Local services listings startup OneFlare revealed today that it has raised $500,000 from three Australian angel investors: Les Szekely from Grand Prix Capital, Garry Visontay of Principal Sydney Seed Fund, and Dr. Jeffrey Tobias of the Strategy Group. That same trio has also invested in DesignCrowd last year.

Headed by Singapore-born CEO Marcus Lim, Australia-based OneFlare has seen strong growth in numbers in terms of users and businesses listed.

The site now has 130,000 unique monthly visitors, this is an increase in traffic of 1,300 percent in the last 12 months. There are over 30,000 businesses registered in more than 250 service categories. OneFlare has processed a total value of $16 million in jobs requested. The plan is to expand the Yellow Pages-style online listings to Singapore in 2014 at oneflare.com.sg.

Marcus comments about this funding:

We’re now cash-flow positive so this funding is really about scaling and becoming the number one marketplace for consumers and service businesses to find each other. The experience that our investors bring to Oneflare is equally as important as their funding. We look forward to tapping into their experience, and capital, to fire a rocket under our already rapid growth.

The startup itself was first founded in January 2011 under the name ‘Pick a Quote’.

Rocket Internet’s web-based food delivery service Foodpanda has been expanding aggressively in Singapore recently, most notably by acquiring a rival Singaporean service last month. Today Foodpanda is trying a different strategy by buddying up with local foodie app Picky.

The new Foodpanda-Picky partnership allows Singaporeans to order dishes from restaurants from a selection inside Picky app, and then the orders will be brought to your doorstep by Foodpanda’s couriers. All that can be accessed under the “Eat-at-home” tab on Picky, which lists Foodpanda’s restaurant partners in the Lion City. It looks like this:

While it can’t all be processed inside Picky app – yes, you’ll still be shepherded over to the Foodpanda mobile site – it should still be useful for those in no mood to dine out or cook at home.

Lee Ken Ming, Picky CEO and founder, says in today’s announcement:

Our recommendation service represents a complement to foodpanda’s food delivery service and vice versa, enabling users not only to decide on where to eat, but to also order and have their meals delivered to their home or office. All customers will benefit from the synergy of this partnership.

Foodpanda – which operates in eight Asian countries – claims to be Singapore’s largest home delivery system, after its buy-out of rival Singapore Dine last month. One existing major rival is Deal.com.sg’s Dealivery site.

Foodpanda’s most recent round of funding was worth over $20 million.

Norway-based browser maker Opera (OSE:OPERA) is today opening its 17th office around the world – and its fifth in Asia. The newest Opera base is in Singapore, which will be led by Fabrizio Caruso, Opera Software’s senior VP for Asia. His role in Singapore will be to develop the company’s advertising business in Asian markets and to work “with operators and brand advertisers to help them reach more mobile internet users”.

In addition, Opera’s new Singapore office will, the company says today, “act as a hub for Opera’s operations in Asia Pacific, including greater China, Korea, and Southeast Asian countries”.

Tove Selnes, Opera’s executive VP of human resources, adds in today’s announcement:

Opera has offices in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan to provide client support and grow our user base. In addition to these four countries in Asia, we have seen huge growth of our operator business in APAC recent years. It makes sense for us to also have an office in Singapore so that we can offer quicker support to our partners. Singapore offers a business-friendly environment, and its strategic geographical location is perfect for Opera a regional base to expand its Asia-Pacific presence.

Opera’s multi-platform browsers now generate more than 60 billion monthly impressions from its 300 million mobile users.

Just last month, Opera switched its Android-based Opera browser (pictured above) to the webkit rendering engine – as used by Safari and Chrome – so as to keep pace with its OS-based rivals.

Opera is up against a lot of Asian rivals – or, more specifically, China-made browsers – in this region, such as Tencent’s One Browser and UCWeb’s UC Browser, which has over 400 million global users.

Nonetheless, Opera is doing well with features like its data-saving capabilities in the Opera Mini browser for both feature phones and smartphones. Out of the top five countries for Opera Mini users in the world, three of them are in Asia.

But it’s not all good news for Asia’s e-commerce businesses. India and China take much of the money, and both deals and funding rounds are way down from a peak in mid-2011. Furthermore, Asian startups – even in this vital e-shopping space – see tiny exits. Indeed, CB Insights calls the exit environment “flaccid”. Most of these web buy-outs in Asia are really small – usually under $50 million. Forget the blockbuster hundreds of millions or billions of dollars being thrown around in Silicon Valley. Here’s the overview graph:

India rings in the deals

In terms of buy-out deals (which includes IPO exits as well), Indian e-commerce ventures lead the way in this region. India has seen 154 e-store deals since 2010, with 25 deals coming in 2013 already. These 154 business transactions are worth $978 million from 2010 to this point in 2013.

Just two weeks ago, India’s second largest homegrown online store, Snapdeal, acquired a smaller rival. Snapdeal is also well funded with $50 million from eBay in its pockets. The larger Flipkart site also helps make India a red hot web shopping market – and one that’s ripe for lots of consolidation this year.

China leads in terms of investments – but we’ll look into China in more depth in a separate post later today (Update: China’s here!).

Here’s how this sector in India leads in terms of deal value:

And this is the remarkable uptick in this category in India so far this year:

MakeMyTrip (NASDAQ:MMYT) was India’s biggest ever tech IPO exit so far, worth $447 million in 2010.

E-shopping in fashion

So, what kind of web store is proving the hottest for business deals? Inevitably it’s clothing sites. Just look at the huge amount of money being thrown at Rocket Internet’s fashion store Zalora, which netted $100 million last month. But thankfully the nature of these e-commerce acquisitions is changing, as shown by the growth of multitudinous web stores that fit into the ‘other’ category in this graph:

Interestingly, clothing leads in India’s e-commerce sector (accounting for involvement in 44 percent of business deals), while the travel sector is second (15 percent).

Exit, pursued by a bear

Most of Asia’s e-commerce exits have been small – 60 percent of them valued at less than $50 million. Only major ones like China’s VIPshop (NYSE:VIPS) and India’s MakeMyTrip have bucked the trend as they IPO’d.

2012 saw an upturn in such exits, with a peak of 29. But there have been 14 so far this year, so 2013 might be even better. Here are charts for exit valuations and their share by geographic location:

Tiger economy

You could say that Asia’s online shopping sector is a tiger economy because the leading venture capital firm in the past three years is Tiger Global Management. It has been involved in 25 deals in 18 companies in the past three years – most of them in India. Accel Partners is second and Intel Capital is third:

Click to enlarge a bit.

See the full report on the CB Insights blog.

• 2010: AdNear extends footprint to Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand.

• 2013: AdNear launches in Malaysia and Indonesia. At the same time, it moves its global HQ to Singapore.

Sequoia-backed startup AdNear today launched its location-based ad platform in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The company has also announced it moved its global headquarters from India to Singapore.

Anil Mathews, CEO, AdNear, said:

As an established business hub, Singapore is the perfect launch pad for AdNear’s expansion into SEA markets. With Singapore as our home, we are able to better serve our regional customers and partners, and have a direct pulse into one of the most mobile-connected cities globally.

Unlike traditional mobile banner ads, AdNear helps retailers attract relevant customers based on their location. You can watch how AdNear works in this video:

Some companies that use AdNear include Samsung, Nokia, Toyota, Intel, Microsoft, Ford, Optus, Pizza Hut, Sony, and KFC. The company recently received $6.5 million from Sequoia Capital and Canaan Partners in November 2012.

After day one on Kickstarter, Pirate3D’s Buccaneer saw over $300,000 raised, but funds from the crowd just kept coming in. In a blog post and email updates to backers, Pirate3D, Singapore’s first 3D printer company, has set a $1 million target on Kickstarter for its 3D Printer — The Buccaneer.

If the target is met, the startup says it will offer official acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) support as requested by folks at Kickstarter. Like most of you, I don’t know what ABS is, but Wikipedia offers quite a bit of an explanation. What I understand is that ABS is impact resistant, tough, and recyclable.

At it currently stands, over $830,000 has been raised so far with 18 days to go on Kickstarter. It looks very likely that Pirate3D will hit its seven-digit target. Pirate3D is arguably one of the most talked about startups in Singapore with many fellow countrymen rooting for their success.

Anyone in the internet industry in Asia must have heard of e-commerce sites Luxola and Zalora. Now these two companies are fighting head on in what it looks like a keyword ads battle on Google’s search results page.

Look at the screenshot above and you will find Zalora’s ads when a user searches for ‘Luxola’. That’s not all, there’s even a subdomain for Luxola (luxola.zalora.com) on the Zalora site. It feels like Zalora is playing some jackass keywords bidding tactic game to trick Luxola users to its sites.

Alexis Horowitz-Burdick, co-founder of Luxola, noticed Lazada and Zalora displaying ‘Luxola’ keywords ads around mid-April in Malaysia. And then it went on to extend to Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. Alexis emailed Zalora’s Lazada’s CMO Stein Jakob Oeie who replied:

We are not in breach of Google’s policy here as it does not cover display URL. I understand your frustration but these campaigns actually work very well for us.

Sure, Zalora didn’t breach any policy. Several Forbes’ articles also seem to suggest so too. Even though Luxola is a trademarked name, it may not win the case if both companies were to go to court.

But I can’t help but feel a sense of injustice here. Now let me highlight what Stein said, “These campaigns actually work very well for us.” That seems to suggest that Luxola isn’t the only startup that is facing keywords pressure from the Rocket Internet guys. My moral compass tells me that this isn’t right. After surveying many experienced entrepreneurs across the region (who all agree that this is a jackass move), I understand it is actually quite common. Usually a simple ceasefire email should suffice. But this isn’t the case for Zalora which continued to roll out its Adwords campaign that targets Luxola. Alexis notes that it has caused a drop in Luxola’s traffic; she tells me:

We have lost a small amount of traffic which is unfortunate […] We continue to try and educate our customers through social media that Luxola is in no way affiliated with Zalora or Lazada. We also continue an aggressive, but above board, search engine marketing (SEM) strategy for the region as we prefer to win on the merits of our platform and not the confusion or misunderstanding of potential customers.

Rocket Internet declined to comment on this matter when we reached out to them.

While I understand that this is business and competition, I do believe that the battle could be fought in many different ways, for example by focusing on better products and customer service. Tricking users who wish to go to Luxola into visiting Zalora doesn’t really make sense.

If you agree with me, please tweet a note to @ZaloraSingapore. Maybe the community’s combined voices will get Zalora to switch off its ‘Luxola’ targeted ads. And if you don’t feel that way, tell us why in the comments.

Microsoft’s Surface Pro tablets – the ones that rock the full version of Windows 8 – are now rolling out across much of Southeast Asia and beyond. The Surface Pro launched in Singapore yesterday (June 3), and the tablet will hit Thailand tomorrow (June 5), Malaysia on June 7, and South Korea on June 11.

Weighing in at a wrist-snapping 916g – yes, nearly a kilo – Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) flagship tablet is apparently better suited to getting some serious work done with the aid of the optional extra Touch Cover or Type Cover keyboards.

The Surface Pro launch comes about seven months after the Surface RT launch, the other Microsoft tablet that runs a stripped-down version of Windows 8. That cheaper model is supposed to compete with Apple’s iPad and higher-end Android tablets, but many reports suggest the RT has been a huge flop. IDC’s report for Q1 2013 states that only 200,000 Surface RTs shipped in that quarter – in contrast to 27.8 million Android-powered tablets in the same period.

Microsoft will be hoping that the full-fledged Surface Pro sees stronger sales with its expanded roll-out across Asia. The Surface Pro is S$1,198 ($950) in Singapore.

Malaysian startup iMoney has raised $500,000 in seed funding, revealed co-founder and CEO Lee Ching Wei today. The online personal finance platform raised the funds from Asia Venture Group (AVG) and will use the cash for its expansion across Southeast Asia.

Founded in April last year, the idea behind iMoney is that it’s a free service that helps regular people make comparisons between banks for loans, credit cards, savings, and other banking services. It has data for over 200 credit cards, 500 loan packages, and thousands of investment products.

The next stop for iMoney is Singapore, for which a beta site is already online. Ching tells us that Singapore should start to get a lot more traction for them in July and August as the Singaporean site pads out its financial data and information.

A former wealth advisor, Ching explains in today’s announcement:

Now, in 2013 we are aiming to generate more than $1 billion in business to banks and insurance companies in the region. We are well on track to achieve this objective – along with becoming the number one destination for financial matters for consumers in all of Southeast Asia.

iMoney was started up, as many startups are, out of personal frustration at a lack of an easy and objective way to compare the rates on loans and credit cards.

The Malaysian iMoney site already gets about 150,000 visitors per month.

We saw a similar startup in the form of Singapore-based LoanGarage pitch at our Startup Arena Jakarta competition last year.

Ching pitched iMoney on the Malaysian entrepreneurial reality TV show Make the Pitch last summer, and you can see that pitch here:

JFDI, the Singapore based startup incubator, had its Demo Day yesterday and it attracted more than 200 attendees. Many of those present were investors with big international names like 500 Startups’ Dave McClure, MIH Group (Naspers), Global Brain, plus regional investors such as Golden Gates Ventures, Red Dot Ventures, Crystal Horse Investments, and more. It was a great event with well rehearsed pitches and a valuable chance for folks to build their network.

I liked this part of the opening message from JFDI’s co-founder Hugh Mason to the investor-centric crowd:

Please don’t come into this space (Southeast Asia) for just one, two, or three years. Come here for ten, twenty years. That’s how investors should look at investing in this region. There was a saying that it takes a mom and dad to bring up a child, but it takes an ecosystem to bring up a startup. So everyone of you here are important in helping startups here grow.

Below are the seven startups that graduated from JFDI this semester:

Our Health Mate

Problem: There are more than 20 million Indians working overseas and they usually send money back home. Part of this money is intended for healthcare services but most families at home may not have access to these services or they wish to scrimp on it.

Solution: Our Health Mate aims build a website that is linked up to thousands of clinics in five major cities in India. Indians working overseas can make payments and fixed appointments on behalf of their family members on this website. To monetize, It charges both the clinic for referral fees and the user for booking fees.

Collabspot

Problem: Salespeople usually communicate with clients via email. Current CRM tools are not built to work with emails. As a result, salespeople have the pain of doing data entry work to transfer information in emails to CRM tools. This reduces productivity.

Solution: Collabspot works as a plugin into Gmail that pulls data from Gmail to your CRM apps. This reduces the mundane data entry work and makes salespeople more productive. Collabspot monetizes on a per user monthly subscription model.

Collabspot secured seed funding last week.

UserScout

Problem: Researchers usually have trouble finding relevant participants to take part in their surveys. They usually advertise on job sites, forums and places like CraigsList to find participants. And thereafter, researchers need to use a survey form to further qualify the relevance of participants. This makes getting test subjects a laborious and costly task.

Solution: Formerly called Referoll, UserScout is a web platform that allows researchers to post jobs, criteria and survey questions. This speeds up this process of offering relevant participants. UserScout monetize by offering premium features to researchers and it also charge a fees on the amount transacted between the researchers and participants.

Duable

Problem: Chinese is a tough language to learn. Not many can successfully self-learn the language using existing learning material. And many a time, the material given is limited and users end up learning by rote.

Solution: As we explained in our review earlier this year, Duable is a browser plugin that generates Chinese translations of key phrases in familiar native texted articles. As users can go to any website and turn on the plugin feature, the learning resources is borderless. Duable monetizes based on a monthly subscription from its users.

Klinify

Problem: Clinics usually keep paper copies of their patients’ records. This results in two main problems for doctors: one is the difficulty in retrieving the right document for the right patients and the second problem is the waste of space in storing paper.

Solution: Klinify has a document management system that scans the medical profile and digitizes it. The whole system takes just twenty minutes to set up and it doesn’t change the workflow of the doctors. Klinify monetizes by charging clinics on a per patient visit basis.

Krake

Problem: Small- to medium-sized enterprises who need to scrap the web for data have the pain of manually copying and keying the data into Excel sheets which is mundane, error-prone and time consuming in terms of finding data.

Solution: Krake is a web-scraping technology that enables people to easily “suck” (the founder used this word) data you want out of sites. In short, it reduces the time to a matter of minutes to get whole page of data into an Excel sheet. Krake monetizes by charging users according to their usage.

Scrollback

Problem: Forum chats are usually used in websites and blogs. However, they are not the most interactive way to engage readers and users.

Solution: Scrollback builds the technology that enables text chat similar to that of Facebook and Google group chat for each of the webpages. Scrollback plans to monetize by advertising and also premium features to community owners.

Two of JFDI’s startup graduates from the earlier batch also pitched and showcased their statistics and growth over the year. Flocations, a meta-search for travel packages that has received over $500,000 in funding, revealed that it sees strong growth and is directing more than $800,000 worth of monthly sales to travel agencies. Fetch+ is another proud graduate of JFDI that has done well in the past year, also raised money and achieving sales of over $400,000 with projected recurring revenue to triple every year. Both startups are looking for their next round of funding for their next stage of growth.

Singapore has long been an Asian hub for data centers, but now the next big data-driven industry – aptly called ‘big data’ – could see Singapore become a center for number crunching and analytics. The latest boost to this burgeoning industry in Singapore comes from Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) and Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), which are today officially throwing open the doors to their Big Data Innovation Center in the island nation.

