North Korea is, to put it mildly, not a country where information flows easily. The web is tightly controlled, and while the country did just add an uncensored 3G mobile network, it’s only for foreign visitors. Plus, buying even a basic mobile in North Korea is pretty expensive.

So North Korea still doesn’t really enjoy the free information exchange that comes along with internet connectivity in other countries. At least, North Koreans don’t enjoy that on the internet. They do, as this wonderful and fascinating article points out, have their own sort of ‘internet,’ though, and it’s trains. From NK News:

In the trains used by ordinary North Koreans for travel, it is so crowded that even the toilets are full of people and luggage. Standing shoulder to shoulder hours at a time for a journey of several days, the atmosphere can get intense. Yet it is in this pressured environment that criticism of the regime can spill out of the mouths of ordinary citizens. North Korean refugee Ju-haeng*, 43 years of age, told us, “North Korean trains are chaotic inside, but in the train compartments we can hear news about the outside world and even complain about our leaders.”

Complaining about leaders; yes, that certainly sounds like the internet. But what about the lulz of social networking sites on the world wide web; do North Korean trains offer that, too? Apparently they do:

In a gathering of people, there may sometimes be a clown. North Korean refugees say that jokes cracked in a train tend to revolve around mocking the behaviour of officials and letting off steam about problems in society. North Korean refugee Young-jin*, 39 years of age, told us, “On the train, the usual hierarchies that are observed in the workplace and in social settings don’t apply for some reason. Many feel comfortable cracking jokes that they wouldn’t dare in another setting. Maybe feeling more comfortable among strangers is a Korean thing. That is why we can be ourselves on the train. Moreover, we know we won’t see any of these people again – that certainly helps us let our guards down.”

Of course, you can’t always hop on a train quite the way you would the web, so information is also frequently passed via mobile phone from person-to-person. This may sound backwards to some of our readers, but really, these are just social networks from the pre-social-networking era; i.e., social networks that are actually social.

While I should make it very clear I’m no North Korea expert, it also seems to me that the fact that people are willing to joke and share information with strangers on trains means that if internet connectivity broadens or the mobile internet is finally introduced to North Korea, the right sort of social network could really take off there. How such a network could be safe to use while still being permitted by the North Korean government I’m not sure. But there’s clearly a desire to exchange information, so when there are internet connections everywhere (which may still be a long way away), I have a feeling that some enterprising folks will take a stab at bringing North Korea’s train-car social networks online.

(via NK News)

We here at Tech in Asia love the internet as much as anyone. In fact, we probably love it more than most people. But we apparently don’t love it as much as a Sichuan teen nicknamed Xiao Long who tried to murder his entire family simply because they were restricting his internet time.

According to a story in the WCC Daily, the 14-year-old Xiao Long really loved surfing the web. But his parents, especially his mother, were concerned that Xiao Long had become addicted and began strictly regulating his internet time. Xiao Long did not take kindly to this. “They were controlling me too tightly, not letting me on the internet,” he told the press. “If I kill them, then there’d be no one to control me, so I’d be happy.”

Xiao Long put his murderous plan into action one night before dinner, surreptitiously putting pesticide cooking oil his mother used to make the stewed cauliflower and meat dish his mother had prepared for the family. He told his parents he had already eaten, so his father, mother, elder brother, and sister-in-law ate the dish without him. They thought it tasted a little odd, but finished it anyway.

Soon after, Xiao Long’s father began to feel ill. At first, it seemed he had a cold, so the family rushed out and bought some cold medicine, but soon everyone else was feeling ill. Fevers flared up, as did vomiting, and when the local clinic diagnosed them with food poisoning they were moved to a nearby hospital. There, testing revealed that the family had been poisoned. Doctors managed to save all of them, but it was especially close for Xiao Long’s mother and father, who both had to be placed in intensive care.

The family recovered, but a village official thought the case seemed odd and reported it to police. The police were surprised to learn that a banned pesticide containing sulfur had somehow gotten into the family’s cooking oil. “This is a pesticide that can’t even be sold in the market, how could it have gotten into vegetable cooking oil?” one officer told the media. Pressing further, police learned that the 14 year old Xiao Long hadn’t eaten that night, and when questioned Xiao Long quickly admitted that he had been trying to kill his family because they weren’t letting him on the internet.

In fairness to Xiao Long, his parents were pretty extreme. “The week before it happened, I scared him by saying if you sneak out to go to the internet cafe again I’ll break your arms and legs,” his mother admitted. “We shouldn’t have threatened him,” his father agreed. But with that said, it doesn’t seem that either parent actually did physically abuse Xiao Long, and this was probably just the sort of empty threat parents make all the time to try to shock their kids into listening. Certainly, it doesn’t justify attempted murder.

Less than a month ago, we looked at another case where a Chinese net user murdered two people and committed arson just because his internet connection dropped. Xiao Long, who has (obviously) been arrested, didn’t end up killing anyone, but his case is arguably even more disturbing since he’s just a kid and he was trying to kill four people in his own family. He is very lucky that his victims survived.

China’s government is already aware that game and internet addiction is a serious problem, and is currently working on its own China-specific diagnostic criteria. But Xiao Long’s case is another piece of evidence that effective methods of treatment and public education about the problem are just as important. Xiao Long may well be mentally disturbed, but even so, if his parents had been better informed about how to handle his burgeoning internet addiction, they might never have ended up getting poisoned by their own son.

(WCC Daily via QQ Games)

It has been a pretty busy week in the China technology space, with lots of activity from the big players, both foreign and domestic, especially in the mobile space. We also saw the net nanny make a brief and very annoying appearance, but thankfully not for too long. So in case you missed any of the action from the past week, here’s our recap to keep you up to speed:

Apple Terminates One China Supplier That Had 74 Underage Workers 01/25

We take a look at Apple’s most recent ‘supplier responsibility’ report, and find that there are still an abundance of problems, including one particular supplier in Guangdong which had been found to have scores of underage laborers.

Microsoft Under Fire For Skype China Business and Alleged Chat Intercepts 01/25

Microsoft is being challenged by dozens of rights advocates today in the form of an open letter to Skype. That letter is asking Microsoft to disclose any “surveillance and censorship capabilities” in the Chinese version of Skype.

WTF? Lenovo Considering Acquiring RIM to Boost its Mobile Arm 01/25

Lenovo has been enjoying pretty good business over the past year. But we’re a little confused by a Bloomberg report saying that the Chinese tech giant Lenovo is pondering an acquisition of Research in Motion. I suspect they must not be wearing their ThinkCaps™.

Nokia Sales Down 79% in China as Symbian Dies, Lumia Slow to Grow 01/24

Nokia is doing well in some countries with its slick new Lumia smartphones. But regrettably, China is not one of those countries as the company just posted its worst ever annual report for the country.

Check Out 3 Years of Stunning 3G Growth in China [CHART] 01/24

Want a big-picture overview of the kind of growth that China’s 3G industry has seen over the past few years? My colleague Steven has you covered, pointing out that quarterly 3G subscriber totals for China’s major telecoms going all the way back to 2009.

China Train Ticket Site Cost Nearly $100 Million, Seems to Be Harassing Programmers, And Might Be Broken Again 01/24

And you thought being a programmer in the US was difficult… Just be thankful that you don’t have goons showing up on your doorstep demanding that you delete that plugin you coded, or else!

Social Coding Site Github Unblocked and Accessible Again in China 01/23

As if coders didn’t have it bad enough, this week saw social coding site Github temporarily blocked in China. Thankfully it didn’t stay blocked for long. Clearly the long, strong arms of the Octocat can be very persuasive.

Apple Sees iPhone Sales Double in China 01/23

China is still as hungry as ever for iPhone, and it looks like the folks at Apple are going to oblige them with more retail stores in the country. Way cool.

Tencent Weibo, the ‘Other Weibo’ That Nobody Cares About, Reaches 540 Million Users 01/22

Tencent always seems to do very big things very quietly. While Sina Weibo is the big attention-getter in China’s microblog space, Tencent appears to have 540 million friends who are willing to console them.

Huawei Profits Up 33% in 2012, Now Seeing 66% of Revenue from Outside China 01/21

Huawei has seen a public relations nightmare in 2012, as we’ve written about many times on this blog. But the company still appears to be killing it in terms of profits, even in overseas markets.

ZTE Posts $400 Million Loss in 2012 01/21

In start contrast, that other scary Chinese telcom equipment manufacturer hasn’t been doing nearly as well.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS feed.

Zopim is six-year old Singaporean startup that provides live chat software for websites. At moment, they have a team of more than 25 members, with around 70,000 businesses actively using their service on websites. More than 200 million web visitors encounter the Zopim chat widget every month. I recently had a chance to meet with Zopim’s founder, Royston Tay, to find out more about his entrepreneurial journey so far.

All their key metrics currently look pretty sexy, but they haven’t arrived at this stage without toil, struggle, and sacrifices in the early days.

Zopim has four co-founders who all met in the bay area while attending the NUS Overseas College Program. Shortly after returning to Singapore, they crashed a networking event where the famous venture capitalist, Tim Draper, was present. An elevator pitch later, Tim was intrigued enough to request a demo of Zopim at his Sandhill office. A prototype was feverishly developed in two months and presented to Tim. While he passed on the opportunity to invest at that early stage, Zopim managed to raise seed funding through the iJam grant, administered by NUS and a Singapore government agency MDA.

School or startup?

At this point, they still had half a year of school left and a major final year project to complete before graduation. With competitors working on similar products, they knew that in order to make the startup work, they had to get it done even while still studying. Knowing full well that their academic results would suffer if they chose Zopim over studies, they still chose to focus on their startup. This is a decision they never regretted.

They worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day and everyone lived on a meagre monthly salary of S$500 (about $410) for two years. Considering the high cost of living in Singapore, that amount is comparable to the weekly expenses for many of their peers who had just graduated. Royston says it was tough but there were necessary sacrifices to be made as none of the founders were born with proverbial silver spoons stuck in their mouths. The team had most of their meals at home, rarely ate at restaurants, and always travelled on public transport. Even though Zopim had a small office granted by their university, the team would often work out in the university’s incubator office because of the well-stocked pantry. Royston says the founders are extremely appreciative of the support and understanding shown by their families and girlfriends, without which they might have given up entirely.

Royston says that maintaining drive and motivation of the team was also an issue in those early years. As Zopim is a very product-centric startup, the first two years saw the team focusing on developing the technology and product on free usage model. There were doubts internally and externally about whether they could eventually monetize it. This near breaking point came in the second year when funds were running low and founders were taking voluntary pay cuts. But the product was still nowhere near monetizable, and morale and determination was at an all-time low. This was when Royston sat everyone down and gave his ultimatum:

Unless I get full commitment from all of you, I’m going to leave the company.

Hitting their stride

And so the team regrouped. In 2008 at end of their second year, the team introduced their monthly subscription plan, effectively changing Zopim into a freemium model. To their surprise, the adoption rate for Zopim was faster than when it was totally free. Many of the businesses who were using the free version of Zopim for the past two years took up the paid version readily. In the following months, they scored a few big brands as live chat clients and that helped them record strong growth of paid users. Fast forward to now and we see that 2012, Zopim recorded more than US$1 million in sales revenue. Not bad!

Royston disclosed that the team actually turned down an acquisition bid worth around five to ten million dollars early last year. Internally, he feels that as long as they continue focusing on their strengths, and developing beautiful products, growing the valuation of the company to at least US$50 million is an attainable target in two to three years time.

On top of the live chat services, Zopim is now working on a suite of customer engagement tools for small businesses. I hope their fairy tale journey continues and I look forward to hearing big things from them in the next few years.

Zopim’s team during an overseas CSR trip.

In the ongoing dispute over the Spratly Islands claimed by China and Vietnam, the latest development is that China is opening up 3G services on the islands, not only to Chinese soldiers but also for the country’s fishermen.

The development will be yet another drop of lemon in the souring of Sino-Vietnamese relations in the past year. The Vietnamese government even voiced its complaint on nguyentandung.org, the Vietnamese Prime Minister’s website. The island disputes recently ignited with anti-China protests in May 2011 after Chinese patrol boats attacked two Vietnamese oil exploration ships near the Spratly Islands.

Chinese soldiers and fishermen will now be able to text message, call, and chat online with family back home over the new 3G network. This upgrade to 3G from regular cellular coverage (started in 2011) and the recent 3G network in the disputed Paracel Islands in July 2012 signals a more permanent Chinese presence on the rocky outposts.

Amid China’s escalating 3G and infrastructure support for the islands, and other points of contention between the two neighbors, my question is this: Have Vietnamese telcos provided 3G to Vietnamese citizens living on those same islands? If not, Vietnam is falling behind in the race for an administrative claim over the islands. Vietnam has had cellular coverage on the Spratly Islands since 2006 but word on the street is there’s no 3G yet.

This news comes just a couple of weeks after a Chinese computer game was banned in Vietnam for showing the contested islands as being Chinese in the in-game maps.

The Spratly Islands are claimed by six different countries in total, including Brunei, the People’s Republic of China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

(Source: China Starts Providing 3G on Spratly Islands)

For those of you who were still in holiday mode during the past week, we’ve done our best to keep tabs on what was happening in the China tech space. Looking ahead to the new year, we expect that China will be in the news every bit as much as it was in 2012 — although we do hope that it’s for more favorable reasons.

1. Gougou, Notorious Chinese Pirate Search Engine, Shuts Down

Having been added to the U.S. Trade Representative copyright offenders report, Gougou.com has finally been shut own. Gougou is operated by Xunlei, who is hoping to clean up its act, perhaps in preparation for another attempt at an overseas IPO.

2. KuaiYong: Chinese Startup Enables iOS App Piracy w/o a Jailbreak

This Windows desktop application lets users install pirated apps without a jailbreak. It went offline briefly last week, but as I write this the KuaiYong site appears to be back up. It will be interesting to see how long this can remain available.

3. 3D-Printed, Smartphone-Controlled Drone by Chinese Startup AngelEyes

3D printing made a lot of headlines in 2012, and we expect that to continue in the new year. Here’s one example of a hardware startup from China which is crowdfunding an exciting 3D printing project. Sure, the HeX looks a lot like the AR Parrot Drone, but it’s still pretty fun. We hope it does well.

4. Chinese Trains Now Capable of Time Travel, Apparently

Yes, it’s a brand new year, but some things seem to never change. China’s Raily Ministry’s website is a prime example of this, as it doesn’t look to have improved very much over last year’s abomination.

5. Sina Weibo Breaks New Record for User Activity Over New Year’s Eve

If you thought Twitter was busy on New Year’s Eve, don’t forget about China’s favorite microblog Sina Weibo, where the first minute of 2013 saw 729,521 messages.

6. Gome Enters Into $160 Million Partnership with Qinqinbaby.com

In an effort to bring more mother-and-baby items onto its online shopping mall, Gome has tied up with Qinqinbaby.com. This helps it compete with Suning, who acquired Redbaby last year.

7. Study: Actually Only About 20,000 Twitter Users in China [INFOGRAPHIC]

Precise Twitter numbers for any country can be hard to pin down, and for China – where the service is blocked – that’s especially true. But this week we saw a fun graphic from one programmer who figures that there are only about 20,000 Twitter users in the Beijing time zone.

8. China’s Biggest Tech Trend of 2013 Will Be The Wall

Perhaps the most interesting story on China from the past week was Charlie’s look ahead at what could be a dismal year for the internet in China. Censorship looms large, but there are some other factors worth exploring here too.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS feed.

China’s tightened internet controls were passed into law earlier today. As well as requiring broadband and mobile internet providers to have full ‘real name’ details of their customers (which pretty much happens already), the new 12-article law also mandates how all web companies operating in China must control what people post. That effectively legalizes the deletion of posts that contain what authorities deem to be “illegal” content or information.

Again, that’s close to what happens already in practice with the blanket self-censorship and fast-paced moderation that goes on on the Chinese web, as seen very clearly on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo. And so the new law will criminalize companies who do not censor the web with the kind of speed and efficiency that the law now dictates. That has huge implications for social companies like Sina (NASDAQ:SINA), Tencent (HKG:0700), and Renren (NYSE:RENN), and search engines from Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), Sohu (NASDAQ:SOHU), and Qihoo (NYSE:QIHU). In fact, it’s an extra strain on the whole internet sector in the country, with possible extra costs involved in the already weighty and arduous practice of removing dissent, as well as other genuinely illegal acts on the web.

It’s surely only a matter of time before one Chinese web company is held criminally responsible for content posted on its service. And what will happen then? A fine? The jailing of the relevant member of staff?

Using Xinhua’s presumably official version of events, the news agency summarizes this aspect of the new law:

Service providers are required to instantly stop the transmission of illegal information once it is spotted and take relevant measures, including removing the information and saving records, before reporting to supervisory authorities, the decision says.

It empowers supervising departments to take technical and other necessary measures to prevent, stop or punish those who infringe on online privacy, requiring relevant service providers to give support during investigations.

There are some positive aspects to all this, as it also puts into law measures that, Xinhua says, “will protect digital information that could be used to determine the identity of a user or that concerns a user’s privacy.”

But as with all new web controls in China, a country where the web is already massively locked down, many will worry that the tightened legal framework will be used to identify people who post online some ‘sensitive’ information, such as – to take a topical example – evidence of corruption among officials.

In practice, a lot of this is happening already, as with recent real name requirements for microblogs like Sina Weibo, or the long-standing need to show ID when buying a mobile SIM. For now, a lot of questions remain unanswered, such as how this affects wifi hotspots, or people who rent homes and whose broadband account will be in the name of the home-owner – and a lot of other issues and unknowns.

As was suspected might happen earlier this week, authorities in China have approved a law requiring ‘real name’ registration in order to sign up for internet access. [UPDATED: Also, the law legalizes the removal of "illegal" content online, with web companies required to do this]. State wire agency Xinhua has just said:

China’s top legislature approved Friday rules to enhance the protection of personal information online and safeguard public interests, requiring Internet users to identify themselves to service providers when signing web access agreement.

