Indonesian game studio Tinker Games releases its flagship game Inheritage: Boundary of Existence today for iOS. The one thing that excites me about the game – besides the fact that it has ample amount of Indonesian characteristics inside – is the game’s size, which is 400MB. I’ve seen my share of Indonesian mobile games so far, and there aren’t a lot of huge and complex games such as this coming from the country. Let’s see how the game’s features justify its size.

As the Tinker Games team describes it, Inheritage is a horizontal shoot’em up adventure game that combines Indonesian culture, anime-style artwork, and a visual novel. It’s aimed at a global gaming audience. The game includes Indonesian cities as the backgrounds for the stages, local urban stories, and traditional weapons. The team has put an Inheritage encyclopedia inside to help explain about the various Indonesian artefacts that appear inside the game.

Of course, for a game with that kind of size, Inheritage offers a few other gaming features and details inside. For example, the game is equipped with spoken dialogue in the Indonesian language (though the whole game is playable in English), and players will be able to unlock special attacks and animal partners called Rakyans. You’ll also want to check out the game’s artwork.

Tinker Games is cooperating with local developer Touchten in promoting a few of its games. Inheritage is available as a ‘lite’ version here, or you can buy the full version for $3.99 here. The game studio is offering a 50 percent discount for the game this week only.

China’s Top 10 iOS Apps

1. QQ
2. WeChat
3. Sina Weibo
4. Taobao
5. UC Mobile Browser
6. Alipay
7. QQ Spaces
8. QQ Mobile Browser
9. QQ Mobile Music
10. Kingsoft Battery Doctor

China’s Top 10 Android Apps

1. QQ
2. UC Mobile Browser
3. WeChat
4. 360 Mobile Guardian
5. Sina Weibo
6. Taobao
7. Alipay
8. QQ Mobile Browser
9. 360 Mobile Helper
10. QQ Spaces

The biggest difference between the two lists is the rather conspicuous absence of Qihoo products from the iOS list. In fact, Qihoo has four products on the Android top 20 list, but not a single Qihoo product made the top 40 on iResearch’s iOS list. Apple has a history of not being particularly fond of Qihoo’s apps, and it banned them from its App Store back in early 2012. That time, they were quickly reinstated, but they were banned again in late January of this year and are apparently under special investigation and still haven’t been re-approved months later.

It’s also worth pointing out that not a single foreign-developed app is featured on either list.

Of course, a more interesting way to measure app popularity is to monitor apps’ time usage; luckily, iResearch has a list for that too (combining both Android and iOS):

Looking at all these lists, if you had to pick a winner the pretty obvious one is Tencent, given that its products (QQ IM, QQ Browser, WeChat, etc) hold the top spot — and a bunch of other spots to boot — on every list. But since most of the apps listed offer free services, we might well call Alibaba another winner, given that its Taobao and Alipay apps exist almost exclusively to help users spend money and yet still made the top ten.

(All data via iResearch)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Source: TechCrunch)

Singapore-made food app Burpple was featured on the front page across 14 countries in Apple’s App Store in recent weeks. The 14 countries include Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Sri Lanka. We asked but the folks at Burrple didn’t even know how they got featured. But I think we all can agree that the Burpple app is beautifully crafted. So it didn’t come as much of a surprise that the App Store editors would like it. If you haven’t played with Burpple yet, you better download it here now.

This isn’t the first time Burrple got featured on the app store though. Co-founder Elisha Ong says that Burpple was featured last year on an iTunes mini-banner in the US and Europe. Though this is the first time the app was actually featured on the App Store homepage. Since the beginning of this year, Burpple has added more than 25,000 new users. The startup declined to reveal its total number of users.

Of course, downloads don’t equate to money since the app is free to use. Burrple is currently exploring how it could generate revenue first by communicating with restauranteurs. Elisha told us:

We are working closely with restaurants and merchants to develop products and services that adds real value and benefit to them. Burpple Pages is one such offering that helps them grow their online and mobile presence, giving potential customers just what they’d need to know and decide where to dine.

Just yesterday, Burpple also made a move into the web, launching a Yelp-like food search site which I think could potentially turn into a restaurant reservation service. Elisha added that Burpple is looking to “change the landscape of restauranteurs, hawkers, and business owners” but didn’t elaborate exactly how. So keep waiting and burpping, folks.

Headlines in the China chat app scene have recently been overtaken by WeChat. Only two years old, the mobile chat app has already accumulated a user-base of over 300 million users with a large majority of them in China. Understandably, WeChat is huge in terms of users, but before we think it has become the single dominant force in social/communication, it’s worthwhile to remind ourselves of the other apps that the Chinese use to connect with each other.

Leveraging TNS’s Mobile Behave (1) panel, we can measure the time smartphone users spend with any one particular app as a proportion of total time spent facing their smartphone screens. This enables us to get a handle on the relative time spent on different social/communication apps.

Looking first at Android – the top five mobile apps account for 34 percent of time spent on a smartphones. Predictably, the top five is dominated by the usual suspects such as UCWeb mobile browser (#1). However, it is followed closely by Mobile QQ and WeChat which account for nine percent and seven percent of time respectively. Sina Weibo comes in at four percent.

With iOS, users gravitate most towards Mobile QQ, which has 15 percent of the total time spent on iOS devices. This is followed by Weibo (13 percent) and WeChat (10 percent). Finally, as one would expect with Apple users, entertainment is an important aspect of their lives – in line with this, PPS (a peer to peer streaming video network) is next in the top five and accounts for three percent of users’ time.

Clearly, people spend a large proportion of their mobile device time on apps like Weibo, WeChat and Mobile QQ. Be it Android or iOS, these three apps have secured a place in the top five and together account for a substantial amount of activity on the smartphone. Connectivity in the form of enhanced instant messaging is a key need in Chinese smartphone users’ lives.

While WeChat is garnering lots of attention, it’s useful to note that both Mobile QQ and Weibo are also apps that the Chinese are using extensively to connect with one another. Not surprisingly, Mobile QQ gets more use than WeChat given that it has a longer history (it has roots as a desktop IM app before coming up with a mobile app for smartphone users). But regardless of whether WeChat or Mobile QQ leads the pack, it’s a win-win situation for Tencent, since it owns both platforms.

However, given the rapid pace at which the mobile app scene is developing, it’s anybody’s guess what the chat app scene will look like several more months down the line. Who would have known that WeChat, which only had 100 million users a year ago, would enjoy a growth trajectory that would rival the likes of Whatsapp on the international scene?

(1) TNS has actual behavioral metrics captured via an app installed on our smartphone user panels.

Singapore’s VIP membership online luxury travel site ImpulseFlyer has launched its iOS app, available to download for free on the app store now. The app looks neat, making it even easier to visit ImpulseFlyer on iOS devices. There isn’t any Android app planned since ImpulseFlyer believes that most of its members are iOS users.

ImpulseFlyer has so far signed up over 100 luxury and boutique hotels in Asia. The travel startup remains mum when asked about membership numbers and nights filled. Competitors in the region include Luxe Nomad in Singapore and Privepass in Thailand. Privepass last claimed that it has 40,000 members and is working with 150 hotels and lifestyle providers.

ImpulseFlyer was founded by Andy Croll (CTO) and Steven Gong (CEO) and its investors include Neoteny Labs and angel investor John Tan. Gong remains secretive when asked about ImpulseFlyer’s future plans. We hope something good is brewing, though.

When Google left China’s search market back in 2010, it seemed like an end to the company’s attempts to seriously engage with the China market. Yet somehow, just a few years later, Chinese people are buying phones in droves that run on Google’s Android platform. 86 percent of the new smartphones sold in China run Android. Most of China’s so-called “home grown” mobile operating systems are just Android ROMs. Even China’s MIIT feels that Android’s dominance poses a potential threat. Heck, even Google’s biggest domestic competitor Baidu has launched a mobile OS that runs on Google’s Android platform. Yet for some reason, China’s state-run media organs seem to be fixated on Apple.

The anti-Apple parade began a few weeks ago with CCTV’s annual World Consumer Rights Day show, in which it accused Apple of treating Chinese customers unfairly because of allegedly discriminatory return policies. Since then, the echoes of anti-Apple sentiment have only grown, in part because some people have hitched their wagons to that train in hopes of getting some free hype.

Yet for all the talk about “China’s war on Apple,” I think Google is the real concern. As my colleague Steven pointed out on Friday, Android’s market dominance in China means that Google essentially controls a huge chunk of China’s mobile industry; thousands of app developers and indeed entire app marketplaces revolve around the Android platform, so much so that even the Chinese developers who want to create unique mobile OSes are essentially forced to make them Android forks to ensure that users will even give them the time of day. Think about it this way: how many Xiaomi users would still be using MIUI if Android apps didn’t run on the platform?

I should state that personally, I don’t think Google really poses a threat to China, although its dominance of the mobile market certainly does take some opportunities away from Chinese companies. But if Chinese authorities are worried about the influence foreign tech companies have over the domestic market — and I imagine they are — it is surprising that there hasn’t been a stronger push towards a real home-grown mobile OS that can compete both domestically and abroad. That’s doubly true given that China’s government already knows Google is opposed to the country’s censorship polices. Google could, for example, release a new version of Android that made it easy for users to circumvent the Great Firewall. It hasn’t, of course, but if it did, the vast majority of China’s smartphone owners already own phones that could run it easily.

Personally, I think it would be great if that happened, but my guess is that China’s government doesn’t. So where is the push-back against Google, and the calls for a real home-grown mobile OS? I’m not sure.

Last week Steven argued that Firefox OS is China’s best hope at a homegrown mobile platform, so perhaps the government is waiting to see how that pans out. But I can’t help but wonder if Ji Yongqing wasn’t right when he argued that the problem lies much deeper and that China will not be able to create its own mobile OS under the current conditions. If that’s true, then China and its mobile marketplace are a little bit at the mercy of Google. It’s strange that we keep seeing headlines about how evil Apple is when in theory, Google could pose far bigger problems.

Disclaimer: I’m not trying to defend Apple here; it probably deserves the stick its getting and even if it doesn’t, I’m mad at the company anyway because yet another of its crap-quality power cords has broken on me. And, as I said earlier, I think if anything Google is likely to use its influence over China’s market for good, not evil, so I don’t think China actually has much to worry about. But since Chinese government authorities (like government authorities everywhere) seem inclined to worry about this sort of thing anyway, I thought it was worth pointing out that for all the bluster about Apple in the press, Google is the real 800 pound gorilla in the room (figuratively speaking).

Earlier today we looked at how many active Android and iOS users there are in China. In the same report where we found those stats there’s also some insightful data about the jailbreaking of Apple iPhone and iPad devices by Chinese buyers. The good news for Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is that jailbreaking – which is often, but not always, done to enable app piracy – is on the decline in the long-run.

The Umeng report explains the downturn in jailbreaking here:

5th February 2013, the iOS 6.1 jailbreak solution was announced. Before this, the percentage of jailbroken handsets in China had already dropped to 27.3 percent but it increased by five percent again to reach 32.3 percent on 16th February 2013. This rate was still 10 percent lower than that in September 2012.

So, the previous report had seen 42.4 percent of iOS devices in China jailbroken, but not even the new iOS 6.1 jailbreak could prevent the overall decline in usage over the course of the past year. But that doesn’t mean that Chinese Apple fans are renouncing piracy. The controversial and popular KuaiYong is an iTunes replacement that enables iOS app piracy without needing a jailbreak, so not all of the country’s growing ranks of Apple fans – now up to 85 million active on iOS in China – are paying up for apps. Little wonder that Chinese iOS developers are only earning an average of 3 cents (yes, US$0.03) per download.

While we’re thinking of iOS, here are the rates of jailbreaking among different versions of iOS in China:

And this shows all versions of iOS being used in China in comparison with overseas iPhone and iPad users. As this shows data from pre-iOS 6.1 jailbreak, it’s little wonder that many were sticking with iOS 5.1 in China:

If you want to see the full ‘China Mobile Internet 2012 Review’ report by Umeng, you can find the 23-page slideshow here.

Newly activated Android devices really started to rocket in numbers last summer, the report notes. Across both platforms, smartphones are now so ingrained in the lives of Chinese mobile users that mobile app sessions rose 16-fold in 2012, with a 12-fold increase in the time spent within the apps that Umeng observed.

As well as lots of interesting demographics and app trends in the infographic, it also points out that iOS jailbreaking is on the decline in the long-run – down from 42.4 percent of Apple iOS gadgets in September 2012 to just 32.3 percent a few weeks ago. Here’s the full graphic:

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

Do you guys remember the Indonesian game Icon Pop Quiz which received props from Korean singer PSY in December? Well, its developer, Alegrium, launched a sequel to its popular Icon Pop game called Icon Pop Brand earlier this month. The new game is proving so popular in Indonesia that it even knocked WeChat from the first position on the country’s iOS free app chart for a few days.

We talked with Stefan Damasena, the CEO of Alegrium, about its latest game and the studio itself. Icon Pop Brand uses similar gameplay to Icon Pop Quiz in which users have to guess the described brands using Alegrium’s catchy visual hints.

One hilarious moment I had when playing Icon Pop Quiz with my friends was discovering that Indonesian dangdut legend Rhoma Irama is featured in one of the game’s questions. Stefan explained that the team intended to insert and promote Indonesian things in the game, and he promises that there is an Indonesian brand inside the Icon Pop Brand game too.

Millions of guesses

Stefan tells us that Icon Pop Quiz has been downloaded over 14 million times, and the new Icon Pop Brand has seen over one million downloads already. The reason they built this sequel, Stefan said, is because they’ve had a lot of requests from users.

Alegrium is a self-funded startup. Besides Icon Pop titles, the developer team has built other game titles that showcase its characteristic great visuals, like Rob n Roll and Snowball Run. The team hopes to build more game titles this year, all the while maintaining its Icon Pop series.

Stefan points out that they are hiring. Anyone passionate about mobile gaming and would like to create great projects can send a CV to jobs(at)alegrium(dot)com. Vacancies include designer/illustrator, social media and content manager, programmer for web (PHP and HTML), iOS, and Android.

Icon Pop Brand is available on iOS here. And like its previous title, it should be available for Android in the future.

Line app has not just got people talking – it’s got them spending as well.

