-free way to post your job requests, solving the disconnect between local businesses and consumers. So all you need to do is to create a project on any services you require, and matching professionals will eventually contact you with relevant quotes. It cuts down on time wastage browsing directories and calling businesses.
4. Matewire: Matewire positions itself as a Lastminute.com for activities, where it is a mobile social network that allows you to find out the activities which are happening geographically close to you right now. It has a description of the event, date, time, and also shows the people turning up for the event.
   

   Tiny Beans Co-Founders

5. Surfed.at: This is a surfer directory made by a surfer for surfers, allowing you to discover new places to surf, record, and rate the surfing spots. Hence, if a surfing spot is crap, it will not be given a good rating. However, when more people rate a spot, the spot’s ranking goes down as it gets overcrowded. Working just like a bell curve, the spot gets a better score when more people add to it, but after a certain point, the score decreases.
6. Tiny Beans: This is a personal favourite because for one, it promotes family bonding. Two, it has plans to expand to China. Tiny Beans allows parents to create a beautiful record of their children’s growing stages, so it journals the developmental process of their kids, in pictures.
7. Tonight: Tonight is an iPhone app that allows you to find, share, and plan nightlife activities, on top of giving you a personalized live feed of what your friends and other interesting people are up to for the night. It’s social network for what goes on after dark, and by knowing what’s happening ahead of time, you will know where to go, and where you should go, and places that you should not miss out.
8. Werdsmith: I actually think our editoral team (in particular, Rick) might like this. Think Werdsmith as the Github for writers, turning your iPhone and iPad into a portable writing studio, where writers can organize, share, and collaborate their writing projects while on-the-go.

Congratulations to all eight PushStart graduates, and cheers to Kim Heras and his team for a great job on this. We’ll be having more in depth interviews with some of these startups, so stay tuned!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over the past few weeks we have noted how more individuals and companies are flocking to Chinese microblogs in an effort to reach out to Chinese people. The premier of Victoria Australia Ted Baillieu as well as opposition leader Daniel Andrews both took to Sina Weibo last month to reach Chinese speakers in their city. And now former Australian prime minister and foreign minister Kevin Rudd, who actually speaks Mandarin Chinese, has finally jumped on Weibo as well.

For Rudd’s first tweet, he sent a short thank you note to CCTV International host Rui Chenggang:

@ruichenggang hello. Thanks for encouraging me to start using weibo! I hope to have many opportunities to chat with my Chinese friends. Lao Lu.

He also noted that he hasn’t used Chinese characters in a long time, and when noting that his characters are like a five year old, he used the wrong character for ‘five.’ The error was quickly corrected by his followers, but many reacted that the mistake was ‘cute.’ Rudd then said perhaps his writing is closer to that of a four year-old. Indeed it’s this kind of genuine interaction that’s likely to win him an even greater number of admirers.

So far Rudd has over 116,000 followers since joining back on April 18th. His approach certainly contrasts with that of London mayor Boris Johnson, whose own weibo blunders we wrote about last week.

As we recently noted, Chinese is reportedly soon going to overtake English as the dominant language on the web, so expect more high-profile people and brands [1] to use weibo as a means to reach out to this portion of the web.

[Via Sydney Morning Herald]

A couple of days ago we told you about how some businesses outside of China are taking advantage of the Sina Weibo platform to reach Chinese consumers. And today there’s a report from Australia’s The Age explaining how both Victorian premier Ted Baillieu and opposition leader Daniel Andrews have taken to Weibo to reach Chinese speaking Victorians.

Having just opened the account on Monday, Baillieu himself has almost 25,000 followers so far, having posted only four updates, all in Chinese. His account sports a “V” for verified, and his advisor Gladys Liu has her email listed on his page for anyone who wants to correspond.

It’s pretty interesting that an overseas politician would take to Weibo to engage with Chinese people in his area. Perhaps we’ll see more of this in areas of the world which have high Chinese populations.

We’ve seen some creative use of social media in politics over the past few years, with Facebook playing a big role in last year’s general election in Singapore as just one example. Of course, the United States will see a presidential election this year as well. Might we see Barack Obama on Weibo reaching out to Chinese voters? Ok, perhaps not. But we can always hope.

Roveb is an Australia-based startup that “turns” websites into mobile sites. There isn’t any technical knowledge required. Well, technically there is – but it is as simple as inserting some Javascript code. All you have to do is key in your URL, tweak the look and feel, and add in content. It is important to note that Roveb isn’t exactly turning your existing site into a mobile site. Rather it helps you build a simple mobile site quickly.