The decision on strengthening online information protection, which has the same legal effect as a law, was adopted by lawmakers at the closing meeting of a five-day session of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC).

This will be enforced alongside other existing real ID requirements in China, such as for buying mobile SIM cards, or for posting to Twitter-like services such as Sina Weibo.

The People’s Daily had said in an editorial recently (which is a good indication of what’s the Communist Party line on issues) said:

The law should escort the development of the internet to protect people’s interest. Only that way can our internet be healthier, more cultured and safer.

Sceptics will worry that the move is another way to suppress dissent online, and to monitor what people are saying on the internet, and what pages and services they’re accessing.

[Source: Global Times]

They’re celebrating over at Viettel.
via http://viettel.com.vn/

Viettel, Vietnam’s leading mobile telco (which holds over 37 percent of the market), is now looking for business opportunities abroad. In several big moves in the past few months, Viettel has secured agreements to provide mobile services in Cameroon by 2014, open a 900 MHz network in Peru by 2014, and it has also surpassed its competitor VNPT to become the largest telecoms firm in Vietnam. It has been a good year for Viettel and the future looks bright. By 2020, the company plans to have one billion people on its network.

If Viettel were to succeed in its plans for expansion, it would put the giant telco among the top 10 largest in the world. Its latest growth spurt comes from its aggressive strategy of deals, marketing, and customer acquisition, while its big competitor, VNPT, struggled with internal management restructuring.

As Viettel looks outside of Vietnam for growth, with presences in Laos, Cambodia, Zimbabwe, Chile, East Timor, Haiti, and Tanzania, the military-owned company is now becoming yet another major Vietnamese company ready to secure consumer market share in non-Vietnamese markets. This is something we’ve seen only recently among big Vietnamese companies.

I think this is more encouragement that Vietnamese tech companies can make it outside of the country. Will Vietnam’s biggest internet companies like VC Corp and VNG also ambitiously follow suit and go global like Viettel?

[Source: Vinacorp.vn - article in Vietnamese]

What’s Vietnam’s next tipping point?

Lately, when thinking about the Vietnam startup scene, I’ve been wondering about tipping points. The online landscape in Vietnam has experienced a few big changes in the last few years. This is an interesting development for a country whose culture is built on conformity. In just a few years, Vietnam has already experienced several major tipping points online.

Social media bubbling up to an explosion

Just over a year ago, Facebook was just sitting at four million Vietnamese users, and today that count has doubled. It has finally hit its tipping point. ZingMe, the leading Vietnamese social network produced by VNG, is perceived by most people as being for teenagers. Yahoo360, Vietnam’s once dominant blogging platform, closed down under the mismanagement of Yahoo, but was mostly seen as a personal diary for teenagers. Facebook experienced a different entrance. Facebook, at first, was seen by users as a platform for games. This gave users an opportunity to get acquainted with the interface and start using Facebook for groups, pages, and advertisements. The periodic DNS blocks motivated by Vietnam’s political climate drove some users away from the site, but eventually it became the go-to social hub. And if your data is all in one place, you come back to your data. Now users are flocking to Facebook. Where games and adolescent social networks started, Facebook has exploded and looks set to be dominant for some time.

Making the web useful, real

Group buying took the online community by storm over the last two years with dozens of clones and the rise of key market leaders. People finally had a useful destination on the internet that had practical applications offline. Despite potentially flawed business models, what they did in the country was introduce an even larger population to a real-world application of the internet, namely e-commerce, which hasn’t been really prominent in the country thus far.

Another trend I see coming this year is mobile chat applications. I’ve got friends on Line, WeChat, Whatsapp, Viber, iMessage, and KakaoTalk. And now, even Vietnamese startups are jumping onto this trend, as seen with Wala. What we saw with group buying is it created e-commerce’s tipping point just like games created social networking momentum. Is there a critical mass happening in chat that will change form and produce something new? Is the current wave of e-commerce sites actually foreshadowing something else?

Tipping points are shaping the landscape

Vietnam’s copy-paste culture when it comes to intellectual property have created the environment for this snowballing to happen. In Silicon Valley (with its years of experience), skilled people, ideas, and resources exist on a much larger scale. This creates space for companies to focus on very separate parts of the online market. Vietnam doesn’t have this luxury. Instead, the landscape is shaped by overarching trends that dominate the priorities of startups.

Although Vietnam’s online landscape might be a bit two-dimensional, it might allow us to predict future trends more easily. Each major shift and trend builds towards the next and the last few trends give us an idea of where it’s heading. From blogging to games to social media to group buying to e-commerce and mobile chatting. Thinking of these major trends as a platform gives us a clue as to the next tipping point. In my mind, this platform is going to lead to a content war.

This week was a surprisingly busy one in China technology news, with Apple finally dropping its new iPhone and a few new retail stores to boot. We also saw some interesting developments in the chat app space, with a foreign player entering China to challenge the dominant Weixin (Wechat). In case you missed any of the action, here’s a quick roundup of the past week’s headlines.

1. Is Firefall, The9’s Free-to-Play FPS Gamble, Any Good?

Early in the week Charlie gave us his impressions of Firefall, having participated in a closed beta. Unfortunately the much-anticipated FPS did not make a great first impression.

2. Tencent’s WeChat is a Threat to Everyone

The WeChat chat app has certainly impressed many in China and around Asia with its rapid rise to popularity. But there are some concerns about security and privacy for its users.

3. Line App Launches in China, Keen to Fight with WeChat

Right on cue, enter NHN Japan’s Line app to see if it can take a bite of the China’s messaging market. It has a tough road ahead, and it’s unlikely that it could ever catch up with WeChat (Weixin) in China – but it doesn’t necessarily have to. If it can get even a portion, then NHN Japan will likely be pleased to have a channel to market its other games and apps.

4. China’s App Apocalypse? Regulators Explain, Developers Worried

Will China’s MIIT institute registration or permit procedures to regulate apps in the country? This news has many developers are worried that a change in landscape might be on the way.

5. CONFIRMED: Google Shopping Search Engine for China Shuts Today

Another Google service bites the dust in China, as the Google Shopping service is finally closed up. Google hopes to refocus efforts on products that are doing well, namely AdMob, its mobile advertising platform, which is doing quite well in China.

6. You’ll Never Guess What The9 and ZTE Are Teaming Up to Work On

These two Chinese companies will be joining forces to create an internet television joint venture, aiming to reach 90 percent of Chinese households within two or three years.

7. iPhone 5 Finally Launched in China, No Reports of Violence

In perhaps our favorite non-news news of this week, the iPhone 5 finally launched in China without any reports of violence. In what was a busy week for Apple, the company also launched retail stores in Hong Kong and way out in Chengdu too.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS feed.

In Vietnam, where research is still maturing, the publishing of white papers of any kind is a welcome surprise. The VNNIC, the center that monitors and issues domain names in the country, has released its latest research on internet growth in Vietnam. The paper coincides with 15 years of internet usage in Vietnam (by an official count), and the anniversary has also prompted research papers from other Vietnamese ministries.

Some of these statistics give an interesting picture of Vietnam’s internet population. The VNNIC’s numbers are a bit larger than those of the Ministry of Information and Technology, putting the number of netizens at 35.49 percent of the population. Thus with a population of 90 million, it’s no surprise that Vietnam is ranked 18th in the world in terms of internet users. But what is interesting is that it’s the regional leader in national website domain name registrations, or domains that end in “.vn”. Here’s the growth:

As of October 2012, registered .vn domains had already hit 225,970 and it keeps accelerating.

As of the third quarter of this year, the number of national registered domain names with “.vn” hit 225,970. Considering that the number of registered domains was just 14,786 in 2000, that puts the growth rate at about 172 percent per year. The total number of domains registered in the country (i.e. with .com, .com.vn, .edu, .org and so forth) is 836,173. At this rate, the number of domains will hit one million in the middle of next year.

So what does this tell us about Vietnam’s internet population? It means the country’s netizens want to produce; they want to create websites. I think this comes out of a need for connection. The young Vietnamese population is hungry for new ways to connect, and it’s no surprise that WeChat, the messaging app, has made such a strong entrance into the Vietnamese market with its “Look Around” function, a feature that allows users to talk to random new people who are also online in the neighborhood.

It’s also good for business. Young Vietnamese businesses, with this same mentality, also see websites as a means to connect with potential users or customers. Unfortunately, the practice of developing valuable content is still something that needs to mature.

[Source: VNNIC’s white paper on Vietnam’s internet - article in Vietnamese]

A common internet scene across Vietnam | photo credit: Time

In dusty, cramped rooms across Vietnam, kids and adults log on to the web in internet shops. It’s a common sight on every other street in Vietnam, from major urban areas to the farthest-flung rural regions. Family businesses clear out their first floor lobbies, mount fans on walls, and install rows upon rows of desktop PCs to rent out web-time at an hourly rate. It’s a stable business because kids and teenagers want video games, adults want info and email, and everybody watches YouTube and downloads free music. With Vietnam’s internet penetration at 34.3 percent, roughly four percent over the world internet penetration average, and is one of the largest populations in Southeast Asia on the internet. Vietnam’s netizens are ranked 18th in the world with over 31 million people online.

2012 marks the 15th anniversary of Vietnam’s official connection to the internet. Gone are the days when people had to sneak in dial-up modems through customs to access the internet just to email their friends abroad. In the last 10 years, Vietnam’s internet population has increased 15-fold but government ministers and leaders of Vietnam’s still-growing internet landscape remain thirsty for more.

In a ceremony in the capital of Hanoi, celebrating the 15 years of internet development, professors, ministers, executives, and leaders gathered together to share their thoughts, hopes, and promises on where the internet in Vietnam is headed next. Dr. Mai Liem Truc, former deputy minister of post and transport laments that “there are still 60 million people who are not using the internet.” He cites that one of the reasons Vietnam has experienced so much growth compared to its regional neighbors is because of the price of web access, which is on a par – or a bit lower – in price with neighboring countries. Most people pay under 300,000 VND ($15) per month for broadband internet via state-owned telecoms.

Dr. Truc sees two frontiers that Vietnam needs to face for successful internet implementation:

1. Encouraging businesses to reach farther out into the rural provinces
2. Integrating IT more completely into education.

Although the internet has been growing in e-government, business, social networks, etc., schools and teachers have still not learned the best way to utilize technology in the classroom. He sees the ministries as playing a significant role in encouraging these developments as well as preparing Vietnamese IT companies to compete on a global stage.

From the state company side, Nguyen Manh Hung, vice general director of Viettel Group, one of Vietnam’s leading telecoms, stated that Viettel wants to see every person in Vietnam with a smartphone, and every family with a 10Gbps broadband internet connection. Viettel has already been quite aggressive with uptake in schools, providing over 30,000 schools with internet connectivity. By 2015 their goal is to have fiber optic lines in every village in the country and by 2020 to equip 70 percent of all households with broadband internet. Other major telecoms companies, including VNPT, SCTV, and FPT, also share this aggressive sentiment and are implementing strategies of their own in their sectors.

My question is, will the major telecoms be able to deliver on these promises, and will the ministries safely guide Vietnam onto the global stage? Vu Hoang Lien, president of the Internet Association of Vietnam, warns that, “Only when the internet has been fully implemented in the countryside in large numbers can we truly be proud of internet growth in Vietnam”. He’s daunted by the task, adding, “There’s a lot of work going ahead to reach the countryside,” but most leaders are optimistic.

Most of the internet growth in Vietnam can be attributed to the major cities like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city, as well as the budding level-one cities like Da Nang, Can Tho, Nha Trang, and Hai Phong, whose internet penetration is well over 50 percent. The countryside is a considerably different problem and the population out there is the majority of the 60 million offline citizens that Dr. Truc is worried about.

There was no shortage of action from the big players in the China tech space this past week, as we saw lots of action from Baidu, as well as some movement in the daily deals and e-commerce spaces. If you missed any of the action over the past seven days, have no fear – here’s our round up of the biggest technology news from the Middle Kingdom.

1. Report: 140 Million Android Users in China, 60 Million on iPhones 11/24

China has 390 million mobile internet right now. And now new data for 2012 Q3 from Beijing-based mobile analytics startup Umeng claims that as many as 60 million of those are iPhones. Android handsets, as you might have guessed, are thought to be even more widespread, at an estimated 140 million devices.

2. Xiaomi TV Set-Top Box Service Suspended, Regulatory Kerfuffle Perhaps to Blame 11/23

There was a bit of a speedbump for Xiaomi’s new set top box as the company has to suspend its video services. We’re told by Xiaomi that this is for system maintenance, and hopefully that’s all this is.

3. Disappointing Date: Momo English App is a Let-Down 11/23

China’s flirtatious mobile app Momo launched its English/global version, and so we decided to give it a test run. My colleague Willis had high hopes for this one, but came away a little bit let down.

4. YY Stock Up 8.5% After First Day of Trading 11/21

Chinese internet company YY officially went public this past week on the NASDAQ. And it didn’t do too bad out of the gates early.

5. Huge Consolidation of Market Share in China’s Daily Deals Sector [CHARTS] 11/22

The very crowded China group-buy space has shown signs of settling down in recent months, and figures for Q3 2012 saw further consolidation as the top three deal sites now account for 62 percent of all sales.

6. Mogujie Looks Beyond Pinterest Roots, Launches Daily Deals Channels 11/21

Speaking of daily deals, China’s top Pinterest clone Mogujie boldly stepped into that messy space this past week, launching two new channels for deals on clothes and household items.

7. Baidu Raises $1.5 Billion in Bonds Issue, Now Has a Fistful of Dollars for Overseas Acquisitions 11/21

Baidu raised $1.5 billion in its first-ever bonds issue, and its expected that these funds will be used as its turns attentions overseas. We subsequently speculated on the many ways it might spend this cash.

8. 360Buy Dances to Amazon’s Tune, Launches an Online Music Store 11/20

360buy has been all over the place recently, stepping into some new areas outside of its normal online retails. This week saw the company open up an online music store, perhaps purposefully following the example of global e-commerce giant, Amazon.

9. MSN Users Down 10 Million Over 2 Years, Is Microsoft’s China IM Dream Dead? 11/19

While mobile chat apps dominate tech headlines here in Asia recently, Microsoft may have sold the farm for MSN in China. I wonder what would happen if they tried to morph it into a clone of WeChat? My guess it that it wouldn’t fly either, but it would be interesting to see if it could be saved.

10. Toxic Roots: The Challenge of China’s Tech Expansion 11/19

I get pensive for a little bit, reflecting on some of the Chinese companies that have succeeded in overseas ventures, as well as some of those that have failed. It’s going to be hard for tech companies looking to make a mark on the global stage, and I don’t see things getting easier anytime soon.

11. Suning Opens E-Bookstore, Promises 250,000+ E-Book Titles by Next Year 11/19

Another Chinese company does the Amazon, as electronics retailer Suning teams up with 1,000 publishers to launch an e-book store with 50,000 titles ready to go.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS feed.

Beijing takes the 18th Party Congress (the once-a-decade leadership transition) pretty seriously. And since this year it’s worried about everything from ping pong balls to boats, it’s probably no surprise that the government is taking the internet pretty seriously too. Last week, I wrote a story about what appeared to be new interference with the internet, and we were surprised by how many readers commented that they were experiencing internet problems, too. So we dug a little deeper using Google and Weibo surveys (you can still submit your own response if you haven’t; we’d love to keep adding to this data set) and discovered that among our first 40+ respondents, virtually everyone is having problems:

(Users in China who can’t see that graph can click here to view a non-interactive image version)

Users could select as many issues as they were experiencing, so the graph above indicates the total number of times each problem was reported. And we specifically asked users what has changed about their internet recently, so although (for example) overseas sites can be slow all year round, our user responses here indicate that they are slower than usual, slow enough that users noticed a change.

It’s clear that most people aren’t experiencing a total internet blackout, but VPNs not working, and Google services not working all seem to be fairly common issues. Moreover, it seems that overseas sites loading more slowly than usual is a nearly universal issue, and many users also reported frequent disconnections when attempting to connect to overseas sites. Users in Beijing and Shanghai seemed to be most affected, with several users outside those two cities reporting no issues.

Now, obviously this is a highly unscientific poll with a small sample size and a self-selecting audience. But it seems pretty clear at this point that Beijing is indeed messing with the internet, with an apparent special emphasis on making overseas sites and blocked sited difficult to access. That’s probably not a surprise, especially given the recent reports in the Western press about the immense personal wealth of several of China’s top leaders. But it looks like readers in Beijing and Shanghai are in for a rough November. Hopefully, things will return to ‘normal’ once the leadership transition is complete.

For those of you in China whose internet is not undergoing maintenance, there were more than a few interesting technology news stories from the Middle Kingdom this past week. Here are a few stories that caught our eyes this week.

1. China Mobile Leads in 3G Subscribers, But Transition from 2G is Slow

As China’s three major telecoms released their subscriber totals for September, we went back to take a look and compare how each has been growing. While China Mobile is still the clear leader in total subscribers, its growth is not as fast as its two rivals.

2. Skillcity.cn is a P2P University With Courses That Are Actually Interesting

Online education is an exciting space these days, and it’s good to see that things are happening in China as well. We took a look at Skillcity.cn, which has a diverse lineup of course offerings ranging from programming to tennis to ‘history of cocktails.’ Fun stuff!

3. Chinaccelerator Graduates 2012 Batch of 8 Killer Startups

Chinaccelerator recently held its demo day in downtown Beijing, with a number of standout startups emerging in this latest batch. Be sure to check them out.

4. China’s Top Pinterest Clone Mogujie Confirms Series C Funding

Rumors of Mogujie’s funding were finally confirmed recently, as the social commerce site says that it is now effectively values at $200 million. The series C round was led by IDG.

5. Chinese Search Engines Sign Code of Conduct, Agree to Ease Up on the Back-Stabbing

After way too much drama over the past year in the Chinese search engine space, this apparent peace pact between 12 web companies may or may not improve relations between rival companies.