Regular readers will know that Japanese smartphone owners are great for spending money on apps. Now we have new data from AppAnnie, released this evening, that shows how the app monetization situation is developing in Japan and around the world. The report paints an interesting picture of amazing smartphone growth in Japan and Asia, along with some huge successes for Japanese social apps and games. Some world-beating achievements, in fact.

Cashing in on social

First up, AppAnnie notes that the social app category is third in terms of revenues around the world; social apps accounted for 30 percent more downloads in January 2013 compared to the previous year. Japanese app buyers are now spending nearly as much as those in the US on their iPhones and iPads:

Line app and the messaging explosion

The hit messaging app Line, made by NHN Japan, was the top social app for iOS revenue in Jansuary 2013, pipping Whatsapp to the post. With over 100 million registered users (just under half being in Japan), Line is the most downloaded social app in Japan – plus it’s the top grossing app Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand.

Line is also crowned the top non-game app in terms of monthly revenue on both iTunes and Google Play in January. It is the only Asian creation on the iOS apps list that’s dominated by American apps. Apple’s Pages app is second; Pandora Radio is third.

KakaoTalk comes out fighting against Line in the chat app battle, proving itself to be the third-best app for revenue on Android.

GungHo for gaming

As for gaming developers, Japan was once again on top. GungHo Online, with its 14 games, was the outright top publisher by revenue on iOS anywhere in the world. Its Puzzles and Dragons title was a particular hit, helping to push GungHo’s market cap to US$3.3 billion – higher than that of Zynga, or compatriot gaming rival GREE. As GungHo’s own financials point out, it made $92 million in gaming sales in January 2013 alone – a figure that’s already 30 percent of its 2012 revenue total. GungHo also sells PC games and console games, but the company recently pointed out that it’s now making more from iOS and Android.

Indeed, the report points out that Puzzles and Dragons was the top monetizing game on both iOS and Android across the globe.

Seventh on the top iOS publisher’s list is NHN (which is spread over Korea and Japan), boosted by the huge success from Line app and its social gaming platform. That’s shown with games like Line Birzzle, which rocketed to the top of iOS and Android store rankings across Asia. Let’s look at the scene on the iTunes App Store:

Asian Android domination

Even more Asian developers rocked the Android platform. GungHo was top publisher in Google Play too, with NHN popping up in second place. In fact, all but one of the leading ten publishers by revenue on Android are from Asia – it’s pretty amazing. It also shows why gaming is the best way to bring in the cash:

Other famliar names on the list include the rival social gaming platforms DeNA and GREE. Plus there’s a remarkable performance from Korea’s SundayToz team to make it into the top ten with only one game – that’s Anipang, which has been a huge hit especially on KakaoTalk’s own social gaming platform.

Anipang pops up as fourth in terms of gaming revenue on Android, just below the similar Line Pop title.

Game on for Asian developers

Ultimately, it’s a remarkable performance for Japanese and South Korean developers on both iOS and Android – breaking into social whilst also building up huge expertise in casual mobile gaming.

Japan recently passed the US to become the top country for Google Play revenue, so developers in the region can prosper among their regional audience – and break out across the globe. Well, in terms of monetizing power, if not necessarily worldwide market reach.

Specifically, Kantar says Apple hit 23.2 percent of China’s smartphone market in January, up from 18.6 percent in September 2012. But Android saw even more impressive growth, jumping from 65.2 percent of the market in September to 71.5 percent of it in January. The big losers, unsurprisingly, were everyone else. Symbian and Windows Phone both dropped (to 3.5 percent and 1.2 percent, respectively) and other OSes didn’t even register. Here’s a chart of what the market looks like now, according to Kantar:

And here’s a chart that compares the size of each company’s market share in China between September 2012 and January 2013:

Kantar’s report also says that smartphone penetration in China has reached 22 percent, so there is still an awful lot of room for position-shifting as the other four-fifths of the country begin the shift to smartphones.

(via Sina Tech, image source)

Just because Chinese consumers love your smartphones, it doesn’t mean they like your mobile ecosystem. In fact, they more than likely hate it. That’s the conclusion that can be drawn from the fact that about 42 percent of Apple iPhones and iPads in China are jailbroken, allowing users to tweak their gadgets in ways that are not sanctioned by Apple – and to install pirated apps. To serve all those iOS jailbreakers, there are plenty of Chinese sites and tools out there, ranging from iTunes alternatives to forums full of cracked iPhone and iPad apps.

Let’s take a look [1] at five popular jailbreaking sites to see what Chinese consumers are looking to get from their renegade iOS devices.

1. KuaiYong

Most controversial of all is KuaiYong, which is some sort of alternative universe iTunes app where all apps are free. Even more worryingly for Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), KuaiYong requires no jailbreak to work. The first beta launched back in June 2012, but it’s only in the last month or two that this piracy-oriented app has gained both local and international attention.

But it doesn’t stop there. As we reported a couple of weeks ago, KuaiYong is planning to expand upon its claimed five million Chinese users by launching an English-language version of its Windows app, which is still in development. With the demise of Hackulous and its Installous app for supporting cracked apps on jailbroken iOS devices, KuaiYong could yet prove even more popular.

2. iTools

If you want to jailbreak your iOS device and find a replacement for Apple’s iTunes, then the Shenzhen-made iTools is what you need. Since we looked at iTools’ range of features back in 2011, the app has added an English interface as well as a Mac app.

We often see Chinese web companies offer their iOS apps as direct ‘.ipa’ file downloads – said to be a factor in Qihoo’s ongoing apps ban by Apple – so something like iTools would be useful for Chinese consumers who prefer to avoid the iTunes ecosystem completely.

While iTools itself could help cheapskates to pirate iOS apps, the service itself isn’t geared towards that, and there’s no dodgy app store within it. Instead, the emphasis is on an alternative back-ups tool to iTunes.

iTools has some major partnerships with the likes of Tencent (China’s biggest web company), China Unicom (Apple’s primary mobile partner in the country), and state broadcaster CNTV, who all support publishing standalone ‘.ipa’ app files for iTools users.

3. Duowan

Duowan, now listed on US markets as part of parent company YY (NASDAQ:YY), used to be a veritable pirate’s bay of cracked iOS apps. But the forum-like site has tidied itself up a lot in the past year, and now most of its listings that we checked head straight to the iTunes App Store.

Although the ‘.ipa’ downloads have gone, we’re listing this here because Duowan still has a dedicated jailbreaking section on the site (here) featuring all the jailbreak resources that Chinese iOS fans could need:

4. 51IPA

51IPA, however, is a site that definitely hasn’t cleaned up its act. Packed full of both genuinely free and totally pirated apps, the site does have optional iTunes links, but the emphasis is on the direct downloads, which are usually stashed in third-party cloud storage services. In the sequenced image below, you can snag Doodle Jump HD from the links at the bottom of the page. Note how 51IPA encourages you to make use of the afore-mentioned iTools for managing your pirated apps:

5. Tongbu

Tongbu, which means “sync” in Chinese, is a forum for cracked apps that has spawned its own tool for downloading pirated apps (pictured below) called Sync Assistant. The Tongbu site has dual links for each app: the left one goes to the actual App Store, while the right-hand one (misleadingly labelled “genuine version”) is a magnet link that fires up an ‘.ipa’ download in its Sync Assistant app. Almost inevitably, Tongbu has a jailbreaking resources center too.

Though the rate of jailbreaking in China is said to be going down – from 51 percent in 2011 to 42 percent by the end of last year, it still looks like a big challenge for Apple. But let’s not forget that Chinese and international developers are the ones getting hurt, being robbed of revenue by the jailbreakers who also go on to steal games.

Apple’s rival mobile OS, Google’s Android, is seeing the same ecosystem battle in China, where consumers are loving the highly customizable Android but don’t want to be tied down to a Gmail address and the Google Play store. Instead, most Android users go to third-party Android app stores where piracy is also a big problem. Despite Apple’s much more guarded approach to iOS, and being able to implement convenient local payments for apps, it hasn’t been immune from the ecosystem snub.

(Image credit: Photoshop contains this sketch from DeviantArt)

The research firm Canalys has unveiled new data for Android shipments in Q4 2012. With Android now powering a third of all mobile phones shipped in that quarter, it’s especially notable that Android has helped China’s Huawei, ZTE (HKG:0763; SHE:000063), and Lenovo (HKG:0992) move into the top five among global smartphone makers.

Canalys tracked smartphone shipments in over 50 countries to conclude that the smartphone market grew 37 percent compared to the same time in 2011. Android is on 34 percent of all such phones around the world, with iOS on 11 percent of them.

There are actually four Chinese brands to look out for, as Canalys notes that Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo, and Coolpad (though the researchers used the “Yulong” (HKG:2369) parent company name) “all grew by triple-digit percentages.” As we noted recently, figures from Gartner have already told us that Coolpad (and Lenovo, ZTE, and Huawei) is outselling Apple’s iPhone within China. But that’s just within China. So CoolPad is mostly restricted to domestic sales, and is not in the worldwide top five.

Samsung still grew 78 percent globally according to today’s stats. Samsung was China’s top smartphone brand in 2012 as its Galaxy phone series, particularly the large-screen ones like the Note II, sold well. But Lenovo has plans to topple Samsung’s statue in China, with CEO Yang Yuanqing having recently declared that intention.

While Coolpad’s success is almost exclusively within China, its compatriot brands have successful overseas sales as well. Today’s report notes:

Huawei took third place for the first time in Q4 and ZTE fourth. As well as their home markets, they have been relatively successful in the US, where ZTE was fourth and Huawei fifth, driven by their portfolios of low-cost LTE smart phones. Even so, both vendors took less than 5 percent share each there.

Lenovo pushed out Sony to get into the top five. Here are the Q4 2012 global stats:

(Source: Canalys)

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

Across the globe, Opera reports:

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

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

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

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

With these levels of smog (this photo is from a couple weeks ago) it’s no wonder people want to know what they’re going to be breathing before they step outside.

Boy, has the government come a long way when it comes to air pollution. Just half a year ago, if you wanted to know how dangerous the air was in Beijing, your only real option was the US Embassy’s @BeijingAir twitter feed, and the Chinese government was desperately trying to stop you from reading that. Now, not only is the Beijing government publishing real-time numbers for the air’s PM2.5 (deadly particles) count, it has released a smartphone app so that users can check pollution stats while on the go.

Of course, there are already a lot of third party smartphone apps out there that are making use of Beijing’s official data and/or the data from the US Embassy’s twitter feed (here’s one, for example). But this app, which was produced by the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center (BJMEMC), is the first official smartphone app to report air quality data. It is available for both Android and iOS, and can access data from 35 different air quality testing stations around the city that report on the PM2.5 content of the air, as well as five other kinds of pollutants.

Although users can check specific stations manually, the app can also access user locations (on phones that support this feature) so that it can automatically report the air quality data from the test station nearest to the user’s position. BJMEMC says that it is aware of the other apps like this on the market, but claims its own app offers more complete and thorough local coverage thanks to the 35 different test stations it accesses.

As you can see from the screens above (from the iPhone app), it’s not the prettiest air quality monitoring application out there, but it does what it is supposed to do, and given that it’s still leaps and bounds ahead of some other official mobile app projects, I’m not inclined to be too critical about it. And having another choice when it comes to air quality apps can only be good news for consumers, so the release of this app seems like something to celebrate. Interested parties can find the iPhone version here and the Android version here (as an apk download).

(Xinhua via Sina Tech, smog image via CBS News)

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

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

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

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

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

Malaysian startup Mobile9 has been trying to solve the app discovery issue for quite a few years. Now it’s launching JazzMyApp as a dedicated and highly social way of finding new apps for iOS and Android.

The Kuala Lumpur-based team describes JazzMyApp as a Pinterest for mobile applications, and indeed the interface does borrow heavily from the popular social pinboard site. But instead of hearts, users can single out awesome apps with a “jazz”. To make it easier to add recommendations, the site uses a combination of a Facebook login and a bookmarklet for your browser, so that you can fire off a recommended app straight from an app store page or website, and JazzMyApp will post it. Other users can follow you, like your choices, and even “re-jazz” them.

Patrick Ooi, the founder of Mobile9, tells us that JazzMyApp stands out by being able to pull in some choice apps directly from top tech blogs like TheNextWeb and Mashable. Patrick explains his angle on app discovery:

I think it’s really comes down to which service can recommend the most relevant recommendation to the users. If we recommend ten apps and the user downloads five, then JazzMyApp is successful. For the first release, we’re betting on the blogs and users for the recommendations. Once we get more data, we’ll be able to crunch them and deliver better recommendations.

The top pick on the site right now is the brand-new Temple Run 2, so JazzMyApp seems to be working well as a way to highlight an amazing new app that many people wouldn’t have realised is out if they’re not regular tech blog readers.

For now, the new apps site is focusing, quite inevitably, on just Android and iOS. But Patrick says that the team has plans to support more mobile operating systems like Windows Phone and BlackBerry pretty soon. He adds that building a user-base is the objective right now: “At this stage, monetization isn’t the focus, so we’re only monetizing via ads.”

We’ve seen quite a few startups in Asia have a go at social app exploration these days, such as Japan’s Peepapp, and the Singapore-made Applorer Gamebox.

Readers may remember that I was very enthusiastic about Japanese finance application Zaim. And while I’m pretty happy with that app, I was curious to come across a Korean-made alternative called M-Story.

From Korean developer ParkPill, the iOS app boasts one interesting feature that caught my attention in particular, that being the ability to export all your data to a CSV file, which can then be used in your preferred spreadsheet program (Excel, Numbers, or Google Spreadsheets).

In comparison to Zaim, M-Story doesn’t require you to add too much information. It just asks you to specify what you bought and how much you paid for it. While M-Story has been around for a while, it recently added iCloud backup and Retina display support as well, both big pluses. There’s a lock feature to ensure your finances are kept private, which I suppose would come in handy to anyone who doesn’t implement iOS’s normal lock screen ¹.

Unlike Zaim, M-Story is a paid application for iPhone and iPad. But at just 99 cents, it still looks to be a bargain. I recommend you give it a try and let us know what you think. I’m looking forward to giving it a test run over the next few weeks.

The folks over at Japanese tech blog AppBank have created a short video demo which you can check out below. The interface here is in Japanese, but the app comes in English too.

