Relocating from one country to another is never an easy task. For some, the decision would probably mean sacrificing friendships, family, and other things you enjoy in your pursuits.

Adriana Gascoigne, the CEO and founder of both Girls in Tech and HelpLearn.Asia, initially moved from the United States to Singapore for personal reasons. When things fell through, she quickly picked up the pieces, and secured a position in startup within a couple of months. After eight months in sunny Singapore, she decided to embark on her own venture, HelpLearn.Asia, while continuing the expansion efforts of Girls in Tech throughout Southeast Asia. She is also currently working on a social enterprise, which will also be revealed in the upcoming months.

Prior to starting up, Adriana had a taste of both corporate and startup life. She was the vice president of marketing at SecondMarket, where she was responsible for marketing, branding strategy, event production, and digital media efforts. Adriana has also worked at various technology startups, such as ImpulseFlyer, hi5, SocialGamingNetwork (SGN), Jambool’s SocialGold, and GUBA, where she spearheaded marketing, communications, and analytics. Her background as the vice president of 360 Digital Influence at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide and vice president of the digital group at Edelman has also reinforced her experience, which proved essential in the setup of HelpLearn.Asia, an e-learning platform providing tutorials on online and digital marketing tools.

With regard to the Girls in Tech Singapore chapter, that initiative grew to over 600 members in just a couple of months. Managing a non-profit organization virtually poses two challenges: How does Adriana(pictured right) motivate the managing directors of each chapter? And how does she manage to grow her member base so quickly?

In the video interview above, Adriana tells us that she leads by example. Regardless of the circumstances or challenges posed to her, she continues to work hard and is dedicated to build her passion around technology startups. She hopes to empower, engage, and educate women in technology, and is driven to make Girls in Tech succeed.

Was the move to Singapore worth it? Does Adriana miss her family and her friends?

She admits, yes, but communication tools like Skype have helped her to stay connected to her loved ones back home. In Adriana’s words:

It is a sacrifice but also an opportunity. I’m learning a lot about doing business in another part of the world, [where] the economy is thriving and people are eager to learn from those of us who have lived in Silicon Valley for many years. I most likely won’t be here forever, but for the time being – I’m living everyday as if it was my last – enjoying what I do, the people who I surround myself with, and focusing on the things that make me smile.

What’s her advice to fellow female entrepreneurs? Take risks.

If you would like to find out more about her entrepreneurial journey, challenges faced, and how she overcame them, check out the video above.

And for those who are keen to find out more about the HelpLearn.Asia seminar series, check out the website here. There are also early bird discounts for those who register before December 28!

This is part of Tech in Asia’s series on female entrepreneurship.

Blackberry JamHack Asia just finished a few days ago, with Indonesian web and app developers Inspira Solusi Indonesia emerging as the grand champion with its Soccer Ticker app (pictured below). The team came out among ten Asian city winners that competed at the event. We spoke more with the co-founder of Inspira Solusi Indonesia, Vincent Putera, about his recent success, and it turns out that Inspira’s portfolio looks pretty impressive, and its future looks bright.

Inspira Solusi Indonesia was founded late last year by Vincent, Hendry Gunawan, and Abrizal Ang. In addition to building their own web and app startups, Inspira is also available to develop apps for clients. Interestingly, the three co-founders are all returnees to Indonesia, having spent time in the US previously. Vincent himself spent eight years there finishing his undergraduate and MBA degrees, and then worked for a publishing house. He said that one of the reasons he came back to Indonesia was to take part in the immense potential of digital ventures in the country.

1. Why did you guys decide to build a soccer scores app?

Vincent: We built Soccer Ticker because we haven’t seen anything similar on the market. I’m a football fan and it’s hard for me to find a mobile app that could really provide in-depth play-by-play live updates on a certain match.

We’re also integrating it with BBM to differentiate our product a bit further and also to replicate the excitement of enjoying football matches in a collective way. Think NoBar (means “watching something together”), or going to see a match with your buddies.

2. What was the secret to winning the JamHack Asia?

Vincent: I think I was somewhat optimistic that we had a good shot at winning it. We had a good idea and it was well executed. It just felt like it hit all the right notes. Plus the marketability and audience for this service is quite huge, so we thought why not give it a shot.

I supposed you could say for now that the integrated chatting platform is the secret sauce. It is certainly one thing that would make the app stickier. We have a few more tricks, but we’ll keep them under wraps for now.

The key factor was definitely the team behind it. We had the right idea, but as always, an idea alone won’t take you far. We worked hard to flesh out the idea using Cascades.

3. What is the revenue model for Soccer Ticker? Is the app available now?

Vincent: It is not available right now, but it will be featured in Blackberry 10 when it comes out. [...] You could go to www.soccerticker.net and leave your email there for scheduled beta access. The revenue model is going to be ad-based and freemium.

4. What do you think about Blackberry’s future in Indonesia? And about its latest Blackberry 10 OS?

Vincent: Indonesia will still be a BlackBerry nation for another year at least, especially with the more affordable variants of Blackberry coming out. RIM’s future is fine in Indonesia. It’s the western hemisphere that they need to worry about.

BB OS 10 is actually decent and puts RIM in the same playing field as Google and Apple. I just hope it’s not too little too late.

5. What are your upcoming plans?

Vincent: Yes, Blackberry 10 isn’t coming out until next year, so meanwhile we’re going to do iOS and Android versions, and make sure they’re out the door in very near future. Time is of the essence. At the same time, we owe it to Blackberry JamHack for discovering Soccer Ticker, so we going to include some features that are exclusive to Blackberry 10 when it comes out. Just minor stuff, but it’s just our way of saying thanks.

I’d like to credit my team who pulled off Soccer Ticker at BBJamAsia. We’re not bunch of Steve Jobses, but we’re bunch of committed individuals. You know how there’s a saying that “If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well,” and I really believe the team has that attitude in them. They are people that wanted to run marathons, cage fight, and hunt alligators, but were born with asthma. They’re the people with that startup attitude.

6. Are you looking for Investment?

Vincent: Yes, we’re looking for investment to help us grow and scale Soccer Ticker in a timely manner.

Soccer Ticker Preview

Below is the video of how the Soccer Ticker app works. Though the explanation is on semi Indonesian-English language, this video can still give you a glimpse of what you can expect when the app is launched on other OSes.

Keeping Busy

Besides building apps, Inspira is also running two startups, they are Indonesian gadget community Gadgetan.com and Daily Deals site HelloGoodBuy.me. The latter startup got nominated for Open Web Asia, and it was featured in Echelon 2012 as one of the 50 most promising startups in Asia. Vincent said that it is scheduled to undergo a major pivot. He adds:

We’re currently operating it as a daily deals site just to get our feet wet. It was never meant to be a daily deals site.

Social media in China is huge. So huge that nobody wants to ignore it. And while lots of people think “Twitter” when they hear HootSuite, the folks at HootSuite are taking China seriously. We already know the company has recently added traditional characters and Sina Weibo support, but what else is in the cards? I got a chance to talk with Dave Olson, HootSuite’s community VP, who gave me the lowdown on the company’s China plans.

Why is HootSuite interested in China?

Since launching almost 4 years years ago, HootSuite’s goal was to make our social media management system available to as many people as possible.

With this in mind, we monitor conversations about HootSuite and reach out to markets in which we see rapid organic growth. Afterwards we work to localize these unique markets. We started with Japan, then Spanish speaking countries, around Europe and then onwards into other Asian markets like Indonesia.

We knew the Chinese market was important but wanted to make sure we avoided missteps that we observed from other companies. We also knew that HootSuite is blocked by association in China because our core product includes access to Twitter and Facebook.

HootSuite is very cognizant that Chinese social media users have different networks, different needs, habits and culture along with different language. In addition we know there is more than one Chinese market with different expectations around China’s provinces including communities in Hong Kong, Taiwan/Taipei, Singapore and the huge ex-pat community such as in our home city of Vancouver.

We also learned that despite the difference, people using Chinese social networks share some of the same needs as users in the West, which are: sharing content across networks, managing multiple online profiles, and help listening, responding to, and analyzing their online interactions.

We’ve learned a lot from localizing elsewhere, and are hoping to use these lessons in bringing HootSuite to Chinese users. We want to tread lightly, and listen attentively.

As such, we are taking a diplomatic and educational approach to build community, share knowledge and deliver on expectations. Eventually we can build a business case as well.

What are you doing to get into the China market already?

Along with adding Sina Weibo support, we translated HootSuite’s web and mobile social media dashboard into Traditional Chinese and released it on October 8th in order to start the conversation with social media enthusiasts in Hong Kong, Taiwan/Taipei, etc.

However, before starting the translation project, we held a Chinese Localization Symposium in which we invited a cross section of Chinese social media users to discuss the linguistic, cultural and logistical challenges. The event was a success and we followed it up with a fun translathon with Chinese themed decorations, music, food, tea and more!

We also built a company presence on Sina Weibo, created a Twitter account, published a variety of videos to say hello and discussed our vision of collaborating with Chinese social media users.

Now, with the Traditional Chinese version launched, we’re underway with working on the Simplified Chinese version. We’ve also started developing a Chinese specific branding as well, to share our name and culture in Chinese characters.

We aim to keep things pretty grassroots, talking with people through our @HootSuite_CN and Sina Weibo accounts to see what is working, what isn’t, and what they want to see in the future.

Building relationships with users is our biggest priority.

What comes next and what are your long term plans?

Next up is getting our Simplified Chinese translation released by the end of the year. We will also increase Sina Weibo integration features, and are exploring integrations with other Chinese social networks like Renren and other Tencent properties. A lot of our next steps will be based on what we hear from conversations with our Chinese users.

We also hope to find quality social media industry events for our CEO Ryan Holmes to speak at and share our culture and story.

Long term plans are based on the feedback and reaction from these initial steps. Obviously, there are challenges facing foreign companies wanting to operate in Mainland China – especially technology companies like HootSuite – so we’ll stay focused on finding ways to get HootSuite in the hands of as many users as possible, perhaps with a China-specific version.

What are you finding the differences are between your Chinese and international users? Between weibo and twitter users?

First off, Chinese users can say a lot more in 140 characters!

Social media has broad appeal, regardless of which network you are using. The desire to connect with people, to broadcast, listen, and share, spans cultures.

Social media usage patterns and attitudes for Chinese specifically – and international in general – is a topic we spend lots of time researching. Getting a finger on the pulse of those differences is something we hope conversations with our users will produce.

For example: Weibo has a focus on media-rich content like photos and videos, as well as things like emoji. Comments and ‘likes’ on posts also helps keep the conversation going.

Overall, feature differences between networks reflect and/or inform usage patterns, so there are definitely some differences between Sina Weibo and Twitter users. We’ve embraced the differences in Twitter usage between North America and countries like Japan and Indonesia, so we’ll continue listening to the Chinese users for guidance.

Mr. Olson also shared some cool extras with us, like this Chinese pronunciation guide an enthusiastic employee made and an introduction video in Chinese (embedded below). I’m sure not everyone at the company is learning Chinese, but this is still a nice, friendly touch that shows the folks at HootSuite are really working to communicate with Chinese users on their terms. Here’s hoping that HootSuite can move even further into the Chinese market (and that that pronunciation video will stop people from pronouncing weibo like “way-bow”)!

Tuniu's Donald Yu

In the West, online travel has long since eclipsed the brick-and-mortar industry, but in China, real-world travel agencies are very much alive. Travel patterns are also very different here; Chinese tourists often prefer to travel in groups as part of meticulously crafted travel packages, not just hop a flight to a vacation destination and figure the rest out later. That means operating a travel site in China presents some unique challenges, and recently, we got an opportunity to talk via email with Donald Yu, the CEO of Tuniu, about some of them.

Tuniu’s development has been surprisingly rapid. How was this accomplished? Can you tell us a little about the founding and development of Tuniu?

We started Tuniu as a community tourism website in October of 2006 and sped its pace of development as an online travel package and group tour booking around six months later. Our vision was to make tourism simple for the still-nascent Chinese travel market. To make this goal a reality, we targeted customer service and experience as our key differentiators from other market players.

Back then, there were three major trends in China’s online tourism industry: do it yourself tours and outdoor activities; air tickets and hotel booking; and tourism package products with cooperation from tourism agencies. Tuniu targeted the third category because we felt it was an underexploited market with great potential.
In order to ensure that customers had a wide range of choices for the types of travel packages and group tours that they really wanted, we built out a business operation supporting system, which we call “BOSS,” built upon sophisticated technology. We use this system to identify trends in the market quickly and leverage our trained travel experts to tailor tours that Chinese consumers will appreciate.

We were fortunate that we got into the Chinese travel market just as it was beginning to take off. The last five to six years have seen remarkable growth in the Chinese tourism industry, and we’ve been excellently positioned to capitalize on that trend.

In the West, traditional brick-and-mortar travel agencies have been almost completely eliminated by online travel sites, but China’s market is different. Do you think online travel sites in China will be able to eliminate traditional brick-and-mortar establishments?

From its start, Tuniu has been focused on leveraging our excellent technology to meet trends and needs in the market in a way that traditional travel companies cannot. Our goal has always been making tourism simple for our customers, which we believe will ensure our leading position in the market.
I don’t think that traditional travel agencies are leaving the market anytime soon, but I also don’t think that they are incompatible with online travel companies. Many traditional travel agencies have expanded into the online realm. However, fundamentally, we provide a different offering than they do. We can arrange one stop travel solutions that are easy to book. And our BOSS system lets us give travelers the kind of package travel and group tour options that they want without requiring them to spend months planning.

So what is so different about Tuniu, as compared to traditional travel agencies or other online services (like Qunar)?

We are focused on tourism solutions and are dedicated to providing a broad range of travel options, while continuing to improve service quality. Our focus on packaged tourism means we don’t sell separate air tickets or hotel bookings. Simply put we don’t focus on travel, but rather tourism. We provide our customers with full package solutions. Everything needs to be simple and intuitive.

Our BOSS system also allows us to track the progress and satisfaction of our customers very well in the pre-sale and post-trip timeframe, as well as during travel. If there is a problem, we’ll know almost immediately.

BOSS further provides us database analysis, which gives us insights into the ever changing tourism market and enables us to react quickly and effectively. We understand what Chinese customers are buying and adjust our offerings quickly to meet the demands. As a result, our products are richer than peers who are less focused on staying ahead of Chinese tourism trends.

E-commerce in China has had trouble dealing with customer complaints, and travel is an industry in which the customer demands are high because normal service can be disrupted by all kinds of things (for example, weather delaying flights or regional instability making travel to a particular place suddenly unwise). How does Tuniu deal with this problem, and how are you handling customer service as your site and the number of trips offered continues to grow?

Since its founding, Tuniu has continuously worked to improve customer experience and control risks. We have dedicated teams dedicated to working on these issues, and we continue to build them out as the volume of our business increases.

In the beginning, we relied on customer surveys to get a sense of how well we were performing, but have made significant upgrades in our sophistication since then. Initially, we worked to set up an after-sale team to handle complaints, refund inquires and help retrieve lost items.

