Singaporean startup incubator Fatfish Medialab has made its first ever investments in four local startups. The new program, a spin-off from the VC firm Fatfish Group that operates around Southeast Asia, has opted to back these guys, who are all still in beta and not yet fully launched:

PeeplePass

Once launched on iPhone and Android, PeeplePass promises to be Asia’s first data-driven social travel app, different to the usual travel diary or search apps.

Blazable Studio

Blazable Studio is working on a game engine to simplify the creation of social mobile games.

VDancer

VDancer is a game studio focuses on a particular niche – what it promises will be a new genre of mobile dance games.

DockPHP

Will be a SaaS business for creating business-oriented websites.

Fatfish is an iJAM-approved incubator. For those who missed the news, iJAM is a tiered funding program created by the Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore. It has experienced entrepreneurs and seasoned investors onboard to guide the startups, such as partners Chow Yen-Lu and Lau Kin Wai.

Mr. Lau says in today’s announcement:

We have quite an exciting first quarter of the year with the investments we made into the four startups. We are selective in finding the right startups to invest in, but we do see a very active startup scene in Singapore. At this juncture, we believe that we will be investing into more than 15 startups over the next 24 months.

Twitter is fun, but it’s not a very visual medium. Japan’s TwitCasting is trying to change that with its video broadcasting platform that’s tied very closely to Twitter. Today the startup has revealed that it now has US$640,000 in seed funding from East Ventures and various angel investors to help it grow. (Disclosure: East Ventures is also an investor in TechinAsia).

TwitCasting now has more than 2.4 million users, of whom 80 percent are in Japan, 10 percent in Brazil.

Yosuke Akamatsu, CEO of Moi Corporation, the startup company behind TwitCasting, says in the announcement:

TwitCasting is seeing ‘hockey stick’ growth since last summer,
and we were behind the speed of the growth in terms of human resources
and system infrastructure. This funding will enable us to rapidly deliver a good
communication platform and acquire core team members.

TwitCasting has both viewer and broadcaster apps for Android and iPhone. There’s also a web app, where you can also choose to view streams that are radio only, music only, or full video. You can view live broadcasts where available, or dig through archived videos.

The service can be used for events and other useful stuff, though most of the videos on the site seem to be just people rambling on about stuff. A lot like YouTube.

With this investment, Taiga Matsuyama, a partner at East Ventures, will take a seat at on MOI’s board of directors.

Disclosure: East Ventures is also an investor in TechinAsia. See our ethics page for more information.

Rocket Internet’s fashion e-store for Asia, Zalora, has raised a truly massive round of funding. The sum is an eye-watering $100 million – yes, one hundred million dollars – coming from best buddies and returning investors Summit Partners, Investment AB Kinnevik, Verlinvest, and Tengelmann Group.

Michele Ferrario, the managing director of Zalora, said in today’s announcement:

Our company is one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies in Southeast Asia and has bright prospects. It is an honor for us that investors of such great repute have invested into an e-commerce company as young as Zalora. Our goal is to continue serving up world-class products and services, so everyone in Southeast Asia can benefit from the wide selection of products at Zalora, the convenience of our e-platform, and the speed of our delivery.

Zalora operates in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan.

After launching in March 2012, Zalora attracted funding from JP Morgan last September, then scored $26 million just two months ago from German retail company Tengelmann Group.

The fashion e-commerce site already employes over 1,000 people and delivered its one millionth order last week to a customer in Singapore.

Mixi has ploughed over $700,000 into CloudStudy, whose main product is StudyPlus, a social learning management platform. The other investment, explains the Startup-Dating blog, is in Reventive, a young company that has so far made three social apps. It hasn’t been revealed how much Reventive got.

StudyPlus

CloudStudy’s StudyPlus platform helps students to record their study times, subjects, and content. Students can then share this progress with contacts inside the app, or to social networks like Facebook (yes, Mixi’s main rival).

After starting up in March 2012, it has now grown to 100,000 registered users, though CloudStudy’s CEo concedes that only about 12,000 of those learners are active on the service. But those who are active do post a lot each day. It’s accessible in a web app as well as on apps for Android and iOS.

Reventive

Reventive’s main product is a Path clone called Close (see the GIF demo), which is on Android and iOS. Whereas Path lets you have over 100 buddies within the app, Close lives up to its name by restricting you to just nine close friends. So perhaps it’s somewhere between Path and so-called couples’ apps like Between.

The same startup is also working on a location-based group dating/hangout app called Gocon which is still in the works.

Mixi mixing it up

While Mixi hasn’t acquired the startups, that might happen later if one really takes off. A few months ago, Mixi acquired the startup company Kamado, which makes a host of sites and apps.

But Mixi has also shut down a lot of things that don’t work. Its subscription fashion e-commerce service Petite Jeté was launched last September, but it was killed off by January of this year.

Mixi has been hovering – a polite way of saying horribly stuck – at about 15 million active users for two whole years while Facebook has grown strongly in the same time period. Also, social media trends have moved towards social messaging apps like Line. Line now has 150 million global users, with about 45 million of those based in Japan.

(Source: Startup-Dating)

Hong Kong-based social fashion and commerce platform Viss has received a round of strategic seed investment from Clive Ng and Christian Remrod via their company 8 Plus Holding.

Clive Ng is the chairman and founder of AsiaContent, MTV Japan, China Cablecom, and Fashion Networks International. While Christian Remrod is the managing director of Fairchild Fashion Media (Conde Nast Group) and the founder of Fashion Networks. No financial details of the funding were disclosed.

Founded by Ivy Wong and Leo Ku last September, Viss has recorded 2.8 million monthly unique visitors (MUV) and 18 million monthly page views to date. It also has apps for iPhone and Android (pictured below). When we last reported about the startup back in January this year, it had only 600,000 unique visitors and 3.5 million monthly page views. This means that the startup has grown by more than over 400 percent in terms of unique visitors.

Perhaps that’s due to the well-made and sleek product produced by the team which got featured on Apple App Store’s ‘New and Noteworthy’ and ‘What’s Hot’ sections in 14 Asian countries.

Ivy Wong, founder at Viss shared more of her thoughts today:

Viss aims to rewire the connection between curated user-generated content, brands engagement, and commerce. This is extremely powerful as we are hitting the sweet spots on generating brand awareness and engagement and conversion.

With the new funding and key connections, Viss plans to expand its geographic reach, work with brands for engagement and commerce partnerships, and also establish global media partnerships. “Not only we want to make it super fun and easy for fashionistas to share their looks and stories, we also want to reward them with both exposures and brand partnership opportunities,” Ivy added.

One other such social fashion app we looked at recently is Zoolook, which is made by a team split across Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Get the Viss apps for iOS or Android.

We’ve been following the progress of Beijing-based MadeiraCloud pretty closely since last year, and today the cloud visualization and management startup has its biggest news ever – a round of series A funding worth $1.5 million from Sequoia Capital.

MadeiraCloud founders Peng Zhao and Daniel O’Prey

The funding will be used to open an office in San Francisco and to enhance its newly rolled out support for Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service. MadeiraCloud will also grow to 12 staffers.

The simple idea behind the software-as-a-service (SaaS) MadeiraCloud platform is that it allows users to manage their AWS cloud architecture the way you design it – diagrammatically. It’s proving especially useful for startups managing an app backend on AWS as they grow and scale, and MadeiraCloud is currently utilized by thousands of users in 85 countries – from startups to large enterprise – to manage $25 million worth of AWS resources.

MadeiraCloud CEO and co-founder Daniel O’Prey puts the early success down to a “simple, familiar, self-service interface” that allows drag-and-drop re-organization that saves companies “significant time and money” in managing their servers and connections.

It seems that San Francisco will be the new base for this globally-minded startup, with Beijing retained as a development office.

Rocket Internet’s Asia-based food delivery startup Foodpanda has announced another major round of funding today. The new round is worth more than US$20 million with investment from Sweden’s AB Kinnevik, Russia’s Phenomen Ventures, and several other unnamed investors.

Foodpanda takes orders online from over 5,000 partner restaurants in nine Asian countries and employs 150 staff. It was launched in April 2012. The new funding will be used “to further accelerate growth and optimize customer service,” according to Rocket Internet’s Ralf Wenzel in today’s announcement.

Co-founder at Foodpanda, Kiren Tanna

Foodpanda co-founder Kiren Tanna recently told us that growth has been especially great for Pakistan, India, and Indonesia.

The food delivery startup is run in conjunction with the similar Hellofood, so that the two services collectively cover some cities in 27 nations.

There’s plenty of competition in this sector in Asia for Foodpanda. Hungry netizens can make use of HungryDelivery and Dealivery in Singapore, and there are four strong homegrown rivals in Vietnam’s major cities.

Beijing-based car rental startup Yongche has been diversifying recently, launching a taxi finding app in the form of “DaChe Xiaomi”. Investors seem to be appreciating this move into a hot new niche in China – Yongche has secured a massive new round of funding this weekend, with its taxi app being a major focus of the investment.

Yongche’s investor this time round is China Broadband Capital Partners. The funding amount hasn’t been revealed, but it’s believed to involve tens of millions of dollars. Yongche’s series A round came in August 2011, and was in a similar range.

The taxi-oriented DaChe Xiaomi is up against a lot of similar – and similarly named – competition, such as Yaoyao ZhaoChe, Didi DaChe, and Kuaidi DaChe. That latter one secured seed funding earlier this month.

Yongche’s new baby is a totally mobile-only app, unlike the company’s car rental service which also has an Uber-like limo/car-booking feature. DaChe Xiaomi’s homepage is just its official Sina Weibo account (see here).

All the taxi finding and booking apps and services in China are facing an uncertain future, however. As noted recently by Marbridge Daily, it’s rumored that Beijing municipal authorities are seeking to regulate these services because of a confusing array of surplus charges made to consumers. That could even involve the city of Beijing creating its own taxi booking platform, which would devastate these startups. About 30 percent of Beijing taxi drivers are using one or more of such apps.

It’s not unfeasible that an entire city could build its own platform – after all, we’ve already seen that happen in Chongqing, a massive municipality of 28 million people.

(Source: CSDN – article in Chinese)

We’ve been following the progress of Singapore-based Dropmysite pretty closely in the past year. In that time, the website and email cloud backup service has acquired a US rival and expanded into numerous countries. Today the startup has announced an investment from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups. The funding amount hasn’t been revealed, but will be in the usual 500 Startups seed funding range, which is US$25,000 to $250,000.

Aside from the cash, it gives the Dropmysite crew – who also run Dropmyemail, which has received funding in the past and expanded into the US market – access to the entire roster of 500 Startups mentors. Dropmysite says that it currently backs up a quarter of a billion emails and websites a day for nearly a million users.

Singapore’s Payroll Hero and video-streaming site Viki are two other local ventures that have attracted funds from 500 Startups.

Explaining the appeal of Dropmysite to small business owners, 500 Startups venture partner George Kellerman said in today’s announcement:

Very few people think about backing up their e-mail, voicemail, or SMS until
it’s too late, and most carriers and ISP’s can’t help you if they lose your data.
Dropmysite, however, solves that problem and allows any SMB to backup
their e-mail or whatever else they need simply and cost-efficiently. It’s a great
cloud-based business that has the potential to go global.

The Dropmysite crew also revealed today that there are “acquisitions under way” to help the business expand and will be announced in due course. Plus it’s finalizing a reseller program for its software-as-a-service offerings.

Remember the Vietnamese Dropbox that I wrote about in January? It just closed its first round of seed funding for an undisclosed amount with the goal of increasing brand awareness in Southeast Asia. Kleii’s also aiming to work more closely with service providers, release applications on all platforms, and then look at series A funding from Silicon Valley.