(Images: QQ Tech)

Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Eric Schmidt dropped into the GeekPark conference in Beijing earlier today where, in a panel discussion, he reminded the assembled developers that Android is the numero uno mobile OS in China. Schmidt added that iOS is in second place in the smartphone platform battle in China – as in many nations – and he tried to dissuade devs of the notion that it’s harder to monetize on Android than on iOS.

Talking to 1,000 developers and businesspeople in the audience, Eric Schmidt focused on Android in China by highlighting the monetization possibilities for apps, and by explaining that Android will also come to be the OS of choice for more digital home products in the future. He added that Chrome, and Chrome for Android, could become China’s top web browser.

Eric Schmidt in the panel discussion this afternoon.

Although Chinese consumers do indeed love Android (and as much as 86 percent of smartphones sold in 2012 Q4 will be Android devices), the monetization issue is still a tricky one for Google in China. Google Play doesn’t support paid apps in China, and most web companies and startups still prioritize building iPhone and iPad apps. The Android landscape in China is further complicated by Chinese consumers generally not liking Google’s wider ecosystem, instead opting out of Google Play, not using Google search or Gmail, and lots of other avoided products.

As for mobile browsers, surely Chrome can never beat the wildly popular UC Browser, with over 400 million global users.

Schmidt was in neighboring North Korea for much of last week on a controversial humanitarian mission which ended with the chairman of Google calling on Kim Jong-Un’s government to embrace the web.

During his stage time today, Schmidt also noted that Google is now guiding Motorola to some new products that will emerge later this year.

(Sources: TheNextWeb and QQ Tech (article in Chinese))

As consumers rapidly move to mobile, here are the top trends that will drive mobile advertising and take centre stage in 2013:

1. Android will continue to be the “mass market” smartphone momentum

Mobile Asia Expo Shanghai: Curious about Windows Phone

Everyday over 1.3 million Android devices are being activated, with most of them priced for the “mass market.” In 2013 Android will cross an install base of one billion users. That’s a truly massive number. Windows Phone 8 launched last October amid a lot of fanfare, and there are other new platforms in the news such as BB10, Ubuntu Mobile, and Tizen. But the Android/iOS duopoly will continue given the head start these two platforms have. We will see new operating systems and platforms chip away small shares but there is nothing on the radar that will make a significant dent in the ongoing Android momentum. Over the long term, it may be a different story but this is unlikely to change in 2013.

2. Mobile advertising will get smarter

The surging app ecosystem has not gone unnoticed by marketers. Mobile internet traffic is booming across the globe and it is now clear that the mobile internet will grow far bigger than the ‘desktop internet.’ Advertisers today are now adapting their campaigns to connect with consumers. While the buzz is mostly about smartphone advertising, soon you will see marketers leveraging the broader mobile ecosystem. Internet-enabled feature phones still dominate emerging markets, and advertisers will have to invest time evaluating mobile habits and behavior patterns in order to create smarter campaigns.

3. Freemium will flourish: In-app purchases and ad-based revenue in parallel

Developers using the classic in-app purchase models to monetize are seeing that only 10 percent of their app users make paid transactions. With an increasing number of app users coming from emerging markets, this conversion rate will drop even further. While emerging markets have a high mobile penetration, the GDP per capita is much lower and credit card penetration is only in single digits. More developers will work to monetize the remaining 90 percent of their app user base by plugging into telco billing for micro-transactions, or use powerful mobile advertising solutions. 2013 will see such premium apps come into the mobile advertising foray and advertisers will benefit from being able to target the premium audience of these apps and games.

4. Mobile ad ecosystem further fragments, with new players, new models, new forms of mobile advertising

We are already noticing traditional online advertising networks trying to extend their footprint to mobile. As mobile platforms become a part of mainstream media, this trend is likely to continue. At the same time, network operators who missed the mobile advertising bus are still looking to get back into the game and cash in on opportunities, especially in emerging markets. We have seen Singtel making such moves last year. In 2013, we will see more action and partnerships as companies dive further into the rapidly growing mobile advertising industry.

New business models and forms of mobile advertising will become popular. Tablets will start contributing significant inventory to the overall mix and new engaging formats will emerge. Overall, display advertising on mobile will grow exponentially as a result!

5. Consumers’ mobile lifestyle will allow brands to converge advertising, distribution, and transactions!

Starbucks is one brand that is trying to leverage mobile to reach more customers, especially in China. Above is a Startbucks e-Christmas card on the Jiepang platform.

Mobile is fundamentally altering consumers’ lifestyle today, changing how we live, work, and play. Over the past few years brands have tried to integrate mobile as part of their overall media mix. In 2013 they will have the opportunity to take it to the next level, leveraging mobile for all the four Ps of marketing! Marketers are now realizing that mobile means ‘place-shifting’ purchases, i.e. purchase decisions are not happening at a physical store but in the hands of the mobile consumer. Combined with micro transaction capabilities of mobile, m-coupons can alter the pricing paradigm with hyper-segmented offers! As more and more consumers use their devices for making purchasing decisions they previously made offline, the lines between advertising, distribution, and transaction will blur.

6. Video on mobile will explode

The latest trend in online video is the rise in mobile viewership. As consumers get used to watching more and more videos on their devices, publishers will significantly increase the distribution of video content on mobile. This will also present a unique opportunity to brands to leverage the mobile platform for video advertising. Given the popularity of video ads online, mobile video advertising will become widely accepted in 2013 as advertisers realize the benefits of targeting consumers on the go.

7. Mobile performance marketing will go mainstream

Much of the work in mobile advertising has been focused on rich media formats and app creation. However, as mobile advertising now begins to go mainstream, the focus will also shift towards performance. Mobile, like all digital media, is highly measurable, and advertisers will be looking for response/outcome focused campaigns such as leads, acquisition, or any other definitive actions that enhance the ROI of the marketing budgets.

Thailand-based game studio Pocket Playlab has recently released a fun puzzle game for iPhone called Lost Cubes. The folks over at Kotaku rightfully points out that the title is pretty much a clone of Flow Free, in that you have to connect multiple cube pairs on a grid without connecting lines crossing one another. So if you like that puzzle game, you’ll be sure to like this as well.

I’ve been giving it a light trial run over the past couple of days, and Lost Cubes is a fun casual title. At times it’s a little bit too casual, as the early stages are pretty easy. But eventually the puzzles get a little bit trickier, and require a little bit of creative thinking in order to solve them.

The level select is in the style of Angry Birds, as is the scoring system which awards you one, two, or three stars based on your point total for that round. And while the folks at Pocket Playlab aren’t going to win any points for originality in game design, the artwork for Lost Cubes is pretty solid as you can see the from trailer and screenshots below.

I understand that Lost Cubes is the studio’s initial effort at creating a first party title. It has previously worked on third party games, and you can browse its portfolio here.

The game is free to play, but is supported by ads. Pocket Playlab boasts that in the first 24 hours after its release that more than a million levels were played on Lost Cubes. It’s doing respectably well in the US app store, ranked fourth in the family category and fifth among puzzle games.

If you’d like to check it out for yourself, you can download it now over on the app store.

Well, I guess it was only a matter of time before this happened. Korean pop star PSY has been a phenomenon over the past year for his infectious Gangnam Style hit song, but now he’s getting the eight-bit treatment in a new iPhone game called Gangnam Style City.

The game is a side-scrolling platformer where you assume the role of the Korean rapper as he horse-dances across city rooftops. I’m not sure how exactly the game developer would account for PSY’s sudden interest in Parkour, but there it is. It’s a very simple but fun game where PSY has to collect coins and items, and avoid falling into gaps between buildings. He can also get items like bikes, cars, and planes to drive in too – although admittedly that’s not nearly as fun as horse dancing.

In addition to the retro graphics, the game comes complete with an ‘eight-bit’ version of the Gangnam Style song too which plays in the background ¹.

The new mobile title is available for free over on the app store for a limited time. I do recommend giving it a try, although if the price goes up to more than a buck or two, I’d take a pass on it. Gangnam Style City was just released over the weekend by Argentinian developer Voon, and it’s currently ranked in the top ten in the music category in 17 countries, including Italy and France (number one), as well as South Korea (at number three).

Things were a little slow getting back into gear after the holiday break, but there was still some interesting tech news happening over the past week. And when there wasn’t we took a moment to reflect back on the past year, and looked ahead to what the new year holds for tech in Asia. With that in mind, here are our favorite stories from the past week.

Enricko’s pick: Chinese Startup Enables iOS App Piracy Without a Jailbreak

This week saw China’s KuaiYong making headlines on a lot of tech sites, including ours. The founder is ballsy for not only operating an illegal business, but also for letting the world (including Apple’s lawyers) know exactly who is running the company.

Minh’s pick: Study: Actually Only About 20,000 Twitter Users in China [INFOGRAPHIC]

I chose this article for two reasons: I love Twitter, and I love statistics. It’s also cool to note that while Sina Weibo is still dominant in China, that at least a few mainland Chinese are managing to log on to Twitter since it got blocked in 2009. China’s Great Firewall is not to be messed with.

Rick’s Pick: Apple’s Annual Lucky Bag Sale Delivers for Japanese Fanboys

Apple’s annual grab bag sale in Japan is always fun to watch. And unfortunately most of us have no choice but to watch, because if you want to take advantage of the sale you need to line up the day before. But as we saw this year, some lucky shoppers walked away with far more than they actually paid for!

Steven’s pick: China’s Biggest Tech Trend of 2013 Will Be ‘The Wall’

Using the internet in China can often feel like banging one’s head against a brick wall, so I enjoyed this post from my colleague, Charlie. His post is not just referring to the notorious and censorious Great Firewall, but to a whole range of regulatory and regional geopolitical issues that will make the Chinese internet – and, indeed, China as a whole – even more isolated in this new year.

Willis’ pick: Vietnamese Tech News Sites, Give Us More Vietnam and Less Silicon Valley

Minh wrote a very bold post to highlight the ugly truth about the Vietnamese press. In fact, this applies not just to Vietnam, but I think most major media sites in Asia aren’t writing much about their own startup ecosystems. This also explains why blogs like TechinAsia.com exist.

Charlie’s pick: Tmall Now Lets US Food Companies Ship Directly to Chinese Consumers

Food safety is a big issue in China, and imported (safe) foods are becoming big business. Expect to see a lot more of this sort of thing if the government doesn’t get involved to some degree.

As the new year is almost upon us, most of us are likely pondering some resolutions for 2013. For those of you looking to quit smoking this year, there’s a new application from Singapore-based Bitsmedia which could help you meet that challenge.

Its new app Quit Pro takes an analytical approach to kicking your habit, by recording not only when you smoke, but also where you smoked, as well as the feelings or events that brought on the craving (see screenshots below). There are options for quitting gradually, as well as cold turkey [1], so you can customize it to whichever looks achievable for you.

You can also track the length of time that you have managed to stay quit, and also the amount of money you’ve saved, and how it has affected your life expectancy. There’s an aspect of encouragement too, as the app comes with 200 motivational quotes from different health organizations.

I’m a big fan of these life-quantifying apps [2], and Quit Pro comes with some fun graphical features that help you track your habit.

Some of you may remember Bitsmedia as the same app developer behind the very popular Muslim Pro app, which we mentioned a few times last year. After a brief stint at Google, founder Erwan Macé has decided to refocus on his app development. Muslim Pro has over three million downloads on iOS and Android to date, and he says it is generating “decent revenues.” He says that his approach to development is very lean, as it’s mostly himself working as a one-man indie developer with some help from freelancers on occasion.

Erwan notes that he quit smoking 10 years ago using a similar Symbian application, and he thought that the same process could work for others. But with new tracking features, he says that Quit Pro is something entirely new.

Like Muslim Pro, Quit Pro is a freemium app that offers some additional content if you choose to upgrade. Admirably, Erwan is putting five percent back towards cancer research, and so if you’re looking for a reason to choose this over other smoking apps, I think that’s as good a reason as any. You can get it for free over on the app store.

Korean-made chat app KakaoTalk is keeping quite busy this Christmas holiday, introducing two new features on its app: a carrier billing partnership with Indonesian telco Telkomsel and Christmas-themed digital items for iOS and Android. KakaoTalk’s global business development VP Yujin Sohn commented on the importance of the Telkomsel partnership:

Indonesia is one of our key markets and it has a huge potential. Now with the collaboration with the biggest telco in the country, I believe it will not only help our users to feel more convenient when they enjoy KakaoTalk but also help us create a new digital economy on our platform.

The Telkomsel’s carrier billing partnership applies for KakaoTalk’s iOS and Android users in the country. Those users can now purchase digital items such as stickers, emoticons, and themes with their Telkomsel phone credits.

The chat app plans to add more localized premium digital content by working with more Indonesian artists in the near future. We already know that KakaoTalk is working together with Indonesian artist Vidi Aldiano for its Plus Friend feature. The company has also just set up its Indonesian Twitter account @KakaoTalkINA last week to better cater to local users.

This is not the first cooperation KakaoTalk has set up with Telkomsel; other examples are KakaoTalk’s being part of BBM-like package deals for third party chat apps – the Telkomsel’s Opera Mini package and the Chat and Share package. KakaoTalk is also included in another Indonesian telco Axis’ Gaul package.

HO HO HO Merry Christmas

While the aforementioned Christmas-themed digital items can be accessed for free on iOS and Android, the same cannot be said for the Windows Phone and Blackberry platforms. Not only can the two platforms not send the Christmas digital items, they also cannot receive any. When a friend of mine tried sending a Christmas sticker to my Windows Phone handset, it said “this type of message is not supported.”

The company believes that the Christmas-themed digital items will be able to merry up the bulk of holiday greeting messages sent during the Christmas and New Year’s Eve holidays. KakaoTalk also released a Christmas sound emoticon (pictured above, left), which the company calls the first product of its kind in the hot chat app scene.

Anyway, merry Christmas guys!

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

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

1. Informative

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

2. Suggestion of routes and transportation

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

3. Offline maps

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

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

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

Screen shots of Street Directory app

The folks over at Cooliris have been pretty busy of late, recently pushing a new update for its iOS app with support for new services like Google Drive, Picasa/Google+, and Flickr. And today the California-based company has more news, as Chinese versions of its iPad and iPhone photo viewing app are now available in Apple’s app store.