Launched by Dell and Intel with Revolution Analytics, the new facility is located at the Dell Solution Center (DSC) in Jurong East. The Big Data Innovation Center makes use of Dell’s computing horsepower, and is effectively open to the public – well, small- and medium-sized businesses – for various training classes and workshops that will help companies learn about using big data processes to better understand their data and draw useful conclusions and strategies from it.

Along with all that, Dell and Intel’s Big Data Innovation Center is also a platform for companies to plug in their own data and let Dell churn it up and spit out analytics. And you don’t have to even drop into the DSC, as Dell will let customers connect to the stack via a secure virtual private network.

Research firm IDC expects corporate spending on big data to hit $603 million in 2013 in Asia-Pacific (but excluding Japan), up more than 40 percent from 2012’s spending.

If you’ve got friends all over the globe, those buddies are probably scattered across not just lots of nations but also several social media services. It’s even more fragmented if you’re an overseas Chinese, working or studying far from home, as your new workmates or classmates are using stuff that’s blocked in China – like Twitter and Facebook. To bring all these sites, conversations, messages, and buddies together is a new app that launches today called MelonFriends.

Launched initially just on Android, MelonFriends brings Sina Weibo and Renren into the mix with Twitter and Facebook. You can choose to view those streams separately, or aggregate them into one.

It’s a nice idea, though it comes at a time when lots of people are using apps like Whatsapp or WeChat for more and more communication. MelonFriends designer Duan Tingliang – based with the three-man ‘Melon Sail’ startup team in Singapore – tells us that the idea of the app is to keep the group dynamic alive:

The core feature for MelonFriends is to help overseas Chinese to manage their social network connections across China (Renren, Weibo) and overseas (Facebook and Twitter). So the usage of MelonFriends is very different from WeChat and such messaging focused apps. In a nutshell, WeChat is focusing on one-to-one communication with friends (which can be in China or overseas) while MelonFriends is focusing on the sharing, interacting, and managing of one’s entire network of friends. But there are opportunities in the one-to-one messaging business that are worth exploring in future.

To keep the conversations flowing, MelonFriends will add in interest-based ‘channels’ at a later date that work across different social networks. A social shopping/gifting service is also in the works. Duan explains:

For instance one of the channels which I will definitely build and use personally would be “Food back home”. Through this channel, we can introduce users with service providers who give bulk discounts on buying food from China (maybe via Taobao) and overseas shipping solutions for group buying, etc. As such, a channel services not just information but also a viral shopping/gifting solution for overseas Chinese. Eventually, this could extend its reach to overseas Chinese’s connections in China and overseas also.

That social shopping aspect would also be a form of monetization for the app, along with upcoming in-app-purchases for customizations like themes and emoji.

MelonFriends for Android has a two-day exclusive on Chinese app store Wandoujia before launching on Google Play on Wednesday (June 5th).

On just day one of the Kickstarter project, Singaporean 3D printer startup Pirate3D saw overwhelming support with backers flocking to pledge crowdfunded cash for the ‘Buccaneer’ 3D printer.

Right now on Saturday morning, a full 24 hours after hitting Kickstarter, Pirate3D has seen $366,763 pledged for it Buccaneer 3D printer. The warm response from the Kickstarter community must have surely surprised the folks at Pirate3D who set a $100,000 target. There are 28 more days to go so we can expect more money to be pledged.

As we explained earlier this week, Pirate3D had vowed not only a discount but also to ship its printer in December this year to a limited number of early crowdfund pledgers – which likely caused the huge rush on Friday to support the project.

Pirate3D’s Kickstarter page explains how the Buccaneer works at home. It looks really simple. Users can log on to the Buccaneer printer over wi-fi and start customizing and printing from a laptop or smartphone. The startup will also have an online store with 3D designs to print out. If you are interested to find out more, click here to go to Pirate3D’s Kickstarter page. If you have some spare cash, do consider pledging some bucks. There are still some slots left to get the 3D printer for the regular price of $397 along with the assurance that it’ll ship to you in February 2014.

The all-new Save22 – Click to enlarge.

Scanning barcodes in-store and comparing the best prices sounds like a winning strategy for consumers and retailers. But in reality that isn’t the case. The founder at Save22 Guyi Shen says that the pivot was inspired by an avid user who was caught scanning barcodes at a retailer.

That users wanted to share a deal on Save22 but was stopped by the store manager, her phone in hand, despite explaining that sharing deals on Save22 may bring more sales to store. To learn more about why she was stopped, Guyi met with the store’s CEO. The CEO explained that even though he understands that Save22 could help to improve sales he was reluctant to support the app. He believes that the shopper’s retail experience is not just about the lowest price. It also turns out that many other retailers are having the same thoughts. Guyi said in an email:

His thoughts are not unique, the majority of retailers felt the same way, we found it hard to scale the company with retailers in a love-hate relationship with us. We had to find a way to have retailers advocate the shopping experience we created for consumers.

So we decided to digitize a retailers’ print promotions and catalogs that are normally only found in-store, and make them searchable and location aware online.

The new Save22 launched today in Singapore and the Philippines (pictured above). I gave it a couple of searches and it works pretty well. Thanks to Save22, I know there’s a Colgate toothpaste promotion at Guardian and also a Tiger beer promotion in Sheng Siong in Singapore.

The closest similar price search service would be the numerous price comparison sites like Kakaku’s PricePrice, Rocket Internet’s PricePanda, Priceza, Telunjuk, and PriceArea. Though these are specifically product price search sites and are not promotion based, so people could use a number of such sites.

Prior to this pivot, Save22 recently raised $400,000 from Crystal Horse Investments, Nuffnang, Strategia Ventures, and Little Lights Capital.

Yes, that’s quite a dilemma.

Entrepreneurs based in Singapore fall into either one of two categories: either they believe that Singapore is the best market to get started in or the worst possible one to succeed in. I think the latter is true and the longer you stay in Singapore, the more you’ll come to realize the serious problems with the market here.

But first, let’s start with reasons for why the Singapore market is so awesome:

1. Seed money flows freely

This is a nation where money paves the streets. Not since the days when the roads of Nanyang (Singapore’s traditional name) were literally paved with gold has there been such a hive of activity in the Singaporean economy. And this trickles down to the startup scene as well. I wrote about this previously – if you’re just starting up and not a recipient of a government grant, something is wrong with you. Why deprive yourself the chance of an added level of support just because you need to fill in a form?

2. Highly savvy and connected demographics

Singapore ranks among the top most technologically savvy populations in the world. While statistics are hard to come by, it is safe to say we are a nation of well-connected mobile users. Best of all, Singaporeans move in broad trends; three years ago, iPhones dominated the scene, but now there is a gradual shift towards Samsung Galaxy phones. This makes planning and penetration simple. Furthermore, the population continually seeks and chases the next upgrade, pushing us to the forefront of the technology adoption curve.

3. Great launch platform into the Southeast Asia region

Lastly, no one will challenge the logic that the Singapore market is small. I won’t even argue against it. However, we are an excellent launch pad for the larger, and much more tempting region of Southeast Asia. There are six capital cities and a total addressable market of 350 million people within an hour or two of Singapore. If that isn’t exciting, I don’t know what is!

The flip side

But what about the flip side of SIngapore for startups?

1. Yes, I have seed funding. Now what?

As much as the initial setup is quick, the race to survive is not. You might hear of huge initial rounds in the half a million range, but this dries up quickly, leaving many facing the “I’m still testing problem-solution fit but ran out of seed money” problem. This makes the Singapore startup scene one where only the lucky survive; it is difficult to distinguish between those that are stronger and those who did not get the chance to fully test their hypothesis. To survive here in Singapore, revenue generation is critical. Jump straight into producing your first drop of income, or risk being obsolete faster than you can say “series A”.

2. Culture shock along the way

As geographically close as those 350 million I mentioned are to Singapore, demographically they’re all over the map. From an addressable market point of view, Southeast Asia remains a heterogeneous hot spot of mess. The language localization alone can kill you, never mind modifying your product for different domestic markets. Flights may be cheap, but talent is hard to find and communication is tough.

Singapore cannot be seen as a good reflection of Asia, or even Southeast Asia. It might be a good reflection of more developed Asian markets, but not emerging ones. The population and development progression has moved so far along the line, that there remains little congruence between a locally launched start-up product and the needs in other Southeast Asian markets.

So what’s the takeaway from this?

If you’re a young entrepreneur just getting started on your first startup, treat Singapore as your best friend. Spend a little time preparing a business plan, meet up with people and get your seed money in to support your fledgling idea. Don’t lose the opportunity to have someone pay you to do market research and hypothesis testing.

If you’re a seasoned entrepreneur looking for your next big thing, other factors will weigh in your decision but I firmly believe that if you can make it work here, you can use it then as a springboard to the region. There’s nothing like the limitation of a small domestic market and lack of revenue opportunities to kick you into expanding overseas – and it needs to be dome as fast as you can to find your next golden egg. I have already experienced this first hand at my own startup, having started an Indonesian operations in less than two years since inception as we seek out new regional opportunities!

Following the revamp of eBay’s US site in late October last year, eBay Singapore has officially announced today that it has also rolled out a brand new interface which claims to provide a more visually inspiring and innovative shopping experience to users.

The new look is currently only in Malaysia, Singapore and Philippines as part of their initiative to roll out the interface across Southeast Asia. eBay users in other parts of the region such as Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam could expect the interface switch by the end of the year  soon. (Edit: According to the eBay’s PR, no date has been confirmed yet.)

Part of the revamp enables local users to get better access to global sellers which ships directly to their home country. eBay has revealed that through this introduction, there are now 40 million more listings from global sellers that ship directly to Singapore, in addition to the current pool of local sellers.

There is also a new feature called the Feed (refer to video below), which bears a striking resemblance to Pinterest’s iconic image grid interface with infinite scrolling. Users are able to furnish their feed by entering their interests into the system, and have a personalized homepage feed of curated products which are ‘instantly shoppable’. While giving the new feature a test, I chanced upon several repeated products listed side by side (as seen in image below) as well as inconsistent product images which made browsing not exactly visually appealing. eBay remarked that they will be working with the local retailers in educating them to make use of their larger product image canvases and better product descriptions.

To date, 60 percent of eBay’s revenue is derived from regions outside of the United States, with over 116 million active users, 25 million sellers and 400 million listings worldwide. However, there are no figures pertaining specifically to Asia released to the media.

Californian-based TubeMogul is a platform for the real-time buying of video ads on mobile devices. Aside from how annoying it must be to be hit with a video ad on your phone, it’s an interesting business. The investment arm of telco giant SingTel seems to agree that it has lots of potential, as today SingTel Innov8 has led a $10 million funding round in TubeMogul.

At the same time, TubeMogul is expanding into China and has just opened an office in Beijing to be headed by Sven Rossbach. His task, says today’s announcement, is to “introduce Chinese brand marketers and publishers to the programmatic buying of video ads, and grow TubeMogul’s presence.”

TubeMogul’s main product is PlayTime media buying, which also enables brands to get assurances that their video ad was watched, and gives analytics on where it was viewed and who saw it. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is on the board of TubeMogul (Updated: No longer on board).

This is TubeMogul’s third major funding round and it already has offices across the US, plus one in London, and more recently opened bases in Singapore, Japan, and Sydney to begin its Asia-Pacific expansion.

SingTel Innov8 director Punit Chiniwalla said today:

TubeMogul fits perfectly into our strategy of investing in top advertising companies that are poised for rapid growth in Asia. We are impressed by the product and team on the ground and look forward to working more closely with the company.

The last time we saw SingTel Innov8 splashing some cash was just last month when it put $5 million into a Chinese startup that helps overseas gaming developers publish in and monetize from Chinese gamers.

Cross Creek Capital, a venture fund linked to Wasatch Advisors, also participated in this series C round along with existing investors Digital Advertising Consortium, Foundation Capital, and Trinity Ventures.

Referoll, a platform that recruits and rewards research participants, has announced that it will go through a change in both name and business model. The Singapore-based startup is now known as UserScout, which will give the startup “a fresh start”, says CEO Ariff Munshi, and a chance “to reflect the business better”. The company had received feedback that the previous name was difficult to pronounce and spelling was an issue.

Unlike in the past where the platform served as a recruitment service and the team would hunt down participants for market research companies, the service has now evolved where it is a full software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform where anyone is able to post market research projects and manage participants on his or her own. With the new UserScout platform, using the service becomes a breeze. Ariff likens this to an “EventBrite for user research projects”. He elaborates:

What we offer are the tools to help them out with the recruitment process and a page where people can sign up for the projects. We are also now a platform where participants can easily search and be matched to the projects. Thus we’ve changed the business model from a recruitment fee to a subscription model for using the tool.

The Singapore-based startup also allows sharing to social media platforms, which widens the network of both local and international research participants. With its tools available, it will help support academic, medical, and market researchers to effectively screen, schedule, and pay participants all on one platform.

During UserScout’s pre-launch beta stage, it had 35 user researchers from countries such as Singapore, India, United Kingdom, and the United States to test the site. At present, 10 user researches have created projects to do their recruitment. From the last time we communicated with Ariff, he tells us that 16 projects have already been posted with 20 user participants successfully recruited.

Ariff expects the number of research participants to grow once it pushes out its referral scheme. It currently has 300 user participants on board from its pre-launch beta, which excludes the 1,600 user participants it has previously acquired on the Referoll platform.

UserScout aims to fill the gap in finding the right participants for market research studies. Ariff adds:

Tools such as SurveyMonkey, UserTesting.com, and Loop11 have seen rapid adoption over past couple of years but they are no good unless you have the right people in your study.

[With UserScout,] researchers can focus on the study and the insights it yields instead of getting bogged down by tedious detective and admin work.

UserScout will also be one of the seven startups pitching at JFDI.Asia demo day which will take place on June 3. It is currently looking for seed investments to accelerate its expansion efforts.

Evernote Business, the enterprise-oriented version of the note syncing and online collaboration app, has launched today across much of Southeast Asia. It’s now available for the usual price of $10 per user per month in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam; it’s S$14 in Singapore. (Update: Corrected the Singapore price).

Evernote Business notebooks in the app.

US-based Evernote says it has 5,000 global subscribers to its Business platform already. It’s usable in small- and medium-sized companies, as well as for workgroups in larger corporations. It can be used to store and share notes, presentation files, and all kinds of images and charts.

The same service launched in mainland China earlier this month, where Evernote has a total of four million users, including its free service for regular folks.

Earlier this year, Evernote’s Tiang Lim Foo told us that the note syncing company has two million users throughout Southeast Asia. About 400,000 of them are in Thailand where Evernote is proving popular, and 350,000 of the users are in Indonesia. Globally, over 50 million have signed up to Evernote.

Sponsored by Visa My Finds and organized by social enterprise Who Gives, the flash sales site serves as an alternative to the Great Singapore Sale, and will be offering substantial savings from popular online and offline brands. It boasts discounts of up to 80 percent and 50 percent at Zalora and at Reebonz respectively, to fantastic travel deals where Singaporeans would be able to purchase a one-way ticket at S$34 (US$27) to Kuala Lumpur on Jetstar. Other popular offline brands include Golden Village Cinemas and popular traditional Chinese medicine company Eu Yan Sang.

BiggerBetterSale starts at May 30 at 8.00pm (Singapore time). That’s just one day ahead of the Great Singapore Sale. The main sale lasts for 24 hours on the site. Then there’ll be a ten-day sale with items from over 50 participating merchants. The country manager for Visa Singapore and Brunei, Ooi Huey Tyng, hopes with Visa My Finds’ support at BiggerBetterSale.com, it will provide Singaporeans, especially Visa cardholders, a safe and convenient online environment to get the best deals.

Dorjee Sun, director at BiggerBetterSale.com, has set expectations for the online platform:

We think that with around 50 merchants and several hundred products listed, we could be helping boost e-commerce in Singapore by an excess of several million in sales during our 24-hour sale and the subsequent 10-day period.

However our goal for the first year is about helping increase online wallet share online in Singapore while providing merchants with a great return on investments on this campaign, as we are offering them this first campaign for free.

Shopaholics who would like to have extra holes in that pocket of yours and be notified of the ongoing sales and promotions, you can sign up with your email address at BiggerBetterSale ahead of the event.

If you’re living in Singapore or Malaysia and fancy spending over $300 on a glorified web browser, today is your lucky day. That’s because three Chromebook models, which run Google’s entirely web app-based Chrome OS, have just launched in Singapore, while one Chromebook variant is arriving in Malaysia.

The sole Singaporean retailer for now is Courts; Malaysian buyers will have to drop into a Yes store.

In Singapore, the Acer Chromebook is the cheapest at S$369, while the Samsung and HP Chromebooks each cost S$449. Judging from the new site for Chrome OS in Malaysia, geeks there can only get the Samsung Chromebook for RM 988 ($328).

Chromebooks have only launched in 11 countries so far, and today’s dual launches mark the Asia debut for these gadgets and Chrome OS.

However, just a few weeks ago we saw that the Malaysian government will deploy Chromebooks at 10,000 public schools in the nation backed up by Google Apps for Education accounts for students to work collaboratively online (Update: Corrected).

(Source: Google SG on G+)

A few months ago we saw Singaporean startup Pirate3D get seed funding to help develop what it claims to be the world’s most affordable 3D printer. That’s now a step closer to reality with the Pirate3D crew announcing today that they’ll hit the crowdfunding site Kickstarter on May 30. (Updated: It raised $300,000 in just 24 hours, blowing past its $100K goal).

