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 seen all kinds of social fashion startups crop up in Asia in the past couple of years. One of the newest is Zoolook, created by a team of six people that’s split evenly between Tokyo and Hong Kong. This particular app focuses on the social and photography side of clothing, and is made up of a social network were people can share and tag their favorite looks (pictured below).

One big draw in the app, explains Zoolook founder Benoit Lavaud, is the presence of top fashion labels who have virtual “showrooms”, not dissimilar from Facebook brand pages, within the social network. This feature is being used by over 60 regional but prominent fashion companies, such as Kenzo, and… er… lots of others that I won’t pretend I know. But I’ve heard of Kenzo. For more clued-up fashionistas, the app is a way to keep up with trends, share their looks, and get inspiration from the numerous Asian fashion bloggers who also make use of the startup’s service.

Benoit explains this strategy to us:

Brands are quite lost in terms of promotion now that digital has entered their landscape. They lack resources to manage at same time in-store promotion and digital promotion. We have entered this category where they feel we do the job of connecting bloggers and influencers for both real and digital.

Zoolook is also working the floor at offline events in this sector, and was recently selected as the official app of the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Tokyo. Readers in Hong Kong might want to check out Zoolook’s ‘live fashion snap’ event on Thursday (16th) evening at 6pm at Apple’s Causeway Bay store. Benoit explains what’s going to be happening that night:

We have invited over 20 top bloggers and Hong Kong Fashion icons to come and be snapped by Stephenie Kay, a Chinese fashion photographer. We setup a photo booth and a stage in the store and gather fashionistas to watch how Stephenie master photography snapping these influencers using an iPhone and our app. Very unique to be able to organize such a gathering in an Apple Store.

The Zoolook iPhone app is here, while the Android version is still in the works.

The one millionth customer was Singaporean mum-to-be Kelly Nguyen, who was surprised by the Zalora team at her workplace, who handed over her order (a maternity dress) free of charge.

The Zalora crew also concocted a little infographic (below) to show some of its other stats. For example, the e-commerce service has shipped to 16,853 towns in the region so far, and over 23,000 new products are added to the site each week. To hold all that stock, the company has over 20,000 square meters of warehouse space, which is the equivalent of five football fields.

Zalora released its iPhone app last month, and attracted a further $26 million in funding back in March.

Swedish music streaming company Spotify recently stepped into Asia; specifically Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. Spotify’s Sriram Krishnan, head of new markets and Asia-pacific at Spotify, explained to us that Asia was picked because piracy is high in this part of the world.

Sad but true, Singapore is one of the leading nations for digital pirates. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), about half of Singaporeans visit unlicensed sites for music and movies. The report also says that Singapore has an average of about 300,000 incidences of illegal downloading a month. Citing a 2011 report by the Malaysia International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), Spotify pointed out that Malaysia is ranked 26th in the world in terms of the amount of connections to unauthorized peer-to-peer file sharing. Sriram added:

Spotify was set up as a better, simpler, faster alternative to piracy […] With the high level of piracy in this part of the world, it made sense for us to enter the Asia market through these markets. According to IFPI, 95 percent of all digital music was illegally downloaded, so combating piracy is by far our, and in turn the industry’s, most serious challenge.

I know it might sound like some corporate bullshit that Spotify was built to fight piracy. But thinking deeper, it actually makes sense. Spotify gets content from labels who in turn make money when people buy their music. But folks who download music from illegal sources – and at no cost – hurt the labels’ bottom line. So this makes piracy a common enemy for music labels and Spotify. The more people use Spotify, the higher the chance to convert them to paying users, thus driving revenue for music labels and also Spotify.

To date, Spotify has 24 million users with about 25 percent of them paying monthly. I guess if you can’t get 100 percent to pay for music, then it’s perhaps good enough to have 25 percent of them paying. But we’ll have to wait and see if that conversion rate from free to paid users also applies to the startup’s new venture in Asia.

In Asia, Spotify faces major competition from Taiwan’s KKBOX which claims to be the largest Chinese music library in the world with 10 million songs from 500 international labels.

E-shopping marketplace Taobao has been aggressively expanding to Hong Kong and Taiwan. With 1.4 million registered users already in Hong Kong, Taobao today announced at a media event in Hangzhou, China, that it has recently launched a Hong Kong official site at hk.taobao.com.

The official Hong Kong site is customized for a Hong Kong audience in many ways. It features products that Hong Kong users are most likely to buy and also offers a guide to educate users on payments. The design of the site is also much cleaner and neater compared to the China version of Taobao.

Taobao in Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore

Elsewhere, Taobao is also enjoying growth in Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore. By the end of 2012, there were 600,000 users in Taiwan, 210,000 in Malaysia, and 280,000 in Singapore. Daphne Lee, director of international business at Taobao, also shared that Malaysia is seeing explosive growth at the moment. In Malaysia, Taobao is experiencing 78 percent growth in monthly paying unique visitors and also 97 percent growth in daily pageviews.

The countries which are outside of mainland China that Taobao are targeting so far have a significant Chinese-speaking population. Taobao hopes to service the Chinese-speaking audience first before moving on to serve non-Chinese speaking customers. Daphne also pointed out that Singapore is an important market for Taobao since it is a country that uses both Chinese and English languages which could possibly provide Taobao with some data and experience on how to cope with an English speaking market.

A fun fact which Daphne pointed out is that Singaporean shoppers tend to buy winter clothing on Taobao. Well, as you may know, Singapore is really freaking warm all year round. So there aren’t really any offline stores to buy winter clothing for travelers – so online shops like Taobao become the go-to destination for rare items like winter clothing.

While it might seem like a piece of cake for Taobao to expand from country to country, there’s actually a lot of ground work to be done. Daphne highlighted four fundamental building blocks which her team are constantly tackling: process, logistics, payments, and customer service.

As of June 2012, Taobao has more than 800 million product listings and 500 million registered users worldwide. Today is also Taobao’s 10th anniversary and also a day that Jonathan Lu officially takes over from Jack Ma as Alibaba’s CEO.

We’ve seen crowdfunding been put to use for zany gadgets and enacting positive social change, but we’ve not yet seen it being used for investment purposes. But Crowdbaron wants to change that. It’s a Hong Kong-based startup that wants to make investing in real estate as simple as booking a hotel online. Aimed at folks who want to bolster their personal investment portfolio, the idea is that buying a small stake in one or numerous properties lets you take advantage of surging property prices in several countries.

While you are buying a share in a property, this is not a sort of timeshare for the 21st century and so you won’t be staying in the apartment or villa in which you have a stake. This is purely for the profit. So you can spread the risk, Crowdbaron lets you take as little as a one percent stake.

Crowdbaron is aiming its platform at users across Asia, with an initial focus on customers based in Hong Kong, China, and Indonesia. Founder and CEO Saeed Hassan explains to us that the startup is “targeting a less wealthy target group” than would normally take a 100 percent stake in properties – a phenomenon seen recently with wealthy Chinese snapping up properties (and potential escape routes) in Australia, the UK, the US, and many other nations. Instead, Saeed says the site is good for “middle income families who are saving for the future, and who have been burned by the stock market and are frustrated by low interest rates”. He adds:

For these individuals, there is little chance they can purchase in Hong Kong or elsewhere. This group is very large and are willing to enter shared purchase arrangements – because it opens the door to potentially higher and stable returns they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford. It’s about lowering the entry barriers and getting more people involved.

Aside from making a profit from rising property prices, Crowdbaron investors can also earn revenues from renting out their properties, which will be unfurnished to save hassle for the crowdfunded landlords. Saeed points out that these properties will remain managed by Crowdbaron through its network of property agents, and is also responsible for finding tenants. In the event of a property being empty, Crowdbaron promises to pay investors their share of rental revenue anyway.

Crowdbaron is split between a team of four in Hong Kong, and a further four in Jakarta, Indonesia. More sales staffers are being added this month, and a Madrid office is being prepared. While its investors are mostly in this region, it’s open to global investors aside from, for tax reasons, the UK and the US. Crowdbaron’s properties are currently spread across London and Jakarta, with more in Madrid and perhaps some US cities being added soon.

Real estate crowdfunding could turn out to be one of 2013’s hottest startup – and investment – trends. I notice that US-based RealtyMogul also looks promising, and recently won a bunch of awards and plaudits.

Surround App is free and allows one-click machine translation of any Weibo post from someone you follow. In addition, it gives you a full English UI for the most common Weibo functions, like making retweets and comments. The Hong Kong startup admits that many features are omitted in this beta, with things like translation of comments, slang translation, image uploading, and paid-for human translations all coming at a later date. Here’s the current beta that I’ve been playing with:

There are a few confusing aspects to the new beta. What looks like the retweet/repost button (pictured above) is actually for comments, and what’s apparently a refresh icon actually serves to repost the content. It’s not made very clear how to activate the translation – it turns out you need to hit that arrow button in the bottom-left of the app. Hopefully the icons will be rethought. If it sounds like I’m being too tough on a free app, that’s just because I’m keen for it to be good as it could prove so useful for many people.

Surround App is now in Google Play for Android users, but the iPhone version hasn’t yet shown up in iTunes.

“We had our best quarter ever in China,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook earlier today. In its post-earnings conference call for Q2 of fiscal 2013, Cook revealed that Apple sales to Chinese consumers (in the Greater China area, not just the mainland) amounted to $8.8 billion in that period of time, which was up 11 percent year-on-year. In response to a question from a call participant, he denied that Apple had hit a wall in China with the iPhone and iPad. The company also revealed that it plans to double its count of official Apple Stores in Greater China (currently 11).

The Greater China stats cover Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, and mainland China. Looking only at the mainland, sales were up eight percent. That’s not so hot when compared to slow growth in the US at a rate of seven percent.

Earlier data from IDC has made clear that 73.2 percent of all mobiles sold in China are smartphones, but the on-the-ground market is far from saturated.

56 percent of Apple’s revenue now comes from non-US markets – representing $24.3 billion in sales. Apple’s total revenues for Q2 hit $43.6 billion, beating analysts’ estimates. But profit nonetheless slipped 18 percent.

Cook inevitably dodged insinuations, notes TechCrunch, about building a budget iPhone, and instead stressed that Apple is selling the older iPhone 4 and 4S in markets like China as a more affordable option for lower-income folks who are trashing their feature phones.

The positive numbers from China come as a relief for Apple after a rough month of public attacks by state media, accusing the company of treating Chinese consumers unfairly when it comes to customer service and repairing devices. Also remember that Android is China’s top smartphone OS, with an estimated 160 million active Android owners right now.

(Source: TechCrunch)

Zorpia, it turns out, is a startup founded and run by Jeffrey Ng and based in Hong Kong. Launched all the way back in the early days of MySpace, Zorpia began as a social network that would facilitate unlimited photo sharing. Over time, Ng says, it has evolved into a service that’s more focused on helping people make new friends (he likens it to a digital bar or a town hall). It has also built up a very substantial base of registered users, growing from just 1.5 million users in 2005 to around 28 million users today, although just one million are monthly active users. Most of those users are in Asia, Ng tells me, and the service is especially popular in India, with over ten million registered users.

When I asked about user acquisition, Ng told me the site used a variety of techniques, mostly based around people inviting their friends. I explained about the emails I had gotten from my friend and my wife and asked Ng to explain why I was getting messages from people suggesting they had left me private messages on Zorpia when they clearly hadn’t. He told me he’d look into it, and but was never able to satisfactorily explain how that had happened.

To get to the bottom of things, it was clear that I needed to sign up for a Zorpia account myself. And so I did. As with all test accounts that I create for work, though, I used none of my real information, opened the account via a browser I don’t normally use, and registered using a unique email address created specifically for that test account.

Things looked bad pretty much immediately. On the account activation page, I noticed that three hyperlinks users might expect would lead to help pages or a “resend email” prompt actually redirect users to sketchy free-survey sites that seem an awful lot like scams.

(Ng confirmed that the links are there intentionally as advertising, but said that Zorpia has no control over what the links lead to as it varies based on the user’s geographical location UPDATE: Ng says that he was referring to the site’s banner ads, and that there should not be text-linked ads on the authentication page. “We simply do not understand how those links could appear on the screenshot you provided unless there was tampering,” he says. However, as evidenced by the screenshot above, they did appear when I activated my account.)

Once I logged in to my new account, I found another surprise: Zorpia was worried about my password security. A banner across the top of the screen blared that my password was “more than six months old.” Given that the password is one I’d never used before and had created only moments before, I was not expecting this. (Ng told me the message appeared to be a bug; however, as of this writing it has not been fixed UPDATE: Ng says the bug is now fixed.). But I ignored it because as you can see in the screenshots below, I had two new messages.