Cooliris is also announcing that its app will also be integrated with local social network Renren (NYSE:RENN) in China, which had about 45 million monthly active users as of this past summer. The other integrated services are still predominantly foreign, with Instagram, Flickr, and Google Drive and Picasa [1]. So I would hope that Cooliris is planning to bring in more services that locals care about, like Sina Weibo, or even Instagram clone Tuding. A Cooliris representative says that they are working on more sources, but they cannot disclose anything just yet.

Cooliris’s CEO Soujanya Bhumkar noted in the announcement that they’re happy to be launching their first international version of Cooliris in China, as it’s a pretty big smartphone market. As we saw over the weekend, there’s certainly more than a little demand for Apple’s iPhone, with over two million iPhone 5s [2] selling this past weekend after the handset finally launched in China.

Docomo Capital is an investor in Cooliris, so it will be interesting to see if Japan will be the next country to get a localized app.

NHN’s Japan has officially brought it’s Line Play virtual world application out of beta, and is now officially launching. The service reportedly has over a million users already as it comes out of the gate, which gives it a decent userbase to start. The Line Play app can be downloaded for both iOS and Android, but so far it’s only available in Japan only.

From what I can tell, it’s pretty much an Ameba Pigg rip-off, with the same cute characters, the same sort of virtual environments, and room decoration (see the video promo below video has been removed). In contrast, Ameba Pigg (from CyberAgent) has over 13 million users [1]. CyberAgent is making a big push to move many of those users onto smartphones, so the two companies are going to be fighting over some of the same users for sure.

Line Play first became available in beta about a month ago, and since then the reception looks ok, with Line claiming a million users, as mentioned above. But when we think about Line and its super-effective distribution channel over its chat app, a million users may not be all that impressive. For example, the Line Birzzle game had two million downloads on its first day back in July, and more recently Line Pop reached 10 million downloads in only 12 days.

It’s interesting to watch Line push out such a diverse range of mobile services and apps. I’m not sure how long NHN Japan can keep it up, but it’s certainly forcing other companies in the country to up their game. [Via Japan.Internet.com]

With Vietnam having more than 130 million mobiles in a country of 90 million and growth projected at five percent year-on-year, what’s the mobile OS breakdown? When you look at the stats from Ericsson’s Mobility Report a few months back, Vietnam seems to be a bit of an anomaly in the region. Android and iOS are equally faced off in terms of market share, but Symbian still rules. Most of the folks you see on the street are carrying the usual durable Nokia phones.

I think this is odd when you consider Nokia’s steady decline since the rise of more modern smartphone platforms, but the predominance of Symbian makes sense in a country that is still mostly rural and still developing its own internet culture. More than 60 percent of the population is outside of the cities, after all. Nokia has recognized this and started plans to build its first factory in Vietnam. But this might be too late without a powerful and attractive smartphone OS of its own. Nokia is far from having a modern ecosystem that facilitates app markets. That’s essentially what has made Android and iOS phones so appealing to consumers around the world – and increasingly in Vietnam too.

Android and iOS are head-to-head at 21 percent each in the overall mobile OS share. This will most likely trend in the direction of Android as its phones are getting cheaper, more powerful, and more accessible. Every major electronics store in Vietnam carries Android phones. iPhones, on the other hand, are found mainly in official Apple resellers and are always pricey. Although older models like the iPhone 3GS and 4 are getting cheaper, products like the iPhone 5 are expensive to the point of being inaccessible to the vast majority of people. For Apple fans, new is more appealing than old. Why would I buy an old iPhone if I can get a new Android-powered Samsung for the same price or less? In Vietnam, the iPhone5 so far has been a loser.

With Blackberry OS at six percent and the new Windows Phone at two percent, their impact won’t be felt until late 2013, by which time RIM will have BB10 ready to roll. Both RIM and Microsoft are intent on cultivating a huge app ecosystem for their platforms but I’m still waiting to see if they can actually execute. Early 2013 will clearly be a battle between Symbian, iOS, and Android. A battle that, like in China, Android is bound to win.

There have been lots of great applications to emerge from Japan over the past year. And while I can’t claim to have that many of them, I have tried quite a few. I thought I’d share five of my favorites for iOS [1], though I’d be very curious to hear which ones you liked as well. Of course, I won’t go so far as to say these are the best, but I certainly got lots of use and enjoyment from them in the past year.

5. Ninja Farm

I’m really not sure why I enjoyed this game so much. I usually despise farming games. But like most people, I do have a soft spot for ninjas ever since Shinobi on the Sega Master System. The idea of planting and harvesting ninjas is a thoroughly ridiculous idea, but somehow the process of leveling up your army and taking them into battle against increasingly difficult enemies made for a game that I didn’t want to stop playing (see my original article here).

The title was made by the CyberAgent’s Gamewave, and if you’d like to check it out, you can find it in the app store.

4. Line Camera

I confess, this isn’t an application that I use a lot, but I am impressed with the photo decoration functions – perhaps more than any other ‘photo-deco’ app I’ve seen to date. Line Camera got off to a scorching start this past summer, as NHN Japan boasted that it reached the 10 million user mark three times faster than Instagram did. It now claims over 17 million users in 210 countries around the world.

In retrospect, looking at the success of the other apps that NHN Japan has distributed via its chat platform, that’s probably not entirely due to the merits of the app alone. But I still think it’s pretty sharp. Check it out over on the app store.

As with many other successful applications, Line Camera has seen imitators spring up as well, most notably (and perhaps shamefully) this crappy Chinese rip-off which has since been renamed.

3. Rage of Bahamut

Perhaps the most successful app or game to come out of Japan in the past year is Cygame’s Rage of Bahamut on DeNA’s Mobage platform. The card battle title has enjoyed huge popularity not just at home but abroad as well, proving that there is some potential for card battle games outside Japan. The game has ranked high on top grossing charts (particularly on Android) and DeNA recently bought a 20 percent stake in Cygames, showing just how much confidence it has in the game publisher.

If you haven’t yet tried it, check it out now on the app store. It’s also available on Google Play for those of you rocking Android.

2. Zaim

This personal finance app is still in the growing stages, but it’s still one of the few apps that I use on a daily basis (see my previous article on Zaim here). You can input your expenses in your preferred currency and according to a range of categories, and pace yourself according to a pre-set monthly budget in each category. Zaim recently pushed its version 2.0 which added support for different types of payment like wallet, credit card, or Pasmo card.

Ideally I’d like to see some sort of data export function in the future for Zaim, although now that I think about it, that sort of thing might be a possibility for a premium version in the future.

Readers may recall that Cookpad recently invested in Zaim to the tune of $512,000, and web and PC versions of Zaim are on the way. You can get Zaim from the app store and give it a try.

1. Battle Cats

I discovered this game just a month back, but I haven’t really put it down for very long since then. It’s a fun tower defense game which pits you and an army of cats against an assortment of enemies. One of the coolest things about Battle Cats is its sense of humor, which rather than getting lost in translation, is actually enhanced in an All-your-base manner, as you can see below from the enemy descriptions. Overall, this game hasn’t been very popular, but I still enjoy the hell out of it, and it’s always making me laugh.

I tried to reach the game’s developer Ponos, in the hopes of interviewing someone at company about Battle Cats – but regretably, they appear less adept at marketing than game development.

If you’d like to try it out, you can get it over in the app store for iPhone or iPad.

KakaoTalk now has a team of 280 people, an increase from a team of 14 just three years ago. Its 70 million users spend an average of 302 minutes on KakaoTalk, a huge increase compared to back in July, when it was just 175 minutes. This surge might have been caused by the chat app’s new hit gaming platform which was launched in July.

There are 27 million daily unique visitors in its apps, sending 4.2 billion messages every day. It is interesting to note that according to AppAnnie, KakaoTalk’s position in Japan’s iOS free app section has jumped 102 spots to number five recently. That’s Line’s territory, of course, so it will be very interesting to see how it fares there. Check out Kakao’s infographic below:

Click to see it a bit bigger.

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

In browsing the top app charts for Japan, I stumbled across an unusual application called ‘Big or Small.’ Currently the eighth most popular free app, it’s is a quiz game which tests your ability to guess whether a ladies… um… assets are… well, big or small — just by looking at their face. So in the interests of science, I took the app for a test run.

The application features photos of over 400 women, grouped into different categories like celebrity, cosplay, gyaru, and others. I have no idea how the application’s publisher collected these photos, but I’m willing to bet that most of these girls didn’t sign up for this. There isn’t any nudity involved here, but be warned that some of the banner ads are a little risqué.

In any case, my brief experience with the app didn’t do much but prove that I’m really not very good at this type of classification exercise (scoring only 5/10 correct, see below) — although it isn’t for lack of paying attention back during my school days.

I’m not certain that such an app will have a very long life in the app store, so if you’d like to test it out, download it while you can (note: it’s in Japanese). The idea of such a game will likely be offensive to many outside Japan I expect. But I’ll leave that to you to decide. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Indonesian game developer Nightspade together with candy brand Chupa Chups launched an iOS game called Give a Dam back in November. This kind of partnership with an internationally recognized brand does not happen too often among Indonesian game developers. We spoke with Hasna Tsaniya Rananti (aka Nia) of Nightspade, as well as Dillah Zakbah, the product manager of advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), the advertising partner of the Chupa Chups brand, about this latest partnership.

We briefly mentioned Give a Dam and its gameplay back when we wrote about the Jakarta Game Show. Players need to stack various characters and make sure they don’t fall off into the waterfall. Nightspade used similar game mechanics in its previous game Stack the Stuff.

Nia told us that the team first met a representative from social game publisher Chuck Studios [1] and BBH during a networking session at our Startup Asia Singapore event earlier this year. They both continued the discussion back in Indonesia, which resulted in an agreement to build a game for Chupa Chups.

Dillah explained that one of the reasons Chupa Chups decided to build games is to capitalize on the immense opportunity in the mobile industry, as more and more people are actively engaged with their phones. It’s sort of a spin-off of social marketing that could be called social gaming marketing. She adds:

We also have a huge fanbase of youth in the social media stream that we would like to leverage on and engage with – more than just through the standard Chupa Chups’ lollipop. Our first game published – Chupa Chucker – was on the Facebook platform, so it would be nice to test out and explore mobile as well.

The target market for Give a Dam is people who enjoy Chupa Chups who also play games on their mobile phones. Dillah said that with this game, they hope to reach markets and groups that the company doesn’t necessarily connect with via traditional media. But of course, she added that the main aim is to treat Chupa Chups’ customers and supporters to a whole lot of fun.

Nia said that there hasn’t been any discussions to port the game to other platforms – not even Android. You can download and play Give a Dam for free from the app store.

We recently wrote about Mr. Ninja, a fun iPhone game from Japanese developer Ponos. That game was fun for casual play, and for the first time really put Ponus on our radar as a developer to watch. And over the past couple of days I’ve taken a closer look at some of their games, most notably Battle Cats, which was released for iPhone and iPad just over a week ago.

The title is a tower defense game, which might initially turn you off with its bad English text and weird backstory intro. But if you can get past that minor flaw, you’ll be rewarded. You take your cat army into battle against the enemy, defending your own tower and trying to destroy theirs. You have different cats with different abilities that you can send into battle, as well as a canon mounted on your castle which you can fire at enemies when it is recharged.

Overall, I really like the game mechanics of Battle Cats. I’m a big fan of tower defense games in general, but this one sort of reminds me of Age of Empires – or dare I say chess – in how you can put stronger defensive cats up front and try to follow up with more offensive cats from the back. Tempo also comes into play as you can time your attacks to coincide with lapses in the enemies attacking wave.

Each round of the game takes place in a different region of Japan, so if you can’t beat one round, you can back track and re-do an earlier round to earn XP and upgrade your army. Alternatively, you can pay to continue or buy more energy so you don’t have to wait to play more rounds. The in-app purchases are smartly implemented, and so far they haven’t crippled the game for me in any way [1].

Battle Cats is currently doing well in the ‘strategy’ and ‘simulation’ categories in the Japanese app store, but it hasn’t really made an impact anywhere else yet. I know it’s still early in the lifespan of this game, but I think that with some polishing, this game could have some serious potential to be a global hit. It’s the most fun I’ve had on an iPad since Infinity Blade. Battle Cats fits right in that category of ‘cute/wacky Japan’ that follows in the bizarre tradition of Nyan Cat, and the characters are just as marketable as those in Angry Birds [2].

Give it a try and let me know what you think. You can download it for free over in the App Store. Selfish update: If you want to kickstart your game with an invite code, mine is yg2t0!

invoking the god cat, similar to Angry Birds’ Mighty Eagle

A few weeks back we told you about Japan-based Bitcellar, whose FxCamera for Android had past the impressive milestone of 20 million downloads. At that point we also learned that the company had an iPhone version in the works, and now finally it has been released in the App Store. The Android version originally launched back in mid 2009, so the iOS version has been a long time coming.

Interestingly, the iOS version includes what appears to be a new function. There’s now a ‘voice picture’ feature that allows you to slide and hold the shutter button in order to record video. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what format the resultant pictures take, since there currently appears to be a bug that does not allow these sound photos to be shared. The company says it has almost finished a fix for this, so hopefully you can try it out soon [1].

Coincidentally, yesterday we featured another photo application from Japan for iOS called Voice Pic which performs the same kind of function.

FxCamera’s other functions are similar to those of its Android cousin, with including ‘Toycam,’ ‘Fisheye,’ and ‘Symmetric’ shooting modes.

If you’d like to give it a try for yourself, you can download new FxCamera for iPhone over on the App Store. And if you haven’t yet tried the Android version, it’s still available over on Google Play.

Indonesia’s biggest forum, Kaskus, just celebrated its 13th anniversary yesterday in Jakarta. At that event, the team shared some recent figures about its business and unveiled a trio of newly-developed Kaskus apps.

Kompas cites Ken Dean Lawadinata, the CEO of Kaskus, as saying that the company is looking to focus more on its payment system, KasPay. At the moment, Kaskus has partnered with three banks — BCA, Mandiri, and Permata — from which people can top-up their KasPay. Ken is looking to partner with more Indonesian banks in the future.