Today’s seed funders include Do Hoai Nam, CEO of Emotiv and an investor in local Vietnamese crowdfunding site IG9, and Nguyen Hong Hai, CEO of BTIC, plus some other angel investors. BTIC is a technology park located north of Ho Chi Minh city, heavily invested in by the Vietnamese government and aspiring to be Vietnam’s tech hub. It’s also where Kleii’s office is located.

I spoke with Nguyen Tuan Son, CEO of Kleii, for more details on each of the above points. But first, let’s cover some of the most significant stats.

• After 10 months, Kleii’s got 750,000 users. It’s set to get one million users by the end of this year. That’s explosive growth for a startup coming from Vietnam.
• Zero dollars on marketing.
• Kleii transfers five terabytes of data per day.
• Currently Kleii users use it mostly for photo syncing (41 percent), music streaming (27 percent), and video and documents storage (21 percent).
• Kleii’s top users, in descending order, are from: Vietnam, Indonesia, United States, Thailand, Brazil, South Korea, Malaysia, Germany, Australia, Singapore. Indeed, 60 percent of users are in Vietnam.

Son did not reveal current revenue nor the amount of the seed funding but we do know that the startup service has a freemium model like Dropbox where users who want to have more storage pay a fee. But, currently on the freemium model, users can get 50GB for free. That’s way over Dropbox’s initial 2GB.

For increasing brand awareness, Kleii is specifically focusing on Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. In terms of working with service providers, Son would like to work with telecoms, ISPs, and TV providers. He didn’t clarify exact details on this but I speculate that, given Kleii’s strong interest in streaming media and aspirations of becoming the center of users’ entertainment systems, it will be in allowing users to stream more content on their devices.

For future platforms, Kleii is set to release Android and Windows phone apps in the next two to three weeks and an iOS app one month from now. We will keep you posted on those native apps. Up until now, Kleii’s streaming and cloud features have been built exclusively on HTML5.

Yodo1 is a game development studio in its own right, and it does a lot more than just peddle others’ games to Chinese smartphone owners. It actually co-produces the China-market versions of its clients games, getting access to the code so as to add graphics, music, and virtual items especially for local gamers.

In today’s announcement – via the team at TechCrunch – Yodo1 CEO Henry Fong says that it has 25 million active Chinese players of its clients’ titles, such as Defiant Development’s Ski Safari, and XMG’s Powder Monkeys. For fun, I made a collage of the Chinese and international versions of Powder Monkeys (pictured below) to compare and contrast the styles.

The funding will be used, Henry says, to “expand Yodo1′s production capacity […] and build the company’s platform and production team.” Referencing telco SingTel and possible future expansion, he added:

Emerging markets such as China and Southeast Asia represent the most exciting prospects for mobile games developers, with close to one billion mobile subscribers migrating from feature phones to smartphone handsets over the next two years. [For that reason,] the SingTel Group is a perfect partner for Yodo1, with over 450 million mobile subscribers across Southeast Asia and other high growth emerging markets, and growing.

China currently has about 160 million active Android users, and 85 million on iOS, representing a massive mobile gaming market that could easily grow to half a billion potential smartphone gamers by next year.

Chinese startup Kuaidi Dache (meaning “fast taxis”) has flagged down seed funding to help the taxi-finding service grow. Centered around apps for iPhone and Android, Kuaidi Dache claims to have 300,000 users across the two cities where it operates – Shanghai and nearby Hangzhou – and covers 30,000 existing city taxi drivers. The startup sees 20,000 daily rides taken via the app.

The funding amount hasn’t been revealed, but according to Chinese tech blog 36Kr it takes the form of input from Ameba Capital’s Li Zhiguo, as well as a reported seven-digit RMB (hundreds of thousands of US dollars) investment from e-commerce company Alibaba.

While the Alibaba stake isn’t confirmed officially, it wouldn’t be too surprising, since the online shopping giant has been a lot more interested in startups recently, acquiring the social music site Xiami at the beginning of this year. Plus, there are rumors that Alibaba has bought the mobile ads platform Umeng, and is thought to have ploughed money into the flirty chat app Momo. Also, there’s a nice synchronicity to Kuaidi Dache operating in Hangzhou, which is Alibaba’s hometown.

Kuaidi Dache will use the funding to bring more drivers on board – it already covers 70 percent of cabs in Hangzhou – and expand to new cities.

This particular startup has some rivals in this space, such as Yaoyao Zhaoche and Didi Dache. The latter one has been incorporated into the updated Baidu Maps mobile service; since Baidu Maps has over 80 million users of its smartphone apps, that should be a big boost to Didi Dache.

If you want to see how these taxi-finding apps work, check out this six-minute report from Chinese TV. The reporter tries out booking a cab via SMS and phonecalls and finds that it can be a slow and hit-and-miss affair; then, at the 4:35 mark in the report, she tries out the Kuaidi Dache app and gets a cab arriving at her feet in just five minutes:

(Sources: 36Kr (article in Chinese), via Marbridge)

California-based game studio Kabam has set up a $50 million fund aimed at getting Japanese games into the Western markets of Europe and the US. Kabam’s fund will also involve assistance in localizing and translating games for export, marketing the titles, and helping developers with analytics on their game’s performance.

As noted by the WSJ, the new Kabam fund and platform puts the studio into competition with Japanese social gaming giants GREE and DeNA for the affection and allegiance of Japanese developers.

Since Kabam pitches itself as a maker of social games for hardcore gamers – not for bizarre and fairly simple games like Battle Cats – it’ll likely be more interested in promoting titles like its popular and free-to-play Kingdoms of Camelot. So this news might be positive for Japanese developers who make more complex titles like the card battle game Rage of Bahamut.

“We’re putting our money where our mouth is,” said Kabam CEO Kevin Chou, who added that a Japanese game developer can double revenue by achieving success in western markets. Although Japanese smartphone owners are great for paying up for games, the prospect of doubling the money will appeal to a lot of startup studios in Japan.

Kabam also has a Beijing studio, where it now employs nearly a hundred people after boosting numbers in December with the acquisition of Balanced Worlds. Kabam acquired two other properties last year after a $85 million series D funding round helped fuel aggressive expansion.

Kabam made more than $180 million in revenue in 2012 and now has 600 employees across the US and China.

(Source: WSJ Japan Realtime blog)

Singapore-based cosmetic and skincare e-commerce startup Luxola announces today that it has received series A funding from GREE Ventures for an undisclosed amount. The startup will use the funds to help its expansion plan across Southeast Asia as well as growing its product offerings.

Luxola founder and CEO Alexis Horowitz-Burdick said that they hope to expand to Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. e27 explained that Luxola has become GREE Ventures’ biggest investment as a Southeast Asian company. And that this falls into GREE Ventures’ US$ 25 million Asia fund.

Luxolaʼs founder and CEO Alexis Horowitz-Burdick

As mentioned, Luxola’s customers are women. And we know that GREE Ventures does believe in putting its money in e-commerce businesses, including Indonesia’s Berrybenka which targets women as well. This latest investment can complement those two portfolio companies to be the women’s answers to online shopping in the region.

Today Luxola also revealed its two new senior executives Christine Ng as chief marketing and product officer as well as Adrien Barthel as general manager for Indonesia. Prior to this investment, Luxola had raised S$740,000 funding from WaveMaker Labs, Singapore’s National Research Foundation, and angel investors. GREE Ventures itself has invested in an Indonesian women’s fashion online shop Berrybenka. This latest investment could be a signal to bridge those two businesses in Indonesia.

By the way, Alexis was one of our panelists speaking about women in tech startups at our Startup Asia Singapore event. She was quite straightforward in giving her answers and had some support from the audience for her views. And this latest news is a testament that women can indeed excel in the tech startup industry – not that we had any doubts at all. Her suggestion for fellow female entrepreneurs: be tough, in every way.

#13:59: Kee Lock has nurtured two billion-dollar companies, so our guest interviewer, Darius Cheung, asks how to build a billion-dollar business. Kee Lock says there are invisible barriers to entry and difficulties, but there are opportunities all across the world to do that. In terms of success factors, he says that it’s all down to the entrepreneur and the staff. Then, the ability to change enough to adapt to shifting markets and technologies. “Ultimately, it’s all about the team”.

#14:05: Regulations are often the biggest barriers, he says. Telcos are an example of where regulations and high prices – previously $1 per minute for SG-US phonecalls – inspire innovations. That’s part of the story behind Kee’s MediaRing business.

#14:08: But he admits to mistakes with MediaRing, like when it ditched PC-to-PC calling. That perhaps caused MediaRing to lose out to Skype. He and his team listened to analysts, Kee says, rather than listeners.

#14:12: However, it’s not really about money – the startup is about a bond among the team, “about building something great” and keeping the right startup culture.

#14:13: What are his favorite portfolio startups? Kee first points out that the VC task his hard – he has to be a sort of fortune-teller. Even after two or three years, he can’t be sure how the startup is performing and new challenges always emerge. So, no names named.

#14:14: Is there a series A crunch in Asia, as hype seems to suggest. He says that NRF does a great job to give funding and often gives around $1 million, which takes them up to the next level. But, for the next levels, you’re talking ten-million-plus levels, taking you to needing $50 million or more in funding for major expansion and capital-heavy work. He concedes that late-stage funding is tougher to find, as well as medium-stage startups. He calls that “the valley of death” where the company is operating well but has no money to scale. That’s sad, he says.

#14:20: Vertex has put three rounds of funding into Reebonz, the luxury flash sales site. At first he called it “a stupid company” but then saw the virtue in it, and at first Reebonz addressed Singapore and Malaysia well. That’s when the first input came.

#14:24: Reebonz is also a good example of keeping ahead of the competition, Kee says. It’s a bit like martial art Tai Qi. It seems easy to copy, but it’s very hard to master.

#14:27: There are still more startup opportunities in social and other areas. Though Vertex tends not to invest in that area.

#14:29: Which leads Kee back to the hardest part of the job: seeing trends. That requires a mix of objective and subjective – data and feelings about the market and where it’s heading. Look for opportunities in growth areas. Like Vertex looking into mobile components and smartphone usage grows.

#14:31: Vertex invests in six, seven, or eight startups per year. Typically mostly in China. Hopefully, he says, in Indonesia soon – but not yet.

#14:32: Vertex does co-invest, he says, in response to an audience question. In terms of startups themselves, he looks for those in the business for the long-haul.

#14:33: “A good entrepreneur needs to be arrogant – but also listen.” That’s hard to do. The arrogance is mainly confidence, he says, which is needed in the industry.

#14:39: What drives you, Darius asks? Kee Lock says that it’s possible to create great companies if you’re passionate. He points out that Singapore Airlines didn’t exist 35 minutes ago. It’s the same in sport: whoever wants to win will stand out from those who don’t want to lose. But those striving to win will succeed in the end. “We need more want-to-win companies”.

#14:41: Thanks for following the live blog.

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

Pocketing $50 million is no joke, so hopefully this one is not inspired by April Fool’s Day. According to Indian tech blog NextBigWhat, eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) has led a huge round of investment in India-based e-commerce site SnapDeal. Not yet officially confirmed, the rumored $50 million sum comes 18 months after a $40 million round, and an earlier $12 million injection shortly after it launched.

After starting out specializing in daily deals, the homegrown online mall soon surpassed LivingSocial in terms of traffic in the country and then pivoted/expanded into a broader e-commerce company early last year. SnapDeal is now up against local rivals like FlipKart and Infibeam.

According to the report, eBay participated in SnapDeal’s biggest-ever investment along with “a Japan-based financial institution” and the site’s previous investors, which include Bessemer Venture Partners and Nexus Ventures. The sources suggest that the investment was wrapped up four months ago, and eBay was reportedly drawn to the synergy it has with SnapDeal’s marketplace-based structure.