Later, when our business grew further, we set up a dedicated in-sales team to respond and follow up on customer inquiries as quickly as possible. We appreciate that when there’s a problem during travel, you want the situation resolved immediately. That’s why we’ve invested in putting local quality supervisors on the ground in some of the most popular Chinese tourist destinations like Xiamen and Sanya. We want to make sure that if our customers have a problem there’s someone on the ground who knows the market and can help resolve the situation immediately.

At present you only operate and send tours from within China; are there any plans to expand your market and begin operations elsewhere (for example, Southeast Asia)?

We are highly focused on the Chinese market and we believe that we are only just beginning to reach our full potential audience. The exciting part about China is that travel is still relatively new for so many people. We believe that we have a key role and responsibility in broadening what Chinese travelers do and what experiences they are able to enjoy. So far, we have over 20 departing cities for tourism products, which positions us at the forefront of the market.

If I’m a person who wants to travel, why should I choose Tuniu?

Tuniu is the best option for our target customers: those looking for simple solutions to great tour experiences. This means we cater to the needs of all types of customers, including those who have limited travel experience – a rapidly growing demographic among Chinese travellers. For each of these kinds of trips our team works to develop the richest possible travel experience.

For the group tour and package travel segment of the market, we are confident that we are leaders in the breadth and depth of our offering. Our teams of experts design packages to meet all sectors of the Chinese—from outdoor domestic adventures in areas like Yunnan, to trips to Europe, Japan and Korean. Each of the packages that we offer is carefully tailored to offer a different experience so that our customers have a wide range of off-the-shelf options. And even with all of the time and energy we put into getting these packages to meet our customers’ varied needs, we are still extremely competitive in our pricing.

The entire customer experience, from purchasing to after sales is designed to be easy, and customers can count on us to be there and help out when problem occurs. Based on the positive feedback and repeat customers we have from among the more than one million travel experiences we’ve serviced, we believe that we are succeeding in creating simple but rich tour solutions.

What are the biggest problems facing Tuniu right now? What challenges will you face in the future?

Companies that experience the kind of explosive growth we’ve seen inevitably have a learning curve, and we’re no different. What I’m most proud of is that throughout the company we’ve shown a commitment to continuously investing our resources in technology and our people with the consistent goal of making tourism simple. Tuniu has made tremendous improvements over the last several years, but I think our strength is that we always keep the big picture focus on the customer, and will continue to invest in product development and internal team management.

Moving forward, we will continue to focus on providing tourism solutions, increasing efficiency while improving quality of service.

It's time to eedoo.

A day before I wrote this piece about the launch of the CT510 and how the console is nowhere to be found in Beijing, I sent an email to the folks at eedoo, the company that makes the device. Yesterday, eedoo’s Victor Wang finally got back to me, and the answers to my questions do clear up a few things about the CT510, although they also raise some new questions. What follows are his answers translated verbatim from the Chinese, and unedited.

Why did eedoo change the name from iSec to the CT510?

We were calling the iSec a ‘motion-sensing entertainment device,’ but in the development process we discovered that the scale and number of games required for an entertainment device is very high, and [games'] demands on the [operating] system are also very high. We currently don’t have the ability to develop and release an entertainment device that would satisfy gamers and the public. In exploiting platform technology we already have to release an ‘eedoo online multimedia motion-sensing device,’ we’re emphasizing the motion-sensing and internet apps, and weakening its appeal as a games/entertainment device. This is in accordance with our Chinese family demographic: women, and middle aged people. For the time being, we won’t try to cater to core gamers.

The ‘eedoo online multimedia motion-sensing device‘ is being called the ‘eedoo motion‘ for short. The English name for this is a OMMS (Online Multi-Media Set-of-box) [sic] and the product model is the CT510. We will continue to research the needs of core gamers, acquire technology, and release the iSec at an appropriate time.

How has the market responded to the device since the launch?

The market and gamers have been following the launch very closely. We have our first ‘experience store’ in Beijing’s Shiji Jinyuan, and the atmosphere is very good, with consumers experiencing and buying the device.

The reaction of retailers has also been very lively, there are over 200 distributors nationwide who are currently involved in discussions with us.

Why did the price go up by 799 RMB ($126) [compared to the announced price from last year]?

The ‘eedoo motion’ has never been officially on sale before now, and the official price of the device now is 3799 RMB (~$600), therefore, there has been no so-called price increase.

Are you not concerned the price is too high? For $600 consumers could buy two Xboxes with Kinect…

We know that many gamers will compare international products at their gray market prices [with our device], and we understand this.

Gray market products are not officially on the market, they are not taxed, the games and content are pirated, there is no after-sales service, etc. We can’t compare prices with the gray market; there’s no way to compete.

But if we compare with international products using Amazon.com prices, we can see an Xbox with Kinect and one or two bundled games sells for $400 [Note: it appear's he's referring to the 250 GB Xbox 360 Kinect Value Bundle, which comes with two bundled games]. Because of differences in the [game] distribution model, Xbox games are distributed on CDs, and Kinect games go for about $30, so six additional games would cost $180. In total, that’s close to $600, so the prices are the same. Eedoo’s target demographic is middle and upper-class families in China, and the device includes eight bundled games and ten pre-installed online apps. The games have content covering martial arts, dance, exercise, sports, relaxation, and other motion games. The online services include streaming video, online karaoke, Disney English, and interactive educational stuff for kids. In the future we will also have an app store to download updates and additional content. Plus there’s the Fanhome OS, a dual-core processor, 250 GB of HDD space, wifi, and after sales service to guarantee the reliability of the product. The ‘eedoo motion’ is a special domestic product created independently, the first in the Chinese market, with a strong ability to compete.

Of course, there will be a process required for many consumers to recognize a product like this, so we will continue and strengthen our brand promotion and sales, and expanding into new channels, for example video ads, online community plans, family sporting competitions, etc., to let more consumers know about the product and understand the value of eedoo. We believe that Chinese family consumers will quickly achieve health and happiness thanks to the ‘eedoo motion.’

So, there you have it. The iSec isn’t dead, just resting, and the CT510 isn’t a game console, it just happens to come bundled with eight games. While I have some, ahem, disagreements with some of what the folks at eedoo have said here, it’s nothing I haven’t stated before. Now that they’ve finally given me an address where I can play the thing, though, I’ll be getting out there at the first opportunity to put the CT510 through its paces firsthand and see if it lives up to eedoo’s hype, lives down to my extreme skepticism, or falls somewhere in the middle. I’m looking forward to it.

CloudFactory is a fascinating business and concept, not just because it’s based in the Himalayan nation of Nepal, but because it can put one million people in developing countries – including in Nepal itself – into work on the web.

Those folks get employment doing basic computer work from their own home, while the companies that make use of the CloudFactory service get that huge human workforce to do tasks online like flagging bad content, inputting data, transcribing audio, fixing OCR, tagging images, etc. Essentially, many kinds of digitization, categorization, moderation, or even translation.

Started up in 2008 by Mark Sears, who came to Nepal with his wife on a two week vacation that never quite ended, the business itself employs 40 staff, mostly software engineers, in its Kathmandu office. Its cloud workers are scattered across the globe – mostly in poorer nations where work can be hard to come by – and are more than just a database of names. Using the microloan model, CloudFactory aims to put its cloud labor force into work as independent businesspeople, helping them purchase the kind of low-end tablet or netbook that can get them started.

To learn more about the region and the business model, TiA chatted with Tom Puskarich, the VP of business development, and got some founder’s insights from Mark Sears (both pictured below) as well. First up, Tom fields the questions:

1. Startups often have a tough time finding talent for their own team. How is that situation in Kathmandu, or Nepal in general?

Tom: Kathmandu’s universities put out hundreds of computer engineers every year; and with the lack of work opportunities, these engineers are hungry and motivated, especially for a Silicon Valley-style startup right in their backyard. Add that to the social mission of being a part of not only trying to change their own country but using their skills to change how the world works and create millions of jobs for those in developing countries, and you’ve got a recipe some seriously motivated talent. We’re certainly not at a loss to find programmers with a passion for developing software for the developing world, in the developing world.

2. Your CloudFactory creates opportunities for a claimed million “cloud workers” to do things like digitization, moderation, translation, etc. How does the system work, and what’s the deal for all these workers?

Tom: We use several worker pools, some of which are in Nepal and others through partnerships such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The idea behind all of these systems is a massively distributed workforce who get the huge benefit of not only working from wherever they would like, but also whenever they would like. Our own workforce, that is starting in Nepal, has much more opportunity for growth, training, and feedback which will then give our clients higher quality results.

3. You have a business card scanning app called BizcardArmy which is a sort of showcase for the CloudFactory.

Tom: BizcardArmy is a great example of CloudFactory in a market flooded with automated business card scanning apps that don’t really work. The efficient and on-demand human workforce that CloudFactory provides is the perfect solution for both the business and the users who get a great solution for turning paper business cards into contacts on their phones. As I said, this is just an example of the power of CloudFactory, and these same principles can be applied to all kinds of ideas from savvy entrepreneurs.

4. What’s your personal startup/entrepreneur story?

Mark: My wife and I actually came to Nepal for a two-week vacation – and that kept getting extended. Three and a half years later we are still here and have teamed up with Tom and his wife to take CloudFactory to the next level. Initially we started as a Ruby on Rails outsourcing company and grew quickly as we hired smart young computer engineers and trained them up.

Then we wanted to give training and opportunities to other talented people in Nepal and other developing countries. At the same time we were getting requests from clients to hire people in Nepal to do lead generation, image and video tagging, and other non-programming work. The supply and demand were there, so we started work on an innovative platform to bridge the gap. Initially it was a side project where we reinvested profits and extra time from the outsourcing side of the business, but since January it is now 100 percent of our focus.

5. How’s the startup scene in Nepal?

Tom: To describe Nepal in a word would be “adventure” – which is also how you could describe the startup scene. Wherever it exists in the world. Startups are not for the faint of heart whether you’re an entrepreneur, an investor, or a geek looking to change the world. So, in one way, you could look at Nepal and find all the reasons doing a startup in a country like Nepal is difficult, but if you’re ready to generate your own electricity and pass a few cows on the way to work, you may just find all the hidden advantages that go along with creating a startup at the top of the world; not the least of which is an awesome and hungry workforce or the breath-taking mountain views from the office.

You might like to check out BizcardArmy on its minisite.

Payment, Payment, Payment. That seems to be the biggest problem needing to be solved in the Indonesian e-commerce ecosystem right now. Previously we have looked at efforts by Indomog, Inapay, and UNIK, plus there’s Kaskus with its Kaspay. Now we have GudangVoucher as well.

The company has been doing this kind of stuff for years; not to mention they are the only payment solution working with Facebook in Indonesia for its Facebook Credits, and one of the few merchants that is working with BCA, the country’s biggest private bank.

Rather like Indomog, GudangVoucher is focused on social and in-app payments, not the broader aspect of being a payment platform for general e-commerce sites.

To learn about the company’s inception and where it’s heading, we talked with Gede B. Mahartapa (pictured right), the founder and COO of GudangVoucher:

1. Can you tell us how it started?

We were established in 2003, at the time when the only game online publishers were PT. Boleh Net Indonesia and PT. Lyto Datarindo. So a lot of people consider us the pioneers in this payments area. With my knowledge and experience of online banking systems I could partner with the banks and roll out an online e-voucher distribution system.

2. How large is your team now? And have you received any outside investment?

We have 42 employees in total, across Jakarta, which is our marketing office, and Yogyakarta, our development office. We are running on our own capital.

3. Can you give me any recent statistics or milestones?

I don’t remember exactly how many merchants have formed partnerships with us since 2003, but I guess it is more than 300 companies. How many users? You can see live from our main website. We broadcast our registered users and concurrent connected users. Right now it’s 179,273, and adding around 500 new users daily.

4. You have mentioned that you are the sole partner in Indonesia for Facebook credits, can you tell us more?

If you want to purchase in-game currency in all games in Facebook, you will be given an option to pay using your GudangVoucher balance. If you can read Indonesian, please follow these instructions; Indonesian app developers can also benefit from this as they can monetize through Facebook credits.

5. One of your recent updates is an API for app devs…

This is an alternative for mobile app developers to monetize directly, instead of using many other common platforms that rely on credit card transactions.

6. What is your target this year?

We have been operating in Singapore and Australia for the last three years, we are now preparing to enter Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Hong Kong.

To see the GudangVoucher payment platform in action, check out this four-minute demo video that was made by the company:

Yoshikazu Tanaka on the right.

Dressed casually in sneakers, dark blue jeans, and a simple black outfit, he looked very much like your typical tech geek. Perhaps it was the warm Singapore weather that inspired the casual dress. The young founder of GREE (TYO:3632), Yoshikazu Tanaka, shook my hand, handed me his business card and bowed like any other Japanese professional. I managed a clumsy bow in response, in admiration of his sincere and polite attitude. We had met once before in Beijing last year, but our conversation hadn’t lasted long.

Many know that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. But Yoshikazu Tanaka amassed a whopping $1.6 billion fortune by the young age of 32. He is now 34.

His entrepreneurial story dates back to 1999 when he was a fresh graduate. Prior to GREE Inc. Tanaka didn’t have any experience building a startup. But he was always a keen admirer of great Internet businesses. He told me that the the Japanese version of Wired magazine was his source of inspiration.

“Back then, I witnessed Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo’s phenomenal growth in the Internet world. That got me very inspired and motivated to do one myself,” said Tanaka. But like most aspiring entrepreneurs, he didn’t jump straight in. “I wanted to work and gain some experience first,” he noted.

Hungry to learn and succeed

Tanaka graduated in March 1999 from Nihon University. Within a month he was recruited by So-net Entertainment Corporation, which is a Sony Internet service provider affiliate. That job didn’t last very long, though.

“I enjoyed my time at So-net, but I thought I needed a change to a more startup-like environment and culture. So-net is too large of a corporation to learn how to run a business,” Tanaka remarked. After ten months at So-net, on February 2000, Tanaka joined Rakuten as employee number 50.

When Tanaka joined, Rakuten — now one of the world’s biggest and most successful e-commerce sites — was just a three-year old venture. As he explains, it provided him with “very good exposure in managing a startup.” At Rakuten, Tanaka had a chance to challenge his abilities:

“Besides my technical role, on Rakuten’s range of products, I also managed online product reviews, the blog network, and affiliate marketing… the marketing stuff,” he explained.

Tanaka spent a good four years at Rakuten and was part of the team that witnessed the Japanese e-commerce giant listed on JASDAQ in April 2000, the rollout of Rakuten Travel in 2001, the acquisition of Infoseek Japan K.K and DLJSecurities in 2003.

All this would prove useful when Tanaka started his own empire.

Billion-dollar hobby

While Tanaka was focused on his job at Rakuten, he was also a keen observer of what was taking place outside of Japan. In 2003, he was inspired by Friendster, the popular social network with a large number of users from both the US and Asia. Tanaka was fascinated by the online social networking concept as the possibilities and growth seemed limitless. That sparked his entrepreneurial instinct, and he began to wonder if there was any way to bring the social networking concept to the Japanese market.

Around the end of 2003, I started doing the programming myself, developing the first version of GREE. It was just a hobby to me… And I only launched GREE as a social networking site on February 2004.

Success came pretty quick after GREE was first introduced to the public. The first version of GREE, as Tanaka explained, was a PC-focused social networking site.