Pirate3D’s gadget is ‘The Buccaneer’ (pictured above) which will be priced at just $347 when it’s finally up for sale. The startup says that a “limited number of 3D printers are available for early delivery date of December 2013”. Also, another limited number will be sold at just $247 to early Kickstarter backers – but it’s not yet clear what kind of investment in the project that would entail.

Pirate3D’s chief of operations, Brendan Goh, notes that the proposed project was “subjected to a rigorous vetting process and had to fulfill strict requirements on design, technology, operations and production”. Having passed all that, the renegade 3D printer will hit Kickstarter on May 30 at 11am Singapore time, and this will be the link.

The Singaporean team has just revealed the swashbuckling Buccaneer in its first ever video, which is embedded here:

JFDI’s demo day for its 2013 batch of startups it still a week away, but already one of the seven startups has some good news. Collabspot, the sales email platform, has agreed upon a management buy-in worth S$100,000 (US$79,000) by Laurent Gasser, co-founder at Revevol.

Collabspot is the first of JFDI’s newest soon-to-be-graduates to secure seed funding. The platform combines Gmail with customer relations management (CRM) tools like HighRise.

There’s a synergy between Collabspot and Mr. Gasser’s area, which is reselling Google Apps for enterprises. Gasser will now sit on Collabspot’s board. Founder Jeremi Joslin says in today’s announcement:

Laurent generously gave his time to Collabspot as a mentor through the JFDI.Asia accelerator program. It was immediately apparent that his experience as the first non-American to be trained to provide Google Apps solutions, even before they were launched, could give us a huge boost as we scale up worldwide. Laurent and I found ourselves working well together and it’s now a huge honour that he has agreed to join me to help lead the business in an executive role.

Gassler points out that Collabspot “approaches break-even on its fixed costs” and adds that it already has great traction.

I’m sure many of you have heard of China’s largest e-commerce company, Alibaba. For our next Tech in Asia Meetup in Singapore, we are honored with the chance to present the premiere local screening of Crocodile in the Yangtze, a documentary about the early days of Taobao, the e-store created by Alibaba founder and former CEO Jack Ma.

The film’s producer, Porter Erisman, who worked at Alibaba for ten years, created the 75-minute documentary to share how Alibaba grew from a startup to the world-class corporation it is today – and to show how it beat eBay in its home market. Porter will also be there at our Singapore Meetup to share his experience of working at Alibaba.

Crocodile in the Yangtze has shown at 16 film festivals and 10 universities, including Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, and more. The documentary has been given several awards, including ‘Best Film on Innovation and Entrepreneurship’ at the 2012 Silicon Valley Film Festival.

Catch the trailer below:

If you are interested to catch this startup-to-powerhouse blockbuster film, join us on June 24 at 6:45pm at SMU Administration building, Level 5. Tickets are free, but grab them fast while stocks last!

Agenda:

• Registration: 6.45 – 7.15pm
• Opening Speech from Porter Erisman: 7.15 – 7.30pm
• [Screening] Crocodile in the Yangtze: 7.30 – 8.45pm
• Sharing session by Porter Erisman: 8.45 – 9.00pm
• Networking & Dinner: 9:00 – 10.00pm

Venue: Singapore Management University, Administration Building, Level 5

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Speaker: Porter Erisman

Porter Erisman produced and directed the award-winning documentary film, Crocodile in the Yangtze: The Story of a Westerner Inside China’s Alibaba.com. The film is an independent memoir of the eight years he worked alongside China’s first Internet entrepreneur, Jack Ma, as Ma grew Alibaba Group from an apartment into China’s first global Internet company – beating eBay in China along the way.

From 2000-2008, Porter worked as a Vice-President at Alibaba Group, at various times overseeing the company’s international marketing, website operations and corporate affairs. Porter earned an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management and a BA from Stanford University. Crocodile in the Yangtze is Porter’s first film.

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Asia is very young and fresh in terms of tech, so the continent is just getting started. In fact, economically, Asia’s only really had its growth spurt in the last few decades. Whereas the West has had a head start and we all know the big players and key areas – Silicon Valley, New York, London, Paris, etc. – who really knows Asia? It’s so vast, it’s hard to know where to start. So, we went around and talked to bloggers, investors, and entrepreneurs across the region to ask them to share a bit about the startup eocsystems in their respective cities and countries.

We’re lucky our friends were so forthcoming and open to share about their ecosystems. It gives us all a very intimate picture of what the most important centers of commerce and technology in Asia have to face in the next decade. You can read more about who they are at the bottom of the page. Here’s the list of 11 startup ecosystems across Asia.

1. Singapore, Singapore.
2. Tokyo, Japan.
3. Beijing, and Shanghai, China.
4. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
5. Taipei, Taiwan.
6. Hong Kong, China.
7. Seoul, South Korea.
8. Jakarta, Indonesia.
9. Bangkok, Thailand.
10. Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam.
11. Manila, Philippines. (NEW!)
12. India.
13. Pakistan. (NEW!)
14. Contributing Authors.

Singapore

Darius Cheung: Singapore is the first stop in Asia for the majority of westerners. It is often ranked as one of the top places to live in the world and is poised to take over from Switzerland as the largest offshore wealth center by 2020. In other words, Singapore is rich and has great infrastructure that includes a stable, clean, and efficient government and legal and finance systems; plus there are solid transport and IT networks, a highly educated work force, and English-speaking multicultural society, and lots more. While Singapore has a small population of close to five million, it also has extremely strong internet, mobile, and smartphone penetration rates, a mobile average revenue per user ARPUevenue per user) of $40, and growing e-commerce market size of $2 billion.

Singapore probably has the most developed startup ecosystem in the region, with a handful of growth stage startups and many more in angel or seed stage. It also highly active accelerators like JFDI and many active early stage funds spawned in part due to government funding under the NRF TIS scheme. There are also many notable angel investors, including Skype co-founder Toivo Annus (whose Singapore investments include Coda, Luxola, Redmart, Referral Candy, ADZ, and Garena). There is a general gap in series A funding except for a handful of investors such as DMP, Walden and JAFCO, but this might well change quickly with further NRF programs in the works and funds such as Vertex becoming more active in the series A range, as well as an influx of foreign, particularly Japanese, funds such as Global Brain, CyberAgent Ventures, and Rakuten Ventures.

Despite the funding gap, Singapore is a gathering point for startups in the region and serves as a launchpad for local, and more often foreign, entrepreneurs to launch their businesses for the region. With a handful of local (SGCarMart, HungryGoWhere, etc.) and international exits (JobsCentral, Brandtology, TenCube, etc.) in recent years, and growth companies like PropertyGuru, Reebonz (now with a $40 million funding boost), Viki, Mig33, Garena, Zopim, and recently RedMart well on their way to becoming major hits, Singapore is starting to establish a creditability for exits and is starting to see recycled capital which is the quintessential rocket fuel for startup ecosystems.

However, its potential as a startup hub for Southeast Asia is threatened by undertones of tightening immigration control, overly strict and bureaucratic government and regulations, and general xenophobia. Especially with the clear rise of neighboring cities with larger talent pools and domestic markets, Singapore will need to be more aggressive and risk-taking to strengthen its position as a startup city.

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Tokyo, Japan

Anh-Minh Do: Of course, Japan is one of the more mature markets in the region, and it’s got big influential hits that shape the region. The center of all the activity is in Tokyo. But gone are the days when big guys like Hitachi, Sony, Fujitsu, and Panasonic are the rising stars (with Japan struggling economically, and hardware alone being less of a factor for consumers) and new players are on the scene now, with folks like GREE, DeNA, and Rakuten looking increasingly global and influential. If you want a quick look at the local scene, take a click over to our friends at Startup Dating and you’ll see a particularly vibrant ecosystem of business, VCs, and incubators.

On top of the big startup successes, Japan’s education system is particularly supportive, with incubators like Open Network Lab attempting YC-like startup acceleration. You can check out a full comprehensive list of incubators and accelerators in Japan here.

On the other hand, the problems that Japanese startups face are difficult: a relatively low-risk culture, with high rent costs, and a small ecosystem. But despite all this, big successes do manage to peek through and the government has been very supportive in setting up incubators – there are more than 300 across the country today.

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Beijing and Shanghai, China

Steven Millward: China might have a very well established web industry, but it’s still a rough ride for Chinese startups. There’s little in the way of government support like you’ll find in nations like Singapore, and there are strong web portals and companies out there that could easily and quickly clone a startup’s key product. In fact, you’re more likely to be copied than acquired. And when it comes to the government, you’re more likely to face troubles and restrictions than get solid support. Right now, taxi booking apps are flourishing – but then authorities have already begun to regulate or even ban these apps in some cities. What recourse do these startups have? None.

On the more positive side, there’s a great startup ecosystem from the idea stage right up to major follow-up funding. At the base are startup events like Startup Weekends and Barcamps in cities like Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai occurring very often. It would be nice to see more in the way of startup contests (like TechCrunch Disrupt or our own Startup Asia events) that can give local startups a visibility boost. Or a cash boost for the winners. The annual GMIC Beijing event does do that, but more pitching and contest chances would be good.

At the funding level, there are strong funding interests in China from a wide variety of sources, which makes it not too vast a challenge to get funding for a successful enterprise. Interest in e-commerce seems strongest, with anyone from Sequoia Ventures to GGV Capital to California’s Bluerun Ventures being especially keen on innovative e-stores. Social is a tougher area – hard to monetize, and easy to copy – for all but a few lucky ones. With e-commerce in China set to be worth a total of $177 billion in 2013, it’s little wonder that a lot of startups are trying out this business avenue.

For incubation and acceleration, the largest is Innovation Works, created by Taiwanese-American Lee Kaifu, which is incubating over 50 startups that are now estimated to be wealth over $600 million. It can do series A funding as well as seed-stage. Aside from that, there’s Tisiwi in Hangzhou, and the soon-to-be-rebranded Chinaccelerator up in Dalian.

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Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Tony Yew: With the effort put in by the Malaysian government under the National Alliance (Barisan Nasional) to collectively push Malaysia towards the high income nation model, technology will play a pivotal role in the Economic Transformation Program (ETP) spearheaded by Malaysia’s sixth Prime Minister Najib Razak.

Malaysia has come a long way since the introduction of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) where technology companies made full use of the privileges as well as tax incentives to relocate their operations to the MSC. In recent years, startups have also received additional assistance from many grants made available through many schemes driven by both government agencies as well as private venture capitalists. One example is the Cradle fund, where assistance is provided via seed or commercialization grants which are then channeled through carefully managed technopreneur to mentor programs. There are also SME driven programs providing matching grants, apart from the more conventional pre-seed funding.

Almost all of these grants incorporate professional advisers including those who have succeeded from the grant program right up to fund managers. Hence an insightful response from those in the very thick of the action is able to guide the hopeful startups right from the word go.

Apart from these conventional funds, a developer league has also been created, whereby hopeful technopreneurs are pitted against each other and winning ideas and concepts will receive grants and contracts with certain technology companies. Basically, hackathons plus incubation. This is done in conjunction with many universities that provide the facilities for the intending startups, in the past corporations and telecoms have hosted these.

Among the more recent successful startups in Malaysia include TeratoTech, which won many accolades for its mobile application designs and specialized apps for iOS and Android.

Overall, the startup scene is quite upbeat and vibrant with all the assistance available to the technopreneur who wants to explore Malaysia as their future base.

Taipei, Taiwan

Jamie C. Lin: Taipei is rapidly becoming one of the most vibrant startup scenes in Asia. There’s the Startup Digest Taipei mailing list where people post startup events, and you see workshops, forums, meetups and mixers happening all week long every week. At Stop by Meet, hosted by Business Next magazine, or TO Mixer by TechOrange, two of the more popular monthly startup gatherings in town, you see hundreds of founders passionately exchanging their startup ideas. Demo events are held quite frequently as well. Both the Institute for Information Industry’s IDEAS Show and Business Next’s Meet Conference run annually and feature several dozens startups. Demo Day of leading startup accelerator appWorks takes place two times a year, featuring 20-30 startups in its graduating class and is always a packed room with more than a thousand local venture investors, media, and startup founders.

While more successful Internet startups such as Lativ, Gamesofa, Mayuki, PubGame, i-Part, and Bahamut run their businesses with tens to hundreds of employees generating tens of millions of US dollars in sales, smaller startups are increasingly started by only a few founders at a co-working space or a startup accelerator. IEH is the leading co-working space housing 20+ startups while AppWorks’ accelerator space is home to over 50 startups.

Investment wise, more active investors are CyberAgent Ventures, AppWorks Ventures, CID Group, and TMI Holdings. Together, the local VC industry pumps close to $100 million into the ecosystem each year, funding 30 to 50 startups across seed stage to pre-IPO stage.

Taiwan’s outdated company and securities-related laws, the Taiwanese government’s lack of understanding of internet-based businesses, and its failure to recognize the web as an industry platform of strategic importance can often hurt local startups and their founders. For example, Taiwanese securities laws still require all shares to be issued at at least NT$10 ($0.33), which means if a company gives its founders equity, or “technical shares” as it is called in Taiwan, it will be treated by the government as taxable income, calculated based on the NT$10 value times the amount of “free” shares the founders receive. Moreover, local company law mandates that only a maximum of 15 percent technical shares can be awarded to the founders, even when they are willing to pay income tax for receiving it. If the founders want to own more of their company, they have to put up even more capital to purchase all additional stocks, at at least NT$10 per share.

At the same time, Taiwan is still yet to pass a legal striucture within which a full-service third-party payment solution comparable to PayPal or Alipay can be operated, which hurts its e-commerce and digital content industries’ ability to collect payments while protecting both the sellers and buyers from possible fraud. The Taiwanese government also mandates a seven-day return policy across all e-commerce and digital content products sold by online retailers. While seven days can be way too long for a mobile game or an e-book to be “tried” before the potential buyer decides if he/she wants a return, it is sometimes too short for a physical product – Zappos actually offers a 360-day return for the shoes it sells. By enforcing a rigid rule like this, it shows the Taiwanese government’s lack of understanding of internet-based businesses. And in Taiwan, most web startup founders find themselves fighting with local government on a wide variety of issues the whole time, which in turn has been slowing Taiwanese startups down in their pursuit of greatness.

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Hong Kong, China

Rafael Wong Chi Hao and Casey Lau: Hong Kong was rated one of the world’s top four tech capitals to watch after star-studded Silicon Valley and New York in a recent Forbes’ article. Despite the lack of a startup ecosystem in the early to mid-noughties, Hong Kong’s economic focus on traditional industries such as real estate, a lack of investors looking at tech, and a lack of computer science talent graduating from local universities, Hong Kong’s startup culture is brewing. In the past two to three years, co-working spaces like CoCoon, The Hive Hong Kong, The Good Lab, and BootHK are flourishing to bring in an enormous amount of foreign tech talents. Startup breeding grounds such as Startup Weekend, AcceleratorHK, the Make A Difference Venture Fellows Program, the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park Incubation Program, and StartupsHK are up and running to set Hong Kong in the right direction towards promoting entrepreneurship.

A partial list of Hong Kong-based startups can be found here and updates on what is happening in the local scene can be found on the StartupsHK blog along with a full calendar. Also, here’s a resource page of incubators, funds, and job sites for startups in Hong Kong.

The next stage, therefore, is for Hong Kong to develop a healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem where startups and investors exist, the startup industry will grow naturally. So the big difficult question is how?

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Seoul, South Korea

John Kim: South Korea’s startup scene has experienced tremendous growth over the last half a decade, with a proliferation of not only ventures but also of accelerators and VCs. Casting a glance across the startup space, two main reasons for this growth are apparent.

First, the increasing visibility of successful startups has drawn attention from the public and inspired a younger generation of entrepreneurs. The Forbes list of wealthiest Koreans, long the domain of family-controlled conglomerates (or ‘chaebol’), is now peppered with gaming company founders worth billions of dollars. More recently, companies like TicketMonster, Kakao (makers of KakaoTalk) and Coupang have shown strength not only by financial prowess, but also by penetrating a much broader segment of society with their products. Last year, the influence of the startup community was seared in the minds of the public when Ahn Chul Soo, founder of anti-virus company Ahnlab, ran for the country’s highest office.

Second, the Korean government has shown tremendous support for the startup community, a trend that looks set to continue following the recent presidential race. Ahn eventually dropped out, and Korea elected its first female president, Park Geun Hye, who included increased venture financing as one of her campaign pledges. South Korea already boasted the fourth largest VC market in the world (with only the 17th largest economy), but venture financing looks to hit new highs when government programs kick in this summer.

That said, entrepreneurs report that applications for government funding have tapered off this year as the typical high failure rates of start-ups start to crystallize trepidation in the minds of graduating seniors. Throughout the world, most startups fail, but unlike in Silicon Valley where failure implies learning, in Korea, as in most Asian countries, failure implies inadequacy.

This fear of failure and other cultural characteristics of Korean companies could be barriers in going global, the next challenge for Korean startups. But conglomerates like Samsung, gaming companies like Nexon, and K-pop groups like Big Bang have encountered similar barriers before and yet succeeded in spreading the Korean brand beyond the borders of the hermit kingdom. With continued visibility and government support, we could see the same for the next generation of startup founders.