SnapDeal has over 50,000 marketplace merchants and 18 million registered users in its latest data for September 2012. It ships to over 4,000 towns and cities across India. But SnapDeal’s rumored overseas expansion has yet to materialize.

The Hindu points out today (in a story unrelated to the rumored funding) that SnapDeal aims to hit Rs 2,000 crore ($367.4 million) in sales revenue in fiscal year 2014. Co-founder and CEO Kunal Bahl told the paper: “We have maintained a growth rate of about 400 percent year-on-year in the last two years.” He added that “about 30 per cent of the sales will come from m-commerce” in the next 18 months.

India’s entire e-commerce segment is thought to have been worth $14 billion in sales in 2012.

(Source: NextBigWhat)

Yes, there’s already Instagram and a whole host of photo-sharing services out there, but they don’t allow for much photo tweaking. That’s why niche photo apps for customizing images often do well – especially apps aimed at half the population. That’s the case with Japan-made DecoAlbum, which is aimed at women smartphone owners. The startup has just revealed the finalization of $100,000 in seed funding from East Ventures. (Disclosure: East Ventures is also an investor in TechinAsia).

First launched in June last year on iPhone, then in December on Android, the DecoAlbum team tells us that it now has one million users, with half of those being active each month. The app’s available in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai.

DecoAlbum is not a social network by itself, and instead focuses on customization of your photos with text, backgrounds, glittery virtual stickers, and lots more. It supports posting images to Instagram. Plus, the app lets users chronicle their photos and organize them into albums in a way that’s easier than with the stock photo apps on iOS and Android.

There’s a “DecoShop” inside where users can download extra artwork. Currently, all 600-plus customizations are free, but that’s a monetization avenue the startup can follow.

90 percent of DecoAlbum’s users are Asia. There’s a lot of competition in this kawaii sector of the app market, with lots of similar apps from developers across Japan, South Korea, and China. That includes some major web portal competition, such as from SK’s Cymera or the China-made MeiXiuXiu.

Find DecoAlbum for free on iPhone or Android.

Disclosure: As mentioned above, East Ventures is an investor in TechinAsia. See our ethics page for more information.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Malaysia’s e-payment giant MOL has announced its majority investments in Turkey’s Game Sultan and PaytoGo. The strategic investment in Turkey brings MOL closer to lucrative mobile payments markets in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Indeed, PaytoGo plans to expand into the Middle East and North Africa in 2013, according to MOL’s announcement today.

Game Sultan is an e-wallet system using G-cash as its virtual currency which can be purchased in kiosks, retail outlets, cybercafés, and online in Turkey. So far, it has partnered with over 100 online games and 25 global publishing partners. PaytoGo is a mobile payment solution not only for games but also for online shopping, mass transportation, m–parking, and m–ticketing, working together with telcos in Turkey including Turkcell and Vodafone.

Ganesh Kumar Bangah, group CEO of MOL Global, explained more on this move:

Turkey is one of the fastest growing e-commerce markets in the world. We have observed the growing trend of game developers putting in more efforts to localise their products. In addition, Turkey is an attractive market for mobile payments with over 61 million mobile phone users and mobile phone ownership reaching a penetration level of 85 percent.

Onur Ergüney, the general manager of Game Sultan and PaytoGo, added that MOL’s investment will boost its standing among the global publishers and partners that it works worth, and will help alot with their mutual expansions.

Also Read: The Founding Story of MOL

With this investment, Singapore-based iCarsClub is looking to expand the business to other countries within the region. As mentioned in our previous coverage on iCarsClub, the team (pictured right) is made up of mostly mainland Chinese exptrepreneurs, hailing from backgrounds at Tsinghua University and Baidu. Naturally, the first step in the expansion plans would be to their homeland, China, kicking off in major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Its goal for China this year is to have 1,000 participating cars in its marketplace.

The numbers seem pretty encouraging for the team at iCarsClub. Just three months from its official launch last December, the company has 3,000 members in its database with over 300 cars available. The five-man team has also set goals for 2013 – to gather a total of 5,000 members and 1,000 cars.

Android monetization platform Metaps has just announced series B funding worth US$11 million. The Japanese startup, which launched in August 2011, helps developers earn money from their Android apps by applying adverts, in-app cross-promotions, or gaining new users from social media sharing.

Metaps’ funding comes from Fidelity Growth Partners Japan along with some existing investors. Today’s announcement explains:

The proceeds from this private placement will be used for securing top talent and growing Metaps service in Asia along with expansion to other countries. The company aims to accelerate business and become the largest Android monetization platform in the world by the end of 2013.

Metaps has been focusing on developers in Asia where Android is (or is close to being) the leading mobile OS – such as in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Metaps now has overseas offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Silicon Valley.

A few months ago, Metaps told us that its ad network and cross-promotions had helped drive 10 million Android app downloads and that it has helped some partners make more than $1 million per year from their apps.

The Android specialists got a massive $4.2 million in series A funding shortly after starting up, and that was followed by a minor round of $1.3 million in February 2012 that helped with its overseas push. An anticipated office in China hasn’t yet appeared, where Metaps will be up against some homegrown app-boosting platforms such as Innovation Works-backed Umeng.

An example of Metaps in action in an app.

Making a T-shirt in the SnapTee app. Click to enlarge.

SnapTee focuses on its iPhone app as the place where users can customize and create their own T-shirts – then get the finished garment delivered to their door anywhere in the world. The main website is where anyone can browse lots of user-crafted T-shirt designs and order the ones that are up for sale (not all are).

Today’s SnapTee seed funding comes courtesy of a group of Hong Kong and Singapore investors, including Yat Siu from game developers Outblaze and Animoca, Chris Lee from 6waves, Mikaal Abdulla from 8 Securities (the online stock trading platform), Singapore-based angel investor Emanuel R. Breiter, and Hong Kong-based investor Tytus Michalski of Fresco Capital.

Co-founder and CEO Wai Lun Hong tells us that SnapTee is now a five-person team which will be expanding to 10 in the coming months. The T-shirt store has seen 10,000 designs to date and claims to be doubling in growth each month. The team is seeing most users in the US and Europe right now. Its next major project, Wai Lun explains, is to explore Japan – which would presumably require the startup’s first attempt at translating its service.

Across the rest of Asia, we’ve seen other young companies take slightly different approaches to selling unique T-shirts, such as the designer-to-consumer platform OuterEdit in Singapore, or the one-a-day e-commerce store Buyitee from China.

Snap up the SnapTee app for iPhone in the App Store.

We recently looked at the MOGi mobile wallet and loyalty cards app, which combines discounts with mobile payments. Today, the startup behind the app, Mobile Media Creations (M2C), tells us it has secured S$588,000 in funding for this service.

That amounts to US$475,000 in investment in the MOGi app, which was led by TNF Ventures (TNF) through the NRF’s Technology Incubation Scheme (TIS) that’ll be familiar to all Singaporean entrepreneurs.

MOGi claims to be a first in Singapore – capturing the full retail process from storing loyalty cards to actual cash-less m-commerce. With apps for iOS and Android, the startup says that MOGi is now supported in 220 dining, shopping, and health and beauty outlets across Singapore. For consumers, it means convenient payments via their smartphone (in conjunction with a PayPal account), and for retailers it offers up analytics that help them stay in tune with loyal shoppers.

M2C CEO Rashad Budeiri said that the funding “is an important component in our plans to make MOGi the most popular mobile commerce and wallet app in Singapore for both the merchants and the consumers.” TNF managing director Shirley Wong described the app as “a solid proposition for both the consumers and the merchants.”

Though a bit different from its rivals, MOGi is still up against other loyalty card platforms operating in the region, such as Perx.

The last time we saw TNF in action was when the NRF-backed incubator put a similar sum into the travel discovery startup Flocations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After attracting its first major financing in May of last year, the Chinese vacation home rentals startup TuJia has announced today that it has wrapped up series B funding. The startup had not previously revealed financial numbers, but today said that both rounds amounted to RMB 400 million (US$63.7 million) in investment.

TuJia’s series B saw participation from an all-star array of investors: GGV Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, CDH Ventures, and Qiming Venture Partners. Plus, China’s biggest travel booking site, Ctrip (NASDAQ:CTRP), contributed funds, along with America’s HomeAway (NASDAQ:AWAY) – as both did in the last round.

The new funding is thought to have been agreed upon before the Chinese New Year holiday, which ended yesterday for most people.

HomeAway recently worked together with its Chinese startup partner, adding a selection of rental properties in some overseas markets onto the TuJia site.

The TuJia site.

TuJia, which came online in December 2011, says that it now has over 400,000 holiday rental homes in 65 Chinese cities and 45 overseas locations. It focuses on mid-range to high-end properties. The site’s founder has a great deal of experience in online real-estate portals, and has been using this know-how to ensure a steady supply of good apartments and villas on the platform.

We were impressed with TuJia when we first reviewed the site in January of 2012, and our prediction that a lot of funding was about to flow its way is certainly coming true.

With people getting back to work for ‘catch-up’ days this weekend after a lengthy Chinese New Year break, we’ve already seen the e-commerce site 360Buy announce a whopping new $700 million funding round.

(Source: iHeiMa – article in Chinese)

It was only three months ago that 360Buy, China’s second-largest online store, wrapped up $400 million in funding. Today 360Buy has confirmed an even bigger injection of capital with a fifth round of funding worth $700 million. [UPDATED: The April 2011 round turns out to have been the largest ever, worth $1.5 billion in total, with $500 million of that from Russian investors, DST; the headline and first paragraph have been amended to reflect this].

It means that 360Buy, which is second in the B2C e-commerce sector in China to Alibaba’s Tmall site, has raised well over $2.5 billion since it first got investment back in 2007.

The massive new round saw participation once again from Ontario Teachers’ Retirement Fund (OTPP) along with new input from Riyadh-based Kingdom Holdings, which was founded by Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud.

360Buy’s previous round effectively valued the store at $7.25 billion, but there’s no indication of its current valuation.

360Buy told Chinese media that the newest financing will be used to bolster day-to-day operations, as well as to build up its fledgling logistics service.

CEO and founder Liu Qiangdong has indicated in the past that 2013 was likely a good time for an IPO, but it’s not clear if the new investment would delay that timeline.

China’s e-commerce sector is marked by a ferocious burn rate for companies, as well as vicious price wars. 360Buy has diversified into a few areas where monetizing is a bit simpler in the past few months, such as by shipping some products to overseas customers, and launching an online music store within China.

(Source: iHeiMa – article in Chinese)

We’ve seen the niche community called Tokyo Otaku Mode pass 10 million Facebook ‘likes’ and launch the awesome Manga Camera app, and now the fledgling social startup has another major milestone. This evening, Tokyo Otaku Mode announced that it has attracted funding, for an undisclosed sum, from three local VCs. The investment came from YJ Capital (an investment subsidiary of Yahoo Japan), DG Incubation, and ITOCHU Technology Ventures.

Focusing on the otaku community surrounding Japanese anime, manga, and cosplay, its venture started out as a Facebook page before also launching a standalone site and its first mobile app (pictured below). [UPDATE: We're told the app has had nearly 700,000 downloads so far; plus a brand-new app dedicated to users of the main site will be launched in April]. Tokyo Otaku Mode will use the funding to accelerate its growth and global presence, says today’s announcement.

The site features user-generated otaku content, and is perhaps the world’s biggest English-language destination for this kind of niche pop culture.

Explaining the attraction, YJ Capital’s Toshiki Oya said today:

The presence of Japan’s pop culture is being strengthened throughout the world. As a worldwide media distributor, Tokyo Otaku Mode spread rapidly. I am exceedingly glad to be able to take part through investing. I anticipate seeing even more growth from this company moving forward.

After enjoying Manga Camera so much, I hope that more apps will be a key part of its global expansion. Find it here for iPhone, and here for Android.