When I opened my messages, one of them was the boilerplate welcome greeting you’d expect from the Zorpia team. The other was an absolute shock. There sitting in my inbox just a minute after I first opened this account, was a message from my real life friend “Mike”:

That’s when I started getting goosebumps. That’s also when I double-checked with “Mike” to be sure he hadn’t somehow sent me a message — he hadn’t — but frankly, even if he had wanted to, it should have been impossible. I didn’t use my real name, my real email, my usual browser, or any real information about myself when setting up either the Zorpia account or the email account it is attached it. I also hadn’t told “Mike” I was planning to set up a test account of my own, and we live thousands of miles apart. It would have been nearly impossible for him to find my account even if he had wanted to in a sea of more than 28 million registered accounts. And of course, when that message was sent, he wasn’t using Zorpia anyway. He says he has never used Zorpia.

Zorpia CEO Jeffrey Ng told me that this was “very odd,” and that he’d have his tech team look into it. While I waited, I was thinking about Occam’s razor. How likely was it that some convoluted bug could randomly link two people who actually know each other from among the site’s nearly 30 million members? How likely was it that “Mike” could have found my account in the first place even if it was really him sending the message? The simplest explanation seemed to be that somehow (possibly through my IP address, which I foolishly forgot to obscure), Zorpia had linked my test account to my real identity, and then confirmed that I knew “Mike” through the access it apparently has to his email contacts list.

When Ng got back to me, he confirmed that that was indeed what had happened. Although I was using a separate browser to do everything related to Zorpia, I did load the “confirm account” page with my default browser once by accident because it is what opened when I clicked the account activation link. Previously, I had used the same browser only to unsubscribe from Zorpia emails — I have no Zorpia account — but nevertheless Zorpia apparently used the cookies from that interaction to connect my real identity (and thus my friendship with “Mike”) to my new test account.

Ng told me that when a friend joins, the system automatically sends them a private message from their friends already on Zorpia welcoming them. So, even though my new email couldn’t possibly have been listed in “Mike’s” contacts, his account automatically sent me a private message without his knowledge simply because I happened to once use a browser that once previously had been associated with unsubscribing from the spam emails Zorpia was sending me on his behalf.

After he explained this, even Ng admitted that this was a bit beyond the pale:

We do realize this comes off as creepy and poses a potential security threat to the user. Therefore we have disabled Zorpia from using cookie to store friend relationships already.

But he still wasn’t able to explain how Mike’s contacts — and my wife’s — got into Zorpia in the first place. Both deny having intentionally provided them to the service, and while Ng stops short of calling either of them a liar, he doesn’t seem to be able to explain how it could have happened otherwise:

From your friends’ experience, it seems like they simply do not recall they have added any friends on Zorpia. We will review our process and address this issue.

UPDATE: Ng says: “Zorpia is not a spam social network that auto-enrolls accounts,” and maintains that my wife and friend proactively invited their friends to join the service, pointing to server logs that apparently reflect this. Both my wife and “Mike” continue to deny having intentionally invited anyone.

My friends are not the only ones having a similar experience though. Although PandoDaily covered the startup last year and didn’t mention the problems it seems to have with emailing people who aren’t signed up for it, there are complaints about this dating back to 2009 at least. Each of the words in the previous sentence links to a different person complaining about being auto-enrolled in Zorpia or having their contacts list spammed by the service, and I found all of these quite easily and quickly via Google (where there are plenty more to be found if you want to go hunting). It seems like an awful lot of people have the same apparent amnesia Ng is suggesting my friends have when it comes to handing their contact list over to Zorpia.

UPDATE: Zorpia responds: “With 28 million registered users on Zorpia, we do not think a few hundred complaints online is statistically significant to merit an overall conclusion that Zorpia is a spam social network which auto-enroll accounts. Even if we assume there were 500 complaints, that represents a complaint to user ratio of only 0.0018%.”

Ultimately, though, the only way to be sure was to do another, more complicated test. After deleting all the cookies in both my browsers, I connected to my VPN (to obscure my IP) and opened up two new gmail and Facebook accounts, called ‘Zorpia Test1′ and ‘Zorpia Test2′. I made sure that the two were friends, and had a history of emailing back and forth. Then, I signed Zorpia Test1 up for a Zorpia account. I authenticated this account using both the Zorpia Test1 Facebook and Zorpia Test1 gmail accounts, but I never invited any friends (Ng had told me that all non-user friends needed to be invited manually by the user). I loaded the Zorpia “Add Friends” section once to be sure that the social network saw my connection with the ‘Zorpia Test2′ account, but I unchecked the name and backed out of the “add friends” dialog. I did not invite the Zorpia Test2 account as a friend or sign it up for a Zorpia account. Then, I waited.

And sure enough, within a couple days, the Zorpia Test2 account was getting messages from Zorpia. In fact, the Zorpia Test2 account somehow acquired its own Zorpia account! In the email below, you can see the welcome message I received about an account I never signed up for, using a username that defied the naming conventions I had set up for this test.

UPDATE: Zorpia says its server logs prove that I did accidentally sign up Zorpia Test2 for an account, and since I didn’t record video of my testing process, I cannot prove that I didn’t.

For me, the question of whether Zorpia is a real social network has been more or less put to bed. For a ten-year-old social network, there are simply way too many “bugs” here, and almost all of these “bugs” seem to result in non-users getting messages aimed at tricking them into joining the network. If years of online complaints haven’t changed the company’s ways, it’s unlikely this article will be any different.

So, unfortunately, I’ve got to say this: if you’re getting messages from Zorpia, your best bet is to click “mark as spam” and move on with your life. Zorpia, from what I can tell, is less a social network and more a mirage, an illusion designed to cajole and trick you into visiting so it can earn a few cents more from its ubiquitous advertisements. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. This is social networking hell.

China’s newcomer phone-maker Xiaomi said a while back that it would make its first ever venture outside mainland China. And now Xiaomi has set dates and prices for upcoming launches in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

According to the now-online Xiaomi HK and TW sites, the recently launched Xiaomi Mi2S model (pictured) will launch in Hong Kong on April 23rd for HK$2,499 (US$322), which works out as the same price in mainland China. Over in Taiwan, the price will be a comparative TW$9,499 with a more vague sometime-in-May date set.

Xiaomi sells most of its Android-powered devices online, so the startup gadget-maker needs to tweak its e-commerce site for the new markets. The solution is accepting Paypal in both of the new territories. There’s no word yet on whether any Hong Kong or Taiwan telcos will carry the device in the same way that China Unicom and China Telecom has done on the mainland.

Xiaomi is aiming to sell 15 million phones in 2013, double its tally in 2012.

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

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

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

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

We mistakenly leaked last week that Spotify is set to launch in Singapore. So today’s launch by the Swedish music streaming giant into Singapore isn’t too much of a surprise. But, wait! There are a few more countries included in today’s launch — Hong Kong and Malaysia. This marks Spotify’s first big push into Asia.

At the launch event this morning, Spotify’s Sriram Krishnan, who takes charge of new markets, demoed how simple to Spotify is to use. In a nutshell, simple to search for songs, create playlists, use Spotify radio, and one-click sharing to Facebook with your friends. The premium package allows users to listen to Spotify across all their devices for SGD$9.90 or you can give a try for free on your PC only. Krishnan said:

Asia has always been on the roadmap for us. We always have an eye for Asia. We take as long as we want to create that perfect [service]… for this part of the world.

To date, Spotify has over $500 million paid to music rights holders since it launched. Spotify is available in over 23 markets with one billion playlists created. It has 24 million active users and six million paying subscribers. An average user spends about 107 minutes per day on Spotify with over two billion music objects posted to Facebook last month. 30 million playlists are created monthly by Spotify users.

In Asia, Spotify faces challenges from Taiwan’s KKBOX, which has a presence in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and Malaysia. KKBOX claims to have over 10 million songs from 500 international labels. But most of its music, it seems, are Chinese-language songs. Spotify, in contrast, is stronger for English-language songs. More on that as I wait for my Q&A session with Krishnan…

(Update: Changed Malaysian to Malay since we’re talking about the language, not the nationality!)

Dropbox reckons that it has 161 percent more Chinese-speaking users now than it had last year. So that makes it a good time for the American cloud storage service to roll out language support for Chinese – as well as Malay and Indonesian.

As announced on the Dropbox blog today, the updated Asian languages (along with new support for Polish and Russian) can be found on the Mac, PC, Linux, Android, and web apps from today, and will reach iOS soon.

With Dropbox being blocked in mainland China [1], the support for both simplified and traditional Chinese text is clearly aimed at the Chinese diaspora worldwide, be they in San Francisco, Sydney, or Singapore.

In terms of Malaysia, the Dropbox team says it’s seeing 274 percent growth there, and an even more stellar 537 percent annual growth in users in Indonesia. Though it’s not clear precisely how many users that entails. But Malaysians are saving 7.5 million files per day, while users in Indonesia are committing five million files to the cloud each day.

Dropbox is having a busy day, and also just announced Dropbox for Business as an expansion of its enterprise-oriented Dropbox for Teams cloud service.

Last May, Dropbox ventured into the Korean market, and began its push into Japan way back in 2011.

China’s top e-commerce player, Alibaba, also runs the nation’s leading daily deals site. Run under the familiar Taobao brand name and URL as Juhuasuan, the site is today expanding to include customers and daily deals in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Centered around a new overseas site at hk.ju.taobao.com, the number of offers right now is very limited, but that will expand over time. The main Juhuasuan deals site has several thousand product listings at any given time, so it might be a while before relevant deals are made available to new users in Hong Kong and Taiwan. (UPDATED the stat about product listings to correct a mistake).

This new version of Juhuasuan will focus on deals for things like clothing, homeware, mother and baby products, consumer electronic accessories, and children’s toys. Travel and “lifestyle” deals will appear in a few weeks’ time, though it’s not clear if that will cover food/restaurants. But it will be an interesting challenge to Groupon in both Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The new site has ‘traditional’ Chinese characters, which is the script used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Just last week we were talking to Daphne Lee, the director of Taobao international business, who told us how Alibaba is keen to expand its various e-commerce offerings to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and across Southeast Asia, though there’s no word yet of the whole site being made available in English or other languages.

In today’s announcement, Daphne said:

[W]e firmly believe will enhance and complement the online shopping experience at Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com for our more-than two million registered users in Hong Kong and Taiwan. In 2012, we continued to improve upon platform infrastructure and introduced new features such as the Alipay Card to make online shopping more convenient for Hong Kong and Taiwan consumers. Users can expect an even more diverse and comprehensive set of new and localized features and services to be rolled out in 2013.

This is the second consumer-oriented Alibaba site to venture overseas after the afore-mentioned expansion of the C2C Taobao shopping site. The Juhuasuan overseas service is promising delivery of its items in one or two days. For travel and lifestyle deals, QR codes or serial numbers will be employed so that shoppers can collect their deal from a retailer.

In our most recent daily deals industry stats, Taobao Juhuasuan has 47.8 percent market share by revenue – that’s way ahead of the indie Groupon clone Meituan with 13.1 percent share.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China’s top video-streaming company Youku Tudou (NYSE: YOKU) has signed an exclusive two-year deal with Hong Kong channel TVB. If you’re Chinese, you’ve most likely watched at least one or two popular dramas from TVB. The deal allows Youku Tudou and its two sites to serve over 2,500 hours worth of TVB’s new and classic Chinese dramas.

The agreement also notes that TVB and Youku Tudou will explore partnerships to co-produce original content. The statement also revealed that Youku Tudou has a whopping combined audience of over 100 million daily video views from mobile devices.

Youku Tudou President Dele Liu commented this evening:

This strategic and cooperative partnership combines the strength of Youku Tudou’s internet platform and apps with TVB’s wonderful repertoire of shows. It’s an invaluable combination that will help Youku Tudou achieve its goal of being the go-to source for high-quality internet television in China.

The Youku and Tudou sites are in a spending war with rivals like Sohu Video, Baidu’s iQiyi, and Tencent Video, to secure the rights to popular TV series and major movies.

If anything, this deal strengthens Youku Tudou’s dominance in the internet TV segment in China. Before Youku and Tudou merged, both video stream sites have had working relationships with TVB – though they were previously rivals before last year’s merger. But with combined efforts, resource, and audience, tying up exclusive deals should be easier for the company.

