The new office will work to further localize and popularize WeChat, although with one million Malaysian users the app already has a solid foundation in the country. But it will also work to introduce new Tencent products to the Malaysian market, and it could even become a new source of exits for Malaysian startups. Tencent international business VP Poshu Yeung told the Malay Mail:

Tencent has conducted a lot of mergers and acquisitions around the world and we actively look for innovation as well as expansion opportunities.

So is this good news for Malaysian startups? It’s hard to say. Obviously, more capital in the region is a good thing, but Tencent has a well-earned reputation in China of copying startups’ ideas rather than acquiring them, and then using its massive war chest to bury the original product. And to be honest, we haven’t seen Tencent make a lot of acquisitions in Southeast Asia, so if I were a Malaysian startup, I might be a little wary of the arrival of this new office.

With that said, there’s no cause for undue paranoia before the office even opens, and if Tencent is publicly announcing its intent to look for innovation and potential acquisitions in Malaysia, then the door may well be open for Malaysian startups looking for funding or a potential exit. Whatever happens, it will be interesting to see how Malaysia’s startup scene responds to the presence of the Chinese tech giant once the company has finished setting up shop there.

(Malay Mail via TheNextWeb)

The reason it has taken so long to raise a seed round, according to founder Ken Wong, is that it wasn’t really necessary; the company has been profitable since 2009. But with three big game launches on the horizon, the recent cash influx will be used mostly to increase the level of marketing devoted to the new games.

And of course, the investment is something of a no-brainer on Crystal Horse’s part; the company is already profitable, which makes it the easiest kind of startup to invest in. With this investment, Nexx Studio has become the company’s eight Malaysia-based portfolio startup.

Malaysia’s media giant Catcha Media Berhad and social news network Says.com have today shaken hands and agreed on a $20 million merger to form a digital advertising business under their combined wing.

The merger will see Says.com and Catch Media subsidiaries enjoy a combined reach of 9.78 million Malaysians each month, which represents about 30 percent of Malaysia’s population. Catcha Media’s publishing business includes 15 magazine titles while Says.com serves over 80 brands including Nike and Coca-Cola which highlight both companies’ media dominance in the country.

Patrick Grove, CEO of Catcha Media Berhad explained more about the merger:

This new company offers a tremendous opportunity to dominate the future of digital marketing in Malaysia by pairing two clear leaders in the space in a manner that creates a holistic and complete solution for any brand looking to ride the crest of the new media wave. We intend to expand this business regionally and the expected profitability of this merged entity should make us able to consider an IPO within the coming 12 months.”

Says.com was co-founded by entrepreneur Khailee Ng who previously founded Groupsmore, a Malaysia-based deals site that was acquired by Groupon in 2011.

(Image credit)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taobao in Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore

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

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

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

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

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

Silicon Valley-based BootstrapLabs has announced today that it’s bringing the 12-month BootstrapAccelerator program to Southeast Asia. After hooking up with Malaysia’s MAD Incubator, the new scheme is promising mentoring, funding, and a US-oriented fast-track to its chosen Southeast Asian startups.

Enrollment is already under way, with an application deadline of May 30th for a July 2nd start. The year-long program takes its batch through three stages – “Ideation, Incubation and Acceleration” – and can actually drop or pick up new startups on a monthly basis during that process.

The new BootstrapAccelerator Asia will “focus on early-stage capital efficient startups” with seed funding, and could result in the startup relocating to Silicon Valley – presumably if that makes sense for their market.

BootStrapLabs founder Nicolai Wadstrom hails Southeast Asia as a “thrilling” market with one billion consumers and a general market potential of US$30 trillion by 2020.

MAD Incubator founder and CEO Andrew Wong says in today’s announcement:

Our partnership with BootstrapLabs creates a different offering than other Silicon Valley accelerators operating in Southeast Asia. By combining aspects of the local culture and disposition with Silicon Valley execution we are creating the accelerator model of the future.

Of course, the Southeast Asia region already has some strong accelerators such as Singapore-based JFDI, which has already selected its eight bootcamp startups for 2013.

BootstrapLabs started up in 2009 and has already helped some non-US startups to grow, such as Audiodraft and Zerply. Judging by those and other incubatees, Southeast Asian startups might want to think less about simple, consumer-oriented apps, and focus on more complex and perhaps enterprise-oriented business visions.

Interested startups can apply here before May 30th.

Made in Malaysia, Instapps helps merchants to set up an online storefront within their Facebook page. Instapps allows merchants to easily manage their product listings and sales.

Once published, the Instapps store appears as a tab on the Facebook page and merchants are able to manage their inventories all within the Instapps management system. The service remains free for merchants for up to eight products. Anything above that, Instapps charges from $9 per month. The idea is very similar to Indonesia’s Onigi which has had more than 14,000 users since June last year.

Instapps was started within Tribeup, a digital marketing agency based in Penang, Malaysia. The first version of Instapps helps users build Facebook landing pages, like Pagemodo does. But the team scrapped the idea after two weeks and it eventually became a Facebook commerce (sometimes dubbed f-commerce) solution application. The team has received angel investment to help Instapps get started.

Despite so much expectation that social commerce will take off, it doesn’t seem to be a widespread reality yet. I think this GigaOM article does a good job of explaining why it hasn’t been a success – and also why it could be a success in the future.

Japanese companies seem to be doing well in terms of social marketing, with drink-maker Ichitan coming out on top in Thailand, and bike-maker Yamaha revs up the most social media fans in Indonesia. But in Malaysia and the Philippines, two homegrown brands (Air Asia and Smart, respectively) are at the top of this ranking.

This combined count can be a bit unfair in some ways, as it punishes brands who opt to, say, avoid Instagram but have good numbers on other networks. An example is BlackBerry Indonesia, which is not in the ranking despite being one of the nation’s top Facebook brand pages with 26.7 million followers.

With all that in mind, here’s the full infographic, which also has some fun snippets about user behavior on brand pages on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram:

(Source: ZocialInc blog)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: Googleblog.blogspot.ca

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) announced yesterday that that its Google Apps will be used for educational purposes by 10 million Malaysian students, teachers, and parents. Furthermore, the government will also ‘deploy’ Chromebooks to be used in the country’s primary and secondary schools. VentureBeat believes that the government chose Chromebooks because of their relative affordability. All of this is to support Malaysia’s 12-year education blueprint.

The government plans to provide 4G internet access, a virtual learning platform, and a minimum 10:1 ratio of students to computers to all 10,000 schools in Malaysia. Those Chromebooks will definitely help the students get more familiar with computers, and of course will also make sure Google is very much central to people’s lives starting in the early school years.

Google Apps for Education has gained quite a few partners across the Asia Pacific region in the past few years. Among them are Thailand’s Khon Kaen University, Indonesia’s Petra University, the Philippines’ Commission for Higher Education, Singapore’s Ministry of Education, and India’s University of New Delhi faculty of management. There are currently 3,000 schools worldwide that are using Chromebooks for educational purposes.

(Source: Google via VentureBeat)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As one of the biggest payment companies in Southeast Asia, it is going to be interesting to hear what MOL founder Ganesh Kumar Bangah has to share about how he started his company. And most importantly, what his company plans to do in the future. Interviewed by Willis Wee, this is what Ganesh has to say:

#15:21: MOL’s annual revenue is US$300 million, with 60 million transactions in a year.

#15:22: Ganesh raised funding of two million Ringgit from Berjaya Group in its early days. Out of Berjaya Group’s 30 investments, he was one of the two to survive. About MOL’s biggest investment made by Malaysian billionaire Vincent Tan, now Vincent owns over 80 percent of MOL. “When you raise a lot of money in the beginning, you increase your overhead, and after you do that, it’s difficult to turn it down.” So it is good to be conservative in spending, explained Ganesh.

#15:23: Ganesh gives advice to fellow entrepreneurs: persevere, don’t lose focus. A lot of people give up early on. Back in the days, internet connection was not as big as now, if Ganesh gave up in the first eight, 12 months, he wouldn’t be here now.

#15:24: Focus on games is important, and the social aspect inside it too. Before Zynga arrived, Ganesh suggested Friendster to put in social games, but it was ignored.

#15:25: “We bought Friendster not to beat Facebook, but to buy its assets, its brand.” The moment after Ganesh bought Friendster, everyone recognizes his company as the one who bought Friendster. Before the Friendster acquisition, MOL had around 200,000 registered users with a few of them spending $60 a month. After the acquisition, MOL gathered 2.7 million registered members in three years, in which six percent of them spend $60 a month. Friendster patents had some value as well. It was sold to a big social network… maybe Facebook, but Willis was the one who said that, not Ganesh.

#15:27: Tons of developers out there need marketing, and now Friendster is a channeling arena for developers to launch games.

#15:28: Talking about MOL’s acquisition to Indonesian payment gateway AyoPay, he explained that AyoPay is similar to MOL, but in Indonesia. MOL has had presence in Indonesia for one to two years, and AyoPay was distributing MOL points during that time. Ganesh sees that they can broaden the relationship to the next level.

#15:29: The next five to eight years, Ganesh will change Indonesia’s game play to mostly physical card games compared to online gaming.

#15:30: “At this time and age, we need to have Southeast Asian focus which has 600 million people. Its demographic is similar to China and the US.” Ganesh said that if you’re not considering tp go global, at least eye Southeast Asia. Malaysia is small.

#15:31: MOL was once a listed company, but not anymore. Coping with its shareholders became problematic. They gave back shareholders good return, and cut some losses. Maybe next year MOL will go public again.

#15:32: On MOL’s future plans, there’s something about Vietnam which is associated with payment. The press release will come soon. Willis couldn’t break Ganesh to reveal anything more.

#15:34: About things Ganesh would do differently if he could do it all over again, he said that he went for easy money too fast, like going to new region, selling his company [share] too fast, or even listing his company. This can decrease your company value, explained Ganesh. You need to aim medium to longer timeline.

#15:35: “I do angel investment, but in areas I’m good at.” Ganesh doesn’t invest in advertising, because he doesn’t do that.

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

I believe many startups, app developers, and site owners are plagued with the issue of creating an excellent user experience for their users. Often, with lousy user experience (UX), it translates to users who quickly abandon the app, and low conversion rates among premium customers. Often, testing can be expensive and take up long hours for startups, and hence many opt to skip this initial process.

Here’s a new startup that aims to solve the problem. First to take to our Startup Arena Singapore 2013 stage today is Malaysian-based startup NetizenTesting, an online usability testing service that taps into a crowdsourced pool of online citizens to test applications. During the entire testing process, all the screen activity and voice comments of the testers will be recorded and given to clients so that they can understand user behavioral patterns, point of exit, and so on.

So a typical testing cycle begins with the client listing the test instructions and requirements online, and then proceeds to choose a tester from the pool of crowdsourced testers that NetizenTesting already has. Once the tester is done digging through the website, the results will then be delivered to the client.