After just one month, GREE had attracted 10,000 users. And by October 2004, it had more than 100,000. Tanaka says he didn’t spend a single dime on marketing, and that his startup became popular purely through word of mouth from its users.

The traffic brought Tanaka an unexpected problem though. Tanaka discovered that he needed to hire someone to manage his server to keep GREE up and running. His new network could no longer remain just a hobby. After tasting early success, Tanaka was determined to take the next step, and that necessitated that he quit Rakuten and channel all his energy towards building GREE. In December of 2004 he left Rakuten and began his journey as a full-time entrepreneur.

GREE Inc. is born

GREE was registered as a formalized business in December 2004, as soon as Tanaka left Rakuten. GREE Inc. was officially born.

To expand quickly, Tanaka needed fresh funds to hire talent. In June of 2005, Globis Capital Partners invested 100 million yen (about US$1.3 million at today’s rates) in his venture. The funding allowed him to hire and expand his office space. Tanaka reflected on his fund raising experience:

In 2005 and 2006, investors were looking out more for online search businesses in Japan. They were influenced by Google and Yahoo’s success. So some of them weren’t exactly comfortable investing in a social networking service.

Nonetheless, growth remained strong and GREE started to gain attention from Japanese telecom operators. In June 2006, GREE received investment from KDDI, amounting to 360 million yen (or about US$4.6 million).

As a result, EZ GREE was launched in November 2006 as the official mobile service for KDDI; it’s now known as ‘au one GREE.’ Three months later GREE became NTT Docomo’s official mobile networking service. And by March of 2007, GREE had hit the one-million-users milestone.

Mobile, the future of Internet

With such robust growth, Tanaka still wasn’t satisfied. He told me:

I always believed that the future of Internet is mobile. Back then I predicted that by 2010, the mobile market will be larger than the web market and that was why we wanted to build GREE to be a mobile-focused social networking service instead.

Even with all the funding and partnerships ongoing, Tanaka already had his mobile plans in the pipeline. However, it wasn’t just a mobile social networking service that Tanaka was planning.

Just social networking on mobile is boring. We wanted to introduce games to our users. And [gaming was] also planned as a business model for GREE.”

A few months after in May, GREE’s first game, Tsuri-Suta (Fishing Star), was launched. The idea of selling virtual goods via mobile games was inspired by PC games that were already employing the same business model in Japan, Tanaka explained.

Games and virtual goods turned out to be a gold mine business model for GREE. For fiscal year 2011, paid services (virtual goods and social games) reached US$700 million in total sales.

IPO and overseas expansion

In December of 2008, GREE was listed on Tokyo Stock Exchange’s ‘Market of the High Growth and Emerging stocks.’ In April of 2009, GREE hit 10 million users, and that figure doubled to 20 million just 14 months later, in June 2010.

In the same year, GREE moved to the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Business was great but still very much limited to within Japan’s borders. To bring GREE to greater heights, Tanaka knew that he had to expand his business abroad. And the two largest markets in the world, China and U.S, are certainly part of his plans.

In January 2011, GREE partnered with China’s Tencent to create a common API. Japanese developers on GREE who wish to target the Chinese gamers can now port their games over to Tencent’s platform with some localization support. It’s the same for Chinese developers who wish to build games for the Japanese market. So far, Tanaka says that two games were ported from GREE to Tencent and one game has gone the other way, onto GREE.

We treasure our partnership with Tencent, but at the same time, we are also working with independent game developers in China… For China, it is important for GREE to tap into that market.

But the deal that really thrust GREE onto the international stage was its $100 million acquisition of OpenFeint in April of 2011, which highlights the company’s intention to impact the U.S market. GREE is also constantly seeking out other businesses in the U.S with which to establish meaningful relationships. Could that be Facebook or Zynga? Tanaka explains:

We don’t have any plans to publish our games on Facebook. However, we’re searching for possible partnerships with Facebook… Not only Facebook but different companies around the world.

To date, GREE has overseas offices in China, Singapore, South Korea, the UK, Brazil, Netherlands, Dubai, and in San Francisco in the States.

The GREE global gaming platform

GREE’s global gaming platform is coming soon, sometime between April and June of this year. It promises to be a one-stop shop for the world to enjoy games on GREE. It will first be launched in English and Japanese, and 14 other languages will follow suit.

As you know, we have two platforms, the GREE and OpenFeint platform. So we will bring these platforms together, and it will be called the GREE platform. The brand will be only GREE after the global platform launch. All the good features on OpenFeint and GREE will be included onto one single platform.

GREE’s move to merge two platforms into one is a big step towards building a truly international social gaming platform company. The company also recently announced a number of partnerships with leading game developers in China and Korea to bring more games to its new platform. On the topic of going global, Tanaka told me that he is inspired by Japanese gaming console giant, Nintendo, which generates 80 percent of its revenue from overseas and 20 percent from the local market. Right now, Tanaka said that almost 100 percent of GREE’s revenue comes from the Japanese market. “We’re inspired to achieve what Nintendo has achieved in the global market,” said Tanaka.

GREE Group (GREE and OpenFeint) currently has more than 190 million users globally and will continue to press forward to “make the world a better place through the power of the Internet.” That is GREE’s official corporate message, but as Tanaka took the last sip from his coffee, he elaborated, showing that he really means it:

I think gaming is the biggest [form of] entertainment that we can have. However not everyone in the world is playing games. And for console games, there are only 200 million gamers out there. And you know, for people like you and us, you can’t really imagine, but there are people in the world who don’t have access to games even if they want to play. And I believe if you can play games on mobile, then everyone in the world who has a mobile should be able to play our games.

We have covered many other social gaming platforms like GREE, DeNA, and mig33, but admittedly, we haven’t written too much about PapayaMobile (from now on we will). So when PapayaMobile’s co-founder and CEO, Shen Si and I briefly met at Beijing a couple of months ago, I thought it would be great to work on an interview to learn more about her experience and ventures.

Unfortunately, Shen Si [1] couldn’t meet up with me at the time, but we still managed to shake hands and exchange business cards. With our face-to-face interview called off, Shen Si has now taken time to share her thoughts with us in written form.

She shared several cool statistics, including PapayaMobile’s 50 million user milestone and its whopping average revenue-per-paying-user of $22. Other interesting insights include PapayaMobile’s expansion plan for 2012. For all the details, here’s the interview in full:

Could you briefly tell us, what is PapayaMobile?

Shen Si of Papaya Mobile

This is difficult because Papaya means so many different things to so many different groups of people. Web and mobile game developers love us because we offer a diverse tool set (Social Game Engine, Social SDK, Social Splash) to get their games created, ported, or connected to the best social network on the planet.

Our users love us because we have designed a network that makes it easy to make new friends and share lives and gaming experiences with each other. For me, however, Papaya is part of who I am and it continues to evolve everyday. It has always been about offering the best possible experience for mobile users and developers. We won’t quit even after we’re the last social network standing.

How is it different from GREE and DeNA?

We put developers first. I could point out dozens of differences between our platforms but at the end of the day this is what separates us from the competition. GREE and DeNA are both in the game publishing business and that’s what their investors are concerned with. Third party developers on their platform will always take a backseat when it comes to promotions and traffic.

We, on the other hand, are not a publisher and are solely concerned with offering the best possible social platform for developers and users. This shows in everything we do. Our developer relations teams advises third parties on social design tweaks to increase virality, put together a stellar promotional package, and drive traffic to those games.

Our product teams continue to churn out awesome new social features like picture and voice messaging that keep our users engaged longer. Our marketing teams work with popular game review sites to add extra promotional channels. The sum of all these efforts is a better experience for our developers, higher ARPU’s, and a vibrant community of users who love to play new games with their friends.

Besides China, what other markets are you exploring?

We are heavily focused on Europe as well. Throughout 2012 we will be localizing our social network for all major languages across the continent. We also have South America on our radar. There are many impressive studios in places like Brazil and Argentina that expressed interest in our tool-sets and we intend to work with them in the future.

Can you share any interesting statistics or milestones with us?

Well the first one off the top of my head is we just reached 50 million users last week. In the last six months we’ve doubled in size. Another stat is our very high average revenue per paying user of $22. However, my favorite is the most spent within a single third party game using our virtual currency – $36,000!

What is your revenue model? Are you profitable?

We don’t disclose financial information but let’s just say we’re in a very healthy place right now and are able to maintain our independence. We generate our revenue from the sale of Avatar virtual goods and take a share of the revenue from third party game’s virtual goods sold using our virtual currency. As more and more third party developers are moving to a freemium model we are seeing a larger share of our revenue come from these games.

What are some of the big hit games on PapayaMobile?

It depends on how you define big hit. Our most popular arcade style casual games are Paper Toss, Office Jerks, Ninjump, and Burn the Rope with millions of combined installs. Social games are really the big hitters when it comes to engagement and virtual good sales though. Some of the more successful social games on our network include Fallen Realms from SEGA, X-City, Zombies…OMG!, and Mafia Farm [2].

Do you have any future plans that you can share with us?

We have some very big news that we are planning to announce sometime during Q1, so stay tuned.

Paper Toss	Ninjump
Office Jerk	Burn the Rope

We all know how famous Instagram is with millions of users snapping and sharing grungy pictures with it on their iPhones – even in Indonesia. Yet, with most of us smartphone fans here having a Blackberry by our side, we wish it would be ported to RIM’s (NASDAQ:RIMM) OS.

Our wish has sort of come true – perhaps for the second time, as Pikubo tried back in August – with BibbyCam (pictured above), which was made by Grace Tahir and Ronald Komalaputra. Although not officially launched yet, the app has gained some word-of-mouth hype, and we thought it’d be interesting to see what the founders have to say. So, we chatted with the duo via email:

1. What’s the Bibbycam app about, and what inspired you to start/make it?

Bibbycam has 15 filters including lomo, old photo and over-saturated, plus a double filter feature to create your own filter. Users can link their photos to other sites such as Facebook and Twitter, they can comment and ‘bibb’ (or ‘like’) each others’ pictures as well. We created this application because we realized there’s a dearth of photo-filtering and sharing apps for Blackberry users, and as avid photographers and Blackberry freaks, we wanted to do one that can meet that need. We hope this application can also be fun and useful for other Blackberry users out there. We do plan to have it available through the Blackberry App World as well.

2. Instagram is famous for its filter-photo-service, partly because the iPhone has got a great camera. Can you replicate this on a Blackberry?

Obviously we won’t be able to compete or change anything about the hardware, but that’s precisely the reason why we did BibbyCam just for Blackberry. Even though the RIM OS and hardware aren’t as great and versatile as the iPhone’s iOS, and we realise a lot of people and critics have undermined Blackberry. However, there are still a lot of Blackberry users out there and a lot of them want a photo-filter service. The market for iPhone and Android photo apps is amazingly crowded and competitive – we realized this and we did not want to go into that market. We wanted to empower Blackberry users, to give them a choice.

3. Some local social networking apps – such as Menoo and Bouncity – have gotten into trouble getting traction because most Blackberry users in Indonesia are getting the cheapest data plan that includes only Twitter, Facebook and Instant Messaging. How will you overcome this?

We can only overcome it by creating a product that is super great and engaging, so people will want to upgrade their data plan to be able to use BibbyCam. This is why it’s free; BB users can use that extra money instead to upgrade their data plan.

4. It has been launched for a few weeks now; what are the early adopters saying?

It has not been officially launched, the current users have found us through word-of-mouth. We do plan to launch it officially early next year. We are in talks with three big consumer brands in Indonesia to launch BibbyCam not as a “techie” product but as a lifestyle product. Thus far, we have seen an increase in registered users week after week, and they have been very supportive in sharing the app with their friends and even giving us suggestions for future updates.

5. What is your plan for BibbyCam next year since we’re close to the end of this year?

As mentioned before the first thing we’re going to do is to launch BibbyCam officially, and next up we are planning to introduce a photo-filtering service on the website so we can grab more market share. We are also planning a series of contests and games with local brands.

6. What do you think about the start-up ecosystem here in Indonesia?

We are new to this industry, but we have seen great camaraderie in the start-up environment here in Jakarta. All the different developers want one thing, which is to see this industry grow and mature, so we do support each other’s projects.

Head on over to the Bibbycam site to sign-up and get the app.

Selling sexy - La Miu Lingerie

Origins

Lu launched his first start-up, Beyond Tailors, in 2006. That service was an online custom men’s shirt company, but Lu quickly realized that idea wasn’t easily scalable. Looking at the US and Japanese markets, he came to the conclusion that a lingerie retailer like Victoria’s Secret could do well in China, and a company selling mass-produced clothing products for women — while also more risky — ultimately had more potential for growth than a one-off custom clothing company aimed at men. In 2008, he founded La Miu and, he says, “it took off really quickly.”

Lu notes that there was also demand in China for a shopping and customer service experience that wasn’t, well, awful. Many brick-and-mortar shops in China have terrible customer service, and online outlets can be even worse. Lu said he’s built La Miu on the idea that if you trust your customers, they’ll reward you for it, even if a few do try to game the system. And in the absence of other sites doing what La Miu does and offering a good experience and good customer service, the customers have come flocking.

“I feel like I’m in a desert,” Lu says of China’s shopping environment. “My job is to create an oasis.”

Don’t Call it Ecommerce

“A lot of people call us an ecommerce company,” Lu says, “but we’re not an ecommerce company, we’re a branding company. We sell our brand.” Of course, the internet is by far their largest distribution channel, but La Miu also has three brick-and-mortar stores, and Lu stressed that the company is not so much an ecommerce company as it is a company that’s making use of the best way to reach its customers which — for the time being at least — is the internet.

That’s part of the reason Lu chose to eschew sites like Taobao and instead launch La Miu on his own site. A risky move, to be sure, but one that has ultimately paid off. “I want to build a brand,” he said, “I don’t want to just sell a product,” noting that his own background is in branding, not products. “I’m more experienced in the experience industry,” he said, “that’s my strength: creating customer experience.”

another La Miu offering

Building Trust

Of course, the downside to not selling on an established platform like Taobao is that consumer trust has to be earned, and that can be difficult in China. Moreover, Lu pointed out, “99.9 percent” of your customers are “doing something that they’ve never done before” because most Chinese women hadn’t ever bought lingerie online in 2008.

To help fight this, La Miu added a big toll-free number to the top of the site — it’s still there today — so that customers with any questions could call and get the “human touch,” as Lu put it. Within six months of launching the online store, Lu also launched La Miu’s first brick-and-mortar store in a high-end retail district of Beijing, which has also helped create trust.

Selling Sexiness

The one-line introduction of La Miu given to many foreigners is that La Miu is China’s Victoria’s Secret. “But we’re not just that simple,” said Lu.

“The spirit is selling sexiness — which is mainstream — to the Chinese audience, to young girls who want to have not only comfortable but also fashionable lingerie, and also reasonably priced.”

Initially, Lu said, some were skeptical of the marketability of that sort of business in China, but there aren’t many skeptics now. “It’s just phenomenal,” Lu said of the company’s growth, noting that they’re seeing pretty significant growth even this year, as marketing costs rise and as the company invests in re-tooling its platform. Lu thinks they can maintain at least 100% yearly growth for the forseeable future. “We’re really in a good market,” Lu says. “We’re lucky.”

