EatAds, the Singapore-based startup that’s an online platform for buying and selling offline adverts, has today revealed that it has entered the Indian market. Just as the online ads industry has been revolutionized by such services, EatAds aims to do the same for outdoor and out-of-home (OOH) media.

It enters India with one major company already onboard in the form of Times OOH, which is a local powerhouse in outdoor, road-side and landmark advertising. EatAds already has over 100 media owners listed in Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Thailand, and now India as well. The platform has over 6,000 outdoor ad listings.

EatAds co-founder Nigel Hembrow says in today’s announcement:

Being such a large and fragmented country, we had always suspected a need for EatAds in India, and over past months all the India buyers and sellers we have met here have validated this need. We’re excited to be working with our Delhi- based partner to grow our user base in India.

You might recall that EatAds raised seed funding last December. The startup got back into action in October 2012 after remaining dormant for a while as co-founder John Fearon was focusing on building Dropmysite and Dropmyemail. Now EatAds’s expansion is beginning all over again having previously scrapped some of its earlier overseas moves.

After today’s India launch, EatAds is teasing more expansion in the region which will be announced soon. I get the feeling it’ll involve Myanmar and Cambodia or some other market where the outdoor ads industry is fragmented, under-utilized, and somewhat chaotic.

The core EatAds team: Nigel (left) and Dhruv.

CEO and Founder at InMobi, Naveen Tewari, speaking at the Global Mobile Internet Conference 2013 in Beijing

Founder and CEO of mobile ad network giant, InMobi, Naveen Tewari, has come a long way. Naveen is an engineer by training, studied at Harvard Business School, and worked at consulting firm McKinsey. In between all that, Naveen also had some experience working in startups while he was in Silicon Valley.

Entrepreneurs being entrepreneurs, Naveen was very fascinated with the rapidly changing mobile internet. He wanted to build something which he could call his own. Naveen and his team started to dabble and among their first few projects was a VOIP application and also a chat application. But it was too early for the market back then. So the team started to question, “What are the things that could work? Maybe there’s a play for us if we were to build a fundamental service?”

These fundamental services range from mobile e-payments to advertising platforms. Therefore, with more interest in the advertising side of the business, mKhoj was founded in 2007. The name was later rebranded to InMobi to suit the international audience better. Naveen told me:

Over the period of years, we started to see success. We decided to go broader and into different markets and not just stick only to Asia. That’s how we expanded.

InMobi has had many turning points. Naveen pointed out three. The first was when the team decided to pivot when their chat application wasn’t gaining traction. “Pivoting really lead to the next level of growth for us,” he added.

The second one was when InMobi received funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPCB), a renowned global venture capital firm. The investment, said Naveen, gave InMobi a lot of confidence to grow and compete globally. The vote of confidence from KPCB also helped InMobi attract more talent to join the team. The third turning point was when InMobi received $200 million in funding from Softbank which really helped the company scale quickly in various markets.

We have doubled or tripled down on technology. We have built multiple platforms to go after the entire value chain of the ad business. We made acquisitions too to fill that up. We have also deepened our strengths in local markets – in the UK, Europe and launching ourselves in Korea, China, and Japan.

“We’re one of the largest mobile ad networks in China”

Today, InMobi can pat its chest and call itself a global company. Outside of India, it has offices and operations in Australia, Taiwan, the US, the UK, France, Italy, Russia, Germany, China and more. Despite launching in China only in late 2011, Naveen says that InMobi is “one of the largest mobile ad networks in China.”

An InMobi China PR representative later filled me in that the company is seeing 400 million impressions a day, serving 30,000 applications in China. Naveen believes that by the end of 2013, InMobi will be the largest mobile ad network in China.

We have aggressively invested into China. It’s a big market, we can’t just fiddle around with it. We don’t want to lose.

InMobi has offices in Beijing and Shanghai with more than 50 people running its China operations. When looking for talent, Naveen says that hunger and passion are the key things he is looking for.

Growing from a startup to a multi-national corporation, InMobi faces challenges like any fast growing young company would too. Naveen told me that as a young organization with little processes it was tough running a global operation with 25 offices while keeping one culture, one system, and communicating clearly with everyone. He also said:

As a company what we faced was to showcase and tell people that we have a great product. People expect great products coming out of Silicon Valley, innovations coming out of Silicon Valley and probably didn’t expect that innovation to come from an Indian company.

Despite the problems, InMobi has had a great reception around the world. Today, the company is close to reaching 700 million smartphone users across the world. InMobi was also recently crowned by MIT Technology Review as one of the 50 most disruptive companies in the world.

I know that India’s Just Dial has been on the verge of an IPO before, but this time it’s for real. The local search engine, which now operates in seven countries and is accessible both online and by SMS, has just filed for its IPO, which will hit stock tickers on May 20th.

Just Dial seeks to raise as much as Rs 950 crore – that’s a little under US$175 million. It will list locally on the BSE, NSE, and MCX-SX markets, thereby foregoing a long anticipated US IPO. In contrast, the travel portal MakeMyTrip raised nearly $80 million in its 2010 IPO on NASDAQ.

Sequoia Capital has been a major investor in Just Dial over the years. It started up in 1994.

After Just Dial, it’s likely that BharatMatrimony and HomeShop18 will go public soon too, giving a big boost to India’s tech sector, which has previously seen few web company IPOs. But HomeShop18’s listing might not happen until 2014.

Over the weekend, Google quietly killed off its SMS search feature, which will be a shot in the arm for Just Dial and other ‘dumbphone’-oriented search services like SMSgyan.

Image via Reuters

On Monday, the US Department of Defense released a report that once again points the finger at China for hacking and other forms of digital data theft that pose a threat to American public and military interests. And although the report doesn’t mention Chinese telecom companies Huawei and ZTE by name, it apparently spooked Indian intelligence authorities enough that Indian intelligence agencies are now undertaking a thorough investigation of the Chinese companies.

According to the Hindustan Times, Indian intelligence has set up a testing facility in Bangalore and plans to run Huawei and ZTE equipment through the ringer.

This isn’t the first time Huawei and ZTE have found themselves in the sights of Indian authorities. Last year, India considered investigations into the telecoms, and earlier this year both were denied ‘domestic telecom’ status in the country over lingering security concerns.

Concerns about Huawei and ZTE stem from their apparent ties with the Chinese government and military. Huawei, for example, was founded by a former military officer and maintains a Chinese Communist Party office within its corporate headquarters.

(Hindustan Times via Sina Tech)

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

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

Co-founder at Foodpanda, Kiren Tanna

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

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

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

Building an app is more than just giving it a pretty face. Of course, your user interface has to be clean and clear and easy to use. But most apps also have a substantial backend that, while users will never see it, has to be done right to assure that the app runs properly, its services are scalable, its APIs are working properly, its servers are up, etc. Appacitive is an India-based startup that looks to simplify backend development and management for app developers by putting it into Appacitive’s cloud so that developers can focus on the front-end work.

The company’s feature-set is pretty impressive; even offering a visual-design tool that literally lets you “draw” your back-end architecture. It works on all the big mobile platforms and also with HTML5 and includes built-in API connections to Facebook and Twitter as well as tons of other features like geolocation, push notifications to your users, and even a testing sandbox. I’m not an app dev, and some of what the company offers is a little bit technical for me, but even I can see that it’s a platform with pretty robust offerings.

“The general mantra is: you focus on your app and let us worry about everything else,” says Appacitive co-founder Neil Unadkat. And while there are a few other back-end solutions out there for app devs, there may not be any quite as slick and pretty. That’s part of Appacitive’s goal, Undakat says; “What we have done is gone about solving the [backend] problem, while keeping a great user experience in mind. That’s been our driving force.”

The startup hasn’t been around long — it was founded in September 2012 — and it’s run by a tiny team of only eight people, but the service has gained some impressive traction in a short period of time. Since launching in private beta in December 2012, Appacitive has attracted more than 500 users in various stages of development. Of course, apps take time to develop, but Undakat says, “We are expecting a few apps [on the Appacitive platform] out there in the app store in the next couple of months.”

The best news for other startups is that Appacitive works on a tiered payment model, with apps that get 1 million or fewer API calls per month being totally free. And the official site also says that Appacitive offers special pricing for startups, negotiated on a case-by-case basis, so even bootstrapping startups expecting tons of API calls should get in touch and see what they can work out.

As for what’s next, Undakat says the company plans to branch out:

Plans are to integrate and partner with third party services, so that we can provide everything that is necessary for a dev to build their app, in once place. We are in talks with a few established companies.

The company is also looking at offering pre-packaged backend solutions, so that a dev can say (for example), “I want a game backend,” get a pre-created and fully functional backend immediately, and then tweak it as they see fit.

Appacitive has also been in contact with investors, and I suspect they’ll hear from quite a few more before the year is out. Right now, the company is run out of a two-bedroom apartment in Pune, India, but something tells me the company is destined to outgrow that space sooner rather than later.

We know that Mumbai-based game studio Reliance Entertainment Digital makes a lot of titles, but it usually focuses on mobile. That’s why it has only just made its debut on Mac OS X. The game in question is Real Steel HD, based on the robot fighter movie Real Steel that starred Hugh Jackman.

While Jackman is nowhere to be seen in Real Steel HD, the game gives you plenty of choices for a monstrous metallic melée with the option of a tournament or survival mode.

Reliance Games first released Real Steel back in 2011 and has seen millions of downloads across versions for Android and iOS.

As for the studio itself, Reliance Games expanded its operations in Japan and South Korea last month by acquiring Funnel Japan and taking a 51 percent stake in Seoul’s Bluesom. With those scoops, the Indian studio seems set to launch a turn-based card battle game in those East Asian markets to challenge the phenomenally successful Puzzle and Dragons.

Reliance Entertainment Digital subsidiary Zapak Mobile Games recently recorded a whopping 100 million downloads from the Nokia Ovi Store for its very many feature phone titles.

Real Steel HD is priced at US$6.99 in the Mac App Store.

• 21.7% of all data used by Opera Mini’s Android users is for Facebook

• Each of the top-10 Android devices cost less than Rs. 10,000 ($185)

• The typical Android Opera Mini users are male, between 18 to 24 years of age and live in urban areas

• Top 10 Android phones in India are a Samsung. Exception: the HTC Explorer which ranks at number eight

• Most Opera Mini Android users consume news (28 percent) followed by surfing e-commerce sites (17 percent)

In case you’re interested, the full report can be found on Opera’s report page.

Delhi-based Zomato seems to be expanding its restaurant reviews platform at a fair speed. After launching in London in January, the startup then went to Manila in March and most recently down to Johannesburg earlier this month. At that kind of pace, it’s probably time for the startup to be thinking about its next move. Speaking over the phone with CEO and co-founder Deepinder Goyal, he confirms that there’s already a target in sight – Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia.

Zomato plans to launch its Jakarta restaurant listings in late July. There are already two staffers in the city of 10 million people and the plan is to hire a mostly local team, oriented around content and sales. Having already done their homework, Deepinder reckons that Jakarta has about 18,000 eateries of all kinds – including the city’s many excellent coffee shops. Of course, Zomato wants them all to be listed, but it’s not yet clear how many will be on the site by the time of launch.

Learning Indonesian

With such a large base to cover, Deepinder says that Jakarta is Zomato’s biggest ever single city to tackle. Another new challenge to face is that it’ll be Zomato’s first ever launch in a language other than English. While the company is internally testing Hindi for the 13 cities it covers in its home nation of India, the Jakarta launch will be the first public unveiling of a new language on the site. That means getting Bahasa Indonesia right (linguistically and culturally), and that puts even more of an emphasis on finding the right local staff.

As nice as Jakarta is, why choose that place? After all, there are a lot of world-renowned foodie cities in the region that make more obvious choices for a listings and review service. Deepinder tells us:

We love going into markets where there’s not much smartphone penetration or web usage so we can build the market around us – and help build up the market.

That’s how Zomato grew to a claimed 70 to 80 percent of the eatery online listings market in India – and why its first two targets in Asia (outside of native India) were Colombo (Sri Lanka) and Manila. It’s no coincidence that they’re also markets with little in the way of solid competition. Deepinder freely admits this too; apart from London, he says, the competition has been “fairly simple and easy.”