Bangalore-based online travel community HolidayIQ has announced today that it has raised series C financing from Tiger Global Management and Accel Partners. While the investment amount hasn’t been revealed, it’s perhaps more significant that HolidayIQ is also now de-merged from Singapore’s Wego, which is an online holiday booking service.

That merger happened in November 2010, and led to HolidayIQ growing a site that was localized for Singapore and Indonesia. The move into Indonesia came at around the same time that Wego itself opened a Jakarta office to tackle the burgeoning travel e-commerce market in Indonesia.

Though the funding amount was not made public, The Economic Times reckons it was Rs 26 crore to Rs 30 crore, which is nearly $5 million.

HolidayIQ is a specialist travel community site, not a booking platform, so HolidayIQ says in today’s announcement that it benefits from being fully de-merged and independent so that it “can provide travelers with truthful information not affected by any requirements to sell specific travel products.” Therefore, HolidayIQ is a sort of Yelp for your holidays – you can use it to find information, but not to book flights or hotels.

Founded in 2004, HolidayIQ says it now has reviews and resources for 30,000 Indian hotels and 1,300 nationwide destinations, and is used by 4.5 million Indian travelers every month for planning their trips. No mention is made of any Singaporean or Indonesian numbers.

Wego has an India travel search and booking site that launched in May of last year.

Crowdsourcing has become an increasingly popular way to raise money for new ideas in the West, but the concept hasn’t really taken hold in China yet. But that doesn’t mean there’s no desire to crowdsource things. Getting investment can be tough, and one Beijing-based startup called Meiwei Media thought of a novel approach: why not just sell shares of your stock on Taobao? The platform is well-trusted and robust, and while it was designed for selling actual objects, why couldn’t stocks be sold on Taobao, too?

The answer to that question, it turns out, is that doing that is illegal, at least according to the legal experts consulted by China Business News. Public companies must meet with regulatory approval before publicly selling stocks, and private companies cannot have more than 50 stockholders. Meiwei had already racked up 1,191 stockholders when its Taobao operation was apparently shut down, probably because it was offering its stock at rock-bottom prices: 1.2 RMB ($0.19) per share. That may not sound like much, but the company actually raised more than 800,000 RMB ($126,000) this way, though it now seems likely they won’t actually be able to keep it.

It’s not yet clear whether regulators will step in to deal with Meiwei, but searches for the company’s stock on Taobao no longer turn up any responses. Representatives from Meiwei told China Business News that there was definitely “risk” but declined to comment on the legality of the company’s fundraising activity. The company did, however, say, that its other investors would fund a stock repurchase in the event that its Taobao fundraising was declared illegal (which seems quite likely).

A spokesperson from Taobao parent company Alibaba told Tech in Asia that the Meiwei stock had been removed by Taobao:

These types of products are not allowed to be sold on our platform according to our listing rules, and as such have been removed.

(China Business News via Sina Tech)

3D printing promises a world of amazing possibilities, bringing small-scale manufacturing onto your desktop. But hardware costs are holding back its adoption. Singapore-based startup Pirate3DP is aiming to combat that, and is “developing the most affordable and user-friendly 3D printer for the mass-consumer market.” Today, Pirate3DP announced that it has attracted S$589,000 (US$482,000) in seed investment from Red Dot Ventures, which is one of the Singapore government-supported incubators.

Pirate3DP hasn’t even launched yet, and the countdown on its homepage indicates that the startup is 72 days away from revealing its own 3D printer, dubbed the Buccaneer, which is currently in the prototyping phase. The startup says that its creation will “provide consumers with an affordable and easy-to-use 3D printing solution, but it will also become the playground for artists to create, monetize and share ideas with others.”

The Pirate3DP founders are childhood buddies Roger Chang, Brendan Goh, and Tsang You Jun (pictured), along with experienced entrepreneur Neo Kok Beng of the National University of Singapore. In today’s announcement, Brendan explains that the product grew from their frustration with existing, costly 3D printers:

The Pirate3DP team.

After six months of losing hair over jammed printers, and nine failed prints out of 10 arising from 674 different problems, we decided that we could probably do better than all of this. Hence Pirate3DP was born and so was our dream.

Red Dot Ventures’ managing director Leslie Goh reckons that “3D printing is going to make a dent in the universe” and he wants to be part of a local startup contributing to that huge disruption. We’ll be sure to keep an eye out for the device’s launch in April.

Back in December we saw Red Dot put a similar sum into Singapore’s The Stakeholder Company which makes some pretty neat influence-mapping solutions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For all the horsepower behind every general search engine in the world, it seems that consumers are increasingly finding product search engines useful. And that’s part of the reason why India’s Pricebaba has attracted an undisclosed amount of seed funding yesterday.

Pricebaba focuses on finding good prices among offline retailers for mobile phones. It differs from some of its product search equivalents in the region by focusing on listing India’s numerous brick-and-mortar phone resellers – not online stores So far it has the details of shops in Mumbai, Pune, and Delhi, and the investment will allow the startup to expand that to 10 cities during the course of this year.

A product listing on Pricebaba.

Pricebaba’s seed funding was led by Pune-based angel investor and entrepreneur Karamveer Singh, with participation from a good amount of other established businesspeople.

Founder Annkur P Agarwal explains to TechinAsia that retailers can get their listings for free within Pricebaba, and he believes that this curated shopping approach – not the usual crowdsourced one – is what consumers really want. The team believes that shoppers “are confused with the wide variety of mobiles” and other gadgets out there, and want some slimmed-down listings that are searchable within their budgets. With tech purchases researched and planned for weeks and months, a simple resource is, they believe, what’s needed.

Annkur insists that Pricebaba’s method is scalable as it moves into new cities or new product categories. Likening its listings to those of the India-based food and restaurant guide Zomato, the founder reckons that it costs the search site not much more than US$2 to keep each store listing fresh for a year.

As for venturing into searching for gadgets for sale on e-commerce sites, like we’ve seen with Telunjuk in Indonesia or the massive eTao in China, Annkur explains to us:

We have thought about it, but there is a huge disparity between online and offline buyers. If we hear enough users ask for it, we would consider it. So far that isn’t the case.

One other investor, Dinesh Tejwani, likes the current approach, saying in the startup’s announcement:

Annkur and team has come up with a unique idea of connecting mobile phone buyers with mobile shops, thereby ensuring lowest price for the consumer and more business for the seller.

Indonesian online fashion store Saqina, which focuses on clothing for Muslim women, announced today that it has received investment from Jakarta-based investment firm Ideosource. The funding amount was not disclosed. The investment will see Ideosource hold a minority stake in Saqina and a right to put representatives on the board of directors.

Founder Mohammad Rosihan said that besides funding, Ideosource brings valuable experience, knowledge, and a much needed network to help develop the Saqina store. Ideosource director Andi S. Boediman sees that the fashion e-commerce business in Indonesia, particularly the Muslim fashion industry, is a big business. He added that Saqina is being run well and has a lot of potential to grow even bigger, and the new funds will be used to that end.

Ideosource representative Andrias Ekoyuono told TechinAsia this afternoon that what sets Saqina apart from other Muslim fashion sites is that it has a good understanding of its customers and what they want. That understanding is derived from the startup’s experience in the offline world as well.

It should be noted that this is Ideosource’s second investment announced this year. Previously, Ideosource was also among the companies which ploughed funding into Gimmie, a Singapore-based brand loyalty platform.

We’ve written many times about how Singapore is a great place to do business, with lots of support available via different avenues for young startups. But collecting funds from private sources can still be difficult, and that’s a problem that local startup Crowdonomic hopes to address.

The company bills itself as the first crowdsourcing platform for startups in Asia, and is planning to launch on January 23rd featuring six local fundraising campaigns to start, including Eden Story, FlagaHero, and Video Guide Singapore. Each one will be targeting about S$30,000 to start. This launch follows the Crowdonomic’s private beta which began back in November.

The system is rewards-based, so if someone decides to support a given startup they could be given certain privileges in return for their support, such as early access.

Founder Leo Shimada

The company’s founder Leo Shimada explained in the announcement:

Our ultimate goal is to help entrepreneurs by addressing a key pain point – the funding gap. Since the market, or “crowd”, decides who to fund, it offers a more democratic alternative to how capital is allocated. We aim to have a higher standard of service delivery based on our deeper understanding of client start-up needs.

As for Crowdonomic’s own funding, it is backed by unspecified angels and VCs across Asia and the United States.

It’s nice to see a service like this spring up, not only because it provides another funding option for local startups, but also because it means that the companies funded will ostensibly get money because of widespread public support and approval for their idea. Check out Crowdonomic’s promotional infographic below:

Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures has had a Taiwan office for well over a year, and now the VC firm has yet another local site on its portfolio. This morning CyberAgent Ventures revealed its investment in Fashionguide, which it calls Taiwan’s largest beauty and cosmetics-oriented social networking service, but no funding sum was disclosed.

Fashionguide is essentially a socially-equipped clothing and make-up portal that has a mix of news and lots of user-submitted product reviews and enthusiast fashion blogs. CyberAgent Ventures’ Catherine Chang explains to TechinAsia that Fashionguide, although it looks fresh, has been around since 1997 and is one of Taiwan’s top 100 sites by Alexa’s rankings, with millions of monthly unique visitors.

The fashion site will use the funding, according to today’s announcement, to launch a flurry of new sections and services “targeting related women’s lifestyle categories” such as catalog shopping and hair design. The biggest boost will go to the recently launched ‘Ai Piao Liang‘ (literally “Love Beauty”) feature, which is a Pinterest-like social network for fashion and accessories. The hope of the CyberAgent VC office in Taiwan is that Fashionguide can “become the leading women’s lifestyle portal in Taiwan.”

Catherine tells us that the social portal has no current plans for expansion outside of the island. Fashionguide did venture into mainland China a few years ago but “found that market difficult to monetize.” So the focus will remain on Taiwan “where ARPU is higher.” The site monetizes with a mix of advertising and referral links, just as we’ve seen with Meilishuo in China.

CyberAgent Ventures’ last funding round was in the Taiwanese social recipes startup iCook.

Today’s announcement details that the Fashionguide investment “was made through CA-JAIC China Internet Fund II, which is jointly managed by CyberAgent Ventures and Japan Asia Investment Co.”

Singapore-based loyalty service provider Gimmie has announced that it has received S$639,000 (about US$520,000) from various investors, led by WaveMaker Labs in partnership with the Singapore National Research Foundation. This round of funding will be used to help Gimmie expand to other regions in Asia.

Gimmie’s CEO David Ng explained in the announcement that the company’s first area of expansion will be Indonesia. Helping them make a push in that country will be Jakarta’s Ideosource, which also participated in this funding round.

As I understand it, Gimmie differs from other loyalty programs used by mobile publishers in that it doesn’t require you to leave the application to be rewarded. Instead, users can be rewarded for criteria such as their playing time, reaching new levels, or subscribing to certain content.

WaveMaker’s managing partner Debneel Mukherjee explained that the recent mobile boom in the region means that the market is ripe for a service provider like Gimmie:

With the mobile internet penetration poised for a quantum leap, across Asia, in the next few years, Gimmie is well placed to harness this untapped opportunity and become the leading provider of customized loyalty solutions for digital media businesses, in the region.

You can learn a little more about Gimmie in their fun promo video below.

With China’s e-commerce market consisting of so many sites, the rather unique Mizhe.com is making a business out of being an online shopping guide that offers discounts for shoppers on top Chinese e-tailers. That hasn’t gone unnoticed by IDG Capital Partners, which has invested just over 10 million RMB (US$1.6 million) in a series A funding round for Mizhe.

The investment news was revealed this week, but Mizhe founder Zhang Lianglun said that the IDG backing was wrapped up last summer and the funds have already come through.