Soon you can buy this underwear with your phone!

Going Mobile

La Miu is in the process of launching mobile apps to supplement its online sales right now. “The reason it took us a little while to launch the mobile app is because we want to do things differently,” Lu said. He compared other mobile ecommerce apps to “supermarkets” that just replicated the online buying experience. “That’s not very sexy,” he said. “We trying to create a mobile app that is more interesting.”

He thinks they have done that, and in mid-December we’ll all get to see for ourselves exactly what he’s talking about when La Miu rolls out its first iOS app. An android app is also coming “a little bit later,” Lu said, so ‘droid users can get in on the lingerie-buying fun too.

Lu expects their mobile app to contribute to their business, and notes that they’re planning to “promote our mobile app through different channels to avoid cannibalizing our [online] business.”

“I strongly believe mobile is definitely going to take over web,” Lu said. “It’s a matter of time. Three years or five years, and we really want to emphasize a lot on that.” Within six to twelve months of their apps launching, Lu expects their mobile income to account for 20-30 percent of the company’s total revenue.

Expanding Into Asia

Lu told me that the company is planning to expand beyond China, and that there are already people selling their products in Japan and Malaysia, among other Asian countries. Those aren’t official outlets — it’s just retailers purchasing products from the La Miu store and then selling them themselves, and it proves that there is a market for La Miu products outside China. “Next year we’re probably going to start selling our products in Japan,” says Lu, noting that they already have distributors lined up.

But the company is certainly going to be cautious, noting that they won’t venture into any markets where they can’t find a strong and reliable local distributor to partner with.

If you attended the Tokyo Game Show this past weekend, chances are you saw GREE’s mammoth exhibition area, the largest one at the show. And if you didn’t see that, you likely saw one of the many GREE girls on site, or one of the schwag bags the company was passing out.

The company’s massive presence at the game show is symbolic of a shift in the gaming space, one that sees new mobile players like GREE and DeNA suddenly eating the lunch of portable console gaming companies, most notably Nintendo.

We had a chance to sit down and talk with GREE’s senior vice president of media business development, Taisei Yoshida at the Tokyo Game Show. He elaborated a little more on the company’s rapid rise so far, as well as its lofty aspirations for the future.

Be sure to turn on the captions for the Japanese portion.

About two weeks ago, a man walked onto a stage and unveiled a game-changing mobile OS. But since he was wearing a peach-colour shirt and not a black turtleneck sweater, we’re not talking about Steve Jobs.

The man in question was Wang Jian, and he gave the world its first peek at the Aliyun phone and mobile OS. As the president of AliCloud – a division of China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba – he explained that the cloud-based smartphone and tablet software was Alibaba’s bid to make China’s first open and convenient mobile OS.

Alibaba’s significant foray into mobile, software, and cloud-computing opened up a lot of questions, so Penn Olson reached out to the company and got some answers from an Alibaba Group spokesperson.

A mobile platform is only as good as its developers – a problem that Android, HP, and BlackBerry are grappling with right now – so this is perhaps the first hurdle that Aliyun faces when it hits the shelves soon on a K-Touch manufactured W700 phone (pictured above and bottom). Chinese app devs will need it to be more affordable than developing for rival platforms, and start-ups will be judging what kind of leverage they can get on the Aliyun OS, compared to launching on Android, iOS or Symbian. The Alibaba spokesperson explains:

The Aliyun OS, coupled with the cloud services provided by AliCloud, greatly reduces the cost and time barriers for developers as they can either develop cloud apps with their own fully developed servers or opt for AliCloud’s cloud infrastructure service at a nominal fee; developers can therefore devote more attention to business innovation. Third-party mobile software developers will be able to use technology such as HTML5 and JavaScript to reduce the complexity in the app development process.

We hope to help third party developers to enter this platform and will hold a developer’s conference later this year for developers to attend and learn how to use the cloud platform and how to develop cloud apps. Aliyun OS may also be integrated with other mobile devices, including mobile phones with larger screens and tablet computers in the coming months.

Aliyun is a custom-made OS that Alibaba has been secretly working on for years, whilst simultaneously publicly building up its AliCloud business. Although it’s not Android-based, it will be fully compatible with Android apps, which might help with initial traction if it means users can still play popular games such as Angry Birds on it.

On the app store front, Alibaba explains to us:

We will provide users with two channels or storefronts to access apps: the first being our cloud app store containing third-party and sister company cloud apps, and the other being the “native app” store that offers Android apps, which can be downloaded and installed onto the mobile device.

A Mobile Gold-Rush

Just as Apple’s iOS was an enticement into Apple’s music and film stores, and Android a way of spiriting more Google ads into people’s hands, so Aliyun will be integral to Alibaba’s B2C and C2C e-commerce platform.

Alibaba seems to have decided to be an exemplar in the Chinese web industry, building its own mobile OS before Baidu, Tencent or anyone else could get there first. It’s undoubtedly inspired by the phenomenal growth in mobile usage in China in recent years, and by the near certainty that mobile net usage will surpass PC web browsing in China by 2013.

Although it’s possible to shop online on Alibaba’s Taobao.com via various mobile apps, the new Aliyun OS raises the prospect of some innovations in phone- or tablet-based shopping in China.

Global Ambitions?

Aliyun seems to be China-bound – for the moment anyway. An Alibaba representative tells as that, “We do not rule out the possibility of the Aliyun OS making its way onto mobile devices outside of China.”

We know that Alibaba will not push into hardware, so the emphasis is on AliCloud and the cloud-based services that are baked-in to the new OS, such as notes (see the middle picture), chat, email, and back-up storage for SMS, contacts, and photos.

Alibaba is not revealing what kind of cloud power they’re packing right now, in contrast to Apple’s very visible US$1 billion data centre/’server farm’ – see it here on CNN – that it’s using to power its upcoming cloud-based features in iOS5. But as China’s biggest e-commerce, group buy, and online payments services – in the form of Alipay – Alibaba surely has the horsepower ready to be unleashed for the Aliyun OS.

On a final, tantalizing note, AliCloud and Aliyun are huge ventures for Jack Ma’s behemoth e-commerce firm. Some might say that this mobile OS is a step towards Alibaba becoming more of a “China’s Google” kind of company than Baidu itself. But for now, Alibaba is insisting that Aliyun is actually just about moving with Chinese consumers to their mobiles, and that the “open” nature of the OS invites competitors to develop for it. An Alibaba spokesperson concludes that Aliyun is simply their way of coming up “with innovative ways to address customer wants and needs. That is where we are putting our energies.”

We talked to Graham Hills, General Manager Wego Indonesia, about the company’s plan.

1. Who are your competitors? What makes Wego different?

Wego is the first South East Asia-focused travel meta-search site and launched in 2006 in Singapore. We have a unique position in Asia as we partner with the majority of online travel booking sites in the region enabling our users to search real time rates and availability for hotels and flights from over 150 partner sites.

Having been in the Asian market longer than our competitors gives us a competitive advantage in that we’ve had longer to understand consumers in the region and longer to develop strong relationships with our partners.

2. Wego headquarters is in Singapore and it has offices in Australia and Hong Kong. Why Indonesia too? Why now?

Actually we now have over 100 staff in Singapore, Australia, Thailand, Philippines and India and we’re finalising our incorporation in Indonesia.

Expanding our existing presence in Indonesia was a logical step for Wego. Travel is becoming increasingly more affordable and more and more Indonesian travelers are coming online for travel research and bookings.

Indonesia is a great source of users but also a very important destination with places like Bali being popular with users from around the region.

From a distribution perspective, it’s also important to have people on the ground here to work closely with key partners like Yahoo! and Detik.

3. What approach will you use specifically in Indonesia to win over travellers here to use your service?

We see a lot of potential in Indonesia, but it’s not a market where you can just bring an existing product and expect it to succeed on its own.

For Indonesia we recognise providing our product in the local language is really important as well as making sure our product is easy to use from any device. Mobile is obviously a key consideration for Indonesia and we’re currently making the final touches to our mobile product now. Stay tuned!

It’s also hard to ignore the need for a strong strategy for leveraging social media in Indonesia with Facebook, Twitter and other social networks capturing large percentages of time spent online. Building an active travel community will be critical to our success. We’re already really thankful to our existing fans and followers. They’ve been actively helping us share the benefits of using Wego to find the best travel deals with their friends and family.

4. Wego also has Groupon-like service. In your travel niche, do you think you can rival Groupon, LivingSocial and their many clones?

With millions of users already searching Wego for the best travel prices online it was a natural progression for us to move into the deals space. We’ve now launched Wego FAST:DEALS in Singapore and Australia and will be expanding this further in the region.

There are clearly a lot of players in the daily deals space and we expect to see continued consolidation in the industry. We feel strongly though that there is a great opportunity for a purely travel-focused deals offering in the region.

We see Wego FAST:DEALS as more of a private sale site than a group buying site and are focused on providing a more supplier-friendly offering. From a consumer perspective we can not only provide our members with great deals, but through our meta-search product we can also help them find the best time to redeem these.

Wego would like to offer Penn-Olson readers a $25 credit for new users on Wego FAST:DEALS. Simply click the links below and use Promo Code: OLSONWINS

• Singaporean users
• Australian users
• Everyone else

Be quick, there are only 500 vouchers per site and these are limited to first time users only.

5. Speaking of daily deal service, will there be offers from Indonesia as well?

Yes! We are launching Wego FAST:DEALS in new markets including Indonesia and India. Indonesia will be an important destination for our members across the region and a significant source of bookings.

6. Can you share Wego’s short term plan in Indonesia? How many people will you hire for Wego Indonesia?

Last year Wego merged with an Indian company called a HolidayIQ, a leading content and community site for Indian domestic travelers. We’re currently finalising the incorporation of Wego in Indonesia and will be launching local versions of both Wego and HolidayIQ very soon.

At this stage we’re looking to have a team of about 15  to 20 people in Indonesia. If you have an interest in working in online travel and have a digital background feel free to get in touch with me!

7. With your experience at Yahoo South East Asia, and specifically in Travel, how does that help you at Wego today?

Running Yahoo Travel was an exciting time for me. I worked with some really talented people and learnt a lot about the region.

When I joined in late 2008, Yahoo had travel sites in Singapore and Malaysia. By focusing on the user experience and rolling out several new features and product enhancements I was able to significanly help grow the audience in these two markets and use that as a basis for launching Yahoo Travel in the Philippines and Indonesia. Launching in Indonesia clearly helped me develop a much deeper understanding of Indonesian consumers which is invaluable in my new role.

1. Apart from FriendStream, where else is Weibo integrated into the HTC Weike?

The one-touch dedicated Weibo key on the HTC Weike offers users a host of integrated functions and services. For example, a short press on the Weibo key allows users to:

• Write on and edit their Weibo pages
• Add new contacts
• Add trends and topics to their Weibo pages
• Insert emoticons into their posts

Users can also check-in at their current locations or send their location information on both Weibo and Gypsii by holding and pressing the Weibo key on the HTC Weike

There are lots of other integrated functions which make the HTC Weike the ideal device to share content with friends and family. Simply press the Weibo key to share Web pages and links of interest which you come across while surfing the Internet. Sina music content is also easily shared by pressing the Weibo key. Your friends on Weibo can then listen to the music that you have just shared simply by clicking the music player on their Weibo pages.

Weibo integration on the HTC Weike

Consumers can use the HTC Weike to take photos wherever they go. Instead of clicking the shutter button to take photos, pressing the Weibo key uploads the photo instantaneously onto their Sina Weibo photo album. Their friends are then able to view all uploaded photos, and see their albums as well.

The HTC Weike also makes live chatting simple and easy to use with the Weibo chat widget, allowing consumers to chat with friends in a real-time chat environment that is constantly and instantaneously updated. Users will also be able to search for and locate the hottest topics on Weibo and join in the real-time discussion immediately.

2. Have Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr integration been removed from the phone for China?

Due to the unique market in China, and the popularity of Weibo, HTC has partnered Sina.com in a groundbreaking initiative to launch the first mainland-China specific smartphone which offers integrated Weibo services and a dedicated one-touch Weibo key that makes it easy, simple and intuitive to connect with friends and family…Currently, Facebook and Twitter are not supported as these services are blocked in China.

3. Will this Weibo integration expand to the popular Desire S and Incredible S phones as well? Will HTC be offering OS upgrades for the HTC Weike?

HTC does not comment on future plans and will make the appropriate announcement in due time.

4. Will this come only on official HTC phones sold at HTC outlets, or can people get this on gray market too?

Weibo integration is only available on the HTC Weike, and is available through authorized HTC retailers and distributors.

5. Which 3G network will the HTC Weike run on?

The HTC Weike is a WCDMA smartphone.*

6. Is there anything else you can share with us about your strategy for social media phones?

HTC understands that social media is one of the most important ways in which people interact, engage and communicate with each other. The HTC Weike is a prime example of how by putting the customer at the centre of everything we do, HTC is able to create the best possible mobile lifestyle experiences to benefit consumers’ lives.

*Editor’s note: This means that, at least theoretically, the phone is compatible with China Unicom’s 3G network. [Back]

[Images via Sina Tech]

Chinese start-up Let’s Powwow is a unique location-based service (LBS), social network, and group buy/deals site. Located at letspw.com, the site has nine employees now, and is notable for having a triumvirate of founders from China, Italy, and the US.

Rather than just focusing on check-ins or brands, Lets Powwow instead aims to connect its users more closely with actual venues, create hyperlocal deals, get users to “redeem” deals at venues, and encourage people to bring along friends to a store. There’s an iPhone and Android app to accompany the site.

Let’s Powwow seems less like fellow Chinese LBS Jiepang.com – whose CEO we interviewed recently – and more like the Indian Geosocials. That’s because both Geosocials and Let’s Powwow put less emphasis on check-ins and are instead oriented towards being hyperlocal and ‘game’-like.

To find out more about Let’s Powwow and where it’s heading, Penn Olson talked to its American CEO and co-founder Adam Guli (pictured below):

1. What inspired you to launch this start-up?

Well I have been part of start-ups in the past – always the guy working for someone else. I gained a real taste for the freedom and fluidity of the whole experience, even though each project ended in failure. I learned a lot from those failures to hopefully give me some insight into how not to make the same mistakes. But ultimately it was working for huge organizations and not having my ideas or strategies amount to more then a pat on the back and a “What are you going to do for me now” attitude.

2. What kind of financing did it take? Have you had some venture capital backing?

My two co-founders and I started with a pooled US$40,000 to start this thing. It meant we had to be creative in how we spent our funds. Over the past year we have had seed funding and some angel funding of nearly $200,000. We are in major fund-raising mode now and hope to bring in some bigger fish to help take us to the next level.

3. You position Let’s PowWow as an LBS with group buy deals and a “game” element thrown in. How does it work for a user?

We stress the social aspect of the app to our users. We do this by encouraging them to share their thoughts, feelings and ideas about their surroundings. The problem with LBS at the moment is that the games are focused on an individual raising his/her own status. This provides little value both to their friends and the venues they “check-in” at.