As for Kaskus’ latest business numbers, Ken shared that they now have around five million registered members with 22 million monthly visitors. On the e-commerce side, its C2C marketplace’s transaction value reaches up to $60 million (IDR 575 billion) every month. He added that Kaskus has 100 percent user growth every year, and the team projects that the total membership could reach 40 million next year.

Kaskus, however, is notorious for being overloaded by the volume of its users, so Ken assured that they routinely add more servers every year to try solve this issue. He explains that they have only reached 60 percent server capacity with the current user base.

Kaskus founder Andrew Darwis, alongside game studio Agate Studio, the biggest Indonesian photographer forum Fotografer.net, and 14 other young creative were given awards by the minister of tourism and creative economy to acknowledge their impact in the Indonesian creative sector.

DailySocial points out that during the anniversary, Kaskus also unveiled its new apps for iOS, Android, and Blackberry. The apps offer a new UI of the forum which is deemed better by users, according to the comments so far. Some of them still comment on how the apps’ loading time can be made faster, and about how the app can only be used in portrait orientation and not in landscape. All in all, the new apps are a better version compared to the last one.

[Sources: Kompas and DailySocial]

Travelog is developed by the four-person team at Korea-based startup CultStory. Prior to the development of Travelog, there was already a Korean version (translated as Travel Diary) launched specifically for the Korean domestic market in March 2011. However, the team decided to widen its scope to the global market with updated and improved functions, and officially launched an English Travelog for iOS in May of this year.

Founder Jepil Yun explained to us that during a trip to New York, he missed several beautiful attractions nearby where he was visiting, and this could have been avoided if he had a tool that could give him location-based information on-the-go. And so they came up with Travelog.

Registration can be done via social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, or you can opt for an email registration. Travelers can then upload their personal notes, recommendations, and photos on their personal log, which becomes like a trip diary. Travelog also offers seven types of photo filters which can be applied to photos prior to uploading.

While logging trips, the Travelog app has a Foursquare-like check-in function whereby locations are mapped and pinned, with the relevant country flag displayed. However, it only allows users to check-in from their current, exact location. This would mean that in order to log your travels when you are overseas, GPS must be enabled at that point.

Travelog also allows users to discover other travelogs within the app, from all over the world. Users can browse through recent feeds by city, or they can follow a specific traveler. In addition, travelogs are not only limited to in-app viewing. Upon registration, each user will be allocated a specific URL that can be entered and viewed in the browser, a page sort of like a photo blog.

Although there are several big competitors like TripColour and Gogobot – or more general social services like Path and Instagram – Jepil Yun says that the main, unique point of Travelog is that it focuses on documenting your travel experiences while also giving you useful information. The startup will be introducing new features such as travel recommendations and the creation of photobooks and slideshows from your Travelogs.

If you’d like to give it a try, you can get Travelog for free in the app store.

We’ve written about a lot about creative photo applications coming out of Japan. There has been Line Camera, which has some crazy decorative functions, as well as the more recent Manga Camera which lets you turn your photos into a manga-style comic picture. But another photo application got some attention last week at the Techcrunch Tokyo 2012 event, walking away with the ‘Mashup Award.’

UIEvolution’s ‘Voicepic’ app for iPhone brings the element of sound into your photos, letting you add a brief voice comment, or record and attach ambient sound from where the picture was taken. I’ve been a fan of services like Soundslides for a while, so I was excited to learn more about Voicepic’s recent developments, even though it has been around for a while now. Even though you’re just adding audio to one image, this is a pretty great solution for when you find a scene that sounds just as good as it looks. An idling motorcycle, a barking dog — there are lots of fun possibilities here. Here’s one below of a baby laughing. Just press the play button to hear the voice element.

The service could be potentially popular in emerging markets where data speeds aren’t up to par, making video transfers difficult. We recently wrote about California-based Vuclip, and how it are focusing on emerging markets as a target audience for its compressed video product. Voicepic’s director, Manabu Shimobe, tells me that his company is also planning to push Voicepic in similar markets, and I think this is a wise move. I’m told that an Android version is in the works, and that will certainly help make Voicepic more accessible for those with budget handsets. But so far there’s no word on when this version might be released.

But how can a service like this make any money? Manabu explains that there are a number of ways that they could do this. One is by holding sponsored events in the application, asking users to create Voice pics around certain themes. So for example, a noodle company could sponsor the theme of people eating/slurping noodles, and the resulting media could then be shared on social networks.

Other potential monetization strategies include in-app purchases like image and voice filters, or the possibility of selling their solution to with a customized user interface to entertainment companies looking for a creative way to present their content.

So what’s in store for Voicepic in the near future? Manabu adds that they are planning to add login support for Sina Weibo, which will make access to the China market a lot easier for them. The company also plans to continue work on its picture format, as Manabu explains:

We’re planning to embed audio data within jpeg’s application data segment and make the specification publicly available to spread the jpeg+audio format (aka Voicepic format).

I was impressed to see that Voicepics can be embedded and shared on the web, and they can even be played on Facebook after they are shared. But because they depend on Flash right now, that creates some problems for mobile — although they are hoping to rectify this in the coming weeks so that Voicepics can be played on both desktop and mobile. So stay tuned for that.

To learn more about Voicepic, check out the demo video below. Or if you’d like to take it for a test run, go get it in the app store.

China has, at present, 390 million mobile internet users among its billion-strong phone subscribers. And now new data for 2012 Q3 from Beijing-based mobile analytics startup Umeng claims that, among all those mobile users, Chinese consumers have snapped up just over 200 million iPhones and Android smartphones. Of those, 60 million are iPhones, and 140 million of them are Android-powered devices.

The researchers reckon that 200 million figure has rocketed up from a mere 87 million iOS and Android phones in China in 2012 Q1. Though these stats are not based on sales figures, it’s good to have a reasonable sounding figure for only Apple’s and Google’s mobile OSes as they ascend to replace the outdated Symbian and JAVA-based touchscreens. Here’s the key graph for the Q2-to-Q3 explosion in just iPhones and Androids:

That stellar growth is sort of backed up by Canalys’ recent finding that smartphone sales were up 199 percent in China this year, with 42 million shipped in the country in Q2 alone. Of course, that stat doesn’t fully satisfy the larger leap that the Umeng stats claim, and it’s worth noting that the data is based on observed usage of certain apps on Umeng’s network, not of shipped/sold phones.

Of all those shipping smartphones in China, the top four were all predominantly makers of Android phones, and the fifth in the line-up was Apple itself, so it’s clear iOS and Android are seeing insane growth. This is proving to be the dawn of a heyday for Chinese-brand smartphone makers like Lenovo and Huawei.

China’s smartphone market is far from sated, with still hundreds of millions of people ripe for upgrading to smartphones as wages rise and the prices of (some) devices drop. That’s a major force behind Android’s growth as it now dominates in China.

[Source: Umeng’s 2012 Q3 report - article in Chinese; Background photo in main image from creativityinspiresme.wordpress.com]

Have you ever needed some quick advice on choosing the colour of your shirt for a formal event, or where the nearest cafe with wifi is located? Gabble, a free app that provides users real-time question and answers (Q&A) on-the-go, might be the solution for you.

Gabble is a Taiwan-based startup which officially launched its service in mid-July of this year. And the startup team of four is still working hard to better improve the app’s features and user interface.

CEO and founder, Kenzou Yeh, says that the idea behind Gabble was all due to his frustrating experience with Siri, the iPhone’s personal assistant. Instead of having a machine to answer our queries, why not create an iPhone app where we can push questions to our friends’ devices and have them answered almost instantly? He added:

After [coming up with the idea], I also took around two months to survey the market and look at the current Q&A services as well. In February, I decided to build it up, having faith in a big vision.

Currently, Gabble might not be as sophisticated or as famous as similar apps like Thumb, but it is seems to be off to a good start. Kenzou brought up names like Quora and Yahoo! Answers as their main competitors, however in comparison, Gabble focuses solely on mobile and leverages on the benefits of a smartphone’s mobility and location-based services.

Currently, users are only able to register on Gabble via Facebook, which might be a turn-off to some potential users who prefers to keep their Facebook account out of bounds to external service providers. UPDATE on Nov 23rd: In addition to having a Facebook log-in, users will also be able to log-in via Twitter and Foursquare in the upcoming app update. For registered users who don’t have friends on Gabble, there’s also a cute ‘sidekick’ that will provide suggestions to your queries. My sidekick, Monny, might be a tad bit too slow as it has been three hours since my question was posted and she has yet to speak to me.

In addition to having questions sent to your friends on Gabble, you can also opt to send them to users within your proximity.

However, there are some downsides which I’ve noticed while exploring the app. Besides my sidekick not helping me for three hours, there seems to be no option for users to delete or edit a previously posted message. User profiles also have little room for customization, and the app will only be useful if there are many people within your proximity or if Facebook friends are using it. Otherwise, it will just be a ghost town. Hopefully with greater exposure, the app might be able to gain some traction.

The team behind Gabble is also planning to introduce new features such as recommending questions to friends and enabling answers with videos instead of only text. They are also looking into using Facebook to gather more questions on Gabble. UPDATE on Nov 23rd: An Android version will be developed after the release of the next Gabble update.

Gabble is currently available for iOS over on the app store.

Korea’s Kakao recently claimed that its the first company to successfully merge a messaging service and social games. NHN Japan might take exception to that claim, as its game platform launched just before Kakao’s — but it all depends on how you define success.

Its Line Birzzle has been doing well, and the company just launched a new lineup of four games, one of which – Line Pop – has surpassed 3 million downloads in just 24 hours.

Given that Line now has a user base over 75 million both in Japan and around the world (mostly here in Asia so far), it is effectively using that platform to cross promote its own games in prime real estate in its main chat app.

From App Annie: top 5 free. iOS

Currently in Japan’s iOS app store, Line Pop, Line Patapoko Animal, and Line Cartoon Wars (my personal favorite) are in 1st, 2nd, and 4th place respectively. Not too shabby. Over on Google Play, Line Pop sits in 10th spot. We haven’t seen this sort of domination since, well, since yesterday — when we looked at Kakao’s dominance of the Korean app store!

Ironically, since I’ve started writing this post, I have also heard DeNA’s Comm app advertised on TV (here in Tokyo) at least three times. I expect that it will also be a service to be reckoned with in the future as well. Comm is a little late to the party, but I don’t think it’s too late by any means.

Here’s a fun iPhone game from the folks over at Japan-based Ponos Games which is today discounted from it’s regular price $0.99, available for free on the iOS app store. Mr. Ninja is a simple game where you slash up invading aliens in an effort to keep your castle safe.

This game has been around since last year, but if you haven’t checked it out yet, I think it’s worth a look. There are three game modes, but only normal mode is available to start. As you play and improve your ninja skills, you’ll unlock new game modes.

The second is ‘Super Chain’ mode, where a timer comes into play, requiring you to slash with a little more urgency. After that, there’s ‘Impossible Mode,’ to which I haven’t yet graduated but I expect to see quite soon!

To get a better idea of how the gameplay works, you can check out the trailer below. And if you like this one, you can check out Ponos’s other ‘Mr’ titles, including Mr. AahH, Mr. Space, and Mr. Oops. The latter two are also available for Android. [h/t AppBank]

Blackberry’s dominance in Indonesia is starting to falter, with Indonesians now more open to Android devices. RIM needs to start to worry about the Android threat, because given the amount of gaming and entertainment apps available on Google’s platform, it’s likely to lure many younger Blackberry users to switch. Android apps crossed the 700,000 mark last month, but Blackberry won’t even cross the 100,000 mark until next year.

Recently RIM has stepped up its efforts to convince developers worldwide to start building apps for Blackberry. You might have noticed campaigns like the Blackberry JamHack event, Blackberry’s generous ‘$10,000 developer commitment’ program, the Blackberry Got Game Port-a-Thon, and its #BB10Believe campaign. But why aren’t many developers building their apps or games on the Blackberry platform in the first place?

We talked to three Indonesian game developers Mintsphere, TouchTen, and Nightspade, as well as Malaysian game developer E1 Studio, who have all been approached by RIM and some of them were given Blackberry devices on which to test games. While Nightspade didn’t have much problem from a technical perspective, the other three argued the opposite. They agreed that building games for the Blackberry platform is a bit complicated. E1 Studio added that it is a challenge for them to build for Blackberry’s various form factors such as full touch and QWERTY handsets.

TouchTen had similar concerns. Most of the studio’s games use the Unity engine, which is easily deployed onto iOS and Android – but not Blackberry. This would mean that TouchTen would have to rewrite its code from scratch if they want to port games to Blackberry, which they deem not worth the effort.

In the end, it seems that another big reason for the lack of apps in the Blackberry OS is simply developers’ lack of trust in Blackberry’s market. All the game developers, including Nightspade this time, agreed that the Android or iOS app stores are more promising markets.

Why Build for Blackberry?

Unfortunately, Angry Birds isn’t available on Blackberry 7 OS. (This is just a joke image, btw).

Mintsphere has previously built a game for Blackberry OS [1]. Its award winning game Trigger Knight is available on four platforms: Android, iOS, Symbian, and Blackbery 10. Wilson Tjandra, the co-founder of Mintsphere, explained three reasons for this.

First of all, they were supported by RIM. They were given a Blackberry device and were enticed with the $10,000 developer commitment program. Second, Trigger Knight is a relatively simple game, so it is easy to be made for both touch or non-touch devices. Third, the lack of gaming apps for Blackberry provided a better chance for the studio’s game to stand out. But in the end, Wilson said that building for the Blackberry OS is still not their main priority.

Nightspade argued that they might consider building for Blackberry OS if they can get further support from RIM – not only in terms of devices, but also in terms of licensing and promotional support. The game studio gives the example of how the Windows 8 team did just that for them. Nightspade also mentioned that RIM could benefit by emulating Nokia’s efforts to support young game developer startups in the country by holding more local developer-related events.

The four game developers we talked to above may or may not be a representative sample, but they may share similar views with other game devs out there who aren’t prioritizing Blackberry OS either. These opinions definitely do not bode well for RIM’s upcoming Blackberry 10 phones, which are set to be launched on January 30th next year.