In addition, Zomato’s CEO guides the startup to new cities where he feels restauranteurs or corporations are most willing to pay for ads, which is the main monetization channel. Thus the Zomato team doesn’t fret over the rate of smartphone usage in a particular area, and instead follows the money into a relatively immature metropolis where the lifestyle food sector is lacking in online resources.

25% of restaurants shut down each quarter!

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

After a month in Manila, how’s Zomato faring there? Deepinder says that the Metro Manila site now gets 10,000 pageviews per day, and that’s rising 25 percent per week. “It’s the fastest growing market for us,” he observes. After launching with 9,000 listings, the site now has 10,000 establishments on file.

Interestingly, about 25 percent of all restaurants on the site shut down each quarter – but more are opening up, resulting in a net gain. “It’s a lot of effort,” Deepinder admits, “But we have processes in place to deal with it.” Indeed, he concedes it can be a scaling issue for the Indian startup, as the content side of the business is labor intensive, and the ad sales are mostly done offline.

But the Manila team seems to be on top of things: it’s able to add 60 to 80 new locations each day, and processes 1,000 menus (scanned menus are a particularly useful feature on the site) per week, which are a mix of brand-new menus or updates.

Right now, the Manila team is made up of 12 people, though it’s not the final country team, as five of those are Indian staffers, and most of them will inevitably want to return home. So the goal, we’re told, is for Manila to have a fully-fledged local team there, and that takes about six to 12 months to form. “We’re building a pipeline of country managers,” Deepinder points out, but that takes years of personal growth and experience within the company, and then final training for each new country manager takes three months. That’s the same process that’ll happen in Jakarta.

Singapore? The US?

With Zomato preferring emerging markets, it doesn’t seem very likely that Singapore will be added to its roster anytime soon. There’s already Yelp in the Lion City, and local startup Burpple made an interesting move into this area earlier this month.

But one very mature market is being eyed up by Deepinder and the Delhi crew: the US. While not a definite green light, the co-founder says that, in the event of venturing into the States, they’ll use their experience in London to help shape their approach to another western market. One deciding factor is the success of the London site. After launching that at the very start of this year, it already has 250,000 visits per month. If that can rise to be the top foodie reviews site in that city, it could well signal that they’re ready for a push into the US. “We’ll know in four to six months time.”

Zomato has 260 employees around the world right now, with just over 200 of those being in India. A further 200 will be added in that nation this summer in an apparent push to speed up the processing of both its content and ad sales teams.

So, Jakarta readers, are you keen for the launch of Zomato in the city this summer?

The largest local map provider in India, MapmyIndia has added lots of new places with version 8.0 of its online maps today. It comes with more driver assistance features such as live traffic and lane guidance. More interestingly, the digital map provider shared that it now covers 10.33 million places, 1.9 million kilometers of roads, 600,000 villages, and 4,787 cities at street-level in India.

Last year, when Apple’s new maps app imploded, MapmyIndia cheekily offered its own iOS maps app to help Indians and travelers navigate in India.

MapmyIndia’s investors include Qualcomm Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, and most recently Zenrin, a Japanese mapping giant. Besides online map service, MapmyIndia also offers offers printed products and hardware, such as its in-car GPS tablet and the CarPad. All of today’s new locations and features will also be updated within MapmyIndia’s navigation products.

India-based mobile gaming developer and publisher Zapak Mobile Games made an announcement a couple of days ago that it has now passed the 100 million user download mark from all of its game titles on the Nokia Store. How many of Zapak’s game titles so far on Nokia? Over 350. The company notes its huge increase from 50,000 download mark passed just 14 months ago.

Currently ranked first on India’s Nokia Store, Zapak discloses that its most popular game is T20 Cricket 2012 with 7.76 million downloads, with Border War Face Off at second place with 5.83 million downloads. Nokia India representative Gerard Wego believes that Indians love games. With over 80 million downloads occurring on the Nokia India Store every month, one of its most popular categories is gaming.

Besides having its games on the Nokia Store, Zapak also showcases its games on its mobile site. A Reliance Entertainment Digital (the parent company of Zapak) representative told us that the mobile site has roughly three million unique visitors every month. The team will focus on creating local content that can be connected with its Indian audiences.

When it comes to mobile games, Reliance Entertainment Digital is eyeing a bigger market than just India. The company has made its presence felt in Canada, the US, as well as Korea and Japan. Its international gaming division Reliance Games – which primarily builds smartphone games – has announced its full acquisition of the mobile gaming division of Funnel Japan and the majority acquisition of Korean gaming studio Bluesom a month ago.

The big picture, the representative said, is to cater to the first generation of mobile device users in India while strengthening the company’s footprints in the international market.

The best part of Traverik right now is probably how easy it is to use. It’s ridiculously simple. You just pick a destination and a date, and then Traverik will spit out an itinerary for you. From there you can switch things around, add or subtract activities, and even invite friends to work together on the itinerary and plan collaboratively.

The downside is that at least right now, Traverik doesn’t give you an itinerary so much as it does a list. For example, when I chose Beijing as a destination, Traverik spat out a list of pretty good places to visit, but they were sprawled all over the city and the way Traverik had ordered them would make getting from one to the next very inefficient. There are also no times supplied, so it would be tough for a visitor to know whether they should set aside 30 minutes or 3 hours for the Temple of Heaven (for example). The site also doesn’t seem to include many scheduled activities yet; most of what’s on its activities list are year-round attractions, so Traverik travelers aren’t going to be aware of any seasonal fairs, sporting events, or performances that might be going on during their trip.

The site just launched in beta last Septemeber, says co-founder Abhishek Deo so the company still has a lot planned for the future, so some of these problems will inevitably be rectified as the site is further developed. “We already have theme based itineraries for different cities aka, Honeymoon, outdoor, arts & culture etc.,” Deo told me. “In due course of time, holiday events & festivals will also be a major planning base for users.”

The company is also working on an Android app — that’s coming this May, Deo says — and other cool things like making bookings directly through the Traverik site and integrating the professionally-planned itineraries of tour agencies into the site’s offerings. As an total trip planner, I don’t think Traverik is quite ready for primetime yet, but it’s already a great way to see what activities are popular in whatever city you’re planning to visit, and once some of its new features are rolled out, it really could become a one-stop-shop for all of your travel planning needs.

(In the meantime, if you’re looking to plan a trip right now, I might recommend another Indian travel startup called Triptern, which we looked at back in February).

Foodpanda co-founder Kiren Tanna

Rocket Internet’s online food delivery website, Foodpanda, was launched last year in April and has since undergone rapid expansion. Today, Rocket Internet’s FoodPanda is in eight Asian countries supported by 150 staff. Foodpanda, combined with Hellofood which is a food delivery site targeted at non-Asian markets, is serving over 10,000 restaurants. Foodpanda alone has around 5,000 restaurants.

Foodpanda co-founder Kiren Tanna (pictured), claims that all nine markets are growing and growth has been especially great for Pakistan, India, and Indonesia. In India, Foodpanda is working with over 2,000 restaurants. Interestingly, Kiren shared that India has a lot of orders from iPads over the weekend. For Pakistan, around 60 to 70 percent of the orders come from mobile. Singapore is a big dinner market while Indonesia and Taiwan prefer to order during lunch time.

Foodpanda works like this: customers go to the website and place orders online, then the restaurants will receive an order slip from Foodpanda’s GPRS box (or through SMS/email/fax), prepare the orders, and deliver them to the customers’ doorstep.

Foodpanda GPRS box

In places like Indonesia where food orders can be done by text or phone without the need of such a platform, I asked how Foodpanda differentiates itself. Kiren explained that the experience ordering food through the phone isn’t ideal. There’s a higher rate of errors when communicating information on the phone. Plus, expats who don’t speak the local language wouldn’t be able to place an order. With Foodpanda, it remembers customers’ delivery information when they next place an order, minimizes errors in communication since information is digitized, and ensures the most updated menus and prices available.

Although food orders are mostly done online, Foodpanda occasionally accepts phone orders to help new users get started. In such cases, the login details are sent to first time users together with discount perks to encourage them to order online in the future.

When asked about how Foodpanda selects restaurants to work with, Kiren told me:

We find the [restaurant] leads based on what we see [online], for example, HungryGoWhere. When we signed up a restaurant, we asked them questions like how many deliveries do you do? Are you ready for weekend peak capacity?

Foodpanda also orders from new restaurants to ensure that the food delivery experience is good and the food is in a good state when they are delivered. Orders from Foodpanda, though great, can be stressful for restaurants. Kiren shared that there are cases whereby a company flooded one store by ordering 200 sandwiches and another ordered 120 lunch boxes!

Moving forward, Foodpanda is looking to integrate with the big restaurants’ points-of-sale (POS) to make the process from ordering to billing smoother. Foodpanda is also investing heavily in mobile as it sees “very good traction” and growing number of orders from mobile devices. Kiren added:

We’re looking at city expansion […] and we want to be the number one in emerging markets for delivery services.

In Asia, Foodpanda competes with Dealguru’s Room Service Deliveries which operates in Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia. There’s no way to investigate who is bigger since both sides aren’t willing to share any data.

We saw the India-made messaging app Hike launch last summer and then go global in December. In the fast-moving world of social media, that means it’s time for another update. This week, the New Delhi-based startup has rolled out Hike v2.0 – across iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, and Symbian – that aims to connect you more directly with what your friends are feeling.

The updated Hike app now has status updates and moods, so you can tell your buddies how you’re feeling with a fairly big emoticon. We’ve seen virtual sticker packs and large emoticons to be an integral part of the success of rival Asia-made messaging apps, like Line and KakaoTalk, so they’re clearly popular. Hike emoticons can also serve to reflect your status update, and you can even view your circle of friends by their mood within the app:

That latter feature is also a new one, dubbed ‘circle of friends’. Other useful new additions include a mute option for notifications. Plus, the new status updates now show up in WP8 homescreen tiles and on iOS they’ll appear as a number in the counter; Android users will have to wait for a further update to see how status updates get pushed to them.

It’s a pretty fun update while still keeping the app simple. Kavin Bharti Mittal says of this new aspect, “Now you can share what you’re thinking about or what you’re up to in real-time with your close friends. You can still message anyone on your address book, yet at the same time share those intimate and personal moments with your close friends.”

Just the other day, Whatsapp revealed that it has 200 million active users – yes, active – which is mightily impressive for a service that we often mock on this blog for being dull and not very innovative. But that huge number shows that not everyone wants social games and all the bells and whistles of some newer messaging apps, so Hike still has a chance to win over such users to its elegant and fairly minimal app. And the market is far from saturated yet.

Get the app download links via the Hike homepage.

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”).

ZipDial is a unique company from Bangalore, India that monetizes from missed calls. In India (perhaps also similar to many developing nations), people use missed calls to notify the other party at zero cost. Say for example, if someone is home safely, she will notify her boyfriend by giving a missed call so no one gets charged by the telcos.

What ZipDial does is it provide brands with a toll-free number which allows them to leverage on the “missed call” culture. If a user missed calls a brand’s number, it will send them the latest promotions at no cost. From the looks of it, Zipdial is the only service out there in India which monetizes from missed calls. More use cases can be found in the picture below.

ZipDial’s unique business model has caught the attention of Singapore-based Jungle Ventures who invested in the Bangalore-based startup (Hat tip: NextBigWhat). Amit Anand, managing partner at Jungle Venture told us:

Valerie and her co-founder Amiya have taken a very simple concept and turned it into a very powerful customer engagement platform. Zipdial acts as a great bridge between traditional media like print and television and the mobile screen which has already proven to be the preferred mode for interaction for millions of consumers in these markets.

Prior to today’s financing round, ZipDial has also received funding from other investors including Mumbai Angels (about $800,000) and 500Startups.

Click to enlarge

Co-founder Valerie Rozycki Wagoner said that Jungle Ventures, which is made up of experienced entrepreneurs, has been brought on to help ZipDial expand into Asia. Coupled with today’s news of getting funded by Jungle Ventures, ZipDial also announced that it has expanded to Sri Lanka, marking its first overseas expansion. ZipDial has extended its relationship with Unilever India to Sri Lanka by spearheading a Sinhalese New Year campaign for Unilever’s Laojee tea brand in the country.