Our deals are aimed at identifying a venue’s target customers and develop promotions that will attract that customer and his/her friends. We want each user to be a social influencer to their circle of friends so we can reward them. Moreover, we are implementing gaming mechanics that encourage group behavior, and can reward users for sharing their ‘liked” establishments.

4. How do you reward a user who acts, in your words, as a “social influencer” to his/her friends?

The concept is simple. Because we are tracking the users who are frequenting a venue often and redeeming deals, checking in and ‘liking’ the place, we can identify them as a possible social influencer. We can target these users via push notifications for more rewards if they bring other friends into the place. For example by saying: “Bring three friends to enjoy our lunch special and you eat for free.” Those who actually follow up and bring their friends in are instantly identified as a social influencer.

But in reality, anyone who likes a place and shares the venue with their friend, and checks in with their friends at a place or event, can be an influencer. The beauty of the system is that we can make anyone into a social influencer once we know what they really like. Then we can build rewards around that to have them influence their friends to partake.

5. You’ve said you don’t emphasize checking-in so much, and prefer to focus on a user “redeeming” stuff at a location when they buy stuff…

Checking in is a social act that is based on the internet world to show your friends where you WANT them to see you at. As most LBS apps do not actually care if you are at a location or not when you check-in, it decreases the value of that user for the venue itself. By creating a redeem function in our deals, the venue actually validates that an individual is at their establishment and spending money.

This is a lot more interesting to us because we believe if a user/customer is actually at a place and spending money, then we can make money from that. Too little focus has been put on the venues in the LBS world at the moment, and therefore little revenue has been produced for these companies. When you have the venues participate in the entire experience some interesting business models end up developing.

6. You seem to be up against both LBS such as Jiepang, and group-buy sites such as Dianping and Lashou. How are you persuading clients/venues that your way is the right way (or that your users have more income, etc)?

Because we add value for the venue. It is simply not enough to have people looking at or seeing what people have said about a place. Venues are more interested in seeing what are the buying behaviors their customers have. Then they can target loyal or active customers and have these customers draw similar-minded customers to their establishment.

Because we work with the venues in creating deals that can identify these buying behaviors we collect and give reports on what is working and what is not. We become the platform that can be used to understand gaps within the business. More importantly, because we do not populate our search of venues simply using distance, but rather in terms of popularity. That ranks personal interest and friends’ interests, which is a natural ranking system. That’s what happens in the venue list in Let’s Powwow – it does not happen with other LBS companies.

In effect, we are creating a meta-game for the venues to try to bring their ranking up. It is similar to Google analytics, but focused on a 500, 1,000, or 2,000 group of search results around a particular individual. No one else does this at the moment, and it creates great appeal for our service.

7. Because your service is more focused on venues and what users actually do in them, will this only work at high-end places, such as upscale hotels or boutique stores? Can it be scaled?

We are easily scalable within reason. We are targeting mid- to high-end venues. In China, the middle class demographic is expanding rapidly and there are new places popping up daily to feed their desires. We believe that through this range we have more than enough room to grow and become profitable.

8. Why did you decide to launch this start-up in China, rather than any other country?

300 million mobile internet users and growing! The math does not lie. We can accomplish more traction in one market then others are doing globally. Foursquare has 10 million users globally. China already has 18 million LBS users. Imagine what will happen if we can make this thing really popular. Ask [Sina] Weibo how they are doing and it gives you a hint of where our ambitions are. It’s very exiting to be here. Besides, I fully believe that it will be Chinese companies re-shaping the commercial world, and we want to be part of that new shift in power.

Achmad Zaky, founder of Bukalapak.com

Bukalapak.com, one of the C2C e-commerce sites based in Indonesia, received investment last week from Batavia Incubator, a joint venture between a Japanese venture capital firm and an Indonesian financial institute.

To find out more about their future plans after the investment, we contacted Bukalapak founder, Achmad Zaky, for an email interview.

1. What is the story behind this investment deal? Why did you chose Batavia Incubator?

After that session, we scheduled a follow up meeting with the same intention, just for pure sharing. We shared quite intensively, probably once a week.

We found that Batavia has a lot of experience in Japan and was able to give us much feedback and tips. Then when Batavia offered a serious proposal, we said yes without any hesitation. Meanwhile, some other VCs who we also had discussions with did not have a strong understanding or experience about e-commerce. That’s why we chose Batavia Incubator.

2. Can you share some details about this investment?

3. What are your targets and plans with this newly added-capital?

We are also aiming for 100,000 merchants next year. Currently we have only about 40,000. After this deal, I will quit my position as managing director in Suitmedia and focus on Bukalapak. Suitmedia’s Managing Director is now Fajrin Rasyid. We will be managing Bukalapak.com full-time from now on. Previously, our CTO and I weren’t fully managing the site on a day-to-day basis. This has to change if we want it to reach hockey-stick growth.

4. Do you have any tips for fellow start-ups, especially on finding an investor?

5. Four months ago, Bukalapak.com’s pageviews were over nine million per month. Could you please share your latest statistics with us? How much transaction value per day is there?

• Total product has sold: 100,000 products
• Total products offered: 64,000 products
• Total bike-related products offered: 22,600 (about 1/3 of all products)
• Daily pageviews: 430,000. (that’s more than 12 million per month)
• Daily visitors: 22,000

Average price per unit sold is two million rupiahs. It is quite expensive, because items sold are mostly bikes. We sell 200 items per day on average. So, we have about 400 million rupiah (US$48,000) worth of transaction per day according to our estimates.

6. Bukalapak.com is well-known as the biggest marketplace for bicycle and bike-related product. Could you please tell us why this is? Was it planned from the very beginning or is it growing naturally?

7. How much is Bukalapak.com’s revenue?

Before we even started talking about Dealised’s plans in Asia, the confident-looking CEO, Jonathan Marchbank, shared a little bit more about service. One thing to keep in mind is that Dealised isn’t a group buying site. Rather, it offers group-buy technology and solutions for large corporations which hope to offer daily deals, or at the very least open a new revenue stream through e-commerce.

Dealised’s clients include The Daily Telegraph in the UK, Mecom from Scandinavia, and Spreets from Australia which was acquired by Yahoo! for US$42.9 million in 2009. The technology solution it offers includes mobile (both feature and smartphone), electronic direct mailer (eDM), web, and analytics.

Friends with Groupon and Livingsocial

Dealised is in no way a competitor of group-buying sites like Groupon and Livingsocial. Marchbank explains that Groupon and Livingsocial are disrupting technologies which have caused large corporations to rethink their strategy. For example, merchants would rather put up a deal on group-buy sites than advertise in a newspaper, shrinking the ad revenue pie within the traditional media industry.

Marchbank also feels that big players like Groupon and Livingsocial are important because they educate the market, which in turn helps large corporations to understand the group-buy industry better.

Mobile, Southeast Asia, and India

Dealised has team members based in Europe, India, Singapore, and Australia. Mobile is something that it will be focusing heavily on.

“We believe that mobile is rising fast in Asia, and mobile commerce will be part of the growth too. Everyone will want to ride on the wave,” says Marchbank. He specifically pointed out Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India as Dealised’s primary markets.

There are multiple ways for Dealised to work with various partners. For example, a supermarket could leverage on its customer base to share relevant deals from an external group-buy site, and as such earn a cut from each deal sold. Alternatively, the supermarket could also employ Dealised’s technology to sell its own products through eDM or SMS.

For Dealised, working with telcos is also a crucial part of its key strategy. Its lead investor, SingTel, is the largest telco in Singapore with a wide network and presence in India, Malaysia, and Indonesia. In Singapore alone, SingTel has over three million customers which constitutes about 60 percent of the entire population.

“SingTel has wide reach in Singapore. It could offer deal services to its huge client base,” said Marchbank.

However, Marchbank explains that Dealised is also open to work with other telecoms groups. “We will leverage on Singtel’s network and expertise but we are also open to working with others if the opportunities arise. We don’t have any exclusive clause with SingTel.”

China and Japan have to wait

“They are huge markets, but if we focus on too many countries we will spread ourselves too thinly,” he explains. While China has a huge mobile user base and e-commerce culture, Marchbank feels that it is a market that is hard to enter if you have few contacts.

Edy Sulistyo is the co-founder of eEvent, currently leading the overall technology direction of the company. eEvent is a robust online event management service powered by game mechanics which helps users create viral events. We have previously written a detailed introduction about it here.

Edy is also a serial entrepreneur, and prior to eEvent he co-founded a consulting firm in Columbus, Ohio and began several web start-ups.

eEvent has gone through several iterations before hitting its stride. So we thought it would be interesting to hear to Edy’s entrepreneurial experiences, and share them with you here.

1. What inspired you to be an entrepreneur?

2. We know eEvent is doing pretty well now. What are some of the greatest obstacles you have faced so far? How did you solve them?

The problem was, however, that most of the features we released are frivolous features and did not add much value to the product. The features even backfired because at one point, we had too many of these frivolous features which caused us to lose our company direction.

To overcome this, we went back to the company vision and mission, reviewed everything, and decided to eliminate all of the frivolous features. We then tune in to our existing users and build a single value proposition that actually solves our customers’ real problems.

3. You’re based in U.S and also have a team in Indonesia. How does that work? What’s the strategy behind this?

4. What’s the big plan for eEvent?

5. I understand you guys have made countless changes before arriving at your current stage. How has pivoting worked for you guys and why is it important for fellow entrepreneurs?

In our case, before we got to this point, we have made at least four major changes to eEvent. This actually helped us to be closer to our customers, identify their real problems, and most importantly win their hearts.

6. Who are the people that are inspiring and mentoring you?

There are also many successful entrepreneurs that have either directly or indirectly taught me very important lessons in life. My other co-founders also stay positive regardless how bad the situation is, and that itself is inspiring and encouraging.

7. What would be your three tips for fellow entrepreneurs?

1. Build a product that can solve a real problem, preferably the problem that you face daily.
2. Listen to your customer very closely. Don’t assume anything because your opinion is most likely will be wrong
3. Focus! don’t try to be everything for everyone. Focus on what you can be best at, and do so one thing at a time

[UPDATE: July 8th, AM - We've been contacted by Alibaba Group representatives who claim that there are "factual errors and bad underlying info" in the source, the China Entrepreneurs Magazine (CEM) interview. On the understanding that CEM will amend and correct its post shortly, we're amending some aspects of the first-person quotes attributed to Jack Ma.]

[UPDATE 2: July 8th, AM - Also, we've be contacted by CEM's English Editor who admits grave errors in their transcript, saying, "We found some mistakes that may cause people's misunderstanding." CEM's official notice and apology is here. So, we've removed the PDF transcript that had been embedded at the bottom of the post, and also deleted the offending passages from CEM's inaccurate initial transcript. A corrected transcript will be issued shortly. Apologies to our readers for running with the source's inaccurate text.]

Jack Ma, the Alibaba founder and CEO, has finally spoken up and revealed the thought-processes behind his controversial and cavalier transference of Alipay away from the Alibaba Group – a move that left Yahoo (which owns 39% of the Group) embarrassed, and exposed just how in the dark the American firm is about Alibaba’s inner workings.

In a tough-talking, exclusive interview today with the Chinese-language China Entrepreneur Magazine, Ma admits to unilaterally shifting its online payment platform Alipay away from the Group, with full consent from neither the board of directors nor Softbank or Yahoo.

Mr. Ma paints it as a necessary move – and, importantly, a fully legal ploy – for Alipay to get a crucial government-mandated online payments license, where the Group’s majority foreign ownership (Japan’s Softbank owns 29.3% too) would have been an issue at state-level.

Jack Ma vigorously defends himself and emphasizes what a difficult, time-sensitive position he was in, saying:

I’m standing here with the Central Bank of China on one side, and they’ve [Softbank and Yahoo] squeezed me out and made me out to be the bad guy ….. I’ll tell you, this matter wouldn’t have even been approved with ten times the time. Why? Sun [Zhengi; of Softbank] has countless investments. If Alibaba were to die, sure, he’d be sore, but to him it’s one of many. To us, it’s everything. Yahoo is in a similar situation.

As part of his bold move, Ma terminated the “variable interest entity” (VIE) that usually safeguards the assets of foreign owners in a firm, as he realised at the start of the year that he was in this bind – facing three options to move forward, or risk seeing Alipay being shut down by authorities for the lack of proper paperwork. The interview makes clear that Ma favored termination of VIE and organizing compensation later; Softbank’s Sun Zhengyi preferred to maintain the VIE but lie about its existence to the State Council (which is technically illegal); while the third option was to keep VIE and go through due process, with a heightened risk of Alipay failing to get its license. In Jack Ma’s own words, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang “was sitting on the fence”. And so Ma unilaterally made his move.

“I don’t like politics, I don’t play at it”

Jack Ma’s actions this year have made him into something of a hate figure in tech circles in China, with some accusing him of worsening an awful June for Chinese tech IPOs by heightening uncertainty and making Chinese tech firms look risky. As for Yahoo, they’re now facing a class-action lawsuit by some shareholders accusing Yahoo of not being sufficiently in control – and those claims might be strengthened by Ma’s words in this interview.

Yahoo’s Jerry Yang comes out badly from this, for sitting on the fence for so long over the license process issue. Jack Ma also believes that Yang made the wrong move in how he handled the news, adding, “he should have immediately told the Yahoo shareholders, but he waited until May to tell them.”

[Source: China Entrepreneur Magazine]

Today it serves 18,000 customers and 375,000 users to create animated and interactive charts for web and enterprise applications. FusionCharts serves big name clients including Google, LinkedIn, and U.S President, Barack Obama.

We spoke to Pallav Nadhani, the man who started FusionCharts at age 17, in an effort to find out more about his story as an entrepreneur. His thoughts are below:

Work hard, play hard: Pallav in a pirate hat

1. Could you briefly describe your personal entrepreneurial story?

I was born in Bhagalpur, a small town in India and then I shifted to Kolkata (a metro city) when I was almost 15. My father was running a web design business in Kolkata. I worked with my dad for a few quarters and picked up valuable lessons in client engagement, web designing, and tools of the trade. During that time, I got to meet other web designers and programmers, which helped me pick up things fast. I then came across ASPToday.com which used to pay a good amount of money for writing innovative articles. I joined them in the end.

While at ASPToday, I had to prepare charts in Microsoft Excel for my school work – and it was only after doing web design that I found these charts very boring and dull. And since I had been working with Macromedia Flash (Adobe Flash now), I started exploring how to marry that to business data to create better charts for web. After a few weeks of coding, I made an animated and interactive charting system, though it was very crude.

I wrote an article on that and it got published. I got $1,500 from the article (and another article that I subsequently wrote for ASPToday.com itself). That was my seed capital for my business, and it also marked the start of my entrepreneurial journey. Developers who read that article liked it and kept on asking for modifications and enhancements. This is when I realized that a product could be created out of it.

2. How was it to be a CEO and Founder at age 17?

For the first three years I worked alone – I did all the coding for product, built websites, wrote documentation, created marketing collaterals, did customer support and anything that was necessary to run the business. This was necessary at first, and I was learning things as I went along. Secondly I had no capital (and nobody would have trusted their money with a 17 year old). But this was crucial as it allowed me to focus on things which were most important.

Since I had to do everything, I needed to prioritize the right things. And this also helped us to learn how to run a lean operation (we’re still just over 50 people today, serving 18,000 customers and 375,000 users in 110 countries).