As with social pinboard sites like Mogujie), Mizhe’s shopping guide monetizes from referral links to e-commerce sites such as Taobao, Amazon China, and many more. Mizhe claims to generate over 100 million RMB ($16 million) in sales via its platform, though it’s not clear how much revenue can be squeezed from all those referrals. The site says it now has millions of users signed up, and hundreds of thousands of daily active shoppers.

The Mizhe frontpage, which emphasizes getting discounts on China’s top e-commerce sites. Click to enlarge.

The discounts-oriented site claims to offer as much as 50 percent off some purchases, but most price-cuts will be just a few percent. The startup – founded in August 2011 – also has coupons, which are the focus of its Miquan.com sister site.

Founder Zhang Lianglun knows the e-commerce business, being a former employee of Alibaba, the company that runs Taobao and Tmall, the nation’s top two online malls.

Other Chinese e-commerce sites in IDG’s portfolio include top travel site Ctrip, and the Amazon-esque Dangdang. IDG also led the recent massive series C round in the afore-mentioned social shopping site Mogujie.

(Source: Kuailiyu – article in Chinese)

And this little piggy went wee wee wee all the way to series A funding.

Our first two bits of Chinese startup funding news of 2013 could not have gone to companies with weirder names. Beijing-based Xiaozhu.com (meaning “little piggy” in Chinese) is actually a short-term rentals site in the mold of Airbnb. Today Xiaozhu revealed that it brought home the bacon recently with “nearly US$10 million” in series A funding.

Likewise, the similar Mayi.com (meaning “ants”) disclosed that it had been spun off as an independent entity from its parent company, Ganji, and also secured about $10 million in backing. Mayi’s round is led by VantagePoint, with participation from BlueRun Ventures and Sequoia Capital.

The growth and progress of Xiaozhu is pretty impressive for a travel site that only launched in August of last year. The investors in its initial major round haven’t been revealed yet. Xiaozhu has properties in 13 Chinese cities thus far. But it’s not just focused on China’s middle-classes and fancy homes (like the one pictured above), and even has listings in places like student dorms for a few bucks per night.

A property on Mayi. Click to enlarge.

As for Mayi (pictured right), it claims to have surpassed 300,000 rented room nights in its first year of operations. But if its commission is 10 percent, then it’s difficult to see how short-term rentals can actually be profitable for startups once they’ve splashed out on prohibitive marketing campaigns.

The good news for these two curiously-named travel rivals comes eight months after series A funding for the site that will surely be the nemesis of both sites: Tujia. It attracted interest and funds from China’s biggest online travel company, Ctrip, and followed that up by adding over 2,000 overseas listings in conjunction with its American co-investor HomeAway.

The double investment whammy for Xiaozhu and Mayi is sure to shine a spotlight on the Chinese holiday rentals industry, which has so far been overshadowed by a lot more dynamism in Southeast Asia, with lots of recent action from Travelmob, 9Flats, and Airbnb itself.

(Source: Donews – article in Chinese)

Indonesian women’s fashion e-commerce site Berrybenka.com kicks off the new year by announcing that the company has raised series A investment from Japan’s GREE Ventures. The amount of money raised has not been revealed.

Furthermore, daily deals site Disdus co-founder Jason Lamoda now joins the e-commerce company as president director [1]. Together with other Disdus co-founder Ferry Tenka, Jason previously filled the role within Berrybenka as member of the advisory board. He commented about their plans with the investment made:

I truly believe that fashion is one of the biggest market opportunities in the Indonesian e-commerce landscape. When you look at more developed regions such as Europe, China, Japan, and India, there always existed leading local fashion e-commerce players. Similarly, we aspire to become the leading fashion e-commerce player in Indonesia, built locally.

We are proud to be able to promote and nurture local brands and designers who are looking to market their products throughout Indonesia. More importantly, Berrybenka has a strong team with both fashion and e-commerce expertise. The extensive network and knowledge that GREE Ventures brings will be extremely beneficial for us to accelerate our trajectory.

Berrybenka, which has worked with more than 250 local brands, will use the fund to expand its range of products, improve its logistics services, and inject more marketing fuel. Berrybenka co-founder Claudia Widjaja then said that they are planning to add more payment options, fashion content, and to launch its smartphone apps in the coming months. Last year, Berrybenka previously secured seed funding from East Ventures [2].

Thailand’s new M8VC fund has 300 million baht (nearly US$10 million) to invest in local startups next year, so it’ll be a new VC player to watch. Myself and the Thumbsup team had the chance to talk to M8VC’s Pornthep “Vincent” Sethiwan, who’s also the co-founder of Launch Pad, one of Thailand’s top co-working spaces.

Started just last week, M8VC is an incubator, accelerator, and technology investment firm with its headquarters and its incubation center in Bangkok.

Vincent started by saying, “Venture capital and angel investing are powerful forces for change. It allows individuals to pursue their dreams that improve society and makes the world a better place.” And so M8VC would like to contribute to the Thai startup community and be an agent of change. Vincent adds:

It is not easy for passionate entrepreneurs to thrive in the Southeast Asia [SEA] market. The way things are done in SEA is vastly different than in the West. Many talented young entrepreneurs do not have the needed experience or networks to take their venture to success. This is exactly where we come in to help.

M8VC HQ. Click to enlarge

Each founder of M8VC has previously started up ventures, and each has experienced successes and failures first-hand. We are confident in our ability to help lead our incubated portfolio companies to success.

Fellow founder Krisd Aksornwong tells us:

M8VC will assist from the start, analyzing each team’s idea and business plan continuously until the prototype is produced, and real products come to market. We share our vision in pitching or selling an idea, and create a financial structure to help mobilize big funds for expanding to markets abroad. We have experts from each field to look after every stage. Since your idea is the most essential aspect of your business, we at M8VC are doing our best to protect the owner of the idea without considering whether it will turn to mutual cooperation later, or not.

M8VC will focus on fairly small amounts of seed money, and startups under its wing can utilize M8VC’s networks both within Thailand and abroad – that includes entrepreneurs, financiers, and investors who all have, we’re told, a great track record of success.

The core M8VC team consists of Vincent and Krisd, plus Shakrit Chanrungsakul, Pawoot Pongvitayapanu, Kit Arunanondchai, Sua Kanjanasakchai, Varut Bulakul, and Permsiri Tiyavutiroj.

This is yet is another movement in the startup ecosystem in Thailand to keep your eyes on.

Noom Inc., a mobile health & fitness developer, has announced that it has secured $2.6 million in pre-series-A funding. The funding round was led by UK-based VC firm m8 Capital along with Qualcomm Ventures, Harbour Pacific Capital and former executives from Nexon.

With this new round of funding, New York-based Noom is looking to further expand its services into Asia. It will be opening a Noom Korea marketing office and also launching a Korean version of Noom.

Noom offers a series of wellness products including Noom Weight Loss Coach, its flagship app, which currently holds the number one spot for weight loss apps in the Google Play store. The app provides a customized weight loss program based on the users’ current weight and their goals for weight loss. Users can log daily diet information and keep track of their caloric intake. One interesting feature of the app is the forum discussion, which allows users to discuss and share weight-loss experiences. Topics on the forum include recipes, desk job exercises, drinking water challenges, food confessions, and more.

According to Noom, Noom Weight Loss Coach users have already dropped a whopping 19 million collective pounds. Now, the company is targeting Korea, and it has gained a total of over 15 million downloads across Noom Weight Loss Coach and other apps such as CardioTrainer and Calorific.

Regarding the funding round, Noom co-founder Saeju Jeong said:

We are very happy to have gained a valuable partner in m8 Capital as well as additional support from existing partners. With this support we will continue to expand internationally as well as to other mobile platforms.

Noom Weight Loss Coach is available free on Android. You can find out more about Noom Weight Loss Coach from the video below:

How the 8 Securities trading dashboard will look for Japanese users.

We’ve been following the progress of Hong Kong-based 8 Securities for about a year, and the socially-oriented stocks trading portal has done a lot in that time. The latest news from 8 Securities is two-fold. Firstly, it has closed another $3 million funding round last week, coming quite a short time after earlier rounds of $1.5 million and $8 million. CEO Mikaal Abdulla explains to us today that the team has “100 percent follow-on participation from our original eight investors.”

The second bit of news is that 8 Securities will open an office in Tokyo in March 2013, and will launch for Japanese users pretty soon. This takes the startup global into what it calls, along with its Hong Kong HQ, the two most important markets for stock trading in Asia. Mikaal reckons that Asia has 80 million online investing accounts among its citizens, leaving it with huge scope for growth. The interface in the top image is how its trading dashboard will appear to Japanese users.

As for 8 Securities’ own progress, the startup says it now has “55,000 accounts holding $1 billion USD in assets with us.”

Co-founder Mathias Helleu explains what Asian investors are interested in on its service:

The biggest trend we see in Asia is customers investing in the US companies they interact with daily. They see the growth opportunity of companies like Google, Apple, and Starbucks in their own markets and it is no coincidence these are some of the most popular stocks. Customer can invest in their local market or the US, all from a single account.

And with that enthusiasm, the startup is keen to disrupt US brokerages where, Mikaal insists, there has been “very little technology innovation in the past decade.”

The trading platform, which features social integration and an API for third-party developers to create their own widgets, came online in April 2012, but we first saw it in action at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing in November of last year, where 8 Securities was one of the Startup Battlefield finalists.

Thomas Wong, Local Singaporean

I drafted up a few quick diagrams to explain the funding scene in Singapore. It’s not complete, but might be helpful to some. There are three main sources to look into when starting out. Of course I am presuming you are not planning to fund it entirely on your own.

1. Friends and family
2. Private funding
3. Government funding

Friends & Family

I’ve seen mixed advice on this aspect, and I agree that you’d mostly only get one shot at this. But I’ve seen enough businesses that exist on support from supportive family and friends, a famous one would be Sir Richard Branson. It’s great to get started and get you off the ground, but you’d want to get familiar with raising funds from cold contacts/investors as soon as you can.

Private Funding

This is a pretty unmapped territory as there are a plethora of options. There are some networks like BANSEA, which pool together a mix of private investors and government linked ones as a collective of seed investors. There are also MNCs with funds dedicated to identify interesting startups to invest in, [like] Google Ventures, Gree Ventures, Intel capital, and even Singtel’s Innov8.

Recently, the entire Hackathon trend has been ported from the US to Singapore, where people who want to begin on their startup journey can participate in these thirty to ninety day events. They form a team, pick an idea, and patch together a product that they then pitch to investors at the end of the process on “demo day.”

There are private funds and investors, Innosight, DFJ, and some invest considerable amounts even at seed level. I personally know two companies who raised a million dollars from individual investors, without a technology or traction in place when they pitched. Basically, it’s a jungle out there, you’ll need to talk to people, do your own research, and keep your ears on the ground to identify which funds to approach.

A good way if you have the connections, though, is to identify these funds from a higher level on the value chain. If you have friends in finance, fund managers, fund of funds, wealth managers, they might be able to give you a quick take and even introductions to the people running these funds. Most of these guys work with or fund these angel investors, venture capital, or seed investors.

Government Funding

The Singapore government has been working hard to lift entrepreneurial activity here for a while, and they have put in place number of schemes to facilitate that, each focusing on various industries and stages in a company’s growth. I’ll cover three of the more popular ones for fresh startups.

Essentially there are three schemes I’ve come across that a fresh technology startup in Singapore would normally look into.