How does NetizenTesting ensure that the results are of top quality and effective to the client? In the event that the tester is found not to follow instructions or produces irregularities, the client has the option to get a refund or choose another tester.

At present, clients are charged at US$35 per tester, and there’s a bundled offer of $19.90 per tester should clients opt for three users or more. If the client wishes to have a more in-depth analysis, a full UX report can be churned out for $1,000 per report.

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

Global outsourcing online marketplace Freelancer, which connects people to freelance jobs posted worldwide, is making an effort to bring in more members from Malaysia with a localized language feature that launched just last week. The company is looking to assist with the country’s eight year plan in catalysing growth and income of its SMEs with jobs offered on the site. At the moment, 97 percent all business establishments in Malaysia are SMEs.

There are around 50,000 Freelancer users in Malaysia, and regional manager for Asia, Evan Tan, told us that they plan to increase that to 300,000 by next year. The company aspires to do this by launching more features targeted towards the Malaysian market, such as the recently rolled-out Bahasa Malaysia language service.

Most of Freelancer’s jobs come from English speaking countries like the UK, the US, and Australia. As English is a widely spoken language in Malaysia, a lot of Malaysians are well able to use the site’s features effectively already. Internet penetration in Malaysia is good at about 60.7 percent, or around 17.7 million people being online. Evan adds:

We’re supporting the Malaysian government’s goal to become a high income, advanced nation by 2020, by making top talent as well as high-quality work accessible to Malaysians.

Before stepping into Malaysia, Freelancer expanded to neighboring Indonesia last year, rolling out localized language support for the country. It has seen significant growth of over 60 percent in only three months, with more than 100,000 Indonesian users currently.

Social recruitment startup TribeHired has concluded a US$560,000 seed funding round led by TNF Ventures through the Technology Incubation Scheme (TIS). Angel investors Ben Ball and Ben Chew also participated in the round.

In short, TribeHired taps into its users’ Facebook connections to spread job recommendations. So the more friends you have on TribeHired, the more job recommendations you are likely to receive. Using it is simple. You log on using your Facebook account and select interests to view related jobs that are posted on TribeHired. The site creates resumés as well, with a user’s CV based on his/her Facebook information and customizable on TribeHired.

Posting a job is simple and seems to be free for now. (I posted one in just a minute). You fill in the job description and upload a picture either through your Facebook or computer. Japan’s Wantedly is another startup working on social recruitment.

Prior to today’s funding, TribeHired received funding from Cradle Fund, a government agency under the ministry of finance, Malaysia. TribeHired was also part of JFDI’s accelerator program in 2012.

JFDI CEO Hugh Mason tells us that TribeHired’s news means that it’s the seventh of JFDI’s eleven graduates from the 2012 batch to have secured backing (including the likes of ShopSpot and Fetch Plus). He adds:

Our startups have now raised S$3.9m between them, going from idea to investment in 100 days and creating around 40 jobs along the way.

Malaysia’s e-payment giant MOL has announced its majority investments in Turkey’s Game Sultan and PaytoGo. The strategic investment in Turkey brings MOL closer to lucrative mobile payments markets in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Indeed, PaytoGo plans to expand into the Middle East and North Africa in 2013, according to MOL’s announcement today.

Game Sultan is an e-wallet system using G-cash as its virtual currency which can be purchased in kiosks, retail outlets, cybercafés, and online in Turkey. So far, it has partnered with over 100 online games and 25 global publishing partners. PaytoGo is a mobile payment solution not only for games but also for online shopping, mass transportation, m–parking, and m–ticketing, working together with telcos in Turkey including Turkcell and Vodafone.

Ganesh Kumar Bangah, group CEO of MOL Global, explained more on this move:

Turkey is one of the fastest growing e-commerce markets in the world. We have observed the growing trend of game developers putting in more efforts to localise their products. In addition, Turkey is an attractive market for mobile payments with over 61 million mobile phone users and mobile phone ownership reaching a penetration level of 85 percent.

Onur Ergüney, the general manager of Game Sultan and PaytoGo, added that MOL’s investment will boost its standing among the global publishers and partners that it works worth, and will help alot with their mutual expansions.

Also Read: The Founding Story of MOL

Japan-based app Line announced today that the company has reached another milestone by hitting the 120 million users landmark, an increase of 20 million users since January. During this opportunity, the messaging company also shared its gaming app Line Play’s progress, which has gathered around six million users worldwide since its global launch last month.

Still on Line Play, the app managed to climb its way to the top two free apps spots in several countries and platforms like in Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, and Malaysia. The same success can’t be said about the game’s reception in Vietnam, with Line having only one million users there. Looking at the nature of Line Play’s cutesy avatars and gameplay, surely most of its six million users are female.

As we’ve said before, compared to rival KakaoTalk, Line’s key differentiator lies in its social games platform. Cho Simeon, general manager of Line Business Office, echoes that thought when it comes to Line’s push into Indonesia, saying that the gaming industry in Indonesia is growing very fast with mobile internet penetration reaching 57 percent. There are quite a few game lovers here too, with around 12 million Indonesians playing web-based games every day.

Thanks to Line’s TV ads in the country, Line for iOS and Android are now the top two chatting apps being downloaded in Indonesia; WhatsApp is another major challenger. But rival WeChat – reaching an impressive growth rate this month – is another strong contender to the title.

The Chinese-made messaging app WeChat got a version for older Blackberry models late last year. But now the makers of WeChat have promised that the app is making its way to the newest BlackBerry 10 OS “in the near future”. The pledge was made on the official Facebook page of WeChat Malaysia a couple of weeks ago, and was more recently noticed by the crew at 36Kr:

As with the version for older devices, the BlackBerry 10 iteration of WeChat will be crucial in its expansion into Southeast Asia and the Middle East. While much of the app’s 300-million-plus user-base is in China, the parent company Tencent (HKG:0700) is keen for the app to be China’s first social media success story, and gave it an English name in April 2012. WeChat is being promoted overseas via things like its Facebook page, but it’s up against stronger offline marketing by NHN Japan and its Line app.

Surely the BlackBerry 10 version of WeChat would get features that put it on par with its iOS and Android siblings – like video calling, song recognition, and voice chatrooms. Then it wouldn’t be so inevitably bare-bones as the BB5/6/7 and Symbian versions.

Tencent’s focus on Asia seems to be paying off, and a BB10 version of the app should help – so long as BlackBerry’s newest platform proves a hit in the Canadian company’s few remaining strongholds.

This is a heatmap of WeChat’s global user-base so far:

Click to enlarge the map.

(Source: 36Kr – article in Chinese)

Thailand-headquartered e-book platform Ookbee said today that it launched operations in Malaysia two months ago. The result? Pretty good. To date, Ookbee CEO and founder Natavudh Pungcharoenpong (commonly known as Moo), said that his team has over 100,000 users who consume 40 magazine titles and 5,000 local e-books in Malaysia. He also highlighted that “the number is growing every day.” He added:

We have around 100,000 users in Malaysia now but expect it to be at least a million within 2013. We will have at least one telco partner in Malaysia like what we did with AIS [in Thailand].

Moo declined to reveal which telcos he is working with as the deal hasn’t finalized yet. As a whole company, Ookbee has around three million users in total, as he shared with us last December when we met in Tokyo. Rumors in the industry have it that some major breaking deal is coming up for Ookbee. But Moo declined to comment on the matter.

On a related note, Moo will be speaking at Startup Asia Singapore 2013 held on April 4 and 5. He’ll share how Ookbee bootstrapped to success. Plus, maybe there’ll be some juicy bits of news about the big deal that we keep hearing about.

If you haven’t yet grabbed your tickets, do it early.

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

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

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

An apartment listed on ACproperty. Click to enlarge.

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

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

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

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

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

MOL is one of the biggest payment companies in Southeast Asia, with over 680,000 physical and online payment channels, 60 million annual transactions, and yearly revenue over $300 million. Some of MOL’s main payment products include:

1. MOLPoints is an online wallet for purchasing virtual goods, specifically for game credits and online content.
2. MOLPay is an online wallet for purchasing non-virtual goods like products and services from online enterprises.
3. MOLCards is a prepaid card sold at MOL distribution channels. It is used to top up MOLPoints.

MOL also owns Friendster after its acquisition in 2009. I recently met up with MOL founder Ganesh Kumar Bangah as he told the story of MOL’s founding.

Ganesh started work at age 17 in 1997 when he was still an undergraduate. He worked as a promoter in a Johor-based company, Cyberfield. Cyberfield does development, runs cyber cafes, and also produces a cyber cafe management software that it sells to other such cafes. After working there for some time, Ganesh dropped out of university to focus on the company because of the potential he saw. It was a decision that he doesn’t regret but doesn’t encourage either.

In the interview, he quipped cheekily:

I saw an article that the Singapore government wants to turn Singapore into a Silicon Valley. They should encourage students to drop out.

Starting up

During the dot com bubble period in 1999, Ganesh and his two co-founders had the idea of spinning the cybercafe management software off as a separate business entity and offering the software for free to cafes around the world. They approached Tan Sri Vincent, a Malaysian self-made billionaire and founder of the Berjaya Group to pitch this idea, which raised two million ringgit ($640,000). It was a small investment compared to Tan Sri’s other investments, but Ganesh feels this was a blessing in disguise.

At that time, Tan Sri invested 200 million ringgit ($64 million) in 30 other startups. Some of those startups raised ten to fifteen million ringgit. I only raised two million. It was one of the smallest amounts raised. If I had raised ten million, I would have shut down the company in one and a half years. Because I raised two million, I managed to wait it out. When you raise fifteen million, you tend to build your burn rate to one to two million per month. And when you have one to two million ringgit burning every month, you cannot generate revenue after one year, you need to cut the team. When you cut the team, it’s a downward spiral.

With the investment, MOL AccessPortal was launched in February 2000. Within three months of giving the software away for free, it was installed in more than 15,000 cyber cafes across the world.

Solving problems

But MOL had problems monetizing its users as there wasn’t Google AdWords to easily monetize the traffic. As such, Ganesh and team developed their own payment system and turned the wide cyber cafe network into a payment system where people could pay cash at the cyber cafes for online transactions. This master stroke instantly made MOL into a potential giant monetizing machine with a wide distribution channel in Malaysia and across the world.

With the payment channel sorted out, the team faced a chicken-and-egg problem of having few transactions happening. There weren’t many virtual goods to be purchased online back then as there were few merchants online. The team went out to solve this by working with game publishers. In 2002, MOL was the exclusive payment gateway provider with Helbreath, an extremely popular Korean game. The partnership propelled MOL’s reputation, which saw many game publishers using MOLPoints. By December 2003, MOL got listed on the Malaysia Stock Exchange.

Starting the company was the most challenging time because the internet hadn’t picked up yet. So you needed to learn how to wait it out and bootstrap, especially at the beginning. The first three years are the toughest times. After we get traction, it’s just growth. The first day I started collecting game payments, my revenue was like 3,000 ringgit from one game. Today we collect more than a million ringgit a day from online game payment alone. And we work with more than 250 to 300 game publishers all over the world.