Incidentally, ‘the Korean startup scene’ typically refers to the South, but North Korea has also seen a surge in entrepreneurial activity in the last half decade. Though no traditional incubators exist in the DPRK, the Choson Exchange has started a ‘Women in Business’ program to train female entrepreneurs in the country, and brought five North Koreans to Singapore for a one month internship at a startup incubator. In a time of increasing tensions, perhaps the peninsula could benefit from some startup statecraft.

Jakarta, Indonesia

Aulia “Ollie” Halimatussadiah: When I was at a tech conference, someone asked me if my startup’s already making money. I said, “Of course. I can’t afford not to!” That also describes most bootstrapping startups in Indonesia. We use our personal money as seed funding, then we create a startup and it has to be making money from day one to survive. There’s no government funding for startups, so the startups built in Indonesia are mostly practical, like e-commerce, travel, and logistics. Innovation is something we think about later.

In 2010, around 30 startup founders gathered in a Starbucks to discuss their startups and surprisingly it was one of the most important moments for the Indonesian startup scene. The meetup became regular with specific topics; because it was started from Twitter, so the organization is called #StartupLokal. Natali Ardianto, Nuniek Tirta and I organize every monthly meetup. Now there are more than 200 people per meetup and thousands subscribed to our mailing list.

It is a favorable time to start a startup in Indonesia because we’re politically stable, freedom of speech is a way of life, we have a rising middle class (up to 45 million people in Indonesia now have strong buying power), the penetration rate of mobile phones is extremely high with the average Indonesian having more than two mobile phones; we have 47 million Facebook users and very active Twitter users; and last but not least, our biggest asset is that more than 60 percent of Indonesia’s 240 million population are under 35 years old with a median age of 28 spread across more than 17,000 islands in Indonesia. It’s a young country with so much room to explore and so many problems to solve, which means more opportunities for entrepreneurs.

More investors are coming to Indonesia from all over the world, and more incubators available and they’re ready to invest. But most of them find difficulties to get a startup with a $1 million dream. So now the homework for Indonesian startup founders is to change the usual mindset, aim higher and think global.

There are quite a few investors in Indonesia these days, including Merah Putih Incubator, GDP Venture, East Ventures, GREE Ventures, Grupara, Ideosource, and Cyber Agent Ventures.

Bangkok, Thailand

Prathan Thananart: The explosion of the startup scene in Bangkok over last year can be characterized by three related trends. First is the momentum building done by tech events over last several years through a series of BarCamps, Mobile Mondays, and Startup Weekends. These events, and success stories shared by entrepreneurs from local and abroad, send the message that startup entrepreneurs aren’t a fringe group anymore.

Second, the rise of co-working spaces is interesting to note since they were once predicted by many to never take off due to the solid member base they would need to sustain operation. Now there are several healthy ones throughout Bangkok, and they help connect entrepreneurs to developers and freelancers in the industry.

Finally, the establishment of venture capital firms and business angel groups, including expansion from firms based in other Asian countries. Prominent ones include InVent, owned by Intouch, which also operate the largest telco in Thailand, and Ardent Capital, run by the investors of Ensogo which sold to LivingSocial.

A downside of the scene we have here is that it’s not very diverse. Last I counted there are 10+ companies competing in the loyalty app space, and countless group buying clones. Chances are, as we mature, some of this energy will be channeled into other less tapped spaces. Just like how Tel Aviv, with its famous traffic jams, gave birth to Waze, the navigator app with crowdsourced congestion data.

Bangkok is home to millions of smartphone owners and over 18 million social media users from a web user-base of 25 million. And as the digitally native, younger population grows up, there is bound to be plenty of disruption to how people shop, commute, and stay in touch.

Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam

Anh-Minh Do: I’ve already written about Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city at length, but let’s look more at the Vietnamese startup scene in general. So far, the venture capital landscape has been exciting but drying up in some places. DFJ Vina Capital and IDG Ventures seem to be slowly pulling away from tech startups and shifting their strategy to a more incubatory and hands-on approach, while CyberAgent Ventures, the new Japanese VC firm that’s very active in the county, has been making some really interesting investments.

As far as the government goes, there hasn’t been too much of a hands-on approach as yet. Although, the building of industrial parks on the outskirts of both Vietnam’s major cities has given birth to plenty of outsourcing companies and startup opportunities for the past decade. And this has lead to a relatively strong community of developers and startup folks. To get the pulse on the scene, all you need to do is visit the Launch group on Facebook and you’ll immediately see a vibrant and talkative startup scene. In other words, much of the momentum of the startup scene in Vietnam has been happening organically through the community and huge companies like FPT, VC Corp, and VNG leveraging the size of their infrastructures and markets.

Thinking globally though, has not been on the agenda of many of Vietnam’s startups until recently. Of course, some medium sized startups like Appota and GHN are looking outside of the domestic market in the future, they’ve centered most of their strength on developing strong business models at home. The irony is, a common startup model you will see in Vietnam is a subsidized kind, wherein a tech company will take foreign contracts to finance their operations and then build a product team on top of that revenue. This has allowed some startups to avoid the necessity to get investor money but is sometimes a barrier to true product innovation.

These points underline a key feature of Vietnam’s startup scenes centered in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city, a very practical and commercial oriented set of success stories that will serve to foster the growth into the future.

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Manila, Philippines

There has never been a more interesting to put up your own product or tech-service as a Philippines startup.

An emergence of early seed-stage investors include Kickstart which has invested in six startups ranging from ($30,000 to $120,000); Launchgarage is a collaboration between Jay Fajardo of Proudcloud; and Kickstart has invested in four startups and will be incubating four more between the months of July and November. You also have Ideaspace whose team just seeded 10 startups with $12,500 each. SeedAsia is the latest team to enter the field and is looking at several startups in the country.

There are also a few government backed incubator/seed-stage funding options from UP TBI/ Enterprise TBI/ DOST TBI – TBI. While other investors such as Global Gateway Ventures, Narra Ventures, ICCP Ventures, and Plug and Play are also shopping around locally.

Several companies have already raised cash internationally to get their feet wet in Manila. These include Kalibbr and Payroll Hero and several Silicon Valley geeks are hanging around Manila.

There also are communities active on Facebook such as StartupPH, coupled with several meetups such as Roofcamp, Open Coffee Wednesday, Founder’s Drink, and MobileMonday – they all come alive almost on a monthly basis. This does not even include the numerous startup events such as Startup Weekend, AngelHack, and the near-weekly developers’ bootcamps for almost every language available on the web from Globe Labs to SMART’s Developer Network. Both companies provide free training and education camps on best practices and entrepreneurship.

With a steady population of close to 100 million, a rising economy and a growing middle class, the Philippines is probably the largest English speaking market in Asia outside of India! The economic resilience of the Philippines during the financial crises of 1997 and 2008 is an amazing testimony to the country’s superb fundamentals which in turn is echoed by three upgrades in investment grade ratings by JCRA, S&P, and Fitch.

But there are major challenges. As with most Asian markets, there exists a gap between seed and series A investors in the Philippines and that limits the number of possible exits. E-commerce visibility is still in its early stages as there is a need to decrease the friction between paper money to credit cards to online e-payments – fewer than 10 percent of the total population have access to credit cards. The delineation between online commerce and retail commerce is still wide as logistics can still be further streamlined. Government still governs all e-commerce businesses with the same bureaucratic and cumbersome processes that isn’t very business friendly for entrepreneurs or investors.

This is also likely because the Philippine startup scene has only inched out of infancy and is beginning to see its early-stages. The success of the recently incubated companies will also largely determine the credibility of the Philippine market to compete in the global (or regional Southeast Asian scene). Nonetheless, the future of the Philippines looks bright as local leaders are emerging in the scene, an influx of talent returning back into the Philippines to either participate in the tech scene (not to mention the booming business process outsourcing (BPO) sector) and great products that are being built to help solve challenges of the market it is trying to serve! The Philippines is a growing bubbling economy where innovation and social challenges meet through technology.

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India

Mukund Mohan: The one thing that strikes most outsiders about the technology startup ecosystem in India is how diverse it is.

Entrepreneurs range from 21-year old college students to 61-year old executives, and it takes all types in between. The anatomy of the “average” Indian technology entrepreneur is a 30+ year old male, with some technology background, though not necessarily in product development, focusing on building a product that’s largely trying to solve local (Indian) problems. The average, though, is the middle of the ground, and there are exceptional folks at both ends of the spectrum. From those exclusively focused on the American markets with SaaS applications to building cloud infrastructure software for large data centers. It’s all happening.

On average about 970 technology-product entities get started each year in India and only about 380 actually incorporate the entity as a corporation. The mortality rate is fairly high, with over 60 percent of these “entities” pivoting or going dormant within 12 to 18 months. An equal number of services (consulting) entities get started each year in the technology space as well, which tend to last longer.

The startups are a good mix of 61 percent focused on business oriented offerings and about 39 percent on consumer applications such as mobile apps, social networks and e-commerce offerings and others. In the last few years, there has been an explosion in e-commerce companies. Thanks to a growing Internet user-base (about 100 million individuals, with 15 million actively purchasing goods and services online), high penetration of broadband (over 10 million connections) and an explosion in the number of mobile phones (currently at over 800 million connections) there has never been a better time to start a technology company in India.

The state of the investor ecosystem is also on the rise. From about 43 active venture investors in 2006, investing in about 73 companies each year, now there are over 80 angel investor networks, seed funds, accelerators and early stage funds, and over 153 companies get some form of institutional funding each year.

Finally the support ecosystem for entrepreneurs is also growing at a fast pace to help the entrepreneurs. From the idea stage (Open Coffee Club, Startup Saturday) to prototype stage (HasGeek, Startup Weekend) and from the product ready stage (DEMO India, Unpluggd) to the growth stage (NASSCOM product conclave, Reverse Pitch). There are multiple events and organizations that are bringing the various parts of the system together consistently and delivering results.

There are three main challenges that the Indian technology ecosystem faces, to which there are no short-term fixes. The first is the paucity of exits, second is the lack of a sophisticated angel investor and mentor ecosystem, and third is the inherent risk-averse nature of the Indian middle class.

The optimist in me says these problems, albeit structural, will change over the next five to ten years and are relatively easy to solve given the inherent dynamic nature of Indians entrepreneurs. Buoyed by the success of Indians in the Valley and the fact that they form 43 percent of all product startups in the Bay area, I am absolutely confident that the metrics and trends will point to a 300 percent to 500 percent growth in both startups and success in the next five years.

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Pakistan. (NEW!)

The startup scene in Pakistan has been very energetic since 2012. Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad, the three major cities, have become the home for new startups in Pakistan and every now and then aspiring young entrepreneurs are launching interesting projects.

Prior to that, Pakistani startups had started to gather attention by winning at various competitions held in 2010 and 2011. The team from Pakistan won seven silvers at the Asia Pacific ICT Awards 2010 held in Kuala Lumpur that year, and in 2011 picked up two gold medals in the e-logistics and e-health categories, plus five silver medals.

In 2012, universities like LUMS boosted the spirits of young entrepreneurs by holding Startup Weekend events for the first time in 2012 and then in 2013. Such efforts added fuel to the fire and motivated many professionals to jump forward and show their talent to the world.

Similarly companies like Microsoft and Google are taking interest in the region. Microsoft’s Windows Phone Hackathon hit Lahore earlier this year.

Besides this, the government of Pakistan is also very supportive to young students and entrepreneurs. With tech incubators like Plan9 and various other grant opportunities from P@SHa and PITB – aspiring entrepreneurs now have better funding opportunities than those who have started in the past.

Strengths : We can conclude that startups in Pakistan have a bright future and there are many organizations locally that are supporting potential web entrepreneurs. The professionals in Pakistan are second to none in terms of skills and ideas. Startups.pk is filled with numerous startups that are being launched in Pakistan. Pakistan has a young and vibrant population with 70 percent being under 30!

After the recent 2013 elections in Pakistan, the government is more stable than ever and this means more favourable circumstances.

Contributing authors

Many thanks to all of our gracious contributors for sharing with us an intimate picture of their startup scenes:

Darius Cheung was the founder of TenCube and is an investor in JFDI and TIS Funds Neoteny Labs and Golden Gate Ventures.

Malaysian-born Tony Yew is a blogger and current secretary general of Blog House Malaysia. He’s @tonyyew on Twitter.

Prathan Thananart, aka Pop, is a startup entrepreneur and is building Page365, a back-office app to take the pain out of running Facebook stores.

John Kim, is a Managing Partner at Amasia Associates. He started out as an internet entrepreneur and has been trading/investing for the last 11 years including 5 years at Goldman Sachs. John is also a Board Director at the Choson Exchange.

Rafael Wong Chi Hao is an event organizer and blogger based in Hong Kong, who is also strongly involved in events like TEDxHongKong.

Casey Lau is a community developer in Hong Kong as well as catalyst at Soft Layer.

Aulia “Ollie” Halimatussadiah is the writer of 25 books, the co-founder of online bookstore Kutukutubuku, and the first online self-publishing platform in Indonesia, NulisBuku.

Mukund Mohan is the CEO-in-residence at the Microsoft Accelerator. He founded and sold BuzzGain, a leader in do-it-yourself PR, to Meltwater in January 2010. Before that he founded and sold two Silicon Valley startups.

Mohsin Khawaja is an internet marketer and has an entrepreneurial spirit. This year he participated in LUMS startup weekend 2013 and founded a startup TravelPakistan that aims to promote local and international tourism in Pakistan and project country’s brighter image to abroad as well. Also Mohsin has setup a new blog PakistaniJunction, to create an information hub for news related to Pakistani startups.
Follow @connectmohsin on Twitter to remain updated on the StartUp news in Pakistan.

A new S$5 million (US$3.95 million) Kickstarter fund was announced during Singapore Budget 2013 back in March to support lifestyle concepts with strong tourism potential and scalability. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing more startups in the Singapore scene competing in the travel space (think Indiescapes, Travelogy, and Flocations).

Launched last August 2012, Singapore-based travel and lifestyle reviews portal TheSmartLocal.com is the new kid on the block, boasting close to 16,000 reviews to date.

TheSmartLocal editor-in-chief Bryan Choo tells us that the team is pretty stringent on who writes the reviews on the site and they are done by invitation only. It seeks to build a community of trusted reviewers, hailing from backgrounds such as book authors, startup founders, bloggers, and people who are well-versed in lifestyle and travel. In essence, the team wants to have reviewers on board who are passionate about sharing and writing their experiences. This way, it ensures that the reviews are true to what is being written, minimizing the problem of having fake reviews or competing firms lashing out against public submissions. Bryan adds that random reviewers often lament about their bad experiences and hardly do follow-up posts, which admittedly is a very Singaporean culture (an example here).

It also has a points system in place which acts like an incentive for members to contribute more on the site. With more written comments, reviews, and postings on forums, members will get more points.

TheSmartLocal was created to aid not just travelers, but also locals to make better decisions. Common frustrations such as where to find a good photographer for one’s wedding shot, to where one should bring his or her international friends when they visit – the site aims to answer these questions. Bryan elaborates:

There are many times where we exhaust our network and still have no information about things, often plunge into the unknown and end up with bad experiences. We want to help people not have to go through that. [That is] our aim, to help Singaporean consumers make better decisions, [to have a better knowledge] about everything Singapore.

But the site doesn’t just focus on Singapore, and has has already expanded to Malaysia (screenshot pictured right) as well. The team of six has yet to work out details on expansion to other countries, but will look into other nations by drawing inspiration from My Destination’s model.

The reviews portal currently has 50 regular reviewers on the site, and will be launching its Android application in the third quarter this year.

Grey Singapore seems to be riding a wave of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, with part of the team launching the Lend an Eye app for the visually impaired which we wrote about earlier. Now, the digital and social media agency Yolk Singapore (a Grey Group company) has launched PawfectPets.sg, which is an interactive website that aims to increase awareness of cruelty at puppy mills in Singapore. This is in collaboration with local animal welfare groups that hope the public will gradually switch to adopting animals from shelters instead of purchasing them.

Singaporeans browsing the web will soon see advertisements that will lead them to PawfectPets.sg (screenshot above). It then brings visitors through a video illustrating the inhumane practices and unimaginable living conditions at puppy mills. For those who are unaware, puppy mills are large breeding facilities where dogs live in dire conditions (pictured right). They are often not given the necessary food, water, or veterinary care and forced to reproduce time and time again. It hopes to highlight that the cute little puppy we fancy at the window of the pet store comes from these puppy mills.

Jun Jek Low, creative director at Yolk tells us that it aims to primarily target potential and existing dog owners so as to reduce retail demand, and also hopes to raise awareness among the general public. He elaborates:

The goal of the campaign is to educate the public that buying a puppy from the pet store is indirectly fuelling the growth of a cruel industry which allows for animal abuse. There is still a good majority of the public who are unaware of the existence of puppy mills. [Through PawfectPets.sg], we would like to create awareness that adopting a pet is the better alternative. We integrated an adoption page on our site that will lead visitors to our partners’ pages, allowing them to contact them should they wish to adopt a pet.

Some of the partners in this initiative include Animal Lovers League, Save Our Street Dogs, and the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Singapore (SPCA). The campaign was launched on April 26 and will run for two months.