Once you’ve inserted the Javascript code, all mobile traffic will be automatically redirected to your mobile website. The service is simple and is targeted at small business owners who require a quick and simple solution to activate their mobile sites. I can imagine such services getting popular in mobile-centric countries like China and Indonesia.

For folks who prefer to have a really customized solution, do it yourself. But the service looks neat after giving it a quick test, and it’s pretty simple to use. Roveb is available for free but there are a number of different paid plans depending on your requirements, with the lowest paid service starting at $29 per month.

Kim shared that areas in marketplaces, enterprises, and mobile space are looking sunny bright in Australia. A few examples he quoted were:

1. Big Commerce: A Sydney-based e-commerce platform company which raised $15 million in series A funding from General Catalyst and recently launched an integration fund to aid the development of BigCommerce integrations and third party applications.
2. 99designs: A Melbourne-based online marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design which received $35m first-round investment led by Accel Partners last April. It is projected to pay out $25 million to its designer community in 2012.
3. OzForex: A Sydney-based online foreign exchange payments platform which received growth investment of $70 million – $110 million from Accel Partners and The Carlyle Group last November 2010.

Australian entrepreneurs understand the true meaning of being bootstrapped and know how to run their businesses cheap. Kim describes this phenomenon as a by-product of the absence of capital in the Australian startup scene. Australian VCs are generally risk adverse, so entrepreneurs value every single cent that is given to them.

Australian entrepreneurs aim for the world market and possess a more global outlook. Let’s take some factors into consideration: Australia is relatively close to Asia, used to be a British Colony, and looks to the United States for expansion of their companies. They are well-positioned for a true global understanding of markets.

Kim also shared that the real market outreach in Australia is about four to five million users, which makes it difficult for startups to scale. For that reason consumer web startups have trouble gaining popularity. It is essential for Australian entrepreneurs to think globally and integrate with other markets.

But having said all that, it seems that there is not much of an entrepreneurship culture in Australia. In fact, most students choose to seek comfortable high paying jobs instead of venturing out on their own upon graduation. It takes time to build an eco-system, and Kim actually sees the potential in Australia to produce the next big thing:

Companies that come out of smaller countries must have a global focus, and those are the type of businesses that Australia is producing.

I thought this was applicable to our Singaporean entrepreneurs too, given our small market. And something motivational for all entrepreneurs:

It is the difference between small business owners and growth-minded entrepreneurs – The latter thinks bigger.

[Australia image from Shutterstock]

Chinese characters can look like arcane codes, cryptic communiqué, that conspire to obscure the meanings of an ancient culture. But new, hi-tech tools can help anyone wrap their ears, eyes, and tongues around those swoops and shapes. The Mandarin Madness app, from the Australian startup Native Tongue, is one such tool, which aims to help total beginners grasp the simple sound and meaning behind many common characters. Plus, the app – now newly launched on iPhone and iPad – has game-ified the activity of learning, with points, flash cards, and ‘lives.’

Native Tongue’s CEO, Matthew Ho, tells PO that his team-of-three startup won Australia’s first startup weekend competition in May 2011, and then went full-time in readiness to launch the free Android app at Techcrunch Disrupt Beijing back in November. There a pro/paid version for Android as well. This approach was taken, Matthew says, so that the team could “release new features, gather user feedback, iterate and test the product” on Android for a couple of months before incorporating that all into the iOS versions which came out last week.

Unlike the freemium model chosen by so many apps and games, the Mandarin Madness app is not free, but costs only 99 US cents on both platforms. Matthew adds that, in the Android Market, the “proportion of paid downloads to free downloads in the US is 16 percent,” for his team’s app, which is a better than average conversion of ‘lite’ users into paying customers.

Game-ified Learning

The app itself goes for total immersion of the user, preferring to immediately tie the Chinese character to the sound, with no Anglicized text – known as hanyu pinyin – or translation as an accompaniment. The focus is totally on sounds and images, with Chinese characters dropping slowly down the screen (as pictured above), giving you about five seconds to hit the right flash card and not lose a life in the gaming element of the learning. As it’s for beginners, and all about fun, there’s no writing – just aural and visual recognition.

Matthew explains:

Our products are designed to be a game from start to finish so you learn as a by product of playing the game and have fun along the entire journey. Other apps in the marketplace use more traditional techniques whereby the second language is taught by translating from/to the user’s native tongue.

[Instead] we have minimized the text. […] We have devised an innovative approach to language learning designed to be “Native Tongue agnostic,” with no translation that uses visual and aural immersion instead, similar in philosophy to Rosetta Stone.