ZipDial was founded three years ago by Valerie Rozycki Wagoner, Sanjay Swamy, and Amiya Pathak. To date, the startup has worked with over 400 clients including The Times of India, Oreo, P&G, Kingfisher, and Unilever, serving over 410 million consumer engagements. ZipDial claims that by adding ZipDial call-to-action into ads, it increases ad responses up to 50 times. ZipDial is a concept that our team here likes a lot. When asked what inspired Valerie and his team to start ZipDial, she told us:

We recognized two problems in the market. First, in such a diverse market, advertisers need more granular data on consumer preferences, and they cannot get this from internet (only 8 percent penetration), smartphones (only 4 percent penetration) or payment data (only 3 percent purchases on cards). Second, users get nothing personalized and advertising messages are predominantly cricket, Bollywood, and spam. ZipDial took the typical mobile VAS model, flipped it upside down, and made the user experience simple and free for 100 percent of consumers (based on “missed calls”).

We have also included an interesting interview with Valerie by Young Turks below:

A Mumbai-based startup is taking on the world’s top project management web apps – things like Basecamp and Trello – with its minimalist and good-looking BrightPod. Made by the team at Synage Software, BrightPod is now close to the end of its months-long private beta and will launch to the public on April 16th. (UPDATE from the startup team: TechinAsia readers can sign up for Brightpod with the code “founders” (without the quotes)).

Up against a hundred or more task management app rivals, BrightPod aims to be the best collaborative working platform for marketing teams – and that of course includes social marketing. So the idea is that the web app is the best place for marketers to run campaigns, check off tasks and milestones, and keep track of organizational messages without resorting to a mess of email threads.

Among lots of useful BrightPod features are workflows that can be cloned and automated across different projects or campaigns, a daily digest email of the previous day’s work, an intuitive card-based layout, and an area for things that need particular attention from a team member. It looks like the kind of thing that this blog could use as well, rather than our lumpen Google Docs-based editorial spreadsheet.

Keeping track of the project team in BrightPod.

Yamini, the startup’s marketing manager, tells us that Brightpod now has over 150 companies using the app with a total of 272 users making use of it prior to the public launch. The seven-man Brightpod team previously started up DeskAway, a more general project collaboration service that’s in use at some major corporations. Because DeskAway already got funding and is now profitable, that helped the Mumbai entrepreneurs to get BrightPod rolling. Yamini adds: “However, in the next few months we may look at raising money as we expand the [Brightpod] team and broaden our reach globally.”

As for the focus on marketing teams, Yamini explains:

Over the years, we were seeing DeskAway being used as a general purpose project management tool by companies across a lot of verticals. However, we also witnessed a surge in signups from marketing teams with feature requests aimed at marketing/campaign related projects – stuff that they require. They felt it was chaotic to plan and track progress of various marketing projects/campaigns (SEO, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) when working with multiple people and clients.

We know the collaboration space pretty well and hence decided to create a new product that would serve this niche market with features specifically for marketing teams.

New features will be added to the web app soon, including an editorial calendar and marketing analytics. Also, it will better integrate with social networks, which is something obviously critical to those doing social marketing.

India’s Eventifier, the startup that archives your events has concluded a financing round for an undisclosed sum from KAE Capital and Chennai-based incubator The Startup Centre.

The startup tracks the content of events by collecting posts using the events’ official hashtags across major social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. So far, event organizers using Eventifier are ranging everywhere from Boston, London, Berlin, Bangalore to Manila. The startup charges from $19 onwards depending on the event’s archiving requirements.

Founded by Jazeel Ferry, Nazim Zeeshan, and Saud Mohammed, Eventifier has so far archived over 1,000 events, attracting 17,000 unique visitors each month. The startup has spent most of its time incubating and building its product at The Startup Centre. Startup Centre founder Vijay Anand said:

All of this was built out of India, without stepping into the US. Bottom line: You can build global companies from anywhere. Sure, they would travel to their markets to expand, but we are glad we could help this startup get off the ground, in the time period we spent with them.

We also understand that Eventifier is gaining interest from advisors and investors who are keen to bring the startup to the next level. If you’re keen to archive your events effortlessly, give Eventifier a try.

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

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

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

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

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

Get the Zomato apps from its homepage.

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

The team behind My Savvy Kid, headed by founder Rakesh Medabalimi, hopes to help other youths, and their parents, avoid those kind of pitfalls through specialized instruction, at an earlier age than average.

Money Bee is the core offering of My Savvy Kid. It is straightforward enough, minimalistic yet clear cut in design and layout. Here you can set goals, chores, jobs, even track transactions and auto payments. Goals can range from spending, saving, or even non-monetary goals. Jobs can be set up, with completion dates and incentives, a nice way to reward your child for a job well done.

Conceived in January 2012, Medabalimi and team are based in India. My Savvy Kid began simply as a platform to gauge inflow and outflow. It has since evolved into a tool that teaches kids to become independent, responsible and accountable for their actions. Above all it teaches the values associated with managing money.

The Money Bee can be sampled free over a three-week trial period, but like all things in life, nothing is free. A six-month plan will run you up to $15, while a one year subscription costs $24. The team however, is confident this is money well spent, and not just for the potential payout after.

Basically, Money Bee is a blend of technology with age old money management principles to make today’s tech-savvy generation money-savvy as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mobile apps are getting big everywhere, but it was just a few years ago that you might have been forgiven for thinking that India was still the land of feature phones. Well, no longer. Cheap smartphones and cheap mobile data plans have helped mobile apps take off in India in a big way. So what does the mobile app scene in India look like now? Thankfully the folks at Vserv have compiled an infographic that should answer a lot of your questions. Behold!

Like infographics like this? Well then you’re going to love all these posts with infographics in them. Aww yeah.

(via Vserv.mobi)

While some fancy stores have “personal shoppers” to be your fashion guide, most people turn to friends and online buddies for purchasing recommendations of all kinds. India-based social shopping app Wooplr wants to bring together local and friend-based guidance – for food, clothing, decor, and lots more – in one place.

Recently launched into public beta after almost a year of testing, Wooplr is, says co-founder Praveen, “about helping people discover products from brick-and-mortar stores.” He adds:

Users are recommending things that they find interesting or want to buy later. And these are shopping finds which if someone didn’t tell us about, we had probably never hear about them. And that’s essentially what Wooplr is doing. Bringing these word-of-mouth recommendations online so that more people get to know about it.

Following tastemakers

So far, Wooplr’s users have added over 1,800 locations across India, from department stores to flea-market stalls. Friends can view, ‘like’, and comment upon the food or fashion items that you’ve snapped and shared. If you spot someone whose taste matches your own, you can follow that individual tastemaker so that you don’t miss out on their finds. In some ways it’s similar to US-based Snapette, though Wooplr covers more than just female fashion.

Praveen explains that Wooplr is made up of four co-founders based in Bangalore, India, and it’s now seeing over 100 new signups per day since its soft launch (no longer requiring an invite) on March 8th, which is International Women’s Day. Despite it’s usefulness for clothes shopping, the startup is finding that there are plenty of male users as well, with women making up 57.5 percent of its user-base right now.

The startup’s platform is also targeting brands, offering a chance for Indian businesses of all sizes to build a trusted online presence and reach out to satisfied customers and potential punters alike. Once rolled out, this will be a freemium package for retailers.

In terms of other future plans, the team has created a suggestion engine that it hasn’t yet turned on. Once the switch has been flipped, it’ll give Wooplr users an algorithmically curated and personalized social stream based on their activity, Facebook ‘likes’, and lots of other cues.

We’re told that the team is currently in talks with a few angels for the first round of investment. If any potential users, retailers, or investors need a bit of persuasion to try out the app, Wooplr has even made a pitchdeck that caters to all three groups of people.

Wooplr is available on Android right now, with a version for iPhone in the works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Source: NextBigWhat)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When you get sick, all you want is to get better. But the reality, in India and almost anywhere else, is that different hospitals offer different services and charge different prices, and the service you get at one hospital might end up being quite different from what you’d get at a different hospital, even if you have the same symptoms. Indian startup Medeel aims to solve this problem by allowing patients to submit their medical records to multiple hospitals and solicit bids for their treatment options online. In other words, you submit your medical records, and then without ever leaving home, you can sit back and wait for hospitals to come to you with treatment packages.

The advantages for patients are pretty obvious; the site basically allows you to start a public bidding process over your own healthcare, which (assuming you do your homework) should help you find the best care at the lowest price. Medeel claims the service is also beneficial for hospitals, giving them access to more patients and potentially helping them attract non-local patients who otherwise wouldn’t have considered traveling to their hospital. Clearly, at least a few hospitals agree, as six hospital partners are listed on the site and it claims there are also “many more” unlisted. When I asked founder Mohit Bahri for a specific number, he said Medeel had signed up 16 hospitals and was “in talks with another 15 plus,” mostly in the Delhi region.

Obviously, the process isn’t instantaneous since the hospitals have to review each patient’s medical records manually, and getting a response can take 2-3 days, so Medeel definitely isn’t a good option if you’ve got any urgent medical issue. But for patients with the luxury of time, Medeel could be a good way to review a number of options without having to trudge around to each hospital in person to explain the situation and submit your medical records.

The site is clean and clearly laid out, and it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going on. With less than 100 Facebook likes and only one testimonial so far, it’s clear the site hasn’t attracted a ton of attention from patients yet, but Bahri says the company has already helped two patients receive treatment and has served many others. The startup is still very young, launched just a couple weeks ago, and it is already receiving inquiries from international patients, so those numbers seem destined to grow (“We understand that estbalishing a new concept like this will take time in India,” Bahri says). Given the creative approach and the fact that the startup is working to solve a real problem, we wouldn’t want to bet against Medeel.

It’s only about seven weeks until the globally-minded Korean startup conference beLAUNCH takes place in Seoul on May 1 and 2. But there’s still time for readers to nab tickets and startups to apply to pitch onstage. Good news for startups in India is that beLAUNCH is now taking applications from Indian startups who want to expand and increase their reach in Korea and East Asia.

Indian startups need to apply before March 20 on this page; then some will be chosen for an audition-pitch in Bangalore in late March, and then one will win a place in the 20 presenting startups at beLAUNCH 2013. It’s an exciting chance.

Discounts for Seoul and Beijing

As for tickets for the beLAUNCH conference in Seoul, TechinAsia readers can now get a 30 percent discount for the May event using the promo code beLAUNCHTIA on this page.

Aside from the startup pitching contest at beLAUNCH, there’ll be an array of keynote speakers and panelists, such as 500 Startups’ Christine Tsai, Evernote’s Phil Libin, and GREE’s John S. Kim. Throwing in some chaos will be a few startup media bloggers such as our own Willis Wee, and SGE’s Gwendolyn Regina T.

As noted by our friends at GWC, the beLAUNCH event on May 1 to 2 is a perfect complement to the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing on May 7 to 8. So if you’re flying into the region for one of those events, you might as well go to both. We even have a 25 percent discount for our readers for GMIC, so there’s even more incentive to come to Beijing as well.

When faced with a problem or annoyance, it’s sometimes nice (if annoying for others) to vent about it online. For Indian urbanites, their gripes about pollution, potholes, and other street-level hazards will soon actually flow from Twitter and Facebook directly to the relevant authorities – and cause some positive action to be taken. That’s the goal of SocialCops, which describes itself as a platform to bring together community stakeholders: NGOs, local governments, and the citizens who encounters these issues every day.

SocialCops is aiming to launch soon in India, explains Prukalpa Sankar, a student at Sinagpore’s Nanyang Technological University and a co-founder of this civic-minded startup. There are citizen-side apps in the works, and the Android version and main website will launch in May in New Delhi, India, for the SocialCops pilot.

For this to work, local authorities need to be involved as well, and so SocialCops is also building a council-side web platform so that all the street-level hazards and annoyances can be filtered from social media, through SocialCops, and straight to the men and women who can sort things out. The Singapore-based startup – with a team of three, who are all NTU final-year students – is also looking beyond India in the future, as Prukalpa explains:

We’re building the product for developing countries – We’re looking to launch in India. We have a collaboration with a local council that services about 100,000 people and we’ll be reiterating the council dashboard with their support. Once the council side of the platform is ready, it will be ready to be launched on a global level – but we’re mainly targeting Asian countries. In Singapore, we’ll be looking to launch sometime in 2014 if we manage to get council support. The business model and monetization strategy will be different for developing and developed countries but the product will essentially be the same.