6. Xiaomi TV Box Spills its Guts In Possible Leaked Photo

We had heard rumors of this set top box from Xiaomi earlier in the week. But on Friday, Sina Tech reported on some leaked photos which appear to give us a glimpse of the hardware. Or at least, of its system board anyway. A new video app in the latest developer build of its MIUI operating system [1] is further evidence a set top box is coming.

7. Zhou Hongyi Aiming for 15–20% of China’s Search Market

Speaking of search, Qihoo 360’s CEO Zhou Hongyi recently told reporters that he is targeting between 15 and 20 percent of China’s search market. The company currently sits at about 10 percent, and its initial growth spurt appears to have stalled.

8. Playstation 3 Gets Certification in China, Ban on Gaming Consoles May Be Ending

Six years after its initial release, Sony’s Playstation 3 has finally received regulatory approval in China. We don’t know if this means the console will actually be sold in China, but it is encouraging news for gaming fans nonetheless, as game consoles are not officially available in the country.

9. Alibaba Capital and Citi Ventures Lead Series D Funding into China’s DDMap

After raising $40 million in funding just six months ago, deals and listings company DDMap has closed another major round, this time led by Alibaba Capital and Citi Ventures.

10. Shops in One Beijing Electronics Market Caught Cheating Customers

It’s not exactly news to hear that Chinese electronics vendors might be occasionally shifty towards its customers. But Beijing’s BuyNow has been attracting an unusual amount of attention of late, including that of an undercover reporter.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS feed.

Another week, another fun batch of startups scouted by our TechInAsia team. Here are some of the more notable young companies we looked at this week. Entrepreneurs, remember that you can submit your startup pitch to us anytime. For readers, if there’s a fresh young company out there which you think we should feature, let us know here

1. iCard English: Daily micro lessons to perfect your spoken English

With over 70,000 users already accumulated in just a month after its official launch, iCard English is helping many in China study with help from its mobile app. The company aspires to reach a million users within a year.

2. Japan’s Manga Camera Doing Well Overseas, Passes 3 Million Downloads

This is one of the more unique camera apps we have seen in a long time, allowing users to apply Japanese manga-style effects to their photos. It recently surpasses the 3 million downloads milestone, thanks to popularity not only at home in Japan, but also in the US, the UK, and around Asia. You can download it from the app store here.

3. Inspired by Etsy, Berbatik Brings Premium Batik Products Online

This Indonesia-based startup recently launched, aiming to sell traditional batik to the world. Focusing on high-end batik products, Berbatik.com wants to take advantage of high demand both at home in Indonesia, as well as abroad. It will be interesting to see how they fare in this very niche e-commerce area.

4. Vibease Impresses in Dublin, and Announces Angel Funding

Vibease tends to be a fan favorite any time that they pitch their smartphone-controlled personal massager. They recently pitched their product at a Dublin event, and received an enthusiastic reception. They have just launched a pre-order campaign for the third model of their prototype, so if you want to check it out, drop over to their site. Vibease tells us that they recently closed funding from angel investors in Singapore as well.

5. Xipin, China’s Fab, Attracts About $1.5 Million in Series A Funding

This flash sales site raised nearly 10 million RMB in series A funding, and hopes that it can continue to push unique, hand-crafted products to an emerging middle class in China. The company is headed up by Tan Kaiyi, one of the few female startup founders in the country.

6. With Social Discounts, Stilomo Hopes to Freshen Up the Indonesian Daily Deals Market

Having brought in angel investment just a few months back, Stilomo.com, a graduate of the Jakarta Founder Institute, finally launched on Android recently. Their mobile website is in the final stages, and an iOS app is expected in the new year.

7. Pulsk Wants to Spread More ‘Wow’ in Indonesia

Sparxup winner Pulsk serves up various channels of user-generated photo content, with the aim of wowing its audience (a ‘wow’ is similar to a Facebook ‘like’ on the platform). Since its launch in mid September it has racked up more than 850,000 page views, a decent start for this young site.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full coverage of Start-ups in Asia, you can click here or subscribe to our Asia Start-ups RSS feed.

China is a country of impressive numbers, but when it comes to technology adoption, it is still behind most of its Asian neighbors. As we all know, global advertising is increasingly dependent on digital platforms and technological innovation to convey engaging and targeted messages to consumers. This is the challenge advertisers in China will have to face over time should they want to make an impact in the local market.

Unlike other developed countries, China has had a late digital start but the past decade has proven that the Chinese are hungry to catch up and position themselves as technological innovators. The recent announcement of Miao Wei, head of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) mentioning that delivery of 4G licenses will be brought forward to 2013 illustrates this desire to strengthen its position in the connectivity race. Furthermore, companies such as Tencent (with its QQ IM, and WeChat app) or Sina (which runs the Twitter-like Weibo) have already established themselves as global players and leaders of the digital evolution that is taking place in China.

China’s high internet and smartphone adoption rate, and 401 percent market growth in 2012, has pushed most first-tier city inhabitants (Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, etc) to the forefront of a fully interconnected mobile internet world. With this in mind, let’s picture Shanghai 10 years from now and what a typical day in the life of an upper-middle class Chinese person might be.

Meet Da Ge. He is 32 and married with a young daughter.

7:00 AM: Da Ge’s phone alarm linked to a smartphone app goes off, turning on his favorite morning playlist, with all sound directed to his side of the bed as his wife doesn’t wake up till later. His phone also turns on the water heater at a preset temperature for his shower.

7:15 AM: China becoming increasingly environmentally conscious of its limited natural resources, he scores Eco points based on the amount of water used while showering. The less water used, the more points he accumulates that entitle him to discount prices for an apparel brand that is sponsoring the app that measures these ‘eco points’. Entering the kitchen, the room light automatically comes on. Using voice control, he is able to activate a wall projection screen and chooses the divided screen display option with one half showing his favorite Youku channels and the other his schedule for the day (7).

8:02 AM: Leaving the house, he puts on a pair of recently acquired audio AR glasses which link to his mobile and listens to his favorite Weibo feeds. While waiting at a traffic light, he witnesses a car crash, which he films with his glasses. China has improved its mobile Internet connection considerably over the past decade, enabling him to instantly feed snippets of the video to his Weibo account. This year, Weibo is one of the primary digital platforms used by brands in China because it has consistently enhanced its offering for advertisers by adding relevant ads at the end of user-fed videos. Da Ge’s recently posted video of the accident concludes with a German car ad. Into the subway he goes…

8:14 AM: Getting into a subway car, he sees an ad for a new badminton racket on a 3D screen – he gets excited! Thanks to his phone’s social integration and improved GPS signal, some of the ads he comes across are based on his interests. Waiting for the subway, he chances upon an ad for chocolate. He interacts with it, using a network ad app on his glasses. He now sees AR chocolates flying in his direction and needs to grab as many as possible in 10 seconds to get a discount coupon link. It’s a win, free chocolates for the family tonight!

8:56 AM: Opening his office door, he receives a personalized greeting; the company server records his time of arrival and sends a signal to his coffee machine. A hot sugar-free cappuccino is already waiting for him when he sits at his desk. He gets a low coffee supply notification on his phone. Re-order? Yes please!

12:00 PM: After a busy morning, the first hunger pang strikes. Not sure of where to eat, he types “lunch today” in Baidu, and gets localized results ranked by recent reviews made by his friends. Putting the full potential of the semantic web to use, China’s leading search engine has become much more relevant and transparent over the years. However, still uninspired, Da Ge sends a voice message to one of his contacts working in the neighborhood. Amy’s free and suggests a good restaurant he’s never been to! He gets directions and the approximate duration it takes walking there displayed on his glasses.

3:30 PM: Back at work, Da Ge attends a real-time telepresence conference with Europe that is controlled by a virtual keyboard projected on their meeting room table.

6:55 PM: After work, he heads to his favorite hot pot restaurant and meets with four friends there. They choose their dishes directly from an interactive table they are sitting around. Once ready to settle the bill, brief multiple-choice questions on their overall satisfaction are asked via the table screen. They can skip these queries of course, but can get 10 percent off the total bill if they respond. Da Ge kindly treats everyone and pays directly through a mobile payment app that links wirelessly with the table. The app also offers suggestions of places and products he might be interested in based on his previous mobile purchase.

9:30 PM: Da Ge hails a cab ride back home. At the back of the driver’s seat he watches a small Touchmedia screen displaying interactive ads. This screen has a micro camera that not only keeps the driver informed of what is happening in the back of his cab for security, but it also determines the approximate age and sex of the passenger and so the ad agency feeds ads in accordance to the retrieved data.

9:45 PM: At home, his wife and daughter are watching the Lancôme branded web channel on Youku. Being a leader in branded text web content, Lancôme quickly understood the power of dedicated web channels. Viewers comments are displayed live on the side of the screen. He joins them and altogether they engage with the compeer and audience of the show, by using their mobile to send live feeds.

11 PM: After a productive day, Da Ge heads to bed, ready for another digital tomorrow.

So that was Da Ge’s day. Now, back in the moment, we see signs of much of that already. Take the most recent Yihaodian virtual supermarkets for example, this digital tomorrow is spreading like wildfire in China. If it remains behind on some aspects of the digital realm, very few will be left in the dark because of the growing interconnectivity of technology there. All examples mentioned above represent the undeniable evolution of existing technological innovations, which advertisers will need to understand in order to grasp the full potential of digital advertising in the next decade. Furthermore, the recent news of earlier 4G licenses for China, suggests that super-speed mobile connectivity could hit China as early as next year.

Agencies have already begun the shift towards digitally driven marketing strategies. Yet, if they hope to position themselves as leaders within the industry, they will have to think ahead and create more dedicated digital research departments. They will have to grow from being digitally savvy to tech-savvy in order to provide unique interactive content and work hand-in-hand with platforms developers and hardware providers, to reach out to Chinese customers in more innovative ways.

The threat posed by malicious hackers to companies and the government in Indonesia continues to grow stronger, although so far there hasn’t been any significant damage to speak of. Not yet anyway, says the director general of the Telematics Applications of Ministry of Communications and IT, Hashwin Saso, at a seminar and international conference titled “Potential Information Security Threat Awareness ” in Bandung. Hashwin explains:

Hacker attacks in Indonesia are quite big, but so far they are not yet on a destructive level. It also has not caused site or network damage that could resulting in chaos for IT systems that run companies or institutions.

He noted that hackers include not only local players in the country but also include hackers from abroad. The MCIT has conducted a number of steps, working with the community to maintain digital security.

Hashwin said that government sites are the most favorite target for the hackers. The MCIT and the Ministry of Defence sites have been targeted several times. However, there was no real damage of the IT systems and networks there. He said there are communities abroad who openly gather forces of hackers to hijack the MCIT site.

The seminar and discussion in Bandung was attended by more than 700 IT experts. With this seminar, many around the country could join forces and increase the awareness of potential threats to information security. This international conference brings together IT experts from at home and abroad. This particular event was the first time that the meeting was held in Bandung.

[Source: Republika.co.id]

The ‘Damn I Love Indonesia’ T-shirt has been worn by a lot of celebrities, ranging from Maroon 5’s vocalist Adam Levine to Korean singer, Jay Park. Founder and CEO of Damn I Love Indonesia, Daniel Mananta shares his dream to open his store in 33 provinces in the country. But for now, he is only opening five stores. That’s why he has collaborated with Octovate Group to launch DamnILoveIndonesia.com to spread the patriotism throughout the country. Daniel explains:

With DamnILoveIndonesia.com, I hope Indonesian culture can be preserved. It also opens access to people coming from Sabang to Merauke as long as they have internet access. With this website, the store could also send products abroad. At the same time, it will promote Indonesian culture outside the country.

Daniel said that the company has focused on young people by adding a certain “cool factor” in the design. To promote the website, it opened a design competition called Sumpah Pemuda 2.0 (or Youth Pledge, a historical event for young people on October 28th, 1928 to pledge their love for Indonesia). This event was held from July 5th to August 12, 2012. The result is 400 artworks which can be seen and ordered on the site.

The DamnILoveIndonesia.com site will provide unique articles and photos in its Speak Up menu, like the coolest places to hangout. There’s also video contents on the DAMN! TV channel. The content aims to make youngsters realize the beauty of cultural heritage and tradition in Indonesia.

The site will collaborate with the arts and design community in Indonesia. The content system is crowdsourcing where the members could contribute stories on the site. In return, the registered member will get a 10 percent discount for all products. They will also receive a newsletter which contains information about promotions, discounts, concert partnerships, and competitions.

As for e-commerce, the payment system does not yet support credit cards. That will come later this month. But for now, it only supports ATM transfers from local bank, BCA.

The company hasn’t set any target revenue for the site. At first, it wants to bring awareness to Indonesia. It has already dipped its toes into e-commerce by using Multiply. But the biggest portion of income still comes from the offline stores. Its Multiply site can only reach one third of the total income from offline stores. For this year, it will remain focused on the web. Perhaps next year it will add a mobile-optimized site?

Photo: Pinoybbdev.com

BlackBerry is really in need of help in its app section. Now RIM (NASDAQ:RIMM) is turning to developers in the region and asking them to boost the upcoming BlackBerry 10 platform with tons of apps. For Asia Pacific developers, RIM is about to stage the BlackBerry JamHack 2012 in ten cities.

This event is scheduled across Asia over two consecutive weekends. Firstly, Bangalore, Delhi, Manila, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur will host the event on October 12. Then, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh, Jakarta, Melbourne, Shanghai will take place on October 19th, 2012. In Jakarta, the JamHack will start at 7pm local time. The winning team from each city will represent their countries to compete head-to-head in the JamHack finals, which is part of the BlackBerry Jam Asia event, on November 29th to 30th, 2012, in Bangkok, Thailand.

The non-stop coding event will be held for 40 hours. RIM promises that there will be an endless supply of food, drinks, activities, and giveaways. Teams will build apps for the BlackBerry 10 platform, which will ship in phones at the start of next year, and will get support from RIM’s ‘developer relations’ team.

For this two-day event, RIM will host community sharing sessions called JamBytes. Topics for the event will be ‘invocation and sharing,’ the ‘unified inbox and notifications,’ ‘going viral with BBM,’ ‘pushing data and notifications,’ and ‘handling payments in your app.’ All teams will also get insights from RIM’s tech experts, RIM’s virtual global helpdesk, and the company’s business development roving team.

The winning team from each city will receive a BlackBerry 10 DevAlpha phone, a BlackBerry 7 phone and a BlackBerry Playbook tablet for each member; plus they’ll get technical and business consultancy from RIM up to the eve of BlackBerry Jam Asia, and an all-expenses-paid trip to BlackBerry Jam Asia 2012 in Thailand to advance to the Asia-Pacific Finals. As for the winning team in the finals, it will get:

• the grand prize of an all-expenses-paid trip to the BlackBerry 10 global launch
• app co-marketing with the launch campaign, and AppWorld marketing for two months from the BlackBerry 10 launch in Asia, Middle East and Africa
• AppWorld marketing for one week from the BlackBerry 10 launch in North America, Latin America and Europe, inclusion in BlackBerry 10 launches in respective markets
• technical and business consultancy from RIM for three months after the BlackBerry 10 launch
• a cash prize of US$10,000

The runner-ups will get a number of fun prizes as well. You can register for the event on the BlackBerry JamHack 2012 site. Prepare to hack!

As the internet industry continues to boom in China, it is easy to foresee more businesses and startups engaging in online to offline (O2O) services. The O2O business concept has yet to be fully maximized in the market, and jumping into the wave right now is not a bad idea. Beijing-based startup, iBanke, is looking to provide an online to offline solution for people who need to find home movers.

iBanke basically serves as an agent in helping families to find home-movers. The process is rather simple. Users are only required to take pictures of the items they wish to move, and send them to iBanke. The startup will then liaise with home-movers and send a quotation to the user based on the scale of the project. After which, the home-mover will then communicate directly with the user if the latter agrees to the quotation.

The idea is cool, and this service would be definitely helpful for people in big cities. Of course, there are plenty of home-mover services out there, but many people are confused as to which are the best or most credible. Having someone else doing the selection work could save a lot of time and worry for many people.

The website is still in beta, and I’m sure that the team will be making changes to improve it as they embark on a mission to make a mark in the O2O market. Right now, the site is pretty much just an unappealing “I want to move house” button. But If you are moving any time soon, you might want to consider making use of iBanke.

Hundreds of people in the name of the Save KPK movement gathered at Bundaran Hotel Indonesia, Jakarta, yesterday. They demonstrated their support for the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) after Indonesia’s National Police raid on October 5th. This movement begun as the news broke that police had threatened to arrest the KPK investigator, Novel Baswedan, for something related to a 2004 case that was recently reopened.

Since Friday night, around 1,000 activists joined in the demonstration in front of the KPK building with various Save KPK banners. This movement is also gaining steam on Twitter with the #SaveKPK and #dimanaSBY hashtag ^[1]. At its peak, #SaveKPK became a Twitter trending topics with 39,997 tweets (as recorded by Topsy.com on October 5th).

Online petitioning

The buzz around KPK on Twitter continued to spill into the streets at the Save KPK demonstration and concert, held in the center of Jakarta on Sunday morning. As it coincided with ‘car free day,’ people on foot and with bicycles gathered around the stage and shouted, “Save KPK, save Indonesia!” Onstage was the daughter of former president Abdurrahman Wahid, Anita Wahid, and the campaign director of Change.org Indonesia, Usman Hamid.

The demonstrators demanded a number of things of Indonesia’s president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, such as stopping police intimidation of KPK investigators and their families, and removing the head of the National Police Timur Pradopo and his associates.