Founded in June 2012, Hong Kong-based PassKit, a startup that enables customers to create mobile wallet passes for both iOS and Android devices has just concluded its $1.2 million series A funding from undisclosed investors.

Specifically, PassKit claims to be the first ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) interface and Passbook designer (see image below) on the market, which allows geeks and non-geeks to design and publish their mobile coupons, boarding passes, and event tickets in minutes. To date, it has helped its users issue over 250,000 passes globally. The statement also shared a case study where the franchise owner of Subway Hong Kong saw 10,000 of its passes issued in 24 hours.

Paul Tomes, CEO and co-founder of PassKit said in the statement:

We were first to market with a Passbook Designer which empowers anyone to create a pass and launch a mobile marketing campaign in just a few clicks. We have already issued over a quarter of a million passes globally and our cloud-based solution can easily scale up or down depending on demand.

On a related note, PassKit’s Indian counterpart who just graduated from 500 Startups, WalletKit, also provides a similar service. But the team at WalletKit has relocated to San Francisco which means its targeted markets are slightly different. One is based in and aimed at the U.S, and the other is focused on Asia.

Vertical e-commerce is a trend in Asia. So far we have lingerie, bags, beer, baby products, beauty products, and…uh…buttons! Yes, buttons. Lots of Buttons.

Lots of Buttons is a Hong Kong-based vertical e-commerce site that sells — you guessed it — lots of buttons. Founder Ken Lee initially founded Lots of Buttons (with the URL LotsofButtons.com) as a fashion site in 2011. But his investor Jong Lee advised him to sell buttons instead to maximize the impact of his URL. So Ken did, and Jong invested.

It was relaunched as a buttons-only e-commerce site on June 4, providing a great way to sort and search for the right buttons based on colors, types, size, shape, and design. I’m certainly no button expert but it seems like a really convenient way to find the perfect buttons quickly. To date, Ken says that his startup’s had over 3,000 orders. When asked about competitors, Ken said that none are online and they are more like the brick-and-mortar stores like Michael’s, Joann, and Hobby Lobby. He told me:

We are different because no one can carry the amount of styles we do in one shop. It is impossible, to do so would be a logistical and operations nightmare and money suck. Shipping from Hong Kong is fast and cheap, and it’s same price and speed as shipping with the US.

I did a quick ‘buttons’ search on Google. True enough, Lots of Buttons ranked fourth on the search result page. There isn’t any other button-only e-commerce site listed on the first two search result pages for ‘buttons,’ so Lots of Buttons is definitely in a good place. When asked about future plans, Ken told me:

We would like to expand to other product categories, wholesaling, as well as other features in our website. Two features we would really be keen on after getting an angel round investment is to offer people who buy our buttons and crafts materials the ability to post back on our site to sell it.

This is similar to what Etsy and Ebay does. Another feature we are contemplating is to allow fashion designers and producers to view our buttons on garments in a software based tool on our site. This way, they can see what looks good on a shirt or dress, and simply add those buttons to cart and check out.

Ken also told me that the gross margins for buttons are amazing, and could reach anywhere from 500 to 3,600 percent if he gets them straight from the factories in Qiaotou, in Zhejiang Province which is China’s global button capital and makes over 60 percent of the buttons in the world.

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.

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

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

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

An apartment listed on ACproperty. Click to enlarge.

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier today we looked at statistics from game developer Animoca that show the Samsung Galaxy range of phones totally dominating in India. While that’s not quite the case in Hong Kong, the same research reveals that eight of the top 10 Android phones observed on Animoca’s games in Hong Kong were made by Samsung.

The only two interlopers were smartphones made by Sony, with the Xperia Arc S being the sixth most popular phone in this survey. But on the whole, Samsung’s big-screen phones are performing well in Hong Kong, led by the sizeable Samsung Galaxy Note 2 as the Android market leader. The newest Samsung Galaxy S3 hasn’t quite surpassed its predecessor, the S2 (see table below). As a whole, the Galaxy S series have racked up over 100 million in sales, and Hong Kong is clearly one of the developed markets where consumers want high-end new smartphones.

Hong Kongers’ desire to be on the cutting-edge is shown by the versions of Android OS that are being used. On Animoca’s gaming platform, the developers found that most Hong Kong mobile gamers – a full 21.2 percent – are on Android 4.1.1 (jelly bean) right now; a further 19.3 percent are on Android 4.0.4. The game developer says that these statistics show that companies making apps and mobile services need to look carefully at particular markets and not just think of averages across Asia; that’s because countries where consumers opt for older and cheaper phones (like India or the Philippines) can really skew the data and cause you to underestimate the demands of customers in more developed markets.

Here are the top 10 phones in Hong Kong in this study, which took place from January 15th to February 15th:

(Image: HongKongHustle)

The new Asia Pop channel has only four videos so far, but that will soon expand once it adds livestreams of special events. The first Hangout will kick off on March 8th with Korean pop star SHINee.

Also useful are the playlists within the new Asia Pop area – there are five so far – that give you a rundown of the most popular music of the past week.

Google tells us that the new channel will focus on Korean, Japanese, and Chinese pop music. Hopefully that might also expand to cover other nations with vibrant pop music scenes that have cross-border appeal – and perhaps some alternative music too. But that’s just our wishful thinking.

There are seven Hangouts planned for early March. This is the line-up so far:

March 8 – Shinee (K-Pop)

March 9 – Wang Lee Hom (C-Pop)

March 10 – Super Junior (K-Pop)

March 11 – Kyary Pamyu Pamyu (J-Pop)

March 12 – Flumpool (J-Pop)

March 13 – 2PM (K-Pop)

March 14 – Mayday (C-Pop)

Only five lucky fans, Google explains, will be allowed into each Hangout, so you better start thinking of a good question if you want to get in.

As you’ll likely know already, PSY’s Gangnam Style is the most-viewed YouTube video of all time, so it seems like a fitting time for the region’s pop music to get more attention from YouTube itself.

Just last week, YouTube announced the opening of Asia’s first YouTube Space in Tokyo to give content creators a professional space to craft their videos.

Read any news report out of China today, and chances are it’ll include a smarmy comment or two from a netizen on Sina Weibo. The 400 million-strong microblogging site is almost synonymous with the voice of the country’s young urbanites – so much so that there’s an online cottage industry (Tea Leaf Nation, Ministry of Tofu and China Digital Times among others) dedicated to translating cross-sections of it for an English audience.

But without fluency in Chinese (and a street-smart awareness of online slang), most of Weibo is near incomprehensible. That’s where Hong Kong-based startup Surround App comes in. It’s an upcoming English mobile client for Sina Weibo, with its first release planned for April 2013, offering a mix of machine and human translation to help you make sense of the content on China’s vast social networks. From trenchant social commentary to…um…Brad Pitt.

“It was inspired basically by my own frustration,” says co-founder Jeffrey Broer over my Skype interview with him, admitting that he can only speak about five sentences in Mandarin. “I’ve been in and out of mainland China for over 10 years, and there are all these fascinating people online that I want to follow, but I can’t. It was a whole world that I couldn’t grasp.”

Broer, the founder of another Hong-Kong based startup, Grayscale, put together a team of four late in 2012, and Surround App received about US$15,000 in seed funding (plus office space and technical guidance) from HK Accelerator.

Targeted at “language students, bloggers, micro-celebrities and managers in China”, Surround App plans to follow a freemium model – the free app will allow awkward machine translations (like copy-pasting a block of text into Google Translate) of all Sina Weibo content, helped partly by a slang database that the team is planning to build into future releases. Broer adds:

We’re still playing around with the specifics. But we’ll have monthly subscriptions that will feature human translations of specific accounts, a ‘curated’ human-translated daily news section, and packages for corporate clients.

Even with translation, the two challenges in engaging with Sina Weibo are figuring out who to follow:

We’re developing our own strong search databases for that, and we’ll present users with recommendations based on keywords.

Users will be able to make sense of the dense web of punning and wordplay that the network is famous for, and understanding those images people keep swapping. For that, Broer says:

We have a few ideas, such as optical character recognition (OCR) that we could use for images, but not planning to address that in our first release.

Built as a hybrid HTML5 app, Surround App will be available on all major mobile platforms. The UI will let you switch back and forth between the original Chinese posts and the English translations – a potentially interesting feature for language learners.

Surround eventually hopes to support multiple Chinese social networks – Broer mentions RenRen and QQ – though dealing with Sina Weibo’s 34,977 posts per second might keep the team occupied for a while yet.

The relatively new Chinese phone-maker Xiaomi teased a possible expansion into Hong Kong and Taiwan a while back – and now we finally have a date for Xiaomi’s first ‘overseas’ push. Xiaomi team member Li Wanqiang posted to his 1.25 million fans on Sina Weibo over the weekend that the startup company “will begin sales in April in Hong Kong and Taiwan.”

Xiaomi sells a strippd-down line-up of just two Android-based phones, the flagship quad-core Mi2, and its revamped first-ever phone, the dual-core 1S. It’s rumored that the Xiaomi Mi2 will sell for HK$1,999 (US$257) in Hong Kong, but it’s somewhat unrealistic that it would be at such a price-tag, which would make it slightly cheaper than its already barely profitable mainland Chinese price.

Confirmed: An April launch.

Xiaomi revealed last month that it sold 7.19 million phones in mainland China in 2012. After selling in Hong Kong and Taiwan (probably via its preferred e-commerce channels, as well as one or two telco tie-ups), the Beijing company is contemplating launching in North America in 2014 or 2015.

(See: Founder Lei Jun Talks About Xiaomi, China’s Disruptive Phone-Maker)

The young phone-maker already has a Facebook page where it’s posting in traditional Chinese – the script used in Hong Kong and Taiwan – and has garnered 15,000 likes so far.

We contacted Xiaomi, but no further details about the April launch can be revealed.

(Spotted via: BuyBuyChina, Netease Mobile – article in Chinese)

The mobile-loving World Summit Awards (WSA) 2013 has finally found its eight winners for each of the eight competing categories, and three Asian startups managed to claim prizes for outright wins. This comes after five nominees in each sector were named back in November.

Two of the Asian winners of the WSA are location-based, namely Indonesia’s Harpoen (winning in the m-tourism and culture category) and Hong Kong’s iButterfly (m-business and commerce). The third winner is Sri Lanka’s Prognosis (in the m-environment and health category).

The three-day grand final was held in Abu Dhabi from February 3rd to 5th and came to its conclusions yesterday. Harpoen was selected, the WSA said, based on uniqueness of concept, execution, potential to reach a global audience, and commercial applicability. Regular readers will recall Harpoen and its gorgeous-looking app from our Startup Arena contest in June last year where the app launched officially.

The WSA judges also liked the location-based app iButterfly, piling similar praise on the augmented reality method of finding local points of interest.

Included among the members of the jury were Rovio COO Harri Koponen, Ralph Simon (widely regarded as the founder of the mobile entertainment industry), Impact Mobile CEO Gary Schwartz, and executives from SAP, Dolby, and the head of global research at Mobile Monday.

Asia’s winners

Harpoen wins outright in the WSA m-tourism and culture category

Harpoen is the first Indonesian nominee to win this prestigious award since its inception in 2010. Just last week, the Indonesian startup rolled out a major update. The update includes a notification feature to let users know if there’s any nearby ‘digital graffiti’ created by their friends in the Harpoen app, and it can even tell you if there’s a pinned location related to a favourite search word. So far, tens of thousands of users have left over 50,000 of those digital tags around the world.

iButterfly is also an interesting app. It lets users acquire discount coupons or content by ‘hunting’ 3D butterflies that are flying around. The app makes use of a 3D engine, augmented reality, location, and motion-sensing technologies. Up to last November, there have been over 10 million digital butterflies caught by 350,000 users. iButterfly also became a hit in Thailand with 100,000 downloads there in the first week. The app has flown its way to Indonesia too with Unilever and top music brands becoming major partners with the Chinese company. The WSA accolade is the newest in iButterfly’s award portfolio after previously winning more than 10 other local and international awards since its inception in 2011.

Prognosis helps medical students to learn and practice their diagnosis skills with over 100 cases inside the app. It has been downloaded over one million times and has made it into the top 50 free medical app on both Android and iOS.