• There is the ACE program administered by SPRING Singapore; they match about $50,000 to about $21,500 you raise on your own. (Thank you, Brian, for pointing out the original inaccuracy http://www.techinasia.com/startu…)
• There is iJams reloaded, administered by MDA. It has two phases to its funding scheme. MDA works with private or institutional incubators to administer this fund. In the first phase, MDA will match $50,000 to about $10,000 that the founders or the incubator puts up. If the milestones are hit and the startup is eligible for phase two, MDA will match $100,000 to $100,000 raised by the founders or the incubator.
• There is also a scheme under the NRF (National Research Foundation), TIS Technology Incubation Scheme. “NRF would co-invest up to the lower of S$500,000 or 85% of the incubator’s investment in a qualifying company, and grant the incubator the call option to buy over its investment at 1.1x before the second year, and 1.15x between the second and third year.” Check out (NRF reopens TIS, opens floodgate on early-stage tech investments in Singapore) (James Chan, thanks for pointing out my confusion and original inaccuracy http://www.techinasia.com/startu…)
• There seems to also be an NRF ESVF scheme which offers up to $3 million, though I don’t have much details on this scheme (NUS Entrepreneurship Centre)

There are some nuances for each scheme that a founder should be aware of, between schemes and between the bodies that administer these schemes.

Nuances

On top of where to get funds for your startup, each funding scheme has its own set of advantages and intricacies. These are some things to think about when deciding which funding scheme would work for you.

I’ve shared a quick mind map with a few more details of the funding landscape in Singapore. It’s not complete, but is a pretty good guide to founders fresh to the ecosystem. You can view it below.

More questions on Startup Advice and Strategy:

• What are the leading startup trends and ideas of 2012 and 2013?
• What are some good places to connect with entreprenuers in India when starting a startup?
• What are some great “must-watch” videos on Youtube for entrepreneurs?

The Burpple crew at OpenWebAsia 2012 in Hainan, China, this week.

The social food app Burpple has been served a double order of good news today, the largest of which is $500,000 in seed funding, which is the startup’s first-ever funding round. It’s led by Neoteny Labs, with QuestVC also providing some backing.

Neoteny Labs has backed lots of early-stage startups in this region, as well as Path and video site Viki; while QuestVC, led by 55Tuan’s James Tan, will also be able to help out, says Burpple co-founder Dixon Chan today, with “growth strategy in China and Southeast Asia.” The funding will be used to build up its app and team even further, as well as “scale growth opportunities across a variety of markets and platforms on the mobile and on the web.” Hopefully that’ll also help speed up its in-the-works Android app.

Indeed, Burpple has already expanded into China, and now claims to have users in over 3,300 cities around the world.

The second bit of good news for the Singaporean startup is that it has been hailed as one of the ‘Top 10 Startups in Asia’ at the OpenWebAsia 2012 event which was held on Monday on the tropical island of Hainan in southern China. One other Burpple co-founder, Elisha Ong, said today:

Burpple’s iPhone app. Click to enlarge.

We’re humbled and grateful to receive this award. It’s been an exciting and favorable journey and we know that this is just the tip of the iceberg of greater things to come!

Also in contention in the top 10 at OpenWebAsia this year was the social app for couples, Between, which is made in Korea.

The Burpple app for iPhone is in the iTunes Store.

Yes, this is the third bit of news for a China-based wine e-commerce site in as many days. This time it’s the turn of WineNice to count some cash as it wraps up series B funding thought to be worth over RMB 100 million (US$15.8 million). No financial details have been given, but CEO Lu Yide, teased the investment news a few months ago and also mentioned that exact figure.

Rumors in the industry suggest, however, that the funding is led by the N M Rothschild Group, the investment arm of the centuries-old Rothschild family empire that also runs Château Mouton Rothschild and Château Lafite. That’s because WineNice has suggested that it’ll reveal its source of funds at a Rothschild event in China on the evening of December 10th.

WineNice’s funding will be used to to build up both its online B2C infrastructure and its offline “experience stores” that now number just over a 100 across China.

The site started in 2008, one of the pioneers of premium wine e-tailing in China. WineNice saw RMB 150 million ($23.7 million) in sales revenue last year, and aims for this to grow to RMB 1 billion ($158 million) in revenue within two to three years.

Earlier this week we saw WangJiu launch as a high-end rival to WineNice (and others like Jiuxian and YesMyWine), and Vinehoo raised a more modest round of funding.

[Source: QQ Finance - article in Chinese]

The newly-expanded EatAds founder crew: (L-R) Nigel, Dhruv, John.

We’re seeing a great proliferation in online marketplaces in Asia this year, and here’s another one that’s blossoming. Singapore-based EatAds is a marketplace for the buying and selling of outdoor advertising space in Asia and Europe, and it has announced today that the startup has an undisclosed sum of seed funding from Crystal Horse Investments, along with some angel investor backing. Plus, it’s also “currently preparing to raise the next funding round of SG$600,000” (US$493,000).

When we last looked at EatAds in September of last year, it was expanding aggressively across Asia. Now we find that the traditional ads marketplace has listings in 16 countries, including as far afield as the US and the UK.

But the startup admits it was, in its own words, “dormant but functioning” for the last year. Now, however, it is revitalized with two new co-founders – Dhruv Sahgal and Nigel Hembrow – alongside the original, John Fearon. You might recognize John from his startup efforts after EatAds, namely Dropmyemail and Dropmysite, both of which have been growing quickly in the past year – and taking up a lot of his time.

An EatAds representative tells us that the site currently has one office based in Singapore, and will eventually expand overseas.

The revamped EatAds crew believes that the offline ads market is riddled with inefficiencies, and is really hard for businesses to navigate. Nigel points out in today’s announcement that there’s “60 percent occupancy in outdoor advertising in India,” so it’s clearly a broken system. Dhruv chips in to say:

Around Asia, many people don’t know how to buy billboards, who to contact, and what are the prices – there are too many barriers. And in addition we are making it much easier for traditional buying agencies to serve their clients.

Rocket Internet’s Asia-oriented e-commerce site Lazada announced yesterday that the company received $26 million in funding from equity investor Summit Partners. The money will be spent on further business development in its five markets: Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand. Maximilian Bittner, the regional CEO of Lazada, adds:

We are very proud to have an investor of Summit’s calibre joining our shareholder base. They have extensive experience in supporting fast‐growing companies which will be of huge benefit as we continue to build out our offering and services to win the Southeast Asian market.

Lazada launched its new fashion marketplace platform in Malaysia on November 21st. The platform allows offline retailers control over logistics and operations while selling their items online. The company plans to introduce this platform to its other four countries in the near future. It’s an interesting diversification, especially as Rocket Internet already has its own Southeast Asia-oriented fashion e-tailer in the form of Zalora.

This is the third major investment that Lazada has received in the past four months. Previously the e-commerce site received $40 million from Swedish investment firm Kinnevik, and before that an undisclosed investment rumored to be in the region of $50 million from J.P. Morgan.

[Source: TechCrunch via DailySocial]

Being big fans of both alcohol and startups, we’re pleased to hear of yet more funding for a Chinese wine e-commerce site. This time it’s Vinehoo that has pulled in RMB 5 million (US$800,000) – though the investor has not been revealed.

Vinehoo’s funding news comes just a few days after the launch of China’s priciest and glitziest online wine mall, and three months after a much more substantial $32 million in investment for rival Jiuxian.

But Vinehoo is different from those others in being as much a social network as a B2C e-commerce site. Indeed, it started in 2008 as an online forum for wine connoisseurs, and its premium wine sales only began in 2010. The site does limited-time flash sales, which help to reduce costs both for itself and for consumers. Now the site has over 100,000 users, and it’s on course to bring in RMB 10 million ($1.59 million) in sales revenue in 2012.

A flash sale of wine on the Vinehoo site. Click to enlarge.

That’s not a huge amount, and perhaps all its figures would be higher if the website focused more on its flash sales, and less on news and user-generated content. Indeed, it might escape the notice of new visitors that Vinehoo even sells anything.

In terms of flash sales of good wines, Vinehoo is up against more focused opposition, such as Moooton and TasteV.

Sales of alcohol online is expected to reach $2 billion in China by 2014.

[Source: 36Kr - article in Chinese]

Singapore-based incubator Red Dot Ventures has announced that it’s ploughing S$600,000 (US$490,000) of seed funding into compatriot startup The Stakeholder Company. Founded last year, The Stakeholder Company, is a data-loving, influence-mapping solution for large corporations to visualize their corporate or market structure – or that of their rivals.

The Stakeholder Company – let’s call it TSC for short – describes itself more succinctly in this pitch from the founder:

This is CRM meets six degrees of separation meets big data issue mining. Essentially it’s your stakeholders relationship mapping on demand, cutting edge intel at your fingertips, and it saves our customers literally years of building the right stakeholder network.

It has lots of major brands across many sectors as its clients, including the likes of HP, Nokia Siemens, and chemical corporation Syngenta.

Despite the global customer base of TSC, it currently has little more than 30 staffers across 5 country offices. The founder is Terence Lyons, who formerly worked in a similar context at Microsoft as the ‘global stakeholder engagement lead’. From Singapore, he tells us some plans for the cash:

The funding will be used primarily to build our V2 solution portfolio [for data management] and increase the size of our dev team. That team has a big program of rapid releases planned over the next four months that cover mobile apps (iOS, etc), new big data mining algorithms, network visualization, etc.

Asked about expanding further to get closer to TSC’s clients, Terence replied:

Presently we are two full-time staff in Singapore (four by January), 28 in India, one in Australia, one in France, and one in the UK. We grew 400 percent this year so, yes, expansion is definitely on the cards and we should be opening a London office in Q1 next year to take advantage of our momentum there. Typically this brings us closer to the HQ’s of our clients though in reality we work on many projects across many countries so it’s the deciders with the budget that we try and stay close to.

Regular readers might recall that Red Dot Ventures is one of eight incubators inducted into the Singaporean government’s Technology Incubation Scheme (TIS) earlier this year. The incubator’s previous investment was a similar seed sum put into digital security startup Innova Technology last month.

A new specialist e-commerce site in the form of Bilna.com launches today in Indonesia, and it comes prepared with seed funding from both CyberAgent Ventures and East Ventures [1]. The online store sells everything that could be needed for babies and infants – and also the mothers – such as food and milk formula, clothing, toys, accessories, and maternity skincare products.

One of the two co-founders of Bilna is Ferry Tenka, who’s formerly co-founder and CEO of Groupon Disdus. Ferry tells us that the team is primarily himself and Eka Himawan, formerly an investment banker at Barclays. The financial details of the funding cannot be revealed.

Ferry explains to us what inspired Indonesia’s newest online product vertical:

We have a great passion in the world of Indonesia’s e-commerce. We believe that in a few years time, the market of e-commerce in Indonesia will be very big. We have also learnt that more than 65 percent of online shoppers in Indonesia are female, thus we believe that baby and mom related products are the right market to target and yet there is no established online player in this space. […]

Bilna homepage – click to enlarge.

We are going to be really aggressive and dominate this space. The value proposition of Bilna.com will be the wide range of products and world-class customer experience. We will ensure fast delivery and best customer service.

So, with the CyberAgent Ventures and East Ventures backing, Bilna is aiming to be the top specialist site of its kind in the country. The site has come online today with 2,000 products already on offer, and is giving away free shipping during its launch week.

Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures last month ploughed funds into Taiwanese social recipes startup iCook, and East Ventures has been busy recently putting seed funding into Indonesian flights search engine Traveloka.

GGV Capital, perhaps spurred on by its new US$625 million fund that focuses on China, has invested in the local recipes sharing startup Douguo.com. This second round of funding for Douguo is worth $8 million, and was only announced today despite being finalized in August.

Social recipes sites are a growing trend, and are doing especially well in Asia. The early success of Japan’s Cookpad.com is proving inspiring, and last month we also saw Taiwan’s iCook raise funds from CyberAgent Ventures.