And so the app’s nicely-drawn and cartoony visuals come to the fore. As a bonus to the developers, there’s very little localization to be done when developing the app for new markets.

Native Tongue plans similar apps for the learning of English and Spanish, as well as expanding the vocabulary range from just objects/nouns to adjectives and more complex grammar as well.

There are paid versions for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, plus Android users get a ‘lite’ version for try-out purposes. Get the links from the Mandarin Madness homepage.

Grepsr is one of the more intriguing startups I’ve come across in a while. It is a data extraction and web crawling service which you can use if you need to automate data collection from places on the web. Initially I thought this was simply a data scraping tool, but upon closer inspection ‘service’ does seem to be a more apt description as there is some human involvement from the Grepsr team as well.

I spoke to Amit Chowdhury, who explained that Grepsr is a just a two-man operation so far. The service, which launched back in October, aims to give users a simple interface to tell Grepsr which data on a webpage they want. This is done with a sort of screencapture tool, where you can highlight or ‘snap’ the data that you want on a given webpage or document. There are also browser plugins that users can use to highlight target data as they browse websites (see picture). Once Grepsr has your requirements, along with any comments you might want to send them, they then create an extractor. Amit explains:

There is some manual intervention in this process, but we shield the users from this. It differs from [other solutions] in such a way that our focus is mostly on non-technical customers or companies who do not know how to go about data extraction… Grepsr hides the details, and just delivers the data neatly, organized and in a very streamlined fashion.

User dashboard

Browser Plugins

Amit estimates that the process is about 80 percent automated and 20 percent manual, the latter being the time needed to write an extractor for each project –though he points out that their “stable backend system makes it very easy and quick to write extractors.” Once an extractor is prepared, it can then be scheduled to collect data or update at certain intervals.

And Grepsr appears to present a number of options for data delivery, such as integration with Dropbox, FTP, and Google Docs, or you’re a developer they’ll provide data feeds that an application could consume. From what I can see by browsing a sample project, the results look very good.

Data view export

Scheduling

Such a tailor-made data collection service doesn’t come free, as you might expect, with costs ranging from $99 to $129 per project depending on the chosen pricing plan. But if you’re someone who lacks the technical skills to extract data on your own [1], then it could be well worth the price and more.

Grepsr is currently based in Australia, but they are in the process of moving the startup to Nepal where they are originally from, explaining

We liked the challenge of bringing up a tech-startup from a virtually unknown country and hope to put Nepal in the map somehow – even if it’s in a very small way.

Currently Grepsr is self-financed, and has had about 15 individual clients in their first two months – ranging from real estate agents to researchers to even lottery players – with some recurring projects. That’s not a whole lot of business, but Grespr says that their costs are minimal: mostly their time, cloud computing expenses, and coffee! They hope enterprises can take advantage of their service in the future. And for those of you who might be wondering about the unusual name, and explanation is below:

But given the manual attention given to each project, can a two-man operation like this scale? Amit doesn’t foresee any problem in scaling, saying that their backend platform does not absolutely require super-talented programmers, but that an average programmer could get by because the backend hides all the details from extraction.

Given the importance of ‘big data’ these days in business, and in news as well, I really hope that Grepsr does well. Services like this that make working with data more accessible to non-programmers, are in my opinion, very much needed. And for anyone wondering about the unusual name, an explanation is below:

A couple of months back we told you about how Japan’s Mediba Inc was branching out to establish a Singapore office to help its expanding mobile advertising business in the Asia region. And today we received word that the company is to cooperate with Australian mobile advertising company Leadbolt.

The partnership is aimed at improving each company’s ad business according to the announcement:

Through this collaboration, advertising sponsors who place advertisements on the “mediba ad powered by AdMaker” can expect increased advertising effectiveness and the ability to significantly expand their exposure not only in Japan, but also abroad as well. In addition, site operators who join “mediba ad powered by AdMaker” will be able to post LeadBolt’s global ad plan into their sites.

Mediba also noted that it will continue to seek partnerships with other ad network operators both in Japan and abroad, specifically focusing on the growing smartphone market in the Asia region. The company previously stated that it was considering branches in Korea, China, Indonesia, and India. The company is perhaps best know for its work on KDDI’s (TYO:9433) ‘au one’ portal site, as the Japanese carrier is Mediba’s majority shareholder.

As for Leadbolt, you can learn more about the company in their introductory video below.

There are a lot of social media dashboards out there that try to bring together your social missives, but only one includes integration with China’s hippest social network – that’s Hubblr.