Congratulations to all the WSA Mobile Content winners from across the globe.

iButterfly screenshot 1	iButterfly screenshot 2
Prognosis screenshot 1	Prognosis screenshot 2

Nokia’s Lumia phones weren’t enough to stop Nokia’s most disastrous China numbers ever. (Images: Techinasia.com)

If you thought Nokia’s (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) China figures for 2011 were a disaster, you should see what just emerged today. Nokia’s China nightmare is clearly not yet over as the country’s growing middle-class continues to pick up iPhones and Android smartphones. That’s the picture painted by Nokia’s full-year 2012 report that came out today. It shows Nokia sales revenue down 79 percent in China from the previous year, and phone units plummeted 69 percent to a mere 4.6 million sold in the final quarter of last year.

The Nokia report details how Symbian is dying, causing dramatic drops in its Greater China numbers, and Windows Phone (WP) Lumia shipments are far from filling the gap:

In contrast, North America net sales and volumes were up quite substantively (phone units up 40 percent) mostly thanks to Nokia’s Windows Phone devices. While WP7 launched in China in March of 2012, and then WP8 last month, it appears not to have stopped Nokia from experiencing its worst ever annual report in China.

When we looked at Nokia’s end-of-2011 stats, the volume of phones sold was down 33 percent year-on-year, with 14.7 million units shipped into customers’ hands in 2011 Q4.

Nokia’s WP offerings look great physically, so there’s a chance that Chinese consumers will fall in love with Nokia all over again. But Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone is still not an easy sell. Yesterday, Apple boasted of doubling iPhone sales in China in the past year, and the wide variety of Android smartphone price-points – boosted by lots of homegrown handset brands – is powering Google’s OS to what analysts say is 86 percent of 2012 Q4 smartphone sales in China.

With Nokia’s Lumia lineup up against all this, the Finnish company’s 2013 might be even more grim.

Last fall we told you about Hong Kong-based startup Viss (www.viss.me), which encourages its users to share fashion photos and follow their favorite trends on the Viss network. Since that time, we’ve received an update on how the company and its trendy mobile app are doing. Yesterday the company just pushed new updates for its iOS and Android applications, and this new iteration contains an interesting feature.

The latest version of the app includes a ‘Shop the look’ function, which helps users easily click through on interesting clothes items they seen in photos to product pages where they can buy those items. I’m told that Viss does work with partner merchants in this way, and earns some affiliate payments or commission — which is smart.

The app was recently featured in Apple’s App Store’s fashion section, as well as the What’s Hot section in eight Asian countries. So far the Viss website has about 600,000 unique visitors, and 3.5 million monthly page views.

Since we last looked at it, Viss has also added integration for sharing to WeChat, which is certainly a big plus for users in the Greater China region. As we recently noted, WeChat now boasts 300 million users worldwide.

Viss’s CEO Leo Ku tells me that in 2013 the company hopes to work with more brands and online stores, as well as possibly bring in further rounds of investment to drive expansion of its current operations.

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

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

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

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

(Sources: Kompas #1 and #2)

2011 saw economic turmoil and financial scandals that led to only two Chinese tech companies venturing to IPO in 2012. But 2013 is looking up. This year there’s the distinct possibility of there being nine major Chinese web company IPOs, among which will be the biggest ever that China has produced.

Buoyed by the solid progress of the small class of 2012 (VIPShop and YY), these are the names to look out for in the year ahead. Inspired by a longer list on QQ Tech, we’ve pruned that down to nine realistic contenders. Some of these Chinese internet companies have been more candid than others when it comes to intent or timing, but they are, to varying extents, likely to be hitting the stock tickers in New York or Shanghai in the months to come.

1. Alibaba

Let’s start with the big daddy, Alibaba Group, which runs market-leading e-commerce sites like Tmall and the iconic Taobao. Just yesterday we wrote of how Alibaba, according to rumor, has already hired two underwriters for its public listing in Hong Kong, thought to be coming mid-2013. Alibaba could well raise US$3 billion to $4 billion at a valuation of $35 billion to $40 billion. Yahoo owns a 20 percent stake.

2. 360Buy

It’s difficult to determine which would be the second most valuable company to go public, so the rest of this list is in no particular order. Though I think 360Buy is the next largest. It’s the main rival to the afore-mentioned Tmall in China’s fiercely competitive B2C e-commerce industry. In November of last year 360Buy attracted $400 million in series D funding, which effectively values 360Buy at $7.25 billion.

2013 has long been pegged as 360Buy’s IPO year, so it’s a case of the online store balancing its ability to attract investors despite a lot of losses on the books with the need to raise a realistic amount. Last year’s reports of it raising up to $5 billion by a public listing might prove to be seriously exaggerated.

3. Sogou

Sogou is the search engine and software division of Sohu (NASDAQ:SOHU). It’s third in China’s volatile search market with 7.92 percent share of pageviews (a few percent above Google) at the end of last year.

Sogou is Sohu’s top earner and has been for 10 consecutive quarters. Sohu bought back Alibaba’s 10 percent stake in Sogou last summer. It’s now ripe for being spun off and floated.

4. Qunar

Qunar has been rumored to be working towards an IPO this year for quite some time, and the CEO of this online travel site even said in January of last year that a listing made sense as soon as “the market stabilizes.”

China’s top search engine, Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), invested $306 million in Qunar in the summer of 2011, thereby taking a major stake in the travel store.

5. Vancl

You’ll notice that all but one of the list so far are e-commerce companies. And here’s another. Vancl runs both an own-brand store (like GAP or Uniqlo) online, as well as the V+ open platform mall. Vancl CEO Chen Nian explained recently how its cancelled US IPO at the end of 2011 turned out to be a bullet that he very narrowly dodged. There’s an interesting anecdote about how George Soros helped out.

As with Qunar, the wait for markets to improve is surely over for Vancl.

6. UCWeb

The UCWeb listing is one of the most likely of this bunch. The makers of the hugely popular UC Browser for smartphones, which has over 400 million global users, have made it clear that 2013 is their ticket. CEO Yu Yongfu has already explained that “It would be better for us, branding-wise, to be listed in the US. It would expand our brand name and make us better known.”

7. Cloudary

A particularly likely US venturer is the Shanda (NASDAQ:SNDA) spin-off Cloudary, which is its e-book platform subsidiary. A ringing of the bell at the NYSE sometime in April is rumored to be in the cards. Shanda Cloudary – formerly dubbed Shanda Literature – recently appointed a new chairman in ‘Robert’ Qiu Wenyou, a former investment banker at Merril Lynch.

Cloudary, as we saw with Vancl, is another cancelation casualty of a grim capital market towards the end of 2011.

8. Dianping

Heading back into the realm of e-commerce again, Dianping is often called “China’s Yelp” and is also the country’s third-largest daily deals site. But Dianping has not been outwardly chasing an IPO, so this one is far from certain. Nonetheless, the deals service has matured a lot in recent years and now has a claimed 40 million mobile users, so it’s at the stage where it might be ready to go public.

Dianping raised $60 million in fourth-round funding a few months ago.

9. Xunlei

Another 2011 IPO withdrawal, Xunlei is very keen to list to raise funds for its growing video streaming site. Back then, Xunlei was aiming to raise $200 million.

Trouble is, Xunlei also has a P2P file-sharing network that’s riddled with piracy. On top of all that liability, Xunlei’s main site is over-reliant on advertising, which is an unreliable source of sustenance. Nonetheless, Xunlei is very likely to resuscitate its 2011 IPO plans pretty soon, now that 2013 is looking like a much better climate for Chinese tech stocks.

(Hat-tip to QQ Tech for the partial list of names)

It was just yesterday that Alibaba founder Jack Ma said he’d be retiring from his CEO role at the e-commerce giant in May. And now Bloomberg suggests that Ma’s passing of the baton will not slow Alibaba’s progress towards an IPO. Indeed, the site says today that Alibaba has hired Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs to arrange the public offering, which looks likely to raise $3 billion to $4 billion. For now, this is a rumor.

Alibaba will probably list in Hong Kong, not following the same path of local rivals such as Baidu, which listed in the US. The IPO looks set to be China’s biggest ever tech IPO. Alibaba runs China’s largest C2C shopping site, Taobao, the biggest online mall, Tmall, the most-used e-payment platform, Alipay, and several other products.

The financing that Alibaba raised for the partial Yahoo ownership buyback last September effectively valued the whole Alibaba Group at $40 billion.

Ma will remain as Alibaba Group’s chairman, but his successor as CEO has yet to be named. Yesterday Ma said that, at 48 years of age, he was too old to be running an internet business, and indicated that he was keen to promote someone internally to the top job.

(Source: Bloomberg)

Piling on the clues, the image features a map of Hong Kong in silhouette, and has the Bauhinia flower (as appears on the Hong Kong flag), so those are massive clues that suggest this is related to Hong Kong. In case the tweet gets deleted, I’ll post a screenshot:

We reached out to a Xiaomi representative in Beijing, but the team could not comment on this.

When we talked to Xiaomi founder and serial entrepreneur Lei Jun a few months ago, he did reveal that the phone-maker was looking to expand to Taiwan and Hong Kong in the near future.

Then, at the GMIC Silicon Valley conference, Lei expanded on what he told us to pin-point Hong Kong, Taiwan, and even Singapore as targets for online sales by the end of the year.

The new Xiaomi Mi2, a quad-core Android smartphone that costs only 1,999 RMB (US$318), looks set to replicate the success of the first-ever phone the company made. The device is sold in batches, partly to generate hype as it repeatedly sells out, though also to alleviate the fact that it’s struggling to manufacture the phone in sufficient numbers at a time when giant manufacturers like Samsung dominate the supply-chain of key components from smaller suppliers. If Xiaomi is indeed launching in Hong Kong and/or Taiwan, then it must be confident that it has enough stock to ship to these markets – despite their small size.

Rival Meizu has its own brick-and-mortar store in Hong Kong, which opened at the very end of last year. But Xiaomi is a big believer in e-commerce, and its overseas sales would certainly be done purely online.

Here’s the full teaser image; notice the Hong Kong map in silhouette and the iconic flower:

Click to enlarge.

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

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

1. Informative

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

2. Suggestion of routes and transportation

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

3. Offline maps

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

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

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

Screen shots of Street Directory app

Hong Kong’s 4G landscape will get a bit more inclusive tomorrow with the roll-out of China Mobile’s (NYSE:CHL; HKG:0941) dual-mode 4G network. It adds support for the TD-LTE version of mobile data alongside the FDD LTE that the world’s biggest carrier launched in Hong Kong in April of this year.

This support for both 4G modes by China Mobile will be particularly useful for global business travelers. It’s apt that this is happening – claimed to be the first such dual, high-speed mobile network in Asia – in Hong Kong, which is a regional business hub. It’ll allow people with TD-LTE-equipped 4G phones, or those on dual-mode smartphones, to use China Mobile’s 4G network when in Hong Kong.

But it should be noted that the telco’s rollout is not complete in Hong Kong, and quite a few areas – such as the Tseung Kwan O and Kwun Tong subway lines – won’t be fully online until mid-2013. The company has 4G plans starting at HK$188 (US$24.50) per month for a mere 500MB of data, up to HK$398 ($51.30) for an unlimited-but-sorta-limited package.

China Mobile’s new dual 4G, which it calls “a seamless converged FDD LTE and TD-LTE network,” has been put in place in conjunction with telecoms giants Ericsson and ZTE (HKG:0763; SHE:000063) – that was announced back in July of this year. Other major carriers are prepping such a 4G expansion in the region, with Korea’s SK Telecom and Japan’s Softbank thought to be implementing this as well.

Looking to the future, this added support for TD-LTE will be crucial to Hong Kong once mainland China sees a national rollout of 4G (which will be the TD-LTE band). But that’s some time away. Though there are some major, city-wide 4G trials going on in mainland China, authorities in Beijing are keen to establish 3G more fully first. At present, about 200 million Chinese phone owners are on 3G, but that’s not a great ratio of its billion-plus total phone subscribers.

[Sources: Netease Tech (article in Chinese), and China Mobile HK]

Images courtesy of @hypercasey on Instagram.

Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) third official Hong Kong store opens tomorrow morning and already the covers are off, giving everyone a great view of the three-floor, glass-fronted shop. The newest Apple Store is over in the Causeway Bay area, and takes up a huge corner of the luxury-oriented Hysan Mall.

Hong Kong-based Apple enthusiast and sometime NeonPunch blogger Casey Lau has been in the store already and has been generously sharing out photos to his Instagram and Google+ pages.

The street view shows how the spectacular new Apple Store appears to have no walls, throwing as much natural light inside as can possibly be found on ground level amidst Hong Kong’s cluttered skyline:

The third floor is mainly a Genius Bar, while the second floor seems to be devoted to Macs:

Click to see the 2nd floor close up.