Click to enlarge

The SocialCops team has lined up a couple of revenue streams already. One of these is for local small businesses to advertise on the platform and also offer rewards, perhaps in the form of discounts or promotions, to people who contribute positively to the site. The other monetization channel is more traditional: taking sponsoprship from large brands and retailers who’ll participate as part of corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs.

[A common] scenario is: The local council outsources civic duties to third-party service providers and are finding it difficult to monitor the ground reality of the performance of these companies. We ran a low-tech pilot in India which invited SMS complaints from citizens on one hand and SMS reports of third-party service providers and created a common newsfeed for the council – which created a check-and-balance in the system and increased efficiency.

Perhaps SocialCops would fair better in India by continuing to accept SMS entries, as smartphone and cellular data adoption in the country is pretty slow. That’s why we’ve seen some neat feature phone-oriented startups emerge, like the messaging-based search engine SMSGyan.

But SocialCops looks promising, and we await its full launch in May to see how it manages to help good citizens take care of their neighborhoods. The startup has already been given a boost by winning a Global ICT Prize in the Global Social Entrepreneurship competition, where the team walked away with a check for $10,000 from Microsoft.

Prices for Google Play e-books in India.

Android fans in India now have a new source for e-books. Today, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) announced that it has opened up Play Store Books to Indian consumers, and the change is already visible on both the desktop site and within the Google Play app.

It’s a challenge to India’s homegrown e-commerce store Flipkart, which sells e-books (as well as music) within its Flyte store. Flipkart recently upped the ante by launching a Flyte E-Books app for Android.

This move also allows Google to get the jump on Apple, who has not yet started selling e-books in India. In December, Apple’s iTunes expanded its music and movies section to India (and Indonesia), but the e-books were left on the shelf.

It’s not clear if every single e-book title within Play Store Books is available for Indian buyers, but the range seems healthily large, ranging from Fifty Shades of Grey (also on Flyte store) to The Hobbit.

Indian readers can buy e-books from the Google Play web store and app, and read them in a desktop browser, on Android, or with the iOS version of the Google Play Books app.

(Image: saransays.com)

By some estimates, India’s middle class consists of 250 to 300 million people. That’s just a few million below China’s middle-income demographic numbers, so Apple simply cannot neglect India. Having only sold about 500,000 iPhones in India last year (and half of those just in the last quarter), that’s slim pickings compared to Apple’s over two million iPhone 5 sales in China alone. Apple’s shown a strong interest in China with Tim Cook going to Beijing last month.

For 2013, according to mobile research firm Canalys, Apple is looking at ramping up its partnerships with Indian distributors like Ingram Micro and Reddington, playing nice with payment plans, and doing more marketing. The company also opened sales of Apple TV, and started up the India iTunes Store this month. Basically, making it much easier for consumers to know that Apple is accessible. But there’s no Apple Store in Mumbai, the country’s biggest city, in contrast to the two in Beijing.

The problem is, Android is cheap for low-end models. And cheap is where the growth is in India. As we noted last week, Indian Android fans love Samsung handsets, but the smaller and cheaper models are more popular. Realistically, India’s middle class numbers indicate nothing, because the purchasing power parity income is around $3,608. A software engineer in India can barely afford an iPhone, which runs well over $800.

By October 2012, Android owns India with over 50 percent of the smartphone market, whereas iOS is at a low five percent.

With rumors of Apple’s cheap iPhone dying out, it’s pretty clear that Apple needs to capture the hearts and minds of luxury-product buying Indians before it’s too late. With Android having already caught up to iOS in terms of features, apps, and power, it’s not looking good.

So, when are we going to see Tim Cook in Mumbai?

(Source: ZDNet)

As time goes on, it becomes clear that this whole internet thing isn’t just a passing fad. Yet somehow, as popular as social networking has become around the world, no one has really managed to solve the problem of what happens to a person’s web presence when they die. Facebook deletes or memorializes the accounts of dead users (meaning that you can still post on their wall, but the account can’t be updated or even logged in to) but that doesn’t please everyone and there are a lot of questions about what should be done, especially when relatives want to update a dead person’s page as a tribute.

The India-based startup Creative Nature’s DepartedLife project hopes to solve this problem with what it calls “the world’s first social networking site for departed souls.” This isn’t actually true; there are a number of other sites like this including one created by Monster.com’s founder. But DepartedLife is definitely the first Asian social network for the dead that we have come across.

It’s not difficult to understand the impetus behind creating such a site, and founder Rahul Suri told us that the site was inspired by the death of his mother:

Gradually, grief gave way to a need for preserving my memory of her for my children – it was like I wanted to build an online monument to her. That was when I felt the need for a site like DepartedLife. I wanted my kids to know what their grandmother looked like and what I felt about her. And I’m sure many people feel the same way.

It’s a noble goal and there’s an increasing demand for it, as our social networking profiles say a great deal about who we are, and that’s all information our family and friends may be interested in after we’re gone.

Unfortunately, in its present beta iteration, DepartedLife doesn’t do much to separate itself from the pack. The site’s design is certainly functional but there’s nothing special about it, and you still have to create the profiles of loved-ones manually rather than directly importing information from a Facebook account (for example). That’s the kind of feature that would really set the site apart from the pack, but sadly, it’s not there yet.

The site does allow users themselves to log in via Facebook, but I’m not sure I would recommend it, as the app asks for permission to do almost everything, including log in as any Pages accounts you might have connected to your own. Obviously, you can opt-out of this, but why would it ask for that kind of permission in the first place? It could just be a bug, of course, but I’d be a bit wary of the Facebook login until it’s fixed.

So in the end, we’re featuring DepartedLife here not so much for what it is as for what it could be. A site that could pull information from Facebook and other social networking sites to automate the memorialization process but then still allow family members and friends to post updates could be very popular. When most startups are thinking about the targets for their services, they’re thinking mostly about people who are alive, but there is definitely space in Asia for services that allow users to memorialize their loved ones. Whether DepartedLife becomes one of those will depend on whether the startup is willing to rethink a lot about the way the site works now.

(Note: normally we’d include a screenshot of the site in a review like this, but it seemed a bit disrespectful to uses photos of the dead in a startup review, so we’ve just pulled an image from DepartedLife’s Facebook page instead).

We’ve all seen the big-screen Samsung Galaxy Note 2 or SIII phones being clutched in one uncomfortably stretched palm, but India’s Android market reveals that the smaller and cheaper Samsung Galaxy devices are actually more popular. Indeed, in new statistics released by game developer Animoca, they observed that every single one of India’s top 10 Android phones carry the Samsung Galaxy brand – and that the top one is a budget phone with a mere three-inch screen.

An Animoca representative explains to us that this this is from a sample base of 500,000 Indian gamers on the developer’s many titles, such as Pretty Pet Salon. It’s great news for Samsung (KRX:005930), whose budget Galaxy Y phone (pictured) is far and away the most popular Android phone in India.

Of course, this doesn’t equate with sales in India, but statistics from these kinds of mobile platforms often give a good picture of what folks are using. I asked Animoca’s Matt McAllister if these stats (see the full top 10 below) might be skewed towards younger gamers, and he responded:

Yes, the demographic is mobile gamers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a younger demographic. Animoca publishes over 300 games that attract many different audiences, so I’d say it’s fairly representative of the overall populations at large.

There are plenty of other budget Android phones in India, such as the fairly powerful Micromax A85, so Samsung might soon find its dominance weakened by telcos shipping cheap phones from such Chinese OEMs.

The game startup says that the most popular Android OS version in India is Android 2.3.6 (gingerbread) with 39.1 percent market share, which proves that cheaper phones – which often come with outdated software – rule the roost. But, more promisingly, Android 4.0.4 (ice-cream sandwich) is next up, with 17.9 percent share.

Here’s the phone list:

Stay tuned for stats later today from Animoca for their native Hong Kong as well.

Kevin from WalletKit at the 500 Startups Demo Day.

WalletKit was one of the most recent batch of 500 Startups graduates, emerging from the incubator with some funding and renewed conviction about the path ahead. That newest batch of fledgling teams was notable for containing four Indian startups, and WalletKit also counts as one of those.

The co-founder and CEO of WalletKit, which is a platform for creating good-looking cards for Apple’s Passbook or Google Wallet – is Kevin William David (pictured above). He tells us that it was useful being among fellow entrepreneurs from India:

Being around three other Indian startups has been really beneficial. All of us are in the same boat, trying to get customers, meet investors. Some of the Indian founders have done a successful startup and raised money before. Also being a part of a batch with startups from across the globe from various industries and expertise has helped a lot. You get to learn from each one of them on their experiences with each passing day.

WalletKit is now a team of five and, like a number of 500 Startups graduates, has opted to move to San Francisco soon (from Chennai) so as to be closer to the team’s prospective clients.

The service lets businesses make customized virtual boarding passes, tickets, store cards, and coupons for various mobile wallet platforms. Moreover, it gives retailers and other companies a way to analyze the usage and redemption of these kinds of digital tokens. Kevin says that users can make the first 500 Passbook-style passes for free before the startup’s tiered pricing kicks in. With mobile wallets being so fragmented right now across dozens of emerging providers, WalletKit aims to be a constant and affordable way for businesses to serve up these passes to their customers.

Stalking into 500 Startups

WalletKit duo Kevin and Ramakanth.

Kevin and co-founder Ramakanth are both 23 years old and from Chennai, and only graduated from college last year. Getting into 500 Startups was an initial aim of theirs, and Kevin explains that it required some cunning and planning:

We stalked one of the 500 Startups partners at his hotel when he was in India figuring out his hotel location by his tweets. We made a customized pitch book for each partner at 500 along with a poster of their life-size cartoons. Pitched him in his cab all the way to the airport. Three weeks later we were invited to the US to be a part of the current accelerator.

That occured a couple of months before 500 Startups became more firmly entrenched in India by opening the StartupWallah fund to pump US$5 million into startups in the nation. So for future Indian entrants, perhaps they’ll only need to drop an email to 500 Startup venture partner Pankaj Jain to begin their journey into incubation.

The other three Indian startups that toiled along side WalletKit were GazeMetrix, Instamojo, TradeBriefs. In the past, 500 Startups nurtured the Indian team behind Teliportme. Looking outside of India, another one to emerge earlier this month was the clever Chinese-English translation app Waigo, which we reviewed last year.

The next – and fifth – batch is now being recruited by Dave McClure’s incubator, and submissions are open until March 1st. That gives Indian startups one more week to be able to follow WalletKit and other graduates into the program.

The countdown to Demo Day in a photo from January.

It’s Valentine’s Day, so those without an object of affection might be looking for a new way to find a date. That’s why an Indian startup is today launching PairBuddy. It’s a lot like the more crudely-named Facebook dating tool Bang With Friends that’s got so much hype over the past few weeks.

PairBuddy focuses more on outing a secret crush than getting people hooked up immediately. If your Facebook friends also use the app and someone has identified you as a crush, then the prospective pair will be notified (pictured below). If there’s no mutual crush, the secret will remain inside PairBuddy and will be taken within your soul to the grave.

PairBuddy was built by Nirav Shah and a small team in under 48 hours. Nirav tells us that it has had a good response after a quiet soft launch, and a mobile app version is in the works. Though created in Mumbai, India, this little tool for finding a Facebook buddy that has the hots for you can be used worldwide. Some other new features, he explains, are being worked on too.

After a wave of apps for flirting with strangers – such as the success of China’s Momo, which went global at the end of last year – there now appears to be a series of tools for romantically connecting people who already know each other. Surely it’s only a matter of time before versions appear for Twitter or Sina Weibo.

Global collaborative phone directory app Truecaller is based in Sweden, but it’s proving to be a hit in India and other parts of Asia. Truecaller revealed today that it now has 11 million users worldwide, with 300 million phone number searches every month. With this momentum, the team also released a major new update which now allows its users to search phone numbers by name, among other new functions.