It’s a brand-new, enterprise-oriented web app from an Australian start-up that’s aimed at making PR and online marketing across the globe – including China – a safer and slicker experience.

Hubblr’s CEO and co-founder, Michael Lam (pictured right), gave me a guided tour over Skype, and then we coincidentally ran into each other again at TC Disrupt Beijing last week, giving me ample time to get a feel for the service.

Right now, Michael says, it’s in private beta and free – but it will launch soon and come ready with a number of packages for brands to do their global marketing and PR. Apart from multi-posting to Twitter, Facebook, Sina Weibo, and LinkedIn, it also features analytics, a profanity filter, one-click translation, embedded image viewing, scheduling, and some advanced gizmos for marketing professionals to follow-up on individual tweets. They’re also “working on Renren and Tencent Weibo” integration.

Hubblr is, he tells me, a spin-off from Cornerstone Tech, and is “now boot-strapping, looking for funding.”

Weibo Marketing to China

The main Hubblr dashboard, showing a mix of tweets from Twitter and Sina Weibo.

Asked what Hubblr offers, he says, “It’s aimed at global brands who operate in China. It gives them visibility. Plus, it’s real-time and instantaneous, and gives brands immediate feedback.” Michael adds:

It can prevent a PR disaster by blocking swearing, and you can add any words to monitor, such as your brand name – or even a misspelling of your brand name.

The stats and analytics begin from a user’s first day on Hubblr, and include monitoring of posting levels and follower counts.

The last time we looked at corporate use of social media across Asia, we found that microblogs – i.e. Twitter and Weibo – were now second only to broader social networks such as Facebook in terms of them being used for engaging with consumers. But, in China, a brand’s presence on Sina or Tencent Weibo is now arguably more essential than being on, say, Renren.

Simul-Posting Dashboard

Hubblr analytics allow you to visualize followers, engagement, activity, etc.

The Hubblr post box allows single or multi-posting to numerous social networks.

Aware that his start-up risks getting blocked in China, Michael has “implemented an IP filter” so that it cannot post to Twitter and Facebook for users in China. And so the emphasis is firmly on enterprise users overseas reaching out to Chinese consumers, and not for individuals looking to tweet behind the GFW (as HootSuite and Seesmic used to be able to do, before Net Nanny blocked them).

Personally, I don’t think it’s a good idea to multi-post the exact same thing to different social networks – especially not if there’s a language barrier between the two. But that’s not an issue on Hubblr, as it can be used as a launchpad for posts to any social network either separately or simultaneously, and you still get the benefits of the other features. That means an overseas company can easily manage its Sina Weibo account, despite the original site not having an English localisation.

If you’re with a company and would like to take Hubblr for a blast, click the link to reveal the Hubblr email address and fire them an email with “Penn-Olson invite” in the subject – you’ll be given priority access to the private beta.

International premier news portal BBC.com has launched three new dedicated editions of its website for India, Asia, and Australia/New Zealand respectively.

These new editions will reportedly offer an “immersive and localized” BBC.com experience for its audience. It will provide in-depth analysis and breaking news coverage that will appeal to the audience’s needs and interests.

To aid with this coverage, BBC.com has built a new Asia-Pacific team based in Singapore who will be working alongside other journalists from the BBC’s international news service. Chris Davies, acting managing director, for BBC.com explained:

At present BBC.com is the leading international news website in Asia-Pacific with 11.1 million unique users per month. These editions are the response to overwhelming audience feedback and testing and will ensure even greater engagement from new and existing users.

Taking advantage of Geo-IP recognition technology, the homepage of these editions are supposedly designed to show the most localized version for each visitor. So you can expect to see local news, sport and travel sections, weather updates, features from local correspondents, and lots of video content once you load the homepage.

BBC India (Weather)

That said, I am not quite sure if the technology is already in place, since I got a generic homepage at the time of writing this article. The only localization I saw was the TV schedules for BBC Entertainment in India, along with weather information for Mumbai city, whereas I live in Bangalore. (Note: It does offers an option to edit the location, but that’s not the point!)

Apart from regular programming, BBC has also unveiled five specially commissioned reports, commencing from tomorrow. These will offer topics beyond the major headlines, including:

• Start-Up Stories China – An eight-part weekly series investigating how entrepreneurs in China are transforming the country and the world, starting on November 4. It’s both online and on BBC World News.
• Generation Asia – An eight-part series starting on November 4. The series explores the huge changes sweeping across the continent and the impact on a new generation of Asians.
• India Direct – A series of reports starting on November 7 which will run in tandem with the India Direct season of programming on BBC World News.
• China’s Global Reach – In line with the G20 summit, this series of eight reports will complement the Global Economy section of the News website, focusing on the key role China is now playing, and will continue to play, in the global economy.
• The New Middle Class – Two additional reports from the BBC series looking at financial decisions facing a new generation of middle class Asians, this time focusing on India. The reports will air in the week commencing November 21 and November 28.