[Picture source: Buzzfeed]

(Pre-photoshopped image from balanceofculture.com)

One of our favorite sources of stats, Beijing-based Analysys International, has come up with some China smartphone market share stats for 2012 Q3. The numbers show that Android has still not yet peaked in China, growing to 90.1 percent market share in Q3, compared with 82.8 percent in Q2 of this year.

The Analysys report is put together with smartphone sales and ownership figures, combined to reflect the state of the smartphone landscape in China. It shows Android’s amazing trajectory in the country, coming from a mere 58.2 percent share this time last year. A great deal of Android’s success is at the expense of Symbian and Nokia, with the creaky old mobile OS and lacklustre hardware crashing from 23.3 percent in 2011 Q3, to a one-foot-in-the-grave 2.4 percent now:

The early-mover advantage of Apple’s iOS hasn’t borne so much fruit as with Android, perhaps held back by a the highest average hardware cost, which is more of a barrier in China than in Europe or North America. Right now, the average cost of iPhone hardware is 3.25 times higher than for Android; and Android’s prices have been going down a lot despite also bringing much stronger specifications. The average Android price now is just 1,393 RMB (US$222):

Canalys recently observed that smartphone sales in China were up 199 percent this year, and projections for the end of 2013 suggest that Chinese citizens might have as many as half a billion smartphones by that time.

[Source: Analysys Internation @ Eguan - article in Chinese]

You might have had a hard time finding the nearest café with super good wifi to catch up with your work when you trapped in a traffic jam in Jakarta, Indonesia. But this app, Darisini (meaning ‘From here’), helps ease your pain.

Darisini is an iOS and Android app that helps Indonesians find nearby locations based on certain categories. There are now 13 categories in the app, including the nearest food and beverages, shopping spots, banks, or hotels.

The service was founded by Firman Maulana and Thomas Arie earlier this year. The first version of the app was released in May 2012. With an initial 1,500 data points stored, the first version was released for iOS only, and the Android version appeared two weeks after. Darisini now has 14,800 data points in its newest update.

Let’s say you want to search for the nearest Starbucks. Just type ‘Starbucks’ in the search box, and it will give you a list of the nearest ones. You can email and call the store right away from within the app on your phone. Or, you can let Darisini guide you there by using the route feature which sources info from Google Maps.

If you don’t see enough results, you can get more by expanding the search radius. And if you are about to lose your internet connection, you can also add the venue to your phone book with a single tap.

As a sort of weekend/side project, Arie told me it took two months to build everything from scratch. And it took five months to rack up over 11,800 downloads of its iOS version.

The most important things for a directory app are accuracy, consistency, and validation of data. On this point Arie explains:

We compiled data from multiple sources. Some data is provided directly from merchants or from online sources. We made contact to request a location database from Starbucks Indonesia, English First, etc. We clean up the data, and make sure that everything is valid. Yes, it takes hard work, but we chose this mechanism.

That might be hard to scale, but it’s a nice-looking app. It’s also up against big – if slightly different – rivals, such as Foursquare and Google Local (formerly called Google Places). So what’s the next big thing for Darisini? It will go social, Arie said. “We have plans to release some new features before the end of this year. We want to make our content more social and increase user participation,” he added.

Here’s an app from Japan that is totally ridiculous, and probably not worth paying for — but I can’t help but share it anyway.

Ningen Inc’s ‘Watching Cute Girl’ iOS app has a number of different and equally bizarre features. Essentially, it’s just an on-screen girl who watches over you, occasionally reacting to various inputs like sound or movement. There are 180 pre-recorded video patterns that can be played back, depending on the situation or settings. All those behaviors have resulted in a pretty bloated app though, as it’s a 314 MB download.

Actor Kendo Kobayashi supposedly has some input in how this app was developed, and there’s actually a mode that when switched on will address you as Mr. Kobayashi. So if your surname actually is Kobayashi, perhaps you might want to buy this app.

It’s currently on sale for the promotional price of 85 yen (or $0.99), and I’m not even sure it would be worth it at that price. I’m half-tempted though, just to make the home office a little more interesting.

Check it out over at watching.jp, where you can preview many of the different ‘watching girl’ behaviors.

App Annie has recently released some figures about the growth of Android and iOS in global markets, including Asia. The company points out that freemium apps on iOS have seen revenue increase by a factor of four on iOS over the last 24 months, and on Google Play by a factor of 3.5 over the past year.

Looking at the Korean market, the company points out that even though downloads remained relatively stable for both Android and iOS, revenue on Google Play shot up by a factor of 6.3 for the period of January to August of 2012.

In Asia’s other mature mobile market, Japan, we can see that Google Play freemium app revenues have shot up by a factor of 24 since last January. On iOS, it’s a similar story, with a distinct upwards trend for freemium apps.

Meanwhile in China, the Android market is still fragmented as Google Play still doesn’t support paid apps in the country. But for iOS apps, the story is the same — freemium revenues are up by a factor of 25 since January of 2011.

Asia is an interesting space to watch when it comes to making money on mobile. In comparison, freemium revenues are showing growth in the US (see iOS, Android), but not quite to the extent as the countries mentioned above. With Japan and Korea leading the way as two of the most developed mobile markets, and China gradually showing its potential, Asia will continue to provide many interesting case studies for mobile companies around the world to learn from.

[Source: App Annie]

[UPDATE 8 hours after posting: Good news! The cloned game has been removed from Google Play totally, and we think it's gone from every country's iOS App Store as well. That was quick justice].

Friends of the developer are also helping out by posting negative reviews of the cloned game in the iTunes store. One writes: “You hijack my friends game. Garbage!” Another comments: “This game hijack from Elventales [...] original game only for Flash game and Nokia.”

Funnily enough, the copied game even still has the Elventales Studio logo in its iPhone and Android incarnation. Is this somehow a way for the copier to pay tribute to the real game developer, or maybe the copycat developer was simply too lazy to change anything else besides the title and the thumbnail picture? Here’s the genuine game (pictured below, left) side-by-side with the ripped-off version (pictured below, right):

Elventales Studio Logo on Screenshot	Elventales Studio Logo on Screenshot Remains Unchanged

The copied game on iTunes is uploaded by someone named Zhang Huimei. We are not sure if that is even the copycat developer’s real name as we couldn’t find many details about that person or about May Games in general. Its website is just a free blog that’s mostly blank. The developer’s email address is: maygame2012@gmail.com.

Kompas cites Mahdi Basroni Rizal, the CEO of Elventales Studio, as saying that they had just found out about the iOS copy on November 1st, one day after the copycat game was published on iTunes. The team is now working to resolve it by filing a report to the Apple App Store.

This is not the first time that an Indonesian game developer has had its games copied and published illegally. The popular Flash-based game Infectonator 2, made by Toge Productions, was copied and published on Android by someone named Hasan Akruyek back in May. Not long after Toge Productions and its partner ArmorGames.com released an official statement about the hijack, the ripped-off Infectonator was taken down from Google Play, and gradually from other app directories such as AndroidZoom.

We saw a similar incident involving another copied game by a Chinese studio recently. On that occassion the Chinese studio had the decency, in the end, to apologize and remove the game of their own accord. We hope that this will help get across the message that copying someone else’s game is never a good idea – and to avoid downloading the cruelly ripped-off Hungry Chase game.

[Source: Kompas]

Yesterday marked the second day of the Jakarta Game Show 2012. We will take a look specifically at five game developer startups that were exhibiting there.

Altermyth

This game developer (pictured below, left) was one of two game developers that represented Indonesia at the Tokyo Game Show’s Asia New Stars Area this year. Aditya Sumantri, the business IP manager of Altermyth said that they are looking to launch an iOS fishing game called Pancipon Fishing as early as next week! Do stay tuned for an update about that.

Toge Productions

This game developer’s name is quite interesting. The team’s (pictured below, right) name uses a common vegetable ingredient in Indonesia called toge, or bean sprout). They were showcasing games such as Infectonator and Relic of War, the latter having won the best 2D PC game prize at the recent Indonesia Game Show.

You can play Toge’s games for free on your PC here. For Infectonator, you can also buy and play it on your Android or iOS smartphone.

From the left – Hutama Setyo Ruswidyo and Aditya Sumantri

From the left – Dio and Jonathan Manuel Gunawan

Nightspade

Nightspade (pictured right) was promoting an interesting iOS game sponsored by the candy brand Chupa Chups. It’s called Give a Dam. The gameplay is simple – you stack various characters and make sure that they don’t fall off to the waterfall.

The team said that it didn’t take too long to finish the game development, just around four months. This is because the Chupa Chups game adapts similar gameplay to Nightspade’s previous game Stack the Stuff. Nightspade is looking to launch the game soon in Bandung with Chuck Studios acting as the game’s publisher.

Mintsphere

This game developer (pictured below, left) also won a prize at the recent Indonesia Game Show, as the best feature phone-based game Trigger Knight. The game can be played on both feature phones and smartphones, and it looks like a lot of fun. Mintsphere is looking to launch the award-winning game into the brand new Windows Phone 8 platform in near future.

Sangkuriang

Sangkuriang is a unique name that showcases the game developer’s love of Indonesian legend. Teguh Jati Nugraha, a representative of Sangkuriang (pictured below, right), showed me the team’s newest game for iOS and Android called Gori Lost. The gameplay requires you to deliver items safely to the finish line using Indonesia’s traditional vehicle, the becak.

It seems like Sangkuriang does more than just build games. The company is divided into four main IT services, and one of them is Sangkuriang Game Studio. You can check out more details about them at the company’s website here.

Touchten [1]

Another Indonesia Game Show winner (this time in the best smartphone game category) was also present: Touchten. The team was showcasing two of its latest games – the puzzle train tracks building game Train Legend, and a zombie-themed game which hasn’t yet been given a final name. The former is already available for Android, and the iOS version should be available later this month.

As for the zombie game, we play as the big sister who’s holding a baby and is running away from a horde of zombies. While running, the baby will help shoot the zombies that are trailing you. The game is still, we’re told, at the quality testing stage in the studio, and the team says that they are still figuring out a name for the game. Anton Soeharyo, the co-founder of Touchten, also explained that they are building the sequel to its award-winning game Infinite Sky.

The Mintsphere team at Jakarta Game Show

Teguh Jati Nugraha from Sangkuriang

Singaporean game dev PD Design Studio has launched a 2D hack-and-slash game called Dusty Revenge on online gaming platform Steam Greenlight recently, and they are looking for your votes to make the game available on Steam’s online store.

Keng Jin (aka: KJ), the co-founder of PD Design Studio, describes Dusty Revenge as a 2D side-scrolling beat-’em-up game. As the name implies, it tells the story of the main character exacting his revenge throughout the Wild West-themed game. KJ said that it took the studio two years to develop Dusty Revenge, which has seen the game’s graphics change from having cute animals into the serious-looking and bloodspattering creatures you see today. He explained further:

We wanted lots of good, old-fashion action and thus the revenge theme came in. Additionally, the idea came when we were watching lots of revenge-themed movies.

KJ believes that the special thing about the game is its supporting character mechanics, which allows the player to control three types of characters – a fighter bunny, a heavy arms wielding bear, and a sharpshooter dog. These characters play particular roles – for example, you’d want to call the artillery bear’s help when faced with a huge cluster of enemies, or the sharpshooter dog when you need help taking out pesky enemies in some inaccessible places.

Dusty Revenge will be made available for PC and Mac. The 10-man team is also looking to release the game for Playstation 3 and PS Vita, which will have a two-player mode, in the future. KJ said that he is still unsure about the game’s age/suitability rating, but he definitely wouldn’t recommend it to kids under the age of 12, as you’d see by all the blood in the game trailer.

PD Design Studio actually started as a multimedia company back in 2006. KJ explained that incidentally, the company’s first job was on a Flash-based game and they happened to do lots of them over the next few years. After changing the company’s focus to solely games development, they’ve also made two iOS games, Alien Masher and Move Caster – besides the current Dusty Revenge.

You can check out Dusty Revenge over at Steam here, and if you think the game’s worth your money, be sure to vote for it there.

Related:

• Malaysian-Built Japanese Game Up For Voting at Steam Greenlight

• Another Game Seeks Your Vote on Steam Greenlight, as Malaysian Game Devs Look to Penetrate Global Market

Singapore-based Sprooki is a location-based mobile commerce service that lets retail shops send targeted messages and promotions to potential customers who are passing by via their smartphones. The company is announcing today that it has raised SG$590,000 (about $483,000) in seed funding from incubator Get2Volume and the National Research Foundations’s Technology Incubator Scheme.

The service launched its first trials last year, and more recently it launched its software-as-a-service platform license business this year, allowing malls or retailers to use the platform to connect with customers. We got in touch with Sprooki’s founder/director Michael Gethen, who further explains:

We offer a marketing and technology solution that is 1) far more cost effective, quick and easy to deploy than building their own mobile system, and 2) allows them to have far more control and flexibility than using an external advertising service such as a group-buying website. The license fees are based on usage of the platform, so our success is aligned with the success of our customers.

So far Sprooki, which to date consists of a team of eight people, is doing well in Singapore, and they recently appointed a representative in Manila to explore business possibilities there. I’m told they have already partnered with Channel One Media there, so it will be interesting to see how things progress on that front. They are also in the early stages of looking to Australia as a market as well.

Sprooki has over 60 mall and retail partners in Singapore and around Asia to date. If you’d like to give their app a try, you can pick it up for free in Apple’s app store. Retailers can learn more about Sprooki here.

Japanese social gaming giant DeNA (TYO:2432) has just launched its very own voice/chat application called ‘comm’ (at co-mm.com) The free application is available for both iOS and Android and is available in 204 countries/regions. It allows users to make free voice calls, and also includes chat features and photo sharing.

We’ve written much about the recent rise of mobile chat applications in Japan and around Asia, most specifically NHN Japan’s Line and KakaoTalk out of Korea. Both those companies have expanded their services to include game platforms, and given their rapid user acquisition they may pose a threat to the current mobile gaming incumbents, GREE and DeNA. So it’s really interesting to see DeNA join the chat app party at this point in the game.

Of course, DeNA is not only a social games company (it does e-commerce as well, for example, and describes itself as a “global internet company), and I’m told that Comm is “not a reactive measure” but rather a way to reach out to new users that it might not reach with Mobage. Nonetheless, it’s fascinating to see such overlapping competition in the mobile space these days.