The Save KPK online campaign doesn’t only rely on Twitter. Anita Wahid created an online petition called “Serahkan ke KPK” (meaning: leave it to the KPK) on Change.org, while Rendi Ahmad from @simponii (Inhabitants Music Syndicate) was responsibled for the Save KPK petition. Together, online petitions on Change.org Indonesia have collected over 10,000 supporters. Usman targeted around 100,000 e-signatures for this KPK case. Usman said:

All the hashtags can be used to spread the online petition and ask people to sign it. Each signature will be sent directly to the president’s and the National Police email account. So, if there are 10,000 signatures for the petitions, 10,000 emails will be sent to the National Police and the president.

KPK investigator, Novel was accused of involvement in an assault case while serving as an official with the Bengkulu municipal police in 2004. According to KPK deputy chairman Bambang Widjojanto (speaking to the Jakarta Globe) the case was already settled in 2004 as a subordinate of Novel was found to have committed the crime. Yet it was reopened, with an arrest order letter brought by the chief detective of the Bengkulu provincial police, Sr. Comr. Dedy Rianto, on Friday night. Anti-corruption activists claim that Novel is being targeted for his continuous efforts to investigate driving simulator project corruption which is linked to former National Police traffic unit chief inspector Gen. Djoko Susilo.

The support for the KPK seems to come from both netizens and people on the streets. Save KPK demonstrations spread across cities like Bandung, Yogyakarta, Banda Aceh, and Bali. On Facebook, the Save KPK Save Indonesia fanpage has past 15,000 likes. It’s another interesting use of the web to tackle endemic corruption and raise awareness

The news cycle in China was in low gear last week due to the National Day holiday, but there were still more than a few interesting stories from the tech space. From Weibo trash-talking to grey market iPhone upgrades, here’s a quick rundown of some of the notable technology news from the past week in China.

1. China Mobile Says in an Emergency, It Can Text Everyone in Beijing in 10 Seconds

Given the poor government communication we saw this past summer during the Beijing’s floods, it’s encouraging to see that China Mobile now boasts it can quickly send out notifications in mere seconds. But in reality, such messages still need government approval, so it might be unrealistic to expect that process to move quickly.

2. Railway Ministry Mobile App Fails to Materialize; Kaifu Lee Recommends Ikamobile App Instead

The Chinese Railway Ministry still hasn’t produced the mobile apps that it previously promised to help customers more easily buy train tickets. But Innovation Works founder Kaifu Lee noted on Sina Weibo that one of his portfolio startups has already made an app like this called Train Finder.

3. Chinese World of Warcraft Players Protest CCTV Misrepresentation

While Chinese gamers finally got the latest World of Warcraft Mists of Pandaria title this past week, many of them were pretty upset over what they feel is a misrepresenting and disrespectful report about WoW players by state broadcaster CCTV.

4. Chinese iPhone 4S Owners Trading in Year-Old Phones to Buy iPhone 5

While the iPhone 5 is not yet selling in China, the inevitable grey market sales are enticing Apple fans to sell their iPhone 4S and upgrade to an iPhone 5. The iPhone 4S is still just a year old, but it looks like more than a few Chinese think the upgrade is worth it.

5. Chinese Video Sites Turning off their Japan Channels

In what was most likely marching orders coming down from the central government, a number of Chinese video sites quietly removed the ‘Japan’ category from country listings on their sites. The Senkaku island dispute is an ugly one, and it’s a shame to see this pettiness seeping into our interwebs.

6. BingDian Hotels App Checks-In Some Series A Funding

In what was reported to be a multi-million dollar round, the makers of the BingDian Hotels app closed series A funding this past week. The investment was led by Bluerun Ventures.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS.

The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology in Indonesia has decided to postpone the highly-anticipated 3G tender. Though the authorities are concerned about the bizarre Telkomsel ‘bankruptcy’ ruling, it’s not the only reason. According to the head of PR at the ministry, Gatot S. Dewa Broto, talking to Detik:

It’s not entirely correct that the auction was postponed due to the Telkomsel bankruptcy. We are indeed concerned about the condition of Telkomsel. However, since the tender documents and the selection procedure is not 100 percent firm, so we better retreat now than later create problems.

This 3G tender involves five telco companies, including Telkomsel. It’s looking to take both of the 3G blocks available. But Telkomsel is mired in the debt case with PT Prima Jaya Informatika which caused Indonesia’s biggest operator to be declared bankrupt by the Commercial Court of Central Jakarta as it was judged unable to pay the relatively small Rp 5.3 billion (over US$552,000) debt that Prima Jaya says it is due.

The process of selection for the two important blocks of 3G airwaves should have been held at the end of September. The ministry itself must be cautious in its decision to delay the tender of the remaining 3G blocks. The Business Competition Supervisory Commission (KPPU) has begun to oversee the bidding process.

If they postpone it because of Telkomsel, the ministry could be accused of being biased towards Telkomsel – and that could also cause the authorities to be in a breach of competition and monopoly law no. 5/2009. On the reverse side, the ministry does not want to prolong the process as it will lose money from the non-tax state revenue (PNPB). The minister of Communication and Information Technology, Tifatul Sembiring, once said that if the tender were to be postponed, it will threaten the PNBP target for the ministry of Rp 1 trillion (over $104 million) for the year 2012.

[Source: Detik.com]

Generated using Quickmeme.com

As we mentioned earlier, RIM acknowledges a wave of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) errors in Asia Pacific. Twitter in Indonesia is swarming with negative sentiments towards RIM and BlackBerry. There’s even a Twitter “rap” mocking BlackBerry users for today’s error.

The errors, however, started to die down later in the day. PR manager of RIM Indonesia Yolanda Nainggolan said to Detik.com (translation is ours):

We have finished fixing the service interruptions experienced by our users in the APAC (Asia Pacific) when sending and receiving BBMs, and full services are recovering right now. We apologize to users for any inconvenience.

According to the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology in Indonesia, BlackBerry services have faced three outages this year. There was even a conspiracy theory about RIM’s outage before, as previously mentioned on Kompas.com. In March 2012, the House of Representatives held a plenary session about the plan to increase the fuel prices, which sparked protests. At that time, BlackBerry’s email service was disrupted. The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology spokesman, Gatot S. Dewa Broto, said there was speculation that the Ministry had created a conspiracy to disrupt the spread of information (translation is ours):

Back then, there were people who accused the Ministry of being behind such scenarios. We were accused of going to impede the flow of information to the outside by turning off the BlackBerry email service. Fact: the problem came from RIM technical problems.

Today, the same day as the BBM error reached its peak, Indonesian laborers held a mass strike and demonstration against outsourcing. Gatot doesn’t want people to speculate again that the ministry is behind both of the issues.

Telecommunication analyst Sutikno Teguh mentioned to Merdeka.com that Indonesian carriers have to use this moment to insist on building a RIM server network in the country in 2012. He argued that it will be easier for the government and the operators to do forensic audits as interference occurs.

After the BBM service slowly recovered, a hoax message was spread in BBM Broadcast Message (BM) which said that BBM users who don’t spread the message will be deactivated. Yolanda denied responsibility for this on Detik.com, stating that this BM was not officially spread by RIM.

Indonesia now has 3.5 million BlackBerry users who have suffered service interruptions because of these issues. Perhaps RIM could consider some form of compensation to keep its many users loyal. BlackBerry is the most popular smartphone in Indonesia, but issues like this can only help in pushing users towards the already-growing Android platform instead. They could also make users want to switch to other chat apps such as Whatsapp and WeChat.

Source: Kompas.com, Detik.com, Merdeka.com, Okezone.com

This article was updated at 0:48 to correct several issues with the language and to clarify that the translated quotations are our own translations.

Photo: Erafone

Samsung Indonesia is now ready to open its first pre-orders for the new Samsung Galaxy Note II. Erafone, as one of the biggest phone retail stores in Indonesia, is running the pre-order scheme. Samsung is offering a big cut in the price from Rp7,499,000 (over $780) to Rp5,299,000 (over $550) – but the discount comes only by paying for it via credit card installments for 12 months at a zero percent interest rate. This price promo is valid only for credit card holders of BCA, BNI, Mandiri, and Citibank.

For carrier bundling, you can pick either Telkomsel or Indosat. If you choose Indosat, you will have to subscribe to Indosat services for 12 months for Rp200,000 (over $20) each month. Yet you can get the benefit of 4GB of 3G data per month with speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps, and voice credit lasting 1,800 minutes for calling other Indosat subscribers.

In contrast, if you opt for Telkomsel, the contract plan for 12 months will cost Rp250,000 (over $26) each month. That gives you 4GB of 3G per month, 175 minutes of free talk, 10 minutes worth of international calls, and 350 SMS.

The down payment for both carriers is Rp500,000 (over $52). The pre-order period runs to the 10th of October. The first Galaxy Note II devices in Indonesia will ship from the 12th to 21st of October. The pre-order process can be started here on the Erafone site.

Meanwhile, if you love quizzes (or free stuff), Samsung Indonesia is giving away a Galaxy Note II for free every day with different challenges. You need to create a doodle, write something, or submit a photograph in response to daily challenges set by the company on Twitter with specific hashtags. Part of the judging process has been assigned to three local creative talents: Iwet Ramadhan (fashion designer) for #Note2draw, Adib Hidayat (music journalist) for #Note2write, and Renny Fernandez (film-maker) for #Note2capture.

To join the competition, you first need to link up your Twitter account by accessing the 1 Day 1 Note website. The Samsung Galaxy Note II freebies are up for grabs until October 12th.

PT XL Axiata Tbk plans to sell most of its telecommunications towers (or base transceiver stations). According to Kontan, The “emiten” (the company that issues stocks to be sold to the public ^[1]) with EXCL coded stock will sell 8,000 towers which value of approximately Rp14 trillion (over $1 billion). EXCL now own 10,000 towers. If the asset sales plan goes ahead, EXCL will be left only with 2,000 towers.

EXCL Director, Hasnul Suhaimi explained that his company plans to hire back the towers after being sold to another party. The goal here is to reduce operating costs and the maintenance of the towers.

According to Hasnul, to rent one of the towers, EXCL only needs to pay from Rp11 million to Rp15 million (over $1,100 to $1,500) per year. Usually the contract is for a period of 10 years. So, in one year, the company would spend around Rp120 billion (over $12 million) to hire about 8,000 towers.

Referring financial reports from this past June, EXCL has the burden of Rp392.61 billion (over $40 million) for repair and maintenance of network infrastructure. There is also Rp 14.27 billion (over $1.4 million) for the repair and maintenance of non-network infrastructure.

Source: Kontan.co.id

The “Soul of the Nation” movement finally reached its goal last night. Videos from over 2,000 people singing Indonesia’s national anthem, “Bagimu Negeri,” were broadcast by Indosat on giant screens over three different stages at the Java Soulnation Festival 2012. The videos acted as a choir for singer Raisa Andriana as she sang. “Digital Sing Along with Raisa,” part of Indosat’s Super WiFi campaign, broke the record for the biggest digital recording choir in Indonesia.

Raisa and the Indosat team received an award for the record from MURI (Indonesian Record Museum) on Indosat Stage. According to MURI, up until 5:30 pm on Sunday, the project gathered 2,287 videos and 2,841 pledges.

On stage, Raisa expressed her concern about escalating crime among the nation’s youth, possibly aluding to a recent assault and killing of a high school student. With this project, Raisa hopes to bring some positive soul back to the country and its young people by asking people to pledge their love for Indonesia. The lyrics of the song “Bagimu Negeri” itself is about a pledge to serve the country. Raisa said on stage in front of thousands of her fans:

Nowadays, teens are often identified with something bad, like drugs and violence. Now this is the time for us to show that teens do not act like that.

The Soul of the Nation project is asking people to visit its website and connect to the Facebook to pledge. While the video submission process for Java Soulnation 2012 ended on September 29th, people can still show support by sharing the videos on Facebook or on Twitter by using the #soulofthenation hashtag.

People can also show support by calling 959 with their Indosat numbers to recorded themselves singing “Bagimu Negeri.” The Java Soulnation 2012 mobile app also has special features to support this campaign.

Today Indonesian developers gathered at the Google Dev Fest in Jakarta. This is the place where they can share knowledge on how to work with the application engine and monetize their apps. The developers could also benefit from having face-to-face technical discussions with Google engineers and local speakers. But Dev Fest is not only for current developers – lots of students went to the event too.

Today’s Dev Fest coincides with Google Day – and therefore Google’s birthday, this time its 14th – whose theme is “University Day”. In Google Day, Indonesian students and lecturers focused on university programs sponsored by Google and also a number of internships. So, this event is more about introducing Google services for educational purposes.

One of the speakers at the Dev Fest was the head of technology and program management at Qualcomm Indonesia, Salim Ezer. He talked about the Qualcomm Vuforia SDK that supports Android and iOS. This is a mobile development platform to build Augmented Reality (AR) applications. Even though it’s a Qualcomm SDK, it’s compatible with processors from other brands. But Salim said that he can’t guarantee it will be as optimized as in Qualcomm devices.

Salim showed off some Vuforia featured apps, which looked very promising. The most amazing part which wowed the audiences was an app that can make it look like you’re being beamed in a Star Trek-style teleportation. The AR app could make you disappear and then show up again in your device screen. Another app has a naughty part that can undress people in a picture. Vuforia can also bring book’s characters to move in a certain tablet app. It has the ability to deliver a lot of information from image tracking. Salim stated:

The numbers of animations which can appear in the apps depends on handset support. But with Vuforia, all of the animations are stored in the cloud. So, you can provide millions of bit of information.

Computer vision

Another exciting topic related to AR was shared by a lecturer at the School of Electrical Engineering and Informatics of Institute of Technology Bandung, Peb Aryan. Discussing ‘computer vision’ applications, Peb shows how an app can erase a person easily from a picture like that person never existed. That happens with the power of accessing and manipulating pixels in the picture.

Peb’s topic, computer vision, plays an important role in an AR app. Basically, it’s a computer’s ability to recognize visual targets just like face-recognition features in Facebook’s photo tagging or determining the state of traffic jams from the police camera images. Computers can be programed to detect and separate objects from the background based on colors, borders, corners, regions, and motion.

The use of computer vision gives a lot of benefit to the kind of apps that we can see nowadays. Computer vision can be “trained” to recognize faces from a moving picture. Peb gives the example (while joking) on how to recognize people when there is a homemade porn video that leaks online. Together with recognition algorithms, computers can match faces in the picture with its database.

Computer vision can also reconstruct objects from assorted pictures. He shows an image of a building complex that has been reconstructed using pictures taken from the people who visited the place.

At the end of the session, attendees shares their crazy ideas on building computer vision/AR apps, throwing out concepts like one for recognizing criminals from e-KTP (Indonesian electronic identification card) photo data, to an app for handwriting recognition for psychological analyses. We hope that some of those crazy ideas from these developers find their way into your cellphone pretty soon.

After launching a price comparison site for cameras recently, Indonesia-based Telunjuk.com brings similar functionality to hotel reservations today. It completes the travel menu on Telunjuk which is useful for plane tickets booking too. If you’ve already found the cheapest flight, you can also reserve the best hotel deals by using the new hotel section.

This hotel search service gives price recommendations from trusted hotels in Indonesia and the world. You can compare more than 100 hotel prices in one click. From Telunjuk’s service, you can order online from sites that provide room deals, such as Agoda.com, Otel.com, and Booking.com.

In the search tab, Telunjuk provides queries about your travel destination, check-in and out dates, and the number of the guests. Telunjuk will show popular hotels, which you can search based on airport location, local attractions, convention centers, and lots more. And of course you can search by requirements like broadband web access, parking spots, etc.

Basically, Telunjuk saves you a lot of time by gathering up information about the hotels rather than just opening a lot of external hotel websites. Plus, the price is already in the Indonesian currency.

The co-founder and CMO of Telunjuk, Hanindia Narendrata Rahiesa, said that the need to find accommodation that fits your needs at an affordable price is a pretty exhausting activity nowadays. Launching a search and price comparison feature for online hotel reservation is Telunjuk’s solution to simplify the process.

We hope Telunjuk.com can further enliven the Indonesian tourism industry by providing both comfort and convenience to travelers and the tourism business owners.

There’s a lot of competition in this sector – from the Airbnb-esque Travelmob to the newly-launched GONLA – that’s also up against this product search engine.

Today, Indonesia celebrates Google Day in Jakarta. This is the first Google Day event in the country. The same event also took place in the neighboring countries like Malaysia and the Philippines. The event goes for two days, starting today with the agenda of ‘Business and Government Day.’ The head of communications for Google Indonesia, Vishnu K. Mahmud said that this event is just for a basics introduction of Google products. He said:

These seminars gather all of the Google users in Indonesia to be introduced to Google’s products and services. It’s just an introduction which gives basic knowledge about using these products.

Search, AdSense, Google Analytics, Map Maker, Google Places, Google+, and YouTube were all on today’s menu. Vishnu said that today’s agenda received interest among a wide range of people, from businessmen to students. Tomorrow will be University Day which introduces Google services for use in education.

Google Dev Fest Jakarta 2012 is also tomorrow. This will focus on Google developers as a community event that connects developers with developer advocates and Google engineers in Indonesia. The event included several introductory and intermediate level sessions on best practices using technologies ranging from Android to App Engine.

The country’s marketing manager for Indonesia, Krishna Zulkarnain, announced today that Google’s next big space will be the Google Glass Project. But the release date has not been declared yet. He can not give more details about the shape, target market, and the price. But new innovations are on the way.

Vishnu stated that this event is a great way to meet Google users, especially people from Google Business Group Indonesia and Google Developer Group Indonesia. After the seminars ended, there was a Gangnam Style flash mob held in the main exit. That video marks a YouTube success story which recently broke the Guiness Record for most liked YouTube video.

Photo: Smartfren

Today, Smartfren launched a new cellphone with tethering capability, the Smartfren Xstre@m EVDO HotSpot. Xstre@m can function as a wi-fi hotspot and can connect up to five devices all at once. And it only costs only Rp399.000 (just over $41).