From good to great

Many entrepreneurs dream of getting listed but Ganesh had his sights on bigger things. In 2008, he again roped in help from Tan Sri Vincent to de-list and privatize MOL. This was another monumental moment for the company. By now, both of his co-founders had exited, and Ganesh was the sole remaining founder in the company. He went on to expand MOL to India, SIngapore, and Thailand and passed the milestone of $100 million yearly revenue. In 2009, MOL acquired the giant social network Friendster, presenting the world with a rarely-seen phenomenon: a Southeast Asian firm acquiring a giant US internet company.

Despite the success he has achieved so far, Ganesh doesn’t seem to be slowing down. He hinted at several acquisitions in the company road map and market expansion to other countries is part of the plan. At a personal level, Ganesh also does angel investing and mentoring of local entrepreneurs. Certainly more entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia could learn from Ganesh’s example: got funding and being listed don’t have to be the end of the story. Sometimes, it’s just the beginning.

MOL’s ten-year anniversary

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.

It’s always heart-warming to see a startup growing from a paper idea into reality and success. Alright, success is subjective. But I think the folks at Piktochart have done quite a phenomenal job so far. Piktochart is a simple-to-use online infographic builder for both designers and non-designers. We know that our readers love it.

[UPDATED: The new Piktochart tools are now live and can be found here].

The Malaysian startup was part of the 2011 China Accelerator program and also took part in our Startup Arena competition in Singapore last year where they won third place. (Shameless plug: this year’s Startup Arena in Singapore is still accepting startup applications). Today, Piktochart announces its new and refreshed infographic builder with more useful features packed into this upgrade. Users can now include hyperlinks and multiple clickable tabs all within a single infographic. Infographics in HTML format exported from Piktochart are now search engine friendly too. Previously, only images could be exported.

To date, it has over 5,000 premium users, with more than 170,000 users altogether. 51 percent of Piktochart’s users are from the U.S. and Canada. When asked if Piktochart is profitable, CEO and co-founder Ai Ching Goh told me that the startup has been profitable since June 2012 and is now generating more than $40,000 a month in revenue. In September 2012, Piktochart received $140,000 of commercialization funding from Cradle Fund to scale its business.

Founded in June 2011, the Piktochart team consists of a total of nine people today. The startup claims that they have no tricks in scaling up at such a fast pace. Ai Ching believes that building a product that meets the market’s needs is key to success. She also credits her team, all of whom are willing to sleep in the office to work things out whenever needed. Her future plan is simply to make Piktochart better by listening to its users. She shared with me some of Piktochart’s future plans:

[We aim to] make Piktochart even better. We are planning for interactive controls such as tabbing and tool tips – but make them more graphically relevant so that it replaces any wordy landing page. Interactive, simpler, more-user-friendly, and we will keep iterating based on what users tell

Augmented reality developer AR&Co recently created an augmented reality Android app solely to help promote an Indonesian movie called 3Sum. The app is touted as the first use of augmented reality (AR) technology to promote an Indonesian movie.

Though the name might conjure up certain images for several people ¹, the movie doesn’t revolve around a sexual theme. 3Sum is an omnibus movie that combines three short films made by three different directors – Andri Cung, William Chandra, and Witra Asliga. The movies embrace three different genres: thriller, drama, and action.

The augmented reality app can be used together with 3Sum promotional items like its movie posters, banners, T-shirts, and premiere gala invitations. The latter two are exclusive items, whereas the former two can be found in nearby theatres.

This is a fun initiative by AR&Co as Indonesia hasn’t seen many augmented reality technologies being developed or used like this. I can imagine that this has already given a lot of developers some ideas to use augmented reality for other promotional purposes.

AR&Co plans to expand to Kuala Lumpur this year after previously opening offices in Singapore, Myanmar, London, and Barcelona. An AR&Co representative told us that they are also planning to launch a gaming theme park soon.

3Sum’s press screening and gala premiere will be held today, and the movie’s nationwide launch is on January 31st. You can download the Android app for free here and try using it by first pointing your phone’s camera toward specific markers which are located on the afore-mentioned promotional items.

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.

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

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

In demand in India, Malaysia

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

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

[Source: Value2020]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Source: Lowyat via Trenologi]

We know that the China-made messaging app WeChat has global ambitions, and that’s made even more clear today with the launch of a beta version of WeChat for BlackBerry. Since pretty much no-one in China uses BlackBerry phones, this is certainly aimed at markets where WeChat is already seeing good growth (and where the BB OS is huge too), like Indonesia, Malaysia, and across the Middle East.

The new WeChat for BlackBerry is not on the app’s front page, and is instead announced on a backroom WeChat page; it seems to be in public testing for a while. It supports group messaging via text, voice, or photos – but it doesn’t have major features like video calling, as seen in the iPhone and Android versions.

If you really want it, the new release supports BB OS5, 6, and 7, and is in this ZIP file. Here are a couple more screenshots:

WeChat will reach 300 million registered users next month, according to its makers, Tencent (HKG:0700). Whatsapp never reveals numbers, but it’s likely ahead of some newer challengers such as Line (80 million) and KakaoTalk (70 million).

Get more info on WeChat v1.0 for BlackBerry (but in Chinese) on this page. If you test it out (I have no BlackBerry device to give this a spin), let us know how it performs in the comments.

[Source: 36kr - article in Chinese]

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

While you were sitting in your room doing nothing the past couple of months, Airbnb was busy renting your room to other people, because that’s what they do. And although the company has been a bit slow in coming to Southeast Asia and is running behind some competitors, over the past couple months, the company has made serious moves to expand into the region, expanding operations into Thailand, Indonesia, and most recently Malaysia. As a reflection of this new focus on Southeast Asia, the company has even established a new Asia Pacific division that will be managing these regional operations.

Along with the launches, Airbnb shared some statistics about its progress in each country thus far, and frankly, it’s all pretty impressive. In Thailand as of November there were over 1,300 listings, and hosts were making around $2,000 annually, which is pretty great for supplementary income. The service has also become more popular for Thai people looking to travel abroad; Airbnb says its Thai travelers increased by 270% in 2012.

Indonesia has more than 1,800 listings, with most of them (unsurprisingly) centered around the tourist haven that is Bali. If you’ve got a full apartment to rent out, you can make some real money renting with Airbnb in Indonesia; the company says people who rent full apartments or houses make an average of $5,000 per year. Not too shabby!

Malaysia is Airbnb’s newest addition, and unsurprisingly it has fewer listings (around 800 at the moment) than Indonesia or Thailand. But the company says that travelers from Malaysia using the services are up 350% this year.

At present, there is one big downside to anyone considering listing their property in Southeast Asia: Airbnb’s $1 million host guarantee (which protects hosts in the event that guests cause damage to their space) doesn’t yet cover any Southeast Asian country. But with the company’s increased focus on Southeast Asia, we’re certain that’s something that it will be looking to rectify in the coming months. In the meantime, it will be interesting to see how Airbnb’s competitors, especially local competitors, respond to the company’s increased focus on Southeast Asian markets.

Silicon Valley-based game development studio, Gamenauts, is announcing today that it will be partnering with a number of independent mobile game developers from the Asia region. The company has previously worked with Indonesia’s Menara Games on Ninja Fishing, a popular title reminiscent of Fruit Ninja which reached number seven on the US paid app charts for iOS [1]. You can check out a video demo of that game below.

Gamenauts plans to publish games from a number of Asian developers in the new year, including the afore-mentioned Menara games, as well as another Indonesian developer Artlogic Games. They also plan to publish titles from Malaysian developers Nerdook Productions and Kurechii Studios.

Gamenauts says that it will provide funding, as well as support during development, marketing, and monetization. The company’s CEO Stanley Adrianus added:

It is our goal to help independent Asian developers have their games discovered and successfully received in the western market. […] We are thrilled to be working with such talented developers, and we anticipate 2013 to be a great year with these publishing partnerships.

I was curious to hear how these india Asian developers ended up on the radar of a Silicon Valley-based game developer like Gamenauts. Stanley explained to me that he was actually born in Indonesia, growing up in Singapore before moving to the US. But he had many contacts in the gaming industry in Southeast Asia, including their partner Menara Games.

It will be interesting to see what comes of these partnerships, and if we can see these developers have an experience similar to that of Menara Games in working with Gamenauts.

Rocket Internet’s Asia-oriented e-commerce site Lazada announced yesterday that the company received $26 million in funding from equity investor Summit Partners. The money will be spent on further business development in its five markets: Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand. Maximilian Bittner, the regional CEO of Lazada, adds:

We are very proud to have an investor of Summit’s calibre joining our shareholder base. They have extensive experience in supporting fast‐growing companies which will be of huge benefit as we continue to build out our offering and services to win the Southeast Asian market.

Lazada launched its new fashion marketplace platform in Malaysia on November 21st. The platform allows offline retailers control over logistics and operations while selling their items online. The company plans to introduce this platform to its other four countries in the near future. It’s an interesting diversification, especially as Rocket Internet already has its own Southeast Asia-oriented fashion e-tailer in the form of Zalora.

This is the third major investment that Lazada has received in the past four months. Previously the e-commerce site received $40 million from Swedish investment firm Kinnevik, and before that an undisclosed investment rumored to be in the region of $50 million from J.P. Morgan.

[Source: TechCrunch via DailySocial]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tiny Macau is Big on Facebook

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

Japan <3 Twitter

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

Who Loves Weibo?

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

Social Savants

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

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

LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) is announcing today that it has surpassed the one million user milestone in Malaysia. The company launched its Bahasa Malaysia language site late last year (along with Indonesian and Korean), and appears to be growing well since then.

The professional social network boasts a sign up rate in Malaysia which is faster than the global average of two new members per second.

According to LinkedIn’s own ad creation tool (which it disclaims is an approximation), Malaysia had a user base of more than 600,000 over a year ago, and in comparison to other regions around Asia, Malaysian users do indeed seem to be signing up fast. Indonesia, which also received language support last year, has over 1.3 million users according to the ad tool. The company says it passed 1 million users on February 21, 2012.

Of course, India is still the undisputed Asian champion of LinkedIn with around 18 million users (officially 17 million+ as of October 10, says LinkedIn). Interestingly, the network still hasn’t made much progress with Japanese users it seems (despite its past efforts), so it remains to be seen if the company will continue to push much there. As for Korea, it looks to have just over 300,000.

For the Asia Pacific region as a whole, LinkedIn has about 34 million members in total.

according to LinkedIn’s ad tool, approximate

We recently told you about Blood Donors Network, one of the six great ideas from Social Innovation Camp Asia which tool place earlier this month in Kuala Lumpur. Blood Donors Network was awarded second place at the event, finishing behind one other team.

The winning team is the makers of ThatApp, a mobile application that aims to help to answer teens’ questions about sex. It aspires to help young people make smart, informed decisions about their sexual health. The name of the app is intentionally subtle, in order to make sure users don’t feel shy or embarrassed.