I’ve personally had mongrel dogs for a long time, and have adopted them from animal shelters as well. To be honest, they can be as adorable as pure-breed dogs and make really good companions. I’ve made a pinky paw promise on the site (see screenshot above) and shared on my social media channels – perhaps you could do your part by spreading the word too!

Singaporean startup incubator Fatfish Medialab has made its first ever investments in four local startups. The new program, a spin-off from the VC firm Fatfish Group that operates around Southeast Asia, has opted to back these guys, who are all still in beta and not yet fully launched:

PeeplePass

Once launched on iPhone and Android, PeeplePass promises to be Asia’s first data-driven social travel app, different to the usual travel diary or search apps.

Blazable Studio

Blazable Studio is working on a game engine to simplify the creation of social mobile games.

VDancer

VDancer is a game studio focuses on a particular niche – what it promises will be a new genre of mobile dance games.

DockPHP

Will be a SaaS business for creating business-oriented websites.

Fatfish is an iJAM-approved incubator. For those who missed the news, iJAM is a tiered funding program created by the Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore. It has experienced entrepreneurs and seasoned investors onboard to guide the startups, such as partners Chow Yen-Lu and Lau Kin Wai.

Mr. Lau says in today’s announcement:

We have quite an exciting first quarter of the year with the investments we made into the four startups. We are selective in finding the right startups to invest in, but we do see a very active startup scene in Singapore. At this juncture, we believe that we will be investing into more than 15 startups over the next 24 months.

Singapore-based incubator JFDI.Asia today unveils its seven startups that have graduated from its 100-day accelerator program. It is down from the original eight that was first announced last February, but it’s still a strong line-up. The seven are:

1. Scrollback: A micro-forum platform for open communities.
2. Collabspot: A sales email platform that integrates customer relationship management (CRM) with Gmail, and aims to simplify data entry, increase CRM adoption, and increase productivity.
3. Krake: This is a data harvesting engine that brings benefits of big data to individuals, helping them to compare market positioning, analyze reputation and sentiments, integrate content, and grow customer base.
4. Klinify: Cloud-based patient record management platform that fits clinics’ workflow, where patient information can be accessed anywhere and on demand.
5. Duable: Uses computational linguistics to customize learning language, allowing you to learn and read effectively according to your language capabilities.
6. OurHealthMate: Helps you book and pay for your family’s health checkup, on top of giving detailed feedback straight from doctors about your loved ones’ health conditions.
7. UserScout: This one is an end-to-end research process management tool.

The startups pitching are collectively made up of 30 percent Singapore citizens and permanent residents, with others entrepreneurs hailing from the United States, Taiwan, the Philippines, India, France, Vietnam, and New Zealand; but all startups are incorporated in Singapore.

The demo day will be held on June 3 at the Joyful Frog Innovation Campus at 71 Ayer Rajah Crescent. It is also sponsored by Japan’s Global Brain, and will see more than 100 investors attending to listen to the pitches by the seven startups. Some of the seed stage investors who will be attending include Golden Gate Ventures, Jungle Ventures, TNF Ventures, and Wavemaker Labs, on top of institutional funds that include Vertex Venture Holdings, Temasek, and Sequoia Capital.

JFDI alumni, both Fetch Plus and Startup Arena Singapore 2012 finalist Flocations will be returning to their alma mater to share their progress after a year. The presentation, sponsored by Global Brain, already has over 100 investors confirmed to attend including 500 Startups ‘Geeks On A Plane’.

See you guys at its demo day on June 3!

Instead of requiring someone to be next to a blind person to assist them, the app allows the user to launch Lend an Eye app and calls a volunteer via voice activation or by double tapping on the screen (screenshots below). The volunteer then picks up the call and would be able to see exactly what is around the user and guide them, as the phone would be hung around the neck, with the camera facing out.

You might be concerned that the live streaming video would be inverted since the camera is hung upside down, but there will be a button for volunteers to invert the video back. And upon accepting the video call, a map will appear along with the live streaming, making it even more effective for the volunteer to guide the user (screenshots below).

Lend an Eye empowers the blind to be able to move from one location to another and also helps them to make simple daily decisions, such as deciding which flavour of soft drink they should get from the convenience store, all without someone to be physically next to them to help them. It also makes micro-volunteering a much easier task, so people would still be able to do some good during the pockets of free time that they have, without having too much time commitment.

As mentioned, this is a CSR initiative and Grey Singapore has no plans to monetize but would like to give this product to a non-profit organization or government organization to use. As to how many volunteers it currently has on hand and how it chooses its volunteers, Deng Yingzhi, one of the core team members of this initiative tells us:

We’re just done with our testing. At the moment, we’re exploring different ways of making this a reality. [Our] immediate plan is to approach organizations like the Singapore Association of the Visually Handicapped (SAVH), and work with their volunteers. The volunteers will be screened and registered, of course.

This app has also been tested with visually impaired people and have received much positive feedback. That’s important because most of the time, as the blind would require help from strangers to perform simple tasks, some choose not to get out of the house. This app can give them the confidence to be able to step out the comfort of their own homes without much supervision and complete simple tasks they previously were unable to accomplish.

And this awesome initiative was created by a small team of six, which includes Ali Shabaz, Joseph Cheong, Deng Yingzhi, Sudhir Pasumarty, Sandeep Bhardwaj, and Karn Singh from Grey Singapore, taking time off from their normal working hours to embark on this.

If you would like to find out more, you can visit the website here.

Things have been evolving quite a bit for Zalora since it entered Singapore. Last year, there was some controversy over customer service, but this year the fashion e-store hit over one million monthly visitors in March and last week it delivered to its one millionth customer.

Now, Zalora is continuing to step up its game in Singapore by offering customers a cash-on-collection option at local 7-Eleven stores across Singapore. That means it’s even easier to pay for your e-commerce clothing purchases starting from today. This is all part of Zalora’s play to make customer service as good as they can get it. It’s in stark contrast to last year’s mishaps.

Singaporeans can select the 7-Eleven payment option on the Zalora checkout page, which will allow them to check their preferred store to pay at. Zalora will then SMS the customer to notify them when their package has arrived at the designated 7-Eleven. Then they would go to the 7-Eleven, cash in hand. After paying in cash at the 7-Eleven of their choosing, they’ll be able to get the package.

According to Amanda Eng, marketing director for Zalora Singapore:

This is an exciting step for us as it can help those still apprehensive about online shopping get over that initial barrier. We hope that this collaboration can help us grow the market by increasing consumer confidence in e-commerce efficiencies.

Currently, the 7-Eleven cash-on-collection plan is only running in 19 stores in Singapore, but the Rocket Internet-backed company is hoping to expand that to all the 570 stores across the island.

Paying for items that you buy online at a mini-mart is certainly not a new thing in Asia. We’ve seen examples of using convenience stores to pay for online goods in China, Thailand, and 7-Eleven-loving Taiwan.

In my first interview as part of our new student entrepreneurship series, I speak with SpeakingMax.cn co-founder Jason Lin (pictured right) on his thoughts of stopping school to create a startup. He tells us of his journey as a Singaporean student venturing into Chinese waters and gives words of wisdom from what he’s learnt thus far.

Tell us more about yourself.

Jason: I am the co-founder at SpeakingMax and am also in my final year at National University of Singapore majoring in political science, with a minor in technopreneurship at Tsinghua University under the NUS Overseas Colleges Program (NOC). I took an additional year off on top of my NOC program to embark on SpeakingMax.

What does SpeakingMax do, and what is your role?

Jason: SpeakingMax is a new and unconventional English language learning tool. Our team aims to revolutionize mobile English education and pioneer the future of mobile english learning in China through the use of unique content and innovative learning methods. Users, through thousands of recorded real-life situations, would be able to learn how to speak close to how a native American would.

Also [being] the VP of product at SpeakingMax, I manage almost all aspects of product development, from day-to-day operations, website management, business development, to fund-raising.

SpeakingMax.cn was also one of the finalists at Beijing’s Global Mobile Internet Conference G-Startup Growth Stage competition (pictured right).

What were the challenges faced at SpeakingMax?

Jason: There are three problems faced while penetrating into the Chinese online education market (SpeakingMax.cn screenshots below):

1. Chinese habit of learning online. Most users are used to a classroom education and think that one-to-one and face-to-face would be the most effective way to learn. The general perception of online education is that it cannot be seamless and effective online. Until they are in contact and exposed to the idea of online education, they will not realize how effective it can be. In fact, the Chinese market for online education is still in its infant stages. Korea turned to online education back in 2008. Offline language education firms such as Wall Street English have been constantly fighting a price war but are now eventually losing their Korean market share to online players.
2. Online paying habits and trust issues. Most Chinese do not have the habit of paying large amounts online for intangible goods, services such as ours. Also, people tend to be more wary when it comes to paying online due to the high number of fraud cases in online transactions. We do get calls time to time asking if we are a real operating company, and if there’s the possibility that the company could close down. Also, it gets difficult to make payments online. There are too many different restrictions and conditions for credit cards, such as the amount you can pay per day for different banks. It is also not a habit to pay online using credit cards.
3. Slow internet speeds. All I can say is, welcome to China! Slow internet speeds and bad 3G networks. But we are looking forward to better improvements in internet speeds in the future.

How are your user demographics?

Jason: Our users are mostly white-collar professionals in the bigger cities within China, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. There are three reasons for this: One, such cities tend to be more cosmopolitan and have a greater influx of foreign talents. Hence there is a higher demand and need to learn the English language. Two, they tend to have higher spending power, and are more willing to spend on self-enrichment courses which they believe will give them an edge over others in the future. Three, the internet conditions in these cities tend to be better. They tend to be the early adopters or early majority within the adoption curve, and are more receptive when it comes to trying out new technology.

What is your revenue model?

Jason: It is a subscription-based model, which averages out to about RMB 2,000 (US$326) to RMB 3,000 (US$489) per year.

What are the upcoming plans at SpeakingMax that you can share with us?

Jason: We are focused on expanding our user-base in Mainland China before moving to other markets. We will also be expanding our product line, adding a variety of online teaching tools to learning english.

Was it difficult navigating the Chinese waters as a foreigner?

Jason: Yes and no. Ultimately, I am a Singaporean Chinese and look just like anyone [there]. I also have Singapore’s bilingual education system to thank for being fluent in both English and Chinese. In fact, if your Chinese is good enough, they will see you just like one of them.

But the way they do business is still very different. Singapore, as a whole, is still very much influenced by the West. So there is definitely a learning curve in terms of the business culture. It is pretty much a taboo to have confrontations. People hardly say no upfront and in your face.

As much as foreigners may hold an advantage knowing a different language, often the Chinese market is so big that firms do not have to expand overseas in order to be successful. Many of the local firms here are looking to expand within the Chinese territory even before thinking about international expansion plans.

But of course, being a foreigner gives a different slant and fresher perspective on matters, which might blend into a nice fusion of new and innovative ideas to solving problems.

Not to forget, dealing with business in China, as cliché as it may sound, depends on guanxi (关系), which means the connections and networks that you have. As a foreigner, you may not have those kind of renmai (人脉) and contacts, so it is really helpful if your co-founders have that for a start. Be careful never to close doors on people and keep your options open, because you will never know one day you might just need it.

Perhaps one thing I learned that I’d like to pass to the readers at Tech in Asia would be one given to me when I first arrived in Beijing in 2011. A taxi driver said this to me: 办法总比困难多. Short and simple, but it meant a lot to me. It means there are many ways of solving a problem, and one should always think of different methods should one not work. We as Singaporeans are often too used to being black and white, in its absolutes. But we need to acknowledge that there are in-betweens, or what we call gray areas. It depends on the context to the way we solve problems in China, but I guess that should be applicable even in other countries as well.

I understand you are still a student. What made you decide to stop your studies temporarily for this venture?

Jason: Two reasons for this.

One, it was an opportunity that came knocking on my door. The market, when we first entered, was just timely and might be one that if we miss it, it will never come again. Coincidentally, a couple of days back, my team and I were looking back on the past efforts and realized that we had it spot on. We’re pretty glad we entered because the industry is currently at its peak.

Two, I wanted to be part of the early development phase of the product, where I could participate in all aspects of the business from scratch. Most of the my other partners (team pictured below) were much older and more experienced, and I saw it as a privilege and an exponential learning opportunity where I could obtain much from this stint. It saves a lot of trouble since they have “been there, done that”, where I can easily learn from their mistakes.

Would you encourage other students to stop school temporarily, as you did?

As I mentioned earlier, there’s no definite yes and no. It depends on the situation.

For my case, I am left with a semester to complete at school, where I can make sure that the business is smooth before completing my studies. I think the team that you’re going to work with matters as well. If you are not contributing much and will be very much replaceable, then there’s not much point.

Whether one should leave the comfort of his or her home to embark on an entrepreneurial pursuit overseas, depends on your personal goals and [from] weighing the opportunity costs.

Would you give up your studies for this?

Jason: No. I thought about it before, people have been saying I will lose an opportunity if I don’t give up my studies for this. On the contrary, I see it as a lost opportunity if I give up my studies for this.

Yes, there are a few successful cases, such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, but there are also many examples out there who have quit and failed are not being taken seriously. For every successful entrepreneur, there are at least 10 out there who have failed. Why look at the one, and not the millions?

In my opinion, getting a degree isn’t just a piece of paper. The entire process of learning, co-curricular activities, and being in a strong student network are part of the package of a student life. For instance, being on the NOC program at NUS has put me in this opportunity to take my career further. Without this platform, I would not be exposed to such opportunities. You will only be able to take part in such programs which are uniquely available to students.

Would you encourage others to give up their studies to pursue entrepreneurship?

Jason: This might sound a little unrelated, but I would think that finishing what you started comes as a form of responsibility to your parents. How I would put it is that a society is made up of many basic family units. Fulfilling my role within a family unit is a good indicator as to how I would fare within the society. Hence, no. I will not encourage others to give up their studies to pursue [entrepreneurship].

Having the perseverance to complete the degree, to me, is also a form of mental endurance which I think is a skillset required during the startup journey. So when the going gets tough, the tough get going.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food delivery site Foodpanda has been making headlines a lot recently. First with a $20 million financing round and then a rebrand in Vietnam. Today, Foodpanda has announced a merger with former rival Singapore Dine, though the terms of the deal haven’t been made public.

The Rocket Internet-backed startup claims to be “the market leading food delivery company in Singapore” with this merger.

Kiren Tanna, CEO Asia at Foodpanda in Singapore, said about the merger:

The merge with Singapore Dine makes us by far the market leader in the Singaporean food delivery market. Customers who want to order at Singapore Dine will be redirected to Foodpanda.sg in future to access the broadest culinary variety from more than 200 restaurants delivering island-wide. We are very happy that we can offer the leading and best food delivery platform in Singapore.

Singapore Dine started up in 2010, promising to offer “the widest index of eateries in Singapore, including buffets, coffee places, hawker centers, restaurants and more.” All those delivery options now transfer over to Foodpanda.

Foodpanda operates in nine countries across Asia.

Singapore-based luxury private flash sales site Reebonz (pronounced ‘ribbons’) has completed a $40 million (S$50 million) financing round led by Singapore’s media giant MediaCorp.

Other investors in this round are Vertex Asia Investments, Granite Global Ventures GGV Capital, Intel Capital, Matrix Partners China, and Infocomm Investments, the venture arm of Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore. This financing round values Reebonz at about $200 million (S$250 million).

Reebonz offers short-duration, online private sales events, which are exclusively open to members only. Registration to Reebonz is free. Sales events are for both women’s and men’s brands and are modeled around the concept of ‘accessible luxury’ with up to 70 percent discount.

MediaCorp CEO Shaun Seow told his own network, Channel News Asia (CNA):

We see great alignment between what Reebonz does and what MediaCorp has – audiences, content targeted at the luxury market and our star power. We are confident that by collaborating closely with Reebonz, we’ll see even more breakthroughs from the retailer

Reebonz was founded in March 2009 by Samuel Lim, Daniel Lim, and Benjamin Han who haven’t been speaking much to the tech press recently. Many Singaporean entrepreneurs and investors have long thought of Reebonz as one of the most promising internet companies in the nation. Besides, Reebonz.com, the founders also run Kwerkee.com, a store for designer-created items that was started in April 2012.

Reebonz’s success is built upon layers of experience. Prior to Reebonz, Samuel founded Fusion Mobile in 2000, a mobile content business that was later acquired by a Malaysian listed company in 2007. In 2004, Samuel founded Fusion Direct, a company that did database marketing, and that was acquired by a Singapore listed company in 2010.

Samuel, who’s the CEO at Reebonz, told CNA that with this investment he wishes to “build a world-class billion-dollar Internet commerce group out from Singapore.”

Dr Lim Kuo-Yi, CEO of Infocomm Investments, echoed Samuel’s mission and told us:

We are excited to be working with Samuel, his team, and fellow investors in growing Reebonz as the top online luxury retailer in Asia. It is our mission to support our Infocomm startups to expand internationally, and we are confident Reebonz will show it is possible to build a great startup from Singapore.

Prior to this MediaCorp-led financing round, Reebonz has also received funding from Vertex Asia Investment and Intel Capital. Headquartered in Singapore, Reebonz has regional offices in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, Shanghai, and Korea.

(Source: CNA)

Beijing’s App Annie is growing rapidly with over 80 team members located at Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, San Francisco, and London. Today it serves over 220,000 apps with 85 percent of the top 100 iOS publishers using its service.