What do you think about these new localized editions of BBC.com? Do share your views below.

[Source - IndiaInfoline.com]

Using social media in Asia: BMW's official Sina Weibo account.

Burson Marsteller (BM) has just released its Asia-Pacific Corporate Social Media Study for 2011, giving insights – and infographics – that cover how companies are using social media in the region.

This year’s study paints a picture of brands being ever more keen to engage with consumers via social media, yet still not doing some things very effectively – such as failing to use video on social video-sharing sites, and not maintaining corporate blogs where more complex issues can be covered.

Without further ado, here are the ten key points…

Number of social media channels with corporate activity - BM is heartened that 81 percent of top Asian companies have a branded social media presence this year, compared to 40 percent in 2010. It means that a great deal fewer are ignoring this useful form of communication:

Corporate use of social media channels by market; 2010 compared to 2011 - In these two we see that South Korean and Malaysian companies are the most aggressive users of social media for corporate communications and marketing. South Korea remains the most adept at all this – but it’s clear that its neighbors are catching up. Taiwan is still lagging behind.

In terms of particular channels, microblogs are popular for their reach and share-ability. But there’s an element of superficiality to it, as it obviates the need for more detailed dialogue:

Top social platforms used for corporate marketing and communications - That lack of deeper dialogue is shown by these platform stats. Microblogs – from Twitter to Weibo – are great for extending a brand’s reach, but there’s not too much more to it than that. Social networks such as Facebook or Renren give a bit more scope for this. But it seems to be coming at the expense of corporate blogs.

Video-sharing is strangely neglected in the region. Videos – especially informal ones that give insights – can be so useful, but Asian companies don’t seem to have figured out that magic:

Top global social platforms used for corporate marketing and communications - Engagement is up across the board here. BM notes:

Twitter is emerging as the predominant social media platform used by corporations, although corporate Facebook pages have more “likes” than Twitter accounts have “followers”

Levels of corporate activity on company social media channels - Here again we see the dearth of video-oriented output from brands, with so many seemingly inactive – or too infrequently updated. Across the region, 62 percent of social channels surveyed were inactive:

Integration of social media channels with company website - In many countries in Asia, brands are keeping their social media efforts very separate from their other online presences. But why not bring them closer? There could well be some reticence on the part of companies around here, say, to embed tweets in corporate home-pages. BM speculates it could be about the risk of ‘losing face.’

South Korea is here doing the best in bringing the two entities closer together, followed by Malaysia and Australia:

Use of company video-sharing channel - Getting back to the subject of visuals, we see here the average number of videos uploaded to the surveyed branded video channels, such as those on Youku (NYSE:YOKU) or YouTube:

Focus of corporate social media activity - Time for some more pie… So, what are all those corporate social tweets, wall posts, and fan pages about? The survey suggests that, to quote BM:

Asian companies are focused mostly on ‘pushing’ news to users, including journalists, bloggers and other opinion-formers.

Few Asian company CEOs or senior executives are actively using social media.

Well, we can think of quite a few who do in China, such as DangDang‘s (NYSE:DANG) Li Guo-qing, or Xiaomi’s Lei Jun. But perhaps those are not great examples, considering that they’ve caused quite a few firestorms with their Weibo posts in recent years:

Corporate use of social media channels by industry - Financial service providers in Asia are found to be most behind in using the web socially. And, surprisingly, technology companies across Asia are not doing the best job of reaching out to the many consumers who might be using SNS on that company’s own gadgets:

For the full story, head to Burston Marsteller’s SlideShare page for both the highly-detailed study overview, or the summary presentation.

Think about it. We usually search for information on the web. Google, Bing, and Yahoo give us good results based on algorithms. But are they the best? At times, not. That is why Quora, the Q&A platform, has been flourishing recently. We often get more insights when the right person answers the right questions. If you want to find a good pub with a rock band and ahem… hot waitresses in Singapore, a local who has lived there for over 30 years will probably be able to give you a better recommendation than an FOB tourist.

Drumo also gamifies the platform in the way that whether you post a question or answer one, you earn points. Besides local reputation, these points can be exchanged for merchant deals.