Douguo has apps for iPhone and Android, and claims to have six million users who have uploaded 10,000 recipes so far. Its first major round was led by China’s Shanda, but the size of that investment was never revealed.

GGV has backed lots of Chinese startups – like Meilishuo or the recently IPO’d YY – as well as local web giants such as Alibaba and Tudou.

[Source: Donews; via Technode]

[UPDATE 1: This was all confirmed by the company later in the day. The story's text has been amended to reflect this just in the first and final paragraphs].

Earlier this year we suggested that 360Buy, China’s second-largest B2C e-commerce site, was focusing on a major new funding round rather than prepping a US IPO. And that is now a reality today with earlier rumors on ChinaByte being confirmed by the company that it has secured series D funding worth $400 million.

The huge fourth round of funding for 360Buy is led by Ontario Teachers’ Retirement Fund (OTPP), with participation from the Tiger Fund. As large as the investment amount is, it effectively values 360Buy at $7.25 billion, which is a lot less than the $10 billion or more that the e-tailer was pegged at after its $500 million injection from DST in April of last year. Indeed, means 360Buy’s valuation has been slashed by a quarter. [UPDATE 2: A DST spokesperson has reached out to clarify that, at the point of DST's investment in 360Buy in June 2011, "360Buy was valued at $6 billion" - and not $10 billion, a figure which was bandied about last year. So the suggestion here (though DST cannot confirm the size of its stake) is that 360Buy's valuation has actually grown].

Ontario Teachers’ Retirement Fund is Canada’s third-largest retirement fund. Bloomberg reported last week that the OTPP is planning to open a Hong Kong office in 2013 as a part of its strategy to diversify the group’s investments.

This summer I asked what on earth 360Buy is truly worth, amidst wildly fluctuating numbers of its eventual evaluation when it finally lists publicly. Some in the e-commerce industry in China reckon that 360Buy should not be evaulated on the same price-to-sales ratio as Amazon, since 360Buy is in a much less stable a position compared to Amazon in the US and many other markets. To cut a long story short, some industry experts reckon that a valuation of $5 to $6 billion is closer to the mark.

360Buy confirmed the news later on Tuesday after many initial reports about the new funding round being secured. CEO and founder Liu Qiangdong has been unusually quiet on social media in the past month and hasn’t commented personally on this.

[Source: ChinaByte - article in Chinese]

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

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

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

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

[Source: TechCrunch]

Korean game development studio Playnery has been growing quickly since it opened in October of last year. Already partnered up with Zynga to distribute its forthcoming first title Mother of Myth, now Playnery has secured $3.7 million in funding, led by Japan’s Softbank Ventures. Qualcomm and Stonebridge Capital also put some money into the round.

Playnery specializes, notes TheNextWeb, in 3D RPG gaming, whilst also making the titles social and playable in any recent web browser. The startup uses its own, self-developed 3D gaming engine. In this way, it’s pushing forward the current social gaming model of simplistic action that began with things like Farmville. The investment arm of Japanese telco Softbank is clearly impressed with this new vision for social and mobile gaming; SoftBank Ventures’ Seo Il-shik said today:

In the future we predict that the social and mobile market will break off from the casual gaming seen up until now, and achieve rapid growth with the diversification of genres such as MORPG, MMORPG, and FPS. When various user groups form and the market grows rapidly, we expect that Playnery will become a successful game developer through high quality games and global partnerships.

It’s not Softbank Ventures’ first foray into social gaming in the region, as it has also backed South Korea’s SundayToz, makers of the hit game Anipang.

Playnery’s first game, Mother of Myth, is due to launch next year, and is aiming for a global rollout in 12 languages, and will be playable on Zynga’s (NASDAQ:ZNGA) gaming platform, on Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), and as iOS and Android apps. Until then, there’s this interesting demo video of how the game will play:

(Video link for mobile readers)

[Source: TheNextWeb]

It seems that 2012 is definitely the year for startups venturing into the Indonesian travel industry. Today, the Indonesian flight search engine Traveloka.com, which was just launched to the public last month, has announced that it has received seed funding from East Ventures [1]. The investment amount hasn’t been disclosed.

Traveloka helps people look for the cheapest available flights online. Ferry Unardi, the co-founder of Traveloka, says:

Indonesian travelers are price-sensitive when it comes to their transportation budget and our service is uniquely suited to serve this market.

Interestingly, the people behind Traveloka are Indonesian engineers who are returnees to the country having worked in Silicon Valley before. They are Ferry Unardi, Derianto Kusuma, and Albert Zhang. Both Ferry and Derianto worked for Microsoft in the past, while Albert was recently at cloud CRM company NetSuite.

Impressively Traveloka (which is still in beta) has served over 400,000 flight searches to users located in more than 200 different cities. The site currently supports results from 12 airlines, on mostly domestic routes. The current website seems to focus on budget travelers as it doesn’t offer premium flight search categories such as business class.

Traveloka has a clean and simple website interface, and it can round up the cheapest flights available from different airlines. Users then can choose to book the tickets either directly from the airlines’ official websites or from Traveloka’s partners, Tiket and Tiket2.com. Buying directly from the official airline website is the cheaper option compared to its affiliates, Ferry explains:

We believe in diversity of prices and services for our users. For example, airlines direct might have the cheapest price, but Tiket.com and Tiket2.com are already better in terms of experience.

Ferry said that the startup will still continue to focus on flights because of the immense opportunity in that sector. He said that users can expect to see more partners and better integration with them, such as by creating a better flight search and purchase experience.

Traveloka has become one of the many startups that is betting its money on the Indonesian travel industry this year. We’ve previously seen other startups making their marks there too, such as Gonla, Flamingo, and search comparison site Telunjuk.

Congratulations on the investment, Traveloka!

Chinese software maker – and disruptive new search engine competitor – Qihoo 360 (NYSE:QIHU) has invested in VIVAme, which makes a magazine subscriptions app and a Flipboard-style reader (pictured above).

The Qihoo investment comes as part of VIVAme’s new funding round, which also saw input from Highland Capital Partners. The news is confirmed by Beijing-based VIVAme, but the total funding amount has not been disclosed. Qihoo’s founder and CEO, Zhou Hongyi, now sits on the board of VIVAme. It raises the possibility of the aggressively-expanding Qihoo using the strategic investment to bring new content into its product offerings, and perhaps into its Android-based mobile software.

VIVAme has partnerships with over 300 magazine titles and claims to have 14 million monthly active users who read over 120 million mobile magazines each month. Its two core mobile apps are VIVAme, which is like a Flipboard-style reader only for iPad (here), and VIVA for in-app magazine downloads (here) which supports eight OSes, including Android, iOS, and Windows 8.

[Source: Sina Tech - article in Chinese]

Just six months after Chinese deals and listings company DDMap attracted $40 million in funding, it has now wrapped up another major round, now series D, that was led by Alibaba Capital, the VC arm of e-commerce giant Alibaba, and CitiGroup’s (NYSE:C) Citi Ventures.

The amount of this new funding hasn’t been revealed, but it’s a major vote of confidence in one of China’s top local and O2O startups. DDMap has daily deals, local listings, and discount coupons for major retailers across China. These also appear in a suite of useful and good-looking apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Symbian.

DDMap CEO Xu Longjiang said that the funding will also see a stronger partnership with Alibaba – which also owns China’s top e-payments service, Alipay – and that will enable his company to grow faster.

Alibaba Capital’s MD, Zhang Hongping, confirmed the strength of the tie-up in yesterday’s announcement, and said that DDMap is well placed at the nexus of the mobile web and the O2O sector in China.

DDMap’s discount shopping app, DDCoupons (pictured above), now has a claimed 13 million users making user of coupons from 100,000 merchants in 38 Chinese cities. The app has also bolstered its location-based features in recent updates, and now can push relevant deals and coupons to shoppers when they come within three kilometres of partner merchants.

[Source: JFDaily - article in Chinese]

Just as the rumors said a couple of months back, China’s top Pinterest-like social commerce site, Mogujie, has secured a major series C funding round. It was led by IDG. The funding was confirmed today by Mogujie, but the startup was tight-lipped about the exact investment amount – though it was happy to say that it’s now effectively valued at $200 million.

The first round for Mogujie was led by BDMI, and series B came from Qiming Ventures – both those raised a total of $20 million.

Earlier this year we described Mogujie as a social commerce money machine. That’s because at that time, as confirmed by CEO Chen Qi, the site was earning over 100,000 RMB ($15,900) per day in ad referral clicks to Taobao, China’s largest e-commerce site. In March of this year, the social pinboard site had 9.5 million registered users.

Mogujie is up against a large number of similar sites that are aimed at young Chinese female shoppers, including ones from major web companies, like Taobao’s Wantu, or Renren’s Plaza site.

[Source: 36Kr - article in Chinese]

The Chinese online security outsourcing company Anquanbao.com has secured series B investment, for an unknown sum, led by Northern Light Ventures. Beijing-based incubator Innovation Works also participated in this second round for Anquanbao, just as it did in the first.

The funding news was revealed by Innovation Works founder Kai-Fu Lee. His incubator ploughed in about $5 million into the first Anquanbao round.

We first encountered the security startup back in November of last year when Anquanbao impressed at the TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing event. Indeed, the team emerged as the runner-up in the Disrupt Battlefield finale.

In Anquanbao’s startup pitch, the team said that they foresee a trend towards security outsourcing for business sites in China, to safeguard them against hackers and DDoS attacks. The startup said it aims to serve two million company sites in China, and 60,000+ government-run websites. Currently the service is growing, and now has just over 6,000 clients.

As for Innovation Works, it recently added $224 million to its second funding war-chest.

[Source: Sina Tech - article in Chinese]

An iCook.tw user’s recipes.

Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures clearly likes the look of what Taiwanese startup Polydice is cooking up, and has today invested in its social site iCook.tw. As the name suggests, iCook is focused on recipes, and provides a Pinterest-esque platform for people to share their tastiest concoctions.

The funding amount hasn’t been revealed, but it’s significant as this is the first Taiwan move since the Cyberagent (TYO:4751) investment arm first set up offices in Taipei late last year. (There was also the backing for restaurant review site iPeen last Spring, before the local office opened). CyberAgent Ventures explains in today’s announcement that the “investment was made through the CA-JAIC China Internet Fund II, which is jointly managed by CyberAgent Ventures and Japan Asia Investment.”

The investment firm reckons that iCook.tw is the fastest-growing social recipes site in Taiwan. Catherine Chang from the CyberAgent Ventures Taipei office tells us that the startup “has been live for 11 months, and has 70,000 users and 10,000 recipes – all user generated.”

Catherine adds that, at the moment, iCook is monetizing via a mix of banner ads and promotional tie-ups with food companies – as seen with its brand-oriented recipe/cooking contents. But the startup is mainly focusing on building up its user-base – and Facebook fandom – for now, as well as its iOS app, which was “released last month and has reached 150,000 downloads.”

As for the appeal of this kind of niche social site, the announcement points out how it’s learning from the Japanese web scene:

As there is a void for this type of media in Taiwan, and successful business models have been executed off existing recipe-based SNS in Japan, CyberAgent Ventures believes that iCook.tw has strong potential to become the leading player in Taiwan and will take advantage of CyberAgent Inc’s wide network of resources to enhance the company’s growth and value.

Indeed, the startup team is particularly looking to Japan’s Cookpad, which brought in over $40 million in sales last year thanks to a mix of ads, brand promotions, and premium content.

You might recall that in June of this year, Groupon China was merged with larger daily deals rival FTuan into a company called GroupNet. And now GroupNet’s CEO, Lin Ning, has revealed that it has recently netted $40 million in funding. The investment is thought to have been led by Groupon (NASDAQ:GRPN) and Chinese web giant Tencent (HKG:0700), but that’s not confirmed by offiicial channels.