App Annie is largely serving clients from the US, Europe, China, and Japan and hasn’t really gotten into Southeast Asia yet. But the team just might start to look at Southeast Asia as it is seeing growth in this region. Vice president of APAC at App Annie Junde Yu said in an email:

Google Play is growing very fast in terms of downloads in the region, especially in countries like Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines, where downloads are much higher than iOS.

Even though Android downloads are much higher, revenue from iOS is still higher in Southeast Asia. Junde also commented that things will get exciting when Google Play manages to establish local payment options as it has done in South Korea and Japan. He added:

Additionally, despite of the growth in downloads, most of the apps downloaded in the SEA markets are published by foreign publishers. There are local publishers, but most of them have more of an international outlook for content and distribution as opposed to local. It will be interesting to observe the rise of the local players for the local markets, as the local markets grow in downloads and revenues.

(Also read: The Story of App Annie)

A Singaporean in China

Junde takes extra interest in Southeast Asia since he was born in Singapore, which is part of the region. Having worked in China for several years now, Junde says that he still has much more to learn from both markets. But from what he has observed, he sees great connection between China and Singapore, noting that SingTel Innov8 (who also invests in China startups) and ACE Beijing Chapter have done a great job bridging the two regions. In China, he sees Innovation Works and the Great Wall Club (which runs GMIC) also having links with Southeast Asia and Singapore.

Junde says people often mistakenly think that Chinese aren’t paying customers. He notes that iOS revenue isn’t significant even with huge downloads because most iOS users in China do not own a foreign credit card to pay Apple. “It is also inconvenient to use local bank cards to top up their iOS credits,” he added.

For Android, Junde says that most revenue-making apps make their bucks from second and third-tier cities, supported by carrier billing that makes paying just an SMS away. He explains that consumers in these cities do not spend much on entertainment outlets like cinemas, pubs, and clubs and thus they are very much content to spend on mobile content.

If you are very serious about the Chinese market, you need to be physically here. If not, you can also work through a distributor/publishers; there are good options available, like iDreamsky, Yodo1, Cocoachina etc.

Coincidentally, Junde will be back in Singapore for the upcoming Casual Connect conference on May 21 to 23. He will be speaking on the topic “Global Trends in App Store Monetization” on May 22, 11.00am where he will be sharing the latest trends about the app store economy and also interesting tips about marketing mobile apps in Asia.

While his work and heart is now mainly in Beijing, Junde does plan to return to Singapore someday to start a game studio, a pub, or a chicken rice franchise.

(Image credit: Startapp.com)

The newest earnings report from SingTel (SGX:T48) makes for painful reading. The giant Singapore-based telco, which has over 420 million subscribers on numerous networks across Asia-Pacific, saw its first full year drop in revenues for 14 years in today’s stats for Q4 and FY 2012. The only ray of light comes from SingTel’s digital business, which saw a 156 percent rise in revenues. Perhaps inspired by this, SingTel will set aside US$1.6 billion for startup acquisitions so as to find “next-generation growth engines in the digital space”.

That $1.6 billion investment will be spread over the next three years, and will be largely ploughed into strategic acquisitions in the online space that can tie in with SingTel’s phone services across the region.

Indeed, we’ve already seen SingTel doing this over the past couple of years, having acquired the mobile ad company Amobee for $321 million, snapped up the food recommendation startup HungryGoWhere, and made investments in things like TheMobileGamer. Plus the telco has a VC arm called SingTel Innov8 that has made lots of significant investments across the region. The most recent one was in the China-based mobile game developer and publisher Yodo1.

Profits down

Getting back to SingTel’s latest numbers, net profit fell 12 percent year-on-year to s$3.51 billion ($2.83 billion) at the end of March 2013. Group revenue fell 3.4 percent to S$18.18 billion ($14.66 billion) for the full year.

SingTel wholly owns Australia’s Optus, and has significant stakes in telcos like India’s Bharti, Philippines’ Globe, and several others.

See more financial data on the SingTel IR homepage or on ZDnet.

(Hat-tip to ZDnet for spotting this)

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.

Today Singapore-based Loan Garage, a startup that aims to help people get loans online, announced that it has launched its Indonesian platform KreditAja.com. It’s interesting to note that the expansion arrives only two months after Loan Garage made its full launch in Singapore. The Indonesian version looks to be off to a great start as Loan Garage has secured a partnership with Indonesia’s Ministry of Economic Coordination (KUR) to distribute loans and microcredit worth $3.7 billion in Indonesia.

The KreditAja website looks identical to the Singapore version. Its video tutorial is still just in English, but the Indonesian version will be made available within two weeks time. Just like the Singapore version, KreditAja is an online platform for both borrowers and licensed lenders to conduct transactions. Details such as the interest rate of the loans can also be seen and compared within the site.

Although launched today, Kredit Aja will start its operational phase tomorrow with three banks as lenders. Three months after that, the platform will bring in the rest of the KUR bank partners onboard. Loan Garage CEO Aidil Zulkifli said that they earn money from commissions made from successful loan applications, premium subscription listings, and later on, advertising as well. The team will also introduce value-added services after they have amassed data on consumer financial behavior.

Led by country manager Emir Yamin, six out of nine of the Loan Garage team are stationed in Indonesia. Loan Garage is backed by private investors from various backgrounds like investment bankers and cloud computing specialists. Talking of the personal finance market and the team’s plans, Aidil ¹ added:

The personal finance market in emerging markets is ripe for disruption and there are many inefficiencies in the market for us to take advantage of and arbitrage. It is not as sexy or cool but it is easy for us to monetize. At the same time, all of us come to work excited with the prospect of building a product that could help in the financial inclusion process in emerging markets and help the average person on the street make a better life for him/herself through financial and credit empowerment.

We don’t want to say much, but one thing that is for sure is that we won’t just be in the personal loans vertical.

KUR itself distributed $3.5 billion of loans to Indonesian individuals and SMEs through banks in 2012. And since the beta launch in December, Loan Garage has processed over $500,000 of personal loans.

There have been other startups doing business in similar fields across Asia like Lenddo in the Philippines. Loan Garage itself is one of the startups that competed at Startup Asia Jakarta last year.

1. The quote came from Aidil, not Emir.

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.

Image credit: www.agneselle.com

It is not known who first created the word blogshop or started the first ever blogshop in Singapore, but blogshops have become a huge phenomenon in Singapore, with four of the country’s ten most-searched stores being blogshops. A blogshop is an online fashion store that uses a blog such as Livejournal to conduct business online. Blogshops usually sell women’s clothing and accessories for affordable prices ranging from $12 to $30.

Origins of Blogshops

Blogshops – Love Bonito, Agneselle, Hollyhoque, Dressabelle

In the early years of the blogshop industry (2006-2008), the owners were young females aged between 16 and 20. Most of them were still in school and didn’t start out with the aim of being entrepreneurs. Many thought it was a fun and easy way of selling off their secondhand apparel online, and the money earned from these sales would go towards funding their future fashion purchases.

After a few months, some realized the potential of fashion e-commerce and the huge market of customers who were willing to spend between $15 to $40 for a piece of clothing online without needing a physical fitting. Looking to fulfill the demand of their customers, these owners went to source from apparel importers at City Plaza in Singapore and some even went on frequent sourcing trips to Bangkok to bring back large supplies of cheap clothing.

How do they sell clothing on blogs?

It seemed questionable to start a business using Livejournal blogs with the lack of a proper web framework, inventory control, checkout and payment processing systems. But these young female entrepreneurs were not deterred and came up with various unique hacks. The four points below were crucial factors that contributed to the success and popularity of blogshops in the competitive e-commerce industry:

1. Weekly time-specified launches

As a small business starting out, it would be difficult to stock up clothing in hundreds of different designs without incurring large expenses of warehouse storage cost and labour costs. Instead, blogshops introduced a series of five to ten different designs with limited availability in the form of a themed collection format. The collection would launch weekly at night between 7pm and 10pm, and customers were informed through email newsletter a few days before the actual launch.

2. Backorders

Backorders were available a few days after a successful selling out of a collection launch; it also gave those customers who missed out on the launch an opportunity to purchase sold out designs. It was guaranteed income for the owners, as customers would need to pay upfront to purchase sold out designs that were on backorder. Backorders would take two to six weeks to arrive before they were shipped to customers. The amount of designs available on a backorder was an indicator of the popularity of a blogshop.

3. Gmail

Gmail was a must-have tool of any blogshop owner. Firstly, It was used to issue order invoices manually to customers after they commented on the items they wanted on Livejournal. Secondly, blogshops sent mailers in bulk to inform customers of pending launches and the arrival of backorders. Thirdly, Gmail labels were used as a tool to keep track of those who had made payment by tallying the payment details of buyers’ bank accounts against the owners’ bank accounts. Popular blogshops often exceeded Gmail’s 500 daily messages sending limit during the launch of a new fashion collection.

4. Trust

Payment is an important mechanism to close the purchase loop in e-commerce. However when shopping at blogshops, buyers had no choice but to trust sellers with upfront payments to sellers’ accounts. POSB/DBS internet banking was the primary choice of payment accepted by sellers, but buyers often had to wait up to 48 hours for their payment to be manually verified by sellers through email.

There was no payment protection for sellers in the case of non-fulfilled orders, thus buyers preferred shopping at the more popular blogshops to avoid getting scammed. While it was slow and inefficient for owners to verify every single payment email, there were no transaction costs involved and most customers had an active POSB or DBS account.

Stay tuned for part two of my look at the blogshop phenomenon where I will talk about the golden age of blogshops and the top blogshops in Singapore.

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.

During Startup Asia Singapore a month ago, I met Streetdirectory‘s founder, Firdhaus Akber and learned about his entrepreneurial journey. From my perspective, it was one hell of a roller coaster ride: one that involved the excitement of seeing exponential growth in traffic, the promise of an IPO and him being courted by flocks of investors; and the low times of being forced out of his own company before scraping his way back in, and getting sued by a Singapore government agency in a lawsuit that lasted more than a year.

StreetDirectory is a Singapore startup that was founded back in 2000. It is a portfolio company of Hong Kong’s JDB Holdings, whose portfolio also includes JobsDB, 88DB, Openrice, Cozycot, FlowerAdvisor and SgCarmart (which was recently acquired by SPH). Streetdirectory has a team of around 200 staff across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Hong Kong and boasts more than 1.2 million registered users and 1.3 million apps downloads.

Connecting the Dots

Firdhaus started his first full time job before starting university. He worked as an instructor at a fitness club and did enough to convince his boss to entrust him with managing the club. He deferred school to focus on the job. Then he moved to join an event company as a salesperson. He also worked at an IT company at a job that involved him handling brands, building relationships and making sales. Reflecting on his entrepreneurial journey, he attributes what he has achieved at Streetdirectory to the many skills he picked up in these previous jobs. He has found that despite the diverse industries he has worked in, it all connects.

Unknowingly, the different exposures in my previous jobs helped me greatly in running Streetdirectory. When I became a boss, all these pieces came together. I got the experience of managing a team in the fitness club; I got the skills of doing sales from the events company and the skills of developing relationships with important clients through my work at the IT company.”

Photo credit to The Titan Times Daily

The Roller Coaster Ride

Firdhaus started Streetdirectory with three other co-founders in 2000. Previously, they had approached him on numerous occasions about the idea of building an online map. But he rejected them every time as he was skeptical that people needed an online map and he didn’t see how it could be monetized. But they were persistent and eventually he decided to give it a shot.

In the beginning, the founders funded the startup themselves. In 2000, there was no other online map company in Singapore. The idea was to get maps from a government agency, Singapore Land Authority (SLA), and put them online. The business took off almost immediately.

After operating for a while, people started knocking on my door. These people were venture capitalists. Suddenly, I realized Streetdirectory is actually in the dot com arena. I didn’t realize that. I started researching and understood more about it. Shortly after the VCs’ visit, HSBC bank also came and offered to bring us to IPO. During this period, something was happening to our site. On a daily basis, our traffic jumped without us doing anything. If today’s traffic is 3,000, next day will be 6,000 and 12,000 day after next. This 100% daily growth rate continued for a while and there was never a day traffic didn’t grow.

Being traditional business people and not the typical dot com founders (who value traffic more than dollars), the founders saw this phenomenon growth as a liability because the server cost is expensive. Cash was the main problem for their business then. They started to do consulting projects for governments, schools and get SMEs to advertise on their sites. The consulting projects involved helping government agencies and schools to map out their campuses and also listing them on the street directory maps. Through these projects, they were able to bring in revenue to balance their books. They also raised a million Singapore dollars from angel investors at that time.

During the third year of operations, things got dramatic. Firdhaus was voted out of Streetdirectory as the board felt that he wasn’t contributing enough to the company. At this point in time, Streetdirectory had already grown to become the leading online map portal for Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia and sales were doing well. Firdhaus went off to do consulting work on his own. He re-joined the company only a year later, when one of the co-founders wanted to cash out and move on; Firdhaus bought back his shares and came back.

Firdhaus’s roller coaster ride did not stop there. Due to copyrights issues, the SLA sued Streetdirectory and wanted it to take down the maps. This would effectively put Streetdirectory out of business, as maps are fundamental to its business. Firdhaus took on the lawsuit and fought it for over a year, incurring huge legal fees. During that time, shareholders and directors pulled out of the business, leaving Firdhaus as the remaining shareholder.

Surprisingly, during these troubled times, a Hong Kong investment group still choose to put faith in his team and backed them. The group advised them to develop their own maps and not fight a losing lawsuit against the state-owned agency. Adversity brought out the best in his team and the remaining members of the team fervently re-created their own map. Interestingly, despite having its service suspended for three months, the traffic for the re-vamped site (with the new in-house maps) did not show any decline.

Looking back at his own experiences, Firdhaus advises entrepreneurs to be resilient.

Entrepreneurs need to understand that they may not be successful on the first time, most aren’t. One needs to learn to pick themselves up and try again when they fail. What I learned from my Hong Kong investors was their nonchalant attitude towards failure. Why be so concerned about failure? If you fall down, pick yourself up and try again. Just keep trying, there’s no one who will fail forever.

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

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

Co-founder at Foodpanda, Kiren Tanna

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

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

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

Looking for applications made by Singaporeans? AppsInSg.com has it all. Created by Ryan Tan, the site showcases only made-in-Singapore apps. In a blog post, Ryan explained why he created the site:

I realized people outside of development and entrepreneur circles are often unaware that there are many talented app designers and developers in Singapore. And when I try to show them examples, there isn’t a list of made in Singapore apps. You either know that Autumn Dynasty is one of the top selling games made locally, or you don’t.

So AppsInSg was founded, with the aim to list all made-in-Singapore applications. There are some familiar applications including Burpple, Qlubbr, HungryGoWhere, Viddsee, and more. Currently the apps listed are mostly mobile apps but Ryan noted that he hope to see more web and desktops apps in the future. If your app is made in Singapore and you wish to be listed on AppsinSg, submit it here. There’s no harm in getting listed with a link back, I think.

Besides running AppsInSg as a pet project, Ryan also runs Red Airship, a consultancy that covers a wide range of services from branding, gaming, to UX.

JFDI, which stands for the Joyful Frog Digital Incubator, is an accelerator program in Singapore that helps entrepreneurs turn their ideas to investable businesses in a hundred days. Founded by Hugh Mason and Meng Weng Wong in 2009, the accelerator has turned out to be one of the more successful accelerators in Southeast Asia. It is also the first Southeast Asian member of the Global Accelerator Network.

In exchange of a small percentage of equity, JFDI offers founders S$25,000 (About US$20,000), mentorship, and facilities to build their startups in 100-days. Its first round of incubatees, which “graduated” last year, was quite a success. Out of 11 teams of entrepreneurs, six were funded with an average funding size of S$650,000 (About US$520,000) per team: Kark, Fetch Fan, Flocations, ShopSpot, Tradegecko, and TribeHired.

Starting JFDI

JFDI actually stands for “just fucking do it.” Or rather, it was supposed to stand for that, but for some people, especially government officials, find it hard to say the f-word publicly. So JFDI is now more commonly known as the Joyful Frog Digital Incubator. It’s an easier sell to a wide range of people and the frog mascot sticks in people’s minds. It works, although Hugh and Meng get asked “why frogs!?” so often that the duo has a page to explain all the awesome goodness of frogs.

In 2010, Hugh and Meng wondered if it was possible to bring world-class mentors to Southeast Asia to help entrepreneurs here grow. Both found the answer to be a yes. In 2011, they wondered if they could get the quality raw startups in Southeast Asia they needed to make the accelerator work. JFDI ran Startup Weekends at six different cities in Asia and found that they could source good entrepreneurs for their program. In 2012, Hugh and Meng kickstarted the actual 100-day accelerator program to test if it would work. Again, the answer was a yes, with both believing that an accelerator program would work well in Southeast Asia.

Bring your company to us and we will either make or break your company in a hundred days. If we make it, that’s cool. If we break it that’s cool because you can move on to do something else. You give your best shot in the 100-days.

Our goals at JFDI are:
1. We help individual people explore who they are quicker
2. We help companies reach their potential quicker
3. We are also about building an ecosystem

Secret Sauce

There are numerous accelerators or incubators in this region that haven’t quite reached the returns of JFDI. When asked, Meng said that there isn’t any secret sauce to making an accelerator work. It’s all about execution. Meng explained further:

What we mean is taking advantage of what the state of the art is in helping startups. We’re taking advantage of agile development, we’re taking advantage of lean startup methodology. We’re doing customer development as taught by Steve Blank. We are looking at all the best practices and we’re executing. And this makes us a bit different [compared to those] who aren’t aware of these practices.