Victoria Ng, a representative at Drumo explained to us that the start-up is the first Q&A platform of its kind to be launched in Asia Pacific (APAC). There are of course other Asia-based Q&A platforms, like Baidu Zhidao and Zhihu in China — but there aren’t quite like this . Here’s a confident statement from her:

These kind of services, [including Drumo], are widely pre-empted to take over old forms of search such as Yellow Pages, TrueLocal, Yelp and even Google; because it is based on trusted reviews and sources, real opinions, and connecting with real people.

Drumo is founded and managed by Design Royale, an Australia-based digital agency which has managed brands like Pepsi, MTV, Warner Music and Disney. This isn’t the first time that the agency has ventured into the web world. It has previously developed other Internet products, such as Royale/CMS – a content management system for advertising agencies – and Royale/Live – a social media feed aggregator.

Drumo is currently under construction but you can sign up here to get onto the invitation list.

Perhaps, sharing a screen on Skype could help. This is much better but it still requires both parties to arrange a common meeting time on Skype and it doesn’t allow you to take notes digitally on the problems. Sigh…

There is obviously a problem to solve here and thankfully Australia-based BugHerd has provided a great solution. Here’s how Founders Alan Downie and Matt Milosavljevic described their idea in 60 words:

BugHerd is the world’s simplest bug tracker for web designers and their clients. It embeds directly into a website so bugs are flagged and managed visually without the need to fill out lengthy forms or annotate screengrabs. Bugs can be logged in 5 seconds which is much quicker than emails, phone calls or any other issue tracker on the web!

Having gone through the pain myself, I think BugHerd really has a simple but brilliant idea. Sure, there are also other issue-tracking apps available on the web, but the simplicity and focus of BugHerd (for web designers) makes it outstanding.

BugHerd is invested by Dave McClure’s 500 Startups and also Startmate, an Australian-based seed fund and incubator group.

Interested? Head over here for a free 14 day trial to experience BugHerd’s awesomeness.

So we thought it was pretty neat when Microsoft announced the availability today of Office 365 in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand. (Unfortunately, the launch isn’t for all countries in Asia though.)

So what is Microsoft’s Office 365 all about?

Well in short, a cloud-based IT enterprise solution. It helps businesses, both big and small, to collaborate online:

• Online real-time document sharing/editing
• Instant messaging
• Video and web meetings
• Secure email with calendar integration and more
• ActiveSync, which lets you access all your cloud-based information on any device
• Every Office 365 plan comes with 24×7 IT support

Office 365 comes in two different offers; For small business and enterprise.

With US$6 per user per month, small businesses can power their operations with Office Web Apps, Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Lync Online and an external website in minutes. No IT hassle, a plug and play solution.

For the big boys, Office 365 starts from US $2 to $27 per user per month, depending on the customization level. You can head over to the cost estimator to understand the pricing better. Check out what Office 365 can do for businesses this video too:

Early Adopters Claim Success

In today’s launch in Singapore, Microsoft also presented early adopters of Office 365 in the Asia Pacific region, including Crystal Edge Zeptop Consulting in Malaysia, MedRecruit, ESL Industries and Xpress Accounting in New Zealand and Fortescue Metals in Australia.

The statement sent to us boasts that these companies are already reporting a reduction in IT costs due to higher productivity.

While there is much buzz about Office 365, the new Microsoft cloud product does face a stiff challenge from Google Apps, which also helped several companies in Asia to save huge chunk of costs in their IT operation.

XL previously conducted some trials among participants of the BlackBerry World Conference in Orlando, Florida from May 3 – 5, 2011. XL hopes to improve its service with the feedback obtained from these participants. The prepaid roaming service can now be enjoyed by XL Blackberry customers in the US and Australia at a cost of only US$6 per day once the user is registered.

Blackberry XL prepaid roaming service is also available in nine other countries, namely Japan, HongKong, Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Macau, and Taiwan.

As one of the biggest telco companies in Indonesia, XL now has 880,000 subscribers for its Blackberry service. It’s competing with other telecom companies such as Telkomsel. With improved network infrastructure and expanding cooperation, XL hopes to give better service to accommodate the needs of its customers, where ever they may be.

Source: Republika

The iPad 2 has finally launched in Australia and New Zealand… You have waited long, we know, especially after browsing the photos by BeauGiles on Flickr. Apple consumers are now able to purchase the gadget via its website since 1 am but shipments are likely to be delayed as the world is running short of iPad 2. The wait has to go on until 5 pm local time today, though.

Be patient, mingle with other Apple fans and get excited over the iPad 2. Your hours of waiting probably isn’t as bad as Mr Alex Lee who is prepared to wait for 50 hours to be the first person in Australia to grab hold of an iPad 2, according to Current. The Apple staff at Sydney, allowed him to use the bathroom, grabbed him snacks and gave him access to the store’s Wi-Fi.