When I asked about the SI Camp experience, ThatApp representative Wong Chee Yan spoke of it very highly:

I got to know so many people that shared the same passion and vision, which is really very motivating to keep me going down this tough road of fighting for social causes. […] There were so many people I could learn with in term of business development, tech-related stuff, presentation, etc.

I’m told as things stand now they have a working app, and they plan to continue development. If you’d like to stay up to date on their progress or get early access to the app, you can register for updates over at thatapp.sh, or follow them via their Facebook page.

MIS Asia is reporting that Tencent (HKG:0700) claims 400 percent growth for its WeChat app in Malaysia since June, and currently has more than 1 million users in the country. Louis Song, the country manager for Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, commented on the app’s progress in the country to date:

We are very proud to achieve a great and healthy base of subscribers in the Malaysian market in just five months. Our team is committed to continuously improve the user experience and this will definitely be the impetus for WeChat to achieve even greater heights.

Reportedly, a number of Malaysian celebrities are using the service to communicate with fans, and that likely helps WeChat in terms of visibility.

Currently the Android version of the app is ranked 12th overall in the free app category in Malaysia, but it has been one of the top ten communication apps since back in August. On iOS it has been doing even better, and is currently ranked fifth among all free apps, and second in the social networking category.

WeChat launched in Indonesia back in September and it looks to be performing well in there too.

Much like UCWeb’s mobile browser which recently surpassed 1 million Android users, WeChat is an example of a Chinese company that is leveraging the power of app stores to reach consumers around the world.

Rocket Internet’s e-commerce site Lazada has received more investment today, this time from Swedish investment firm Kinnevik for a sum of $40 million. Lazada, which was just launched in March this year, operates in five Southeast Asian countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand. Maximilian Bittner, the regional CEO of Lazada, noted:

Kinnevik has a proven track-record of investing in emerging markets and we are very excited to have such a knowledgeable and experienced investor on board. In addition to capital they will provide us with invaluable strategic insight of operating in such markets. It is also a strong testament to what we have accomplished so far and verifies that we are on the right track to achieve our aggressive strategic goals

TechCrunch rightly pointed out that it is interesting to see Lazada disclose the amount of its investment to the public. Previously, the Amazon clone has been quite vague when publishing any numbers. Magnus Ekbom, Lazada Indonesia’s managing director told me during our recent talk that they were unable to speak about any numbers in detail due to a number of reasons.

Kinnevik acquired a quarter ownership from Rocket Internet during the first quarter of this year. This latest investment move might be part of the bigger financial deal agreed between the Swedish and German companies. This is also the second investment Lazada has received recently, as you may recall that J.P. Morgan also invested in the company a couple of months ago.

[Source: TechCrunch]

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

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

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

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

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

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

After three months of intense hacking, coding, biz refinement, and some pivoting, China’s funkiest incubator, Chinaccelerator, yesterday graduated all eight of its 2012 batch. Rather than heading up to the incubator’s home-base in Dalian, the Demo Day event took place in downtown Beijing.

Chinaccelerator has a pretty good track record. One of last year’s graduates, OrderWithMe, went on to win TechChrunch Disrupt in Beijing a short while later, and the super-funky PiktoChart has graced the stage at our own Startup Arena contest in Singapore earlier this year. The incubator was founded by Cyril Ebersweiler, who’s also in demand as a mentor at 500startups, OnLab, and lots of other places.

The 2012 batch is all killer and no filler (and includes some startups we’ve profiled already), so these are some startup teams to watch:

• AdConnect
  This startup has already launched its free app cross promotion network, AppSpree.me, which is aimed at early-stage startups that have apps. We talked to co-founder Andrew Boos earlier this month, who describes AppSpree as “a zero-cost way to help apps grow” via its customizable cross-promotions.

• HopCab
  Unlike the rest of the 2012 batch, HopCab is focused on a different country – Malaysia. Launched earlier this summer, and centered around its iPhone app (the Android version is coming soon), it’s a location-based service for booking cabs or executive cars-for-hire. Before you even book your ride, the app can help you get an estimated cost for your journey. It’s currently operational in Kuala Lumpur and Penang.

• QuWanBa
  QuWanBa (or “LetsGoOut” in English) takes a different philosophical approach to the other 2012 batch startups, encouraging people, in the words of founder Yung-Chung Lin, to “reconnect in real life and rediscover the love shared among us.” This “offline socializing” startup will monetize from offline travel transactions, sort of like Airbnb, on its “peer-to-peer activities and happenings” service. The site is at QuWan.ba, which will launch on November 3rd 30th [The startup's website had the wrong date before].

• 7Colors
  7Colors has already rolled out as a cross-platform online learning platform for children. From its homepage at 7colors.cc, it already has a lot of education-oriented Windows, Android, and iOS apps.

• WeiboAgent
  Another one to have already launched into action is WeiboAgent, a service that aims to help brands do much better social media marketing on Sina Weibo, the nation’s hottest Twitter clone. Essentially, as the co-founder recently told us, it’s a SaaS advisory tool built on top of social media analytics – but it has actual human advisors onboard to help out its users in their marketing to Chinese consumers. [UPDATED: Co-founder Michael Michelini reaches out to explain that the business model was tweaked since our first interview. He adds: "We pivoted from advice/analytics to lead generation and B2B. We learned (using the lean startup methodology) that people didn't want "advice" but instead [wanted help to] find customers/business contacts in Chinese social media”].

• TuiCool
  TuiCool is a social network oriented around reading. From its UI it looks to be halfway between Reddit and the China-made Wumii Reader, and it’s backed up by a very alpha-stage Android app.

• ToyCloud
  ToyCloud is doing something that sounds both insane and very neat – encouraging people to create apps that can control toys. The website is up, but the SDK for all this hackery – which would let things like radio-controlled cars be maneuvered by smartphone swipes or voice commands – is still in the works. There will also be hardware, in the form of RC cars, sold via the ToCloud website.

• QiuQiu
  Lastly, there’s QiuQiu, which is a social dating platform that’s currently in open-but-quiet beta. Co-founder and CEO Michael Lewis tells us that the idea behind QiuQiu is that “the two most common ways that people meet each other are through their friends/family, and online – we are combining it and putting it on an app.” The app is close to ready for a full launch, but for now is being kept under wraps. With stats indicating there could be more than 30 million adult males in surfeit to the female adult population in a few years’ time, China is sitting on a bachelor timebomb. And clued-up dating apps could be the answer. Or more homosexuality. Either way, it’s all cool.

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Many investors will have been in the Demo Day audience – place your bets in the comments as to which of the startups have the promise to attract VC backing.

Season two of the Malaysian startup pitching TV show Make The Pitch has just wrapped up with two of the six finalists securing some serious seed funding from MyEG (MYEG:MK), the e-services provider that also backs the TV show. The larger of the two investments was made into the clothing e-commerce site FashionValet.net, which has secured RM1 million ($326,000) in funding from MyEG.

From its Kuala Lumpur base, FashionValet’s marketing manager Marissa Zamani tells us that the startup has “over 10,000 users, and over 150 brands” on board now, which is way up from 10 fashion suppliers/partners just over a year ago when the site was first conceived – way before the recent TV show appearance. It sells male and female clothing, shoes, bags, and accessories.

Marissa explains that the two founders of FashionValet, Fadzarudin Anuar and Vivy Yusof (pictured above, with Vivy on the left), “had to go through three rounds of presentations and Q&A between us and the [Make The Pitch] panelists throughout the whole show,” and then “all negotiations were done on the TV show and the [funding] deal was made on the spot in the finals.”

As much as we love to see startups moving quickly, that sounds pretty terrifying. Like with Singapore’s similar Angel’s Gate reality TV show for startups, that kind of high pressure, high-speed deal is risky – after all, funding is not just about the money, but also your rapport with the VCs who should also serve as quality mentors.

Anyway, the show allowed Fadza and Vivy to show their mettle, and they impressed the Make The Pitch judges by getting sales to grow 15 percent in the first six weeks of the show’s airing.

FashionValet is up against some strong fashion e-commerce rivals in the region, such as Rocket Internet’s Zalora. Co-founder Fadzarudin Shah recently penned an interesting blog post about dealing with major competition. In it, he writes:

My response is simple: Having huge competitors play in the same space only further validates that there is a huge opportunity available. So forget about getting bogged down by a brand that suddenly blankets the websites you visit with their ads. Instead, now is the time to show potential clients and investors what your website could be. If you are scared of competitors, you will always be behind them in the pack. Take it as a challenge and enjoy the ride.

Steam Greenlight is the Kickstarter for game developers, but instead of pledges, the developers need to get people’s support so as to earn a spot at the Steam online store. We previously talked about a Malaysian-built, Japanese game which is up for voting called Alpha Kimori. This time around, there is another interesting Malaysian-built game at the site, called “Hoodwink: The Brute, the Babe, and the Bogey” created by E1 Studio. We talked to Amir Irwan, the executive producer of E1 Studio about the game’s prospects on Steam.

Hoodwink tells the story of a Michael Bezelle, who prefers to call himself an ‘acquisition expert’ rather than a ‘thief,’ in his adventure to outwit the last surviving corporate giant called ‘UniCorp.’ The game uses cell shaded art with a post-apocalyptic atmosphere setting. The graphics, music, and sound are all quite good.

Amir explained that the inspiration behind the game is the classic adventure games like Monkey Island, Grim Fandago and Full Throttle. He also said that the movie Blade Runner was the inspiration behind the architectural environment. He adds:

The game was 100 percent developed in Malaysia from all aspect (tech, art, and design). The music was scored by an award winning music composer, Leon Willett, who has offered himself to work with us.

Steam has the sole discretion to choose 10 games every month. Amir told me that Hoodwink has received good feedback and is currently sitting at number 66 [1] on Greenlight out of 3,000 submitted games there.

You can check the Hoodwink game here. If you like the game, be sure to support them there.

The Gangnam Style video by Psy has been viewed more than 359 million times and has inspired thousands of people across the world to remake the iconic dance by performing their own version of Gangnam Style.

Here’s a collection of the neatest Gangnam Style-inspired tribute/parody videos from around Asia to help kick start the weekend ahead of you:

1. Philippines

Here is a very well organized flash mob dance performed by around one thousand inmates of a Philippines jail. Yes, this is the same bunch of Cebu cellmates who hit global headlines back in 2010 with their Michael Jackson dance performances. I wonder if they get reduced sentences for these flash mob dances?

Plus, this video nicely showcases just how viral and influential the Gangnam Style song/dance is, as the prisoners’ video has been viewed close to 2.6 million times since it was uploaded just over one week ago.

2. Indonesia

This is a daring attempt by 1,000 Indonesians performing an illegal Gangnam Style flash mob at an Indonesian landmark called Bundaran HI. They did a pretty convincing job and even encouraged passers-by to join the mass dance. This video has been viewed around 1.9 million times so far.