This year’s merger was masterminded by Tencent, which already had an undisclosed stake in Ftuan and was also the official local partner for Groupon in China. As a part of the merger deal, GroupNet also runs Tencent’s own QQ Tuan daily deals site. It’s believed that FTuan – which attracted three major funding rounds already before its amalgamation – still holds the majority of the stake in GroupNet.

The investment is interesting as Lin Ning said that it will be used to acquire some smaller deals sites – so we might finally be seeing some of the tens of thousands of group buy sites in China get a meaningful exit. As opposed to collapsing in financial ruin, which is the way that thousands of them are going each year.

Lin Ning also revealed that GroupNet gets many merger proposals each day, and that the troubled 24Quan – which recently suspended operations – is one target that it might actually go for. Any acquisitions will be a case of buying users, rather than talent, in this overcrowded market.

In figures for 2012 Q2, Taobao Juhuasuan (run by Alibaba, which is is Tencent’s e-commerce nemesis) is the top deals site in China with 21.5 percent market share, and Meituan is a steady second place.

[Source: Techweb - article in Chinese]

Season two of the Malaysian startup pitching TV show Make The Pitch has just wrapped up with two of the six finalists securing some serious seed funding from MyEG (MYEG:MK), the e-services provider that also backs the TV show. The larger of the two investments was made into the clothing e-commerce site FashionValet.net, which has secured RM1 million ($326,000) in funding from MyEG.

From its Kuala Lumpur base, FashionValet’s marketing manager Marissa Zamani tells us that the startup has “over 10,000 users, and over 150 brands” on board now, which is way up from 10 fashion suppliers/partners just over a year ago when the site was first conceived – way before the recent TV show appearance. It sells male and female clothing, shoes, bags, and accessories.

Marissa explains that the two founders of FashionValet, Fadzarudin Anuar and Vivy Yusof (pictured above, with Vivy on the left), “had to go through three rounds of presentations and Q&A between us and the [Make The Pitch] panelists throughout the whole show,” and then “all negotiations were done on the TV show and the [funding] deal was made on the spot in the finals.”

As much as we love to see startups moving quickly, that sounds pretty terrifying. Like with Singapore’s similar Angel’s Gate reality TV show for startups, that kind of high pressure, high-speed deal is risky – after all, funding is not just about the money, but also your rapport with the VCs who should also serve as quality mentors.

Anyway, the show allowed Fadza and Vivy to show their mettle, and they impressed the Make The Pitch judges by getting sales to grow 15 percent in the first six weeks of the show’s airing.

FashionValet is up against some strong fashion e-commerce rivals in the region, such as Rocket Internet’s Zalora. Co-founder Fadzarudin Shah recently penned an interesting blog post about dealing with major competition. In it, he writes:

My response is simple: Having huge competitors play in the same space only further validates that there is a huge opportunity available. So forget about getting bogged down by a brand that suddenly blankets the websites you visit with their ads. Instead, now is the time to show potential clients and investors what your website could be. If you are scared of competitors, you will always be behind them in the pack. Take it as a challenge and enjoy the ride.

The makers of the BingDian Hotels app, which we looked at earlier this year shortly after it launched, has checked-in some series A funding. The round was led by California-based Bluerun Ventures, which also has an office in Shanghai and has invested in some other hot Chinese mobile startups such as the karaoke app Changba and the Pinterest-like Meilishuo.

It hasn’t been revealed precisely how much Bluerun put into BingDian with this investment, but Technode reports it to be a “multi-million US dollar” round.

In China’s very mature online travel market, BingDian is one of a number of mobile-only startups aiming to disrupt the homegrown industry leaders, Ctrip (NASDAQ:CTRP) and eLong (NASDAQ:LONG). That puts it right up against other new apps like the Innovation Works-backed Hotel Finder. BingDian says it has seen half a million downloads of its iOS app in the first 150 days after launching in March this year.

But BingDian has a bit of a twist, as it claims to help hotel chains to offer discounts and benefits to loyal customers whilst still allowing them to book via the app. In theory, that makes it into a more attractive platform for major hotel brands. BingDian’s partners run the gamut from cheap business hotels like Hanting and FX right up to top-notch chains like Hyatt and Shangri-La. Plus, the app has auctions for some rooms, rather like with the American travel booking site Priceline.

Prior to this series A funding, BingDian and taken in two rounds of seed funding. Currently its service is only accessible via the iPhone app, and its Android counterpart has still not materialized but is said to be in development.

Check out the BingDian app on its homepage.

[Source: Technode Chinese]

Singapore-based mobile security and intelligence startup, V-Key, has raised US$4 million from IPV Capital in its series A round. The funds will be used for product development.

V-Key produces a range of products including V-Track (threat management), V-guard (mobile app protection layer), and V!Va (secured mobile-to-mobile communication). The team looks solid with Eddie Chua, Benjamin Mah, and Joseph Gan as founders.

Benjamin Mah, CEO and co-founder of V-Key, said in a statement:

Traditional methods of managing mobile device security policies via trusting the native mobile operating system offers a basic level start. However, the world needs an advanced security protection and mobile threat analytics to address advanced persistence threats in the mobile apps landscape.

This week, at least here in Asia, everything has been about mobile, mobile, and more mobile.

I've always wanted to meet the "Queen of Europe"!

An obscure Chinese e-commerce site that sells sex toys has caused quite a shock in the industry by securing the biggest funding round for a highly specialist e-tailer in the country this year. AiLu is said to have wrapped up RMB 300 million (US$47.4 million) in series A funding from Shenzhen Capital and New Margin Ventures.

The news comes from the August venture capital report by Coinsay, as spotted by Chinese finance site Ebrun. Beijing-based AiLu – see its site here – sells all kinds of erotic toys, sex dolls, and revealing underwear – a product vertical in which its main local rival is Gdian. The company hasn’t commented publicly on its major funding round, so it’s not clear how the business will spend its new capital.

Hopefully some of that money will be spent on web design, as the site right now has the most eye-stabbingly awful user interface that we’ve even seen on an e-commerce site. Think of a Geocities site in 1999, and you’re close.

The last major round by a Chinese specialist e-commerce site was just last month when the wine e-tailer Jiuxian secured $32 million in series C funding.

[Source: Ebrun - article in Chinese]

Earlier this year, the former managing director of Skype Asia, Turochas “T” Fuad, left to form a new startup called Travelmob. And today, Travelmob has revealed that it has raised US$1 million in seed funding, led by Jungle Ventures and with participation from other “prominent, private investors.” The money will be used to “help drive further growth and expansion for Travelmob across the Asia Pacific region.”

[UPDATE on November 28th: Travelmob has revealed today that the other participating investor is Silicon Valley VC firm Accel Partners].

When we looked at the online travel service and chatted to Turochas in March, Travelmob.com was still in stealthy beta mode, and it eventually launched in July. The Singapore-based site is different to most others in the travel sector in that it focuses on short-term rentals – not hotel bookings. In many ways it’s like Airbnb for Asia, but Travelmob focuses on consumers traveling in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, promising a much more authentic and social travel experience than you’ll usually get at hotels.

Though nearly all its rentals are in this continent, a Travelmob representative tells us that its user-base is much more mixed:

50 percent of [the site’s] visitors are currently coming from within the Asia Pacific region and the remaining 50 percent from markets like the US, Europe, and the Middle East. However, we are increasingly getting more intra-APAC travelers.

For all those folks, the site runs in English, Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Vietnamese, and both Traditional and Simplified Chinese. Plus, it supports 13 currencies – 10 of which are Asian ones.

The startup has added some new features recently, such as “experience tags” to allow potential travelers to search by the kind of trip they want – one more oriented to “nature” or the “beach” or “nightlife” for example.

We’ve talked about Japan’s crowd-translation service Conyac.cc as recently as four days ago when the company participated in Myojo Waraku festival. The company’s pitch impressed the judges there, and we thought readers might want to check out the company’s progress so far. We caught up with both Tomohiro Onuma and Naoki Yamada, the founders of Conyac, via email to talk about their plans.

Tomohiro shared a few recent statistics about their service. He said that there are over 7,000 translators and 5,000 clients on the translation platform, an increase of 2,000 users compared to last year. Broken down by nations, its user-base looks like this:

The company is showing promising growth in terms of sales and translation requests over the past year. Naoki explained that Conyac’s number of requests is increasing every month. Back in January 2012 it had 1,000 monthly translation requests, while now it receives about 20,000 per month. He says that their focus is not on the number of users, but on the number of translation requests and active user percentage. Their monthly request target by March 2013 is 50,000. Naoki adds:

We are now especially focusing on the east Asian market. We have increasing numbers of translators from SEA [Southeast Asia]. Conyac is a great solution for localization.

Since receiving seed investment from Samurai Incubate early last year, the company has received other investments from NGI Group (now called Motion Beat) and Skylight Consulting at the end of last year. Now the company plans to start looking for series A investment over the next year. We wish them the best of luck.

We heard rumors about J.P. Morgan wanting to invest up to $50 million in Rocket’s e-commerce Lazada.

It’s official now. The press release doesn’t reveal much detail about the investment, but you can read it in full below:

LAZADA, the leading online department store in Southeast Asia, has confirmed an investment by J.P. Morgan Asset Management, which will take a stake in LAZADA through its German holding.

Following its parallel launch in five Southeast Asian countries during the spring of 2012, LAZADA has become the fastest growing online department store in the region. Since then, LAZADA has surpassed most established local and international competitors and according to web ranking site Alexa.com it is already ranking among the top local B2C eCommerce sites in all of its markets. This growth is a testament to the huge potential of this region with a population of more than 600 million people and a growing young middle-class which are embracing new online experiences – ranging from eCommerce to social media – at an ever increasing pace through their mobile phones or other connected devices.

With the support of Rocket Internet, the leading global online venture incubator (e.g. Zalando, Dafiti), LAZADA has already established itself as a household name in the region by providing a one-stop shopping experience online. With an unrivalled brand and product selection available online, LAZADA has developed a wide offering ranging from consumer electronics to household goods, toys and sports equipment. Today, approximately 1,000 employees are operating streamlined businesses with own logistics and distribution centers in Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia.

“We feel very honoured to welcome J.P. Morgan to our investor group and are particularly excited to be joined by an investor that shares our vision and belief in the huge potential of this populous region replicating online shopping behaviours in developed countries”, regional CEO Maximilian Bittner commented. “This will further support our growth as we strive to offer all of our customers fast, convenient and secure online shopping experiences”.

J.P. Morgan Asset Management Portfolio Manager Robert Cousin, who worked on the deal from New York, confirmed the transaction, saying, “We are excited to partner with LAZADA as it continues to expand its eCommerce presence in Southeast Asia.

This month marks the third-year anniversary of Innovation Works, the startup incubator founded and run by the former head of Google China, Kai-Fu Lee. To celebrate the occasion, Kai-Fu has revealed some stats about the group that added a $148 million second fund earlier this year.

The prime stat is that Innovation Works (see its homepage) has backed 50 startup projects so far – which means mentorship and an array of advantages above and beyond just the seed investment. Those 50 young companies are worth an estimated RMB 3.9 billion (US$615.8 million).

A total of 5,000 potential projects were screened before those lucky startups got incubated under the wing of Innovation Works. The accepted ones include the likes of the mobile apps cross-promotions tool Umeng, the company behind the Hotel Finder mobile commerce app, and the third-party Android store and sync service Wandoujia.

As well as seed funding, Innovation Works can also go up to series A investments, and maybe even beyond. It has put in a first round of funding into 18 projects, and one startup got series B backing from the incubator. Almost inevitably, some projects failed: the crash-and-burn tally so far is four.

Its first fund was worth $180 million dollars.

We look forward to seeing more startups leaping into flight from the Innovation Works nest.

[Source: Techweb - article in Chinese]