Companies are also taking advantage of the iPad 2 hype in Australia. LogMeIn, a software company that runs on the iPad 2 has offered free pizza to waiting Apple fans. It seems like the same Alex Lee was the person who received the pizza in this picture.

Japan was supposedly one of the three countries in Asia to receive the iPad 2 today. However, Apple delayed the launch as the Japan team is focused on recovering from the recent disaster. The iPad 2 isn’t shown on Apple Japan homepage. An iTunes donation announcement covered the homepage instead. Enjoy the iPad 2 and donate if possible.

Connect on Facebook:

Out of the 100 million, 56 million users are based outside the United States. LinkedIn also said that India is one of the fastest growing countries with a 76 percent annual growth rate in 2010.

In absolute terms, India has over 9 million users while other prominent LinkedIn Asian countries include China and Australia has about one million and 1.94 million users, respectively.

Thanks to China, LinkedIn was able to celebrate its 100 million milestone earlier. The professional social network site was banned during late February, last month. Fortunately, the ban was short-lived and access to the site was regained within just 2 days. Chinese professionals heaved a sigh of relief as the ban was lifted. With Twitter and Facebook blocked, LinkedIn naturally became the only social platform to connect with the world.

LinkedIn users are still largely from U.S and Europe. It isn’t very popular among Asians. However, Singapore seems to be the outlier country. Despite a total population of just 5 milliion, the island-nation has more than 1 million LinkedIn users. That is equivalent to 20 percent of all Singaporeans.

Enjoy the infographic designed by our friend, Vincenzo Cosenza:

Connect on Facebook:

iPad 2 is here. But most Asian countries will have to wait. Apple has only announced launch dates for U.S and another 26 countries, including Japan, Australia and New Zealand. In Asia, iPad 2 will be available to Japan, Australia and New Zealand on March 25, two weeks after it is made available in the U.S.

The rest of the countries with launch date on March 25 are Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. If you are an Apple fan, note the date on your calendar and be prepared to queue for your new Apple gadget.

As expected, the iPad 2 has new front and rear cameras. iPad 2 users can now make FaceTime calls to millions of iPhone 4, iPod touch and Mac users to family and friends as long as there is Wi-Fi connection. The new iPad also comes with Photo Booth which let users apply fun visual effects, including eight photo special effects like Squeeze, Twirl and Kaleidoscope, to photos captured by either camera.

“With more than 15 million iPads sold, iPad has defined an entirely new category of mobile devices,” Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO said in a statement.

“While others have been scrambling to copy the first generation iPad, we’re launching iPad 2, which moves the bar far ahead of the competition and will likely cause them to go back to the drawing boards yet again.”

Apple has also introduced two new apps: iMovie and GarageBand for the iPad. The apps provide great convenience for users as photos and videos taken can be edited and sent through the iPad 2

So, it will be a pretty long wait for countries in Asia, especially in India where the first generation of iPad had just launched in late January this year.

An audit revealed that the Australia Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research used social media for about 400 hours per week. It was also said that usage peaked at 1pm and remained steady until about 3pm. This was the situation even when the department had restricted access to social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

With social media flooding the offices, questions on employee’s productivity were raised. Liberal senator Cory Bernardi said “millions of dollars were being spent as public servants wasted their time facebooking and tweeting on social media sites.” He added saying, “This government needs to advise departmental staff that formulating policy is more important than playing Facebook Scrabble,” The Australian reported.

To prevent social media from hampering work efficiency, the Department of Treasury has blocked YouTube, Facebook and MySpace access but allowed Twitter for work purposes. Some departments like the Attorney-General’s Department has allowed  staff to use Facebook, but blocked  MySpace.

With all the negativity about social media in workplace, we thought new media could be helpful if a company were to set the right rules and embrace it, rather than restrict it. That depends largely on the company’s culture, though.

The study, which looks at the latest trends in digital consumer behavior in Australia was presented at a comScore-hosted industry event in Sydney.

Social networking activities account for 22% of the total time spent online had increased by 5.3% from the previous year.

*Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs

Additional insights from the report include:

• In December 2010, Microsoft Sites led as the most-visited Internet property in Australia, followed by Google Sites and Facebook.com. When looking at the top sites by total minutes spent, Facebook.com assumed the #1 spot followed by Microsoft Sites and Google Sites.
• More Australians visited Retail sites compared to last year, outpacing increases in the global average. Amazon and Apple led as the most-visited retail destinations.
• Group-buying sites continued to gain traction over the past year. Cudo, an MSN property, currently leads the space with 418,000 unique visitors in December 2010.
• 3 out of 4 online users in Australia watched online video in December 2010, with an average viewer watching more than 7 hours of video during the month.
• Nearly 12 million Australians conducted an online search query in December, with an average searcher performing 115 queries. Google Sites accounted for 80 percent of searches in December.