3. Malaysia

Malaysians do not lose out when making their own Gangnam-themed music videos. This funny video is called “Orang Sabah Style.” Orang Sabah means Sahabans, and is made both to promote tourism on the Malaysian state of Sabah and to celebrate Malaysian Independence Day. Though the lyrics are in Mandarin Chinese, they provide English subtitles for more people to understand. The video has garnered around 3.6 million views so far.

4. Thailand

This is Thailand’s version of the Gangnam Style video – though it keeps the original’s Korean lyrics and just focuses on changing the visuals. Nonetheless, they’ve done a great job of keeping the humor of Psy’s video. Impressively, this video has close to 4.6 million views.

5. South Korea

This Korean-made video is called “Hongdae Style.” I don’t understand Korean but I think that is the only word changed from the original Gangnam Style lyrics. The cinematography of Hongdae Style closely resembles the original video. This one has an impressive 4.8 million views to date.

6. Singapore

Here’s a quirky video titled “Singaporean Style.” The music’s lyrics satirize aspects of life in the city state – but ultimately it’s about how they’re proud to be Singaporeans. This video has around 2.1 million views so far. Though we notice it is also getting quite a few dislikes, even from Singaporean commenters, perhaps because the performers have riskily changed the lyrics.

Bonus

This hilarious “Pyeonyang Style” video appears to be made by a Canadian, and is pretty hilarious. Although I’m not sure what Kim Jong Un would make of this particular Gangnam Style reboot. This video has 4.1 million views with lots of commenters joking that this video might instigate a nuclear war.

[Image source: HollywoodReporter.com]

Malaysian game developer Sherman3D is reaching out to get more votes for its flagship Japanese RPG, Alpha Kimori, over at at online gaming platform Steam Greenlight. Sherman Chin of Sherman3D told me that they have reached nearly a thousand favorites at the moment, but the game still need a lot more votes to earn its way onto the Steam Greenlight online game store.

Sherman3D was one of three Malaysian game developers present at the recent Tokyo Game Show’s “Asia New Stars Area.” According to Sherman, Alpha Kimori is the only classic Japanese RPG at TGS that received acknowledgement by the Japanese media as a tribute to the JRPG genre.

Alpha Kimori is also the first official commercial game that uses the RPG Maker game engine, chosen by its engine distributor Degica. Sherman explained that they didn’t use the RPG Maker’s ready-made graphics and game resources, instead they used only custom-made ones. He added:

Sherman3D is working closely with Degica and Enterbrain (the creators of the RPG Maker engine) to create even more commercial classic Japanese Role Playing Games that are more than the amateur RPGs created with RPG Maker, showcasing the power of the RPG Maker game engine for professional purposes.

You can check out Alpha Kimori here, and if you like it, be sure to show it some love.

China’s score went up from 83 to 85 – and going up is not good. That means there were even more limits on web access and violations of users’ rights on the web. Burma’s dropped from 88 to 75 in a year in which it opened up to gradual reform, even releasing the political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi and allowing her to take an elected seat in parliament.

Indeed, China is now the third-worst in the world in terms of freedom of usage and expression on the net, behind only Iran and Cuba in first and second respectively. Note that North Korea is not listed. In Asia, Vietnam’s web tightened, while Indonesia’s improved slightly.

Here’s the graph just for Asia:

The report notes the paradoxical approach to the web in China, wherein the nation has a massive, thriving and very competitive internet industry – including social media like Sina Weibo – but it very tightly controlled at a number of levels. It continues:

This paradox was especially evident in 2011 and early 2012. On the one hand, the Chinese authorities further enhanced an already sophisticated and multilayered system for censoring, monitoring, and manipulating activities on the internet, while abducting or imprisoning dozens of activists, lawyers, and bloggers. The scale and speed of the censorship effort — particularly the use of tens of thousands of human censors to identify and delete social media posts — was remarkable.

One academic study reviewing censorship across nearly 1,400 blog-hosting and bulletin-board platforms in China estimated that 13 percent of posts were deleted, many within 24 hours of a particular term becoming sensitive or indicating collective action potential. Such controls contributed to the Chinese internet increasingly resembling an intranet. Many average users, isolated from international social media platforms and primarily exposed to a manipulated online information landscape, have limited knowledge of key events making news around the globe, including the publication of diplomatic cables by the anti-secrecy group Wikileaks or anti-government protest movements sweeping the Middle East.

The China section is massive, running from pages 126 to 151, so we encourage you to get the full report from the link below.

On the known offenders, Freedom House notes:

Green = Free; Yellow = Partially Free; Purple = Not Free. Click to enlarge

After reviewing the findings for the 47 countries covered in this edition of Freedom on the Net, Freedom House has identified seven that are at particular risk of suffering setbacks related to internet freedom in late 2012 and in 2013. A number of other countries showed deterioration over the past two years and may continue to decline, but the internet controls in those states — which include Bahrain, China, Iran, Syria, and Ethiopia — are already well developed.

Then it also highlights some other countries that risk slipping into tighter web controls in the coming year. In Asia, those are Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Azerbaijan, and Pakistan. China’s neighbor Vietnam is also a state that’s proving more adept at shutting up its growing population of netizens. Malaysia’s internet might not be censored in conventional ways, but the report highlights a worrying new form of cyber warfare:

Prominent online news outlets [in Malaysia] and opposition-related websites have suffered cyber attacks at politically critical moments.

Get the full Freedom on the Net 2012 report from here.

Fashion e-commerce site Zalora has officially confirmed today that JP Morgan has invested in the site. JP Morgan seems to love Rocket Internet products, and has also made investments in some of Rocket’s other sites. It comes just two weeks after JP Morgan backed Lazada, the Asia-oriented Amazon clone. The bankers have become the latest addition to Zalora’s current list of investors – Rocket Internet, Invus, and Summit Partners. The investment sum for Zalora has not been disclosed.

Zalora operates in six countries – Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam – and started up at the beginning of this year.

Despite this funding, everything might not be so rosy at Zalora. Back in April this year we heard that Rocket’s Oliver Samwer flew in to motivate the team, and that Zalora was being hit by floods of user complaints in some nations – especially from users in Singapore and Malaysia who were waiting a week or more for items to arrive.

Catherine Sutjahyo, the co-founder of Zalora Indonesia, said in today’s announcement that she felt honored to welcome JP Morgan into Zalora’s group of investors. Catherine believes that this investment shows that Zalora’s strategy to position itself in the Asian e-commerce fashion market is working very well.

Looking at one country in particular, Zalora Indonesia also shared some recent statistics:

• There are more than 400 local and international brands that are working with Zalora. The e-commerce company offers more than 20,000 products to its Indonesian customers.
• Zalora Indonesia employs 200 people with a 5,000 square-meter distribution center located in east Jakarta.
• Zalora has over 70,000 newsletter subscribers in Indonesia with 100,000 Facebook fans.

Recently, Magnus Ekbom from Lazada told us that there are no changes being made to its operations after JP Morgan’s major investment in the company. Will the same thing apply for Zalora? Let’s wait and see.

Ukraine-based online plagiarism checker Plagtracker.com is gunning for an Asian expansion. The site offers free online plagiarism checks without the need to download anything – you can simply put in the text and let the site check it for you. Interestingly, Plagtracker already has a good online presence (according to Alexa) in Asian countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Philippines, India, Pakistan, and others. We talked with Emilia, a Plagtracker representative about the startup’s Asian exploits and plans.

Emilia shared some of Plagtracker’s traffic statistics. Since its founding in July 2011, the website sees 20 percent of visitors coming from Asia out of its 5,000 daily visitors. The US is the number one biggest user of the site, with India in second place. Other heavy users are Malaysia, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Singapore, all in the top 10.

The site also shows live daily stats where visitors can see the number of papers checked everyday, the percentage of plagiarism observed, and feedback received from users. Today’s traffic counter shows that there are around 2,400 papers checked with a current rate of 36 percent plagiarism detected. Most of the users are teachers, professors, students, bloggers, and webmasters [Ed: And editors too!]. The site offers premium services for stronger plagiarism checking and professional editing assistance. The site’s premium users are mostly professional writers, science journals, and several universities and publishers.

I tried using the website to check a few online articles in both English and Indonesian languages, and Plagtracker worked fine on both. The results conveniently show which lines come from which online sources. But I guess that compiling and checking sources from academic papers would be the key challenge for the team. At the moment, the site boasts that it checks content from 14 billion web pages and from five million academic papers.

The Asian Plans

Emilia tells us that the team is looking to establish partnerships in Asian countries. Their first target is nations with highly developed IT industries such as India, China, and the Philippines. At the moment, the company hopes to kick-start the Asian expansion starting with India, saying mainly because the English language is common there and that the country teaches to a lot of IT experts and engineers. Plagtracker already has several partnerships with Indian science journals, and is looking for more partnerships with educational institutions in the region.

Regarding language localization, Emilia concedes that they are still unfamiliar with Asian languages. Plagtracker is now searching for specialists in the Asian languages, and only then will Plagtracker launch its services in, say, Hindi or Chinese in the future.

Emilia names TurnItIn, CopyScape, and DustBall as Plagtracker’s main competitors. She claims that Plagtracker’s main advantage up against its competitors are its free services and easy user interface. Plagtracker doesn’t have any investors at the moment, but they are looking for one now.

Photo: Businessinsider.com

The California-made video The Innocence of Muslims, the anti-Islam film behind violent and deadly protests in several countries, is all over YouTube. This has led to the Indonesian government asking Google-owned YouTube to restrict access to the video which portrays the Prophet Mohammed as immoral.

The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology spokesman, Gatot S. Dewa Broto, said that Google as the parent company of YouTube had emailed them on Thursday evening to say it had blocked Indonesia’s access to 16 URLs related to the “Innocence of Muslims” videos on the site. But the video remained online until Friday noon until access was restricted.

The minister of Communications and Information Technology, Tifatul Sembiring, stated on Friday afternoon that ministry has coordinated with YouTube to take down the videos in question. Extracts of the film were still available with the help of video-sharing websites up until Sunday. Even though Google was making special efforts, it still takes time to block everything due to file sharing. When Indonesians try to access the video now, they will see “This content is not available in your country due to a legal complaint.”

Widespread Protests

Around 250 people from Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia protested in Apsari Park, Surabaya, regarding the film. This was followed by around 50 Indonesian students who trampled the US flag and threw eggs at a US diplomatic mission American Presence Post, which is part of the US Embassy in Jakarta, in Medan today. This afternoon, thousands of people from Muslim organizations like Gerakan Reformis Islam (Islamic Reformist Movement), Gerakan Pembela Islam (the Islamic Defenders Movement), dan Front Pembela Islam (the Islamic Defenders Front) held a march from Hotel Indonesia to the US Embassy Jakarta to condemn the film. They all demand the same thing: hard punishment for the filmmaker, Sam Bacile. Some even demanded the death penalty.

Muslim protests also occurred in other parts of the world since the film originally appeared on Youtube. Today, Sam Bacile been arrested and questioned by the United States police, but due to illegal drugs possession, not the film.