In a simple way, Truecaller is like the Yellow Pages, but a global one and it can be used from your phone. The ones putting in their number details are the users themselves. Users can opt to let Truecaller record their phonebook, but the process is reversible, meaning that the users can ask Truecaller to delete said phonebook data. In order to get the data from the users we’ve searched, we need to send a contact request to them first, and see if they’ll let us see their data. This helps guarantee that the users’ privacy is still within their control.

From the 11 million users on Truecaller today, marketing manager Kim Fai Kok tells us that more than 60 percent of them come from Asia. The top five users are based in India, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Kim says that Truecaller became very popular in India because, he claims, traditional directory services hadn’t existed before Truecaller. Plus, there are 960 million mobile subscribers in the country in which 97 percent of them are pre-paid numbers, so a lot of number-changing goes on. Truecaller makes the huge task of keeping track of who owns the numbers easy.

He explained Truecaller’s main benefits:

The primary reason why our users are loving the app is that before Truecaller, there was no easy way to find phone numbers unless you wanted to spend hours searching the web or asking friends. Truecaller’s users from all over the world enhance the service by sharing their contacts and together, we create a collaborative dynamic database that is always evolving. Truecaller also features a collaborative top spam list, which is built by our users to help identify the top spammers in your area. You are automatically warned and protected by Truecaller from these spam numbers and the top spam list.

The app is available on many platforms – iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry, and Nokia Symbian. While the Truecaller app’s functions are mostly free, contact requests using the new name search feature require a fee. And the new update is available just for iPhone and Android for now. You can download the app according to your OS here.

For some people, planning a trip down to the last detail is part of the fun. Not everyone enjoys poring over guidebooks for hours on end, and for those people, there’s Trip Tern. Trip Tern is an India-based startup that automates the travel-planning process, giving you a daily itinerary that’s designed to fit your interests and maximize your traveling efficiency.

It works like this: you hop onto Trip Tern’s website and pick a destination from one of its limited list of cities. At present, there are only sixteen cities, but most of them are major travel destinations like Beijing, London, New York City, and Dubai. For some inexplicable reason, Liverpool is also in there, but as a Liverpool FC fan, I’m not complaining.

Once you have chosen a city, you choose from a list of hotels to stay in and set your check in and check out days. No fares are listed on this page, so you’ll need to have done your research already, but most cities have a good variety of options available for all budgets. Then you select from a list of interests — right now the only options for most cities are art, food, history, kids, and music — which is followed by a list of city-specific locations you know you want to visit. You can pick as many as you’d like, and then Trip Tern generates a day-by-day itinerary for you complete with a handy Google map:

Day 3 of my made-up trip to Beijing

If you want, you can further customize your trip by adding additional sites in on any given day or moving things around. You can also share your trips with friends via Facebook, although I’m not sure how interested any of your friends are going to be in the itinerary for a trip you haven’t actually taken yet.

The whole experience is very slick and the user interface couldn’t be easier. The site’s only problem at present seems to be a lack of choice. Only a few cities on offer, and within those cities the attractions available are limited to pretty traditional tourist stuff; travelers looking for a more unique trip itinerary are probably out of luck here. With that said, I would expect the site’s city and attraction offerings to expand as it grows, as it’s currently still in beta and has only been online for a couple of months (the site was first launched on December 15, 2012). According to a press release, the team is planning for an aggressive city expansion this year, and the site is also continuously aggregating information from the web automatically and using that to add to its offerings.

Trip Tern is also planning to launch a mobile app sometime in 2013.

Mobile video service Vuclip announced today that it opens a video portal dedicated to education videos called edu. The videos are created to supplement education for K-12) and higher education across the world, and it can be watched on 5,500 internet-enabled mobile handsets, even including the most basic phones.

So far all the educational videos are provided by the famous non-profit educational organization Khan Academy. While currently the educational videos on Vuclip’s new channel are only in English language, eventually the company plans to roll out course materials in other languages too.

Would Vuclip’s new educational video channel prove to be a success? So far all indicators say yes, particularly for India. According to a recent global education survey made by the company, more than 50 percent of the respondents in India said that they are restricted by money matters when it comes to choosing their ideal education. They are quite open to studying at home, and 82 percent of Indians are open to receiving education through their phones.

Vuclip CEO and founder Dr. Nickhil Jakatdar shared his vision with the new educational channel:

Inclusive education is possible only when good and fresh educational content is universally and continually accessible through better discovery methods. Mobile video transcends all language barriers and can help democratize education. Vuclip today has more than 14 million active monthly users in India and this number is growing quickly. This is a readily available platform through which Indian universities and institutes can participate in making quality education accessible to the masses anywhere, anytime.

Vuclip raised $13 million in series D funding late last year, and has seen its download numbers passed the one million mark in December. Among Vuclip’s biggest users are big feature phone markets like India, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia. Looking at this fact, I’m curious if the company will prioritize rolling out localized languages of the new educational channel for Indonesia. I hope it does.

Education startups rock

I think this is a great move by Vuclip, as it now enables more people to access free education online, even when they don’t have smartphones. People who cannot afford high quality education or equipment like computers at home, will find Vuclip’s new channel very helpful. It’s awesome.

There aren’t a lot of mentions about education startups these days, at least when compared to the startups focusing in other industries such as gaming, entertainment, e-commerce, and others. One of the issues might be the difficulty in reaching those who really need it. Khan Academy won’t prove to be as effective in Indonesia, for example. In part, because a lot of impoverished schools here don’t provide internet connection for its poor students. But I hope change is about to come soon. With companies like Vuclip as well as the budding educational startups over in Silicon Valley taking the lead, we may see that change.

With the US top for mobile ad impressions and Indonesia second, there was also a lot of ad serving and clicking going on in India (5th), Japan (10th), and Vietnam (11th). While this is data from only one ad company, and so might not be representative of broader web browsing and ad tapping habits in the nations as a whole, it’s still interesting to see. Across the whole Opera Mediaworks ad platform, North America as a whole was way ahead:

Across the globe, Opera reports:

The fourth quarter represented more than a two-times increase in impressions
and revenue to publishers compared to any other quarter in 2012.

The most number of ad impressions came from music, video, and media-related ads, and was also the top in terms of generating revenue.

While you’re here, you might also like to see Opera’s findings in terms of mobile platforms. The company noted that “iOS continues to outperform other device platforms” and accounted for 51.02 percent of mobile ad revenues despite only clocking up 41.91 percent of all ad clicks. Android didn’t quick bring in such a proportion of ad revenue despite its rocketing usage:

If you’d like the whole Opera State of Mobile Advertising report, you can find it here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

With a view to the “world outside of China,” Chinese chipset maker Spreadtrum (NASDAQ:SPRD) has announced a tie-up today with Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) to embed Facebook in its Android-oriented chipset platform. Spreadtrum then hopes that these low-cost internal gizmos will be bought by Chinese handset makers to form smartphones to go on sale “in overseas markets such as Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa and India.”

One of Spreadtrum’s earlier chipsets proved popular with brands like Huawei, who stuck it into their budget Android phone, the U8110, which typically sold for just over $100.

This Spreadtrum-Facebook tie-up is clearly aimed at emerging markets where many consumers are upgrading from very basic phones to their first ever smartphone. Today’s announcement points out that Spreadtrum will work with the social network “prior to the release of new versions of Facebook software” so that the embedded features will get updates in the future.

Facebook’s VP of mobile partnerships, Vaughan Smith, commented:

We are pleased to work with Spreadtrum to deliver a high quality application experience to many of the consumers around the world who will be buying smartphones for the first time in 2013. Working with Spreadtrum will extend Facebook’s reach in emerging markets, leveraging the rapid shift from feature phones to smartphones that is now taking place globally.

This deal mirrors what we’ve seen happening with basic feature phones for quite some time, like Indonesia’s Telkomsel pre-installing a tiny version of the Facebook app – just 128kb in size, which is roughly the size of a single photo on this blog – on its feature phones.

Spreadtrum expects to ship 80 to 100 million of its 2G/3G smartphone chipsets in 2013.

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

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

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

Melbourne to Sydney

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

York Butter Factory in Melbourne. Click to enlarge.

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

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

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

Crowdsourced wiki

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

View World Startup Report in a larger map

It’s no secret that India and China aren’t the best of friends. The two countries still have unresolved territorial disputes, and are also engaged in an ongoing struggle for regional influence and control. So it’s no surprise that India hasn’t been excited about the idea of Chinese telecoms like Huawei and ZTE, both of which have close ties to the Chinese government, getting too deep into the Indian telecommunications market. And those two companies faced another big step backwards in their Indian aspirations late last week when India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT) rejected their applications to be included on a list of domestic telecom companies.

Inclusion on the list would have made it easier for Huawei and ZTE’s Indian subsidiaries to do business in the country, especially on public sector projects. Both countries cited substantial manufacturing and investment in India, but were rejected amidst claims of security concerns. The real reason for the rejection may go deeper: the list was prepared by an Indian telecommunications lobbying group that neither Huawei or ZTE is a part of before it was approved by the Indian DoT. An internal memo from the DoT attained by the Economic Times raised the possibility that the companies might be included on some future list, though, saying of ZTE: “we may not include them now.”

Whatever the true reason for Huawei and ZTE’s rejection, India is clearly concerned about Chinese espionage via telecommunications networks. The country has also expressed concerns about Chinese telecommunications networks building infrastructure in Indian neighbor countries like Nepal and the Maldives, fearing that this equipment may be used to monitor communications coming out of India. Chinese companies, of course, claim that these suspicions are completely unwarranted, but at least in the short run, that isn’t likely to matter. As I’ve said before, brand China is poison (especially when it comes to telecommunications), and Chinese companies are going to continue having a very hard time convincing foreign governments that everything they’re doing is on the level.

(Sources: Sina Tech, Times of India, http://tech.sina.com.cn/t/2013-01-28/14338022829.shtml again)

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

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

A product listing on Pricebaba.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The WeChat messaging app seems to be China’s biggest social media export to date. But, apart from Tencent telling us that the “focus is Asia,” no one knows where WeChat is proving popular. Keen to find out where the app is doing well, the China-oriented consultants Value2020 have come up with this neat heatmap.

We’re told that the map is collated “based on app stores’ rankings” of WeChat, balanced by a “percentage of smartphones connected to the internet” in that country. While it’s far from an official way of tracking WeChat’s near 300 million user-base, it seems like a decent approach to find such elusive information. Of course, download numbers and app store tallies don’t equate to registered or active users, so that has to be thrown in there as a disclaimer.

In demand in India, Malaysia

The WeChat heatmap reveals that Tencent’s Asia strategy is paying off, with strong popularity for the app in places like Malaysia. Indeed, Tencent’s country manager for that area revealed a while back that WeChat has one million users in Malaysia, so that’s a useful, solid reference point. The Value2020 team says that India is actually the second-most popular area for WeChat outside of its native China. So long as the app’s censorship slip-up last week doesn’t put off overseas users, it looks like WeChat is building up a strong bulwark against Line and Whatsapp in some crucial, mobile-oriented markets.

In terms of recent trends, we’re informed that the messaging app is now growing even faster in India than it was last year, and it has been taking off in Spain, Mexico, and Argentina since last summer. Here’s the heatmap that Value2020 cooked up:

[Source: Value2020]

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

LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) announced yesterday that it has reached the 200 million user milestone. And to mark the occasion, Linkedin released an infographic illustrating some insights about the company’s growth so far.

Drilling down to Asia, we can see that India is still the number one country in the region on LinkedIn, and is the fifth-ranked country overall with 18 million members. The fastest growing Asian country is Indonesia, which according to LinkedIn’s ad creation tool, has around 1.7 million members at the moment and is now the third ranked Asian region in terms of users. Surprisingly, China represents Asia’s second largest LinkedIn user base with around 2.8 million members.

It’s also worth noting that the most-followed person on LinkedIn is US president Barack Obama who briefly spent his childhood in Indonesia; he has 617,239 followers. Indian-American author Deepak Chopra MD is third overall with 372,903 followers.