Whether its for leisure or business, social media is playing an increasingly prominent role in Australians’ digital lives.

Will Hodgman, comScore executive vice president for the Asia Pacific region said, “2010 was dynamic year for the digital media industry in Australia. Consumers are turning to the Internet with increasing frequency for a vast array of activities including entertainment, commerce, news & information and communication, as digital media becomes embedded in the daily lives of Australians. Look for 2011 to be another year of continued innovation and increased competition as brands vie for consumers’ attention in this rapidly fragmenting digital environment.”

You can download a copy of the State of the Internet in Australia here

For example, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” was an instant hit, and Las Vegas can’t seem to find something better to replace it. On the flip side, Australia’s “Where the bloody hell are you?” tagline didn’t work too well for her.

With a new tagline, “There’s nothing like Australia,” and a $4 mil campaign, we thought all would be well again. But I guess the tourism board didn’t see this coming: someone went out and registered the domain NothingLikeAustralia.net, and started posting spoof versions of the campaign.

Having no clue how to deal with this, Tourism Australia (TA) considered taking legal actions against the site. If you know anything about the people online, you wouldn’t want to consider legal actions. Laugh it off and leverage on the situation instead. Luckily, TA came to its senses before getting a severe backlash.

If concocting well-received slogans is so tough, and tourism campaigns are so expensive (and might go terribly wrong), what else can a tourism board do? It surprises me that tourism boards are taking so long to try out social media. Those who are already on it are seeing very impressive results!

Here are some things they did that I love:

1. Creating Valuable Information Platform

Planning for a vacation can be a complete nightmare. Sometimes, I don’t even know where to start. Having a place I can turn to for information would be a blessing.

Visit Japan 2010 has a Facebook page that aggregates all the travel info and links you’ll ever need! The layout is clean and information is organized. It’s the first place (not Google!) I would go to when planning for a Japan trip. Get updates through the page, ask questions and share your experiences with others. Who would you trust more, the tips and views of a fellow tourist or the tourism board?

New Zealand has a YouTube channel that not only shows you great videos, it helps you plan your trip as well (under slogan)! The channel links you to information about New Zealand, getting to New Zealand, places to stay, and a New Zealand map.

A twitter list, like what Vegas did, might help too!

2. Promoting Social Media Presence

Las Vegas tourism board has dedicated a significant amount of space on its official site to direct traffic to its social media accounts. It is crucial to engage potential tourists outside of a website. People are spending hours on Facebook everyday, but maybe 15 minutes on websites, and only when they need them. Social sites are a great opportunity to let organizations become a part of consumers’ daily life.

3. Checking Tourists In (Foursquare)

I absolutely love this. Chicago users of the Explore Chicago section on Foursquare can earn three badges, themed around the city, by visiting locations such as historic sites, film locations, restaurants and clubs. This is to help boost awareness of both the popular and less well known tourist attractions.

Mobile Apps

With more Smartphone users wanting travel-related apps, it is a good opportunity for tourism boards to start thinking of how they can value add people on the go. Well, Tourism Vancouver is already doing it! It has launched an interactive tourist guide with integrated street navigation of Vancouver and Whistler. Check it out.

Being on Social Media Comes With Risks

Word of mouth is a powerful thing, and it has been made even more powerful by the Internet and social media. While writing the post, I visited the “Visit Japan 2010″ Facebook page again. To my surprise, users are posting videos and pictures on its wall, asking Japan to stop killing whales and dolphins. Some are asking people to boycott Japan until  she addresses this issue. With such an awesome Facebook page, it is a pity that something like that has happened. Japan National Tourism Organization has deleted all the negative posts, but can it keep doing this? Maybe this would help.

Just because social media comes with risks does not mean we should avoid it. That’s what a fool would do. All we need to do is prepare for social media disasters and unpleasant situations in general. Handle it well and reap the vast benefits of social media!

Other Business Resource:

1. 4 Important Social Media B2B Marketing Lessons

2. How A Restaurant Uses Foursquare To Gather 161 Users

3. Brewerkz Singapore: How It Uses Social Media

4. 5 Ways To Leverage Foursquare For Business

5. 5 Social Media Marketing Case Studies

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