Upon sign-up, Comm asks for your real name and phone number, sending you an activation code via text message. Users can also sign up with their Facebook accounts, if they choose. From there, you add or search for friends and see who else is using Comm.

I initially thought that this would be a service that DeNA might tie up with its Mobage gaming platform. But the company notes that this is a stand-alone service that will not connect with Mobage or its other services.

We also understand that there is no immediate plan for monetization or advertising, but that DeNA will look into that later on.

Our readers may remember that we featured Manga Camera a few weeks back, a photo application from Japan which had started very hot in the Japanese app store after its release in early September. The application lets you apply manga-style frames and filters to your photos, making them look like scenes from a Japanese manga.

VS Media is pointing out today that Manga Camera topped the 3 million download mark just a few days ago, thanks to rising popularity in the US, the UK, and even in Greater China. Here’s a quick overview of the top ten countries by downloads as of October 19. As you can see, Japan is still by far its most popular market, but there’s certainly lots of love developing in other countries, especially around Asia.

While the app’s momentum appears to be leveling off, VS Media notes that a major upgrade is coming in November, and that could bring a resurgence in popularity if all goes well for the folks at Super Software, the app’s developer.

For those of you who have experimented with Manga Camera already, let us know your thoughts in the comments. For those of you who haven’t, you can check it out in the App Store.

GREE’s (TYO:3632) US studio has just announced a new title, as Monster Quest has just dropped for iPhone and iPad. The game is free to play, and lets players collect, train, and fuse monsters in order to create a monster empire.

Monsters represent eight elements, with each type possessing certain characteristics that will help them in battle. But in addition to this battle element players can also build habitats as well, sort of as you would in a farming or city-building game. The graphics look really sharp (it has retina support), and the variety of missions (over 300) should provide lots of opportunity to explore.

GREE International’s Kenneth Chiu explained:

In Monster Quest, the talented members of the team that brought us Crime City, Modern War, and Kingdom Age have created a smooth, high performance game that uniquely ties fantastic art with a deep single player experience and high quality PVP interactions.

The team that Chiu is referring to there is, of course, Funzio. Our readers may recall that GREE acquired the San Francisco-based game developer back in May for the huge sum of $210 million dollars.

You can check out GREE’s trailer and some images for Monster Quest below.

from forum user spectra

‘I Find Hotels’ is an iOS hotel comparison app made by Australia-based company HotelsCombined.com. Interestingly the app doesn’t compare hotel rates directly, but instead it compares hotel rates compiled by other hotel comparison booking apps and sites, such as Booking.com and Agoda. Today the company announced that the app is available in Indonesian, which is good news for frequent travelers looking for the best hotel prices.

The app claims to be a one-stop solution for comparing hotel rates worldwide as it has more than two million hotel deals across more than 120,000 destinations. Rizka Maydita, the market manager for Indonesia at HotelsCombined, explains:

We are internationally focused and doing our very best to continue providing new ways to help our diverse customer base to find what they’re looking for.

HotelsCombined and ‘I Find Hotels’ now support 26 languages, which includes other Asian languages such as Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, and Arabic. For more information, you can check out the free application for iOS here; or it’s also available for Android under the name ‘Hotels Combined’ here.

Photo: iTunes.Apple.com

Electronic Gamelan, or e-gamelan, is the name of an iOS app that has been created by students and lecturers of the University of Dian Nuswantoro (Udinus) Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia. The app brings the complete sound of Indonesia’s traditional instrument, the Javanese gamelan, which is a large set of xylophones, drums, and gongs. The precision of percussive tones is similar to the original gamelan.

Udinus is an IT-oriented university in Semarang. The e-Gamelan team has performed in many countries like Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan. In the country, they have performed for the Governor of Central Java. Later in October, the team will perform at the State Palace.

Team member Ikhsanuddin Mohammed Rahmatullah said that the e-Gamelan community formed about two years ago. All the gamelan objects and sound recordings are taken from the Sri Kuncoro Mulyo Gamelan in Indonesia’s historical music studio, Lokananta in Surakarta. Starting with the inception of the e-Gamelan project by one of the lecturers, they began thinking how to create the modern gamelan. Rahmat said:

This is faculty research. We are under a research body and community service. It started when we won a competition set by the minister of Education and Cultural Affairs.

The purpose of the e-Gamelan app is to attract youth towards traditional music at a time when kids are gravitating towards western pop music – or popular music in general. E-Gamelan rises to the challenge via the iPad app. To achieve these goals, the community works with kids on the e-Gamelan app/program as an extracurricular activity at several high schools in Semarang. As a result, the students are said to have become more interested in the gamelan.

(See also: Bring Out Your Inner Beastie Boy with the Gamelan DJ App)

According to Rahmat, after using e-Gamelan, players can sort of play the original traditional instrument. However, to use the app, you don’t need to know the Javanese instrument. Approximately, it takes two days to be able to smoothly play e-Gamelan.

Several types of gamelan can not be played in the app – or maybe in any app – because of inevitable difficulties with complex actions on a touchscreen. So you won’t find the gender gamelan, the two-headed drum called the kendang, and the two-stringed fiddle called rebab.

e-Gamelan can be downloaded from the Apple App Store for US$5.99. The purchase price of the app will be used by the team partly to preserve the original gamelan – the other half of the income of course goes towards app production and recording costs. Before you buy, check out a demo video here:

[Source: Republika.co.id, Egamelanku]

Finding apps that you like and find useful can be a little bit tricky given all the choices that are out there. We recently looked at India-based Appszito which proposes an alternative way to search. But what about recommendations from friends? Well, there are apps for that too. And one of them is Hubbl.

With its headquarters in India, this startup was founded by Archana Patchirajan and Kushal M. Choksi. They have a team of 12 people in total, and you may recognize the former as a co-founder of MyCityWay.

Their app integrates with your social circle and makes use of tags to catalogue applications into handy groups. You can also follow certain users if you like their app suggestions. A team representative tells me that the founders saw a definite need for such a service, as they wanted a platform where they, as mobile enthusiasts, could discuss and discover new apps.

[A]s passionate smartphone users, we did not find a tool to talk about apps. Hubbl was born to act as a word of mouth platform for apps that transforms an app’s users into loyal advocates of the app by giving them tools to talk about it.

Hubbl was founded only recently, in July of this year. In addition to being a useful service from a consumer point of view, their team originally saw it as a useful took for developers as well.

[H]aving developed apps for the iPhone and Android platforms for three years now, we have always had issues with positioning our apps among a million other apps. It is hard for developers to get traction without spending big marketing dollars.

Interestingly, this need ties in with its revenue which will take the form of sponsored app recommendations, paid developer tools, and affiliate revenue.

They participated in Techcrunch Disrupt under the name of Hmmm, before transitioning to Hubbl. The app did quite well after its initial launch, with about 15,000 on board after just one week of being public, I’m told. The company boasts that the average session time on Hubbl is about nine minutes.

The team is also planning to launch an app discovery game this weekend, which should be interesting to see. The next version of Hubbl will include more gaming and social aspects as well, I’m told.

I think such a service is a pretty solid idea, because there is a subset of people whose recommendations I tend to accept without much hesitation, as I’ve come to trust their taste. And if they were on Hubbl, I’d be sure to follow them close.

Currently Hubbl is bootstrapped, but they are looking for seed funding at the moment. If you’d like to give the app a try, it’s available for iOS and Android.

As we saw in last year’s tragic earthquake in Japan, communication in the wake of a disaster can be a huge problem. Last year network disruptions left many people unable to get in touch with loved ones to find out their whereabouts.

Earthquake Buddy is a new mobile application which aims to resolve the problem of locating people in the event of an earthquake. Once you buy the app (for $4.99), you enter the contact information of four friends or family members. And in the event of an earthquake that registers higher than magnitude 5.5, your buddies will be alerted with your location (see more in demo video below). In addition to the English version, there are Japanese and Spanish versions as well.

Earthquake Buddy was developed by a company called The App Collective, based out of Australia. It was funded by angel investors with contributions from Screen NSW as well. I spoke with CEO Adam Wells to find out more about the app, and the company’s future plans.

Could you tell me a little about your company and this project?

The App Collective was formed to save lives through the use of mobile technology and community engagement. It is currently designing a range of rescue apps including tornado Buddy, Hurricane Buddy, Hiking Buddy. Earthquake Buddy is also being presently developed in the Android platform as well.

As the name implies, The App Collective is a disparate group of app designers, developers and marketeers brought together to make a real difference in saving lives. In all there are two founding ‘employees’ with external experts in the above-mentioned disciplines. Our collective aim is to save lives using both high technology with community engagement.

Importantly, the app has been independently endorsed by Global ‘Recovery Tsar,’ professor Ed Blakely, who headed up the Hurricane Katrina recovery among others. His endorsement allows us to take the app to The United Nations and possibly The World Bank.

How did the project start?

We were astonished to learn that most rescue services often don’t know where to begin their search when trying to find missing victims of large earthquakes. Earthquake Buddy is designed to solve this fundamental problem by ensuring community engagement can act swiftly to find them.

Once Earthquake Buddy is downloaded, users are prompted to enter their details and details of four friends or family members to become their ‘buddies.’ In the event of an earthquake above 5.5 on the Richter scale [1], the user’s buddies are instantaneously and automatically sent an email, from the cloud, showing a Google map of their location. After 30 minutes, if the user has not heard from his buddies, they can go straight to the Google map location (if safe to do so); or contact emergency services to alert them of their buddies’ location.

Most importantly, the message is designed so it will be received prior to any telecommunications outage and thus does not rely on the iPhone itself to be sent. Buddies can also receive an SMS, a Facebook post and tweet with the same details.

The new app is designed not only for people living in earthquake zones, but also for tourists and business travelers nervous about traveling to quake prone destinations like New Zealand, Japan, the west coast of the USA, and Asia.

What are your plans to promote the Japanese version?

Japan is a primary country for the app. I used to live there, and remember the lengths government and community used to go to prepare for the next big one. Well, the next big one hit last year, and we are determined that through this app we can make a difference to the people of Japan.

There is no other app that automatically and in real-time, finds lived ones after an earthquake. This is why we developed the Japanese language version of the app.

As mentioned above there will be an Android version for Japan in the next couple of months. We plan to engage with government departments, natural disaster management associations and NGOs to spread the word about an app that does so much.

Was there ever any thought to make it a free app somehow, in order to make it available to more people?

We are talking to Apple about changing the remuneration model to a subscription whereby people can buy it for less, then update their subscription in say, 1 year, 3 years etc. We are also deciding on NGOs about sponsorship/s which would allow us to offer it at a lower price. A freemium model is not workable as the app is not an app with value-adds, nor would advertising work as it’s not an app that you would interface with everyday.

That leaves the up-front fee, which we have priced to enable us to continue our development of other rescue apps and platforms. The alternative is per above. When we launch in India and China, our price will definitely be lower.

Is there any plan to speak with local carriers (Docomo, KDDI, Softbank in particular) about licensing the app and pre-loading it on as many smartphones as possible?

We are open to speaking to telcos although our initial launch is direct. We would welcome a dialogue with these telcos though.

Besides India and China, are there plans to expand to other Asian countries? Indonesia perhaps?

China will be our next language, with a possible version for India in Hindi. However we are pragmatic, and know that most of India is not as earthquake prone as Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh. An indonesian version is definitely planned. Our decision not to initially develop in Indonesia was because of Indonesia’s high concentration of Symbian phones. We watch market penetration keenly, and as soon as we can see that Android and iOS has a critical mass in Indonesia, we will launch there too.

I just came across a very simple, but yet pretty fun little iOS game from called Shutter Chance, released yesterday by the folks at Goodia.

The idea behind the game is very basic. You’re a photographer who has just 30 seconds to snap off a group picture of the students posing in front of you. The problem is, at least one or a few of them occasionally turn their head. Your challenge is to take a picture when everyone is facing the front, and you’ll actually lose points if more students are looking away. You only have five chances in total to take a snapshot.

This game is brand new, and is currently in 18th spot in the Japan app store in the kids and family categories. And while I don’t expect it to be wildly successful, I do like the creative spirit that comes up with such game ideas, as well as the 8-bit style graphics that used to create this one.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a casual game that’s a little bit on the weird side, you can download it from the app store here.

Here’s a fun Friday app recommendation, as Hakuhodo DY Media Partners has released ‘Daiby’ for iPhone, an app that lets you record your baby’s first few years.

There are a number of features included in this application. The most notable is the the photo-by-date function, which can be used like the many photo-a-day apps already on the market. But you can also add comments, and the app will note how many days old your baby is (i.e. this is the first day, tenth day, or 1,000th day).

Photos are stored locally on your iPhone which is a bit of bummer. Some kind of iCloud or Dropbox integration would have been nice.

The app can also transform your photos into a movie, with a soundtrack added. There’s a sample video showing the end results below. While the app is free, one of ways it plans to make money is by charging for multiple slideshows, as well as certain advanced settings (see below.)

The feature which is most interesting however, it the information delivery system, which sends the parents useful information based on the babies age. This could be things like vaccination information, special offers, or other parenting information.

So far the Daiby application is in Japanese and English only, although apparently more languages are in the works, including Chinese.

Photo: 7langit.com

Starting today, Java Festival Production held the biggest soul music event in Indonesia, Java Soulnation 2012. This festival will last for three days, from September 28th to 30th. Soulnation 2012 will bring soul, hip hop, R&B, and rap beats from worldwide caliber musicians like James Morrison, Robin Thicke, Color Me Badd, and US’s electric disco band Scissor Sisters. There are also local performers too. To accompany you on your night out, application developer 7Langit is back with the Java Soulnation app, 2012 edition (Yes, they were the folks behind the 2011 edition).

This paperless concert guide keep you from getting lost in this big concert venue by providing a map and directions. Just like a typical concert guide app, you can find general information about Soulnation 2012. You can learn more about the performers by reading their bio in the artist menu, and see the schedule for the event.

Sometimes when you’re in a festival, you can lose track of time. But with this app you won’t miss your favorite musician thanks to its reminders feature. You can save the schedule of your favorite artist to your mobile’s calendar and get alerted when the time comes. There are also prizes from the event’s main sponsor. All you have to do is check out the Special Quiz menu. You can also join the Twitter quiz by directly replying or retweeting @Javasoulnation from within the app.