Below is the new infographic in its entirety. You might also want to check out another recent infographic from LinkedIn about the most desired professions in Singapore. (Via TNW):

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

India’s popular online food and restaurant guide, Zomato, has announced that it is expanding to include a section for London, England. The service subsequently has coverage of popular food spots in 18 cities in India, the UAE, Sri Lanka, and now the United Kingdom too.

According to the announcement, the London section now has over 14,000 restaurants listed, and they are adding content for about 500 more per day. Initially I thought that the high population of Indian emigrants in the UK might have been a motivating factor in Zomato’s decision to roll out London listings. But I’m told by a Zomato representative that while it is a certainly an advantage in getting a kickstart there, it was not one of the most significant factors. According to the company’s blog, the initial idea appears to have been somewhat whimsical. Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal writes:

The evening of November 20th, 2012, sipping tea in our office, we were discussing the beauty of London during Christmas. Naturally, the conversation steered towards restaurants in London and how much fun it would be to spend Christmas in London while eating at some of the best restaurants in the world. Somewhere in the middle of the casual banter, someone jokingly said, “This Christmas, Zomato is coming to London”. This was followed by complete silence… and some goosebumps.

If you’d like to try out the new Zomato London section, you can head over to zomato.com/london. Right now access is by invitation only, but if you request one I expect the folks at Zomato will let you in.

The company aspires to further expand later in the year, with more coverage in Europe, the Middle East, and South East Asia, although a representative says they have yet to settle on any specific cities.

Currently Zomato sees more than 9 million people each month using its services, so it will be interesting to see how quickly and how far the New Delhi-based company can grow beyond that user base.

It’s been a while since we heard from India-based mobile ad platform InMobi, but now we’re told that the company has acquired Britain’s Overlay Media, a data-driven specialist in context aware computing. The buy-up should help InMobi with its targeted mobile ads, since Overlay is all about delivering personalized content to phone users.

The financial terms of the deal haven’t been revealed. The Overlay Media site is now blank apart from the announcement about its InMobi deal. The UK team will move into InMobi’s London office, which is its Europe and Middle East HQ.

Overlay’s main product is its Context Engine which can help developers or brands learn about their mobile users and customers. CNN says that this hasn’t been deployed yet, giving InMobi the chance to have exclusive access to this product which will likely arrive on its ad platform later this year.

Overlay Media comprises of a team of data scientists, and InMobi founder and CEO Naveen Tewari today said of them:

We are excited to add amazing talent to InMobi. This acquisition, along with Metaflow Solutions and MMTG Labs, will help us to continue to be at the forefront of delivering highly engaging content to consumers globally.

InMobi got $200 million in investment from Japan’s Softbank back in September 2011.

Earlier this month, Malaysian based social-network-turned-social–gaming-website Friendster.com launched new dating features, allowing people to browse and hook up with potential partners online. Used widely as a dating website in the past, the new dating features of Friendster could be welcomed by many of its former users across Southeast Asia.

There are three dating-related features on the website: My Crushes, My Admirers, and My Matches. In the Crush game, users get to choose whether the pictures of potential partners are hot or not. If users say that the picture is hot, then they become an admirer of that person, and that person becomes a crush of the user in return. If both parties say that the other person is hot, then we have ourselves a match. Users can view these three features from the social dashboard.

Another big change is that Friendster is being far more choosy with users’ profile pictures. There is a requirement to add profile pictures with an emphasis on your face, and the pictures will then need to be approved from the Friendster team. When I tried using a picture with my face a little far away from the camera, the picture got rejected by the team. Other profile information is required as well, such as users’ sexual orientation.

There are on-site purchases that can be made using Friendster coins, including features to make profiles more easily discovered through search or through banner spaces. These coins can be bought online using several payment methods, including PayPal and Indonesian banks BCA and Mandiri.

Around two months ago, Friendster CEO COO Nikolai Galicia said that more than 50 percent of the site’s users come from Asia. Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines were the site’s top four countries, which is where Friendster had its social gaming platform. So you might find more search results when looking for potential partners from those countries.

By combining social gaming and dating features, Friendster could potentially make a huge comeback as one of the biggest dating social networks — at least in the Southeast Asia region. That alone would certainly be a good step.

[Source: Lowyat via Trenologi]

India-based chat app Nimbuzz is holding a competition where users have to name Hollywood or Bollywood movie titles by talking with a Santa ‘chat buddy.’ The competition runs until December 27th and promises three daily prizes like the iPhone 5, Amazon Kindle, and Philips HD LED TV.

To get started, users just need to add the Santa Claus Buddy located under “What’s New” in the “NWorld” section. Then you can start the competition by chatting with the Santa Claus Buddy on your contact list. The gameplay is similar to Hangman.

Do note that users need to pay 10 Nimbuckz to participate in the contest, and then you get to play unlimited games for that day. You can view the leaderboard too to see how close you are to winning the prizes. In Indonesia, the app charges only around IDR 6,400 (66 cents) for 250 Nimbuckz. That would make the competition entry price about IDR 256 (3 cents) for 10 Nimbuckz.

You can check out the Nimbuzz blog for more information.

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

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

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

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

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

Vikas Saxena, the CEO of Nimbuzz

Chat app Nimbuzz, which has been around since 2006, recently won two categories in Opera Software’s 2012 Top Apps Awards – the communication category for Android, and the overall winner for Symbian OS. Vikas Saxena, the CEO of Nimbuzz (pictured right), shared the company’s plans for competing in the hot messaging apps market in Asia.

Similar to the other emerging chat apps like Line, KakaoTalk, and WeChat, Nimbuzz features messaging, voice, and video calling. The chat app is also an open platform which third party developers can utilize to build more apps such as games for Nimbuzz’s users. Nimbuzz however, also has integration with other online chat platforms such as Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Facebook, and Windows Live Messenger.

Vikas pointed out that Nimbuzz was originally a Dutch company. He shifted its headquarters to India in mid-2011 to focus more on Asian markets. The company is funded by investment firm Mangrove Capital Partners and media group MIH. We asked Vikas about his future plans for Nimbuzz:

1. Do you have any particular plans for Asia?

Vikas: Since our inception, we have recognized that for Nimbuzz to be successful, we have to compete in the Asian markets. We currently have over 60 million users in Asia and it is our most rapidly growing region. Many of these users are in India and the Middle East region, and we will be aggressively pursuing market share in the far eastern Asian region in 2013. We currently allow our users to purchase avatars and gifts in our virtual store. We plan to continue and expand these services so our users can express themselves as creatively and freely as possible.

2. Can you share some data with us?

Vikas: [...] Today, approximately 60 percent of our over 100 million users are in Asia, 10 percent in Europe, 13 percent in Africa, and 7 percent in North America. In total, we have users in more than 200 countries. Our platform breakdown is as follows:

3. Do you have any plans for making the free call feature available to other OSes such as Blackberry and Windows Phone?

Vikas: We would love to integrate our free calling feature onto BlackBerry phones. However, RIM (the maker of BlackBerry devices) has not opened its API for app developers like us to provide call functionality. The free calling feature will be available for Windows Phone 8 soon. Currently these features are available on all other mobile operating systems.

4. What do you think makes Nimbuzz unique compared to other chat apps?

Vikas: What makes Nimbuzz unique is its versatility. Whereas other apps specialize in one service, Nimbuzz offers VoIP calling, messaging, video calling, chatting and a lot more. In addition, users can connect to another user’s unique Nimbuzz ID or to a phone number from their contact list on their desktop. Unlike other messaging only apps, with Nimbuzz you won’t lose your contacts if you lose your phone.

Additionally, in many regions that we focus on, Nimbuzz Credits for voice calls allow you to connect to anybody in the world, even those friends who are not on Nimbuzz.

The chat app earns revenue from ads, the virtual store, and international calling via its Skype-like “NimbuzzOut.” The company seems to be very proud of its customer behavior insight on mobile handsets, which can be used extensively to help make companies’ advertisements more effective on Nimbuzz. The virtual store lets users purchase avatars and virtual gifts. 30 percent of Nimbuzz customers, it claims, are making purchases there.

Nimbuzz is available on Android, iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Symbian, J2ME, as well as Windows and Mac desktop computers. So, pretty much everywhere. Vikas mentioned that Nimbuzz is pre-installed on most Nokia Lumia and Nokia Asha mobile phones at the moment as well.

The company is doing very well on feature phone platforms like Symbian and Java, but Nimbuzz is still crawling its way up on smartphone platforms. With other emerging chat apps relying on its cute stickers and addictive games, Nimbuzz might need to come up with a strategy to recreate that fun [1] inside its app to convince more smartphone users to switch, or at least to start using Nimbuzz’s aforementioned online chat integration.

Indeed, Indian feature phone owners – such as those on the new-ish Nokia Asha phones (pictured) – account for over 60 percent of the app downloads since its launch on the Symbian S40 platform in August 2011.

Vuclip also has apps for BlackBerry, Android, and iPhone, so it’s able to target a broad range of individuals, though its service is still aimed mainly at emerging markets. The company claims to have 14 million monthly unique users and delivers over 20 million videos every day.

Not too many big-name video apps or sites even bother to cater to owners of low-power phones, but emerging markets still represent a keen viewership that’s a captive audience for brands. And so Vuclip – which is based in California and has four offices throughout Asia – mostly monetizes from advertising and specialist brand channels within its apps. Plus, those on other phones, like random JAVA-based creations, can still access Vuclip in the mobile browser.

The Vuclip app is here in the Ovi Store.

Beijing-based UCWeb, makers of the smash-hit UC Browser for phones, is announcing today that it now has more than 400 million global users. That huge figure is pretty insane for basically just a single app, albeit one that’s adapted across seven different mobile platforms. UCWeb says this cements its place as the biggest mobile browser in the world. The app accrued 100 million new users in just under a year. Here’s the official word on its Twitter account:

UCWeb Reaches 400 Million Global Users: UCWeb pushes partnership play to accelerate market expansion in… goo.gl/fb/1zt2B #UCWeb Inc.

— UC Browser (@UCBrowser) December 13, 2012

The startup software maker has calculated this UC Browser stat from tallying quarterly active users across all platforms for December 2012. The company highlights India as one country that’s particularly hot for its browser, with that nation being its second-largest user-base outside of China.

The new logo for UC Browser to help it go international.

As we noted back in October, UC Browser has outpaced Opera and its mobile browsers in India, and UCWeb today claims to have 25 percent market share in that country. Indeed, today’s announcement comes out of UCWeb’s Hyderabad office where the team is engaged in the AppFest 2012 event which started today.

The app dominates by an even larger margin – with 73 percent share, according to iResearch data – in China, beating out even the local web giant Tencent, which is spending a lot to market its own QQ Browser. (Full disclosure: that includes on our site).

Though UC Browser is available on all kinds of smartphone and feature phone platforms, Android represents a massive user-base for the company, with 100 million of its 400 million total on Google’s mobile OS.

UCWeb has always had global ambitions, and so it’s also aiming to IPO in the US next year. Plus, its browser got a new icon and logo recently – the swirly squirrel you see above – to replace the cutesy cartoon squirrel that it used for years (and which I never liked, as I always found it a bit derivative of the Firefox logo).

For contrast, UCWeb’s global nemesis, Norway-based Opera, says it has over 275 million users of its browsers across desktop, mobile, and smartTVs.

Find UC Browser for your phone on its homepage.

The India-made messaging app Hike, which we previewed back in September, has made good on its promise to launch internationally. And to make it even more accessible, Hike app is now ready to greet the world with new apps for iPhone and Windows Phone (WP) joining its original Android version.

The act of going global wasn’t as easy as flicking a switch. Kavin Bharti Mittal, from the Bharti Softbank (BSB) incubator that guides Hike, tells us that the app “started rolling out to five countries every day as part of our ‘around the world in 20 days.’” Today the process was complete. He says that the app – which takes on rivals as diverse as BBM, Whatsapp, Line, and WeChat – initially proved so popular that it put a big strain on their servers, and so “launching in a phased manner” made more sense. That also explains why it was a bit late in arriving.

One unique feature of Hike – among such social messaging apps, anyway – is that it also supports SMS, allowing its global users to do Hike2SMS and Indian users to fire back with SMS2Hike. Kavin says that, in feature phone-loving India, approximately half of the usage is via SMS, but, in general around the globe, folks are predominantly messaging when on wifi or mobile data plans.