Broto also said that the government wrote a notification to mobile phone maker RIM to ask for a content filter on its smartphone services. Broto said:

We could access the videos on Blackberry too so we wrote to RIM to ask that it filter them, and RIM has been very co-operative [and filtered it].

The video is also blocked in Libya, Egypt, and India. Minister of Information in Malaysia, Rais Yatim on Sunday also asked Google to remove the video from YouTube from the country as it may trigger violence. Google has begun blocking the video access in Malaysia as a respond to the official complaint. But Google refused a White House request Friday to take it down.

US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said that the video is disgusting and reprehensible. She emphasized religious freedom and tolerance. Clinton added:

The United States government has no connection to the film and absolutely rejects its content and message.

This film was hardly noticed before anti-Muslim activists in Virginia, America, reposted it and sent the links to activists and journalists in Egypt. It doesn’t take a genius with a high budget (or any directing skills) to spread religious hatred online and get instant attention.

A few weeks back Opera released its ‘State of the Mobile Web’ report, with insights on regional mobile market based on trends from Opera Mini web browser usage. As you can see from the company’s chart on the right, the proportion of Opera Mini usage on smartphones versus feature phones has increased significantly this year over last year.

We got in touch with Opera to see a breakdown of Opera Mini usage according to country, which we have plotted on a map below, with data coming from July 2011 and 2012 [1]. Opera Mini usage on smartphones (vs feature phones) has increased in a number of Asian regions, perhaps most noticeably in China where it jumped from 10 percent in July 2011 to 52 percent in July 2012. Similarly, Hong Kong rose from 24 percent to 52 percent.

Other regions with a modest proportion of smartphone Opera Mini users but showing strong growth are Malaysia (from 11 percent up to 20 percent), the Philippines (from 3 percent up to 15 percent), and even Indonesia to an extent (from 1 percent to 5 percent).

Among the other trends that Opera reported is the fact that Facebook is the top domain observed, ranking as the top web property in 16 of 25 countries. This does not include China where Baidu is tops, or Japan where Google wins out.

I’m a big fan of civic tech startups, or young companies with aspirations to use new technologies for public good. When a friend of mine in the US started using Google Analytics to help discover and report on homicides in Washington DC, it made me put food photo apps in perspective with regards to how we are taking advantage of all this new technology. I thought that perhaps Asia was lacking in such socially-minded projects, but to my surprise (now that I’ve started really looking) I’ve been seeing more and more people getting involved in social entrepreneurship over the past few months.

I recently had a chance to speak with Andrew Tan who is based in Malaysia. He’s in the process of preparing for Asia’s first SI Camp (or Social Innovations Camp) in Kuala Lumpur, which is scheduled to be held on November 9th and 10th. The event is calling for ideas until October 19. These ideas could be from the local community or NGOs, or anyone who sees a social issue that could be tackled with technology. From there, six ideas are chosen for the two-day event, and teams of developers, designers, and business people come together around each one to develop solutions. And after the event, there will be a month-long SI immersion in Singapore at the Eden Strategy Institute office.

Globally, there have already been 25 SI Camps in 16 countries, so it’s certainly high time that we saw one spring up in Asia! Hopefully we can see some Asia success stories added to the list of standouts which have already emerged from global events.

In addition to that general overview of the SI Camp Asia, I wanted to ask Andrew about his thoughts on social innovations in general in the region, and he was kind enough to oblige.

*****

When so many others in the Asia region are doing Startup Weekend events, why have you chosen to do an SI Camp event?

Andrew Tan: We are actually really grateful for those who have and are still organizing Startup weekend/Hackathon type events. These are the pioneers who have helped paved the way towards a more vibrant tech scene and without them I do not believe that we would have been able to get the response we are getting for SI Camp Asia. In fact I believe that there is still space for more of these Hackathon type events in this region since I see them as an important piece that helps build a vibrant tech startup ecosystem.

For us, we also see SI Camp as another piece of the puzzle in the ecosystem building process, but potentially fulfilling a different gap compared to other Hackathon type events. We have chosen to focus on this type of event mainly because of our belief that the web and mobile hold huge potential as drivers of positive social change.

We have already seen how the web has had a huge impact on the way we live our lives: it has changed how we communicate, how we entertain ourselves, our friendships and the way we work. Now it is going to change how we access our health care, how we educate our children and how we provide for the most vulnerable in our communities. However we feel that the use of web/mobile for positive social change is lagging especially in this region.

So what’s holding us back?

We think there’s a mismatch between what the technology supplies and what society needs.

Neither those with the greatest social needs, nor those who are at the forefront of tackling social challenges – charities, governments, entrepreneurs – necessarily see that the web might form part of the solution to social problems. Whilst Amazon and eBay have become a common way to shop, the expectation that a similar tool might be an aspect of healthcare choices or a child’s education is not yet a reality. For practical innovations using the web to have impact they must get themselves some users; but for this to happen, both users and social innovators have to understand and value the potential uses of these tools – they have to ‘get’ the tech.

But this is only half the story. What about the people who can supply the tools: the software developers and designers – the geeks who like their code? There’s a wealth of technical talent out there, but developers and designers are not social change experts. Energy that is currently being driven into creating the ‘next Facebook’ or the ‘the next million-dollar location-based spaghetti photo app’ – needs to be given an alternative, social outlet.

So the geeks with the know-how need to be matched with the people who need to build more appropriate effective software, together.

And that’s where Social Innovation Camp comes in.

By bringing together these two groups – technology and need – we’re creating a community of practice where people can experiment, discover, prototype and become advocates for using technology as a driver of positive social change.

Are people/developers enthusiastic about social projects? (as opposed to making the next million-dollar location-based spaghetti photo app)

Andrew Tan: The response we are getting has been great and is actually exceeding our expectations. I think at some level most of us would like to do good and apply our talent so that it has a positive impact to society.

Also sometimes there are misconception that social impact equals charity. Now, I’m not saying that charities are bad. In fact I believe that there will always be a space for charities to play. However what SI Camp is looking to do is to start people thinking about tech-based social startups.

Is there much support for entrepreneurs who engage in social innovation in Malaysia, do you think? 

Andrew Tan: Social Innovation in Malaysia and in fact in the region is still relatively new. So entrepreneurs in Malaysia engaged in social innovation are getting support but probably not enough. However I’m seeing signs that things are starting change.

What I do hope to really see in this region is the establishment of socially inclined tech accelerators and funds that specifically supports these socially based tech startups such as the New Schools venture fund in the US. The New Schools venture fund invests in entrepreneurs developing education technology tools, applications, content, and services that will significantly improve education opportunities for children from low-income communities. 

You mentioned you are looking to do SI Camps in different cites in the region next year. Do you plan more in Malaysia, or are you trying to push more around Asia?

Andrew Tan: Both. I actually see SI Camp being more local in nature. We are getting interest from various folks from the region and hopefully after attending SI Camp Asia in Kuala Lumpur they will actually start one in their own city so that it becomes more accessible.

We might still have one every year that is more regional in nature but my hope is for it to be replicated in different cities in the region.

Are there any social innovators or inspiring social projects which you have already seen in Malaysia or around Asia?

Andrew Tan: There are a lot of inspiring social projects but I’m going to highlight one that is tech based: kopernik.info. Kopernik is an on-line marketplace of innovative, life-changing technologies designed for the developing world. The founder, Toshi Nakamura, is actually based in Bali.

Made by the folks at Thailand-based social analytics firm ZocialInc, it’s concocted using data from its ZocialRank system. The infographic shows that Thailand has the greatest number of high-ranking brands on social media (86 brands), and that the most liked/followed brand in the region is the Bali-based clothing retailer Surfer Girl, which is apparently living up to its claim of being a fun brand. It’s also got some killer social skills. Global brands in the top 10 include motorbike-maker Yamaha, AirAsia, BlackBerry, Nescafé, and Starbucks.

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

[Source: ZocialInc blog]

The Tokyo Game Show, which has attracted more than 200,000 visitors in the last two years, has revealed the exhibitors for its new “Asia New Stars Area” for this September’s event. There will be four countries represented in this new area: Vietnam, Indonesia, Iran, and Malaysia, giving them a chance to stand out from the huge mass of companies from Japan and China. Here’s a quick look at each exhibitor from those four nations and the kind of cool games that they offer:

Vietnam

Vietnam will be represented by a 15 year-old game outsourcing company, Glass Egg Digital Media. Glass Egg’s portfolio looks very good as it’s comprised of numerous games consoles (Playstation 3, XBox 360, Nintendo Wii), mobile (iOS and Android), and PC (Windows). The company has worked with numerous gaming companies, such as Microsoft, EA, Activision, Sega, Ubisoft, and more.

Guillaume Monier, the COO of Glass Egg Digital Media, explained the company’s objective at the event:

Our main goal is to extend our presence in the Japanese market by demonstrating how outsourcing and Vietnamese game companies can help Japanese companies to make games better, faster and in a cost efficient way while there is no compromise on quality.

Guillaume says that because they are an outsourcing company, they plan to showcase only what the company has produced so far, particularly its vehicle art. Its portfolio consists of games such as F1, Colin McRae DiRT series, Driver San Francisco, Blur, TDY2, Need for Speed, and many others. You can check out the company’s profile here.

Indonesia

Indonesia is represented by game developers Agate Studio and Altermyth. Agate’s portfolio consists of online and mobile titles, while Altermyth’s focus is firmly set on mobile.

According to Kompas, Altermyth plans to create a booklet which will showcase other Indonesian game studios at the event. The company also plans to play the videogame trailers made by other local developers during the Tokyo Game Show. Agate’s COO, Shieny Aprilia will also be one of the panelists at the Asia Game Business Summit on September 20.

Agate’s biggest game is an online game called Football Saga 2. So far the Facebook fan page for the game has garnered more than 41,000 likes.

Iran

Iran [1] is represented by a non-profit, non-governmental organization called the Iran National Foundation of Computer Games which was established in 2007. According to the organization’s website, with 20 million gamers out of 38 million internet users, Iran is the biggest-growing video games market in the Middle East. When I look at its game portfolio, the titles look to have really good visual designs, but there isn’t much more information about them. But you can see a video below made by the organization showcasing its products.

Malaysia

There will be three game developers representing Malaysia: Fun and Cool Ventures, Terato Tech, and Sherman3D.

Fun and Cool Ventures is a mobile apps and games developer and publisher which focuses on Android and iOS [2]. The company is based in three countries: Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia. You can take a look at its published games here. The six published games have an average of 500 to 5,000 downloads according to the Google Play store.

Terato Tech is a mobile apps developer for iOS and Android. The award-winning company develops games too of course; you can see all of them here.

Sherman3D is a veteran in the Malaysian gaming industry for feature phones, Nintendo DS, and computer platforms dating back to 2003. Sherman, the founder of Sherman3D told us that its biggest game to date is an RPG Japanese game called “Alpha Kimori”. Sherman also said that Sherman3D has had 20,000 downloads from Big Fish Games alone. You can take a look at the Alpha Kimori game trailer below.