And there’s a customary glass staircase:

There’ll be special T-shirts for some early birds at the Causeway Bay store tomorrow for its grand opening at 9am. Its normal opening time is 11am to 11pm.

Check out our report on Apple’s most recent earnings to see just how crucial the whole China area is to the company.

[Sources: Casey Lau on Instagram and Google+]

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.

Image by Casey Lau.

Nearly three months after Hong Kong got its second official Apple Store, it’s all set for a third, which is due to open quite soon – likely before Christmas – in the Causeway Bay area.

The newest addition to Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) growing retail presence in Asia will be its most dramatic in Hong Kong yet. Located over a couple of floors on one corner of the luxury brand-oriented Hysan Mall, the store is currently partly obscured by Apple’s own teaser posters – “An opening you simply can’t miss” – placed across what seems set to be a multi-floor glass storefront.

Image by Li Chen. Click to enlarge.

In street-level photos from Casey Lau and our own Li Chen, it’s clearly an area with a great deal of passing foot traffic. The first Apple Store in the Chinese city is in the IFC mall, a few miles away also on Hong Kong island.

Apple has not yet confirmed the opening date for its newest shop, but Hong Konger Casey Lau said on Twitter over the weekend that “you’ll be able to shop there before the 25th,” meaning that it’d open in good time for the Christmas and New Year shopping rushes. And, perhaps more importantly, before Chinese New Year.

Asia set to be Apple’s 2nd-biggest region

Apple’s shift to international retail stores has been dramatic in recent years, after perhaps hitting saturation point in the US. But it still leaves a lot of surprise omissions in Asia, such as the lack of an official store in places like Singapore. But, as MacStories recently revealed in some fun number crunching, Apple’s retail ambitions truly went global in 2009, and in 2012 the company looks set to see 83 percent of its store openings in non-US locations:

With the Greater China area – which includes Hong Kong – accounting for 15 percent of Apple revenue in its most recent financials, Asia-Pacific is close to permanently surpassing Europe to become Apple’s second biggest region:

[Sources: 9to5Mac, Casey Lau (@hypercasey), and Chen Li on G+]

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

Tiny Macau is Big on Facebook

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

Japan <3 Twitter

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

Who Loves Weibo?

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

Social Savants

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

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

Travel search engine Wego has announced partnerships today with several online travel accommodation websites – and revealed its newest accommodation booking feature called Holiday Rentals. The new feature allows users to book accommodation alternatives (i.e. not hotels) such as private homes, beach houses, farm stays, villas, houseboats, and even castles.

Ross Veitch, the CEO of Singapore-based Wego, explains:

Working with some of the world’s leading brands, Wego now compares a wealth of incredible accommodation selections; there’s something for everybody, whatever the budget, taste or holidaying style.

Holiday Rentals boasts 400,000 diverse alternative holiday homes at 15,000 locations worldwide. Wego partners with five travel sites for this new feature: Singapore-based TravelMob, Hong Kong-based TheVillaGuide, Australia-based Stayz.com.au, and US-based sites HomeAway.com and FlipKey.com. You can check out the Holiday Rentals feature for yourself here.

This is already the third bit of Wego news this week. Previously, the Wego Indonesia team won the social media-oriented Eye for Travel Awards Asia last week. The travel site also partnered up with Indonesia’s blog advertising network Idblognetwork earlier this month.

Turochas Fuad, the CEO of TravelMob, commented on this partnership with Wego:

We are delighted to work with Wego and be a part of the Holiday Rentals launch. With unique, affordable accommodation options across Asia Pacific – from a traditional boathouse in Halong Bay, Bohemian-style studio in Taipei, to cliff-top villas in Bali, Travelmob caters to a growing group of travellers seeking authentic experiences and local hospitality.

On a somewhat related note, TravelMob revealed today that the other participating investor in its recent $1 million seed funding round was Silicon Valley VC firm Accel Partners. We previously only knew the September round was led by Jungle Ventures. Just an FYI in case anyone was wondering.

A few months back we spoke to the folks at Zendesk about their plans to expand their cloud-based customer service software around the Asia region. And with a fresh $60 million in pocket from Redpoint Ventures, the company is indeed making some good progress.

The company recently announced the launch of Zendesk Voice in Hong Kong and Japan, which lets their clients have a national telephone number that customers can call to get support. This service is powered by Twilio, a cloud communications platform [1].

Meanwhile, a Zendesk representative tells us that it is making solid progress in India in particular this year. Back in January it had 80 Indian customers, but since bringing on a certain Indian customer advocate they have more than doubled that customer base to 168. Most recently Zendesk has been adding about one new customer every day [2].

One notable user of Zendesk in India is the e-commerce giant Homeshop18, which boasts more than 4.5 million end users. That company was searching for a way to lessen the load of call volumes to its call center, and in the end chose Zendesk as one means of doing this.

I’m told that the results have been favorable, with 500 calls daily being diverted to Zendesk, with an average daily cost savings of 1,500 rupees, or about $28.

It will be interesting to see if Zendesk can continue to make progress in big Asia markets. Thus far things look promising, and it will be interesting to see where it branches out to next.

Treecrunch co-founders Boris Boege, Patrick Kosiol and Zane Moi (L to R)

There’s an awful lot of interesting data out there on the internet. More often than not these days, the issue isn’t whether or not useful information exists, it’s how that information can be collected, organized, and presented in a way that’s useful. TreeCrunch is a Hong Kong-based startup that aims to solve this problem, offering customized data mining, organization and presentation solutions to businesses the world over.

Data can come from the companies themselves, from publicly-available posts and comments on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, or from surveys conducted by the TreeCrunch team. Clients then get reports on their data — that is, after they’ve paid subscription fees of between $500 and $2,000 per month, depending on how much data they want analyzed. It’s a pricy service, to be sure, but the product could be extremely valuable, and I don’t doubt there are plenty of companies willing to pay it.

I wanted to learn more about TreeCrunch and the startup experience in Hong Kong, so I got in touch with co-founder Patrick Kosiol, who was kind enough to answer my questions quite thoroughly. What follows are his words and links verbatim, with the exception of my questions (which are in bold).

What inspired you guys to found TreeCrunch?

For that I have to go a little back in history. While still based in China my business partner Boris and I started with Skylab Mobilesystems Ltd. and later we co-founded S4BB Limited which both focus on mobile applications mainly for BlackBerry, but now also on Android and iOS. In total we have launched about 5,000 products to market which are all owned by us (no commissioned work). We have always been product creators that are passionate about bringing new products to life. About a year ago Zane Moi came to us with the business idea of TreeCrunch. He was then Director for North East Asia at Research In Motion (the company behind BlackBerry) and therefore we knew each other well. Based on his idea of analysing open-ended data and visualising those results, we sat together and created a business concept around that. We analysed the market, our competitors and came up with a proper business plan that involved self-funding, raising capital, accessing subsidies and focusing on creating a top-notch product that allows us to monetize as quickly as possible.

We have a long-term vision for TreeCrunch which we are happy to share with the right people who share our passion.

Can you share any user numbers or financial data with us so we can give people a sense of how the company is doing so far?

It terms of financials, we are still at a pre break even stage. We three co-founders have personally funded TreeCrunch initially with a substantial amount that allowed us to have a decent runway. We then entered into the CCMF competition at Cyberport and got awarded the HKD $100,000 grant that came with it. While in CCMF we have built a team and worked hard on our project. We managed to close a pre-seed round with 8 Angel investors which brought an additional HKD $620,000 to the table. After graduating from CCMF we applied for the Cyberport Incubator and got in. This now allows us to access additional HKD $530,000 in subsidies. We are also part of the Microsoft BizSpark program and have recently joined a startup subsidy program with SoftLayer. In terms of financing we are now looking at additional options like a seed investment round as well as other incubators like the ones from Amazon or SAP who we are in talks with.

From a business perspective we have positioned TreeCrunch as a B2B service that allows companies to “visually summarise open-ended data.” Such data can come from Twitter tweets, Facebook comments, NPS data, or open-ended surveys, which allows a very broad application of our service.

In the future, Data will be much easier to visualize. (Sorry).

Any customer cases you could explain for us to give our readers a good “case study” type look into what TreeCrunch does?

An example for an open-ended survey would be the campaign we did with Air Asia’s CEO Tony Fernandes a couple of weeks ago. It was a very successful campaign and gave a lot insight in how Air Asia customers would like the company to improve their service. I wrote a more detailed blog post about that, please feel free to check it out here.

Another example would be our blog post about Forever 21′s fashion trends. Based on comments of their 7.5M Facebook followers, we were able to identify fashion trends. Apparently “Big Sweaters with Tights / Skinny Jeans” are popular these days. The complete article can be found here.

More demos of real data we analysed can be found on our website (hint: there are interesting insights in why smart people like to work at Facebook).

How has it been running a startup in HK? What do you like/dislike about it as an environment for startups?

Hong Kong is a great place for startups and for life. Besides the high costs for office space, wages are somewhat affordable, the infrastructure is incredibly good, and the low amount of bureaucracy required paired with our experience of running businesses in Hong Kong allows TreeCruch to grow quickly. Compared to Singapore there is not much government-driven startup funding in Hong Kong as the local government has always believed in the “Laissez-faire” principle. In the beginning that makes it harder for local startups to get access to funding, but in the long run I personally believe it pays off, because the startups that make it, are sustainable businesses that are profitable and make a difference in the world.

Hong Kong has always been a place of entrepreneurship; it is practically founded on that. So the spirit of starting business and making it successful is very strong here. While there is a bit of a contradiction with Chinese traditions and principles that prefer security over risk, we believe the opportunity to bring a new great company to live that solves real people’s problems, is worth investing in. Investing not just money, but effort, passion and devotion.

There is a fairly small startup community in Hong Kong which people might argue is too small. I believe the fact that it is small creates opportunities to get involved and share experiences and help each other. The best place to start is StartupsHK.com which hosts regular events where entrepreneurs, fresh and established ones, people who are interested in starting their own startup as well as investors come together. Cyberport and the Hong Kong Science are the most established ‘official’ startup support institutions that have their own incubation, funding and mentorship programs. Surprisingly, there are more and more incubators popping up in Hong Kong these days; probably one a month. Some offer financial support, others office space, others mentorship, and so on.

Like I said, it is a great place for a startup.

Any advice for others running startups in Asia or in Hong Kong specifically?

While starting a startup in Asia and especially in Hong Kong is very much related to getting profitable as quickly possible (compared to the way it works in Silicon Valley), I believe starting your own startup just for the reason of making a lot of money quickly won’t work. Running a startup at the beginning means sacrifice; it is way easier to earn a lot of money in Hong Kong in banking. At TreeCrunch we get up every morning because we know we can change the world, we are driven by a passion that allows us go beyond borders and explore new ways of creating a great product.

One piece of advice: Fail quickly. Failure is good because it teaches you what you did wrong and how you can get better at what you’re doing. You must be open to learn from your mistakes. The best mistake is the one you only do once.

The doyen of daily deals, Groupon (NASDAQ:GRPN), opened a new brick-and-mortar store in Hong Kong earlier today. It comes just over four months after Groupon opened its first-ever such “concept store” in Singapore.

The Hong Kong shop, at Soundwill Plaza in the Causeway Bay area, is the same kind of deal, allowing people to pick up pick up certain kinds of products, test out everything that’s on display, and get any kind of customer support. The CEO of Groupon HK, Danny Yeung (pictured right), explained in today’s announcement:

Groupon Hong Kong’s CEO, Danny Yeung. Click to enlarge.

We’ve found many customers prefer picking up their Groupon products as opposed to delivery in Hong Kong, and as a part of our commitment to our customers and the customer experience, the Groupon Concept Store is now launched.

The new Causeway Bay store, which fills out 4,000 square feet of floor space, is opposite Times Square and is open 10am to 9pm daily. It comes a full year after Groupon’s much-deflated IPO; after debuting over its $20-per-share expectation, it’s currently at a mere $2.97 in Friday morning trading.

The store’s opening was hailed with a green-sweatered flash mob dancing on the streets – today and throughout the week. I like to imagine an alcoholic walking past one of these and thinking, “It’s St Patrick’s Day already? Sweet!” Here’s the flash mob video:

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the busy and very social world of flirtatious chat apps, it’s difficult to stand out. Hong Kong-based Hornet is doing so by not only being a gay app, but also by campaigning vocally on gay issues. Another distinctive aspect of the app is that it’s focusing on mainland China, despite Chinese culture’s still largely intolerant attitude towards homosexuality. Nonetheless, with Hornet supporting the Chinese language in the app, the startup’s CMO, Sean Howell, tells us that “22 percent of our global users are based in mainland China.” So that’s not including the more open Hong Kong or Taiwan.