Smartfren proudly notes that this is the first CDMA cellphone in Indonesia with this hotspot feature. Most Smartfren devices reached out for the low-end market. The company targeted 4 million total units to be sold in 2012. This number is up 40 percent from last year’s sales target of 2.4 million units. Deputy CEO of Smartfren, Djoko Tata Ibrahim, said:

We hope that the presence of this feature in the latest Xstre@m phone will make internet connection sharing easier. Users can also enjoy audio and video streaming, internet browsing, and access to social media as well as other data services in a more simple yet affordable way, for all segments of society.

You can also access entertainment content like Smartfren Ring Back Tone to Uangku as a mobile banking service.

With speed of up to 3.1Mbps, Xstre@m comes with affordable data package. The phone price includes a 12GB free data package, free Facebook and Twitter access, and free on-net. All of the freebies will continue for 365 days.

A competitor in the low-end EVDO device space would be Esia with its Max-D modem which only costs Rp99.000 (over $10) — but that’s just a modem with no tethering capability. Yet Xstre@m can also function as a cellphone, so its quite a bargain.

Full Specifications

• CDMA2000-1X EV-DO Rev A Dual Band (800/1900 MHz)
• Kecepatan mengunduh hingga 3.1 Mbps
• 3.5” Audio Port (Stereo)
• Micro-USB Port Interface
• Wi-Fi Hotspot (Tethering) up to five users
• Audio & Video Streaming (RTSP)
• WAP Browser
• Camera
• Video Recording
• Bluetooth
• Multimedia (MP3 dan MP4 Player)
• FM Radio
• Social Networking
• Modem support*
• Support Micro-SDHC up to 8GB (external)
• Battery 1200mAH

Since April 1st, 2011, Twitter account @Triomacan2000 has frequently tweeted about a range of topics, from corruption among Indonesian government officials to the conspiracy of “oil mafia,” as he calls it. The Twitter account claimed to leak the untold stories of an Indonesian political scandal. The account has reached the status of Twitter political celebrity acting like a Twitter version of Wikileaks. A site with the same name TrioMacan2000.net reported that Syahganda Nainggolan (chairman of the board of directors for public affairs research body Sabang-Marauke Circle), Abdul Rasyid (coordinating ministry of economic affairs staff), and Raden Nuh (ex-director of privatization of state-owned enterprises PT. Berdikari) were the people behind Triomacan2000.

Abdul Rasyid objects to the allegation, and has filed a police report for defamation against the site. According to Kompas.com, Abdul said at the Metro Jaya Police Headquarters today:

There are three things that are in my report. Firstly, that I was mentioned as one of the administrators of triomacan2000.net site. Secondly, that I’ve enjoyed the proceeds of corruption. Thirdly, site said that I’ve been fired as managing director of Kemayoran area.

He denies all of these, and demanded for the site to be closed. He said that the news has disturbed his personal life and family. If the news continues to spread, he is worried that it will affect his career.

Together with his lawyer, Dedi Kurniadi, Abdul brought police evidence like print outs of Triomacan2000.net screenshots which contain his biography. Abdul insists that he wants a thorough investigation regarding this matter.

The site stated that Abdul had benefitted from dirty money and had been fired from his post as managing director of one of the regions in Kemayoran. The allegation was written on last Friday, September 21st, 2012. But Abdul just discovered it on Sunday. He wants the police to speed up the investigation.

Triomacan2000, who identified itself as Ade Ayu S. (presumably a pseudonym), has over 130,000 followers on Twitter. This is not the first lawsuit for @Triomacan2000. On June 2012, Junior Attorney General for Supervision Marwan Effendy filed a police report against Muhammad Fajriska Mirza who allegedly under the @Triomacan2000 account accused him of embezzling Rp 104 billion ($11.02 million).

The @Triomacan2000 Twitter account tweets today that it has no correlation with the site Triomacan2000.net. The pseudonym Twitter account is now busy campaigning against Jakarta’s governor and vice governor candidate, Joko Widodo and Ahok.

The post was taken down sometime this afternoon, but you can still see a cached version here.

Photo: Articlechase.com

By the end of 2012, Indonesia’s National Family Planning Coordinating Board (BKKBN) predicts that the country will have 245 million people. Obviously this is a promising market for human resources. Global outsourcing online marketplace, Freelancer.com, is now preparing its expansion to Indonesia, with an Indonesian version of its website and an upcoming official launch. The manager of Freelancer.com Indonesia, Helma Kusuma, wrote in Freelancer.com’s mailing list that the company wants to talk to business people as well as those who have been successfully using the service in Indonesia.

Freelancer is asking entrepreneurs to share their success stories. It also would like to measure direct effects on company’s financials of using the service. By reaching business owners, Freelancer hopes to find out if its users have seen their business improve thanks to usage of the service’s freelancers.

The site would also like to catch up with its freelancers around the country and hear their feedback. It wants to know if freelancers finally established relationships with big clients or got daily income from the site.

Freelancer has open projects for programmers, designers, content writers, and many others. On its website, it claims to have over 4 million freelancers from around the world. They will bid on projects by introducing their skills and payment rates in the hopes of getting by business owners. So far, there have been over 2 million projects on the site.

Collecting inspiring success stories will be a nice introduction when the local site is properly launched soon. Freelancer already connects freelancers globally in over 234 countries and regions. Perhaps Freelancer could even help startup growth in the country.

Photo: Qualcomm.com

Indonesian now knows the importance of mobile technology, it seems. TIME Mobility Poll and Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) have conducted a survey about mobile technology, involving 5,000 respondents from eight countries; US, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Korea, South Africa, and UK.

At the opening of INAICTA 2012, Qualcomm’s president for South East Asia and Pacific, John Stefanac, explained the success of Indonesia’s wireless ecosystem to quicken the growth of 3G mobile broadband in the country, pointing to this survey as evidence.

TIME Mobility Poll showed that 63 percent of Indonesian believe that mobile wireless technology will increase their life quality in general. As big as 93 percent say that mobile wireless technology make Indonesia an effective place to conduct their business. And more than 9 out of 10 people in this survey stated that wireless technology has an important role in education and health in the country.

Stefanac also added that ecosystem needed more than just “conventional” data service. The importance of wireless technology exploration will give higher benefits for consumers.

Mobility is the biggest platform in human history. It has potential to change every phase of human life, wherever you are. Broadband 3G mobile service today just gives entertainment, information, and connect us with one another. But it’s capable of more than that. From health solutions that can save lives to augmented reality applications — mobile potential can only be limited by human imagination.

To maximize the benefits of 3G mobile networks, Stefanac encourages industry stakeholders and the government to collaborate for long term wireless service expansion, noting that “the next step is to make sure the network is capable of handling a bigger data stream.”

To help the next mobile generation, mobile carriers must continuously give better service. But the government has to collaborate to decide network spectrum allocation and open mobile networks in the remote areas. That way, people in the country can take part in developing online business — not just for the benefit of those in big cities, but also for those in remote areas.

With the help of the internet, people in Indonesia can open up to the world. Most people who displayed their creativity today at the Indonesia Information and Communication Technology Awards 2012 said to me that their product was intended for the global market. But some others want to test their innovation on a small scale before going big, like starting in their own city.

Last year’s opening of INAICTA was not as crowded as today. In the competition’s 17 categories, there were 1,447 registrants with more than 800 works to be reviewed.

Internet connectivity is not so easy to access in small cities in the country such as Lumajang, Sidoarjo, Cimahi, and Jayapura. Yet the people who live there still can create innovations worthy of this competition.

136 of 800 nominee were selected to enter the final stage. You can also find eight startups competing in the ‘startup’ category. Chief of the executive team of INAICTA 2012, A. Haryawirasma, congratulated the participants selected for the second round.

The works in this competition were so innovative and creative, suited to this year’s theme “Creativity Breakthrough.”

The much-anticipated exhibition of INAICTA 2012 was held today, at the Jakarta Convention Center, with awards ceremonies to be held at closing tomorrow. Visitors at this event will enjoy the Creative Digital Works Exhibition for software applications and contents. Famous names in Indonesia will attend this conference such as Piyu (guitarist of Padi band), Arief Widhiyasa (Agate), Christian Sugiono (actor), and others.

In addition to the exhibition, there are also informative conferences and workshops over the two days. Speakers discuss certain topics like digital social behaviour, innovation in wireless, gaming, and transformation of television industry. The workshops will talk about effective online promotion, planning social media campaign, digitalpreneur program, and IT for kids.

Minister of Communication and Information Technology, Tifatul Sembiring, said in a written statement that he was delighted and proud that participant grew across the nation. This proves that information technology is spreading, reaching people even in the remote areas in the country.

We hope that the innovations in INAICTA could be breakthrough in ICT. This will encourage nation’s creativity, so this country will be famous for its high quality ICT products and content. All of the products will also have high value.

Tifatul stated that ICT industry in Indonesia contributes around Rp400 trillion (over $41 billion) to the country. Around Rp10 trillion (over $1 billion) of the ICT industry revenue for the country is controlled by Ministry of Finance.

Don’t be sad if you miss your favourite TV show or football game. Indonesian telco Telkom has a solution with video on demand (VOD) that you can watch anywhere and anytime. At a glance, the new UseeTV looks like local rival MivoTV where you can stream TV channels. The difference is you can pick the program that you missed from up to three days ago and watch them right now.

VOD streamed to TVs is not a new thing. FirstMedia debuted it last year with Showtime for its pay TV service. Telkom also introduced Groovia TV for online viewers. eGM Telkom Multimedia Division representative, Achmad Sugiarto, explained to us that Groovia TV was meant for the high-end market – and now Telkom releases UseeTV for a bigger audience which has unlimited data packages on their gadgets.

UseeTV supports 13 channels including local and national channels, even Al-Jazeera. On the ToVi page within the service, you can watch both Indonesian movies and international movies from the likes of Universal Studios. The video content is provided by Telkomvision, which is part of the Telkom Group. As for audio, by the end of this year there will be 350 radio stations that you can stream on the radio page.

Registering for this is free, but you will have to be a Telkom subscriber for one of its other products, like Speedy (internet provider), KartuHALO, or SimPATI for mobile services. Some of the content is free – though to enjoy most of the movies, you have to sign up for the premium package. Achmad says that they’re giving a special price:

Specially for our Telkom group subscribers, we give a premium package with 50 movies for only Rp 3.500 ($0.37). That is really cheap, and might even rival the price of pirated DVDs for some.

According to deputy eGM Telkom Multimedia Division representative, Bambang Lusmiadi, UseeTV has around 120,000 registrants in its first two months. Perhaps this is a result of the large number of users for its other services. Speedy itself has 2 million subscribers in Indonesia up to this month, and KartuHALO has 2.5 million users. SimPATI is the biggest of its service, bringing in 60 percent of Telkomsel’s income with 54.3 million users.

For the next step of product development, Telkom will maximize all of the company’s resources, even its satellites. Bambang showed me UseeTV’s mobile app running smoothly on an Android smartphone and on an iPhone – and they both look great, I reckon – showing that this kind of service can soon make the leap to mobile.

If you see the traffic jams in Indonesia’s big cities, then you might reconsider even going out at all. Doctor Gregorius Bimantoro considers this as one of many problems that makes Indonesians reluctant to go to see a doctor. He is the founder and CEO of a health digital communication startup, Atoma Medical, which runs the online health website, TanyaDok.com. This portal used to be called TanyaDokterAnda.com (ask your doctor). The new name is better.

Since 2006, the site has been supported by a medical editorial team and hundreds of contributing doctors which consist of general physicians, dentists, and an array of experts, such as specialist doctors and senior consultants. Dr. Bimantoro (dr. in Indonesia refers to Medical Doctor or Doctor) said the online venture is a way to combat the off-putting factors: the long wait, the traffic, and folks not having time to spare.

The rebrand was not just about changing its name, but also adding more features like online and mobile consultation in its social health network TanyaDok.com Live. It’s a Twitter-like interactive feature where you can ask short questions and get a doctor to answer it briefly and quickly. To make it more mobile, the company will launch its TanyaDok mHealth App for Android users in Google Play, so you can consult it anytime you feel sick. This portal also contains around 5,000 health articles which were written by doctors who specialize in various fields.

By giving this online consultation, Dr. Bimantoro is not expecting TanyaDok to replace the healthcare system available. He just hopes that it will be easier to access. Ideally, he tells us, queries in TanyaDok Live could be answered directly in real-time. But doctors are really busy people, so you need to wait for a while. The team strives to answer all questions as soon as possible, usually in less than one hour.

Until now, the number of consultations given are in the tens of thousands, either via email or social media. Every day the doctors serve around 20 to 50 consultations. I chatted with Dr. Bimantoro about TanyaDok as a virtual health consultation room, medical ethics, monetization, and lots more.

Is TanyaDok Live like Yahoo Answers, or are answers hidden to maintain patient privacy?

Bimantoro: Answering consultations [on Live] is basically almost the same as Yahoo Answers. In this case it is expected that physicians who are members of Tanyadok.com actively answer questions from the “patient” in Tanyadok Live. Doctors can actively choose the questions you want answered in accordance with the interests and expertise of each. The answers can be seen by consulting other members who are already enrolled in Tanyadok.com.

Live page is a service that is directly connected to social media, while the consulting pages are devoted to consultations – so they’re more private.

Can patients choose a specific doctor?

Bimantoro: In the case of both Tanyadok Live and private consultations, the doctor does not examine patients. A doctors consultation is limited to medical advice on the patient’s complaints. For the selection of doctors for consultations, the online patient can choose their doctors, by utilizing features such as private messages, like a direct message on Twitter to the doctor who chooses to allow that.

How can doctors see the medical records of the patient? Because on the registration form, information about the patient is very limited.

Bimantoro: The medical records system will be seen only in a paid premium service. Patients who want to consult TanyaDok Live can directly inform her complaint including data information. In this consultation, doctors in need other data about patients can ask the patients directly.

In online consultations, how doctors can give diagnosis without seeing or touching the patient physically?

Bimantoro: Because we are not doing a physical examination, the doctors who provide consultations to the patient can not establish a diagnosis. Particulars of blood pressure, heart rate, and temperature, as well as photos of skin conditions may be requested. But again, this information can not be used as a benchmark for diagnosis because the online consultation can not replace face-to-face meeting which could then be followed by a physical examination.

How is the accuracy of the online examination, especially for severe disease? Sometimes patients misread their own symptoms and guess at their conditions.

Bimantoro: The accuracy of these checks could not be measured because again this is not an online consultation which will establish a working diagnosis. The doctors may have a differential diagnosis of the complaints described by patients. However, this notion can not be enforced as a diagnosis because of work needs to be done a physical examination and other investigations.

Possible patients misread certain symptoms and figure out their own conditions – that’s very likely. But even in the doctor’s office with a face to face consultation, the patient’s complaints often do not match the perception of the doctor. Therefore, physicians diagnose the results by doing a physical examination and, if necessary, an investigation. We are working with Network Health Services (ranging from hospitals, specialist clinics, clinical laboratories, etc.) for continued service, and will soon provide ‘home care’ services for paid premium members.

Our China tech coverage this week was pretty much dominated by the news surrounding Qihoo 360′s (NYSE:QIHU) impact on the Chinese search engine space, and the effects that we’ve been seeing among its competitors. Here’s a quick roundup of how this drama played out this week, as well as other major stories from the China tech scene over the past seven days.

Qihoo 360 Shakes up Search in China

• Aug 29: Baidu Strikes Back at Qihoo 360 Search; Qihoo Redirects to Baidu Results to Cached Pages
• Aug 29: Qihoo 360 Fights Back, Banishes Co-operation with Baidu
• Aug 29: Qihoo 360: No Mixing of Paid and Organic Links in Our Search Results Page
• Aug 30: Inside Life at Qihoo 360: Working Under Constant Fear of CEO Zhou Hongyi [EXCLUSIVE]
• Aug 30: Baidu-Qihoo War Reflects Longstanding Feud Between Zhou Hongyi and Robin Li
• Aug 31: The New Face of 360 Search, China’s Most Controversial Search Engine
• Sept 1: Amid Intense Chinese Search Wars, Qihoo 360 Buys New Office Space for $218M

But what about Sogou?

Of course Baidu and Qihoo 360 are not the only combatants in the Chinese search wars, and Sohu CEO Charlies Zhang made his voice heard on that point, speaking up for Sohu’s Sogou search engine.

• Aug 31: Not To Be Left Out, Sogou Says: We Have To Take Part in This Search War

But not everyone at Sohu feels this way, as CTO Wang Xiaochuan posted a message that sorta kinda goes against Zhang’s sentiment.

• Sept 1: Sohu CTO Calls His Boss “Really F*cking Stupid,” Says Sohu Should Stay Out of Search War

In other China tech news…

1. Kai-Fu Lee and Citron Continue to Duke It Out Over Soft Seller’s Ethics and Inaccuracies

I’m not a big fan of Kaifu Lee since his idiotic Olympic Weibo outburst. But his stand against short sellers Citron Research this past week is a promising sign that the ex-Google China boss has come to his senses.

2. Chinese Stolen Game Engine Taken Down, Thief Apologizes to Real Developer – Tech in Asia

Two weeks back we reported that a Chinese developer has copied an entire game engine from a western developer and was selling it at half price. This week we saw that drama draw to a satisfying close with the offending engine taken down and the thief making an apology. Nice.

3. Chinese Developer Sells Fake Line Camera Application in Apple App Store

But then just as fast, another thief takes his place. The popular Japanese photo application, Line Camera, was copied this past week by a Chinese developer. I write this three days after the copied iPhone app hit the app store, and Apple still has not taken it down.

4. Cheers! Wine E-Tailer Jiuxian Celebrates $32 Million Series C Funding

This Chinese e-commerce site confirmed news that it has raised RMB 200 million (nearly $32 million) in series C funding. It hopes to hit $317 million in revenue by the end of this year.

5. China’s Yaodian100 Gone, But Not Bankrupt, Leaving Suppliers Out of Pocket

An update on e-commerce service Yaodian100, who isn’t quite bankrupt but its Shanghai offices are locked and its website and weibo account are pretty much dead.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS feed.