For more information on the Tokyo Game Show, we’ll be bringing some reports from the event from my Tokyo-based colleague, Rick.

[Picture: finalfantasy.net]

It seems that Singaporeans love Apple products so much, as almost half of the country’s smartphone users use iOS, while Android accounts for more than a quarter of users in second place. The same can’t be said in Indonesia – because iOS and Android users are the minority there with only 2 percent and 10 percent respectively.

The mobile software of choice for Indonesians is Blackberry, along with Symbian, with 27 percent and 10 percent. Both iOS and Android take the silver medal in Vietnam with 21 percent for both of them, beaten by Symbian with 26 percent. Inmobi might not agree with the result though as it has published its own report on the Indonesian platform landscape a couple of months ago based on the company’s ad impression. The report stated that both Nokia and Symbian OS dominated the market, with Android having the fastest growth, there was no mention of Blackberry OS.

If you’re wondering what the figures might be for. China and Japan, the infographic provided by App Annie might help. The infographic shows that both China and Japan are in the top three countries for iOS downloads, and no Asian countries made it to top three in terms of most downloads on Google Play, which is for Android platforms.

The report also shows what people use their smartphones for. Singaporeans, Malaysians, and Indonesians have the same answer for this: SMS. This activity accounts for more than 90 percent of usage in all three countries. Internet savvy Singaporeans then use their phones to also browse the internet, and do their emails, both accounting for 82 percent and 75 percent. While Malaysians and Indonesians prefer to simply browse social networks and make phone calls with their smartphones. In Malaysia, 69 percent love smartphones for social media usage, and 67 percent to make phone calls. While in Indonesia, the phone calls usage account for 71 percent, and 57 percent for social network browsing and sharing.

[Source: Tech Republic, picture: norebbo.com]

The series comes from startup Superboyz.tv, essentially an online production company founded by three guys from Kuala Lumpur who go by the names QuaChee, Arico, and Ben CMX. Talking about the choice to shoot on the iPhone for their first drama series, in a press release on the Superboyz website, Arico says:

We have always wanted to shoot in a simple style, nothing too complicated. We did some research and we thought it was possible and worth [it] to give it a try. Then, we went looking for products like the steadicam and adapters so that we could use the iPhone.

The team says the goal of the series is also to showcase Kuala Lumpur as a cool and unique city, and they plan to make use of some unique local spots as locations as their drama about college romance unfolds.

It’s definitely an interesting concept. But how is the execution? Well…not great. The iPhone 4S produces a clear, sharp image as long as it is given enough light, but it looks very much like video because of the device’s deep depth of field, and it’s not always clear where in the frame viewers are meant to focus. There are also moments in the first episode (emebedded below) where you can see the iPhone automatically adjusting the exposure, which is a bit distracting. The iPhone footage also really stumbles in the few slow-motion shots I watched in the first episode, which look very rough and jerky, in part because the iPhone isn’t actually capable of shooting at high frame rates.

The real problem is the sound, though. Because the iPhone isn’t a particularly good microphone — especially not for recording a whole room — almost all of the dialogue is recorded separately and then dubbed. This can work, of course, but in the case of “Summer Love KL” there are just too many moments where it is distractingly obvious. Transitions between dubbed sound and the few bits recorded live are very awkward, and there’s almost no ambient sound, which gives the impression that the characters live in a world where cars make almost no noise but bubbly synth pop music seems to be perpetually playing in the background.

Of course, like all film and television, the product ultimately lives and dies on the quality of the story and the acting. I can’t say that I enjoyed either of those things through the two episodes of the show that I watched, but as an American male, I’m almost certainly not the target audience for this, so I’ll refrain from commenting further. You can check out the episode below and see if “Summer Love KL” interests you. If it does, there are two more episodes up already, and more should be coming soon.

If it doesn’t interest you, I think it’s still important to recognize the series as a reflection of the fact that these days, anyone can put together a TV series. Personally, I don’t think these guys have done it particularly well, but that doesn’t mean in can’t be done. The iPhone certainly has some limitations as a camera, but they’re mostly things problems that should be surmountable with a skilled team and the right techniques behind them. Even if the Superboyz team aren’t the ones to make Asia’s first popular drama to be shot on a smartphone, I do believe that someday we’ll see something like that happen.

Today, numerous websites in Malaysia showed visitors and users a black pop-up window (pictured above) as a form of protest against the country’s amendment to the Evidence Act. The revised section 114A of that Act states that any internet user, including website owners, social media accounts, and all users of electronic devices are deemed responsible for any perceived defamation or slander that is posted on the respective site, even if the content was not made or posted by the user.

Simply put, every internet user is deemed guilty of handling such content unless proven otherwise. The Malaysia Insider cites the Centre for Independent Journalism Malaysia (CIJ), the campaign organizer, yesterday:

It [the amendment] also makes individuals and those who administer, operate, or provide spaces for online community forums, blogging and hosting services, liable for content published through its services.

The protesting pop-up windows will direct you to two links. The first is aimed at spreading awareness regarding the new amendment and how it will affect users. While the second link asks users to like its Facebook page called “1 Million Malaysians Against Evidence (Amendment) (No. 2) Act 2012.” So far it has garnered around 36,000 likes.

According to Malaysiakini, the Blackout Day is supported by a total of 57 Malaysian websites, including news portals, prominent blogs, commercial sites, online resources, community sites, and NGOs. Malaysian Wikipedia also supported the campaign, but preferred to use a banner on its website rather than the black pop-up window. Numerous Malaysian political activists such as Democratic Action Party (DAP) Leader Lim Kit Siang also supported the protest by going offline for one full day as seen on his website. It’ll also impact on free speech on the web. CIJ added:

The Blackout Day has also received international attention ― highlighted in tweets by popular whistle-blower WikiLeaks and global digital freedom NGO Access Now.

The amendment was passed in April earlier this year, and on May 31st CIJ launched an online petition to ask the government to repeal the new amendment. The petition received 3,300 signatures. Since then the organization has gathered momentum and is now trying to pressure the government in another way, this time through the Internet Blackout Day campaign.

Personally, I support the Blackout campaign. I think the new Malaysian Act is wrong in so many ways. Sure, the Act is convenient for the government to pressure internet users, website owners, and forum administrators to be legally accountable for all their website’s content. But that is wrong because the government simply shifts the burden to look for the offender onto society, whereas crime fighting and investigation should be conducted by the government and police. Innocent until proven guilty. That’s why we pay our taxes right?

[Source: The Malaysia Insider via Kompas]

Made in Malaysia, Highrisepro is a SaaS for property management, specifically for condominiums. It does a load of things for building management and property developers ranging from online payment, SMS notifications, and online booking of facilities. Is there a need for such software? Yes, according to co-founder Adrian Teh. I haven’t had the luxury to live in a condominium before but Adrian told me that residents face many problems with management who don’t embrace the internet.

For example, most residents go to work from 7am and return around 8pm. By the time they return, the building management folks have already knocked off. This makes communication hard. They can call and email, sure, but making online payments and booking facilities would be tough since you need to be physically there if you don’t have any online medium.

So using Highrisepro, building management can now accept monthly maintenance fees and facility booking 24/7. Perhaps they wouldn’t really need so many people to run the building with an online solution like that too! Adrian added:

We also provide broadcasts bulletin announcements to residents via email and SMS. So residents get instant notification on community updates. Highrisepro is fully managed, so property management companies as well as property developers can instantly offer and deploy to their properties without having to worry about servers, installations, and maintaining their own IT workforce.

So far, Highrisepro has over two communities (with over 800 residential units) using its product. Every property is charged a minimum subscription fee. Besides running Highrisepro, the team, with co-founders Yuvan Kumar & Ahmad Yazid, also run Leanis Solutions, a company that specializes in Ruby on Rails web app development, business intelligence, and data warehousing consulting. Revenue from Leanis is currently funding the development of Highrisepro.

We are still learning from the market as we grow. There are plans to incorporate property management accounting features as well as other more administrative features into Highrisepro. In the near future, we intend to roll out features that helps us achieve our vision to provide the best integrated living experience to homeowners and tenants, such as online collection of rental by landlords and online groceries.

The solution looks promising. Though there are similar products in the U.S. like Appfolio and Condo Manager, but they are not quite ready for the Asian market.

Founded by Ben Chin and Kian Howe, Malaysia-based startup DSYR (stands for “Design Styles Year Round”) combines flash sales with wonderfully designed products. The founders are obviously inspired by Fab.com which has the same sort of concept. But Fab hasn’t entered Asia yet so the folks from DSYR are banking on this chance. To date, it has over 50 local and international merchants and 700 users on site after just launching two weeks ago.

Ben tells us that merchants do not need to pay to be listed on DSYR. In addition, the company offers a professional photo shoot for its merchants at no cost. For each product sold, DSYR will take 20 to 30 percent commission. Ben explains:

Our mantra at DSYR is that we want to “Delight You With Design” In the future, we hope to work with renowned designers or brands so that our subscribers can discover designs like never before. We also want to make it simpler for local merchants to showcase their creativity to the public.

DSYR’s site is well designed and it is easy to click page after page browsing for beautifully designed products. But e-commerce is more than just design, of course, so we’ll see how DSYR will perform months down the road. And in case you’re interested in the cutesy-geeky pillows pictured below, you can click here to find out more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now that the world knows that Windows Phone 8 (WP8) will roll out later this year, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is also keen [1] to let people know that its app store is expanding globally as well. An official Microsoft blog has just announced that its Marketplace is expanding three-fold to cover more than 180 nations by the time WP8 arrives.

In Asia, it’s good news for the likes of Indonesia and Cambodia, which will get the Marketplace – for downloading free and paid apps and games – for the first time. There’s an even bigger list (see below) of Asian countries where developers will now be granted access to the WP App Hub so that they can submit and sell their apps. Newcomers to the App Hub will include Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Here are the new additions in Asia to both the App Hub and the Marketplace. If a country isn’t mentioned at all, that’s because it already has either or both these services, such as the big WP launch and push into China earlier this year. Here are the newcomers:

• Newly-launched Marketplace in Asia, for local WP users to download apps:
  Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, Fiji, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Macao SAR, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Outer Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Tajikistan.

• Newly-launched App Hub in Asia, for local developers to submit apps:
  Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, Fiji, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Macao SAR, Malaysia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Outer Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

Microsoft has already been active in Indonesia, way ahead of its App Hub starting there, in order to encourage local developers. Earlier this year we attended a Windows 8 Bootcamp in Bandung where Indonesian app devs got a practical and technical intro to the mobile OS.

How are readers using Windows Phone enjoying it so far? Fire away in the comments!

[Source: Windows Team blog - which includes a full global listing]

At an event this afternoon in Singapore, Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) has rolled out a whole bunch of advertising platform products for the first time in Southeast Asia. The mobile-oriented ads are, says Yahoo, multimedia, interactive and well-targeted. They launch immediately in Singapore, and will come to Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam “in the coming months.”