Since the article was published, I knew that developers were willing to pay money to modify or enhance the solution. So rather than doing one-to-one customization for different users, I went ahead and built all such flexibility in the core product itself, and started charging a very little licensing fees for it. It was just $15 back then.

This allowed me to get some money, pay for the servers, and also do some online marketing. We used a lot of free marketing options online (free articles, directory listings, forums, etc.).

Since there was no rent (I was working from home) or salaries (I was the only one) to be paid, the costs were always under control. That allowed me to save a lot of money in the first three years of the business. Then we incorporated, opened our first office, and started hiring. This was in 2005.

The first few interviews that I went through, nobody joined me. They couldn’t trust a 20-year-old guy to run the company (who sets the interview timings himself and opens the door when they come to office for interview). Then I learnt that I had to project a more professional approach and sell the company vision to others.

I created an interview pitch where we highlight that we are one of the few Indian product companies. All others were service companies where their projects are used by a handful of people, and they cannot even claim that ownership tag outside of office (because either the project is internal, or its confidential).

We sold the vision that how products created by to-be employees would reach thousands of users (yes, at that time we never thought we could reach hundreds of thousands of users), and seeing the traction people started believing it and joined FusionCharts.

3. As an entrepreneur, is age a big concern?

Initially it was, as people wouldn’t trust me with their careers, or with their applications using our products. But the Internet is superb at helping you hide it – the right website, presentation, information and pitch takes people’s attention off your age.

In the first few years, we tried to hide the fact that FusionCharts was run by a 17-year-old entrepreneur, and projected a big company image (or at least tried to…) by having a typical “About us” page that beat around the bush (“we are a leading…information technology…visionary…experienced management… “). Now we project a very personal image clearly reflecting that we’re an Indian company and these are our people.

4. FusionCharts came a long way. What are the three most difficult obstacles you faced in your journey so far?

• Finding right people: Both technically and culturally.
• Keeping them motivated and engaged: I always was a nerd, so “people development” was new to me.
• Setting processes in the organization: I had never known what a process was because I have never worked for anyone yet.

5. What are your thoughts about the tech and entrepreneurial scene in India?

It’s on fire now! There’s so much energy and enthusiasm in India at the moment. So many e-commerce plays are happening and growing. Small teams/individuals have started building products (or apps) that have the capacity to go global.

Experienced NRIs (Non-resident Indians) are returning from the valley and joining these companies, or starting their own. People who’ve made money through exits are investing in other start-ups (I also do angel investing). There’s a huge consumption story in the big Indian middle class (300 million people, that’s the size of entire USA).

Nonetheless there are still cultural challenges. For example, many people are scared of joining start-ups as they’re worried about their marriage/career. Failure is still a stigma in India and people want to develop horizontally, being a jack of all trades, rather than a specialist. India lacks high-end talent and entrepreneurs are finding creative ways to solve it.

6. Any exit plans for FusionCharts? Did anyone try to acquire FusionCharts?

This cannot be foretold. Things flow, and if you find its good, you just become a part of the flow.

7. What are your three best tips for entrepreneurs?

• Focus is very important. Doing too many things at the same time, especially when you’re starting up, is a sure shot way to failure.
• Marketing your company and product is as important as building the product. It should start before the product development starts. Don’t leave it to the end.
• Release early, release often. Don’t wait too long for an individual release as the tech industry moves very fast.

8. Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg?

Steve Jobs: His attention to details and usability for each product is something we aspire to attain.

1. Rakuten is now officially launched in Indonesia. What’s next?

We aim very high in this market. And we are striving to be number one in Indonesia. A mall is never a mall without items, merchants, and customer, so what is next? We are populating our mall with items and merchants, as well as providing customer a new experience of shopping.

2. Compared to other E-Commerce sites, Rakuten is pretty unique and has a strong brand name back in Japan. How can you repeat this success?

[It's all about the merchants and quality of goods on Rakuten] We have this one function called E-Commerce Consultant (ECC), which provides consultation for merchants to perform their e-commerce business, so even if a merchant has a limited experience in doing e-commerce, our ECC will help in such way that they can increase their sales. And from the customer point of view, Rakuten will make sure they are getting the best deal.

3. Rakuten launched with MNC Group as a partner. Why them? And since they are a media company, will Rakuten go all-out in media advertising?

Being part of media, we are aware of how important advertising is, so yes we are going to go all out in advertising.

4. There are Tokopedia, Telkom’s Plasa.com , Multiply’s Social Commerce and BliBli.com – How do you see your competitors as you jump into this battle?

We have studied our battlefield before. Everyone has it’s own uniqueness and differentiations, as well as how we differentiate ourself to others. As Rakuten itself, we differentiate by having large numbers of merchants, selling many variety of items.

Our business models is when our merchants’ sales increase, our revenue also increases, many ecommerce players treat this as a vending machine, but we are not, we are doing our best to increase our merchant’s sales so we can also increase our sales.

5. What are your targets for this year and how do you plan to achieve them?

As our CEO has said previously, we are targeting more than 200 merchants by this end of the year, since we are aiming to be the number one online shopping mall. We are going to achieve that by having a series of seminars for the potential merchants, as well as educating the market.

And for the customers/users, we are having continuous promotion, offering the best deal for users, at the same time, ensuring the safety side of online shopping by having escrow service, that is the payment will be withhold until the goods is received by users, so users need not to worry if the goods are not being delivered. Soon, we will be adding more features such as installment and COD (Cash on Delivery).

6. How do you see tech start-ups in Indonesia?

I think this has been a very exciting year for internet industry. With double digit internet penetration, it is a very lucrative market. Especially in the e-commerce industry. Although I think the internet industry is still in the infant stage, but it is the best time to start.

Personal Note

Also catch: The History of Rakuten, Japan’s Largest E-Commerce Site [INFOGRAPHIC]

A few days ago, Jiepang’s CEO and founder, David Liu (pictured, above), took some time to talk with me over the phone from Beijing HQ, to talk about their users’ needs, brand tie-ups, testing out NFC, and working with China’s tech giant, Tencent.

“We’re all about offline”
David Liu, originally from Taiwan, moved to mainland China in 2009, and connected with some Beijing friends that he knew from Taipei or Silicon Valley, to work on a new project. When Jiepang took off just a few months after its launch, he and co-founder Yuan Cheng decided, in David’s words, “it was time to focus”, and so the location-based-service (LBS) and social-network got moving, and made a bunch of mobile apps for their service. A short time later, and the inevitable media moniker ‘China’s Foursquare’ meant that Jiepang was getting some global attention, too.

David set out, with Jiepang, to make “a utility for your offline life … to say ‘I’ve arrived!’ at a place”, and “to allow people to share that”. It was being done already, sort of, on Kaixin001.com or RenRen.com – but, David notes, “sharing [your location] wasn’t fun before. On Kaixin you had to type it all out. So we wanted to help people check in faster, with no typing.”

After first hitting on the LBS idea, David and his team did their homework – “I feel China’s young people are more open and transparent now. They’re growing up with social-networking. So they’re ready to share where they are. In the beginning, we held a focus group of 30 to 40 people, and 80% of them said, ‘Yes, we’re sharing our location already on Kaixin’.” So, the course was decided, and the project was set to be China’s first – and biggest – LBS. David points out, “We say ‘We’re all about offline’, because we’re not forcing people to do different things – we’re just helping you to show what you’re doing normally, and we want to make it more fun.”

Connecting Users with Brands. And celebrities…
Being based in Beijing, it’s not too much of a surprise that most of Jiepang’s users are in mainland China: 95 to 98% of them, in fact, with most of the rest in Hong Kong, Taiwan or Macau (ie: the Greater China area). So, how are users engaging with Jiepang itself? David Liu says, “Our user-base is very mobile. The iPhone and Android apps make up just over half of users’ usage. And then a hardcore segment of users will use the website too.”

That’s quite impressive to see so many people using the hottest smartphones. Little wonder that brands – from Wrangler to Louis Vuitton, IKEA to Starbucks – are keen to get into the lives of these users via their Jiepang check-ins, and perhaps even persuade people to come especially into their store thanks to a Jiepang promo. “We’ve partnered with over 300 brands,” says David, “and right now we’re proud to be working with Burberry and Louis Vuitton, and even have special pages up on Jiepang [see the LV page, bottom] for the special occasions, which are Burberry’s fashion show and LV’s exhibition in Beijing.

What do users, and brands, get from all this, I ask? “For brands,” says David, “it’s to extend their personalities; and for users it’s to get a virtual badge [see the LV, Wrangler, and Starbucks badges in the image, top], maybe it’s a limited-edition badge. It’s not really about material benefit – it’s exciting to collect and show.”

A new area for Jiepang is to connect users with celebrities, and by extension whatever brands they’re promoting. It’s something that Sina and Tencent Weibo, too, have done so well since inception (better than Twitter has, for sure) – getting people to engage with specific brands or celebrities that interest them. “At the moment,” says David, “we’re experimenting with celebrities – partnering with celebrity’s venues, such as their own stores, campaigns or events. For example, Jay Chou [Taiwanese pop star] has a fashion shop and an Italian restaurant in Taipei, and they’re really popular check-ins.”

As for getting China’s hottest stars to share their check-ins on Jiepang, David concedes that probably won’t happen – “Celebrities won’t share their locations, I guess”.

NFC & global plans
Like many of China’s top social sites, Jiepang works around the world – David himself checked into various places in Paris over the weekend for the China Connect conference, where Jiepang was talking to numerous French brands which are keen to use social media in China – but is generally confined to China. Any plans to change that?

“Our roadmap is for Greater China,” says David, “but we can’t rule expansion out.” So, where’s the roadmap heading? “We’ve spread across cities in China as they’re relevant to our users … and serve users city-by-city, and make links between cities. We’ve branched out into Hong Kong and Taiwan, which are important, because a lot of celebrities that are relevant to the mainland come from those places – that’s why we have offices there.”

NFC (aka: Near-Field Communications) is an exciting technology, which looks set to allow payments – or check-ins – with a simple swipe of your (NFC-enabled) phone. Jiepang is pushing hard in testing this, rolling out check-in tests before even Foursquare was trialling it at Google I/O last month, and is now heading towards a second-round of real-life NFC tests…

“Our first tests were warm-up exercises,” explains David, “where we worked with 5 bars or cafés. We want to make it natural, and easy. For our second trial, it’ll be a bit bigger, but we can’t share any info yet. It’s still at an early stage.”

I guess NFC hardware is in short supply right now. And China needs to see both the next iPhone, and future HTCs to be rocking NFC chips for this to take off.

Any other new features for the site? “It’s not the right time to add features,” David concedes, “and instead we’re opening up the API, and looking at areas where we can improve, and give more relevant info, like if a friend is in the same area as you at the same time, then that should be a notification.”

David and Goliath
Lastly, I was keen to know what might threaten Jiepang’s position – who are the Goliaths imperially stomping down the road? How about group shopping websites, I proffered to David, such as Dianping.com, could that site hurt Jiepang, or perhaps the whole group-shopping horde could crush the LBS check-ins?

“Group buying sites and LBS are very different to each other,” David says, “and they’re even complementary. They can both help merchants to build a community with users. Also, Jiepang isn’t focused on discounts at all.”

Tencent, then? I put forward to David the image of the Tencent ‘steamroller’ that copies and crushes… David demurs, “Tencent’s doing a great job with its Open API and platform – we’ll be talking about that in Paris at the weekend, in fact.”

He continues: “We’re partnering now with Tencent to link your Tencent/QQ account to Jiepang. The size of the company doesn’t hinder our working together. Of course, it’s very likely major companies will move into new areas, but it’s still great to work with them.”

Many thanks to David Liu for talking the time to chat. Readers can follow me – but not too literally, please – on Jiepang, as SirSteven, which is also my username for Twitter and Sina Weibo.

Maiplay originates from Hawaii as PlayHawaii. Much like other group-buying sites, it offers deals from restaurants, spas, entertainment merchants, many more. We got in touch with Jon Sugihara, CEO & Co-Founder of Maiplay and PlayHawaii to learn more about the service and his plans in Indonesia.

1. Maiplay just launched in Indonesia, but Groupon is already here. What are your thoughts on this?

One of the challenges to group buying is that there is no customer loyalty. They will buy with whoever has the best deal that day. We have been able to compete with and beat Groupon consistently in Hawaii by providing better deals and we are confident that we can do this again in Jakarta. We have already featured a number of the best restaurants in Jakarta.

2. I know you must be tired of answering this question, but what’s the difference between you and other Groupon ‘clones?’

Our focus is on quality and great deals, both for the merchant and for the customer. Our other differentiator is the value we add to the merchant. We have a number of services and products that the customer does not see that help the merchant to get a clear picture of how their promotion did. Our competitors disappear as soon as the deal is signed, so most businesses are in the dark as to what they got from a promotion. We focus on engaging with the customer and getting them to return to the business after the initial promotion.

maiplay.com

3. If you plan to expand across Indonesia, how do you scale and put your presence across all cities?

The biggest challenge to scaling is finding sales people and managing those teams across larger geographies. We have a number of methodologies and tools that allow us to track the performance and support our teams from anywhere in the world. We have been doing this for almost 2 years, so we have had a lot of time to learn from our mistakes and grow.

4. I heard that one of your backers is Eduardo Saverin. How does he help your start-up?

Eduardo Saverin is helping us as an advisor. Eduardo is very strategic for us as the core principal of group buying is the social aspect of sharing deals with friends. Over 30% of the traffic to each of our deals come from social networks, so it is imperative that we have solid integrations with these networks. Eduardo is helping us to build strategies on how we can maximize Facebook and other social media.

5. Finally, what is your target and plan for Indonesia this year?

We believe the potential market for Jakarta alone could be over USD$12m/year as long as we can convince consumers to spend money online. There is a target population of over 2m users that fit into the initial demographic of users that we are targeting. These are young professionals with disposable income. They love to go out and try new things and are computer savvy.

Catch more of our interviews with founders and thought leaders here.

InvestIdea recently announced its investment in KartuMuu and Bistip. That caught our interest and we managed to grab hold of Charles Gandha, one of the partners at InvestIdea to find out more:

1. Who is the founder of InvestIdea and how big is your team?

All of our partners are Indonesians who had experience studying and working overseas in the high-tech sectors. When we returned to Indonesia, we each started our own ventures before getting together to explore the opportunities of high-tech venture capital in Indonesia. We’re also partnering with Forte Capital in setting up PE & VC funds dedicated towards the TMT (Telecommunications, Media, and Technology) space in the Indonesian market.

2. Can you explain a little bit more about InvestIdea?  What is your plan for Indonesia?

InvestIdea is a technology incubator focusing on helping young Indonesian entrepreneurs to develop their cool ideas into real venture businesses.  Our goal is to get new tech start-ups going through the initial phase to become serious businesses. Most of the time it means ‘get them to the point where they have built something impressive enough to convince their communities’. The communities we are talking about also include the next round of investors on a larger scale.

We achieve our goal using a set of specific strategies from the experiences of our founders, which follow through from the birth of the idea, proof of concept modeling, until [it's a] legitimate working entity. According to our motto ‘accelerating the next tech stars’, the methodologies indeed speed up the ventures that we support to accomplish what they are right now.