After earlier concerns that the free-to-play MMORPG Allods Online might be banned in China, the game will actually launch in the country tomorrow (August 30th) at 2pm local time. The Russian-developed Allods Online has been in closed beta in China for a while, but goes public tomorrow, hosted by Chinese gaming company Giant Interactive (NYSE:GA) on its own mini-page.

To accompany the launch, a Giant representative tells us that the company will roll out a promotion in which it will pay for a year’s worth of speeded-up broadband for some lucky gamers. To take part, Chinese gamers just need to use a specially-developed, Allods Online-themed internet speed page (pictured below) and then register their details for a chance to win a paid-for speed increase on their intertubes:

Giant has informed TiA that this promotion – which is not yet online – has an initial budget of RMB 10 million (US$1.58 million) and might be expanded if it proves successful in bringing more people to the newly-launched game. The reason given is that it’s “to reduce the requirement of participating in this great 3D game” – although it’s not thought to be any more speed-hungry than other 3D MMOs already running in China.

Despite a big broadband infrastructure push in China in recent years, no province has higher average speeds than 4MBps. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Beijing and Shanghai have the fastest general web speeds, dropping to an average of about 2MBps across much of the rest of the country.

But Giant has not commented on whether some controversial aspects of Allods Online might be removed, such as the ability of players to take part in same-sex marriage – something that’s illegal in practice in China.

In our most recent look at the entire Chinese gaming industry, Giant is the sixth-largest by revenue in 2012 Q1, with 4.3 percent market share.

The past seven days were a pretty busy week in China from a technology point of view, with news of big investments and acquisitions, some feel-good news, and even some arrests and trials to add to the drama.

1. Chinese PC Maker Lenovo Wants More of the US Market

Lenovo is going after even more of the American PC market. Currently it’s still way behind market leader HP, but if it can make progress in government and education sectors, it should be able to make up some ground.

2. China’s Dark PR: Time to Say Goodbye to Paid Censorship

Early in the week we reported on news of three Baidu employees arrested on suspicion of accepting payments for deleting posts on Baidu forums. A fourth was not arrested, but was fired.

3. For Chinese Using Online Banking, Forget Firefox, Chrome, or Mac

Chinese bank ICBC triggered many netizens to complain when it admitted that its online banking system lacks support for browsers other than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

4. Niko Partners: Revenue for Chinese Browser-Based Games Will Grow 41 Percent This Year

We aren’t surprised to hear analysts predict that gaming in China will continue to expand. Niko Partners say that revenue for browser-based games is set to increase 41 percent this year, and that it will expand to new demographics.

5. Xiaomi Makes an Acquisition, Points to Building an Apple Facetime Rival

By picking up MSNLite (no official relation to Microsoft’s MSN) Xiaomi could be looking to give their messaging more desktop support, which would make it more like Apple Facetime.

6. Apple’s iPad Holds Nearly Three Quarters of China’s Tablet Market [Report]

New figures from research firm Analysys International say that Apple’s share of the tablet market is now at 72.6 percent. Interestingly, its closest competition is not Samsung, but domestic manufacturer Lenovo at 8.38 percent.

7. Startup Ivali Makes an Easy-to-use Linux-Based OS for the Chinese Market

We don’t get a chance to report on any Linux stories, but this was a fun one. From Ivali, the makers of Ylmf OS, comes StartOS, a Linux-based system that targets Chinese users.

8. Sina Exec: ‘We’re Frightened By Shift to Mobile Internet’

From the company who has brought China one of its most exciting mobile services, comes some apprehension over what the shift to the mobile web might mean for the rest of the company’s business.

9. China Mobile Donates $2.1 Million to Children with Heart Disease

China Mobile has pledged to donate 13.5 million RMB (or $2.1 million) to children with congenital heart disease over the next two years as part of a program based out of Zhengzhou, Henan.

10. China’s Yelp-like Dianping Secures Over $60 Million in Funding

Big news from Dianping, who just announced over $60 million in series D funding. Trust Bridge Partners, Sequoia Capital, Qiming Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners all took part in this round.

11. China’s ‘Kidney for iPad’ Trial Opens, 5 Facing Prison Terms

The trial surrounding the bizarre case of the teenager who sold his kidney to buy an iPad is now underway, with five individuals facing up to 10 years in prison for their part in the illegal transplant.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS.

internet-map.net

I’m a big fan of any visualization that gives me a better idea of what the Internet looks like and one Russian web developer has created a beautiful two-dimensional representation of the internet’s 350,000 biggest websites from all over the world. The creator of this map, Ruslan Enikeev, explains the visualization thusly:

Every site is a circle on the map, and its size is determined by website traffic, the larger the amount of traffic, the bigger the circle. Users’ switching between websites forms links, and the stronger the link, the closer the websites tend to arrange themselves to each other.

As you might expect, websites from the English language dominate, but it’s interesting to look at some Asian regions, like China and Japan for example.

China (click to enlarge)

If we look at China (see right) you can see companies like Baidu and QQ.com are pretty huge, with portal sites like Sina and 163 standing out, as well as microblog service Weibo.com. Meanwhile Yahoo rules Japan, with fc2, Livedoor, Ameblo, and Mixi showing as big web destinations too. What about Korea? Naver, Google Korea, and Daum are all big players there.

Japan (click to enlarge)

Korea (click to enlarge)

Admittedly, the searches for countries like India and Indonesia don’t appear to give tidy ‘pockets’ like the countries mentioned above. While I don’t know why this is for sure, it could mean that those countries are more integrated with the rest of the internet.

In any case, it’s certainly a fun visualization, and I encourage you to check it out. Readers who like this will also want to check out a similar visualization of different world languages on Twitter.

[Via Pocket Lint]

This past week saw some very notable news in China’s e-commerce space, and some new developments in 3G. Throw in the launch of Apple’s new iPad and very generous move by Lenovo’s CEO and it turned out to be a very interesting week. Check out our top headlines from the past seven days below.

1. WTO Ruling May Open China’s E-Payment Market to Overseas Players

This news might be one of the more understated happenings of the past week, in terms of what it could potentially mean for international e-payment services and their prospects in China. The folks over at Paypal are likely very, very happy about this.

2. Tmall Will Make More than $30 Billion in Sales This Year

And if you need any convincing as to why international e-payment services want a piece of the China action, look no further than this news regarding Alibaba’s Tmall, which is expected to make more that $30 billion dollars by the end of this year.

3. China Unicom Added 3 Million 3G Subscribers in June

Here’s yet another strong indication that 3G is growing fast in the Middle Kingdom, with China Unicom’s total 3G subscriber base ballooning to 57 million.

4. Beijing Subway Lines Get China Telecom 3G Service

Would you, could you, on a train? If you’re talking 3G subway access, the answer will be ‘yes’ in Beijing, as the city now delivers a 3G signal on five popular subway lines.

5. Tencent’s Qute Has 1 Million Downloads in Indonesia

One of China’s biggest internet companies, Tencent, is apparently making some great progress in another Asian mega-market, Indonesia. The company’s Qute messaging app, despite launching without much fanfare, has racked up more than a million downloads in the country. Its QQ international browser so far has about three million users in Indonesia as well. Not too shabby!

6. Apple’s New iPad Sees Calm China Launch

Perhaps one of the most anticipated moments in tech in China last week turned out to be pretty unremarkable. The launch of the new iPad on Friday came and went without any headlines of riots or scalper fights. And that’s great news.

7. Lenovo CEO Passes $3 Million of His Bonus on to Junior Staff

And capping the week on a high-note, news that Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing is passing on $3 million of his bonus to 10,000 junior-level staffers is really refreshing to hear. In terms of building a positive image in the eyes of the public and buying positive morale among his staffers, this is likely money well spent.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS feed.

Fight for the Future, a nonprofit organization known for organizing online campaigns, will launch the Internet Defense League on July 19th. The league will provide, to paraphrase its website statement, the Internet’s emergency broadcast system. The Internet Defense League tries to create an easy mechanism to start an online campaign whenever the internet is in danger.

For their launch, the Internet Defense League will hold parties in five cities in the world, including Ulaar Bataar in Mongolia! In these parties, they plan to launch real-life cat signals (pictured above). When I asked about the choice of cities to hold the party, Tiffiniy Cheng, co-director of Fight for the Future, answered,

Members volunteer to host a party. We have volunteers in four cities planning to host a party. One of our earliest members and donors is in Mongolia at an orphanage and will be hosting a party there.

Furthermore, I asked her about their concern regarding the open internet issue in Asia. Tiffiniy answered,

We’re concerned about the censorship and tracking that happens in Asia — how the internet is controlled and censored in Asia is exactly what we don’t want to happen in the US, and want rolled back around the world. I am especially concerned about the lack of media sources in countries like Singapore and China.

Many Asia’s nations have been in the news recently for internet censorship. Most notable of course is China, where recently there has been no shortage of examples. Sina Weibo has previously censored photo sharing and searches in Hong Kong, blocked the official page of the US Consulate in Shanghai, and censored searches for “truth”, all in July alone. And Chinese authorities in general have been harsh in blocking Slideshare recently on top of the many, many other services that are blocked there.

Although, the problem does not stop here. India and Indonesia, two other nations with a significant number of internet users, often seem to follow China’s path. We have reported on India’s efforts to ban offensive content where it asked popular sites like Facebook, Google, and Yahoo to control content distributed on their platforms. The Indonesia’s government for its part passed the Law of Information and Electronic Transaction (ITE Law) in 2008 in which the government is allowed to censor certain material. A recent incident saw a citizen jailed for posting an atheist-sounding status on Facebook.

I’m curious to see how this movement will take shape after it launches. Currently it already has the likes of Mozilla (makers of Firefox), WordPress, and Reddit as members. Will many Asians and Asia-based tech companies follow the movement and fight internet regulation and censorship in Asia? Will we see a lot of cat signals emerging in cities’ sky in the continent? Lets wait and see.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was no shortage of interesting news from the startup world in and around the Asia region this week, including a fun new music service for Indonesia, a fashion crowdfunding service from Hong Kong, a social marketing solution from Australia that helps you reach Chinese consumers, and an app that aims to make a whole nation smile.

1. ReferralCandy | Singapore

Referral marketing solution ReferralCandy got a bit of a bump this week with hip-hop artist Soulja Boy coming on board as one of the startups most prominent new clients, to promote his new line of Ocean Gang clothing.

2. Ohdio | Indonesia

Ohdio began its live beta this past week, with the aim of serving Indonesia’s music fans with an online streaming service. The company still has a ways to go as they only have three major labels on board, but with any luck they can add more in the near future.

3. ZaoZao | Hong Kong

Best described as “Kickstarter meets Fab meets Moda Operandi,” Zaozao lets designers post projects and raise money for production via crowdfunding. Our Charlie Custer interviewed co-founder Vicky Wu who shares more about the service and what it’s like to run a startup in Hong Kong.

4. Hubblr | Australia

Global social marketing solution Hubblr officially launched this week, featuring support for China’s Sina Weibo in addition to other popular social services like Twitter and Facebook. Founder Michael Lam says that the Australian startup is targeting brands who want to engage customers in both Western and Chinese social landscapes.

5. NonStop Games | Singapore

Here’s an update on NonStop Games (formerly known as GamesMadeMe), a startup based in Singapore specializing in HTML social games. Vlad Micu interviews Henric Suuronen and Juha Paananen about their newest project, Paint Stars.

6. Freehap | Thailand

Wanna be happy? There’s an app for that. Well not exactly, but an app with the ambitious goal of making the world a happier place has just launched out of Bangkok.

7. DDmap’s DDcoupon | China

DDmap.com, which claims to be China’s largest lifestyle information website, says it has soared past 10 million downloads for its mobile coupon app. Hey, we all love a bargain.

8. YFind | Singapore

This startup aims to make buildings intelligent through its YFind Positioning System (YPS), a patent-pending technology for a sort of indoor, wifi-based GPS. It’s nice to see a startup we covered in its very early stages get some series A funding.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full coverage of the hottest and most innovative startups in the region, you can click here or subscribe to our Asia startups RSS feed.

There were lots of interesting happenings in China over the past seven days, as Sina rolled out a new microblog feature, Alibaba finally privatized, and Tencent dropped some epic bling. Read on to find out more about what went down in China tech news this week.

1. Welcome to the VIP Room: Sina Weibo Begins Charging Premium Users

Early in the week we saw China’s Sina Weibo microblog roll out a subscription service that charges users for extra features. The VIP services cost a flat fee of 10 RMB (or about $1.57) per month and entitles you to things like personalized pages, voice posts, better security, and extra mobile features. Oh, and your profile will get a pretty golden crown icon.

2. See $55 Chinese Android Tablet Assembled on Factory Line [Video]

Here’s an interesting inside look at the production of a low-cost Android tablet, China’s Boxchip A13. With all the controversy surrounding factory conditions in the country, this behind-the-scenes clip gives a glimpse at the young faces working to put together electronics in China.

3. No Deal! Lashou Withdraws Its US IPO Filing

Chinese daily deals site Lashou had hoped to raise around $80 million by going public on the NASDAQ, but this past week saw the company request to withdraw its IPO filing. Bummer…

4. Alibaba.com Now Officially a Private Company

This move was long expected but it became official this week, with Alibaba issuing a quiet blog post to mark the occasion. According to Alibaba Group founder and chairman, Jack Ma, “privatization is not the end but rather a new beginning.”

5. Tencent Takes Stake in Epic Games, Makers of Unreal Engine

It was announced this week that Epic Games, the makers of Gears of War as well as everyone’s favorite iOS game Infinity Blade, received investment from Chinese internet giant Tencent, taking an undisclosed minority stake.

6. QQ and UC Are Leaders in China’s Mobile Browser Race

According to new figures from Analysys International, the mobile browser war in China is currently dominated by Mobile QQ Browser with 40 percent of the market and the upstart UC Browser, close behind with 38 percent.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS feed.

The Japanese advertising agency Dentsu (TYO:4324), which is one of the world’s largest advertisers, is expanding its reach even further having just announced that it’ll open an office in Singapore tomorrow. The new digital agency in the country will be called Dentsu Mobius, and is being set up with SG$6.3 million (US$4.89 million) worth of backing from Tokyo HQ.

The Singapore office will be headed up by two managing directors: Angeli T. Beltran, who’s also the executive regional director at Dentsu Asia, and James Hawkins. They’ll oversee 30 employees at Dentsu Mobius. The new office is being described as a “specialist digital agency” that will be at the center of the company’s digital business in the region. That includes the likes of Dentsu’s Facebook ad sales deal, which was recently extended when Mark Zuckerberg dropped in to the Japanese capital.

Dentsu’s corporate communications manager in Tokyo explained to Tech in Asia:

Interactive communication is one of Dentsu’s strengths, and the establishment of Dentsu Mobius will allow us to blaze new trails in the mobile advertising markets of Southeast Asia.

Singapore is the latest stop on Dentsu’s journey of overseas expansion. It already has 168 offices around the world in 28 countries. The company has also been enlisted by compatriot GREE in its bid to take its mobile gaming platform around the world.

CNNIC, China’s administrative agency for internet affairs, is expected to announce tomorrow that ‘.cn’ and other Chinese-language domain endings will be made available to individuals to purchase. It’ll mark the end of a long clampdown on such web addresses that saw a business license being needed in order to get one – a move made in December 2009 after state-run television condemned the flood of pornographic websites using the then new ‘.cn’ address.

To back up the personal usage – which also covers wholly localized, Chinese domains that end with ‘.中国’ – Techweb reports that CNNIC will also put into place three new rules to make such websites accountable for their content under Chinese law. It’s not clear if that applies to political material, or if it’s just a safeguard against sexual images or videos.

CNNIC says that there are 3.5 million such localized top-level domains in China, out of a total of 7.86 million registered sites in the country (using ‘.com,’ ‘.net,’ etc). That former number is said to have dropped by 10 million after the ‘.cn’ clampdown in 2009 which saw website owners forced to transfer their domain onto a business license or face having the web portal shut down.

As this is expected to be announced tomorrow, there’s no word of this yet on the CNNIC website. But, in a separate post on the Chinese version of the site, I notice that the agency indicates another rule change issued today which specifies how ‘.cn’ and ‘.中国’ domains will be treated as separate services starting on October 29th of this year.

We’ll update tomorrow if this becomes official.

[Sources: Techweb; and CNNIC - articles in Chinese]

Photo: Gigazine

Japanese advertising giant Dentsu (TYO:4324) has today announced that it has acquired a 15.06 percent stake in Kakaku.com (TYO:2371), a price comparison engine in Japan which we have written about a few times before.

The stake is to be purchased from Kakaku’s main shareholder, Culture Convenience Club. According to Reuters this evening, Dentsu is looking to “advance internet advertising and digital marketing,” and tying up with Kakaku should help on that front.

Our readers may recognize Dentsu as the same company that was enlisted by GREE to assist in its overseas promotion, and it is also Facebook’s official ad sales and marketing representative in Japan.

As Serkan Toto points out in his report about this over on Asiajin, Kakaku also runs the online restaurant guide/website Tabelog, which is also quite popular. On a somewhat related note, it was just about a week back that Kakaku announced Tabelog would be getting Facebook sharing functions, injecting a little bit more social into the service.

As for Kakaku, I personally hope it continues to do well because speaking as a terribly cheap online shopper, I’m a huge fan of such price comparison services. I’ll have a little more to say on that subject later this evening.

Photo: Gigazine

This week in China was punctuated by The Global Mobile Internet Conference 2012 in Beijing. But there was no shortage of other news throughout the week. Our wrap up of the week that was is below, followed by a quick run-down of our conference coverage.

1. Tmall to Challenge 360Buy by Subsidizing Electronics Sales

This week kicked off with Alibaba’s Tmall launching a pricing offensive against in the e-commerce space, subsidizing 200 million RMB (or $31 million) in sales in consumer electronics. The move is a threat to traditional electronics retailers as well.