JFDI probably has one of the most well-thought-out programs in Southeast Asia that I have seen. Apart from the constant mentorships and product development in the day, every evening, is packed with courses to provide that extra nutrients for startups to grow stronger. For example, JFDI offers core curriculum such as:

• Investor Psychology, Early Stage Fundraising Term Sheets and Legals
• Key Metrics, Traction, Crossing the Chasm
• Solution, No Funding Needed, Agile Development

While it sounds easy to run an accelerator, Hugh says it is more than what it seems. Just as many people underestimate how to run a really good restaurant, people tend to think that building an accelerator is easy. Hugh shared more:

People walked into an accelerator and they [see] a bunch of desks and chairs and call themselves an accelerator. They got this cute little frog. It’s not that stuff. Anyone can get a cute frog. Anyone can get desks and chairs. Anyone can get space. That’s the easy part. The thing is really pulling everything together like a really good restaurant.

Challenges

Despite enjoying early success, Hugh and Meng understood the challenge of running an accelerator, a problem that many accelerators in the world face: Sustainability. Hugh explains that a lot of accelerators are investing huge amount of capital to keep things running. Hugh explained:

An accelerator costs quite a lot of money to run and in the US most of the accelerators cost about $500,000 to $600,000 to run. It is slightly more expensive to do it here in Southeast Asia because you have to fly in the mentors and in places like Singapore, accommodation is expensive.

Despite seeing many of its investments grow in value, these assets remain paper assets until an exit happens, which Hugh believes it will take about five to eight years. Meanwhile, cash is needed to keep the incubator running, mentoring and helping current portfolio companies, while also sourcing for new ones to join JFDI. Hugh explains that there are several approaches to keeping an accelerator alive.

For example, 500startups raised enough money in order to find a hit before the money runs out. Meanwhile it is also running other stuff to stay sustainable. “If you’re lucky like YCombinator, you will get a Heroku or Dropbox to make everything work,” added Hugh. Another approach is to do something more immediate and keep the operation sustainable. JFDI is taking on both approaches, renting out work spaces, running educational courses while looking to raise $10 million more. But Hugh admits that the problem with this approach is that it takes away energy from them doing what it really matters, which is the acceleration itself. He added:

Now we can say that we know how to do quality startups. We know how to do innovation. We know how to teach entrepreneurship. What we don’t know yet is how to make an accelerator sustainable!

A blogger like me can’t say for sure how to run an accelerator. But I do know that JFDI’s first round of success has raised quite a few of eyebrows. Perhaps, it has also increased the pressure on Hugh and Meng’s shoulders to perform even better with their upcoming second batch of startups. If JFDI can keep up with the good results I’m pretty sure investment will follow suit. But as far as we all can see, Hugh, Meng, and the JFDI crew are doing good work for entrepreneurs in the Southeast Asia region.

For shopaholics and fans of Zalora, here’s a piece of news that will probably further strain your pockets. Zalora today officially launched its iOS app, and now you can shop for clothes or shoes even while on-the-go.

There are currently over 500 brands and 15,000 products listed on the new fashion e-store app. Users can receive push notifications on the new items and flash sales that Zalora has, and choose from multiple payment methods such as credit cards, PayPal, and cash-on-delivery. The user interface looks pretty and is optimized for the iPhone 5 too.

Unfortunately, the app is not available on Android yet, despite the growing number of Android users within the region. The reason for the initial push on the iOS platform, according to Zalora, is that most of its mobile shoppers are on the iOS platform. For countries with the highest mobile traffic, Zalora has twice as many shoppers on iOS than on Android.

But of course, Zalora is currently proposing to its Germany office to develop an Android app. Other platforms, such as BlackBerry or Windows, are not even in the pipeline yet.

To celebrate the launch, shoppers on the new Zalora app are entitled to a 20 percent discount using its in-app voucher code. According to Zalora, the app is currently the top lifestyle app in five countries, namely Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

If you’re keen to indulge in some shopping while waiting for that train or bus, you can give the app a try here.

We’ve been following the progress of Singapore-based Dropmysite pretty closely in the past year. In that time, the website and email cloud backup service has acquired a US rival and expanded into numerous countries. Today the startup has announced an investment from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups. The funding amount hasn’t been revealed, but will be in the usual 500 Startups seed funding range, which is US$25,000 to $250,000.

Aside from the cash, it gives the Dropmysite crew – who also run Dropmyemail, which has received funding in the past and expanded into the US market – access to the entire roster of 500 Startups mentors. Dropmysite says that it currently backs up a quarter of a billion emails and websites a day for nearly a million users.

Singapore’s Payroll Hero and video-streaming site Viki are two other local ventures that have attracted funds from 500 Startups.

Explaining the appeal of Dropmysite to small business owners, 500 Startups venture partner George Kellerman said in today’s announcement:

Very few people think about backing up their e-mail, voicemail, or SMS until
it’s too late, and most carriers and ISP’s can’t help you if they lose your data.
Dropmysite, however, solves that problem and allows any SMB to backup
their e-mail or whatever else they need simply and cost-efficiently. It’s a great
cloud-based business that has the potential to go global.

The Dropmysite crew also revealed today that there are “acquisitions under way” to help the business expand and will be announced in due course. Plus it’s finalizing a reseller program for its software-as-a-service offerings.

Foodpanda co-founder Kiren Tanna

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

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

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

Foodpanda GPRS box

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The TV commercial (video above)  will feature WeChat’s so-called Super-Duo Ambassadors, Alan Luo Zhi-Xiang and Rainie Yang (pictured right), who are renowned artistes from Taiwan. The ad will include the duo acting as a couple while introducing the functions of WeChat to the audience. For our readers in Singapore, you will be able to catch the TV ad on Channel 8, Channel U, W drama, and E-City starting this week. It seems that the same video used for promotional purposes in Taiwan will be used in Singapore too.

Speaking about this launch, Louis Song, country manager of Tencent’s International Business Group (Malaysia and Singapore), said the Chinese web giant hopes to strengthen its market position and increase its user adoption within Asia:

Singapore is a very strong market like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Thailand – we are witnessing a sturdy growth in mobile application platforms.

As we mentioned recently, WeChat currently boasts 300 million users worldwide, with 40 million overseas users.

I admit I take a lot of photos. I truly believe in the saying “a picture speaks a thousand words” and that photos are the best way to capture the finest moments that will never be replicated again. So apps like Burpple and Instagram are my personal favourites, and here’s another new photo app that I might possibly fall in love with – Shutterpair.

Shutterpair is an instant and easy way for users to share photos taken on their mobile photos and digital cameras via shared albums. So why would you want to have a Shutterpair account when you already have an Instagram account? The idea behind Shutterpair albums is that it is collaborative, where users can collectively upload photos from their Android or iOS devices directly to the selected photo album. So now with Shutterpair, my friends won’t be complaining that I’m slow uploading my photos again. Ever.

As for photos taken using digital cameras, users can also add them to the albums via Shutterpair’s web platform. You can also choose to share your albums privately with selective groups of people, or even share them via social media platforms. And the team has big dreams, and hopes to be as successful as the hugely popular Instagram. Co-founder Ritesh Angural elaborates:

Instagram is a place for individuals to showcase beautiful photos. [Our team members are] all Instagram fans ourselves but we feel taking photos on Instagram – and every other platform currently – is a solitary activity. They do not capture the aspect of taking photos in groups. Our belief is that photos taken together belong together; right from the moment you take them. That said, we aim to become the next Instagram, in a way that we view them as a role model.

Shutterpair pivots from travel idea

The idea of Shutterpair is in fact a pivot from being a travel app, named Rovoria, that the team was originally working on. Rovoria was a self-serve platform aimed at companies operating tourist attractions to build a mobile app to provide more information to tourists and feature a and simple drag-and-drop interface. Ritesh explains the reason for the pivot:

In a nutshell, that didn’t work out for us because most attractions didn’t care for a self-serve platform and the tourists we surveyed did not see a need for an app for every attraction they visited. That prompted us to go back to the drawing board. We recalled all the tourists we had spoken to and discovered four different problems they faced.

One, organizing a group trip was difficult. Two, there is a language barrier for some. Three, without internet, it was difficult to get around. Four, it was difficult to collect all the photographs taken together in one place. For the last problem, that was how Shutterpair started.

Shutterpair beta launched a week ago, and has already seen an encouraging 1,500 photo uploads. Ritesh also said that the team is seeing signs of organic growth, since Shutterpair can only be used in a group setting.

Future focus

The team comprises three National University of Singapore (NUS) graduates, James Dam, Joshua Newman, and Ritesh Angural with backgrounds in computer engineering. The friendship among the trio goes a long way back, with Joshua and Ritesh attending the NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) and scrubbing toilets together while serving their National Service. They are bootstrapped in this new venture at the moment.

On upcoming plans, Ritesh tells us:

One area of the app that we can do better is getting our users to take more photos from within the app. Majority of the photos till now have been uploaded via the camera roll on mobile or via the web platform. We’re working on features to make it more fun for users to take photos within Shutterpair but we’re unable to disclose more on that at this point.

Having played around the app, I realized that the upload feature from the camera roll is not obvious enough. And apparently I’m not the only one who has given such feedback. The team is also quick to adapt and has made changes to make it more easily discoverable. The latest version on the app store will also include the ability to invite people to your album via SMS, and opening the link within the SMS will automatically prompt you to download the app, or bring you straight to the album if you already have it on your phone.

The Shutterpair app is currently available for download on both the iTunes store and Google Play. Users can also expect the team to ship Windows Phone and Blackberry versions in the near future.

In order to fund and sustain itself, Singapore-based non-profit organization One Cent Movement has launched a food delivery project called WeFuel, which strives to deliver quality food for employees.

For a start, the team will be delivering soup dumplings (“xiǎo lóng bāo” in Chinese) within the Singapore central business district (CBD) area in the morning from 8.00 am to 12.00 noon. Each box of soup dumplings costs S$3 (US$2.43) and contains five of the steaming hot confections. To allow the law of economies of scale to work, WeFuel currently caters only to companies that place 60 or more orders at one time.

As a foodie myself, it sounds like a tough task delivering soup dumplings, having to pay particular attention that the skin is thick enough so that the stock does not leak – and also ensure it doesn’t harden as it cools down during delivery. According to Sean, who heads up this project, they will be finalizing certain sustainable packaging which allows the food to be kept warm for a 45-minute window period. All orders will be delivered via a private car initially, but that could change later.

The model pretty much works on volume, and Sean revealed that the project makes around S$20 (US$16.20) for a minimum order of 60 boxes. The team will also look into having other famous Singaporean delights such as chicken rice, char kway teow, carrot cake, wanton mee, and rojak in the future.

So now employees need not step out of their offices, and will be able to enjoy quality food at their own desks, which translates to more time at work. To be honest, I would think an occasional walk out of the office is good for employees, since sitting for long periods, especially when you do not maintain a good posture, might pose as a health risk.

If you are keen to find out more about WeFuel and its food delivery service, you can visit its website here.

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

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

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

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

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

After making fast progress from first launching its foodie-oriented photo app in May 2012, now Burpple has rolled out a user-submitted restaurant listings and reviews site in Singapore. It’s an interesting challenge to Yelp – which launched in the nation in September – by this local startup, covering “5,000 popular places and hidden gems” all across Singapore, replete with maps and plenty of excellent pictures.

The new web app is called Burpple Find. It lets you search by area, food type, or jump to a specific eatery. With Burpple users having posted over 150,000 food moments around the world, plenty of those took place in Singapore and are now laid out in Burpple Find. The listings give lots of useful info, such as a price range, tags, and dishes recommended by users (pictured below). The new feature looks great, too – way better than Yelp, and nicer even than the aesthetically pleasing Zomato. Interestingly, India-based Zomato is pondering Singapore as its next launch, so the local startup will likely have more competition later this year.

(UPDATED: Elisha from Burpple says: “While ‘Burpple Find’ is currently in beta in Singapore, we’re looking for local foodies who simply love to travel and recommend good eats in the region. If you have readers from Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines who might be interested, they can write to us at community (at) burpple.com with the title BURP & TRAVEL.”)

Burpple has users in over 3,300 cities on its iPhone and Android apps, so the Burpple Find site will likely expand in the near future. For now, here are a couple more photos of the new site:

So what kind of data have we collected over the past couple weeks? Besides the usual attendee breakdown, we surveyed participants to find out what they thought about the conference. Out of a possible five, participants at Startup Asia Singapore 2013 rated:

• 4.12 on average when asked how much they agreed with the statement: “The choice of speakers at Startup Asia Singapore is great”

• 4.00 on average when asked how much they agreed with the statement: “I’m overall happy with Startup Asia Singapore 2013”

Last year, participants were complaining about WiFi issues and I think our team overcame the problem this year. There were no major complaints as far as we have heard. Even so, we will be seriously studying all the feedback to serve our participants better at our upcoming Startup Asia Jakarta on November 21 and 22.

Videos of every coffee chat, panel, sharing session, and Arena pitch will be out soon. Our videographer is working hard on it so we seek your kind patience on that front. Meanwhile, you can catch all of our articles about the conference here.

Last but definitely not least, we would like to thank our sponsors and partners for making Startup Asia Singapore 2013 possible. Only with their support can our team continue to do what we love doing: covering entrepreneurs, startups, and technology in Asia.

Networking equipment maker Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) is celebrating 20 years of operating in Singapore with a huge new office that replaces its four previous Singaporean bases. It thereby brings all 1,000 employees in the nation under one roof, located at the UE Biz Hub near the airport.

After initially setting up a presence in the country back in 1993, the first Cisco office at Wheelock Place in 1996 had only eight staffers. But by 1998, Singapore had been selected as the company’s Greater Asia HQ.

San Francisco-headquartered Cisco – allegedly one of the architects of China’s Great Firewall – claims that its new pad in Singapore has some nice green touches, such as motion based sensors for energy efficient control of lighting. There’s also an e-waste recycling program four times a year, and a concerted effort to use less paper.

During its 20 years in the Lion City, Cisco claims that 46,000 students in Singapore have passed through its Cisco Networking Academy Program via its partnerships with 15 local educational institutions.

See more photos of the new Cisco base in Singapore below this little infographic of the company’s local milestones:

PropertyGuru announced this afternoon that it has formed a strategic partnership with Far East Organization to launch a new site called Luxury Gallery showcasing Singapore’s premiere luxury residential developments.

The Luxury Gallery boasts of being a first-of-its-kind collaboration between the two powerhouses in the Singapore real estate market which aims to specifically cater to affluent local and foreign real estate investors. The new luxury site will allow luxury property buyers to browse a delectable selection of Far East Organization developments in Singapore. More information, such as a virtual tour, the location, and floorplans will also be readily available for interested buyers on the new portal.

At present, it lists four luxury Far East Organization properties on the new site. On today’s launch PropertyGuru Group CEO and co-founder Steve Melhuish said:

The launch of the Luxury Gallery forms an integral part of PropertyGuru’s ongoing strategy of growing its core business of offering property purchase options to the property seeker. Our research shows that the demand for luxury residential properties continue to rise with keen interest from new and recurring investors.

For interested investors out there, you can now register as a Luxury Gallery member here to access the materials.

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…

Spotify is now available in Singapore ahead of a launch event later today. Some basic fiddling with the music streaming service’s geo-specific URLs reveals that spotify.com/sg-en is now live.

Interestingly, Singaporean music fans only get the choice of two accounts: free (with ads) or “premium” across all devices for S$9.90 per month. In contrast, other markets like the US also have a middling “unlimited” plan (US$4.99) that’s actually limited to desktop/laptop usage only. Perhaps the Spotify team felt that smartphone-mad Singaporeans didn’t want to be tied to PC/Mac-only music streaming.

My colleague is at the Spotify event in Singapore later, so we’ll hear what the Swedish startup has in mind for its first ever yet another Asian launch. (UPDATE: A reader points out it is launching in Hong Kong and Malaysia today too – more on this later).

But the truth is, it seems users don’t even care about filters, more than half of Instagram users don’t even use filters. I think most of the draw of Instagram has been the social network that’s built and ease of use. Some of the apps below do a good job of that, others not.

The nice thing about these photo apps, is it gives you a good idea of how each of these countries is innovating.

China

Most of these Chinese apps are feature-packed filter machines. I think the only one that currently interests me is Photo Wonder since it’s so thorough. Some have social networks attached, while some are standalone funky filter apps.

Camera360 (iOS, Android) – One of the most popular apps with over 80 million users. It’s chalk full of features on top of the obvious Instagram-like features (it’s got way more than Instagram). Users can decorate photos with stickers, edit photos, upload photos into the cloud and even create puzzle patterns with the photos.

Lemeleme (iOS) – A super simple app that doesn’t innovate much on what Instagram already does. It basically allows users to take pictures and post them to emails or social networks. It doesn’t have its own social network so I’m not sure how it’ll fair in the near future.

PaPa (iOS, Android) – An interesting concept that we’ve written about before, basically users can add sound to their photos. Japan’s Voicepic also does the same thing. It’s a cool concept but it might get steamrolled by the new wave of video apps coming to the fore.