Yahoo reaches over 200 million folks across Asia as a huge publisher of content, and it’s that kind of captive audience that it’s offering up to brands today. And so, for the first time in the region, the somewhat beleaguered U.S. web company is making available three of its key ad products:

1. Clickable mobile video ads – These tap-to-video ads can take over an entire screen or expand to certain sizes, working within phones and tablets. Yahoo claims they they “encourage consumers to interact” and “outperform traditional video ads by 3:1.”

2. Smart ads – These can be optimized for each user, and could include something like hyper-targeted local offers. These initially launched way back in 2007.

3. Targeting ads – Lastly, Yahoo’s targeted ads can reach select groups or demographics “based on interest and content consumed within Yahoo.”

The focus on mobile by Yahoo is understandable since home internet penetration across Asia as a whole stands at a fairly low 24 percent, compared to mobile penetration of 74 percent – with many of those phones being used online.

Malaysia’s high-end department store chain Parkson (HKG:3368) has made a move into the luxury e-commerce market in China with the launch this week of its premium clothing, make-up, and home furnishings site at Parkson.com.cn. The retailer already has 47 stores [1] in some major Chinese cities, the first of which opened way back in 1994.

Parkson’s China site has seven main sections, giving it a broader spread than most luxury e-tailers: women’s clothing and shoes, men’s, sports/casual clothing, make-up, home items, children’s clothes toys, and premium wines and chocolates. Social buttons on every product page ensure that items you fancy are easy to share and display online.

Parkson joins a crowded luxury e-commerce scene in China, with major couture sites like Net-A-Porter already in action against offerings from local web giants, such as 360Buy’s premium store, which is packed with the top fashion brands. Parkson’s new China site, in comparison, is thin on high-end brands at the moment, having labels like Marisfrolg on board, which is usually the kinds of shop found in what could be considered the ‘older ladies’ section/floor of most department stores. The same can be said for the menswear.

Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten (JSD:4755) has been pretty busy of late, just a week ago announcing that it would be the lead investor of Pinterest’s next funding round. Today the company has some more news for us, disclosing that it has plans to launch an internet shopping mall for Malaysia.

The store’s home on the web will be Rakuten.com.my, although it’s actually scheduled to launch in late 2012. Masaya Ueno, Rakuten Online Shopping’s president and CEO noted that now is the right time for the company to enter the Malaysia market, as it has a good e-commerce infrastructure:

The market indications validate our timely entry into the market. At this initial phase, Rakuten seeks to partner mid-sized and large retailers across industries in Malaysia including fashion and apparel, IT and electronics, books and luxury goods. […] We aim to foster continued e-commerce growth in Malaysia by transferring our knowledge and helping retailers to make online shopping a truly viable and sustainable business, leveraging on our 15 years of e-commerce expertise.

Rakuten notes in its announcement that the relatively high internet penetration in the country should be conducive to growth in online shopping. It says that internet retailing in the nation was at RM842 million (or $267 million) in 2011.

This is the latest in a series of international moves for Rakuten recently. The company also launched an online shopping mall in Brazil just one month ago, but it also pulled the plug on its venture with Baidu in China around that time as well. In Asia, the other notable activities for Rakuten are its Rakuten Belanja Online in Indonesia, as well as Tarad.com in Thailand.

After Malaysia, what’s next for Rakuten? According to the company’s CEO Hiroshi Mikitani last year, the Philippines are also on the list of places where the e-commerce behemoth would like to set up shop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Source: WeAreSocial blog]

Most of the folks in Southeast Asia know about Gmarket. But this familiar name will soon be gone in Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The e-commerce giant will be rebranded to Qoo10, according to a note we received from the company. But only one Gmarket will remain, in Korea, which is under eBay’s control.

The main shareholder behind Qoo10 is actually Giosis Gmarket International. Right now, users can still see the familiar Gmarket logo, but the Qoo10 logo will be officially unveiled on May 2. If you’d like a sneak peek at the new logo, you can see it at Qoo10.com. The rebranding came as a shock to me because Gmarket is among the most visited e-commerce sites in Singapore. I reached out to a Gmarket rep today who told me:

We know the Gmarket brand has quite a strong presence in the region (especially Singapore, as we’ve been building this business with our hearts and sweat). But this decision has come from all the stakeholders’ ambition to position our brand as a leading marketplace platform provider for Asia and go bigger, rather than one of many online shopping sites riding on the Korean wave.

Gmarket.com.sg will still be accessible as the team migrates to qoo10.com. But it will take a lot of hard work bringing the site back up to its usual traffic as we experienced first hand ourselves here at Tech in Asia with our own past rebranding. Good luck!

According to Apple, its new iPad will launch officially in five Asian countries later this month. South Koreans will be among the first to grab one when it rolls out there this Friday (20th), while folks in India need to wait a week longer (27th). Here’s the full list of Asian arrival days for the iPad:

• Friday, April 20th: South Korea, Brunei, and Malaysia.
• Friday, April 27th: India, and Thailand.

In total, 12 countries around the globe are getting official shipments of the best-selling tablet this month. No word yet on when it’ll hit mainland China, leaving consumers there paying the ‘grey market’ rates for iPads brought over the border from Hong Kong – though demand hasn’t been that strong this time round.

Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) announcement did not mention specific localized prices for all the new markets. The US price starts at $499 for the base 16GB model of the “new” iPad in either black or white, while the previous generation iPad 2 has already dropped to $399. The new model was unveiled in early March by the company’s CEO, Tim Cook, who hailed the high-res “Retina” screen and the upgraded A5X processor.

People love mobile games, and many folks want to be nice by paying for them – but a combination of lousy payment options on Google’s Play Store (formerly the Android Market) and obdurate app publishers who geo-restrict some games can make life difficult for you and I. So when Applorer Gamebox launched a few months ago, bringing lots of Android games and more payment methods, we were curious how it would fare.

And now Stream Media, the Singaporean company behind Applorer (and Movend as well), has stats to show that the curated Android shopfront is thriving, and has a new promo with Electronic Arts (NASDAQ:ERTS) starting on Tuesday that’ll see EA titles like The Sims 3 for just US$2. But first the stats. Stream Media’s Jeremy Ee says that, after focusing mainly on Asian markets, most users are in this continent. Currently Applorer is seeing 35 percent of its users in Asia, 30 percent from North America, and 20 percent from Europe. He says that people “are buying premium games as well as […] spending on freemium in-app purchases.” Of course, free games are accessible as well.

So far, Jeremy reports, Applorer has just over 5,000 active monthly users, coming from 10,300 downloads in the past one month. He adds: “we are expecting to see [the downloads] number triple in the next month based on current growth rate.” Those folks have clocked up 45,000 sessions in the app, browsing around for games, and seem to be made up of 58 percent guys and 42 percent women.

Users can purchase games – from lots of partner publishers and developers – via PayPal, Cherry Credits, or MOLPoints. All that is powered by the parent company’s Movend billing platform.

Although Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) own app store has improved, refreshed its UI, and even rebranded since we last tested Applorer, it seems likely that the diversity of the Android platform – and issues in getting games – make solutions like Applorer still very viable.

The EA games promo starts within the app this coming Tuesday (April 3rd) and runs every Tuesday until May 1st. Grab Applorer on this direct ‘.apk’ file link; or SingTel users can snag it from the telco’s apps mall. The version on the Play Store only supports getting free games though.

Piktochart is a Malaysia-based startup that focuses on helping customers build infographics fast. Like really fast. I first saw the beta product in Beijing when I met the founders, Goh Ai Ching and Andrea Zaggia. It looks sweet and promising. Eventually, they entered Startup Arena for our Startup Asia Singapore conference and I knew I had bring them in. They won fifth place, which isn’t too bad for a product that was only just ready to demo back then. Now Piktochart is ready for the anyone who loves create interesting graphical presentations. Whenever I’ve done this in the past, it has taken a lot of time. Time that I might have saved if Piktochart were available then.

Logging into Piktochart can be done via Facebook or Twitter, which makes it easy to get started. The interface is simple. You select a theme and dive straight into building your infographic. The interface looks a like a stripped-down version of Photoshop or Keynote. So for folks who aren’t familiar with the functions, it might look a little messy. But once you get used to it, it’s ok. The usual font, color, layer options are placed at the top. On the left, you can find all the necessary shapes and graphics for your infographic. What I like is its sexy and intuitive drag-and-drop interface.. I quickly made the graphic, pictured above, just to test how Piktochart works. That image took me just about five minutes.

The free version allows you to play around with three themes and download the infographic as image file. The pro version, which cost about $9.99 per month, for a limited time only (no deadline given though), will offer over 20 themes, with additional themes as time passes. The pro version also allows you to download the file as HTML or raw data.

It is a little annoying that you can’t find the pro pricing details though. Clicking the “upgrading to pro” button brings you directly to Paypal, which to be honest is quite an unpleasant surprise. But for now I shall stay happy as a free user. The free tools are enough to design a decent infographic in minutes. Give Piktochart a try and let us know what you think.

Disclosure: We sometimes enlist Andrea Zaggia’s expert services to help us with technical issues from time to time on our site.

We just received word from the folks at YouTube that the popular online video site has just launched a localized service for Malaysia. As of about two hours ago, Malaysians can visit youtube.com.my or set their location setting to ‘Malaysia’ at the bottom of the YouTube page.

YouTube’s Asia Pacific director of product management, Adam Smith elaborated on the new regional service:

Over the last few years Malaysians have been watching YouTube in huge numbers, and by launching a version of the site optimized for Malaysia today, we aim to create an even more relevant local YouTube experience.

The announcement has some positive implications for the music industry as well, as Malaysian musicians represented by the collecting society MACP can profit from having videos on YouTube, and even use it as a platform to springboard to a global stage.

Youtube also has partnerships in place with prominent Malaysian media companies such as Astro Malaysia and KRU Studios.

Our readers may recall that it was just back in October that YouTube also launched a localized site for Singapore as well.

Check out the ‘Welcome to Malaysia, Youtube’ video below, which features a number of prominent musicians offering their congratulations.

MilkADeal is a group-buying site. HiShop Malaysia is a flash sales site, the sort of e-commerce that opens exclusively to members for a limited period of time and focuses on selling just branded goods [1].

Anyway, both of these sites have decided to work closely together. Though there aren’t any details on exactly how they will do so, but we’ll update you if we find out more. Both brands will continue to operate as they are, but will actually be a single entity.

With the two sites working together, it looks like they have both ends covered, ranging from deal hunters who are looking for discounts, all the way up to luxury deals.

HiShop was invested in by Crystal Horse Investments (CHI). So with this merger, CHI has once again put its faith into HiShop, and MilkADeal as well by investing (as I understand it) about half a million Singaporean dollars. This merger looks interesting and I’m sure many would wonder how it will work out in the already somewhat fatigue deals market.