2. Meituan Pads its Lead in Chinese Group Buy Space

Figures from Dataotuan show that group buy player Meituan has solidified its position as market leader now with 17 percent of the market. This is not a major change, but it looks like there will be more consolidation in this somewhat messy sector. Stay tuned to see how it plays out.

3. Executives Leaving China’s Group Buy Industry

Speaking of the mess that is group buy, there appears to be a sort of exodus of high-level management from an assortment of companies in the industry. And it isn’t just the little players affected here either.

4. Chinese Lawyer Sues Kane & Lynch 2 Developers for Defamation

The game Kane & Lynch 2 Dog Days offended a certain lawyer in China filed a suit against IO Interactive and Square Enix for “vicious vilifying” of the Chinese people in the game. IO Interactive subsequently issued an apology (of sorts) late in the week.

5. China Unicom to Rollout HSPA+ 3G For Phones Next Week

Good news for lots of iPhone, iPad, and Android users, China Unicom (NYSE:CHU; HKG:0762) – the country’s second-largest mobile telco – will be rolling out higher-speed HSPA+ 3G next week.

6. Censorship Alert: Two Provinces Suddenly Vanish from Baidu’s Tieba

Two major provinces — Chongqing and Liaoning — have disappeared from Baidu’s Tieba. Apparently, just as Melissa Chan has become an unperson online in China, Chongqing and Liaoning have become unplaces.

Round-up of Global Mobile Internet Conference 2012 #

(in chronological order)

• Evernote Launches in China With Separate Service, Yinxiang Biji
• HalfBrick, Maker of Fruit Ninja, and its Future Plans in China
• GMIC 2012: Using Social Media to Help Society
• Julu Mobile Aims to Transform the Mobile Ads Experience
• UCWeb’s Yu Yongfu Talks Strategy, Finances, New Evernote Partnership
• ‘The Sexiest’ Chinese Magazine Goes Mobile
• A Discussion on Games and Building Global Brands
• Females In Entrepreneurship: Why No Love?
• GMIC Panel Discusses Mobile Health
• A Bubble in the Startup World?

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS feed.

Lots of things happening in China this week, especially with many of the big internet players. We saw one big name move to go private, while another biggie went public. Google Drive launched, but didn’t drive for long in China, and a long-anticipated gaming console may finally come to market.

1. Alibaba.com Shareholders Urged to Vote ‘Yes’ as Privatization Plan Advances

Early in the week we heard that Alibaba.com is making moves to return to being a privately held company. Documents were files with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Tuesday, most notably, a voting paper for shareholders.

2. UCWeb and UnionPay Announce New Mobile Payment Solution

Speaking of the e-commerce world in China, online payments in the country could be in for a bit of a shake up if a partnership between UnionPay and UCWeb goes well. In a press conference this week, the two demoed a very slick solution for making payments with credit or debit cards through the UCWeb mobile browser.

3. In Wake of March Merger, Youku and Tudou Connect User Accounts

We had been wondering when the recently merged video giants Youku and Tudou would get around to consummating their union. The still fundamentally separate streaming video services have taken a finally first step towards user account integration with more to follow down the road.

4. It’s Official: Sohu, Tencent, and Qiyi Team Up to Buy Content Rights

With Youku and Tudou accounting for the lion’s share of the video market, it puts pressure on the smaller players to come up with creative ways to stay competitive. Sohu, Tencent, and Baidu’s Qiyi are banding together in an effort to purchase expensive video content together.

5. Google Drive Already Blocked in China, Never Stood a Chance

Mid-week we saw Google launch it’s long awaited Google Drive online storage solution. And as expected, it didn’t take long for China’s great firewall to throw a wet blanket on the party. Just a few hours after launch users widely reported that it was inaccessible.

6. Major Crackdown Reveals Secrets of China’s Black Market in Stolen Personal Data

Charlie brings us a fascinating story from The Beijing Morning Post which gives us a rare glimpse at how the underground trade in stolen personal data works in China.

7. Juwai: Real Estate Listings for China’s Buying Spree of Overseas Property

Here’s a fun startup out of Hong Kong that we think is likely to do well. Juwai serves up housing listings outside of China for potential Chinese buyers.

This cannot possibly fail, yo’.

8. People’s Daily Online IPO Hits Shanghai, Selling Like Hot Dumplings

On Friday, the news website that’s the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece on the web, listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. With the ticker ‘SHA:603000,’ it opened at 31.01 RMB, and currently sits at 34.72 RMB.

9. Eedoo iSec is Now Called the CT510, To Be Released Next Week

This week also brought word that Eedoo’s long awaited motion-sensing game console will finally drop on April 29th, under the unusual moniker of CT510. We’ll believe it when we see it.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS feed.

A new infographic shows that Chinese will soon overtake English as the dominant language online. At the end of 2011, 27 percent of web content was in English, while 24 percent was in Chinese. Despite that, the graphic’s creators, the translation management platform Smartling, lament that the web is still too monolingual, with “56 percent of online content [being] English-only.” It calls for a more multilingual approach to the web.

We’ve taken the liberty of using some of the main images from the infographic and put them below, but you really want to check out the full thing in all its interactive and multilingual glory on the Smartling site.

First up, here’s how the web stands in Asia right now, with this region accounting for 45 percent of all the world’s web users, even though only 26 percent of the 3.5 billion people based in Asia are yet online. That’s room for some amazing growth:

The three-layer pie chart below shows the spread of languages on the web in 2000, 2005, and then 2011. In the past decade, English has shrunk from being 39 percent of all internet content down to just 27 percent at the end of 2011. It is still the lingua franca (boy, that must annoy the French) online but now by a tiny margin: it leads over Chinese – badged as ZH, which is short for Zhong wen – by just 3 percent:

Clearly, Chinese is going to overtake English as the web’s number one language very soon. At its current rate of growth, that could well happen by mid-2014. Its growth has been stellar in the past 11 years, when most other languages have been static – that’s obviously because so few of its populace was online before. Today it’s still a fairly long way from its saturation point.

Other languages are getting proportionally squeezed, such as the drop in the global share of Japanese, which is now at 8 percent and has been static since 2005. But, last year when we looked at languages used on global social media such as Twitter, we noticed the greater prevalence of Japanese, Korean, and Bahasa Indonesia.

[Source: Smartling]

BCG also notes that in 2011, Chinese consumers spent a whopping 1.9 billion hours a day online, an increase of 60 percent from two years earlier. Much of the growth in internet user count will be by fueled by older and rural residents. Internet user count under the “senior Chinese citizen” (over age 51) is estimated to double by 2015 to 81 million.

Young Chinese also trust internet sources more than any other media. And this, to some extent, explains why the Chinese government is so uptight with internet censorship in the country. The last couple of months have provided no shortage of drama: the real-name registration saga, Sina and Tencent Weibo got punished for spreading rumors, and the recent internet blackout in China (which annoying caused our own team some downtime). The reason of the blackout is still unknown despite the many hypotheses that are circulating.

On China’s internet usage, entertainment and social networking (games, music, downloads, weibo, QQ) is still the number one reason why Chinese get sucked into the web. On average a Chinese internet user spends more than three hours consuming online videos. Instant messaging is also at three hours each week. In comparison, an average Chinese user spends just 1.1 hour on email each week. Weibo-ing and social networking activities accounts for 1.7 hours of an average user’s time each week. Weibo has been growing like a weed over the past few years. BCG recorded a 376 percent growth in Weibo usage since 2008 but it remains to be seen how Sina and Tencent will react and recover from the real-name registration requirement set by the government. Right now the rules aren’t strictly followed by both internet giants.

E-commerce also saw a huge leap with a whopping 152 percent growth since 2008. The growth isn’t just from big players like Alibaba Group and 360Buy. Over the course of the year, we’re seeing vertical e-commerce stores like Lamiu, Mbaobao.com, VIPShop, and the hundreds of group-buy sites spurring online purchase in China too. It is also important to note that group-buying is really a competitive business in China and none of the players have claimed to have turned a profit. IPO plans from Meituan, one of the bigger group-buy players was also stalled.

BCG also conveniently segments Chinese internet users in eight different groups. So business development and marketing folks, here is some handy information to make segmenting and targeting a little easier:

In summary, the internet realm in China is huge and still growing. This is, by now, a pretty cliched statement, but there’s really no other way to put it. And everyone, whether they are domestic or international players, wants a piece of the action! We encourage you to click over to BCG’s site and check out the report in its entirety to find out more.

Yesterday, China’s internet briefly became an intranet. Most users inside the country couldn’t access any pages hosted abroad, and net users worldwide lost access to Chinese sites. It had been theorized that this was an issue with China Telecom’s internet intfrastructure, or that it was related to the recent earthquake in Southeast Asia. But now both Telecom and Unicom have officially denied that the issues were caused by infrastructure problems on their ends. Both companies say that during the outage there seemed to be nothing technically wrong with their networks, and they aren’t sure what caused the problem.

Unicom officials said the company’s internet reports showed the earthquake had not interfered with underwater cables that help connect China’s internet to the outside world. An expert at Telecom echoed that the problem was not with its network. This is significant because all Chinese internet traffic must be routed through Telecom or Unicom’s network infrastructure to get overseas.

It remains unclear what the cause of the outage was, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has yet to offer an explanation. Personally, I think it’s starting to look like maybe this really was a test of a new government “kill switch” that would allow it to quickly block access to all foreign websites and disrupt the use of VPNs that previously made it possible to circumvent China’s internet censorship system. The fact that some small VPN providers weren’t blocked and continued to operate as usual seems to indicate that bigger VPNs were probably targeted intentionally, since a real infrastructure disconnect between China and the rest of the world would block all VPN traffic, not just traffic from more well-known VPN services.

In light of the recent upheaval in China’s leadership and the upcoming Party congress that will decide who leads the country for the next generation, it makes some sense that the government might be interested in an emergency off button in case something gets out of hand. But it now also knows that if it does block overseas sites wholesale, it will probably have to deal with significant blowback from Chinese net users, many of whom were quite upset about yesterday’s fairly short outage.

[Dongfang Daily via Sina Tech, Image via The Guardian]

As we wrote earlier today, there was something wrong on the internet today. Many people in China (including our own Charlie in Beijing, and Steven down near Shanghai) complained that they couldn’t access websites based outside of China. Strangely, many foreign users were also reporting that they couldn’t access China-based websites.

We still don’t know exactly what happened, but thankfully things came back to normal in the afternoon. Besides the microblog chatter, the blip appears to have gone largely unnoticed in the press so far (WSJ’s Josh Chin blogged about it) – and maybe that’s not so bad, because after all, maybe this wasn’t anything.

Charlie pointed towards a microblog message from a management-level Sohu employee who said that China Telecom was experiencing a problem which cut off access to sites in Hong Kong, Japan, America, Korea, Australia, and Singapore. But China Unicom users were affected by the outage as well. Other users on other providers saw issues too.

There is also the theory that today’s outage might have been the test of a giant internet kill switch, one put forth by many today – some in jest, some in earnest. David Wertime of the excellent Tea Leaf Nation blog wrote about a similar outage that prompted discussion just a week back.

The outage also seemed to affect VPNs, with users in China reporting that most of the big VPN services wouldn’t connect during the outage. Some users with more obscure VPN providers, however, reported no issues with their connections, indicating that popular VPN services might have been a target in and of themselves.

While we can’t conclude too much from today, I am pretty certain that we need to come up with a better way of collecting and organizing outage reports. Herdict.org might be ok if anyone used it, but hardly anyone did today.

In an effort to find out a little more about what was happening today, we polled some of our readers/followers to see if they could help perform a short accessibility test on ten nine [1] Chinese websites. Between the the hours of 12 noon and 4pm (times below are given in Japan standard time, where I am located), we had the following responses, which are presented in a table below. It’s not in any way insightful in helping find out what caused of the problem, but it is somewhat more tangible evidence that there was a indeed a real problem accessing sites from outside China, and from a wide range of countries.

Internet users in China are reporting that the web has turned into an intranet, and no-one is able to access overseas websites from within mainland China. Local websites are all working fine. In the initial confusion, no-one is sure if it’s a major development in the Great Firewall that has previously targeted overseas social media and other ‘controversial’ sites, or whether it’s simply a technical error on the underwater internet cables resulting from yesterday’s massive quake off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia.

[UPDATED 30 minutes after publishing: It seems the expert we quoted below was right - the morning-long inaccessibility was a technical error, and overseas web access is being restored right now. For some, it's already back to normal. Well, 'normal'].

Our initial suspicions were that this was a ‘Great Firewall’ problem, but at least one weibo user points to a possible infrastructure failure:

Around 10:40 a serious problem occurred with China telecom’s backbone network, leading to sites in Hong Kong, Japan, America, Korea, Australia, and Singapore being inaccessible. This was caused by a malfunction in China’s backbone network. It us under repair…

(Note: We don’t know this guy, but he’s apparently management level at Sohu, and maybe knows what he’s talking about.)

The lack of global web access is being seen this morning across broadband, 2G/GPRS, and 3G from all Chinese carriers and telcos. From my own testing within mainland China, I see these issues as well. For example, I can access Yahoo China, but not Yahoo HK, Yahoo Taiwan, or any other overseas version of it. Though I also notice that P2P bit-torrenting does work even where most of the fellow torrenters are overseas. Some individuals within China are still able to access the full web using a proxy or VPN.

On Weibo, there was a mixture of concern and alarm:

Skype seems back on but nothing else yet. (@BeijingDaze识色北京)

We can’t connect to anything overseas from our office in Shanghai. (@岳撼)

All overseas websites are inaccessible! (@李开复)

Some, but not all, VPNs still working (though Witopia is farked), so it is not a cable issue. Somebody slammed the door. (@David_Wolf)

There the “door” is a reference to the internet restrictions in China that are generally called the firewall. The same users also noted:

Hearing that ppl outside of CN now unable to access CN sites. WTF? (@David_Wolf)

Indeed there are countless reports from Twitter users who say that they are having difficulties access Chinese websites from overseas. We’ve created a poll, and you can help us out by testing a sample of ten Chinese websites. The live results can be seen here.

As we’ve mentioned here before, China’s internet user total passed 513 million in 2011 according to CNNIC, which accounts for 38.3 percent of the total population. That means there’s still much room to grow, in comparision with penetration rates in the US and Europe, for example.

The graphic, which you can check out in full below, also touches on China’s affinity for instant messaging as well as its growing ecommerce market.

For more interesting figures on how China is growing, you might also enjoy:

• China Internet Penetration Map
• Every 60 seconds on the Chinese Internet [Infographic]
• Nearly 1 Billion Served: Chinese Mobile Subscribers Approaching Major Milestone

In China this week many people had time off for Qingming Festival, but there was still plenty of news going down. Here’s a quick rundown of some the notable stories we saw during the past seven days.

1. Guess What? Tencent Clones Zynga’s Draw Something [LEAKED PICTURES]

Tencent didn’t take long to get started on a clone of the popular Draw Something application. Check out these leaked photos of Guess What, a Chinese-language version the sketch-and-guess game. Strangely it looks like it uses pinyin (a romanized spelling of Chinese characters), but it still seems kind of fun!

2. Decoding Sina Weibo’s Real-Name Strategy

Charlie wasted no time this week delving into the confusion surrounding China’s real-name regulation for microblogs. He outlines three reasons why Sina Weibo may have purposefully pushed their luck a little further than the authorities in Beijing would have liked.

3. Now You, Too, Can Spy on Ai Weiwei

The always-provacative artist and activist Ai Weiwei has always been closely scrutinized by the Chinese government. In an effort to save his tails some work, or more likely to mark the anniversary of his detention a year back, Ai setup the WeiWei cam (at weiweicam.com) which includes camera feeds from his studio and home. Not surprisingly, the authorities ordered the removal of the webcams shortly after.

4. Instagram for Android Arrives, But Missing Sina Weibo Support

Android users everywhere were delighted to finally get an Instagram app this week. But regrettably, users in China found a strange omission in the app, as there’s no support to push your photos to the popular Sina Weibo microblog. We hope it comes along in a future update.

5. The Sina Weibo App is Very, Very Addictive!

Willis takes a closer look at the Sina Weibo app for iOS, and finds it to be a wonderful way to look at one of China’s most popular online networks.

6. New Rikai Browser Lets You Read Chinese with Ease

Speaking of reading Chinese on iOS, if you’re not a native speaker you might need a little help when reading Chinese on the net. The new Rikai Browser Chinese from Tokyo-based developer Long Weekend offers some assistance when you come across difficult words and phrases by providing pop-up translations when you need them.

7. Ten Chinese Social Video-Sharing Apps to Watch in 2012

Could these ‘micro-video’ apps be the next big thing on the social web? We’re not quite sure how this particular digital genre is going to fare, but we thought it would be interesting to look at the major players who have explored this space in China so far.

8. An Entrepreneur Says Goodbye: The Story of a Chinese Failure

While we tend to bring you a lot of feel-good success stories of startups and entrepreneurship, here’s one that comes with a dose of reality. Charlie translates/summarizes the tale of Chen Jun, a serial entrepreneur who has gone through a series of failures in his career.

9. China Charges 5 People in Kidney-for-iPad Affair

A report from Xinhua late Friday provided an update on a sad case from last spring. Regarding the teenager who so desperately wanted to buy an iPad 2 that he sold his kidney to do so, there have been five arrests made in connection with that case. Sadly, the boy is still not in the best of health.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS feed.

According to IDC, by 2012 there will be over 30 million internet users in the country. Even though internet penetration is only around 10 percent, that still gives Indonesia the most Internet users in the Southeast Asia region. The figure might be as high as 39 million as stated by WeAreSocial. Mobile penetration is at 78 percent, according to Nielsen, which means there are more than 150 million mobile users in Indonesia.