Photo Wonder (iOS, Android) – Acquired by China’s mega search giant, Baidu, it actually allows users to see the filter before taking the picture, which is lightyears ahead of Instagram’s post-filter feature. But that’s not all, Photo Wonder also has an edit, collage, and allows users to download extra features like stickers and frames.

PIP Camera (iOS, Android) – This photo app departs from the traditional filter-oriented apps and has none of the usual filters you’d see in apps. PIP Camera focuses on framing your photos in different things like glasses, umbrellas, and computer screens. Fun, but a bit overwhelming.

Vida (iOS, Android) – In addition to adding pollution data to images, Vida is a fully packed app that allows filters, and sound. It’s even got its own social network. Unfortunately, you have to have an account with a Chinese social network to use it.

Japan

Japan’s been pretty innovative with photo apps, especially with apps that mangafy pictures. Fun for friends hanging out.

Camely (Android) – A cutesy app that, according to Rick, is “almost like Instagram if it were force-fed estrogen supplements”. Most of the filters are pretty female-oriented and pink, which makes for a particularly cutesy set of pictures. Download it for your girlfriend.

Cameran (iOS) – Cameran’s got an interesting take on decorations. It’s all about allowing users to randomize their decorations. Click on a flower decoration filter multiple times and you get to see different flower arrangements. It also comes from a rather famous Japanese photographer.

DecoAlbum (iOS, Android) – Another photo app centered on females, DecoAlbum allows users to create photos with text, backgrounds, glittery virtual stickers, and more and even allows you to assemble your photo collections into albums. It’s one of the few apps that actually prioritizes making albums.

Decopic (iOS, Android) – This app takes decorations to a whole new level. From adding customizable resizable decorations to hearts and stars painted across the pictures to artsy frames around your picture, Decopic a nice app, if you’ve got time on your hands.

Line Camera (iOS, Android) – Since it’s released by NHN, you just know this camera app is going to be feature packed. It’s 600 stamps, over 100 frames, 14 different filters, 156 brushes, and more. It’s Line’s flagship photo app, and nicely integrated into the chat app. Since it piggybacks on the Line platform, there’s lots of users.

Manga Camera (iOS) – With One Piece and Naruto being the world’s most widely read comic series’, of course Japan would come up with Manga Camera, an app that would literally turn you into a cartoon. You can even add in decorations like Japanese “wow” text.

Million Moments (iOS, Android) – Produced by Sony and primarily focused on photo viewing, Million Moments is a nice though possibly useless departure from the other apps in this list. It allows you to assemble small slideshows so that you can view with your friends. I’d rather view photos on my computer or TV though.

Snapdish (iOS, Android) – Another interesting niche take on photos is Snapdish. It’s all about photos and food, the ideal app for food-lovers, and they’re big population, half of my friends take photos before they eat. Snapdish puts this all in one place and connects food-lovers with each other, thus socializing food.

Voicepic (iOS) – Possibly the progenitor of PaPa from China, this app also allows you to add sound to a picture. It also allows you to add various filters on top of your sound-enabled pictures. I’m not sure how this is catching on though, especially with services like Vine gaining popularity.

South Korea

Pudding Camera (iOS, Android) – Despite the odd chocolate-like name, don’t be deceived, this app’s got the usual Instagram-like features plus a cool panorama feature. A panorama feature is not something most apps in this list have.The app annoyingly posts to Twitter, but can be circumvented.

Cymera (iOS, Android) – This photo editor app is a bit complicated and not so much fun, but it’s got lots of options for editing your photos. It takes quite a few clicks and touches to get to what you want to edit, but the result it really nice since you can do so much.

Southeast Asia

Since Southeast Asia is particularly fresh to the game, there’s not too many apps from each country, but certainly some worth noting, strong unique contenders to their East Asian counterparts.

Singapore

Babygram (iOS) – Have you ever been sick of all the baby photos you get barraged with on Facebook from your friends? Well, never fear, Babygram is here. The app is very specifically about sending baby photos into a timeline for yourself and your close family. Very cute and cuddly.

Fotobook (iOS) – Forget taking photos and posting them to a separate social network, this entire app is dedicated to browsing Facebook photos from your friends. It makes it really easy to look through all your friends’ photos. Other than that, not much to it.

PixaRoll (iOS, Android) – A concept rather similar to KeepShot from Vietnam, you take pictures and you can have them sent to people in other countries. Great for travelers who are on the go and don’t want to have to carry an extra pen and camera. Why buy a postcard when you can just get your photos sent straight to people?

Malaysia

Nostalgio (iOS) – One of the simplest framing collage apps out there, which basically has a set of 20 basic collage frames and 6 borders to choose from. Nostalgio also has filters to give your collages a little more effect. It costs $0.99, though.

Vietnam

Fuzel (iOS) – An Apple Editor’s Choice photo app for 2012’s best photos apps, this swanky app from Not A Basement Studio makes stitching photo collages together really fancy. You can select from a host of readymade collage patterns as well as customize your own, and then directly post to your social networks.

KeepShot (iPad only) – Not A Basement Studio newest iPad app allows users to create, edit, and assemble photo albums together. Then it lets users print the beautiful physical photo albums and delivers them straight to users’ doorsteps. It’s like Pixa Roll for albums, unfortunately, currently the service only ships in the USA.

Indonesia

PicMix (Android, Blackberry) - Indonesia’s feature-packed PicMix is awesome. You can edit photos with captions, filters, frames, and text, and following Instagram it’s also got a nice snazzy social network to post to. In February this year, PicMix has hit the eight million milestone with more than 108 million photos posted so far.

If we missed any apps, please let us know in the comments, and we will add them to this list.

LongPlay is a mobile app that allows your peers to listen to your music on the move. The idea is pretty straightforward. You upload your library of music to LongPlay and send an authentication code to your peers who will log on to enjoy listening to your music. To prevent piracy, friends can’t download the music from peers.

LongPlay is a product that was launched in influential Chinese tech blog 36kr’s developers’ day. The founder, KJ, told me that he was inspired to create an application to allow easy music sharing in real-time because he saw couples and friends listening from the same earphone. LongPlay started as a web service before having its shiny new iOS app. KJ is originally from Shanghai but moved to Singapore for work. He told me:

LongPlay first comes with a web version, with a real time engine, which can play your own music in your Dropbox, then became an iOS app now.

LongPlay is a pretty cool app which can’t really be felt by reading this article. Give it a try on the web or download its iOS app to starting listening and sharing music with your friends in real-time.

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

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

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

In essence, Maskr is a privacy service that allows you to create an unlimited number of free, anonymous aliases that would be associated to a single email address that you own (see screenshots below). First, you will need to head over to the site to create an account and get verified. You will then be able to access a secure dashboard, which has features that allow you to create new aliases that will be associated to the email that you have used to sign up with. In the event a user starts to receive unsolicited emails, one can easily disable and create new ones. Ken Tan, creative director of The Bang Table Company (who are direct investors of Maskr), tells us more:

[There is] an additional protection feature allows direct blockage of senders per alias via a manageable blacklist. Maskr currently works on all platforms with seamless integration between desktop and mobile. An upcoming iOS mobile application will further enhance the mobile experience: store multiple email addresses to create aliases instantly with a single tap.

So what’s the difference between signing up for a new email account and having a Maskr account? The latter makes it extremely easy to create new email aliases. We’re drawing parallels between signing up a new account which typically takes two to five minutes of your time, a click which takes a couple of seconds.

How Maskr came about

The idea behind the Singapore-based service first came about when Ken once left his personal email with a hotel while he was travelling overseas. He then found his personal email flooded with endless honeymoon promotions (which can be annoying, really), and wondered if a service that removes such “bad points of contacts” existed.

The idea was then brought forward and conceptualized towards the end of 2011, and launched just a month back. In the interview, Ken tells us:

Maskr was built in direct response to the increasing number of solicited emails (BACN). We’re on the consumers’ side – we’ve built Maskr to protect the identities of personal email addresses around the world.
Maskr takes away the hesitation when asked to share one’s personal email address, knowing you can kill the alias anytime.

At present, Maskr is free to use, and the team promises more updates with newer features. They are also planning to look into white-labeling the Maskr technology for enterprises (which I personally think is a brilliant idea, since a significant amount of my time is actually spent on clearing unwanted emails).

The Maskr team

Another thing that caught my attention about the Maskr service is the company behind it: The Bang Table Company (TBTC). I like the company name, and thought it added a little local Singaporean flavor. Ken explains more:

We wanted something colloquial, yet that makes sense. We make noise in the [startup] scene, banging on the tables of convention. [...] TBTC is a pre-seed investment company that aids and grows business ideas from their nascent stages, providing support to accelerate the route for startups to profitability. These startups could be either external or internal staff (or both), whom we encourage to think big. We provide the funds and infrastructure for them to develop their ideas, taking them from build to beta and then to launch; after which we’ll take on a bigger stake (and role) to get to the next stage which is typically seed or series A.

And the team (pictured top right) seems pretty solid to me, having a good mix of digital professionals and aspiring entrepreneurs who understand the needs when it comes to emails.

Future plans

The team promises to release its iOS app early June 2013 (pictured above), and is looking to translate the service into Malaysian, simplified and traditional Chinese, as well as Spanish so as to cater to users in the other regions.

Plus, they’re also looking to develop an e-commerce service in the near future. In fact, Ken’s pretty excited about the journey ahead for the TBTC company:

We’ve always been innovators, and we’re obsessed with technology. The process of going from scribbles on paper to actual users embracing the product is both exhilarating and scary for us.

Tech in Asia Meetup number five, and we are back in Singapore! We are more than happy to bring this event back to the Lion City and I’m sure startups here will benefit from this meetup in one way or another.

We have invited Hyungseok Dino Ha, founder of Memebox. The subscription e-commerce service is now the leader in terms of market share in this sector in Korea. Dino will be sharing his startup story at this event, and how he bootstrapped to $1 million annual revenue for Memebox. Participants can expect to learn some tips from Dino on how to bootstrap and grow a business with limited capital.

You are welcome to join us on April 25 at 6:30 p.m. Tech in Asia Meetup tickets are free but grab them fast while stocks last!

Agenda:

• Registration: 6.30 – 7.00pm
• [Interview] How Memebox Bootstrapped to $1 Million Annual Revenue: 7.00 – 7.40pm
• Q&A from floor: 7.40 – 8.00pm
• Networking & Dinner: 8.00 – 9.00pm

Venue:

Plug-In @ Block 71

Block 71, Ayer Rajah Crescent, #02-18 Singapore (139951)

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About our speaker: Hyungseok Dino Ha

Hyungseok Dino Ha is the founder of Memebox. He launched the first subscription e-commerce service in Korea with seed money of $35,000 and is now number one in terms of market share in the country in this sector. Memebox expanded to beauty products e-commerce in August 2012, working with more than 250 beauty brands from around the world.

The startup recently raised funds from SparkLabs Ventures and Chester Roh, the CEO of Ablar.

Dino Ha worked at Ticket Monster as a sales/new business development manager (2010-2011), Tom Ford International (New York HQ) as a PR assistant covering the US market (2007-2009). He then worked on launching Korean fashion brands including Bean Pole (Samsung), General Idea, Lee Sang Bong, and Steve J & Yoni P (2009-2010). He studied environmental science at Kyunghee University and graduated from Parsons The New School for Design in fashion marketing.

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And normally in Singapore, we can easily purchase from the shop located at most local markets, but here’s an alternative for Singaporeans who would want to purchase at the comfort of their own homes: KimZua.com.

Kimzua, in Hokkien dialect when translated directly, also means gold paper. I first noticed the site when my friend told me that he ordered a paper kayak online for another friend who passed on due to cancer. He then convinced me to visit the website, which I thought would be boring and traditional with an unattractive layout, but to my surprise, I saw this:

In all honesty, I was impressed because I didn’t expect anyone to design a site with such flashy colours and a vibrant layout. After all, it’s an e-commerce site dedicated to gifts for friends in the other world (aka spirits). They sell items ranging from paper clocks and paper accessories to paper cars and paper houses. And for those busy bees or people who simply don’t know what to pack in, there are special packages available too.

Also, the team is committed to protecting the environment amidst preserving traditions. According to the site, it says:

That is why we source for alternative paper materials around the world, such as bamboo and hemp fibres, that emit less smoke during combustion. We also use recycled paper for 33% of our paper products to reduce the effect on deforestation.

It might sound bizarre to some, but hey, it’s an offline business brought online. Perhaps another noteworthy startup in the “spirit” of this post to take note of is UK-based Rent a Mourner, which supplies people to boost visitor numbers at funerals.

And for those who are interested to find out more about Kimzua.com, you can visit the site here.

Singapore-based mobile social gaming and entertainment company FunSpot announced today that it has signed a partnership agreement with Indonesia’s largest telco Telkomsel to bring FunSpot’s services in neighboring Indonesia. The agreement, according to the statement, will see FunSpot providing Telkomsel’s customers with a fully integrated mobile social gaming network in the Indonesian language and nine mobile social games. It looks like this latest deal will pit FunSpot head to head with another mobile social gaming platform Kotagames (by TMG) for the Indonesian market.

With around 125 million Telkomsel subscribers in the country, there’s still plenty of room for the two companies to share. But it seems like their battleground is not only in Indonesia as they are both eyeing stakes in the Southeast Asian market. Note that Singaporean telco Singtel has invested in Kotagames and it also owns a 35 percent stake in Telkomsel. This could make FunSpot’s partnership with Telkomsel a little tricky as there is a potential conflict of interest.

One thing that could make FunSpot more appealing than Kotagames though, is the company’s feature which lets users share media files via the website. You can see some of them being shared and commented on by a few users in FunSpot’s Indonesian mobile site here. I don’t think that feature is available on Kotagames.

Kotagames itself is definitely keeping its presence felt in Indonesia by currently holding to six million users so far, with around 90 percent of them as feature phone users. With the huge pie in Indonesia, FunSpot’s emergence in the country shouldn’t deter Kotagames’ 10 million user target by the end of this year.

Spotify is set to launch in Singapore, perhaps as soon as next week. The Swedish music streaming startup has just sent out invites for an event soon in Singapore, but no further details are available at present. (Updated 30 minutes after publishing: Removed one detail at Spotify’s request).

This Singapore launch will mark Spotify’s debut in Asia. The premium music service has only opened up to music fans in 20 countries so far, no doubt held back by Luddite music labels. The only areas in the broader Asia-Pacific region where Spotify is available is Australia and New Zealand.

Spotify has over 20 million tracks available for legal streaming and downloading, and features some neat apps and playlist functions. The premium service costs US$5 per month for laptop/desktop-only access, or $10 for both mobile and laptop usage in the US, so it’s likely to cost the same kind of amount for Singaporeans.

The Spotify rollout might be bad news for local startup TellMyFriends, which wants to help Singaporeans make a profit from legally sharing MP3s with buddies over social media.

E-commerce marketplace site Qoo10 revealed that in 2012, its Singapore operations transacted US$73 million in sales. In Singapore, Qoo10 has a total of more than 900,000 members and 53,000 sellers.

The online marketplace charges commission from about six to twelve percent commission on sellers and makes about three to six percent off each transaction after footing peripheral costs. Based on its margin, we can deduce that Qoo10 Singapore’s commission revenue is anywhere from two to four million. Qoo10 also generates revenue by offering premium listings.

Qoo10 is the rebranded version of Gmarket which originated from South Korea and has a total of 450 employees with 40 in Singapore. Besides Singapore, Qoo10 is also operating in Hong Kong, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia and China. It is also celebrating its third anniversary on 23 April 2013.

Singapore-based startup ShopBust offers an interesting way for shoppers to earn money by doing what they love the most, which is by shopping. How does the team do that? Founder Saad Kamal is now speaking onstage on our Startup Arena event, explaining how exactly the team aims to give money to shoppers all the while offering businesses some insights to its frontline activities.

The concept is quite simple, users first register as a ShopBust “mystery shopper” and then select an available assignment from the site. These assignments are scenarios that clients asked ShopBust do at selected retail outlets, with some of them include making purchases at the store. After the user gets approved for a particular assignment by the team, and have done the scenario, then the user will receive the “mystery shopping fee” which covers the purchase and a bit extra.

Typically, a regular mystery shopper will then review the store’s performance in areas such as staff appearance, friendliness, engagement, wait and service time, cleanliness, the store’s appearance, and overall on-site customer experience. The shoppers themselves will be curated based on location and social media profiling so that ShopBust’s clients get the kind of demographic the store owner wants to hear from.

Saad explains that they now have about 12,350 members to help run the startup’s operations in Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia. They have so far signed a couple of clients in the region and got a deal to run a pilot with two big fast-moving consumer goods brands and consumer electronics brand.

So far, ShopBust’s private beta is now operating in Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The team’s concept has received a good response so far, encouraging more than 12,000 people to sign up to be a mystery shopper.

Judge Nobuaki Kitagawa asked how they can convince retailers better than the current mystery shopping business models. Saad answered that they promise 48-hour full report, rather than a 10 to 12 weeks traditional reporting time. He added that they promise real-time data to clients.

When asked by judge Yasuhiko Yurimoto asked how they can convince retailers to use ShopBust’s services, Saad explained that it isn’t that hard to do so because retailers are already familiar with mystery shopping business model, ShopBust can simply do it better with more technology behind it.

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.