That’s a much greater ratio than I would have imagined for mainland China. Even Sean seems surprised by it:

We consider this a big number already – and we expect global growth, as well as massive users in China, both based on changing demographics and smartphone growth.

Sean reckons that Hornet’s success in China is partly societal, as “gay culture is understated and a private affair” in mainland China, and so an app – and meeting folks online – is a convenient way to keep things under wraps.

Hornet passed 150,000 users back in July of this year, when it also raised $500,000 through AngelList to help it take on Grindr and other such gay pick-up apps. It also has one new local challenger in the form of the similar location-based chat app Blued.

To support its growth in China, the startup has ensured that the Android version of Hornet app is available via third-party app stores like AppChina. Of course, there’s an iOS app too.

Hornet has other mainland Chinese connections, with some of its developers, we’re told, living in Beijing and Chengdu.

There are some things the app is avoiding, Sean explains, such as integrating with Sina Weibo – or indeed with any social network. He explains:

We do not support syncing with any other social networks, in part because we surveyed users and they actually find even seeing buttons for this makes them nervous. They don’t want work colleagues or grandmothers being synced – [that] is their primary concern.

Get the app for iOS and Android from the Hornet homepage.

If you can build a business and pitch it, then give Nest Ideas a shot. The Hong Kong incubator hosts a pitch day on the last Saturday of every month. If you’d like to participate, send your application to Nest Ideas and then you’ll get to pitch if you receive the green light. Successful startups will be offered HK$500,000 (US$64,515) coupled with mentorship, office space, and legal and accounting support.

Nest Ideas was founded by Simon Squibb about two years ago. He is passionate about entrepreneurship and has had a couple of startups in the past. The first in Hong Kong, he said, was a creative agency called Fluid, founded in 2000. Squibb claims that Fluid is now one of the Top 5 creative agencies in Hong Kong, doing work for high profile brands like The Wall Street Journal and Starbucks.

CEO and founder at Nest Incubator, Simon Squibb

He feels that there’s a big gap in Hong Kong whereby few organizations are supporting startups from an entrepreneur’s perspective. He explains:

Entrepreneurs need a lot more than just office space to make a company work. Advice and mentorship from entrepreneurs that have been there and done it, for example. Contacts and support generally are as important, if not more important, than just the cash invested by funds like us.

So far, Nest Ideas has nested nine startups. They are mainly in the lifestyle- and consumer-focused business with elements of using online as a channel to promote and sell. They include Porter House, an e-commerce service for high quality meat); CGFX, an event for comics, games, and films; and Millionaire Asia, an invitation-only club for wealthy business folks.

Squibb claims that one of the companies they’ve backed, Foodie, was recently valued at HK$25,000,000 (US$3.26 million). The startup is an online food and recipe directory which Nest Ideas invested HK$1,000,000 (US$129,031) in 18 months ago. He concludes:

I personally enjoy helping entrepreneurs. I am one. So I know what is involved and the struggles and opportunities ahead. I talk the language needed to get entrepreneurs to listen and scale quickly.

Although Chinese consumers are hot for the nation’s e-commerce sites – with one in seven urbanites shopping online each month – it can be a pain actually picking up your parcels. When the courier companies are working, you’re at the office. And although the courier companies will deliver stuff to your office, you’ll then have to carry it all the way home. And so two of China’s top online malls for brands, Alibaba’s Tmall, and Tencent’s QQ Buy, are tapping some convenience store chains to allow package pick-ups.

The Tmall tie-up launches today and initially covers just nine brick-and-mortar retail chains across five cities: Shanghai, Beijing, Jiaxing, Hangzhou, and Wuhan. But that amounts to 580 individual stores (like C-Store, pictured) as potential collection points. It’ll allow city dwellers to collect their online purchases at their convenience, 24 hours a day. The ideal picture is that your neighborhood store will support the scheme, so you can pick up your package at the same time you stock up on milk.

The scheme will soon be expanded to southern China’s Guangdong province so that there’ll be a total of 1,300 supporting stores across five provinces by next month – just in time for China’s hottest online sales day on ‘singles day’ – November 11th.

Tencent’s (HKG:0700) QQ Buy, a similar online mall to Tmall, started the same thing last month – but only in Hong Kong. It was a way for China’s biggest web company to take its online shopping platform into a new market, and a range of retail partnerships in Hong Kong mean that 1,200 stores are covered in just that once city.

[Source: Sohu IT - article in Chinese]

The deal will mean that Mobage mobile apps for iOS and Android will be made available via the games icon at the top of Yahoo Kimo’s mobile portal (see the games page, pictured below). The Mobage titles that are currently available in traditional Chinese include popular titles like Ninja Royale and Cygames Inc’s Rage of Bahamut.

Interestingly, Yahoo Hong Kong’s mobile site will also feature a mobile games option from which users can then arrive at this new Yahoo Kimo games section. So DeNA is actually reaching more than just Taiwan here. Yahoo Kimo’s managing director Frank Chen noted in the announcement:

With the combination of internationally popular games brought from DeNA and featured content compiled by Yahoo!Kimo editors, we’ll bring our users the best mobile social gaming experience.

As we have mentioned before, DeNA has been quite active in mainland China over the past year, with similar Mobage partnerships with companies like Renren, Kaixin001, and lots more besides.

Just two weeks ago, the wildly popular Rage of Bahamut was launched on Mobage China as well.

There are so many types of different photo sharing apps out there these days. There are photo apps for foodies, photo apps for your babies, photo apps to share feelings, and the list goes on. One young new startup based out of Hong kong is hoping that its fashion photo app can hit the big time on your mobile device.

Viss (www.viss.me) is an application that lets you share photos of your favorite fashions, and follow your favorite trend-setter also on the Viss network. Once you sign up you’re presented with a suggested user list, but you can also browse and discover other people’s fashions by looking at the public stream, or by filtering according to hats, shoes, dresses and more. There’s also a search feature in case you’re looking for something specific.

I was a little skeptical about Viss at first, since fashion photos tend to be best viewed on larger screens for full impact, as opposed to on a tiny mobile device where it could be difficult to see as much detail as you’d like. Viss’s CEO Leo Ku pointed out to me that for people who find trends they like in fashion magazines, it can be cumbersome to bring that bulky magazine into a store. So fashion discovery on mobile has this unexpected advantage.

I understand that a number of fashion bloggers have enthusiastically adopted Viss, and from the looks of the public stream of content, the quality of photos is pretty good. I expected to be overwhelmed by bathroom mirror duck faces, but thankfully that’s not the case.

The app has a very slick design, and it lets you identify different articles of clothing by tagging them. You can select categories like shoes, hats, etc; and you can also tag items with their brand name.

Viss is initially available in English, Chinese, and Korean, with Japanese soon on the way. Leo notes that being an Asia-based startup, and targeting Asian markets to start should serve as an advantage for Viss. The region is home to some of the world’s top fashion capitals, and the world closely watches fashion trends that emerge from Asia.

As a blogger, my fashion sense doesn’t go much further than my lucky drawers, so I don’t think I’ll be especially active on Viss. But for the more fashion conscious among our readers, Viss is definitely an app that you’ll want to check out. You can get it for iOS and Android.

Potential designers can create profiles and upload designs, although that’s no guarantee they’ll appear on the site because, like Kickstarter, ZaoZao is curated so only the best submissions make it online. Designs that do make it online are there for a limited time, and available only in limited quantities. Like Kickstarter, it’s all-or-nothing, so designers aren’t stuck trying to produce an item they only got one preorder for.

Shoppers can easily browse for items by category, popularity, designer, and more, and project pages are clearly laid out with a few photos (some of the items would definitely benefit from more photos, though) along with a description and all the relevant details: how much time and how many items are left to preorder, what the item costs, how close it is to its goal so far, etc. Most of what’s on the site right now is a bit pricey, at least by my humble standards, but it’s probably not bad at all for very limited edition pieces. Prices are listed in USD, and ZaoZao has taken a little trick from restaurant-menu psychology by not including any dollar signs anywhere on the site.

The ordering process is pretty smooth if you’re lucky, but I ran into a few bugs in my day-one experience with the site. When I logged in via Facebook, I had no issues at all, but I ran into some ordering issues after creating a basic account, so I’d recommend interested users log in with Facebook until the folks at ZaoZao work out this issue. It’s also a little unclear sometimes whether the price displayed is the per-item price or the project’s goal (i.e., the total amount it needs to raise to put the item of clothing or jewelry into production).

Hopefully ZaoZao can work out these kinks quickly, but neither of them would stop me from recommending the site to Asia-based fashion designers or to fashion-interested shoppers looking for some cool unique clothing and jewelry.

Apple Store Hong Kong @ Festival Walk

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has confirmed that its second official store in Hong Kong will open on September 29th, which is a Saturday. It comes exactly a year and five days after the opening of Hong Kong’s first.

The new Apple Store is located in the Festival Walk mall, Kowloon district, across the harbor from the other and flashier store at the iconic IFC mall. As spotted by 9to5Mac, Apple has a page up (here) that confirms the date and helps locals locate it.

The opening comes during a public holiday in both Hong Kong and China, so the new Festival Walk store should be packed – unless everyone going to it uses Apple’s new maps app for directions and ends up swimming in the harbor [1].

The new store will also be great news for the scalpers who are said to be buying up 70 percent of all new iPhone 5 models sold in Hong Kong so as to resell them for a juicy profit to keen early-adopters in mainland China.

[Source: 9to5Mac]

Alibaba-owned Taobao.com, China’s largest C2C online marketplace, began expanding to Hong Kong and Taiwan early this year, Tech in Asia learned in a press meeting with Hong Kong and Taiwan media on Monday. It has been hush-hush as the overseas teams in Taiwan and Hong Kong have been laying the foundations over the past months, which include logistics, payment, and customer service.

While the preparation work is still ongoing, Taobao Hong Kong and Taiwan have racked up impressive early numbers. According to Daphne Lee, director of overseas business, Taobao has attracted 1.2 million registered users in Hong Kong and 0.5 million users in Taiwan so far.

To make sense of Taobao Hong Kong’s figure, 1.2 million is about a quarter of Hong Kong’s internet users, which I think is quite impressive. Taiwan requires more work as users face logistic problems because delivering goods from China to Taiwan isn’t as simple. Plus, Taiwanese users still have doubts about whether the goods will actually arrive.

Many people also still have the impression that Alipay can only accept payment from local China banks, which of course would limit Taobao’s overseas business opportunities. But it was just earlier this year that Alipay also enabled Mastercard and VISA, which is a big boost for international users.

Taobao’s move to Hong Kong and Taiwan is pretty straightforward. Besides the close geographic proximity, the populations of Hong Kong and Taiwan are also largely made up of ethnic Chinese, which lowers the communication barrier.

Taobao’s expansion has also brought about some positive changes for merchants as well. Daphne said that CatWorld, a Taiwan-based merchant, had only a moderate income when it was on Yahoo Kimo online auction. But the numbers shot up after it joined Taobao, generating over 6 million RMB (about $1 million) in monthly sales.

Honestly speaking, the combined population of about 28 million in Hong Kong and Taiwan is just slightly above Beijing’s population. It’s a small figure. And I’m certainly not saying that the Hong Kong and Taiwan markets aren’t important — they are, because I believe the regions have bigger-than-average spenders when compared to the mainland. The move to Taiwan and Hong Kong also gives the Taobao team a taste of overseas expansion, and I’m pretty sure they won’t just stop at Greater China. Daphne revealed that Singapore and Malaysia are seeing quite a bit of interest in Taobao, too. I would even say that Taobao in English isn’t too far away.

But it won’t come until Greater China is conquered, and knowing how brilliant Jack Ma is, I would bet on the Alibaba Group winning in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

The recent 11-year jail term handed down to a merchant on Taobao, China’s biggest consumer-to-consumer online marketplace, has raised the alarm in the country among amateur shopkeepers about being caught in the act of a widespread activity: “grey importing.” Essentially: smuggling. Usually done by sourcing goods from overseas – especially Hong Kong with its lack of a sales tax – where prices are lower than under China’s hefty import taxes, it’s an open secret that this illegal practice is one of the secrets behind the success of much of China’s C2C and B2C e-commerce industry.