The good news is that online advertising spending is on the rise too. But on the ground, I’m hearing from some local friends that it is not quite as easy to monetize through ads. Nonetheless, there are some good examples around. Adstars, an Indonesian-based mobile ad network is doing really well. The statistics, both ad impressions and revenue, which I can’t share publicly, are pretty staggering.

In e-commerce, Ideosource forecasted that the transacted value is growing even without a proper and unified e-payment platform, and despite the fact that credit cards are still not widely used in Indonesia. The rise in transacted value is also likely triggered by the increasing number of players in the ecommerce sector, including Blibli, Tokopedia, Rakuten, Multiply, and many more.

So all these favorable statistics have attracted investors and overseas companies to set up offices in Indonesia, including Tencent, Cyberagent Ventures, Batavia Ventures, and GREE Ventures. But potential is still just potential. It isn’t yet realized and I understand that some companies, though taking a close interest on Indonesia, aren’t quite convinced to enter the market yet.

The tech entrepreneurship ecosystem is also fairly young. Though Andi believes that there will be a snowballing effect of success in tech entrepreneurship (profitability or exit) which will encourage more entrepreneurs in Indonesia. He added:

Startups now are led by a new breed of entrepreneurs that mostly do not have previous experience as successful entrepreneurs. So the quality of understanding of consumers, market insight, business cycle, financial knowledge, sales channels and distribution, etc, is not yet there. They will reach full cycle within at least 3 to 5 years when they experience from setting up a company, operation, and exit. They will become more mature entrepreneurs after experiencing the full cycle.

It will be interesting to watch Indonesia grow and develop over the next few years. We hope that we can help bring you some of the stories that emerge from there along the way.

It was an interesting week for technology news in and around China, starting out with the huge acquisition of Tudou by Youku. Perhaps the the second biggest story came on Friday, as the real-name deadline for microblogs came and went on March 16th. But as you’ll see, many are still confused. Including us.

1. In a Huge Deal For the Chinese Web, Youku and Tudou Merge

It was announced that China’s two largest video-streaming sites, Youku and Tudou, have signed a deal to merge. Or, rather, Youku will swallow up Tudou in its entirety.

2. Baidu HR Staffer Launches Pop Career with Debut Song ‘Angry Birds’

Early last week we saw an unusual story about Baidu HR staffer Liu Dong, aka Jocelin, who launched her first pop song, strangely titled ‘Angry Birds.’ This post was one of our more popular articles this week, telling us just how much our readership loves Baidu!

3. China Unicom: Downloading iPhone or iPad Apps Exceeding 50MB on 3G is Fine With Us

Good news for Chinese iPhone users on China Unicom. The company negotiated with Apple to allow users to download and update apps larger that 50MB over its 3G network.

4. Apple Hong Kong Stymies Scalpers, Scalpers Respond in Stupidest Imaginable Way

While Apple fans on the mainland had good news from China Unicom, fanboys down south in Hong Kong were also in for a treat with the release of the new iPad. Who wasn’t happy? Scalpers.

5. Meizu’s Flyme Store Hits 100 Million App Downloads, Looks Towards a Billion

And then there’s China’s own Apple wannabee, Meizu, who claimed that it hit the 100 million app download mark, this just a week after Apple hit 25 billion downloads. Perhaps appropriately, Meizu continued to borrow liberally from Apple for its announcement graphic.

6. Sina Weibo’s Weipocalypse

As Sina Weibo’s March 16th real-name deadline came and went on Friday, we could still post to the Chinese microblogging services without problem. As if that wasn’t strange enough, our man in Beijing notes today that many Sina users – himself included – are receiving thank you messages for filling out identification information. What’s strange about that? They haven’t actually submitted anything!

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS feed.

Click for the full-size version

As a rundown of China’s top sites, it’s pretty well done. There are so many sites that they had to squeeze multiple ones onto each property square, but all the big guys are there. It does seem to be a bit outdated, though. Amazon still appears on the board with Joyo branding, despite the fact that it dropped that name last October, and Youku and Tudou appear on different squares in the video category, which seems off considering their recent merger.

As a monopoly game, though, the board is sorely lacking. There are some clever conceits — the jail becoming the blocked website zone is a good one — but the image is too small to print out, there are no prices on the properties, and because they added in extra property squares, the board doesn’t parallel real monopoly. Honestly, this probably makes me a nerd, but when I saw it the first thing I wanted to see was what they’d put on Boardwalk and Park Place — in other words, what are China’s two most valuable internet companies? Unfortunately, that’s not how they did things; there is no Boardwalk or Park Place equivalent on this board. Other things are just uninspired; the Community Chest card reads: “You have won second place in a tech context [sic].”

Still, it’s a fun image for a quick overview of the main players on China’s internet and where they all stand. I hope it inspires someone to create a full-resolution, playable version of Chinese internet Monopoly though. Something with a full deck of chance and community chest cards, and maybe property prices based on the market valuations of each company, or user numbers? Maybe a version that was printable so that, uh, other people could play it at home? I mean, I’m not that big a nerd, but I’m sure there’s an interest. Just sayin’.

While the Apple/Proview battle was stealing a lot of headlines this week, there were other things going down in China this week that may have slipped by if you weren’t watching closely. Here’s a recap of some of the more notable happenings in China over the past seven days, including a bright spot for Apple that was a little overshadowed by its iPad woes.

1. Chinese product search engine B5M raises $7.1 million in funds

This news caught many of us by surprise this week. Many of us had not heard of B5M before this. But clearly Oak Investment Partners and Giosis Holdings know who B5M is, and was willing to back the product search engine to help fund its future development and marketing.

2. Baidu establishes joint research lab with A*STAR

In conjunction with I2R, Baidu is establishing a joint lab in Singapore that will focus on natural language processing for Southeast Asian languages, specifically Vietnamese and Thai. It’s going to be interesting to watch Baidu’s activities outside of china.

3. DeNA brings Mobage to Huawei smartphones in China

Another incremental step for DeNA in building the Mobage China brand. The company has already established a number of local partnerships in China previous to this one (most notably with Baidu and Alibaba Cloud Computing). At the this rate, we can probably expect to see more Mobage partnerships in the near future.

4. QQ users in China pay for a fake ‘Sent From My iPhone’ hack

Here’s an interesting service that a number of online sellers are pushing on Chinese e-commerce sites. It costs about 8 RMB per month (about $1.25) for QQ users to get the ‘Sent from my iPhone’ tagline appended to their messages. We’re not sure how popular this service actually is, but one seller is reported to have sold 329 times in the past month.

5. China Telecom finally getting the iPhone

The iPhone is hot in China, in more ways than one. China Telecom announced this past week that it would finally be getting the iPhone, with preorders to be made on March 2nd, and sales opening up on March 9th. China Telecom holds about 31 percent of China’s 3G market, so this is indeed a noteworthy deal for Apple — perhaps some solace in the midst of its recent iPad headaches in the country.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS feed.

Phones. Lots of people are using them. (via New York Times)

Everyone knows China’s GDP has been climbing at a pretty astonishing rate for some time now. But the telecommunications industry is growing too, and at a conference today MIIT chief engineer Wang Xiujun announced that for the first time ever, telecom industry growth outpaced GDP growth in 2011 in China.

The overall telecom industry growth was 10 percent, Wang reported, and revenues rose 15.5 percent over the previous year for a total of over 11 trillion RMB ($1.7 trillion).

Some other impressive stats Wang shared about China’s telecom industry as of the end of 2011:

• China has 1.27 billion phone users.
• China has 986 million mobile phone users.
• China has 128 million 3G users.
• China has 156 million broadband subscribers, 84 percent of which have at least 2 Mb/sec connections.
• China has 513 million total net users.
• China has 13.5 million IPTV users.
• China has 59 million people watching video on their phones.

Impressed yet? If not, 2012 should bring further improvements. Wang said goals include better broadband penetration, three-network (phone, internet, TV) integration, and just generally making things better. Here’s hoping they’ll get to work on the abysmally slow internet.

[via Sina Tech]

Siva Sai, founder of Jumpsurf has a possible solution for the problem. If you have US$148 to spare, you can grab a Jumpsurf mobile modem, which contains a SIM card that automatically detects user’s location and provides them with the relevant Internet Service Provider (ISP) — for example, SingTel in Singapore or 3 in Jakarta. The gadget weighs 180g and can last up to 7 hours on WiFi. Right now, coverage is still pretty limited but Siva says that they are actively getting more carriers on board.

The Jumpsurf mobile modem is only a one time payment which also comes with $18 worth of credit. Users pay for the amount of 3G data they use at a $0.20/MB rate. That’s not too cheap. I argued with Siva that getting a local 3G card is way more cost effective. Personally, I have local SIM cards for China, Indonesia, and Taiwan. I would subscribe to an unlimited 3G data plan during my stay, then I can freely tether to my other devices. The process is troublesome but worthwhile considering the money saved.

Siva agrees but also explains that Jumpsurf is targeted at folks who are less savvy about 3G matters. These are the people who would very much prefer a plug and play solution and don’t mind paying the premium for it (mainly corporate travelers).

Personally, I like the idea of having everything into one light device. Unfortunately, the 3G rates are beyond what my wallet can take. But that will hopefully change as more users get on board. Perhaps, Jumpsurf might even have an option for users to sign up for an unlimited plan so they can relax while using 3G, without the fear of breaking the bank while watching YouTube videos.

Siva from Jumpsurf holding his demo product.

]]> http://www.techinasia.com/jumpsurf-mobile-wifi/feed/ 1 http://placehold.it/350x150 http://www.techinasia.com/china-this-week-jan29-2012/ http://www.techinasia.com/china-this-week-jan29-2012/#comments Sun, 29 Jan 2012 13:00:47 +0000 Rick Martin http://www.techinasia.com/?p=65766 Read more »]]>

This week in China tech news was a little quiet as most people were enjoying Chinese New Year. But interestingly, this week saw a few holiday-related stories creep into our weekly round-up. In the spirit of the season and lucky numerology, we’ve got 8 stories here that you might like:

1. Video Review of the Xiaomi M1

We’ve done a fair amount of reporting on Xiaomi’s M1 smartphone this year, but this video review by Charlie takes a closer, hands-on look at the upstart smartphone. The Xiaomi M1 is a pretty impressive offering, especially when you factor in the 1999 RMB ($313) price.

2. Half of All Retweets on Sina Weibo are Spam

We’ve long been concerned about just how many of the 250 million users of Sina Weibo are real, and not spam or zombie accounts. Now a report from the HP Labs ‘Social Computing Research Group’ claims to have found that an astonishing 49 percent of all retweets on the microblogging service come from fraudulent accounts. To make it worse, those automated fake users account for about 32 percent of the total tweets.

3. Fishing Joy Hits 30 Million Downloads

China-based Punchbox has pushed its own New Year holiday update for its popular Fishing Joy game this week. The general manager of the company, Lei Zhang, also pointed out in a statement that the game has now passed the 30 million download milestone.

4. Nokia’s Sales in China Down 40% Last Year, Only Hope Rests in WP7

The final quarter of 2011 proved to be another chapter in Nokia’s horror story in China with the Finnish phone-maker reporting a drop of 40 percent in net sales compared to the same period in 2010. According to its newly-released unaudited results, the volume of devices sold in Greater China dropped 33 percent from Q4 2010 to the same quarter of 2011.

5. Apple’s Siri Can’t Understand Chinese

Apple’s voice recognition feature Siri, which appears on the iPhone 4S, can’t understand or speak Chinese. Perhaps it’s learning. But for now, despite most users probably knowing of this limitation before purchasing, it’s a frustrating omission. That’s probably why two young Chinese nerds made the amusing video, below, about the language barrier that stands between them and their digital assistant.

6. China Anoints a New Most-Followed Celebrity, Way Ahead of Liu Xiang, Lady Gaga

While Sina’s Weibo tends to grab all the headlines, it’s Tencent’s service that rules the roost in terms of users – and also in terms of having the most-followed celebrity in the world. And now there’s a new global social media star who has leapt over the former number one, Olympic hurdler Liu Xiang, with a staggering 26.9 million followers. It’s TV star He Jiong.

7. Chinese New Year Sets Microblog Message Milestone, But It’s Not the First Time

This wasn’t the only year that Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo set a microblogging milestone, although it might be the first year that the West really paid attention. A little big of digging shows that the first second of the previous Chinese Year (Year of the Rabbit) clocked 12,374 messages.

8. Air China’s Facebook Marketing Campaign Takes Off

We were somewhat surprised to hear that Air China was using Facebook as a promotional tool since the popular social network is blocked in China. But upon taking a closer look, this particular campaign was for Air China in Sweden, where of course Facebook is not blocked at all.

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full spread of China coverage, you can click here or subscribe to our China RSS feed.

There were a number of startups and cool projects that got our attention over the past week. And as our colleague Charlie ruminates over whether or not we are all doomed, there are a few initiatives here that give us some hope.

For folks who are interested in investing in or partnering with these startups, drop us an email anytime. And if you’re a tech startup founder in Asia hoping to be featured, kindly send us your pitch here.

1. Photohoku | Japan

This is a great civic initiative in Japan to help families restart photo albums, after the March 11 tsunami washed away family photo collections that they had before. It’s great to see that some people are still very focused on helping Japan bounce back after the disaster last year.

2. Native Tongue and Mandarin Madness | Australia

For students who are learning Chinese, here’s a fun study alternative from Australian startup Native Tongue. Mandarin Madness is an app that aims to help total beginners grasp the simple sound and meaning behind many common characters. It’s newly launched on iPhone and iPad, and has game-ified the activity of learning, with points, flash cards, and ‘lives.’

3. Freecharge.in | India

The Indian startup Freecharge.in has announced this afternoon that its has secured funding worth Rs. 20 crores (US$4 million) from Sequoia Capital – the second time it has been given a cash boost by the same VC firm.

4. Blaast | Indonesia

We’ve talked about Blaast a few times before, but it wasn’t until this week that we saw its official launch. Blaast aims to bring the smartphone experience (mobile apps) to users who are still using feature phones — a worthy venture indeed!

5. Infinite.ly | Philippines

Philippines-based Infinite.ly is an application built for brands and marketing managers to track social buzz about their companies (on Facebook and Twitter) all in one page. Co-founder Luis Buenaventura describes his startup as “a central hub for everything a small business owner needs to get started with their social presence.”

That’s all for this week, folks! For our full coverage of Start-ups in Asia, you can click here or subscribe to our Asia Start-ups RSS feed.

]]> http://www.techinasia.com/startups-this-week-jan29-2012/feed/ 1 http://placehold.it/350x150 http://www.techinasia.com/china-internet-penetration-map/ http://www.techinasia.com/china-internet-penetration-map/#comments Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:15:00 +0000 Rick Martin http://www.techinasia.com/?p=64821 Read more »]]> So, you may have noticed that we like maps and charts and stuff… And after CNNIC released its recent report on internet use in China, one of the key datasets that I was eager to look at was internet penetration by province. I thought I’d put it on a map and see how it looked [1].

Areas in green are above the national average of 38.3 percent, while areas in yellow are below the average. As you might expect, areas along the east coast, as well as the capital Beijing have pretty high penetration rates – Beijing being the highest at 70.3 percent. I have to admit though that I was a little surprised to see Xinjiang province in the west ranks ninth in the country in internet penetration at 40.4 percent, just above the national average.

What about Hong Kong and Taiwan you ask? Well, CNNIC didn’t include them for some reason — which is interesting. But FYI, according to Internet World Stats Hong Kong and Taiwan are way up there with 68.8 and 70.1 percent respectively.

Anyway, have a click around for yourself and explore the map below. I’ve made CNNIC’s data available here if you’d like to check it out yourself [2]. And for anyone who wants it, there’s also an image version of the map here.

Download image version of map here

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1. Some of you may recall I tried mapping this stuff last year, but the map platform was a little clunky, so I wanted to try again. Hat tip to Google Fusion tables for playing nice this time. ↩

2. Note that Xizang out west is Tibet, and Nei Mongol to the north is Inner Mongolia. I’ll try and adjust this on the map soon. ↩

]]> http://www.techinasia.com/china-internet-penetration-map/feed/ 1 http://placehold.it/350x150 http://www.techinasia.com/broadband-monopolies-china/ http://www.techinasia.com/broadband-monopolies-china/#comments Tue, 10 Jan 2012 04:00:05 +0000 C. Custer http://www.techinasia.com/?p=64018 Read more »]]>

via LIU JIN/AFP/Getty Images

As ‘things’ on the internet get bigger, so too have broadband speeds increased to keep up with them. These days, when multiple people in a household might be engaged in high-bandwidth activities like watching videos all at the same time, a fast connection is a necessity. For some people in China, though, it’s also an impossibility.

Although China’s major internet providers — telecom giants like China Unicom (HKG:762) — have been steadily increasing their available speed, smaller local broadband providers haven’t been following. And with major telcoms’s recent and free upgrade to 10M connections, some local users are starting to get pretty annoyed that not only is their internet slower, they don’t even have a choice in providers.

That’s because some local broadband companies have made arrangements with residential communities that give them a complete monopoly over ISP services to residents of the community. “Some real estate developers have totally shut us out,” a spokesman for Guangdong Telecom told the Guangzhou Daily. Basically, in some new communities developers hold open bidding for exclusive rights to be the tenants internet provider, and whoever lays down the most cash gets the job, no questions asked. Guangzhou Daily reporters spoke to representatives of one such community, who told them that major telecoms were welcome to apply to enter the community, but that they’d have to come to an agreement with the developers, the owner, and the local broadband company that owns the monopoly on the development before they were allowed in.

This kind of monopoly means that these local companies have no real reason to be interested in increasing the quality of their services, meaning that some users are stuck using connections that were perhaps fast years ago but now seem agonizingly slow because they just can’t stand up to the demands of the modern internet user.

It’s a complex issue, and one that doesn’t appear to be immediately solvable. But as demand for fast internet continue to rise, providers are going to have to up their speeds or face mobs of angry customers with pitchforks — or something like that, anyway.

[Guangzhou Daily via Sina Tech]

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