3. At which stage does InvestIdea plan to play? Seed-funding?

Unfortunately, we can only play in the seeding period at the moment, up to the point where startup ecosystems in Indonesia reach their maturity. The situation in the Indonesia tech sector right now is kind of similar with Silicon Valley in the pre-millennium era, when the rule of thumb is first come first gain.

We currently provide seed-funding, strategic & legal counseling, operational guidance, and infrastructure support for our startup ventures to help them transit into high-growth technology businesses.

Our bigger plan is also to play a role in the next corporate capitalizing stages, which are growth and buyout, once the support systems in Indonesia are ready. Until then, we will actively contributing to shape Indonesian high-tech industry into the best possible business model.

4. InvestIdea launched with two start-ups in its portfolio. Why Bistip and KartuMuu?

We actually launched with no startup to support. Our partnership with Bistip and Kartumuu had started through several phases following our methodologies mentioned before. It is such a coincidence that when the media started to cover us, we already had both of them in our portfolio.

The underlying principle for our choice of those investments is mostly due to their potential in Indonesia content consumption trends. In addition, we follow the 20:80 rule when reviewing ideas, 20% on the ideas and 80% on the teams’ DNA. So obviously, the other reason for choosing them is because we have good chemistry with the founders.

We also try to balance our investment between tangible and intangible assets. For example, we invested in a wireless hot-zone provider which has the tangible assets to also function as catalyst for our content products.

5. What are the difference between InvestIdea and other VCs that have already invested in Indonesian start-ups?

Our main difference is that all of our partners have experiences starting their own venture covering software development, convergence technology, and IT infrastructure. InvestIdea inherited the spirit and passion of technology and entrepreneurship in emerging markets.  That really set us apart from not only other VCs in Indonesia, but also elsewhere. We are not just investing in our startup ventures, but we become their partners and peers. We go hand-in-hand with the founders through the initial phases to the point where they have built working models. Then we help them nurture the venture into successful and high growth technology businesses.

6. Finally, what kind of start-ups attract your interest?

The biggest trend and opportunity in Indonesia, in our opinion, is something we identify as ‘social commerce’. The potential in Indonesia content consumption is so high due to its big population in the productive ages, and rapid adoption of technology as it becomes the sign of social statuses. So we are interested in the start-ups that focus on consumer-centric internet utilization and mobile business models, which in turn will be the catalysts and key players for the new era of cybernomics in our country.

On the other hand, Indonesians tend to be glued to their mobile devices all the time, something that all of us recently called ‘technology autism’. We’d like [the phrase] ‘make the distant people closer and make a close people distant.’ That is what happens when we are glued to our mobile gadgets all the time. Being a geographically distant country, we also would like our start-ups to become the ‘social bridge’ and yet not make people become anti-social.

In short, the start-ups that catch our attention are the ones with concepts of social commerce and also with the potential to become key players in Indonesia’s cybernomics.

Disclosure: East Ventures invested in Penn Olson.

But to tap into these opportunities it is essential to understand Asia, to comprehend its media usage behavior and culture. And don’t forget about the mighty China which is pretty much self-sustaining as the country uses wildly popular platform like microblog Sina-Weibo or video site Youku.

Today we’re thankful to have Professor Michael Netzley from Singapore Management University (SMU) share his thoughts on Asia and digital media. Michael specializes in digital media across Asia, corporate reputation, reputational risk, leadership and learning, and… um… how to cook a great arrabiata. Besides academic successes, he has also consulted companies like 3M, Shell, and Singapore’s CPF in corporate communication strategizing.

If you’re serious to learning about Asia and its digital media footprint, Michael and his students have created a wiki that consolidates digital media-related information from all across Asia.

1. Hi Professor, it’s great to have you here. Let’s start with something a little general. What are your thoughts on Asia?

I love living in Asia. The diversity of this region never fails to fascinate and consternate at the same time. I am confident I will be calling Asia home for quite some time.

2. Can you briefly describe the current digital media scene in Asia?

In a word, dynamic. Where do we see such a mix of technologies, differing behaviors, emerging and mature markets, and people skipping fixed line Internet and going directly to mobile. There are also many exciting start-ups such as Chalkboard. The mix is quite fascinating and anyone interested in digital can learn from one or more of Asia’s markets regardless of the specific interest. This diversity, however, also presents some real challenges when it comes to regional communications and finding efficiency or scale.

3. What’s the main difference between the East and the West in digital media usage and consumption?

There is no one answer here. Take Singapore where my three year longitudinal study of this market reveals Internet users with some high end gadgets and the latest apps, yet largely reserved in behavioral terms. Go a couple kilometers across the causeway or take a ferry to Indonesia and you suddenly see a more vibrant market. I was fascinated to see similar vibrancy during the Singapore general election , but with the results now behind us Singapore seems to have returned to its very calm and largely reserved Internet ethos, in my opinion.

So the main difference is that one size does not fit most when we think about communicating in Asia. Localization is to a measurable degree much more important here than in USA, for example. Going from Cleveland to Kansas City is very different than going from Tokyo to Manila. This challenge presents itself on so may levels: picking the right platforms, language and translations, user generated versus corporate generated content, and measurement to name just a few.

4. What are the digital media trends you have observed in Asia? How can companies ride them?

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: mobile. Many of the emerging markets are going directly to mobile.

But when we dig deeper, this shift leads to some pretty interesting developments. For example, to see Google hold what the Reuters has reported as a 60% market share for mobile search in South Korea is stunning. Eighteen months ago, before the new mobile network was launched in South Korea, who would have ever thought Google and Facebook could begin getting their foot in the door? The game changer has been mobile combined with a lack of early investment by local players (perhaps even a pinch of complacency was included, too).

Foursquare and the rapid adoption of location-based services can also potentially open up all kinds of doors for corporate outreach and creating a “digital layer” of information which can integrate seamlessly with our real world experiences.

Last of all, and top of my mind these days, is the impact real-time communications will have on organizations. Frankly, I see precious few signs that corporations see the digital tidal wave coming when we begin speaking about real-time. I really have to thank the folks at RIM and Edelman for shaping my thinking on this issue.

5. Facebook is dominating the whole world except for China. Do you ever think Facebook can ever enter and conquer China?

Facebook entering China seems a bit more difficult than Facebook entering South Korea via mobile. South Korea has traditionally been a fixed line Internet market and the comparatively late switch to mobile, combined with slow movement from local players, created a crack that Facebook and Google have stepped into. Frankly, I do not see such a crack in China’s market.

One difference is the relatively low penetration rate in China mixed with rapid growth. There is still a lot of room to grow, and maybe there is room for Facebook if they can work out an acceptable operating agreement with the government. Time will tell. But frankly, I see China as a pretty tough nut for Facebook to crack. Considering how countless other industries have entered and then suffered at the hand of changing regulations which increasingly favor local players, I think we should at least consider the upside of taking those precious resources and investing them in markets more welcoming of foreign investment.

Certainly markets like China, South Korea, and Japan have been notoriously difficult for foreign players to enter. History might favor the local competition.

6. What are your thoughts about the future of digital media in Asia?

The future is bright. Asia has some amazingly dynamic markets, and for me the emerging markets are the most interesting. As both economic and soft power continue shifting toward Asia, and as Asia’s Internet populations continue to grow, it only seems logical that investment in R&D and more marketing leading products and trends will emerge from Asia. And of course with all that in place, global competition will certainly be part of the mix. What an exciting place for digital folks and corporate communicators to be working!

On a final note, I also hope this future can include some of the past. One of the most enjoyable and most sociable qualities of digital channels to date has been the willingness to give credit to others when they find an idea and you use it. A simple hat-tip in words. I really see that recognition-giving behavior disappearing in this region as people start to focus less on the sharing and relationships and more on self promotion. Nothing would make me happier than to see a bit more recognition of one another and to keep these channels a really inviting place to live, work, and share.

1. Can you explain what Bistip is and how it works? What problem does it solve?

‘Bistip is a peer-to-peer courier service which came from personal experiences of the founders who had helped their friends and families. . . by bringing items from overseas’.

Certainly our daily lives need such services and now Bistip allows us to look for peers outside our personal networks to help. Let’s say you want an iPad2 on your hands faster than anybody, [and] then you find someone who’s going to travel from US to your city and negotiate for a deal. And as for travellers, what we call bistip-ers, they can earn extra income for their trip.

biztip.com

2. Who are the founders of Bistip and how big are your team currently?

The BisTip founders are Willy Ekasalim and Doddy who launched it on March 11, 2011. So we’re nearly 3 months old now. We currently having a core team of four people working full time, and occasionally we kind of ‘outsource’ jobs to other teams in our venture group or to third party service providers for the sake of accelerating our development progress.

3. BisTip have received investment from InvestIdea. Has the company changed at all since then?

More energy of course!  Well, to be honest nothing changed much in terms of of how we operate.

InvestIdea had just been like a new member in our team, and we work closely together mainly on making decisions. Their insights into the business and the marketing side have been very valuable so far. It really completes and balances out the skill sets and experiences in our team.

4. How many members do you currently have?  And how many are actively contributing to the site?

We have just reached 1000+ members few weeks ago and we have 500+ combined trips and asks posted. We have a good balance between travelers and lookers in the site that has kept conversations and negotiations flowing between them.

5. What’s your plan for this year? How do you hope to achieve it?

Before the end of the year we want to achieve 10.000 strong/active BisTip members.

We are going to keep doing what has been our focus, that is to build a trusted peer-to-peer courier marketplace. Many of our features were built for this, such as the reputation system, our partnership with escrow account provider rekeningbersama.com, and influencer role. Moving forward we will develop e-commerce-like transactions, deliver personalized data according to location based services, and also present item data such as location availability and price comparison.

We understand that a usable website plays an important part in improving the user experience when doing a transaction. In the coming months, we plan to apply our second iteration of the UI look and feel. Also since a large portion of our users travel, we are going to develop native mobile apps to help them keep in contact with the Bistip community through their gadgets.

Another major plan is to manage the member community that we have acquired. For that purpose, we are in the process of recruiting community and social media managers. Those positions will be the anchor points-of-contact between people in our community to BisTip and other third parties related.

The official release that we received from IPGA Ltd. can be found below. But to follow up on this, we have conducted a short interview with Shaun Di Gregorio, the CEO of IPGA Ltd, to find out a little more on this matter.

We focus on being number one and a market leader wherever we operate. We are a growth company with leadership positions in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore with investments in India and The Philippines. This makes us Asia’s number one property portal group. This position has been and will continue to be driven our focus on innovation.

We identified Indonesia as a growth market for us and one that fitted our overall strategy. We then identified rumah123.com as the leading property portal in Indonesia and set about acquiring them. In addition we will also acquire the number three ranked portal rumahdanproperti. This gives us an unbeatable and dominant position in Indonesia.

2. How long have you been interested in them, and how long did it take to negotiate the deal?

These types of deals always take time. The vendors and iProperty Group have shared a close relationship for some time and we share a similar passion for the Internet.

3. With the leading and third property portals in Indonesia now under iProperty, what are your plans for in that country?

Our plan is to provide our customers with the best possible solution for their marketing and build long term and enduring relationships. The combination of rumah123 and rumahdanproperti will provide unparalleled access to property hunters in Indonesia and as part of iProperty across the entire region

For consumers they’ll have access to more properties than any other property portal in Indonesia and across Asia via the iProperty Network of market leading property portals.

4. With the acquisition, you now have portals based in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and India. Will we see you expand even further across Asia?

We are very methodical about our growth plans. We identify markets that we think make sense and then focus on execution excellence. We think there are a number of other markets in the region that fit our strategy and growth plans but we are focused on getting our Indonesian acquisitions on track.

5. How do you see the tech startup scene in Indonesia?

I think the tech start up scene has a lot to offer with some very bright and passionate people doing a lot of really cool stuff. The big challenge is turning ideas into meaningful businesses.

6. Are there any plans to invest in other property portals?

Guess you’ll have to wait and see.  :-)

Official Release

At The Startup Centre, India

Vijay Anand is an entrepreneurially-minded professional with more than 13 years of hands-on experience as an entrepreneur, an advisor, and a columnist at Entrepreneur magazine.

He recently founded The Startup Centre, an India-based accelerator for early stage start-ups, and also a hub for initiatives related to tech, design and entrepreneurship.

We communicated with Anand who kindly shared with us his thoughts on the start-up scene in India. Catch what he has to say below.

Could you share with us what’s the start-up culture like in India?

I came back to India, in 2004. With an entrepreneurial background, I was trying to figure out how people went about starting companies. It was surprising to see that there were very few start-ups in India. A good number of companies were still enjoying the tide of the outsourcing boom. Soon enough, we met a couple of niche product companies, and things have taken off from there.

The start-up climate here has shifted dramatically – and most of it was thanks to events and meet ups that took on informally. With the birth of Barcamps, Open Coffee Clubs, Mobile Mondays and the likes, India’s entrepreneurial scene is set on fire. The country still has majority of its tech startups based out of the cities such as Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, Delhi and Mumbai, but some of these cities see as high as 700 new startups each quarter. It’s a dramatic shift from how things were in 2004.

How are entrepreneurs in India like?

Indian entrepreneurs have gone through a cycle of learning phases. Initially quite a number of companies were heavily influenced by the west, especially Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs tend to aim for the world. Unfortunately, there was neither customers/infrastructure, nor the kind of capital required to build ventures like Twitter and Facebook in India.

In recent years, feeding the local demands became the focus. I’d say today that it’s a mix of both. Most Indian entrepreneurs are extremely hardworking folks, who understand the domain they are operating in and a good number of them are also exposed to other markets – either by virtue of them working there for a while, or having an education abroad. So these are the people who add value when it comes to making India a global marketplace.

What is India lacking as a start-up nation?

If I have to pick one, it would be exits. India is still seeing growth, but no major exit yet. There are a ton of things that get related to that problem – employees don’t value equity, and hence you need capital, and capital is hard to come by, and good talent is hard to attract.

But fundamentally a good number of this gets tied down to the fact that exits aren’t happening – at least not in the numbers that we would like to see. That said, quite a number of organizations like accelerators, venture firms, and specialized firms are starting to focus on helping start-ups gain fast adoption. Hopefully we should start seeing the fruits of these efforts soon.

Which are some of the promising tech start-ups in India?

There are quite a few interesting companies in India. The well-known ones are Slideshare and Zoho, which have grown to become global brands. There is a company named Flipkart that has replicated Amazon’s awesome customer support infrastructure and took India by storm. There are also companies such as Tenmiles (most probably the potential 37Signals of India), Deskaway, Interviewstreet and a few that are working on the hardware space.

How do you see the India start-up scene in five years time?

Several years ago, India as a country was losing talents, as it was difficult for folks to find opportunities in the country. Much of that has changed – like the way it has changed in China. From what I have read, close to 150,000 people returned from the US last year, and a significant number of them are looking to start their own ventures. Not all of them will be in the tech space, but entrepreneurs are a strong force, to bring about change and economic growth in India. We also see quite a few companies in India, growing to massive size with significant market caps within the local markets.