The imprisoned e-tailer, identified only as Ms Li (pictured right), is an air stewardess who, like many people in the country, is also an amateur shopkeeper on Alibaba-owned Taobao. She sold cosmetics, making use of her job to buy up – and smuggle in – hundreds of thousands of dollars in pricey make-up from South Korea. In addition to the jail term, she was fined 500,000 RMB (US$79,000). Her boyfriend was identified as an accomplice and will spend the next five years in jail. The courts found the duo guilty of dodging sales taxes to the tune of 1.13 million yuan ($178,000). Another man, a Mr. Zhu, was found to have assisted the pair by getting them further staff discounts at a Samsung-run duty free shop in Korea (he’s a Samsung China employee), and he’s facing seven years in the slammer [1].

Smuggling luxury

Sure, this kind of smuggling happens a lot in offline retailing too. The most notorious act of grey importing is seen with the human gadget mules who carry sacks full of iPhones and iPads over the walkable border from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, thereby evading China’s import taxes and allowing the smugglers to make a profit whilst still selling the gadgets for a tad less than the official price in mainland China. Or, when it comes to electronics especially, it’s all about getting access to the hottest gadgets as quickly as possible – rather than waiting the inevitable few months for the iPhone to get its local regulatory approval to be sold.

Chinese social media users reacted with shock to the hefty sentence. Some bemoaned the excessive import taxes in China that make luxury items as much as 30 percent cheaper in other countries. That tax rate might be cut soon for 730 selected items, but it remains to be seen if the move can stop the hemorrhaging of import tax revenue in China to a combination of monied Chinese buying luxury goods overseas, and grey importers smuggling in every item under the sun.

But for now, the courts have clearly set an example with the Ms Li case, and other online merchants must be worried about how their own grey importing might be detected, possibly landing them in prison too. Hopefully it might also cause a rethink of the sales tax.

As for the scale of the problem, Professor Lu Benfu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences has been telling local media this week that the smuggling problem amounts to an annual trade volume of RMB 10 billion ($1.58 billion). But with China’s B2C e-commerce market – to say nothing of the C2C sector – worth as much as 81.8 billion RMB (or $12.9 billion) this year, that could well be a conservative stat to apply to China’s addiction to smuggling luxury items.

[Image of Ms Li: 17utt; main image: Flickr user tweedlebopper]

The firm says that on average a typical viewer watches 159 videos in June. But how does this global average compared to Asian nations? Among the countries measured, Japan had the highest rate of 242 videos per viewer. It was followed by Hong Kong which had a rate of 180 videos per user, and Singapore which had a rate of 157 videos per user in June (see chart below).

I should note that Korea was not included in comScore’s report. But given that the nation has the world’s fastest broadband speeds by far, I would not be surprised to see users there watching even more videos than Japan.

Disappointingly, ComScore’s data does not account for mobile devices (like many of their reports), so you can imagine that in countries with high mobile penetration (like Japan) that video is increasingly enjoyed by many on their handsets as well. And while these figures are hardly definitive, it is a good indication of how online video is being adopted in the region.

[Download image version of this chart]

Akamai recently released its Q1 2012 State of the Internet report, showing key insights about internet development around the world. Looking at the big picture, there’s good news with the average global connection speed, 2.6 Mbps, up 14 percent in the first quarter of 2012 over the previous quarter. Akamai Leading the way with a blazing average speed of 15.7 Mbps was South Korea, with a significant lead over Japan which notched an average speed of 10.9 Mbps. This was despite dropping 1.5 percent over the previous quarter. Hong Kong rounded out the top three with 9.3 Mbps. All three Asian regions held the same ‘podium’ positions since Akamai’s last report [1]. The rest of the top ten were European nations, with Netherlands and Latvia rounding out the top five, with 8.8 Mbps each. The United States finished 12th at an average speed of 6.7 Mbps. For a general idea of how internet connection speeds are progressing by country, I’ve mapped Akamai’s quarterly connection speeds for various countries around the world going back to 2007. Note that Q1 2012 is not included in this map, but it does give you a pretty good idea of the trends in each country over the years. As you can see, the Asia mega-markets of India and China still have a long way to go, although the latter is making progress.

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1. And since we last whipped up one of these maps.  ↩

]]> http://www.techinasia.com/akamai-state-of-the-internet-q1-2012-map/feed/ 0 http://placehold.it/350x150 http://www.techinasia.com/china-top-startup-cities-august-2012/ http://www.techinasia.com/china-top-startup-cities-august-2012/#comments Mon, 13 Aug 2012 08:45:01 +0000 Steven Millward http://www.techinasia.com/?p=87546 Read more »]]> One of my first posts at the beginning of 2012 was about where China’s startups are based. Today, looking at the same stats source, I see quite a big shift away from the capital, Beijing, in just the past eight months. Beijing has gone from hosting 49.7 percent of all the documented startups in the country to the current rate of 43.9 percent (see the chart below). Not a sea change, admittedly. But coupled with no growth in the Shanghai startup arena, it points to more local entrepreneurs heading back to the provinces, out to smaller cities and even their hometowns, and starting tech businesses there instead.

The stats come from looking at the excellent startup database, 17startup.com. It now lists 5,182 startup companies in the country. So where was the growth? Guangdong province, nestled next to Hong Kong down in southern China, saw 1 percent growth in the number of startups based there. But the shift away from Beijing seems to have been spread across the whole country, with the provinces of Fujian, Hubei, and Hunan now emerging as areas with more entrepreneurial drive than ever before. The 93 listed startups in Fujian, on the southeast coast, is a sign of healthy growth:

Of course, the startups are best judged by quality, not numbers in a certain area, so we’ll have to wait and see if Fujian or some other inland areas can prove to be innovative and/or profitable on the web.

In the past couple of years, Sichuan province (still in fifth place) has gone from being renowned for its food to being known, in tech circles, for an impressive array of startups. That’s the kind of diversification backed up by quality that China’s poorer provinces need to show. To celebrate this shift away from the capital, this week I’ll be looking at a few startups from Fujian and some other inland provinces. Stay tuned!

[UPDATED: Swapped out a tastier - and more colourful - pie]

]]> http://www.techinasia.com/china-top-startup-cities-august-2012/feed/ 2 http://placehold.it/350x150 http://www.techinasia.com/hong-kong-startups-bootcamp/ http://www.techinasia.com/hong-kong-startups-bootcamp/#comments Thu, 09 Aug 2012 02:08:34 +0000 Willis Wee http://www.techinasia.com/?p=87100 Read more »]]>

Hong Kong, like Singapore, is a city that is a financial hub for many international businesses, but still a small market. Similar to Singapore, it is a place with a growing number of startups and in fact we have covered some of them here.

In an email exchange, Paul Orlando, who runs Startup Bootcamp in Hong Kong tells me that the current Hong Kong startup scene reminds him of New York in 2008. He describes the current Hong Kong tech ecosystem:

People are coming together, there are more events, people are very helpful to others in the tech community. But there is also a lot of work to be done to develop that community.

The problem in Hong Kong, according to Orlando, is that the city has too few students studying computer science and too few people are willing to work in a startup. That problem sounds like one that bothering Singapore-based startups too, although things are changing. And as a startup Orlando doesn’t believe that entrepreneurs should just leave things as is. Instead, he urges startups to be more creative in their pursuit of talent, convincing smart people that working in startup is a more rewarding journey — in terms of money or experience (or both).

Apparently, startups in Hong Kong are growing. In fact, reports that the startup scene in Hong Kong is booming/escalating have appeared on CNNGO and Forbes over the last two years. But have things really improved? Orlando says that Hong Kong is losing its edge with minimal tech entrepreneurship happening in the country. He elaborated:

This [lack of tech entrepreneurship] is detrimental to the city’s long-term competitiveness. An antidote to all of this in Hong Kong is currently grassroots entrepreneurship. There is no other bootcamp or accelerator program operating in Hong Kong — even activities by the government do not fit this role.

So Orlando sets out to work on his startup bootcamp in hopes of catalyzing the tech ecosystem in Hong Kong. The bootcamp is a three-month program that aims to help entrepreneurs shape their products and be ready for the market. The course will be based on the lean startup concepts and Orlando’s experience as an entrepreneur back in New York City. The program is open for local and international entrepreneurs. In the first Hong Kong bootcamp, Orlando said that he was surprised to see startups from California who travelled all the way overseas to take part in his program.

We are firm believers in building an ecosystem. But a not-so-mature ecosystem doesn’t necessarily equate to failure. An entrepreneur finds his/her way through regardless of how bad the situation is.

]]> http://www.techinasia.com/hong-kong-startups-bootcamp/feed/ 0 http://placehold.it/350x150 http://www.techinasia.com/treecrunch-data-analytics-hong-kong/ http://www.techinasia.com/treecrunch-data-analytics-hong-kong/#comments Mon, 30 Jul 2012 08:22:45 +0000 Willis Wee http://www.techinasia.com/?p=85827 Read more »]]>

Founded in October 2011, TreeCrunch is a Hong Kong-based data analytics company. It claims to be able to take virtually any unstructured or loosely connected data, analyze and visualize it in close to real-time. The startup also provides key themes and trends based on the data analyzed.

The idea is simple and straightforward. But not many data analytics companies can claim to be able to turn data into meaningful and actionable steps. Making data pretty yes; but actionable crunched data is the keyword here. You can check out TreeCrunch’s sample work here and here. Zane Moi, the co-founder of TreeCrunch, has long seen a missing gap (going back to his time at previous corporations) between data visualization and actionable steps. He explained to us how the idea started:

At RIM, I was spending US$30-40k per quarter for sentiment monitoring services, which told me that a certain percentage of people kind of liked the BlackBerry brand, a certain percentage of people didn’t like it, and this percentage of people were bigger or smaller than the percentage from other brands. I never received, though, any real insight as to why people liked or didn’t like the brand.

I thought, this isn’t such a difficult of technology-oriented problem to solve, and if other firms are paying US$30-40k per quarter for analysis that isn’t all that useful, I think I could sell something as an alternative to it at a similar price; something that is useful.

So the idea gave birth to a startup, and the founding team was completed when Patrick Kosiol and Boris Boege came on board as co-founders. Both Patrick and Boris are experienced entrepreneurs. TreeCrunch was self-funded with the three co-founders pooling $200,000 from their own pockets. Subsequently, the startup went on to receive $12,000 from Hong Kong’s Cyberport Creative Microfund and in May and concluded a small funding round of about $80,000 from investors from Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, the UK, and the US.

“For us, we’re still traveling down the familiar path of building startups by finding product market fit,” said Zane.

]]> http://www.techinasia.com/treecrunch-data-analytics-hong-kong/feed/ 0 http://placehold.it/350x150 http://www.techinasia.com/chope-1-million-go-hong-kong/ http://www.techinasia.com/chope-1-million-go-hong-kong/#comments Thu, 26 Jul 2012 02:58:17 +0000 Willis Wee http://www.techinasia.com/?p=85340 Read more »]]>

Chope, the Singapore-based online restaurant reservation startup, has served its one-millionth diner this week. Just to give you a little perspective, that’s about one-fifth of the country’s population.

The startup was founded in June of last year and to date has more than 150 restaurants using its platform to manage reservations requests. The vast majority of the restaurants, for now, are from Singapore.

Chope has also recently partnered with Samsung to preload its Android app onto all Samsung Galaxy S3 handsets in Singapore and is hoping to serve two million diners by the end of this year. The startup also recently expanded to Hong Kong with six restaurants. It’s good to hear about a Singapore-based startup expanding!

]]> http://www.techinasia.com/chope-1-million-go-hong-kong/feed/ 6 http://placehold.it/350x150 http://www.techinasia.com/asia-one-billion-internet-users/ http://www.techinasia.com/asia-one-billion-internet-users/#comments Tue, 10 Jul 2012 14:00:37 +0000 Steven Millward http://www.techinasia.com/?p=83335 Read more »]]>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or first inkling that something was up was this tweet:

Today, Sina.com blocks Hong Kong users sharing photos on Weibo. Any posts containing photos will be shown to yourself only!

— George Chen (@george_chen) July 2, 2012

We’re still working to confirm whether or not that’s true, but it got us interested enough to try a search for “Hong Kong,” and that’s when things got really strange.

Usually, search terms are either fully permitted or fully blocked, meaning that when you search for something, you either get all the results or nothing at all. Oddly, though, searching for Hong Kong returns a full first page with just three results, and although it indicates there are additional pages of results, as soon as you click onto the next page, you get a “no results found” error, as indicated in the screenshots below.