Of course, going into more markets will also result in meeting users with many different demands. While Hike is quite minimalistic, it might find people want features that they’re familiar with from Line or WeChat, like video messaging or themed sticker/emoticon packs. Hike will be adding new things, Kavin says, but he’s remaining tight-lipped on what that entails. He adds:

There are lots of new features coming in 2013. Hike will be very different by end of first quarter. Building on our philosophy of less is more we will always keep user experience prime, which also answers a question we get asked usually – whether we will serve ads in hike to monetize. We won’t. Ads, we feel, are bad UX.

Well, at least there won’t be ads. Judging by Hike’s reception on Android, where it has mostly five-star reviews on Google Play from users around the world, it’s off to a good start with its new audience.

Build a Strategy. Passion can only take you so far.

At Simplify360, we are building a company that sustains. We are neither looking for quick revenue nor looking for a quick exit. So we build a strategy that builds a strong brand – a brand that is vibrant, valuable and strong. No short-cuts by lowering quality.

So we chose a strategy of keeping Slideshare as our focus. We planned to publish regular research reports, case studies, and white papers on the platform, and distribute through other social channels. Slideshare was chosen because the content on there does not die, and remains as an important document for a longer time. This is in sharp contrast to what happens on Facebook, Twitter, or blogs.

Business is a castle. Social channels are towers.

Some social companies believe that they can live only with Facebook pages. We agree that Facebook or other social profiles are important. However, we do not believe that one social profile, however powerful, can suffice all business interests.

We believe that businesses or company websites are the main ‘castle’ of a strategy war game. The castle is powerful but it is always good to guard it with powerful towers nearby. The benefit is huge – the powerful towers (in our case, the Slideshare channel) work as an indicator of territory ownership and create resistance for competitors.

Quality is king. Consistency is the emperor.

Quality is extremely important. Think of content and build a story around it. Then, give an extra effort to make it look awesome. Always remember, social media is still media – it loves anything that is provocative, attractive, and mind-blowing.

And so we make sure that the quality of content that goes out is maintained. It gets more visibility through shares, and also gives a good impression of a brand.

This much alone will not win you success. We have been doing it consistently on Slideshare for over two years. We have published content (research papers or other leadership content) every two weeks.

Share your story

Social media has flooded people with information. And amid all that noise, good stories sell. People like case studies but they will love your story, if you achieve some success. Share it and establish your leadership.

We shared our success with Slideshare in a presentation called “How Simplify360 Built World Class Brand Using Slideshare.” This actually became the second most successful piece of content we produced. It was good marketing material for Slideshare and they kept it as ‘Top Presentation of the Day’ for four consecutive days.

The presentation was shared in Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin by huge number of people, and it hit the Linkedin Today front page too! The presentation received 130,000 views in the first week of publishing. This not only helped with brand recognition but also attracted several business leads.

Building on success

So what’s next? For us, it could be building a new tower as powerful as the Slideshare channel. This could be Scribd, YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. It could be Pinterest too. I don’t want to disclose the channel just yet.

We have decided on one and are working on it. We will not, however, stop building our Slideshare channel. We’d like to have two powerful towers. We do have good SEO too, and are working on official PR as well. All these constitute a business strategy.

To learn more about what we have achieved through Slideshare, have a quick look at the presentation above.

Komli Media has announced its second deal in the last five days, this time a sales partnership with Singapore-based hyperlocal mobile ad network Yoose. The deal will see Komli Media’s mobile division use Yoose’s geo-tagging advertising capability for the India and Southeast Asia market. Amit Bhartiya, the VP of Komli Media comments:

As leaders within the digital media advertising space across India and Southeast Asia, our objective is to add a hyperlocal offering into our mix that ensures setting best-practice standards for mobile geo-targeting and engagement, both for our clients and their consumers. We consider the Yoose partnership to be fundamentally important in achieving this and are confident of the significant value this will bring to advertisers across India and Southeast Asia.

Yoose makes use of the geotagged locations shared on mobile phones, allowing ads shown on mobile phones to be more relevant to the users’ location, such as advertising for a fruit vendor 500 meters away. Yoose’s mobile ad feature will also help strengthen Komli’s recent ad sales partnership with Twitter, which was announced last week.

For more information about how Yoose works, you can check out the interview video below with CEO Christian Geissendoerfer.

People don’t tend to think of Facebook as a major playing in the instant messaging market, but the company has just announced an update to its Facebook Messenger IM app that will make it easier for users in India, Indonesia, Australia, Venezuela, and South Africa using just their names and a phone number.

Previously, Facebook messenger sign-ups have required an email address. And while that’s a fair expectation for Facebook to have for American users, internet penetration is lower in countries like India and Indonesia, and user habits are also different. Many users don’t have regular email accounts, and instead communicate via text messages, IM apps, and VoIP phone calls (among other things). By removing the email account requirement in these countries, Facebook has made it very quick and easy for users to sign-up, and it’s likely that the move will lead to increased use of Facebook Messenger. Facebook hopes that increased use of Messenger will make users more interested in signing up for a full Facebook account, too.

That said, the app still faces tough competition from players that already have a firm grip on the instant messaging market. In Indonesia, for example, Facebook will have to take on BlackBerry Messenger as well as newcomers like WeChat that have been gaining ground fast. The move to make Facebook Messenger easier to sign up for is a savvy one, but it may prove to have been too little too late in some or all of the countries Facebook is targeting with this change. (Interestingly, there are rumors afoot that Facebook is interested in buying Whatsapp, and if that did happen, it would put the company in a much stronger competitive positon. But since Whatsapp has denied the rumor, that seems to be strictly a hypothetical scenario for now).

If you don’t live in India, Indonesia, Australia, Venezuela, or South Africa, it looks like for now you’re stuck with the old sign-up process. But if this current initiative works out and Facebook user numbers rise in some of those countries, it’s very possible Facebook could choose to expand the new sign-up rules to other countries, too.

[Via Facebook and the LA Times]

Image by Nobuyuki Hayashi; At Google Singapore. Click to enlarge.

With developed nations close to the saturation point in terms of web users, Google is looking to Asia for “the next billion” netizens. These will be, said Google representatives today at an event in Singapore, in emerging markets (especially Asia) where 500 million new users will come online between now and 2015.

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) points out that, of its 16 Asia offices, almost half are in emerging markets. There’s one each in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and four in India. Asia already has one billion netizens – many getting online solely on budget phones – but there are many more to come.

This will mean, says Google Singapore in a factsheet issued today:

The global marketplace for ideas will grow from two to three billion people — that means a billion more people contributing and benefiting from the world’s best ideas, talents and more. […] This will also mean incredible new business opportunities as a billion new potential entrepreneurs, small business and consumers expand their markets and the global market.

And so the search engine giant is looking closely at Asia to offer up much of that next billion – as is Nokia with its similar mantra. To prove that Asia is at the center of all this potential web growth, Google’s Asia team cites this snippet from the World Bank:

Explaining how to take the web mainstream to the next billion in Asia. (Image: Nobuyuki Hayashi). Click to enlarge.

In 2011, around 2.2 billion people had the Internet while 4.6 billion did not — half of those who don’t have the Internet now live in just five countries, all in Asia: India, Indonesia, China, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Here’s the state of internet penetration among the main markets in South and Southeast Asia:

• India: 125 million Internet users – 10% of population
• Indonesia: 43.6 million Internet users – 18% of population
• Vietnam: 31.1 million internet users – 35.4% of population
• Philippines: 27.5 million Internet users – 29% of population
• Malaysia: 17.6 million Internet users – 61% of population
• Thailand: 16.4 million internet users – 23.7% of population

Google is facing challenges in some of those countries – such as Vietnam, where Google doesn’t have a country office. A Vietnamese-Russian joint venture search engine, called Wada, launched last month. And it’s likely that China’s Baidu will push into the search engine market in Thailand and Vietnam in the future.

Of course, Google is already doing plenty to get new web users onto its services – such as its recent telco tie-up in the Philippines to allow feature phone owners there access to Gmail, Google search, and Google+ without the need to pay for a data plan.

[Images courtesy of journalist Nobuyuki Hayashi (@nobi) on Twitter]

Joydeep Sen Sarma, engineer

There are a lot of reasons for this. I will try to do this in decreasing order of intractability (and focus mostly on the environment in India):

1. The Indian education system is hostile to outliers. As an example – a teen who just loves to spends all his time programming (and can’t stand anything else like social sciences/arts/literature) can have a very bright future (assuming he has talent) in the US – and has none in India. The system in India will give him/her poor grades, teachers/parents/friends would destroy him emotionally. Forget about doing well – such a person would do very badly in India – and I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up as a wreck.

Just to back this up – in all my years of interacting with multiple adjacent batches of IITians (and alumni of other Indian schools) – there is but one true outlier that I have seen who ever made it through the system.

To state the point a different way, what we consider top Indian talent (grads from IITs etc. – going to top schools or employers in US) is almost systematically biased (because of how they were chosen) to not be tech geniuses of the types that start large iconic tech companies.

2. The Indian technology market – whether it’s consumer or business – is not leading edge. This makes it very difficult for young local entrepreneurs to make a breakthrough. (After all almost all new tech giants emerge from new markets/technology trends.)

This is no less important than the previous point. By the time entrepreneurs in India latch on to something, they are both playing catch up and – even worse – competing with a lot of other people who have caught on as well. The fact that there’s very little about the Indian market that doesn’t make Western tech products (like Facebook/Apple) portable – doesn’t help.

Starting a B2B tech business in India is the hardest. The market for any leading edge business product is almost entirely in the West.

3. Indian venture capital markets are way behind American counterparts in terms of funding risky, pathbreaking ventures. The differences are apparent in valuation, in early focus on cost/revenues and in (predominantly) funding of copycat concepts from the West.

This point is not fundamental, and these things can change. Examples of breathtaking success can change the risk premium for example.

4. Startup and Engineering Culture in India is nowhere close to that in places like Bay Area:

• Engineers don’t remain engineers for long. Very soon they become hands off managers and architects. As a result, expert level hands on engineers – particularly those with both depth and breadth – are much harder to find.
• In my personal experience, intensity at Indian startups is lower. The urgency, the sense of do-or-die, is much lower.
• The few truly great hands-on experts prefer to stick to top employers like Google/Microsoft etc. and are rarely to be found sticking it out in a startup garage.
• Equity compensation is often drastically lower in Indian startups (especially for engineers). There seem to be a raft of reasons for this, but regardless, this makes the previous three points pretty logical. It’s a vicious cycle.
• Mentorship – there’s no Steve Jobs or Peter Thiel here to mentor the local Zuck. The people who made it big in India in tech (on the backs of the consulting industry) are unlikely to be the right mentor for the next Twitter/Facebook/Apple. Less dramatically, the lack of top class engineers who have spent 10+ years programming just means there’s less mentorship for the younger ones [1].

Again this point, overall is not fundamental – these things can all change with time. But these cycles are very hard to break and will take a long long time (if ever) to do so.

Other points – predominantly those related to absence of good governance, poor infrastructure, regulatory hurdles – don’t affect tech businesses as much. But I am sure they affect B&M businesses a lot.

Age is an interesting factor. If young local entrepreneurs have the deck stacked against them, then the ones with potential that remain are the ones that are more experience and education. But as anyone with a kid or two knows – achieving something remarkable (from scratch) after the onset of family life is just an order of magnitude harder.

The silver lining here is that if the reasons are well understood, the solutions can be articulated. What if we have a Super30 program for outstanding young programmers for example? Can we expose such a talent pool to the latest and greatest in technology, including liberal travel to major global tech hubs? What if we can put them in mentor/partnership programs with industry folks who have a solid understanding of the business landscape and with top engineers, both local and abroad. There seems to be potential ways out of where we are, but it won’t just happen by itself.

Aashish Gupta, Founder & CEO Yellowleg.com

It all starts with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (see below). Wanting to “change the world” is presumably right at the top of that triangle. A human being feels that need only after the needs lower in the triangle are fulfilled.