Exits would inspire more start-ups, and also an infusion of capital into early stage investment. I do expect much of this to happen in the next five years in India. Definite signs of this will appear in the next three years to come.

Previously the technology correspondent for The Straits Times, he is now the organizer of UNWIRED conference, Singapore’s independent wireless and mobile conference. A well-known figure in the local technology scene, ALFRED runs the popular Techgoondu technology blog as well.

We managed to grab hold of him to pick his thoughts on the rising mobile industry in Southeast Asia. Catch his interview below. Note that we added a few links to provide you with a little more information.

1. Can you briefly share with us your thoughts on the mobile industry in Southeast Asia?

The mobile scene in Southeast Asia is very interesting with different markets and diverse cultures. Not just in the languages used, the mobile usage patterns are very localized and very different once you cross boundaries. In Indonesia, for example, Blackberry is huge because users who love to message each other rely on the Blackberry messaging system and telcos’ low-cost data plans to chat all day. Singapore, meanwhile, is quite similar to European cities in usage. While in Philippines, messaging is one of the hottest mobile apps.

ASEAN is a huge market that people often do not see when they look at the twin giants of Asia – India and China . But there is so much potential, especially in smartphone apps in Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, in particular, that developers should really explore these markets for opportunities.

2. Let’s go a little deeper. In your opinion, which are some mobile trends (e.g. location-based ads, voice blogging) that may go big in the near future in Southeast Asia?

I think location-based apps – not just ads – will be big. And this won’t be just in ASEAN. The reason why such apps were not big previously was because of a lack of maps and apps that tap on them. Today, Google Maps and its APIs are all you need to create apps with local interest. Think of a Hungrygowhere or OpenRice in each city as a starting point. Then what about social apps that tag onto Facebook Places or Foursquare? The opportunities are endless really. I feel ASEAN has a lot of scope for such apps because there haven’t been so many good developers making local apps for this region yet.

3. What is hindering mobile growth in Southeast Asia?

I think the main obstacle is still the income level. The move towards smartphones will take time, say, another year or two more, when such devices become even cheaper than now, before we get really widespread usage in some of the rural areas in the region.

4. In Southeast Asia, feature phones still dominate. Should developers cater to this group? Or focus on smartphone users?

I suspect there are still at least two years or more to go for text- and SMS-based apps in some of the big cities of ASEAN outside of Singapore and Malaysia , because of the large install base in feature phones. So, yes, these apps should still be made now, though to concentrate solely on them when the move is clearly towards smartphones in the long term, is folly. If you’re a developer who has not started out on any Android or iOS projects, there’s no more time to waste!

5. We’re hearing a lot of good things about UNWIRED. Could you share more?

UNWIRED is an independent conference that brings together the leaders of the industry to discuss top issues, as well as to fathom the way forward for the industry.

What makes it different? It’s independent – topics are selected and speakers participate independently, so an open discussion is ensured. It’s open, as panels as well as Q&As which encourage participation from the audience, in a conference aimed at sharing lessons learnt and fathoming the road ahead for the wireless and mobile industry.

This year, the focus is not just on 4G/LTE networks but also the apps and software in tablets and cellphones that are re-defining how we use the mobile devices on the go. There’s a special panel on the future of mobile OS.

Note: Use code UW50, for a 15% discount to register for UNWIRED. More details here.

Also catch: The Rise of China’s Mobile Industry [INTERVIEW]

Multiply, the social network turned social shopping platform site was reported back in February that it had set up an office and a team to bring a different e-commerce approach to Indonesia.

To understand how Multiply is approaching the e-commerce game in Indonesia, we took time to speak to Daniel Tumiwa, head of Multiply Indonesia who shared some thoughts with us in this interview.

1. Multiply has been around for quite a long time now, what made it changed its focus to e-commerce?

We are responding to the demands made by users. Although we have a strong base of users that continue to conventionally use the site to share thoughts and connect (and make friends) in Indonesia , more and more people are using the site to establish their business. Multiply Inc then decided to enhance and equip the site with better tools and features to support users’ endeavor to do so (business-wise). Plus, left to grow on its own, Indonesia now has 35,000 online sellers (which grows by 2,000 on a monthly basis) supported by 7 million unique users every month. We’re really looking forward to developing the social commerce aspect of Multiply, whilst also maintaining the support system that’s already there, which includes the bloggers.

2. There are a lot of e-commerce sites that were launched before Multiply in Indonesia. How is Multiply going to differentiate from the crowd? What is the advantage of using Multiply in Indonesia?

First and foremost, Multiply is a social network. Hence, Multiply is already equipped with the tools which enable interaction between users (they can share blogs , notes, photos, links, videos and even chat). People who do business in Multiply already have loyal followers, they have a strong network. With the new features that Multiply provides (the improved Marketplace, Stock Room, Payment Gateway and other programs including Multiply Promote and Multiply Trust), we aim to multiply the benefits of selling and buying. Although a few have surfaced, we enter the market with good payment options. Integration to KlikBCA, Mandiri, Virtual Accounts, ATM, PayPal , and soon mobile payments. Unlike others that have one or two.

3. Indonesian Internet users are still “immature,” as in they don’t really buy things online, instead they are more used to Cash on Delivery (COD) way of transaction. How do you see this?

It may be completely immature, but it’s heading there. People nowadays prefer convenience, but they’d also like to maintain the human touch. Multiply provides convenience (in setting up shop, managing shops for sellers, and in shopping for buyers), yet it also encourages interaction between sellers and buyers by utilizing the social network aspect of the site (buyers can befriend sellers, vice versa, from friendship, trust is born. Trust goes a long way for both sellers and buyers. Sellers benefit from having loyal buyers, buyers need not fret since they’re buying from friends). People do COD mostly because it’s deemed as perhaps a safer option. With Multiply’s payment gateway, buyers get more options, all safe plus convenient.

4. One of the unsolved problems in Indonesia is the payment system, what will Multiply do about it?

We’ll continue to socialize the payment system, what is labeled as problem is just a matter of unfamiliarity. When it comes to payment, we put forward the important characteristics: safe, convenient, user-friendliness. We will continue to offer the most payment solutions. The banks have a huge need to socialize their new solutions, and we fit in as perfect partners, so there will be many activities together.

5. What is your target for Multiply in Indonesia this year?

A fair target will be to be within top 3 unaided recollection for Online Shopping. The other one would be 100,000 merchants and for all our merchants to have tried to transact at least once through our payment solution.

With e-commerce sites/startups such as Rakuten, Telkom’s Plasa, BliBli, or even Tokopedia who received Series B funding back in April, it will be a hot and tough battle to earn the market share here in Indonesia, but we do have a huge pie to share! What do you think?

Fahima, Founder of Virus Communications and CEO of Virtual Consulting, is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in Indonesia.

She was named as one of the “10 Intenational Young Creative Entrepreneurs” by the British Council in 2007 and was also featured in Business Week as one of the “25 Asia Best Young Entrepreneurs.” In the same year, she also won the Femina L’oreal Best Mum award.

And the awards just kept coming. Last year Swa Magazine featured Fahima as a “Young Woman Future Business Leader.” She was also featured as one of the “Top 40 Below 40 in Indonesia” by Fortune Magazine.

We’re glad that Fahima took time out with us for an interview. Her story, as we expected, is very inspiring.

1. Thanks for joining us! Could you briefly share with us your journey as an entrepreneur?

Entrepreneurship is in my blood, it runs in the family. In 2006 I started my entrepreneur journey, I was 27 at the time. Together with my husband, we decided to leave the advertising industry to form Virus Communications. People said it was a crazy decision because we quit at the same time. But I think there will be no crazy result without a crazy (daring) start. And it proved to be the right decision, Virus Communication grew fast, and we went in at the right timing too. We also had the right partnership.

Virus was originally a traditional marketing communication company, but two years down the road we did a SWOT analysis for the company, and decided to focus on both online and digital. It was the right decision, again, because the industry was hoping for a consultancy that was able to connect digital marketing and communication in one language.

Another reason why we decided to shift on to the online direction was because we had a strong partner, Virtual Consulting with NukmanLuthfie as CEO at that time.

Once we decided to go online, Virus grew even faster and bigger. We won important pitches from big clients, and even won a regional pitch for a big international brand. Because of this sudden growth, I needed full support on infrastructure, financial and human resources. Not long after that we decided to merge with Virtual Consulting in which I am now the CEO and owner along with my husband.

2. What is your current focus now?

We’re a digital business solution. So for us is going to be about business solutions through digital channels. Its true that there are social media agencies, advertising agencies, online advertising agencies, web agencies out there, but basically we are all that combined. And we’re adding advanced technology into it. We have the ability to combine it all. So, the solutions we offer are business solutions, not just campaign solutions. Advertising talks about campaigns, social media talks about how to handle brands in social media, and PR talks from the PR point of view. We’re combining them all so it becomes a ROI-measurable business solution.

3. What are the key factors that helped you to attain success?

I believe in faith: I’m a part of that faith, and I follow that faith. I will never understand and comprehend the keys to success. But from my experience, there are some things that could be learned. First is family: It’s the root, as my family helps shaped my character. Second is environment: Working environment, friends environment etc. The current situation that I have right now is a result from a chain of luck and hardwork that I call faith.

4. What are three key tips that you would share with budding entrepreneurs?

a. Make sure we understand the business we’re about to start. We need to have the knowledge, have the skills, and understand what lies ahead.

b. Totality. Don’t start with many businesses. Instead, try to understand where your strength lies. We start with one business and we make the business “life”. Spend our life for this little child of yours.

c. We have to be clever managing finance. Especially if we talk about a growing business. A healthy cash flow is very important. Because the pulse of a business lies in cash flow. Many people think too much about spending, forgetting the cash that goes in is equally important.

5. Are there any things you wish you had known earlier, which would have helped you with your business?

My background is in traditional advertising. So when I first decided to jump into online, there’s so much to learn about the business in order to strengthen my strategic thinking. If I had online knowledge earlier, I’d have more time to explore other stuff. For example, if I knew online communication at the beginning, I could have learned more about web development and web strategies, as they are important when recommending business solutions to our clients.

I also wish I knew more about finance. As I said earlier, the root of the company is in its financial health. When we understand finance and know how to manage our money, it would be a good foundation for entrepreneurs to bring the company ahead.

6. Any future plans ahead?

To be able to well-executed a digital strategy, we have to have a good investment in technology, and that’s what we are working on now. For example, like making an investment in CRM technology.

Personal future plans, in a few years’ time I’d like to start a career as a socialpreneur. I have a clear picture of what will it be but I will only share once things become more concrete.

7. Any web applications and/or gadgets that you cannot live without?

Blackberry, iPad

8. Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs?

Zuckerberg.

For more information about them, read our full profile from last week. But I was curious to learn a little more about the origin of this idea, so I asked one of the founders, Miyauchi Takayuki, a few questions about how it all started. Update: I was delighted to meet the Sassor team at the Global Mobile Internet Conference this past week in Beijing. Great bunch of guys.

1. How did Sassor first get started?

My co-founder (Shiuchi Ishibashi) was my high school classmate and and we have shared an apartment for about seven years. About two years ago, we went to the same graduate school and at that time we thought to [create a] start up. But at the beginning we were just talking that we hoped to do something after the graduation.

About a year ago, we applied to the E-idea competition (British Council) for a trial to explore some possibilities, and that [resulted in] the prototype of Energy Literacy Platform. After that, we brushed it up to become our present service by joining with another program (Open Network Lab) and taking advice from Naoki (Yamada) and many others. We will plan to open the service to the public this summer.

2. Where does the name Sassor come from?

As for Sassor name, it’s similar to how Apple got its name. It’s from the staple of their local area. We would like to be like an Apple, so we named our company name after one of our indigenous products. Our local specialties are sashimi (raw fish) and soy sauce. So we merged it and named it “Sassor” (sashimi + soy sauce)”. We just like it (laughs).

3. ELP sort of reminds me of Trangram, a similar ‘internet of things’ project in Japan.

Trangram is the work of a another member from Ishibashi’s lab back in graduate school.

4. So what did you study in graduate school? What inspired your work in this area?

We both studied Media Design (Human Interaction Design) in graduate school. We would like to sense human activity and connect the real world to the cloud.

5. Monitoring electricity looks like it will be very important after the Japan earthquake. Is there an opportunity for Sassor to help that problem?

Yes, it’s big opportunity for us.

6. Are the ELP modules expensive?

I think the ELP module is cheaper than other smart meters. Normally it costs more than $200 per module, but ELP modules costs less than $100 for a set of five. We are currently working with a manufacturer and discussing about the product lead time.

7. So the summer launch schedule is not certain? What are your hopes for ELP one year from now?

We are aiming to introduce the product domestically this summer, but we are afraid that the introduction to overseas market will take some time after that. However we will do our best to make it available overseas market as soon as possible.

“We’re a small bunch of motivated people that are building up a site from scratch. We started in 2008 and everyone enjoys the progress we make every month. We’re not afraid of new things and that brings a lot of new ideas.”

Personally, I have learned a lot about business and life from him. So, I thought it might be a good idea to have Vita on this post to share his experience and tips to growing small businesses.

-

1. In general, what do you think is the greatest challenge for small businesses?

Running a business is pretty complex at times, the greatest challenge is to remain focused on certain things that help boost your  business significantly. Here are some examples of my key focuses:

a. Conquer part of the world from your living room and beat the big and static competitors.

b. Make friends out of your customers.

c. Keep up with the speed of change

On a side note, one of the greatest advantages that small business has over the big brother is being small. A small team makes your business quick, flexible and adaptable. And when everyone does his/her job well, the success usually comes to you somehow naturally. Don’t push it too hard. Stay alert, watch the world and catch the news coming in. Be friendly and open. And suddenly, you’re successful

-

2. What are Pixmac’s Goals?

- Become one of the TOP 6 stores with stock photos for micro prices

- Have a team of Territory Managers that build and feel the local markets

- Keep the site simple, friendly and have a great customer support

- Invest the money we make back into the product

- My personal: make the most effective and usable photo site in the world

Always remember that you need a team to achieve big goals. As for our strategy, I would like to keep it a secret.

-

3. What are your personal tips to grow a small business?

- Never stop learning new things, reading books and working hard

- Be fair and friendly to your customers, listen to them

- Search for innovations, remove features that nobody use

- Find the thing that makes your product different and love it

- Drink tea, don’t smoke and take your girl for a dinner sometime

-

4. So, more specifically, what are the key ingredients leading to Pixmac’s success?

The Team: Our team members complement each other. Michal Prynych and Martin Talavasek are coding a great engine. Lucie Navratilova is focusing on website testing and support to customers. Martin Vlcko is our search engine guru, and all that is glued together by me. Actually I’m just a glue that sticks everyone’s work together

The Satisfaction: Satisfaction doesn’t only come from results and financial rewards. It is also important to work in a happy environment, which is made up of our customers, office employees, territory managers and bloggers.  Life’s too short to focus solely on superficial things. I want to do a great job, be satisfied and keep important people close. Money is a by-product (:

Hopefully, our spirit and personality would shine out of Pixmac.

-

5. A 140 characters advice for our readers please.

Work with the right people. Don’t forget your family. Think of your time as money in your wallet and invest wisely.

-

Stock photos powered by Pixmac