This is page 1 of the search results...

...and this is the second page, note the 'no results' error message at the top of the page.

This appears to be yet another way to censor things without them appearing to be censored at first glance. A user who searches for Hong Kong just to see if it’s blocked will find that it isn’t. But anyone who wants to read beyond the first page is going to quickly discover they can’t actually see anything that’s being said about Hong Kong. Similarly, if it is true that Hong Kong-based users can’t currently share pictures with anyone other than themselves, this allows those users to feel like they’re sharing (they can still upload the pictures, and see them in their feed) without actually letting them share.

Why Sina is doing this is a mystery, as like I said, surely it has absolutely nothing to do with the mass protests yesterday or the general anger surrounding Hu Jintao’s visit and the subsequent leadership handover ceremony conducted in a language many Hong Kongers don’t speak. The timing, I’m sure, is just a coincidence!

(For those of you immune to internet sarcasm: I’m joking. This episode of weibo censorship is quite obviously directly related to yesterday’s protests in Hong Kong).

There’s good news for BlackBerry users as the voice messaging app TalkBox has just launched its Blackberry beta version for public use.

TalkBox is a cross-platform messenger app that allows users to send messages via voice rather than the usual texting. This move would definitely give operators another headache as TalkBox offers another voice communication option without actually calling the person through operator’s normal channel.

The Blackberry version is now available for free here, with built-in push notification. This makes chatting with TalkBox as convenient as it is with the other messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Bubbly, and of course Blackberry Messenger itself. You can also have up to nine people talking simultaneously using its group chat feature. In this competitive market, Korea’s KakaoTalk launched on Windows Phone earlier today.

It is easy to use TalkBox Blackberry as it is also compatible with Twitter and Facebook. Be mindful though that you need at least OS 5.0 to be able to use this app.

Though Blackberry is deemed to be a declining mobile OS by some experts [1], it still boasts a huge user base of 77 million users worldwide [2], and is strong in some areas such as Indonesia. So I think this is a good move by TalkBox. But it remains to be seen whether Blackberry users will migrate directly to TalkBox just because of this voice messaging feature. Here are two more screenshots of the new app in action:

The founders of ZAOZAO, Ling Cai (L) and Vicky Wu (R)

Lots of times, we go looking for cool startups, but every now and then, one falls right into our laps. That’s the case with ZaoZao, an interesting service that I stumbled upon after one of its founders retweeted something I said on Twitter. Curiosity led me to click some links, and I came across the company’s official site and this cool blog about the founders’ experiences running a startup in Hong Kong. It all looked very cool, but I wanted to know more, so I got in touch with co-founder Vicky Wu, who gave me the lowdown on ZaoZao’s plans for world domination promoting indie fashion design in Asia.

Can you give us an overview of what ZaoZao is all about?

ZAOZAO [yes, the founders prefer all caps for the name!] is a web-based platform that allows designers to post projects and garner funds for production through crowd-funding. “Funders,” who are effectively shoppers, can discover cool, unique designs and fund them by placing pre-orders on ZAOZAO within a limited time. If target funds (pre-orders) are achieved within that time-frame, then ideas become reality. If not, then they won’t get produced, and those projects get dropped from the site.

So, if I were to call this ‘a Kickstarter for fashion in Asia,’ would that be inaccurate?

If we are going to use startup analogies, the best way to describe ZAOZAO is probably Kickstarter meets Fab meets Moda Operandi.

What kind of market is there for this sort of service?

There is an untapped market out here in Asia, particularly Hong Kong, Singapore, and other parts of Southeast Asia. Many young, talented designers see their work and dreams disappear overnight because they do not have the means to sustain a business. The way our model is structured allows designers to manage the creative process all the way through production, while minimizing excess inventory and warehouse costs. In this manner, ZAOZAO provides a space for designers to experiment creatively with mitigated risk.

So what led you to create ZaoZao?

While Ling and I are equally passionate about supporting designers and obviously share a mutual love for unique fashion, we also possess complementary skill sets to make this startup work. Ling studied fashion at NYU and counts Oscar de la Renta, Lanvin, Intermix, and Harper’s Bazaar in New York amongst her work experiences. Prior to ZAOZAO, she did a stint at Gucci in Hong Kong. My first introduction to the fashion world was through modeling, as a teenager in New York and then in Boston. Although I studied neuroscience during college, I spent most of my time starting and running the fashion show called Identities at Harvard. Post-graduation, I helped set up hedge fund businesses with Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong (great training) which I intend to parlay into the set up of this fashion business (infinitely more sexy). The culmination of these experiences lent naturally to ZAOZAO as a next step for both of us, which brings us to where we are today.

What has it been like running a startup in Hong Kong?

So far it has been pretty nuts and you can read about our travails and triumphs on our blog. It started with me being homeless, crashing on friends’ couches while using AirBNB to offset rent so I could save up to survive on $0 salary. I figured it was totally doable in Hong Kong because if I ran out of friends, there was always 24-hr McDonald’s or Tsui Wah! Then, shortly after we both quit our jobs, Ling found out that a family member had been diagnosed with leukemia, with six months left to live. Without question in either of our minds, Ling hopped on the next flight to Singapore to effectively become a full-time caregiver. Fortunately, Ling was a compatible bone marrow donor, which ultimately saved her loved one’s life. While undergoing the transplant, she would send me these grotesque photos of tubes protruding out of her neck (tricking me with subject lines like “check out my new accessories! LOL”) yet still generate amazing new ideas for our business.

Working from different countries the first few months was not the initial plan but we adapted to the situation – emailing, Skyping, whatsapping – to keep each other in the loop. Since being reunited, we have continued to find ourselves in interesting predicaments. Once, during a designer scouting trip, we got horribly lost in an abandoned warehouse containing what resembled medieval torture devices and potentially unhealthy levels of asbestos. Often in business meetings we end up leveraging our extensive knowledge of hand gestures and a smattering of Cantonese and Mandarin (sometimes Korean or Hokkien) in addition to English vocabulary to convey our thoughts. When language is not an issue, bullshit sometimes is. People who don’t know us well say ridiculous things expecting us to eat everything up, only to be stunned silly when we call them out. In the startup world, you don’t know what to expect on a daily basis, and passion for these challenges in the unknown are what we wake up for (if we sleep at all) every morning.

Where did the name Zao Zao come from?

ZAO is a play on the words 早, 找, and 造, which mean “early,” “discover,” and “make” in Mandarin Chinese. Through early discovery and subsequent production, ZAOZAO transforms emerging designers’ ideas into reality.

On a related note, if the target for this service is Asia, I’m assuming you’ll also have at least a Chinese version of your website as well at some point?

Correct, traditional and then simplified Chinese is the plan.

When will the site launch? Any plans for mobile apps?

ZAOZAO will launch in July. Mobile app plans TBD.

What advice would you offer to anyone else considering doing a startup in Hong Kong?

“[Be] the opposite of moderate, immaculately polished with the spirit of a hustler and the swagger of a college kid.”

Shareholders in Alibaba.com (HKG:1688), the business trading platform belonging to Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, have approved the proposal privatization put forward by the company back in February.

An Alibaba statement issued after this afternoon’s extraordinary general meeting explains:

Approximately 95 percent of the shares held by independent shareholders voting in person or by proxy were voted in favor of the privatization and a majority of the shareholders voting in person or by proxy on a headcount basis also voted in favor of the privatization.

Maggie Wu, CFO and executive director of Alibaba.com, pictured at the shareholders meeting and vote this afternoon. (Click to enlarge)

And so Alibaba.com’s shareholders will receive the agreed upon cancellation price of HK$13.50 per share in cash. After that nearly unanimous approval, the next step will be getting the approval of the Grand Court of the Cayman Islands – yay for tax havens, huh – before, the company hopes, becoming a private company on June 19 and thereby delisting from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Earlier this week, Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) and Alibaba reached an agreement over the Chinese e-tailer buying back 20 percent of Yahoo’s stake. Just yesterday we heard rumors that the massive sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corp (CIC) was seeking a $2 billion stake in Alibaba via an issuance of preferred shares – something that would sure help with the proposed repurchase from Yahoo, which will cost just over $7 billion.

Some analysts expect that a more consolidated and centralized Alibaba Group – replete with privatized B2C portal Alibaba.com, and with Yahoo having a much smaller stake – might go for a massive IPO at some point later. But the Yahoo buyback won’t be complete for another six months, so it could only happen after all that.

Alibaba runs China’s largest B2B, B2C (Tmall), C2C (Taobao) e-commerce sites, and the nation’s largest online payment platform, Alipay.

Hong Kong-based financial trading and dashboard startup, 8Securities, has just informed us of a $1.5 million round of investment from Velocity Capital B.V. and Full Global. Both investors also led the first round of $8 million which was announced just two months ago. Co-founder, Mikaal Abdullah shared more with me:

This additional capital will allow us to invest more in advertising and marketing to accelerate our growth. We are also expanding the Portal and our Investing App Market in more languages (English, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Japanese). In addition, we are in partnership discussions to launch 8 Securities presence in China and Japan.

It has been quite a rapid session of fund raising made by 8Securities, certainly not too common in Asia. But these guys somehow pulled things together very nicely. You can find out more about 8Securities in the video below:

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) announced today that Pixel Media will be the exclusive advertising representative for Skype in Hong Kong.

Skype will now be available as an advertising option for online and mobile advertising, and advertisers will also be able to reach other Microsoft properties, says Leslie Chu, the company’s general manager of advertising in Hong Kong and Taiwan:

We’re excited that advertisers in Hong Kong can now be part of the Skype experience. By including Skype into MSN, Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail, we are able to offer advertisers unparalleled reach across very intimate and unique communication platforms.

Pixel Media’s CEO Kevin Huang noted that his company is pleased to have been selected by Microsoft, pointing out the importance of a platform like Skype in the digital advertising landscape in the region. In addition to Hong Kong, we’re told that in the Asia region, advertising is available on Skype in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Japan.

Indeed it was just last year we when saw Japanese advertising agency Dentsu sign a deal to be Skype’s exclusive advertiser in Japan, that particular agreement focusing on display ads in the “Skype Home area,” for Windows only. This partnership with Pixel Media, we are informed this afternoon, is also for the Windows platform only.

The announcement also notes that the destination resort Galaxy Macau is the first advertiser to get on board.

Frenzoo, a startup based out of Hong Kong and San Francisco, is a startup that has been around for a while, specializing in 3D avatars and fashion for girls and women. And the company has announced that it has raised $1 million in new seed funding to create 3D lifestyle and fashion mobile games.

The investors include Hong Kong-based Tytus Michalski, Siemer Ventures, K5 Ventures, and Metaverse Services. This is in addition to existing investor Ambient Sound Investments.

According to the announcement, the new funds will be used to help launch the company’s new Me Girl brand of free lifestyle and fashion games. The company also says that Doug Glen (formerly a chief strategy officer of Mattel, currently an entrepreneur in residence at M-Lab technology incubator) will be joining Frenzoo’s board. He noted that Frenzoo is jumping at the same kind of opportunity that Mattel capitalized on years ago:

In the mid-1990s, Mattel pioneered computer games for girls. […] Games like Barbie Fashion Designer were hugely successful, in part because the market was so underserved. Fifteen years later, the girls’ and women’s market in mobile entertainment is now underserved, and Frenzoo is releasing wonderful games that have raised the bar to an exciting new level.

It will be interesting to see how well Frenzoo takes to the mobile gaming space, as we haven’t really seen any games from them thus far. There’s a trailer below that shows an older beta version of its Dress Me Girl game, but I’m told they’ll have some more current promo material coming soon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Source: WeAreSocial blog]

The weekend is just around the corner. And if you need a fun app to entertain yourself, try Brain Lab 2, a quiz-like IQ game developed by Hong Kong-based startup Asia App Limited. I believe many of you might have tried the first version of Brain Lab before. I certainly did but can’t recall whether it was on Facebook or on the iPhone.

Anyway, the game is basically a series of quizzes that will test your right and left brain IQ. It sounds boring but I would urge you to download and try it yourself. To a certain extent, the app does make me feel stupid. So much so that I’m almost compelled to take the quiz over and over again to better my own high score!

The app is now ranked third on the iTunes paid ranking list with very good ratings from gamers. That said, the app has “invited” users to rate five stars before they can unlock the practice session (thankfully, I believe it still unlocks regardless of rating though). For $0.99, this app brings much fun. It’s worth the download.

This obviously isn't a good score!