You can even sing and record songs through this app. There are Pledge and Record features from “Soul of the Nation” section. This feature asks users to join a patriotic movement to pledge their love for Indonesia. All you have to do is sing along to Indonesia’s national anthem with young Indonesian singer, Raisa Andriana. By doing this, it is expected that the initiative could be the biggest sing along in the world. This campaign has been ongoing this month, and participants have recorded their videos and uploaded them to YouTube. The uploaded videos will be aired on September 30th, 2012 at the Indosat stage at the Java Soulnation Festival 2012.

So far the app supports BlackBerry and Android. As for iPhone users, the link will be updated soon. Meanwhile, practice your singing skill with Raisa here:

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

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

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

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

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

Computer vision

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

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

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

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

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

Apple’s new Maps app — and the lack of Google Maps in iOS 6 — has caused a lot of consternation everywhere. But if you’re an iOS user in India, MapMyIndia has some good news for you: Don’t Panic has launched.

Don’t Panic is a fully-featured mapping and directions app for iOS that offers excellent coverage of India. At $20, the nationwide app doesn’t come cheap (there are Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Delhi-only maps available at reduced prices), but the upside is that users can save a lot of money on data and roaming charges because Don’t Panic saves map data to your phone once it has been downloaded once so you aren’t downloading the same maps over and over again, racking up high data bills. Of course, this means that the map data takes up space on your phone, but that’s a sacrifice many users will probably be willing to make.

As you can see, using the app is going to be pretty simple for anyone who has ever used something similar before, and with Apple Maps disappointing nearly everywhere, now is the perfect time to be offering a strong local alternative. That and the appeal of a mapping app that doesn’t run up your data charges should make Don’t Panic a very strong contender in the Indian iOS market. If you’re based in India and worried about getting lost, it may be worth your time to check it out.

Photo: Apple App Store

After a rapid jounrney from being a Flash game to PCs to mobile gaming, Infectonator is now out on Android and iOS. Indonesian startup developer Toge Production launched the smartphone versions on September 24th, 2012 with a price tag of $0.99 on both Google Play and the iTunes App Store. Infectonator still brings the same recipe to the mobile game: infecting people, turning them into zombies, and dominating the world.

Before its official release, a fake version dubbed “Infectonator 2” was released on Google Play. But that was illegally ported as an Android app from Toge’s Flash-based game by an account under the name Hasan Akyurek. This award-winning game developer based in Indonesia was furious about this hijacking of its popular game. But now the rogue title has been taken down.

The new Infectonator game has language support for English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and lots of world languages – and of course Indonesian too. There are also more than 10 unique zombies to play with.

The Infectonator storyline places the player as the person who spreads the virus which turns humans into zombies. You need to decide which city is the target to launch the virus. This will affect the rest of the game. The challenge is to keep the endurance of your brain-dead workforce. In a limited time before the zombies run out of energy, you will have to kill all of the population. And yes, there will be blood. Also there will be coins falling from the pockets of citizens, which you’ll need to collect. Your objective is to destroy all humanity and dominate the world.

The pleasure of playing with a touchscreen phone replaces the way you control the game when it was a Flash game. No longer is there a need to fiddle with the mouse, and now you can just swipe to collect the coins from the victims.

As for monetization in the mobile version, it has in-app purchases for coins to increase the ability of your zombie troops. There is even a package deal to open a whole zombie army. If you don’t want to spend more, you have to be more patient to collect all the coins in the game for getting upgrades.

Are you ready to rule the world with zombies? Get Infectonator in Android’s Google Play or Apple App Store. See the video demo here:

[Source: Kompas.com - article in Indonesian]

An AutoNavi/Apple Maps map of Taipei, Taiwan. Apparently the city is just a collection of parks and gardens now.

Since the upgrade to iOS 6 there have been, well, some complaints about Apple’s new Maps app. In fact, the thing has been kind of a disaster. This is as true in China as it has been anywhere else, and while the iPhone 5 isn’t out in China yet, iPhone 4 and 4S users who have upgraded to iOS 6 are looking for answers, and Apple has thusfar only provided some PR bullshit.

AutoNavi (NASDAQ:AMAP) — the Chinese company that’s providing Apple’s maps for China and some other parts of Asia — has been less quiet, though. It has responded to Chinese user complaints by saying that there is nothing wrong with the AutoNavi Maps product, and the reason for the issues people have experienced is that apparently, the upgrade to iOS 6 has caused some users to be unable to connect to the AutoNavi service. Their maps of China, then, are being served by TomTom (another Apple Maps partner), and that’s where the mistakes are coming from.

AutoNavi has even offered a workaround fix for Chinese users who want the AutoNavi maps back:

1. Close the Maps app
2. Set your system time to seven days in the future. (So if today is Sept. 25, set it for Oct. 2)
3. Reset the phone
4. Open Maps, if the Autonavi logo appears in the bottom right, you’re all set.

Of course, this fix does nothing to rectify many of the complains about Maps, some of which seem to be issues with AutoNavi’s maps themselves. (For example, the terrible map of Taiwan is an AutoNavi map issue and won’t be fixed by getting rid of the TomTom maps in China). It also isn’t clear whether you have to keep your system set seven days into the future for this “fix” to keep working; if so, that would be horribly inconvenient.

In the end, I guess it’s your choice: do you want a phone that can no longer tell you the correct date or a phone that can no longer provide you with accurate maps? Personally, the more I see of AutoNavi’s Maps and the more silence I hear coming from Apple, the more I think about making my next phone an Android…

(And of course, for Chinese users, another option would just be to switch to Baidu Maps, which just got a sweet update).

[Beijing News via Sina Tech]

As an Apple fan myself, I couldn’t wait to get hold of the iPhone 5, which launched in stores in Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong today. There was much hype over the new iOS 6, and especially the new map application that looked so promising at Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) keynote launch. So out of curiosity and with much anticipation, I downloaded the new version of the OS on my iPhone 4S from here in Beijing.

Much to my surprise the new Apple Maps turned out to be a huge let down — and apparently it’s not just me who thinks that. The entire map looks very “clean,” and the grid is undeveloped and incomplete. This version of the map makes this world looked pretty boring. I explored the map around Asia and realized that besides China and Hong Kong, the rest of the countries’ map readings are either inaccurate or undeveloped.

Let’s take Singapore for instance. On the map, there are no road infrastructures, no buildings, no subway stations, except for a couple of random and isolated stations. What’s more infuriating is that it actually listed “Seletar Airport,” the former national airport of Singapore. Like ‘former’ as in decades ago.

In Taipei, Taiwan, all you get is plenty of gardens and parks. Is Taiwan all about parks and gardens to Apple? (Note, this is using maps served up by Autonavi, Apple’s China map partner)

It’s the same for Indonesia, Malaysia, and probably the rest of Asia. There are only the names of the cities, and when you actually zoom in, there’s nothing on the map. Oh well, this is a big load of disappointment. The previous collaboration with Google Maps was serving its users pretty well I have to say. It really beats me to why Apple took this bold step to cut its collaboration with Google and to replicate the product with something that is – from a user point of view – shocking and unacceptable.

Apple has responded via a public statement to AllThingsD:

Customers around the world are upgrading to iOS 6 with over 200 new features including Apple Maps, our first map service,” said spokeswoman Trudy Miller. “We are excited to offer this service with innovative new features like Flyover, turn by turn navigation, and Siri integration. We launched this new map service knowing it is a major initiative and that we are just getting started with it. Maps is a cloud-based solution and the more people use it, the better it will get. We appreciate all of the customer feedback and are working hard to make the customer experience even better.

I don’t know how long it will take for them to fix it, but it’s pretty clear to me that Apple has lost its way with maps.

[Source: Image]

Our friends over at Coconuts Bangkok recently pointed to new iOS application which provides information from Thailand’s Office of National Water and Flood Management Policy. Last year’s floods affected more than 3 million people in the country, so certainly any effort to keep people better informed is worthwhile.

The app is called Water4Thai, and it’s available for free on the iPhone in both English and Thai. It includes rainfall reports, daily tide information, weather charts, and more [1].

I like apps like these a lot, especially ones which are based here in Asia, a region more prone to natural disasters than anywhere else in the world. We need better ways of getting information quick, and there is much that can be done in the digital/mobile space to help. Last year we did see a lot of social media innovation spring up in the wake of the Thailand floods, on Twitter, Facebook, and even on Google Docs. We saw similar online activity during this year’s floods in the Philippines.

Water4Thai held the number one app spot for a few days in the past week in the Thailand app store. It is still the top app in the weather category (see below).

Hopefully we can see more organizations and individuals working on such information services well in advance of any disasters that may occur.

Water4Thai on Thai app store, AppAnnie.com

Photo: itunes.apple.com

This is not an ordinary ranch. Faunia Rancher is a game that’ll take you on a journey full of fairies and monsters. But the gremlins are actually cute. You can even meet an Indonesian monster called Barong in its traditional Balinese house. For this mythological journey, Chowdown Games and Joyverter Entertainment worked together as ‘Art on Code’ and this weekend won the INAICTA 2012 awards in the games category.

The idea is simple: raise these adorable little monsters and take them on a journey to win crystals so that you can create more virtual gnarly creatures. But its story is what makes it interesting. As a rancher, you will have to raise a unique fantasy creature called “Faunia”.

The way you raise the Faunia makes it like a Tamagochi-style game. You will have to feed them, clean their habitat, participate in regular activities, and treat them when they’re sick. As the Faunia grows, it will give you eggs that can be sold. There are some fun “mini games” bundled in too.

Faunia Rancher was developed by Ronald Widjaja, Erick Theodorus, Burhan Dewantara, Robert Tan, Robin Tjungestu, and Felix Jingga. Even though it has Barong as its Indonesian mascot, this game was intended for the international market. Ronald explains:

We’re open to all kinds of monsters, from Barong to Frankenstein. We also have a collaborations for other characters, such as with Animonster [Indonesia’s anime and lifestyle magazine] and Vandaria [a card game from ZIGMA magazine]. In the future, maybe we can approach a local franchise like Garudayana to put their “Garu” monster in our game.

To keep the developers’ kitchen steaming, this iOS game has in-app purchases for every gimmick in the game. You can buy food, medicine, and even crystal shards to speed up the growth of new Faunias for around $1 to $5 each. Without major promotion, Faunia Rancher have 10,000 players in its first 3,5 months, and sells 5 different kinds of virtual coins every day.

To build the community, Faunia Rancher has its own actual merchandise. More than 2,000 gamers on the Faunia Rancher Facebook page have participated in a design competition for new characters and various kinds of fan art.

Grab the free Faunia Rancher game in the iTunes App Store.

Image credit: Thinkdigit.com

With an estimated 28 million active iOS and Android devices, South Korea is one of the biggest and most attractive markets for app developers trying to gain a foothold in Asia. It also helps that the country is the unofficial home of the Android ecosystem, largely due to Samsung and LG, two of the biggest Android phone manufacturers in the world.

But if developers think that all they need to do is to simply localize their apps and release them on Google Play or the App Store to be successful in South Korea, they are in for a rude shock. But at the same time, it is not rocket science either. All developers have to do is to dig a little deep into the market and understand what makes apps tick in Korea.

So, lets try to scratch the surface and see what’s happening in South Korea.

South Korea is smartphone country with a data connection to match

• A recent study suggested that over 76 percent of the adult population (15-64 years) in South Korea use a smartphone. When you consider South Korea’s total population of roughly over 50 million, that’s incredible penetration!

• 28 million active iOS and Android devices

• Although South Korea is a big Android market, Apple has made huge inroads since 2011 with its iDevices, largely due to its desirability quotient and Apple’s seamless ecosystem.

• While the western world happily sips from modest 3G mobile connections, South Korea is still outpacing other nations with the adoption of 4G technologies, which provides speeds up to 40.32 mbps on the go. That’s around 10 times faster than 3G.

High data consumption on the go

Tesco virtual store at a subway station in Seoul, photo: 2d-code.co.uk

• With data speeds to match high smart device penetration, it is a no-holds barred data consumption jungle out there, with consumers replacing a lot of their normal home TV and video viewing habits with a mobile device.

• Entertainment (K-pop, movies, live TV), communication (VoiP, video chat), gaming (both hardcore and social casual), social and professional networking, and shopping lead mobile consumption habits in Korea.

• Education is another category which is rapidly making inroads when it comes to mobile delivery.

It is not just about Google Play

SK Telecom Android app store, photo: ubergizmo.com

• While Android handset growth in South Korea is phenomenal, it’s clear that the Google Play store has yet to establish itself as the dominant Android app store. Here, Google Play is not only competing with iOS, but faces stiff competition from regional app stores operated by local mobile operators.

• It’s not just mobile operators who are getting in on the action, even platform owners are creating their own app ecosystem, notably the KakaoTalk game platform, Com2Us Hub, Hangame from NHN — all are making the non-iOS ecosystem extremely fragmented and difficult to crack. However, each of these platforms has a huge audienc,e and success on one platform usually leads to a trickling effect on other platforms.

Paid vs Free vs Freemium models

• It has been observed that Android users monetize at a much higher rate in South Korea because telecom providers offer carrier billing. A fast and easy purchase option, it allows users without credit cards to purchase digital goods and boosts conversion and monetization rates in the South Korean Android market. Large studios have seen their conversion rates increase by over 7 percent compared to non carrier billing markets.

• Korean studios prefer the free-to-play model, monetizing via digital goods and advertisements rather than opting for a paid model. They believe they can modify their free titles faster and improve conversion rather than a one shot burst from paid downloads, which is more of a hit-or-miss model.

What does this mean for developers looking to crack South Korea?

• iOS and Android are the only platforms that matter.

• For Android products, look beyond Google Play to the various telco app stores and social platform ecosystems for distribution.

• If games is the category you are targeting, increase the lifetime value and monetization of your apps through a free-to-play model with a freemium model.

• If your app has a short lifetime value, then a paid model will work the best for you.

• If ad monetization is your model, then look for an ad network mediation, which allows you access to local ad networks. This will give you better fill and higher brand eCPMs.

• Look for local partnerships. Lot of developers in South Korea are looking to move out and can leverage your experience and help you in turn to distribute your app and also localize it for South Korea.

[Data Sources: AppAnnie reports, Flurry stats]