Now coming to Indian entrepreneurs, given the socio-econonomic backgrounds that the vast majority of our nation comes from, most people get their education and devote their lives to creating a better life for themselves and their families. By the time they feel the need to “change the world” they are probably in their mid-thirties, at least. By contrast, many US entrepreneurs start their journeys sometime during college. That’s a huge headstart – both in terms of amount of time they have to develop their skills and the level of risk they can take at that life-stage.

Even among the few Indians who hail from privileged backgrounds (or work their way into it), the general environment of scarcity dictates that they devote their lives to preserving their wealth and maintaining status quo.

This question originally appeared on Quora. More questions on Startups:

• What are some incubators for start up companies in India?
• How do you launch a startup when you don’t have any technical experience?
• What are the factors that should encourage you to pursue entrepreneurial activities in China?

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.

One-click saving to Evernote in the updated Tencent ONE Browser for Android.

Unlike Tencent’s QQ browser, ONE Browser (formerly called Ibibo Browser in India, or as iBrowser elsewhere) compresses mobile data, and claims to be able to reduce users’ data costs by up to 85 percent. It competes with Opera Mini, which is arguably the most widely used mobile browser (also with data compression capabilities) in Indonesia, as well as UC Browser.

With 40 million users worldwide, including 200,000 users in Indonesia, Evernote seems to be placing a great deal of focus on Indonesia, a nation which matches up very well with Tencent’s mobile strategy. The Chinese company recently partnered with media conglomerate PT. Global Mediacom and also stated its ambitions quite clearly at our Startup Asia Jakarta conference in June of this year.

Andy Pan, Tencent’s Director of International Mobile Products, said:

We are rapidly introducing our products in the Asian region and Indonesia is a primary market for us. With the mobile phone subscribers’ base now topping more than 260 million, Indonesia’s mobile phone penetration has tripled in five years.

Evernote seems to be rapidly ramping up partnerships and initiatives across Asia in 2012. In May, it launched Yinxiang Biji, an Evernote service localized for the Chinese market which was then followed up by Alipay integration (to pay for Evernote pro services). In July, we noted that Evernote has 1.1 million users in China. Just recently, we wrote that Moleskin also creatively launched a smart (paper) notebook which enhances the quality of your photos taken with your mobile phone within the Evernote app.

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

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

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

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

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

Akshay then explained about Komli’s future plans:

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

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

In a blow to India’s supposedly homegrown budget tablet, the Aakash, it has been revealed that the gadget is partially made in China. This applies only to the newer Aakash 2 (pictured above), which launched earlier this month for just $21, and is designed for use in schools.

The tablet’s makers, Datawind, have admitted that much of the new Aakash is made in China and then imported into India by Datawind itself. The Daily Telegraph says today:

[T]he company had imported 10,000 units of the [new] Aakash from four Chinese suppliers between October 26th and November 7th and transported to India ‘duty-free’ under an exemption for government educational materials.

Datawind’s Sunit Singh Tuli denies the full extent of the claim, and explains the manufacturing process to the paper:

For expediency’s sake we had the motherboards and kits manufactured in our Chinese subcontractor’s facilities, and then the units have been ‘kitted’ in China at various manufacturers for expediency, whereas the final assembly and programming has happened in India. This was well discussed and we got approval prior to shipping. The initial devices were assembled and programmed at our facilities in New Delhi and Amritsar.

So, it’s perhaps up to Indian educational institutes and local governments to decide if Aakash 2 makes the grade as a local product for local students. Sunit’s argument is that his company does more of the assembly work than the likes of Apple, whose products are made entirely in Chinese factories. Let us know in the comments if you think the program has been damaged by opting to outsource so much of the work.

[Source: Daily Telegraph; Image via Engadget]

Just a few weeks after India’s MakeMyTrip (NASDAQ:MMYT) acquired the Thailand-based site HotelTravel for $25 million, the travel e-commerce site is continuing its Southeast Asia push by announcing today a new acquisition. This time, MakeMyTrip has acquired a majority stake in the Thai hotel aggregator ITC Group for $3.2 million.

ITC is a tour operator in Thailand which also runs a hotel reservations business. The deal gives MakeMyTrip a lot more offline connections on the ground in Thailand, and indicates – along with the HotelTravel buy-up – that Thailand is set to be a key outbound travel destination for India’s middle-class holiday-makers.

As an insightful guest post on our site explained earlier this year, MakeMyTrip has been leading the way in opening up affordable travel in India – especially by riding the wave of budget airlines. And so Thailand is a perfect fit for these leisurely, low-price get-aways.

[Source: VCcircle]

Chinese phone and telecom equipment makers Huawei and ZTE are having a rough go of it overseas. A recent US Congressional investigation alleged that the companies’ technology may have security flaws that could be easily exploited for the purposes of spying or data theft, and now the Indian government is expected to announce soon whether or not it will be opening investigations of its own into the two companies.

India’s interest in the companies was inspired by the US report, which will be discussed at the upcoming meeting between the Indian Department of Economic Affairs and the Foreign Investment Promotion Board. Both Huawei and ZTE continue to deny all wrongdoing, and both companies have agreed to share their source codes with Indian investigators. Huawei global chief security officer John Suffolk told The Times of India that the company had also shared its source code with other countries in the past.

It’s not hard to see why ZTE and Huawei would pull out all the stops to ensure that they continue to have a future in India: the country has more than 1.2 billion people and a developing mobile market that could represent billions of dollars in revenue. Both Huawei and ZTE spokesmen have said previously that it makes no sense for the companies to permit spying because if discovered, such activity would shut the companies off permanently from huge markets like India and the United States. But Indian regulators, it seems, are just as concerned as some American congressmen about the ties both companies have with China’s government and military. It remains to be seen whether India will launch its own investigation, but if it does, it will be interesting to see what gets turned up.

This kind of scrutiny and suspicion is something more Chinese tech companies are likely to face as they begin to move outside of China. Whether it’s fair or not, concerns about associations with China’s authoritarian government have already blocked numerous Chinese companies’ attempts at acquisitions and expansions abroad, and that trend does not seem likely to shift anytime soon.

[CIOL and Times of India via Sina Tech]

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.

1. Focus on what you are good at

At FusionCharts, we have been developing and selling interactive data visualization solutions for a decade now. We pioneered the very concept of interactive charting and have been the industry leaders in it ever since. Traditional wisdom would say we should expand into other verticals and push the pedal. But we still stick to data visualization since that’s what we know best, that’s what people know us best for, and we think there is enough room to expand further in the space. Expanding into other verticals without much of a connect is only going to spread our focus too thin – and before we know it, another player in the industry would have surpassed us at the one thing we were good at.

2. Don’t offer a product, offer a complete package

Your product might mean the world to you, but to the world it’s just another product. In essence, people don’t care what your product can do, they want to know what it can do for them.

So right from the early days at FusionCharts, we had real-life business demos on our website like sales dashboards, KPI monitors, and network monitoring dashboards that people would check out as soon as they hit the website – and then they’d go, “This is exactly what I am looking for.” Given that we were this unknown company from India, we needed to establish that connect really fast to sell to large enterprises. In addition to the demos, the complete package we offered included comprehensive docs, a product tour, and best practices documents.

3. On the internet, no knows you are small

We were able to sell to 10,000 customers including the likes of NASA and the US Army sitting in India. And, more importantly, without having a single dedicated salesperson on our ranks.

How did we do this? Quite simply, using the power of the internet. A good website created a great first impression, a first-of-its-type product with comprehensive docs and demos, and quick and reliable tech support. That was it. We didn’t have to be present at tradeshows around the world, have expensive offices in expensive cities, or have affiliations with industry bodies just to prove our credibility. The internet helped us mask how small a company we actually were.

4. Hire slow, fire fast

I was working all by myself for the first three years at FusionCharts even though I had enough money to put a team together. Of course, being a 20-year old, I didn’t know much about putting a team together and all the legalities that go along with it. I didn’t want things going wrong.

But even later, once I learnt all of that, I was very selective about hiring people. We hired people only when we badly needed them and were sure that they were a perfect cultural fit for FusionCharts.

We got to 10,000 customers without a single dedicated salesperson but only when I felt I could not handle all the load myself – and other parts of the business needed more of my time – did I decide to hire a VP of sales. Unfortunately, the VP of sales wasn’t a startup guy, and a lot of tasks were beyond his dignity, so I fired him quickly too.

For most of our positions, we look at between 20 to 100 candidates before making the hire. And if we have even the smallest doubt about someone, we pass them over.

5. The best money you can get is the customer’s money

These days funding is sexy. Raise a couple of million dollars and everyone on the blogosphere starts talking about you. You start to have a feeling of accomplishment already.

Raising money, however, just solves one problem: money. But it creates a whole lot of other problems. The biggest of them is being answerable to your investors, most of whom want you to scale up quick, often compromising on the quality of the product and the vision of the company as a whole.

Get money from customers instead. Make a good product that solves their problems, sell to them and be answerable to them. That can never be a bad thing.

6. Traditional business wisdom has no guarantee of working for you

Nothing in the business world is carved in stone. Marketing was all about the 4Ps that they taught in business schools around the world until the 4Cs happened. And then social media happened and marketing changed again.

Don’t go by what the business pundits have to say. Go by what sounds to be the most logical solution to your problem. It might defy all conventional business wisdom but if it the most logical, it is the correct solution.

7. It’s all about people

Even in the intangible world of software, it’s all about people. Customers, employees, vendors, partners, industry watchers — they are all people. It is people who create the technology that makes the world (or at least a small corner of it) a better place. And people have their own aspirations, wants and needs, that you need to listen to and take care of.

8. Give people more reasons to remember you than just the product

Business is not just about your product or service. It’s more what people feel about you. At every touch-point they have with you and your business, give them a reason to remember you. Delight them. A genuine conversation, a good story, they all add up.

Every time we go to a trade show, along with the objective of getting sales leads, product feedback and press coverage, another of our objectives is to give people a nice and happy feeling about meeting us. And we do whatever it takes to get people to smile and remember us even months after the trade show is over. And it all adds up when someone writes in to say just how nice it was meeting the team even months after the tradeshow.

9. Everyone loves a good story

Recently, we completed a decade of being in business at FusionCharts. And to celebrate that, we wrote a book on the complete journey of the company. The book talks about all the mistakes we made, lessons we learnt along the journey, and the hilarious incidents that happened along the way. The feedback we have been getting on the book is astounding. People love the story and are writing in to say how they feel a part of FusionCharts after reading our candid account. Everyone loves a good story, no matter how left-brained they are.

10. Entrepreneurship is a journey, not a destination

This is something I learned much later in my entrepreneurial journey. Stories of obscene nine-digit exits and massive IPOs used to get me all excited earlier and made me dream of the day I would have one of them myself. But then I paused to take a look back at the FusionCharts journey and realized it is the small moments that came along the journey, both good and bad, that I cherish the most. The loss I made on my first sale. The time I changed accents and pretended the call had been transferred from the support to the sales department. The delight at seeing Barack Obama using FusionCharts. These are the moments I will remember and smile about for the rest of my life.

Entrepreneurship will give you the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Enjoy them all.

Big news today from the folks at UCWeb, the makers of the popular UC Browser, who tell us that it has now surpassed the lofty milestone of 100 million Android users as of November. The company claims that theirs is the only third-party mobile browser to break the 100 million mark.

As you can see in the chart below from UC Web, this time last year UC Browser was just approaching the 40 million user mark, which makes this accomplishment one year later all the more phenomenal.

We recently noted that UCWeb is doing very well in India, where it claims 20 percent of the mobile browser market share, edging out even Opera in Google Play’s free app rankings. The company has an office in India, so its feet-on-the-ground strategy appears to have worked there, and is likely one of the main reasons for its overall success on Android.

And of course, UC Browser is also doing very well in its home market of China where a recent CNNIC report put its market share at about 54 percent.

The Beijing-based company also highlighted the top model handsets among UC browser users, including the Samsung Galaxy Ace which was ranked first. Their list also includes a number of up-and-coming budget Chinese smartphones such as Xiaomi, Huawei’s 8650 and 8812, and ZTE’s 880.

UCWeb’s CFO Roy Rong recently told media that the company was considering an IPO in 2013. If its success this year is any indication, 2013 should indeed be a pretty big year for the UC browser as it continues to ride the wave of global Android growth.